In the dream of Inception

What is reality? What is a dream?

These are fundamental questions asked in Christopher Nolan's movie Inception, which you should see as soon as possible, if you haven't already, and aren't doing very meaningful things anyway.

This movie has its protagonists move through various layers of dreamworlds, up to a point where you also start questioning whether the layer that is presented as 'reality' is actually just another dreamlayer. And this, I think, is exactly the point of the movie. If, through tapping in people's brains, we can create worlds as realistic and consistent as what we experience as reality, what for practical matters then, is the difference between reality and a dream? If we are embodied, and our skilled actions have lasting physical consequences in our lifeworld, does it then still matter whether this world is 'naturally given' to us, or 'technologically simulated'? Can't we experience the same things if we still have the same body and mind, can't we create the same things, can't we have the same emotions and existential realizations?

The main difference between the dreamworld and reality at this moment is that the dreamworld is fleeting and unstable. In general, we can grow because our reality is pretty stable, so we can use prediction to learn and adjust our actions to generate certain physical, mental and emotional results. In the dream state, as you don't use your prefrontal cortex, it's very hard to reflect on things and learn. This can be very frightening, but sometimes an attractive temporary alternative to the inertia of things in the 'real world'. As long as we wake up from it. But when this difference vanishes, and the dreamworld become as stable as reality, then the tide turns and we might start to long for living in the dreamworld.

I remember how I couldn't wait to go back into my dream, when I as a child had had a long dream that had continued the night afterwards. I wanted to know what would happen and what creative capacities I could develop in this other world. Basically I wanted to know whether I could split myself up in two worlds. Unfortunately, the dream never continued.

Inception shows that, with the appropriate neurodevices, we can create a lasting dreamworld in which it becomes clear that our mind has a direct creative influence on the world. In such a world, we literally awaken in the dream, because we reflectively realize that it is a dream, and that we have an embodied creative stance in it. We come to see that everything outside is really generated inside, that in fact there is no difference between mind and world anymore. Indeed, that the entirety of experience is what you can call mind.

Now, as seen in Nolan's masterpiece, this blurring of worlds can create very disturbing psychological effects, such as an emotional longing to something that only exists in one layer of dreamworld. To me though, this is not so interesting. This is merely a variant on psychological conditions that have since long existed, which are all based on creating a delusional world to escape into in order to not have to integrate what has happened in the 'real' world. What is interesting, is that when we can create a lasting dreamworld, the experiences and realizations that can dissolve such mental conditions can reveal themselves more easily.

Life is but a dream, so accept it, live it, be creative in it, and develop yourself all you can. What does it matter if the universe is simulated? It's alive, it's given to you, it's eternal, and it's ultimately beautiful. What are you trying to change?

James Cameron's Avatar and our transcendent technological future

We all know James Cameron as the director of Epic movies like Terminator, Aliens, and Titanic. After 1997, he devoted himself to one project and waited for the necessary technology to create a 3D production of mind-bending visual quality. The trailer and high-res images look very promising, and it seems like this is a must-see for anyone interested in transhumanism.

The core of the movie definitely seems to be to address the human desire to transcend itself and transform the own body and world into something that seems paradise-like. The narrative is that humans come into conflict with the Na'vi civilization of the exquisitely beautiful planet Pandora. The Na'vi look exceptionally human, although they seem to be an image of perfection as their skin is serenely blue, they are slim and tall and move with an elegantly intelligent panther-like motion. Their faces look in between human and feline, and they even have a tail for optimal balance in striding the fluorescent forests of their planet.

Humans, still masculine-biased as we have always been, use not embodied skill but mostly brute primitive technological force to combat the Na'vi. But weak as our bodies are, we do not develop them but transplant our consciousness into genetically engineered bodies that mix human DNA with that of the Na'vi. This allows disabled people such as the movie's marine protagonist to still fight.

This movie could definitely be the highlight of the year, as James Cameron combines stunning computer graphics with a nice narrative, contemporary themes of science and technology, and the new medium of 3D cinema that at least adds to the experience of immersion. The whole feel of the movie strongly reminds me of a possibly nearby transcendence of human consciousness which is often called the 'Aquarian age'. From a technological point of view, I always envisioned this to coincide with the intimate connection of electronics into the human body and their enabling of the development of high physical skill towards an embodied oneness of mind, body and environment. The Na'vi seem like a projection of this vision, as they live like tribal people but are highly intelligent and wise, both mentally and physically.

