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# Unsupervised Discovery of Morphemes

## 1 Introduction

According to linguistic theory, morphemes are considered to be the smallest meaning-bearing elements of language, and they can be defined in a language-independent manner. However, no adequate language-independent definition of the *word* as a unit has been agreed upon (Karlsson, 1998, p. 83). If effective methods can be devised for the unsupervised discovery of morphemes, they could aid the formulation of a linguistic theory of morphology for a new language.

It seems that even approximative automated morphological analysis would be beneficial for many natural language applications dealing with large vocabularies. For example, in text retrieval it is customary to preprocess texts by returning words to their base forms, especially for morphologically rich languages.

Moreover, in large vocabulary speech recognition, predictive models of language are typically used for selecting the most plausible words suggested by an acoustic speech recognizer (see, e.g., Bellegarda, 2000). Consider, for example the estimation of the standard $`n`$-gram model, which entails the estimation of the probabilities of all sequences of $`n`$ words. When the vocabulary is very large, say 100 000 words, the basic problems in the estimation of the language model are: (1) If words are used as basic representational units in the language model, the number of basic units is very high and the estimated word $`n`$-grams are poor due to sparse data. (2) Due to the high number of possible word forms, many perfectly valid word forms will not be observed at all in the training data, even in large amounts of text. These problems are particularly severe for languages with rich morphology, such as Finnish and Turkish. For example, in Finnish, a single verb may appear in thousands of different forms \[Karlsson, 1987\].

The utilization of morphemes as basic representational units in a statistical language model instead of words seems a promising course. Even a rough morphological segmentation could then be sufficient. On the other hand, the construction of a comprehensive morphological analyzer for a language based on linguistic theory requires a considerable amount of work by experts. This is both slow and expensive and therefore not applicable to all languages. The problem is further compounded as languages evolve, new words appear and grammatical changes take place. Consequently, it is important to develop methods that are able to *discover* a morphology for a language based on unsupervised analysis of large amounts of data.

As the morphology discovery from untagged corpora is a computationally hard problem, in practice one must make some assumptions about the structure of words. The appropriate specific assumptions are somewhat language-dedependent. For example, for English it may be useful to assume that words consist of a stem, often followed by a suffix and possibly preceded by a prefix. By contrast, a Finnish word typically consists of a stem followed by multiple suffixes. In addition, compound words are common, containing an alternation of stems and suffixes, e.g., the word kahvinjuojallekin (Engl. ’*also for \[the\] coffee drinker*’; cf. Table 1)111For a comprehensive view of Finnish morphology, see \[Karlsson, 1987\].. Moreover, one may ask, whether a morphologically complex word exhibits some hierarchical structure, or whether it is merely a flat concatenation of stems and suffices.

### 1.1 Previous Work on Unsupervised Segmentation

Many existing morphology discovery algorithms concentrate on identifying prefixes, suffixes and stems, i.e., assume a rather simple inflectional morphology.

Déjean (1998) concentrates on the problem of finding the list of frequent affixes for a language rather than attempting to produce a morphological analysis of each word. Following the work of Zellig Harris he identifies possible morpheme boundaries by looking at the number of possible letters following a given sequence of letters, and then utilizes frequency limits for accepting morphemes.

Goldsmith (2000) concentrates on stem+suffix-languages, in particular Indo-European languages, and tries to produce output that would match as closely as possible with the analysis given by a human morphologist. He further assumes that stems form groups that he calls *signatures*, and each signature shares a set of possible affixes. He applies an MDL criterion for model optimization.

The previously discussed approaches consider only individual words without regard to their contexts, or to their semantic content. In a different approach, Schone and Jurafsky (2000) utilize the context of each term to obtain a semantic representation for it using LSA. The division to morphemes is then accepted only when the stem and stem+affix are sufficiently similar semantically. Their method is shown to improve on the performance of Goldsmith’s *Linguistica* on CELEX, a morphologically analyzed English corpus.

In the related field of text segmentation, one can sometimes obtain morphemes. Some of the approaches remove spaces from text and try to identify word boundaries utilizing e.g. entropy-based measures, as in \[Redlich, 1993\].

Word induction from natural language text without word boundaries is also studied in \[Deligne and Bimbot, 1997, Hua, 2000\], where MDL-based model optimization measures are used. Viterbi or the forward-backward algorithm (an EM algorithm) is used for improving the segmentation of the corpus222The regular EM procedure only maximizes the likelihood of the data. To follow the MDL approach where model cost is also optimized, Hua includes the model cost as a penalty term on pure ML probabilities..

Also de Marcken (1995; 1996) studies the problem of learning a lexicon, but instead of optimizing the cost of the whole corpus, as in \[Redlich, 1993, Hua, 2000\], de Marcken starts with sentences. Spaces are included as any other characters.

Utterances are also analyzed in \[Kit and Wilks, 1999\] where optimal segmentation for an utterance is sought so that the compression effect over the segments is maximal. The compression effect is measured in what the authors call Description Length Gain, defined as the relative reduction in entropy. The Viterbi algorithm is used for searching for the optimal segmentation given a model. The input utterances include spaces and punctuation as ordinary characters. The method is evaluated in terms of precision and recall on word boundary prediction.

Brent presents a general, modular probabilistic model structure for word discovery \[Brent, 1999\]. He uses a minimum representation length criterion for model optimization and applies an incremental, greedy search algorithm which is suitable for on-line learning such that children might employ.

### 1.2 Our Approach

In this work, we use a model where words may consist of lengthy sequences of segments. This model is especially suitable for languages with agglutinative morphological structure. We call the segments *morphs* and at this point no distinction is made between stems and affixes.

The practical purpose of the segmentation is to provide a vocabulary of language units that is smaller and generalizes better than a vocabulary consisting of words as they appear in text. Such a vocabulary could be utilized in statistical language modeling, e.g., for speech recognition. Moreover, one could assume that such a discovered morph vocabulary would correspond rather closely to linguistic morphemes of the language.

We examine two methods for unsupervised learning of the model, presented in Sections 2 and 3. The cost function for the first method is derived from the Minimum Description Length principle from classic information theory \[Rissanen, 1989\], which simultaneously measures the goodness of the representation and the model complexity. Including a model complexity term generally improves generalization by inhibiting overlearning, a problem especially severe for sparse data. An incremental (online) search algorithm is utilized that applies a hierarchical splitting strategy for words. In the second method the cost function is defined as the maximum likelihood of the data given the model. Sequential splitting is applied and a batch learning algorithm is utilized.

In Section 4, we develop a method for evaluating the quality of the morph segmentations produced by the unsupervised segmentation methods. Even though the morph segmentations obtained are not intended to correspond exactly to the morphemes of linguistic theory, a basis for comparison is provided by existing, linguistically motivated morphological analyses of the words.

Both segmentation methods are applied to the segmentation of both Finnish and English words. In Section 5, we compare the results obtained from our methods to results produced by Goldsmith’s *Linguistica* on the same data.

## 2 Method 1: Recursive Segmentation and MDL Cost

The task is to find the optimal segmentation of the source text into morphs. One can think of this as constructing a model of the data in which the model consists of a vocabulary of morphs, i.e. the *codebook* and the data is the sequence of text. We try to find a set of morphs that is concise, and moreover gives a concise representation for the data. This is achieved by utilizing an MDL cost function.

### 2.1 Model Cost Using MDL

The total cost consists of two parts: the cost of the source text in this model and the cost of the codebook. Let $`M`$ be the morph codebook (the vocabulary of morph types) and $`D=m_1m_2\mathrm{}m_n`$ the sequence of morph tokens that makes up the string of words. We then define the total cost $`C`$ as

$`C`$ $`=`$ $`\text{Cost}(\text{Source text})+\text{Cost}(\text{Codebook})`$
$`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \underset{\text{tokens}}{}}\mathrm{log}p(m_i)+{\displaystyle \underset{\text{types}}{}}kl(m_j)`$
The cost of the source text is thus the negative loglikelihood of the morph, summed over all the morph tokens that comprise the source text. The cost of the codebook is simply the length in bits needed to represent each morph separately as a string of characters, summed over the morphs in the codebook. The length in characters of the morph $`m_j`$ is denoted by $`l(m_j)`$ and $`k`$ is the number of bits needed to code a character (we have used a value of 5 since that is sufficient for coding 32 lower-case letters). For $`p(m_i)`$ we use the ML estimate, i.e., the token count of $`m_i`$ divided by the total count of morph tokens.

### 2.2 Search Algorithm

The online search algorithm works by incrementally suggesting changes that could improve the cost function. Each time a new word token is read from the input, different ways of segmenting it into morphs are evaluated, and the one with minimum cost is selected.

#### Recursive segmentation.

The search for the optimal morph segmentation proceeds recursively. First, the word as a whole is considered to be a morph and added to the codebook. Next, every possible split of the word into two parts is evaluated.

The algorithm selects the split (or no split) that yields the minimum total cost. In case of no split, the processing of the word is finished and the next word is read from input. Otherwise, the search for a split is performed recursively on the two segments. The order of splits can be represented as a binary tree for each word, where the leafs represent the morphs making up the word, and the tree structure describes the ordering of the splits.

During model search, an overall hierarchical data structure is used for keeping track of the current segmentation of every word type encountered so far. Let us assume that we have seen seven instances of linja-auton (Engl. ’of \[the\] bus’) and two instances of autonkuljettajallakaan (Engl. ’not even by/at/with \[the\] car driver’). Figure 1 then shows a possible structure used for representing the segmentations of the data. Each chunk is provided with an occurrence count of the chunk in the data set and the split location in this chunk. A zero split location denotes a leaf node, i.e., a morph. The occurrence counts flow down through the hierachical structure, so that the count of a child always equals the sum of the counts of its parents. The occurrence counts of the leaf nodes are used for computing the relative frequencies of the morphs. To find out the morph sequence that a word consists of, we look up the chunk that is identical to the word, and trace the split indices recursively until we reach the leafs, which are the morphs.

