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Hackers and the brain...

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A

Aetherius Rimor

Rising Star
So, brief history of myself before I go into this. I've been practicing/learning software development since I was 14, and it's been my career for the past 6 years.

The first 3 years of which, I was writing artificial intelligence without even realizing it. Actually called it automation on my resume, since I was unaware that artificial intelligence doesn't require learning, simply automated decision making based on inputs. Been taking an AI class offered by Stanford and realized I knew far more than I thought I did.

I started learning in the open source hacker communities back in my teenage years. The way we learned to hack something, was by reverse engineering it in any way possible, then using our knowledge of a software system's inner workings to our advantage.

Reverse engineering was the process of feeding inputs, observing outputs, and modifying the inputs in ways unintended to get unintended outputs hoping for something to suit our needs.

Our end goal sometimes was just a fuller understanding of the underlying system, and other times to do something mischievous/humorous or in the more malevolent sense at times, harmful/self-promoting.

Over the past year, I've started experimenting with psychoactive substances of all types. Been called a psychonaut by some friends. I've started reading books, and finally decided I want to go back to school for Cognitive Science specializing in artificial intelligence/psychopharmacology.

Two things have been highly influential in this decision, LSD and a book I've been reading called Psychedelic Information Theory, which attempts to explain a model of consciousness through a modular system.

Experimenting with LSD, and applying this book's theory, it has been possible for me to visualize the human brain programmatically in such a way that I believe I could implement it in software given time. LSD has allowed me to do what I did as a hacker, provoke my underlying system to with unexpected inputs and being able to observe the outputs.

I've started to essentially reverse engineer my brain in the same manner proven effective in reverse engineering software.

My question, for those who have been in this academic field, or just culture longer...

How many people, attempting to explain the science behind the brain, come from a background with the hacker mentality? I know I can't be unique, but everything I've read, nothing seems to be from a standpoint of reverse engineering the brain as a hacker would software.

My ultimate goal, is to use psychoactive substances, to explore the mechanical implementation of the brain to come up with a model I can use to implement it's functionalities in software.

I know this can't be too novel? Is there anyone else out there trying to do this? Who are they if they're publically known? I want to find other people with my mindset and abilities I can work with.

I hope I do not suffer from any sort of delusions of grandeur, but I truly believe that this is possible even if I'm on my own... I'd just prefer to find others with similar goals and aspirations.

Figured this would be a great place to ask, thanks.
 
spent 20 years figuring out new, creative, and often insane ways of rewiring my mind to ensure a more objective perception of reality. Bineural beats, floatation tanks, sweat lodge also work well. In essence study carl jung learn the archetypes etc... and then get into technoshamanism.
 
there was a time people thought the world was flat.. nothing is impossible.. passion for something has a way to breaking down the walls... but what would be the end result?
 
I find the idea of artificial intelligence fascinating, but most of all scary as hell. We wouldn´t want computers to start thinking for us.

What would be left of us if we´d degrade ourselves to mere consumers?
 
Very interesting!

I also looked up the page I was talking about in the chat: Uncoiling the spiral: Maths and hallucinations

plus.maths.org said:
Think drug-induced hallucinations, and the whirly, spirally, tunnel-vision-like patterns of psychedelic imagery immediately spring to mind. But it's not just hallucinogenic drugs like LSD, cannabis or mescaline that conjure up these geometric structures. People have reported seeing them in near-death experiences, as a result of disorders like epilepsy and schizophrenia, following sensory deprivation, or even just after applying pressure to the eyeballs. So common are these geometric hallucinations, that in the last century scientists began asking themselves if they couldn't tell us something fundamental about how our brains are wired up. And it seems that they can.
Click to expand...
simulation.jpg

"Computer generated representations of form constants.
The top two images represent a funnel and a spiral as seen after taking LSD,
the bottom left image is a honeycomb generated by marijuana,
and the bottom right image is a cobweb"

I am looking forward to your progress.


Kind regards,

The Traveler
 
Cool article indeed.

I would be interested to see if other than purely visual phenomena could also be mapped this way. I think they could, but you would probably first have to have a model of the mathematical structure of for instance, a thought or emotion, instead of translating straight from a visual image, to the brain.
 
I wrote in my notes a theory on the time dialation (and in some cases, time going in reverse) perception.

