I am not a scientist – I design and write software. Anyone who works in the field that this post deals with will be able to take it apart in no time, but I stand by my qualitative comments on the significance of Alex for our concept of intelligence.

As the entire world knows by now, Alex the Parrot died a few days ago. He was 31.
Alex was made famous for his considerable communication skills. He was the leading subject of an experiment running over three decades by Dr. Irene Pepperberg – a US academic (comparative psychologist).

Alex

I saw a documentary on Alex and his cohorts a few years ago and there is no denying that their skills and innocent charm were/are magical. Do yourself a favour, read an example of a conversation with Alex here. I grew up with an African Grey parrot[1] and while he/she[2] had an extensive vocabulary of calls and words/phrases I have no doubt that they were learned by rote. Lonka(the parrot) did learn to use phrases correctly, such as calling out to my dad as he left for work in the mornings, but those were limited to very simple, routine situations.
Alex’s abilities were in an entirely different league. Able to combine several attributes of one or more items (color, material, count, size) to answer questions that require comparisons, algebra etc he was reported by some to have had an intelligence comparable to a 5-year-old human.

Another fascinating aspect to Alex’s life is the training technique Dr. Pepperberg used to teach Alex. She would train[3] Alex together with a human colleague. These sessions would basically involve Alex competing against the human for rewards. Alex would observe what the human trainer did to receive the reward (e.g. identify the colour of a wooden block) and then learn to do the same. This would result in a natural competition[4] in which Alex’s learning is speeded up by competing with the human for that delicious treat.

What I’m interested in is the ongoing debate about animal intelligence. Alex was used as a case in point by both sides of the argument. Supporters of the idea that Alex showed a very simple form of human-type intelligence point to his ability to combine various attributes of several items into relatively complex comparisons[2] as an indicator of a flexible form of intelligence that goes beyond simple recognition and repetition. Detractors claim that his behaviour, while complex, is rote – simple repetition and recognition.
Another supporter point is that Alex was able to independently express his desires[6]. However, all animals express desire, the dog whining at the door means ‘I wanna pee’.

What I’m interested in is the detractors’ description of their objections, Dr. Herbert Terrace, arguing against classifying Alex’s intelligence as human-like, describes it as ‘a complex discriminative performance’. Ouch.
But wait! He describes it as ‘a complex discriminative performance’ – complex. Not to want to make trivialising assumptions about Dr. Terrace’s wider argument or his work I am excited about this statement. Sure, he does characterise Alex’s behaviour as a performance (i.e. trained for repetition), but he does concede ‘complex’.
One of my favourite books of all time is Steven Pinker‘s How the Mind Works. It describes, amongst other things, the Computational Theory of Mind which holds that the brain is a computational device(a machine) which produces intelligent behaviour and cognition through a highly, highly parallalised, ridiculously complex form of information processing.
In short, that human intelligence is a simple product of the brain’s ability to process thousands of events in parallel using its roughly 100 billion neurons and their roughly 3 quadrillion interconnection points(synapses). The secret to this ability lies not in some mystic breath of life, but simply on the brain’s complexity. One of the intelligent behaviours that the brain produces is language and something that is important to note is that Dr. Pepperberg does not characterise Alex’s sentences as language, they are responses – either to questions or to his own desires. I agree with this; a voice assisted satellite navigation system does not use language, it produces responses in the form of human words. But this is not a fundamental difference in the mechanism that produces the intelligence – complex information processing.
If you really understand computer programming it should be clear that a very similar mechanism produces computer intelligence[7]. A computer’s information processing capability is a direct result of the stacking on top of one another of thousands of layers of trivial logical operations. A computer can, after all perform only boolean logic[8] – but stacking those on top of one another in layer upon layer of interconnected pieces produces a spell checker[9].
I believe that the same applies to the brain. There is no magic point at which the brain all of a sudden becomes ‘intelligent’, going from being able to perform basic functions like breathing and recognising poisonous foods through to ‘!bang! I see it all now! I understand’. Fuck that. Intelligence is simply a function of the complexity of the device(machine/organ) that processes the information(reported by our senses) received by the system(the body). And in that sense I feel strongly that Alex was intelligent, not ‘intelligent’ or ‘exhibiting signs of intelligence’; intelligent in the same way that a human is intelligent, the same way that a forest of trees is intelligent and that an evolutionary microchip is intelligent.
And no, I’m not into that whole Gaia, we are all one and interconnected bullshit. Yes, we are all interconnected, yes there is information processing that occurs between individual organisms. But without having to resort to some flaky notion of an overmind, individual organisms/devices like that microchip, Alex and I are intelligent in exactly the same way – the mechanism is the same.

