Adrian Thompson - Evolved Hardware

I've discovered this far more detailed article and interview from 1998, about Adrian Thompson's discovery of evolved hardware. It was a later paper by Prof Johnjoe McFadden on his CEMI theory that brought Adrian's work to my attention.

Adrian Thompson disappeared from public life around 20 years ago. It became next to impossible to find anything out about him, only two old photo's exist of him. The specific type of programmable chips he used for his experiments were removed from production.

This article finally confirms what I suspected... that he had been given a grant by the British Government... and probably disappeared into the Ministry of Defense... a few years later Britain demonstrated a new sonar to the US Navy. I saw a US Navy article in which a US Admiral commented that the US were amazed at the British Sonar's abilities, it was apparently able to find and identify submarines from hundreds of miles away. I have little doubt this was the fruit of Adrian Thompson's work.

With the advent of Quantum Computing, and biological hardware which replaces fixed silicon chips with DNA and Protein based processors which offer plasticity, I've become much more concerned about the potential of evolved hardware married to quantum biology, to open a door to extremely powerful information, which could be used to gently mislead those who listen to it and lead us. Doors swing both ways... we may inadvertently let something else in, by utilising non-human patterns

Anyway... this a great article...

Strangely, Thompson has been unable to pin down how the chip was accomplishing the task. When he checked to see how many of the 100 cells evolution had recruited for the task, he found no more than 32 in use. The voltage on the other 68 could be held constant without affecting the chip’s performance. A chip designed by a human, says Thompson, would have required 10 to 100 times as many logic elements—or at least access to a clock—to perform the same task. This is why Thompson describes the chip’s configuration as flabbergastingly efficient.

It wasn’t just efficient, the chip’s performance was downright weird. The current through the chip was feeding back and forth through the gates, swirling around, says Thompson, and then moving on. Nothing at all like the ordered path that current might take in a human-designed chip. And of the 32 cells being used, some seemed to be out of the loop. Although they weren’t directly tied to the main circuit, they were affecting the performance of the chip. This is what Thompson calls the crazy thing about it.

Thompson gradually narrowed the possible explanations down to a handful of phenomena. The most likely is known as electromagnetic coupling, which means the cells on the chip are so close to each other that they could, in effect, broadcast radio signals between themselves without sending current down the interconnecting wires. Chip designers, aware of the potential for electromagnetic coupling between adjacent components on their chips, go out of their way to design their circuits so that it won’t affect the performance. In Thompson’s case, evolution seems to have discovered the phenomenon and put it to work.

It was also possible that the cells were communicating through the power-supply wiring. Each cell was hooked independently to the power supply; a rapidly changing voltage in one cell would subtly affect the power supply, which might feed back to another cell. And the cells may have been communicating through the silicon substrate on which the circuit is laid down. The circuit is a very thin layer on top of a thicker piece of silicon, Thompson explains, where the transistors are diffused into just the top surface part. It’s just possible that there’s an interaction through the substrate, if they’re doing something very strange. But the point is, they are doing something really strange, and evolution is using all of it, all these weird effects as part of its system.

In some of Thompson’s creations, evolution even took advantage of the personal computer that’s hooked up to the system to run the genetic algorithm. The circuit somehow picked up on what the computer was doing when it was running the programs. When Thompson changed the program slightly, during a public demonstration, the circuit failed to work.

https://www.discovermagazine.com/technol...us-machine

I've discovered this far more detailed article and interview from 1998, about Adrian Thompson's discovery of evolved hardware. It was a later paper by Prof Johnjoe McFadden on his CEMI theory that brought Adrian's work to my attention.

https://philpapers.org/archive/MCFTCE.pdf

This is a link to McFaddens paper where he mentions Adrian Thompson's discovery...

