Freud as Real-Time Programmer

Derek J. SMITH, CEng, CITPCardiff School of Health Sciences

University of Wales Institute, Cardiff

dsmith@uwic.ac.uk http://www.smithsrisca.demon.co.uk

As presented to

A JOINT SCIENTIFIC MEETING

of

The British Computer Society (South Wales Branch)

and

The British Psychological Society (Welsh Branch)

Thursday 21st February 2008

Copyright Notice: This material was written and published in Wales by Derek J. Smith (Chartered Engineer), Senior Lecturer in Cognitive Science and Informatics at University of Wales Institute, Cardiff. It forms part of a multifile e-learning resource, and subject only to acknowledging Derek J. Smith's rights under international copyright law to be identified as author may be freely downloaded and printed off in single complete copies solely for the purposes of private study and/or review. Commercial exploitation rights are reserved. The remote hyperlinks have been selected for the academic appropriacy of their contents; they were free of offensive and litigious content when selected, and will be periodically checked to have remained so. Copyright © 2008, Derek J. Smith (Chartered Engineer).

Publication was by PowerPoint presentation on 21st February 2008, running offline with inactive hyperlinks. This online version, complete with activated hyperlinks BUT WITH COPYRIGHT PROTECTED IMAGES REMOVED, comes to you for follow-up private study. Paragraphs rendered feint form part of the fuller narrative but were not unduly emphasised at time of presentation.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

• During the 1980s Derek Smith was with British Telecom, Cardiff, where he specialised in the design and operation of very large CA-IDMS "semantic network" databases.

• Since 1991 he has taught neuropsychology to Psychology and Speech and Language Therapy undergraduates.

• He is working currently in association with International Software Products, Toronto, on "Konrad" [details], an artificial consciousness project using a CA-IDMS platform [details].

PLAN OF THE PRESENTATION

• This presentation explores computer science's debt to the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, and highlights a number of areas where Freud might still have much to offer researchers in the domains of artificial intelligence in general and artificial consciousness in particular.

• It is organised into two "scene-setting" sections, followed by a third section in which the substantive issues are explored in greater detail.

PLAN OF THE PRESENTATION

• Section 1 is primarily for the benefit of British Computer Society members, and offers a brief history of neuro-psychology. Non-psychologists should carefully note the shape of the biological control hierarchy.

• Section 2 is primarily for the benefit of British Psychological Society members, and offers a brief history of modern computer science, with especial emphasis on "real-time" systems. Psychologists should carefully note the shape of the robotic control hierarchy.

PLAN OF THE PRESENTATION

• Section 3 reviews Freud's early work on the modular architecture of the human cognitive system and the possible low-level operating principles of nervous tissue, and draws attention to the uncanny accuracy of his predictions of real-time biological control structures, sometimes a full lifetime before the machines existed to put those ideas to the test.

• The presentation concludes with an overview of the author’s Konrad project, in which a number of Freud’s ideas are currently being implemented.

SO TO APOLOGISE IN ADVANCE .....

THE FOLLOWING STORY IS 90% PREPARING THE WAY AND 10% FINAL DELIVERY

PLEASE BE PATIENT, BECAUSE THE VARIOUS NARRATIVE THREADS DO EVENTUALLY COME TOGETHER.

SCENE-SETTING 1

NEUROPSYCHOLOGY FOR COMPUTER PEOPLE

IN THE BEGINNING, PHILOSOPHERS DEBATED THE PROBLEM OF MIND AND INVENTED LOTS

OF IMPORTANT NEW WORDS .....

νους

φαινομενον

τεχνη πραξις

ψυχη

αισθησις

GLOSSARY OF PHILOSOPHICAL TERMS

σεμαινω

ιδεα

I'm Aristotle, and we'll be talking about two of my

more important ideas in a moment .....

THEN ANATOMISTS TOLD US WHAT THE NERVOUS SYSTEM LOOKED LIKE .....

These images are from Andreas Vesalius' De Humani Corporis Fabrica (1543)

Pay attention

now!

THEN RENAISSANCE PHILOSOPHERS STARTED TO GUESS AT HOW IT WORKED .....

This image is from Rene Descartes' Treatise of

Man (1662), and speculates on how

biological information processing might be

vertically differentiated.

NOTE THE PRIMITIVE

BIOLOGICAL REAL-TIME CONTROL

HIERARCHY.

"Input Processes"

pass here on their way to

the brain

"Output Processes" pass here on their way

to the muscles

BY THE EARLY 19TH CENTURY NEUROLOGISTS HAD STARTED TO CONFIRM

SOME OF DESCARTES’ SUSPICIONS

THE CONTROL HIERARCHY AGAIN

BY 1945 WE EVEN HAD A REASONABLE IDEA WHAT "KNOWLEDGE" WAS AND WHERE MANY

ELEMENTS OF IT WERE STORED …..

THE FIRST OF ARISTOTLE'S GOOD IDEAS WAS THAT KNOWLEDGE WAS

WHAT YOU GOT WHEN YOU CONNECTED LOTS OF SEPARATE MEMORY ELEMENTS TOGETHER.

"ASSOCIATIONIST" PHILOSOPHERS HAVE BEEN DISCUSSING THE

NETWORKED NATURE OF THE MIND EVER SINCE, AND "SEMANTIC

NETWORKS" ARE NOW A POPULAR BRANCH OF MODERN ARTIFICIAL

INTELLIGENCE RESEARCH.

….. ALTHOUGH WE STILL DON’T HAVE MUCH IDEA ABOUT THE MORE ABSTRACT SIDE OF

BEING HUMAN

WILLPOWERCONSCIOUSNESS

SELF IDENTITYETC.,ETC.,ETC. ????

????

OUR KNOWLEDGE OF MIND, IN OTHER WORDS, LAGS FAR BEHIND OUR KNOWLEDGE OF BRAIN.

THERE ARE TWO GOOD REASONS FOR THIS .....

REASON #1.

FIRSTLY, MOST OF WHAT GOES ON IN THE MIND IS "UNCONSCIOUS" , SO WE CAN'T "INTROSPECT" OUR WAY TO

UNDERSTANDING IT.

REASON #2.

SECONDLY, THERE IS ARISTOTLE'S OTHER GOOD IDEA, NAMELY THAT YOU WILL ALWAYS RUN UP AGAINST

THE PROBLEM OF "INFINITE REGRESS" WHEN TRYING TO LOCATE PHENOMENAL AWARENESS …..

WHENEVER WE ZOOM IN ON A PARTICULAR BRAIN MECHANISM WE FIND IT IS MADE OF RELATIVELY SIMPLE PARTS. WE THEREFORE HAVE TO PRESUME THAT

ANOTHER PART OF THE BRAIN IS LOOKING AT IT MAKING CONSCIOUS SENSE OF

WHAT IT IS DOING.

BUT WHEN WE FIND THAT PART, WE ..... ETC

….. AS A RESULT, COGNITION IS TRADITIONALLY UN-DRAWABLE

• There has never been a universally accepted "blueprint" of the flow of mental information during cognition.

• Instead, different authors draw overlapping subsets of the truth in different ways and at different levels of detail to suit the argument then at hand. [To see a tutorial on how to draw cognitive diagrams, click here.]

• Here are two broadly equivalent hierarchically structured diagrams .....

THE COGNITIVE HIERARCHYKUSSMAUL’S (1878) FOUR-LEXICON MODEL

• Click for additional explanation

Note the overriding controller

Note the four separate word stores,

or "lexicons"

IT HAS SINCE BECOME AXIOMATIC THAT SURFACE WORD FORM IS

STORED SEPARATELY FROM CONCEPTUAL MEANING.

