Omribaba

 

"Omribaba"

by 

Spacewarp

~

They say it’s lonely out in space. They’re wrong.

The popular conception of the lonesome traveller being overwhelmed by the immensity of the Cosmos is a myth, propagated by people who’ve never been off-world, and who like to make space sound romantic and mysterious. In actuality Interworld travel is quite mundane, and Intersystem much the same. It’s not the travelling that gets to us. It’s the worlds we travel to.

So here I am, sitting on another planet, feeling a little bit heavier than I’m used to, the sunlight through the window just different enough to tell me it’s not my sun, and not my world; watching a flickering screen that makes me feel more lost than I’ve ever felt before.

~

I’m an Ethnologist by profession. I study Us. Us as people, rather than Us as animals. I study our culture and the way it’s shaped us and how we in turn have shaped it. I know that sounds a bit dry, but like any “ology” it’s as interesting or as dull as you make it, and anyone who thinks we know all there is to know about our own history has got another think coming. The Palaeontologists tell us what we evolved from, the Anthropologists tell us what we evolved into, the Archaeologists tell us how we got where we are today, and the Ethnologists try and tell us where we might be going.

So what’s an Ethnologist doing on a world where there’s no people? Simple. There were, once.

The cosmologists have been studying extra-solar planets far longer than I’ve been alive. Things started out simple - extrapolating the existence of worlds from the way their feeble gravity tugged at the parent star, detecting the presence of gases from the minute change in light spectra filtered through the atmosphere. Then thirty years ago the Big Eye was built – our largest space telescope ever – and suddenly we could pinpoint planets smaller than gas giants, with potentially breathable atmospheres.

That last paragraph is thanks to Zooë, one of our planetologists; they don’t teach this sort of stuff in Anthropology School. But even with the Glide Drive it still took us three months to get here, and the ship doesn’t have windows so there’s precious little to do but talk to your fellow passengers (every journey through GlideSpace, no matter how near or how far, takes just over three months. Why? I don’t know…or at least I never understood the answer when one of the techs tried to explain).

Not that there’d be anything to look at if the ship did have windows. See, that’s another misconception. Windows on a space ship are both dangerous and largely pointless. From what the crew tell me, while we’re in the Glide there’s no light (because photons can’t exist in GlideSpace) and when we’re accelerating or decelerating in RealSpace any kind of particle heading our way could either shatter any glass or plastic windows, or punch a hole right through the ship and out the other side.

Also, as an ethnologist it fascinates me how I picked up the slingo after just a few weeks on board (nobody back home says RealSpace), and even though the ship’s only official designation is “LA-2YD-AA21”, I’ve joined everyone else in thinking of her as “The Lazy Dazy”.

Economies back home are doing well. We’re living in a Golden Age, probably due to the Glide Drive enabling cheap asteroid mining. Budgets are high, and we can finally waste time and resources doing what we once did best – exploring.  None of the other worlds in our own solar system have breathable atmospheres, but over the last three decades the Big Eye has identified over two hundred planets with oxygen and liquid water orbiting stars within our reach (if you don’t mind spending three months cooped up in a spinning metal tube…with no windows).

Zooë tells me that we’ve sent ships out to seventeen worlds so far, and found the Big Eye was right in most cases about the oxygen, the water, and the gravity…though sadly not in the same cases. Seven of the worlds had gravity over 3 gees. Five of them were too hot for us, three of them too cold. Six of them had no water to speak of, and two of them to excess. Various combinations of too much this and too little that made all of them virtually uninhabitable, and of course none of them appeared to have (or to ever have had) life.

Until we broke out of Glide into orbit around a planet where the Big Eye might just have got it all more or less correct.

This world is designated OMR18A-81A and orbits its parent star OMR18A at what Zooë calls a “comfortable” distance. New celestial bodies have less than inspiring names now, ever since the Big Eye started finding more of them than our Classical naming system could keep up with. But the crew have affectionately named the planet “Omribaba”, while referring to its sun as “the Sun” and its moon as “the Moon”. As an ethnologist I find this telling, and evidence that we are not as far removed from our primitive past as we would like to think. No matter what ground we stand on, so long as there is day and night, and air to breathe, anything shining in the sky will always be The Sun or The Moon to us.

