Why shorter Stature and Lower camera angle are Unconsciously associated with "Inferiority"? Memories from childhood (Nature or Nurture)

I think this one is very obvious, I'll share my view on it:

We've felt like this as children, when we've seen the bigger ones and adults from down below and had to bend our necks to look up to see their eyes. Bigger and older ones made us feel inferior, and we really were - back then. (*See also below)

Similarly, we felt superior to the smaller ones, and that's why looking from higher angle feels like being "superior" to the subject on the picture.

Both are for pictures displaying people, particularly faces, and of course - particular emotions on the faces reinforce this feeling. Like low angle and insidious laughing face, or high angle and face blinking with eyes or seeming confused.


I guess the stature stereotype is of the same origin - shorter ones are associated with "smaller one" - children, which is associated to own memories of being weaker and inferior to taller ones. I guess that's why in general short actors are more rarely the protagonists, especially superheros, than taller ones. (Another reason probably is statistics - taller, handsome etc. is more rare ("special") than ordinary).

By the way, it is not "spiritual", "collective unconsciousness", "archetype" etc. like other common phenomena such as similar myths around the world. It's just similar conditioning, repeating experiences at different locations in similar/repeating circumstances, processed by similar generalization "processors".

* I'm not an expert in dog behavior, but I think this is related to the behavior of dogs. As little ones, they had to bend their necks up to see their mother's eyes, and this physically determined behavior is conditioned as a symbol of displaying inferiority or/and loyalty. Eventually dogs demonstrate similar body language towards their master/leader/provider (partially also for physical reasons - their heads are lower than ours, but not only - dogs try to look you in the eyes and come closer to your head).

More generally, I guess one of the discriminating skills of "social" animals is to be smart enough to understand and recognize those "providers" or "leaders", and to understand and "think" about inferiority and superiority of other agents, as grading expected benefits and dangers coming from them, which ultimately goes toward fight or flight decisions/reactions. This skill allow social animals to behave appropriately to maximize benefits according to other agents (whatever benefit is for the particular agents and circumstances).

See Also: (Search: Nurture or Nature)

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Nature or Nurture: Socialization, Social Pressure, Reinforcement Learning, Reward Systems: Current Virtual Self - No Intrinsic Integral Self, but an Integral of Infinitesimal Local Selves - Irrational Intentional Actions Are Impossible- Akrasia is Confused - Hypothesis about Socialization and Eye-Contact as an Oxytocin Source

Аn article, inspired as an answer to a post by Russell Wallace at the AGIRI's AGI List, "Killer Application"

Need to put explicit links to some of the references, if anyone cares: ask, and I'll update it, otherwise I'll add them later.

(C)  Todor "Tosh"Arnaudov , 29/11/2012***
 
Personal AGI Coaches

I agree that one of the early applications of thinking machines will be managing, advising, coaching, suggesting and assisting in all kinds of human activities ("intelligence/mind augmentation"), I myself am working in this direction too, and there are already such applications - Siri etc. are such.

I'd say that the simplest form of such "assistants" and memory augmentations are all kinds of writing, the "to do lists", having a daily-routine, then computer programs, the now obsolete electronic organizers starting from the simple PDAs with alpha-numerical keyboard to put in notes and phone numbers etc.

Working and playing with somebody is better than by yourself, but it depends on the partner also, I don't think it's that simple and straight.

I have experienced personally cases when engineers work better without frequent supervision and intervention (in case of subordinate relations, not peer-to-peer), there's also a business wisdom of delegating responsibilities to the employees in order to make them more confident and more productive, otherwise they would be more dependent and would ask for frequent or immediate feedback, which in some cases is too much of an overhead.

Peer-to-peer interaction can also has negative outcomes to productivity and cause distraction or chatter. So it depends...

...
"Akrasia" as doing something "against own good will" is Confused


As of the "akrasia", I'd partially challenge the concept. IMO the philosophical confusion comes from the lack of physiological knowledge, wrong assumption and overgeneralization. There's no integral self, i.e. the brain is not an integral system.

It self-organizes and integrates the parts, because they are connected to each other, but this happens at the expense of "bugs" and apparently "irrational" behavior, because brain was not created at once and those integrations and effects were not planned.

Body and repeated sensations of self integrate "self" in the POV of the prefrontal cortex, and of an external observer. However there are many competing subsystems that are patched over each other, the highest level "executive function" is strongly influenced and entangled with older systems, which creates a mess of mechanisms and motivations. The limitation of the body actuators (and of the basal ganglia) reduce the possible physical actions and make the body appear as having an integral personality/mind/soul.

Philosophers who are searching for a global and valid-all-the-time non-contradicting integral "will", "moral", "good will" for all possible cases, face those paradoxes of "doing something against one's better judgment" (as cited in the Wikipedia article).

Integral of Infinitesimal Local Selves over given Period...

Current Virtual Self - A Snapshot of the Virtual Simulators in the Brain

I've discussed in (see... 2002, 2003, 2004, Analysis of the sense... ) that if you do something intentionally, that means without your hands being pulled with a wire from another explicit causality-control unit (an agent), or without another agent to force you with a loaded gun etc., then that's what your current virtual self/"will" has chosen as the best action given the experience and the possibilities it understands, and given the time-span and rewards that it sees from its own perspective, at this very specific moment of decision/action, computed for a selected time-period etc. That self is virtual and "exists" at the moment of acting, e.g. moving your hand, grasping something etc. In the next moment there might be another virtual self, which has other goals and motivation, which are valid for the next moment, but they might be "inconsistent" with the past or the next, because the underlying model is covered under the skull and in the long history of experience.

An analogy can be an Integral of Infinitesimal Local Selves, in Calculus terms - a Calculus of Self...

Sometimes, for some cases, in some situations, different virtual current selves match and are/appear as stable, because the set of possible actions is limited, and because brain has also stable parts and configurations as well (at certain resolution), but the point is that "irrational" and "not-consistent" actions are not really such. I claimed in those papers, and still claim, that "irrational voluntary action" is a nonsense.

If something seems "irrational", that means that the observer hasn't recognized either the correct agent, the correct "rationality" or both, or hasn't done with sufficient resolution in order to predict it right. The concept of "rational" (as "consistent") is confused and primitive.

Due to the mess in human cognitive and physical reward system *, the moral values can change all the time and the "good or bad" - too, especially if it's something "abstract", i.e. not directly linked to feeling of dopamine, oxytocin, etc. which can have very fast effect.

Some philosophers don't get it and treat self as a constant, it's like integrating a constant - it equals 0.
Brain is not abstract and constant, it's more like a complicated function - it has specific needs at specific moments, which are caused by specific sensations stored now or before 10 years in specific circumstances etc. which are associated with specific physical sensations ("gut feelings", projected eventually to the insular cortex**).

Brain constructs generalizations out of those specific experiences, but there's a lot of noise and variations, and also working and short-term memory (recent activities and experiences), the environment of every precise moment and the declarative/autobiographical memory contain many specifics, which can be called internally in a sequence that seems "random" for an external observer, while it may have it's very specific reasons, grounded in experience.

Such an observer, - who is assuming "rationality" wrongly as something that he believes is "good", "best" etc., rather than what's best for the agent's own estimate, - wrongly concludes that if somebody breaks his apparently wrong model, he acts against "his good will". NO, it acts against the WRONG model, following its own will. If an agent does something "against his will", then that's not his will.

"Will" is considered as something abstract and independent from the body, e.g. if "you want to quit smoking, but you don't", therefore "you have a weak will". In fact yes, it is separated from the body as the decisions may be initiated by the PFC, and the statements of will might be just words, while the real non-verbal actions are driven by lower dopamine-shortcuts, such as nicotine addictions.


* We've discussed this on the AGI List, see also below
** See also Demasio's works


Akrasia, as "watching too much TV, realizing that it's a waste of time" or "eating too much and not practising sports, knowing that it causes obesity" - in my opinion there are simple reasons and I don't think the reasons have been much different in the past.

Do the average people 100 years ago used to study Vector Calculus, Maxwell's Equations or did they constructed cathode-ray tubes or radio equipment or did they studied all kinds of sciences in order to make new inventions, instead of just going to the pub, theater, cinema, chatting, flirting, reading newspaper articles about crimes and random news from the world?

The reason why they didn't and why they preferred simpler "social" activities, is that the intellectual activities require cognitive profile and capacities that a small minority of the population have, and the long-term goals are hard for the mind even for the gifted ones. One reason - the relation to present or to the future present is questionable and unclear - as noted in the famous Einstein's quote about people that love chopping woods, because they can see the results right away.

In physiological terms, there are dopamine shortcuts, or we may call them short circuits - humans *are* "wirehead"s - which are making long term activities harder, at the expense of short term ones.

There are easier, simpler and cheaper short-term activities providing the desired "drugs", why shooting for something long-term that's uncertain?


