The sentence of sentience

Being sentient is not the same as being intelligent or being able to think, although it is closely related to the idea of consciousness and has been argued to be a prerequisite for real or artificial general intelligence.

Being sentient means being able to sense things about oneself and one's physical and social environment. To make a computer sentient, we just need to give it such sensors. 

Your PC, laptop or phone knows the temperature and voltage and cycle speeds of its major subsystems (what we would call organs in biology). They already communicate with each other and form networks that actually provide and analogy as well as terminology for us talking about social networks. Your phone knows where it is, and can also keep track of where the family phones are, and it can see and hear the world, and maybe recognize your face, voice and/or fingerprints.

What happens when a sensor detects that a subsystem is overheating? In medicine we call that inflammation or fever.

Some sort of alarm goes off! In medicine we call that pain: it tells the system it is not in a good state.

The system as a whole then tries to reduce the workload and stress on the subsystem concerned; or the system may flag the problem, complete high priority tasks and overrides (like ensuring your work is saved), and then shift to sleep mode or shut itself down completely. In medicine we talk about sleep and coma, and indeed doctors may induce coma until the body is sufficiently repaired.

This is the primary function of the most important sensors a system has: pain! This deals with sensing direct immediate problems as they affect the system, and forcing us to take immediate action to remove, protect or ameliorate it. The aim is to force the system to shutdown in part, while there are things that must be done, and in whole, once it is safe to sleep. When operating in a partially disabled way, it is painful to get things down. Pain like the rest of our sensory experiences is inherently subjective and takes us into the domain of qualia.

The secondary functions and sensors relate to less direct threats and longer term survival.  They might tell us we need to eat or drink or recharge. Already back in the 1960s Shakey the robot would go exploring its environment, while ensuring it could always get to a charge point to recharge.  An important function of electric vehicles is telling you where to find the nearest/next supercharger and whether you can make it. An important function of GPS apps is telling you where you can get petrol/diesel/gas - even though there are stacks of places around and it is hard to avoid finding one serendipitously.  They can also tell the driver where the humans in the vehicle can recharge.

The associations and instincts associated with second sensing might trigger fright, flight or fight reactions. They might trigger hunting instincts or the application of acquired habits and skills to obtain what we need to survive. Association learning helps us to learn about both our environment and ourselves, optimizing our skills.

Tertiary signaling functions and memory allow us to make broader more deliberate decision based on remembered pasts and predicted futures, they also allow us to exploit other members of our social grouping to extend the range of our own capabilities both in space and time. They even allows us to exploit observed serendipitous happenings and then contrive to reproduce those situations, inventing tools both concrete and abstract.

But the primary sentence of sentience is pain!

My books

My Casindra Lost stories feature an emergent AI 'Al' and a captain who is reluctantly crewed with him on a rather long journey to another galaxy - just the two of them, and some cats... There's another one, 'Alice' that emerges more gradually in the Moraturi arc.

Casindra Lost

Kindle ebook (mobi) edition ASIN: B07ZB3VCW9 — tiny.cc/AmazonCL

Kindle paperback edition ISBN-13: 978-1696380911 justified Iowan OS

Kindle enlarged print edn ISBN-13: 978-1708810108 justified Times NR 16

Kindle large print edition ISBN-13: 978-1708299453 ragged Trebuchet 18

Moraturi Lost

Kindle ebook (mobi) edition ASIN: B0834Z8PP8 – tiny.cc/AmazonML

Kindle paperback edition ISBN-13: 978-1679850080 justified Iowan OS 

Moraturi Ring

Kindle ebook (mobi) edition ASIN: B087PJY7G3 – tiny.cc/AmazonMR

Kindle paperback edition ISBN-13: 979-8640426106 justified Iowan OS 

Author/Series pages and Awards

http://tiny.cc/AmazonPL & http://tiny.cc/AmazonMW

WorldCon2020 presentation (COVID-style):

http://tiny.cc/CoNZHumanTalkyPPT (downloadable talky) & http://tiny.cc/CoNZHumanTalkyPPT