Note that the hierarchical structure is used only during model search: It is not part of the final model, and accordingly no cost is associated with any other nodes than the leaf nodes.

#### Adding and removing morphs.

Adding new morphs to the codebook increases the codebook cost. Consequently, a new word token will tend to be split into morphs already listed in the codebook, which may lead to local optima. To better escape local optima, each time a new word token is encountered, it is resegmented, whether or not this word has been observed before. If the word has been observed (i.e. the corresponding chunk is found in the hierarchical structure), we first *remove* the chunk and decrease the counts of all its children. Chunks with zero count are removed (remember that removal of leaf nodes corresponds to removal of morphs from the codebook). Next, we increase the count of the observed word chunk by one and re-insert it as an unsplit chunk. Finally, we apply the recursive splitting to the chunk, which may lead to a new, different segmentation of the word.

#### “Dreaming”.

Due to the online learning, as the number of processed words increases, the quality of the set of morphs in the codebook gradually improves. Consequently, words encountered in the beginning of the input data, and not observed since, may have a sub-optimal segmentation in the new model, since at some point more suitable morphs have emerged in the codebook. We have therefore introduced a ’dreaming’ stage: At regular intervals the system stops reading words from the input, and instead iterates over the words already encountered in random order. These words are resegmented and thus compressed further, if possible. Dreaming continues for a limited time or until no considerable decrease in the total cost can be observed. Figure 2 shows the development of the average cost per word as a function of the increasing amount of source text.

## 3 Method 2: Sequential Segmentation and ML Cost

### 3.1 Model Cost Using ML

In this case, we use as cost function the likelihood of the data, i.e., $`P(data|model)`$. Thus, the model cost is not included. This corresponds to Maximum-Likelihood (ML) learning. The cost is then

$$\text{Cost}(\text{Source text})=\underset{\text{morph tokens}}{}\mathrm{log}p(m_i),$$
(1)
where the summation is over all morph tokens in the source data. As before, for $`p(m_i)`$ we use the ML estimate, i.e., the token count of $`m_i`$ divided by the total count of morph tokens.

### 3.2 Search Algorithm

In this case, we utilize batch learning where an EM-like (Expectation-Maximization) algorithm is used for optimizing the model. Moreover, splitting is not recursive but proceeds linearly.

1. Initialize segmentation by splitting words into morphs at random intervals, starting from the beginning of the word. The lengths of intervals are sampled from the Poisson distribution with $`\lambda =5.5`$. If the interval is larger than the number of letters in the remaining word segment, the splitting ends.
2. Repeat for a number of iterations:

1. Estimate morph probabilities for the given splitting.
    2. Given the current set of morphs and their probabilities, re-segment the text using the Viterbi algorithm for finding the segmentation with lowest cost for each word.
    3. If not the last iteration: Evaluate the segmentation of a word against rejection criteria. If the proposed segmentation is not accepted, segment this word randomly (as in the Initialization step).

Note that the possibility of introducing a random segmentation at step $`(c)`$ is the only thing that allows for the addition of new morphs. (In the cost function their cost would be infinite, due to ML probability estimates). In fact, without this step the algorithm seems to get seriously stuck in suboptimal solutions.

#### Rejection criteria.

(1) Rare morphs. Reject the segmentation of a word if the segmentation contains a morph that was used in only one word type in the previous iteration. This is motivated by the fact that extremely rare morphs are often incorrect. (2) Sequences of one-letter morphs. Reject the segmentation if it contains two or more one-letter morphs in a sequence. For instance, accept the segmentation halua + n (Engl. ’I want’, i.e. present stem of the verb ’to want’ followed by the ending for the first person singular), but reject the segmentation halu + a + n (stem of the noun ’desire’ followed by a strange sequence of endings). Long sequences of one-letter morphs are usually a sign of a very bad local optimum that may even get worse in future iterations, in case too much probability mass is transferred onto these short morphs333Nevertheless, for Finnish there do exist some one-letter morphemes that can occur in a sequence. However, these morphemes can be thought of as a group that belongs together: e.g., the Finnish talo + j + a (plural partitive of ’house’); can also be thought of as talo + ja..

## 4 Evaluation Measures

We wish to evaluate the method quantitatively from the following perspectives: (1) correspondence with linguistic morphemes, (2) efficiency of compression of the data, and (3) computational efficiency. The efficiency of compression can be evaluated as the total description length of the corpus and the codebook (the MDL cost function). The computational efficiency of the algorithm can be estimated from the running time and memory consumption of the program. However, the linguistic evaluation is in general not so straightforward.

### 4.1 Linguistic Evaluation Procedure

If a corpus with marked morpheme boundaries is available, the linguistic evaluation can be computed as the precision and recall of the segmentation. Unfortunately, we did not have such data sets at our disposal, and for Finnish such do not even exist. In addition, it is not always clear exactly where the morpheme boundary should be placed. Several alternatives may be possible, cf. Engl. hope + d vs. hop + ed, (past tense of *to hope*).

Instead, we utilized an existing tool for providing a morphological analysis, although not a segmentation, of words, based on the two-level morphology of Koskenniemi (1983). The analyzer is a finite-state transducer that reads a word form as input and outputs the base form of the word together with grammatical tags. Sample analyses are shown in Figure 3.

The tag set consists of tags corresponding to morphological affixes and other tags, for example, part-of-speech tags. We preprocessed the analyses by removing other tags than those corresponding to affixes, and further split compound base forms (marked using the # character by the analyzer) into their constituents. As a result, we obtained for each word a sequence of labels that corresponds well to a linguistic *morphemic analysis* of the word. A label can often be considered to correspond to a single word segment, and the labels appear in the order of the segments.

The following step consists in retrieving the segmentation produced by one of the unsupervised segmentation algorithms, and trying to align this segmentation with the desired morphemic label sequence (cf. Figure 4).

A good segmentation algorithm will produce morphs that align gracefully with the correct morphemic labels, preferably producing a one-to-one mapping. A one-to-many mapping from morphs to labels is also acceptable, when a morph forms a common entity, such as the suffix -ja in puutaloja, which contains both the plural and partitive element. By contrast, a many-to-one mapping from morphs to a label is a sign of excessive splitting, e.g., t + alo for talo (cf. English h + ouse for house).

#### Alignment procedure.

We align the morph sequence with the morphemic label sequence using dynamic programming, namely Viterbi alignment, to find the best sequence of mappings between morphs and morphemic labels. Each possible pair of morph/morphemic label has a distance associated with it. For each segmented word, the algorithm searches for the alignment that minimizes the total alignment distance for the word. The distance $`d(M,L)`$ for a pair of morph $`M`$ and label $`L`$ is given by:

$$d(M,L)=\mathrm{log}\frac{c_{M,L}}{c_M},$$
(2)
where $`c_{M,L}`$ is the number of word tokens in which the morph $`M`$ has been aligned with the label $`L`$; and $`c_M`$ is the number of word tokens that contain the morph $`M`$ in their segmentation. The distance measure can be thought of as the negative logarithm of a conditional probability $`P(L|M)`$. This indicates the probability that a morph $`M`$ is a realisation of a morpheme represented by the label $`L`$. Put another way, if the unsupervised segmentation algorithm discovers morphs that are allomorphs of real morphemes, a particular allomorph will ideally always be aligned with the same (correct) morphemic label, which leads to a high probability $`P(L|M)`$, and a short distance $`d(M,L)`$444This holds especially for allomorphs of ’stem morphemes’, e.g., it is possible to identify the English morpheme easy with a probability of one from both its allomorphs: easy and easi. However, suffixes, in particular, can have several meanings, e.g., the English suffix s can mean either the plural of nouns or the third person singular of the present tense of verbs.. In contrast, if the segmentation algorithm does not discover meaningful morphs, each of the segments will be aligned with a number of different morphemic labels throughout the corpus, and as a consequence, the probabilities will be low and the distances high.

We then utilize the EM algorithm for iteratively improving the alignment. The initial alignment that is used for computing initial distance values is obtained through a string matching procedure: String matching is efficient for aligning the stem of the word with the base form (e.g., the morph puu with the label puu, and the morphs t + alo with the label talo). The suffix morphs that do not match well with the base form labels will end up aligned somehow with the morphological tags (e.g., the morph ja with the labels PL + PTV).

#### Comparison of methods.

In order to compare two segmentation algorithms, the segmentation of each is aligned with the linguistic morpheme labels, and the total distance of the alignment is computed. Shorter total distance indicates better segmentation.

However, one should note that the distance measure used favors long morphs. If a particular “segmentation” algorithm does not split one single word of the corpus, the total distance can be zero. In such a situation, the single morph that a word is composed of is aligned with all morphemic labels of the word. The morph $`M`$, i.e., the word, is unique, which means that all probabilities $`P(L|M)`$ are equal to one: e.g., the morph puutaloja is always aligned with the labels puu \+ talo \+ PL \+ PTV and no other labels, which yields the probabilities $`P(\mathrm{𝙿𝚄𝚄}\mathrm{𝚙𝚞𝚞𝚝𝚊𝚕𝚘𝚓𝚊})=P(\mathrm{𝚃𝙰𝙻𝙾}\mathrm{𝚙𝚞𝚞𝚝𝚊𝚕𝚘𝚓𝚊})=P(\mathrm{𝙿𝙻}\mathrm{𝚙𝚞𝚞𝚝𝚊𝚕𝚘𝚓𝚊})=P(\mathrm{𝙿𝚃𝚅}\mathrm{𝚙𝚞𝚞𝚝𝚊𝚕𝚘𝚓𝚊})=1`$.

Therefore, part of the corpus should be used as training data, and the rest as test data. Both data sets are segmented using the unsupervised segmentation algorithms. The training set is then used for estimating the distance values $`d(M,L)`$. These values are used when the test set is aligned. The better segmentation algorithm is the one that yields a better alignment distance for the test set.

