Arts and Minds

Syncretic Associative Cognition Papers

2011-02-15T11:14:50-05:00

This is a collection of articles my father wrote about his theory of syncretic associative cognition. It gives some good insight into his unique style and his thoughts about mind and intelligence.

Mayer Spivack's Life and Accomplishments

2011-02-13T18:55:31-05:00

Editor's note: In order to illustrate and celebrate the accomplishments and thinking of my late father, Mayer Spivack, I've attached his CV here as a PDF. His work touched many fields, and many people. It's rare for anyone to dive as deep as he did in even one field; but he did it in many. His CV is an example of that special breed of interdisciplinary intellectuals and artists who make Boston so unique. Download Mayer Spivack CV

Mayer Spivack, 1936 - 2011

2011-02-13T11:11:25-05:00

(Note from Nova Spivack, son of Mayer Spivack)

The author of this blog, Mayer Spivack, passed away on February 12, 2011, after a year and a half battle with cancer. Throughout it all he maintained his curiosity, humor, compassion, and dedication to innovation - in fact, these facets of his personality only got stronger as he got closer to his transition. I encourage you to explore the directory of topics here to get a sense of the scope of his incredible intellect. I hope that his theories and observations about the mind, design, art and science will reach a wider audience. Also don't miss his photos - this is only a tiny sampling of the thousands of photos and hundreds of sculptures he produced, many of which we will hopefully be able to show you here in the future. In the meantime, thank you for visiting and for your comments and thoughts about my father's thinking.

ps. You can read my memoir of my father's unique personality, here.

-- Nova Spivack (http://novaspivack.com)

Snake Stories

2011-01-15T20:14:32-05:00

Nan–Nan! Please listen! You’re just my older sister, You’re not my mother. You could not have prevented any of it so try not to blame yourself. It all just happened, things happen. Sometimes they are just a chain of unconnected events. Think about all the good—no, the great—stuff you have done, the stuff you have done for us, for me, try to think about that for a minute. For example—if it weren’t for you, because of you, me and the sibs would not have learned to love the small animals that live near the stream back at the old house. But you know that already—it has been one of your gifts to us all. You have never harmed any of us.

But there has been a kind of family secret that we need to get out from under, and I guess that it’s partly out now. You know some of it, and that’s the part your worrying over, and the others know some, but there is a part that only I know anything about. It has a bit to do with animals.

I think you are the only one who needs to read this, and the only one who might understand why a grown man would still play with the tiniest frogs, and be tortured by these memories, and not think that I am weird. It has to do with you. Nothing horrible (except for me), and nothing dangerous, so don’t worry. I have written it out in story form because I couldn’t stand the confessional, victim, sound of a direct complaining letter to you. So…….

At the house there were all kinds of small creatures. The house backed-up on a thin tributary of the Charles that came down over the rocky mess under Harvey Road Bridge. Sometimes it was a small smelly stream that barely covered the gravel at it’s bottom. Sometimes in stormy weather it was a shocking noisy torrent several feet deep moving as fast as the traffic overhead. When it was tired it would leave all sorts of stuff caught in the stream bed. I found maybe twenty bowling balls, some cracked pins, a few broken chairs, lots of boxes, some with stuff inside, and once a small wooden statue of an Indian snake charmer. I still have it. One time I found an old rusty revolver. I still have that too. But most of the time it was a slow wide eddy, a rotating scummy ponding of river water and spinning cupcake wrappers.

We thought it was a gift put there expressly for us. It brought an endless flood of baby slider turtles like happy wind-up butter cookies, some snappers as determined and fierce as they were tiny, all sorts of bulgy-eyed frogs; proud aggressive bluegills with an endless appetite for bread-balls and night-crawlers, baby horned-pout, cute as newborn kittens, penny candy spotted salamanders, and lots of black water snakes. Wintertimes we played hockey on the bumpy ice and watched fish swim under several inches of black ice. We stared in religious fascination at fish so unfortunate as to be frozen under eight inches of solid inches below our blades. Some, in the thickest black ice of the shallows were frozen in place, a natural museum exhibit. But one time in the spring, we saw these same fish thaw out and swim away while we watched. We learned a lot about second chances from this icy lesson. Not all creatures are so fortunate as to escape from eternal frozen-wide-awake immobility.

I was a little afraid of the many snakes near the pond when I was little, but frogs were there too, and they were always funny for me, precious and beautiful, even mysterious. So much like miniature human cartoons. Some of us kids liked bugs, but never me. I had to put up with them and catch them because my pet frogs needed them to eat. Whenever we fooled around in the weeds near the stream we would find some creature. Most always, maybe because I was afraid of them and extra watchful, I would be the first one to find snakes. They were as afraid of me as I was of them. So for some years I just watched them without touching them.

Nan encouraged all of our creature pleasures as she got on into high school and college science, but mostly I just gradually learned to love snakes, not from any school or library books but from watching the snakes sunning themselves. Snakes, fresh from shedding their skins are perfect, so silent, and private. Lucky, because if the snakes around our house could talk, they would tell all kinds of stories about me and my family.

Snakes are kind of like stories. Both are everywhere, but mostly only people with keen eyes or ears can find them. Stories have to be pulled out of everyday surroundings by the thinnest threads, out from under the stuff left over in the drink cans and food wrappers that litter the vacant lots and backyards of most houses. Snakes are like that too. Lucky if you find one, hard to keep your hands on it if you do. Even harder to extract it from it’s wound-up grip on the grass and roots without fear of doing some damage to it’s delicate beautiful body, or to yourself.

Eventually I recognized the innocence of all these beasties. I believed of course that they were the innocents, unlike me, who never could be. But they bore me no grudges or suspicions. If I treated them with respect and caution, and did not insult their privacy, they did me no harm, and were better company than my family, excepting Nan. Now I indentify with snakes I guess. Sometimes I wish I lived under a piece of cool linoleum in an old back lot somewhere and still had Nan to comfort me. But she will never trust me.

My favorites were the most delicate, the ring-necked-snakes, yellow-bellied, and the green grass snakes, these are rarities now, not like when I was a kid. You would think that these simple elegant green snakes, green and common as grass, would be easiest to find. But they hide in their extraordinary colors within the banality of lawns (hiding by means of a holy green, iridescent and finer than any green except that of a butterfly or an oil slick) so that the fewer there are, the harder it is for a skilled snake-catcher like me to spot an isolated survivor. But they are still there. I’m sure of it.

The neighborhood was generally too poor to afford carpeting inside the houses, but cheap chemicals to make lawns greener and grow faster, and to kill bugs, gave the illusion of a wall to wall in the front yard. These delusions killed off most of the sweet snakes.

There still is some sort of lawn near most every house in my town, even the foreclosed ones, and there are still a few snakes hiding in the lawns (I check them out once in a while when I walk the pug). There are stories in the flaking houses too. Houses are where stories hide. Gossips and storytellers try to dig them up. But find one and just you try to pull it out without breaking it’s back by using It for your own purposes, or by disrespect, killing it. It’s delicate work you lose a few in the beginning and never get over feeling sad and guilty about it. Sometimes the stories are better off untold. Snakes, too, are safer left in their crevices under the rock, or coiled up like ashes from burnt-out “Clown” citronella incense under old kitchen linoleum. So are we.

The grass snakes nearest the oldest farmhouses are harmless, but sometimes the nearby stories inside the houses are too full of trouble for the troubadour and for those who once lived in the houses.

Untold stories are our town’s histories of hidden harm. Telling stories releases harm, reactivates it, stirs up old dust. But sometimes when a story finally does get told it relieves harm. Either way, once you have a snake by the tail you won’t know what kind it is until you have pulled it all the way out of it’s hole and have a look at it.

In the beginnings of stories there are curiosities that we can’t understand until the ending. A lot of times if you get one by the tail you have no idea what kind of head it has, or if it will come back at you and bite you. The catching happens so fast. I never have been sure of my ability to remember the stripes of poisonous snakes and the stripes and colors of the peaceful ones. Despite my pleasure in snake lore I’m no expert. I’ve made mistakes. Most snakes are really peaceful. But, for sure, some snakes bite, and some stink from musk, and some are deadly poisonous. You take your chances. Discover beauty or be bitten.

Opening up an old hidden story can be the same. Something long buried, swept under the rug and ‘forgotten’, is dredged up and made public — sort of a Pandora’s Box situation.

Like when I was out in the field near the old stamping mill lifting up sheets of tin and other scraps left behind when they bankrupted. I was looking for black racers and kings. I knew that they can both bite, but they are super fast and incredibly beautiful. I pulled up the sharp edge of a big old rusted sheet of roofing tin from one of the sheds that had fallen in and found four blacksnakes at the same time! Wow! The biggest was thick, with a big head and a vicious streak. After a couple of seconds of shocked immobility this big one struck at me twice and missed. She recoiled and they all went off in different directions at full speed. I could only follow that same big one that bombed on past me to the left. Since the grass where it headed was an old dirt truck path, there was nowhere for my prize blacksnake to hide. She could only ‘swim’ away on the flat dust with me following. She led us both to a place where sumac trees formed a kind of protected bower surrounded by poison ivy vines. That stuff stopped me, it always does. The snake got away from me in there.

I tried to find a safe way around the ivy into the darker space under the sumac to begin the search again. Only one trampled footpath led inside and I followed it carefully. I never did touch a single poisonous leaf. The light was too dim to find snakes or much of anything in there, but it was cool at noon, and quiet, and I was out of breath and hot. I sat. Luck had not run away completely, because as I felt my way to sit down I found a perfect clean old jackknife with a brown horn handle and no rust. It was just like the one my Nan’s ex-boyfriend had showed me months ago. I felt very lucky even if I hadn’t caught the blacksnake.

It was so pleasant and cool in there, with my newfound knife in my hand, that I lay down, and fell asleep in a few minutes. A distant factory whistle woke me. Lunch hour was over. The noise of the nearby city got louder.

