Virtual Machines in Philosophy, Engineering & Biology
Aaron Sloman
School of Computer Science
University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK
Last updated: 3 Nov 2008
Keywords
Architecture, causation, implementation, informationprocessing, biology,
philosophy, psychology, robots, selfawareness, self-control,
supervenience, vertical modularity, virtual machine, virtual machine
functionalism .
1.INTRODUCTION
A machine is a complex enduring entity with parts that
interact causally with one another as they change their properties and
relationships. Most machines are also embedded in a complex environment
with which they interact. A virtual machine (VM) has non-physical parts,
relationships, events and processes, such as parse trees, pattern
matching, moves in a game, goals, plans, decisions, predictions,
explanations and proofs.
The concept of a virtual machine, invented in the 20th Century, (not to
be confused with virtual reality) is important (a) for many engineering
applications, (b) for theoretical computer science, (c) for
understanding some of the major products of biological evolution (e.g.
animal minds), and (d) for gaining new insights into several old
philosophical problems, e.g. about the mind-body relationship, about
qualia, and how to analyse concepts of mind by adopting the design
stance in combination with the notion of an information processing
architecture [1,2]. Analysing relations between different sets of
requirements (niches) and designs for meeting the requirements exposes a
space of possible minds (for animals and artifacts), raising new
questions about evolution, about future intelligent machines, and about
how concepts of mind should be understood.
Most philosophers, biologists, psychologists and neuroscientists
completely ignore VMs, despite frequently (unwittingly) using them: e.g.
for email, spreadsheets, text processing, or web-browsing. Academic
philosophers generally ignore or misunderstand the philosophical
significance of VMs (in part because many assume VMs are finite state
machines). Pollock [3] is a rare exception. Dennett often mentions
virtual machines, but claims they are merely a useful fiction [e.g. 4,
note 10]. Events in useful fictions cannot cause email to be sent or
airliners to crash. The idea of a VM can significantly extend our
thinking about problems in several disciplines and pose new problems for
future empirical and philosophical research.
2.WHAT ARE VIRTUAL MACHINES?
The idea of a VM had (at least) four sources (a) the demonstrations of
universality of certain sorts of machine (e.g. a Universal Turing
Machine can implement many other machines as virtual machines), (b)
engineering problems related to sharing scarce resources between
different processes running on one computer, (c) problems of portability
and modularity of code for software systems, and (d) the design of
layers of functionality for transmission networks. The common idea is
that structures and processes can exist and interact in ways that
require physical implementation, where the precise details of the
physical implementation can vary from time to time across machines and
even within one machine. Often VMs are layered, with VM1 implemented in
VM2, implemented in VM3, etc. The existence of causal interactions among
VM events and between VM events and physical events (e.g. events in a
word processor and events on a computer screen) challenges many (all?)
philosophical analyses of supervenience and of causation, but the latter
is a topic for another occasion.
Many issues discussed by philosophers (e.g. issues about how mental
concepts work and about relations between mind and body, such as
supervenience) require adoption of the design stance, using the notion
of a VM in which enduring concurrent non-physical (but physically
implemented) sub-processes interact with one another and with physical
entities. Compare: analyses of concepts like 'iron', 'carbon', 'water',
'rust', 'acidic', 'burning' are much better done using a good theory of
the architecture of matter than simply using pre-scientific ideas.
"Virtual Machine Functionalism" (VMF) denotes a type of functionalism
that refers to virtual machines that contain many concurrent interacting
processes, discrete and continuous, synchronised or asynchronous --
unlike conventional Functionalism, usually explained in terms of a
simple finite state machine. See [1,2] and my 'talks' website for more
details.
3.SELF MONITORING AND CONTROL
A VM provides a level of abstraction that avoids the need for a
designer/maintainer to represent and reason about the vast complexities
of the underlying physical mechanisms (molecular, electronic or neural).
The same features make VMs important for complex systems that monitor
and control themselves: they share some requirements with their
designers!
This design strategy works only if: there is a good (e.g. reliable,
robust, flexible) implementation for the VM, and the VM includes
mechanisms enabling relevant states and processes to be sensed and
modulated (e.g. blocking email from particular addresses). Identifying
requirements for good virtual machines in biological organisms. future
robots, and complex control systems (e.g. chemical plants) is a
multidisciplinary task for philosophers, engineers (including
roboticists), biologists and psychologists.
One requirement is that for organisms reproducing in unpredictably
changing environments, some virtual machines need to grow themselves
partly under the influence of the environment, rather than being fully
specified genetically see [5]. That's how 3-year olds can play
computer games: something none of their ancestors ever did at that age.
Growth of an architecture is different from learning in a fixed
architecture with a uniform learning mechanism. Some new mathematics may
be required to specify such processes.
4.BIOLOGICAL VIRTUAL MACHINES
Conjecture: Biological evolution 'discovered' the importance of virtual
machines long before humans did, and produced many kinds of virtual
machine that we have not yet identified or understood.
In doing that, evolution may well have solved far more design problems
(=engineering problems) than we have so far identified. Examples we
already know about include homeostatic systems, immune systems,
perceptual systems, learning systems, many kinds of monitoring, control
and repair systems, and social systems. Much work still remains to be
done finding out what the problems were, i.e. what the requirements were
against which the designs were evaluated (e.g. by natural selection
mechanisms), and what solutions were found. A better understanding of
the requirements may help to direct more fruitful research into the
designs and mechanisms.
This can be contrasted with current biologically inspired AI/Robotic
research (and some neuropsychology) which often attempts to model
supposed mechanisms without finding out what problems biological designs
actually solved.
