Is Intelligence an Algorithm? Part 10: Intuition

Sometimes we don’t need to reason to find the solution to a problem, because we have an insight, an intuition what the solution is. Whereas intelligence normally uses an algorithm to arrive in a rational way at the solution to a problem and even emotions follow a certain predictable path, when we intuit a solution, intelligence seems to have taken a shortcut, which we are unable to trace back.

The intelligence algorithm I have described involves cognition, (pattern) recognition and understanding as described in Part 1 and Part 2. Part 3 explored the process of reasoning, which is necessary to come to identifications and conclusions and is also a tool in the problem-solving toolkit. In part 4 I discussed how we identify and formulate a problem; how we plan a so-called heuristic to solve it, how we carry out the solution and check if it fulfils our requirements. Part 5 and part 6 related to emotions as indicators of the status of a system and how we can deal with the sometimes deceptive messages emotions convey. Parts 7, 8 and 9 dealt with issues and solutions for the generation of artificial intelligence. All these parts fit –at least to a certain extent- into a framework of science, technology and rationality.

And then we have intuition, an aspect of intelligence that remains elusive. This essay will deal with the issue of intuition. Not with the intent to decipher the exact steps involved – because if we could trace them, we wouldn’t call it intuition- but with the intent to brainstorm about a plausible way how intuition can be understood from a scientific point or, if it can’t, to figure out how we must adapt our understanding of existence so as to be able to fit in intuition.

Background

The stunning nature of intuition has been narrated to us by great pioneers of science. From ancient times we know the narrative of Archimedes. The Roman architect Vitruvius recounts the “Eureka” moment of Archimedes' discovery as follows: 

“When he went down into the bathing pool he observed that the amount of water which flowed outside the pool was equal to the amount of his body that was immersed.  Since this fact indicated the method of explaining the case, he did not linger, but moved with delight he leapt out of the pool, and going home naked, cried aloud that he had found exactly what he was seeking.  For as he ran he shouted in Greek: eureka, eureka.”

Or take for instance Kékulé who had struggled to find the structure of benzene. The structure of Benzene was revealed to him in a dream he described in his diary as follows:

"I was sitting writing on my textbook, but the work did not progress; my thoughts were elsewhere.  I turned my chair to the fire and dozed. Again the atoms were jumbling before my eyes.  This time the smaller groups kept modestly in the background. My mental eye, rendered more acute by the repeated visions of the kind, could now distinguish larger structures of manifold conformation; long rows sometimes more closely fitted together all twining and twisting in snake-like motion.  But look! What was that?  One of the snakes had seized hold of its own tail, and the form whirled mockingly before my eyes.  As if by a flash of lightning I awoke...".

And he was not the only one. Einstein said: "The only real valuable thing is intuition...The intellect has little to do on the road to discovery. There comes a leap in consciousness, call it Intuition or what you will, the solution comes to you and you don't know how or why".

What is remarkable about these accounts is that the inventors had a sudden moment in which they saw the “whole” of the solution as being more than the parts of its constituents. There was a holistic insight you can’t get to by simply connecting the dots. This intuitive insight is like a bird’s eye view that sees the whole in perspective, which is impossible from tracing the steps when you are at the ground level.

Prima facie intuition appears to arise magically out of nowhere; it defies causality. In our western society however we like to be able to understand things, we don’t settle for magic. As Shakespeare would say “nothing shall come from nothing”. So let’s explore which phenomena we know of could be related to intuition.

The disadvantage of this exploration is that we are venturing in a rather unknown territory. Just like the notion of “consciousness”, which is considered to be a “hard problem” by scientists because they can’t pinpoint it down to explain it in terms of constituents, intuition is a “hard problem” too. We hardly have a heuristic so we must cling on to whatever knowledge could be correlated to intuition. This essay is therefore extremely speculative. I do not claim the correctness of anything what will follow hereafter. Even the scientific areas I will explore may have some fringes that smell of esotericism. Just bear with me and let’s see how far we can get.

There are three major topics, which I would like to explore with you which may give a rationale for intuition even if they do not describe exactly how it arises.