IT HAS SINCE BECOME AXIOMATIC THAT SURFACE WORD FORM IS

STORED SEPARATELY FROM CONCEPTUAL MEANING.

112 YEARS LATER …..NORMAN’S (1990) HIERARCHICAL MODEL

• Click for additional explanation

Aesthesis Praxis

Phenomenal Awareness

SECTION 1 - SUMMARY

• Biological control has evolved to be hierarchical, with a higher functions system at the apex being fed by an ascending perceptual hierarchy and acting on the world over a descending motor hierarchy.

• These two processing hierarchies deliver the facilities for aesthesis and praxis respectively.

• Some cognitive processes are well understood and readily locatable in specific nervous system structures. However, our understanding of the highest higher functions is still about as sketchy as it was when the Greek philosophers first drew attention to the problem.

SCENE-SETTING 2

COMPUTING FOR PSYCHOLOGISTS

2.1 THE BASIC INSIGHT

COMPUTERS ARE, WERE, AND ALWAYS HAVE BEEN, PART OF THE ARMS RACE …..

CODES AND CIPHERS

• The use of codes and ciphers for political and military purposes goes back to the beginnings of recorded history, and became meaningfully mechanised with Thomas Jefferson’s "cipher cylinder" around 1790.

• For the ensuing 150 years, cryptanalysis co-evolved with telecoms, eventually becoming one of the three main drivers for the development of modern computers [CLICK HERE for a more detailed history] …..

MILITARY INTELLIGENCE, 1914-1918

• Many WW1 British naval campaigns relied on wireless intercept intelligence ("SIGINT"), whose decryption and subsequent analysis was masterminded from "Room 40" at the Old Admiralty Building in London [typical story]. The Director of Naval Intelligence was Captain Reginald ("Blinker") Hall, and among his operatives was one Alastair Denniston.

• Another intelligence office was in the nearby War Office. It was called M.I.1(b), and was headed by the Scottish aristocrat Major Malcolm Hay, Laird of Seaton. Among the small team of M.I.1(b) operatives was one Oliver Strachey, specifically head-hunted from the Indian Civil Service for his interest in cryptanalysis.

MILITARY INTELLIGENCE, 1919-1945

• Denniston kept the Room 40 skill base alive by forming the Government Code and Cypher School (GCCS) in 1920.

• Strachey joined him in 1938 when GCCS moved to Bletchley Park, and during WW2 ran "ISOS Section", specialising in double-bluff deceptions.

• The strategic importance of reliable and timely SIGINT made Bletchley Park a hothouse for war effort technological advance .....

THE COMPUTING FAMILY TREE (TO 1945)THE DRIVING FORCES

Navigation Tables Artillery TablesANALYTICAL ENGINES READY RECKONERS

Cryptanalysis

"Room 40" at the Admiralty

MI1(b) at theWar Office

GC&CSBletchley Park

COLOSSUS

WW1

"Dickensian"Clerical / Filing Systems

Hollerith Card Systems 1890-

IBM

WW2

Artillery Fire Control (Land)READY-RECKONER SYSTEMS

Artillery Fire Control (Naval)ELECTRO-MECHANICAL ANALOG DEVICES

Artillery Fire Control (Anti-Aircraft)ANALOG AND DIGITAL PREDICTOR

AND CONTROL SYSTEMS

REAL-TIMECOMPUTING

GENERAL-PURPOSECOMPUTING

The Atom Bomb

ENIAC

19THCENTURY

Commerce / Cryptanalysis / BallisticsABACUS AND TALLY-STICK / CIPHER MECHANISMS

DIGITAL COMPUTING

ANALOG COMPUTING

PUNCHED CARDTABULATING

THE COMPUTING FAMILY TREE (TO 1945)SOME FAMOUS NAMES IN CONTEXT

Herman Hollerith

Charles Wynn-Williams

Konrad Zuse

John Von Neumann

THE ATOM BOMB

Benjamin FranklinCharles Babbage and Ada, Countess Lovelace

THE CONCEPT OF PROGRAMMABLE COMPUTATION

Alastair DennistonAlan Turing

Max NewmanOliver StracheyTommy Flowers

CODEBREAKING

Christopher Strachey

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Dreyer and DumaresqSperry and FordVannevar BushDIFFERENTIAL

ANALYSER

BELL LABSGeorge Stibitz

Claude ShannonGUNNERY CONTROL

REAL-TIMESYSTEMS

GENERAL-PURPOSECOMPUTING

We shall be focussing on these threehistorical narratives in particular …..

DATA MODELLINGAND DATABASE

CharlesBachman

FatherandSon

"GENERAL PURPOSE" OR "REAL-TIME"?YOU MAY RECOGNISE THEM BY THEIR

FAILURES

REAL-TIMECOMPUTING

GENERAL-PURPOSECOMPUTING

"Inland Revenue loses personal data AGAIN" (The Daily Mail, 18th December 2007) [full story]

"Airliner crashes at Heathrow" (BBC, 17th January 2008) [full story]

2.2

VERTICALLY DIFFERENTIATEDINFORMATION PROCESSING

A QUICK WAY TO GRASP WHAT REAL-TIME COMPUTING IS ALL ABOUT IS TO STUDY THE

HISTORY OF GUNNERY .....

BACK TO THE VERY BEGINNINGBALLISTIC SCIENCE, PREHISTORIC

• Ballistic skills are as old as hunting with stones, spears, or arrows …..

Remember to aim ahead of him, Daddy, and allow for

the crosswind .....

BACK TO THE VERY BEGINNINGBALLISTIC SCIENCE, CLASSICAL

• ..... and ballistic science is at least as old as the siege catapult.

Left a tad, Septimus …..

BACK TO THE VERY BEGINNINGBALLISTIC SCIENCE, MEDIAEVAL

• After all, it takes a fair knowledge of mathematics to hit a castle, big though they are.

"….. therefore, the range equation isR = (v0

2/g) sin2θ ….."

[full tutorial]

BACK TO THE VERY BEGINNINGBALLISTIC SCIENCE, ca. 1805

• You can even hit moving targets, providing they're not too far away .....

Note the control system at work here …..

….. the gun captain's trained eye!

BALLISTIC SCIENCE, EARLY 20TH CENTURYEARLY "ANALOG" COMPUTING

HMS Dreadnought (1906) - the USS Enterprise of its age

Fore-top Range Finder

Fire Control Room

Bridge

Ammunition

Turret Range Finder

THE CONTROL HIERARCHY AGAIN

BALLISTIC SCIENCE, EARLY 20TH CENTURYTHE BARR AND STROUD

"COINCIDENCE" RANGE-FINDER

• Like a manually focussed SLR camera, the two objective lens systems are converged until their images coincide, and the range computed from the degree of convergence.

BALLISTIC SCIENCE, EARLY 20TH CENTURYTHE PROBLEM OF "DEFLECTION SHOOTING"

BALLISTIC SCIENCE, EARLY 20TH CENTURYTHE PROBLEM OF "DEFLECTION SHOOTING"

..... and it means your Rangefinder reading will need

adjusting as well!

• One solution was devised by Lt. (later Admiral Sir) Frederic Dreyer. As Gunnery Officer on HMS Dreadnought, he devised a plotting table on which to combine the readings from the rangefinder (the target's speed and heading), the ship's helm (own speed and heading), and other instruments, into a final relative angle and elevation for the guns.

