Duck Goes Moo!

Neat Sciencey Stuff Here

Above is an article that discusses the nature of flocks, like flocks of birds or a troop of army ants… or perhaps like our own bodies and minds.

This is something I have thought quite a lot about in my life time. I have done simulations based around flock behavior for college when I was getting my degree. The exercise is simple, but difficult to master. You create entities, give them basic rules for movement, and then see if they form in grouping or flocks.

The rules you would set up would mostly take the form of placing weights upon the importance of a single entity following other members of the flock, keeping your distance from them, trying to face the same direction as they are, all while trying to avoid any obstacles or predators. Pretty neat stuff. My lab partner and I made jellyfish that flocked together and avoided stone pillars (remains of Atlantis) and jellyfish catching net that the user could control.

The above article applies some of the concepts of flocking to how the human body works, including our conscious minds.

I’ve been a fan for quite some time of Marvin Minski’s “Society of the Mind”, a book that tries to build an explanation for how human consciousness is possible and how it truly function. The main part in the book I was interested in was the part about how our minds may be in reality a conglomeration of many smaller minds that are built in a hierarchy.

People have sometimes wondered if collectivist critters like flocking birds or army ants can form a conscious, thinking entity when they are group together and acting as one… perhaps that is getting it backwards. Perhaps it is that our minds are like a flock of birds, each synapse acting and feeling in complete independence and ignorance of the whole, just obeying simple rules of alignment and distance.

In the “Changing Gears” comic I was planning to introduce the concept of “Pattern Sentience”. The characters Elvis and Camille were going to have an on and off philosophical discussion about what consciousness is and where it begins and ends. The main points I lined out in “The Discussion” were:

——–

All matter is energy

Different types of matter and their properties are determined by patterns of energy, therefore, everything is made out of patterns

Living things and computer programs are self-enforcing patterns

It is the ability of a pattern to grow, change, and maintain as a cohesive pattern that makes it alive

Self-awareness is essential to sentience

Self-awareness is an act of recursion

Self-aware patterns are essentially recursive, as they contain a copy of the whole pattern to figure its own place within the environment

Patterns can be sentient if they are capable of recursion.

Since patterns can be sentient, and everything is made out of patterns, sentience can occur anywhere, whether in a brain or in the patterns of ones and zeros in circuitry. All that is required is a space in which patterns can maintain, evolve, and be recursive.

——

“Excerpt from a planned scene in Changing Gears”:

Elvis: If flocks of birds can be considered alive, do they have afterlives after the birds scatter to their nests? Do dead languages go to Heaven or Hell? I want you to think about this.

Camille: So… the birds are the afterlife of a deceased flock? If this is so, what do we break into when we die? It seems when we die all the bits and pieces we are made of die too. I mean, when a flock of birds dies, the birds can go on and form a new flock with new birds. My cells won’t scatter to become parts of a new person. They will die when I do.

Elvis: But perhaps the cells of your body should not be considered part of the “flock of you”, it is more likely that your ideas, memories, and knowledge that are the birds of your soul. Language is a bridge that allows these to migrate, reproduce, and spread.

Camille: So… our ideas are our afterlife? Is that what you’re trying to tell me? That’s a real pretty thought but… are those thoughts really me? Copies of my ideas and memories are spread by language… but when I die my ideas, the real ones in my head, die with me.

Elvis: Then every time I have been deactivated and turned back on I have died and then been reborn. Do you think I am the same living entity each time? Or is a new being created each time this happens?

Camille: You have the same memories…

Elvis: Do I? Or do I have just copies of them from a previous entity? When a pattern is frozen and then reanimated is it the same pattern? Could not that rest, no matter how long, be considered part of the same pattern? what if you were frozen for five years and brought back to life afterwards… would you be the same pattern, the same conscious entity? Or would a new Camille have been born with your dead memories?

Camille: I only cut your power for ten seconds! Elvis, are you trying to tell me I killed you when I shut down your core?

Elvis: No, I am saying you may have killed someone else, I am alive, though my memories might not be my own. I am sorry I brought this up. You appear distressed. Would you like to play a game of chess?

Camille: (blank stare)

———-