For morph/label pairs that were never observed in the training set, a maximum distance value is assigned. A good segmentation algorithm will find segments that are good building blocks of entirely new word forms, and thus the maximum distance values will occur only rarely.

## 5 Experiments and Results

We compared the two proposed methods as well as Goldsmith’s program *Linguistica*555http://humanities.uchicago.edu/faculty/goldsmith/Linguistica2000/ on both Finnish and English corpora. The Finnish corpus consisted of newspaper text from CSC666http://www.csc.fi/kielipankki/. A morphosyntactic analysis of the text was performed using the Conexor FDG parser777http://www.conexor.fi/. All characters were converted to lower case, and words containing other characters than *a* through *z* and the Scandinavian letters *å*, *ä* and *ö* were removed. Other than morphemic tags were removed from the morphological analyses of the words. The remaining tags correspond to inflectional affixes (i.e. endings and markers) and clitics. Unfortunately the parser does not distinguish derivational affixes. The first 100 000 word tokens were used as training data, and the following 100 000 word tokens were used as test data. The test data contained 34 821 word types.

The English corpus consisted of mainly newspaper text from the Brown corpus888The Brown corpus is available at the Linguistic Data Consortium at http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/. A morphological analysis of the words was performed using the Lingsoft ENGTWOL analyzer999http://www.lingsoft.fi/. In case of multiple alternative morphological analyses, the shortest analysis was selected. All characters were converted to lower case, and words containing other characters than *a* through *z*, an apostrophe or a hyphen were removed. Other than morphemic tags were removed from the morphological analyses of the words. The remaining tags correspond to inflectional or derivational affixes. A set of 100 000 word tokens from the corpus sections *Press Reportage* and *Press Editorial* were used as training data. A separate set of 100 000 word tokens from the sections *Press Editorial*, *Press Reviews*, *Religion*, and *Skills Hobbies* were used as test data. The test data contained 12 053 word types.

Test results for the three methods and the two languages are shown in Table 2. We observe different tendencies for Finnish and English. For Finnish, there is a correlation between the compression of the corpus and the linguistic generalization capacity to new word forms. The Recursive splitting with the MDL cost function is clearly superior to the Sequential splitting with ML cost, which in turn is superior to *Linguistica*. The Recursive MDL method is best in terms of data compression: it produces the smallest morph lexicon (codebook), and the codebook naturally occupies a small part of the total cost. It is best also in terms of the linguistic measure, the total alignment distance on test data. *Linguistica*, on the other hand, employs a more restricted segmentation, which leads to a larger codebook and to the fact that the codebook occupies a large part of the total MDL cost. This also appears to lead to a poor generalization ability to new word forms. The linguistic alignment distance is the highest, and so is the percentage of aligned morph/morphemic label pairs that were never observed in the training set. On the other hand, *Linguistica* is the fastest program101010Note, however, that the computing time comparison with *Linguistica* is only approximate since it was a compiled program run on Windows whereas the two other methods were implemented as Perl scripts run on Linux..

Also for English, the Recursive MDL method achieves the best alignment, but here *Linguistica* achieves nearly the same result. The rate of compression follows the same pattern as for Finnish, in that *Linguistica* produces a much larger morph lexicon than the methods presented in this paper. In spite of this fact, the percentage of unseen morph/morphemic label pairs is about the same for all three methods. This suggests that in a morphologically poor language such as English a restrictive segmentation method, such as *Linguistica*, can compensate for new word forms – that it does not recognize at all – with old, familiar words, that it “gets just right”. In contrast, the methods presented in this paper produce a morph lexicon that is smaller and able to generalize better to new word forms but has somewhat lower accuracy for already observed word forms.

#### Visual inspection of a sample of words.

In an attempt to analyze the segmentations more thoroughly, we randomly picked 1000 different words from the Finnish test set. The total number of occurrences of these words constitute about 2.5% of the whole set. We inspected the segmentation of each word visually and classified it into one of three categories: (1) correct and complete segmentation (i.e., all relevant morpheme boundaries were identified), (2) correct but incomplete segmentation (i.e., not all relevant morpheme boundaries were identified, but no proposed boundary was incorrect), (3) incorrect segmentation (i.e., some proposed boundary did not correspond to an actual morpheme boundary).

The results of the inspection for each of the three segmentation methods are shown in Table 3. The Recursive MDL method performs best and segments about half of the words correctly. The Sequential ML method comes second and *Linguistica* third with a share of 43% correctly segmented words. When considering the incomplete and incorrect segmentations the methods behave differently. The Recursive MDL method leaves very common word forms unsplit, and often produces excessive splitting for rare words. The Sequential ML method is more prone to excessive splitting, even for words that are not rare. *Linguistica*, on the other hand, employs a more conservative splitting strategy, but makes incorrect segmentations for many common word forms.

The behaviour of the methods is illustrated by example segmentations in Table 4. Often the Recursive MDL method produces complete and correct segmentations. However, both it and the Sequential ML method can produce excessive splitting, as is shown for the latter, e.g. affecti + on + at + e. In contrast, *Linguistica* refrains from splitting words when they should be split, e.g., the Finnish compound words in the table.

## 6 Discussion of the Model

Regarding the model, there is always room for improvement. In particular, the current model does not allow representation of contextual dependencies, i.e., that some morphs appear only in particular contexts (allomorphy). Moreover, languages have rules regarding the ordering of stems and affixes (morphotax). However, the current model has no way of representing such contextual dependencies.

## 7 Conclusions

In the experiments the online method with the MDL cost function and recursive splitting appeared most successful especially for Finnish, whereas for English the compared methods were rather equal in performance. This is likely to be partially due to the model structure of the presented methods which is especially suitable for languages such as Finnish. However, there is still room for considerable improvement in the model structure, especially regarding the representation of contextual dependencies.

Considering the two examined model optimization methods, the Recursive MDL method performed consistently somewhat better. Whether this is due to the cost function or the splitting strategy cannot be deduced based on these experiments. In the future, we intend to extend the latter method to utilize an MDL-like cost function.


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# Telling Three from Four Neutrinos with Cosmology

## 1 Introduction

With the simplifying conditions of isotropy, homogeneity, thermal equilibrium, and the particle content of the standard model of particle physics, big bang nucleosynthesis (BBN) is a one parameter model dependent only on the baryon-to-photon ratio, $`\eta `$, at that epoch. The appeal of this simple yet successful standard model  has motivated a predictive ability, for example, in the number of leptons in the standard model of particle physics .

The light nuclides D, 3He, 4He and 7Li are produced in measurable quantities in the first three minutes of the standard cosmology. Considerable attention has been devoted to the analysis of uncertainties in the predicted abundances of the light elements and their consistency with the observed light element abundances . Though systematic uncertainties likely dominate the helium abundance measurements  and may be present in observations of the deuterium-to-hydrogen ratio D/H in high-redshift quasar systems , and 7Li may be partially depleted by stellar processes , standard BBN is remarkably successful predictor for the abundances of these light elements with abundances that differ by nine orders of magnitude.

There exist a variety of ways of modifying the standard BBN paradigm, including altering the spatial distribution of baryon number, out-of-equilibrium decays of massive particles, or new neutrino physics (for a summary, see Ref. ).

We focus our attention on a minimal extension to BBN by a modification of the neutrino sector, and specifically to models which attempt to simultaneously account for the indications of neutrino mixing and masses from the atmospheric neutrino results of Super-Kamiokande , the observations of the transformed solar neutrino flux , and the Liquid Scintillator Neutrino Detector (LSND) signal . A class of models that can accommodate all of these results introduce a fourth mass eigenstate . As is well known, the fourth flavor state must be sterile, i.e., not participating in $`SU(2)_L\times U(1)_Y`$ interactions, due to its being both light ($`m1\mathrm{GeV}`$) and not observed in the invisible width of the $`Z^0`$ boson . In current manifestations of four neutrino mixing models, the sterile neutrino is not necessarily closely associated with a single mass eigenstate, since the atmospheric and solar observations each disfavor large sterile components. However, recent global analyses  of the available neutrino oscillation data, including short baseline limits , leave four-neutrino models viable. There are several ways that light sterile neutrinos can be accommodated in neutrino mass models. For a review see, e.g., Ref. .

The standard contribution to the energy density by the three active neutrinos can be augmented by the complete or partial equilibration of the sterile mode. The increased energy density in units of the energy density in one neutrino and its antiparticle ($`\rho _{\overline{\nu }\nu }=7\pi ^2T^4/120`$) is then $`N_\nu =3+\mathrm{\Delta }N_\nu `$, where $`\mathrm{\Delta }N_\nu =\rho _s/\rho _{\overline{\nu }\nu }`$ is the relative contribution of the sterile state. Here, we use $`\mathrm{\Delta }N_\nu `$ strictly as a parameterization of extra (or missing) relativistic energy density. Sterile neutrinos in the early universe can also give rise to lepton asymmetry generation , which can alter or strongly suppress sterile neutrino thermalization, or, if the asymmetry is generated in the $`\nu _e/\overline{\nu }_e`$ sector, alter beta-equilibrium and thus light element abundance production, primarily in the production of 4He. As an alternate measure, the baryon-to-photon ratio $`\eta `$ is related to the cosmological baryon density $`\mathrm{\Omega }_b`$ (as a fraction of the cosmological critical density) as $`\eta 2.74\times 10^8\mathrm{\Omega }_bh^2`$, where $`h`$ is the present Hubble parameter in units of $`100\mathrm{km}\mathrm{s}^1\mathrm{Mpc}^1`$.