Alex’s intelligence was massively less complex than a human’s, as it was massively more complex than the microchip’s, but it’s the same. Yes, there are still mysteries that complex information processing begin to answer today(such as consciousness – neither Alex nor the microchip was/is conscious as far as we know) – but intelligence isn’t one of them.
It is arrogant and ignorant of the biological reality of the human brain to claim that our intelligence is somehow special or different from that of any other animal or neural life form.

And so, to Alex – I hope you had fun, you were cool. I’m sure that as the last electrical pulses jumped chemically from neuron to neuron in your brain you saw those delicious moments in your life, those wonderful cork nuts that you ate as you spoke.

Cork Nut

[1] By all accounts still alive, but having flown the coop about 5 years ago. Some months later my parents were walking around their town when they heard Lonka’s distinctive calls coming from a nearby house.
[2] Determining the sex of parrots is a notoriously difficult and error prone business
[3] Here we have one of the crucial points of this post, was she training Alex or teaching him, and is there a difference?
[4] The absolute fundamental environment[i] in which all animal(including human) development takes place – competition.
[i] not to be confused with the process that produces that development; being natural selection
[5] She asks ‘How many?’, he says ‘Two’, she asks ‘What’s different?’, he says ‘Color’.
[6] He says ‘Wanna go back’
[7] No, I’m not going to call it ‘intelligence’, it is intelligence.
[8] is it less? is is more? is it equal? That’s all you need.
[9] And here we can speculate about whether the internet(the most complex machine ever built) has already or is still waiting to become measurably intelligent itself.

While I put the finishing touches on my Facebook rant I thought that some good news might be fun.
I’m always surprised when people comment on how elegant the idea of natural selection is when applied to man-made items (such as in this story) but that they remain uncomfortable with the idea that the same process created the massive complexity that we see around us, including them. Here is a very worthwhile article on natural selection as applied to computer hardware[1].

Dr. Thompson dabbled with computer circuits in order to determine whether survival-of-the-fittest principles might provide hints for improved microchip designs.[...]
[When he] peered inside his perfect offspring to gain insight into its methods, what he found was baffling. The plucky chip was utilizing only thirty-seven of its one hundred logic gates, and most of them were arranged in a curious collection of feedback loops.[...]
Five individual logic cells were functionally disconnected from the rest– with no pathways that would allow them to influence the output– yet when the researcher disabled any one of them the chip lost its ability to [function as required].

The fact that the naturally selected winner used a design which was not only completely foreign to what a human would have created, but also simply could not work on paper shows one of the most elegant aspects of natural selection. Its utter simplicity(the best ones are replicated) produces solutions beyond our wildest dreams.

The more time I spend writing software[2] the more convinced I am that natural selection provides an answer to every evolutionary question and requirement.

Hooray for simplicity. God may not do so, but natural selection certainly does shoot craps.

Wanna dice?

[1] ignore the crappy images – the text makes up for it
[2] which basically involves glueing small blocks into bigger blocks into bigger blocks into bigger blocks

Just saw 300.
I really liked it. It’s graphic, pacy, violent and – yes – mythical.
I certainly didn’t go into the movie expecting anything other than another frame-by-frame translation of a Frank Miller dark-dark graphic novel, and within this aesthetic it works.