BALLISTIC SCIENCE, EARLY 20TH CENTURYTHE PROBLEM OF SPEED AND HEADING

THE DREYER CORRECTING TABLE

BALLISTIC SCIENCE, EARLY 20TH CENTURYTHE PROBLEM OF SPEED AND HEADING

THE DREYER CORRECTING TABLE

• This is the Dreyer table from HMS Dreadnought.

The "Vickers Clock" - an early analog computer

BALLISTIC SCIENCE, EARLY 20TH CENTURYTHE PROBLEM OF POWER AMPLIFICATION

FOLLOW-THE-POINTER VISUAL REPEATERS

• Moving the guns themselves into position was comparatively simple, since power-assisted servomechanisms had been around since the 1870s.

• "Follow-the-pointer" visual repeaters were used to communicate the desired settings between the ship's brain up in the Control Top to those in charge of its steam-driven muscles .....

BALLISTIC SCIENCE, EARLY 20TH CENTURYTHE PROBLEM OF DATA COMMUNICATION

FOLLOW-THE-POINTER VISUAL REPEATERS

BUT MOTHER NATURE HAD GOT THERE FIRST, BECAUSE THE FOLLOW-THE-POINTER

ARRANGEMENT OBEYS EXACTLY THE SAME CONTROL PRINCIPLES AS EXIST BETWEEN THE

GAMMA FIBRES AND THE ALPHA FIBRES OF THE HUMAN SPINAL CORD …..

In both machine and human spinal cord, one part of the system delivers a set of lightweight but constantly fluctuating set of fine control parameters while the other struggles to move the heavy apparatus to catch up with the first. [For more on the biological "alpha-gamma control system", click here.]

EQUALS

BALLISTIC SCIENCE, EARLY 20TH CENTURYTHE PROBLEM OF DATA COMMUNICATION

FOLLOW-THE-POINTER VISUAL REPEATERS

Fine control here and here

Heavy control here and here, in the

lateral corticospinal tract

BIOLOGYTHE PROBLEM OF DATA COMMUNICATION

FOLLOW-THE-POINTER REPEATERS

So Descartes hadn't been that far off the mark when he spoke of "animal spirits - it's just that

nowadays we prefer to call them "neurotransmitters".

MEANWHILE, AT THE PRUSSIAN SIEGE OF PARIS IN 1870 ANOTHER PROBLEM HAD

EMERGED .....

HEIGHT EQUATION

"the time to reach maximum height is tmax = v0y/g"

[see full explanation]

Krupp 25mmBaK rifle

ENTER THE MT DELAY FUZE .....

[click for further details]

BUT AS FAST AS ONE PROBLEM WAS SOLVED ANOTHER APPEARED .....

Tirez!!

Merde!!

BALLISTIC SCIENCE, EARLY 20TH CENTURYWW1 ANTI-AIRCRAFT SYSTEMS

• The systems challenge in shooting down an aircraft is to link target acquisition data (visual and auditory to start with, later radar) to a method of setting azimuth and elevation coordinates in order to deliver a projectile to where the target can be predicted to have got to by the time the projectile had been appropriately fused and loaded into the gun, the gun itself had been laid and fired, and the projectile had climbed (decelerating all the way under the influence of gravity, air viscosity, and wind) to the aforesaid height and coordinates.

BALLISTIC SCIENCE, EARLY 20TH CENTURYWW1 ANTI-AIRCRAFT SYSTEMS

• The sums are complex (aircraft move in three dimensions whilst ships only move in two) and need to be done very very quickly.

• The new three-dimensional deflection calculators were called "AA Predictors", and computing on demand at machine speed is known as computing in "real time".

BALLISTIC SCIENCE, WW2SAME AS WW1, BUT HIGHER AND FASTER .....

Automated MT fuse setting and priming

Automated reloading

Automated elevation and azimuth servosystems

Target acquisition and tracking

Real-time computation

BALLISTIC SCIENCE, WW2AND WITH INCREASING RELIANCE ON RADAR

AND AUTOMATION

AND TO CUT A LONG STORY SHORT21ST CENTURY "SEE-WHIZZ" SYSTEMS

AS (NEARLY) DEPLOYED 7th JANUARY 2008

"‘Reckless’ Iranians threaten to blow up American warships in the Gulf" (The Times, 8th January 2008 [full story]).

BUT AGAIN MOTHER NATURE HAD GOT THERE FIRST …..

BECAUSE STRUCTURALLY SPEAKING, IT'S STILL VERY CARTESIAN!!!

Aesthesis Praxis

ExternalObject

Servo-AssistedBehaviour

Internal "awareness" of internally represented

external object"Intentionality"

REAL-TIME COMPUTINGAA (NAVAL, WW2)

And again this is exactly what seems to be going on in the biological mind …..

BUT REMEMBER THE PROBLEM OF INFINITE REGRESS. IT ASKS, IN EFFECT, WHETHER THESE NUMSKULLS HAVE NUMSKULLS OF THEIR OWN IN THEIR HEADS!!! [AND THEIR NUMSKULLS' NUMSKULLS, IN TURN, AND SO ON .....]

OR TO PUT IT ANOTHER WAY, IF YOU WANT TO DESIGN AN AUTONOMOUS SYSTEM, YOU NEED TO LOCATE THE INNERMOST NUMSKULL!!!

BIOLOGICAL SYSTEMS DO PREDICTION ALL THE TIME, OF COURSE .....

Movement at speed .....

..... and (most important of all) the through pass.

..... catching .....

..... hunting .....

..... WHICH IS PROBABLY WHY PLANNING, VISUAL POSITIONAL MEMORY, AND EYE MOVEMENTS ARE SO CLOSE TOGETHER IN

THE BRAIN

[play this game]

2.3

FROM FLIP-FLOPTO

GENERAL REGISTER SET ARCHITECTURE

MEANWHILE, BACK IN THE 1930s …..

ANALOG SYSTEMS WILL ALWAYS BE IMPRECISE BECAUSE THE ANALOGS IN QUESTION (VOLTAGE, TENSION, MOMENTUM,

ANGULAR POSITION, ETC.) HAVE NO "TRUE SCORE". THEY CAN DEGRADE IN TIME AND THIS DRIFT CANNOT BE

AUTOMATICALLY CORRECTED.

DIGITAL STORAGE ON THE OTHER HAND IS SAFER BECAUSE IT CAN PERIODICALLY BE ADJUSTED BACK TO THE NEAREST INTEGER. AND THIS IS EVEN EASIER IF THE ONLY INTEGERS

ALLOWED ARE ZERO OR ONE.

THE MOVE FROM ANALOG TO DIGITALTHE PROBLEM

ENTER BINARY DIGITAL COMPUTING .....

THE MOVE FROM ANALOG TO DIGITALTHE SOLUTION

THE MOVE FROM ANALOG TO DIGITALCHARLES WYNN-WILLIAMS AT CAMBRIDGETHE THYRATRON BINARY COUNTER, 1932

Click for additional explanation

THE MOVE FROM ANALOG TO DIGITALKONRAD ZUSE AT HOME IN HIS KITCHEN

THE Z1, 1936

Click for additional background

THE MOVE FROM ANALOG TO DIGITALGEORGE STIBITZ AT BELL LABS

THE "MODEL K", 1937

Click for additional background

GENERAL PURPOSE DIGITALTOMMY FLOWERS AT BLETCHLEY PARK

THE "COLOSSUS", 1943

Click for additional background

NOT ONLY COULD THE NEW DIGITAL CIRCUITS BE USED TO CONSTRUCT FLEXIBLE,

"PROGRAMMABLE", GENERAL PURPOSE MACHINES,

BUT THEY COULD ALSO BE USED AS DEDICATED MODULES WITHIN THE SORT OF HIERARCHICAL

REAL-TIME CONTROL SYSTEMS PREVIOUSLY DISCUSSED.