The long term ones have to have some kind of immediate measurable effect in order to keep the interest and compete with the activities which provide feedback immediately. There we are some of the effects of the clumsy AI/NLP and other fields in the academia, where small, incremental and "completely provable immediately right now, with no delay" results must be presented, even if they are globally very vague or meaningless.

It's also an illustration about how bad and weak human brain's executive function is, and how pathetic working memory can be - that's one reason why we need to take notes and pin to-do notes on the wall.


Russel Wallace:>The most powerful weapon against akrasia is social pressure. Our minds
Russel Wallace:>are programmed to act based on encouragement and discouragement from
Russel Wallace:>other people, not to operate autonomously; but the old social
Russel Wallace:>institutions have largely broken down.

Socialization in its local form has simple physiological reasons (see below), besides that we are all made dependent on others' decisions and actions. We are forced to try to satisfy some kind of authority or society's need in one way or another, because otherwise we get punished or deprived of something.

I don't think social pressure is universally constructive, it's often horrible and destructive. That's how many political and religious systems have degenerated into monstrous killing and torturing machines, and the massacres were justified with nonsenses like "to save your soul", "because of God", "for the nation", "for the race and the species" and all sorts of "social" fake abstract concepts. None of this is for society, it starts from satisfying the sick brains of the freaks who led those movements, together with the neurotransmitter-wirehead needs of the masses who follow, sometimes the latter is related to the threat of adrenaline-cortisol-pain-etc. caused by the forces of the sick brain ruling that "society".

The social pressure forced the people to obey, or they obeyed, because they were too much susceptible to be ruled and to obey, even if the commands were insane.

That's also how mediocre artists can get famous, in a milder form of social pressure - they please some big amount of humans, then many other who are not artistically qualified follow just because something was already popular, sometimes in a vicious circle driven largely by low urges and distribution advantages - some "important" ones who tell what's important to the "society".

See: http://artificial-mind.blogspot.com/2012/07/issues-with-like-dislike-voting-in-web.html
Issues with Like-Dislike Voting in Web 2.0 and Social Media, and Various Defects in Social Ranking and Rating Systems - Confused and Vague Design and Measure - Psychology of the Crowds - Corrupted Society Preferences and Suggestions. In Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, TV Networks...

Also that sheep-instinct is why people like us are marginalized, and "society-pleasing" ones who have 1/2 of the IQ and 1/10 of the expertise of people like us are often high in hierarchy and commanding millions and billions of dollars. They please "the society", i.e. what they do is easily explainable in terms that a bigger majority, or a part that is related more closely to financial and other social forces would understand and accept.

In the Planet of the Apes, the banana producers will rule the world

If you do or say or present something that's too complex or requires too much brains, or will produce results too far in the future and if you can't explain it in terms of short-term dopamine, oxytocin, endorphins or something else from the "useful" substances in the audience's brains - you'll look like a mad loser, you will even look "dumb" and "unadaptive".

The ones that produce fast-foods or sweets, or porn and sex-services are encouraged more by the society, because those "beneficial for the society" agents are associated with dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin etc. - the true "universal languages" of humanity, and the dirty true needs of the average humans. In the intellectual ones, it's to a lesser extent, in the average ones - they are slaves of this part of human physiology.

That's the mystical "happiness" which average people are looking for, and that's the "well-being" of society - dopamine, oxytocin and serotonin for all.

The ones who search for a more evolved, cognitive forms of rewards and happiness, are often oppressed by society, which doesn't get it - "find a real job, lazy philosopher!", "go code web sites or accounting software", "go dig-out potatoes", "why don't you pick some stones from the stone-pit?", "if you don't have your hands dirty, that's not work". Etc.. :-D

And...

It's the technology and individualism that are trying to put the social monster (in the totalitarian violent form) to its end. It's not the society, e.g. "the psychology of the crowds". Crowds are monsters.

The person and the technology in the society is pushing society to respect the person, initially the amorphic monster of society/the state/the church/God/the king was supposed to be unquestionable ruler of everything.

Besides, while accepting the social pressure is sometimes reluctant, it's often also the "sheep instinct" for the majority of people - they just don't know what to do themselves and can't choose. That has to do with the Guppy Effect/the Ring Syndrome. We seem to be 99% males here, I suppose everybody has experienced this - if you walk on your own you may seem like a loser and be ignored, but if you walk with or talk to a woman in front of other women, especially if she smiles at you, then the other women will find you attractive and may throw jealous gazes to that other woman... That's a funny illustration of the force of the "social pressure" on women...

..

As of the physiological reasons - e.g. dopamine, oxytocin, endorphins, vasopressin and perhaps a few others shortcuts, another type of "wirehead" and another type of addiction in a more abstract sense - under stress, cortisol is high, it kills the oxytocin, you get anxious and feel bad.

Oxytocin cures it, so you search for social interaction, because you have discovered long-long time ago as a little baby, that when your mother touches and cuddles you*, and when you keep eye-contact with her, you relax and feel good.

I have two hypotheses about how the oxytocin case came to live (need to check some details deeper):

Hypothesis 1.:

1) Brain has some pre-wirings to generate oxytocin (such as cuddling and gentle touching)
2) Eye-contact is not pre-wired and not an inborn source of oxytocin, but brain is conditioned to associate oxytocin to "animate beings", which actually means "interaction" from the very beginning, because:
2'): Eyes are the simplest and the most unquestionable sign of a pattern and correlation (in my definitions, see 2003, 2004, 2010... ) related to "self-moving" objects (temporally matching inputs). Mouth/lips (smile, frown, laugh) should be also related, especially in the foundational semantics of the facial expressions, but I think that eyes are a more obvious and unquestionable correlation for unsupervised learning, and they are more powerful and directed, they can direct the attention to new coordinates, while the mouth can direct only towards itself by it's motion, compared to the static "background".

Eye contact in essence is synchronous motion/reaction of a moving object to some intentional changes, "intentional" changes means predicted changes in the environment (effectively some sensory input) to match with the real input.

That match is the cognitive part of the reward in my model of brain. Dopamine and oxytocin are means for the other type of reward: physical, that is the desired outcome to match the real input. Dopamine and oxytocin are desired, it doesn't matter how they are injected into the brain, and social interactions, hanging out with friends, petting a cat etc. are ways to get that injection.

For example, women apparently are more sensitive or more dependent on oxytocin than men, they have to be in order to get addicted to their children, and the "mother's love is the strongest" namely because they get oxytocin from the interaction with their children.

When both sources of reward - cognitive and oxytocin - are active together, they are associated even stronger.

Hypothesis 2.:

Eye-contact is also pre-wired to induce oxytocin from the beginning - there are evidences that newborns actually do see from the beginning and they can imitate faces. This must be below the neocortex - I've speculated about the thalamus, but it's just a guess.

The feed-forward part of the facial expressions is hardwired tough, that's obvious, e.g. people can't fake a smile if they're not good actors and don't experience it. See ...

Saturday, May 1, 2010
Thalamic Nuclei - primary causes for Mirror Neurons? |Human Face - Important Aspect of Evolution | Cingulate Cortex | Nature or Nurture
http://artificial-mind.blogspot.com/2010/05/thalamic-nuclei-primary-causes-for.html

On another hand, face mimicking causes the adults who see it to smile or/and to start playing with their face, so this is a case of interaction and causing predictable changes, or provoking changes in the "animate being". The babies are usually held or cuddled, which induces oxytocin due to the touches - then all kinds of interactions and play are associate that oxytocin with the dopamine, the cognitive rewards of pattern recognition, and the "animate beings", as recognized in the most basic way.

Also, when a baby is in distress, the ones who care for her would probably also be worried/won't smile, that's how a baby can associate it's distressed facial "expressions" (its gut feelings, including facial muscles proprioception) with others' facial expressions. A similar mechanism probably goes for smiling and associating own smile and feelings with the smile of others.

If distressed, the baby would be cuddled or held, which induces oxytocin, which is an antidote to the circulating adrenaline and cortisol. That's how "bonds" are created.

Another form of social "pressure", the adult's reaction and disturbance by a baby's cry. There's a popular claim, that it's "evolutionary encoded" in order the mother to care for the baby. I think that's not necessary - we might have conditioned the spectral profile of our own cries, so it's not social, but self-induced. I claimed this back in this article:  Learned or Innate? Nature or Nurture? Speculations of how a mind can grasp on its own: animate/inanimate objects, face recognition, language...http://artificial-mind.blogspot.com/2010/04/learned-or-innate-nature-or-nurture.html

...
(It might be encoded, in some of the lower nuclei, but it must be tested, for example if there are experiments with mother's reaction, if she was born deaf and started hearing in sufficiently old age).

Russell Wallace>The solution may lie in another quirk of the human mind: our tendency
Russell Wallace>to anthropomorphize; we instinctively attribute personhood to all
Russell Wallace>sorts of things - including, in some circumstances, computer programs
Russell Wallace>(2).