New York City Book Awards 2021 (Gold and Silver): 

https://nycbookawards.spread.name/?filter=Category-%3AScience%2520Fiction,Science%2520Fiction%252F%2520Adventure 

Paradisi Chroncles Lost Mission page:

https://paradisichronicles.wordpress.com/lost-mission-series/

The quality of qualia is not feigned

One concept that keeps cropping up in philosophical discussions of consciousness is qualia. This term was coined by philosphers to denote the subjective quality of a percept. The classical example is the subjective experience I have of red or orange, feeling pain, or the taste of this apple or the smell of this rose,  or my immersive experience of a piece of music.

Do I experience blue or green the same as you? Particularly when you consider that some languages don't even have separate words for blue and green.

Even when you and I look at exactly the same shades of red and blue as we watch the sun set over the sea, do we subjectively perceive it the same way? How do I know that the sensations I get for red aren't more like the ones you get for blue?

How can I describe these reds and blues to a blind person? Or this symphony to a deaf person?

There is a phenomenon called synaesthesia where people experience qualia from one sense when presented with something in another sense, or even associated with abstract ideas like numbers or letters. For examples sounds may elicit distinct tastes or colours.

Someone who for some reason lacks a particular sense will often have some sort of synaethesic effect.  Generally the parts of the brain that process that sense will be commandeered for other purposes, and will in particular provide additional real estate to enhance the capabiilities of senses processed in adjacent areas.

We live in an immersive environment where all our internal and external sensory organs are continuously being stimulated to one degree or another and perceived through the central nervous system, which in turn controls every muscle in the body and in turn affects our internal and external environments. This is what we mean by sentience.

Living and learning in this sensorimotor experiential world requires us to make connections between the signals that relate to different parts of our body and our world.  The whole body is reflected in, or rather projected to/from, sensory and motor homunculus  regions of the outer layers of your brain (cortex) on top of your head, ear to ear. The association cortices form associations within and between modalities, in particular above and between the corresponding homuncular area (central). The visual input projects to the back of the head (occiptal) and there are areas for auditory, vocal and speech input/output on the sides of the head (temporal). All these areas of the cortex transmit information to the parahippocampal gyrus which allows learning of associations between the various internal and external parts of the body as well as  the experienced world.

When we experience an event, for example clap our hands, the neurons associated with the motor neurons and touch and pain sensors of the hands,and the accompanying auditory and visual experience, all show the same synchronized pattern, and this is often thought to be responsible for binding all these sensorimotor components together.  But this is backwards...

Each unique event with participating sensorimotor and cortical neurons effectively relay message back and forwards to each other producing the synchrony. Neural plasticity means that neurons that fire together get the connections between them strengthened which means they are more likely to fire when the other neurons they are associated with do, and thus predict or preempt their firing, contributing as a cause of that firing.

So is my perception of red much the same as yours?

Probably yes to the extent that the reds of sunsets and traffic  lights, fires and radiators are similar.

Probably no to the extent that we live in different societies or cultures, e.g. civilized (meaning citified) vs uncivilized (meaning not based around our citified way of life). Culture, languages, morals, social expectations are all part of this external world that we experience and learn about, but it is all intertwined through our associations.

Probably no as I have a bigger, smaller or differently shaped  and configured head than you. If pathways are longer then the cycling back and forward of information takes longer so registered frequencies are slower. So we will see red differently to the extent that there is a different anatomical size and layout of our brains - remembering that brain areas grow to the extent they are used  (area grows sublinearly with frequency of use and shrinks with disuse), and new neurons are born and migrate to be incorporated where needed.

The world doesn't really look anything like what you think you see. What we think we see is an internal construction mediated by this synchrony and binding. This is especially true of colors where it seems the precise experience you have will depend on the distances between the different red, green and blue cones involved, as well as the precise arrangement of other neurons, as well as potentially the experiences you have associated with them.

