I am parking this note in an obscure blog. I think better when I write things down. The idea is to go back to school at age 70 to get a Ph. D., probably in something like AI or the overlap between psychology, philosophy and computer science. This would have to be by remote study or under local supervision due to the risk of being away from my medical team. The core idea is to take a good look at computers as a model for the mind. From one aspect, computer languages are a powerful analogy for human language. The similarities and differences are both worth a long, hard look. Computer "classes" and human "categories" share a lot of features but differ in the key aspect that human categories are based arbitrarily on human situations (Hofstadter) Computer languages face some very sharp limitations about what can and cannot be "said". Similar restrictions seem to apply to human languages but only when we are looking at human language "pared down" to wh

This is a great talk by Kasparov, the chess master who "lost" to the Deep Blue computer. Stuart Russel has more to say on the subject. Stuart Russell is a professor (and formerly chair) of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at University of California at Berkeley. His book  Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach  (with Peter Norvig) is the standard text in AI; it has been translated into 13 languages and is used in more than 1,300 universities in 118 countries. His research covers a wide range of topics in artificial intelligence including machine learning, probabilistic reasoning, knowledge representation, planning, real-time decision making, multitarget tracking, computer vision, computational physiology, global seismic monitoring and philosophical foundations. He also works for the United Nations, developing a new global seismic monitoring system for the nuclear-test-ban treaty. Intelligent machines (or even dumb ones) are a model of the human mind, or, mo

According to Wilczek , symmetry is "Change without change" - the most powerful single principle underlying the laws of both aesthetics and physics. In Wilczek's books, he provides simple examples and a few mind bending ones (such as the symmetry involved in the strong nuclear force - the rules governing quarks). For some reason, he neglects the most common example of symmetry that is always quite literally right in our face. This is the ability of our perceptual system to recognize "objects" in the world - "things" that seem to be the same no matter how they are oriented, how far away they are, or how they are illuminated. Sometimes we only need to hear or smell the "thing" to "see" it in our minds. Anyone who has attempted to "teach" a computer to do anything like this knows how incredible this ability is. And it's totally natural, totally automatic. What's more all "higher" animals (maybe all living th

Daniel Dennett likes to give Jaynes the benefit of the doubt: “There were a lot of really good ideas lurking among the completely wild junk.” As Dennett hints (with typical subtly), there is a lot of "junk philosophy" around the subjects dear to Jaynes' heart. In this post, I'd like to extract one of Jayne's ideas and wipe a bit of "junk" off it to see where it gets me. At the center of Jayne's theory is the "bicameral mind", which is firmly based on the idea that we have a "right brain" and a "left brain" with notably different capabilities, each capable of acting somewhat on their own. The "right brain" is good at seeing the "big picture" and sends its judgments to the left brain, where they are perceived as speech - sometimes the speech of the Gods. As things get historically more complicated, we evolve our present day "inner chatter", no longer attributed to the Gods (if we are sane), b

I have copied this review article into the blog as a good summary of contemporary opinion about Jaynes' theories. It seems that his main contribution has been, as I mentioned in a previous post, to ask "impertinent questions" and open up new avenues of investigation. His specific ideas, especially the "bicameral mind" and the idea that early man was not conscious have not fared well. The “bicameral mind” 30 years on: a critical reappraisal of Julian Jaynes’ hypothesis There’s a blind man here with a brow As big and white as a cloud. And all we fiddlers, from highest to lowest, Writers of music and tellers of stories, Sit at his feet, And hear him sing of the fall of Troy. Edgar Lee Masters, Spoon River Anthology (1916) Andrea Eugenio Cavanna a,b Michael Trimble a Federico Cinti c Francesco Monaco b a Institute of Neurology, London, UK b Department of Neurology, Amedeo Avogadro University, Novara, Italy c Department of Classical Philology, University of Bologna,

Daniel Dennett likes to give Jaynes the benefit of the doubt: “There were a lot of really good ideas lurking among the completely wild junk.” (one might say the same of Dennett, but that is another essay ...) "Origin" is an important book. It inspires more notes than will fit in a single post. A sympathetic portrait of the rather quirky Julian James can be found here . Jaynes was somewhat obsessed loner -- a "one book wonder" -- who spent his life chasing a rather off-beat idea of what it is to be conscious. As his title indicates, Jaynes tackles the issue of consciousness. The "Hard" problem of Consciousness is, Why does it feel the way it does? How can a lump of "stuff", no matter how complex its structure and function feel anything? I agree with the general consensus that Jaynes doesn't solve or even address the hard problem but, like the others, comes closer by helping to understand what consciousness is in the first place. His book is fu

If you are not familiar with this phenomenon, I refer you to that the breathless and uncritical treatment of the subject in  near death experiences on CBC Ideas . It seems fairly common for people who are "near death" in the sense of having their heart stop to have a vivid memory of leaving their body, seeing themselves from the outside, perhaps hearing and/or seeing what's going on around them, seeing a wonderful light and feeling a great sense of peace and well-being. The classic treatment of the subject, " Life after Life " is cited with approval by the "expert" for the CBC audience. "People have reported "near death experiences", or NDE's, over centuries and across cultures. The nature of them has historically been the territory of religion and philosophy. But now science has staked its claim in the discussion. And the questions are profound: where is consciousness produced, in the brain, or somewhere else? Can consciousness cont

"Surfaces and Essences" teaches us about the importance of analogies - the key principle behind human thought. When looking at "Ancient Wisdom", we are struck by the poverty of analogies being used. This is not surprising since when these ideas originated, there were not a lot of "core" situations to rely on. Thus, for example, we wind up with theories that "explain" the world in terms of invisible people (Gods) with distinctly human motivations combined with powers that seem to be invented to fit the circumstance. We can do better. The Standard Model of Physics  is the current "state of the art" when it comes to "explaining" what is going on in the Universe at the most basic level. The model can be boiled down to one equation or a few related ones, but the general idea is that everything that happens in the Universe must satisfy the equations of the Standard Model, which can be written down on a single 8x10 sheet of paper. Be