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Old 11-01-2004, 03:14 PM   #1 (permalink)
zen_tom
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A [long] thought experiment...

OK, this is a *thought* experiment only - Please do NOT raid my basement - also, it's going to take a while to explain properly, so please bear with me on this one...
NB: In what you are about to read, I have tried to keep the wording entirely matter of fact, it may sound cold, dry and morally repugnant, but I want to try and put across a hypothetical situation and then ask you to consider the results...
Take two babies - both might be newly born, but preferably we'll start observing them whilst they are still in the womb. Place one baby in an artificial, but womb-like environment - big glass tank full of warm nourishing fluids, breathing noises etc. Where the temperature, chemical makeup, everything possible has been geared so as to make the transition as unnoticeable as possible - making sure all its body functions are fully supported. Leave the other baby to develop naturally.

Both baby's minds are developing in their respective wombs, they both respond to noises they hear and sensations they feel in their respective wombs. They kick, punch, and have periods of relative activity and rest. Essentially they should be pretty equivalent at this point (assuming we've done a good enough job on the artificial womb).

Now our natural baby gets born. Everything in his world is turned (quite literally) upside-down - temperatures fluctuate, lungs breath air, his sustenance is now provided via a complicated process of groping, sucking, swallowing and digesting rather than the much more convenient method of having 'food' piped directly to the bloodstream. Noises are happening all the time, lights flash, dimly discernable things drift into and out of his visual range (not that he knows what any of these things are yet) All in all, it's a pretty lively time compared to the warm comfortable softness of the last 9 months. This liveliness kick starts natural baby's mind into overdrive, trying to process all this data and turn it into some kind of meaningful information. Associations are made. e.g. The smells, sights, sounds, sensations and tastes are grouped into a certain-smelling, smiling-faced, cooing, warm, milky thing called Mum.

A normal baby has a lot of sensual data to deal with, and it takes a great deal of effort to put it all together into a meaningful set of associations. By meaningful, I of course mean things that make the baby feel physiologically good. If a baby feels cold, it will want to be warm, if it feels hungry, it will want to be fed, if it feels bored, it will want stimulation, if it feels over-awed, it will want quiet etc. The normal response for an unhappy baby is for it to cry out until it has its needs served by someone else. There must be a set of 'hard-coded' feelings that makes baby feel good/bad, and mental development is a matter of learning how to gratify these feelings by itself rather than having to rely on a carer who isn't always going to be around out there in the big wide world.

Our tube-baby's birth is rather different. We keep the baby in the flask, but provide it with an array of flashing lights, temperature changes, loud noises and other provocative (certainly no more disturbing than the real experience of being born) stimuli. However, there are some major differences. A tube provides air to it's lungs, everything it sees is displayed on a mask placed over its eyes and it remains suspended in it's liquid environment. Again this child’s brain will attempt to make sense of the (much less richly stimulating) world around it.

It's a reasonably widely accepted fact that what we experience at this stage of our development moulds our brains and makes us able to understand what our senses tell us. Mice who's whiskers are kept trimmed at this stage are later unable to use them as sense organs to the same extent as regular mice. They effectively become 'whisker-blind'. In the same way, our baby is unlikely to develop very good sensual processing areas in its brain for those senses it is unable to use (hearing, touch etc) Meanwhile, it's brain is going to be able to concentrate on making sense of the light patterns it can see on it's screen. This means that the senses that we might take for granted, if not used will atrophy, while those that are stimulated meaningfully will grow and develop.