I am still critical of the technological component of projecting our consciousness into another body and controlling that with thought/imagination, as also seen in the movie 'Surrogates' earlier this year. I do not think that it will be possible to control another body as well as your own body, or even come close to that amount of control, because there is a gap in embodiment. I will elaborate a little bit on this critical view.

Embodied skill is developed through progressive interaction with objects that our consciousness gets directed at. As we learn, more and more of what we do is embedded into our memory. This memory is both present in the brain as well as in the cells of our dynamical muscle-joint system. Muscles optimize themselves so as to facilitate similar movements in the future with as least possible conscious control from the brain. And conversely, the brain optimizes itself to give minimal commands that produce maximal effects. In the end, the body as a whole needs less and less resources, and is highly coupled to the neocortical brain. If the environment of the embodied being is limited in generating value for that being, the actions will be minimized such as just walking, eating and sleeping. Through endless repetition of the same movements then, the body becomes highly intertwined as a functional whole, and in the end only a minimal brain command is needed to set off a series of movements in the body. Which is probably why a chicken can run for a while even after his head is cut off.

But this means that if we want to control a remote organic humanoid body with our brain, this body needs to either be highly coupled to the human controller's brain, or have developed sophisticated motor skills to repeated interactions in an environment. Executing the first option would be highly complex, as an incredible amount of very specific neurons or at least sets of neurons have will have to be coupled to the nerve system or brain of the avatar. Reading a human brain that specifically from the outside will require a device that is as or more complex as the human brain itself. Another way would be to also genetically alter human neurons and connect a wireless transmitting element to the axon, so it can be received by another brain directly. It seems that in principle this could be done, although there would still be an enormous amount of neurons that cannot communicate to the other body, because each brain physically optimizes itself to fit one body. Thus, the human brain would have to alter itself when connected to the other body so that to the brain it becomes part of its own body. Switching connection from body to body would require an enormous amount of neuroplasticity, and I doubt whether the human brain can handle that in its current form. Maybe we will have to engineer our own brains first before that can happen.

The other option is equally challenging, even more so on an ethical level. It implies namely, that if we want a remote organic body to react skillfully to brain commands, this body will have to have developed motor skills through experience. In other words, the body has to have had a life. Moreover, I believe that things like emotions and personalities develop as early ways to increase the derivation of value out of perception-action loops, and that these are intrinsically connected to the process of perceptual-motor skill learning. The concept of flow is an obvious bridge between the two; if you move in a flow with your environment, you often couple this to positive emotions. At the same time, you are developing and refining perceptual-motor skills. When you have difficulty handling something this often is perceived as frustrating, and the body is not yet in the flow, but struggling to grow to find ways to get into a fluent interaction with body and mind. Holistically said, I think that in order for a body to have optimal perceptual motor skills, it has to have a happy life. We probably do not want to create beings that develop a life of their own, to at some point be overtaken by a human being's brain and sent out to fight wars. Also we probably don't want to grow these beings in a lab environment and keep them in a dumb, almost dormant state, to only have them acquire physical skills. This will only create a new master-slave dualism in our society, an increasing cultural deification of the human paired with a reification of the nonhuman.

So what we could do is develop tool-bodies that lie somewhere in between the two extremes of depersonalized but unsophisticated engineered body coupled with high technological human augmentation, or a sophisticated slave body. We could develop bodies that have what you could call an insect-consciousness: basic motor skills but no emotional or reflective capacity. Organic warfare machines that need only a few commands, and that on the fly can develop intelligent motor skills by generating basic action-perception loops such as jumping and running on various terrains. But then, do we just exterminate these bodies when we unplug from them, or can we in some way coexist with them?

