Digital Life-Form™ Simulation Technology Architecture

Our proactive, layered, and relational simulation technology architecture is to the robot what a "window" operating system is to the PC. The modern window operating system design is what makes computers much more useable than they were with only a command line interface, at least for most people. Our simulation technology architecture does something similar for robots, androids, and computer systems that act like robots. Blue Oak technology is designed to enable robots and androids to interact with the world and their users more like people do.

Most computer literate business people would agree that a Star Trek™* like computer or "Mr. Data-like" android would be a valuable technology to have, and that it would form the basis for a very profitable business, as well as have many scientific and educational uses. While it is not possible for computers to be conscious in the exact same way as biological life-forms, a simulation system that mimics the teleological (goal-directed) actions of a life-form and the relational, non-numeric, integrational nature of consciousness would be a huge improvement over today's script or manually controlled robots for many situations. For example, a proactive, goal-directed, relational simulation system would help a robot or android "identify" and interact with everyday objects in ways that would simulate more aspects of human conscious action than is currently possible using state of the art designs, and would be much more realistic. Just as some of the newest humanoid robots mimic some aspects of human form and behavior better than their predecessors, a goal-directed robot or android with a relational simulated consciousness that could "see" or perceive the world as inter-related objects at the human scale (rather than bitmaps), would be better able to mimic human-like consciousness.

Unfortunately, state of the art Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Artificial Life (AL) software does not work the way it does on Star Trek, even after many years of attempts to make it work that way. More advanced human interfaces that use ordinary or so called "natural" human language have been the "holy grail" of the Artificial Intelligence community for over 30 years. To date, however, the successes of making computer systems and their interfaces seem human-like because they can communicate verbally have been very limited. At Blue Oak, we believe that part of the reason is some confusion about how natural human language works on the part of our competitors, and other people who design the current state of the art systems. We believe this situation is the consequence of too much emphasis on the analysis of the mechanics of language itself and on computer technology, and not enough emphasis on the observation of how life-forms actually operate in the world, on the identity of perceptual consciousness itself as a biological process of identification at the human size and time scale, and especially on how people form concepts and then use concepts to make premises (simple sentences). If they did so, reserachers would discover that language is not about communication first, but rather, it is about thinking first, and communication second. Nor has state of the art Artificial Life (AL) been much more successful than AI in simulating consciousness, except as cartoon characters for human audiences. The alternative technologies of state of the art Artificial Life software to AI technologies have not yet produced practical solutions of simulated life-forms that are "conscious" from their own internal perspective the way real animals are at human size and time scales, instead of bitmaps. State of the art AL technologies digitally and mechanically can simulate only low level animal functions such as sensation and locomotion in robots, groups of imaginary animals interacting to carry out virtual biological experiments, or the simulation of entire virtual ecosystems based on some biological model. Extant AL technology does not simulate goal-directed, conscious behavior as it is observed to operate in individual animals and people, except superficially for human entertainment purposes. But these systems are nothing more than computer-generated puppet shows. AL systems are not designed to simulate an intelligent entity that is capable of independent, rational action to accomplish its own goals in a purposeful way from its own perspective of its own relationship to reality.

Most AI and AL researchers base their work on the assumption that all of consciousness is "located" or confined only in the brain, and that consciousness is a complex but mechanistic process, a process that is essentially mathematical and computational in its nature, even as it exists in animal and human brains. It is also assumed that the entire process of consciousness exists and operates only in the brain. This assumed process is then mathmaticized into an algorithm to run on a computer or robot to recreate at least some images or other data from reality inside the brain in digital form, and then the algorithm processes these images and related data as some form of computational information.

However, there is strong evidence to contradict this assumption. There is strong evidence that this assumption is dead wrong.

