Guffaws

I once while eating a large portion of mashed potatoes and gravy,

began to recite the pledge of allegiance with my mouth particularly full...

 

Hoffstader identifies a cognitive quirk, in attempting to speak, we try to translate the way we think into a way that can be understood by others. We are fortunate that so often, "You know what I mean.", because frequently what comes out of our mouths is not what we mean to say -He calls these word-blends. 

They seem to arise when an idea with two similar references wishes to be expressed. Flight and plane, each serve equally as well in the sentence "No one could get tickets on that [blank]." Both words carry slight differences in nuance.

The best word for the job, one with full expressive power, would be a word that contains the full range of nuance provided by these two words. --And since your brain has learned that the phonological sound of a word is directly associated with it's meaning, this new 'best word' should probably sound like both of them. And we get word blends in speech.

Since our brain has learned that the structure of words is directly associated with meaning, we also get word blends as we wrypen [type/write]. 

Word-blends, or as choreographers call them, mash-ups, combine ideas into single entity's. There is an idea that many of our most popular curse words are in fact, mash ups of many-many ideas, and this is why they have provide a full range of expressive power. 

One word linked to the unification  and expression of all ideas, the word of everything, le mot de tout, das wort alles; the word that embodies everything,  is spoken thus:

Ohm.

-dvn

Perception May Be Subjective:

Perception might be influenced by:

beliefs
goals
and
external conflict.

Optimists live longer,
Arrogant and talented.

Zen masters and Phyrronean skeptics recommend abandoning personal:

beliefs
goals
and
external conflict.

All in light of what you meant,
enlightenment.

D.H. makes a good point, suggesting that we imbue our relationships by re-presenting sensations:

What's up in the sky while you're down on the ground.
Look up to your hero while looking down at his grave.

Perception of a situation can be radically reshaped when necessary.
The new conservatives call each other by the names of the old radicals.

When perception and a situation do not meet flush, which do we try to radically reshape?

My Objectivity:
I feel I am very objective,
so much to the fact that,
if a consensus must be reached,
I routinely offer my point of view
as the standard interpretation.

A cheap tailor in the presence of the naked emperor will tell you, the 20-cent alteration, the "paradigm shift", is often regarded
as the process of viewing the world in a radically different way.

Do you find
that the fact that I can with relative/relevant ease
describe my understanding of DNA in terms of computer code,
a coincidence?

Coincidence is one of those messy relationships not easily represented by our sensations.
Perception of Purpose and Intention
can be radically altered by
constraints of the intellect,
beliefs, goals, and external conflict.

"If one restricts the domain, some understanding may be at our grasp" pg-190.

"If instead of using the [real world], one carefully creates a simpler, {artificial world}
in which to study high level perception, the problems become more (tractable)." -pg190.

Translation by Substitution

If instead of using [Objectivity], one carefully creates a simpler, {subjective experience}
in which to study high level perception, the problems become more (traceable).

Does the translation detract from our previous interpretation?

Our MicroDomain:
Let's put a pretty face on it, and trace it's success back to the features of it's face.
Lets put an ugly face on it, and trace it's failures back to the features of it's face.

D.H. keeps saying that all these poor programs,
only sound like they're supposed to.
What's under the surface of the referenced application isn't applicable.
They're skull-fudging the numbers to win the beauty contest.

"While microdomains may superficially seem less impressive than "real world" domains,
the fact that they are explicitly idealized worlds allows the issues under study to be thrown into clear relief" -pg192.

Can someone explain why the phrase "Prolog with weighting" was stuck in my head the entire time I was reading>?

Preface to a Pray Lewd

The Eliza Effect

What we have here is a failure to communicate.

The man who thinks about the the way machines think like humans, our man, D.H.; raises an interesting distinction. 

"D.H sat typing in the Chinese room where he often spent hours rearranging the letters in his alphabet soup. These New York Times computer programs ain't got a clue. They're not even guessing! Sure they keep spitting out pretty analogies, and sure they even use lots of parenthesis, but encapsulation is no substitute for taking (the red pill)! --------Hasn't anybody read their Camus? Just because these programs walk and talk like our everyday neighbors doesn't mean they don't think like L'Etranger!"

-dvn

Cutting the Cake

It's interesting and it speaks for itself.

That is to say when you read it, it's not supposed to make real sense, the kind in which afterwards you understand it. It's just supposed to make the kind of sense where you go, oh how inventive, how creative, it is sort of messy and it has layers! It's got everything that a program that does the think-like stuff should have, nodes and bricks and links and code-lets.