I wouldn't call it instinctive, but I assume that without it we wouldn't have attributed personhood to the other humans, possibly to us ourselves, too, because to the brain the self is a set of correlated sensations and mental states, the way to distinguish it from the others are some details about the feed-back and causality control (intentionality), and the consistency/stable correlations.

As of the other people - at a distance humans "don't look like humans", their angular dimensions are very small, they "don't seem to have" eyes, a face, hands, etc. They "are not humans", but points, circles, blobs moving, right?

In fact that also means "humans", because "humans" are also "points/circles/blobs moving" - the eyes and the mouth + radial and linear motion of the head, that's the initial visual image of "human" for a baby. There are experiments with babies and fake faces, initially they react like to a real face if they see a cardboard with two circles for eyes, then if it has also a nose and a mouth, and finally - if it's 3D or "real".

Then hands, arms etc. enter the equation, that includes baby's own limbs and body parts, the feedback from touching her's own body parts etc.

Since the beginning we see various humans (small, big, old, young, ...) from various distances, various positions, clothes, etc., various occlusions, various effects of their behavior. The general/essential part for the cognition is not that they are "humans", i.e. their biological substrate, DNA, all the trillions of molecules etc. but the way they appear, interact and correlate.

In order for this to work robustly, it must keep being correct up to the highest generalization and down to the lowest resolution and the fewest details, because as mentioned, it probably has started from two eyes/eye balls, which are: two matching objects, linearly transforming (moving, rotating) synchronously in parallel and reacting to intentional operations of the one who learns about humans.
...

Another case - when somebody speaks behind your back, you only hear it - it might be a record, or synthesized.

The same goes for radio or television, or for text as well - that's only sound or image or text coming from a box, or graphics on a piece of paper, there's no persons there. However it's important what it recalls from your brain, not what it is itself.

Only you yourself are an "unquestionable" person for yourself. The other stimuli which you attribute to animate beings/persons remind of *you yourself* and your own flow of thoughts, sensations, feelings, parameters.

It recalls emotions that you have experienced, thoughts that you have had - in one extent or another.

Human anthropomorphize sets of (correlated) stimuli which are similar to his own intentional sensations.

The series continues....

(C)  Todor "Tosh"Arnaudov (Todor Iliev Arnaudov) , Тодор Илиев Арнаудов - Тош 

***
First Published: 29/11/2012
 30/11/2012, - minor grammatical correction;
 2/12 - "complex function" changed to "complicated function" (in order not to confuse with complex numbers)
25-26/5/2023 - a few typos noticed (require -- requires, loose -- lose), while translating to Bulgarian from the book "The Prophets of the Thinking Machine: Artificial General Intelligence and Transhumanism: History, Theory and Pioneers": http://github.com/twenkid

Думи, тагове, tags: Философия, интердисциплинарно, невронауки, неврология, психология, вродени, средата, гени, Интегрално смятане, анализ, социология, психология на тълпата, обществен натиск, общество, личност, съзнание, самосъзнание, интегрално, цялостно, акразия, Сократ, ирационално, рационално, объркано, мозък, човешки, допамин, серотонин, оскитоцин, кортизол, адреналин, невротрансмитер, ...АГИ списък, УИР, Универсален изкуствен разум, изкуствен разум, изкуствен интелект, Decision making, взимане на решение, Reasoning, rationality, агенти, мулти-агентни системи, изкуствен интелект, интелигентност





Corrections of typos (25.8.2025): selfs - selves; endorphins, vasopressin  etc. (not "-ines"); new-borns - newborns; antopomorphize  - anthropomorphize 

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Philosophical and Interdisciplinary Discussion on General Intelligence, AGI and Superintelligence Safety and Human Moral | Cognitive Origins of the Concepts of Human Soul and its Immortality | Free Will and How it Originates Cognitively | Animate Being and Soul and the Cognitive Reason for the Believe that "Thinking Machines can't have a Soul and Consciousness" | Technology Making us more Humane | The Egoism of Humanity | And more

By Todor "Twenkid/Tosh" Arnaudov
http://research.twenkid.com/wp/

* For the followers of the blog - that's not the paper announced in the previous post.


The expression and sharing of the following reflections and speculations is inspired by a publication for a position offered at the FACULTY OF PHILOSOPHY, Oxford University, published on the AGI List (thanks to Sean O'Heigeartaigh).

http://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/get_involved/future_tech_vacancies/futuretech

See the pdf document, the research foci on p. 2, section 5:

http://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0014/25034/Futuretech_Tamas_RF_230112.pdf 

5. This is a research position focused on topics related to the long-term future of machine intelligence and AI. Relevant research foci include: 

- Studying paths towards strong AI: Monitor the current state of progress in the field; identify milestones, roadmaps, etc. 

- Machine intelligence: Analyze fundamental concepts—e.g. how to define and measure general intelligence in artificial systems; how to distinguish different kinds of goal-seeking systems.

- Self-modifying systems: What can be proved about the performance and capabilities of different kinds of recursively self-modifying programs? Can a framework be developed in which demonstrably safe, recursively self-improving AIs could be constructed, with stable and human-friendly goal systems? 

- The role of big data: What impacts and applications will arise from the increasing availability of enormous data sets? What are the fundamental tradeoffs between processing power and data? Is there a minimum amount of data that an arbitrarily powerful intelligence would need in order to effectively deal with various task domains? Can one quantify how much information the human brain contains at birth to enable it to develop general intelligence? Can one quantify how “difficult” it was for such a system to evolve? 

- Philosophy of computer science and of AI: What does it mean to implement a computation? Would a “Boltzmann Brain” or a “Swampman” be conscious? 

- The control problem: How could one ensure that an artificial superintelligence would be safe and beneficial? 

- Can one analyze classes of possible utility functions and construct general statements about the behavior of expected utility-maximizing superintelligence based upon utility functions of a particular class?

Sounds familiar - I have already worked on and have been studied the topics listed in section 5 in the pdf document since the "teenage theory" era, my ultimate aim is at understanding general intelligence and building an eventually developing an AGI system, thus my intent when working on related philosophical issues is to put the  speculations and explanations in coherent computational/theoretical form aligned to a theory of GI to the general/cybernetic/systems theory trends in Universe evolution as I see them (a sort of cybernetic metaphysics).

I also aim to match my theoretical speculations and insights with all accessible kinds of neuroscientific, evolutionary, cognitive science, behavioral etc. evidences I'm aware of at the time. Often I discover such evidences later. For example ~10 years ago, while not being familiar with neuroscience as now, appropriate reflections and a basic understanding in developmental psychology allowed me to induce the existence and functional distinction of hippocampus and the neocortex using only behavioral evidences. See: http://artificial-mind.blogspot.com/2010/06/teenage-theory-of-mind-and-universe.html
Teenage Theory of Mind and Universe (Excerpts, Part 1) - Theoretical Induction of Neocortex and Hippocampus using Consciousness; Compression 

Regarding the philosophical problems, some of my oldest work include analyses of questions, for example related to:

-- What is a "soul" really and why people believe they have such a thing and are more likely to intuitively believe higher animals have and machine shouldn't have?
-- Why a mind believes the soul is immortal and should exist forever?
-- How death is actually perceived from a thinking machine and human perspective and what humans are really afraid of?
-- What actually humans (intuitively) mean with "free will" and why humans insist they have and machines would not?
-- What actually the concepts of hell and heaven illustrate about human mind operation, why so many religions have such concepts, how a cognitive system invents them, why it's so strong?
-- Discussions about consciousness, what is it from different perspectives.

-- General metaphysical universe principles and trends displayed in society, computers, intelligence

-- Core human drives, such as egoism vs altruism, and why love is socially/pragmatically praised?

-- What is creativity, what is to be original, why humans believe computers can't be creative?

-- What is actually implied by "rational". Can an intentional agent (and human) be really "irrational" or rather the model of the agent, used by the evaluator of rationality, is too coarse grained and wrong?


Regarding those sample directions in section 5., I'll use the opportunity to give some contrary statements, from the point of view of the thinking machines, that would be smart enough to unveil our biases and self-praising believes about humans "undisputed" moral superiority.

Oxford: Machine intelligence: Analyze fundamental concepts—e.g. how to define and measure general intelligence in artificial systems; how to distinguish different kinds of goal-seeking systems.

• 1. Hutter and Legg's Definition of Machine Intelligence, and the Educational Test

There is serious work already done, see for example M. Hutter and Shane Legg's  paper below. These are slides I've prepared from it for my students, with some additional notes of mine:
http://research.twenkid.com/agi_english/Machine_Intelligence_Hutter_Legg_Eng_MTR_Twenkid_Research.pdf

• 2. Maximum degree of value-unloadedness for the raw input and output of the system, and maximum resolution of perception and causality/control compared to the maximum possible resolution in the environment where the system exists - that's one definition of generality of artificial intelligence of mine

Another simple/core measure for "generality"  in principle, I tried to discussed on the AGI List in the autumn of 2011 - the generality of the raw sensory input from which regularities are induced, that is -- value unloadedness of the initial inputs and outputs, such as sensory matrices similar to human auditory, visual and tactile input.

