Silicon Awakes

By Author: Charles Douglas Wehner
Total Articles: 10
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I have taught many things to idiots. I showed them how to calculate sines and cosines (http;//wehner.org/fpoint ), how to make animate pictures (http://www.wehner.org/tools/animate ) and 3D (http://wehner.org/tools/anna ).

The idiots were made of STONE.

Yes - they were silicon chips. They were "Central Processing Units" (CPUs). They were so dumb that they gave me no help. They just sat there waiting for me to tell them what to do - and I had to understand the procedures down to the finest detail in order to teach them.

If I told them wrong, they would obediently follow the wrong instruction. Then the computer would "hang", or do crazy things.

So I learned patience.

Given enough understanding, there is virtually nothing you cannot do with silicon. In the future there may be other semiconductors - possibly boron trinitride - but for now, silicon is king.

The methods used on one kind of semiconductor, however, will be valid for all time. It is not the details of the program on a specific chip that are important, but the ideas behind them.

Inevitably, we ...
... analyse our own minds as we work. We have to learn to distinguish belief from knowledge. Belief is a "feeling" in what Freud called the "Preconscious" (Vorbewußtsein). Knowledge is the set of solid ideas that have been tested and proven over and over again.

One cannot program a "conscious mind" into a silicon chip, when one only has a "feeling" of what a conscious mind is.

Mohammed ibn Musa abu Jafar al Khwarismi wrote a book. He said that numbers are made of parts, and can be divided into their parts... and so he went on. It was an excruciatingly slow process of reasoning - designed to avoid errors or omissions. It became a style known as "Al-Kwarisms".

According to Professor Donald E. Knuth, European professors with their European accents were teaching in the States. The students thought they were saying "ALGORITHM" - and a new technical term was born in 1956.

You need an "algorithm" when you want silicon to come to life. You need to think like a Greek philosopher - to question the nature of "me". You need to distill the very essence of awareness from your knowledge of the world. Unless you find it - and unless the finding is TRUE - you will never reach the point of rousing the silicon imbecile.

I spent my life conjecturing about the nature of conscious life. The new revolution of data theory helped me. Computers became abundant, and information technology was going into realms like the neural net. As we learned about silicon, we also learned about ourselves.

I considered that we have just one-and-a-half kilogrammes (about three pounds) of brain. All the data of our lives is stored inside it. There must be data compression.

My studies showed that there are mechanisms that refine the data from the eyes (http://wehner.org/3d ) and from the ears (http://wehner.org/honk ).
There are mechanical things like the basilar membrane, and neurological things like the auditory and visual cortices. That means that the brain is being fed with refined data.

With the help of Martin Wilsher, I had also updated Aristotle's five senses. There are, in fact SEVEN senses - as told on the page about the honky-tonk piano (last page mentioned above).

What goes on BEYOND the data-refinement? What happens when data - generically - is being analysed?

I found a new variant on DIFFERENTIATION. It is not a mathematical process. It is a LOGICAL process. It is the logical parallel of the calculus. I call it the new calculus of sets.

This process - DIFFERATION - seeks out anything NEW. New data cannot be compressed. It is passed on unchanged.

Old data can be defined by a coding system which states that it has been seen before. In the BINARY calculus of sets, if TWO old sets of data repeat, they become ONE new set. So the amount of data shrinks whilst the data is flowing in.

If the two sets are of the same size, sixty-four items may become thirty-two, which become sixteen, then eight, then four, then two, then one.

This is a phenomenon. It is a sensation in the world of data compression. Never before was there a system that thrives on abundant data, and consumes it with exponentially improving efficiency.

Or perhaps Nature got there first. Perhaps that is how we store our lives in such tiny brains.

However, the compression system is unstable. A tiny change to the data, and a flood of output occurs. It is exactly like the "THETA STORM" of the roused human or animal mind.

On my new page, you can see it all:

http://wehner.org/compress

Bear in mind that patent negotiations are in hand. This information is for academic use only.

Awareness is the awareness of TIME. We can only be aware of time if we have the OPPOSITE to compare it with.

But what is the opposite of time? My studies show that it is STORAGE.

Data that is slipping into the past must be stored. If it is not, it is lost. Data that is flowing in must be compared with stored data.

Thus the conscious mind is the point of analysis - the incoming data in the time domain.

The subconscious is the stored data.

There is a term "heuristic", from the Greek "Heureka, I've found it". The new calculus of sets is the ultimate "heuristic algorithm" because it finds difference generically - without being told what to seek.

Eventually, the machine will become too full to preserve its raw data. It will be forced to "TURN INWARDS UPON ITSELF". It will be obliged to collect again (to "recollect") its memories from the compressed data.

That is the moment when the "ME" is programmed.

I AM the totality of my life. The data in silicon is its sum-total. In the new jargon, future compression must achieve "DIFFERATION BY PARTIAL SUMMARATION", when the machine deciphers its stored data piecemeal for comparison.

But that is elaboration.

For now, the demonstration of "awareness" is just about all that the average audience can fathom.

On that page - http://wehner.org/compress - you see the actress POLLY. Her acting is rather wooden, but she is a wooden horse.

She enters the image "Stage Left", and the "differals" appear. They can be seen to be diminishing in number as she moves. The system is becoming "familiar" with her. However, on the left-hand edge there are always some grey dots of raw data showing that new "EVENTS" are arriving from the left.

Then she stands still, and the number of "differals" shrinks by half, half and half again.

Then she approaches the camera (or does the camera approach her - or does the camera zoom)? The change in scale causes problems for the compression system - which "wakes up" to her presence.

When she has become so close that her face fills the screen, the system again grows "bored". It only wakes up when she starts moving away again.

This is - as stated on that page - the BEDROCK level of awareness. It does not get any more fundamental.

A silicon chip has no feelings. It has no needs - for food, shelter, companionship. It has no philosophy. As stated at the outset, it is an idiot.

So what is the machine "philosophising" about? It is saying "NEW". It is saying "OLD". It is saying that about pictures. It is saying that about sound.

It does not know anything about pictures. It does not know anything about sound. In fact, it does not know anything. However, when fed with bytes it can tell which groups of bytes are new - in the domain of time - and which are not.

What we do with the numbers we receive from the machine is OUR decision. Perhaps, we program a database to recognise faces or sounds. We would call this a RELATIONAL database, because we relate a picture of a horse to the name "Polly". But the system is open-ended.

Because it is so fundamental, it reaches out across the whole world of information technology, offering exciting new advances.

Charles Douglas Wehner

About the Author Charles Wehner was born in the Isle of Man in 1944. He became a technical author in radar, nucleonics and electronics instrumentation, also a factory manager and design engineer.

He has been professionally involved with computers since 1962.