I am a strange loop

"I am a strange loop" is the second book by Douglas Hofstadter, the author whoose name I can't pronounce, , that I've read. The first one was "Gödel, Esher, Bach" (a.k.a GEB), his classic from around the time I was born. If there can be things like sequels in the world of philosophical litterature, "I am a strange loop" would stand in exactly that relation to GEB.

Let me start by saying that even though "I am a strange loop" picks up where GEB ends, this really is a different kind of book. While GEB was very broad in its approach to Hofstanders main thesis, "I am a strange loop" narrow it down and really focus on the main question. The question of what conscioussness is. To understand Hofstanders take on this question I have to present some of his basics thoughs about the relationship between high and low level explanation and his theory about the organisation of systems capable of executing adaptive behaviours.

Hofstander encourage the reader to imagine a machine consisting of a set of spring-loaded domino bricks, arranged in such a way that they can compute if a certain number is a prime or not (The computation is in itself pretty easy. If you want to know if n is a prime (where n being any integer), just try to divide it with every number from 2 to n-1. If you find a divisor, n is not a prime. If you don't, it is). All you have to do is to line up the number of bricks that represents the number you want to test and then let all hell break loose. Watching the turbulent process that follows, with dominos falling and rising, triggering different loops in different positions of the board, eventually, if the pattern of dominos find a divisor for the input number, a certain domino strech (Hofstander call this the "divisor strech") will fall, thous signaling to an observer that the number wasn't a prime.

Now, let's say we put 641 bricks in a row and start the machine. If someone were to watch the whole thing, he or she might point to a domino brick in the middle of the divisor strech and ask: "How come that domino there is never falling?".

Hofstader imagines there's two different answer to this question. The first one is that the domino brick doesn't fall because its predecessor didn't fall. However, he points out, this just means that you have to ask the same thing about the preceding brick, beggging the question. The second answer is "Because 641 is prime". I quote:

The point of this example is that 641's primality is the best explanation, perhaps even the only explanation, for why certain dominos did fall and certain other ones did not fall. In a word, 641 is the prime mover (p. 39).

Here Hofstadter is trying to concive an idea that even though a process can be given a low level explanation, the higher level alternative may be the only thing that really can explain what's going on.

The other basic thought Hofstadter is trying to mediate to his readers is the concept of symbols. To understand this, one must really know his distinction between perception and mere input. Imagine a toilet. The mechanism that makes it fill up after every flush is pretty simple. I encourage you to go check your toilets out right now if you're not familiar with the process. Basicly, when the tank empties, a floating part hits the bottom, pulling somekind of valve that starts the filling process. As the water adds upp, the floating part moves up, thereby stopping the onset of the water.

According to Hofstadter, this is not a perceptuall process. The toilet doesn't perceive that the water level has dropped or is rising. Its just a plain mechanical proecess.

What is an perceptuall process then? This is where the symbols make their entrence. A perceptuall process is when something in the world is being represented by a certain pattern and the representation can come about in many different ways. Take an object in your surronding that you can move. Look at it for a second and then move it so that you're seeing it from another perspective. Isn't there a feeling or experience that's reoccuring every time you look at it, no mather which perspective you're choosing? If I've understand it correct, this is what Hofstadter means with the concept of symbols.

The point is that even if I move my cup with tea around on my desk, I'll still know that I can drink from it and that I probably shouldn't push it of the edge. I have a symbol in my mind, or a pattern in my nerve cells, that somehow represents the concept of "cup".

Now, Hofstander proposes that conscioussness is something that comes about when a cetain system of symbols, a pattern of discrete parts if you will, start to have symbols of itself. When you somehow represent your own set of symbols in some kind of higher level symbols. If I seem to be a bit confused, that's because this is pretty abstract stuff.

So, what about the loopiness the title suggest? Well, if I've understood Hofstadters thoughs correctly, it comes about when the symbols of oneself are begining to be so advanced that they encompass themself. Since it infact are a part of the self, it has to include itself in itself to represent itself. But then it has to represent this representation with the representation of itself, thus beeing left one step behind again. It's like someone trying to catch her own shaddow. Or Gödel trying to say something about numbers with the use of numbers.

Let me make it absolute clear that Hofstadter is not a dualist. He firmly states that conscioussness is nothing but the physical pattern that constitues an organisms brain. That there is no distinction between me feeling something and my brain carrying out a certain process. It's only two different explanations of the same thing.

One objection to this might be that even if this is soo, why is it like that? Couldn't one think of a universe where everything looked exactly the same, but where people really were zombies, soulless creatures with no qualia? No, Hofstadter states.

