(Stillness in the Storm Editor) Our minds are far more powerful than we’ve been lead to believe. We also have been lead to believe Artificial Intelligence is some kind of super-human-like mind that can learn anything instantly, and use that knowledge to do almost anything. The truth is, computers have major issues with the unknown, chaos.
For humans, we have the right brain, an entire hemisphere of the mind devoted to contending with chaos. It has the ability, through holistic cognition, emotions, and insight, to pattern recognize new things that translates into specific knowledge. The left brain uses these cognized patterns later, distilling them into slices of specific knowledge we use to do things in the world.
A computer effectively lacks a right-brain; but it has a left brain. Computer programmers and engineers working on AI are contending with this chaos cognition problem.
The issue is that a computer can only deal with things it was programmed to see.
If you hook a camera up to a computer and put a glass of water in front of it, the computer won’t do anything with it, unless it was programmed to.
Humans possess a kind of innate programming too, locked within our biology and consciousness. We have instincts, programmed emotional reactions, and biological responses that are hard wired, acting as initial guides that our brain uses to organize information so it’s useful to us.
Ultimately, the reason why humans can grapple with the unknown better than a machine is that we’re beings of consciousness. We possess a transcendent mind, meaning, we can transcend the limits of our biological programs, literally creating new programs as an implicit feature of being alive.
AI developers assume a machine can do this too, resting on the presupposition that humans are nothing more than machines.
But spiritualists, I would argue, correctly assert we are more than just machines.
In this view, our minds can contend with chaos because, ultimately, we are children of the divine, who is the source of all things. Thus, our minds are preprogrammed, spiritual, to understand and master the unknown, in all its forms.
Thus, while a machine can be programmed to do all sorts of things, and we can use them to improve our lives, AI will never be like human consciousness.
– Justin
by Peter Dockrill, September 27th, 2019
There is such a thing as not enough chaos.
In a new study, scientists have discovered that complex calculations performed by computers can be off by as much as 15 percent, due to a “pathological” inability to grasp the true mathematical complexity of chaotic dynamical systems.
“Our work shows that the behaviour of the chaotic dynamical systems is richer than any digital computer can capture,” says computational scientist Peter Coveney from UCL in the UK.
“Chaos is more commonplace than many people may realise and even for very simple chaotic systems, numbers used by digital computers can lead to errors that are not obvious but can have a big impact.”
For centuries, theorists have contemplated how very small effects can snowball into very large ones downstream.
In chaos theory, the phenomenon is famously referred to as the ‘butterfly effect‘: metaphorically, the hypothetical notion that the infinitesimal flap of a butterfly’s wings in one place could help generate a subsequent tornado in another.
It’s a poetic concept, but while it may seem whimsical, mathematical modelling suggests the notion is grounded in very measurable terms.
The butterfly effect is primarily attributed to American mathematician and meteorologist Edward Norton Lorenz, who in the 1960s, while repeating a weather simulation, took a history-making shortcut: he used slightly simplified numbers for the second experiment (inputting 0.506 instead of 0.506127).
“I went down the hall for a cup of coffee and returned after about an hour, during which time the computer had simulated about two months of weather,” Lorenz later recalled.
“The numbers being printed were nothing like the old ones.”
The results of Lorenz’s fateful rounding off showed how minute changes in initial conditions can produce big changes over time in complex, chaotic systems where lots of variables affect and influence one another.
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Weather prediction is one example, but the same snowballing error phenomenon has since been demonstrated in everything from modelling orbital trajectories to turbulence and molecular dynamics.
The thing is, even though the butterfly effect has been known about for decades, it’s still a fundamental problem in the way computers run calculations.
“Extreme sensitivity to initial conditions is a defining feature of chaotic dynamical systems,” Coveney and his team explain in their new paper.
“Since the first usage of digital computers for computational science, it has been known that loss of precision due to the discrete approximation of real numbers can dramatically alter the dynamics of chaotic systems after a short amount of simulation time.”
This loss of precision isn’t something that becomes apparent in simple calculations. The calculator app on your smartphone is likely perfectly sufficient for everything you need it to do in daily life.
But in big calculations with lots of variables and starting conditions, tiny rounding errors at the outset can lead to huge calculation errors by the end of a given simulation.
At the heart of the problem, the researchers say, is what’s called floating-point arithmetic: the standardised way that real numbers are understood by computers using binary code, which uses approximations and conversions to represent numbers.
In large and complex systems, those approximations can introduce significant errors – a problem compounded by the way that floating-point numbers are distributed between real numbers, even in a newer and more complex 64-bit format called double-precision floating-point.
“It has long been believed that the rounding errors are not problematic, especially if we use double-precision floating-point numbers – binary numbers using 64 bits, instead of 32,” says mathematician Bruce Boghosian from Tufts University.
“But in our study, we have demonstrated a problem that is due to the uneven distribution of the fractions represented by the floating-point numbers, and that is not likely to disappear merely by increasing the number of bits.”
In the research, the team compared a known simple chaotic system called the Bernoulli Map with a digital calculation of the same system, and uncovered what they say are “systematic distortions” and a “newfound pathology” in the simulation of chaotic dynamical systems.
Indeed, while Lorenz discovered his butterfly effect by leaving entire numerals out of a calculation, the researchers found their own much subtler equivalent by simply asking a computer to perform a mathematical calculation at all.
“For Lorenz, it was a very small change in the last few decimal places in the numbers used to start a simulation that caused his diverging results,” Coveney told the Science Museum blog.
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“What neither he nor others realised, and is highlighted in our new work, is that any such finite (rational) initial condition describes a behaviour which may be statistically highly unrepresentative.”
While the researchers acknowledge that the Bernoulli Map is a simple chaotic system that isn’t necessarily representative of more complex dynamic models, they warn that the insidious nature of their floating-point butterfly means no scientist should let their guard down around computers.
“We do not believe that practitioners should draw any comfort from the fact that their models are more complex than this one,” the authors write.
“We would suggest that if so simple a system exhibits such egregious pathologies, a more complex system will probably exhibit even more devilish ones.”
It’s not every day you find out computer modelling may be fundamentally flawed. Until we somehow figure out a way to fix this, the team says researchers everywhere need to closely pay attention to the numbers their computers are spitting out.
The findings are reported in Advanced Theory and Simulations.
Stillness in the Storm Editor: Why did we post this?
Consciousness is one of the most mysterious phenomena of all time. Scientists, philosophers, and mystics have been searching for the answer to the question, What is Consciousness? for most of human history. In modern times, the spiritual origins of consciousness are being replaced with a materialistic view, that awareness emerges as an additive property of electrical impulses in living things. Despite the fact this theory is assumed to be true, any self-respecting psychologist will tell you we have no idea what consciousness really is. The preceding article discusses consciousness, some of its properties, and possible origins. This is helpful to contemplate because, in the act of trying to understand the mysteries of consciousness, you develop critical thinking skills and stimulate your philosophic muscles, both which are immensely important for almost everything we do in life. Additionally, you’ll develop abstract thinking skills, the ability to explore intangible realities that govern material realms. With the power of an active mind capable of navigating the realities of consciousness, great leaps in personal attainment can be made along with preparing you for the Great Work of making this world a better place.
– Justin
Not sure how to make sense of this? Want to learn how to discern like a pro? Read this essential guide to discernment, analysis of claims, and understanding the truth in a world of deception: 4 Key Steps of Discernment – Advanced Truth-Seeking Tools.
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