The Divide

from my flickr

Just read Iain McGilchrist's book on the divided brain. There is also a documentary video that summarizes the 1000 or so pages, which is difficult if not impossible. McGilchrist has a career spanning literature and neuro-psychiatry at the highest level. His thesis, formulated over 20 years is that our thinking and perception evolves from a confrontation between the verbal analytic side of our nature and the integrative perceptual side, and ideally should flow back and forth in a sort of collaboration to achieve good things.

His book has to err on the side of denotation to prevent attacks from the scientific culture which he criticises, and that is both its strength and weakness, it has to live in a left hemisphere world, defending the right, a bit like the opponents of our current demagogues, who need to use their tactics to get though a message. It is a losing game, but one that must be played for the long term.

I want to highlight the relationship to Jane Jacobs' ideas from her book on Systems of Survival where she makes a case for the healthy confrontation between cultural guardians and commercial facilitators. This work complements and consolidates her arguments across the history of the humanities and of the sciences.

Implicitly, the book links Dewey's (and Pirsig's) ideas on Quality and morals to the continental existentialists (finally!), but there is much more work to be done bridging the philosophies of the positivists with that of the continentals, especially in our English speaking cultures. There are glints of hope, for example Lakoff and Johnson's work, but too little uptake from what I can see.

Kahneman and Pinker are also present as critics in the background of McGilchrist's arguments, against thinking fast and favoring thinking slow, and arguing for the primacy of language over music. McGilchrist forcefully responds to Pinker's attack on his web site. I am also not sure how this relates to Chomsky's embedded linguistics, but we shall see. Chomsky can be quite defensive, as Tom Wolfe writes.

Existence precedes essence is so well presented, with forceful cultural, scientific and artistic evidence by someone raised in the positivist tradition. We (the West) need to budge away from Platonism. This key to our success, our domination of the environment, may no longer work now that we are on the downside of the arc of sustainability. This crisis may be a touchpoint, who knows.

I am listening to Joni Mitchell who understood that we were heading this way, back in the late sixties.

HAL, Zombies, Territorial Instinct, and Idiot Philosophers

Fire alarm panel in Kyoto apartment. From my flickr

It hit me like a flash today that 2001 A Space Odyssey is all about the "me" inside us.

Kubrick augmented Clarke's fairly banal story about extra-terrestrial visitation into a philosophical tour-de-force when he modified HAL's role in the story.

He made HAL truly and fundamentally conscious, with all the attendant complications of having to deal with another "me" on the ship.

There exists a school of thought which we could call the ostrich psychologists, who refuse to study or to consider consciousness since they see it as "subjective".

Their idiot brethren cognitive philosophers have proposed a thought experiment to demonstrate this point of view, where a zombie with no "me" interacts with a normal human. The argument goes like this:

• If such a zombie could behave in every way like a person, interact in day-to-day activities "normally", yet not be self-aware, who is to tell that the "me" is not there? 
• So ergo, consciousness is a fabrication and is useless.

There is a big flaw in that argument (despite my brutal simplification, that is the crux of it, I promise):

How do we know that the zombie could behave like a human? It may not be possible.

Consciousness is a survival trait, since it makes one evade pain, evade death, it comes with a territorial urge, a the need for a place in the world, a self is an embodiment of the sensory matrix.

So consciousness is, must be, an evolutionary an advantage, it has to make you run or fight better.

Kubrick saw this clearly and expressed it dramatically. HAL defends its turf because it is conscious. The "me" must prevail over those who want to snuff it.

I'd like to finish with a wonderful quote from a non-idiot:

The demand for continuity has, over large tracts of science, proved itself to possess true prophetic power. We ought therefore ourselves sincerely to try every possible mode of conceiving the dawn of consciousness so that it may not appear equivalent to the irruption into the universe of a new nature, non-existent until then.

—William James, The Principles of Psychology, 1890

A Tale of Two Realities

I have just begun a new job. No hiatus between this new one and the old. One day I am in hell, the next in paradise.

The one I left was as a software manager in a large organization, and the current one is as a software lead in a very small organization.

Other objective differences: the previous job was bureaucratic, there were many processes and constraints and a network of communication and decision paths, and the systems my team built had to reflect the complex interrelated and often historically constrained requirements.