You get it right? Code-rack cyto-blobs entering the rack of neural-tentacles enabling the vestibule to descend, in a human like fashion over the mortuary where we back track from the binary coffin, 0 = dead 1 = alive. Now comes the interesting part, the program shivers, yep, it actually gets cold. This means it needs to add a theoretical "blanket". It does this with the command... 

add-dosh-dat-blanket-locus-o-axe-shun(linenCloset[quilt, afghan, comforter]).

Well if you don't understand it, you're not on the cusp. The new wave of thinking about thinking about. If you don't get it, you're not cool. You want to be cool right? Well then lets keep at it. Just tolerate the fluffy substance and start to think like Hofstadter, let him influence you, and then maybe you will actually publish something and we can try to guess at what you are talking about.

 Show me some code or preach it on sundays buddy.

-dvn

lost your socks to the sandals salesmen

"The human mind as a stochastic processor"

Pg128

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

We as humans have a fascination with the concept of randomness.

Some of us are chronic gamblers. We like risky behavior, engage in actions whose consequences are unknown to us at the onset. We make bets and place odds, not just on sanctioned events, but on the daily interactions of self and environment. 

We are guessers and hypothesizers, what better opportunity for our predictive abilities? Where have we a more equal playing field than at a task of determining the outcome of 'random' acts. See we're trying to get good at it. We're trying to become the masters of our stochastic processors. 

Is there a way to do it? 

Randomness = lack of predictability.

We are constantly trying to increase our predicative power. We are waging war on randomness, and yet we value the freedom we seem to imply from its presence in our universe. Is it that one day, the great understanders will come to a realization that they had no choice in realizing?

-dvn

Frank Zappa said that broken hearts are for...

The heart is a pump metaphor.

Hofstader establishes some AI ideals as formalizing thought away from its current medium.
Thought as a platonic ideal is out there. It just happens to currently only manifest in the brain. The holy grail of AI, is to reproduce it outside of the grey-gooey.

The heart is a pump. Who needs hearts when you have pumps?

The artificial heart produces no pulse.
http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/17523/

Poe, his pit and his pendulum would have no issue with guilty onomatopoeia.

An issue alarms us, a heart that does not pulse? Still a heart?
A machine that does not respond to adrenaline?
That does not increase in tempo in the presence of a loved one?
Does not deliver more oxygen to the escaping prey?

The heart is more than a pump.
We need more than a pump.
Or our robots will turn against us.

You're supposed to know about...

pg 112
"The internal component tries to summarize how well the glom, as a specific instance of a general concept, realizes the Platonic Ideal."


Platonic Idealism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platonic_idealism

"... the exact philosophical meaning of which is perhaps one of the most disputed questions in higher academic philosophy."

Hofstadter takes it, the cake.

He names his ideas by feeling their functions. Cytoplasm , internal and external happiness, and it reads like pseudo code. He's naming ideas, in such a way that their essence's are encapsulated in their roles.

I had a complex experience of a simple event.

"I think such mental juggling is a very important, pervasive kind of mental activity that has nothing intrinsic to do with anagrams."

pg 90.

Do you see it? Hofstadter is dancing around the big idea. We have all these strange little abilities like anagramming. But he doesn't see them as ultra specialized quirks. D.H. wants to interpolate, in his eyes these little mental operations are inherited from the computational consequences at some system level.

There appears to be several layers of information processing. At the biological level, a series of switches are actually firing in some physical pattern--the motherboard and electron level.

At another level 'mental objects' are being juggled, our word bank entries are stored and recalled, --this is an operating system type level; saving data and running programs.

The next level is the one we are most comfortable with, it's our conscious experience of the mental juggling, its us doing crosswords and anagramming-- this can only be compared to our user experience running our operating systems and using our programs.

The fact that in our computer-mind analogy there is no analogue for consciousness speaks to the difficulty with which we have in framing the issue. 

Throughout our readings D.H. has revealed to us that his research is guided by and guides these core intuitions he has about some really big properties of reality. One of these intuitions is that we have these flavored conscious experiences that are really more like animated ghosts haunting the form of a more concrete computational structure.

   In formalizing an anagramming algorithm he is trying to gain insight into the workings of another level by modeling aspects of the level he is familiar with.

-Dvn

wake up and smell the coffin---{}

Men objectify women.

We mentally objectify everything.

D.H. talks of mental objects. Non-physical entities that can be perceived internally.

"Virtual objects...that float on neural hardware".

He compares them to objects in a video game.

What is the difference between the ones we imagine, like a red ball and one's we remember like my favorite red ball?