To illustrate this, Hofstadter comes back to his discussion on low and high level explanation. Let's say that I reach out and pick up my cup to get a sip of tea. On the low level this could be explained by describing every single cell in my body and their changing states over time (probably we can't stop there since there's things like molecules, atoms etc.). If we on the other hand explain the behaviour in a high level fashion we can explain it by saying: "Martin was thirsty - that's why the current pattern came about". In the same way as you can't imagine a universe where the domino brick in the exact same pattern as previously descibed stood still and that 641 was a prime wasn't an explanation of this fact, Hofstadter states that you can't imagine a universe where the pattern of your brain is realised without you also feeling something.

One of the most bissare consequenses of Hofstadters theory is that a person isn't his or hers brain. A person is a specific pattern and the brain is just one of many mediums that can realize it. Just as it doesn't matter if a novels letters are printed in a book or illuminated on a computer screen when it comes to the meaing of those words. Josef K. gets procecuted no mather what (by the way, that book is horrible...there, I said it). This also means that we aren't bound to other bodies, and in one sence, not even our own patterns.

Hofstadter means that we construct symbols that represents others inside our own pattern. When I get to know a person, I start to build up a concept of what that person is like. I can store what she likes, what she doesn't like, how she responds in different situations, what she feels about other people and so on. In one sense I make a copy of that other persons pattern, but since the person isn't anything else then her pattern, what I really do is realising part of her pattern in another medium. She inhibits me. So if I die tomorrow, I'll partly live on in the people I know. It's not a full realisation of me, but it's still me. Sort of.

What I don't really understand with this position is this. Let's say that I'm out for a stroll in downtown Stockholm when a person comes up to me, put a gun to my head and says: "Do you want me to pull the trigger? I give a hundred bucks to charity if you say yes". I'll have to say that my answer would be no. Why? Well, I want to live on, that's why. Charity or not.

Let's say this person comply with my wish and walks away. The next day I walk down the same street and the same person comes up to me, put a gun to my head and says: "Do you want me to pull the trigger? I give a hundred bucks to charity if you say yes...and by the way. I've built an exact replica of you who's standing behind the corner.". If I would agree with Hofstadters ideas, what reason would there be for me to say "no"? Think about it. The perpitrator would give a hundred bucks to charity which would make me glad, and I would still live on in the body behind the corner. Why should I favourise a certain set of atoms that realizes my pattern rather than another? But would I say "yes"? Err...no. Why is that?

Hofstadter never explains how someone, in some sense, can be an explanation and I don't think he thinks that can be done either. To give a meta physical explanation on what the heck is going on is beyond our reach. But this also makes it hard to see why his thesis should be considered at all. Hofstadter himself considers this to be a good and consistant outline for an identity theory, but his main argument is really just him reciting a list of problems with the dualistic viewpoint, more or less ignoring all the problem that arise with the opposit view. However, that's an enormous discussion, something I won't go into now.

In sum, Hofstadter has written a quite ambitious book but somehow it feels that you already, in part, have to agree with him to fully understand it. It just feels that he constantly begs the question. I think GEB was better in the sense that even if you didn't agree with Hofstadters main idea, you could still learn a great deal from it. For example I learned many new things about the foundations of mathematics by reading that book. In "I am a strange loop" Hoefstadter really gets down to buisniess. Really esoteric buisniess.

But I guess someones got to do it.

The function of consciousness

When trying to discuss something as delicate and complex as consciousness, I think it's important to define the question at issue on a manageable level. If one tries to attack the core of the problem right away, there's a big chance to get lost in the infernal maze of metaphysics that follows.

One of the most intresting, and at least partly graspable, question is what role conscioussness plays in the big picture. It must be present for some reason. The question is what that reason is.

Before I start reasoning about this, let me just put in a disclaimer here. The following discussion takes for granted that there is something like an external material world. I admit that this is just an assumption I make, and I'll be comming back to this topic in future posts, both regarding to the problem of conscioussness and the more epistemic question about if we really can assume such a thing.

The way I see it, there really are two different ways you can fit in conscioussness into the whole process that the brain undertakes.

One possibility is that it's just a kind of parallel redundant process. In other words: The brain recives an input, make some calculations and then produces an output, and the conscioussness just follows the process without any manipulation of it. In this scenario, the conscioussness can be seen as a passive bystander. Whatever happends in the brain decides what we experience, but there is no feedback process back to the brain.