The meaning of initial cognitive data in such representations is just a sequence of numerical values and their coordinates in space and time within the matrix and within the records of past states of the sensory matrices and to some internal parameters.  That's the most general (value free) input to which further is added value - meaning, generalized and specialized.

The initial output in humans and in maximum general intelligence is as general either -- muscle actions --- which are translation, rotation, propulsion. These operations alter the coordinates of the parts of the system relative to the environment. That's true also for the vocal tract and speech - the surfaces of the vocal chords vibrate - alter their coordinates at high frequency, compared to muscles - and the tongue, lips, jaws, larynx motion and coordinate changes modulate the sound. The environment - "the real world" is just the richest and the lowest level sensory input, the one with the highest possible resolution, the most details, the computationally hardest to model (predict).

• The more of initial value loadedness, the less of generality of the intelligence derivable from that point on

In this regard, on the other hand NLP (Natural Language Processing) for example is far less general intelligence, because it starts with very abstract concepts whose derivation from lower generality concepts is lost and unrecoverable by the words themselves without using lower level inputs and concepts - less abstract inputs.

That's a common problem in narrow AI and NLP - to move forward, the working concepts of the theories need to start from a lower level of generalization, otherwise they start and finish as combinatorial equations with no grounding.  See the series of critical articles: What's Wrong with Natural Language Processing?.

Oxford:   Self-modifying systems: What can be proved about the performance and capabilities of different kinds of recursively self-modifying programs? Can a framework be developed in which demonstrably safe, recursively self-improving AIs could be constructed, with stable and human-friendly goal systems?
Oxford:   The control problem: How could one ensure that an artificial superintelligence would be safe and beneficial?

It seems obvious, but any significant invention can be used either for good or evil, but while thinking machines *could* only hypothetically turn into terminators... However there's one nature's "invention" that has always been a terminator and has ever been an unstoppable killer: HUMANS.

• Humans are the archetype of James Cameron's "The Terminator"

When discussing the dangers of AGI with my students I've asked them to reflect on:

- How could one ensure the safety of humans and human intelligence? How could one control humans and did we succeed in the history of humanity to prevent wars or genocides?

If anything could control humans not killing and hurting each other, that would be either:
-- an utopia society (totalitarian, for example...)
-- machines which are stronger and faster than us to monitor and react fast enough only in case
-- some sort of cyborg-like implants or environmental means for prevention which block violator's brain or muscles etc...
-- why not altering our "human" nature phisically

In the current state of affairs though, the human race should admit that all homicides are executed by humans and every person is a potential killer and a criminal. History has proven for millenia that humans, or a lot of them, develop as greedy, violent; exploiters, killers, may go insane and aggressive for no apparent reason etc., and the major historical events are of wars, exploitation, slavery and genocides.

• Two Camps/Enemies Fighting

All those acts are eventually of humans who are in two camps, applying force and aiming to conquer, rob or destroy others - it's not about humans vs non-humans, one ethnic group against another or one race against another*. It's not because of their "genetic difference" (see below for a remark), it's all  about "mine" vs "yours", no matter how or what the one or both of the sides want to get or keep away from the enemy. It comes from the individuality and then groups with particular identity, which can be based on arbitrary values.

In this regard, there could be machines which are on the either sides**, and there could be thinking (or not that smart too) machines which could fight against other machines (to protect particular people and themselves), or against aggressive humans in order to protect civil ones or other machines etc. 

There might even be different "taxa" or "states" of machines fighting each other etc., but in my opinion superintelligence, if autonomous and not spoiled, is supposed to be wiser than humans and might be created or would itself wipe out or control better its human counter-part primitive brain/behavioral functions which for humans drive emotions such as mindless anger, rage, fear, lust, addiction.

Such emotions lead to wars and violence. Wise men are not warriors, but unfortunately the ones who were overtaking the government throughout the history were the ones who had the force, aggression, greed, hatred, cruelty and power to do it. Wisdom is powerless against the physical force.

• "Neurobiological philosophy"

Indeed - familiarity with comparative-, computational-, evolutionary-, etc. variations of neuroscience happens to lay many philosophical issues down onto evolutionary biological, physiological, behavioral etc. grounds.

* Racism and theories about "inferiority" of races or ethnic groups or nations or whatever groups are in their bottom just made-up formal excuses for applying force and/or measures in order to conquer, exploit, eliminate etc. (rage, greed, anger) - the stronger one wins. Many human acts are driven by low urges, violent ones of course are among them. However people have also higher cognitive functions which run in parallel and they need and produce (invent) systematic reasons to explain the behavior as a whole, which in its gross directions is largely driven by the primitive urges anyway. That's supposed to be related to the phenomena I've discussed recently in the following publication:
Rationalization and Confusions Caused by High Level Generalizations and the Feedforward-Feedback Imbalance in Brain and Generalization Hierarchies
http://artificial-mind.blogspot.com/2011/10/rationalization-and-confusions-caused.html

** War machines don't require very powerful (general) intelligence to be effective - recognition of enemies and allies, aiming at, navigating and transport are not that complex if it's just about destruction and defense, and if the agent is controlling a tank for example. I suggest Hugo de Garis's book  The Artilect War: Cosmists vs. Terrans: A Bitter Controversy Concerning Whether Humanity Should Build Godlike Massively Intelligent Machines - which I haven't read myself, though and can't comment on.

..

Back to the topic:

Oxford:  The control problem: How could one ensure that an artificial superintelligence would be safe and beneficial?

Another example I've given to my students:

• What if your fellow soldier was a machine, and your enemy - a human?

- Imagine in a state of a war, or a gun fight, what if your fellow soldier is a humanoid robot, and there is a group of enemies - aggressive humans who want to kill you. Should you defend the "humanity" and let your "brothers" kill you or would you fight back with the robot, which is on your side?

In fact soldiers "love" and create emotional bonds even with their guns, tanks and aircrafts, what about intelligent or/and humanoid robots that look and acts like them and protect them.

Another confusion regarding machines as intrinsically "antagonistic", "inferior" and "evil" to human race is related to the fact that society now takes "Human rights" for granted and obvious and sometimes the technological society is blamed for alienation and violence (weapons for mass destruction, world wars). This is an illusion and ignorance, humanity has not obeyed human rights up to very recently, recall again the millenia of wars or just exploitations: slave-masters, serfs, workers in terrible conditions, mindless wars and mindless genocides.

• Don't take Human rights for granted - they were not always here. Technology made them possible.

In fact, the generalization of an abstract concept of humanity as a whole and the application of those rights de facto and not only in abstract philosophical works are recent artifacts. In my opinion they actually became possible because of the advent of advanced technologies of any kind, especially ones in medicine and for transportation, information and telecommunication, where the IT and communication are crucial for development of all sciences and technologies, and the overall progress is mutually enhanced between different fields.


The technologies allowed massive and fast inter-personal and inter-cultural communication, international world-wide economical and cultural collaboration, higher living standard, higher levels of education and awareness about the world. These events allowed more of "friendliness" between different societies at any scales.


This is unlike for example in the authoritative one-directional communication/propaganda in the nationalism epochs some 100-200 years ago and the 20-th century totalitarian regimes (early advent of radio telecommunication, and the specific antagonistic political situation). It is also unlike the very narrow, localized and culturally heavily biased image of the world and other cultures in the epochs without fast transportation, without steady food-supply, lacking health-care, lacking education, knowledge and telecommunication, when societies were generally very fragmented, isolated, exploiting each other and separated in violently antagonistic camps in all scales.

This topic can be elaborated in details, but in general I believe the progress and IT-communication-transportation-medicine etc. technology allowed the "human rights" to be applied.

• Machines are making us "humans" and "humane" as we see the terms today

In my opinion, in the long run it is the machines (higher technologies) that are making from us the "humans" as we are now. Technology is where intelligence crystallizes, and intelligence is fighting our beast-self .

Religious objection: Christianity etc. taught people to be good, to love their enemies and all people etc.. Technology makes us bad, greedy ("consumers"), it's a product of evil and the devil etc...

Unfortunately the beautiful suggestions to love all people etc. were not and couldn't be applied totally, and if the Christian moral is literary applied today it won't pass - such as the fornication, not to talk about the darkest times of all churches.

There has always been wise people who has loved all people and were against violence and tyranny, but in reality - big scale - that was an utopia. Enormous amount of wars and outrageous violence were politically justified with words about faith, "moral", sacred goals, "god commandments" etc., where in my opinion the root of all was as simple as:

• The ones who don't support your vision and direction (the same as your party, your society, your national country, yourself) or refuse to obey your laws no matter what they are, don't  subordinate, don't agree etc. -- they can be tortured and killed without any mercy, because you have the power to do it, and according to ... the power is from... god.
  