THE MOVE FROM ANALOG TO DIGITALTHE PAY-OFF

REAL-TIME DIGITALTHE BELL LABS AA PREDICTORS

• Bell Labs began their involvement with digital computing following George Stibitz's experiments with binary adding circuitry in 1937.

• Samuel B. Williams led their Model 1 Relay Calculator project (aka the "Complex Number Computer"), and had the product ready for action in January 1940. It was publicly demonstrated in September 1940, being operated over a teletypewriter link.

• The Model 1 was not programmable, however, and this defect was remedied as an adjunct to Bell's work on flak systems in the Model 2 Relay Calculator (or "Relay Interpolator"), a tape-controlled device with self-checking arithmetic.

• The Model 2 became operational in September 1943 at the US National Defence Research Council, where it was initially used to produce lifelike test data for Bell's AA Predictor No. 9. The machine contained 500 relays, and remained in use until 1961.

• For a more detailed history of the role of artillery fire-control systems in the history of computers, click here and scroll down to Section 2.

• One of the young engineers involved in these developments was a certain Charles W. Bachman [more on whom in due course].

REAL-TIME DIGITALTHE BELL LABS AA PREDICTORS

After WW2, computers began to re-shape the world. Here's a British Tabulating Machinery HEC computer, vintage 1953.

DIGITAL COMPUTING COMES OF AGECOLOSSUS, DEMILITARISED

DIGITAL COMPUTING COMES OF AGETHE FERRANTI PEGASUS

• One family of first generation computers evolved out of the tripartite collaboration of Manchester University, the Ferranti Company, and Elliott Brothers, and the coordinating force here was the Government's scientific funding office, the National Research and Development Corporation (NRDC).

• Elliott Brothers was founded by William Elliott in 1795 to supply Royal Navy officers with precision technical instruments, and had then simply grown with the technology to provide many of the Royal Navy's fire control systems during the analog computing era, not to mention supplying some of the parts for Babbage's original Difference Engine (Clarke, 1975).

• After WW2, Elliott were keen not to lose this marketing foothold, and in 1946 established a digital computing research unit of their own at Borehamwood, Hertfordshire.

• Their first major project was to develop a state-of-the-art computerised naval anti-aircraft fire control system, codenamed MRS.

• MRS's broad specification was for "ship-borne radar [to] lock on to a target at about eight miles and then track it and supply aiming information to a ship's guns" (Lavington, 2000, pp8-9).

• A large number of R & D staff were duly taken on, and the computer which resulted was the Elliott 152, with logic circuits designed by Charles E. Owen (details in Clarke, 1975). The 152 "executed several instruction streams in parallel from an electrostatic read-only memory" (Lavington, 2000, p11).

• Government contracts being what they are, however, minds soon changed, and MRS was cancelled in 1949, threatening to put over half of Elliott's researchers out of a job (Hendry, 1989).

• One of the Elliott projects - the 1952 "Nicholas" (another Charles Owen design, with system software by George Felton) - was developed by Ferranti's London works to turn it into a marketable package, and the result - the "Pegasus" - ran its first program in October 1955 and entered commercial service six months later (Lavington, 2000).

DIGITAL COMPUTING COMES OF AGETHE FERRANTI PEGASUS

• The Pegasus proved a highly reliable general purpose serial computer, thanks to a 49-item three-operand instruction set which made for very concise programming. In achieving this they had been assisted by one of the NRDC engineers, Christopher Strachey, son of Bletchley Park's Oliver Strachey.

DIGITAL COMPUTING COMES OF AGETHE FERRANTI PEGASUS

CHRISTOPHER STRACHEY (1916-1975)

WW2 - radar engineer, running complex calculations through a small differential analyser, which aroused his interest in computing. 1950-1951 - part-time programming with the National Physical Laboratory's Pilot ACE team, working specifically on the problem of getting a computing machine to play draughts. This was one of the first "Artificial Intelligence" (AI) projects. June 1951 - head-hunted by the newly created NRDC. 1953-1954 - helped the NRDC improve the Elliott 401 and Ferranti Pegasus.

DIGITAL COMPUTING COMES OF AGETHE FERRANTI PEGASUS

• About 40 Pegasus machines were sold before the product line was discontinued in 1962: the sixth helped design the Concorde airliner, and the 25th has been restored to working order and is on display in the Science Museum, London [check it out]. The history of the Welsh Pegasi is presently being compiled to celebrate the 50th Anniversary of the British Computer Society.

• Lavington (2000) credits the success of the modern computer to its general register set architecture, and, in turn therefore, to Christopher Strachey.

HERE IS HOW STRACHEY'S GENERAL REGISTERS FIT INTO THE BASIC LAYOUT

OF A GPC .....Short-term single-purpose memory

[poorly recognised by cognitive science]Short-term multi-purpose memory

[well known by cognitive psychologists as "working memory"]

THIS IS THE STM AREA INTO WHICH ITEMS ARE LOADED FROM THE MACHINE'S LTM

DEVICES (NOT SHOWN).

IN GPC SYSTEMS LTM IS OFTEN VERY LARGE AND DEMANDS METICULOUS

ORGANISATION.

MANAGING MAN-MADE SEMANTIC NETWORKS

THE KEY TO THE EFFECTIVE MANAGEMENT OF LTM IS IN STARTING WITH A CAREFULLY RESEARCHED

DATA MODEL, OR "SCHEMA".

WHERE THE BODY OF DATA IS LARGE AND RAPIDLY UPDATED, THIS DATA MODEL IS BEST IMPLEMENTED AS A DATA NETWORK, JUST LIKE THE BIOLOGICAL "SEMANTIC NETWORK" MENTIONED IN SECTION 1.

[See SECTION 2 ANNEX for further background]

2.4

REAL-TIME SYSTEMS IN THE MODERN WORLD

AS FOR POST-WW2 REAL-TIME COMPUTING, THE DRIVING FORCES HAVE BEEN BALLISTICS (AS ALWAYS), BUT NOW

ALSO INCLUDE PROCESS CONTROL APPLICATIONS, FLY-BY-WIRE AVIONICS, CLASSICAL ROBOTICS, AND - MOST

RECENTLY OF ALL - AUTONOMOUS ROBOTICS .....

THE COGNITIVE HIERARCHYARKIN’S (1990) ROBOT MIND

REMEMBER THE PROBLEM OF INFINITE REGRESS?

ONLY WHEN THE NATURE OF BIOLOGICAL AUTONOMY HAS BEEN DISCOVERED WILL IT BE POSSIBLE TO DO AWAY WITH THIS SORT OF EXTERNAL CONTROLLER IN MACHINES.

WE'LL BE SEEING MUCH MORE OFTHIS

SCREEN LATER

HENCE THE REAL MONEY'S CURRENTLY GOING INTO ROBOT AUTONOMY RESEARCH

THE DARPA CHALLENGE[check it out]

THE BATTLEFIELD CHALLENGES[check them out]

THE DEEP SPACE CHALLENGE[check it out]

SECTION 2 - SUMMARY

• Real-time control architectures deliver the facilities for artificial aesthesis and artificial praxis [i.e., robotic autonomy] (save that so far they lack the consciousness and sense of self-identity to do the job properly).

• GPCs, on the other hand, manage other people's data rather than their own, and do it standing still. Much more data has to be managed, and as LTM rather than STM.

