The Evolving Artificial Organism

A taste of things to come, researchers are finally firing-up an artificial organism to record how it evolves from primitive unicellular origins to hyper-plexed associative memory network.

The artificial organism unfolds in a virtual world at over ten-thousand generations per hour (kind of hard to do in real life). We can then see how higher beings develop the ability to create associations, and eventually use this knowledge to build more intelligent robots.

Good thing olfaction is the prototypical primordial sensory system, because that’s why this new research is being posted right here. But think about this for a moment – there is no artificial nose. We already have the seeing retina, the hearing cochlea, and even a hand that feels. The nose however, has not been reverse-engineered.

There is a true challenge in replicating the sense of smell, and that is because our sense of smell is programmed by our autobiography. Smells don't mean much to us outside of our subjective experience with them. You just can't upload a dictionary of smells into an electronic nose and expect it to recognize random odors in its environment.

The only way you could do that is if you had a robot that grew up, just like a little kid, with multimodal experiences, social integration, and existential episodes, all associated together and built together into the tangled ball of nerve fibers that we call Self.

Your robot would then have its own limbic system, programmed by a childhood of interaction with the world. It would have to develop a life of its own, an autobiography. This self-identity would then be the substrate upon which the odor network is built. It could then recognize odors, as they would stimulate physiological and emotional responses and associative episodic memories.

Because smell is so tied to our limbic system, it requires a body in order to work. A cerebral organoid isn't a body per se. And neither is an artificially intelligent neural network. And neither is a robot that “comes to life” as a fully-formed adult, all booted-up and ready to go. Humans don’t do it like that. You can’t have a self without a history. (See Patient HM for more on that, however.)

What this new research now reminds us, is that not only does an artificial intelligentity need a body in order to smell, it also needs a lifetime of learning as well.

Notes:

Evolution of learning is key to better artificial intelligence

Sep 2019, phys.org

Anselmo Pontes et al. The Evolutionary Origin of Associative Learning, The American Naturalist (2019). DOI: 10.1086/706252

Post Script:

Finally seeing someone recognize the utility of studying olfaction in the context of machine learning artificial intelligence:

"Srinivasan says he will focus on how noise or variability in odor coding determines the balance between discrimination and learning, explaining that the variability the duo is finding in their work might be a mechanism for distinguishing odors, which could be applied to making better machine learning or AI systems."

How mammals' brains evolved to distinguish odors is nothing to sniff at

July 2019, phys.org

Embryos Can Smell Too

Comparing the embryonic development of various animals, Ernst Haeckel's Art Forms in Nature                   

Among the myriad ways olfaction is set apart from all other senses, this is perhaps the most important – Smell is the first sense to develop in ontogeny (the ‘lifetime’ of an organism), and begins in the womb.

We know babies can hear in the womb, but it isn’t often considered that they can smell too. Smell is a form of chemosensation. And if we think of an embryo as floating in a chemical soup, it makes sense that such an organism would be able to sense its surroundings. Possibly more surprising than this, it should be noted that adult humans have olfactory receptors in other parts of their bodes besides the nose. Certain organs are populated by the same nerve cells that relay the presence of aromatic molecules to our thinking brains via olfactory perception.

Here we must distinguish between sensation and perception. It is a misnomer to say that an embryo, or any such simple organism, can smell. Can you see with your eyes closed? Well, yes, but it depends on what you mean. The photoreceptors in your eyes still work whether your eyes are open or closed. In fact, they never stop working. The “seeing” part of you may stop, but the receptors are on all that time, ready to be stimulated by the most gentle of photon showers. (And when there is none – they make things up!) Babies in utero too can sense light levels in this way – but is that “seeing”? Not so much. And is it the same with smelling? Sort of. Perception requires a brain, but to sense does not. Plants can smell. Not really though; they can only sense chemicals.

Back through the mirror again, what does it mean for adult humans to smell, to perceive chemical signals? It is not a cognitive sense, or should we say a ‘cortical sense’. Smell is different in the way it uses a cortex, the perceptual-processor that creates an experience in our minds. For smell, the ‘processor’ is the limbic system itself, a beta-brain that runs inside, underneath, or within our more advanced human brains. This limbic system-chemical signal interaction is much more akin to the way a plant “sees” a sunset than a human. And so, to say that an embryo can smell, is less of a stretch than to say that it can see.

It makes matters more complex, however, when the chemical environment of the organism in utero actually affects its adult behavior. But because smell is a learned perception – an emergence of episodic memory – the osmic sensorium that we experience today and ultimately the way we respond to it, is predicated upon the very primitive origins of our ontological journey.

Post-Script

Study shows embryos can learn

phys.org, Dec 2014

Pond snails are able to sense chemicals released by their predators whilst they are still embryos in the egg and alter their behaviour accordingly, according to new research at Aberystwyth University and the University of Exeter and Plymouth University

When snails are exposed to predator smell during this very early developmental stage, they are better able to avoid predatory fish once they hatch...

The ability to respond to potential predators while still in the egg may be extremely important in allowing young vulnerable snails to survive.