Double Flee A

And now,
"Me and my buddy Marv"

Hello Dr. Minsky, I have an idea and my brother told me you would be the man to talk to.

I think that consciousness is nothing more than an emergent behavior of the brain.

Is there anything published on the subject?

Thank you for taking the time to read the above three sentences and in advance for getting back to me,
Dale Shipley
Minneapolis, MN


Dear Dale,
You're awesome. Can I buy you a house and move in and shine your shoes? I promise that I won't listen while you have sex! What happened last time was just a fluke!

Ok, that's fake, but the rest isn't.

"At the end of my book, "The Society of Mind," I suggest that the word "emergent" generally is used to mean little more than "I can't figure out why this system did that." Specifically, there's a Glossary entry that discusses the older word "Gestalt."

The unexpected emergence, from a complex system, of a phenomenon that had not seemed inherent in that system's separate parts. Such emergent" or "collective" phenomena are alleged to show that "a whole is more than the sum of its parts." However, further research usually shows that such phenomena can be explained completely, once we also take into account the interactions among those parts‹as well as the peculiarities and deficiencies in the observer's own perceptions and expectations. There do not seem to be any important principles common to the phenomena that have been considered, from time to time, to be emergent beyond the contemporary inability to understand them. Thus, holistic views tend to become scientific handicaps when they undermine our determination to extend the boundaries of our comprehension."

A common example of using 'emergent' is to "explain" why a random array of spins in a lattice -- as in a piece of iron -- will self-organize into a collection of larger "grains" of magnetically oriented regions. This can be regarded as "spontaneous symmetry breaking" but, with more careful analysis, one can derive the statistics of such final distributions from the statistics of the initial orientations; then there remains no mystery -- and to a sufficiently good mathematical observer nothing mysterious will have happened. So in this case, "emergent" means only that "I wasn't a good enough mathematician to foresee what sort of situation would result".

So far as I can see, this is usually what happens in "chaotic" situations. Granted, some such situations will be so complex that no _human_ mathematician can figure out what will happen."

Call me when you're in town. We'll do lunch and abuse the waitress.
Your main buddyroo, Marvin.

Well, as you can see, Dr. Minsky's faithful have let me know that he's moved on from the copout called emergence, or at least redefined it, which is fine. What we agree on is that it's going to take a long time to get the computational power organized to perform humanlike cognitive functionality. What I don't fucking like is that his enthusiasm is somewhat curbed: "Granted, some such situations will be so complex that no _human_ mathematician can figure out what will happen."

????

"_human_"? What kind of shit-teaser is that? "Next week, the computational power of GOD ALMIGHTY! UNLEASHED IN ALL ITS GLORY at the METrodome! All seats just twelve bucks SATURDAY SATURDAY SATURDAY!"

This is how Dale responds when he doesn't get his way. In a related story, my girlfriend is an angel for putting up with me.

Ye of misguided faith, I believe that spirituality in general is a load of dingo's kidneys, and have invented this emergent consciousness idea so that I can have hope for the future. We could do what we've been doing forever, draw lines in the sand and give each other hell and kill each other because one god's not as good as the other (largely a children's exercise of pronunciation), or we can turn the focus where it belongs. Us. Females eat food and turn it into a baby, just like every other living thing. A chemical process forms life. That much we know. Why not be pragmatic about it and take 'er from there? The law of increasing returns, that's why. Them that has a church, gets. It's not a new idea that we all ought to drop all the torches and kiss and make up, but now there's a direction to move in. We gots to build us a self-aware machine. That will happen if the shitbag fanatics don't kill us all first. I have faith.

posted by dale @ 12:08 PM