Now, it was not so cool and comfortable in the bower anymore, but getting hot and steamy. With the jackknife safe in my pocket it was time to go. I pushed down against the ground with both hands to get up from where I lay, and the fingers of my left hand got tangled in some sticky stuff. Standing, and outside in the sunlight, I saw that I was stuck to cloth by some gooey red paint. No—it was clothing and old dark red blood, almost black in the sun. I was holding a girl’s inner pants actually, the kind I was never supposed to look at, even in the Sears Catalogue. (but of course I had looked or I would not have known what I was stuck to). I sat down again, pretty suddenly as I remember it, and got up again just as fast, and ran full-speed all the way home, wheezing, crying, and moaning with fear, disgust, and shame all at the same time.

No one was home. The back door was unlocked as always, and I slammed the screen-door shut, locked it with the hook, and turned the inside key on the solid door. All of this with only my right hand.

Up on the second floor — with nobody to forgive me or to punish me for all of this mess I had got myself into — I panicked. I had to pee and my nose itched (these two things always happened to me when I got worried or my hands were messy or busy). I scrambled into the bathroom but I couldn’t pee because my hands were bloody and sticky, and now to my horror, stinky. I couldn’t touch my penis with those bloody hands because, because I was beginning to think the blood was female stuff. I couldn’t dare touch my pants to unzip my fly for fear of marking myself forever with the blood. A dark musky stink of guilt and injury surrounded and marked me no matter what I tried to do. Writhing there on the bathroom floor, paralyzed like a kid about to be executed, feeling helpless once again, I peed in my dungarees. That kind of jolted me into action. I kicked off my warm wet dungies and my now yellowed underpants dropping them onto the shower floor and jumped in after them. The water was icy for a long time before the warmer water came up to the second floor. I got rinsed soaped off and clean. It took me a while, and gave me time to think and remember stuff the way a shower always does.

As I stamped the soap out of my pants on the shower floor, I remembered a similar-looking disgusting mess a few months ago when in the middle of the night, Nan, my sister, screamed and passed out in this same bathroom sometime after midnight when everyone in the house was sleeping. My parents woke up and broke in through the locked bathroom door. Nan was on the floor bleeding and they all began screaming at each other.

That’s what I saw as I squirmed my way through the crowd. My father came out with something horrible and dripping in a bath towel. My mother passed out in the hallway. To go and help mom, my father put the bundle down on the second floor porch threshold outside, where I saw a little bit of what was wrapped up inside it. Eventually they all calmed down and went crying into Nan’s room. On the way they yelled at me to shut up, dry myself of and go back to bed. I had already peed in my pajamas because the only bathroom was full of screaming grownups and I was scared by all I had seen. But I got in there slipping around on all the bloody linoleum and rugs, and kicked off my pants and slippers that were full of piss. I felt like a baby who had wet the bed again. Mostly I stank of my own pee, but there was that other smell on my feet.

Now, this time, I was deeper into trouble that I had somehow caused, I gagged from that rank dark smell that seemed to still be rising indelibly from my hands and feet. I remembered how back then in the dark and screaming night-time, the same nauseating stink had come up from the bath mat and the dumb little mat around the toilet. There had been a lot of blood when I squished on that mat. That middle of the night I had got too scared to wash myself, I peed some more and then threw up, I had to poop at the same time and it just fell out where I stood, into the bloody mat. I ran from there into my bed and cried for hours. I lay there messy as I must have been, just as now I had run from the sumac bower. I remembered the same dark, warm smell that I had choked me last fall. And the shame!

What was this mystery of bloodiness? I was 12 years old. Blood was about shooting Indians in the movies. Never at home. Women’s and girls stuff was for women and girls and I had heard rumors that girls sometimes had something to do with blood. I dared not ever ask about it. I didn’t want to know about it. This seemed to be girl’s stuff that I had got tangled into. I knew nobody would believe me that I had not gone snooping into anywhere or any stuff that didn’t concern me. And then there was the sin part.

I cleaned up the floors and the sink. I cleaned the toilet holding my nose with one hand. I tried to not make the room too clean in case someone noticed and asked me why that was. I put away the cleaning stuff just the way it was and wrapped up the dirty stuff in paper bags and took it down to the shed and dumped it into one of the tin containers that we had there along with the other tenants, and made sure that it was covered over by older garbage. I brought my dungarees out on the back porch, put them through the wringer and then down into the back yard where I rubbed the knees and behind in dirt to make it look like I had got them messy by accident in some game and hung them in the sun on a clothesline way in back.

As I turned to come back from the clothes, I saw a large sunning black racer on a piece of old carpeting near the rocks at the edge of the yard. I launched myself across the short distance, landed on my knees and belly with my hands firmly around the racer’s body and neck. I had finally caught one! And a beauty! The bit of carpeting was the old silly piece from in front of the toilet that my father must have thrown off the porch that middle-of-the-night.

I shuddered and squealed. I let go of the snake. It fell on the carpet and ducked under it. Horrified and angry I grabbed the edge to pull out the snake and got him again, but with one hand. He immediately turned around and bit me twice near the wrist. I held on but fell on my knees to grab him and in the process threw the rug several feet away.

I got control of the snake, and myself. The snake curled up around my forearm and was calmer than I was. At my feet, where this prize snake had coiled, and where the rug had protected the ground for a long time, was a small heaped-up and patted-down pile of dirt ringed by a rectangle of small stones. It was something a younger kid might make for a toy soldier’s hill, or to burry a dead cat. But there was a plastic cross stuck into the ground at one end. It was the one from my father’s rear-view-mirror. I carefully put the jackknife down next to it.

I released the snake and watched him move away with the dignity of a free grown-up snake. All the rumors I had heard came together in my mind with a kind of thump. Weeping, I delicately put the rug back down over the mound and swept everything that had happened to me and my family under it.

Mayer Spivack,

January, 2011

Cancer Reveals The Sublime Within The Ordinary

2011-01-15T18:39:05-05:00

Cancer is a time machine. The ‘C-Word’, once attached, clings like a burr, leaving sharp bits of itself everywhere. I cannot get rid of it. I heard the word pronounced by a creature whose eyes, dark with seriousness, were telling me the truth.

Waking up in the morning, or less fortunately in the middle of the night, I am innocent, having only to pee. Unaware, forgetting, that the definition of my life and that of my family has been twisted short and for the worse. In a few seconds I remember that I have cancer and we have been pitched steeply into an unknown. I am becoming the newest specimen in the La Brea Tar Pits and must watch us all slowly sink below the surface.

Sinking, I am surprised to notice that everything is not cast in horror-show imagery. I find that the sublime and the agape, what as an artist I have sought all my life, are right there— hidden in plain sight within the ordinary. The most sublime understanding lurks enticingly within the surface of ordinary experience.

I will embarrass myself by claiming, against all my self-training, that phrases and words like I send-my-love and heart, when seriously intended, are as buoyant for me as salt water. They float my boat, the boat in which I am now a castaway. One midnight my intestine folded over itself and blocked. Perhaps in an attempt to escape by air, I swelled, resembling an overinflated blimp. Instead, I rode a bucking ambulance to an emergency room 18 miles away and was placed on a hydration-only diet. And so my life was saved. For eight days my lifeboat was drawn down into a gyre through storms I cannot remember, with no food nor compass, but with ample bags of salt-water. There, truly disoriented in a mental black hole, time became elastic and distorted. Days confused with minutes, seconds now were equal to hours later, and sequences reversed. Much light and love were poured down that vortex into me. Very little came out in return. This is how I became conscious that I was a cancer patient in an immaculate white hospital suite.

I met nurses and doctors who did the most routine repetitive tasks without boredom and somehow made me comfortable in the slop at the bottom of my lifeboat.

That’s the love that is the foundation of compassion. The ‘C-word is changed into Compassion in a cancer-hospital where love begets love. I found that for every kindness given freely to me, I welled-up with gratitude and the wish to give something greater back. I spoke freely, feeling like an oracle, and said things to strangers that I would never have said previously to my intimates. I was also high on morphine.

The trivial became serious and vital. I pointed out that discovery frequently, giving life-lessons unasked. What did I know? Morphine pulls out inhibitions like teeth removed from under a carpet of Novocain. It also erases memory. I cannot remember faces or names from that time. I cannot remember what I said.

Finally free and on the way home in the car, my minds-ears rang with the sounds of the cancer battle in the hospital. My minds-eyes were coming open as never before. I had landed on Earth. Spaceman-me documented the amazing landscape of home with about seventy-five quick photos using on my iPhone. The photos are terrible, but no matter. They are mnemonics for ideas, for light and form, for far horizons and time, for the simple emergent from within the complex, for invention, for another chance…, for awareness and meaning–making. For being.

Will The Keyboard Ever Disappear?

2010-02-22T15:05:21-05:00

We now accept that voice activated computers have come of age. There are many applications of voice input that are used by people wishing to avoid using their keyboards. We read about direct brain control of the computer interface and have seen convincing demos of this in action as a prosthetic assist and as research effort. Soon that too will seem commonplace.

The profusion of technologies that offer novel ways for people to enter information into their computers will continue to amaze us. But will the keyboard ever disappear? I strongly doubt it.

Why would we not want to abandon a mechanical kluge, that is noisy, prone to repetitive stress injuries, ergonomically ridiculous in it’s qwerty modality, and slow? Even so, we writers will hang onto our keyboards with our aching fingers even as technical wizards and early adopters call us luddites.

We like our keyboards for the same reasons that we like musical instruments. They serve nearly identical purposes. Human language has deep roots. Early primate language was very likely a mixture of gesture and musical vocalizations. Imagine a lot of hand and finger waving with sounds that are part singing and part muttered intonations. Other species and evolutionary branches are much the same using body position, vibration, arching, puffing, color, and ritualized ‘dance’.