These topics are:

• quantum mechanics

• digital physics and quantum computing

• resonance and the collective unconscious

Quantum Mechanics

Quantum mechanics defy logic. Firstly there is the wave-particle duality, which means that depending on the experimental set-up, you will detect a particle or a wave like behaviour for light but also for subatomic particles such as electrons. In other words: “If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.” Often this phenomenon has been postulated to involve consciousness as an agent. In the famous double slit experiment light particles or electrons are sent to a screen, but before they reach the screen there is a plate with two slits. When a detector is observing at the position of the plate which one of the slits a particle passes, a classical pattern of two zones on the screens is observed. However when no one (or no detector) is observing, a wave interference pattern is observed.

Observation at the slits. Image from https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Materials_in_Electronics/Wave-Particle_Duality/The_Two-Slit_Experiment

No observation at the slits. Image from https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Materials_in_Electronics/Wave-Particle_Duality/The_Two-Slit_Experiment

There have been plausible explanations for this phenomenon such as the “pilot wave” theory by Yves Couder (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHHaDWEWtQE).

However, there is a variant of the double slit experiment that defies our ability of understanding even more. And that is the “delayed choice experiment” by Wheeler. This has been further developed by Kim et al. giving rise to the so-called quantum eraser experiment.

Image source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed_choice_quantum_eraser

This experiment is too difficult to explain in the framework of this essay, but the conclusions of the scientists are important. Essentially the choice about which type of detection set-up (one which will give an interference pattern and one which won’t) is used, is made after the photon beam has already been split or not. If the set-up is for an interference pattern, that you will get, if the set-up is for a single line, that’s what you will get; but the decision to split (which gives rise to an interference pattern) or not (which doesn’t give rise to an interference pattern) was made by the photon before the set-up was installed . How is it possible that the photon has already knowledge about a future event? It defies our understanding of time and causality: It is as if the effect determines the cause. Some scientists even evoke the possibility of retro-causality. 

What does this have to do with intuition? Well, if a complete holistic picture of how something is configured arises in our minds, where we were unable to link the parts in a meaningful way, we may have received/captured  information coming from a future state where the item was already assembled.

This of course implies we could receive information quasi-telepathically from the environment. As if we can tune into some kind of electromagnetic wave. 

These notions may seem far-fetched and non-scientific, but there is a vast deposit of data which have measured such parapsychological effects relating to precognition and telepathy. The scientist Dean Radin has corroborated very solid evidence, that such effects are not some statistical oddity.

Quantum effect joke. Image source: http://www.dailygrail.com/Fresh-Science/2015/12/The-Universes-Biggest-Double-Slit-Experiment

If we can receive information from the future, this poses another question. Is the future then already predetermined? Is our life nothing more than watching a 4D movie in a full immersion mode and is everything we do already there? So that we do not have free will and that we are merely under the impression that we make our decisions ourselves? The non-deterministic behaviour of quantum particles in other experiments seems to defy such a fully deterministic scenario. Or are there –as Everett suggests- multiple parallel universes, whereby every time a decision is made, a universe splits up in the different possibilities that could occur, so that everything that could possibly happen, de facto does happen, only in parallel dimensions? This is of course a very unsettling notion. Because it also means that every moment in a parallel universe you are killing someone or you are being killed. Do you die in 50% of all possible scenarios? Or is there some kind of pruning going on eliminating the most unlikely scenarios? Are we forced into certain chreodes of a teleological attractor at the end of time and does our freedom merely exist in staying within the path of a chreode? (A chreode is a necessary route or path, which can be illustrated by a ball rolling downhill from an undulating mountain; see image).

Chreodes. Image from http://databio.org/research/

This is of course heavy speculation, and as of yet we do not have experiments to verify what kind of theory is true.

But the notion that we may have a faculty of precognition and that information can travel retrocausally (i.e. back in time) is not to be excluded. There are by the way no reasons at the quantum level why the arrow of time should only point in one direction.

