Arts and Minds

I am starting to post in Twine.com

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

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

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

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. How interesting that the fact that he was raised by a white Mother and Grandparents, while being abandoned by his African Father has been played down in the media? Multicultural would be a more accurate description of his 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

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.

Intelligence and Adaptability in Systems

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

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.

Peer-Reviewed Publication, Weblogs and Technorati Ratings of Original Thought

This posting is another in what I now realize will be a longer series on the life-cycle and utility of communication channels. The first, posted on December 14, 2003 is entitled: Six Stages In The Life Cycle Of Communication Channels.Six Stages In The Life Cycle Of Communcation Channels Now in this current paper I will consider the special case of information propagation and dissemination for original, disruptive, or counterintuitive intellectual content.

The peer-review process filters undesirable qualities from publications within scientific and academic communities. It is generally intolerant of innovations, disruptive observations, and contributors whose work is nearly entirely original (with the exception of mathematics), yet these qualities are essential to a healthy intellectual environment.

Original workers take great risks, often remain isolated from their peers, and are typically shunned and disrespected by potential employers. They are lonely thinkers that crave colleagues and dialogue.

The web-log, or blog, is now the most accessible as well as the most rapid route to publication for these original minds, and it does offer some dialogue. But the blogosphere is a generally a chaotic and unreliable marketplace for information. It is more often used for agglomerating news, publishing news and commentary or accessing news, either personal or news of interest to the greater community, than as a portal for serious intellectual publication.

Publishing original material on a blog is risky because the contribution is automatically branded unreliable because the writers become known by the company that they keep, and that company is far too often intellectually messy and unreliable.

Is Intelligence A Property of All Life?

Is intelligence is a basic feature of life? What do we mean when we speak or write about intelligence? There are at least a few working definitions, one is humans know it when they encounter it, as in the Turing test. Another is that human intelligence marks the top of a scale of animal intelligence. Casual language about intelligence usually confuses it with smartness, and is a competitive notion.

I wonder if intelligence is not a more profound aspect of all life, present in every living organism and at every scale. We may find a more useful idea of intelligence if we give intelligence some wiggle-room. I also wonder if intelligence is a fundamental property of life. Could any organism function without some level of intelligent or orderly information transfer and exchange within it's boundaries? Isn't information transfer and exchange a basic operation within intelligence? Perhaps an organelle or a virus does not aspire to the label highly intelligent, but it gets it's own job done.

Artificial Intelligence Requires Emotional Mediation

Artificial intelligence will never be intelligent in the human sense until we find a way of organizing machine process, storage and retrieval that is mediated by an emotion-emulating algorithm.

Information moving about within our brains, even what we believe to be pure logical thought and fact is attached to emotional preferences and dislikes (intellectual passions if you like), and these emotional tags or neurological links assist us in making efficient and meaningful use of the primary sensory chaos present in the unprocessed perceived environment. Emotion plus other data equals meaning, and meaning is everything in both thought and emotion, and in action or communication.

Comprehending what meaning means aught to be our main target as we pursue the grail of artificial intelligence. We can eventually understand and build an operational concept of meaning, but it will be difficult (or maybe impossible) if we only stick to the computer science worldview. The difficulty will be somewhat eased if computer scientists go to lunch with psychotherapists who teach and use psychodynamic theory.

In a simple mind experiment, think of an idea or a theory, perhaps some fact or strong belief you have been working with. Are you fond of it? Do you defend this belief or theory when colleagues challenge it’s validity in meetings? Your defense is not purely logical. It is also strongly emotional.

We are motivated by emotion first, logic second. We store away and remember our observations and scientific ideas with ‘tags’ that connect emotion to logical thought.

If computation is ever to be deeply companionable with humans, we must build computers that process data the way humans feel and think, this is not improbable. Because they exist together within the brain, emotions, logically, must be merely another quality or kind of information in the brain in the same way as are logical propositions.