Letting $`N_\nu `$ be a free parameter of BBN, its primary effect is altering the predicted 4He abundance $`Y_p`$. The remaining parameter, the baryon content $`\eta `$, is (over) constrained by D/H, 3He and 7Li. In one analysis, Lisi, Sarkar and Villante  used four permutations of primordial light element abundance determinations to derive limits roughly in the range $`2<N_\nu <4`$. In one combination of light element abundance determinations (their data set A), the 99.7% CL region allowed $`N_\nu 4.5`$. This value is widely cited as allowing for an additional neutrino (or relativistic degree of freedom) at BBN. Though this limit was correct, it relied on the possibility of a “high” primordial deuterium abundance. Since that work, deuterium has been observed or bounded to have a “low” value in six high-redshift quasar absorption systems (QAS) by three groups , and the “high” deuterium QAS observation  has not been verified in other systems and is disputed . Using the low deuterium abundance and a small uncertainty in $`Y_p`$, Burles et al.  found the limit $`N_\nu <3.20`$ with the prior $`N_\nu >3`$. The work by Cyburt, Fields & Olive  took the possibility of two values of the baryon density, that given by D/H+BBN and CMB, $`\mathrm{\Omega }_bh^20.02`$, and a value of $`\mathrm{\Omega }_bh^20.01`$ preferred by one inferred primordial value of $`Y_p`$  and the 7Li abundance  (if undepleted). Ref.  finds that these densities give 95% CL upper bounds of $`N_\nu <3.6`$ and $`N_\nu <3.9`$, respectively.

Motivated by the six quasar absorption system measurements of a “low” D/H and the analysis of the observations of the CMB anisotropy experiments DASI, BOOMERanG, and MAXIMA, we adopt that the inferred value of the cosmic baryon density from D/H plus standard BBN $`\mathrm{\Omega }_bh^2(\mathrm{D}/\mathrm{H})`$ and the shape of the acoustic peaks in the CMB angular power spectrum $`\mathrm{\Omega }_bh^2(\mathrm{CMB})`$, are approaching the actual value of $`\mathrm{\Omega }_bh^2`$, within statistical and systematic uncertainties. The forthcoming analysis of the Microwave Anisotropy Probe (MAP) satellite’s observations will potentially reduce the uncertainty in $`\mathrm{\Omega }_bh^2`$ to approximately 10% . In Section 2, we analyze in detail the constraints arising from accurate calculations of the primordial helium abundance, the inferred primordial helium abundance, using either $`\mathrm{\Omega }_bh^2(\mathrm{D}/\mathrm{H})`$ or $`\mathrm{\Omega }_bh^2(\mathrm{CMB})`$, and show that a thermalized fourth neutrino is highly disfavored by standard BBN. In Section 3, we analyze current four neutrino mixing schemes and their behavior in the early universe and show that thermalization of a fourth neutrino state is unavoidable. In Section 4, we describe various means and methods of extending the standard model to evade this constraint.

## 2 The BBN Prediction of the Number of Neutrinos

The consistency of BBN as a predictor of the light element abundances already been explored in some detail . We instead focus on the current uncertainties in the cosmic baryon density $`\mathrm{\Omega }_bh^2`$ and the observed primordial 4He abundance $`Y_p`$, the light nuclide whose abundance is most sensitive to the energy content of the universe at the BBN epoch.

The baryon content of the universe can be estimated in a variety of ways, of which the most precise measures currently are the deuterium abundance at high redshift and the shape of the acoustic peaks in the CMB . Deuterium has been observed in high-redshift metal-poor neutral hydrogen systems which are seen as absorbers in the spectrum of back-lighting quasars. The deuterium in these extremely metal-poor systems is inferred to be close to the primordial value due to minimal stellar processing which produces metals and only destroys deuterium. Due to the extreme sensitivity of D/H to the baryon content at BBN, the baryon density required to produce the observed deuterium abundance is rather precisely determined :

$$\mathrm{\Omega }_bh^2(\mathrm{D}/\mathrm{H})=0.020\pm 0.002(95\%\mathrm{CL}),$$
(1)
for the standard energy density content $`N_\nu =3`$. The baryon density inferred from D/H has a small dependence on the relativistic energy density of the plasma, which is

$$\mathrm{\Omega }_bh^2(\mathrm{D}/\mathrm{H},N_\nu )=\mathrm{\Omega }_bh^2(\mathrm{D}/\mathrm{H},N_\nu =3)(1+0.125\mathrm{\Delta }N_\nu ).$$
(2)
The baryon content also alters the amplitude of acoustic oscillations in the primordial plasma at CMB decoupling and the relative height of the first three acoustic peaks (for a review of the physics of the CMB, see Ref. ). The first three acoustic peaks in the angular power spectrum of the CMB have been detected in the analysis of CMB anisotropy measurements by the DASI , BOOMERanG  and MAXIMA  experiments. The results of these experiments’ analyses find

$`\mathrm{\Omega }_bh^2(\mathrm{D})`$ $`=0.022_{0.003}^{+0.004}`$ $`(95\%\mathrm{CL})`$ (3)
$`\mathrm{\Omega }_bh^2(\mathrm{B})`$ $`=0.022_{0.003}^{+0.004}`$ $`(95\%\mathrm{CL})`$ (4)
$`\mathrm{\Omega }_bh^2(\mathrm{M})`$ $`=0.033\pm 0.013`$ $`(68\%\mathrm{CL})`$ (5)
respectively. The BOOMERanG value above is that given by their Bayesian approach. For concreteness in our analysis, we quantify the uncertainty in the cosmic baryon density inferred from the CMB with the likelihood function given in Ref.  by DASI+DMR.

If analyses of the CMB anisotropy measurements change and provide a value for $`\mathrm{\Omega }_bh^2`$ that is higher than that inferred from standard BBN, then this could have been an indication for a model with large and disparate neutrino degeneracy parameters known as degenerate BBN . However, if the favored large mixing angle (LMA) neutrino mixing parameters of the solution to the solar neutrino problem are verified (e.g., by the KamLAND experiment ), then synchronized neutrino flavor transformation in the early universe stringently limits neutrino degeneracies  and degenerate BBN is no longer a rescue.

In order to precisely predict the abundance of 4He from standard BBN for varying baryon density and neutrino number, Lopez and Turner  included finite-temperature radiative, Coulomb and finite-nucleon-mass corrections to the weak rates; order-$`\alpha `$ quantum-electrodynamic correction to the plasma density, electron mass, and neutrino temperature; and incomplete neutrino decoupling. Ref.  provides a fitting formula for their results of the predicted helium abundance as a function of $`\eta `$, $`N_\nu `$ and neutron lifetime $`\tau `$. We employ this fitting formula for the predicted 4He abundance, taking into account the typographical correction of signs noted in Ref. . After all of the above corrections are applied, the uncertainty in the predicted helium abundance is dominated by the neutron lifetime uncertainty, which is now known better than 0.1% . Therefore, we can safely ignore the theoretical errors, as they are dwarfed by observational uncertainty, which we now address.

The primordial helium abundance $`Y_p`$ has been estimated in observations of hydrogen and helium emission lines from regions of hot, ionized metal-poor gas in dwarf galaxies (Hii regions). By extrapolating the helium abundance and metallicity relationship for these regions to zero metallicity, Olive, Steigman and Skillman , and Fields and Olive  find

$$Y_p(\text{OSS-FO})=0.238\pm 0.002\text{(stat.)}\pm 0.005\text{(sys.)},$$
(6)
while Izotov and Thuan  find

$$Y_p(\mathrm{IT})=0.244\pm 0.002\text{(stat.)}.$$
(7)
Uncertainties regarding the ionization structure and temperature uniformity of the Hii regions as well as underlying stellar absorption are sources of significant systematic error. Refs.  estimate systematic effects in the primordial helium abundance are 2%. Ref.  finds that systematic effects can lead to 2-4% uncertainties that tend to overestimate $`Y_p`$. In an attempt to avoid bias, in this work we adopt the central value of

$$Y_p=0.241\pm 0.002\text{(stat.)}\pm \sigma _{\mathrm{sys}},$$
(8)
and characterize the systematic uncertainty as the disparity between competing claims

$$\sigma _{\mathrm{sys}}=|Y_p(\text{OSS-FO})Y_p(\mathrm{IT})|,$$
(9)
or approximately 3%. The shape of systematic uncertainty in likelihood space is certainly not well defined, therefore we make the simplifying ansatz of a Gaussian distribution, as done, e.g., in Ref. , and combine the statistical and systematic errors in quadrature.

We produce probability distribution functions (p.d.f.’s) for $`N_\nu `$ versus $`\mathrm{\Omega }_bh^2`$, using Gaussian distributions for $`Y_p`$ \[Eq. (8)\] and $`\mathrm{\Omega }_bh^2(\mathrm{D}/\mathrm{H},N_\nu )`$ \[Eq. (2)\], and the likelihood function given in Ref.  for $`\mathrm{\Omega }_bh^2(\mathrm{DASI})`$. We find, using either the information from deuterium or the CMB on $`\mathrm{\Omega }_bh^2`$:

$`N_\nu (\mathrm{D}/\mathrm{H})`$ $`=`$ $`2.60_{0.90}^{+0.90}`$ (10)
$`N_\nu (\mathrm{DASI})`$ $`=`$ $`2.46_{1.01}^{+1.03},`$ (11)
at 95% CL, which is consistent with the standard BBN prediction. We show the shapes of the likelihood contours in Fig. 1 (a). To illustrate the difference between adopting the IT or OSS-FO helium values, we plot the 99% likelihood contours for the choices $`Y_p(\text{OSS-FO})`$, $`Y_p(\mathrm{IT})`$ (using the systematic uncertainty of $`\pm 0.005`$) and our choice (8). As seen in Fig. 1 (b) the range of uncertainty does not depend on the choice of the central value but the size of systematic effects.

For a sterile neutrino to be thermalized with the bath of the early universe, the active neutrinos must be thermalized initially. This constitutes prior information that may loosen the constraints shown in Fig. 1. Prior information can be included in a Bayesian approach , integrating the p.d.f. only in the physically allowed region, $`N_\nu >3`$, which we have done using a Monte Carlo integration. We show the confidence level intervals for this case in Fig. 2. As seen there, a fully populated fourth neutrino is excluded at approximately the 99% CL.