The other possibility is that conscioussness does play an active role in the process of thinking. The brain recives an input, make some calculations, then sends the information to the conscioussness which somehow manipulates it and then sends it back to the brain for further calculations and production of an output. Where the physical calculation fit in doesn't really matter for the theoretical outline. There could also be several steps of information exchange between the brain and the conscioussness but that doesn't really matter when discussing the general structure.

So, to summarize this in an illustrative way:

Model 1:
1.1 Input--->1.2 Calculations--->1.3 Output
Parallel process: 1.2 Consciousness

Model 2:
2.1 Input--->2.2 Calculations--->2.3 Consciousness (Calculations)--->2.4 Calculations--->2.5 Output

Let me state that it is my firm belief that even if the second model is the right one, the human behaviour doesn't require conscioussness. In other words: I see no reason why a computer theoreticaly shouldn't be able to simulate the exact same cognitive processes as we have, with or without the help of consciousness. Even if the conscioussness have some important calculating part in the animal mind, I see no reason why it couldn't be carried out in a strictly material way. Even if conscioussness is an unavoidable consequense of the pattern itself that constitutes human behaviour, I see no problem with posting a world where this wouldn't have to be the case.

Another thing that we can see right away is that the question "Why are we conscious?" have a single answer in the first model and two of them in the second one. Both explanation demands a physical reality that distinguish itself from our current view of the universe. In other words: No matter which model is the right one (if any), a metaphysical reason for consciousness must be present that answers the question how it is posible that something is consciousness at all. If the second model is the right one, we have to provide an evolutionary explanation for it, in addition to a metaphysical. Note that the first model still would have a genetical explanation, but since that proposal doesn't include some kind of function that would make consciousness affected by natural selection, it couldn't be seen in evolutionary terms.

Another thing we should note is that even if both models demands a metaphysical explanation, the explanations themselves can be totaly different. Model 1 only demands a physical reality that makes it posible for some kind of consciousness to arise. This consciousness doesn't have to do anything really. The only criteria is that it's correlated in an isomorphic way to what goes on in the material process that spawns it (for example a human brain).

Model 2 on the other hand demands, not only that it is posible for a consciousness to arise, but also that the mental realm in some way can affect the material realm. In one way or another, there has to be some kind of feedback process from the conscioussness or else we can't state that it have a function. An input signal that isn't returned doesn't do very much good for the overall process.

I think the best way to tackle this problem is to look at the demanded metaphysical realities that each model spawns, and somehow analyse them to see which one is most plausible. For example, the fact that our experiences seems to be coherent in respect to the situation. When my body is damaged, I feel unpleasant pain which I want to repelish, in the same way that my behaviour try to make it stop. If model 1 was the right one, there really wouldn't be any reason why I couldn't go around and feel pain all the time. The actual content of my feeling, really can't matter, if it isn't capable to affect the outcome of the situation. Let me try to illustrate this:

Let's say that we have person A and person B. Person A feels happy when his body isn't in danger of being damaged in any way, but feel sadness and pain once something happen. Person B feels sadness and pain all the time. Remeber that I only talk about the qualia here (the feeling itself). A and B will act in precisely the same way, since their consciousness can't affect their bodys in any kind of way. Therefore, it would't really matter if consciousness was constructed like in person A or B. Isn't it pretty strange then, that we seem to have this coherent mind that we at least think we have?

Another way to attack the problem is to examine what we are consciouss about. Needless to say, most of what goes on inside our brains, we aren't aware of. There are a lot of unconsciouss processes that takes place that can be messured in different kind of tests, althoug we ourself couldn't notice them even if a gun was put to our heads. One example is implicit knowledge. We can't explain how to ride a bike no mather how experienced we are with this activity. However, we have no problem actually riding it. It happends more or less automatic. Now, why would this be the case? Wouldn't it be posible to be consciouss about all the processes that happends inside the head? We already have the power to, to some extent, experience several things at once, so there shouldn't be any theoretical reason why a being subjectively couldn't take part of all the calculations that constitutes its behaviour. Why then is the human mind so restricted? If conscioussness in some way can affect the outcome in the physical world, then it makes sense. Conscioussness only experience the parts it can affect. It's there because of its power to change things, so why would it be present on any other level than its function? In the first model scenario, another account has to be given to why consciouss experience doesn't contain lower level processes.

Of course, all of this is pretty ungratefull work, since it's really hard to say something at all about what is plausible or not, when it comes to the construction of realities whose inner workings we know next to nothing about, and even more, realities that we are trapped inside ourself. I admit to not entierly escaping the very metaphysical maze that I warned about in the begining of this text. It's just really, really, really (understatement) hard to avoid it.

But rest assured. There will be more maze running in the future.