Approximately 50 years ago philosopher Ayn Rand discovered that consciousness is in its essence a relational process of identification between Man and reality, a relational process capable of causation because it is an integral part of the animal body. In more recent times, U. C. Berkeley philosopher Alva Noe, and others researching consciousness have discovered based on newer scientific research that consciousness is in fact, active, causal. And most importantly, these researchers have also concluded that: Consciousness is relational. Though apparently not yet well known in AI and AL circles, this view is a breakthrough compared to past ideas and theories about consciousness because it means that the process of awareness is not just a thing, like a computer algorithm or a neural network, and that consciousness is not confined to the brain alone. Consciousness in animals and people IS their action-based relationships with the world they live in . Noe has explained this idea quite well and in some detail in his book Out of Our Heads , published in 2009. Noe bases his conclusions on the ground breaking work in sense perception research of J.J. Gibson and others. The result of his conclusions is a whole new perspective and understanding of what consciousness is and how it works. In 2011 Raymond Tallis published his book Aping Mankind in which he demolishes the idea that consciousness is "located" only in the brain. He also cites Alva Noe as one of the few authors who grasp this fact. In other words there are now a growing number of intellectuals, Noe, Tallis, Rand, and a number of other philosophers such as Dr. Leonard Peikoff and Dr. Harry Binswanger, along with experimental psychologists like Gibson conclude that the essence of consciousness IS the relationships between a self-generated, self-sustaining, self-regulating life-form and the world it lives in. This is a revolution in thinking that means that consciousness is not only in the brain (animal or human), but rather that consciousness is a biological, causal life-process that is an emergent property between the brain-body of a life-form and the physical world in which a life-form acts to cause its own future survival. The full context of this relationship must be taken into account in order to properly understand how consciousness works in life-forms because it is in essence, part of the life process itself, or so argue scientists like Gibson and others who have done extensive experimentation in this area over a period of many years. Consciousness is therefore biological, not mechanical. In fact, Gibson goes so far as to say that technology concepts such as "image," "sensory channel," "information," and so on should not even be used to discuss the process of consciousness because consciousness does not process "image information" that comes through "sensory channels," and consciousness is not "information processed" by some brain algorithm. Those terms describe what video cameras and computers do, but those are machines, not life-forms. What life-forms do is biological and fundamentally different. Eyes are not video cameras and the brain is not a computer.

If what Rand, Peikoff, Binswanger, Noe, Gibson, and others have identified is the case with perceptual consciousness in animals and people, then it stands to reason that the designers of simulations of consciousness intended to improve the capabilities of robots and androids must take these facts into account as well, and not simply ignore them as most people in AI and AL have done so far. In other words, in order to simulate consciousness in robots or androids, the simulation system must simulate most of the same relationships too, that is, most of the same relationships that are pro-actively formed by real life-forms with the world they live in. In the context of the relationship between the simulation system and reality, the simulation system must be designed to pro-actively form similar relationships to the ones that animals and people form with the objects around them that they interact with, and that must happen at the same size and time scale as for animals and humans, not at the scale of bitmaps. Then, once "brain-body-action-in-world-sense-perception" relationships similar to those of animals and people are operational in a robot or android simulation system, simulated consciousness is also operational for that robot or android precisely because the robot or android has made similar relationships to its world that animals and people have made to theirs. It is not sufficient merely to build neural networks and write software, though that is certainly a necessary part of creating a simulation of this kind. The simulation of consciousness at the perceptual level IS the process of forming such relationships, of making it possible by design for a robot or android as a complete integrated entity to establish its own relationships with the world in which it must "live" its simulated "life." Simulated consciousness IS the process of forming and using the relationships the system forms with reality. Simulated consciousness is not the software in its simulated neural network brain.

It is important to be absolutely clear that we at Blue Oak do not believe that perceptual consciousness is either mathematical or computational. That is a key differentiator for the ideas and technology architectures of Blue Oak from those of our competitors. To paraphrase the notes** of the author of this website taken in a lecture by Dr. Leonard Peikoff on the topic of logical induction: "Consciousness is not physical. It is relational, a perspective, so not susceptible to numbers or numerology. Consciousness is a causal, integrating faculty that is not a blender. Consciousness is a biological process of identification that is not mathematicizible. Thoughts do not exist in degrees, only either/or, and cannot be reduced to a brain algorithm. Conscious states are not entities, only awareness of entities. Only the content of perceptual consciousness is measured, and then only by comparison, by relative measurements of "this" as compared to "that," bigger than, smaller than, and so on."