Emotion is not a halo of irrational spiritual vapor hovering outside our brains. It is more likely central to the brain’s own deep logic. Perhaps emotion is a faster pathway to learning and remembering in animals, including humans, and will eventually provide the same functions within computer systems and their application programs.

Perhaps, if we keep our minds open this avenue of investigation may also lead to a better understanding of the mysterious process of human thought and emotion.

Time Is Our Event Horizon

We stand at the edge of time, onlookers and participants in a swirling cosmos that we have neither understood or imagined. It is our illusion that we look ahead at tomorrow or next year. This moment is our event horizon. We cannot see beyond it. We cannot anticipate if our passage in this solar system will either continue or end. We do not know if what we view is a beginning or an ending. Because all moments mark the end of now, all moments are finite singular end points. Restricted to such a foreshortened view, what business do we have causing destruction? All we can achieve in this mode is to restrict and narrow the course of the future, essentially contributing only to entropy, not to life.

Cryptospontaneous Generation

I don’t believe in evil or in daemons, yet as we have been reminded, the accidental accumulation of little daemons lies in the details. As errors combine and their details accumulate, there is increased potential that at some critical moment the heap will slide and all the little errors, once un-noticed, will identify themselves by cascading, contributing to some sort of entangled disaster. Most errors are born the way my grandmother believed house-flies were born—by cryptospontaneous generation. She was wrong about house-flies and cockroaches but would have been somewhat right about data-bugs and data-corruption involving media age and cosmic rays. These accidents during birth and senescence cause little evil data-daemons. Heisenberg and the cosmos are about as spontaneous as we can get in a deterministic universe. Mix lots of details, accidents, and bugs over time and what do you get? Flies.

The Mind Behind The Wheel

Psychodynamics Of High-Risk Drivers

Road rage is a misleading term for pathological violence while driving. Rage is rage, anywhere. We enjoy our new huge crush-cage cars with air-bags. But they cannot protect us from ourselves, and while we are driving, each of us, sometimes, is a danger to ourselves and to others. Some of the danger is preventable by high-level driver training, but that training is not offered in ordinary driving schools, nor is it affordable in the defensive driving schools that do address it.

All drivers are a bit preoccupied some of the time. It is rare to see a driver totally focused who is commuting in traffic. Professional drivers like ambulance, police and fire-truck drivers responding to a call, and race-car drivers, and some accident-wise and wary motor-cycle riders tend to keep their attention more focused on the act of driving.

The rest of us, who are not professional drivers, relax, listen to music or talk shows, talk on cell-phones (rarely using speaker-phones), talk to passengers, consult the tiny print on the GPS or map. Some eat, brush hair, put on makeup, shave, and even read the newspaper. We discipline the kids in the back seat, argue with our spouse in the passenger seat, or search on the floor of the car for dropped cigarettes. Often without realizing it, we daydream.

Information Sausages

Imagine that the worldwide network is in fact only a information sausage exchange and sausage packing plant . If we poke a peephole in the roof and look down at the operations below, we see crowds of people, millions really, trying to stuff their own information into some sausage and send it off, or pick-up a delivery of sausage with their name on it. Each person arrives with some idea or question to stuff into the sausage-making machines below. We see that the production line winds around like an airport check-in area—unrelated people are located in front of and behind each other, each in their turn stuffing their information into funnels, filling each of the sausage-skins in sequence with discontinuous, unrelated packages of information.

The information-sausages move along the line, each filled with it’s bits, and are cut off from the endless supply at the end of the line where a packing station counts lengths of just-so-many-sausages to be randomly tossed into boxes and shipped out the back door. From our perch on the roof we see outside the building that the boxes are carried away and distributed through the distribution network.

