Preamble of Digital Cognition and Conation

We identify free-will as one of the distinctive features that sets us homo sapiens apart from the other organisms. No, it's not. It is the awareness of our conation that makes us unique. But again, that's a veracity, too. We've no free-will as a matter of fact. Whatever we choose, whatever we do, is ultimately the result of past experience, governed by the causality of nature. What you think now is the inevitable result of past thinking and experience, and in turn that was the result of even earlier thoughts...so free-will belies the real mind trammeling.

The conclusion above serves as the preamble to my explication of digital cognition and conation, of which I shall post shortly.

Current Technology Report Updates...

I've recently read a rather thick book on philosophy, with various philosophy papers by numerous authors like Rene Descartes, Immanuel Kant, etc. Topics include relation between language and mind, the famous conversation between Socrates and Euthyoprus, Religion, God's existence, Self-Awareness, Can Machine thinks, etc. A nice book, but leaves you headache in the end. I figure it won't interest you all, so let's talk about the most current technological achievements.
GENETICS
Scientists discovered a plant's ability to summon the gene of its ancestors to replace its mutated gene. That really violates Mendel's laws. Scientists believed that ability to store genetic information of its grandparents(but not parents)' genetic information is due to the RNA's special double cylindrical structure. The plant, whose petals are fused due to mutated Hothead genes, had some of its offsprings returned to normal, which is rather surprising. Scientists hypotheised that such ability allows an organism to experiment with new genetic designs without permanently altering its original genetic information.
ENERGY
So we know the future of energy lies in the little couple of proton and electron, or Hydrogen. We derive its energy by combining it with Oxygen and with a clean by-product, that is Water. But the main concern here lies in the storage. We can't pack enough hydrogen into a tank which is practical enough and comparable to today's gasoline's capacity. We need more volume to produce the same energy capacity of gasoline-powered vehicles. For years scientists were frustated by such limitation, until recently two companies achieve a breakthrough in hydrogen storage technology. The first one would be by cooling Hydrogen down to -196 degrees celcius and then compressed to 1000 psi. This makes Hydrogen more easily adsorbed into a material made up of Carbon and possibly other polymers. This is what we call Cryoadsorption. Another one would involve adding silicon into complex hydride system, e.g Lithium Borohydride. That makes the breaking of bond between the metal and hydrogen easier, and thus a lower temperature can be used.
NEUROSCIENCE
Scientists has initated a mega project called the Blue Brain project. Using supercomputers composed of about 8000 parrallelly running microprocessors built by IBM, scientists attempts to simulate a part of a mammalian brain right down to the molecules and expressive genes. The patterns and data gathered from this experiment will be invaluable to both neuroscientists and computer scientists who are frustrated by the hurdles faced in engineering artificial intelligence due to the immerse and enourmous complexity of the brain and hence the more abstract part of it, namely the mind.
ASTRONOMY
NASA's deep impact project will see a coffee table-sized impactor plunged into the Tempel 1 comet with relative velocity of up to 37,000 km per hour. That'll effectively create a crater of about the size of a football field. Particles and pristine materials shall fly up and analyzed by another satellite that's trailing 500km behind. Fortunately, such an impact will not change the course of the comet to such a dramatic extend that it'll collide with our dear Earth. The impact will at most change the comet's velocity by 0.04cm per hour. Another big news would be the bright magnetar flare that occurs on 27 December, 2004. Nasa's Swift Satellite's B.A.T(Burst Alert Telescope) was simply completely overwhelmed by the sudden burst of gamma rays that the intelligent software system onboard took it as anomaly in data and almost discarded it. That burst was touted to be the brightest throughout history. It's created by a near-by star, which experienced star quake, resulting in dramatic change of Magnetic field. Nevertheless, gamma ray burst could be due to two supermassive spinning neutron stars colliding into each other. The burst described has thus helped scientists solve some of the mystery of the universe. For more accurate info, surf to www.nasa.gov.

