The Moment Noise Is Discarded, Autonomy Disappears

 When we think about autonomy in Physical AI, ordinary AI and robotic control tend to treat noise as something undesirable.

Of course, given the enormous amount of data involved, it is understandable why this happens.
Reduce noise, correct errors, suppress variation, and bring behavior closer to something predictable.
As an industrial product, that direction is natural.

However, when we think about autonomy, there is a serious problem here.

Noise = something undesirable
Error = something to be eliminated
Variation = something that lowers stability
Unpredictability = control failure

With these assumptions, how can autonomous AI possibly be created?

Experience does not mean returning the same result every time from the same input.
Even when seeing the same scenery, hearing the same sound, or touching the same person, the response changes subtly depending on the body at that moment, memory, fear, fatigue, smell, temperature, and the remaining trace of past pain.

The moment such subtle differences are erased as noise, the changes produced by experience disappear.
If the changes produced by experience disappear, carry disappears.
If carry disappears, irreversibility disappears.
If irreversibility disappears, autonomy becomes mere control.

In 1972, Dr. Kaoru Nakano of Japan proposed an associative memory model called the Associatron.
The Associatron stores memory in a distributed manner and recalls the whole from partial cues. When the cue is sufficient, recall becomes clear. When the cue is small, recall becomes ambiguous.

What matters here is that ambiguity itself is part of how memory works.

About ten years later, the Hopfield network appeared.
The Hopfield network had a major influence as a model that converges from noisy input toward stored memory patterns.
It is an excellent model, and I do not deny its value.

However, within that stream, neural network research increasingly moved away from first-person ambiguous experience and toward externally defined correct answers, evaluation, stable states, and convergence.

Here lies a major fork in thinking about autonomy.

Do we remove noise and move toward a stable answer?
Or do we treat noise as an entrance for experience, allowing those differences to alter the internal state?

I am researching Atron, a first-person autonomous robot, based on Dr. Nakano’s associative memory model, the Associatron.

Things do not possess meaning from the beginning.
Through the result of experience, it accumulates whether something has meaning for oneself.

Memory is something that is forgotten.
However, something may trigger recall.
And only then, after the fact, is “meaning” first attached as a label to that event.

This is not about controlling objects that have been labeled from the beginning.
Meaning does not come first.
Meaning appears after experience.

I do not deny algorithms.
However, we must distinguish between the third-person artificial external environment and the first-person internal environment.

In the external environment, there are artificially designed events, but there are also natural phenomena that do not follow an algorithmic order.
In the internal environment, there are impulses without order, and there are also behaviors that become algorithmic through external influence.

Both are dynamic.
For this reason, I define them as the outer ring and the inner ring.

The outer ring is the flow of events entering from the outside.
The inner ring is the field where the first-person internal state wavers, selects, rejects, recalls, and changes in response to that flow.

What is a world without algorithms?
It is close to the world of a baby, which everyone has experienced.

A baby cannot say, “I am hungry,” simply because it is hungry.
It does not even know that it is hungry.
Without knowing the reason, the body cries.

Food, too, does not possess the meaning of “food” from the beginning.
It is merely an object that exists there.
Whether something tastes good or bad is not yet recognized by the mind in an organized way.
It begins only with whether the body accepts it or rejects it.

As the baby grows a little, something even more interesting happens.
Rather than eating because it is hungry, the act of eating may come first, and only afterward does it become possible to realize, “Perhaps I was hungry.”

In other words, order and recognition are not arranged from the beginning.

Through accumulated experience, things gradually settle where they settle.
However, this does not mean starting from zero and moving toward the same standard.

An ambiguous individual accumulates ambiguous experiences.
As a result, a way of settling emerges that is unique to that individual and those experiences.
The difference becomes that individual’s standard value.

This is the starting point of autonomy.

For Atron, noise is not garbage.
Noise is the crack through which experience enters.