Penmanship and cursive writing served us well and fulfilled some of the same purposes for hundreds of years, just look at the fancy almost carved letter work in a handwritten document from the past several centuries. The visual text supported and illustrated the meaning of the text.

Almost every developed society has it’s own unique version of sign language for the deaf. These expressive languages are rich in meaning, art, and subtlety—and they are gesture languages. They are languages of the body, the arms, the hands and fingers, the face, eyes and mouth.

What does this collection of apparently unrelated examples tell us about keyboards? That they are a continuation of hand gestures and signing, they are in a way related to music and music making. When we type many of us ‘run’ a parallel soundtrack of the written language in our mind’s-ear as it appears on the screen. Nobody else can hear it, but it must sound right to us. This is an integral part of the creative process for writers like myself.

Is there much difference between my Mac Book Pro laptop keyboard and a pianist’s keyboard? My keyboard holds many aesthetic pleasures for me. It has a satisfying ‘feel’ that is rich in kinesthetic feedback to my fingers and hands. It is klicky and tub-thumpy. It makes satisfying sounds for my ears to use in judging if keys have been properly struck. It is warm to the touch and the keys are softly sculpted to cradle my fingertips. I usually don’t like other keyboards. Most importantly, when I use my keyboard in a writing project, I feel free. The freedom of expression that the keyboard offers to a trained touch-typist is a great pleasure. It is a freedom machine for the mind. There it is— what a good keyboard offers is pleasure in creating a musical and meaningful text. You can’t take that away from me.

Mayer Spivack

2/22/10

A Quantum-Entangled One-Time-Pad For Continuous Transmission.

2010-02-12T23:18:14-05:00

Masahiro Hotta at Tohoku University in Japan has proposed an energy and information teleportation system, (Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1002.0200 Energy-Entanglement Relation for Quantum Energy Teleportation). His proposal, as I understand it, would be limited to a single instantiation event taking place in a single simultaneous pair of measurements, one in a laboratory, the other somewhere within the grand fluctuating universe.

To be useful beyond the laboratory we would need a constant seamless flow of such events. But how? Let us suppose that a locally observed smidgen, one part of a singlet (herein named Constance), is one part of a shared identity within a pair of entangled Siamese-twin-sister particles.

Whimsy is Constance’s twin sister who is traveling incognito. Whimsy’s Location is to be specified by information (her code) inserted by nanohypodermic into the vibrating 'bodies' of both sisters at their birth in a Petri dish. That code will come to determine the whereabouts and life-story of Whimsy as she roams the world at the speed of light. Any leaks of information about the secret locations of sister Whimsy would itself constitute quite a lot of valuable information and be in violation of some law or other. But these sisters are scofflaws, just the kinds of pioneers we need to explore for us. But for them to perform any work (as spies perhaps?) they will each have to carry some additional coded information perhaps written upside down in invisible ink on their foreheads. For this information to 'work' the sisters must never be aware of the writing on their heads.

That encoded information is a determinant that defines timing and locational coordinates within a fluctuating indeterminate future. This code may alter some feature of a tiny thread in the fundamental fabric of the universe. (It might be more accurate to suggest that this determinant information constitutes and qualifies the whole of Whimsy's oh-too-brief existence. Description, her story, is her existential truth. Information appears to equal reality. Whimsy is no wimp, she is petite, but she is also a brave time-traveler who never knows quite where she is, and could care less.

This information, having been encoded onto Constance’s forehead, must instantly permit the remote extraction of that same information (or energy, or ‘stuff’) from within the entangled ‘mind’ of poor remote Whimsy, who in her loneliness, has impulsively fled for the billionth time from an English train, and is now strolling forlornly in an "octopuses' garden 'neath the sea". It is nonetheless vital that she must be found instantly. The only clue, the only note we have that might lead us to her whereabouts is written on Constance’s forehead. (Did we make a Post-It-Note copy of the info? Did we stick it on the cryogenic icebox?)

Now, us lab apes, at a scale beyond their imagining, on the basis of that note, must figure out approximately where in the grand tapestry the picture of little Whimsy's forehead is woven. Once we call out both their names, the necessary space/place/time coordinates deep in the hearts of each sister will make them so happy that they will wriggle under our magnifying glass, Constance will heat up until she glows, right here on our lab table, and our simultaneous n-dimensional telescope view of Whimsy somewhere over there, indicates her glowing like a firefly, see? just–right– there! No, she moved. Now, is she is up there in that tree?

The problem, as I see it, is that once we have brought Constance and Whimsy back together again for an instant, we immediately lose contact with Whimsy along with their paired function as an information channel. We can no longer trick Constance into telling Whimsy any secrets. In order to create a continuous channel that will be useful in the next moment and moments beyond, we must not only encode Constance with some secret information to be communicated via her one time only, but we must also provide some way for that information to be carried by both sisters as they become entangled and are split apart. The point here that is to be pulled from the humor and metaphor is that: This code must also enclose another code that identifies the location and time of the next transmission. Somehow we must find a way to piggy-back codes.

In function, this is similar in practice to the old-time-spy’s use of the famed ‘one-time-pad’. This easy-to- propose but hard to invent encoding method might allow the content of each pairing to link forward to the next in a daisy-chain.... and so on.

A communication system of entanglement servers (infotanglers?) might provide a fast and unlimited bandwidth-free information pipe, one that would be dependent upon indeterminate and constantly changing directories for place and time but would nevertheless work. Whimsy will turn up instantly and always, wherever Constance requires demands, and she will tell all to anyone who knows the code.

Mayer Spivack

http://artsandminds.typepad.com/artsandminds/2009/05/way-out-on-a-limbic-about-quantum-entanglement-for-associative-recall-and-thinking.html

NOTE: Why have I written this post in what I hope is humorous metaphor?

Sometimes re-contextualizing and making light of a complex subject frees the mind from thinking only linearly, and allows our associative and creative abilities to come up with novel perspectives and innovations. Have fun at my expense!

iPad Launch Viewers Overload Information Channels

2010-01-27T15:34:09-05:00

Today the Apple Tablet media crunch by Steve Jobs has created an enormous demand for information. We have become a swarm of distributed agent systems programmed to follow Jobs. “Distributed agent systems r(u)n by themselves…You set them up and let them go.” (M Crichton, Prey, p.500). We techies recursively crowded internet sites, and caused channel overloads?

(see this blog: http://artsandminds.typepad.com/artsandminds/2003/12/five_stages_in_.html

Watching the attempt to live broadcast the iPod via http://www.ustream.tv/leolaporte, I am struck by how quickly (in a matter of seconds) the ‘live feeds’ broke down into intermittent transmission. Viewers of this website were estimated and 100,000 or more, and that is only one channel. I am watching the most rapid cycle of evolution/devolution I have ever seen.

Consider that this event is hotly anticipated by millions of potential users. Consider that Apple must want to drive their desire and has arranged to do that by restricting our access to the information making us beg for their advertising feeds. We fall face-first into the feedbag and are overwhelmed. Is the process of information overloading a goal of promotion and advetising? Is customer frustration the way to create demand? I believe that whether these phenomena are intentional or a function of information channels in general, they have becomethe a sub-context of the whole Apple event. The media spent much time analyzing the media because their shortcomings were so frustrating.

Read Steven Weber's Discussion Of Why Art Is Vital

2009-06-09T10:11:29-04:00

I recommend reading Steven Weber's article on the importance of art in education and the mind. find it onThe Huffington Post at:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steven-weber/its-arts-time_b_212732.html

I read new posts on the Huffington Post several times each day. The journalistic freedom and effort there, the truths revealed and doors knocked off their hinges have become an essential isotope of oxygen for my mind. This Blog of Blogs has become an essential beginning middle and end every day.

Way Out On A Limbic About Quantum Entanglement for Associative Recall and Thinking

2009-05-31T18:56:11-04:00

(Please follow me at @MayerSpivack on Twitter for further articles and discussion)

Perhaps I am overreacting to a query at the end of an article discussing the implications of Quantum entanglement in organic environments—Technology Review by K. Birgitta Whaley et al. at the Berkeley Center for Quantum Information and Computation as published in Quantum Physics — but writing from the bottom of my limbic system, here goes —.

If there ever was an organ that might benefit from quantum entanglement it is the brain. If there is a system in the brain that would benefit most from entanglement it will involve associative process. Consider:

Quantum entanglement for information storage at the origin and terminus of nerve fibers in the brain might allow instantaneous signal processing at multiple locations within the brain that have in the past become associatively categorized and connected. This would make the brain operate as a far more energy-efficient organ. It could run cooler, require less sugar-fuel, and have a faster response-time and be free of the time-lag that is a product of transmission speed as a function of nerve fiber length. Cells located a few inches apart could be called upon to fire instantaneously (speed of light? no measurable speed?) and perhaps also to act simultaneously (seizure? migraine? consciousness?).

Pushing the envelope of the possible, credible and the probable:

Were it possible that entangled particles could be found at both ends of nerves, and that this entanglement could be produced not only in entangled pairs, but among great entangled families or multiples (think of: neural web), in other words—that they could be replicated, and their tangled-together potential to interconnect could be maintained over time by some yet unknown and unobserved mechanisms—then—quantum entanglement might yield advantages in associative processing power and speed within the brain.

Assume that associative memory and recall processing, (including processes of attention direction, memory formation, and memory recall) involves a great number of cerebral cortex end-point locations that are discrete and separate cells. The origins (in space, time, and entanglement) of these connections would lie somewhere among sensory systems and within the limbic lumps.

For associative connections to be made among many such end-points, transmission and process speed would benefit from (and perhaps require) multiple simultaneous real-time connections among a plurality of distal end-points that were first entangled when sensory, attention or thought stimuli first originated at a sensory organ or from within somewhere in the limbic system, or within the cerebral cortex itself (as in the case of thought and imagination).

Linear/logical processes (think of: tax accounting) would not require such massive investment in cellular connections or wiring as would associative / syncretic processing (think of: scientific hypothesis-making, art, invention).