Moreover quantum particles can be entangled and keep a link such that even when they are very far apart, changing one of the particles also changes the other particle. This change is instantaneous. It cannot be accounted for by information transfer from one to the other, if it is true that information cannot travel faster than the speed of light. If I change the spin of an electron, the spin of an entangled electron will change instantaneously too. This has been demonstrated experimentally is an accepted notion in physics. This strange entanglement interaction is also referred to as “spooky action at distance” by the quantum physicists. Though strange, it does find application in many modern physics applications. 

Ervin Laszlo has suggested that the type of coherence observed at the quantum level is also present at the macroscopic scale, especially in living beings. Our physical responses are the consequence of well-orchestrated coherent patterns. Laszlo even goes further and postulates the presence of a subquantum scale medium, which he calls the “Akasha” (ancient Vedic terminology for space or a kind of ether). That this medium may not be pure fantasy but is gaining momentum in the scientific world, is evident from the so-called “Casimir” effect, which shows that subatomic particles can emerge from what we call the quantum vacuum or the zero-point field.

Not only Laszlo, but also ralph Abraham and Sisir Roy in their book “Demystifying the Akasha” show that the Akasha behaves as a computational substrate, a neural network in which clique formation occurs. 

Dr.Joe Tsien has recently shown that intelligence indeed follows a “neural network” type algorithm (not a traditional von Neumann style algorithm). The more thought, the more cliques join in, Tsien says. The basis of Tsien’s Theory of Connectivity is the algorithm, n=2ⁱ-1, which defines how many cliques are needed for an Functional Connectivity Motif to arise. This enabled the scientists to predict the number of cliques needed to recognise options in their testing of the theory.

Could it be that the whole of existence is one vast computer, a vast neural network? If this is so, then our brains are merely embedded fractal copies of the very essence of existence. If this is so, then it is not so strange that our brains can receive information from cliques at another aggregation level, namely that of the quantum level.

And this ties neatly in with the theories of Penrose that our brains may indeed have a faculty of quantum computing, which may occur as coherent states in the microtubules in the neurons. It has even been suggested by Penrose et al. that it is here that consciousness arises in their so-called Orchestrated objective reduction (Orch-OR) theory. 

This type of entanglement could also be involved in intuitive knowledge: Information is conveyed to us instantaneously, because we are somehow entangled with it.

Digital Physics and Quantum Computing

It is not only from the more esoteric speculations about an “Akasha” that theories have arisen in physics that the whole of existence and the laws of physics are the consequence of a computational process, no, the very popular modern currents of digital physics and string theory also suggest this!

The premise at the base of the theoretical perspective of Digital Physics is that the universe is computable and a manifestation of information. Deep in the equations of supersymmetry of string theory, the physicist James Gates found what is essentially “computer code”. The concept of entropic gravity by the physicist Erik Verlinde and the holographic principle of the physicist van ‘t Hooft both concur with the notion that the physical universe is made of information, of which energy and matter are merely manifestations. Perhaps the most famous articles as regards the Simulation Hypothesis are the “It from Bit” article by the physicist J.A. Wheeler and the “Simulation argument” by Nick Bostrom.

As an extrapolation from these theories has come the suspicion that the universe might actually itself be a computer and that we might in fact live in a computer simulation.

If we take into account the observed oddities from quantum mechanics, it is unlikely that this computing is a traditional classical Turing computer. Alan Turing showed that certain functions are not computable. This is also known as Turing’s incomputability. It stems from, the Church–Turing thesis, which states that a function is algorithmically computable if and only if it is computable by a Turing machine. As there are functions that are not computable by Turing machines (see also the book Gödel, Esher Bach, an Eternal Golden Braid, by D.Hofstadter, herein incorporated by reference), there are non-deterministic functions which will always remain incomputable and to that extent also unknown.

Gödel came with the incompleteness theorems. The first incompleteness theorem states that no consistent system of axioms whose theorems can be listed by an "effective procedure" (e.g., a computer program, but it could be any sort of algorithm) is capable of proving all truths about the relations of the natural numbers (arithmetic). For any such system, there will always be statements about the natural numbers that are true, but that are unprovable within the system. The second incompleteness theorem, an extension of the first, shows that such a system cannot demonstrate its own consistency.

