Biologically inspired distributed machine cognition: a new formal approach to hyperparallel computation

The irresistable march toward multiple-core chip technology presents currently intractable pdrogramming challenges. High level mental processes in many animals, and their analogs for social structures, appear similarly massively parallel, and recent mathematical models addressing them may be adaptable to the multi-core programming problem

Machine Hyperconsciousness

Individual animal consciousness appears limited to a single giant component of interacting cognitive modules, instantiating a shifting, highly tunable, Global Workspace. Human institutions, by contrast, can support several, often many, such giant components simultaneously, although they generally function far more slowly than the minds of the individuals who compose them. Machines having multiple global workspaces -- hyperconscious machines -- should, however, be able to operate at the few hundred milliseconds characteistic of individual consciousness. Such multitasking -- machine or institutional -- while clearly limiting the phenomenon of inattentional blindness, does not eliminate it, and introduces characteristic failure modes involving the distortion of information sent between global workspaces. This suggests that machines explicitly designed along these principles, while highly efficient at certain sets of tasks, remain subject to canonical and idiosyncratic failure patterns analogous to, but more complicated than, those explored in Wallace (2006a). By contrast, institutions, facing similar challenges, are usually deeply embedded in a highly stabilizing cultural matrix of law, custom, and tradition which has evolved over many centuries. Parallel development of analogous engineering strategies, directed toward ensuring an 'ethical' device, would seem requisite to the sucessful application of any form of hyperconscious machine technology

Institutional Cognition

We generalize a recent mathematical analysis of Bernard Baars' model of human consciousness to explore analogous, but far more complicated, phenomena of institutional cognition. Individual consciousness is limited to a single, tunable, giant component of interacting cogntivie modules, instantiating a Global Workspace. Human institutions, by contrast, seem able to multitask, supporting several such giant components simultaneously, although their behavior remains constrained to a topology generated by cultural context and by the path-dependence inherent to organizational history. Surprisingly, such multitasking, while clearly limiting the phenomenon of inattentional blindness, does not eliminate it. This suggests that organizations (or machines) explicitly designed along these principles, while highly efficient at certain sets of tasks, would still be subject to analogs of the subtle failure patterns explored in Wallace (2005b, 2006). We compare and contrast our results with recent work on collective efficacy and collective consciousness

Dysfunctions of highly parallel real-time machines as 'developmental disorders': Security concerns and a Caveat Emptor

A cognitive paradigm for gene expression in developmental biology that is based on rigorous application of the asymptotic limit theorems of information theory can be adapted to highly parallel real-time computing. The coming Brave New World of massively parallel 'autonomic' and 'Self-X' machines driven by the explosion of multiple core and molecular computing technologies will not be spared patterns of canonical and idiosyncratic failure analogous to the developmental disorders affecting organisms that have had the relentless benefit of a billion years of evolutionary pruning. This paper provides a warning both to potential users of these machines and, given that many such disorders can be induced by external agents, to those concerned with larger scale matters of homeland security

Darwin's Rainbow: Evolutionary radiation and the spectrum of consciousness

Evolution is littered with paraphyletic convergences: many roads lead to functional Romes. We propose here another example - an equivalence class structure factoring the broad realm of possible realizations of the Baars Global Workspace consciousness model. The construction suggests many different physiological systems can support rapidly shifting, sometimes highly tunable, temporary assemblages of interacting unconscious cognitive modules. The discovery implies various animal taxa exhibiting behaviors we broadly recognize as conscious are, in fact, simply expressing different forms of the same underlying phenomenon. Mathematically, we find much slower, and even multiple simultaneous, versions of the basic structure can operate over very long timescales, a kind of paraconsciousness often ascribed to group phenomena. The variety of possibilities, a veritable rainbow, suggests minds today may be only a small surviving fraction of ancient evolutionary radiations - bush phylogenies of consciousness and paraconsciousness. Under this scenario, the resulting diversity was subsequently pruned by selection and chance extinction. Though few traces of the radiation may be found in the direct fossil record, exaptations and vestiges are scattered across the living mind. Humans, for instance, display an uncommonly profound synergism between individual consciousness and their embedding cultural heritages, enabling efficient Lamarkian adaptation

