Surfaces and Essences I have known my wife for almost 50 years. I'm still only vaguely aware of what it is "like" to be her. But language is a big help. I know what it is like when her back hurts and how she feels when the neighbors block our driveway. But some things I will never understand, such as the way she intercepts everything on its way to the recycle bin and thinks of ways to use it in her Kindergarten class. But here, language comes to the rescue. We invent a word. A private word that is known only to her and me. KINDERGARBAGE.  We have invented a new name for a situation, thus creating a bridge between her mind and mine. We both know what kindergarbage is. It's a new category . We both recognize when any particular object is in this category, although she is much more inclusive than I am. "Surfaces and Essences" is about the magic of language - specifically our ability to instantly form  new categories and instantly recognize them by analogy. If

It may be said that whether or not a corporation is "alive" is a matter of definition. I find it quite easy to make the necessary adjustments. But we are still left with our doubts about the analogy. We expect a living thing to be "like" us - especially to have something we call consciousness. Consciousness is a slippery idea. For most of us, it refers to the experience we have of inhabiting the world. It is subtly connected to the phenomenon of attention . A vast amount of my behaviour is obviously controlled by my brain but not in a conscious way (I don't need to think about how to walk down the street, drive a car or decipher letter patterns while I read). Consciousness (attention) is about what I do need to "think about". This distinction is made in " The Ravenous Brain ", a very readable source for those looking for an update on the current status of research into how the brain works. In summary, the function of "attention" or

Trekspertise explains the origin of the Borg It is interesting to note the perspective of the narrater, who is totally "assimilated" into the Star Trek multiverse. He sees the Borg threat as a symbolic treatment relationship between humanity and technology. According to the narrator, the Borg represent the perfect foil for the values represented by the "good guys" in the Star Trek Franchise: freedom, diversity, individuality . In fact, these values can be recognized as uniquely American . The premise of this blog is that the threat to these values does indeed come from technology, but there is no need for technology to be particularly advanced. The first time that assimilation appeared in history on a frightening scale, it was enabled by the expert bowman riding on horseback . Conquerors soon learned to to enslave their victims instead of killing them.  Fredrick W. Taylor , the first management consultant and inventor of the assembly line put this explicitly. His co

For those who still like memes, the reviews of this book on Amazon are worth reading.   The meme are a rhetorical device that can't stand up to the mildest of criticism.

THE NORMAL WELL-TEMPERED MIND  (2013) Dennett describes the idea that you can break down the mind into "dumber" minds and those into dumber minds and so on. He calls it an "dramatic over simplification". He now likes to think of neurons as a competing society (let's call this "hypothetical reductionism", distinguished by reduction of the need to explain something into the hypothetical ability to solve something simpler) and persues the analogy all the way up to society. Still refers to "cognitive science". As a philosopher, he is wistful about the younger generations that take computers for granted. Still clinging to Turing. Likes recursive organizations, virtual machines implemented on top of virtual machines. Control in computers is very different from control in brains. Computer is a society of slaves. Creeping love of competition and survival. His "hunch" is that competition applies in the brain - an admittedly wild idea. And ba

Richard Dawkins, the originator of the "meme" idea, hardly takes it seriously except as a rhetorical device to attack religion as a viral infection of the brain. THE MEMETIC PERSPECTIVE Dennett, on the other hand, takes the idea and runs with it. Here are some key talks on memes by Dennett. I note that Dennett has been promising for the last 4 years that he will soon come out with a book on memes, but we're still waiting. Dennett is a philosopher, not a scientist, so he understandably misunderstands what a "science" of memetics might look like. In fact, the word "memetics" sounds like "genetics", but it's really an extended analogy or a "meme" in its own right. It's a way of talking about culture that philosophers would be more inclined to call "Dennettism". What Dennett winds up with is a "philosophy" of memetics, which is still interesting. It is certainly a powerful rhetorical device, but its pretensio

D&D dance  around the terrible reality of death. It's fascinating to watch two of the world's leading atheists grapple with the big issue that religion supposedly deals with. Typically, Dawkins waxes eloquent, firing off an impressive display of wordy fireworks that almost makes you forget what he's talking about. We see them both grasping for "big ideas" that make life make sense. To my mind, they both avoid what Buddha saw: that suffering is inevitable. Suffering must be faced head-on. The "self" is ephemeral. All things come to an end. What D&D are doing is making death part of a grand and compelling story, which is exactly what "religion" does. Death is a terrible tragedy. Is it not possible to face it without fear, without rationalization?