Hypothesis: most untrained (unschooled), or ‘native’, ‘spontaneous’ thought process is associative, not linear.

A corollary hypothesis: education deals with almost exclusively with teaching and training in linear / logical processing at the expense of associative / syncretic processing.

This emphasis on logic eventually suppresses associative / syncretic processing, causing associative neural connections to devolve or disappear.

If quantum entanglement among a myriad of endpoint memory cells and attention systems or cortical cells were possible, then it might allow the communication structure of the brain to bypass the expensive problem of wiring and wire-maintenance among all these points. This would mean that the actual dissectable structure of the brain would diverge from how information travels within it. The brain is complex enough already and we are still stumped by it all.

This divergent independent network of fast linkages would allow a kind of 'wireless neurological network' with instantaneous interconnections and throughput to create what we call thinking and consciousness (two quite different phenomena, neither of which has been proven to exist, at least for many people).

There is nothing outrageous about a suggestion that quantum entanglement may be operating within the brain, except that I am the clearly unqualified person discussing it with you.

What may be unique about my spin (intentional pun) on the subject is that I emphasize the advantages for the highly interconnected requirements of associative processing and memory as differentiated from logical, cognitive, or other operations.

Mayer Spivack

Could Information-Projectiles be our Legacy?

2009-05-31T17:52:45-04:00

The internet, and within it the blogosphere, are not legacy media. The internet races always into the future trailing it’s comet’s tail, a short electric past, while blogs and websites tumble into their own archives and disappear forever. Websites and weblogs if not kept up (and paid up), lapse, leaving only limited traces to be traced in future decades. What wisdoms, without durable printed pages, are we leaving for upcoming generations to contemplate?

Bricks and mortar libraries have tended to last for hundreds of years and sometimes far longer. Digital information and digital storage devices are more fugitive do not survive as well, nor migrate through generations with surety. Desert caves and tombs seem to preserve information best, but let’s not go there.

Should we invent an overview capture system within the internet that sends information-projectiles, skipping-stone time-capsules, that repeatedly revisit our great grandchildren’s computer-thingys to stir things up during their part of the Long Now? Like a benign viral pandemic, it would mysteriously appear into whatever the internet has then become at intervals of twelve years? How would we now know what is worth preserving and set to fast forward? The question begs us to evaluate the worth of what we are doing now. Most Twitter content and Utube afterimages would not make the short list. Lose the spam and the list is over eighty percent shorter with one click. The advertisements would fight for their lives and then be smothered by the mute button. What would remain? What do we really care about?

I Reject Intuition and Insight

2009-05-30T21:20:58-04:00

I think of the word intuition and the word insight as far too-comfortable and simplistic euphemisms for complex associative / syncretic /concilliative processes that operate in the brain all the time, and that we are too lazy to examine. We use the words intuition and insight to cover up the fact that we do not know how creativity operates, or what it really is. I don’t trust many of the words in common use that have to do with the mind and the brain, and with thought.

I never allow myself to deceive myself by using these words. Words are like stage ‘magicians’ who are distract us from what is really happening to the rabbit. Words like these, unexamined operational terms, have the reflexive effect of make us incurious and complacent. In this case, we end up remaining ignorant and believing in magic instead of science.

Intuition and insight are usually identified as the sources of ideas and sudden insights. Not so. We and our accumulated experiences, and the amassed brain associations among superficially dissimilar (but deeply similar) things are the sources of our own creativity.

Because I need to understand how creativity works, I reject the illusions of intuition and insight.

Visual thought and the ‘blind’ artist

2009-05-28T20:42:21-04:00

Please watch the video about the work of the artist Esref Armagan at the end of this posting.

It presents a credible record of the process of a Turkish artist, Esref Armagan, born blind, who nonetheless draws and paints. Despite the ‘common sense’ impression one might have that this is a trick, his is not a ‘supernatural’ ability or parlor trick in which he attempts to convince us that the blind can see. The video demonstrates quite solidly how he is able to conceive of and draw what he can only touch and walk around.

This calm and humble man has the desire, as does any artist, to make images. What is unusual and provokes our interest is that he cannot see because he was born blind. Yet, he makes images of objects and places that he can only know by touching and moving through and around them, and presumably by hearing sound reflected and refracted from their surfaces. Listen closely outside to the echoes in a quiet public square. You will hear this effect when the environment is relatively free of motor noise. Go to Venice and learn that the whole city is an echoic symphony.

His memory of shape, form, and space are apparently a combination of tactile, kinetic, and probably acoustic (passive echo-location) sensory and cognitive abilities and skills.

I think that there are important lessons here! Mr. Armagan is not a freak talent but in some ways is an ordinary and true artist. For us who pour over images on websites, drawing and painting have become a kind of faux litmus test of intelligence and creativity in animals, and we have become accustomed to novel u-tube videos featuring elephants and other animals that can paint. We know chimps can make images of sorts. Those animals have been trained to draw by humans, and/or have found some pleasure in moving colors around. Those videos should not be compared in any way with this one. Blind people are not elephants.

This video documents a man making art using the neurological equipment and talents he was born with, just as do other artists, myself included, (sculpture).

Sculpture-making, at least for me, is a process, similar to the kind of 'seeing' Mr. Armagan describes and demonstrates. What he does is quite familiar. When I am working on a piece of sculpture, images of form 'arrange themselves' in my mind's eye. There is no ‘muse’ in my mind. I am doing the arranging, and the eye I speak of here is truly in my mind’s visual center, but it feels much as if I am watching a mind-controlled computer-graphics display filling out an image. This envisioning may occur voluntarily or involuntarily with my real eyes open or closed. I can do this any time I need to imagine an object. In any case, I choose to do much of my most successful decision-making and preparatory conceptualization work just as I am about to sleep in order to take advantage of the leverage of hypnagogic imagery.

Most often, when I am intensely creative and productive, I intentionally set aside some time before sleep to consciously think about alternative ways of solving a formal or other problem for the next day’s studio work, and am able to evolve and to ‘watch’ various alternative solutions develop on the screen of my mind. I have learned though that I must consciously ‘tell myself’ that I will remember all these images when I am awake and able to draw or write them to paper or computer. Occasionally, if I am fortunate, this process continues while I dream. This sleep-work is a great boost to my studio work.

These images, particularly the ones that I choose as the better ones, then become multi-sensory and sometimes synesthetic impressions. Nearly always they combine into visual ideas or visual thought having qualities of tactility, form, space, time, place (location), material (wood, steel, copper etc.), mass, weight, size, structure, balance, motion, color, texture, , light absorption and reflectivity, shadow, highlight, (and myriads of other qualities).

Visual thought integrates the relationships among all these parts, giving to my imagined sculpture a high degree of apperceived realism. I can rotate the envisioned object, observe it from various angles, inspect it internally and externally for contradictions and mechanical interferences and failures in structural logic. Making the piece the next day in the studio is then a matter of completing this previously envisioned solution, and inventing changes to it as the work progresses.

The analogy that comes to mind is as if my brain were able to compose, code, and send the output data (via a buffer) to a printer (my hands), to ‘print’ by representing the original visual thoughts in three dimensions, or more, (my work often involves movement and time). This print-out of the whole pre-conceived artwork develops like film in a darkroom tray as I work during the next days or weeks. Many of my pieces go on like this for a year or more.

All this internal envisioning and real-time studio work is a compelling experience that one does better as one works.

Mayer Spivack

Now please watch the video.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3783271421768921322

and read:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esref_Armagan

Was It Torture?

2009-04-18T15:29:56-04:00

Was It Torture that the Bush administration lawyers allowed, within ‘limits’? My first question is how could they have known if it was or was not torture? Had they tried the various techniques on themselves or on each other in a specially equipped legal dungeon with a dispassionate group, twelve of their peers, observing, taking snapshots, and helping to form a decision? It is common to expect experts in any professional discipline to have some direct experience living, or at least working within the niche where they advise or decide.

Now that so many people worldwide are out of jobs, as a nation we may be grateful for the visibility of strong, hands-on famous role-models teaching us how to get and keep a job.

I suggest that any tribunal that seeks to pass judgment on the people who allowed torture, and those who did the torturous acts, make it their goal to give these folks their old jobs back—with slightly altered job descriptions. Put them back to work as evaluators who are in a proper position to decide just where the line is that demarcates torture from uncomfortable piffle. Their daily work, on a contract of uncertain duration—(to assure their ‘security’) would oblige them to subject themselves, and each other, to the same experiences they once had decreed for others. At the end of that work they will be able to render opinions and judgments of their own, on precisely where that line aught to be drawn.

These serious legal issues are at the core of national and worldwide debates that only seasoned field experts can hope to sort out for us. We trusted them and depended upon them when they made their initial determinations, and we should continue show our trust and loyalty and support now. In a sentence, our hats are off to the lot of you as your head(s) are off to the dungeons, and keep up the great work!

Art and Real Value *

2009-04-15T17:22:24-04:00

Artists have practice in survival on minimal rations and little income. Many make little or no income from art, but with pluck and luck can make a side-job support their own work efforts. Peanut-butter and impasto paint are both common artist’s materials. Peanuts in—paints out.

Some people must be paid to do a stitch of work, while artists gladly pay for the privilege of working. That is the first paradox. The second paradox is that what the larger economy values (not necessarily art), has now become massively devalued and everyone else’s shirts are in tatters, the hair shirts worn by artists are still as itchy, and covered with wet clay and paint.

While Christies and other Auction houses, and the galleries report declining art sales, this does not much affect most living artists whose art is rarely shown, and infrequently offered at high-end auctions.

Now, as the economic slump closes factories and stores, causing bankruptcies and foreclosures, artists work right on into the night, their studio lights burning brightly.