It is also important to be absolutely clear on precisely what we mean by "identification." To continue paraphrasing from the same lecture by Dr. Peikoff: "Identification is a goal-directed process of building and validating relationships. Consciousness is a relationship building engine." This is what the process of consciousness does, and it is not what state of the art AI and AL systems do. This is what Blue Oak has specified in our patents and other intellectual property, and this is what our technology architectures will simulate when they are fully developed. Our technology is designed to simulate the way animals and people build and use relationships with reality to cause their own future survival.

Blue Oak is designing and developing the worlds first artificial "relationship building engine" that is modeled on the complex causality of the goal-directed action of life-forms.

Given the foregoing, it is crucial to grasp that Blue Oak technology is entirely based on the idea that consciousness is pro-active, causal, and relational, and this is why we believe Blue Oak technology can succeed in simulating consciousness for robots and androids where other state of the art designs have not. We will succeed because unlike all known competitors, Blue Oak is apparently the only simulation development company with a clear, objective definition and understanding of the complex causality of goal-directed action and the relational nature of consciousness, and also the only company with a detailed, patented design for how to simulate it. In fact, this is precisely the reason why our RICX Perceptual Simulation Technology™ is designed to simulate sense perception at the scale of physical 3D objects, instead of at the bitmap scale as state of the art robots and computers do, and why our design's focus is identification, not image recreation or statistical analysis in computer's memory. We chose this scale because that is the scale of size and time at which animals and people causally interact with the world with their perceptual consciousness, identifying and building relationships in the process. So far, the only real, operating source of 3D object level sense perception is the animal mind, but our patent pending new technology will change that.

In fact, there is no technology that can functionally mimic goal-directed behavior, the sense perception of real world objects as sensed by animals and people to identify them, originate independent actions, or think and communicate using ordinary human, Natural Languages (NL) such as English, French, Arabic, Spanish, German, Japanese, Russian, and so on. Until now, that is.

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Note: See our RICX Perceptual Simulation and DLF Simulation technology architecture white papers for details. These two white papers summarize the new approach and theory we offer as solutions to long standing problems in the fields of AI and AL. Also see our white paper: An Inductive, Biological Approach to NL and Math . This paper explains the new approach to logical induction that DLF Technology utilizes and depends on.

You may also take advantage of our FREE BOOK offer below for additional details about how robots, androids, and computer systems can be used to simulate consciousness more effectively than is possible with state of the art designs. Our book describes and explains many ideas and principles that are new to AL. Our book also provides an extensive list of references and supporting documentation and research.

One other key point: At Blue Oak we freely admit we do not yet know to what degree consciousness and the more complex, conditional, goal-directed causality of life can be simulated using mechanistic computer and robot platforms. But since biology itself also "runs" on or is animated by the mechanistic "platform" of chemistry and physics causality, we believe it is possible to substitute the mechanistic platform of computer and robot systems for the chemistry and physics mechanistic causal layer in the system architecture, in order to animate a reasonable simulation of life and consciousness. Of course, this will only work if the layers of life processes are also simulated properly as well, as we have explained above and other places in our documentation. It is absolutely esssential that a simulated life-form can create its own relationships to reality that are similar to those that animals and people form, or the simulation system will not work. This latter idea is key to our whole enterprize: Consciousness is an unanalyzeable, non-mechanistic state of awareness, a natural subject/object relationship that state of the art computer systems and robots simply do not have, but that biolological organism do have. And that is what our technology duplicates.

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The goal of DLF Simulation Technology™ is to replace or assist people where it is necessary and practical to do so with robots, androids, or computer systems running simulations of virtual androids. DLF technology is a general architecture that simulates life-like, goal-directed behavior and human consciousness as a relational identification process in order to offer other solutions in situations where using people does not make sense (or to assist people working in difficult situations). State of the art AI and AL systems are not teleological (goal-directed), whereas DLF™ technology is a new kind of software architecture that is. This means that DLF Simulation Technology is a hybrid system. DLF technology is AL technology with simulated goal-directed, relationship building and relationship use actions, simulated free-will, methodical concept formation, and simulated logical induction added to it to make the technology more accurately reflect what real life-forms do. RICX Perceptual Simulation technology adds simulated sense perception (non-numeric version of relationship building and relationship use actions) to this list of features to provide the data that DLF Simulation Technology processes, to provide the simulated life-form with its direct, observational access to reality.