But I am here on Omribaba because five years ago when the Big Eye found that this world had an oxygen and water atmosphere, it also detected for the first time what seemed to be complex radio signals coming from the same region. Not only did it look like Life, it looked very much like Intelligent Life. I remember this hitting the news while I was still in my last year at University, and for a few days it seemed like the whole Universe had suddenly become much more welcoming. We were no longer alone. There was Life elsewhere, and it could be like us. But then the scientific community admitted that the signals (if they even were signals) were only weak fragments and although within a range of wavelength that we used ourselves, there was very little structure and certainly nothing that anyone could begin to decipher. Plus we certainly couldn’t answer them. OMR18A is over 1,200 light years away, and with a round-trip of 2,400 years it seemed a long time to wait for a simple exchange of “hellos”.

So the novelty wore off, the Media turned nasty on the Scientists, the Governments complained about the waste of Budget, and the Public forgot.

But although 1,200 years is too long for a meaningful conversation, a trip through the Glide isn’t. So here we were, three months on, and for the first time, among the planetologists, the climatologists, the geologists, the zoologists and the biologists, there was now one lone ethnologist. Yours truly.

Nobody had any idea what to expect when we got here, but I had a pretty good idea what not to expect and after those tin-can months through the Glide, I had come to my own conclusions about what we might and might not find.

For a start, although the Big Eye had picked up radio signals, we wouldn’t be meeting whoever sent them. They had originated over a thousand years ago, and very few of our own home-grown civilisations had lasted that long, so why should Omribaba be any different. Secondly, would they be like us?

Since their planet was only slightly larger than Earth, with a comparable atmosphere and day length (estimated from the Big Eye’s results as around 30-35 hours) then it was possible that life had evolved in a similar fashion. Of course the zoologists and the biologists had been through similar discussions seventeen times before, and found nothing even as simple as a microbe. However this time there was also evidence of intelligent radio broadcasts, and this might mean beings comparable in both form and intelligence to us.

At these times I found myself asked more questions than I could begin to answer, and although I hated to speculate, I concluded that at the best we could find a space-faring civilisation far in advance of our own (and hopefully benign), while the worst might be a civilisation attempting to claw itself back from the latest of many collapses.

But the Lazy Dazy arrived in orbit, and we found neither of these scenarios, although we did find life on Omribaba. It has something like fish in its deep oceans and rivers, and both large and small four-legged creatures on its continents. It has flying creatures that correspond to what we call “insects” and “birds”, and it even has what we would call “trees” and “plants”– sedentary life that soaks up energy from sunlight. The parallel evolutionists are in ecstasy.

Like Earth, Omribaba has a single large moon that, together with its sun, produces regular tides of varying intensities (or as we call them, “spring” and “neap”), and the days are just over 34 hours long. Like Earth, Omribaba also sits in what Zooë chooses to call the “CLOW” orbit (“Comfortable, Light, Oxygen, Water) and together these factors have probably contributed to the spread of life across Omribaba in much the same way as it did on our world. Sunni the biologist thinks all his birthdays have arrived at once.

There are two polar ice-caps formed of water ice that probably change with the seasons, and yes the planet has an axial tilt, so it has seasons. There are areas of desert, and areas of tundra. There are lakes and forests and jungles, all containing plants and animals that while not the same as on our own world, appear to have filled the same evolutionary niches.

But the species who sent the radio signals? Long dead. The signals themselves must have ceased hundreds of years ago, when whatever happened…happened. We don’t know what happened, and we don’t know when or why it happened, although future archaeologists will no doubt piece together the clues and arrive at a likely explanation; but we do know who it happened to.

There are cities and towns and villages buried in the jungles and swallowed up by coastal erosion and deserts. There is evidence of volcanic eruptions, and what looks like meteor bombardment, but then there are also areas of radiation. They are small and localised and we’ve only found a few, but they are all near buildings…or rather remains of buildings. This was no prehistoric society of cave-dwellers. This was a full-blown planet-wide civilisation.

You see, this all happened a long long time ago. The towns and cities were all made of rock or brick or clay or concrete or metal, and all of these things crumble in time. We aren’t an experienced archaeological team and we can’t excavate villages buried beneath sand, towns drowned in the sea, or cities overgrown by jungle. But we have found some settlements closer to the surface, where we can climb cautiously into still-standing buildings where the rooms have been spared the worst of the elements.