The current one is technical, working within a small team and with very precise mostly self-defined scientific requirements, adjusted to meet specific customer requests. The software has to run precision equipment to capture and calculate results within extremely tight tolerances, both in time and numerical accuracy. The only measure of quality is repeatable precision. The culture is one of technology and science.

In the new job, I report to people who have the same engineering training as I do, who have more experience in the R&D business than I do, who I can ask questions of without risk of offending or destabilizing them emotionally. Peers and superiors in all senses.

In my previous job, I reported to people who asked me to explain what I did "in simple terms" and who liked to hear themselves talk so that they could pretend to make sense of their lumbering thoughts in public forums, often referred to as "meetings" but which felt like beatings. Dissent could be career limiting.

The analogy I would like to give to dispel any conclusion that I may be a pretentious ass is as follows:

Suppose you are a medical practitioner, a physician, and you see patients in a clinical context. You have to diagnose and prescribe treatment as part of your day to day routine.

Also, suppose that you are "managed" by someone who had not undergone the same level of training as you, say a registered nurse, who knew the lingo, understood the context, but did not feel confident enough to make life or death decisions affecting patient health, but felt competent enough or was somehow appointed to tell you, the physician, how to run your practice.

For example, "please use language that is easier to understand in your charts". Or  "make sure your handwriting is legible for the pharmacist", or " you have not seen your quota of patients today, why did you spend 6 minutes more than average with Mrs. Smith today?".

Could you practice under such circumstances? How long would you last?

I lasted 5 years in the analogous IT context. My manager was a technologist, previously a school teacher who joined th IT boom of the nineties and hung on. She did a bit of COBOL programming, hated it and went into management because she could talk better than she could listen or understand.

She is proud to claim that she does not understand the need for system architecture versus program design, her eyes glaze over when there is talk of latency, language choice, servers, data flow analysis, code profiling, and factoring and she had no patience for options analysis or proof-of-concepts. She will not deign to read code. She has trouble with email client software and spreadsheets.

She wants simple, clear explanations and plans, and wants to set deadlines before beginning design, because iterative work can only lead to grief. She always used waterfall approaches in COBOL, and they worked fine for her.

Her weakness and fear prevent her from adding value, from making decisions. She was a pass-through for her manager's decisions to me and my peers. No value added, but lots of aggravation and delay. Never understood or wanted the concept of situational management, which is probably the most effective way of managing people, so effective that there have been lawsuits about who has a right to claim authorship and teach it. She is a scared rabbit, hanging on until she can retire and cash in.

Others in that environment have said that we, the technical folk who did the work, should not "speak Neanderthal" when in the presence of senior executives, by which it was meant that we should use non-IT terms of less than 3 syllables. The executives in question were the CIO and her direct reports.

But all this is now in my past, one-day-old stuff. I am now in another world, where the conversations around me centre on measurement tolerances, ADC resolutions, real-time interrupt-driven code, clock speed and sampling rates, hierarchical state machine approaches, language selection and compiler efficiencies. I have scope probes and micro-controllers on benches beside me, no fuzzy walled grey cubicle partitions in sight, and a project to deliver with people I can talk to who want me to talk dirty.

I am in heaven.

Gender relations

Franz Erhard Walther, 1983 - Paris, Centre Pompidou - by A. Barake

Still digesting the readings from Thanksgiving...

I read Simone de Beauvoir's "The Second Sex" recently, and as I was driving in this morning, it hit me how such a study can be a good reflection on the state of gender relations at a point in time yet how it is just that, a touch point  since these relations are so varied, so much in flux, constantly evolving and I asked myself if her study was of any use in day-to-day life.

The sample size being dealt with is huge- 3 billion give or take a few million on each side of the equation, and this results in a large variety of sexual behaviours, variability and variety. The middle of the bell curve is very broad, even if we limit it to Western culture, as she does.

Yes, we are a laboratory for sex, as we should be. Until we get totally artificial about it, survival and renewal require this experimentation. Since our brains are so adaptable, interest in sex requires huge variety I guess. There is no end to the variations, and the minor things are as exciting as the major ones, however you define the categories. Marketing and advertising depend on this instinct as their currency of the new.

Despite the difficulty of categorizing such a complex topic, De Beauvoir's expose covers and uncovers much ground. Her method is to work at the delta she perceives between gender status, behaviour and emotion in every context of her time, and historically where she can.