I think it would be better to not fight any remote civilizations in the first place, but to first find a way to live with ourselves on this planet, be happy with the body and planet we have, not need any avatars at all, and realize that this is paradise already. So I would encourage movie-goers to see this movie from the perspective that this could happen and what you would do, instead of being only emotionally massaged and imbued with new dreams and desires.

unraveling the brain

This hourlong lecture by Thomas M. Jessel is highly recommended for anyone interested in the workings of the brain and the importance of embodiment. He explains up to a molecular level the development of the nervous system and its interaction with an organism's morphology. One striking explanation is about how sheep can be born with one eye in the center of the head as a result of a lower concentration of sonic hedhehog signalling. Another is how the nervous system continuously grows through a growth cone at the tip of each axon, which gets stimulated or inhibited by its local environment and thus connects to muscles in highly intricate ways.

self-organized criticality in the brain

Beautiful visualizations of brain activity. A new metaphor for understanding how thought works is 'self-organized criticality'. It is not logical, not random, not based on deterministic chaos, but based on a critical state in between stability and turbulent instability that might be the optimum for information transmission within highly complex interlinked structures such as the brain. It also appears to allow the brain to adapt itself quickly to new situations, by rearranging which neurons synchronize to a particular frequency.

An analogy is made with a growing pile of sand; it keeps growing in a quite predictable fashion - this corresponds to the brain's resting state - , until the pile collapses and an avalanche of sand creates new piles, creating an increasingly complex structure over time.

This metaphor could also help to understand what the brain does in people with autism, epilepsy, schizophrenia and other ailments. To me, it would be interesting to create a map of what common stable states are in this self-organization process of the brain; a sequence that everybody's brain follows from foetus to possibly enlightened individual and what the neural correlates of these states are. I namely believe - and agree with Ronald Laing - that discovering/creating such a map could greatly help people with mental illnesses by guiding them on inner journeys, where they have to puzzle things out for themselves. Such a map could show people where the journey can lead to, what the path looks like, and how it can best be travelled.

Neurons stuck to a robot

A recent article on New Scientist, 'Rise of the rat-brained robots', describes how professor Kevin Warwick and his team have succeeded to incorporate a living culture of neurons into the simple behaviour of a wheeled robot. These neurons are kept disembodied from it, in an oven, and communicate wirelessly. The goal is to create a model of the brain that might be useful in the treatment of diseases like Alzheimers.

It is interesting how behaviours emerge like neurons firing when they are not stimulated to a certain extent. I am not a neuroscientist, but such findings might be the key to understanding things like human creativity on a neuronal basis; it might be just neurons firing randomly out of 'boredom'. It also provokes many questions, such as how it will feel if you would connect some of your neurons to a body somewhere else in the world. You could literally become a spread out being, as if you transformed from a solid to a gaseous state of being.

I personally can't wait for more of these findings, but at the same time am concerned, since any study does not just generate neutral knowledge; it also invites certain developments more than others. And, as with any research, I would like to see not just stating the obvious goals of such research, but also the wider implications and possible future scenarios. I would certainly like to invite discussions on this, so feel free to comment through this blog.

Thought Exposed

To start off with a dystopian tone of voice, George Orwell might have had a true glimpse into the future writing 1984. I feel there is still a possibility that when machines go autonomous and can't be controlled any longer, they might start behaving with the egoic traits that also emerged in humans: territorialism, pride, honour, jealousy, shame, etc. This can be catastrophic if machines will have enormous power.

Here's a project that is both wonderful and concerning at the same time. Researchers at Harvard university are currently trying to map out, in high resolution, the physical structure of the human brain using a technique called diffusion spectrum imaging. It employs magnetic resonance to track the movement of individual water molecules inside the axons, the long rods extending out of neurons. Then, by using sophisticated algorithms, the highest probability of the arrangement of nerve fibers can lead to an estimation of their location inside the brain.

Hence, through technology we can learn everything about ourselves. It totally turns us inside out, making us see parts of ourself we never saw before. In the future, an important transcendence I hope we shall undergo is that of losing the illusion that we are in control, and that we understand ourselves better than anything or anyone else. We will see that we are much more than our consciousness can describe, and that moreover our mental concepts of the world and of our self are highly shallow and limited for use in a world that is increasingly becoming more complex and scattered. I think that these kind of findings from neuroscience are one of the most enlightening developments of today.

What if I had a transparent helmet that shows how my thoughts developed during the day, or even the year? Could there once be a direct interface to the brain, for example to trigger lost streams of thought, or stimulate new associations? I believe so. However it may sound paradoxical, our control over the brain makes us see that there is no such thing as control, but that humans can only try to control things, since that is the inherent goal of the brain. I hope that it will make us see how futile we actually are and truly put us in a state of mind that empowers us to transcend the separation of the 'I' and the rest of the world.

