Operational Consciousness

(Cross-posted at RedGloo)

Operational Consciousness is a book I gladly recommend to anyone in the field of consciousness studies, and especially with regard to Machine Consciousness.

On the cover, it says :

"Consciousness is not a state of mind

It is a procedure

It is not an optional extra.

It is an indispensable and integral part of any system, biological or artificial, which has a high level of intelligence"

And I tend to agree. In the book, Noble argues that consciousness is not a property of the brain, or system, nor is it a 'thing', but rather it is what the brain-mechanism does. Thus it is a procedure, or a process, something which I remember having a heated debate about with one of my lecturers a couple of years ago. Some people, it turns out, have a problem with ascribing the label consciousness to the dynamic process rather than the 'hardware' or 'software' which enable that process to exist. Fortunately, perhaps, I do not share the problem, although it is a very useful mental exercise to try to describe the categorization of the instantiation in a meangingful way, using a language which appears to have had its origins in describing and talking about material objects.

Noble takes pains to be able to explain developments between the various meachanisms in his model in terms of pseudo-evolution. In other words, each step can be explained as having been possible to evolve, without actually having to show how, or, indeed, if such evolution actually happened in that way.

The view taken is also Functionalist, in that it breaks down the proposed structures into functional units which could be realised using known computational methods and hardware. This is not to say that the endeavour would be easy, as one of the major hurdles is the bandwidth necessary for the sensory data the system should be able to handle. Additionally, the whole system must, perforce, build on existing experience to develop its internal models, and is unreasonable to expect early versions to even be able to do this as quickly as, say, a human child would, let alone faster. It seems reasonable that any such system would, certainly during prototyping, take years to build up the body of experience necessary for its qualities to be fully recognised.

Of particular note, Noble uses pragmatism, summed up nicely in his wording "Adopting his [James'] use of the word 'expedient' I call this view of reality 'expedient reality'. Briefly, an object or circumstance can be said to 'exist' in the 'world', if its inclusion in our representation of that world, results in an improved ability to predict future experience". So whilst we can have representations of things which do not 'exist' we do not consider them to be real unless the internal model can use them to make predictions which are more accurate than the ones we make in their absence.

Noble's 5-layer model consists of 5 semi-autonomous layers which each build on the functionality of the earlier ones. This is similar to the concept of a subsumption architecture.

Layer 1 A stimulus-response automaton, providing sensory mechanisms. This also manipulates the data in simple ways, and provides for 'programmable' responses.

Layer 2 A memory layer, which can be used to anticipate a limited range of events, and which can pass data on to subsequent layers. This is similar, I believe, to our short term memory.

Layer 3 An abstraction layer, driven primarily by compression techniques. By recognising repeated patterns in Layer 2, and representing them in a 'concept store', the data volume is reduced, and some level of abstraction is produced. In my view, this is probably a layer which may have multiple self similar layers, each acting on the previous one, possibly still with inputs from Layer 2. This layer is described as constructing a predictive interpretation of events.

Layer 4 A layer which enables the system to hold a Theory of Mind for other animate objects it encounters and produces models of in the lower layers. This layer also provides some level of introspection, and maintains a model of 'selfmind'.

Layer 5 Language layer - built on its predecessors, this layer introduces a mechanism for language, and the idea of a meta-concept, necessary for the development of language in the system.

The rest of the book goes into some detail, explaining the concepts, and exploring what they mean, with explanations of how they could have evolved using pseudo-evolution. It provides a detailed analysis, and, frankly, you should buy the book and read it. Whilst it is not always the easiest read, it is certainly easier than many texts and puts its points well.

I particularly like a comment near the end. When discussing how various mechanisms work, and the way that the interpretation procedure has to process large amounts of data to spot concepts in the reality stream provided by the senses, Noble cautions the reader:

"And remember this - you are not sitting there watching your brain doing this from some stance on the side-lines. This operation is you. You are that mechanism"

Noble, H., (2005) "Operational Consciousness", Tartan Hen Publications, Argyll