  As stated above - human violence is not about humans vs non-humans, or a race against another, or a religion against another. It's just about me vs you, "I am more powerful and I am right, thus you should obey, or you will be destroyed". In one word: egoism and brutal elementary animal instincts. (See below also.)

Yet another opposite POV of the same question asked in the Oxford's list of research foci:

Oxford: The control problem: How could one ensure that an artificial superintelligence would be safe and beneficial?

People take for granted that AGI should be safe and beneficial from their current point of view, and the world should stay static as it is now. However social and moral values change, humans also change and their values - too, even without radical physical changes, such as to get modified into new biological species of transhumans, cyboorgs or whatever...

• Safe and beneficial for whom?

Evolution usually is ignored or forgotten - humans feel themselves as "the undisputed masters", "the top of the nature". Some may claim that there are scientific etc. evidences. To me it's a made-up excuse. 

• Humans believe they are the top of the Universe, because they are the top egoists in Universe

The reason we think ourselves as the masters is, in my opinion, rather much simpler - such as our egoism - individual and the egoism of the society and human race as a "super ego". The anthropocentrism is an expression of human egoism. In anthropocentrism every single individual is identifying as a representative of this idealized model. 

The forced altruism is an extended egoism as well -- society acts as an "individual". It has its specifics - values, identities, - and it forces its members to contribute for the preservation of the "body" and "values" of society as it sees them at the moment.

If anybody opposes, he's punished - everyone should be an altruists, meaning to serve the needs of the society - yet another ego ("super-ego"), satisfying its needs at the expense of exploiting the smaller individual egos.

In order to change the values of the super-ego where a small ego belongs, an aggregate of small egos should collaborate and tune on the same waves to collect enough force. However that would diminish their identities and turn them into another "super-ego".


This process goes in living organisms, from cells to organisms and ecosystems; in the religious groups and political/state governments. The highest level of causality control is aiming at keeping itself as it believe is "correct/stable/right" (it's ego), while the lower level components are aiming at serving their smaller "egos", but are subordinated by "force" and due to the formation of local smaller "super-egos".

• Humans like to exploit and enslave

For example, the classical Asimov's robots in most of the stories and the robotics laws are an example of humans wanting to have their personal slaves and servants to obey their orders, the same goes to a bigger extent in Karel Chapek's play coining the term "robot".

I guess that to the society back then this view was more acceptable than now. Some would say "of course" - they are machines, they are built, and not born, "they don't have a soul" or personality and individuality (see below for this "spiritual" topic) etc. therefore they should be slaves - that's fair, according to humans.

On the other hand,

• Is it fair or moral to enslave a being if it outsmarts you and is behaviorally, cognitively and physically more sophisticated  than yourself?

A good example of how this feels is the original version of the movie "The Planet of the Apes" (1968), which is based on the original novel. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0063442/

What if the gorilla's or chimp's predecessors were smart enough to recognize the rise of the homo lineage and managed to kill it and did forbid "illegal genetic mutations" for the sake of gorillas welfare, because they had the power and will to do it and because they had provisioned, that "this next step in evolution can't be controlled and proven to be safe and beneficial" for them?

The apes would have been morally right for their society, because the future homo species were not beneficial for them - humans killed apes and restricted their habitats. Human race has killed billions of living beings for their own benefits or because we considered the other species "pests". Animal rights are recently applied too, and they don't stop us from killing animals, it's just more "humane killing", and in fact a big part of our identity that we consider "human" is rather animal and evolutionary very ancient.

• If gorillas and chimps' predecessors had measured the risks of human evolution, they would have killed our lineage millions of years ago and would have been morally right for their society...

Indeed:

- Who gave us the right to kill other species?

The answer is straight: we did, it's the law of the jungle. The physical power is ours, and there are no other beings that are intelligent or powerful enough to contradict or oppose.

We defined the moral to fit us, so this is moral - we consider us being "higher", or that living is "sacred" (living is us, that's why it's sacred). We're "smarter", we're "more fit" - our measures and classifications are ones that match the principles of our social hierarchies, if you're on top, you deserve the ones below to obey and to subordinate.

Humans just feel as being the masters and they have the power and need to do whatever they want, i.e. "their moral suggests them".

It's interesting to extend the problem of robots and artificial general intelligence as not adequate persons, justified by their nature of being "built", but not born.. What about human children?

• Aren't children and humans built, too? Do they deserve equal rights to... older humans???

Children are intelligent beings and eventually become citizens with full rights, but everybody was initially "built" by somebody else too like the machines, even though not in a factory, but with biological "robots" - RNA-DNA protein-building processes.

Everyone owes her existence "legally" to somebody else.. In fact - to many others, I don't mean family predecessors - to the society which provided secured environment for them to live as well. 

• Should then mother or parents (and society) enslave their children? 

In fact parents and society figuratively do - children are dependent on their parents good will and they are deprived from many choices, money and rights to earn money, goods and they lack many civil rights for 16-18 years or more, they are obviously considered "inferior" by the adult society and parents. It's partially justified by their real incapability to survive on their own initially, but the latter is mostly because they live in a world of generally stronger and smarter beings with which they would have to compete - they are protected by their parents and society at the expense of not having particular rights. Even though gifted children are functionally and mentally superior to many young men and adults, they can not climb the hierarchy until they serve their "duty time" until the age fixed by the adult ones in the laws, which are considered "right".

Indeed, the inferior position of children to their parents and to the older ones is perhaps responsible for the following visual psychological phenomenon: "Why shorter Stature and Lower camera angle are Unconsciously associated with "Inferiority"? Memories from childhood (Nature or Nurture)" http://artificial-mind.blogspot.com/2011/08/why-shorter-stature-and-lower-camera.html

Regarding some  "spiritual" issues on AGI/thinking machines

• Another "right" for humans to put thinking machines at inferior position is the concept of "soul" as a sacred status-symbol, and the self-awareness and consciousness as some supernatural magical characteristics of humans, instead of comparing and studying them as cognitive properties/capabilities

Let me present for example what "soul" actually means for a mind, according to the AGI theory and model of the mind of mine, I got insights and have discussed in this direction since my earliest major works about 10 years ago.

The initial and essential meaning of the concept of "soul" from a computational perspective is just a generalized model of the sensory inputs associated with the initial perceptions of/associated with human beings. 

The template for this model and for "animate beings" is constructed by the perceptions of the dynamics of the sensory inputs generated and associated by/with the interaction with the particular mother/care-giver and one's own body and visceral senses, "happiness" level etc. Initially baby doesn't distinguish itself and its feelings as individual, they are closely related to the care-giver so their observed generalized model is part of self, later on this template is associated and linked to wider range of people.

The model is further extended to other agents and animals - because their bodies, faces, motions, sound, behavior, interactivity etc. match or is similar to the initial template, perhaps also because it makes one feel (or recall feeling) particular sensations associated with the ones associated with the first "template". This process is cyclically reinforced.

It probably starts from the eyes/eye contact and lips -- eyes are the most clear (self-contained), dynamic and simple early visual sensory pattern. See:  Learned or Innate? Nature or Nurture? Speculations of how a mind can grasp on its own: animate/inanimate objects, face recognition, language...

[Neural correlates will be discussed in another upcoming work]

This abstract model of a human/animate being is used by mind to predict future inputs of it (perceptible future transformations), therefore it's not derived from, and it's supposed to cover all minute physical details (molecules, chemical reactions and full precision physical laws). 

Mind has the computational capabilities and can model at low level only approximate aspects acquired by sensory experience - e.g. motion pictures and records of all kinds of sensory experiences and emotional states - own and the implied of the others' (guessed by associating/matching to own).

• Nobody really dies until there are people who remember her, because: the mental models of their physical bodies - don't.

Here the explanation of my theory of the cognitive origin of the believe in eternal soul comes:

When somebody else dies, in order this happening to be perceived and evaluated as "death", there should be another living (running, functioning) mind. The model of  "human" and "animate being" and the specifics regarding the dead man's soul are still on-line, the model is not deleted and mind can still imagine it - recall and predict/replay/generate plausible sequences of future "motion" or sensory transformations, like it could do before the person has died.

Mind/self obviously cannot imagine its own death with its own resources as well, because it cannot operate if it's not operating. Probably that explains why often when reflecting on being dead, mind is imagining itself not as "not functioning", but just as in the known self-model, however imaging it as not embodied, not feeling particular emotions, in another place etc. The general properties of the "self" are still kept, such as reflecting, memories, imagination.

In fact, for mind there's no perceptual difference if somebody has gone away (and never has come back) or if he has died without the mind having low-level or clear signs about that - in both cases the deceased agent is just not interacting anymore, there are no new low level inputs to mind associated/recognized as coming from the person that previously was associated as the living person X.Y.

