Getting new ideas

Important transitions in society had often to do with revolutionary approaches to increase the production of goods, i.e. in agriculture, in mass-manufacturing and nowadays in the production of media and information. Outstanding work in all areas are attributed to "very intelligent" people. But what makes intelligence, creativity and genius ? One problem with these questions is that we assume to understand the mechanisms behind those words. In his book Society of Mind (SoM), Minsky discusses that it is dangerous to define something which is not yet understood. His attempt to define intelligence comes down to:
"Our minds contain processes that enable us to solve problems we consider difficult. 'Intelligence' is our name for whichever of those processes we don't yet understand."

Although this is a short post and maybe again too summarized, the idea of this post actually was triggered by the following sentences: "Why assume that what our greatest artists do is very different from what ordinary people do - when we know so little about what ordinary people do. Surely it is premature to ask how great composers write great symphonies before we know how ordinary people think of ordinary tunes. ... We shouldn't let our envy of distinguished masters of the arts distract us from the wonder of how each of us gets new ideas."

(to explore further the importance of the generation of new ideas in the information society: http://www.tdctrade.com/econforum/hkcer/hkcer010701.htm)

Wholes and parts

Finally I have received the "Society of Minds" book by M. Minsky. It's a great pleasure to read. It offers the opportunity to understand non-formal, common-sense reasoning that makes our human thinking so manifold. Two idea's were striking my interest so far: The idea that parts and wholes can only be understood by considering them together (you can only understand a part if you understand its purpose) and that emotions help us to assign priority to goals. Especially the different emotional states of pain and pleasure help us to simplify actual situations, and reduce our interests in long range plans.

Understanding and learning

This week I made some progress in my understanding of "common sense". Also here, a key element is related to the interpretation of different representations in the mind. Minsky proposes that we are constantly processing many analogies in parallel. This is very much contradictory to our "single-self" views that we use to answer questions like who we are, where we are from and what we do. During these conversations or thoughts we reflect mainly on our actions, on what "we" did. Therefore, the "single-self" view must be constantly switching between different realms of actions, physical spaces, social and dominion relationships. In every realm we keep updating representations that respond to the same memory address, I would say. So, when one representation can not be used to solve a problem, we will try to switch to another model. The core of these idea's can also be used to explain why analogies are so usefull during "learning".
By the way, I also came across a statement on learning. It was pointed out that learning is another container word where we put a lot of different idea's. A very interesting remark on learning in relation to science:
"Students who don't feel they have exceptional mathematical aptitude ought to start with mathematics, anyway -- until they cannot tolerate any more. You might object that this would not be much fun. But for me, the most fun is learning to do something that "you're not good at", yet. So dialectically, the most fun is the least fun. Perhaps a person that hasn't learned that shouldn't do science at all." (Minsky in comp.ai somewhere)
It's a very difficult lesson to learn, as it has to do with chosing "suffering" above "pleasure", or as it is stated above, finding "pleasure" in "suffering". This is certainly somewhat contradictory in folk-psychology terms. One way of leaving this contradiction would be to use better representations of pain and pleasure. Both aspects also directly correlate with goal and purpose mechanisms inside the society of mind.

Symbol processing

Although this week was very exhausting due to "normal life", I had some time to enjoy again the thought that minds can be seen as complex symbol processing machinery. There are mainly two questions associated with this idea: How do symbols look like and how do we deal with these symbols inside our nervous system ?
One class or categories of symbols are simply words themselves ! I am just thinking on how words might have evolved, and how amazing it must have been ... First, there were the basic words to describe food places, dangers and interests. "Here's the ham, there is the dinosaur, be carefull it will get cold, and I will protect you !" Might be one of the first idea's or symbols that we expressed by using words ! If we jump couple of ten-thousands years back to today, it is funny to think about how limiting words are to communicate complex modern-day emotions, such as expressing sympathy or disgust, and how our internal mechanisms might even try to take other words, to hide the actual cause, as has been discovered by Sigmund Freud.
But we need many other symbols as well, words are not very well suited if we want to communicate about dynamic events, for example to tell the football player how to shoot a ball, the pilot how to fly an airplane and the musician how to play piano. Then we use gestures, computer simulators or compact discs.

Sunday evening

Sunday. Perfect time to spend some time on re-capturing thoughts. I have been reading about some philosophers lately and again I found it very interesting. Aristotle made many statements which I do not understand too much (yet). One thing is clear, he mainly wants to make statements which we would call "real" or "down-to-earth", opposing to his teacher Plato, who has a very speculative nature. According to Bertrand Russell, the ideas of Aristotle seem to have had a huge influence on modern ideas about ethics, physics (in a very broad context including biology and chemistry), logic and politics. I was mainly interested in the field of logic. Aristotle seems to have introduced the idea of "categories". A concept which can be quite broad. I was surprised that we have learned about a very similar concept in the German class of lower high-school without knowing it. So what are they, the categories ? Aristotle classifies different types statement or words (if I understand correctly). Those are substance, quantity, quality, relation, place, time, position, possession, action and passion. To demonstrate the use of the idea we could take an arbitrary sentence:

The musician plays an instrument.

Questions to this sentence could be: How ? Where ? When ? What instrument ? Or, changing the viewpoint: The instrument is played by the musician.

In any case, the next very important philosophers after Aristotle seem to be Descartes and Leibniz, almost 2000 years later ! Very interesting.... but sorry, I have to leave ;-) We'll see how the blog will continue....

Why ?

Hi. So, welcome, I guess, to this little conglomerate (from Latin conglomeratus, past participle of conglomerare to roll together) of my thinking. Today, I was thinking on thinking again, and thought it could be joyfull for others to share my progress with this. Thinking is something very complex and unknown. It still gives the opportunities for many adventures: There are so many questions that can be asked, and so many answers to discover ....