Many people who disliked their jobs have now lost them along with their income and security. Artists still have their artwork and love to do it. They are used to not having security and they don’t have it now. Yet, we are not all in the same boat. Artists keep on working, creating the inherent value of discovery and invention. They open our senses to what was previously unnoticed, sometimes make ‘beautiful’ objects or images, and in the process they re-create our ideas of the beautiful; and they remain busy.

They are working to create something of real value to themselves. How could art be “real value”? If I replace the word ‘real’ with ‘long-enduring’ does that help? New breakthrough artworks become the great art treasures of tomorrow and their value may last for generations, if not for centuries. Notice the word ‘may last’—this is not risk-free investment. No investment is risk-free, as today’s headlines demonstrate. It is up to the collector/art buyer to perform their own due-diligence; to know the current art world, and to go it one better based on their personal aesthetic choices, to invest in the un-noticed or undervalued artists, find the significant, the rare, and to buy and to exhibit these works, and thereby create a niche for their growing collection.

Most of the time, the works of living artists are affordable, because artists must meet a ‘price-point’ that smaller art collectors can bear. Now during the economic slump these artworks are relative bargains, available to the more prosperous collectors who have not lost their taste for art that they still love, even though they no longer can afford the work of great masters.

This is their time to pounce. Great art collections were acquired this way, when relatively wealthy collectors, art patrons, galleries, and private buyers have invested in art while others counted only their losses. Their investments in art were often relatively so small in comparison with their own larger economic losses (along with the losses of others), that the downside risk was negligible while the upside possibilities were great.

Many of those investments appreciated wildly over decades and are the reasons that we visit now museums. Museums, these days more so than banks, continue to retain works of real value.

Now is the time for smart people to visit their local artists, before the quick old foxes wake the lazy dogs.

*(Full disclosure, I, the writer, am a sculptor.)

Economic Recession and The Psychological Ecosystem Around Individual Depression and Violence

2009-04-08T15:02:13-04:00

Economic recession and depression are part of the larger psychological ecosystem that interacts with individual human depression. If we were too busy to notice these relationships before the current economic ‘downturn’, we cannot fail to be aware of it now if we read the headlines.

We all live together in a largely unnoticed greater context of nested interacting ecosystems. This is a way of describing and interlinking environments of all sorts—physical, social, economic, educational, climatic, geophysical—I could go on naming them until the list and their interactions became too complex to imagine, let alone sort out. That is the work of science, and this is a brief article of opinion.

People are killing themselves and each other at an increasing rate. While what the media casually refers to as ‘gun violence’ has always varied quite a lot, in the United States statistics have been more or less consistently bloody with up’s and down’s but the yearly totals of deaths by violence of all kinds is usually written in red ink. Murder is probably easier with a gun, but without guns, psychotics would kill with knives or bats or automobiles. We cannot hope to limit the uses of sticks and stones, bats and bullets, but we can and must deliver mental health intervention to desperately needy families and individuals even in tough times. Most especially in tough times. Everyone knows of at least one such example. Every community institution is aware of several or many. We pile up the papers, overwork and underpay our health delivery workers and ignore the problems until the spike on the desk is suddenly bloodied.

Since the downturn, there has been an up-tick, a compulsive thumb cocking the hammer and releasing the safety; taking aim at the mirror or through the window. Desperate times trigger desperate acts and the times are becoming increasingly desperate.

The feeling of helplessness, or real hopelessness and helplessness for that matter, is at least in part a mental and emotional trap, a closed dark room. For some this room has only rage and a gun as an exit.

Will we change our attitudes about emotional stress, depression, and the potential for destructive acts like murder and suicide, or quite often murder/suicide and rid ourselves of the stigma of being human and terribly upset?

Probably we will not be effective in large-scale public education and healthcare delivery for some time to come, as financial resources for preventative care are being cut from budgets. Can you see the downward spiral?

We may complain and grow fearful for our lives and for our children’s safety, but it is our collective responsibility, not our guilt, that needs to be recognized. In these desperate times, we desperately need legislation to assist in the early identification of children and adults who are at high risk of committing mayhem, and get some kind of help delivered to their doors, whatever the cost.

There are far too many privately owned guns in the nation to effectively reduce their use in psychotic attacks. There are, as most of us have been figuring out, far more crazy people, seriously crazy people, in every group than we used to believe. Believe it now.

As a nation, we have jealously guarded both our first amendment right to peaceably assemble, and our second amendment right to keep and bear arms. These two positive aspects of our national heritage are coming into increasing conflict. How long will you or anyone feel safe in a crowd that (statistically) must contain a few depressed people with fear, helplessness, self-hate, rage, and homicide blocking their minds?

Gun control, or perhaps more realistically an acceptably intelligent negotiated legislative effort leading to ‘gun management’ will be of some limited help.

We must focus our attention on matters of mental health, childhood education and safety from abuse, and job creation.

Mayer Spivack, Wednesday, April 8, 2009

Those Who Work With Money Are Tempted To Play With Money

2009-03-21T12:35:03-04:00

When you work with other people’s money you may be tempted to play with money. Some bankers now seem to fear that no one will trust them or pay them again—ever, so they are trying to quickly grab as much cash as they can on the way out of the tower, a case of institutional ‘take the money and run’.

In a few months time, everything they value or measure value by, has been devalued by their own hand. They have undone themselves and us. As their stash of value diminishes (as does our own), by reflection, their self-worth along with their net worth—disintegrates. Their established social and professional connections fracture. They are in pain. In a moneyslide, many now tumble like mud down an over-logged hillside in a downpour, pouring down from the top and wildly grabbing at our wallets to stop their fall. They appear ready to take anything from anyone because they believe that their own lives or their way-of-life is out of control and the whole hill is washing down the sewers. The out-of-control aspect of their fall is crucial to their mental health. These folks were quite control centered orderly people when things are going their way. That is why we trusted them. As the chaos they created explodes around them, they have become disoriented and helpless. They have no control of anything. They are at a Wall Street intersection, with their pants down. It is no dream, and their panic is beyond their (or our own) control.

Something happens in the conscience (wherever that may be in the brain) when a marginally illegal, destructive, or self-destructive impulse goes badly wrong. When bankers and investment councilors lie and run off with lots of our money they also lose everything that they are or have been. They lose their sense of who they are and eventually lose their money. Once heroes of the reserved tables and the country club, they fear that they will be shunned.

Just as the depressed enraged husband who mangles and shoots his wife and children must then tip into the part of his mind from which there is no returning, and must shoot himself to stop his crazy rage, these moneymadmen tip and morph into self-destructive cash filled piñatas that will be batted about by their victims until they are entirely emptied of their hoard of sweets and pocket change.

People seem to have a tipping-point for fear. When unconscious fear and guilt dominates the mind; when a sneak becomes a thief, that thief may become a bank-robber. This is why bankers rob banks (After all, who else has the insider information to be able to rob a bank?). As we know there have been many ‘professional’ bank robbers who famously robbed banks in the kind of robberies that require a misspelled note handed to the teller, a mysterious paper bag, and maybe a gun. (Incidentally this classic kind of penny-anti bank robbery is on the increase now that the magic carpet has flown off without us, pilot-less.) Bonnie and Clyde are the archetypal characters in that dramatic tradition. But these kinds of crooks are amateurs despite the infrequent dramatic heist in which they haul off thousands of dollars in nickel and dime money-bags. They rarely vanish with billions. The pros are showing the way and providing their biographies for the next decade’s film scripts.

We are gullible. In lies we trust. Our trusting mind-sets and belief systems having learned unshakable categories for social and professional roles and behavior, and codes of conduct and ethics, we do not anticipate that the trusted experts upon whom we depend are playing with our money in an expensive version of three-card-Monte or a shell-game with our minds and our money. Gullibility, our own greed, and our ignorance allow us no hint that bankers might ever become robbers.

There is a wailing multi-million-voiced high wind on Wall Street. The card game is been busted, and the cards are scattering with the operator, the shills, and the marks money. We have seen the cardboard box fold-up and blow away, and the confident ingratiating smile twist into a smirk.

Trust not only has to be earned, it has to be demonstrated, and we must do our own and our national due-diligence by asking the kind of simple, probing, questions that must untangle and ultimately result in laws that edit out misleading language and the tiny print on the other side of our contracts. So far we have been reluctant to reveal the extent of our ignorance to our hired-in experts. But this is not ignorance. it is honest confusion in a long prevailing culture of financial obfuscation and fraud.

Once we were e a nation of people who made things. We worked with our hands, our minds, and our whole bodies to produce goods of value to ourselves and to others. That kind of effort was a full time job (and where has that gone?) that left little time or energy for a farmer or machinist to become an amateur banker or investment broker. This information-gap provided the niche for the con men. That gap and the niche will never go away. Someone will always try to exploit it. But we need to get back to the business of making stuff of real utility and tangible goods of value. We can now take off our dunce-caps. We can stop pushing paper around from pile to pile until someone looses track of it. April fools used to last only one day. Let’s keep it that way.

2009-02-27T18:32:44-05:00

Everyone who loves music should follow this link to a performance from Venezuela during the recent TED conference.

I think that this is an unbreathable performance. Now that I have inhaled, I cannot remember such energy in a conductor or orchestra integrated so well since Sergei Koussevitzky conducted The Boston Symphony Orchestra, way back. That is the highest praise, well deserved. Hope, alive in the world!

Talks Gustavo Dudamel and the Teresa Carreño Youth Orchestra: A musical sensation from Venezuela

<objhttp://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/astonishing_performance_by_a_venezuelan_youth_orchestra_1.html

Artificial Intelligence and The Railroad Track Illusion.

2008-08-08T16:02:48-04:00

by Mayer Spivack
8/6/2008

The Singularity—The Siren.
If any definition of ‘The Singularity’ is: That future moment when artificial intelligence function levels in machines are equal to or greater than human intelligence, then how do we get there from here? By the wayside, how intelligent are we? What do we include and exclude from our definitions of intelligence, including our own?