Gödel, Escher, Bach

I've finaly managed to get through Douglas R. Hofstader's quite thick book, "Gödel, Escher, Bach" (the library demanded it back so I had to rush through the last 150 pages this weekend). Even though Hofstader wrote this back in the 80´s, it still feels pretty modern, even though some of his thoughts have been proved uterly wrong in the last two decades.

So what is it about? Well, many people seem to have misunderstand this book. Why that is, I can't say. Sure, Hofstader talks about quite a few different topics, ranging from logic and mathematical history to molecular biology and the collevtive behaviour of ant collonies, but It´s always presented in a context of the main theme which is intelligence, thinking and conscioussness. However, allthough many surmises that the book tries to explain how conscioussness comes about, that isn't my understanding of it. Rather, I see it as a generall theory about the content of conscioussness, which is a completly different subject. In short, what Hofstader says, and I apoligize if I've completly missunderstood him, is this:

The human mind is a piece of machine which consist of billions of neurons. It can be understood on different levels, in the same way a computer can be. In the later case, you can interpret a program in terms of different functions and commands, but you could also break down every bit of these parts and get down to a much more basic level, physically describing every change that takes part in the systems hardware. Conscioussness is basicly the high level understanding of what goes on in our heads. For example: When you read this text, you don't have to concentrate on every single letter. Every letter is lumped togheter with the ones around it to create a word, every word is lumped together with the ones around it to create a sentence and every sentence is lumped togheter with the ones around it to create some kind of meaning. Now, every part of this process isn't conscioussly percieved. It's only the high level lumping that takes part conscioussly.

M.C. Escher's "Print Gallery"

So, what does Gödel, Escher and Bach has to do with anything? Well, the main theme Hofstader draws from these three different men is the notion of self reference. Gödel's theorem is posible thanks to self reference, Escher has created a lot of paintings where self reference is in focus (see the picture below) and Bach created music which often experimented with self reference. Combining all these mens work, Hofstader eventually tries to present the idea that conscioussness is something that forms when the mind starts to represent itself inside itself. When the perception is turned from the outside world, onto itself.

If Hofstader's goal with this book was to give a plausible metaphysical account of how conscioussness comes about, I'm not impressed. However, I don't think that that's what he tries to accomplish. Rather, he's done a quite good job on giving the reader an introductory set of tools and ideas for further investigations of the minds inner workings. I can't say that the book contained the huge climax I expected it to have, but hopefully it managed to equip me with directions to some new viewpoints that probably will prove to be fruitful in the future.

Talk

Talk from Brett Russell Dougherty on Vimeo.


This here is really a pretty ordinary video, but still it isn´t. I found it on Vimeo when I just browsed around for some intresting content, and intresting it was (Ok, I´m starting to sound like Yoda here).

It´s really just a simple portrait of something we probably do to litte. Talk. And I don´t mean idle talk among our friends. We´re perfectly fine at doing that. No, I rather meen talking to strangers. People we don´t normaly communicate with in our own neighborhood, on the bus, at the store, in the park or whereever you go during the day. We´re meeting more people during a single day then most people did during a whole year a hundred years ago, but still I can´t shake the feeling that we´re becoming more and more isolated from eachother. Sure, most of us probably have big circle of acquaintences but what about all the other outside of our realm of familiar faces? One could argue that you can let those people mind there own buisniess, which is partially true, but we´re still working on a common project - forming an society together with them - which meens we can´t ignore them all together.

All this is of course very utopic when applied to the population as a whole. It would be really great if everybody had this mindset I´m talking about, but unfortunately that´s not the case, and frankly I don´t think it will be either. However, from a pure subjective point of view, I don´t think that that´s relevant to the behaviour of the single individual. You can gain a lot just by making this your own reality, no mather what other people are doing.

Well, anyway. This video made me feel good.

Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel

I recently finished Rebecca Goldstein's book "Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel" (Swedish translation (which I read): "Ofullständighet: Kurt Gödels bevis och paradox"). For those of you who aren't familiar with Gödel (I hardly was before I read this book), he was a logician, by many people though of as the greatest thinker of the last century along with Albert Einstein. This book tries to explain why, but often gets stuck in its vivid description of this somewhat strange and esoteric character. The fact that Kurt Gödel died of malnutrition due to paranoid delusions maybe explains why there's a lot of intresting anecdotes about this strange man well worth brought up, but it sometimes feel that the author is more excited about Gödels odd life than what he actually accomplished. With that said, the book is, in my opinion, a great and captivating introduction to his work.