Just as your computer screen takes various weightings of red, blue and green to display those flowers on the screen, so does your brain in depicting the full range of hues and tones that our sensoria can experience actually construct that corresponding internal experience, and maintain it during the sometimes conscious often unconscious scanning motions (saccades) as the small 2-3° foveal area that has high resolution and good color discrimination roves the most important features of the salient objects (esp. people) in the scene you are looking at.

This is not arbitrary, and we can actually look at these patterns using a variety of brain imaging techniques.

But qualia are not the only epiphenomenon or consciousness that we should consider - another is conscience, the idea of right or wrong, morality and ethics. But we will leave that till another blog entry.

My books

My Casindra Lost stories feature an emergent AI 'Al' and a captain who is reluctantly crewed with him on a rather long journey to another galaxy - just the two of them, and some cats... There's another one, 'Alice' that emerges more gradually in the Moraturi arc.

Casindra Lost

Kindle ebook (mobi) edition ASIN: B07ZB3VCW9 — tiny.cc/AmazonCL

Kindle paperback edition ISBN-13: 978-1696380911 justified Iowan OS

Kindle enlarged print edn ISBN-13: 978-1708810108 justified Times NR 16

Kindle large print edition ISBN-13: 978-1708299453 ragged Trebuchet 18

Moraturi Lost

Kindle ebook (mobi) edition ASIN: B0834Z8PP8 – tiny.cc/AmazonML

Kindle paperback edition ISBN-13: 978-1679850080 justified Iowan OS 

Moraturi Ring

Kindle ebook (mobi) edition ASIN: B087PJY7G3 – tiny.cc/AmazonMR

Kindle paperback edition ISBN-13: 979-8640426106 justified Iowan OS 

Author/Series pages and Awards

http://tiny.cc/AmazonPL & http://tiny.cc/AmazonMW

WorldCon2020 presentation (COVID-style):

http://tiny.cc/CoNZHumanTalkyPPT (downloadable talky) & http://tiny.cc/CoNZHumanTalkyPPT

New York City Book Awards 2021 (Gold and Silver): 

https://nycbookawards.spread.name/?filter=Category-%3AScience%2520Fiction,Science%2520Fiction%252F%2520Adventure 

Paradisi Chroncles Lost Mission page:

https://paradisichronicles.wordpress.com/lost-mission-series/

Paradisi Chroncles Lost Mission page:

https://paradisichronicles.wordpress.com/lost-mission-series/

The consciousness con

Can an AI be conscious?
Can we make a conscious AI?
HOW can we make an AI conscious?
SHOULD we let an AI become conscious?
SHOULD we limit the emergence of conscious AI?

Let's go back to 1950 when Turing asked a slightly different question:

Can a computer think?

What is well known is that he picked apart a few definitions of think (like thinking is something people do in their heads) and basically decided that was pointless as such definitions can simply rule it out.  So he talked about a parlour game and we ended up with the Turing Test and the Loebner Prize and CAPTCHA. If you talk to a human and a computer/robot and can't tell the difference, that is you're guessing is at the 50:50 chance level, then if you think the person is thinking you've got to admit the computer is.

What is less well known is that he suggested effectively giving the computer sensory-motor capabilities, like a robot (or spaceship or even a car or a drone) and getting it to learn. He also predicted that computers would get to be able to fool people 30% of the time, in a five minute conversation, by the year 2000.

Arguably Weizenbaum's Doctor/Eliza program did that by 1970, and certainly Loebner prize winners have done so periodically since the 1990s (and not just in 5 minute conversations).  In fact, Loebner went one step beyond Turing's explicit test, consistent with his proposed training regime, in wanting an audiovisual or sensorimotor component to the his $100K +  Gold Medal prize. People are too easily fooled. The charitable assumption is that people are just like us, and that is a necessary assumption to avoid information overload.  If a person has a disability, or is a foreigner or a child, that actually changes the level of our assumptions - we might slow down or dumb down or some such.

Harnard popularized the sensory-motor grounding idea in the 1980s and enshrined a similar (robotic) idea in his Total Turing Test as well as a look alike (android) idea. Searle on the other hand changed the question in 1980 to:

Can a computer have a  mind?