I say “we” but at first there was little that I could do during these first few weeks. I was hired to analyse a civilisation, not scavenge among its ruins, and quite frankly with my lack of athleticism I’d be a danger to myself and those around me. So I spent most of my time at our coastal base camp, writing my reports and watching the sun rise and set, while others more skilled than I sifted through the ruins. As they brought back their results, I slowly began reconstructing what the people of Omribaba might have looked and lived like.

They raised oblong buildings of many floors, they used electrical wiring for lighting both inside and out, and they built wheeled vehicles of metal that seemed to be self-propelled. We also knew from the very few skeletons unearthed that they were bipedal, about two thirds our height (assuming they walked upright) and versatile digits on the ends of their arms confirm they were tool-makers. From the look of things they appeared to have reached approximately the same technical level as us, only perhaps a century or two behind.

Then one day the techies came to me with their latest find.

Although I only have two civilised species to compare – us and the Omribabans – it would appear that any creature that evolves similar intelligence probably does the same thing – use language. Like our own primitive ancestors they would have started out with an oral tradition, then progressed to cave-painting, and written language on stone, then scrolls made from either the hides of animals or processed plants, finally culminating in storage on electronic or optical media.

Very probably every civilisation will eventually fall upon the disc as the ideal medium, because that’s what we did and it’s what the Omribabans did. That’s what our teams found, and when they had worked out the storage process and how to decode it, they brought it to me.

They brought them to me. Hundreds of discs. Plus a hastily built mechanism to play them on. Constructed of plastic and metal, the discs have proved remarkably resistant to corrosion, and contain nothing less than simply-encoded video files, designed to be played back again and again.

Yes they were bipeds, they stood upright like us, and their society was just as diverse as ours. They argued, they laughed, and they cried like us. They had children and they had parents, they fought with each-other and they fell in and out of love, like us.

At first I found their mannerisms strange and alien, but then suddenly things just snapped into place and for all their oddness, and the fact that they weren’t us, I began to comprehend them. Although I have found what appear to be programmes aimed at young children, and now know the spoken and written words for “tree” (as well as more specialised ones for various fruits and animals) there is no way to fully understand their language, either written or spoken, and we probably never will. But some things bleed through. They divided their days up similar to our “hours”; they even grouped them into something akin to a “week”, and measured their history in multiples of their planet’s orbital period that could be called “centuries”. They even used their Moon’s orbital period as a measure of time comparable to our own “month”. Like us, they used these divisions of time to structure and define their lives. And like us, they may even have called their planet “Earth”.

No matter that we can’t understand the dialogue, their hearts, minds, hopes and fears are there on the screen for us to see, and like us they could not be satisfied with just one world, and looked ever outwards. They built rockets and spaceships. They explored their own Moon and nearby planets…and then struck out beyond their solar system to neighbouring star systems. They fought with and conquered alien races, colonised distant worlds, their indomitable spirit forging ever on.

Except they didn’t.

Because these are not historical records. They aren’t archives preserved for posterity. This is entertainment. These were their films, their travelogues, their stories, their weekly dramas, their tales of love and comedy, their fiction.

Like us their hearts soared to the heavens, but unlike us they never got there. Sometime in the last thousand years they were suddenly wiped out, either by war or by natural disaster. Observers on the Lazy Dazy have discovered evidence of a few primitive landing sites on their Moon, and that’s it. The star ships, the colony worlds, the space battles, all existed only as dreams, and they died before they could make their dreams real.

As if I’m looking into a mirror and seeing an alternate history of ourselves, suddenly I realise how lost and alone they were, and how we could have been if this had happened to us, and as I write this I can’t shake the horrible feeling of the What If. What if our own aspirations had never been realised? What if this that you were reading was just another fantastic story, a fictional future destined never to happen, and what if they had survived, and found the remains of us?

Would anyone have been able to tell the difference?

 ~

 

© Spacewarp, Nottingham, June 2015

 

Are We Conscious? Part 2

My use of the word "supercomputer" was as an analogy to illustrate that an object or device that had not been born naturally as part of an evolutionary process could theoretically be indistinguishable from a "conscious" being.

