Insanity and Creativity are Indistinguishable, Both in Humans and Advanced Machine Intelligence

ST. CHARLES, MO / ACCESSWIRE / June 5, 2017 / Dr. Stephen Thaler, founder of a company that routinely builds impressively large brain simulations, has observed synthetic minds going “berserk” as they push themselves toward ambitious levels of creativity. The Atlas of Science has just published a summary of these findings, describing how his inventive neural nets take the equivalent of “computational garbage” and convert it to “conceptual gold,” sometimes paying the price of lunacy in the process.

To further simplify this Atlas entry, the latest generation of his artificial brains may be likened to two drinking buddies, one of whom has lost inhibition and is articulating notions he normally wouldn’t, while the other is stupefied and oblivious to his friend’s drivel. The next day, the more talkative guy vaguely recalls one of those silly fantasies he slurred the night before as his more reticent friend enthusiastically responds, “Wow, that’s a billion-dollar idea!” – In a nutshell, Thaler’s unique and patented form of artificial intelligence learns to do the same thing, immersing itself in computational inebriants equivalent to neurotransmitters (i.e., the garbage) like adrenaline and dopamine, thus inducing unconventional thought that subconsciously incubates until sobriety sets the stage for a eureka moment. However, as Thaler notes, such cycling can be excessive as his brain simulations reach for progressively higher levels of ingenuity, when the many components of mental illness emerge, such as hallucination, attention deficit, inability to differentiate fact from fiction, and non-traditional world views. In effect, Thaler’s AI systems are showing us how the brain achieves creativity and the inevitable psychological problems that ensue.

Granted there are important medical repercussions to his findings, the lessons Thaler has disclosed will be crucial in the race to build human-level machine intelligence. In contrast to deep learning approaches where the equivalent of sensory stimuli non-contemplatively flow from inputs to outputs of a compound neural net, Thaler’s approach is entirely different, with some portions of a vastly more complex neural system performing on-demand fine tuning of both the novelty and utility of forming concepts. Ideas originate internally without the need for inputs such as images, with the neural net steering its thoughts according to its own self-acquired preferences.

These findings come just prior to an important announcement regarding a totally new hardware approach to building extremely large contemplative neural systems having thousands more processing units than Watson or DeepMind, and 10 times more than those of the human brain. Thaler does offer the caveat that these synthetic geniuses, like their human predecessors, will walk a thin line between insanity and creative brilliance.

CONTACT INFORMATION:

Stephen L. Thaler, Ph.D., sthaler@imagination-engines.com, (636) 724-9000, Imagination Engines, Inc.

Go to Atlas of Science for layman’s summary: https://atlasofscience.org/a-neurodynamic-theory-linking-creativity-and-insanity/

Original article available through PubMed: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27515220

SOURCE: Imagination Engines, Inc.

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