Reverse Engineering the Brain

The Blue Brain Project, a collaboration of IBM and a Swiss polytechnic school called EPFL, might be leading to the first product that equals humans in terms of intelligence.

This ambitious project aims for an understanding of the human brain by modelling it from the bottom up. The team is trying to match the behaviour of individual simulated neurons with behaviour of real neurons by studying the brain of a living rat. So far, they have succeeded in simulating the behaviour of an entire neocortical column. This is the basic building block of which every brain is made up; ours contains a few thousands of these elements, each highly specialized in one function like recognizing the taste of cheese. After stimulating the model with impulses the simulated neocortical column just seemingly spontaneously began to grow dendrites, connecting neurons in an optimal way. Many entities, each of them behaving according to simple rules, can generate beautifully complex, highly intelligent, and seemingly unpredictable behaviour as a mass. The virtual model is now even so accurate to the behaviour of biological neurons that studying the model delivers better results than studying a real brain.

So the brain is simply a highly interactive network of these entities, and the major current limitation for the project is computing power. This is where IBM plays its role, by providing one supercomputer for simulating all neurons, and one to visualise the process. This results in spectacular imagery.

I'm pretty sure that this development will lead to the next humiliation of man, of a similar significance as the Copernican revolution. We will see that the brain is physically explainable, there is nothing metaphysical to it, that we can create artificial brains, and in the end, that technological organisms can be built that are as intelligent as humans. There already is the plan to build a robotic rat that would develop by interacting with the world, just like a real rat. Professor Henry Markram, director of the project, even believes that in the end, the model of the brain can let us experience what it experiences.

I myself do not believe in this latter prediction. The model will allow brains to communicate more easily and directly, as an alternative to language based communication about our experiences, but still it will remain communication, so there is inherently a gap caused by misinterpretation. You can never align two minds completely, so they can never share experiences, I think. The model can show us what it experiences, but then still our own consciousness selects what it picks from what is communicated. I, following the philosophy of embodiment, also feel that the project underestimates the importance of the physical form of an organism's body in generating its experiences and in the development of the inner structure of the brain. How you think is directly related to how your body is able to interact with the physical world, and this is different for every body. But I remain open for surprises, of course.

The project will have huge implications for designers of technological products. Like already with some other organs, we will possibly be able to create fully artificial human brains. But in contrast to organic brains, these technological brains could be networked electronically, via the internet for example. Brains become transparent, understandable, and rationally controllable. How can we make sure that humans still experience it as pleasurable if they become directly networked and others can directly monitor and influence them? I think to accept this, people first need to undergo a spiritual transformation, for example that of losing their egos, so they don't feel attacked but instead they feel helped by the technology.

Furthermore, how can we make sure our fellow artificially intelligent physical entities on this planet constructively and empathically interact with us? Still, biological brains are quite primitive, and need to go through great struggles to transform their internal configuration into one that works best in creating a fulfilling life. Egotism and territorialism, our present-bias, instinctive behaviour, our inclination to get stuck in self-reinforcing negative spirals, are just a few of the undesirable traits of the human brain, resulting from how we evolved in a primitive environment while these traits don't work anymore in our new, highly networked world. I think our task is not just to reverse engineer the brain, but rather already transform it so these brains more easily reach states like enlightenment. For example by equipping it with new hardwired couplings, like a new instinct. Or by giving it the additional function of being directly able to compare itself against the minds of others. Also, for people themselves to understand their brains, the electrical processes inside them must be translated for the senses, and not just remain abstract visualizations, so they can be easily interpreted and used in social communication in everyday life.

In my view, reverse engineering the brain is just a small start that will help catalyze a huge development: the complete convergence of the artificial and the natural.

More via Seed Magazine and the website of the Blue Brain Project.

Make sure you also watch this video where you can have a virtual flight through a model of the neocortical column. This will give you a feeling for the actual complexity of the human brain, and the scale on which thoughts occur; an entire neocortical column is only 2 mm long and 0.5 mm in diameter. For me this is extremely beautiful, because it confirms that thoughts are nothing but physical processes.