SECTION 2ANNEX

MANAGING MAN-MADE SEMANTIC NETWORKS

• The story of the network database begins in the early 1960s at the General Electric Corporation's laboratories in New York, where the aforementioned Charles W. Bachman had been given the job of building GE a "Database Management System" (DBMS).

• The resulting system was the "Integrated Data Store" (IDS), and was built around a clever combination of two highly innovative design features, namely (1) a "direct access" facility similar to IBM’s acclaimed RAMAC, and (2) Bachman’s own "data structure diagram" (soon to become famous as the "Bachman Diagram").

MANAGING MAN-MADE SEMANTIC NETWORKS

• Bachman Diagrams prepare your data for maximum usability by analyzing it on a set owner/set member basis. Here, in the style of Maurer and Scherbakov (2005, online), is a typical owner-member set of real-life "occurrences" (left) and the corresponding abstract Bachman Diagram (right) …..

• CLICK HERE to see a typical big system Bachman Diagram

FATHER

NameAge

Smith35y

CHILD

NameAge

Tom10y

CHILD

NameAge

Nick7y

CHILD

NameAge

Rob4y

The Family SetSpecific "Occurrences"

FATHER

NameAge

CHILD

NameAge

x(16)9(3)

The Family SetAbstract

x(16)9(3)

DataAnalysis

MANAGING MAN-MADE SEMANTIC NETWORKS

• Bachman had the IDS prototype running early 1963, and by 1964 it was managing GE's own stock levels. Initial user feedback was so positive that the Bachman-GE approach soon came to the attention of CODASYL, the Pentagon committee which had specified the COBOL general purpose programming language in January 1960.

• In October 1965 CODASYL established a List Processing Task Force (LPTF) to look into possible improvements to the COBOL specification. The LPTF meetings immediately became so dominated by database issues in general that they renamed themselves the Data Base Task Group (DBTG). We may thus refer to IDS as a "DBTG database", a "CODASYL database", or a "network database". All these terms are synonymous and used inter-changeably in the database literature.

MANAGING MAN-MADE SEMANTIC NETWORKS

• A curious turn of events then saw IDS development taken over by one of GE's early customers, the B.F. Goodrich Chemical Corporation. Goodrich had been highly impressed with IDS, but wanted greater functionality, so they bought the rights to develop an IBM version, and by 1969 were able to market their improved system in its own right, badging it as the "Integrated Database Management System" (IDMS). The new product was heavily deployed commercially in the 1980s, and survives to this day as Computer Associates' CA-IDMS [details], in which incarnation it continues to power many of the world's heaviest duty online systems.

• Bachman was awarded the 1973 A.C.M. Turing Award for his achievements [see the citation paper].

MANAGING MAN-MADE SEMANTIC NETWORKS

SECTION 3

THE SUBSTANTIVE ARGUMENT

3.1

COGNITIVE SCIENCE

WHERE COMPUTING, PSYCHOLOGY, AND MENTAL PHILOSOPHY MEET

THE FACT THAT REAL-TIME ARCHITECTURES HAVE BOTH MAN-MADE AND BIOLOGICAL IMPLEMENTATIONS MEANS THAT THOSE WHO STUDY THEM NEED SOME KNOWLEDGE AND

EXPERTISE IN COMMON

Better autonomous systems Better remedial practicum

Better interdisciplinaryunderstanding of

the mind

"COGNITIVESCIENCE"

INTERDISCIPLINARY SKILLS ARE GOING TO BE VITAL IN SOLVING THE ULTIMATE SECRETS OF THE MIND

• As we argued in Smith (1997), the secret of understanding biological cognition lies in being able to understand its component subsystems in isolation. Unfortunately, the component skillsets are frighteningly diverse, including - surprising though it might seem - database skills .....

The present author's

specialism.

INTERDISCIPLINARY COGNITIVE SCIENCE HAS BEEN AROUND SINCE THE 1980s, BUT NONE OF THE

CONTRIBUTING DISCIPLINES HAS YET EXPLAINED IN PHILOSOPHICAL TERMS WHAT AWARENESS IS OR HOW

OUR EMOTIONS OVERLAP WITH OUR INTELLECTS.

IN THIS SECTION WE REMIND OURSELVES OF ONE OF THE MOST COHERENT ATTEMPTS YET AT AN

INTERDISCIPLINARY EXPLANATION OF THE MIND, NAMELY THAT DEVELOPED BETWEEN 1891 AND 1923 BY

THE "FATHER OF PSYCHOANALYSIS", SIGMUND FREUD .....

3.2

FREUD THE ACADEMIC

SIGMUND FREUD (1856-1939)KEY DATES

• Trained as physician, 1874-1881; specialised in nervous diseases, both neurogenic and psychogenic; in 1885 studied hysteria under Charcot in Paris; between 1887 and 1893 learned to use hypnosis as a therapeutic technique and collaborated with Josef Breuer on hysteria theory.

• Pre-psychoanalytic writings 1891-1899, including "On Aphasia" (1891), reflecting his work with neurogenic disorders and "Studies on Hysteria" (1893 with Breuer), reflecting his work with psychiatric disorders.

SIGMUND FREUD (1856-1939)KEY DATES

• Freud's basic theory of the mind was trailed in his correspondence with Wilhelm Fliess (1892-1899) and in his "Project for a Scientific Psychology" (nominally 1895).

• Published "Die Traumdeutung" (1900) [translated as "The Interpretation of Dreams"]; henceforth specialises in psychodynamic psychiatry using his house technique of "psychoanalysis" by "free association".

• Collaboration with Carl Jung, 1906-1914

• Collaboration with Ernest Jones, 1908-1923

SIGMUND FREUD (1856-1939)KEY DATES

• Published "Totem and Taboo" (1912-1913), linking psychodynamic forces to the cultural anthropology of human belief systems. Published "Introductory Lessons in Psychoanalysis" (1915-1917). Published "Beyond the Pleasure Principle" (1920).

• Published "The Ego and the Id" (1923), containing his "structural theory" of the mind, with its recognition that much of the content of memory was doomed to remain permanently unconscious.

• Published "Civilisation and its Discontents" (1930). Published "Moses and Monotheism" and a number of other mature essays, 1934-1938

• Died London 23rd September 1939.

SIGMUND FREUD (1856-1939)WORKS IN ENGLISH

• 1900-1924 - adhoc translations by Ernest Jones, Abraham Brill, Joan Riviere, and James Strachey [Oliver Strachey's youngest brother and Christopher Strachey's uncle]. "Collected Works" started to become available, 1924 onwards

• A few days after Freud's death, Jones proposes that Strachey leads the production of an English language Standard Edition [the "SE"] of consistent translations and supporting editorial.

JAMES STRACHEY (1897-1967): WW1 - conscientious objector; becomes interested in Freudian theory; 1918 - met Ernest Jones; 1920 - psychoanalysed by Freud in Vienna; after only a few days, was asked to help out translating past publications for the English-speaking market; 1921 - translated case notes; 1927-1946 translated and compiled various works; 1939 - invited by Jones to translate the Gesammelte Schriften as the complete and definitive English version; 1953-1966 led the SE team.

THE STRACHEY FAMILY TREE

Richard(1817-1908)

Jane Maria Grant(1840-1928)

Elinor (b. 1859)

Richard (b. 1861)

Dorothy (b. 1865)

Ralph (b. 1868)

Philippa (b. 1872)

Oliver(1874-1960)

Pernel (b. 1876)

Lytton (b. 1880)

Marjorie (b. 1882)

James(1887-1967)

Christopher(1916-1975)

3.3

FREUD THE COMPUTER ARCHITECT

FREUD AS COMPUTER ARCHITECTHIS USE OF DIAGRAMS

• Freud was a prolific technical author, but generally seems to have preferred dense textual explanation over diagrams, which are used only sparingly. In the following slides we present the six diagrams which most pictorially convey his theoretical position .....

