Error-Correction is the Key to Understanding Intelligence and Consciousness
I’ve solved both Intelligence and Consciousness. They are both ‘Error Correction’ mechanisms. Let me know what I cannot explain from this hypothesis?
This is a better narrative than Intelligence is Compression. Intelligence as Compression doesn’t explain consciousness. Many believe that you can’t have intelligence without consciousness.
Oddly enough, the characteristic primary characteristic of democracy is also ‘error correction’. Democracies might not elect perfect leaders but they always have options to make corrections on their mistakes.
Super-resolution is to compression as Error-correction is to occlusion recovery. If you can imagine the person that is partially occluded behind an object, then that’s error correction.
This said, Error-correction like Compression are terminologies that come from computer science. Both are terrible metaphors for describing intelligence.
So if you ever encounter a computer science person who claims that intelligence is compression. You can easily put him on a spot that ‘error-correction’ is a better explanation.
General intelligence is of course a consequence of biology. But unfortunately, most technical people do not understand the metaphors of biology. As Lakoff has said, we understand our world through metaphors. To best explain intelligence, you might as well use error-correction.
The way to explain something to someone else is to use the metaphors they are familiar with. That is because error-correction always requires a measure that is relative to some expectation. If one has no basis of comparison with their current knowledge, they cannot understand it.
It is through the translation through many signs that brains derive meaning. For humans, that begins with metaphors that lead to other metaphors. Eventually leading to a better metaphor that is derived from a worse metaphor that the receiver has understood previously.
Understanding is always a gradual ascent from one understanding to another understanding. The best explainers are the ones that can give an intuitive explanation. But what is an intuitive explanation other than one that uses metaphors that you currently understand?
As Feynman said, if you cannot explain an idea to a five-year-old (actually it was originally an undergraduate student) then you do not understand the idea. In short, have an intuitive grounding of the idea and can work your way in explanation from that grounding.
So through incremental error corrections of our understanding via the use of related metaphors, we are able to understand. Can we have intelligence without an ability to understand?
But what about consciousness. How is that related to error correction?
We assume first that we are intuition machines (system 1 in Kahneman’s terminology). System 2 is a reflective system 1 mechanism (that’s why it is slower). Consciousness is our mechanism for explaining our thoughts.
According to @danieldennett it is our user interface into our thoughts. Consciousness is an intermittent process in our minds. We can be awakened from our unconscious thinking by surprising unexpected events in our perception.
Consciousness allows us to perform the necessary deductive reasoning to resolve complex unexpected events. Our intuition works on habit. System 2 however works in regimes that are unfamiliar. In regimes that we are ‘error-correcting’.
I am certain that many with an organic perspective of intelligence are cringing at my use of the term ‘error correction’. However, let me explain that all organic behavior is a consequence of continuous error-correction.
Christopher Alexander (see: Pattern Languages) introduced this connection when he noticed that organic designs were very different from conventional human designs. His explanation behind this was that organic designs are continuously error-correcting.
In human designs, we make many assumptions about how a design will fit within its environment. Many assumptions may be wrong and we may overlook many others. However, a design that adapts to its environment adjusts assumptions in an incremental way to fit its environment.
These adjustments are done in the alignment with how it interacts with the environment. An organic design makes corrections to itself so that it can better fit with it being embedded within an environment.
This is how evolution works and this is how the brain works. So I have now connected the computer science concept to an organic concept. I hope that sequence of sign translations leads you to a better understanding of intelligence and consciousness.
I guess Ross Ashby said a long time ago “The whole function of the brain is summed up in: error-correction.” So I’m not alone in this observation.
But since he said it already, I may need to come up with something original. The key to intelligence and consciousness is “self-repair”. My rephrasing the is “The whole function of minds is summed up in: self-repair”