The Railroad Track Illusion.
Consider a walk alongside a railway line where one rail represents human intelligence and the other represents AI. The tracks will always remain parallel because the two kinds of intelligence are likely to remain dissimilar. From where and when we stand here and now, standing on one rail, they do appear to join at the horizon— at ‘The Singularity’. However, no matter how far we walk, these rails will remain parallel and never join.

Yet, something is shifting in the ground below the tracks. Humans are becoming cleverer, (but not necessarily smarter), and computer driven AI is getting more complex. We wonder, are these rails beginning to bend toward a convergence? Is their angle changing as their intelligences grow? Is this path converging, or is it only asymptotically, ever so tauntingly, closing the impossible gap? Perhaps despite increases in computation power and richness, and greater human ingenuity, the tracks can only become narrower gauge, to remain forever parallel however nearly touching.

The Rapidly Receding Singularity.
I suggest that the singularity will recede at the same rate that we approach it.
It is in some respects a fixed race, with humans on one track, and our inventions on the other, with us at a fixed distance from the apparent horizon. Philosophically-speaking, is it possible for us to become cleverer enough to invent clever machines that outsmart us, without that event making us also just that much smarter than the machine we have just built?

Picking AI Up By It’s Bootstraps.
About forty years ago at the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory in the Gyro Research Group, I faced a similar problem. As a novice designer and builder of inertial navigation equipment, I designed and built a high-precision rotary grinder, one that could finish the interior annular groove inside a ball bearing race. It had to produce better tolerances in that surface than could be obtained—or could then exist—in the bearings and on the motor of the grinding wheel that machined them. In simple machines this bootstrap trick can be, and was, done. In AI we can, I am sure, make a device that is smarter and works more smoothly than ourselves sometime in the future, but when we are done, it may only be something like a ball-bearing race, not a person-replacement. It may just be a gadget, like my grinder or it’s product. We know that all gadgets are obsolete the moment they are built, because we learn so much in the effort of making them that we end up smarter than we were at the outset. This is particularly true in the world of computers.

Emotion Trumps Crunch.
Speed is not the most important factor in Artificial Intelligence, but we cannot move forward in that effort with slow equipment. If AI merely succeeds in making computers with faster crunch, we will gain negligible advantage in our quest to make them smarter. If we believe that faster is smarter we are fooled by an illusion. In that scenario, AI would have failed at the larger goals of replicating the rich abilities of our own brains and minds within machines. Human minds are not mere number crunchers. We are emotional thinkers.

We Need An Owner’s Manual For The Brain And Mind.
Achieving holistic machine intelligence that resembles our own messy emotional intelligence may always seem a long way down the tracks. Many will say at the outset that we should keep emotions out of the AI effort because they insist that emotion cannot be understood nor controlled. They are wrong. The work starts in the examination of our own minds. We use mind and emotion together all the time, yet we have no idea how they interact, or even if they are separable. We have no owner’s manual. Before we get good at AI, we need to write a good owner’s manual for the brain and mind, and keep it updated in Wikipedia.

We Cannot Reverse Engineer What We Have Not Studied.
I think AI is a noble goal. It is noble not because of some romantic compulsion to climb impossible mountains, but because the pursuit of AI will finally drive us humans to do something we have resisted for millennia—we have to take a good careful look at ourselves. We cannot reverse engineer what we have not first studied.

We Are The Forbidden Fruit.
Most cultures, and most individuals, resist the work need to acquire self-understanding or self-knowledge, instead substituting religious, moral, or legal belief systems in the place of careful scientific self-study. By running as a team together along the tracks, the developers of Artificial Intelligence with the new neurosciences, along with psychotherapists, can do what has usually been taboo or was considered too embarrassingly touchy-feely. (Does the phrase ‘touchy-feely’ suggest that we are afraid of admitting the emotion in ourselves)?

Go Talk With A Psychodynamicist!
It is time to tackle the work of understanding what we are and how we work. That effort is great and noble beyond description. It is essential to world peace, health, and planetary salvation, to the development of human intelligence, and not least or last to the development of Artificial Intelligence.

AI Is Brain Science.
This will be a complex and unfamiliar kind of work for the computer wranglers. It is not yet clear to neurologists. It is finally an exiting and hopeful time in the sciences of brain and mind. In order to move forward, we must parse the work into units that complete some task or other in the brain. This will break the AI goal into manageable pieces that can integrate with each other and with the findings from neurology and psychodynamics. Ultimately we would try for integration of all the parts within an environment that is holistically higher than any particular part contained in the effort. This will take a long, long, time and lot’s of people.

There Is No Yellow Brick Road To Artificial Intelligence.
There can be no roadmaps isomorphic to the inside an illusion. There are no onramps leading to an indefinite location that will always remain somewhere over the rainbow, in a future that may not occur. Those of us who pump our little handcarts along the tracks will have to be open to new ideas, new psychological discoveries, and be patient. We will not be able to publish four papers per semester. Why am I so pessimistic? Do I have no faith in human ingenuity, innovation, and engineering? Alice, following the yellow brick road, heard the Tin Man sing—“If I only had a brain!” At least we each have one. Let’s study it.

The answer is that I am wildly optimistic. I think that we will make wonderful advances in neurology, computation, and networking. We are already making amazing progress in studying our brains. We need to come together in teams. What will keep the tracks parallel instead of convergent is not lack of computation power and abilities but an inherent paradox. If AI and human intelligence get even close or get very close, then it will be just great! Close will be more than good enough, and we get there.

May The Paradox Be With You.
The paradox is within us. We are the problem. We may be the one problem that is most difficult for us to solve because of our lack of distance from the structure of the device we are studying. The device on the workbench is ourselves. We have trouble overcoming that blindness and fear of discovering of our own workings, even trouble accepting the terms of the study of ourselves. We strongly resist psychodynamic understanding for our own personal, social, familial, and cultural reasons. If we do not understand our own mental process, we will fail at understanding our psychological/emotional processes. Ask any psychotherapist to help you understand what I mean. This is not psychobabble. In fact, the term psychobabble is employed as a defense to prevent self-understanding and shut out the psychotherapist. Now, psychotherapists need to become a significant part of the AI team effort.

What Is The Secret In The Shoebox?
The whole subject has been in a shoebox at the back of the human family closet for a few thousand years. Within the past century, psychiatry abandoned it’s own psychodynamic child. Freud died and we buried his ideas. We must look at how we think AND HOW WE FEEL about the world we experience, and within which we work on our computers. The AI enhanced computers in our future must not just fool us into believing that they feel what we feel, they must be able to proactively replicate the processes of emotion. The AI computer needs to be selfishly recursive, it must always strive to understand it’s own process independently from it’s operators or programmers. (see comments by Aubery De Grey, PH.D., on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0A9pGhwQbS0

However smart our AI computers get, they will not even be temporarily replicate our intelligence only then to surge ahead of us to become our galactic-cloud self-extensions, the supernovas of our extrahuman intelligence. That is fun to imagine, but it is science fiction. We need to mount a more humble effort from within the computer community to learn about ourselves in enough depth and detail to fashion computers that resemble us.

We Are The Secrets In The Box.
A blocking problem occurs at this junction on the railway to the future of AI. We humans have no adequate agreed-upon model of how to self-examine. We do not nearly understand ourselves. Those of us who work in the area of emotion and behavior with real people know that most people, mentally healthy or not, do not begin to conceive of how to do this task for themselves, and the AI community, however smart, is no exception. We are the ultimate black box problem, and we are all inside the box.

In order to understand general human intelligence, and the intelligence that underlies science and engineering, we must to deal with human emotion. Emotion is an important part of intelligence. It is not a separable human foible. Emotion mediates, motivates, and directs all our actions and reactions to our own thoughts and ideas, to each other, to what we work upon; all experience and mentation is emotionally correlated. Emotion rules all of it, there can be no exceptions. Are you angry yet? Do you emphatically disagree? Are you emotional about an idea that you hold dear? There is no objectivity. Science is passionate because it is the work of passionate people.

We Cannot Download Or Upload Psychology.
Psychology cannot supply any simple answers or a neat and clean mind-dump, consultation service for AI designs. or supply, on contract, the human emotional package that completes artificial intelligence for the rest of us psychologically unwashed. Psychologists are themselves intellectually divided, and emotionally conflicted about what is acceptable content within their own fields of research and practice. They are of at least two minds about everything, like the rest of us. Nonetheless, we need their participation in AI and they need ours to help drive the effort of self-understanding. We first have to accept that computers and ourselves are, and may have to remain, as distinct entities. We could do this now, and here. Just accept it.

If we team together, the most we can hope for is that we might intentionally and incrementally narrow the distance between the railroad tracks—between ourselves and our computers. We will learn a lot about both in the process. What are the predictable moments when the track might narrow but not touch?

Where The Tracks Can Get Closer.
I believe that narrowing, or a drawing together of human intelligence and AI might occur at the following railway junctions:

We Replicate Intelligence Incrementally.
The first narrowing point may occur when we become incrementally able to replicate our own neurological structures in a complex and useful built device. That device (or network of devices) must have enough processing power to be assist in real-time human interactions and communication. It must be a tool. Modestly—just give us one machine that can occasionally out think, not just outwork, a talented and informed human. If we are ever going to do a good job of self-replication we had better mount a national project to discover our own humanity.

Psychodynamic Modeling Is Problematic And Necessary.
The next narrowing of the tracks will occur when, modeling upon our own psychodynamics, we replicate some our own psychological and psychodynamic structures in a built device and that device has fewer neurotic bugs than we do.