The fact that everything isn't centered on hard scientific facts all the time makes this book a pretty easy and convenient read. More speculative philosophical discussions are blended with stories of Gödels life and his own ideas in respect to his logical claims. In the middle, there is a pretty technical, although pretty talkative, presentation of the work that made him almost immortal. The reader who wishes to really dig down into Gödels theorems - and at the same time spare oneself from those vauge discussions on different implications of it - will probably be pretty disapointed by this book though. However, if you know that you wouldn't last more than a couple of pages reading a book filled page up and page down with stringent logical arrangements, but still wants to grasp the main idea about Gödels theorems, look no further. This book will probably get you intrested enough to go on to the last page.

The fascinating thing about this book is how it's almost structured as good detective story. In the beginning, intresting implications of Gödels work is suggested, and when your half way through the book, you could recite all the passages about how great and novel his theorems was, without having read a single conclusive description about it. Sort of like this review.

***

Well, I feel I can't publish this post without at least taking a shot at trying to explain what Gödel's pioneering results were. This attempt, sprung from my megalomania, shouldn't be taken too seriously though. Ok, here we go.

Gödels proof of incompletness is really based on the old liar paradox. It goes something like this (there's countless different versions of it):

This sentence is false.

If you look at it, it soon becomes clear why it's a paradox. If the sentence is false as it claims, the statement that it's false is true, which makes the sentence true and hence contradicts itself. If the sentence is true then the statement that it's false isn't true, hence the sentence is false, which contradicts the fact that we said that is was true. As you can see, it becomes pretty complex, but the main idea should be pretty easy to grasp.

What Gödel does is to expand this paradox into the domain of mathematics. First, he construct a system, that translates logical statements to aritmetic statements. In this way, he can represent every logical statement with a specific number. Let's say for example that the statement "If A then B" in this system is represented by 10230. It doesn't really matter what the actual system is (although If it did, I couldn't give an account of it) but the important part is this. What is demanded from the system is that it is isomorphic with standard logic (which Gödel, a couple of years before his incompleteness theorem, prooved was complete). What this means is that there have to be a given set of rules to combine different numbers, depending on what rellation you want them to have to eachother, so that the output produces the correct logical statement. Let me try to illustrate this (since I don't know Gödels system, and since I don't really think I have the time nor the knowledge to create a coherent one myself, you have to ignore that this example is taking some liberties).

Let's say I want to make this series of statements (this is a so called syllogism):

(A) If A then B.
(B) A is true.
-----------------
(C) B is true.

Let's say that (A)=1, (B)=2 and (C)=3 after the translation. What we now want to do is to find some rule that we can use whenever we have two statements and want to know what the consequenses of those statements are. Well, in this example it's pretty easy. 1+2=3. So let's say that plus holds that function. The trick with Gödels system is to work out something that always is interchangeable with simple logic. In this case, you could clearly see that my model doesn't get very far. Let's try to state:

(A) If A then B.
(A) If A then B.

What's the result? 1+1=2. In other words:

(A) If A then B.
(A) If A then B.
-----------------
(B) A is true.

Hopefully not true. Well, let's move on.

Why did Gödel go through all this fuzz then? Well, his goal was to create an aritmetic system that could make claims about itself. If you can represent every logical statement with a number, then you can say something about the aritmetic system and then translate it into a number being part of an aritmetic system, hence make it say something about itself. It's almost like if you, everytime you said something about a pig, was turned in to one, and therefore said something about yourself (anyone who's ever been told by a parent that he or she eats like a pig, and witty responded that pigs usually have pigs for parents, know what I mean).

So, what's the point of doing this then (we're soon home free)? Well, this takes us back to the liars paradox. The reason why it is so effective is that it says something about itself. "This statement is false" get problematic because it refers back to itself, creating somewhat of an infinate loop (Yes, I'll get to "Gödel, Escher, Bach" in future posts).

Gödel now make this statement:

This statement is impossible to prove in an formal system capable of aritmetics.

He then translates this statement into a number and get something like, well, let's say:

52352359875239823987609238765987234987587237865982309589723

Yes, I just made that up. What the numbers above now is saying is this:

This statement is impossible to prove in a formal system capable of aritmetics (and this is a statement in a formal system capable of aritmetics).

What this statements says, given that it's true, is that there is true statements within a formal system capable of aritmetic, that still are impossible to prove. And what it says given that it's false, is that it actually can be proven. But since the statement is false, it could possible be proven, hence we have a contradiction.

So, what follows of all this? Well, when we construct a formal system, we don't want it to be able to contradict itself. That's really the worst thing that can happend. We can't have a system that says that 1+1 is 1 and that 1+1 is 2. That would mean that 1=2, which would make it possible to prove any kind of statement. 3+3=8? Sure.