Assuming your memory is a data stream of memory objects, one of the variables in these objects I believe is along the lines of "Relative time since last memory".

So you have the following stream of events during normal cognitive function:

1. Memory A, relative time since last event (RTSLE) irrelevant (this is state 0), look at clock, it's 5:30pm
2. Memory B, RTSLE 5 minutes. Look at clock, it's 5:35.
3. Memory C, RTSLE 5 minutes. Look at clock it's 5:40

Now when normal cognitive function is dirupted, the memory stream above, could end up like this instead:

1. Memory A, RTSLE irrelevant, look at clock, it's 5:30pm
2. Memory B, RTSLE 10 minutes (data corruption, was supposed to be 5), look at clock it's 5:35
3. Memory C, RTSLE 20 minutes (data corruption again), look at clock it's 5:40

The time perception "module" of the brain, looks at these stream of events and sees it as time is going really slow.

Another possible disruption, leading to time going in reverse (relative time since last memory irrelevant here)

1. Memory A, look at clock, it's 5:48 pm
2. Memory B, look at clock, and it's 5:53, but due to math/perception error, you note that "25 minutes has passed"
3. Memory C, look at clock, and it's 6:00. Your memory tells you that your last memory was 25 minutes after 5:48, so your last memory happend at 6:13... but now it's 6:00. Time just went in reverse.
 
Highly fascinating!

I don't know what kind of role the mysterious "consciousness" plays in all of this, and what are the limits of AI, but I think that self experimentation as you are doing, and given your programming/hacker mentality, at the very least a lot of very insightful ideas and experiments can come out of this.

Unfortunately I dont know how to contribute to these ideas much, but I would be very interested to read more about your experiments and the ideas and thoughts that go through your mind.

Also maybe one way we could help is if you devise certain self-experiments, that different members can do, and then we can share the results and see how reliable the results are, or if they are highly dependent on individuals.
 
Hacking into your own brain and rewiring it? Sounds like some fascinating and possibly groundbreaking work. Have you been able to do any reprogramming yet?

I can't say I can be of any help, but I do have a hunch that this pursuit is a bottomless rabbit hole. I'm sure there will be loads of cool things you'll be able to reverse engineer at each level as your learning grows, and the thought of what's possible with that excites me. But I think it's like any other research(quantum physics comes to mind), where the closer you get to the core "program", the more complex, mysterious, paradoxical and magical it gets. A very worthy pursuit, and probably an endless one. Good luck, and godspeed. You've got the kind of strange, smart, and inventive mind that can probably do anything it seeks to accomplish.
 
Wow Aetherius, your ideas have an enormous potential. this is quite a revolutionary way of thinking about mapping the human mind...very fascinating, and mind-blowing stuff. I can't directly help you in this endeavor of yours, but i support and encourage your enthusiasm towards this field of study. best of luck bud!!:d looking forward to reading your future posts and progress in this subject. take care<3
 
Interesting ideas

i'm pretty sure my old cognitive science professors are in a similar boat as you are in some respects (they're total closet hippies :p lol )

I didn't go the AI route in cog sci but its a fascinating area. I'm sure if you keep at what your doing you'll hook up with like-minds. They're definitely out there
 
Shamasi Wiz said:
Hacking into your own brain and rewiring it?
Click to expand...

My goal is not to manipulate the human brain, merely to put it into "non-normal" operating modes to deduce and map out it's inner functionality.

Was reading an article awhile back (a rebuttal to the Chinese Machine AI argument) that was talking about Tensor equations.

Here is the source: Artificial Intelligence

But the TLDR

A part of the human brain is capable of peforming the complex mathmatical formulas to take arcs, velocity, gravity all into account to predict the location of an object thrown, to determine where to place your hand to catch it.

Tensor equation is the underlying formula to compute that. You can unconciously compute these formulas, but you can not conciously without great effort (it's college level trig I -think-?) Tensor - Wikipedia



Finding out what other things our mind is doing without us realizing, and figuring out the math behind it, and figuring out the logic structures implementing it, is my goal.
 
Aetherius Rimor said:
My goal is not to manipulate the human brain, merely to put it into "non-normal" operating modes to deduce and map out it's inner functionality.
...
Finding out what other things our mind is doing without us realizing, and figuring out the math behind it, and figuring out the logic structures implementing it, is my goal.
Click to expand...