300

Anita had the flick’s number from the start when she said that the tagline should actually be ‘Prepare for Gory!’
Boy, was she right. It’s vi-o-lent with a capital ‘o’. But the violence is slick and stylised and comic-book-as-fuck.
I also thought that the makers managed to extract a reasonable narrative from the extremely simple storyline.
Pity about the soundtrack – who knew that the Spartans were into strip-mall-metal guitar power-riffs? The soundtrack is more Xbox than Xerxes.
In the end it’s more testosterone (and thong) heavy than Sin City, and as such I liked it.

Now if only someone would produce a screenplay that could convince Frank Miller to film The Dark Knight Returns[1].

Prepare for Gory!

I did cringe a little at the pompous speeches made by Leonidas, his queen, Gorgo, and the his mythmaker sidekick Dilios.
It’s all quite standard flag-waving fare about glory and honour and justice and puking in your popcorn. More strip-mall-metal guitar chords ensue. I wasn’t fazed[2].

But what did get me about 300 was something due in large part to my own response to all the macho flexing.
I was amazed at how viscerally I react to all that glory/hero nonsense. I sat there squashing popcorn in my balled fist, squirming in my seat with each US-Marine-like A-ROOH! let out my the crimson clad warriors.
Here’s what I’m talking about:

Xerxes: Imagine what horrible fate awaits my enemies when I would gladly kill any of my own men for victory.
Leonidas: And I would die for any one of mine.

Leonidas: The world will know that free men stood against a tyrant, that few stood against many, and before this battle was over, that even a god-king can bleed.

Leonidas: [Dying words] My Queen! My Wife! My Love.

Leonidas: No retreat, no surrender. That is Spartan law. And by Spartan law we will stand and fight, and die.

What bullshit! But my testosterone/adrenaline levels attested to its efficacy(on guys at least).
Me too Leonidas, I also want to go and fight with you! A-ROOH! uhm, cough. sorry.

Stiff upper lip, kiddo.

It’s not that I don’t know what’s happening or what the dialogue is designed to make me feel.
I’m not ignorant of the mechanics of the appeal to emotion that makes propaganda and Newspeak work.
But I was surprised at how effective the technique of repeating(loudly) a oversimplified, testosterone-fueled message really is. By the sixth time Leonidas was crying for the Spartans! I was ready to shout back at him.
I guess that’s what makes crap like the following tender snippet work.

Stelios: It is an honor to die by your side.
Leonidas: It is an honor to have lived at yours.

diee!

And I’m convinced that it’s not simply a matter of having been socialised/brainwashed to respond to such oversimplified messages – it’s something far more reptilian[3] and its radically powerful.
Does the following sound familiar?

Dilios: This day we rescue a world from mysticism and tyranny, and usher in a future brighter than anything we could imagine. Give thanks, men, to Leonidas and the brave 300! To victory!

The world’s military is built on crap like this – honouring the glorious dead. And it’s not about honouring the gory carcasses at all – it’s about that injection of adrenaline/dopamine/testosterone at the back of the spine that makes you shout.

Still, good movie – violent.

[1] The only graphic novel that I re-read after years and loved just as much the 8th and 9th time around.
[2] Since Saving Private Ryan’s flag-waving end I’ve been prepare to stomach just about anything aimed at US cineplexes.
[3] From the linked wikipedia article: ‘The Reptilian complex is named for the most advanced part of the brain higher mammals share with reptiles. It is responsible for rage, xenophobia, basic survival fight-or-flight responses, territoriality, social hierarchy, and the desire to follow leaders blindly.’

Time flies when you’re having fun.
Or just when the world is swallowing you whole.

I’m fascinated by the brain[1]; its origin, its work and its deterioration.
More than anything I’m fascinated by its ability[2] to observe itself.
Right now I’m observing a phenomenon related to the plasticity of time in the brain; I’m madly accelerating towards each year’s end.
It’s almost May, soon it will be July and then it will be October – each year accelerates.

July will be October -

It turns out that this sense of acceleration that overwhelms me is very real.

The brain has two distinct time keeping modes: a Circadian rhythm (aka the body clock) and a momentary perception of time passing.
From what I’ve read, these are intertwined and are both controlled by the Suprachiasmatic nucleus. However, they function separately.
The body’s circadian rhythm is relatively fixed[3], but it seems that our perception of time and the real time in which our senses operate is changeable.
The Suprachiasmatic nucleus controls these independently, separating our body’s concept of time, from that of our conscious mind.