One observation which struck me was the notion that a large number of  women she observed define themselves through a male spouse or mate, as a means to gain territory, because of the cultural power disparity that existed. Desire and power, the old story, examined with great perspicacity and dissected and countered with new approaches. The central thesis of the book.

I extrapolated this notion to the study of relations between gay men and hetero women - to try to answer the question of why there can be friendly attraction without sexual attraction. Also, to test whether there was a converse with lesbians and hetero men. There isn't in a general sense. De Beauvoir has a chapter on lesbianism, and she concludes that the relation between heterosexual and same-sex desire is much closer and symmetrical in women than in men.

Having also read what Camille Paglia says about homosexuality, I am not sure that one can conclude anything like that. The spectrum is very broad as I wrote earlier, and maybe de Beauvoir's snapshot is just a reflection of what she could see, or what was visible when she wrote the book at mid-century.

Gender relations and sex remain very difficult things to generalize about, and I think it goes back to the idea that we are attracted to the new, to variety, and that behaviours that test and taste that variety are usually good for evolution, for survival, so long as they are not culturally or biologically damaging.

As the culture and the population widen, the behaviours that can be experimented with can grow, there are wider safety margins, and there is also motivation and opportunity. The taboos and secrecy around sex that act as cultural anchors to maintain tribal cohesion loosen as the tribe expands to include the planet's population. The need for protectionism disappears, reflecting the monetary and commercial globalization.

This may be why there is a resurgence of fundamentalist thought, a backlash, a clinging to what can be perceived as a moral high-ground, based on limited communications, limited population size, limited cultural migration. Pockets of resistance.

Oh yes, the book was banned by the Vatican. Go figure.

Cognitive Philosophy

There seems to be a movement afoot - long overdue - to embody the foundations of intelligence and philosophy. It is partially old news, the heroic AI of the 50's, 60's and 70's has been discounted despite our benefiting from the results of that research in today's mainstream technology: neural nets, machine speech recognition, handwriting recognition, natural language translation, cars that drive themselves, and all kind of other low-level intelligent (unconscious?) activities simulated by programs.

I think that it is the Minsky flavour of AI (now re branded cognitive science), the one grounded in logic, seems to have fallen out of favour -since the fruits of that work did not rise up to the expectation of the "I" in AI; an AI based only on logic, a formal game with symbols that pretended to be words. How can that be smart without the observer having to make all kinds of allowances and assumptions?

This stuff was subject to sometimes acrimonious debate for a while, until technology and big data made many of the arguments moot.

The good news is that there is now a strong movement towards the recognition of the role of the perceptual environment and its embodiment in animals like us as part of the equation.

This realization may be due to the Web, indirectly, since it should be now be obvious that the seeming "intelligence" of the Google search would not exist without the "environment" of all the Web sites, which are of course interactions with people's brains (in fact there was a very simple AI program that used "Google distance" as a way to measure metaphorical strength between concepts. For example "Castro" and "cigar" scored pretty high on that scale).

So now there is a movement, a possibly serendipitous program of research coming together to ground AI in the real-world of experience, and some of the people that I think are leading this effort align themselves along a somewhat elegant but odd symmetry of ideas.

Let me explain.

There is David Gelernter, the computer scientist and columnist who wrote "The Muse in the Machine" and "Mirror worlds". These books made me want to go back and look at AI again. In fact I ran back. His arguments are so cogent, so seemingly simple and common-sensical that I almost missed their radical novelty. He states that data and the links between data is the key to intelligence. These links are often emotional gradients, in the sense that logic is not always what binds ideas; it is similar emotional affect!

The brain associates memories based on the closeness of the emotions they evoke, the sensory input parallels that occurred as the memory is created. The whole model, not just the idea...how you felt, how cold or hot or tired or dizzy you were. This links data to environment so elegantly that it is a mystery to me why no-one has picked up on this earlier. He breaks the syntax/semantics dichotomy very deeply. Also, Gelernter has very conservative political views - right of centre. I am noting this now so as to make my strange symmetry argument a bit further down. Bear with me.

There is George Lakoff, the cognitive linguist. His work with Johnson on embodied philosophy and with Nunez on the origins of math, takes the empirical evidence around the links between our brain wiring and the perception of the world and uses it as a foundation for philosophy.