The DLF technology architecture can be designed, for example, to be an interface persona that is focused specifically on simulating an intelligent assistant to become part of a computer operating system, a robot or android, a computer game, a web bot or to control military and security systems. Or, the technology can be designed to be any other kind of persona a user finds necessary. At Blue Oak, we believe that the simulation of life-like functions can be achieved to only a very limited degree by human programmers. This is because they must attempt to anticipate every fact and action capacity a system will ever need. Such a task is obviously not possible to complete successfully. In fact, that is why real life-forms do not work in this way. In biology, if you are not successful, you are dead and no longer exist. Yet biological life does exist, and it functions much more effectively than machines do, and life-forms do so without human help. The fact is that no one "programs" biological life-forms, yet they exist, survive, and act independent of human desires, technologies, and purposes quite effectively and have done so for millions of years. Our premise at Blue Oak is that to be as effective and useful as biological life, life-form simulation systems must more closely mimic what real life-forms do than what state of the art computers do. These new AL systems must learn about reality for themselves---directly, not from programmers, who can only pre-arrange the overall design for the systems they are designing, necessarily without sufficient knowledge. Digital Life-Forms or DLFs must program themselves for the purpose of earning their own survival and do so from their own internal perspective (though they do so within the design parameters our programmers provide). They will do so by pro-actively forming their own relationships with the world in which they act.

DLF Technology is not the same as human consciousness, but merely a new way to think about consciousness (as relational) and a new technical design to simulate it. A Digital Life-Form mimics the form of some human conscious functions and relationships with the same world people intereact with, just as a department store mannequin mimics the human physical form in the scenes in the store windows. Only biological life-forms are really (biologically) conscious, but a computer simulation system that is programmed to mimic the goal-directed and the identification behaviors of life-forms as it interacts with reality to build its own relationships firsthand can mimic certain aspects of life and consciousness, and do so better than state of the art designs. You can think of DLF Technology as reality-based computing (as opposed to the "arbitrary computing" found in state of the art computer systems or AI systems). In state of the art systems, human programmers have attempted to anticipate everything in their programs. Since this is impossible, the result is necessarily arbitrary in the full context of real, biological life. Only a few kinds of systems such as neural networks and some genetic algorithms interact directly with reality, and those do so in very limited ways. We are offering more ways with our designs, new ways.

This is an important distinction. Part of the reason for the limited success of AI is that there is a widespread misconception in our culture that sufficiently advanced AI computer systems can somehow become conscious on their own the way some life-forms have. And having done so, then somehow learn to use language like people do to communicate with us, if only the right kind of computer program could be written. This view has been put forth in many popular science fiction stories and movies, but it is just plain false.

State of the art computer systems are not alive, cannot be conscious in the same way as biological life is, and computer programs certainly cannot think, only their programmers can think. Computer programs simply operate like falling dominos, mostly using data made up arbitrarily by programmers or pulled from users for their content (and stored in files). If reality is sensed at all by these kinds of systems, the data that results are used just like the rest of the arbitrary data in the system because its context and other relationships to reality are lost in the process (or were never formed), the identity information about reality it contains is not conserved. Relationship data that may have been sensed in reality by state of the art systems and stored in bitmaps is not used for identification of reality by the computer system sensing it. And even if it was used, the data would not work because extant designs do not allow for data to be used from the perspective of that computer system itself to cause its own goals to become a reality.

Strictly speaking, computers do not even calculate. State of the art computers are just machines, electromechanical automatons that change the electrical properties in their components ("memories"), parts of which represent "1" and "0" bit values. Computers change their bits and the output of their display mechanisms according to the laws of physics, mathematics, computer science, and what people type into them. But these bit values, and all the programming that is built on them, only have meaning to people, not to the computers themselves from their own perspective . State of the art computers and robots do not have the same relationships to the world that animals and people do, more importantly, they do not have their own relationships to reality. So it should not be a surprise that they cannot do the same things. Identity determines action capacity.

