Descartes on teaching

"My present design, then, is not to teach the method which each ought to follow for the right conduct of his reason, but solely to describe the way in which I have endeavored to conduct my own. They who set themselves to give precepts must of course regard themselves as possessed of greater skill than those to whom they prescribe; and if they err in the slightest particular, they subject themselves to censure." (Discourse de la methode)

altruism

I am reading one of those "self-help" books because I am interested on how to manage challenging projects. The book is called "7 habits of highly effective people", and up to now, the main message is to have high values and respect for life and other people's life. I guess translated to biological, evolutionary terms, this means of giving way to altruism, but not faked altruism to make "fast progress". Anyway, life is challenging for sure, even more so, if you try to involve with science.

Here a quote by Werner Heisenberg:

"What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning."

(hmm..... designing a programming language that help us switch questions and models more easily, that is something I am thinking on lately.)

On imagination

I have the suspicion that imagination works best, when leaving it alone, i.e. is fueled by laziness. There is a saying: "Laziness stimulates the engineering creativity." - I found this interesting with respect to the following quote by John Backus, one of the early designers of programming languages:

"Much of my work has come from being lazy. I didn't like writing programs, and so, when I was working on the IBM 701 (an early computer), writing programs for computing missile trajectories, I started work on a programming system to make it easier to write programs,"

By the way, I am wondering who is reading this blog. As the blogspot.com commenting did not work satisfactorily, you might want to contact me at mulder DOT patrick AT gmail DOT com

more on music

personally, I am not a fan of heavy-guitar music (well, better, I stopped being a fan of heavy-metal 10 years ago, I stopped being a fan of most popular, electronic music around 3 years ago)

for the ones who need an excuse for heavy-metal music:

Stress

Narratives

When listening to music, it is interesting to think on how different tones in a tonal scale can take different functions, as if certain tones exert more gravity than others. The different functions of the same tones in different contexts can also be seen in a theater for example, where the same actors (tones) can play different roles (gravity) depending on the theater piece (tonal scale).

People need good narratives to work or play.

simplicity and complexity

I am just thinking that a system to represent multiple things at once (via equations, movements, sounds, light effects) would be great. the system should be as easily accessible like listening to music, and like good music, gradually increasing complexity.

hope to start programming on this sort of system soon.

Meta-mathematics

I have been reading about the problems of deductive and formal reasoning and lately finished the book on Goedel's proof by Nagel and Newman.

It got clear to me, that for every formal system, there exists a meta-system that can be derived (or used) to help to understand the nature of the original formal system. Some point out, that for intelligence, you would need to have meta-intelligence to derive understanding of what intelligence is. Some conclude further, that the meta-intelligence is "god" and can not be understood by intelligence. Somehow this is circular reasoning, and will not give "better" memes. What can be derived from this sort of reasoning however is some reaction we humans show to inconsistent reasoning. Meta-control mechanisms (= emotions) will point out that some processes are wasting time. See also a quote Marvin made in the newsgroup comp.ai.philosophy:

"I think that I've said before, that philosophy is mostly bad psychology. The most common reaction that "normal" people have to such propositions is -- after a few moments of thought -- to LAUGH! This is because, I'm sure, that the detection of absurdities (which include both asserting inconsistent propositions and exhibiting tabooed views of certain body-parts) activates certain brain centers that are used to prevent the rest of the brain from continuing normal reasoning. In other words, the machinery that prevents you from "taking it seriously". There's some more about this in chapter 27 of The Society of Mind.

Classical monotonic consistent logic was one of the first good ideas that came with the era of modern technical thinking about thinking. It came in the infancy of what we now call cognitive science. Philosophers played an important role in developing it.

Today that young organism, cognitive science, is approach puberty or, perhaps, middle age. Philosophers, it seems to me, with the exception of Dennet, Sloman, and a very few others, are fixated in that infantile stage. "

Developping ideas

This weekend, I finished reading the book "The Selfish Gene" by Richard Dawkins. It was very impressive to think about the complexity and similarities between species, and how we inherit shapes and functions from one generation to the next. Dawkins argues that similar to the alphabet of life, our human brains can transmit words and ideas coded in an alphabet of "memes", replicators on an abstract level in our brains that are competing for communication channels (the internet is an incredible rich meme-pool, so is the television, a newspaper and a patent office).

All in all, I am thinking that ideas share some abstract features with computer programs, that use the roles of functions and expressions for coding change. At least, good ideas often (always ?) address some useful changes. And indeed, I would agree with John Maeda, that to develop those meme programs inside one owns mind, it is needed to look at these processes and programs and try to ban the critics and imprimers from guiding you. (There is a saying from Marvin Minsky: "Never listen to your critics. Don't even ignore them.")

Returns and success

During the lunch we had some discussion on the merits of socialism in education, i.e. that everyone should have the opportunity to learn whatever (s)he likes and as such can improve her/his personal understanding ("personal" is opposed to "socialism", but let's assume that the value of minds under development are equal)

The discussion turnt to the enormous endowments some universities have, and how they manage their financial assets to provide this sort of intellectual freedom for new ways of learning. I found an interesting article on the investment manager of Yale university, with an intersting advice on returns vs. making money1:

"What he demands of himself is exactly what he demands of the custodians of Yale’s capital: 'People who define success by generating great returns, not by making as much money as they possibly can,' he says. "

(1) http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/18/business/yourmoney/18swensen.html