A ship of the line

Objective

To describe the data structure – in the sense of reference 5 – which would put a battleship into consciousness.

It is quite possible that it would have been helpful to know more about how computer systems – perhaps support systems in today’s warships – do this sort of thing. Or even the systems which are learning to drive cars (see references 2 and 4).

But for the purposes of this paper, we suppose that we do know a fair bit about second world war battleships, this one being the very large Japanese battleship called the Yamato, sunk towards the end of the second world war. With the photograph below taken during sea trials off Japan, near the Bungo Strait, 20 October 1941. See reference 3.

Scenario in words

Frame 1

We are in a small boat, off the south of Japan, looking at the battleship which is maybe a hundred yards away. We are conscious of that part of the hull which is underwater, even though we can’t see it. We are conscious of the noise of the engines, which we can just about hear. We are also conscious of the noise of the waves and the water against the hull, a noise which we know about, but cannot actually hear.

Frame 2

We then focus on the B turret (second from the right, that is to say from the front or bows). We are conscious of the turret and its various parts, with the assembly as a whole going down through the hull, more or less to the bottom of the ship. Perhaps vaguely aware of the gun crew, perhaps even more vaguely aware of the gun direction from the bridge.

Frame 3

We remember an incident in a similar gun turret on a ship on which we served some years ago. Perhaps a human incident, nothing much to do with guns, involving a couple of people we used to serve with.

From where we back out into remembered images of this second ship, along the lines of that with which we started.

Scenario in layer objects

Frame 1

Pale blue sky background.

Darker blue sea foreground.

One layer object for the ship, both above and below the waterline.

The visible part of the ship gray, well below the horizon. Clear boundary against the sky. Black ellipse, another layer object, the puff of smoke above.

The invisible part of the ship dark blue, visualised in less detail and with less accuracy than the visible part. Underneath the layer object for the sea, which is foreground and by which the messy waterline is expressed.

In addition, we have a number of small layer objects for the foam and spray, represented above by the blue circles.

What we do not do is add a layer object for that part of the sea which is behind the ship, so some of the sea is, as it were, missing. Noting that, as the ship is in the sea, rather than in front of it or behind it, we cannot do all the sea in one layer object and all the ship in another; something has to give. An alternative solution, which might with experience turn out to be better, would be to have one layer object for the visible part of the ship, another for the invisible part, the part below the waterline, a third for the sea as a whole and a fourth for the sky as a whole. Visible part of ship in front of sea in front of invisible part of ship in front of sky. Do we do better with a ship in one piece but with a damaged sea, or the sea in one piece but with a damaged ship?

Some emotional background. Perhaps a mixture of respect and fear. Respect for the magnificent ship, fear of what it, the enemy, might do. Fear for the havoc it might wreak if it got among the troop transports of an invasion fleet, as it very nearly did.

Frame 2

The sky, the ship and the sea have been pushed into the background, leaving the focus on the two brown parts. Upper part visible, with bit more detail than before, lower part invisible, but in mind.
Then there is detail supporting the turret, in a layer below the ship layer. The sort of thing that might be in the back of the mind of an observer who knew something about big naval guns.

Drawing package layers

Here we digress to drawing packages, the sort of thing used by building managers and architects, part of the inspiration for our layered data structure, with our experience being drawn from a package called Drawbase, once used to describe the large government building in Parliament Street, then known as GOGGS. A package which still seems to be up and running, still about buildings, although it has probably moved on since we knew it more than twenty years ago. See reference 7.

Sticking with just plans in two dimensions, a plan in Drawbase is made up of layers which are made up of objects. Objects are lines, which may have line and fill in the way of Powerpoint. But more than Powerpoint, objects can have all kinds of other properties, quite apart from those needed to specify or control their appearance on the plan. Properties which the managers and users of the building which is the subject of the plan will be interested in. For example, in the case of a room, the occupier or, in the case of a fitting, purchase date, vendor, price, vendor part number and owner asset management number. And, these days, such information could easily include pictures and video clips.

Layers are a management concept. Any particular user of the package has access – read, write or both – to administrator nominated layers. One tells the package which of those layers one wants to see, as one goes along, and any particular visualisation draws on just those objects which are in those layers.

For each floor of the building, from sub-basement to roof, we might have the following layers, quite a lot of them altogether.

One layer for the core of the building, the masonry, steel and concrete.

Another layer might add the timber: the doors and door frames, the windows and window frames, partitions.

We might have one or more layers for utilities. We might, for example, have layers for the IT infrastructure cabling – although much of the detail would probably be held in a specialised system, perhaps directly connected to some of the infrastructure concerned. The same might be true for security systems: cameras, intruder alarms, controlled doors and such like. With deciding how exactly to carve things up being a matter for nice judgement. Nice judgement which will also be needed in the layers needed here, to which we turn shortly.

Then we have fixed fittings, such as those which might be found in washrooms and kitchens.