Only consciousness as the relational identification process that is observed in humans can calculate. Consciousness is an an active, relational process of interaction with reality and for the identification of reality as explained above. Consciousness is a process that is an attribute of biological entities, such as some kinds of animals and people. Of all life-forms, only people can calculate because only people possess the kind of consciousness that has that ability as part of its identity, and therefore its action capacity. Only people possess a consciousness with freewill that can perceive objects and count objects in reality selectively, that can choose to focus on some of the objects' attributes and ignore others, form concepts of objects and of numbers, eventually abstract the principles of mathematics, and then inductively use those principles to attain human goals---such as building computer systems to automate human calculation abilities.

If computer systems are to interact with humans using natural language in other than a preprogrammed, predetermined way like state of the art systems do, they must be designed to sense and use reality-based data (as opposed to arbitrary data), and both consciousness and concept formation must be simulated as active, relational processes in order to enable the functionality of this type of robot or android interface. Since consciousness is an attribute of life-forms, the conditional nature of life processes must also be simulated to functionally enable the consciousness simulation and provide it with the simulated motivation and the means to act in reality. Otherwise, the simulation system cannot operate in a realistic manner to initiate real causes and build real relationships in the world, which means it cannot operate at all. The conditional nature of life processes is what provides biological life-forms with the motivation and independent ability to act, to initiate causes in the world, to do what they need to do in order to cause their own future survival, and to do so continuously or cease to exist physically. In other words, for a life-form, failure is not an option! Any realistic simulation of consciousness must operate the same way.

Working from these premises, Blue Oak has developed and patented two radical new Artificial Life simulation technology architectures as described, two new kinds of simulation systems to simulate some of the unique aspects of life-forms, including many of their conscious behaviors, such as sense perception, freewill, concept formation, and the use of natural language.

Our new technologies simulate goal-directed behavior, sense perception, freewill, concept formation, and logical induction to form premises as relational processes with the world outside the robot or android , as opposed to the simple mechanistic behavior found in state of the art AI and AL systems. They do so by emulating the conditional nature and more complex causality that makes life what it is. They emulate the relational nature of consciousness as the pro-active, relational process of identification that is observed in real life-forms. These are not simple mechanistic processes, but complex causal, relational, mathematical, processes that are new to the field.

The thrust of DLF Technology is to create simulated Digital Life-Forms (or DLFs for short) which, while based on and animated by the mechanistic automatons of a state of the art computer system, simulate the more complex causality of conditional, goal-directed, self-generated, self-sustaining behaviors identified with biological life-forms. These behaviors depend on continuous action just as they do in real life-forms. (Dead life-forms cannot act.)

DLF Technology will make possible a wide variety of simulated life-forms of many types, as well as make possible improved natural language interfaces for computer systems, enable animated virtual reality characters to communicate with people and each other, enable robots to engage in more independent behavior than is possible today, and lead to more powerful digital assistants that are much more flexible than those available now.

While this all sounds complex, it is really just the identification of objects in the world by the simulation system, the things the system "sees" from its own perspective just like the things we all see everyday. The things the system "sees" are in a new form that is calculated in new ways in order to identify relationships similar to those people identify, and thereby make recognition and other higher level processing more efficient. This approach also makes the system's simulated "experience" (its simulated percepts and concepts) more similar to a human experience, so what it "sees" matches more closely to what a person sees in size and time scales (from the system's own perspective). Finally, much of what is needed to simulate the higher level functions of consciousness, such as concept formation, logical induction, and natural language, can be easily calculated by processing the large numbers of simulated percepts a DLF system will build up through its RICX technology perception system as it explores the world with the aid of a human tutor.

