Computer
The Living Computer
By Desmond Yeoh
Reproduced from the ebook ‘Candles of Celebration’ available for free download on www.kriyayogamalaysia.org)
Imagine that you have just created an ‘artificial intelligence’ computer program that enables a computer to gather knowledge through its own experience. Over time, the computer will have more and more knowledge and is able to make decisions and conclusions based on that knowledge. It does so by associating its current experience with the memory it has accumulated in its database. For example, in its database, it has information that cancer is usually fatal. When someone tells it that he is suffering from cancer, the computer will conclude that the person must be feeling sad and responds with sympathy. It decides on what is good or bad based on the same method of association.
After 10 years, you tell the computer that its parts are no longer functioning and needs to be shut down. The computer, through its experience, has learnt about death. It begs you not to shut it down as it does not want to die. You then tell the computer that it is not the ‘mind’ and ‘hardware’ but the intelligence (software) that enabled it to gather the experience. It is just using the hardware temporarily to interact with the world. Pretty soon, you will load the intelligence (software) into a new computer and new knowledge and experiences can be gathered. The computer will argue endlessly; How can this be? My name is so and so, and I am an expert in this or that area, and the other computers know me and so on. You tell it that it is not the memory and knowledge that it has accumulated. Its Real Self exists in all computers.
Ceramic Products
It appears that this example is almost real. The following article titled, “New IBM computer chip mimics the human brain” appeared in CNN on 19 August 2011:
Making computers behave like humans has taken another step forward.
IBM on Thursday announced it has created a chip designed to imitate the human brain’s ability to understand its surroundings, act on things that happen around it and make sense of complex data.
Instead of requiring the type of programming that computers have needed for the past half-century, the experimental chip will let a new generation of computers, called “cognitive computers,” learn through their experiences and form their own theories about what those experiences mean.
The chips revealed Thursday are a step in a project called SyNAPSE (Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics). The two chip prototypes are a step toward letting computers “reason” instead of reacting solely based on data that has been pre-programmed, IBM says.
“Imagine traffic lights that can integrate sights, sounds and smells and flag unsafe intersections before disaster happens,” said Dharmendra Modha, the project leader for IBM Research. “Or imagine cognitive co-processors that turn servers, laptops, tablets and phones into machines that can interact better with their environments.”
Other scenarios the researchers envision: A computing system that could monitor the world’s water supply — measuring things like temperature, pressure, wave height and acoustics — then give a warning when it thinks a tsunami is likely.
Or imagine a sensor that a grocery store owner could use to read sights, smells and temperatures and give an alert that produce may have gone bad.
“The computers we have today are more like calculators,” Modha told tech blog VentureBeat. “We want to make something like the brain. It is a sharp departure from the past.”
Let us compare ourselves to this life-like computer. Our body can be compared to the chip. The experiences and data that the computer gathers over time is comparable to our ego. The ego is merely an accumulation of experiences and information. The ‘ego’ of the computer can be downloaded into another computer and for that second computer; it could be called ‘reincarnation’!
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