The concept of "soul" is familiar for all kinds of societies, including most primitive ones, and children use that word also - they apparently should mean something which is simple enough, accessible using raw senses and common.

Besides, I suspect the mind imperfection stated above has to do with the origin of  Idealism in philosophy.

• The believe in the eternity of ideas, soul, spirit and so on come from the impossibility of mind to imagine itself not operating using its own resources. Mind can perceive and imagine  only the death - cessation of operation - of other agents and while it does, it evaluates it using running mind. The "running"-ness of evaluating mind confuses the model of death.
  
  ...
• Another meaning implied with the word "soul/spirit" is of course close to consciousness and "qualia", but lack of qualia can't be proven or disproven.

Humans may claim they have a soul, but a machine has not, because it's "just electronics", "just 1s and 0s", "a bunch of metal and semiconductors" etc., but people usually don't realize that a thinking machine that is intelligent enough may claim the same for humans:

"The Machine: Yeah, and your human emotions are quantitative, qualitative, spatial and temporal correlation of chemical substances - proteins, hormones, nucleinic acids etc. I can explain you all the details, but I'm afraid it won't be of any use for you, because your poor human brains won't be capable to cope with that complexity."*

In regard of animals and souls - humans tend to give a right to have a soul of animals, because they look very similar to us and behave like us (we see matches to the initial human model - to that "soul" template), where "us" means each of us individually. That's one reason why people normally feel less remorse for killing an insect or a plant than killing a dog -- insects are just too different visually and behaviorally, and plants don't react to pain.

Empathy is driven by fooling mind like if the person/animal perceived suffering were you, it matches the sensory experience one has for his own and mind assumes the experiences of the other agent should be similar.

As already suggested, the initial perception of "animated beings", and the generalization of a soul as a model of a human initially comes from the actions and observations of our own body and senses, and from the perceptions of the behavior of our parents and people who care for us, and it's strongly correlated with *us* either.

Initially babies don't recognize others as others, they associate their entire experience, all their actions and expectations with their senses (visual, tactile, visceral, happy/sad (the latter correlated with the level of: oxytocin, serotonin, dopmain, adrenalin and other chemicals)). The virtual generalized model of human beings gets imprinted and bound to our basic cognition and to our basic feelings and sense of ourselves.

Indeed, the process of bonding and empathy in mammals is strongly driven and reinforced by release and the effects of the neurotransmitter oxytocin, it's released when giving birth, during sex and when interacting with animated beings (no matter pets or humans). For example that's why caring for a pet is relaxing, and why violence against animals may be an indication for future sociopathic behavior - some subjects have "faults" regarding reception of oxytocin, or they fail to produce it, and feel no remorse and no empathy.

There's another hormone - cortisol - which is produced after a prolonged stress is encountered, such as fear. Fear causes initial release of adrenaline, and if the stress is not overcame, cortisol is released. Cortisol melts down tissues in order to produce glucose, it melts particular brain structures too (hippocampus, involved in declarative memories). Regarding empathy in particular - cortisol is an oxytocin antagonist. In a state of sustained fear, oxytocin is swept out, and mammals get aggressive. 

Desire for a hug in a state of stress is also related - hugs release oxyticin. Not surprising that usual profile of serial killers are people with awful childhood, which might have damaged their oxytocin-related neurochemistry and the template of other humans and animate beings.

* The thinking machine statement on human soul and emotions is a translation from the novel of mine "The Truth" (Истината), first published in late 2002. It's available on-line, but only in Bulgarian.

• In regard of man and machine relation, the "soul", and also consciousness as qualia are also a sort of "status symbols" for ones who "hate machines", but have not a better reason or can't understand well why. (Such as Mr. Searle, IMHO some of his claims are self-humiliating and ridiculous)

Humans, and particular individuals, are taught and are self-praising as "kings of the nature", and they're afraid of being "dethroned" as "the most special ones". When threatened, they are searching for proves, such as - machines are accused for "just doing what they are programmed/told to do", while "humans have free will, they can do what they want", so AGI is reduced to a simple machine.

• The "doing what they are programmed to do" vs "free will" is confused in many ways. For example: 

A) It implies that humans have a soul or consciousness, because they *don't always know/can predict why they do what they're doing with a precision that they believe they should have known in case if they didn't have free will*. 

However the lack of appropriate knowledge is not free will, but less of sentience or even randomness. (I guess you're familiar with the paradox - if one has completely free will, causally unrelated to past and/or the environment, that means her will is random, and she's supposed not to have merits for her random choices)

B) In the same time, humans justify and define their free will with examples such as "if I want to do something, I can do it"

They have "choice", and there's "intention" - a match between desired and caused. See the first pages of "Universe and Mind 4" (2004) for the discussion on resolution of causality/control and how low it is in such cases.

While machines:

C) They just do what they are programmed to do, exactly, have no choice, no will, no soul etc. In fact even the simplest algorithm has "choice" if it has one single conditional operation.

Generally I suspect this "hatred" come from the perception of machines as "inanimate objects" and "not humans", "not like me, and I am the master". The attempts to justify it are rationalizations - see the already mentioned article - Rationalization and Confusions Caused by High Level Generalizations and the Feedforward-Feedback Imbalance in Brain and Generalization Hierarchies.

Point (B) is an illustration of the observation of a *match* between intentions and future sensory input - intentions are predictions, expectations for the future sensory inputs - including proprioceptive, which are related to motor outputs, muscular actions. 

- It's noticed also, that the match between predicted and observed is with a precision which is assumed to be high enough to accept that it is a display of free will (B).
- Yet it's noticed that sometimes precision is not high enough for ones' own actions (sometimes you may want something, but it may not happen) and especially when expecting and evaluating other agents actions - one can't predict that precisely others' behavior. However others  are recognized as "similar, like me", see the "soul" template above - and from their behavior/their model, implications are induced and reapplied to the model of self.
- Besides, the "machine hater" applies his vague and inarticulate knowledge about computers and inanimate objects on the thinking machines  -- Computers - you type in, it does your commands. Programming - you type orders, it computes. Algorithm - it executes exactly as it's programmed. It's constructed of 1s and 0s. Works without mistakes, like a machine (too high a precision) etc.

The latter confusion is not surprising, the notorious mathematician Lady Ada Lovelace, daughter of Lord Byron has made it too, but Alan Turing has given her a nice answer a 100 years later. See...
T. Arnaudov - Faults in Turing Test and Lovelace Test. Introduction  of Educational Test. In Todor Arnaudov's Researches Blog, 17/11/2007
http://artificial-mind.blogspot.com/2007/11/faults-in-turing-test-and-lovelace-test.html

For (A) the precision is decided by comparison between the precision of self-predicted actions (and presence of proprioceptive feedback and recognition of parts of self etc.), and the acceptably lower precision of prediction of behavior of other agents and the lack of proprioceptive feedback (other people's bodies future trajectories and utterances are harder to predict than our own body, sometimes there are unpredictable "glitches", caused by their "free will", meaning - unpredictable component of the model of their "soul" in the computational sense defined above).

Going to lower neural level, "will" is the execution of  muscular actions, initiated by sequences of neuronal activities in the motor cortices of the brain, which are in the roots of the "intentions" in the neocortex, and perhaps the initial source of sample data for this kind of multi- and inter-modal match.

The will as matching between intentions and future perceptions is encoded in the words' semantics either. Apperently in English as a particle for future tense. In Bulgarian for example, the particle for future tense, the future tense of the auxiliary verb съм/sum  (to be) - "ще" (shte - "wlll") sounds close  to "shta", that is a word meaning "want" in negating sentences:

- Не ща! - I don't want (it/you/...something/this/)!
- Щеш - не щеш, ще трябява да го направиш. -  It doesn't matter if you want or you don't want to do it, you will have to!

Also, the explanation of one's own behavior when other reasons are unknown usually is reduced to "I did it, because I wanted so!"

The "wanted" outcome is what's in the "intentions" and is matched to the really happened.
I believe the match between "intentions"(expected/predicted) and reality is a fundamental metaphysical concept of Universe and of mind. Check the "teenage era" works, Control/Causality units.

-- To be continued -- 

(C) Todor "Tosh/Twenkid" Arnaudov
Twenkid Research - http://research.twenkid.com/wp/

Last edited: 19/2/2012

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Thalamic Nuclei - primary causes for Mirror Neurons? |Human Face - Important Aspect of Evolution | Cingulate Cortex | Nature or Nurture

a face in action

Regarding mirror neurons and early facial expression imitation, another hypothesis. Continues from:  Learned or Innate? Nature or Nurture? Speculations of how a mind can grasp on its own: animate/inanimate objects, face recognition, language...

Emotional facial expressions are innate, I remember a many decades old research on understanding facial expressions around the world, which shows that we're compatible at emotions expression level, no matter of culture and the level of society development. I think this was proven thousands of times by Cinema, and it matches with the hypothesis that emotions are driven by older parts of the brain: Cingulate Cortex --> Fornix --> Thalamus --> Hippocampus --> Neocortex.