In [6] McCarthy discusses conjectures about the problems evolution
solved in producing humans, some of which will also be problems for
intelligent machines.
5.LIMITATIONS OF SUCH SYSTEMS
A consequence of the use of virtual machines, important for philosophy
and psychology, is that self-monitoring systems that use the design
features described above gain practical benefits (from 'vertical'
modularity and reduced complexity of control and monitoring). The price
is inherently limited self-knowledge and self-control, since
implementation details are inaccessible.
These limitations may not matter in most normal conditions (if the
design is good) but things can go badly wrong in abnormal conditions.
This sheds new light on philosophical discussions of qualia, their
ineffability, their causal powers, the alleged impossibility of being
mistaken about them, the nature and limits of introspection, free will,
etc. It can also shed light on some possible types of mental/cognitive
dysfunction caused by injury, disease, genetic abnormalities or even
abuse. In particular it becomes important to distinguish problems with
physical causes from problems that exist at the VM level (like software,
as opposed to hardware, bugs in machines). This can be very difficult to
do. Some genetic abnormalities produce a tangled mixture of hardware
(wetware) and VM dysfunctions.
6.VMS FOR INTELLIGENT MACHINES
There are also engineering implications: if use of VMs is needed for
sophisticated autonomous machines that monitor and control themselves,
and which need to be able to adapt to and cope intelligently with
unforeseen situations, and reach practical decisions in reasonable
times, then they will have some of the failings that we find in
biological systems with such designs (e.g. humans). See
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/talks/#talk51
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/talks/#talk64
This raises ethical issues that I shall not discuss now, but designers
will need to.
7.CONCEPTUAL IMPLICATIONS
We need to understand how VM architectures vary. Concepts that are
appropriate for describing such complex systems are different for
different virtual machine architectures. E.g. a computer operating
system VM that never allows time-sharing or paging can never get into
the state described as "thrashing" on a multi-processing system.
Similarly an architecture that does not support formation and use of
predictions would be incapable of getting into a state of being
surprised. (It is very likely that the vast majority of animals are
incapable of being surprised, despite apparent 'surprise behaviour'
often an evolved automatic reaction to sudden danger, etc.)
So, philosophers interested in analysing mental concepts need to learn
to do new kinds of architecture-informed conceptual analysis, both
(a) to explicate and improve on our existing concepts of mind (e.g.
believes, desires, intends, likes, imagines, expects, learns,
understands, values, enjoys, dislikes, fears, cares, honest,
delusion, self-deception, personality, multiple personality, etc.
etc.), and
(b) to work out which sorts of mentalist concepts are relevant to
future machines (most of which will, at least in the short run, have
far less complex VMs than humans do, which means that the set of
concepts that can aptly be used to describe them will be different
in important ways contrary, for instance, to the assumptions of
current researchers claiming to build "machines with emotions").
This requires us to extend Ryle's notion of 'logical geography' with a
deeper notion of a 'logical topography' that can support different
logical geographies, as explained more fully in
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/misc/logicalgeography.html
8.CONFUSIONS ABOUT EMBODIMENT
The recent emphasis on embodiment in AI, Cognitive Science and
Philosophy of mind has mostly involved a failure to understand how the
physical morphology and sensorimotor interfaces of an information
processing system relate to the variety of virtual machine layers that
may coexist in one system, where some layers are far less constrained by
the details of their embodiment than by complex features of the whole
environment in which they are embedded and which they need to interact
with, think about and understand.
That is why seriously physically disabled humans can, with appropriate
help, learn to think and communicate like most humans, despite missing
limbs, cerebral palsy, blindness, deafness, etc. which seriously limit
their physical interactions with the immediate environment. (Examples
include: Alison Lapper, Helen Keller, Stephen Hawking, grown up
thalidomide babies, etc. Gender differences are not relevant to this
point.)
Consequently, machines (robots) with very different physical forms and
physical capabilities can, in principle, if their virtual machines are
appropriate, share a great many forms of representation, concepts,
concerns, values, thoughts, beliefs, hopes, fears, etc. with humans --
and be capable of communicating with them, despite great physical
differences.
But before we have any hope of producing such machines, we need a far
deeper understanding of (1) the problems evolution solved (the
requirements for biological VMs), (2) the design options for solving
those problems and the tradeoffs between the options. Philosophers will
need to learn to think about tradeoffs and designs as engineers do, and
engineers will need to learn to do conceptual analysis in order both to
clarify their objectives and to avoid misdescribing what they have
achieved, thereby invoking the scorn of McDermott [7]. Self-aware
machines will need to use VMs to understand themselves.
9.REFERENCES
[1] Sloman, A. 2002, Architecture-based conceptions of mind. In P.
Gardenfors et. Eds., In the Scope of Logic, Methodology, and Philosophy
of Science.
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/00-02.html#57
[2] Sloman A., Chrisley, R.L. 2003, Virtual machines and consciousness,
Journal of Consciousness Studies,
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/03.html#200302
[3] Pollock, J. L. 2008, What Am I? Virtual machines and the mind/body
problem, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 76, 2, 237--309,
archive/00003341 http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/ archive/00003341
[4] Dennett, D.C. 2007, Heterophenomenology reconsidered, Phenomenology
and the Cognitive
Sciences, 6, 1-2, 247-- 270 DOI 10.1007/s11097-006-9044-9
[5] Sloman & Chappell various papers and presentations in
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cosy/papers/
[6] McCarthy, J. 1996, The Well Designed Child, Stanford University,
http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/
[7] McDermott, D. 1981, Artificial Intelligence meets natural stupidity,
in Mind Design, Ed. J. Haugeland, MIT Press.
Maintained by
Aaron Sloman
School of Computer Science
The University of Birmingham