In order for the tube-baby to make sense of it's sensorium, we need to give it meaning. So, when the baby is hungry, we flash a certain combination of lights, and only when the baby responds in some simple way, do we provide it with what it wants. (Quite how to establish a meaningful set of representations with which to communicate to an infant in this situation is a huge task, but I'd ask that you allow me this shortcut and assume that we've worked out a suitably workable method) We also need to allow our baby to communicate with us somehow, perhaps by tracking its eye movements, or by the means of some basic implant (again unfortunately I don't have the details I'd like here, so would ask that you bear with me)

So while the normal child is busy processing information about its natural world, our tube baby is doing the same, only the information available to it is entirely controlled, and limited to the images it sees on the screen, and what it hears and feels in its tank (which we of course try to keep to a minimum). In addition, we carefully monitor our tube baby's physiology, translating it into a pattern of lights, which are relayed back to the child’s screen. Over time, and with little else to think about, it should be able to learn to regulate it's entire physiology, translating what it sees on the screen into some form of understanding.

Instead of a mother figure providing relief to unpleasant physiological stimuli, we use a certain frequency of flashing light, over time this frequency will become comforting. Since the child is aware that it can in some way control the stimuli it sees, it will try to determine what it can do to maintain the flash at the same frequency. We place mathematical puzzles in the form of lights for the baby to solve - since it has nothing else to focus on, these should be very easy - in the same way that autistic children, who find the world terrifyingly over-complex, retreat into the simple, logical worlds of mathematics, or representation (drawing, painting etc). As our child's mind learns to live in this (very strange) artificial world, the senses it doesn't use will likely atrophy with disuse until over time, it may be entirely unable to feel touch, sense smell or taste etc. At the same time, the purely logical information we present and collect will have the full brain's attention, the brain will become tuned to solving, or dealing with this kind of problem - we will have built a living computer.

There are a number of questions this line of inquiry poses:
Is the mind really this plastic? Would we think of this thing as a child, or a some kind of super-powerful computer? Would we have created a logical genius? A gruesome monster? Would this child have any form of emotion? Would we be able to communicate (as in discuss, or hold a meaningful conversation) with it? Would it have a soul? Would it have a notion of 'I'?

When thinking about this, bear in mind recent experiments involving animal neural tissue (linked to here) where pieces of rat brain were trained to control a simulation of a plane flying. There are other instances where animal brain tissue was used to control simple pieces of machinery.

Once again, I'm not suggesting that we try this out, nor am I saying that I don't find the idea abhorrent and against everything I value, but what I am asking is whether this is possible, and if it is, what does it say about us as biological machines, and if it's not, why not?
 
Old 11-01-2004, 03:37 PM   #2 (permalink)
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Basically your question boils down to "is the mind a blank slate?" to which I would answer NO, certainly not.
But I am currently far to tired to write anything more in depth, so I will get back to you!
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Old 11-01-2004, 04:37 PM   #3 (permalink)
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I'm generally very suspicious of this sort of thought experiment, so my basic answer is "I don't know". But here are some of my suspicions, for your questions I have suspicions about:

Quote:
Would we think of this thing as a child, or a some kind of super-powerful computer?
Most people would think of it as a child, since it would look like a child.

Quote:
Would it have a soul?
Depends on what you mean by soul. If people generally have souls, yes. If people don't generally have souls, no. I don't see how this experiment would change the existence or non-existence of a soul.

Quote:
Would it have a notion of 'I'?
Perhaps. That's really a question for a psychologist rather than a philosopher.
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Old 11-01-2004, 05:45 PM   #4 (permalink)
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CSflim - yes, I guess you are right - a blank-slate is what I'm getting at (if only I could have thought of that short phrase instead of that massive and clumsy explanation!) - I mean within reason, I think there is some natural hard-wiring that needs to be considered, but having taken that into account, I'm suggesting that yes, perhaps the mind is a blank-slate, and it is the experience of growing up that shapes us.

asaris, your suspicions:

a) That was a stupid question, let me rephrase it. If all you saw was an input/output terminal, and all the gruesome workings remained hidden, how easy would it be to work out whether there was something organic inside. To put it another way, is it possible to run the 'Turing Test' the other way around?

b) On souls, that too isn't really necessary - if you believe in souls, you believe in souls, the state of the individual isn't important.