AI and Civil Society.
A grand narrowing will occur when we can agree internationally and across cultures upon the common wisdoms and common sense underpinnings that support a civil society, for only then can we begin to judge whether our machine intelligences have got it right or not. Strong AI will have an enormous impact upon civil society because civility is perhaps the greatest product of intelligent communities. The impact is inescapable. Civility at the macro-scale is a by-product manifestation of human intelligence so hopefully and our intelligent machines can be scalable to this high level. The first part of this millennia-long challenge does not need a machine at all, it is first up to us. So far, unaided by smart equipment, we have not been very good at civility (maybe we are not yet intelligent enough for peacefulness), but no machine will have much value without it. We have to teach machines our values, large and small.

Why Can The Train Tracks Never Meet?
We are essentially trying to reverse engineer something we do not understand, that we have never completely inspected, that has some parts we do not want to acknowledge; something that is changing all the time, and that is one of the most complex devices (organism-systems) in existence; ourselves, us humans. We will therefore remain the model for the top of the line AI machine, and it will never catch up with us.

The Human Information Input-Output Pinch-Point.
As we make progress in AI (and general information technology), we will quickly arrive at a pinch-point beyond which we can no longer communicate with our artificial assisted intelligence devices fast enough to benefit from their speed and complex outputs. Our sensory inputs and expressive output channels will simply not operate anywhere near machine speeds. This is something that we are already experiencing. Everyone has experienced this at some time when listening to fast speech in voicemail.

Our learning and expressive abilities will fail because information flows too fast for our eyes, ears and fingers. Our tongues and fingers will fail to keep up. Even our prize, the mind itself, will boggle as information speed increases. We are very nearly at this pinching-speed now. Our eyes and ears frequently overload our brains as information flows faster. Our brains, when forced to attend to rapidly changing data get fatigued. We lose concentration and focus. Our bodies have various bandwidth limits that technology might not be able to overcome completely. We have not yet evolved to move that fast. Our biological inputs and outputs seem to have built-in speed limits. As we accelerate our walk along the railroad tracks in an imagined high-speed train we reach the pinch-point quite quickly. This will push the tracks apart so far that our
AI work may be derailed. This is a major challenge to AI.

The Parallax Paradox Of AI Development.
As we get better at replicating our own brains in vitro, our brains will grow that much smarter because of that process. Here is the explication of this claim: In order to build a brain as good as our own, we must first observe the brain within ourselves as it is doing the work of machine-making. We know from Heisenberg’s work at the smallest scales that a system observed is changed by that observation. There are some very small-scale electrical and chemical processes running inside brain tissue. Recursiveness ratchets us tightly into this conundrum in a kind of Heisenburgian dilemma that will dog every step of our effort.

It’s nip and tuck, becoming self-aware pushes the train tracks further apart, just as continuing, accelerating changes in our intelligent machines appear to move the contact horizon closer to us. Damn! a variation on Zeno's paradox has grabbed us. Just because we figured ourselves out a bit more, we raceed ahead of the computer we made—just when it was so close to being our equal. Maybe we just learned something. That is already an advance in AI. Yet what we have learned will bring us no closer to AI.

I am starting to post in Twine.com

2008-07-06T12:50:45-04:00

I am starting to post in Twine.com. Twine is a new service for sharing and discussing information around mutual interests. It's like blogging but more interactive, and there is more community. Also, Twine uses the Semantic Web to automatically organize information and help you discover content around your interests. Twine is the product of my son's company, but that's not why I'm using it -- it's actually really useful.

Note: Twine is still in invite-beta, which means you have to register and then get invited in, but it's free and they will be opening it up soon -- so join and then once you get in join my twine and let's connect. I'm looking forward to getting to know my readers.

I Am Now Publishing Lumia Photography in this Weblog

2008-06-29T13:06:30-04:00

I have begun to publish a series of my Lumia and other photographs as an addition within this weblog. This begins a longer term effort to present a range of photographic art. I will upload images as I convert them to digital format from my own 35 mm archives, and from my still, yet quite active, handheld cameras. The original Lumia images are high-density film transparencies. As photographs are converted to high resolution in digital format they might eventually be available as large archival quality color prints.

These images can be found most easily by pasting the following code into your browser:

http://artsandminds.typepad.com/photos/lumia/index.html

http://artsandminds.typepad.com/photos/lumia/index.htm

A Response to Adam Nagourney, 5/19/2008 New York Times Article Entitled "A Lack Of Luck And Skill"

2008-05-20T12:34:17-04:00

The NYT has proven itself again and again during this Democratic race to be as conservative as anyone in the industry. The media ’s “molly coddling” of Senator Obama has been as rampant as the sexism towards Senator Clinton. To imply that Senator Obama is somehow a weak and helpless victim of a strong woman candidate, is ridiculous and astounding in this century. It is interesting that the fact that he was raised by a white mother and grandparent, while being abandoned by his African father has been played down in the media. Multicultural would be a more accurate description of Obama's background, not simply focusing on the ethnicity of his father. Isn’t that a rascist, as well as sexist position for the media to take about Senator Obama’s personal history? “Lack of luck and skill” is not the issue for Senator Clinton… The media has set the stage for this, and I am sad to say that the NYT has played a major role in perpetuating the sexism and 1950’s mentality towards a strong and extremely competent candidate for President of the United States.

This was first posted by L.H. Freedman on May 19th, 2008 @1:31 PM in the New York Times.

Electoral Psychodynamics and Senator Obama

2008-02-25T17:19:46-05:00

Many Americans, and especially the press and media, fear, talk about, and impugn strong confident women who enter the generally hardball realm (or kick-boxing ring) of political power. While we are all free to talk in any way we wish to, expressing ourselves in either healthy or unhealthy ways, the media and the press have a greater impact on government then the rest of us when they pronounce or broadcast prejudicial speech, sly winking innuendo and personal neurosis in place of balanced measured opinion and factual journalism.

The media therefore have an obligation to us all to hold their opinion and journalism to the highest possible standards. They cannot behave like a snickering high-school locker-room gang if they are to maintain credibility as the Fourth Estate. Some members of the press and media (and ourselves) would benefit us all if they had their heads examined.

I am not attempting to present a psychobiography of either Democratic candidate but instead to inspire all of us, especially individuals in the media, to examine and outgrow a few of our attitudes, fears and prejudices. Each of us manifests our own personal psychodynamics, and those effect how we might correctly judge or misjudge the characters of the candidates. In the interests of writing accurate reportage or making sound decisions each person in the media and press should strive to identify and separate our neurotic reactions, resentments and old childhood fears, particularly regarding powerful women, from the real issues of candidacy and presidential office.

As a lifelong Democrat and a retired psychotherapist I watch and listen to the debates between two fine Democratic candidates for nomination to the presidency with the fabled psychotherapist’s ‘third ear’.

My ‘third’ ear hears a great deal of intolerable, underhanded anti-female rhetoric, particularly from within the media. I also hear that both candidates are locked into a sorry three-way zero-sum battle with the press and with each other while the rest of us watch or cheer the fight. I hope that we can learn what our unconscious positions are, become more aware of them, question them, and that all might benefit from some self-searching for the benefit of the democratic and Democratic Party process.

From one corner of this triangular boxing-ring the press shouts it’s opinions while we, the audience and in some sense the referees shout for blood or a knockout punch. The press in all forms has been describing not the reality of the candidates and their positions, but the writer’s own personal, and often very neurotically personal context of views and fears about each of these unusual, intelligent and talented public servants.

Our candidates ought to try not to bond with the press or to passively condone press attacks against their opponent (Am I naïve?). Ganging up with the press can and always will backfire against the most favored son or daughter because the contemporary press has no long-term loyalty. The media requires an enemy, preferably a falling hero or heroine, or salacious scandal to fuel ratings and sales. When a suitable Icarus (who with sufficient heat from the press might be caused to fall) cannot be found, the press will create one, even by employing innuendo, defamatory language or lies.

I hear the press make the assumption that because Senator Barack Obama is partly black, of mixed parentage, he is a natural underdog and must be protected from the strong and assertive debating style of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton. He is not weak and helpless, on the contrary he has achieved an admirable record for any person whether male, female, white or black. Incidentally, his parentage is a mix of a black African father and a white American mother. I don’t care a bit about skin color, except to say that in his mixture each of us may find a bit of ourselves, and that is a fine thing. Notice that Senator Barack Obama does make frequent reference to skin color or ‘race’, making it into an aspect of the race to the White House.

Perhaps a healthier truth might be that everyone is at least unconsciously aware of ‘race’. The notion of race is a traditional notion, not a scientific one. That it is a pseudo-biological myth as has recently been demonstrated by the work of geneticist Dr Spencer Wells of The Genographic Project. The idea of race is entirely a cultural construct and has no scientific basis. It is a term used universally to draw power distinctions among people and groups in order to elevate the social condition of one and to stigmatize and reduce or harm the condition of others. The idea of race is a fabrication that has historically been the enabler of enslavement and of war, whether of women and girls, or of men and whole conquered populations.

Does it make sense to bring up the old arguments about race during political discourse in The United States of 2008? It does, for these old saws cut our country up in ways that have not yet fully healed. We are all unconsciously scarred by this three-hundred eighty-nine year-old national problem.

For the most part, Americans would like to achieve a color-blind society. That might be possible if we were in fact color-blind. We are not, no matter if one is white or black or tan. All of us do hold traditional fragments of malignant learned prejudicial beliefs in our unconscious despite our conscious efforts. Even the candidates themselves must hold these kinds of confused and harmful distinctions in their own unconscious history.

The social impact of these unconscious notions, even if examined, are several. Senator Barack Obama must deal with his feelings about his own dark-skinned father’s abandonment of both himself and his nurturing white mother just as he would with a mother or father of any color. Boys and men contest with both their mother and father for attention, love, and control over their own lives. Mothers and fathers contend with their own children over the same issues.

