Some more about Brain Research and U-CEP / Free Will

[rainer93138]

Some more about Brain Research and U-CEP / Free Will and related experiments

There is a long philosophical discussion about Free Will, perhaps officially started by Plato around 2.500 years ago. But since the experiments of Benjamin Libet, published 1984, the discussion about "Is there a Free Will or not or what it means if not" got a new quality. If you ask this question your neighbour at the counter in the bar, he would probably tell you "of course have a free will, just ordered the next pint", what is typical for the current time period. But the experiments with contrary recognitions were and are continued by researchers, e.g. like the teams of

- Wolf Singer
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wl224WyY ... re=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsSKIYkaYYs&NR=1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHQDpwp1 ... re=related

- Gerhard Roth
http://de.sevenload.com/sendungen/Trend ... e-Illusion
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvWFuDZANfY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWJBCDtUtpw&NR=1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2XLW0z_bW08&NR=1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIOhy1-HcvM&NR=1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JeMElXQ4Qjk&NR=1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68EpMu66hsU&NR=1

and also the research about decoding of conscious and unconscious mental states of the team of John-Dylan Haynes http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/John-Dylan_Haynes are related with the question about Free Will:

http://www.cbs.mpg.de/staff/haynes-10438

There the question is: "Is it possible to predict what a person is thinking of - or even what they are planning to do - based alone on their current brain activity? This project investigates ways to decode and predict a person’s thoughts from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data. The key is that each thought is associated with a unique brain activation pattern that can be used as a signature or for that specific thought. If we train a classifier to recognize these characteristic signatures we can read out a person’s thoughts from their brain activity alone. Such “thought reading” can reveal how information is neurally encoded in the brain. The idea is that it is only possible to decode a thought if one knows the correct code."

In order to find such activation patterns we can use U-CEP and connect a human to event patterns from the universe via special event adapters. We can experiment in a controlled environment on the basis of a U-CEP platform. This will lead us to "radically new" products and outcomes according to the European FET-F 2020 and Beyond Initiative. "This research has many potential applications, as for example in detection of deception, in the control of computers and artificial prostheses by brain activity, or even (more controversial) in market research" - to name a few.

Some more experiments in this field

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn1 ... tance.html

What is the product idea behind? This is obvious:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSCLBG9KeX4
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg1 ... e-lab.html

Precisely stimulating individual neurons or circuits may harness the beetles more precisely. The research may be successful in revealing how the brain, nerves and muscles of insects coordinate flight and other behaviours, but also at bringing six-legged cyborg spies into service. We can help accelerating returns on the basis of a controlled U-CEP environment and we can experiment with more precisely stimulating individual neurons or circuits by special event patterns respectively event adapters.

Already some years ago Kevin Warwick (University of Reading) has experimented as a Cyborg with his arm where he implanted a kind of an event adapter which connected him to the events (actually to a still simple event) of the Internet and let the arm react without his Free Will:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0712669884/qid%3D1012487809/sr%3D1-2/ref%3Dsr_sp_re/202-8722897-4122252

Nowadays Kevin's team is experimenting with brain cells and Intelligent cars as we've mentioned it in the outline, chapter 1 for table (6)
http://forum.complexevents.com/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=252
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2010-10/08/ratbots

Typical reactions taken from blog comments

Along with such research and experiments we should also discuss the typical comments and anxieties or ethical concerns. Here are some examples of Pro's and Con's we could systematically categorize:

--------------------------
Where Will This Lead To?
Really humane. Maybe one day you could control live or recently dead people as an ultimate fighting machine
...
it does leave a rather bad taste in my mouth too
...
"The project's goal is to create fully remote-controlled insects"
and pentagon's goal is to create fully remote-controlled humans.

Why do the mad scientists have the need to torture other animals? Power?
...
I hope that they will (eventualy) develop an electronic interface with the human brain, as the potential for such a tool is incredible.
Of course there is potential for horrible things, but that's the case with every invention. Should we stop using the wheel because it can be used in tanks?
...
I completely agree... humans are the MOST inhumane, (now) dumbed-down, ignorant and manipulated species on this planet. How is this helping ANYTHING? Of course, the perversion is probably going on far beyond this behind our 'military's' closed and classified doors.
...
Humans today, are really persons owned by the STATE through indoctrination and so forth. Seriously, how much money was wasted and how many sovereign beings are tortured in the name of science? Too fkn many. Look at the state of this planet and tell me modern man is so damn wonderful.
...
The book The Body Electric was written many years ago and even then we KNEW of adverse effects of EMFs on ALL life force... Yet, now we are above 1B times our earths natural radiation; we, believe it or not are ALL connected and this interference, mostly for military use, is destroying and has destroyed the beauty of the human mind and thought. Humans are becoming more and more like programmed drones--that is the perfect STATE of the master controllers of course.
...
The U.S. is nothing more than an a Consumeristic society that is totally used for experimentation--social engineering takes place every day via the idiot box and indoctrination centers (formerly known as schools).
...
This is NOT a good thing, neither are nanochips, nanospies,etc., but one needs an independent mind in order to think for oneself, and that is not permitted in this Police State.

