Chapter 17 3.7 Mental/physical black-blind insanity

The tedium is deranged. 40 years ago, the Canadian psychologist Herbers became very interested in some cases: It is said that some people have weird hallucinations when they are extremely bored.Radar spotters often report a signal when there is nothing on the radar screen; a long-haul truck driver will stop suddenly because he sees a hitchhiking traveler when there is not even a ghost on the road.During the Korean War, the Canadian Defense Research Society invited Herbs to participate in another difficult study, the product of the human body's mental fatigue of monotony: confession.Those captured coalition soldiers seemed to have renounced the Western world after being brainwashed by the communists (a new term at the time).They may have been tortured by being locked in an isolation tank or something.

In 1954, Herbers built a small room protected from light and sound at McGill University in Montreal for this purpose.Volunteers stay in this small room, wearing translucent protective glasses on their heads, wrapping their arms in cardboard, wearing cotton gloves on their hands, and plugging headphones into their ears, which play a low noise, lying quietly on the bed two to three days.At first they heard a constant hum, which soon faded into a dead silence.All they felt was a dull pain in their back, and all they could see was a dull gray, or maybe black?The five colors and hundred senses that were born in my heart gradually evaporated.Slowly, various consciousnesses broke free from the fetters of the body and began to spin.

Half the subjects reported hallucinations, some of which occurred in the first hour: "A troop of little men, a German helmet...a vivid and complete scene of a cartoon-like character." In 1954 the The Age of Innocence, the Canadian scientists reported: "There were several cases in our early subjects who claimed to have entered what one tester called a 'waking dream'. This description was at first inexplicable. .Later, one of our researchers observed this phenomenon as a subject and realized its peculiarity and implications.” After lying still until the next day, subjects may report “a sense of reality Gone, altered body image, trouble speaking, vivid memories of the past, preoccupied with sexual desire, slowed thinking, complex dreams, and dazzled by worry and panic." They did not mention "hallucinations" because at that time The word is not in the glossary yet.

A few years later, Jack Vernon continued Hebbs' experiments.He built a "black room" in the basement of the Princeton psychology department.He recruited some graduate students; the test students were going to spend four or five days in the dark "thinking about things."One of the students in the original group later told a researcher who came to listen to the situation: "When you opened the viewing window, I guessed that I had been there for a day. I wondered why you passed It's been so long since you've come to watch me." But the truth is, there's no viewing window at all.

After staying in this isolated and silent coffin for two days, almost all the subjects lost their normal thinking.Attention has crumbled, replaced by unreal daydreams.Worse, active consciousness gets caught in a cycle of inactivity. "One subject came up with a game where he listed, in alphabetical order, every chemical reaction and the name of the person who discovered it. When it came to the letter N, he couldn't think of a single example, and he tried to skip N continued, but N kept jumping into his thoughts stubbornly, insisting on getting the answer. This process was so annoying to him that he was about to give up the game completely, but found that the demons were already in his mind. He endured the consequences of the game After persisting for a short while, I found that I could no longer control the game, so I pressed the emergency button and stopped the test.”

The body is the harbor where consciousness and even life anchor, and the machine that prevents consciousness from being swallowed by the self-brewed storm.Neural circuits have an innate tendency to play with fire and set themselves on fire.Left alone, without direct connections to the "outside world," smart networks will take their visions as reality.Consciousness cannot go beyond what it can measure or count.Without a body, consciousness can only take care of itself.Driven by a godsend curiosity, even the simplest mind will struggle to find an answer when faced with a challenge.However, if consciousness is mostly confronted with its own internal wiring and logic problems, then it can only indulge in the whimsy and whimsy created by itself all day long.