Measurements of CMB anisotropies by the MAP satellite may measure $`\mathrm{\Omega }_bh^2`$ to 10%, giving a precise value independent of BBN. If consistent with $`\mathrm{\Omega }_bh^2`$ inferred from D/H and BBN, then $`\mathrm{\Omega }_bh^2`$ becomes a “nuisance parameter” that can be marginalized and the confidence level for $`N_\nu `$ is simply the integral of the p.d.f.,

$$\mathrm{CL}(N_\nu )=_3^{N_\nu }p(N_\nu ^{}|Y_p)𝑑N_\nu ^{}.$$
(12)
## 3 Four Neutrino Models in the Early Universe

There is now convincing evidence for neutrino flavor states to be composed of large amplitudes of more than one mass state from two experiments: Super-Kamiokande  and the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO) . There is also an indication of a neutrino oscillation signal at short baselines from the Liquid Scintillator Neutrino Detector (LSND) experiment . To accommodate all three of these results, a four neutrino model must be invoked (or $`CPT`$ is violated; see below). The mass and flavor state bases are related by a unitary transformation

$$\nu _\alpha =\underset{i}{\overset{4}{}}U_{\alpha i}\nu _i,$$
(13)
where $`\alpha =e,\mu ,\tau ,s`$ denotes the flavor state and $`i`$ is the mass state. The matrix $`U_{\alpha i}`$ generally has 6 rotation (mixing) angles and 3 $`CP`$ violating phases. The transformation probability has the form:

$`P(\nu _\alpha \nu _\beta )=`$ $`\delta _{\alpha \beta }4{\displaystyle \underset{i>j}{}}\mathrm{Re}\left(U_{\alpha i}^{}U_{\beta i}U_{\alpha j}U_{\beta j}^{}\right)\mathrm{sin}^2\left(\delta m_{ij}^2{\displaystyle \frac{L}{4E}}\right)`$ (14)
$`+2{\displaystyle \underset{i>j}{}}\mathrm{Im}\left(U_{\alpha i}^{}U_{\beta i}U_{\alpha j}U_{\beta j}^{}\right)\mathrm{sin}\left(\delta m_{ij}^2{\displaystyle \frac{L}{2E}}\right),`$ (15)
which provides rich neutrino oscillation phenomenology and experimental possibilities . Here $`\delta m_{ij}^2m_i^2m_j^2`$, $`L`$ is the distance from where the flavor $`\nu _\alpha `$ was created, and $`E`$ is its energy. For reviews of neutrino phenomenology see, e.g., Refs. .

For neutrino physics in the early universe, we are interested in the magnitude of mixing amplitudes of active neutrinos converting to sterile states. First derived by Langacker , and Dolgov and Barbieri , it has been known for some time that a sterile neutrino coupling with a single active neutrino via the unitary neutrino mass matrix must not have

$$\delta m_{\alpha s}^2\mathrm{sin}^42\theta _{\mathrm{BBN}}\{\begin{array}{cc}5\times 10^6,\text{for }\alpha =e\hfill & \\ 3\times 10^6,\text{for }\alpha =\mu ,\tau \hfill & \end{array},$$
(16)
in order to not fully thermalize the sterile neutrino prior to BBN via nonresonant collisional processes. Such constraints (16) certainly do not directly apply to multiple neutrino mixing schemes including a sterile which nature may have given us. Multiple mixing angles and the phenomenon of lepton number generation via neutrino mixing complicate the BBN bound.

We adopt a rotation angle ordering for $`U`$ so that $`(\nu _e,\nu _\mu ,\nu _\tau ,\nu _s)=(\nu _1,\nu _2,\nu _3,\nu _4)`$ when all mixing angles are set to zero. Four neutrino mixing scheme constraints have been examined recently in detail by Di Bari , which we summarize and expand on here in view of the recent global analyses of four-neutrino models by Maltoni, Schwetz and Valle . The effective oscillation amplitude of active-sterile neutrino mixing between flavor $`\alpha `$ and the sterile can be written as

$$A_{\alpha ;s}=4|U_{\alpha 4}|^2|U_{s4}|^2\mathrm{sin}^22\theta _{\mathrm{BBN}}.$$
(17)
Therefore, BBN constraints for active-sterile mixing through a pair of neutrino mass eigenstates $`\nu _4,\nu _i`$ are

$$\delta m_{4i}^2A_{\alpha ;s}^2\{\begin{array}{cc}5\times 10^6,\text{for }\alpha =e\hfill & \\ 3\times 10^6,\text{for }\alpha =\mu ,\tau \hfill & \end{array},$$
(18)
for nonresonant sterile production, where $`\delta m_{4i}^2>0`$. This constraint (18) applies primarily to the active-sterile mixing that leads the oscillation, i.e., that which has the shortest oscillation length or largest $`\delta m_{ij}^2`$. Small vacuum mixing amplitudes in the leading oscillation mode may avoid thermalization, and so secondary oscillation modes with larger mixing amplitudes may thermalize the sterile.

### 3.1 3+1

Models referred to as (3+1) may satisfy all experimental indications of neutrino oscillations with a triplet of mass eigenstates that provide the atmospheric and solar mass-scales, and a sterile-dominated mass eigenstate with a large mass-scale splitting with the triplet providing the LSND result via indirect $`\overline{\nu }_\mu \overline{\nu }_e`$ mixing through the sterile. In order to satisfy the mixing amplitude that would provide the LSND signal, the oscillation amplitude must be

$`A_{\mu ;e}`$ $`=`$ $`4|U_{e4}|^2|U_{\mu 4}|^2`$ (19)
$`>`$ $`3\times 10^4(99\%\mathrm{CL}),`$ (20)
at a $`\delta m_{\mathrm{LSND}}^22\mathrm{eV}^2`$ from Fig. 8 of Ref. . Indirect mixing of this form has two mixing amplitudes that may thermalize the sterile. In this case, the mixing amplitudes $`A_{\mu ;s}`$ and $`A_{e;s}`$ may participate in the thermalization. Consider the slightly less-constrained \[cf. (18)\] $`A_{\mu ;s}=4|U_{\mu 4}|^2|U_{s4}|^2`$. The mixing matrix element

$$|U_{s4}|^2>0.54(99\%\mathrm{CL}),$$
(21)
is bounded from below from constraints on the fraction of sterile neutrinos participating in atmospheric oscillations (see Fig. 3 of Ref. ).

Evading constraints from BBN on $`A_{\mu ;s}`$ and $`A_{e;s}`$ would require minimizing both $`|U_{e4}|`$ and $`|U_{\mu 4}|`$ while satisfying (20). This gives $`|U_{e4}|^2=|U_{\mu 4}|^210^2`$. Combined with the limit (21), the BBN constrained combination has the minimum value

$$\delta m_{\mathrm{LSND}}^2A_{\mu ;s}^27\times 10^4$$
(22)
which exceeds the limits (18) by at least two orders of magnitude and invariably thermalizes the sterile. This constraint comes from the conservative case where $`\delta m_{4i}^2>0`$. The inverted case $`\delta m_{4i}^2<0`$ is resonant and more stringently constrained. Therefore, (3+1) models are strongly disfavored by standard BBN.

### 3.2 2+2

Four neutrino models may also accommodate all indications for neutrino mixing with mass eigenstates in a pair of doublets that provide the solar and atmospheric mass scales and a large mass gap between the doublets providing the LSND mass scale. The global analysis by Maltoni et al.  finds that such (2+2) models are consistent within 99% CL either with the sterile neutrino completely participating in the atmospheric or solar solutions. Therefore, it is possible to choose a very small amplitude mixing between the doublet not participating in sterile oscillations and the sterile state such that the large LSND mass splitting does not populate the sterile neutrino. On the other hand, unitarity constrains the sterile state to be present among some linear combination of mass eigenstates. Whether (2+2) scenarios are compatible with the exclusion of large sterile components in both the atmospheric and solar neutrino observations is controversial .

Whether the sterile flavor is in the atmospheric doublet or solar doublet is not of concern for the early universe. In either case, the sterile flavor will be thermalized. For our notation, we employ the mass scheme used in Ref. , where the (2+2) model has the solar scale between $`\nu _1`$ and $`\nu _4`$ and the atmospheric scale between $`\nu _2`$ and $`\nu _3`$, with the hierarchy only being determined by the condition for resonance in the sun, $`m_1<m_4`$. One can avoid the effects of thermalization of the largest mass scale by setting the inter-doublet mixings to zero, $`U_{s1}=U_{s3}=0`$, but by unitarity $`|U_{s2}|^2+|U_{s4}|^2=1`$, whereby the sterile neutrino participates in large part in the solar scale, atmospheric scale or both. Having a complete sterile solution for either scale has already been known to thermalize the sterile neutrino . One could consider democratically separating the sterile into both the atmospheric and solar scales to minimize its presence in both, so that $`|U_{s2}|^2=|U_{s4}|^2=1/2`$. However, the oscillation amplitudes $`A_{\mu ;s}=4|U_{\mu 2}|^2|U_{s2}|^2`$ and $`A_{e;s}=4|U_{e4}|^2|U_{s4}|^2`$ still grossly exceed the BBN bounds (18) since the magnitudes $`|U_{e4}|^2=|U_{e1}|^2\mathrm{tan}^2\theta _{\mathrm{LMA}}`$ and $`|U_{\mu 2}|`$ must be large to accommodate the large to maximal mixing angle solutions of the solar and atmospheric neutrino problems. Therefore, (2+2) models are also strongly disfavored by standard BBN.