Research is showing that a variety of factors influence the functioning of this tiny instrument to the extent where time really, physically, perceptually speeds up.The most common such influence is age[4].
My grandparents have many times mentioned that the days pass really quickly, even though they are retired and spend all of them sitting in different chairs humming to themselves.
Remember how long a school term was in primary school? A week took fucking forever to pass, never mind an entire term!
Your Suprachiasmatic nucleus is accelerating. The world really is moving faster.

Acceleration -

Here’s a fascinating experiment that shows the real plasticity of not only our perception of time, but of the rate of our brains’ internal clocks.

Psychologist Dr David Eagleman, [...] asked volunteer Jesse Kallus to perform a terrifying backwards free-fall of 33 metres.
If the [theory was] correct, Jesse’s perception of time would be slowed by the terrifying experience.[...]
Dr Eagleman came up with a cunning device: the “perceptual chronometer”, a wristwatch-like device which flicked blindingly fast between two LED screens.
Normally the flicker would be so fast Jesse could only see a blur. But if time slowed down for him, he might be able to discern the two different screens and read a random number on one of them.
All Jesse had to do was jump, and read. As he ascended the 33ft metal cage no-one seemed to believe this curious experiment might work.
When Jesse landed, he noted he had seen “98″. [...] In fact the number was 96. Not quite spot-on, but the two numbers look very similar on a digital screen.
Further jumps got similar results – all suggesting that time did seem to slow down for Jesse during the jump.

Whether or not the science of this experiment is sound, we cannot deny the evolutionary imperitive for this in the brain.
When we are not under threat and simply need to operate efficiently under rote conditions (performing a repetitive piece of work, walking far etc.) the brain can safely speed up time, thereby reducing the energy that it consumes in processing events in real time.
But when reaction time is crucial (e.g. in dangerous situations) the brain’s clock speeds up, processing more information, consuming more energy, slowing down time.

Of course, none of this helps me to catch a hold of the days that zoom past the foot of our bed.

[1] Not just the human brain. Sure, it is the most complex we know of, but even the common house fly’s brain is radical. The house fly’s optimised neural wiring gives it a reaction time of one 50th of a second, twelve times faster than a human’s.
[2] At least in humans
[3] Michel Siffre spent 2 months in a cave in 1962 foregoing any means of telling time – his circadian rhythm remained relatively in tact, but his ability to measure the passing of time (guessing what time it was) was totally lost.
[4] There are numerous scholarly articles on this topic – but they don’t make for good reading so I won’t cite any.

If there is one thing that I am really fearful of[1] it is losing my memories.
Only our memories and the knowledge and judgement which we develop as a result of these episodic experiences and re-use has real value[2].
This fear drives my interest in Alzheimer‘s disease since it lurks on the horizon for so many people.

Looking up at the sky I see the neurons in my head.

Salon have a pretty standard interview with an author on mid-life memory loss and the early onset of Alzheimer’s – Cathryn Jakobson Ramin.
It’s not revolutionary, but here are some bits.

Does anything about our brains improve with age?
Vocabulary. You keep learning new words and you don’t forget them. But that does not mean that you can produce them! As we get older we blank and we block. We can’t retrieve the word in the middle of a conversation.

I remember hearing that older people are better at predicting outcomes?
That’s true. We can make certain valid assumptions based on previous experience, that younger people cannot. You can look at your daughter’s boyfriend and realize in about 20 seconds that this is not going to work. But it will take her about two years.

So what is memory to us?
Memory is everything. Memory is who we are. When it goes, there is nothing left there. It’s what we know about our lives. When it goes — as it does in Alzheimer’s disease — people don’t necessarily lose the ability to get up or eat a meal or go for a walk or sit in a chair. They lose themselves.

[1] Other than severe pain or a violent or slow death – things that the neurons fear.
[2] This, of course, excludes the elaborate material bulk that I move around to ‘improve my quality of life’.