Senator Barack Obama may still be contending with his feelings and his fears and anxieties about his own complex family of origin including his mother who, in the early part of his campaign he rarely mentioned or described, while he did mention his black African father who abandoned him. Most children (and adults) who have lived through the loss of an abandoning parent blame their loss upon themselves and throughout their lives attempt to gain the attention, if not the love, or perhaps revenge upon the parent who left them. Most men and boys actively attempt to distance themselves from their mothers without realizing it. Does Senator Obama still hold some self-defining distance from her and from women in general, as do most men and boys? In psychodynamic slang we sometimes refer to this fearfulness as gynophobia*. He may, and most of the rest of us guys do also. The male press seems unable to keep their own personal issues in the background.

Most men and women hold some degree of gynophobia. The danger is that the press and the candidates and ourselves may develop negative transference (originating within these childhood reactions to all strong mothers or to people with different skin-color), ganging-up against women candidates, a process that is an actively clear and present danger. In consequence of these beliefs any one of us may reject a candidate for the wrong immature reason.

Some men (and some women) reveal truly fearsome gynophobic reactions, and I believe that this describes quite a number of television commentators, interviewers and pundits. It also seems to be underlie the writings of print journalists who do not appear to understand how much of their own personal lives are revealed to the rest of us by their prejudicial attacks against Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton (remember comments about measuring the White House for drapery? Alleged Lesbianism?) and by neglecting the subject of Senator Barack Obama’s female mother.

Women and American blacks experience disproportionate amounts of prejudice and abuse as a function of population numbers. Certainly, blacks of both genders in America have a long history of abusive treatment by whites and also by African blacks who sold whole African villages into slavery to Europeans and Americans. Both white and black females have a long history of abusive treatment by males of all ‘races’.

For the purposes of this discussion let us assume that roughly half of black Americans are female and black, and that half of the white population is female. This means that in the domains of abusive experiences black females get double trouble from everyone, and that white females don’t have an easy time of it. Neither is a recipe for a happy life with access to power and voice equal to that of men of any color. Historically, as in the present, women have had a bad deal.

This preponderance of long-suffering women of all colors may ultimately define the reservoir of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s strongest cheerleaders and may have been the source of the most votes for her campaign. I hope that the gynophobic fears of men of all colors do not overrule the strength of women who can identify their common aspirations in this brilliant female executive. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton may also have benefited from the male voting constituency who are healthy enough to recognize ability where they find it (and who presumably may have more comfortable opinions about women in general based upon their experiences with their own mothers, specifically).

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s strengths are not Senator Barack Obama’s weaknesses. When she stateed that she could perform well in office she should not have contended that Senator Barack Obama was not. She benefited most when she made statements about herself, not about him. Of course the same applies to Senator Barack Obama, and to any candidate. The option to ‘go negative’ is always tempting in our press-driven public-opinion climate, but it often turns out to be untrue and nearly always impugns those who employ or disseminate it as a tactic.

It now seems obvious, in the hindsight of recent events at the Democratic Convention, that both Democratic candidates are the hope of us all (and the rest of the world) and their combined force is a gift. When one of them, Senator Obama achieves office, even by the wonderful fact of their historicaly unlikely candidacies, he will have begun to overcome ancient worldwide divisions, fears, and hatreds. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, by her candidacy has ‘raised-up’ the minds and aspirations of well over half of our American population and brought a truly great difference to governing.

Females have less testosterone than males, and it is time for the world to get off it’s testosterone habit and try some gentleness. (If you the reader fail to see any gentleness along with the strengths and advantages of both in Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s well known life-history, then perhaps your own gynophobia has blinded you to who she is.)

Senator Barack Obama is male and his testosterone levels may be presumed normal and are his own business. Whatever they may be, his mild and level comportment suggest that he to may be able to bring about a world that has greater trust and compassion than the overly testy president who now drives so much misery around the world. Senator Barack Obama is a moving visionary leader with a wise, respectful and gentle touch.

Nobody is ready to be president that has not already served a first term. It is an outrageously demanding job for which there is no training. Now Senator Obama must quickly learn how to fill both roles in this non-parliamentary government and society. One hopes that he learns rapidly how to express not only what is most in his comfort zone but also to become the kind of leader he may be less comfortable showing in public life. We will need both functions when he becomes our new president.

The whole world will need this from our president, for as we have learned to our discontent and peril, the President of The United States Of America can be either a balm to other nations or a terrible feared menace.

Both Senator Barack Obama and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton owe this combination of strengths to the world precisely because they aspire to a level of responsibility that extends around the globe.

The press is another matter. The members of the press do not seem to be in any hurry to learn how to express themselves with the even-handed distinction we expect and should demand of journalists, but instead appear to relish the destructive power they can wield to damage political figures, especially if they are women. Many members of the press still act as if they were paid, partisan campaign members whose special purpose is to dishonor the candidate they or their news organization does not favor or endorse.

I have become convinced that Senator Obama is going to become a great president.

It is a sad truth that prejudice against women and people of color is still widespread. In combination those prejudices are dangerous to us all. To the extent that these prejudices are actively expressed (if subtly) in the media, and that they fall most heavily against Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, the press should hold itself accountable for clear hostility to women first, and particularly to strong smart women, (Oh, mom, can’t I stay out just a little while longer tonight?). The press is also frequently hostile to and fearful of strong black men. But the greatest prejudice and most difficult prejudice for most of us to detect is the deep well of hostility, originating from within the dynamics of the family of origin that remains demeaning to women and especially to black women (who must occupy the most undesirable position in the ranking of abuses). This hostility is hard to ‘see’ or admit to oneself, because doing so requires admitting to one’s own residual anger against one’s own mother. If anyone should be tempted to label me or this essay as feminist (now an epithet among the ignoratti) then I argue that I am a humanist who refuses to hold prejudice against women because I might still harbor an unconscious grudge against my mom. I am certainly not ‘racist’, and yes, I am proud to be a feminist (and a man) and a humanist and civil-rights advocate.

Prejudice against women is wrong and strong, just plain cussedly wrong-headed and ignorant. It is the most egregious error to engage in verbal battle against half of humanity. That is a battle that makes men into less than we can be (no proud army, this), because in that inner conflict we fail to recognize that our strengths and our own survival was or still is interdependent with, and learned from, our own strong mothers, grandmothers, aunts, girl-friends, wives and daughters. Someone in that list must have done great things for any man who feels strong, for otherwise he would feel and be as weak as a kitten. Honor that woman and her gender—and all women.

But feeling sorry for oneself or for a candidate is no reason for choosing a person for high office over one for whom one feels less of the ultimately infantilizing feelings of pity or sympathy. Our leaders should be chosen because they can envision and will lead the nation to excel and develop, and not because we need a weaker person to lead us (do we men still need to cuss out mom behind her back to build-up our own self esteem?).

We need strength and wisdom from a human who just may also be female or black or of mixed complexions, and we need this leader to provide steel in the backbone when things get really tough, as they always do. We need it now-—and that’s why we need to elect t Senator Barack Obama to become our next president.

*Gynophobia is a term coined in the work and psychotherapeutic teachings of Dr. Peter Gill. Defined, it means fear of intimacy, and particularly fear of MOTHER.

Intelligence and Adaptability in Systems

2008-02-22T10:35:13-05:00

My son Nova Spivack ( http://novaspivack.typepad.com/nova_spivacks_weblog/2008/02/a-classificatio.html?cid=103805366#comments ) has brought up the subject of developing a universal classification of intelligence. It is a worthwhile effort, and one that may require a century of reflection and research. It is worth more and serious work. Others have and will attempt it as well, and agreement will be slow and hard to achieve.

One problem is that we do not yet have a workable non-universal (species- our own) description of intelligence. My own questions are — What do we mean by intelligence? What are we getting at when we measure it or write about it? Much of the literature seems to confuse intelligence with 'smarts' (see my own previous posting on this blog — Is Intelligence A Property of All Life?)

I wonder if a useful way of discussing intelligence might be to consider it as an aspect of adaptability and a part of all biological process, and extend that into inorganic systems as well.

This dumps us into the possibility that intelligence evolved out of simple primal and basic properties of inorganic and organic systems in the early universe (at least on our planet, and in it’s high form (homo-sapiens) it is merely an extension of those simpler capacities for adaptability and change.

In this context intelligence is a scale of what can change or adapt in any examined system, ecosystem or species and how rapidly (in a comparative sense) this takes place. For instance, what is the scope and depth of possible change and adaptability in a molecule or virus and how does this scale up as systems become more complex? What terminology might we use to consider all this in a fresh perspective and to avoid the language and conceptual pitfalls hidden within our classical and current definitions and research?

One Person, One Ballot, One Envelope

2008-02-06T19:02:09-05:00

National Public Radio, that great national radio university, announced that voters in some states were unable to vote because some polling places ran short of ballots and envelopes. Voters waited outside polling places in freezing weather for their moment in the voting booth. Many waited patently while many were too cold and could wait no more. But worse still, many were stopped at the door after waiting for hours because ballots and ballot envelopes had run out. Why do we allow this?

Every mailbox in this nation is stuffed with junk mail every day. Nearly all of that goes directly into the trash. We accept or tolerate that situation.

We also tolerate denying voting rights to eager voters because we are afraid to waste a little more paper. We have to expect the waste of some paper ballots in order to preserve our votes. The assurance that every voter can vote is worth the cost of additional trash, and is a worthwhile and manageable risk. Our failure to print one ballot and provide one envelope for every registered voter in the nation is a silly false economy.

We should require federal law to mandate every state, district and county to protect the right of every voter by providing enough voting ‘stationary’ for everyone. We should assume and expect that some ballots and envelopes will remain to be recycled. No person or agency should be permitted to estimate or guess future voter turn-out based upon previous election figures.

Compared to the annual gross national paper junk-mail waste-stream, two additional sheets of paper per possible voter per election-year (recycled at that) is more than a fair trade and expense for the guarantee of our individual voting rights. This change would also put an end to one form of voter manipulation that is no less than a sub-rosa form of gerrymandering. This should become our next, or first, electoral reform. If this voter fairness requires government subsidy, so be it, no matter how poor, we all can afford to add it to our income tax. A penny for your thoughts.