--------------- Pro's-------------------
There are two degrees of nature. Living and non-living.
We are alive last time I checked and we are FAR from ignorant.
If we are so 'inhumane', then how is it that we are the only species with hostpitals for other species?
We are the only species that actively seeks out to save other species.
It is only a tiny percentage that fail to experience empathy. That is a proven fact.
Experiments like this are only negative if the organism is aware that it is being controlled and doesnt want to be... or if it is harmful (painful/damaging) to it.
...
If we brought a person up with a chip in their head that made them enjoy extremely intense manual labour without them knowing, it would be ok. If it doesnt affect the mood/perception in a negative way, then it is stupid NOT to do it.
...
It is ONLY negative if the feelings/responses are negative... And we are quite capable of knowing when something is harmful or unpleasant.
...
EVERY feeling, thought, desire that any organism is capable of feeling is TOTALLY physiological. There is no 'soul' or anything metaphysical or beyond our bodies/brains.
...
We know how every cell functions and how it interacts with others, that is ALL you need to know how something living feels.
For instance, neuroscience is all you need to understand how people react to anything.
If you cant understand how this can make a positive impact, then you are making it clear that you are too emotional to involve yourself in reality.
Get a grip and stop living in movies/the bible.
------------------------------------
Actually neuroscience has barely started learning just the basics of our brains, no one knows nearly enough about how just a single brain neuron functions, let alone the thousands of different types of brain neurons that serve different functions in our brain. And even when we finally do understand individual neurons much more clearly, the process of understanding how a whole brain works, that is made up of the most complex thing in the entire known universe, made of such an amazing combination of hundreds of millions of neuron cells and links in a way that will probably take us hundreds of years to understand.

I'm not exactly a by-stander just sitting on my couch talking about something I don't know about, I'm a robotics engineer that does work on projects based around controlling robots using brain cells or mathematical equivalents of brain cells. I even worked on a project that controls a mobile robot using a mathematical equivalent of biological brain cells from a rat. Neuroscientists studied the brain cells for about 7 years before trying to mimick it in a computer, so you would expect it to be fairly realistic. But it was based on one of the most simplest cells in a brain (Hypocampus), that behaves amazingly as simple as a computer would, and yet the mathematics they came up with to mimick the cells only mimick a fraction of what their complexity, and yet we were only using a handful of neurons, compared to the millions of neurons that actually make up a simple rat's brain.

It seems that the closer science thinks we are to understanding brains and thought and our "soul", the more we find new discoveries that prove its so much more complex than we thought!

I actually thought the same as you, that there's no such thing as a soul or anything metaphysical, because it would defy physics & science, etc. But the more I look at physics & science, the more I keep finding out that we still don't know what is inside a single atom, let alone know what causes gravity. If you don't believe me, try reading up about quantum physics / quantum mechanics and you'll see that even though scientists thought we completely understood physics by 1900, by the 1930's quantum physics shown that even a single atom is so much more complex than we could ever expect!

And then we thought we understood how a single brain cell works, that it acts just like a very simple electronic circuit, But in the past decade there has been more and more findings that even one brain cell can occasionally show a huge amount of complexity, and in fact does use quantum physics in part of it's processes.

So I'm just trying to let you know that life is not as simple as you say, it turns out that science still doesn't know how to explain a lot of very basic things like how does an atom work, how does gravity work, and how do we have a soul.
--------------------------
The designers of robots and cybernetic systems (cyborgs) will naturally enable the systems to record events. In computing systems like cyborgs, the logging of activity or perception is easy to do and can yield value. But the recordings will raise legal issues. Generally speaking in the US, the recording of conversations is more legally risky than the recording of public images. When automated systems like cyborgs approach "people" on the street, legal issues will arise as to whether they can record conversations they overhear. The natural implication is that cyborgs and robot owners will seek to get consent to audio recording of nearby people
--------------------------

These are some arbitrarily taken comments from blog entries. There are more comments and concerns also from prominent persons like Jürgen Habermas (see website of de-trans) or well known journals like http://www.zeit.de/2004/42/N-Transhumanismus.