At millions of endpoints and nodes in this network, like the one you are on right now, humans get to sample the sausage and digest it’s contents. But the overall impression we get from looking down through our peephole is that of too many people trying to jam too much stuff into too many small packages and tossing them unsorted, into an endless queue of trucks. We are looking at a traffic jam stretching from input to destination of ideas, words, bits, identities, locations, and workers, each speaking different languages, without understanding of meaning. It is Babel, even for those who speak the same language. The hum is deafening, the noise out-shouts the signal. This signal to noise imbalance is most difficult when nasty selfish folks attempt to fill millions of sausage links with viruses causing endless trouble. While the sum of all this effort is greater than the sausages themselves, it is not as great as it should be. We have a thoughtless network because information does not conform to semantic structures. We need a thoughtful one structured in the terms of human language. We need Twine (developed by Radar Networks Inc.) to tie our packages together in personalized 'giftwrap'.

Two Kinds Of Meaning

There are at least two essential kinds of meaning: first, the real dynamics of the physical universe—the facts and laws we work to discover and use. These meanings have real consequence in our everyday world. Those consequences are the essence of meaning. The second kind of meaning consists of the meaning we merely believe. These belief-based meanings are flawed, imperfect and constantly evolving. Hopefully, over time, and with the benefit of good science and philosophy our ideas and beliefs will better resemble the dynamics of the real universe. Until then we are all at risk of confusing facts with beliefs.

After The Fast Last Mile are The Slow Last Inches

After the ‘last mile’ is completed, when the last high bandwidth cable has been connected, and computers are predictably faster than they are, information will still have to travel the last few inches from the screen and be formed into meaning and memory within the mind. These inches are your own nerve fiber, not copper or optical fiber, and they place the ultimate limits upon our efforts to push or pull information from providers to consumers. Outwitting our own brains will be the next big thing. In order to make these last inches more receptive to what the information network provides to their computer screens, the network must pre-digest the information it serves to users. The most powerful digestive juices we can employ come by way of Twine via Radar Networks Inc.. Twine, like the human brain, does a lot of it's work associatively. It is the first really syncretic system to be developed for computation. Using Twine, my computer finds something for me, something important that I did not know and was not seeking. It is a bit of a shock. This is new territory. My computer suddenly seems smart.

While Moore’s Law optimizes the possibilities for many aspects of computation, the pace of nerve fiber information transmission will ever remain constant. Eventually, (a long time from now) a computer may demonstrate the processing and intelligence equivalent of brain-power. But we will still always have to read, organize and consider the sentences as we read them.

Then follows the complex brain-work of deriving and ascribing context and meaning to what we have read. This will always happen at the nice human speed of brain and nerve. There is human pleasure in this process and pace, like taking a walk, or a swim, we live within and enjoy our human scale speed limits. Someday Moore’s Law will become unimportant to most hands-on uses of computers because our brains will be so much slower (and more expensive).

Who Is Reading This Out There?

Who is out there reading this work? I would like to know what interests you about the pieces you read on this weblog. What are you working on? Why have you searched out this Blog? Have you quoted these papers? if so why and where? Could you take a moment and leave a comment on the comments sections? Would you be so kind as to e-mail me some answers and perhaps share your own work with me? Writing a Blog is a bit like shouting into a canyon during a blizzard. Please send me an echo.

INSTITUTIONAL ENVIRONMENTS

Fear, isolation, and a sense of numbing helplessness characterize the nursing home, the mental hospital and other institutional experiences for the majority of inmates. To enter a hospital, especially a mental hospital or a nursing home, either as a visitor or a patient, is to encounter an environment that has no equal in barrenness anywhere in our culture except for the prisoner's cell.

These environments may be described as dis-integrated or degraded because they lack wholeness; they are incomplete. Because the ordinary everyday settings for behavior are missing, they cannot adequately support the great range of human activities and behaviors that are associated with everyday life and particularly with the recovery process. Most institutions force inmates to ‘kill time’ without purpose. More typically and destructively, institutional environments may further impair the patients' faith in their own competence to take care of themselves and live normal independent lives. Prolonged institutionalization or hospitalization, especially in a mental hospital, nursing home, or prison may seriously impair the inmate’s mental health, as individual’s responsibilities and social behaviors fall away.

Psychiatry and psychology in particular, and medicine in general, all lack a clear vision or theory of mental health and ‘wellness’, as distinct from illness, that could inform and enrich the lives of patients in their care. Since the earliest records of institutional mental health treatment there have been relatively few reform revolutions during which the quality of the patients' experience, their environment, and their care were given enriching humane attention.