Whereas we are quite happy to talking about computers having to "think over" some relatively mundane problem (we really just mean the computer or network is slow), having a mind makes it more subjective again - although even now we might talk about a computer or a shopping trolley "having a mind of its own".  The problem here is that we are very accustomed to using metaphor, and in fact most words have a range of meaning from the most literal physical (like "in" in a 2D or 3D world sense) to increasingly abstract (like "in an hour" or "in mind" or "in the process of doing that" or "in order to do that").

Searle's definition of AI was so different from that of AI researchers, that it became known as strong AI and the good old fashioned AI (GOFAI) as weak AI.

Searle's thought experiment is basically about hand (or later mind) simulating the program for an AI that is a Chinese speaker (unlike Searle) with messages written in Chinese passed in and out of a locked room  - and he concludes when he does this as a thought experiment that there is nobody else at home, no Chinese-speaking mind. The problem with thought experiments is that may be you don't think them through enough.

So what if I ask Searle if he is hungry, and receiving an affirmative, what he'd like to eat? Are we simulating a Chinese stomach too - and leaving Searle's to starve? Or does he get to order and eat the food after doing all that work of  looking up grammar rules and dictionaries and relating it to himself - in this case it becomes a Chinese teaching/learning environment.  He'll eventually recognize the dinner order questions and be able to write out the order for his preferred dish or the day, or even just copy it from or mark it on the menu he's given.

So what is different about asking questions about mind and consciousness? Definitions of mind tend to be in terms of awareness, consciousness and thought. But Searle and Turing also both talked about aesthetics, feelings, emotions, and the subjective way we are aware of and experience things like love and pain.

Definitions of consciousness tend to talk about being awake and aware - but this applies to cats and dogs, and arguably autonomous drones and driverless cars.

But what it misses is the part that Turing and Searle focus on? The language aspect. Being conscious also means communicating with the external world, or interacting with it in a sensorimotor sense, as Turing and Harnad focus on. And of course you can also talk to yourself - this is the stream of consciousness. And by talking about a stream we are focussing on the serial nature of conscious attention, which is quite different from the parallel way the nervous system processes all our sensory and other neural inputs in parallel, and produces our muscle and other neural outputs in parallel.

Another key element that tends to get overlooked is thus idea of a focus of attention, but it is one of the ideas at the heart of the recent explosion in the capabilities of neural networks, particularly in relation to auditory and visual processing, speech and language. And all of these concepts should hopefully map to things we can look for in the brain with EEG or fMRI or other brain imaging techniques.

It may be helpful to sum up in terms of three levels (or alternate definitions) of consciousness that we can see even in a pet or a baby:

• awake - brain/cpu operating, not currently in sleep mode
• aware - sensors are providing information about our world
• awail - sensors trigger an alarm designed to elicit a remedy

So what is the part of consciousness that we think computers DON'T have?

My books

My Casindra Lost stories feature an emergent AI 'Al' and a captain who is reluctantly crewed with him on a rather long journey to another galaxy - just the two of them, and some cats... There's another one, 'Alice' that emerges more gradually in the Moraturi arc.

Casindra Lost

Kindle ebook (mobi) edition ASIN: B07ZB3VCW9 — tiny.cc/AmazonCL

Kindle paperback edition ISBN-13: 978-1696380911 justified Iowan OS

Kindle enlarged print edn ISBN-13: 978-1708810108 justified Times NR 16

Kindle large print edition ISBN-13: 978-1708299453 ragged Trebuchet 18

Moraturi Lost

Kindle ebook (mobi) edition ASIN: B0834Z8PP8 – tiny.cc/AmazonML

Kindle paperback edition ISBN-13: 978-1679850080 justified Iowan OS 

Moraturi Ring

Kindle ebook (mobi) edition ASIN: B087PJY7G3 – tiny.cc/AmazonMR

Kindle paperback edition ISBN-13: 979-8640426106 justified Iowan OS 

Author/Series pages and Awards

Amazon Series and Author pages:

http://tiny.cc/AmazonPL & http://tiny.cc/AmazonMW

WorldCon2020 presentation (COVID-style):

http://tiny.cc/CoNZHumanTalkyPPT (downloadable talky) & http://tiny.cc/CoNZHumanTalkyPPT