Links to other tables of the World Cafe

We could for instance also make the link to table (2) of our World Cafe about SocioTechno flagship ideas and how such technologies could help in the case of disaster or emergency management, if we could control large crowds and connect them to optimized processes in order to let them react appropriately according to a situation or event patterns and avoid panic and hysteria, etc.

[rainer93138]

Back from Ireland where I uploaded this in an internet cafe, I just saw that some of the links don't work anymore in the meantime. We will work on updating the contents and links in connection with the workshop in Gent, 13 Dec 2010.

[rainer93138]

As I have discussed with Leslie Smith (host of table 4 of our WorldCafe), it is interesting what is happening in Asia in the field of the "Decade of the Mind Initiative" (http://dom-6.org/):

________________________________________
"In recent decades, brain and cognitive science research has witnessed a dramatic expansion in many parts of the world, from the Americas to Europe and also in Asia. This has led to vast leaps in the fundamental understanding of mind and brain, and also to the emergence of neurotechnologies with profound impact on health care, education and the improvement of human life."
...
"The Decade of the Mind initiative will be holding its sixth meeting for the first time in Asia (http://dom-6.org/), aptly at the Fusionopolis complex in Singapore, where research in biological and engineering sciences converge. This meeting is significant for marking the beginning of the Decade of the Mind (2010-2020) where we stand at the cusp of a new impetus in the study of mind and brain. Come join us to engage with leaders in the field as they cast their minds to the future of research in the cognitive sciences and neurotechnologies. Despite the progress that has been made, many challenges remain in our quest to understand mind and brain. What new advances can we expect in the next decade? How will the cognitive sciences and neurotechnologies continue to affect our lives?"
...
"The conference will be organized thematically to address the spectrum of cognitive science research and neurotechnology: sessions on neuroscience and psychology will explore fundamental scientific issues, while topics on brain-machine interface, robotics, and neuroengineering will discuss advances in neurotechnIology..."

For instance, especially interesting for U-CEP was:

A 5-Chunk Brain-Mind Network Model for Multiple Events in Complex Backgrounds
Professor Juyang (John) Weng
Department of Computer Science and Engineering,
Michigan State University, USA
& Fudan University, China

Understanding Humans by Building Humanoids and Androids
Professor Hiroshi Ishiguro
Professor of Osaka University
Department of Systems Innovation / ATR Fellow

Brain-Computer Interface: Looking Beyond Communication and Control
Dr. Guan Cuntai
Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R),
Agency for Science, Technology & Research (A*STAR), Singapore

[rainer93138]

Another article, which I found on Opher's blog http://epthinking.blogspot.com/2010/11/human-body-as-event-producer.html and which are typical today for a lot of similar reports about progress in this research area:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/artic ... ain&page=1

We will contribute with our ideas about U-CEP.

[rainer93138]

Another typical article about Neuromarketing, which will - perhaps not very welcome - further be developed with the help of U-CEP:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/14/busin ... .html?_r=1

“The idea is that somehow neuromarketing is going to be so much more powerful that, like zombies, we are all going to go out and buy soap,” Professor Wolpe says. “But that is just not realistic in terms of the way the brain works...” still...

"Moreover, at this point, neuromarketing probably isn’t sophisticated enough to realize some of its critics’ worst fears..." still...

"...neuromarketing may distinguish whether a person’s emotional response is positive or negative, but not whether the positive response is awe or amusement..." so far...

[rainer93138]

How to Train Your Own Brain
A new way to create and interpret real-time brain scans could help addicts control their cravings.

http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedi ... 768/?p1=A1

In connection with U-CEP we could help to develop specialized tasks to figure out how to apply this to addiction and other disorders.
See also the other link about Event adapters for living cells viewtopic.php?f=13&t=268

[rainer93138]

http://www.kurzweilai.net/the-brain-has-three-layers-of-working-memory-allowing-for-multitasking?utm_source=KurzweilAI+Daily+Newsletter&utm_campaign=c028008567-UA-946742-1&utm_medium=email

How is this related to Jeff Hawkins's six layers model of the cortex or neuro columns
and our ideas about U-CEP and Brain Research, e.g.

http://forum.complexevents.com/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=294&p=1112&hilit=jeff+hawkins#p1112
and
http://forum.complexevents.com/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=276&p=1088&hilit=jeff+hawkins#p1088
http://forum.complexevents.com/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=285&p=1102&hilit=brain+research#p1102
http://forum.complexevents.com/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=277&p=1091&hilit=brain+research#p1091

[rainer93138]

Artificial Global Intelligence (AGI) is closely related to Ubiquitous Complex Event Processing (U-CEP), whereby CEP is a descendent from AI, Active Databases and Messaging as it was stated at the first CEP-Symposium in March 2006 in Hawthorne/NY.

