The Programmable Ape
 |
| FROM SECOND LIFE: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/MetaLES/59/98/21 |
I will attempt a "quick and dirty" summary of this synthesis, hoping to come back later to provide more detailed links and arguments, but, for the moment, I just want to make sure I capture the most relevant facets of the insights behind "The Programmable Ape".
All the blogs mentioned above are dealing with a single question: What is it to be human? I take it for granted that we are related to the Ape family. I make a serious effort not to go much further than this in my observation that we are apes. I consider most discussions that attempt to justify some theory of human behavour in terms of "adaptive" characteristics sorted out by evolution to be straightforward bullshit - not much different from theological arguments. They seem to be simply attempts to make some theory of human nature to "sound scientific".
ANALOGIES
One of the key inspirations for this blog comes from "Surfaces and Essences" by Hofstadter and Sander -"Surfaces". This argues that thinking is, at least to a large extent, accounted for by the analogies we make. The mind is an analogy making and processing machine.In "Godel, Escher, Bach" (GEB) Hofstadter asks the impertinent question:
"To what extent are our thoughts channeled by language?"
At the time, in the 1970's, Hofstadter was preoccupied by languages, including computer languages of the time. However, in GEB, he weaves together an elabourate tapestry of analogies that include human language, computer language, languages invented for the purpose of making his point, music (Bach) and art (Escher). In "Surfaces", we see a focus (with the presumed assistance of Sander) on the varieties of analogy in language, but in the final chapters, we see analogies in mathematics and physics (Hofstadter has a Ph. D. in Physics). So, to consider the above "impertinent question", we must extend our idea of "language" to include virtually all symbolic methods humans use to communicate with each other, including the symbolic methods they use to think. For example, a physicist covering the blackboard with symbols and arcane diagrams is "thinking" in a symbolic language and we may ask, To what extent his thoughts are channeled by language"?
A somewhat amusing side-issue can be followed in the case of music - especially "Country Music", which confines itself to three-chord melodies in a major key along with a small subset of human experience - usually to do with romance. The category of "Country Music" (Surfaces) is easily recognized by the family resemblance between its members - especially those who don't like Country Music. I won't carry this argument much further except to say that it illustrates how the ideas in "Surfaces" are easily extended beyond language into other domains such as music - a topic that fits nicely into Hofstadter's earlier thought - in GEB.
GED was written in a time when some sources of analogy were "in the air". As well as the computational idea, we had the powerful idea of evolution - newly energized by the implications of the discovery of DNA, creating (at least in the minds of believers) a mechanical image for life itself.
We have come a long way since the 70's. Almost everything we know about the brain has been discovered in the decades following 1990. Computer technology has moved far beyond the naive descriptions we find in the mandatory chapters inserted in books like "Consciousness Explained". Even our understanding of genetics and evolution has been immensely refined, leaving behind the facile use of the concept in books like "The Selfish Gene".
It's time to re-tool our analogies. The main contribution of "Surfaces" is to remind ourselves that they are analogies. The ancient insight of Taoism applies here. The "real world" and our ideas about it are quite different.
The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao
The name that can be named is not the eternal name
The nameless is the origin of Heaven and Earth
The named is the mother of myriad things
The name that can be named is not the eternal name
The nameless is the origin of Heaven and Earth
The named is the mother of myriad things
I will return later to a closer look at "Surfaces", which is a deep dive into the nature of analogy. First, I'd like to place one particular rich source analogy under the microscope: "Computation".
THE COMPUTER ANALOGY
It's hard to find a book on the mind that doesn't assume that the brain is some kind of computer. In fact, even in ordinary conversation, the analogy is so compelling that it's hard to draw attention to the fact that it is an analogy. What, after all, would be alternative analogies? What's wrong with the analogy?
In GEB, Hofstadter goes to great lengths to discuss the nature of analogies (though, at that stage, he's talking about "Isomorphisms" or "mappings" between one domain and another). Some isomorphisms (analogies between entire systems of ideas) are better than others - chiefly because some mappings map more from one system to the other or vice versa in a way we can, for example, learn about system A by studying an isomorphic system B. As a computer expert, I must say that attempts to "map" properties of the mind into analogous properties of computers have been more or less laughable. They survive only because the general reader is not familiar with the properties of either brains or computers. To a certain extent, the also depend on "cherry picking" - mapping supposed familiar aspects of thought into more-or-less "well known" computational processes but leaving aside the vast amount of what we actually know about brain function.