The work of figuring out the brain's logic structures and mapping out its inner functionality obviously lends itself to manipulating different pieces of the puzzle for improvement, enhancement. You want to leave the tinkering part to others?
 
Shamasi Wiz said:
The work of figuring out the brain's logic structures and mapping out its inner functionality obviously lends itself to manipulating different pieces of the puzzle for improvement, enhancement. You want to leave the tinkering part to others?
Click to expand...

What I mean is, my goal is not to discover or attempt behavior modification, therapy, or other manipulation with anything other than temporary effects.

Obviously psychiatrists/psychologists/neuroscientists in general see a use for psychoactive drugs in those endeavors, but those are not my end goals.

However, if I can do what I intend to properly (again, looking forward 10 to 20 years, after further education/research), the idea is to create a software model of the brain, that can be used in AI, but also in simulations of drug induced states, thereby removing the necessity for human trials of unknown compounds or when testing potentially dangerous ones.

Psuedocode example of this simulation of a type of experiment someone could run after configuring the starting parameters, using an idea from another thread I posted:

Code: 
enum MeasurementUnit
{
    Microgram = 1,
    Milligram = 2,
}

enum RouteOfAdmission
{
    Oral = 1,
    Insufflation = 2,
    Intravenous = 3,
    Intramuscular = 4,
}

class Compound
{
    const Acetylcarnitine= "C9H17NO4";
    const LSD = "C20H25N3O";
}

class Brain
{
    public function InsertCompound(string formula, RouteOfAdmission roa, MeasurementUnit unit, int amount)
    {
        // Interesting code here.
    }
}

// First test
testBrain.InsertCompound(Compounds.Acetylcarnitine, RouteOfAdmission.Oral, MeasurementUnit.Milligram, 500);
Thread.Sleep(1000 * 60 * 60); // Wait 1 hour
testBrain.InsertCompound(Compound.LSD, RouteOfAdmission.Intravenous, MeasurementUnit.Microgram, 250);

// Second test
testBrain.Reset();
testBrain.InsertCompound(Compounds.Acetylcarnitine, RouteOfAdmission.Oral, MeasurementUnit.Milligram, 500);
Thread.Sleep(1000 * 60 * 60 * 5); // Wait 5 hours
testBrain.InsertCompound(Compound.LSD, RouteOfAdmission.Intravenous, MeasurementUnit.Microgram, 250);


And then this hypothetical program would have other threads monitoring the state and recording all the changes as they happen. Then after both tests are run, compare the results to see which is the better course should this be seen as worthwhile to explore further in animal/human research.

Obviously this code is over simplified, but the concept should be clear.
 
Aetherius Rimor said:
Obviously this code is over simplified, but the concept should be clear.
Click to expand...

Very oversimplified if you ask me.

It seems to me a good idea, but it also seems that you are basing the development of this theoretical AI project on the advances of practical Neuroscience experiments?

Don't get me wrong, I love this idea you are bringing up... I'm just not getting these whole AI code thing yet.

2 suggestions:

1. Read some of Vovin's experiments... I think he is the closest thing to a brain hacker around the Nexus.

2. Maybe read some of Franz X. Vollenweider work about Neuronal Networks and Neurotransmitter dynamics underlying Altered States of Consciousness. He is a neuroscientist that works with psychedelic substances in the Heffter Research Institute of Zurich.

[YOUTUBE]
[/YOUTUBE]

P.S. I like your ideas.

Cheers.
 
clouds said:
Aetherius Rimor said:
Obviously this code is over simplified, but the concept should be clear.
Click to expand...

Very oversimplified if you ask me.
Click to expand...

Yep, long ways to go, and I won't guess at an underlying structure until I have a more firm grasp on current knowledge base out there.

clouds said:
It seems to me a good idea, but it also seems that you are basing the development of this theoretical AI project on the advances of practical Neuroscience experiments?

Don't get me wrong, I love this idea you are bringing up... I'm just not getting these whole AI code thing yet.
Click to expand...

I only really have one goal, figure out how my brain works and translate that functionality to a language I can understand/experiment with (software).

What the result of my goal is used for, I could care less about honestly, but I know it could have many useful applications.

The easiest way to test the functionality of a software translation of the human brain, is as a form of AI. Sure it won't be nearly as efficient as specifically targeted AI programs, but it will suit my purposes just fine.
 
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