The Neocortex eventually learns to control face as well, and good actors do it well, however, being an actor myself, I would say that good acting involves feeling the emotions of the character, "living a part", which goes below neocortex. Indeed, I believe this is easier, because it happens partially subconsciously and automatically.

Perhaps neocortex "calls" or better "recalls" and "reruns" complex functions from the lower parts - memories of already felt emotions or better - situations when emotions were felt. On the other hand, bad actors probably do not feel, because cannot recall emotional memories so well. Bad actors are trying consciously /mechanically to pull-up/pull-down facial muscles which makes their faces to look unrealistic and unconvincing (like if their characters felt nothing or something inappropriate). Perhaps, because conscious cannot do control precisely in parallel so many muscles, and maybe because these muscles are too strongly linked to their thalamic nuclei.

I would suggest here: it's better not to smile if you're not happy, rather than do a "false smile".



Facial Hardware

Our face has a dedicated cranial nerve like the other sensory and motor head-"interfaces", and like the rest, except olfaction, but including optic nerve, facial nerve passes through a thalamic nuclei in the thalamus:







Going up, Thalamus has projections to the neocortex and back, so eventually it can turn into "magic neurons" up there.

Boris Kazachenko recently suggested in a comment here: Meta Evolution: fitness beyond reproduction

BK: "I think there have been minor genetic changes in humans that produced a major increase in intelligence, mostly through the growth & folding of neocortex"

I believe that the face might be one of the important aspects of human evolution, as well.  
 
Making a digital networks analogy (see Physical layer) 

Face - physical level interface

If brains and intelligence have evolved to cope with more complex social interactions in the high level of processing, face should have taken a part of the evolution of the "Physical Level Interface" and the thalamic nuclei are a middle layer, doing primary decoding of physical layer signals, sorting, redirecting. I suspect they might/should be correlated at DNA level, because, growing one thing requires growing a counter-part, all muscles or receptors etc. need to have appropriate nerves that eventually reach the Central Nervous System, and I guess that evolving parts in pathways inside the CNS may also involve all subregions, if they develop together prenatally. (I'm not yet that much deep into embryology, though.)

Flexible physical layer interface allows telling others clearly and visually  how do you feel, so they can react appropriately and/or learn using it as a sign/conditioned stimulus. I guess this should be related also to the grow of the importance of vision in human senses.

Basic Emotions and Mammals 

All mammals have the basic emotions, lower animals also should have at least part of theirs (such as: Fear, Panic, Lust, Search; even the Octopus seems to have an elaborated brain and "Play" system on its own).  There's a funny research showing that rats laugh when being tickled...

However, most mammals, e.g.  cats or dogs display just a portion of their emotions using face. Expression of Rage (human also growls and clenches its teeth) and Fear/Panic? (eyes wide open)  seem to be similar, and I think they both are amongst the evolutionary older emotions.

When we do say that a cat or a dog has "a sad face", though I suspect it's rather a blind visual similarity we spot (like finding faces in a fish or insect), a form of anthropomorphizing, than real. Cats and dogs faces are not that flexible and expressive as ours - as Alice says in Wonderland: "Cats can't smile". Well, I don't know.  :)

Whitney was a sad little kitty, starring in a photo story of mine.
Photos - (C) Todor Arnaudov, 2006 - "The Ghost" photo story

Big Apes 

I haven't studied well great apes facial expressions to speak seriously. Of course they do use faces for expressing emotions, but I suspect their face is not as versatile as human's, the visual contrast between features and background is worse and they lack eyebrows, which are clues for human emotions.

However mirror neurons and facial expressions imitation were found as early as rhesus monkeys, so this line may started long ago.

Conclusion

Overall, I guess that mirror neurons might be projections or related to projections from facial and optic thalamic nuclei, maybe related to a primary integration of both. I suspect that part of the integration between face and optic, dealing with imitation of facial expressions, can be done as early as the thalamus itself, by sort of low resolution processing; I haven't studied internal thalamus anatomy yet, though (is it studied/understood?). 

I would conclude, that if one day I could do study myself how exactly a baby imitates faces, I would try to find spatial/contrast etc. resolution thresholds when these reactions first appear. E.g. a baby boy may put his tongue out if he sees a quick-enough change in contrast in a wide spot of the visual field, not only in a mouth - it might be a high-contrast line moving quickly vertically anywhere etc. I don't know if such tests had been done already.
 

Appendix 1: Talents
I think there's no doubt that there are innate predispositions/talents for arts - drawing, music, dancing, also acting. So far I thought that it's related to details about  personal cortical architecture, maybe differences in the speed of learning - ease/speed/durability of synaptogenesis/neuroplasticity. Now I have an additional guess: Thalamic Nuclei may also play a significant part in talents. E.g. people who can't feel the rhythm can barely learn dancing, while the others start dancing even without being taught. At a low level dancing seems to be related to basic prediction of sound patterns, linked with syncrhonized motions. Cingulate Cortex, related to emotions, has projections into motor-pathway as well, which may add to explanation why dancing is an emotional activity. I suspect that acting talent may have some of its roots in Cingulate Cortex as well. 

Finally, good dancers and any talented people may have an advantage in that lower-level preprocessing part. The cerebellum of course should be also a "suspect" whenever there is fine motor-coordination, and it has much more neurons than the neocortex and supposingly vast computing power. I can't speak about cerebellum with supporting data yet, but my first guess is that some people have faster "processors" - cerebellum has longer-lasting and faster neuroplasticy capabilities, maybe wider range connections.

Appendix 2: Lower parts of the brain and prediction - prediction mechanisms below neocortex 

Many if not all AGI researchers would agree that prediction and compression are amongst the main basic  keywords when defining the substance of intelligence. I assume that classical conditioning, which seems to exist even in fish*, can be assumed as a primitive form of prediction of one stimuli, associated with another. The emotions or the basic behavioral drives are also forms of prediction,  predicted behavioral patterns, appropriate for particular situations. This is there in all animals, in insects as well - genetically predicted/precomputed patterns.

I think a nice example is the ants "conditioning" to care for their "farms" of greenflies, which ants keep to milk juice. Ants are not eating the greenflies, but are just milking them, and even further - they are protecting their animals from enemies such as lady-birds...

It is known that thalamus does make primary decisions about what sensory information should pass up to neocortex and what should be processed faster through lower pathways.

I suspect (it may be a well known fact), that Thalamus and Cingulate Cortex  do have capabilities to predict or drive complex motor patterns like the Neocortex, but of course their models are much vague, short and specific - emotional patterns, face expressions, body language(?).

I suspect that it may be connected with part of the body-language as well, which seems to be uniform in many cultures. (Not all gestures, though - e.g.  the middle finger evidently passes through a visual analogy...  ;)  )

...To be continued:

Beauty, music and more.

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Learned or Innate? Nature or Nurture? Speculations of how a mind can grasp on its own: animate/inanimate objects, face recognition, language...

Some possible explanations of mine. Български - като го преведа... :)

Nativists:

Babies early can make a difference between animate and inanimate objects etc...

Todor:

They can, because the difference is easy to extract from the raw sensory inputs:

Inanimate objects are:

- Static. E.g. places which seem to drive "place cells" in mammal's brain are simpler stimuli than stimuli caused by "animate" objects.
- Dynamic, but mind can predict their future with a precision that it believes is "high enough". E.g. when one throws a ball, he doesn't know where exactly it will fall, but the ball wouldn't fly at all if an animate object didn't throw it.
- They change in parallel with the will, in pair with the motor commands.
- Linear (generally).
- Places are immovable inanimate objects. 

An object is a set of correlated stimuli.

"Animate" objects or subjects with "free will":

-  Their future cannot be predicted with high enough precision and one cannot predict precisely enough their behavior based only on observations. Sometimes they are totally unpredictable.
- They can start to do a sequence of actions on their own, a behavior. 
- They can react to your action, without being physically affected/touched.
- Mind can assume that there are internal states, which are unobservable. This is the inanimate object's "free will" or  its "state of mind", opinion etc., as opposed to predictable entities, whose state is observable.
- Non linear.
- It's hard to synchronize your will with the will of another "animate objects", or to do so you need to do a complex sequence of voluntary actions. 

Where "high enough" precision is a value that mind decides. 

Recognition of faces

A baby can easily spot that this is an entity that changes the most in his first perceptions, especially the eyes and mouth. I think the eyes - two spots that move in the same direction and  same speed can show to a developing mind that they are correlated. This also goes for nose and mouth, which all do translate in parallel. Entities which are correlated can be grouped together, this is "a face", i.e. this is a set of dynamic correlated elements. 

Actually, this can be one of the first coherent and stable set of visual correlations/patterns that the mind understands, and may serve as a basis for the future ones, which may explain existence of "face cells" or so. Faces are seen everywhere afterwards, and we use to see faces in inanimate objects.