And the body - or rather, any entity brought together by senses and catalysts - interrupts the mind's whirling thoughts by loading them with urgent matters that need to be dealt with immediately!Life and death are at stake!Can you dodge? !The mind doesn't have to make up reality anymore - reality is coming, hitting the nail on the head.dodge!With a new and original insight never tried before, never dreamed of trying, it decided. Losing the senses, the mind will fall into obsession and produce psychological blindness.If it is not constantly interrupted by the greetings of eyes, ears, nose, nose and fingers, the mind will eventually curl up in a corner and live in seclusion.The most important sense is the eye, itself half a brain (stuffed with nerve cells and biochips).It nourishes the mind with unimaginably rich information - half-digested data, major decisions, hints of future evolution, hidden clues of things, dynamics of jumping around, endless beauties.After chewing and eating slowly, the mind came on stage vigorously.If the connection with the eyes is suddenly severed, the mind becomes confused, dizzy, and finally withdraws into its own tortoise shell.

The eyeballs that have seen the world for a lifetime will produce lens opacity. This kind of cataract that afflicts the elderly can be surgically removed, but before they can see the light again, they have to go through a period of total blindness, which is darker than the opacity caused by cataracts.Doctors surgically remove the lens with deteriorating lesions, and then put on a black eye patch to block the light and prevent the eyeball from turning, because the eyeball will turn subconsciously as long as the eyeball is looking at something.Because the left and right eyeballs are linked, you must wear blindfolds on both eyes.To minimize eye movement, the patient is bedridden for up to a week.At night, the bustling hospital gradually fell silent. Because the body was still, the patients felt more and more the boundless darkness brought by blindfolding.In the early 20th century, when the procedure first became popular, hospitals had no machinery, no television broadcasts, few night shift nurses, and no lights.Lying in the ophthalmology ward with a bandage on his head, surrounded by darkness and silence, it feels like he has fallen into a bottomless abyss.

The first day post-op felt bleak and just resting.The next day felt darker, dull and restless.The third day was dark, dark, dark, plus silence, and the surrounding walls seemed to be covered with dense red bugs. "Late at night on the third postoperative day, the 60-year-old woman tore her hair and sheets, desperately trying to get out of bed, claiming that someone was about to grab her, and that the room was on fire. The nurse unwrapped her unoperated arm. With the bandages on her eyes, she slowly calmed down," said a 1923 report from a hospital. In the early 1950s, doctors at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York discovered 21 abnormal cases in a row in the cataract ward. "Nine patients became increasingly agitated, tearing off their protective braces or trying to climb on the bedside shelf. Six patients developed hysteria, four patients complained of physical discomfort, four patients were agitated, and three patients had hallucinations , 2 have auditory hallucinations."

"Black-blind delirium" is now a symptom on the eye of the ophthalmologist as he rounds the ward.I think universities should also pay enough attention.Every philosophy department should hang a pair of black blindfolds in a red fire-alarm box marked: "In case of disputes involving consciousness and body, please break the glass and put on the blindfold." In an age of virtual things, the importance of the body cannot be overemphasized.Mark Pollin and Rodney Brooks have been more successful than anyone else at building humanoid machines precisely because they have fully materialized these creations.They insist that the robot they design must fully integrate into the real environment.