Human consciousness is almost certainly a product of gradual evolution. We can guess from fossils of earlier hominids that they did not have the same level of consciousness as we do now, pretty much infer that our ancestors of 65 million years ago had even less, and that our bacterial ancestors of 3 billion years ago had no consciousness at all. Each consciousness was produced by a process that preceded it (be that the manufacture of my hypothetical computer, or the evolution of life on Earth), and somewhere along the line, non-conscious must have eventually evolved into conscious. Either we postulate that this happened suddenly, and one of our ancestors achieved sentience while his/her parents didn't (which is of course absurd), or we say that it happened gradually, and our level of conscious self-awareness is simply one step on a sliding scale from higher mammals down to flatworms and beyond.

My point was also that this supercomputer would not necessarily be programmed specifically to mimic consciousness, but that if it was complex enough, it would be indistinguishable from consciousness. An analogy would be the many accepted definitions of what constitutes “Life". If an object completely fulfils those definitions, then we have no choice but to say that it is alive. Even if the person who built it says "No, this is a machine, I created it", it must be alive if it fits the criteria for being so. If we don't like that, then we have only two logical choices - we either re-define what we mean by "life" or we reluctantly accept that this thing is alive. We can't just say that it isn't alive because we don't like the idea of it.

Similarly, with consciousness, if we could create or encounter an object that fulfilled our definitions of being conscious, then we would have to either accept that it was conscious, or redefine what conscious means. We couldn't just say that it wasn't conscious for no other reason than we didn't agree.

A supercomputer that fulfils the Turing Test, while admittedly far in the future, may well fit this criteria. If it did, then there would be only two possibilities: either we deliberately programmed consciousness into it, or we didn't, and consciousness emerged from the complexity.

If we had deliberately programmed consciousness into it, the question would then be moot, as we would therefore already know what consciousness was and that we could create it.

But if we accept that its consciousness arose as an emergent property of its complexity then we could safely conclude that our own consciousness also arose in the same way.

Are We Conscious? Part 1

One of the problems with understanding consciousness is that we need to go back to first principles and actually define what we mean by “consciousness”. Once we lay out a complete description of what properties "conscious thought" exhibits, then we can attempt to find a possible theory of what might be causing it. Well, in order to describe consciousness, we have to first study it, and there appear to be two ways of doing this. However, at first glance both appear problematic in their own way.

The first is “from the outside”, and essentially means studying the demonstration of consciousness of another creature.  This is actually pretty easy to do – the principle of the Turing Test shows us that a sufficiently advanced non-conscious device could appear to us to be indistinguishable from a conscious one. The problem here of course is that passing the Turing Test does not mean that you have consciousness, but that what you have is indistinguishable from consciousness, at least by the terms of the Test.

However, that may not be as problematic after all, since from the outside the only way we can define consciousness is by observing the demonstration of it, and if it is demonstrated, then by our own definition we can only conclude that it exists.

The second appears a bit more difficult - how do I study my own consciousness and determine if it is real or not? Surely the fact that I would be using my own consciousness would automatically prove that I was conscious. End of. Except...the same could be said of our hypothetical "Turing-Test-beating" supercomputer. It could be programmed to think that it was a conscious living creature rather than a construct, so in a conversation with it, not only would we be convinced that it was conscious, but it would also demonstrate to us that it thought it was conscious as well. Of course this does simply bring us back to Square One - that we are viewing another's consciousness from the outside. We cannot know how the computer truly "thinks" about itself, without being the computer.

However, if we had not programmed our hypothetical computer to think it was self-aware, and we could demonstrate that our hypothetical computer displayed to us all the signs of being consciously self-aware that we ourselves display, then we would have to conclude that the computer's self-awareness had arisen as an emergent property of its very design.

If the computer's complexity was of the same order as our own brain, it would be difficult not to conclude that both the computer's consciousness and our own had arisen through the same process. If we are happy with our own sentience being something that will naturally emerge from any sufficiently complex system (and both biology and physics continually demonstrate that this sort of thing happens all the while in nature), then we have solved the mystery. If we're not, then we may have to conclude that the supercomputer's apparent sentience came from the same mysterious place as ours. We would then have to conclude that if we could create a sentient creature through manufacture, then nature could create one through evolution.

The Ultimate Lockdown?

Now we all like IT stories of stupid users. We also like stories of weird and unforseen disasters. Finally everyone likes a good cautionary tale. Well this one is all three...and the stupid user was me.