c) I'd argue that philosophy nowadays (as always) needs to embrace all fields of human knowledge. If you wish to exclude psychology, then theology, physics, logic and even common sense ought to be excluded to. The earliest philosophers pondered questions we might now relegate to physicists, but I don't think their considerations are any less philosophical now that there's a specially named branch of science devoted to the study of what things are made of and how they interact with one another. Likewise, I'd strongly argue that of all the sciences psychology is the most philosophical, because it, if nothing else is perhaps closer to answering (at least it asks more often) the question, what is it to be conscious, what is it to be self aware.
 
Old 11-01-2004, 05:49 PM   #5 (permalink)
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Theoretically it would be possible for this experiment to work, there are many other factors which you haven't covered such as the fact that some animals die if they are not held, touched or have social experience, however, I don't think that's your point so I will disregard it and assume there could be a solution to the previous. Going back to your experiment this could only work theoretically. As in, even if we had everything solved and planned out and were that far ahead technologically it would be impossible to do it because of inherent error, to create a machine out of a human, whose brain fires many 100s of billions of neurons per second, seemingly in a random way, would be very hard. You would have to control every factor that could possibly be controlled, and do a very good job at regulating this environment and have the smartest possible people all working on modeling scenarios in which the child would grow up with the wanted traits, which because of the many variables would probably involve calculations with chaos theory and etc. For chaos theory to work as in, for the predictions to come true the initial variables have to be held within a very strict target value, and since no human will ever be able to actually be so accurate all the time or 100% right the experiment is doomed to fail. To sum it up mankind can't create anything as perfect as what the experiment would seem to create.
I think there have been a lot of movies and books on the subject, vaguely I believe Brave New World dealt in passing with something like this, however, it's a "nice" idea but that is all it will ever be.
Not quite sure if that helped but I gave it a shot.
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Old 11-01-2004, 07:37 PM   #6 (permalink)
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Is the test tube baby exposed to language or merely images and flashing lights and sounds? If it was kept in isolation without the sensory input, raised to adulthood and released how would it view the outside world?
To us grass is green, but to this child it would neither be grass or green but rather it would just be. Language traps us into matrices of definition and conflict, but what would this childs be? How would it order the world?
This is an interesting question but impossible to answer. Also why would the child even need to be 'birthed' if it was kept in a stable environment why would it need to be shocked out of it?
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Old 11-05-2004, 11:16 AM   #7 (permalink)
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Kagemusha, there would be a language of sorts I suppose, but an internal one. I'm not sure whether the child would be able to understand the outside world, unless it was relayed to it using this light-code. As for ordering the world, I don't know, I'd like to think that we order things through an ever evolving system of theories, tenets and beliefs, each being tested, replaced, defended and refined based on our experiences from birth. Providing a wholly different experience should provide an entirely different model in which thought occurs, if it occurs at all.

And yes, I was wondering why I went to all the trouble of birthing the child. I wanted to show a comparison between real-life and this imagined one, and included a shock-phase since it's the closest I can imagine being born must actually feel like. But does it have to happen? I don't know. That itself is an interesting question. What happens to the foetus that never gets born?
 
Old 11-06-2004, 12:09 AM   #8 (permalink)
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Your hypothetical made my skin crawl a little bit. I do see what your getting at.
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Old 11-06-2004, 03:06 PM   #9 (permalink)
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Interesting idea, but what practical applications could such a thing have to us? I think something along the lines of the rat-nerve tissue tests might be more likely, in that we take the brain of a human being, or only parts of the brain, and use to form part of a computer network. Although computers can do many things faster than the human brain, pattern recognition is not among them.

Imagine a computer system designed with a video camera as its input source, designed to recognize human faces. Such a system could be useful for spotting fugitives in airport terminals, or directing specific advertisements at an individual (similar to the film "Minority Report", but there I believe it was iris recognition, not face recognition). Although it would be very difficult to program a computer to recognize the differences, putting in a human brain might solve this problem.