1+1+1=3--->3*2+2=8--->3*1+2=8--->3*1+2+1-1=8--->
3+2+2-1=8--->3+2+1=8--->3+3=8

Since 1 and 2 are interchangeable at the same time as they have different meaning, we can prove whatever we want. We can't have that. Our only option is to accept the other outcome. There are true statements in formal systems capable of aritmetics that can't be proven. This made a huge impact on the mathematical world (to the extent that mathematicans were willing to accept it) when Gödel presented it in the the 30's. Untill then, the general idea was that every true statement in mathematics could be proved. That was by many though of the very analytic meaning of true. That it could be proven. Gödel showed that that wasn't the case.

***

Gödel's incompletness theorem spawns a lot of different implications in respect to how you choose to see it. From platonism to conscioussness, people have tried to apply Gödels famous work in a lot of different areas. I'll definitly come back to this topic in the future, but this will be all for now.

If anyone have any objections against how I've presented Gödels incompletness theorem, please tell me. I'm eager to improve.

For a kind of halfly vauge parallel to Gödels theorem, see my post titled "The epistemology of consciousness". What I try illustrate there is a (hypotetic) true statement that cannot be proved, although this one is not within a formal system. In you are a sceptic, you could come up with countless of examples of situations were this holds. I'll get to this too in due time.

The epistemology of consciousness

One of the biggest and most beautifull puzzles in the universe is, according to me, the question of consciousness. Therefore, I've decided to write a couple of texts about it, to see if I can shed some light on this mysterious phenomena. I'll start with an epistemological view of the subject, namely the fact that our inability to ever prove that consciouss exists in any other enteties than ourself spawns a sort of paradox.

***

That I am conscioussness is self evident. It is something that I feel, and since a feeling is defined as something consciouss, I really can't be mistaken. Let's also assume that there is somebody else who's consciouss too. This person can also prove his or hers own conscioussness, but have no way of accessing mine, and can therefore not prove that it exists.

What we have here is a sort of a stand of. My knowledge proves my own conscioussness and the other persons knowledge proves his or hers. It's important to see here, that my knowledge isn't transferable in some sense. It isn't the content of my knowledge that is the important factor for the proof here, but rather the experience itself. The experience proves the phenomenon by beeing the phenomenon itself.

Let's say that for some reason, you don't know the answer to 7+5. You lack that knowledge. Now imagine I show up and tell you that the answer is 12. You gain that knowledge. But have you gained my knowledge? Well, no. You now have a replica of my knowledge. Its content is the same as mine, but it's still not the same experience. You have your experience, I have mine. They might post the exact same thing, but that doesn't mean that they aren't seperated. It's not the same knowledge. It's two different set of knowledge with the same content.

Most knowledge is of the type that can be combined and thereby extended itself to embrace more than it did on its own. If I know that Stockholm is the capital of Sweden and you know that Sweden is in Europe, we can combine our knowledge and get the statement that Stockholm is in Europe. What matters is the abstract contents of the knowledge, not the knowledge itself. I can give you all the reasons why I think that Stockholm is the capital of Sweden and once you got them, your knowledge is as good as mine.

The paradox, which is more of a dilemma rather than a paradox, is this: If it's the case that I am consciouss and know it, and you are consciouss and know it, we can't combine our knowledge and get the true statement that there exists more than one consciouss entity. I can't just tell you that I know that I'm consciouss, since the abstract content of the knowledge isn't the important factor for the proof here. To know that I'm consciouss, you actually have to be me. If there were some way to merge two minds togheter, we could merge our knowledge, but at the same time we would both share the same conscioussness, and thereby the statement that there exists two consciouss entities would't be true anymore. To prove the statement, you have to make the statement false, and thereby you have nothing left to prove. The catch 22 of consciousness.

Creativity

After reading the article "Creativity - The last human stronghold?" by Israel Beniaminy over at TFOT, I got inspired to jot down some of my own thoughts on the subject. Let me just emphasize, that even though I might sound like I'm lecturing about the objective truth in the matter, this is only me speculating. To much "I think that..." and "It's my firm belife..." just gets irritating in the long run.

So, what is creativity? What I find especially fascinating is that behaviour, carried out by a machine, seldom is acknowledged as creative. What is it that we have, that the machines are missing?

Would you trust this guy to repaint your bedroom?

Let's first ask ourselfs: Is creativity present under circumstances we normaly don't associate with this skill?

Imagine you're searching for something in a limited space. Let's say you're trying to locate your keys which are somewhere in your house. How do you proceed?