Basic brain mechanisms are considered to be foundational and ideas grow as hierarchies of metaphor (i.e. links).

Metaphor becomes a key mechanism for cognition. Similarly to Gelernter,  Lakoff et al propound that metaphors are based on evolutionary and environmental constraints, not some platonic logic ideal. No such thing as the separation of  mind from the world of things. These guys are existentialist scientists. Finally! The rampant positivism and Platonism of the English speaking world, the Whitehead/Russell school, is giving ground. Merleau-Ponty and Husserl are now more visible in the world of scientific cognition.

Lakoff is an ex-student of Chomsky. He seems to disagree with the flavour of Chomsky' thesis of hard-wired syntax in the brain. He believes syntax and semantics to be more of a spectrum of complexity in cognitive biology than a differentiator between humans and other animals. Also he is a non-neo-con, a strong and vocal opponent of  right wing politics as it is played in the US today, and although I hesitate to slot him with Chomsky on the political front, they are on the same side of a hypothetical centre line.

So we have right and a left wing thinkers on cognition who fundamentally disagree in the political realm, the realm of people relations, nations, influence, and power. That is a healthy and good thing. This lends support to the notion that there is a grounding in "objective" reality for this thinking on cognition, it is much more than opinion.  (A slim argument, I know, but hey, this is my blog, I can say what I want.)

Aside from the political thing, I want to continue to talk about is the cognition thing. There is another thinker/scientist that seems to be breaking new ground along those same lines.

He is a neuro-scientist, one who gets his hands dirty opening up craniums, working with brain surgeons. William H. Calvin. I read two books of his: "Conversations with Neil's Brain" and "How Brains Think, Evolving Intelligence Then and Now". His ideas centre around the notion that cognition is an initially subconscious Darwinian process among neural bundles that remember perceptions, integrate them and ultimately model the environment perceived by the body, and that the successful "species" of memories/emotions (let's call them cognitions) are the ones that we call conscious, the ones that rise to the top of the noise of cognition, to differentiate themselves as our inner voices.

His research fundamentally agrees with the models put forth by Gelernter and Lakoff. Like Lakoff, he believes that most cognition in the brain is fomented through unconscious processes. Like Gelernter he finds that memories are linked through non-logical processes. He shares with Lakoff a deep knowledge of Chomsky's ideas on innate language ability and like Lakoff disputes the simplicity of these models, without denying the human brain's ability to parse language. He also talks of metaphor, not surprisingly, since all this is supported by empirical evidence at the chemical and behavioural level.

So I am very happy that this stuff is happening. I tended to get hot under the collar when I read "classic" texts by Minsky or Pinker on intelligence. They seemed simplistic and smug. I was always perplexed by the lack of attention given to Grey Walter's ideas which preceded but anticipated Gelernter's. I wanted 'The Muse in the Machine" to be discussed more, but to my chagrin, Penrose's strange books on quantum brain hypotheses got more press.

Let's get back to empirical research, let's continue the program of work that will ultimately bring philosophy and psychology back into science.The foundational thinkers list above should also include Turing. Even Penrose mentions his "other work". He did mathematical research on molecular biology (plants mostly) and how stem cells can become complex structures. His mathematically-based hypotheses on these matters were validated experimentally just this year in the UK. Ultimately this theoretical work may prove to explain some of the brain mechanisms underlying the work Calvin and others are doing.

There are conceptual layers to all this analysis, from the bottom-up: the molecular, the cellular, the systems (bundles of neurons evolving), and the cognitive and behavioral, leading to metaphor, logic and science, including physics, on to philosophy, morality  and politics. The gaps needs to be filled so that we have a continuum of understanding. A New Science in the Vico sense. Something we made and understood that we made, but that is grounded in experience.

(I just found an earlier post that was wishing this stuff would happen, and so here we are.)

Djerassi and Houellebecq

I wrote earlier about my disappointment with Djerassi's "science-in-fiction". I would point him to the much more effective and artistic Houellebecq style, directly descended from Aldous Huxley, but done with much more panache (bien-sur). It is over the top in some of its narrative descriptions of extreme behaviours, deadpan and not suitable for every audience, but if I were to recommend some books for anyone studying human motivations (and that includes business types and techies, not just the humanities majors), it would be "The Elementary Particles", "1984" and "Brave New World". They talk of biology and power and the link to human affairs. Free will is mediated by biology and biology is the layer just below power.