Institutional paraconsciousness and its pathologies

This analysis extends a recent mathematical treatment of the Baars consciousness model to analogous, but far more complicated, phenomena of institutional cognition. Individual consciousness is limited to a single, tunable, giant component of interacting cognitive modules, instantiating a Global Workspace. Human institutions, by contrast, support several, sometimes many, such giant components simultaneously, although their behavior remains constrained to a topology generated by cultural context and by the path-dependence inherent to organizational history. Such highly parallel multitasking - institutional paraconsciousness - while clearly limiting inattentional blindness and the consequences of failures within individual workspaces, does not eliminate them, and introduces new characteristic dysfunctions involving the distortion of information sent between global workspaces. Consequently, organizations (or machines designed along these principles), while highly efficient at certain kinds of tasks, remain subject to canonical and idiosyncratic failure patterns similar to, but more complicated than, those afflicting individuals. Remediation is complicated by the manner in which pathogenic externalities can write images of themselves on both institutional function and therapeutic intervention, in the context of relentless market selection pressures. The approach is broadly consonant with recent work on collective efficacy, collective consciousness, and distributed cognition

Lurching Toward Chernobyl: Dysfunctions of Real-Time Computation

Cognitive biological structures, social organizations, and computing machines operating in real time are subject to Rate Distortion Theorem constraints driven by the homology between information source uncertainty and free energy density. This exposes the unitary structure/environment system to a relentless entropic torrent compounded by sudden large deviations causing increased distortion between intent and impact, particularly as demands escalate. The phase transitions characteristic of information phenomena suggest that, rather than graceful decay under increasing load, these structures will undergo punctuated degradation akin to spontaneous symmetry breaking in physical systems. Rate distortion problems, that also affect internal structural dynamics, can become synergistic with limitations equivalent to the inattentional blindness of natural cognitive process. These mechanisms, and their interactions, are unlikely to scale well, so that, depending on architecture, enlarging the structure or its duties may lead to a crossover point at which added resources must be almost entirely devoted to ensuring system stability -- a form of allometric scaling familiar from biological examples. This suggests a critical need to tune architecture to problem type and system demand. A real-time computational structure and its environment are a unitary phenomenon, and environments are usually idiosyncratic. Thus the resulting path dependence in the development of pathology could often require an individualized approach to remediation more akin to an arduous psychiatric intervention than to the traditional engineering or medical quick fix. Failure to recognize the depth of these problems seems likely to produce a relentless chain of the Chernobyl-like failures that are necessary, bot often insufficient, for remediation under our system

The cultural epigenetics of psychopathology: The missing heritability of complex diseases found?

We extend a cognitive paradigm for gene expression based on the asymptotic limit theorems of information theory to the epigenetic epidemiology of mental disorders. In particular, we recognize the fundamental role culture plays in human biology, another heritage mechanism parallel to, and interacting with, the more familiar genetic and epigenetic systems. We do this via a model through which culture acts as another tunable epigenetic catalyst that both directs developmental trajectories, and becomes convoluted with individual ontology, via a mutually-interacting crosstalk mediated by a social interaction that is itself culturally driven. We call for the incorporation of embedding culture as an essential component of the epigenetic regulation of human mental development and its dysfunctions, bringing what is perhaps the central reality of human biology into the center of biological psychiatry. Current US work on gene-environment interactions in psychiatry must be extended to a model of gene-environment-culture interaction to avoid becoming victim of an extreme American individualism that threatens to create paradigms particular to that culture and that are, indeed, peculiar in the context of the world's cultures. The cultural and epigenetic systems of heritage may well provide the 'missing' heritability of complex diseases now under so much intense discussion

`The frozen accident' as an evolutionary adaptation: A rate distortion theory perspective on the dynamics and symmetries of genetic coding mechanisms

We survey some interpretations and related issues concerning the frozen hypothesis due to F. Crick and how it can be explained in terms of several natural mechanisms involving error correction codes, spin glasses, symmetry breaking and the characteristic robustness of genetic networks. The approach to most of these questions involves using elements of Shannon's rate distortion theory incorporating a semantic system which is meaningful for the relevant alphabets and vocabulary implemented in transmission of the genetic code. We apply the fundamental homology between information source uncertainty with the free energy density of a thermodynamical system with respect to transcriptional regulators and the communication channels of sequence/structure in proteins. This leads to the suggestion that the frozen accident may have been a type of evolutionary adaptation

Gene Expression and its Discontents: Developmental disorders as dysfunctions of epigenetic cognition

Systems biology presently suffers the same mereological and sufficiency fallacies that haunt neural network models of high order cognition. Shifting perspective from the massively parallel space of gene matrix interactions to the grammar/syntax of the time series of expressed phenotypes using a cognitive paradigm permits import of techniques from statistical physics via the homology between information source uncertainty and free energy density. This produces a broad spectrum of possible statistical models of development and its pathologies in which epigenetic regulation and the effects of embedding environment are analogous to a tunable enzyme catalyst. A cognitive paradigm naturally incorporates memory, leading directly to models of epigenetic inheritance, as affected by environmental exposures, in the largest sense. Understanding gene expression, development, and their dysfunctions will require data analysis tools considerably more sophisticated than the present crop of simplistic models abducted from neural network studies or stochastic chemical reaction theory