In these types of cases, the rest of the human body would not be necessary. The person would be a brain in a vat, entirely under the control of others.

In "RoboCop 2" they actually had a great shot of the bad guy's brain and spinal cord which they used to implant into a super-strong robot. Somehting like that.

Also see the Japanese animated film "Ghost in the Shell."

Regardless, what do you see as a reason to justify the expense and difficulty of putting a human brain or entire body in such a state?
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Old 11-07-2004, 12:15 PM   #10 (permalink)
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Mister Shake, I don't think there is any reason to justify actually doing this, but I do think it asks questions that are interesting.

Loved 'Ghost in The Shell', my favorite scene is the beautifully rendered trip through Hong Kong in the rain. A 5 minute study into what it is to be a living thing experiencing the moment. Truely magnificent.

As for practical uses, you're on the ball again. Neural networks are notoriously hard to put together, especially when so many connections are required in order for the network to perform with any usefull accuracy. Why spend time threading all the wires just so, etc when you can take a piece of natural computer and train it to perform the tasks you want performed. This itself suggests that the tissues that make up our brains are higly flexible, trainable and 'plastic'. People may in the future eschew the body, and being born into a machine, live out their lives from within an artificial sensorium. Applications might be space exploration, or some other endeavour for which our bodies do not provide adaquate support. Things that we may be unable to currently comprehend might be easily graspable by someone with an upbringing that has been solely tailored with that purpose in mind.

Once again, justification is not something I'm trying to do, I'm just pointing out possibilities and asking whether they are possible, and if so, what implications do those possibilities have on the way we see the world around us?

If a patch of cells can control a computer, or recognise a pattern, or perform one, or a range of tasks that we find natural, but which logic-based machines find difficult - at what point does a patch of cells get to think of itself? At what point (if any) does it become self aware? Can it just be that after reching some critical mass of connections, conciousness emerges?

At what point is a brain in a vat under the control of others? Does it have free will? How does it compare with a brain settled comfortably in its body?

The idea of keeping the infants body intact, but allowing senses we're less interested in atrophy due to disuse was just my way of illustrating a way of getting a 'brain in vat' but without any surgical procedures which might confuse the issue.

Finally, returning to the 'why do this rather than have a lump-of-cells' point, I suppose again for practicality. The brain-body arrangement already provides easily accessible input and output interfaces. The lump-of-cells needs to be trained to recognise various inputs, and to act in such a way to send equally various outputs.

If you are interested in thought and developments along these lines, I can thoroughly reccomend reading or finding out about a chap called Igor Aleksander and the types of research he and many others are doing in this field (not, I hasten to add invloving bottled babies of any kind!)
 
Old 11-08-2004, 12:32 AM   #11 (permalink)
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Reminds me of various experiments I've heard about involving baby monkeys. They were separated from their mothers and given the choice of two model 'mother replacements'. One was a model made of wire, which was able to dispense milk. The other was a model made of something soft (I'm not entirely sure what), and didn't give out any food at all. They abandoned food in favour of the soft one.
So I'd guess we might be preconditioned to want our 'mum'/'comforter' to be something soft/warm etc - and that you might have trouble comforting the baby with only a set of lights.
It's an interesting idea, but I think that even at/before birth we're unlikely to be quite 'blank slate' enough for the experiment to work. Test-tube baby might probably have shockingly high cortisol levels, 'fail to thrive' and die.
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Old 11-13-2004, 02:14 AM   #12 (permalink)
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There are fundamental differences between the human mind and a computer, so we probably wouldn't consider the child to be a supercomputer, since he/she really wouldn't be one. The computational methods are simply too different. But still, it is an interesting scenario.
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Old 11-13-2004, 02:34 AM   #13 (permalink)
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Sounds vaguely Matrix-like.

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