Dawkins is the "pope" of not-something. Unlike the heros of Skepticism, Dawkins spends most of his energy on the attack against what he imagines to be "Theism". For many who have basically parked their spiritual side as part of there general rebellion in their teens and never thought of it since, Dawkins can seem like a revaluation.

If IQ is a measure of intelligence, we are much smarter than previous generations. This is a verified fact. In this presentation, Flynn himself analyses the effect. At the core of his argument is the idea that we are getting better and better at considering the "hypothetical". This can also be seen as an enhanced capability to use analogy and find abstract categories: an ability that increases with successive generations. Taking it all together, we see the power of analogy growing through time. In other words, it's culture as a whole that's getting "smarter".

The Ravenous Brain Bor loves the " Prefrontal parietal cortex " PPC, which he identifies as the seat of "working memory". In turn, the concept of awareness, consciousness and working memory a so closely intertwined that research in any of these subjects is, by default, research in all the others. In this book, he makes a strong case. It turns out that we can be conscious while missing big chunks of our brain. Evidence from such sad situations, along with EEG and fMRI studies, allow us to zero in on the brain functions that are necessary and sufficient for consciousness. Bor provides extensive examples of experiments that reveal the limits of consciousness and how it can be "taken apart" in various ways. One of is central ideas is "chunking". He visualizes working memory has having a limited capability to handle "chunks" - perhaps just 4 at a time (whatever "chunks" are). To deal with this limit, the brain (mainly the PPC), det

Both scientists and pseudo-scientists feel the need to provide evolutionary "explanations" for whatever phenomenon they study. I fact, the explanations seem more elaborate for phenomena whose very existence is controversial. Memes are the poster child for this phenomenon. Sometimes, long diversions into evolutionary story telling seem like nothing more than an effort to "sound scientific". If the average person has any idea about evolution, he'd say it's about "survival of the fittest". In the back of his mind, he's assuming that evolution has produced an unbroken chain of more and more "fit" creatures, culminating in the most "fit" of all: man. Even "white" man. Even the Aryan race. Actually, "survival of the fittest" is circular, if "fit" simply means the ability to survive and pass on one's genes. The key idea of evolution is descent with variation. There are many reasons why some varieti

Questions: Is thought based on "nothing but" analogies? Prevailing theories of "attention" (the "pointy end" of consciousness) focus on "working memory", which has a limited ability to juggle "things". Working memory therefore tries to "cheat" by making "chunks" of percepts. For example, not four lines -- a square. In general, some kind of pattern. What is the relationship between "pattern" and "analogy". Are there not patterns that are not clearly analogies? It would seem that, once recognized, a pattern can be the source of a new analogy, but perhaps analogy is a special case of pattern and it's pattern seeking that's the "fuel" of idea creation. "Pattern recognition" is the mental model behind modern efforts at machine perception What is meant by "our" concepts? Do the insights of S&E apply to "the" mind or the mechanism of a cultural mind - t

The idea of a meme was introduced by Richard Dawkins in a final chapter of his popular 1976 book on genetics: "The Selfish Gene". Dawkins kicks around the meme idea with philosopher Daniel Dennett here . Even after 40 years, Dawkins still brings up the meme constantly, especially when he's talking about religion as a meme that "infects" the human brain. The word "meme" is now tossed around quite freely, almost a synonym for "idea", but usually confined to a "big idea" or at least one that is effectively communicated from person to person and somehow "survives" competition with competing ideas. Given " Surfaces and Essences " (S&E), we can immediately see that the meme is an explicit analogy with the gene. We can also ask if it's a very good analogy. Does it lead us to understand anything about ideas that we can't easily see without it? Does it mislead us to think that ideas have properties or behavior