Then we have furniture, such as chairs and tables. Not to mention the once all-important filing cabinets.

These fixtures, fittings and furniture might well be linked into some asset management system.

There is clearly some overlap in function between such packages, cameras and consciousness, with all three seeking to provide an at least mainly, pictorial representation of a chunk of the world. We see consciousness as lying somewhere between the other two, combining elements of both. As including both something like the pixels of the one and the properties of the other.

Our data structure layers

Here we attempt to enumerate the layers of our data structure which we would need to support the first two frames. A task which is easier than the building to the extent that it does not need to be exact or comprehensive – and we can probably get away with cutting plenty of corners.

Remembering in what follows that visibility works from the top down. A layer object in sight mode on an upper layer may occlude another layer object in sight mode on a lower layer. If, however, the upper layer object is connected to the lower layer object, then it is as if the lower layer object were projected into the upper one. The position of the subordinate, lower object in the visual field is constrained by the position of the dominant, upper object, giving us, in effect, a form of zoom, usually zoom in rather than zoom out. So the version of the turret at layer 8, in what follows, zooms in to much less detailed version of the turret included at layer 4.

The necessary connections are introduced at reference 5.

Sky in the background, ship in the middle and sea in the foreground. Ship in front of the sky fairly straightforward, ship behind the sea at the waterline rather less so.

1. The top layer. The foam and the spray around the ship, partially occluding the sky, the ship and the sea below. Sight mode. 
2. The sea, around the ship and up to the waterline. Messy boundary at the waterline. Sight mode. 
3. The sounds and smells from the sea. Mixed mode. 
4. The ship, including the visible parts of the B turret in summary form and that part of the hull which is underwater, hidden by the sea. The ship will be a single layer object, possibly divided into parts corresponding to the main parts of the ship. The parts will be divided in turn into the small elements which provide detailed visualisation. 
5. Other information about the ship. For example, the place and date of launch. 
6. The sounds and smells from the ship.
7. The emotions arising from the ship. As noted above, perhaps a mixture of respect and fear. Respect for the magnificent ship, fear of what it, the enemy, might do.
8. The B turret in detail, in many of its parts. But compressed by its connection, through the two intervening layers, to the ‘realistically’ sized part in the ship layer above. Sight mode.
9. Other information about the B turret.
10. The wisp of smoke.  Sight mode.
11. Other information about the wisp of smoke. 
12. Miscellaneous sensations arising from the movement of the small boat we are in. Not visual as we are concentrating on the battleship.
13. The bottom layer. The sky in the background. Sight mode.

There are lots of ways in which one might do all this, but it also seems probable that the brain will have a generally consistent approach, an approach which is much the same from one scene to another, while also allowing for the moods and interests of the day.

But no sequence of layers is going to put everything near to everything else to which it is connected. The ship layer cannot both be immediately above the layer carrying the other information about the ship and the layer carrying  the detailed picture of the turret. While collapsing everything onto a single layer is not an option either.

Conclusion

We have presented, in outline, one way in which our battleship might be expressed in the layers of our data structure.

Footnotes

The title of this post is taken from reference 1. A childhood favourite about a Captain Hornblower on a battleship of yesteryear. Albeit a second rate rather than a first rate, like Nelson’s ‘Victory’.

GOGGS is the abbreviated version of government offices, Great George Street. For those of a heritage bent, GOGGS was built over the first 20 years of the 20th century and was originally called the New Public Offices, as opposed to the Old Public Offices – now the Foreign Office – next door. It started its service as home to the Board of Education, the Local Government Board and the local Ministry of Works Office.

It would be easier to do the spray with something like the semi-see-through objects of MS Powerpoint. But we need to think about if or how that might translate to this context.

The hypothesis is that the subjective experience is generated by high frequency activation processes scanning the various objects in our data structure. The current thought is that mixing modes during activation would not matter, would not disturb the subjective experience. Or put another way, that the subjective experience is additive, provided only that the duration of the scan is kept short. This would mean that it is not necessary to tackle the modes in series. More thought is clearly needed, but in the meantime, current thinking on mode is to be found at reference 8.

We also need to think about why the regular brain cannot cope with seeing layer objects which overlap in the visual field in their entirety. Such a brain seems to need to reduce the visual field to two dimensions, even though, on the model presented here, more might be thought to be available. And some people are quite good at visualising complicated objects, perhaps in three dimensions, in their minds. Perhaps to the point of being able to rotate them.

References

Reference 1: A Ship of the Line – C. S. Forester – 1938.

Reference 2: https://waymo.com/.

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_battleship_Yamato.

Reference 4: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/04/first-go-now-cars.html.

Reference 5: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/03/a-new-start.html.

Reference 6: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/03/coding-for-red-and-other-stuff.html.

Reference 7: http://www.drawbase.com/.

Reference 8: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/04/more-on-modes.html.

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