• 1891 On Aphasia, Figures 8 and 9 [NOT included in the SE]• Jan 1895 Correspondence with Wilhelm Fliess, Sketch in Draft G

("Melancholia")• 1950 (Manuscript dated Sept-Nov 1895) Project for a Scientific

Psychology, Figure 14• Dec 1896 Correspondence with Wilhelm Fliess, Sketch in Letter

52• 1923 The Ego and the Id, Figure 1

FREUD AS COMPUTER ARCHITECTTHE IDEA OF "CATHEXIS"

• In Freud's view, the relationship between the intellectual self (the "Ego") and its emotional and instinctual underlay (the "Id") relies on a biologically given process called "cathexis" [Besetzung]. The basic idea is (a) that physiological energy of some fluid sort gets attached to the mental representations of external objects, and (b) that the resulting relative excitation dictates what happens to those charged-up mental objects in the ensuing swirl of cognition.

• Cathexis is thus the pivotal theoretical assertion in Freudian theory.

FREUD AS COMPUTER ARCHITECTFLIESS PAPERS (JAN 1895, "DRAFT G")

As with Descartes' scheme, the process begins with

sensory input .....

..... sensory information then ascends to the Id, where it acquires

- i.e., is "cathected with" - an additional emotional charge .....

• Here is a very early hierarchical control diagram showing cathexis at work .....

NOTE THE PRIMITIVE

BIOLOGICAL REAL-TIME CONTROL

HIERARCHY.

..... which the ego finally does its best to cope with and interpret.

FREUD AS COMPUTER ARCHITECT

• Friendlier on the eye is this later version from "The Ego and the Id" (1923, Fig 1) .....

Perceptual Consciousness

The "Preconscious"

The "Id" - our emotional (i.e., sexual and aggressive) self

"The repressed" - hurtful memories, kept safely

under lock and key

NOTE THE REAL-TIME HIERARCHY

AGAIN

The "Ego" - our intellectual self. THIS IS WHERE TRUE BIOLOGICAL AUTONOMY

LIES.

FREUD AS COMPUTER ARCHITECT

• Note en passant how the machinery of autonomy sits within a matrix of memories, like a spider in a web .....

NOTE THIS MATRIX OF ERINNERUNGSRESTE

OR "MEMORY RESIDUES"

3.4

FREUD THE DATA ANALYST

FREUD THE DATA ANALYST"ON APHASIA" (1891)

• Neurologists who specialise in acquired neurogenic disorders frequently observe that some focal brain lesions induce highly particular cognitive problems whilst others have no obvious or predictable effect. Some mental tasks demand a discrete module, in other words, whilst others demand the collaboration of more diffusely located resources.

• Freud incorporated an example of both types of arrangement in his 1891 monograph "On Aphasia" .....

FREUD THE DATA ANALYST"ON APHASIA" (1891)

Here are Kussmauls' four lexicons again. These are

readily separately impaired.

And here is Kussmauls' central ideation process, now shown as a diffuse resource and not

so readily impaired.

FREUD THE ASSOCIATIONIST"ON APHASIA" (1891)

Note the Associationist

overtone here ....

..... and here

And note the presumed network of

associations here

FREUD THE ASSOCIATIONIST"ON APHASIA" (1891)

What we are looking at,

indeed, is an early sketch of a

semantic network database!

In fact, Freud's views were so compatible with those of the Associationists that his "free association" clinical method

was grounded in this very web of interconnections.

Patients were encouraged to let their minds wander through

their memories, while the psychoanalyst kept watch for evidence of hidden trauma.

3.5

FREUD THE CONNECTIONIST

FREUD ON ΦΨω NEURAL NETWORKS"THE PROJECT" (FREUD, 1895)

• Fancher (1976/2007 online) reminds us that at medical school Freud had studied under both Ernst Brücke and Theodor Meynert. From Brücke he seems to have acquired the microanatomical notions of neural excitation, and from Meynert [Germany's equivalent of John Hughlings Jackson] he seems to have acquired the macroanatomical model of nervous system organisation.

• In "Project for a Scientific Psychology" (nominally 1895), he pondered the greatest secret of them all - the Holy Grail relationship between neural excitation and mind.

FREUD ON ΦΨω NEURAL NETWORKS"THE PROJECT" (FREUD, 1895)

• His conclusion was that the basic unit of information processing was the ΦΨω neuronal network, a moderately diffuse circuit of neurons through which quantities - Q - of physiological excitation passed to significant effect elsewhere, or in which they accumulated to significant effect in situ.

• His explanation of the ΦΨω code letters follows .....

FREUD ON ΦΨω NEURAL NETWORKS"THE PROJECT" (FREUD, 1895)

• Φ = This is the Greek letter phi, which, as the first letter of the word phusica, is a common abbreviation for words beginning "physio-".

• Freud uses it throughout the Project to indicate a physical system of "permeable neurons", just like the connections in a computer's "data bus".

FREUD ON ΦΨω NEURAL NETWORKS"THE PROJECT" (FREUD, 1895)

• Ψ = This is the Greek letter psi, which, as the first letter of the word psuche, is a common abbreviation for words beginning "psycho-".

• Freud uses it throughout the Project to indicate a system of "impermeable neurons", neurons for data storage and manipulation rather than data communication, because he conceived of this system as being the seat of the Ego.

FREUD ON ΦΨω NEURAL NETWORKS"THE PROJECT" (FREUD, 1895)

• ω = This is the Greek letter omega (lower case).

• Freud uses it throughout the Project to indicate a particular subsystem of the Ψ system which supports consciousness as a biologically important system of reality testing .....

• "It is probably the ω neurons which furnish ..... the indication of reality" (The Project, p325).

FREUD ON ΦΨω NEURAL NETWORKS"THE PROJECT" (1895)

• The basic idea for the Project had been in his head for some time, but his enthusiasm was peaking in Summer 1895. His biggest problem was that two key bodies of knowledge were missing - psychology (because he was a neurologist-psychiatrist) and computational electronics (because it hadn't been invented yet) .....

• "All I was trying to do was to explain defense, but just try to explain something from the very core of nature! I had to work my way through the problem of quality, sleep, memory - in short, all of psychology" " (Fliess Letters, 16th August 1895 [Masson Ed. p136])

FREUD ON ΦΨω NEURAL NETWORKS"THE PROJECT" (1895)

• Work began on the Project following an inspirational meeting with his friend Wilhelm Fliess early in September 1895 .....

• "I am writing so little to you only because I am writing so much for you; namely [.....] a summary account of the ΦΨω [.....]" (Fliess Letters, 23rd September 1895 [Masson Ed. p139])

FREUD ON ΦΨω NEURAL NETWORKS"THE PROJECT" (1895)

• Things went well to start with, as ideas came together from the component disciplines .....

• "Everything seemed to fall into place, the cogs meshed, I had the impression that the thing now really was a machine that shortly would function on its own. The three systems of neurons; the free and bound states of Qn; the primary and secondary processes; [....]; the two biological rules of attention and defence; the characteristics of quality, reality, and thought; [.....] finally, the factors determining consciousness as a function of perception - all that was correct and still is today! naturally, I can scarcely manage to contain my delight" (Fliess Letters, 20th October 1895 [Masson Ed. p146])

FREUD ON ΦΨω NEURAL NETWORKS"THE PROJECT" (1895, FIG 14)

• The Project proposed a detailed neural architecture, one aspect of which was summarised in a simple neuronal circuit diagram. .....