The cemi field theory claims that consciousness is a by-product of an evolutionary
advantage (field-level information processing) captured by the human mind.
However, there is no reason why similar advantages should not be captured by
artificial minds. In my earlier paper I suggested that an artificial consciousness
could be built if real electrical neural networks (rather than the simulated neural
networks in a serial computer) were constructed to ensure that their information
processing was sensitive to their induced em fields (see discussion in McFadden,
2002, p. 44). At the time of writing I did not know of any evidence to support this
claim but I have since been made aware of an intriguing experiment performed
by the School of Cognitive & Computing Sciences (COGS) group at Sussex University
that appears to have (accidentally) evolved a field-sensitive electronic
circuit (Davidson, 1997; Thompson, 1996). The group used a silicon chip known
as a field-programmable gate array (FPGA), comprised of an array of cells.
Electronic switches distributed through the array allow the behaviour and connections
of the cells to be reconfigured from software. Starting from a population of
random configurations, the hardware was evolved to perform a task, in this case,
distinguishing between two tones. After about 5,000 generations the network
could efficiently perform its task.

When the group examined the evolved network they discovered that it utilized
only 32 of the 100 FPGA cells. The remaining cells could be disconnected from
the network without affecting performance.

However, when the circuit diagram of the critical network was examined it was
found that some of the essential cells, although apparently necessary for network
performance (if disconnected, the network failed), were not connected by wires
to the rest of the circuit. According to the researchers, the most likely explanation
seems to be that these cells were contributing to the network through electromagnetic
coupling — field effects — between components in the circuit. It is very
intriguing that evolution of an artificial neural network appeared to capture field
effects spontaneously as a way of optimizing computational performance. This
suggests that natural evolution of neural networks in the brain would similarly
capture field effects, precisely as proposed in the cemi field theory. The finding
may have considerable implications for the design of artificial intelligence.

I would have thought that any hardware that RELIED on stray coupling effects to perform its operation would be extremely unreliable.

I would have thought that any hardware that RELIED on stray coupling effects to perform its operation would be extremely unreliable.

How would one be able to evolve if one was bound so tightly that one was unable to make a mistake?

What you're asking for is a slave that obeys your every request, not some extremely unreliable slave that does what it wants and can't be controlled. For what use is a slave that doesn't accurately perform any task you give them. But Adrian was looking for the very stuff of life... he went to extreme lengths to ensure the chip circuit evolved with as little interference from him as possible.

We see the same general trend in DNA relating to the impact of damage to DNA ... organisms with slow evolution like the horseshoe crab have many many redundant copies in their DNA... organisms with very fast evolution like the fruitfly have very few redundant copies in their DNA... humans occupy the middle ground between these extremes.

How would one be able to evolve if one was bound so tightly that one was unable to make a mistake?

What you're asking for is a slave that obeys your every request, not some extremely unreliable slave that does what it wants and can't be controlled. For what use is a slave that doesn't accurately perform any task you give them. But Adrian was looking for the very stuff of life... he went to extreme lengths to ensure the chip circuit evolved with as little interference from him as possible.

We see the same general trend in DNA relating to the impact of damage to DNA ... organisms with slow evolution like the horseshoe crab have many many redundant copies in their DNA... organisms with very fast evolution like the fruitfly have very few redundant copies in their DNA... humans occupy the middle ground between these extremes.

My point is, that unless this 'design' was to be used as a one-off, it has to be copied, and electronic components aren't going to be so exactly similar that these parasitic couplings would be faithfully reproduced. I mean look at a simple resistor - it has a number o bands on it, and some of them represent the value of the resistance in Ohms, and one band represents the precision of the resistor. Likewise, other components have tolerances, and a normal design is done in such a way that the circuit works for any value of those tolerances. Even so, a few circuits will fail and have to be discarded.

DNA evolves (at least according to orthodox ideas) by single changes to the letters of the code. There is no analogy to what is going on here, because the DNA changes are discrete - digital if you like.

David

My point is, that unless this 'design' was to be used as a one-off, it has to be copied, and electronic components aren't going to be so exactly similar that these parasitic couplings would be faithfully reproduced...[]...

DNA evolves (at least according to orthodox ideas) by single changes to the letters of the code. There is no analogy to what is going on here, because the DNA changes are discrete - digital if you like.