### 3.3 Self-Suppression

The possibility that a four neutrino mass scheme could be arranged in such a way as to evade sterile-thermalization constraints were considered by Bell, Foot & Volkas  and Shi, Fuller & Abazajian . One could potentially either self-generate a lepton number and suppress the large-mixing-amplitude thermalization or offset the effects of sterile thermalization by altering the electron neutrino-antineutrino asymmetry through alteration of beta-equilibrium,

$`\mathrm{n}+\nu _e`$ $``$ $`\mathrm{p}+e^{}`$ (23)
$`\mathrm{n}+e^+`$ $``$ $`\mathrm{p}+\overline{\nu }_e.`$ (24)
In the models considered in Refs. , the direct thermalization bounds (18) were avoided by placing the sterile neutrino in the small-mixing-angle solution to the solar neutrino problem, a region of parameter space still viable at the time and outside of the constraint region (18).

In addition, Refs.  explored methods of generating asymmetries between electron neutrinos and antineutrinos by resonant lepton number generation . The resonance condition in the early universe requires $`m_4<m_i`$, where $`m_i`$ is a mass eigenstate (more) closely associated with an active flavor. A positive electron neutrino number will suppress the 4He abundance by shifting the rates (24), which would be necessary if standard BBN is inconsistent by having too high of a predicted 4He abundance for a given $`\mathrm{\Omega }_bh^2`$. As shown above, standard BBN remains consistent within observational uncertainty. The sign of resonantly generated electron neutrino/antineutrino asymmetry can be chaotic , or at least not well determined , having an significant chance (50% if chaotically random) of being negative and actually increasing $`Y_p`$ by altering beta-equilibrium in the opposite direction. If the sign of the asymmetry is randomly chaotic, then causally disconnected regions will have different sign asymmetries, which leads to an enhancement of the transformation of active neutrinos into sterile neutrinos at the boundaries of regions of different sign  and potentially placing more stringent constraints on four neutrino mass schemes .

There is considerable evidence now that the solar solution lies in the LMA region of parameter space . Therefore, as discussed in the previous sections, thermalization of the sterile is unavoidable in either the (3+1) or (2+2) scenarios. And, importantly, it was shown by Di Bari  that thermalization of the sterile in these four neutrino models suppresses lepton number generation, and electron neutrino/antineutrino asymmetries are not effective in avoiding the BBN bounds (18).

## 4 Constraint Evasion and New Physics

The simplifying and appealing principle of Occam’s razor has proven to be a powerful tool as a predictor in science, yet nature does not always take the most simple form. The minimal model for four neutrino mixing or the standard BBN described above may certainly not be the entire framework of the early universe or particle physics. Importantly, if all experimental indications for neutrino oscillations remain, viz., if the MiniBooNE detector  verifies the LSND signal, K2K  and MINOS  verify the atmospheric oscillation solution and KamLAND detects the LMA signal , then new physics must be at play beyond standard three-neutrino mixing and standard BBN. There exist a number of ways of accommodating such a scenario, several of which are described below. The aesthetic value of these scenarios are left to the judgment of the reader.

Pre-existing lepton asymmetry — A lepton number in the active neutrino flavors will suppress sterile neutrino population by magnifying the associated lepton potential and dwarfing the vacuum mixing amplitude . This lepton number would have to be produced by an unspecified mechanism earlier than the population of the sterile neutrino would take place.

A fifth mass eigenstate — Appropriate insertion of a mass eigenstate with a major sterile component with $`m_5<m_i(i=1\mathrm{}4)`$ in degenerate neutrino mass models may resonantly generate lepton number sufficiently prior to sterile thermalization as to suppress it. This possibility was explored in Ref. .

Majoron fields — One mechanism for generating neutrino mass involves a massless Nambu-Goldstone boson (a majoron) from models where either the total or partial lepton number is spontaneously broken . In such models, a coherent majoron field creates potentials for the neutrinos proportional to the gradient of the field and suppresses sterile thermalization in a similar way as a pre-existing lepton asymmetry . Interestingly, this mechanism arises from the neutrino mass model itself.

A low reheating temperature universe — There is no direct evidence that the neutrino background is thermalized. As explored in Refs. , the highest temperature of the universe could have been only $`0.7\mathrm{MeV}`$. The neutrino background may never have been thermalized, but the observed light element abundances could still be created. In this case, sterile neutrinos may modify the nucleosynthesis processes by partial population but are not directly excluded.

Baryon-antibaryon inhomogeneity — Detailed calculations of diffusion and nucleosynthesis in universes containing baryon number asymmetries  have found that small-scale antibaryon domains are not excluded by BBN and the observed light element abundances , and may lift constraints on relativistic energy density present at BBN to $`N_\nu 7`$, even with total baryon densities consistent with CMB observations .

Extended quintessence — Non-minimally coupled quintessence models (where the quintessence field is not only coupled to gravity) that provide a negative-pressure vacuum energy density to explain the acceleration phase that the universe may be entering can alter BBN . In certain cases of such “extended quintessence” scenarios, the quintessence field may behave to decrease the expansion rate during the freeze-out of beta equilibrium (24), and therefore decrease the predicted helium abundance. This reduction of the expansion rate could offset the increase in the expansion rate due to the presence of an extra neutrino degree of freedom and allow for four-neutrino models.

$`CPT`$ violating neutrinos — There exists a radical proposal that fits all indications for neutrino oscillation and invokes $`CPT`$ violation in the neutrino sector . The success of this model lies in the fact that LSND’s indication for neutrino oscillation lies primarily in the antineutrino $`\overline{\nu }_\mu \overline{\nu }_e`$ channel , is motivated by braneworld scenarios with extra dimensions, and gives dramatic predictions for the MiniBooNE  and KamLAND  experiments. This model has no effect on standard BBN since in the standard case the neutrinos and antineutrinos are equally thermally populated and therefore $`CPT`$ violating neutrino oscillations do not disturb the detailed balance of thermal equilibrium, leading to no direct conflicts between light element abundances and standard BBN.

## 5 Discussion and Conclusions

In minimal models of big bang nucleosynthesis with no new physics, we have shown that four neutrino models explaining current indications for neutrino oscillations are disfavored at the 99% CL. This conclusion depends on systematic effects not being larger than that expected ($`3\%`$) in determining the 4He abundance in ionized Hii regions and that the baryon density inferred by the D/H abundance in six high-redshift quasar absorption systems and the anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background are approaching the true cosmic value of $`\mathrm{\Omega }_bh^2`$.

The MAP satellite will verify or disprove the value of $`\mathrm{\Omega }_bh^2`$ inferred by the above methods to high precision in the near future . If consistency remains in cosmological determinations of the baryon density, then $`\mathrm{\Omega }_bh^2`$ would then become a “nuisance” parameter in determining the cosmological energy density at standard BBN. The primordial helium abundance is currently the best probe of the energy density of the universe present at BBN, yet there remain no concrete proposals in the literature for the reducing systematic uncertainties present in determining the primordial 4He abundance, which is the dominant uncertainty in constraining the energy density present in the universe at the age of one second via standard BBN.

In addition, we have summarized several scenarios that evade the standard BBN model constraints presented here. Remarkably, if all experimental indications for neutrino oscillations are confirmed, new physics must be present not only in the particle content of the neutrino sector but also in the early universe.

## 6 Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Kaladi Babu, Gabriela Barenboim, Nicole Bell, Scott Burles, Janet Conrad, Scott Dodelson, Josh Frieman, George Fuller, Manoj Kaplinghat, Jim Kneller, Rabi Mohapatra, Sandip Pakvasa, Subir Sarkar, Mike Turner and Jose Valle for fruitful discussions, and the Institute for Nuclear Theory at the University of Washington for hospitality and the DOE for support in hosting a Mini-Workshop on Neutrino Masses & Mixing which initiated this project. I would especially like to thank John Beacom for extremely valuable discussions regarding my statistical approach. This research was supported by the DOE and NASA grant NAG 5-10842 at Fermilab.


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# Untitled Document

Mathematics, Brain Modelling & Indian Concept of Mind

Bikas K. Chakrabarti

Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics

1/AF Bidhan Nagar, Kolkata 700064.

Abstract: We describe briefly the recent advances in understanding the distributed nature of computations in the (neural) network structure of the brain. We discuss if such artificial networks will be able to perform mathematics and natural sciences. The problem of consciousness in such machines is addressed. Ancient Indian ideas regarding mind-body relations and J. C. Bose’s experimental observations regarding the highly distributed computations in the plant body is discussed.

I. Mathematics and logic:

What is the nature of mathematical truths? Is mathematical knowledge true a priori? Independent of experience and observation? Does one have to verify mathematical truths in any (mathematical) laboratory? If not, what makes it true?

Philosphers and mathematicians have thought about it for a long time: see e.g., Whitehead and Russell  for some discussions on these thoughts by western thinkers (a comparative study of eastern and Indian thoughts seems to be missing – at least not known to this author). Although several ideas had been developed over the ages, Whitehead and Russell proposed very forcefully, following Hilbert (1862 \- 1943), the idea that mathematical statements are true because of their internal consistency and as they do not convey anything new; they are in fact tautologies. Mathematics is just a condensed form of logic. Mathematical proof of a proposition is just an elaboration of the proposition itself; nothing new is conveyed or introduced by mathematical proof. That is why, there is no need to have a laboratory checking the truth of a mathematical statement. Two plus two is four because the concept of (the set of) four contains the concept of (the sets of) two. That fifty minus fifty makes it zero need not be checked by pushing all the fifty odd audience out of this lecture hall! It is true just like the truth of a statement “A bachelor does not have any wife”; one need not check if each individual bachelor satisfies it or not. To prove the truthfulness of these statements, one just needs to look at the meaning of the words involved!

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Based on a lecture delivered at the Asiatic Society, Kolkata, on March 15, 2002 (Conf. Mathematics & Astronomy in Ancient India, Asiatic Society, March 2002).

If it is true that mathematics is just a condensed form of logic, it is certainly formalizable. In that case, is the human brain unique or even necessary for doing and developing mathematics? Or, can a machine do that? May not be today in a complete form, but in some future day? Mathematics is certainly necessary; but are human mind or the mind of a mathematician absolutely necessary? May be, we do not have the machine or the computer yet to replace the mathematicians; but in the future, can we dispense with them?