This is Qή - a non-background amount of neural excitation arriving

from a precursor location.

FREUD ON ΦΨω NEURAL NETWORKS"THE PROJECT" (1895, FIG 14)

• This particular example came close to describing a NAND logic gate [details] .....

..... activation in this region of the circuit can provide a "side

cathexis" at neuron a .....

..... capable of switching off transmission in this

direction.

Given input from this

direction .....

FREUD ON ΦΨω NEURAL NETWORKS"THE PROJECT" (1895)

• But before long, the problems of reductionism and infinite regress started to hit him .....

• "I really do believe that it hangs together, but I still do not trust the individual parts. I continually exchange them for others and do not yet dare to show the structure to a wise man. [.....] Now I am pretty much drained" (Fliess Letters, 31st October 1895 [Masson Ed. p148]).

FREUD ON ΦΨω NEURAL NETWORKS"THE PROJECT" (1895)

• ..... and a week later he put the project on hold .....

• "From now on my letters will lose much of their content. I have packed up the psychological manuscripts and thrown them into a drawer, where they shall slumber until 1896" (Fliess Letters, 8th November 1895 [Masson Ed. p150]).

FREUD ON ΦΨω NEURAL NETWORKS"THE PROJECT" (1895)

• As it turned out, however, he never returned to the work, preferring instead to trickle out the occasional new ΦΨω idea in his better known psychoanalytic writings.

• As a result, the Project manuscript was not available even in German until relocated in 1950. It appeared in English in 1954, and was subsequently championed by the neuropsychologist Karl Pribram as an introduction to his own "holonomic theory" of memory [tell me more about this].

3.6

FREUD AND REAL-TIME CONTROL

Higher-Order behavioural constraints

[often themselves hierarchical]

Predictive control

Servo-assistance, with dedicated sensory

apparatus and"closed loop" negative feedback

control

Status-sensitive execution scheduling

Semantic Knowledge Base

Redundancy and Back-Up

Exception detection and handling

State-sensitive behavioural initiation

Constant status monitoring

Perceptual Knowledge Base

NB: THESE KNOWLEDGE BASES" ARE DEEMED TO

CONTAIN RANDOMLY ACCESSIBLE LTM, COMPLETE

WITH FUZZY KEYING AND SHORT AND MEDIUM-TERM

ACTIVATION STATES AUTONOMY

AUTOMATICITY

• Here are some of the defining characteristics of a real-time control system .....

• Or to put it another way .....

• AUTONOMY = AUTOMACITY + GOOD JUDGMENT

• ..... where the criterion of "goodness" is the adaptive value of the decisions taken in a life or death evolutionary sense. You live or die, and enjoy life or not, according to the resources available to your Ego, and its skill at using them.

You blink; you lose!!

FREUD ON THE STAGES OF AESTHESISFLIESS PAPERS (DEC 1896, "LETTER 52")

• Freud was very precise in charting a possible sequence for the events leading to phenomenal awareness. In late 1896 he proposed the five-layered perceptual hierarchy shown below .....

Note the three successive "transcriptions" and "re-registrations"

of the incoming data.

FREUD ON THE STAGES OF AESTHESISUCs, PCs, and Pcpt-Cs

• Freud regarded Transcription III as activating the ω system previously described .....

• "Thus we summon up courage to assume that there is a third system of neurons - ω perhaps - [.....] whose states of excitation give rise to the various qualities - are, that is to say, conscious sensations" (The Project, p309).

• [Readers must therefore carefully distinguish W, the content processed during Transcription I, from ω, the subsystem activated by Transcription III.]

FREUD ON AUTOMATICITY VERSUS AUTONOMY (1) RECOGNISING AUTOMATICITY

• This layering of the control architecture henceforth allowed his psychoanalytic theories to emphasise (a) that not all ascending information reached consciousness, and (b) that not all behaviour originated there.

• Again, we see the same arrangement in modern robotic hierarchies .....

Unplanned behaviour - typically involving low-level servo-systems, with inbuilt (reflexive) modulation

Planned behaviour .....

• Freud consistently described the accessible parts of the mind (PCs and Cs) as sitting just above the inaccessible parts, and as having a special identity and purpose .....

• "In fact, however, with the hypotheses of 'wishful attraction' and of the inclination to repression we have already touched on a state of Ψ which has not yet been discussed. For these two processes indicate that an organisation has been formed in Ψ whose presence interferes with [data transmission]. This organisation is called the 'ego'" (The Project, pp322-323).

FREUD ON AUTOMATICITY VERSUS AUTONOMY (2) THE EGO AS DATA FILTER

• Specifically, it was the Ego's job to add long-term reality testing to these lower processes .....

• ..... thereby to elevate a merely automatic system to the status of a truly autonomous one.

The Ego

FREUD ON AUTOMATICITY VERSUS AUTONOMY (3) LOCATING THE EGO

The Superego??

• His notion of "realistic anxiety" recognised that one of the Ego's primary functions was "reaction to the perception of an external danger" (Introductory Lectures, 1916, p441).

Anxiety!!

FREUD ON AUTOMATICITY VERSUS AUTONOMY (4) ADDING IN "ANXIETY"

• Pleasure and unpleasure are simply clever feedback devices for informing the Ego how successful its decisions have been (The Project, p312).

Pleasure and Unpleasure

FREUD ON AUTOMATICITY VERSUS AUTONOMY (5) ADDING IN "PLEASURE AND UNPLEASURE"

• Our abilities for reasoning and judgment help us select the most appropriate course of action from a choice of possible courses of action (The Project, p328).

Behavioural choice

FREUD ON AUTOMATICITY VERSUS AUTONOMY (6) ADDING IN A BEHAVIOURAL REPERTOIRE

• Signals can be amplified as necessary .....

• "[motor excitations] produce an effect far superior quantitatively to themselves" (The Project, p314).

Local signal amplification and power-assistance

FREUD ON AUTOMATICITY VERSUS AUTONOMY (7) USING LOW LEVEL SERVOMECHANISMS

• Overreliance on a narrow subset of the available behaviours is an effective way of reducing unpleasurable outcomes, but will present as an "obsessional neurosis" (Introductory Lectures, 1917, p297).

OBSESSIONAL BEHAVIOUR!!

FREUD ON AUTOMATICITY VERSUS AUTONOMY (8) ADDING IN "OBSESSIONAL ACTION"

• "If the perceptual image is not absolutely new, it will now recall and revive a mnemic perceptual image with which it coincides at best partly" (The Project, p330).

FUZZY ACCESS TO

PERCEPTUAL LTM

FREUD ON AUTOMATICITY VERSUS AUTONOMY (9) ADDING IN "FUZZY" LTM SEARCH

• "The male genitals, then, are represented in dreams in a number of ways that must be called symbolic" (Introductory Lectures, 1916, p187).

FREUD ON AUTOMATICITY VERSUS AUTONOMY (10) MORE "FUZZY" LTM SEARCH

FUZZY ACCESS TO SEMANTIC

LTM

CONSCIOUS MOTIVATION FAILS TO OVERRIDE

UNCONSCIOUS

• When turning ideas into speech, rogue thoughts - partly cathected but repressed - can slip through the normal rules of etiquette and social appropriacy and make themselves known, GIVING US THE FAMOUS "PARAPRAXIS", OR "FREUDIAN SLIP".