A while ago my Microsoft Natural PS/2 keyboard went wrong. Luckily I had Natural Keyboards on both our PCs (because being a touch-typist I find them easier to work with). The second PC has now become my daughter's PC, and she let me swop her keyboard for a standard USB one while I sourced a replacement. She wouldn't let me keep it, because she is used to the "split" keys and like me, now dislikes the ordinary layout.

It appears that PS/2 Natural keyboards are almost impossible to find now, so I had to go for a brand new Microsoft Ergonomic USB keyboard, which I didn't like as much because it was black, and I can't see the keys as well. Ho hum. [Note the significance of USB]

Anyway, it looks like my department will be "working from home" for the foreseeable future, so today I dropped in and picked up my work keyboard (which happens to be a beige Microsoft Natural PS/2) and brought it back home with me. At last I could go back to a lighter keyboard that I can actually see. Yay!

So I plugged it in, and booted it up...and it didn't work. After much Googling I found out the reason. When you plug a new MS Ergonomic USB keyboard in, Windows 10 does two things:

1. It downloads a new version of the keyboard driver, to support the enhanced capabilities of the new USB Microsoft Ergonomic Keyboard hardware.

2. It disables the old PS/2 keyboard by changing a Registry key from 1 (Start up at Boot) to 4 (Disable)

So now I knew the reason, and a tech discussion on a web page advised that all you needed to do was change the USB keyboard's setting to 4, and the PS/2 keyboard's setting back to 1, and then reboot. What could go wrong? A couple of Registry changes and I rebooted the computer. End of story.

Unfortunately it was not the end of the story. Can you guess what happened next? Of course you can. But I'll explain why. You see the new keyboard driver doesn't support the old MS Natural PS/2 keyboard any more, because it has overwritten the old driver (which did).

[Yes I know some of you may be thinking "I've swopped between PS/2 and USB keyboards before, I never had this problem!". It's the new USB version of the Microsoft Ergonomic (née PS/2 Natural) Keyboard that has this issue, not standard PS/2 and USB.]

Anyway, so what happens when Windows boots up? The USB keyboard is disabled, so it doesn't work. The PS/2 keyboard tries to load up, but fails because the new keyboard driver no longer supports it. So I'm faced with a Windows logon screen and no way to type my password into it. So I can't get into Windows to change the Registry settings back! I'm permanently locked out of the computer in the most stupid way possible.

Luckily of course there was a way out of it. Well actually two. If you have an old standard USB keyboard, you can plug that in and reboot, and you will be able to type, so you can reverse the damage to the Registry. I used the second method, which was to access the PC through a remote desktop session from another PC.

Of course if you have only 1 PC, and no spare keyboard...you're screwed.

Be warned!

Why You Should Continue To Protest

Things are looking a bit shaky on the political landscape at present and for the first time in 40 years the prospect of a World War is crossing people’s minds.

Personally speaking I’ve been here before at least twice, both in the 80s with the Falklands War and in the 90s with the Gulf War (not forgetting those times when War seemed likely, but never quite happened.

What should we do when War seems very likely?  Well, we should protest. We should demonstrate. But does it ever do any good?  What do we reply to those people who say “What’s the point? It won’t achieve anything!”

What you do is, you tell them that protesting does produce results. For a start – Impact.

Everyone remembers the CND marches of the 60s, 70s and 80s; Poll Tax protests in the very early 90s; Greenham Common; the US over Vietnam.  The fact that we remember these examples at all shows exactly how much impact they had.

“Well yes,” say the detractors, “But they didn’t have any effect.”

How do you know that?  What proof do you have that protests don't (and never have had) any effect?  For all you know, things might have been worse if nobody had protested! We could be living in a World created by the influence of protestors. If nobody had protested against the Vietnam War, it might have ended much later; and I think it’s safe to say that if nobody had demonstrated against the UK Poll Tax, it wouldn’t have been abolished three years after. OK so the World isn’t perfect, but I think we can all imagine how it could easily be much worse.

And don’t tell me the sheer weight of opinion can’t affect the way Governments turn.  When organised protests start, the Media picks up on it, and tells the rest of the country.  But it puts a political swing on it for its readership, until eventually one side has overwhelming support...which causes more readers to change their viewpoint, and then MPs take note and start taking the same sides...and you’ve got the PM basically apologising to everyone, while taking a detour in policy.  Sound topical?