CLASSES, CATEGORIES AND OBJECT-ORIENTED DESIGN
Modern computer systems are not designed or used according to the quaint system of concepts you will find in philosophical texts like "Consciousness Explained". Such ideas were what we learned about computers in the late 1960's but were still taught to undergraduates decades later. These included the idea that the computer had a CPU that marched through a series of instructions, pulling data out of memory, doing simple operations on the data and shoving results back in memory. Any attempt to describe, for example, how your smart phone works in these terms would be like trying to understand the behavour of your dog in terms of basic physics.
Especially for grad students, like myself, we went through a phase where the idea of computation was formalized with a deep and broad analogy with human language. You can see this influence in GED. Interestingly, "Surfaces" is also preoccupied with language, but the idea that language is some kind of computation that a computer could perform is abandoned. In fact, Surfaces can be read as a convincing refutation of the idea that the mind is some kind of computer. As mentioned, "Surfaces" also marks escape from the tyranny of language as the analogy for the way humans communicate and think. The concept of "language" must, for example, be extended to include mathematics, economics and engineering.
By the 1990's, the "language" analogy was fading from computer systems design. In its place, a new discipline called "Object Oriented Design" emerged. This revolution also arrived in the hands of computer users in the form of "Graphical User Interfaces". Users no longer filled in blanks and read piles of printout. They manipulated ghostly objects on the screen with pointing devices or even their fingers.
There is a two-way analogy going in with Object Oriented Computer design. Examined deeply, the analogy is between the model the computer has of the world and the world itself, which consists of objects that we observe with our eyes and manipulate with our hands. This analogy is extremely "tight" and "isomorphic" (in the GEB sense). It's also an analogy that gets to the "Essence" of things in the sense discussed in "Surfaces". This is why the analogy works so well. I will refer to this analogy as the CLASS/CATEGORY analogy or "CCA"..
But are our minds computers running an "Object Oriented" view of the world. That would be the obvious conclusion and it would repeat all the mistakes made in the 1970's when we forced ourselves to conceive (for example" that neurons were somehow "like" bits of memory or little CPU's.
No, the brain is an object that is "like" no other. Any analogy will be approximate. It will tell us something but not everything. I will get around to showing another analogy between the brain and a hologram that will allow us to "map" certain brain properties to holograms in a way that the computational model cannot. Whatever the merits of the "holographic" analogy, at least it provides a way to shake off the idea that our brains are "really" computers.
CLASSES AND CATEGORIES (CCA)
Two very similar ideas lie at the heart of both Object Oriented Design and the analogies discussed in "Surfaces". "Surfaces" discusses the idea of "category" in breathtaking depth. The central thesis is that the mind forms categories by means of analogy and does so in surprisingly arbitrary ways. There is nothing inherent in categories, although some categories seem like they are "out there" - like "chair", others, like "viral video" are clearly creations of culture.
On the other hand, the "Class" at the heart of Object Oriented Design is a very different kind of animal. This difference becomes apparent to computer systems designers when we attempt to build an "App" which is a little "toy" world full of classes that (more or less" correspond to categories and objects in the real world. Problems include:
- Classes need to be very cut and dried. An object can't be both a member and not a member of a class. Changing an object from one class to another is a dangerous and possibly illegal operation in most systems, but we do it all the time in "real life".
- Real "categories" are "fuzzy" and arbitrary.
- Class libraries (like Java) are maintained at great cost to be consistent across platforms (the source of endless update headaches), whereas everyone can walk around with major differences in his or her set of perceived categories. This is most blatant when you look at human languages itself. Great swaths of categories are not common, for example, between Chinese and English, yet both Chinese and English speakers manage to get by perfectly.
CLASSES ARE NOT REAL
Classes are "software". They exist in the world of ideas, like poems and stories. Even instances of classes ("objects") are "materialized" in structures of electronic bits and bytes in a computer that have no meaning apart from the (mental) interpretation of the designer and the user. The mapping between instances and classes is assumed to be perfect and unambiguous. For example, a bit of memory is or is not treated as an integer. Any attempt to treat an object as a member of a class that it doesn't belong to is a "type error". It's interesting to note philosophers have attempted to declare "type errors" as out of bounds in everyday speech. GEB goes to great lengths to expose the futility of this effort.