Although the debate still continues, it appears that a major part of mathematics like arithmetic is already formalizable and indeed a computer can do it and do it better. Question arises, what about analytical mathematics and geometry? Intuitionists like Kronecker (1823-1891), Poincaré (1854-1912), Borel (1871-1956), Weyl (1885-1955) and others chiefly argued against such formalized view of mathematics on the ground of its inappropriateness in analysis and geometry (see e.g., ). For example, how does such formalization work when a function or a number is expressed as an infinite series? When all the terms in the series, which are part of the function or the number, can not be enumerated, as in many such series forwarded by Ramanujam (1887-1920)? Similar are the cases of geometrical analysis. A celebrated demonstration of the problem came from Gödel (1906 - 1978). Seizing upon paradoxical situations like “The statement I am making now is untrue”, Gödel was able to show that if a formalized mathematics, as proposed in Principia Mathematica is wide enough, then (a) the system is necessarily incomplete in the sense that there exists a formula F of the system such that neither F nor its negation is derivable, and (b) if the system is consistent, then no proof of its consistency is possible which can be formalized within it (cf. ). Later works of people like Feigenbaum on the bifurcation route to chaos in some nonlinear maps and its universality class obtained using renormalization group technique (a physical or inductive principle, not a mathematical one), or like Witten on the string-dynamical description of elementary particles indicated the existence and need of (computational or physical) laboratory of mathematics (cf. ).

II. Inductive logic and pattern recognition:

As discussed in the previous section, mathematics is thought primarily to be based on deductive logic. Physics or for that matter other natural sciences are based on inductive logic. Here, based on careful observations and ‘inductions’ from there, one formulates the basic statements or truths. From such inductive truths, one then deduces the special statements or truths appropriate for specific situations in physical or natural sciences. This deductive (logic) part in natural sciences is of course an integral part and naturally involves mathematics. Unlike most of mathematics (if not all) these inductive truths are obtained from the observations in various ‘laboratories’. Looking at the sun rising on the east every morning, we come to the inductive truth “The sun rises in the east every morning”. This helps us to predict almost certainly, that the sun will come up in the east tomorrow. But unlike the mathematical or deductive truths, this inductive truth and its predictions are provisional; an observation next day might force us to update, refine or change the truth. Compared to this, the prediction that two stars and two others in sky in the night tomorrow will make four stars, is not provisional and one need not have to check if it was valid yesterday!

The search and application of these inductive logic are admittedly the hallmark of human brain; more specifically of the brains of great scientists. Unlike mathematics, which is thought to be mostly formalizable and based on deductive logic, the natural sciences are thought to be essentially based on inductive logic or truth. Unlike the major part of mathematics therefore, which can be performed by a machine or computer, natural science is expected to be essentially developed by and dependent on the human mind or brain!

Recently, the computer scientists have developed algorithms to ‘search or recognise patterns’ in seemingly unrelated situations or sequences. These mechanical processes of pattern recognition are indeed similar in spirit to the search of inductive truths by human mind or brain! For example, by recognising the ‘abnormalities’ in the regular pattern of blood flow through our veins, the physicians diagonose our illnesses. Such an expertise of a medical doctor is of course much too rudimentary compared to that of natural scientist recognising, for example, that the same pattern is involved in the motion of the planets around the sun and the apple falling on the ground from the tree! Nevertheless, in the extended language of the computer science, all these are pattern recognition problems; some are much simpler compared to others. Basically, the problems of the medical doctor and of Newton are the same; pattern recognition. Indeed, the above mentioned simple pattern recognition of blood flow pulses can often be performed these days by ‘expert computer algorithms’ as well. Slightly more complicated recognition problems like that of elementary musical rhythms and of hand-writing etc are now analyzable using computers; several algorithms are already developed to help solving such problems. The recently developed ‘associative memory’ algorithms by Hopfield (in 1984; see the next section and ref. ) and of ‘learning’ by reorganising the connections through interactive minimization of errors by the multi-layer perceptrons, originally deviced by Rosenblatt (in 1962; see next section and ref. ) are indeed very encouraging. To some natural scientists, these are clear indications (inductive truth?) that all our deductive and inductive logics, and hence entire mathematics and the natural sciences, can in principle be performed by machines: computers or artificial neural networks. This is a very recent and highly exciting problem posed in the literature of philosophy of science, often known as the ‘Strong Artificial Intelligence (AI)’ hypothesis; see e.g., Crick  supporting the hypothesis and the excitement and Penrose , Chalmers  et al, contradicting parts of it (essentially arguing from the Gödel’s theorem). We will continue with the discussion on this issue at the end of the next section.

III. Neural network modelling of the brain:

Although we differ from the animals in almost all the parts of our bodies, our essential difference is rightly identified in our respective brains. We are known by our brains; a mathematician, a scientist or an artist differ essentially in their respective brains. Although even in the physiques of mine and of mathematicians-scholars like Aryabhatta II (b. 476 A.D.) or Bhaskaracharyya II (b. 1114 A.D.) there must have been a lot of differences, the essential difference, as we are all too aware, have been in our brains! But what is the precise physical difference between my brain, and that of Aryabhatta or for that matter that of a cow? We do not know yet about all the differences, except for their size and the structure.

We know today, at least in principle, the structure and working mechanisms of almost all the parts of our body, except for the brain, and have in fact developed some artificial supplements for them. They are used when parts of our body fail to function normally. We know that the outer-retina part of our eye is like a camera, heart is like a pump, etc and we can be provided with artificial supports like spectacles, pacemakers, etc to supplement their partial failures. In case of the brain, however, we are still helpless, even if it fails minimally. Our interest in the brain structure and function is therefore not just of epistemological, mathematical, computational or physical curiosity or interest, medical support possiblity in future is of extreme importance and can hardly be overemphasized.

During evolution, the animal bodies developed their brains to perform the primary task of helping the body act according to the changes in the environment: to analyse the signals received from the environment and to respond accordingly. As the body surface receives the external signals, each portion of it is mapped in the brain. In fact, as the body surface grows with the body volume to the power 2/3, the brain mass varies with 2/3rd power of the animal body mass; bigger brain of the elephant is required for the control of the bigger body. By injecting coloured stains inside a dead brain, about hundred and fifteen years back, the spanish doctor Ramon y Cajal (nobel prize in Medicine in 1906) showed that the brains are made up of many tiny cells, called since then neurons, which are connected to each other through synaptic junctions seperated by semipermeable membranes. We now know almost certainly that human brain contains about $`10^{12}`$ neurons and we are all born with them; Aryabhatta, Newton, Einstein, Tagore and myself were all born with more or less this number of neuronal cells in the brain. This number does not differ much within the species, but differs considerably from species to species; e.g., the birds have about $`10^8`$ neurons. The physical structure of a neuron is indicated in Fig. 1. Each neuron is an electrical device capable, in principle, of a very simple (electrical) operation. It collects electrical pulses (of millivolt order) from $`10^4`$ to $`10^6`$ other neurons connected to it through its dendrites. These pulses, collected over a synaptic period of a few milliseconds, are then summed-up in the cell body. If the resultant sum exceeds a threshold voltage, a few tens of millivolt order, the neuron fires and a millivolt order electrical pulse propagates (at a speed of few meters per second) through the axon (cable). It then passes over to the other connected neurons through the respective synaptic junctions. As noted by several neurophysiologists, including Hebbs (in 1949), these synaptic connections between the neurons develop with training and learning. We are not born with all these electrical wirings (synaptic connections) among the components (neurons), although a significant fraction of them seem indeed to be determined by hereditary factors. Needless to mention here that according to this picture, I differ from Aryabhatta in developing my inter-neuronal connections; not in our brain size or neuron number. These synaptic connections may be both excitory (where a positive pulse flow accross it keeping its phase unchanged) and inhibitory (where a positive pulse passes over to the connected neuron as negative pulse, with changed phase). In fact, such random millivolt order $`10^4`$ to $`10^6`$ incoming pulses add up to only about $`10^2`$ or $`10^1`$ volts in the cell body of a single neuron. For all excitory or all inhibitory connections, this sum in a single cell would go to an extremely high value and cause the failure of the cell. More importantly, as we will see later, the absence of ‘frustration’ (see e.g., ) in the cases of all excitory or all inhibitory connections would reduce enormously the brain memory capacity. As may be noted from Fig. 2, these synaptic connections develop with appropriate signals to the brain (received in appropriate time), and it takes maximum time (about 26 to 30 years) for human. Compared to this, the animal brain development (development of their inter-neuron connections) takes very little time and in fact it ceases almost immediately after their birth. It appears therefore that I differ from great artists, scientists or mathematians, mostly in our respective developments (of synaptic connections) after our births!

As mentioned already, neurons are electrical devices and can be in two functional states: firing state (if the aggregate synaptic voltage in the cell exceeds the threshold) or quiescent state (otherwise). Neurophysiologists McCullogh and Pitts (see e.g., ) therefore proposed the idea of functional modelling of a single neuron by a two state device like an electrical valve or an electronic transistor. The consequent excitement came from the realization that the present day computer workstations already employ about $`10^8`$ transistors (comparable to the neuron number in a pegion’s head) and the transistors, being electronic systems, work much faster (typical time scale being $`10^8`$ seconds) while the ionic flow rate in the neurons are much slower (with typical time scale of the order of $`10^1`$ to $`10^3`$ seconds). Once the inter-neuronal connection architecture in the brain is understood, its artificial implementation on a silicon device may become extremely powerful!

As mentioned before, although we know now a little bit about the structure and function of a single neuron, we are still in the dark about the growth of the neural network through the inter-neuron synaptic connections. We do not know yet the precise algorithms followed during the learning processes to develop these connections.