New York City Book Awards 2021 (Gold and Silver): 

https://nycbookawards.spread.name/?filter=Category-%3AScience%2520Fiction,Science%2520Fiction%252F%2520Adventure 

Paradisi Chroncles Lost Mission page:

https://paradisichronicles.wordpress.com/lost-mission-series/

Why TWO blogs

A Tale of Two Blogs

Yes, I know, it is hard enough to find the time to keep up with one blog - and I probably won't do a very good job of doing so. In fact, it is not at all my purpose to provide a daily online log of my activities.

My two personae are working in opposite directions.

One, the incipient science fiction writer, aims to turn science into science fiction where the science is real and drives the story. It would be great if it got readers interested in science, technology, engineering and even mathematics - and helped engender the next generations of great scientists and engineers, researchers and explorers. The relatively sparse updates relating to this aspect will be focused on providing information about my writing, forthcoming publication, etc. This blog is https://martiscifi.blogspot.com/ 

Two, the experienced researcher and teacher, inspired by such greats as Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke and Astroboy, aims to guide science with science fiction. Science fiction is a great way to explore the real world outworkings of our technology, asking the question 'what happens if...', exploring the ethical implications, offering alien perspectives on our earthly conception of the universe. The more frequent updates from this identity will relate to the research I am currently carrying out both in the real world and in my imagined worlds.  This is https://martiward.blogspot.com/

No Spoilers

I'm conscious of the issue of spoilers in engaging in discussion of elements from my books.  I won't be giving away key plot points (and neither should you), and the science I talk about won't necessarily even be related to specific books. Sometimes, I might talk about other SciFi work.  How can I talk about robots without at least thinking about Asimov's three (or four) laws? Even my AI characters will of course be aware of Clarke's HAL and compare themselves with him!

My Background

I write under a number of different names for a number of reasons.  One of these is that people tend to put other people in boxes, even if they don't like being put in a box themselves. Moreover, when you engage in a different kind of writing, enter a different genre, move from real science to science fiction, it is convenient to be able to keep the writing compartmentalized so people find just what they are looking for. And then I can choose what else I point people to. I have hundreds of published works, including a few books - even I find it hard to find what I'm looking for!

In general pseudonymous identities aren't really secret - the publishers and editors and beta readers all know. For some controversial political or allegorical writing expressing unpopular or untolerated opinions, it might be expedient to write anonymously or pseudonomously. In the case of Marti/Martin/Martina Ward, it is simply a matter of distance from my scientific writing, although sometimes I might even use Martina's work in my teaching or research presentations because of the way the issues I am trying to explore as a scientist are worked out in the novels.

So what is this mysterious "scientific" work I do. After all, a B.Sc. and a Ph.D. can cover just about anything.  In fact my remit does cover just about anything, from behavioral, biological and biomedical science through to artificial intelligence, cognitive science, green energy, robotics and vehicle engineering.  I also have a background in physics and chemistry, philosophy and theology, linguistics and neuroscience, engineering and entrepreneurship.

Yes, I invent things and start up companies to exploit the technology. However, I don't usually get involved hands-on in the companies, because my life is my research and teaching, training up the next generation of researchers while pursuing my own research interests on a variety of fronts. My family, even the cat, would all agree with that - although I do try to make some time for them, otherwise one of them will eventually pull me away from my laptop.

The Topics

The Paradisi System is in the Andromeda Galaxy, and we use a wormhole to get there.  So that's a good starting point: what is the science behind wormholes, what is it actually like to go through one, and what does a scifi author need to know about astrophysics to get there?

The drives we use are EmDrives based on the use of electromagnetic radiation and driven by Thorium Reactors. These heat up very quickly and that creates the problem of how to cool them... These elements were nicely thought out by Cheri Lasota and the team of authors that originally designed the Paradisi Universe.