Anger With Denial Yields Violence

V = (a)d2

A Discussion of the Social Consequences and Individual Psychodynamics Within The Violence Cycle

The social and personal processes of abuse, anger and denial fuel a psychological chain reaction— the violence cycle. Our psychological defense process of anger-denial promotes and maintains this violence cycle by further denying that violent events are cyclic phenomena, and denying that they are endemic to our culture. We hide their presence in nearly every family, so that the painful or violent events experienced by nearly everyone from earliest childhood onward must be systematically suppressed. This denial uses the building blocks of suppressed childhood anger to produce adult rage that is too often expressed as violence.

This personal and social process of denial serves both the individual's neurotic psychological needs and the needs of society by identifying and punishing only the most recent perpetrator of violence, exonerating ourselves and our parents. Most protected are the particular parents (and/or others) who aimed the original and causative and determining violent painful experiences at the helpless, powerless and once innocent, child who has now become the latest violent actor in this millennial drama.

School Shootings—What Was The Motive?

>School Shootings—What Was The Motive?
© Mayer Spivack 10/10/2006
Permission to reproduce this work is freely granted for educational, non-commercial purposes. I would appreciate notification.

We see it every week, nearly every evening on the news. Another violent crime in a school is discovered. The victims relatives and friends and sometimes the whole community or nation is saddened, outraged and frightened. The life of the suspect, already in custody, is examined. ‘He was always such a nice quiet guy— so good to his family and kids in the neighborhood’, or— ‘She kept to herself, didn’t bother anybody, no one expected that she would kill kids. “How could she (or he) do that?”

Quietness in extremes in an indicator of suppressed expression and of depression. We should become especially aware of children who have a severely narrowed emotional repertoire. These children need help now. By helping them we may prevent a violent future.

Their crimes all seem senseless because we cannot sense their causes using only our unexamined but still popular premises. The sense of these crimes eludes us. We search clues for a motive— which we mistakenly equate with— a reason. But motives are not reasons. We confuse the idea of reasons (with it’s whiff of reasonableness) with the idea of causality. The kinds of motives that satisfy the police and the courts may be probable causes but they are not reasonable causes, they are usually only thetriggering circumstances (literally and figuratively) of a particular act of violence. They are the immediate causes, the formative determinant causes causes are far older, and predate perhaps by decades the recent circumstance of motive. Facts as they are quoted and discovered by the press and the police cannot and do not explain the action to our satisfaction. We hear neighbors left pondering an image of ‘human nature’ presented as a mysterious and unfathomable dark (animalistic, wicked, sinful) horror. Yet there remains some sense to be discovered. Were we to use the right questions with more reflective, and self-reflective intentions we might pull straight the psychodynamic thread that runs through all this violence and killing.

Guns Have Three Ends

Guns Have Three Ends
© Mayer Spivack 10/10/2006
Permission to reproduce this work is freely granted for educational, non-commercial purposes. I would appreciate notification.

We all know that guns have two ends, the pointy end, the one with the hole in it and the blunt end where the shooter is. There is really a third end on every gun, and that is what I want to point out. But to do that I will have to discuss a bit of psychology.

The person on the pointy end is scared, and in mortal danger. The person on the blunt end, the one who is aiming the gun, the would-be-shooter, may be nervous, may be terrified if he or she feels that his or her life is in danger were it not for the power of the gun, or may be enraged and mentally ill. But when a gun is aimed by someone who is enraged, or slightly angry, or mentally ill, the third end of the gun comes into gun-play; that is the psychological end, where the shooter feels insulated from harm by being at the powerful end of the gun. This kind of shooter is not sane, nor mentally healthy—and these terms do not mean the same thing. This shooter is mentally ill, and insane—both. The third end of the gun is the emotional act of shooting the gun. It is an end in itself. In school shootings and many other kinds of shootings, all three ends of the gun are involved.