Chapter 13 3.3 All fools become wise

The brain and the body are built the same way, bottom up.Similar to starting with town, you start with simple behaviors—instinct or reflex.First generate a small neural circuit that does a simple job, and then make a large number of similar circuits work.Then, the complex behavior emerges from a bunch of reflexive behaviors that work effectively, and you build the second level.Regardless of whether the second tier is active or not, the original tier will continue to operate.But when the second level manages to produce a more complex behavior, it subsumes the behavior of the lower level. The following is a set of pervasive distributed control methods developed by Brooks' mobile robotics laboratory:

Do the easy things first. Learn to do simple things without error. Add new levels of activity on top of the results of simple tasks. Don't change simple things. Let the new tiers work exactly like the simple tiers. Repeat the above steps, and so on infinitely. This approach can also be used as a recipe for managing any kind of complexity, and in fact it is used for that. You don't expect to rely on a centralized brain to run an entire country.If you wanted to have your sewer repaired and you had to call the Federal Bureau of Sewer Repair in Washington to make an appointment, can you imagine the horrible chain of events you'd start?

When doing something complicated—such as governing a population of 100 million or walking on two thin legs—the most common way people think of is to make a list of tasks that need to be completed in order, and then in the central command or These tasks are completed under the instructions of the brain.The economy of the former Soviet Union worked in this logical but highly impractical way.The inherent instability of its organizational model was evident long before the collapse of the Soviet Union. The body under the central command is not much better than this central command economy.However, the mainstream robot research and development, artificial organisms, and artificial intelligence have always followed the central command routine.Brooks is not at all surprised that the mind-centered guys have bred robots that haven't been sophisticated enough to "break down."

Brooks has been working on cultivating systems without a central mind, so that the system has the complexity to "crash".In one paper, he dubs this type of intelligence without a center "irrational intelligence," with a vivid and nuanced pun.On the one hand, this kind of intelligence based on the bottom-up accumulation structure itself has no reasoning mechanism, and on the other hand, there is no reasoning to follow for the emergence of this kind of intelligence. The Soviet Union collapsed not because a centralized system stifled the economy, but because all complex systems controlled centrally were rigid and unstable.Institutions, corporations, factories, organisms, economies, and even robots are unlikely to prosper if they are designed to be centrally controlled.

Yeah, I hear you mumbling, as a human being, don't I have a central brain? Humans have a brain, but it is neither centralized nor called a center. "The idea that the brain has a center is wrong, and it's very wrong," asserts Daniel Dennett.Dennett, a professor of philosophy at Tufts University, has long advocated a "functional" view of consciousness: the various functions of consciousness, such as thinking, come from parts that do not do the thinking.The semi-consciousness of reptile-like mobile robots is an excellent example of animal and human consciousness.According to Dennett, there is no place in the human body that is used to control behavior, and there is no place that creates "walking", there is no so-called soul dwelling."If you look inside the brain, it's really empty," he said.

Dennett is slowly convincing psychologists that consciousness emerges from a distributed network of tiny, unconscious neural circuits.Dennett told me: “The old paradigm was that there was a central location in the brain, a hidden sanctuary, a theater, from which consciousness arose. That is, everything had to be presented to an emissary in order for the brain to Being able to perceive this information. Every conscious decision you make is finalized at the Brain Summit. The exception is the instinctive reflexes, which are tunnels through the mountains and thus avoid the Consciousness Summit.”

Following this logic (which is absolutely orthodox in the field of brain science), Dennett said, "When a person speaks, a language output box is created in the brain. Some speech artisan compiles and typesets what is to be said, and then plays it. into the box. The speech craftsman obeys the instructions of a subsystem called "concept generator" and obtains some information prior to language formation. Of course, the concept generator also has to obtain information from a certain source, so the similar control process is infinite backtracking." Dennett calls this notion "only central intent."The meaning to be expressed is passed down from the central authority of the brain.He described the idea in terms of language—as in "a four-star general addressing troops: 'Okay, guys, here comes your job. I want to slap this guy. Quickly find a suitable topic, create some swear words in English, and send it over.’ If you have to go through such a process, you will feel discouraged when you think about it.”