Strictly speaking, there are more places where they could be than you could posibly cover in a somewhat reasonable time. However, some places are meaningless to even consider. You won't look in the shower or in the dishwasher, simply because you never would put your keys there. Many options are in other words excluded from the begining. Of course, you could ask yourself the question whether these alternatives is processed by the brain at all. In the same way as you don't consider traveling to another country to try to retrive your keys, you probably don't either take the bathroom alternative into account. Some other, more plausible options, may however be taken into consideration and rejected.

Anyhow, you could attack the problem using a lot of different strategies, but you'll probably make some kind of mental list over posible places. This list is probably hierarchic organized too. You look in your jack pockets before you start to get really desperate and search through your loundary basket. Sometimes you'll get an spontaneous idea just by being in a certain situation. You might for instance look in the top drawer when you've just gone through the one on the bottom. Not because you had that intention when you walked up to the bureau, but because the situation generated that idea.

Has this whole search process something to do with creativity? Well. Let's leave these infernal keys for a moment and go to an other area which is highly accosiated with creativity. Let's go to another set of keys. The piano.

What happens when you sit down by the piano, ready to compose a masterpiece? Well...If it's your first time playing, chances are that what you accomplish probably will sound like crap. But let us say that you have some experience.

First of all, like in the last example, there are a lot of key combinations that you simply even won't consider. You have a sort of repertoire with acceptable moves and combinations. The first thing you play, if you don't really have a plan of what your going to create, will probably be something random. However, from there, there are a lot of options that will make your ears hurt. As soon as you've started playing, your options are limited and you have to apply your, either implicit or explicit, knowledge of scales, harmony, counterpoint and so on. However, it isn't a strict formal process that always will lead to the same result. The outcome depends on your current mood, what you focus on in the music, your habits, what you happend to associate with what according to certain circumstances and so on. Everything is connected in an extremely complicated network of calculations, and the slightest change of a parameter can have profound impact on the outcome.

Compare this situation to something simmilar (I will try to tie up all these examples in the end. Bare with me). Imagine you're producing linguistic statements. The statements doesn't really have to make sense. The only thing that matters is that you keep producing them, even if you really can't think of any meaningfull content to put into them. For example, this is what I produced right now: "I wan't to think that then it isn't really that bad but couldn't you say that again if that's no big problem." Even though I probably would be institutionalized if this was how I usually talked, you can clearly see somewhat of a pattern here. If you read the the whole sentence it's just confusing, but by looking at segments of it, it's actually coherent. "I want to think that", "it isn't really that bad" and "no big problem" are all fully understandable and usable segments that can be put into meaningfull sentences.

Could one argue that this situation is similar to the piano example? Clearly you're following a given set of rules. You have a grammar that you really don't violate and exactly which words you choose to utter depends on a lot of different factors that togheter decide the outcome. So, are both the latter and the former situations examples of someone using their creativity? That naturally depends on how you choose to define the concept of creativity, but let me try to distinguish what's really differs beetween the two.

A computer could carry out the latter task, producing linguistic sentences, without any bigger problems. You just have to give the program at hand a couple of words, assign them to different clause elements and then put down some rules of how it's allowed to combine the different grammatic parts. It won't be perfect, and noone has so far managed to make a fully explicit description of a gramatic system in any human language, but it would be fairly easy to put something togheter that performed about as good as a real human. Is this an example of creativity? Well, some people maybe say so, but it really just boils down to a given set of rules and a couple of randomly asigned values. Not so exciting.

Well, let's turn to the other example. Playing the piano. Isn't this really just a set of patterns, rules and learned behaviours? Well, yes it is. But what makes this behaviour special is all in the feedbak process.

Think about the key example again. What kind of feedback process does take place in it? Well, nothing really. It's pretty simple. If you find the keys, you stop looking. If you don't, you continue the search. There isn't any kind of situation where you sort of find them. So, the feedback response is binary and purely used to decide whether the behaviour should be canceled or not.

Let's get back to the piano. Now, things get a little more complicated. There isn't one way to play it that is the right way. The performance is constantly being judged by the brain on the basis of a lot of different factors. Rythm, harmony, tension, mood, constancy...The list could go on for a pretty long time. If something sounds good, we reinforce the behaviour that led to it. If it sounds bad, we repress it. Of course, this process is at work when we search for our keys too, but to a lesser extent.

I suggest this is the key (there are an awful lot of keys in this text) to creativity. The reason we haven't been able to successfully inplant this preciouss behaviour into computers, is because we haven't figured out what makes us tick, when it comes to these areas accociated with creativity. It's a complicated process to create a computer program that does something we want. It's even harder to make it do it in the same way we do.