Pauline's automata didn't live too long.After each performance, there are very few iron warriors who can move by themselves.But in all fairness, robots developed by other universities don't outlive Pauline's hunks.There are only a handful of mobile robots that can "survive" for dozens of hours.For most mobile machines, they are improved while they are off.Essentially, roboticists figure out how to improve their creations while they are "dead," a bizarre dilemma that has not escaped the attention of some academics. "You know, what I want to build is a robot that can be turned on 24 hours a day for weeks. That's how a robot learns," said Maja Matarek, a member of Brooks' team. member. When I visited the MIT Mobile Robotics Lab, Genghis was disassembled and lying on a bench next to some new parts. "He's studying," Brooks quipped. Genghis was learning, but not in a proven way.He had to rely on a busy Brooks and his busy students.How nice it would be to learn while you're alive!This is the next big step forward for machines.Self-learning, never stop.Not just to adapt to the environment, but also to evolve ourselves. Evolution is step by step.Genghis' intelligence was comparable to that of an insect.Its descendants may one day catch up to rodents, and one day, further evolve to be as smart as apes. But Brooks cautions that we might as well be patient as machines evolve.Counting from the first day of Genesis, it took billions of years for plants to appear, and about 1.5 billion years for fishes to make their appearance.In another 100 million years, insects took to the stage. "Then things really started picking up pace," Brooks said.Reptiles, dinosaurs, and mammals appeared in the next 100 million years.And intelligent apes, including early humans, appeared in the last 20 million years. In the history of geology, complexity has developed rapidly in modern times.This made Brooks think: "Once you have the basic conditions for life and response to the outside world, you can easily evolve advanced intelligence such as solving problems, creating language, developing professional knowledge, and reasoning. From the evolution of single-celled organisms to insects. It took 3 billion years to evolve from insects to humans, but it took only 500 million years to evolve from insects to humans. This means that the intelligence level of insects is by no means low." Thus, insectoid life—the subject that Brooks is grappling with—is a real puzzle.Artificial insects were created, and artificial apes followed.It also points to a second advantage of working on fast, cheap, runaway mobile robots: Evolution requires huge populations.A Genghis can certainly learn, but to achieve evolution, you need a cloud of Genghis. For machines to evolve, swarms of machines are needed.A mosquito-like robot might be the ideal approach.Brooks' ultimate dream is to create living systems full of machines that can both learn (adapt to environmental changes) and evolve (populations of organisms are subjected to "numerous tests"). When democracy was first proposed, many reasonable people did worry that it might even be inferior to anarchism.They have their reasons.Likewise, democratizing autonomous, evolutionary machines raises concerns about a new anarchism.Such worries are not unreasonable. Chris Langton, an advocate of autonomous machine life, once asked Mark Pollin: "Where will human beings be when the machines one day have incomparable intelligence and super-high efficiency? I mean, where are we?" Do you want a machine, or do you want yourself?" I hope that Pauline's answer can be echoed between the lines in this book: "I think that human beings will continue to accumulate artificial and mechanical capabilities, and at the same time, machines will continue to accumulate biological intelligence. This will make the confrontation between man and machine less like So obvious, so ethical today." Confrontation may even turn into a symbiotic collaboration: thinking machines, viruses in silicon crystals, people connected to TV hotlines, life customized by genetic engineering, the whole world is networked into a symbiotic mind of humans and machines.If all comes to pass, we will have ingenious machines that assist humans in living and creating, and humans will assist machines in living and creating. The following letter was published in the Journal of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 1984. The most significant social consequence of the Darwinian revolution was the reluctant recognition by humans of being an accidental offshoot of the apes, imperfect and undesigned.And the most significant social consequence of the new biological civilization of the future is that humans will reluctantly admit that they happen to be the ancestors of machines, and that we as machines will also be improved by design. The above point can be further summarized as follows: natural evolution emphasizes that we are apes; artificial evolution emphasizes that we are machines with a mind. I believe that humans are more than just ape and machine combined (we have many unique advantages!), I also believe that we are more ape and machine than we think.This leaves room for the unmeasurable but identifiable differences that humans possess.This difference inspires great literature, art, and our entire beings.I appreciate and immerse myself in this sensual knowledge.But in the process of mechanical evolution, in the complex and knowable interconnections that underpin living systems, in the reproducible process that produces reliable robotic behavior, what I encounter is the gap between simple life, machines, complex systems, and us. The great unity that exists.This unity can inspire as much inspiration as any passion we have ever had. Machines are still an unpleasant thing because we have not breathed life into them.But we're going to be forced to reinvent them so that someday they'll be something we all know. As humans, we find our spiritual home when we know we are a branch of the leafy tree of life on this blue planet.Perhaps someday, when we know we are a link in a complex machine layered on top of green life, we will enter spiritual heaven.Human beings are a magnificent node in the vast network of new life born from the old life system-maybe we will sing hymns for it! When Pauline's robot monsters cannibalize their own kind, instead of worthless destruction, I see lions rounding up zebras to preserve the evolutionary journey of wild animals.When Brooks's six-legged Genghis robot stretched out its iron claws, searching for a place to grasp, what I saw was not a worker freed from mechanical repetitive labor, but a newborn baby wriggling happily.We and the machines will eventually become the same.Who wouldn't be in awe when a robot speaks against us one day?