Software engineering and hazing

Maybe the reason engineering faculties used to have such painful initiation rituals was that they (unconsciously I'm sure) wanted to drum into you that there was a culture here, you had to adhere to the body of knowledge that existed, that was developed, and that you could not "come in arrogant". This is different from computer science, where everyone is de facto arrogant and knows everything. And when you get old and wizened in the IT world, you try to maintain your influence by going into management, and the continual flow of new technologies keeps coming, almost as if to prevent experience with the details from continuing to grow, to maintain the arrogance of the new, a bubble effect really.

Ultimately it is only experience that counts :

 what you say I forget, 

what I say, I remember, 

what I do, I understand.

Palomar's Hale Telescope

Finished reading Ronald Florence's "The Perfect Machine" about the project to build the 200 inch telescope. A couple of things struck me.

1. The most interesting characters are the ones who are presented as being the most problematic, for example, Edwin Hubble and his huge ego, or Fritz Zwicky and his crazy sounding lateral thinking. Both are presented in a somewhat worse light than the "reasonable" folk like George Hale. Cooperation and cooperative people get things done but the competitive bastards are the ones who are valued more if they manage to prove something. I guess it is because the competitive route is more risky, more likely to move the culture in new directions, painful as it may be to the culture.
2. The other striking insight has to do with a line near the end of the book that mentions that charged-coupled device (CCD) sensors are so much more efficient than film for capturing light that a one meter telescope today could do what the 200 inch one did with film. This is certainly an example of disruptive technology, given the herculean efforts made to build the Hale machine, with its precision movements and optics. Of course CCD's can be used with the 200 inch mirror, but one must wonder if such efforts would have been made if CCD's had been available in the 1920's.

Science in fiction

A review of the Bourbaki Gambit I am surprised that a prestigious imprint like Penguin would accept The Bourbaki Gambit as a novel. It is an uncomfortable advertisement for its author at best and at worst an insult and a slight to the artistic process by a scientist too conceited to realize it. Djerassi, who made discoveries which led to the birth control pill is branching out into a style he calls science-in-fiction. He writes of scientists and of their egos, a bit like C.P. Snow, but with much less art. He revels in showing off his observations of fancy places, but really only manages to show his limited world view. Capri, Manhattan and cliches about vacation resorts. I guess someone who has achieved so much in science may be excused for thinking that art is something secondary, and this is exactly what writing this novel and sponsoring the arts indicates.

The Guardian and Harry Potter

The Alps at New Year seen from the northwest Swiss side - Copyright 2003-2008 A. Barake

I wrote earlier about a Nick Lezard Guardian posting that strongly criticises JK Rowling's prose. Recently, there has been another Guardian article about the prevalence of Oxford and Cambridge graduates in English public life. There may be a link between the two. JK Rowling did not attend these prestigious schools, yet she writes about them in the Potter books - in fact King's College at Oxford was used as a setting in some of the earlier films. So is Lezard unconsciously chaffing at the gall of it all? She is successful, very successful, and yet she does not come from the rank of the elite, she did not attend Oxbridge.

I like the Guardian, I think they are very balanced and fair, but there is a snobbery factor there, which, I am guessing, comes from this elitist attitude that is probably part of the legacy of such a prestigious education. The few graduates (less than 10) of these schools that I have met have been overly dismissive and difficult when their opinions and statements have been challenged in a social context such as a meeting or workshop. A lot of clever sophistry has been put on display to discredit their interlocutors during such occasions. Debating skill is a good thing, but taken to excess can be quite offputting. So I will probably remain prejudiced until I gain further experience in the matter.

Brad Warner

I have been reading Brad Warner's book Sit Down and Shut Up! about Zen. His writing makes me think he is a kindred spirit. The book is engaging, very funny, and down-to-earth and it somehow manages to transcend the words and project the deep essence of the Buddhist meanings he wants to convey.

Brad is a Buddhist monk and a teacher. He also plays bass and writes columns on the Web. He writes about how his Buddhism allows him to react in a balanced way to situations and to people that may be frustrating or annoying. However, I get the feeling that he is still fighting the demons that assail us many of us, the ones having to do with pride and with having the last word. I guess that one aspect of enlightenment is the destruction of that urge, or at least its domestication.