The reality, says Dennett, is more like "there are a lot of tiny little things that don't mean much by themselves, but meaning emerges just through their distributed interactions." Contradictory raw material—a usable word here, an indeterminate word there. "Language emerges from such a jumble of disjointed, imperfectly coordinated, even competing words." We often use literary devices to rhetorically speak, thinking of it as a flow of consciousness, like a news broadcast in our heads.Dennett said, "There is no such thing as a stream of consciousness. There are often multiple and simultaneous occurrences of consciousness, or there are many different streams of consciousness, and no single one is singled out." Pioneering psychologist William James Writing in 1874, "...thought at any stage is like a stage on which concurrent possibilities are staged. Consciousness rises and falls in the process of comparing these possibilities with one another, choosing one over the other...  "

Disparate minds clamoring together to form what we think of as a "unified intelligence".Marvin Minsky called this the "society of mind".He puts it simply as "you can build awareness through many tiny reactions, each of which is unconscious by itself." Imagine having many independent professional bodies concerned with their own important goals (or instincts), Mechanisms such as foraging for food, drinking water, finding shelter, reproducing, or self-defense, together form the basic brain.Taken apart, each mechanism is only at the level of an imbecile, but through the intricate layer-by-layer control and the organic combination of many different combinations, it can create highly difficult thinking activities.Minsky emphatically stated, "There is no intelligence without a society of mind. Wisdom comes from stupidity."

The society of mind sounds a lot like the bureaucracy of the mind.In fact, the society of mind in the head would be bureaucratic without the pressure to evolve and learn.However, just as predicted by Dennett, Minsky, Brooks, etc., dull individuals in a complex organization always compete with each other and coexist and cooperate in order to obtain organizational resources and organizational recognition.The cooperation among competing individuals is loose.According to Minsky, intelligent activity arises from "loose alliances of almost discrete individuals united for almost independent purposes." The winners survive and the losers fade away over time.In this sense, the mind is not a monopoly, but a ruthless ecosystem in which competition breeds spontaneous cooperation.

This micro-chaotic nature of the mind is even deeper than we realize.It is quite possible that mental activity is actually a random or statistical phenomenon - equivalent to the law of large numbers.This randomly distributed population of pulsating neural impulses forms the bedrock of intellectual activity; given a starting point, the outcome is not preordained.There are no repeatable endings, just random outcomes.It takes a little bit of luck for a particular idea to emerge. Dennett confessed to me, “Why am I obsessed with this theory? Because when people first hear it, they shake their heads and laugh, but then they think about it and they think maybe it’s true! The more they think about it, the more they realize, oh no, not only is this likely to be true, but something must be true!" As Dennett and others have noted, multiple personality syndrome, which is rare in humans, stems in part from the decentralized and distributed nature of human consciousness.Each personality—whether Billy or Sally—shares the same set of personality agents and the same set of actors and behavioral modules, yet produces markedly different characters.Patients with multiple personality disorder actually present a fragment (or group) of their personality as a whole.Outsiders never know who they are talking to.The patient seems to be missing an "I". And aren't we all like that?In different periods of life, in different moods, we also change our character.When someone is hurt by the other side of our inner world, she screams at us, "You are not the you I know!" "I" is a general extension of our inner world, and we use it to distinguish self and others.Once the "I" loses the "I", it will rush to create a "I".That's exactly what we do, Minsky said.There is no "I" in the world, and mediocre people set it up for themselves. There is no "I" for people, no "I" for beehives, no "I" for beasts, no "I" for companies, no "I" for families and countries, and no "I" for any living thing.The "I" of a living system is a ghost, an unknown bacterium.It is like an instantaneous vortex formed by hundreds of millions of water molecules, with a light touch of a fingertip, the bait will disappear. However, in an instant, those mobs distributed in the lower floors stirred up a vortex again.Is this vortex a new image, or is it an old shadow?Have you ever had a near-death experience?Do you feel reborn from the ashes, or have you experienced vicissitudes?If the chapters in this book were out of order, would it still be the same book?Think about it, when you think of the unsolved worries, you will understand what a distributed system is.