What is the difference between a person and a program. Neural networks, which now constitute almost the entire field of artificial intelligence, can take into account many more factors in decision-making than a person, do it faster and in most cases more accurately. But programs only work as they were programmed or taught.
They can be very complex, take many factors into account, and act in very varied ways. But they still cannot replace a person in making decisions. How does a person differ from such a program? There are 3 key differences to note here, from which all the others follow:
- A person has a picture of the world, which allows him, in terms of information, to supplement the picture with such data that are not prescribed in the program. In addition, the picture of the world is structurally arranged in such a way that it allows us to have at least some idea of everything. Even if it is something round and glows in the sky (UFO). Usually, for this purpose, ontologies are built, but ontologies do not have such completeness, poorly take into account the polysemy of concepts, their mutual influence, and so far are applicable only in strictly limited topics.
- A person has a logic that takes into account this picture of the world, which we call common sense or common sense. Any statement has meaning, and takes into account hidden undeclared knowledge. Despite the fact that the laws of logic are many hundreds of years old, no one still knows how the ordinary, not mathematical, logic of reasoning functions. We don't really know how to program even ordinary syllogisms.
- Arbitrariness. Programs are not arbitrary. This is perhaps the most difficult of all three differences. What do we call arbitrariness? The ability to construct new behavior that is different from what we performed under the same circumstances before, or to construct behavior in new, not previously encountered situations. That is, in essence, this is the creation of a new program of behavior on the fly without trial and error, taking into account new, including internal, circumstances.
Arbitrariness is still an unexplored field for researchers. Genetic algorithms capable of generating a new program of behavior for intelligent agents are not an option, since they generate a solution not logically, but by means of “mutations” and the solution is found “by chance” during the selection of these mutations, that is, by trial and error. A person finds a solution immediately, building it logically. The person can even explain why such a decision was chosen. The genetic algorithm has no arguments.
It is known that the higher an animal is on the evolutionary ladder, the more arbitrary its behavior can be. And the greatest arbitrariness is shown in a person, since a person has the ability to take into account not only external circumstances and his learned skills, but also hidden circumstances - personal motives, previously reported information, the results of actions in similar circumstances. This greatly increases the variability of human behavior, and, in my opinion, consciousness is involved in this. But more on that later.
Consciousness and arbitrariness
What does consciousness have to do with it? In behavioral psychology, it is known that we carry out habitual actions automatically, mechanically, that is, without the participation of consciousness. This is a remarkable fact, which means that consciousness is involved in the creation of new behavior, is associated with orienting behavior. This also means that consciousness is connected exactly when it is necessary to change the usual pattern of behavior, for example, to respond to new requests, taking into account new opportunities. Also, some scientists, for example, Dawkins or Metzinger, pointed out that consciousness is somehow connected with the presence of an image of themselves in people, that the model of the world includes the model of the subject himself. How then should the system itself look like, which would have such an arbitrariness? What structure to have so that it can build a new behavior to solve a problem in accordance with new circumstances.
To do this, we must first recall and clarify some known facts. All animals with a nervous system, in one way or another, contain in it a model of the environment, integrated with the arsenal of their possible actions in it. That is, it is not only a model of the environment, as some scientists write, but a model of possible behavior in a given situation. And at the same time, it is a model for predicting changes in the environment in response to any actions of the animal. This is not always taken into account by cognitive scientists, although this is directly indicated by open mirror neurons in the premotor cortex, as well as studies of the activation of neurons in macaques, in response to the perception of a banana, in which not only the banana region in the visual and temporal cortex is activated, but also the hands in the somatosensory cortex, therefore that the banana model is directly related to the hand, since the monkey is only interested in that fruit,that she can take it and eat it. We simply forget that the nervous system did not appear to reflect the animal world. They are not sophists, they just want to eat, so their model is more a model of behavior, and not a reflection of the environment.
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Such a model already has a certain degree of arbitrariness, which is expressed in the variability of behavior in similar circumstances. That is, animals have a certain arsenal of possible actions that they can carry out depending on the situation. These can be more complex temporal patterns (conditioned reflex) than direct reactions to events. But still, this is not completely arbitrary behavior, which allows us to train animals, but not humans.
And here there is an important circumstance that we need to take into account - the more well-known circumstances are encountered, the less variable the behavior, since the brain has a solution. Conversely, the newer the circumstances, the more options for possible behavior. And the whole question is in their selection and combination. Animals do this simply by showing the entire arsenal of their possible actions, as Skinner showed in his experiments.
This is not to say that voluntary behavior is completely new, it consists of previously learned patterns of behavior. This is their recombination, initiated by new circumstances that do not completely coincide with those circumstances for which there is already a ready-made pattern. And this is precisely the point of separation of voluntary and mechanical behavior.
Modeling arbitrariness
The creation of a program of arbitrary behavior that can take into account new circumstances would make it possible to make a universal “program of everything” (by analogy with the “theory of everything”) at least for a certain domain of problems.
What could make their behavior more arbitrary, free? My experiments showed that the only way out is to have a second model that models the first and can change it, that is, to act not with the environment like the first, but with the first model in order to change it.
The first model reacts to the circumstances of the environment. And if the pattern activated by it turned out to be new, the second model is called, which is taught to look for solutions in the first model, recognizing all possible options for behavior in the new environment. Let me remind you that in a new environment more options are activated, so the question is precisely in their selection or combination. This is because, in contrast to the familiar environment, in response to new circumstances, not one pattern of behavior is activated, but several at once.
Every time the brain encounters something new, it performs not one, but two acts - recognizing the situation in the first model and recognizing the actions already taken or possible by the second model. And in this structure there are many possibilities similar to consciousness.
- This two-act structure makes it possible to take into account not only external, but also internal factors - in the second model, the results of the previous action, distant motives of the subject, etc. can be remembered and recognized.
- Such a system can construct new behavior immediately, without long learning, initiated by the environment according to evolutionary theory. For example, the second model has the ability to transfer solutions from some submodels of the first model to other parts of it and many other capabilities of the metamodel.
- A distinctive feature of consciousness is the presence of knowledge of its action, or autobiographical memory, as shown in the article. The proposed two-act structure has just such an ability - the second model can store data about the actions of the first (no model can store data about its own actions, since for this it must contain consistent models of its actions, not the reactions of the environment).
But how exactly does the construction of new behavior take place in the two-act structure of consciousness? We do not have a brain or even a plausible model of it. We started experimenting with verb frames as prototypes for patterns in our brains. A frame is a set of verb actants for describing a situation, and a combination of frames can be used to describe complex behavior. The situation description frames are the frames of the first model, the frame for describing one's actions in it is the frame of the second model with verbs of personal actions. We often have them mixed, because even one sentence is a mixture of several acts of recognition and action (speech act). And the very construction of long speech expressions is the best example of voluntary behavior.
When the first model of the system recognizes a new pattern to which it does not have a programmed response, it calls the second model. The second model collects the activated frames of the first one and looks for a shorter path in the graph of connected frames, which, in the best way, “closes” the patterns of the new situation with a combination of frames. This is a rather complicated operation and we have not yet achieved a result in this that claims to be the “program of everything”, but the first successes are encouraging.
Experimental studies of consciousness by modeling and comparing software solutions with data from psychology provides interesting material for further research and allows you to test some hypotheses that are poorly tested in experiments on humans. This can be called simulation experiments. And this is only the first result in this direction of research.
Author: Alexander Khomyakov