What got me thinking about this was one of his Web columns, responding to a label he acquired for his association with the Suicide Girls site. That he responded at all was indicative. I often feel the same, some energy has to dissipate when one feels wronged. The state I am trying to attain is one where I don't feel wronged in the first place.

The other coincidental event that got me going along this train of thought was a funny excerpt from a diary-joke-agenda that suggested ways to "annoy the Dalai Lama". I don't think any of those methods would work, but they are so funny that they contain their own flaw; and the solution to this little problem: humour.

I think Brad knows this, and that is why his books are so great, the jokes are part of the religion. What other religions have jokes so deeply embedded (I know of only one joke in the Bible - about Peter being a rock to found the church on, and that one is really a pun that only works in Latin and its derivative languages)?

The most important thing, revisited.

display, originally uploaded by MisterMeta.

What is more absurd than a sports car? It is usually limited in seating capacity, more expensive to buy, to service, to insure, and to run. It has an engine that is oversize, and is built for speeds that are usually illegal. Yet such a thing is highly prized and often is an object of desire. Like swimming pools in Arizona. Supply and demand you say? Yes, in a strange way, in a way where utility is not a factor. Buying groceries with a sports car happens, and so does cooling off in swimming pools on hot days. But just saying these lines sounds drab, pedestrian and quaintly humorous, not to mention pretentious and stilted. Indicators that something is off, way off.

So if it is not supply and demand for utility, what is it?

Display maybe, like huge elk horns or very red bums on baboons? Yes, but that is a bit obvious is it not? What if sports cars were inexpensive? Would they still be desirable? Dune buggies were a type of response to this question, back in the fifties and sixties. One was advertising a life style rather than wealth. Ability, possibility, culture. There is a sports car culture, there are gatherings, and there are cults. However, beyond those activities, there is a signifier. Someone driving a convertible fast red thing signifies leisure, some wealth, and a fit to western culture. A link to all the others that have a name, that did the same in films or TV shows.

So, this on-the-surface-absurd artifact becomes more desirable, and more must be charged for it to remain so. It has value. It is important, more important than utility, wealth, or the things it signifies. It becomes a goal in itself, a life aspiration for some.

We all have external memories in the form of data, notes, pictures; external power and strength in the bank and in our wallets; and external body displays in the closet, the garage and on our heads. These are very important things. Are they the goal, the end, or is the end security, pleasure, environmental modification to suit ourselves? You tell me, I have to go get a haircut now.

Are you more important than your money?

From my flickr

A short time ago Leonard Cohen lost much of his money. He published a book of poetry and seems to be doing OK again. I think he is more important than his money. He has a name.

Donald Trump, in the 1980’s was purported to have said that a panhandler on the street was worth more than he was. Yes and no. Donald had his name to trade on.

Aristotle Onassis gave advice about how to get rich: buy an expensive suit and hang around posh parties. Make a name.

You can tell when money is more important than you are if it controls you. Hemingway said the rich were different, and he meant that the money was what guided their lives. Money can make you act in ways that are inhuman, simply to protect it, the abstraction of a number in the bank, that is not allowed to decrease, but must always increase. This is the danger. Making a name in something other than money, like Bill with software (maybe not a great example), is liberating, because the money will follow, not lead.

Soros is becoming a humanitarian, yet his name is associated with currency trading. He is trying to liberate himself. Bill too, with humanitarianism, and Warren Buffett of course. So rich guys sense that the money is more important than they are and try to use it to change that. It helps to have name recognition, for talent rather than for wealth, but the game is to make wealth accumulation look like talent, which is not always easy, since much of it depends on luck, leverage and ruthlessness. It is much more like being a general than an artist, and the field is full of opponents You can always be a patron of the arts and get it by proxy, but that is like being a john. No real love there.

Closer to home, there are the real-estate agents who convert heritage and land into abstract profit, and who are slowly eroding the material fabric of the city six percent at a time. The malaise of our town is that money is more important than anything. We do art on Sundays, but the meetings at the museum or at the library have more to do with operating expenses than with creation. And the old folks die, leaving their abstract numbers to their kids who leave to live in the bigger cities, and who sometimes come back to settle, buying old houses, tearing them down, or covering them with maintenance-free siding and giving six-percent to the real-estate agents who cover the town with their signs.