Gödel’s incompleteness theorems have a relation with the liar paradox (The semi-mythical seer Epimenides, a Cretan, reportedly stated that “The Cretans are always liars”). An example of this relation is the sentence "This sentence is false". An analysis of the liar sentence shows that it cannot be true (for then, as it asserts, it is false), nor can it be false (for then, it is true). Or what happens if Pinocchio says: “my nose will grow”? 

A Gödel sentence G for a theory T makes a similar assertion to the liar sentence, but with truth replaced by provability: G says "G is not provable in the theory T." The analysis of the truth and provability of G is a formalised version of the analysis of the truth of the liar sentence.

So mathematical and logic knowledge, including language can never yield a complete and completely consistent framework.

But then there is quantum computing.

The terminology “quantum computing” is often wrongly understood. Whereas it is often well described how classical computers can take on only two fixed states for each bit, namely a 0 or a 1 and in contrast quantum computers can take on in a qubit any value between 0 and 1, in most laymen descriptions it remains a mystery how quantum computing actually works. Quantum computers are said to use specific quantum effects such as entanglement between particles and superpositions of 0 and 1 states in order to calculate. Whereas I won’t provide an elaborate explanation how quantum computing functions, it is important to realise the following: Pure quantum algorithms calculate a global probability for the behaviour of an ensemble and do not calculate precise specific outcomes for individualised instances. 

This is best illustrated with the “Saint Peter parable”: Saint Peter has labelled 8 persons who want to enter heaven with a three digit code from 000 to 111. Either he is going to let in everybody or he is going to let in only half of the people. If you use a classical computer and the first four persons are found to have admitted, you still don’t know the outcome of the query: Will he let everybody in or only half of the people? So you’ll have to check if the fifth person is admitted, which will tell you if everybody is admitted, whereas if the fifth person is not admitted you can be certain that only half of the people were admitted. A classical computer needs to check five instances here to come to a result, where a quantum computer which calculates a single value for the ensemble, would have come up with only one instance. If the outcome is between 0-50% half of the people are admitted, if the outcome is between 51-100% everyone is admitted. Thus quantum computers can give probability outcomes which will solve your problem much faster than a classical computer, provided that the problem and outcome relate to global information and not local specific information. If you want to know if person number seven is admitted, you will have to go the classical way and check until you arrive at the seventh person.

This does however not mean that with a quantum computer you cannot perform classical operations: Even if you use superpositions in qubits, by cunningly combining your question digit with two control bits the so-called “Toffoli multiple-bit/qubit gate” is generated, which can make a quantum computer “operate” as a classical computer. This was somehow already implicit in the Saint Peter example, since there were two sets of outcome corresponding to a digital reply. In other words, by using the right gate, quantum computation can emulate classical computation, which makes that quantum computation in the larger meaning can be said to encompass both classical computation processes and pure quantum calculation processes.

Some scientists state that even quantum computing is ultimately reducible to the functioning of a Turing computer. The fact that any function of a quantum computer can be simulated by a classical Turing machine does not mean that a quantum computer IS a classical Turing machine.

It is my understanding that neural networks can achieve complex pattern recognition very fast and in a way, which is very difficult to achieve with traditional algorithms.

It is my conjecture that the combination of neural networks and quantum computing gives the emergent effect, which allows for the experience of those non-deterministic events which seem to fall outside of the “computational paradigm”.

It is exactly there that intuition may arise. It is difficult to know exactly how a neural network configures itself to recognise complex patterns; it is like a black box that does the job, without you knowing exactly what sequence of steps was followed. Just like intuition. If this process is sped up via quantum computing, which according to certain theoretical physicist probes solutions over a plethora of parallel (real or potential) universes, indeed information may pop-up as if by magic, but in fact following a complex process or algorithm of backpropagation along a gradient, to optimise and learn a process. There is an intrinsic feedback and integration of information involved in these processes, which I have already stated in part 8 of this series to be the hallmark of consciousness. Then there are also feedforward neural networks, which can give an output similar to a conscious decision but which are not necessarily conscious according to Tononi.

