Unsolved problems linking physics, biology, consciousness, philosophy of mathematics, and chemical information processing. Wed 2nd June 15-18pm(CET)

[Aaron Sloman]

This may be strictly beyond the scope of the FOM list but I'll be grateful for
comments if any member of the list has ideas about the potential of chemical
information processing inside eggs (especially the suggestion that such
mechanisms are somehow able to provide spatial perception and reasoning
abilities in newly hatched animals that need to such abilities soon after
hatching without having opportunities to train neural nets after emerging from
their eggshells. Some questions and ideas about this will be presented in this
talk:

Zoom Talk Hosted by Carl Friedrich von Weizs?cker-Colloquium, University of Tubingen
https://uni-tuebingen.de/en/facilities/central-institutions/carl-friedrich-von-weizsaecker-center/events-1/carl-friedrich-von-weizsaecker-colloquium/

Title: Unsolved problems linking physics, biology, consciousness, philosophy of mathematics, and chemical information processing

Speaker: Aaron Sloman, School of Computer Science, University of Birmingham, UK
         http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~axs

Date/Time: Wed 2nd June 15-18pm CET, 14-17pm UK(BST).

ABSTRACT:

There are types of spatial intelligence, detecting and employing varieties of
spatial possibility, necessity,and impossibility, that cannot be explained by
currently known mechanisms. Evidence from newly hatched animals suggests that
mechanisms using still unknown chemistry-based forms of computation can provide
information that goes beyond regularity detection, concerned with possibility
spaces and their restrictions. Ancient human spatial intelligence may be based
on multi-generational discovery of what is possible, necessarily the case, or
impossible, in complex and changing environments, using related mechanisms of
spatial cognition, centuries before Euclid, that enabled discoveries regarding
possibility, impossibility and necessity in spatial structures and processes,
long before modern mathematical, symbolic, logic-based, or algebraic formalisms
were available.

Immanuel Kant characterised such mathematical cognition in terms of three
distinctions largely ignored in contemporary psychology, neuroscience, and AI
research: non-empirical/empirical, analytic/synthetic, and necessary/contingent.
He argued that ancient geometric cognition was not based simply on
empirical generalization, nor on logical deduction from arbitrary definitions.
The truths discovered were non-empirical, synthetic, and non-contingent.

[But not necessarily applicable to all types of space: e.g. the surface of a
teapot or torus.]

Neither formal logic-based characterizations of mathematics (used in automated
theorem provers), nor postulated neural networks collecting statistical evidence
to derive probabilities, can model or explain such ancient mathematical
discoveries. E.g. necessity and impossibility are not extremes on a probability
scale.

Unexplained facts about spatial competences of newly hatched animals (e.g.
chicks), before neural networks can be trained in the environment, may be
related to mechanisms underlying ancient spatial intelligence in humans and
other animals.

Chemical mechanisms inside eggs, available before hatching, somehow co-existing
with the developing embryo, apparently suffice to produce the hatchling's
spatial intelligence. Such mechanisms may be partly analogous to types of
"virtual machinery" only recently developed in sophisticated forms that provide
services across the internet (like zoom meetings) that "float persistently"
above the constantly changing, particular physical mechanisms at work, without
occupying additional space.

While chemical mechanisms in early stages of reproduction are well-studied,
little is known about the enormously complex types of machinery required for
later stages, e.g., of chick production, including creation of control
mechanisms required for actions soon after hatching. I suggest that development
of the foetus uses many stages of control by increasingly sophisticated
<i>virtual</i> machines controlling and coordinating chemical mechanisms as they
create new chemical mechanisms and new layers of virtual machinery.

Different sub-types must have evolved at different times, and the later, more
complex, virtual machines may have to be assembled by earlier virtual machines,
during foetus development, whereas earliest stages of reproduction simply use
molecular mechanisms controlling formation and release of chemical bonds linking
relatively simple chemical structures.

I suspect Alan Turing's work on chemistry-based morphogenesis (published 1952)
was a side effect of deeper, more general, thinking about uses of
chemistry-based spatial reasoning in intelligent organisms. But he died without
publishing anything to support that suspicion, though he did assert in 1936 that
machines can use mathematical ingenuity, but not mathematical intuition,
without explaining the difference (on which Kant might have agreed). We may
never know how far his thinking had progressed by the time he died.

An extended abstract for the talk is available online:
https://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/misc/unsolved.html

Anyone interested who was never taught how to create and use spatial
constructions and proofs in Euclidean geometry may find online tutorials
useful, e.g.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-kA1_h1dZ58

Or this highly unconventional tutorial using paper and scissors:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKV0GYvR2X8

------------
Aaron Sloman
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~axs