Things have changed though. We don’t seem to get quite as many physical protests now, and it’s easy to conclude that people are more apathetic, more satisfied with their lot, or basically just drunk on the opium that Governments feed us. But hang on, people are still protesting, and I think I know where they’re doing it.

Online. Social Media. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. You know longer have 40,000 people marching down Whitehall towards the Houses of Parliament, instead you have several million Tweets all criticising you. Protesting is still there, and it’s possibly stronger than ever.

Governments don’t like protesters, right? Well actually Governments love most protests. No matter how organised a Demo is, there’s a good chance it’ll eventually spawn or turn into a Riot, and then the Police will have to step in.  Once that happens the protest is lost, and the Government wins, because now it’s Rioting, and Riots not only lose Public sympathy but are easy to control - you send in the Police, and the worse the Rioters behave, the more sympathy you get.

However Governments absolutely hate Twitter, probably for three main reasons.

Firstly, they can’t control it.  No matter how organised a physical protest is, it’s still controllable in some way, because by watching it like a hawk, you can constrain it.  But because Twitter has no physical presence, there’s no chance of an actual physical Riot, and therefore you can’t send the Police in.

Secondly, because nobody’s rioting, the Government can’t force a change in Public sympathy.

Thirdly, when a political Twitter storm comes winging your way, you can attempt to fight fire with fire and respond,  but the fact that you are the Government automatically means you aren’t allowed to defend yourself without everyone assuming you’re either lying or “just saying that”.

And, like with the protests of the late 20^th Century, the Media shark still waits in the shallows. But instead of thousands of people in Trafalgar Square, it now reports on large public changes of opinion.  The irony of this of course that Twitter (and to a lesser extent Facebook) is all about posting links to news stories while surrounding them with pithy comment.  

So you and a million others Tweet. It gets reported in the Media.  You retweet the reports. This causes more people to agree with you and Tweet...which gets reported...

It’s a fantastically self-perpetuation, and you can quickly see how relatively easy it is to use the mechanism yourself.  The difference this time is the either side can start the ball rolling.  So remember next time you're tweeting your disgust at some social injustice...who's pulling your strings?  Are you working against the opposition...or for them?

-o0o-

You are a Simulation of a Simulation

I've always maintained that human consciousness has evolved as a by-product (or "emergent property") of the way in which the human brain "models" other elements of its social environment in a kind of virtual world inside the head. 

This virtual world contains modelled copies of other people that we know and regularly interact with, and the better we know a person, the more detailed their model is. We use these models to try out social "dry runs" before we interact physically with the actual person. We know this is what happens because we can observe it in ourselves every time we anticipate meeting, or having a conversation with, someone.  Who hasn't run conversations through their head prior to such a meeting?  And how well the conversation goes (or how accurately it mirrors the simulated conversation we've already had) depends on how well we know the other person, and how detailed our model of them is.

The more detailed the model is, the better able we are to interact socially with them.  My contention has always been that the person we know the most about (ourself) is therefore the most detailed model, and in fact it is so detailed that it thinks it is alive.  This is the origin of the human consciousness.

However this means that that simulation of "you" that exists in your brain isn't a copy of the "real" you. It IS the real you.  The simulation is you. In effect making you a simulation of a simulation.

Man does not think...he only thinks he thinks

Okay, so we want to build robots, right? Proper autonomous-thinking robots. AI with arms and legs. The mechanics and electronics we’ll get by trial, error, and design; all we’ve got to wait for is the technology to advance, which it will do with time (technology always does). But what about the brain? No, let’s qualify that, what about the Mind? The brain after all is just more tech. But a thinking mind, with Artificial Intelligence?

Well there’s advances there too, but mainly in complexity, not in the underlying logic of the artificial intelligence. That’s something we’re still having difficulties with, because the very thing we want it to be like, is the very thing we don’t understand - ourselves. But perhaps that’s the part of the problem - we want our robots to think like we do. At least that’s what we say. In actual fact what we mean (although we probably don’t realise it) is for them to act like we do, not think like we do.

Hang on, isn’t that more or less the same thing? After all, we act on thoughts, so the way we think is the way we act? Well probably not. It’s more likely that how we think about something is based on how we acted first, and a lot of how we act is instinctive.