FREUD ON AUTOMATICITY VERSUS AUTONOMY (11) SUBCONSCIOUS MOTIVATION

CONSCIOUS MOTIVATION FAILS TO OVERRIDE

UNCONSCIOUS

• As for the homeostatic aspects of control, Freud had also clearly foreseen the value of the negative feedback comparator .....

• "If a perception arrives which is identical with the idea [.....] the difference between the idea and the approaching perception then gives occasion for the process of [further processing]" (The Project, p361).

FREUD ON AUTOMATICITY VERSUS AUTONOMY (12) NEGATIVE FEEDBACK CONTROL

FREUD ON MEDIUM-TERM MEMORY

• And finally, Freud also very clearly foresaw the need for what has since become known as "second messenger" neurotransmission, a mechanism for sensitising recently activated memory traces and/or connections .....

• "There is no doubt, however, that the process of thought does leave lasting traces behind it, since a second thinking, a re-thinking, calls for so much less expenditure than a first. [This requires] special traces [besonderer Spuren] ....." (The Project, 335).

3.7

CLOSING REMARKS

CLOSING REMARKS

• Freud's six diagrams are bold attempts to cross inter-disciplinary boundaries. They link philosophy, clinical neurology, neurophysiology, microanatomy, cognition, and behaviour. In this respect he was roughly a century ahead of his time, for nowadays the same interdisciplinary mix is often referred to as "cognitive science".

• The integrating theme was the idea of the mind as a marvellous, but on occasions highly flawed, mechanism of biological real-time control.

CLOSING REMARKS

• Freud's suggestion of a networked, but compartmentalised, cognitive architecture predates much of the modern modularity of cognition debate.

• The resulting architecture can relatively easily be mapped onto a typical modern robotic architecture, save that the Freudian scheme includes an autonomous ego whereas the robotic architecture does not.

CLOSING REMARKS

• Freud died 23rd September 1939, three weeks into WW2. We have seen no mention of him having paid much attention to the electrical engineering literature on analog or digital computation.

• Therefore, we can only imagine what he would have thought had he survived to read McCullough and Pitts' (1943) design note on how to construct a "neurode", an artificial neuron, to principles not dissimilar to those still tucked away in his unpublished Project papers.

CLOSING REMARKS

• Similarly, we can only imagine his excitement had he survived to pay a call in May 1951 on his translator's nephew, Christopher Strachey, as he painstakingly taught himself programming on the National Physical Laboratory's PILOT ACE machine.

• Especially once it had dawned on them both that each machine instruction in the latter's draughts-playing program was explicitly and precisely commanding some microscopic act of machine cathexis!

ONE FINAL SPOOKY THOUGHT .....

ONE FINAL SPOOKY THOUGHT

• Freud had cut his academic teeth on the subject of hysteria, and had a set of very controversial views on how the mind's real-time control structures might, if pushed out of kilter by some damaging past experience, produce some highly characteristic symptoms. For example .....

• "Hysteria begins with the overwhelming of the ego ....." (Fliess Letters, 1st January 1896 [Masson Ed., p169]).

ONE FINAL SPOOKY THOUGHT

• So perhaps we ought to start worrying about the "sanity" of the autonomous minds we are trying to create [especially the ones with weapons systems on board]. Perhaps the science fiction notions of a slowly dementing HAL or a "paranoid android" aren't just science fiction, after all.

ONE FINAL SPOOKY THOUGHT

• When we build autonomy, in other words, will we be able to control its sanity any more than we can control our own!! [See Smith (1999) for some more detailed speculations on the issues raised above.]

SECTION 3ANNEX

INTRODUCING PROJECT KONRAD

INTRODUCING PROJECT KONRADEXECUTIVE SUMMARY

• Project Konrad is an entrepreneurial academic collaboration between UWIC and International Software Products, Toronto, and is so named as a tribute to the German engineer Konrad Zuse, the pioneer of digital computing mentioned in Section 2.

• It is a machine intelligence project, but it uses neither an inference engine nor a neural network, choosing instead to model the systemic end-to-end flow of biological cognition, and the semantic network nature of biological LTM.

INTRODUCING PROJECT KONRADTECHNICAL SPECIFICATION

• The application platform is the CA-IDMS (Release 16) network database mentioned in Section 2 (Annex).

• As is normal for such databases, the outcomes of the all-important data analysis exercise are set out in a set-structured Schema. [CLICK HERE to see the latest version of the Konrad Schema, drawn in conventional Bachman Diagram format.]

INTRODUCING PROJECT KONRADTECHNICAL SPECIFICATION

• Konrad then provides a number of research testbeds, each with its own carefully restricted Subschema. Each such Subschema deliberately switches something useful off, in order to create a precisely specified "damaged mind".

• This "masking Subschema" facility allows ethical and non-destructive testing of hypotheses in the virtual world of simulated cognition.

INTRODUCING PROJECT KONRADTHE MAIN UPDATE PROGRAM

KONRADMain

Program

CA-IDMSNetworkDatabase

KONRADReport

Program

COMMANDSFILE

OUTPUTLOG FILE

REPORT

Each masking Subschema allows a precisely defined cognitive deficit - large or small - to be introduced at

will. The effect of the simulated pathology may be established by

comparing the masked and unmasked Report File for an identical set of input

Commands.

This input file contains records to be loaded into or used to interrogate the

database

This is the Main Update Program. It applies records from the Commands File to

the database one by one

And here is the Report File recording all database accesses for examination and

analysis offline

Here is the database defined by the Schema

INTRODUCING PROJECT KONRADTHE DEMONSTRATION SUITE

• Plans are already in hand to provide such investigative Subschemas to researchers in the areas of autism, human error, ageing, criminality, health and social care, and - basically - anything.

• The first Subschema to become available for a work-in-progress conference demonstration - the KONRAD-MARTYR subschema - will probe the psychological roots of the sort of suicidality seen in would-be suicide bombers.

THE END

REFERENCES

• Smith, D.J. (1997).The IDMS set currency and biological memory. Poster presented 10th March 1997 at the Interdisciplinary Workshop on Robotics, Biology, and Psychology, Department of Artificial Intelligence, University of Edinburgh. [Need a transcript?]

• Smith D.J. (1999a). Freudian structures in the computational mind: Some lessons from the study of ritual sacrifice. Cardiff: UWIC. Paper presented 15th April 1999 to the 13th Annual Conference of the History and Philosophy of Psychology Section of the BPS, York. [Need a transcript?]

• Smith, D.J. (2005a). On database keys, with an application to the Praxisproblem. In Callaos, N., Lesso, W., and Palesi, M. (Eds.), The 9th World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics, and Informatics, July 10-13, 2005 - Orlando, Florida, USA (Volume IV). Orlando, FL: International Institute of Informatics and Systemics. [PLAY POWERPOINT]

• Smith, D.J. (2005b). How ideas evolve into speech - A computer animation. Paper presented to the 9th Annual Conference of the Consciousness and Experiential Psychology Section of the British Psychological Society, St. Anne’s College, Oxford, 18th September 2005. [PLAY POWERPOINT]

• Smith, D.J. (2005c). The problem of context in sentence production - Surely a case to re-convene the Data Base Task Group? In Chu, H.-W., Savoie, M.J., Sanchez, B., and Hong, S.-M. (Eds.), The 3rd International Conference on Computing, Communications, and Control Technologies, July 24-27, 2005 - Austin, Texas, USA (Volume III). Orlando, FL: International Institute of Informatics and Systemics. [PLAY POWERPOINT]