The Paradisi System has a number of Goldilocks planets which are in a sweet spot in relation to their sun, Paradisi, that offers the potential for humans to survive on them, and in one case hopefully live just as comfortably as on Earth.  The Paradisi System was very carefully and scientficially designed by Bill Patterson, and I rely heavily on his background material.  Other basic concepts in the idea of where to locate your operations in a new solar system, and how to get around it efficiently, relate strongly to NASA's ideas of the Interplanetary Superhighway and Interplanetary Transfer which in turn depend on the idea of Lagrange Points or Lagrangians.

Then it would be nice to have some sort of gravity, at least a centrifugal simulation of gravity but ideally antigravity. And for the long trips (months to years) some sort of cryobeds would be fundamental. Then we also need radiation shielding, in case we meet a solar flare or other kind of ion storm, and given we are likely suffer various kinds of injuries or illness, we need medbeds and treatment regimes. Then there's the biological and medical knowledge and background for dealing with not just those that relate to the dangers of space, but also those that relate to colonizing a planet that already has its own indigenous life, from microorganisms to macrofauna.

Then of course there are the quantum computers, emergent conscious AIs, nanites and nanobots, self-replicating von Neumann machines.

Finally, there are the questions of ethics that come up, whether to do with taking over an ecosystem or with how to deal with conscious AIs, or even those AIs that are not (yet) conscious but just follow orders.

My Paradisi Lost books

Casindra Lost (Gold Medal) – tiny.cc/CasindraRing

Kindle ebook (mobi) edition ASIN: B07ZB3VCW9 – tiny.cc/AmazonCL

Kindle paperback edition ISBN-13: 978-1696380911 

Kindle enlarged print edn ISBN-13: 978-1708810108 

D2D paperback ISBN: 979-8223141938  all retailers

D2D eBook (epub) ISBN: 979-8223930112  libraries and retailers (except Amazon)

Moraturi Lost (Silver Medal) – tiny.cc/MoraturiLost

Kindle ebook (mobi) edition ASIN: B0834Z8PP8 – tiny.cc/AmazonML

Kindle paperback edition ISBN-13: 978-1679850080 

D2D paperback ISBN: 979-8215751763  all retailers
D2D eBook (epub) ISBN: 979-8223441458 libraries and retailers (except Amazon)

Moraturi Ring (Silver Medal) – tiny.cc/MoraturiRing

Kindle ebook (mobi) edition ASIN: B087PJY7G3 – tiny.cc/AmazonMR

Kindle paperback edition ISBN-13: 979-8640426106 

D2D paperback ISBN: 979-8223481393   all retailers

D2D eBook (epub) ISBN: 979-8223749523  libraries and retailers (except Amazon)

My Paradisi Lost books are part of a bigger multiauthor Paradisi Universe, and most of the world building is due to the creators of that universe, whom I thank for allowing me to play in their world:  https://paradisichronicles.wordpress.com/

Author/Series pages and Awards

Series and Author pages:

http://tiny.cc/AmazonPL & http://tiny.cc/AmazonMW

WorldCon2020 presentation (COVID-style):

http://tiny.cc/CoNZHumanTalkyPPT (downloadable talky) & http://tiny.cc/CoNZHumanTalkyPPT

Global Book Awards 2021 (Gold and 2 Silvers): 

https://globalbookawards1ny.spread.name/?filter=Category-%3AScience%2520Fiction (Casindra Lost, Gold)

https://globalbookawards1ny.spread.name/?filter=Category-%3AScience%2520Fiction%252F%2520Adventure (Moraturi Lost)

https://globalbookawards2.spread.name/?filter=Category-%3AScience%2520Fiction%2520Series (Moraturi Ring/Series)

Paradisi Chronicles Lost Mission page:

https://paradisichronicles.wordpress.com/lost-mission-series/

And the big reveal (Amazon outed me):

https://australianauthors.net.au/author/davidmwpowers/  & http://tiny.cc/AmazonDMWP &
 https://www.flinders.edu.au/people/david.powers