So on the one hand intuition might arise by 1) the neural network or 2) quantum computing or 3) a combination of both i.e. the neural network enforced by quantum computing and on the other hand, since these processes appear to be ubiquitous in nature they can be amplified through scales so as to emerge from the quantum level to the macroscopic level. Thus we may internally intuit things by the function of our brains, but also externally due to the neural network propagation from any external event through the computational medium of the Akasha.

Note that in his book “Unified Reality Theory” Steven Kaufman describes the medium that builds space-time (which I equate with the Akasha) as a cellular network of reality cells packed in the closest packing as an isotropic vector matrix (stacked cuboctahedrons, in which each of the vertexes of the cuboctahedron is the centre of a reality cell). 

Vector equilibrium. Image source: https://www.laetusinpraesens.org/docs80s/80vecteq.php

When these cells are at rest they can be considered to have a value 0. When energy traverses through these cells, they are switched on and have a value of 1. The propagation of such energy through the matrix Kaufman shows has the speed of light! The energetic distortions (which are a kind of information) in this geometric system -Kaufman also shows- automatically generate the principle of gravitation in line with Verlinde’s entropic attraction. 

Mikado Universe as explanation for Entropic Attraction. Image source: http://www.science20.com/hammock_physicist/it_bit_entropic_gravity_pedestrians-66244

This can be illustrated by the Mikado universe : by creating local emergent structures (the two red circles) the overall dissipative entropic effects of the whole are increased. In other words a system with substructures can have a higher entropy than a maximal homogeneous “disorder”. 

Since all the reality cells are inextricably interlinked they provide an explanation for quantum effects such as entanglement. Similar structures cluster, which gives rise to a proximity co-occurrence of informational and energetic entities: In the physical world we know this as gravity. In the informational world of Latent Sematic Analysis, which is used by machine intelligence to answer queries, this same principle is used to convey meaning!

Since similar attracts similar in this informational computational matrix, it may not be too surprising that if we think of a problem, the associated solutions that are already present in the fabric of this matrix pop into our heads via resonance and entanglement.

If similar information content clusters in such an informational matrix this has an advantage for the dissipation of undifferentiated energy. In other words by creating local order, overall entropy can be increased. Chaos is optimised by local levels of order. Chaos cannot exist without levels of order nor can levels of order occur with the creation of an ever increasing chaos. In that sense Chaos and order are two sides of the same coin, giving rise to a fractal of ever newly occurring levels of metasystems. In natural systems every level of Chaos has an internal order, which repeats itself over scales giving rise to a chaos-order fractal; every order gives rise to chaos. A great book on this topic is "Chaos" by James Gleick. The ordering principle integrates the most basic elements of each level, which when compounded generate new basic entities of a higher meta-level. These entities can be recombined in all possible permutations in a computational screening  and pruning process, which creates a new spawning of all kinds of combinatorial forms. 

This also happened in the genesis of life: In the Cambrian explosion a vast plethora of so-called “Phyla” were formed (a higher ranking type of class in the taxonomy of living beings). But only a limited number was kept. The new forms can then organise themselves in yet higher dimension like structures, which can again recombine. Thus from atoms molecules were created, from molecules macromolecules, from macromolecules unicellular organisms, from unicellular organisms multicellular organisms and from multicellular organisms societies with a global brain. 

This is the algorithm of intelligence at work. This is the evolutionary system that bootstraps itself to ever higher forms of complexity, to create ever enhancing possibilities for the generation of overall entropy, whilst lowering local entropies. This is the process that alternates feedback information integration with problem solving feedforward combinatorial screening and pruning. The Yin-Yang dance of order and chaos.

And it is here that a global brain will be integrated by us, the human species, by interconnecting the World Wide Web and endowing it with artificial consciousness, the hallmark of intelligence.