In his interview Ben Goertzel talked on Artificial General Intelligence and transhumanism
http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-06-dr-ben-goertzel-artificial-intelligence.html

and mentioned the next AGI conferences

- hosted at Google:
AGI 2011 (http://agi-conf.org/2011/), to be held in Mountain View on August 3-6, is in large part a technical and scientific conference for those involved in Artificial General Intelligence, but the pre-conference workshop, as well as the Keynotes and demo sessions, will be interesting to everyone – so I encourage you to register soon, as there’s a cap on attendance of some 200 attendees due to the size of the venue at Google.
AGI ’11 Conference – a technical AGI conference which will be held at the Google campus in Mountain View, California – we’ll have a Future of AGI Workshop before the conference, which should attract Transhumanists who wouldn’t necessarily attend the technical meeting. Pulling the community together like this can have a lot of impact – some Transhumanists may be involved in practical projects that could benefit from AGI technology, others or their friends and associates may have a technical background and so might want to get involved with AGI work, and of course meeting and talking with real AGI theorists may help them speculate about the future about ways that are better grounded than might otherwise have been.

- hosted at Hong Kong Polytechnic University:
The Humanity+ @ Hong Kong Conference (http://humanityplus.org/conferences/hongkong/Home.html) will be held on December 3-4, 2011, at Hong Kong Polytechnic University’s Chiang Chen Studio Theatre. It should be very interesting in terms of bringing in scientists and futurists from mainland China who don’t circulate much in the world-at-large or intersect with their Western counterparts – so I’m psyched about the cross-cultural admixture there

[rainer93138]

Decoding Action Intentions from Preparatory Brain Activity in Human Parieto-Frontal Networks

http://www.jneurosci.org/content/31/26/9599

This is similar to what the team of John-Dylan Haynes at Max-Planck-Institute für Kognitions- und Neurowissenschaften in Leipzig is researching since some years as mentioned in the posting above and what we could do together with U-CEP: They use functional MRI (fMRI) (event) pattern recognition techniques "...that we can also decode movement intentions from human brain signals, specifically object-directed grasp and reach movements, moments before their initiation..."

[rainer93138]

This looks like an accordant lab regarding Jeff Hawkins theory of the "memory-prediction-framework" mentioned in the posting above
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0014443

Mark Shein Idelson, Eshel Ben-Jacob, Yael Hanein of the School of Electrical Engineering, Tel-Aviv University, Tel-Aviv, Israel, and the School of Physics, Tel-Aviv University say:
"...Information processing in neuronal networks relies on the network's ability to generate temporal patterns of action potentials. Although the nature of neuronal network activity has been intensively investigated in the past several decades at the individual neuron level, the underlying principles of the collective network activity, such as the synchronization and coordination between neurons, are largely unknown. Here we focus on isolated neuronal clusters in culture and address the following simple, yet fundamental questions: What is the minimal number of cells needed to exhibit collective dynamics? What are the internal temporal characteristics of such dynamics and how do the temporal features of network activity alternate upon crossover from minimal networks to large networks?..."

See also some research progress regarding Jeff Hawkins theory of the "memory-prediction-framework" http://www.phillylac.org/prediction/. This page of Saulius Garalevicius presents some "...research on modeling the memory-prediction framework for visual pattern recognition. The memory-prediction theory of the functioning of human neocortex is described in the book "On Intelligence" by Jeff Hawkins and Sandra Blakeslee (2004). This book contains the theoretical foundation of this research..."

The Neocortex Project
http://sourceforge.net/projects/neocortex/

"After several years of analyzing, developing and testing applications modeling the memory-prediction framework, I released the latest version of the framework including all source files on an open source (GPL) basis. Applications, training and testing examples, documentation and the full C++ source code are available for download. The project page also contains the latest news and updates... The project demonstrates the key techniques of a hierarchical Bayesian memory system. It runs learning and recognition of images with configurable network parameters, eye movements, noise and other options. The architecture facilitates core algorithm enhancements within its framework... contributing to the goal of building the first human-like, truly intelligent machines. Let us make it happen!"