In the near future, DLF and RICX simulation technology architectures will do for today's tiny computers and other products that contain them (such as robots and androids), much more than what the windowing interfaces did to improve computers with command line interfaces. Though the technology sounds complex when you first read about it, it is actually quite simple, easy to understand, straight forward to develop, platform independent, scalable, and relatively inexpensive to make into a developers kit for companies to use to make specialized products. For example, think of scientific or medical instruments or special purpose robots and androids that are self-motivated, can see and identify the same objects we all can, use logic and ordinary simple sentence language to communicate about the objects, and are capable of self-generated, self-sustaining actions to achieve goals relating to those objects. Or, think of a virtual reality world in which simulated personalities in avatars behave like independent people, instead of or in addition to todays avatars that are only of real people. Or think about having your own personal android. Think of the educational benefits of being able to monitor the logic of your personal android as you step through its "thoughts" like a computer programmer might step through program instructions one by one while debugging. You will be able to disect your personal androids thinking like you can disect a video, frame by frame, and learn how thinking really works. Think of children teaching their personal androids new skills, then looking at the mental consequences as the android is learning its "life's lessons." All of these examples and many more will be possible with DLF and RICX Technology Architectures once they are more fully developed, just as happened with personal computers, PDAs, and cell phones.

In addition, there are two other emerging markets for Blue Oak technology that may surprise you. One market is the Semantic Web, which depends on ontologies to work. That is, hierarchies of Web objects structured according to the ways humans usually use them so as to store their known relationships and thereby be better able to anticipate users' needs. Today, the object hierarchies the Semantic Web needs must all be hand programmed with tools like Owl (see Google or wikipedia). Imagine if we could use Web “bots” (software robots) to speed the day when the Semantic Web is a reality by assisting the human programmers who are working in this area. We believe DLF robots could do a large part of that work to at very least, semi-automate the building of the Semantic Web. When it is a reality, this new Internet will be able to anticipate what you want, or even ask you intelligent questions to help you find it.

Another market is improving huge organizations. Many large corporations and other organizations have realized that if they could capture and reuse the wealth of conceptual knowledge that is locked in the minds of their employees, then they could save billions of dollars in new software development and quality management system development, not to mention product development and many other areas of their businesses. Blue Oak has also been working in this new field of computational epistemology in order to discover easier ways to capture and conserve business knowledge that is now routinely lost. Computers with the added capability so that they can simulate consciousness will make knowledge capture and reuse much faster and easier. Such systems will use virtual DLF androids to work quietly in the background much of the time, after being tutored by human experts, and then by requesting on-going interactive sessions with human experts as necessary.

For example, much of the insurance industry is switching to the popular Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) that is heavily promoted by IBM for its IT systems and product development systems. Object and service oriented systems lend themselves very well to methodical simulation of human conscious functions by virtual robots that can operate in the background to organize and store business conceptual knowledge for reuse. Today, literally billions of dollars worth of the conceptual knowledge and other know-how that businesses depend on for successful, profitable operation exists only in the minds of employees and contractors, and much of it is lost as people change jobs. Only the bare minimum of that knowledge gets transferred to new employees. One of the business objectives of Blue Oak is to help our licensees use computational epistemology and consciousness simulation systems to help them ensure less of this valuable resource is lost when people change jobs and companies reorganize.

You can read more about how business knowledge capture, storage, and reuse can be accomplished in our white paper on Business Knowledge Engineering™. 

To Read Our Free Book On-line

Our free book describing how Digital Life-Form technology works and how to build your own consciousness simulator is now available at this web site for on-line reading:

How to Simulate Consciousness Using a Computer System

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You may: Download Your Own Copy of Our Free Book

 

To License Our Technology

If you wish to apply for a license or have questions about our patented DLF technology, please mailto:greg@blueoakmountaintech.com, and we will reply to you as soon as possible. Please include your Name, address, phone number, title and organization (if any), and your interest in the technology, such as education, scientific research, product development, and so on.

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© Copyright 1998 - 2012, Blue Oak Mountain Technologies, Inc. All Rights Reserved

* STAR TREK and related marks are trademarks of Paramount Pictures Corporation.

** Notes taked at the lecture: Induction in Physics and Philosophy , Dr. Leonard Peikoff, copyright 2003, available at the AynRandBookstore.com