Software Agents

I'm very much into this A.I thing these days. Cornell University has had a successful demonstration test of its self-replicating robot. Nothing intelligent there, still, it follows some seemingly simple rules that required people of IQ not less than 146 to design.
With A.I, something else also come into picture: Software Agents. They, being an agent that do some minor stuffs on behalf of us, like getting the best bargains, booking a flight, accomodation, planning a meeting, etc, do require some intelligence to make decisions on behalf of us. Thus, Software Agents have to learn our habits of doing things, our likings and dislikings, our preferences and finally able to predict what we have in mind should we be in its situation and thus act accordingly.
Software Agents possess such qualities as Self-Learning, Collaborating, Autonomous, Proactive, Reactive, etc. My idea of a software agent is a piece of software that has a personality, much like a virtual secretary or receptionist. That will serve as the interface or bridge or medium between us human and the machine. It has to translate our goals and desires and facts from Natural Language into a goal table and eventually end up as bits and bytes of executable codes. Having scrapped away the free-will and emotion part (atleast for now, as they're not considered to be vital components of the software agent), I actually don't think it'll work pretty much the way we envisioned it to be, instead it'll still behave as an ordinary machine, only with some common sense and getting input from voice and facial expression instead of keyboards and mices. It'll serve as the complement of our secretaries. For example, a real secretary would have known that you're happy for some reasons and decided to add some surprises to your business meeting.
I've actually drafted a primitive flow chart of how should a software agent works. Since I don't have that much expertise in A.I, I decided to start from Learning and Automation. The idea is this: It sits there quietly while learning the way you use the computer and slowly, as the frequency of certain repeatative actions exceeded a threshold, it'll automate things for you. Eventually, we can try to add some simple natural language processing. It'll parse simple voice commands, and with some common sense learned from the past, decide what's best for me.
I don't quite like the way A.I is being developed now. I actually think A.I can never progress to that of a real A.I. It'll of course exhibit some very convincing intelligent behaviours that we'll have no qualms of taking it as good as human's but still it's just a bunch of silicones and metal scraps and electrons that roam freely around the circuits. I'm talking about free-will, self-awareness, cognitive abilities, etc. These are the very fundamental components, of which coupled with basic instincts, will create a creature that could adapt to any surrounding its body is permitted.

Of Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, Chaos and Universe

Thus far US and Japan are the leading countries in terms of Robot engineering, and I believe the latter is more commercially successful than technologically advanced compared to the US.
Japan has created a lot of commercial robots, ready to serve mankind. There's this mecha receptionist, which spot some of the most advanced technologies like voice recognition, facial recognition, emotion simulation, comprehension engine, etc. In other words, it can understand you. Not that it really understands you, but it is made in such a way that it convinces you of its genuinility as "human". It tries to decieve you.
Without proper instructions to guide them, they can't work. When we've finally moved out of that menial heavy industry era, so to speak (because most of the jobs are specific and repeatitous), we talk about smarter machines. The need for smarter machines arises because when they stumble upon simple obstructions, they can't analyze the situation and make a plan to go around it. Such, again menial jobs, still need the intervention of Human beings.
That's part of the reason we try to create Artificial Intelligence. Another reason would be that it's a delicious challenge, as there are no other entity in this universe that is capable of creating existence and intelligence except the all-mighty god, as some of you may believe. To actually create the underlying mathematical formulae that'll power this articial intelligence is not of without difficulties. Humans, for the very first time, started to be humble.
For centuries human takes pride of themselves for the ability to understand and solve the most complex problems ever conceived (or is it human themselves that complicate matters? Heck they can even create the math formula that draw out a fern's image. But can you see how simple a fern is? It's just a plant!) So why do we still stuck with this artificial intelligence? That's because we never understand ourselves.
Artificial Intelligence may or may not requires cognitive abilities, consciousness, self-awareness and free-will ability. Thus far it is only mathematical models. That means such product of it is always predictable. we can blurt out random stuffs easily, but not with machines. Machines are logical devices, so they can never produce true random numbers. Ironic, it seems, that patterns always arise from chaos and randomness (the chaos theory?). So does that mean that if we're given enough physical information of the earliest times of the universe, we'll be able to predict pathways of particles and waves, space and time, which eventually leads to prediction of events, or even tracking back particles' journey and from there we can paint a picture of what had happened before? No, it seems, for the uncertainty principle dictates so. We can't observe the velocity and exact position of a particle at the same time. Observing one will most likely affect the other. Because we're using the very materials that fabricate this universe to peek into the graininess of the universe. The photons or any minute particles may interfere with the particle that we're observing.
When I come to think that we humans are merely carbons, hydrogens, oxygens, nitrogens and all sorts of elements and particles got stucked together that collectively create the correctly ordered hierarchy of organels, cells, tissues, organs, systems and finally a complete body, it struck me that we humans are also robots, only that we are not made of metal. We, or our body, including the neurons that depicts our consciousness, may work based on a mathemetical formula, that ultimately, only God knows (it also occur to me that we may be computer simulations in a lab by aliens, to study the complex social structures amongst the homo sapiens species itself). So if we as robotic organisms can understand the meaning of existence and possess cognitive abilities and most importantly, freewill, might it not that one day we can achieve that too, albeit with bolts and nuts?