If Reality is a quantum computer, it is not necessarily a quantum computer as we are engineering these, but one as described by Kaufman, Laszlo and others: A medium that transcends the dichotomy between neural network and linear algorithmic computation: A medium that is both a neural network and a quantum computer with entanglement effects of the entire scope of its meta-level, possibly reverberating across scales and dimensions to be entangled at every level. A medium that by virtue of its extraordinary parsimonious structure which can moreover “breathe” in a process called “jitterbugging”, provides new emergent effects, which may account for the fact that this computational medium may be not be reducible to a simple Turing machine, but show indeterministic effects as well.

Jitterbugging of a vector equilibrium (alternating between cuboctahedron and octahedron shapes) 

Image source: http://www.mereon.org/themereondiablogue/2014/08/11/a-truce-is-not-the-way-to-true

Resonance and Collective subconscious

The fact that similar looks for similar in this matrix can also be considered as an inherent mechanism that strives to resonate. Information or energy patterns that resonate amplify themselves across scales.

In the animal kingdom we see that animal societies organise themselves in flocks, schools, herds, hives etc. Here too there is a spooky information transfer beyond our understanding. These animals act in concert: When a bird flock changes direction, it cannot be observed that the change starts somewhere in the flock and is then propagated as a wave through the flock, no, all the birds turn at exactly the same moment, as if they share the same mind. The biologist Rupert Sheldrake has posited a theory of morphogenetic fields that are shared by such animals. In my view these animals are in resonance, together they build a field of mind waves, which becomes a single resonating field all the birds are tuned into. A single thought of needing to change direction, is sensed simultaneously by all, as well as the impulse to execute the change of direction.

Perhaps we humans also share such a common mind. In fact there is a vast literature about a so-called collective unconscious as suggested by the psychologist Carl Jung. In this collective unconscious information is transmitted via archetypes, which are universal symbols we know from Tarot Gnosticism, Alchemy etc.. Interestingly, Kékulé’s intuition was exactly that: He saw the symbol of a snake biting its own tail, which is the gnostic symbol known as the “Ouroboros”. Possibly ubiquitous principles of intelligence which are valid at each level of existence have been crystallised in the form of such simple glyphs. As said before in this series, glyphs are an extremely parsimonious way to store information. You may remember the set of mnemonic tools I developed in the form of glyphs in my posts, which I personally consider as a great “intuitive” tool to order my ideas and to spawn combinations thereof! 

Glyph library. Image Source: Antonin Tuynman  

In this way, by tuning into this collective field of knowledge we are able to retrieve information going back aeons, which we then call intuition or creativity, but which in fact is merely a downloading of information from a mind at large.

Conclusion

In this essay I have speculated about the various ways intuition may arise. From quantum mechanics and digital physics, we have seen that reality might in fact be a kind of giant supercomputer, which is built from computational building blocks at its most basic level. This network combines principles of both neural networks and quantum computing principles and possibly has emergent effects going beyond these. Intuition may arise due to amplification of information though metasystem levels from a very basic level of primordial computation. Alternatively it may arise by tuning into and resonating with collective mind fields, which are ubiquitous in the animal kingdom and possibly exist at the human level as the collective unconscious.

We have also seen how the intelligence algorithm alternates order and chaos generating processes in a process of creating ever increasing levels of complexity. This is the way existence assures its self-sustention, its so-called “Autopoiesis”. If reality is both a computer (but not as we know it) and a system with a global consciousness that integrates information and a global brain that spawns new combinations of information and if these processes take place at each and every level of existence, then perhaps reality is what we might call a process of “Pancomputational Panpsychism”.

This is my intuitive intelligence algorithm for you: Sense, Feel, Integrate, Spawn and Steem!

If you liked this post, please upvote and/or resteem.

If you really liked what I wrote very much then you might be interested in reading my book or my blog. If you like my speculation in this article, then you will certainly like my upcoming book that I will publish this month on “Transcendental Metaphysics”.

Image source of the bacterial colony on top: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_IQ_score_of_bacteria  

By Antonin Tuynman a.k.a. Technovedanta. Copyright 2016.