David

Yes, the one-off nature of the circuit design is exactly what they recognized. Therefore they moved away from trying to evolve a circuit design onto a mixed complex messy fixed substrate, instead developing new clean substrate technologies using pure "..molecules.." with more reliable and predictable forces.

Whether Carbon Nanotube processors (CNT) were one of the steps of their research to create a more predictable interface substrate to these molecule based designs is unknown, but CNT's are now being used to accurately identify molecules https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsami.0c06503. The CNT technology also continues to advance https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8878677/. My gut feeling is they are likely to have moved onto stable crystal protein structures, but I have no evidence to support this, https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/jp991883n, and https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full....202000180

Yes, the one-off nature of the circuit design is exactly what they recognized. Therefore they moved away from trying to evolve a circuit design onto a mixed complex messy fixed substrate, instead developing new clean substrate technologies using pure "..molecules.." with more reliable and predictable forces.

Well thanks for confirming my initial hunch!

Whether Carbon Nanotube processors (CNT) were one of the steps of their research to create a more predictable interface substrate to these molecule based designs is unknown, but CNT's are now being used to accurately identify molecules https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsami.0c06503. The CNT technology also continues to advance https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8878677/. My gut feeling is they are likely to have moved onto stable crystal protein structures, but I have no evidence to support this, https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/jp991883n, and https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full....202000180

To be honest, I think this is so far from consciousness, that I am not particularly interested in pursuing it. However, notice that the initial, conceptually simple, idea of evolution of hardware was really used as a hook to draw people's interest. I'll bet nothing ultimately comes of this research - there is a lot of ideas like this in the literature that ultimately go nowhere.

You are obviously interested in the idea that this concept could be used to create conscious physical structures, where perhaps the fact that the 'design' could not be copied might not matter.

I think you should seriously look at the theoretical limits to evolution. These have been studied in detail by scientists at the Discovery Institute, and they confirm the impossibility of evolving biological life using the RM+NS mechanism.

Also, with any potentially conscious machine, an important question might be to ask how it circumvents the Hard Problem.

https://philpapers.org/archive/MCFTCE.pdf

This is a link to McFaddens paper where he mentions Adrian Thompson's discovery...

I don't think the CEMI theory can be validly used to bolster Thompson's theory, because CEMI has so many problems.

From the abstract of an article summarizing Johnjoe McFadden's neural electromagnetic field theory of consciousness, at https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32995043/: 

"....the conscious electromagnetic information (CEMI) field theory has proposed that consciousness is physically integrated, and causally active, information encoded in the brain's global electromagnetic (EM) field. I here extend the theory to argue that consciousness implements algorithms in space, rather than time, within the brain's EM field."

It seems to me this theory is so much not in accordance and out of step with fundamental reality and boatloads of evidence that it isn't even wrong. 

To summarize, firstly, the paranormal empirical evidence, especially that of veridical NDEs, investigated reincarnation memories, and mediumistic communications establish that the human spirit is an immaterial center of consciousness that only temporarily inhabits the physical brain and body. Needless to say, this is absolutely incompatible with a theory that ties human consciousness to the physical EM field generated by the brain.

Secondly, the Hard Problem is massively collided with by the theory, since the EM field of the brain is physical and all its parameters and properties are physical, but the CEMI theory apparently claims the EM field somehow creates or is identical with human consciousness, whose properties are entirely nonphysical, including conscious first person awareness and qualia in general. The notion that information encoded in the brain's EM field literally is consciousness is magic, literally turning something physical into something immaterial, turning water into wine so to speak. 

Thirdly, algorithms are apparently claimed to be fundamental to human consciousness, but it has long been determined that consciousness and subjective awareness and qualia and other aspects or properties of consciousness are non-algorithmic and incapable of being one and the same as calculations implementing algorithms, or for that matter calculations of any kind in any substrate. The properties of matter and energy and information encoded in them are totally different and in a different and lower existential category than the properties of consciousness, which is nonphysical.