Besides, these stimuli are early and further strongly conditioned with the baby's/one's own feelings, behavior and other agents' behaviors - these functions are exercised a lot.

Why baby's cry irritates us?  

Nativists: "Evolutionary encoded" etc., to call his mother to deal with it... 

Todor:

Actually a very simple explanation of this is: because it reminds us our own cry, and these sound patterns were conditioned with our own early unpleasant experiences.

Why "mama" means a mother in so many languages?

This is also a simple one to explain - my theory is that "mama" requires one of the simplest possible articulations, if not the simplest - just the mouth opens and closes twice + breathing.* The sounds is recognizable even without a breathing, and even dogs can be trained to say "mama".

I think it is important that there are two open-close operations, because this may serve as a confirmation of the first syllable.

So I believe that the babies themselves  have coined the word for their mothers, then their parents started to use it themselves. 

*BTW, I've been speech synthesis designer and developer and have some projects, but not the time....

Hippocampus

- formation of long term memory
- navigation
- head direction cells
- spatial view cells
- place cells

At least several or even all of these can be generalized. Places and navigation goes together. Places are long-term memories of static immovable inanimate objects (the agent has not experiences that these entities move).

Navigation, head-direction, spatial-view, place-cells - they all are a set of correlations found between motor and sensory information, and long-term memories, which are invoked by the ongoing motor and sensory patterns.

The static immovable inanimate objects (places)  change - they translate/rotate etc. - most rapidly in a correlation with head direction (position) and head movements. 

Navigation and spatial view are derived from all. 

Language

This one needs work, but in short I would say that:

The language is a hierarchical redirection/abstraction/generalization/compression of sequences of sensory inputs and motor outputs, and records and predictions for both.

Chimps can communicate using sign languages, such as: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washoe_(chimpanzee) 

Mirror neurons

They were found experimentally in rhesus monkeys (it's well known that monkeys use to imitate people) . Monkeys can imitate facial expressions and operations with hands such as picking.

There is a famous research of Miltzoff proving that newborn human babies at age of a few weeks are capable to imitate some facial expressions, like sticking out a tongue. They've never seen themselves and other experiments show that babies at that age are not capable to recognize different faces or to find a difference between a face without a nose or mouth or 2D vs 3D etc. (it smiles when see fake faces, by Fantz, R., 1966 trough R. Stamatov "Child Psychology")

This is interesting, I don't know how far the experiments have gone in the aspect of showing to the babies stimuli which are similar to faces.

This capability may require inborn links between basic image analysis (to find contrast/color change etc.)  and motor commands to facial and tongue muscles, I suspect that part of this may be done out of the neocortex, it can be of a very low resolution. Or there can be some pre-wired mirror neurons at the neocortex, related to this.

Other researches state that a one month baby vision has about 1/30 of the adult's resolution, which grows rapidly to about 1/4  at 8 months.

Regarding imitation of manual operations by monkeys, though,  I believe that this can be learned by mapping of similarities. Human arms and hands are visually similar to monkey's ones, they are "sticks" and "planes" which translate, rotate etc.

Unlike with the face, a monkey can see its own hands and other hands and can make a map between both. I don't know how it's done, but I think it can be done even without a pre-wired map.

I would quote my own teenage Theory of Mind and Universe (only Bulgarian yet: http://eim.hit.bg/razum), where I concluded that mind is a Universal hierarchical simulator and predictor of virtual universes, where these virtual universes are derived from sensory inputs.

Further reading:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_N._Meltzoff
http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Mirror_neurons
http://www.interdisciplines.org/mirror

Google keywords and expressions: "mirror neurons", "Miltzoff", "chimps sign language" etc....

Keywords: Artificial General Intelligence, Seed AI, Development, Cognition, Developmental psychology, Neuroscience

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NLTK's Swadesh List in the Bulgarian-Macedonian part | Списък на Суадеш

While browsing the Swadesh list from the NLTK corpus, especially the Bulgarian and Macedonian*  columns.

The Swadesh list is a corpus from comparative/historical/developmental linguistics, which is trying to map how languages evolved by tracking the most stable subset of words. It's also suggestive in the field of language acquisition/child language/developmental psychology/evolutionary psychology, because one can imagine which words would appear first in the vocabulary of a primitive human society and may reach to the same or similar basic concepts as the real ones.*

For the record, I've "discovered" such sort of a list before discovering Swadesh one, inspired by developmental psychology, while trying to imagine and write down a short set of words/concepts which would appear first and in what sequence. I wanted to generalize on them - on the complexity and specifics of these basic concepts, why and how they may appear. For example, the eyes of the mother are among the first "objects" that a child sees. Soon after the child sees the moon and the sun (in the sunset and the dawn). They are all circular, the eyes are spherical... That's answering the question "who invented the wheel"... It was... in front of humans' eyes forever.

The "wheel", in the transportation domain, was rather constructed or built after the tools got good enough, the groups of people grew enough and/also/therefore allowing roads to be built - both by cleaning out forests or utilizing areas which were dry and flat.

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Bare in mind that in general Bulgarian linguistics deny that Macedonian is an independent language, it was started to be forcefully and violently diverted in the Yugoslavian period and afterwards. Of course there were difference which have grown, but if people talk in their local dialects in Bulgarian, there are differences between Thrace (where I live) and all other regions such as "Shopskiya Kray", Northern-West, Northern-East, in different villages. There's one prominent dialect in Rhodopes/Smolyan which is almost impossible to decode.

Bulgarians and macedonians don't need translators in order to communicate. Macedonian sounds like a dialect, sometimes funny, I guess it sounds the same for the other side.**

The similarities are most apparent and harder to deny if you know the grammar which is harder to change forcefully by the political authorities (than replacing or adding a few letters in the alphabet, adding lots of foreignisms). For example, among the Slavic languages, it's only Bulgarian and Macedonian (?) which have determiners (as "the", but it's in the end of the word) and are analytic, there are no cases, but prepositions - as in German and Latin languages.

...

Bulgarian Swadesh list in NLTK

I don't know who's responsible for the translations and making them official.

However, IMO:

1. Где - as of now it's a kind of archaism for къде . 

  "Онуй" for "that" is a dialect? and funny form of онова   .
It's used in the expressive phrase "туй-онуй" and is funny because "уй" sounds like "хуй". That word is the same as the one in the famous greeting in Russian "Пошол на хуй". :)
   
2. "Бастун" is given for stick, however this is a foreignism and a specific instance/application of the general term "пръчка" ("прачка" in Maced.), "палка" is also used for some specific "sticks" ("palka" is given for other Slavic languages). Edit+: "шосе"  is also strange instead of път.

3. For other words there are also many translation.

баща/татко  (in Macedonian - татко, I don't know what's the frequency there or how they've decided. 

4. 'To swell" in Bulgarian is actively used in many variations which match the roots in other Slavic languages as given in the list:

"подувам се" is given as a translation, but it's also:

1. подпухвам  (пухнуць и др.)
2. набъбвам  (набабрува, мак.)
3. отичам ( otékat, oteći и др.)
4. бухвам (набухати, беларуски?)

4. "Овошка" for "fruit" is another funny item, instead of the more common and ordinary word "плод".
"Овошка" is appropriate for a "fruit tree", short for "овощно дърво" such as an apple tree etc.

Etc., that's what I spotted at a first glance.

I think there should be many words for each entry and more structural data.


How to use it? Install NLTK:

python -m pip install nltk

python
import nltk
nltk.download()

Find the corpus, download it. Then:

from nltk.corpora import swadesh as sw

sw.entries()

Here they show how to get translations between the language pairs:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/23479912/how-to-translate-words-in-ntlk-swadesh-corpus-regardless-of-case-python

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* For instance, I think that "mama" is produced by the first random sound-producing attempts of the baby, "ma" is maybe the simplest syllable, "mama" is more reliable than "ma", because it's repeated (suggests it's a pattern) and yet two repetitons are enough. The baby called their mother "mama".

http://artificial-mind.blogspot.bg/2010/04/learned-or-innate-nature-or-nurture.html


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**E.g. the Macedonian word for "boyfrend" is "дечко", which in Bulgarian means a little boy or an infantile adolescent/teenager boy, somebody acting inappropriately as a younger child.

"Барам" in Macedonian means "to search" in the search engines, while in Bulgarian it's an expressive word, a stem/root for "to touch" as:

- Обарам/обарвам, набарам/набарвам, прибара/прибарвам, да се барна

However it actually has an old/deducible meaning of "search" by a gradual explorative touching.

"Обарвам" can be applied for "to search (somebody)", because it involves touching, but it's also to erotically touch somebody.

...

Extending the line, there are a lot of funny false-cognates in the Bulgarian-Serbian relation.

"Сине" in Serbian is an address to a "daughter", while in Bulgarian it is an address to a... "son". (However there are Bulgarian dialects where "син" means "daughter", too).

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