This post compares Noam Chomsky's Linguistics to the ideas put forward in "Surfaces and Essences" - S&E- by Hofstadter and Salter. A good introduction to Chomsky's theories can be obtained in: " Noam Chomsky on Linguistics " For anyone new to Chomsky, I suggest that you read S&E first. While Chomsky is confident that analogies (the core of S&E) are irrelevant to the study of linguistics, anyone familiar with S&E will find themselves shouting at Chomsky's video. THE INNATE CAPACITY OF LANGUAGE It seems to me that Chomsky's theory harks back to an era when theories of computation were in vogue, especially at Chomsky's home base, MIT. His linguistic theory (Universal Grammar) is closely analogous (oops) to fledgling formalism behind the new computer languages being developed in the 1950's. His core assumptions seem to be: Language is an innate capacity of humans; Language is computational in its essence. It is a computational pro

This post compares Noam Chomsky's Linguistics to the ideas put forward in "Surfaces and Essences" - S&E- by Hofstadter and Salter. A good introduction to Chomsky's theories can be obtained in: " Noam Chomsky on Linguistics " For anyone new to Chomsky, I suggest that you read S&E first. While Chomsky is confident that analogies (the core of S&E) are irrelevant to the study of linguistics, anyone familiar with S&E will find themselves shouting at Chomsky's video. THE INNATE CAPACITY OF LANGUAGE It seems to me that Chomsky's theory harks back to an era when theories of computation were in vogue, especially at Chomsky's home base, MIT. His linguistic theory (Universal Grammar) is closely analogous (oops) to fledgling formalism behind the new computer languages being developed in the 1950's. His core assumptions seem to be: Language is an innate capacity of humans; Language is computational in its essence. It is a computational pro

Marvin Minsky says how he pictures the human mind Time spent listening to Minsky is always time well spent. In this chat with Science Fiction Author - cum futurist, Ray Kursweil, Minsky demolishes the reductionist view of the human mind. "We get resourcefulness by having many resources, not by having one very powerful resource"

TED Talk: Can we build AI without losing control over it? This talk packs most AI mythology into a single 15 minute presentation. Harris joins a long list of "talking heads" that warn us that AI is a clear and present danger. We are just around the corner from an AI armageddon.  His bottom line is that this disaster is real and unavoidable. His complaint is that we are not sufficiently scared about it. AI, like the concept of God, becomes more and more real in the public mind just because everyone is talking about it. His assumptions: Intelligence is a matter of information processing . He employs the fallacy that our brains are "mere matter" so we will eventually build something like brains because our brains are just "mere matter" We will continue to improve our machines . We don't stand on a peak of intelligence . He assumes that intelligence is defined as in #1 and puts everyone on a curve between a chicken and John Van Neuman. It's "overw

Ever since I mounted a sting operation to expose the vast Santa Clause conspiracy (age 4), I have been asking  impertinent question s. You could say I'm a born skeptic. I built my "day job" as a computer nerd around my skepticism.  A systems analyst assumes nothing . My impertinent questions got me fired more than once. Along the way, I became a youth minister in the United Church and studied Theology at Queen's University. I gained a deep appreciation for the foundations and history of Christianity along with influence of myth on our lives Eventually, my skepticism triumphed and I was forced to find new ways answers to my impertinent questions. Now retired, with no more need for a "day job", I have returned to the quest I started as a child. I suppose you could sum it up by asking, " If not Santa, then what? " The twists and turns of my journey are documented in my blog " Diary of a Christian Skeptic ".

Ever since I mounted a sting operation to expose the vast Santa Clause conspiracy (age 4), I have been asking impertinent question s. You could say I'm a born skeptic. I built my "day job" as a computer guy around my skepticism. A systems analyst assumes nothing . My impertinent questions got me fired more than once. Along the way, I became a youth minister in the United Church and studied Theology at Queen's University. I gained a deep appreciation for the foundations and history of Christianity along with influence of myth on our lives Eventually, my skepticism triumphed and I was forced to find new ways answers to my impertinent questions. Now retired, with no more need for a "day job", I have returned to the quest I started as a child. I suppose you could sum it up by asking, " If not Santa, then what? " The twists and turns of my journey are documented in my blog " Diary of a Christian Skeptic ".