Are memory cartridges loaded into our mental-video-game-console which will emulate them for our internal perception?

Is there a differentiation between the perception of our memories and the perception of our imaginations? 

Why is it so easy, to close my eyes and go back to somewhere I've been a thousand times, then take a step, and find myself inside of a soap bubble? The boundary between the two is unnoticeable.

We fill our imaginations with the world we've experienced.

   

 

Me Too, Gimme Gimme Gimme

The Me-Too Phenomenon 

Pg 75.

Carol: I often forget my last name, still.

Peter: How long have you two been married now -- nine months?

Carol: About.

Peter: I have that trouble every year in January.

Hofstadter's example of analogous reasoning is exemplary for the following reasons, it clearly demonstrates the issue at large, it is within a familiar context[cheater detection], and it is one of those quirks that happens to everyone.

Relating the family name forgetting of the newly-wed to everyones problem of writing last years number on this years dates; it really melds well. Both are issues of remaining in old patterns, habits; but one is an event of once in a lifetime variety and the other happens annually. One is a matter of self identification, and the other a matter of time and setting identification. One is a string, the other an integer. What I like best, is that they are phenomena of the same mental mechanism that deals with recalling information while writing.

I tend to continue writing 8-15-2009 in September, because man, I don't give up on Summer. 

Knowledge is Flower Power, Reading is Fudge You Mental

Hofstadter Warns Against Expert Systems Trap

Pg 36.

 

The key to all intelligence is just knowledge, knowledge, and ever more knowledge.

 

                Our man D.H. has already defined pattern-finding as potentially the core of intelligence. The expert systems trap, is the idea that the acquisition and access of knowledge is the core of intelligence.  Expert systems were designed to access a redundant knowledge base identical to a knowledge base that an expert in some field would possess. The systems available on computers, would allow users access to an expert whose time and resources are almost unlimited.

                It seems to me there are at least two strategies for replicating the intelligence found within the human species. The first strategy is to store every pattern ever discovered or devised for every problem ever encountered. This is likened not just to an expert system, but to the expert system. The second strategy is to create a general purpose pattern-finding system. This system should be able to find a few patterns. The system should also be able to replicate itself over a period of a few hundred-thousand years, from one to roughly 7 billion systems, each one slightly different from the other. Each one of these systems finding a few patterns, would, with much redundancy; encompass the entirety of human intelligence.

                Now does Hofstadter want to program intelligence or human intelligence?

 

If it’s human intelligence he’s after which of the two strategies makes the most sense?

 

If it’s intelligence he’s after, then does he needs a super pattern finding system that can find every pattern that the entirety of our regular systems can find?

               

 If you want to model a little bit of human knowledge, the general pattern-finding system is a fine horse to put your money on, but if you want to encompass the intelligent results of the entire human species, well my two bits are on the expert system trap.

 

 

Making Mental Assumptions Out of You, Me, and Dot. Dot. Dot.

 Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies -Douglas Hofstadter-pgs 1-35.

When you’re typing the word "analogies", do you sometimes just stop at the L?

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“Pattern-finding is the core of intelligence” (Hofstadter pg 13.) 

     There is a distinction between pattern-finding, and pattern-creation. The process by which a human determines some bit of information to be either random (gobbeldy-goop) or relevant, depends almost entirely upon the potential or perceived functionality of the information. Subsequently aesthetics and functionality form the criteria for evaluating some bit of data to be part of some pattern.This criteria for pattern finding is specifically human. The average heartbeat is about 60 beats per minute. Our appreciation for duality emerges from our symmetrical biology. Our number system is an analog derived from counting our fingers. From a non-human perspective, our patterns are entirely biased by our humanity. In fact the only thing that gives our patterns objective validity is the fact that they are found or adopted by a large number of us, and that they serve us well.

      From this Hofstadter is most correct in being specific, intelligence is not about patterns, it is about the finding. The mechanism that does the recognition or creation is the essential aspect responsible for higher data processing. Just as patterns are the essence of the lowest level of life, in rna and dna, the manipulation, reproduction, and identification of these patterns are key to biological success. This simple principal scales throughout the various levels of life, all the way towards the highest concentration of complexity, the human brain. Repetition is the fundamental aspect of patterns, in all relatively constant systems, (chess, the universe, math); the key to long term success is the repetition of short term successes. 

But as enlightened as our modern cognitive scientists are, their work is still in the clutches of Freud’s most basic assumptions.

I mean c’mon. Fluid Concepts and Creative …

-DvN