Saturday, August 29, 2009

Evolving Utopia Part 19

Part 19: Turing And The Mind Model


If we want to restart social evolution we have to understand how we can change the pattern of behavior an individual exhibits. In the past this either just happened because of circumstances that were accidental, or some prophet found a way to articulate a new behavior pattern in the form of an ideology. We, however, would prefer to see how change happens independent of a specific ideological content. One place to start is to find a model for a behaving individual. We start with a robot.
Alan Turing was a british mathematician and cryptanalyst who devised a test for a robot with intelligence. He proposed having a telephone conversation with the robot (so the robot doesn't have to look like a human) and requiring that the human having the conversation guess whether the tested individual was a human or a robot. We will call a robot who passes the test a "Turing-Pass" robot.

In order to build a Turing-pass robot we have to know exactly what its functional parts are and how they go together. We don't know that for a natural human being.


Earlier we described the behavior pattern of an entity which exhibits behavior in terms of a matrix, where the matrix operates on the stimulus to generate a response. We can represent that in more detail by using a "black box" which contains components that have specific kinds of behavior. In the case of the behavior of a Turing-pass robot we use a "black box" with an internal structure as shown in Figure A1 below.



Figure A1

If Figure A1 is used to represent a domesticated animal the green section of the model will be minimal, since the animal will respond to a very small vocabulary and will generally not respond by making mouth-noises. An animal that was not domesticated would not have any of the green boxes at all.

On the other hand we would expect that a Turing-pass Robot would have a green section whose function was comparable to the language system of a human being. That means that we can use the "black box" of a Turing-pass robot as a model for the equivalent "black-box" of a human being.


Figure A2 shows the "black-box" model of a human being, in which the functional boxes of the Turing-pass robot provide the basis for the corresponding parts of a human being. The "black box" of a human being has parts that were originally labled by Freud (in German) and were given latin names by Jones when he translated Freud into english.


Figure A2

The part of the model structure that we are conscious of is the Ego. We need to be aware of that so that what we say to ourselves is as understandable as what we say to other people. We cannot directly communicate with the Superego because that is a filter for Ego-language that operates using Id-language. We can't directly communicate with the Id for the same reason. But both the Superego and the Id sometimes need to communicate with the ego; they just don't do it in ego-language.

What we do receive from the Superego is the simulated fear (called "free floating anxiety" or "existential dread") that it uses to control the Ego and Id. The main function of the Superego is to maintain conformity, so it allows the Ego to perceive various kinds of fear when it senses something nonconformist is happening. We typically call this fear "shame" or "guilt".

What we receive from the Id is simulated sensory events, such as dreams. We often call that reception "intuition".

The autonomous person has less Existential Dread and a more sensitive intuition.

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