While categories may be "totally imaginary" (like Leprechauns) with instances that are still "in the mind" of the believer, many are definitely real, 3-D, tangible objects, like chairs, planets and thunder storms. This "binds" our world of categories to the "real world" and accounts for the fact that many of us "think" by "tinkering" with real objects, such as bits of wood or telescopes.
ANALOGIES AND CATEGORIES ARE THE "SOFTWARE" OF THE MIND
Allowing ourselves to use the Computer/Brain analogy (or the Category/Class analogy), we can see that virtually all computer software part of class libraries (like the Java Class Library), whereas our brains use categories that are part of language (as extended above) as their "software".
This is the central metaphor of this blog: that humans are uniquely capable of being "programmed" by the "software" of language. It must be remembered that this "software" (categories) maps (in some cases) directly to objects in the real world, such as sticks, stones and automobiles. To a great extent, our "tools" of thought are real things in the world. Our ability to impose categories and analogies on to the real world is, to a great extent, arbitrary. However there are also limits: we must assume that "reality" imposes significant constraints on the analogies that expose the "essence" of things.
To explain this thesis to the general public, it will be necessary to introduce both sides of it. "Surfaces and Essences" does a great job of describing how the "software" of analogy works in real brains. Fortunately, it's much easier to explain object oriented computer systems design to the general public since almost all of us own a smart phone or other product of this design discipline. Our task is much easier than, for example, Dennet's in "Consciousness Explained", where he attempts to communicate his own shaky understanding of computers to an audience wholly unfamiliar with the concepts.
EVOLUTION AND THE CLASS LIBRARY
As mentioned, I make little or no reference to "evolution" in my explanations here. The analogy simply doesn't apply and I feel no need to "sound scientific" by mentioning it. In its place is the concept of the "Class Library", the immensely powerful concept that underlies all of modern information systems design.
Class libraries "evolve" by "intelligent design". The rules that govern their "evolution" have little or nothing to do with Darwinian evolution, but their development follows fascinating rules of its own. Many of these rules turn out to have subtle implications for the analogous system: language as "programming" the human brain.
The Class Library is a concept that will be new to most readers, but is easily explained with a short tour of a smart phone or the desktop being used to read this blog.
THE MOUNTAIN
One of my favorite images of the Zen journey is the mountain. I visualize myself and fellow seekers following a steep, winding path up a mountain. Most of humanity is visualized as semi-asleep in the village below, lacking all curiosity of "higher issues". It is certainly quite clear that the esoteric issues considered in my blogs are of zero concern to the average "Joe Six Pack". Using the Programmable Ape analogy, Joe Six Pack his happy to be programmed. He is empty except for the program. No ideas or goals of his own.
RETURNING TO "DRAGON THEORY"
"Dragon Theory", the previous focus of this blog, proposes that humans are assimilated to large social entities that can be considered to be alive in their own right. Such entities include armies and corporation.
Previous entries hint at where the blog is now heading, including the idea that the language of economics is a powerful force for assimilation, including money as a part of language and language itself, in general, as being a powerful assimilating factor.
In a sense, the view of "Programmable Ape" is even darker than "Dragon Theory" since there seems to be no escape from assimilation through language and culture, whereas "Dragon Theory" held out the slight chance that human beings can avoid assimilation and somehow recover the true nature of humanity.
Previous entries hint at where the blog is now heading, including the idea that the language of economics is a powerful force for assimilation, including money as a part of language and language itself, in general, as being a powerful assimilating factor.
In a sense, the view of "Programmable Ape" is even darker than "Dragon Theory" since there seems to be no escape from assimilation through language and culture, whereas "Dragon Theory" held out the slight chance that human beings can avoid assimilation and somehow recover the true nature of humanity.
THE ZEN OF VALUE
I sketched in a previous blog devoted to the analogy we draw between value and money. This can now be seen as a special case of what we're talking about here, since the language of money is deeply embedded in the way we talk and think. The fact that we can all understand a sentence like "This hamburger costs $5" is as remarkable as the fact that (some people) perfectly understand "I have been saved by the blood of Jesus".
Comments
Post a Comment