Kaleidoscopics

I got to thinking about brains today, which as any person with an overactive imagination knows, is sort of a black hole. But regardless, my thoughts shifted to consciousness, understanding of the world around us, and psychedelics (specifically DMT and other chemicals which occur naturally in the brain).

I'm not one to believe that much (if any) real astounding wisdom can be derived from the use of drugs, but it does raise the question of why such chemicals naturally exist in our brains, and why adding more of them (or sympathetic chemicals) has such a profound effect on us, perceptually, spiritually and emotionally.

As I started to think about the problem from a programming perspective, I wondered what their role could be and I came up with the idea of "kaleidoscopics". Really this is just a made up word that I though sounded cool, but the idea is that it's an agent which casts doubt upon normal inputs.

 It's difficult  to design a system which is both deterministic and "intelligent" in the sense which humans typically ascribe to the word. A simple system would be an if-then statement. More complex systems introduce more and more variables, until you have a system, which, like a brain, or an ant colony, takes on emergent properties. There's obviously a lot more going on than the simple interaction of one method or another, but to some extent after a time a system (we'll use the brain as the example from here on out) reaches a state of relative homeostasis.

So I'm rambling a little bit. The point is, how do you program something which can learn any language, lie, love, play, laugh, calculate, trust and kill? You've got to have some pretty flexible rules around what defines reality.

So my hypothesis (like most of the hypotheses I make, being grounded in absolutely no scientific study) is that these chemicals, or if not them, some other set of chemicals in the brain, has the job of turning things on their heads; randomly flipping bits, and presenting the mind with alternative interpretations of what's going on. As a child, when the brain is young and the neurochemical soup of  grey matter starts to solidify into a brain and consciousness, benefits greatly from the ability to try out theories and discard them at a moments notice.

As we get older, we start to know what the flipping of a bit will do (what if I COULD put my hand through the wall), and some of our experimentation, sadly, ends.

It also brings up the somewhat terrifying concept of The Singularity, in that to program a mind with the same ability to perceive reality as flexibly as we do, we would have to take the safety off, and really give the program the ability to come up with whatever it wants. It's pretty cool when you see it on the scale of Conway's Game Of Life, but scale it up to (super)human intelligence and allow the possibility for it to veer off in a direction like Skynet, and the human race would be in trouble. Or we could end up with something closer to Peter F. Hamilton's concept of the singularity; a more benign entity whose motivations are beyond our comprehension.

Again, I'm rambling. But if I can try to tie a nice bow on this, is that reality is highly subjective. If you think about how YOU would try to program something to "perceive" reality, it cascades into all sorts of deliciously complex issues. But one of them I'm sure is a mechanism for self doubt. It plagues us and drives us at the same time, but always has a profound effect.