I would like to say that computers, in theory, can be just as creative as us humans. The problem is that they're working with another set of preferences than us. Of course we are going to look at the result and say it's worthless when it's created by something that doesn't share our views on what's good. If you would let a cat compose its own meal (don't ask me how that could be carried out) we probably wouldn't like that either. That doesn't mean that the cat did something wrong according to its own measures. It just means that we don't like tuna that much.

Mark lives in IKEA

I saw this guy on the news this morning and it made my day. Or at least my morning. Well, the first ten minutes of it anyway. You see, I descided not to go to sleep this night in an desperate atempt to sync up my diurnal rythm to the rest of the world now when the school starts up again after the holidays. With that said, nothing really stays in my head for more then a couple of minutes today. Anyway, that's not the point. The point is...I forgot. No, got it. The point is that I thought this was hysterical. Or...Well, let's pretend I thought it was hysterical. That sound better than moderatly funny and pretty clever.

Anyway. Mark is some kind of comedian/filmmaker/lunatic who obviously like to get everybodys atention. Apperantly he is famous for that he, and I cite right of his homepage here, "visited and consumed purchases at all 171 Starbucks locations in Manhattan in one day". Well, since I'm not New York based I haven't really heard about him before, but when he commits to his next rather bizarre project, living at IKEA for a week, he's bound to get some atention here in Sweden. I'd be lying if I said I hadn't thought about doing this myself. Who hasn't?

Randy Pausch

I stumbled upon this video when it came out about half a year ago and it fascinated me. It's the last lecture of Randy Pausch, a professor at Carnegie Mellon. The reason it's his last is that he's going to die from pancreatic cancer in the very near future. So, what he tries to do is to sum up his life and at the same time pass something on. The theme of the lecture is "Achieving your childhood dreams", something Randy himself confidently states that he did.

I like this video. Allthough the serious circumstances, Randy is so optimistic you almost get suspicious. Kinda makes you think.

As far as I know, Randy is still alive, and you can follow his progress on his personal site.

Update: On the morning of July 25th, 2008, Randy passed away.

Bring rock'n'roll to the music box

When I searched google for any suitable pictures for the header to this blog (which you can see I haven´t found yet), I stumpled upon an adorable little product over at Grand Illusions. If you're anything like me (I understand that the chanse of that isn't that big), you've also always wished that you could replace the tune that your old music box plays to something funkier. Well, here's an intresting little toy that lets you do exactly that.

It's basicly a hand cranked music box which uses stips of papers, with strategicaly placed holes, to play different songs. The whole process reminds me a little of the good old days when computers where programmed using pasteboard cards with holes punched through them (well, it reminds me of reading of those good old days...The floppy disk ruled the earth when I was a kid).

I'm going to have to try to resist the temptation to order one of these, mainly because I know how frustraded I will get by trying to program Bach's fuga in D-moll, on a piece of paper. Heck, I have trouble geting it right on the piano. However, for all of you musical sadist out there, I recomend a peek at the demo video of this fascinating little device.

Of course...If you want to be really extreme, you can always get yourself one of these.

First post

New year. New blog.

Welcome to Speldosa, my personal blog. Who am I then? Martin is the name I usually respond to. I live in Stockholm, Sweden, and I'm currently studying a wonderfull mixture of fields at Stockholm University. So far I've had the pleasure to learn more about philosophy, cognitive science, linguistics and mathematics and I plan to keep on trying to structure this crazy world through expanding my knowledge.

What I hope to accomplish with this site is pretty simple:

I want to write an intresting blog for you, my dear audience, to read. The blog hasn't got a totaly clear direction, so you might find that the subjects I write about differs quite a lot, ranging from everyday observations to scientific related stuff. I feel that the secret recipe to keeping a project like this alive is to not put to many restrains on it. That is an excelent way to kill your creativity and motivation. At least that's how my sick mind works.

Anyway, I'm sure a red line eventually will reveal itself and if it doesn't....well...I'll just deal with it then.

I should probably mention what "Speldosa" means, for those of you who are feeling your swedish is a bit rusty. Speldosa is the swedish word for music box. I won't tell you the complete backround story to why I choosed to call my blog this (partly because I really don't know myself and want to keep some of the mystiqe), but it will probably, as everything else, get clearer down the road.

Oh, one last thing. Since my native tounge isn't english, I happily listen to anyone who have any complains on my writing. My expectation is that I will develop my skills as I go along with this blog, but there's nothing wrong with a little help from outside. So go ahead. Tear my apart.

Well, enough said. Let's get started.