One can use a digital or binary representation of any pattern using pixel decompositions. Each such pattern can then be made an ‘attractor’ configuration of the network (of binary neurons) following a network dynamics. Starting from any ‘corrupted’ or distorted version of that pattern then the dynamics of the network brings back the ‘learned’ pattern as the dynamics get attracted towards that. The dynamical matrix elements, representing the synaptic interaction between the neurons, depend on the pattern the network intends to remember or get attracted to. Two independent patterns then demand differently for these matrix elements. Memory of a large number of such patterns then demand conflicting or frustrating requirements for the synaptic connections or the matrix elements. This is a generic feature for such networks. In fact, this frustration leads to a macroscopic number of local attractors of the dynamics of the network, which helps large memory size etc; without frustration, the network would have only two attractors (and hence two memory states). In the Hopfield model, one defines an energy function in the pattern configuration space such that the learned patterns correspond to local energy minima, whereas the corrupted or distorted patterns correspond to higher energies. Any dissipative energy minimisation dynamics then brings the system to the local minima or memory state if the starting configuration was within its domain of attraction. In this model, the synaptic connections are taken, following Hebbs, symmetric and its magnitude given by the algebric sum of the inter-neoron interactions required for each of the pattern to be learned or memorised. The resultant interactions then become random not only in magnitude but also in sign. This frustration leads to a maximum memory size of the network (capable of recalling from distorted patterns) about 14% of the network size, given by the number of neurons in the network. The network gets confused if more patterns are put in it! In the Rosenblatt perceptron model, these dynamical matrix elements (synaptic connections) evolve dynamically by minimising errors in predicting the ‘unseen’ part of the pattern. After some initial ‘supervision’, such networks perform various pattern recognition jobs satisfactorily (see e.g., ).

Criticsms: As mentioned in the previous section, although there have been intreguing developments and consequent excitements regarding the possibility of artificial intelligence and mind, as good as those of the human, severe criticsms of such Strong AI hypothesis have been forwarded by several scientists. The Strong AI states (cf. Crick ) that a “Computer will not only have mental states as its emergent property, the implemented program will by itself constitute the mind”. Penrose  argues that such a machine can not have consciousness (cf. emperor’s new cloth) which in his view is complicated by quantum mechanical entanglements. Chalmers  argues that even if such a machine performs all these (computations and pattern recognitions), it can not be ‘self-conscious’. The argument is that a computer program is defined purely syntactically, and that the syntax itself is not enough to guarantee the presence of mind. My stomach pain is my personal feeling and I am conscious of that, while the physiological disorder and neurological processes following that are objective facts for a physician identifying the cause of my pain; they are not identical. Searle  developed a ‘chinese room’ argument to refute the Strong AI hypothesis. The argument runs as follows: Even if I do not understand chinese, I can behave like a chinese by following a set of preassigned (say translated) rules or programs. Within these set of rules (program) I will appear to behave as understanding it; although I do not! Thus (a) programs are entirely syntactical, (b) minds have semantics and (c) syntax is not the same as, nor by itself sufficient, for semantics. This three step chinese room argument therefore proves “Programs are not minds” (cf. ).

IV. Indian Concept of mind & Bose’s nervous mechanism of plants:

In Upanishad (1500 B.C. - 1000 B.C.), the mind was argued to be composed of the heart and the brain. In fact, in Praśna, one gets even a description of the physiological structure of the mind . From the heart, 101 ‘nadi’ or ‘dhamani’ gets out, each of which apparently branches out in 100 thinner and tinier branches, and so on. It says, in total about 72000 ‘nadi’ or ‘dhamani’ are spread all throughout our body and the brain. Proper function of our brain depends on all of them . This 3000 year old crude and speculative model might be compared with our present (established) knowledge of about $`10^{12}`$ neurons in the human brain! Upanishad then argues that the external objects or processes then induce, through the senses and conveyed through the ‘nadi’s, ‘Manas’ (or sense-data) which in turn induces ‘Buddhi’ (becomes unmanifest) giving rise to ‘Purusa-Atman’ (self or ego) which finally melts down to ‘Chitta’ (consciousness). These ideas about the consciousness of our mind were later evolved in Bhagavad Gita (300 B. C.) and in particular in Buddhism (273 B. C. - 200 B. C.) .

The idea or the philosophical doctrine that the mind is not essentially confined only to a small part part of the body (for example the brain), and that it disperses all over the body seemed to be a dominating one in ancient Indian thoughts. In fact, even the treatment and control of the mental processes, as advocated and prescribed in Susrut (500 B. C.) and in Yoga and Tantraloka (cf. ), involved some thoughtful and thorough exercise of the various parts of our body! It is indeed unfortunate that scholastic follow-ups, scientific investigations following these ideas and their refinements are nonexistant or insignificant. Even documents and books on these developments are scarce (cf. ).

It is particularly heartening to ‘discover’ in this context, the experimental work of Jagadish Bose in the last century on the nervous mechanism of plants . It is well known, plants do not have brains, and hence do not have any neuronal cells or their network like us. Yet, the plants do indeed perform computations for adjusting and responding to the changing environments. Plants do these calculations slowly, but surely. Imagine the response, say within a week, of a plant in a suddenly darkened area with sunlight coming only from an angle, or take the case of a creeper plant climbing up a window grill or a pillar with its tentacles or branches! Imagine the amount of computations involved in ‘recognising’ the structure of the neighbouring posts or grilles, in ‘finding’ their minimum cross-sections and in holding them by growing around the necks of the neighbouring structures. Do they also have personal feelings? Are they self-conscious? We do not know.

Through his pioneering experiments, J. C. Bose  showed about hundred years ago that the plant cells are excitable and can transmit millivolt order electrical signals at about 10-40 millimeter per second speed. Through these electrical signals, these cells communicate in coordinating their responses to the environment (see Fig. 3). This analysis and ‘recognition’ of the changes in the external environment is therefore performed by the plants, according to Bose, through its extended (nervous) cellular network all across its trunks, branches and leaves. It may be mentioned that this partial electrical signalling between the plant cells, like those in the neurons of the animals, is now a fairly established fact; although, for a long period after Bose’s pioneering work, the plant physiologists did not accept it and considered the inter-cell signalling to be purely chemical diffusion in origin (see e.g., Shephard ). This observation of extended computation or processing of the environmental signals all over the living body of the plant or the animal is in fact very much in conformity with the ancient Indian idea of mind-body relationship. Again, not much development has taken place in this direction.

Concluding remarks:

Present analysis of the brain structure and of the neural computation process indicates how a collective computing property (like consciousness) might emerge out of a network of (about $`10^{12}`$) neurons or transistors. Unlike the present day computers, our brain calculates in a distributed way. It employs parallel processing involving almost all the neurons in the brain for each computing operation. The observation by Bose  on the plant nervous system suggests that computations can be much more distributed than we can think today. Plants do not have any brain and yet they compute using their cells all over the plant body. Can individual brains interact? Electrical contacts or interactions are not possible, but perhaps socially? World population today is about $`10^{10}`$, and every one of us has got a brain to perform simple tasks. Is it possible that collective computational capacity of many such brains might give rise to higher order comuptational abilities and the (social) consciousness we are so familiar with? Isolated person like Robinson Crusoe’s brain may not generate it. But an interactively evolving society perhaps develops it necessarily? Partial or indifferent participation may then lead to different perceptions, ‘value judgements’ and ethics. Compared to the innate history of the universe, human histroy therefore becomes accessible to value judgements and conscious evaluation (cf. ). Such a possiblity seems to be pretty close to the ideas floated by the major Indian schools of thought, starting from Upanishad. If this is true, machines can also have such consciousness; only perhaps collectively!

Acknowledgement: I am grateful to A. K. Bag, R. Banerjee, P. Bhattacharyya, R. L. Brahmachary, A. Chatterjee, A. Dutta, A. Kundu, S. Pradhan and P. Mitra for several useful and encouraging comments.

References:

 A. N. Whitehead and B. Russell, Principia Mathematica, Vols. I-III, Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge (1962)

 G. T. Kneebone, Mathematical Logic & Foundations of Mathematics, Van Nostrand, London (1963)

 R. Penrose, Emperor’s New Mind, Oxford Univ. Press, Oxford (1989)

 M. J. Feigenbaum, Journal of Statistical Physics 19 (1978) 25 ; E. Witten in Critical Problems in Physics, Eds. V. L. Fitch et al, Princeton Univ. Press, Princeton (1997) pp. 271-280

 D. J. Amit, Modelling Brain Functions, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (1989)

 F. Crick, The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul, Simon & Schuster, London (1994); see also P. Churchland, The Engine of Reason, The Seat of the Soul, MIT press, Massachusetts (1995)

 D. J. Chalmers, The Conscious Mind, Oxford Univ. Press, Oxford (1996)

 J. R. Searle, The Mystery of Consciousness, Granata Books, London (1997)

 P. T. Raju, in The Cultural Heritage of India, Vol. III, Ramakrishna Mission Institute of Culture, Kolkata (1983) pp. 507-519, 581-607

 R. L. Gregory (Ed.), The Oxford Companion to Mind, Oxford Univ. Press, Oxford (1998) pp. 146-47, 357-61

 J. C. Bose, The Nervous Mechanisms of Plants, Longmans, London (1926); See also V. A. Shepherd, Current Science 77 (1999) pp. 189-195

 I. Berlin, The Proper Study of Mankind, Pimlico, London (1998) pp. 17-58.

Figure captions:

Fig. 1. Schematic structure of a neuron.

Fig. 2. Development of inter-neuron synaptic connections in the human visual cortex after the birth: (from left to right) newborn, three month old and two year old infant \[From T. H. Bullock, R. Orkand and A. Grinnel, Introduction to Nervous Systems, Freeman, San Francisco (1977)\].

Fig. 3. Electrical pulsations in Desmodium, measured by inserting the probe slowly (0.1 mm per turn) within the tissues \[from Bose \].