Brian D. Buckley

I’m working my way through Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophical masterpiece, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. It’s easy to read, and more profound than I expected.

Take this quote:

The self says to the “I”: “Feel pain!” And at that it suffers, and thinks how it may put an end to it – and for that very purpose it is made to think.

The self says to the “I”: “Feel pleasure!” At that it is pleased, and thinks how it might often be pleased again – and for that very purpose it is made to think.

Nietzsche is saying that pain and pleasure aren’t just one small piece of consciousness. Rather, seeking pleasure and avoiding pain is the mind’s entire job, its sole function.

This defies tradition, and common sense too. We’re used to thinking of the mind as something noble and elevated, for which the body is merely a tool. Most people believe the mind can even exist apart from the body, as an immortal soul. Yet Nietzsche claims the mind is not a master but a slave, whose elaborate calculations serve only to avoid an ouch.

Here, you might say: “That sounds silly, but what’s the point of arguing about it? We’ll never know. We can’t test it one way or another, it makes no difference to anyone’s life, so this is all a bunch of hot air.”

I would’ve said that myself, not so long ago.

But one of the great beauties of artificial intelligence is that it’s a proving ground for philosophy, especially philosophy of the mind. (And after all, it’s all philosophy of the mind.)

Statements like “experience is the foundation of knowledge” seem airy and abstract. But to an AI engineer, it’s all very real. Every day, I write programming code that constructs the foundation of knowledge. When you’re building a mind, philosophical questions become practical.

And from what I’ve seen so far, I believe Nietzsche was exactly right. The mind is a noble, elegant, powerful thing, but at its roots, it has one main job: seek pleasure, avoid pain. Everything else is subordinate to that primary function.

You may argue that lots of people do things that could be considered pain-seeking: going to battle, even volunteering to be crucified. But I would say that these acts are driven by pursuit of a higher “pleasure” or a deeper “pain,” encoded in the conscience.

Well, you say, then isn’t my argument circular? Isn’t such a definition of pain and pleasure so broad as to be meaningless?

From a human, subjective viewpoint: perhaps. From the objective stance outside of the AI’s code: no, it’s not meaningless at all. Pleasure and pain are values that can be calculated and measured.

Of course, my AI design is not the only one possible. Even if my architecture works, it may be very different than how the human brain operates.

Maybe. But I don’t think so – not about this, anyway.

What’s on your mind this Monday morning?

On Monday, I posed this riddle:

I thrive in gardens and in war.
I’m what drunk drivers oft ignore.
I am a thing no man can hear,
yet light a fire and I’ll appear.
When cherries rot, I also die.
I can’t be felt – but what am I?

Longtime blog reader momenteye asked an excellent question:

How would an AI approach solving this riddle?

Let’s talk about that!

Of course, I’m only going to tell you how my model of an AI would handle this. There are a million approaches to artificial intelligence, and I don’t claim to have the only right answer. The AI I’m building is named Procyon. What would Procyon do with this riddle?

We’ll start by asking: why is Procyon trying to solve this riddle in the first place?

At his most basic level, Procyon has two main impulses: seek pleasure and avoid pain. That may sound crude or hedonistic, but it’s only the foundation of the mind, not the mind itself. Humans are, I believe, built on the same foundation. Ideas as varied as pacifism, fascism, Zen, and even sadomasochism all derive, I think, from these two basic impulses.

(In a philosophy class, we might stumble now into a debate about the definition of “pleasure,” and whether the concept is really meaningful, etc. Fortunately, in an AI, it’s much simpler. “Pleasure” is what happens when this variable right here is set to True.)

The point is, Procyon isn’t working on the riddle because some high-level directive tells him that riddles are fun. He’s doing it because this kind of thing has brought him pleasure in the past. (And if it hadn’t, then he wouldn’t care about riddles.)

Similarly, his approach to figuring out the riddle doesn’t follow some crystal-clean logic that starts with a set of Riddle Axioms and derives an answer. Formal logic is good for a lot of things, but as a foundation for intelligence, it sucks.

Instead, Procyon compares his situation with similar scenes from his past. In effect, he’s asking, “When I’ve come across puzzling textual questions before, what did I do? Did I like the way that approach turned out? Then I’ll try to apply it here.” Though of course he may not explicitly think in those terms.

So how would Procyon solve it? The answer, like so much else, is simple but maybe unsatisfying: it depends. His approach will be based on whatever’s worked in the past, not on any pre-defined rules for Figuring Things Out. Kind of like how humans operate.

This strategy, which I’ve breezily summarized, turns out to be fiendishly complex in practice. When I talk about “similar scenes from his past,” for example, what do I mean by “similar?” How do I define a “scene?” What does this comparing his situation entail? And how does he “try to apply it here?”

As generations of AI researchers have learned the hard way, the devil is in the details. Just explaining my own approach to these questions would take a full-length book, and I’m still far from having all the answers. Likewise, Procyon in his current state is far from having any concept of what a question is, much less a riddle.

But he’s getting there, a day at a time. And so am I.