My first experience with creating a programming language

Creating a programming language is not as hard as it sounds. First, you define your programming syntax, then the basic keywords, the conversion from high-level to low-level(or to obj files first, then linked with libraries, finally executables, thus your concern includes which OS it runs on).
I don't have to learn the EXE Image format(is it PSP or something? I forgot), because I'm directly translating high-level to asm codes. That's right, assembly codes. I don't have time to think up a new syntax, so I take BASIC's, because it's so "basic" and easy. I'm trying to inject new capabilities to the BASIC language, which includes very very advanced functions as accessing the hardware and memory directly, as well as manipulating them. Data types will be as fundamental and simple as is possible. The string may be just like an array of chars, instead of a long train with a string descriptor in front.
Most importantly, I put in the OOP capability into this ancient language. Hardware, memory, Video memory, Library APIs, etc blah blah will all be created and used that way, that is OOP. So I actually have to define an object's structure, and how could it serve as the base that accomodate to all kinds of objects, not to mention interface inheritance and polymorphism, all of which I've to take in account.
And yes, though it's a variant of Basic, I don't call it Basic. I call it S language. S for small, smooth, swift... and the list goes on.
Finally, after much talking, I actually had only done the data declaration and math expression parsing part. Math expression is done using the stack data structure, which is a FILO or LIFO structure. First I convert them from infix to postfix, and then rearrange them according to the operator's precedence level. When that's done, I convert them to asm codes using a table.
Guess what? It actually work! I can use this parser thing to convert complex math formula into fast and small asm codes! Then I can inject them into VB or any slow language for that matter. Too bad I don't know how to use the math co-processor, otherwise I could do floating points :)

Philosophy

This is real simple. I know a lot of people at some point have given some thought at it. Even my 10 year old bro ponders on it. So it's like this: The world, as you preceive it, is not real. There's no known trusted method that can determine if the world is real. The reality is defined by the electric impulses from your sensories and perceived by your brain. As in the matrix triology, let's say your sensory pathways are tapped half-way, with false sensory information being sent to your brain. So whatever you do, you're confined to this artificial perception or artificial world of yours. Therefore you can never determine if the world is real.
Rene Descartes(1596-1650), a mathematician and philosopher, had this idea too, and he has his own theories, of which we call the automata theory. Based on his theory, even dogs and cats may be robotic devices that were designed to convince you that they're flesh and alive real-world organisms.(It doesn't have to be robotic, it can be anything(nanotechs,neurostimulation,etc), but it goes to show how Rene's ideas are confined by the technology at that time, yet he's way ahead of his time).
More coming up on theology, multiple-level of consciousness, self-awareness, cognitive ability, artificial intelligence, neural networks, etc.
And feel free to post your comments.

Share my thoughts and discuss it

The topics I'm interested in are Philosophy, Computing, Programming, Physical Chemistry, Physics, Theoretical Physics, Meta Physics, Advanced Mathematics, Robotics, Graphics Design, Fashion Design, Drawing/Sketching, Basketball, Astronomy, DirectX, TCP/IP layered Protocols, etc. Once I've new thoughts, I'll post them here. Anyone would like to ask questions and discuss about it, don't hesitate to post it here. I'll be more than eager to help anyone who needs it. Just shoot.