Let me clarify that. Think about an instinctive act you’ve performed, and how often you perform it.  Somebody waves their hand in your face and you jerk back, ready for action. If we ask you afterwards why you did that, you will probably say something along the lines of “If I hadn’t moved, he would have hit my face”. You’re not explicitly saying that you decided to flinch, but it’s kind of implied in the language, and let’s face it, don’t we feel that this was what happened? Trip on the kerb and put your hands out to catch yourself; grab a ball out of the air; all of these feel like conscious decisions, but they’re not. They’re the result of millions of years of behavioural evolution. The fact that these instinctive reactions are still here proves they’re successful, and they’re successful because they’re quick, much quicker than human thought. There’s no way we could have controlled those actions at anywhere the same speed. That’s why they have remained as instinctive processes - humans think too slowly.

The point of that last paragraph is that we are mostly instinctive, with conscious thought merely a kind of afterthought (see what I did there?). if we want our AI to think like us, we’ve got to make it act like us first. So let’s make a start.

The previously-mentioned avoidance instincts should be simple to design, as they are really nothing more than a series of logical on/off decisions. Does this fit this criteria? If so, then - followed by a final yes it does, so do this. You could model any of these in a flow-chart.

But if most of our instinctive actions can be modelled and replicated, what about other functions of the human mind, such as deciding to eat because we’re hungry? This is where we have to look not at what we are thinking when we behave a certain way, but what mechanism could have evolved to make us behave that way in the first place.  

Well the smell of food certainly stimulates the feeling of hunger, which causes us to seek food and eat it, and then the feeling of eating gives us the feeling of enjoyment, followed by the feeling of contentment from being full. That’s simple enough, and in fact it’s pretty much acknowledged that this is a Reward System and that there’s actually no thought involved. The stimulus prompts the human nervous system to offer or promise rewards. Again our conscious thoughts are not the decisions that cause this action, but are after-the-fact results of  a decision already taken instinctively.

So could we model this too? Of course we could, because again it’s simple on/off decision-making – if feelings of hunger, then… But what about the actual reward? How do we model the feeling we get when we achieve a result, gain a prize, avoid pain? How do we reward a robot, or even get the robot to acknowledge and seek reward? Again, simply by the same method. It’s easier to explain this with an example.

We have built a robot. Let's call him "Robert". Robert has a power cell. When it gets below a certain level Robert must seek a recharge. We could just put that in as a simple instruction, a yes/no test for certain criteria (power below a specific level), and probably robots today may already be designed this way. However that’s not going to make Robert think and act like us. After all, we don’t have a simple meter for our stomach contents, with an instruction to eat when it gets below a certain level. Our system is a lot more Heath-Robinson. Yes there is a kind of level meter in action, but it’s the body’s chemical signals that supply the trigger. Sugar levels in the bloodstream,  for example, cause cells to react when a certain level has been reached, and we don’t have conscious access to this decision-making. However these systems do also produce other secondary effects (dry mouth, grumbling stomach) that we are consciously aware of, which we interpret as telling us that we’re hungry...and then we’re into a standard reward system again, where we eat to stop the unpleasant feelings and gain the pleasant ones.

Now we get to the crux. No matter how much detail we replicate in our AI, how do we get to that last I’ll do this because it makes me feel good? Well in Robert’s case, what if we keep the Level meter, but instead of the trigger simply instructing Robert to seek recharge, we pop an extra step in? We trigger an increment in some figure stored in a memory register. We then instruct Robert’s system to “do what the trigger wants us to do” when it detects either a rise in the figure in memory, or (for a slightly more complex process) when the figure has got to a particular number. The more Robert is discharging, the higher that figure gets, and this will cause Robert to follow the instructions in the trigger circuit - Recharge.

The beauty of this monitoring of increase of a figure (let’s call it the Reward Register) is that we can re-use it for any other scenario: Cold? That's bad for the electrics, so increase your internal heating and warm yourself up. Encounter an obstacle in front of you? Step over it (if small), Remove it without damaging it (if bigger), Walk round it (if very big).

Using the Reward Register (along with some very complex logic paths) for every example of decision-making Robert has to make allows for Redundancy, Design simplicity, and Adaptability. We can make Robert a decision-making machine on a par with a human being, and who’s to say that with this structured system in place, Robert won’t evolve Consciousness? After all, current neuroscientific thinking is that Consciousness may well be an Emergent property of the Brain’s processes anyway.

So in fact while we’ve modelled an Artificial Intelligence in this way, who’s to say that the human mind doesn’t already work like this?