Life Programmer

After a few insightful chats with fellow conscious entities and some introspection, I've come into contact with a few more ideas about Life and stuff that I want to write up. (Sidenote: I once wrote a blog entry called "Life is a Program" (must've been more than 2 years ago now...), and I just hope this entry does not expose the same idea. I'll figure it out as I write this now.)

You know how, when you perform an action for the first time, such as walking, you have to concentrate to achieve it? You have to work for it, think about your steps, keep your balance, be aware of your whole body to avoid tripping with any obstacles. After a while, however, you're suddenly walking all over the place, thinking now only of the toys that you're now able to reach, almost unaware now of the skill that allows you new possibilities.

Same thing with driving. First you're mistaking the gas pedal for the brakes (a very bad thing to do), and before you know it, you forget the pedals exist as you're texting doing 90 on the highway. The task becomes automatic, a learned subprocess into which consciousness now barely intrudes. So I then think: This seems to happen with all tasks. Walking, running, eating, driving, swimming, reading, playing an instrument, watching TV, playing Halo, typing, talking - they all initially require learning effort (maybe except for the TV), but then they become automatic, unconscious.

As a programmer, I see this effect as the creation and calling of functions in our mind. We learn tasks, we create specific functions for each of them, and as we refine our function with further experience, we enclose these tasks into functions we will rarely need to change or think about again. We just call them with the appropriate parameters and we're done!
So what does our consciousness do? In this model, it seems to be the programmer. The scripter, the operator. It is the entity that takes experience through our perceptions, ponders about what has to be done, learns methods to do it, accumulates enough observations, and gradually learns a pattern of action that is best suited for each task in most observed contexts. And as this pattern of action is enclosed into a function and shows better and better success rates when used, our consciousness gradually learns to trust it and eventually takes no further part of it until it again perceives the need to. The function is complete, and the "programmer" can now move on to "writing" (learning) new tasks.

void drive(Vehicle car, Location destination) {
  Key carKey = this.obtain(car.getKey());
  this.enter(car);
  Route route = MapUtil.traceRoute(this.getLocation(), destination);
  car.start(carKey);
  car.driveRoute(route);
}

Do you think of putting your keys in the ignition before you're actually doing it? Do you think about your hands when you turn the steering wheel either way? I assume not, just as you barely think of how much you bend your knees as you walk down the hallway to go eat at lunchtime. According to this model then, learning is the creation of "functions" for tasks that we repeatedly perform, and consciousness is the learner for these, the creator.

Far-fetched dumb baseless hunch? Imprecise/incomplete model of a much more complex reality? May be. But I like it. It fits a pretty big chunk of my perception of Life until now very well.

I'd also like to relate this concept with that of the Exploration/Exploitation tradeoff, famous in the context of Reinforcement Learning. What should a learning agent do? Explore uncharted states, find new tasks to learn, new goals to achieve, risk unknown hazards? Or should it further exploit and refine its learned tasks, guaranteeing its success, content with its predictable world? The latter requires little effort on the part of the consciousness (the programmer) and mostly guarantees a predictable outcome, but will probably learn very little. On the other hand, exploration requires considerable effort from the consciousness, and the results are mostly unknown, but the experience the agent gains as new learned tasks (functions) extend its set of skills, and with it, its set of possibilities.

IMO (In my opinion, not International Maritime Organization), I prefer Exploitation only as much as it allows for more Exploration. In other words, Exploration is my goal, and Exploitation the means (and the occasional distraction :).

So, I consider myself a Life Programmer. I'm guessing others do too.

As more and more thoughts churned around me, even less of them made sense, and guilt barely managed a lash as I succumbed to my animal instinct.