Arts and Minds

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?

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.

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'.

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).

Associative Decision-Making: A Challenging Paradox for Management

The Syncretic Process and The Value Of Associative Thinking In A World Of Linear Decision-Making

The products and services—the creative intellectual capital upon which most business are founded—were born in an associative thought process. Paradoxically, later decisions in those same organizations are frequently initiated, managed, and concluded almost entirely within a framework of linear-logical thinking. Syncretic thinking is a mental process that makes non-linear, and therefore unexpected, but nonetheless logical associative connections among seemingly divergent phenomena or data on the basis of subtle qualities they may have in common. This process, present during the conception of a new venture, should not be abandoned or overwhelmed by linearity.

By understanding and resolving this paradox between the creative syncretic process that characterizes the founding stage culture of an organization, and the conservative linear processes that characterize later stages we can generate a new mix of creative thinking that effectively includes and optimizes both elements. These two divergent modes highlight several differences between the mind-sets that typify the young and innovative start up phase of a business, and that same business when later it is more mature and settled into it’s niche. Associative and inventive thinking that generated a novel product or service and founded an organization or industry usually, at maturity, will have yielded to a more rigorous calculus and competitive strategic analysis. In this later phase of organization, rewards linear thinking frameworks that conserve capital and that advance incrementally within a defined and established niche. The creative productive early associative process is discouraged, and linearity, alone, is widely believed to support long-term survival. Neither framework by itself is likely to encourage the growth of new ideas that may form the future re-creations of the organization in a changing market and technical environment.

Bird Flu Virus H5N1 Planning

The problem of bird flu virus H5N1 is brewing, quite literally, in a biological soup in Asia and now on the European continent. It is a time-bomb. We will all be fortunate if it ticks for a few more years before detonating everywhere at the same time (within a week). Isolationist plans are worthless. Post-crisis-planning, as in Katrina, is worse than useless, it is inexcusable. Incompetence and ignorance of science an public health techniques round out a lethal combination for probably many millions worldwide. None of us has any familiarity with calamities of this sort. The death rate from infections of this flu epidemics in humans is around 50%, some predict worse outcome. Those who are not killed would be so ill as to be unable to care for each other. Downstream and later, the effects of this great human trauma would be felt for a century. It horrifies me to personalize this, but should the pandemic occur, about half of us, family, freinds, and strangers might die, at home, together.

ALEX And Like-Minded Birds: Environmental Determinants In The Occurrence of Rival-Model Learning Among Four Birds.

Comparisons among four birds, their early development and behavioral determinants.

ALEX, our finest feathered colleague in the Laboratory of Cognitive Scientist Dr. Irene Pepperberg has died before his work, or hers, was completed. He was somewhat of an avian guru, a teacher, who participated in the Rival-Model learning method, ultimately developing clear human speech. He helped us answer many important questions about cognition and learning in general. He left Dr. Peppergerg and the rest of us who knew him and followed his progress with even more questions about the still largely unexplored animal-to-human interface.

Following the death of ALEX it seems the right moment to sum up some of my own informal observations about the linguistic and emotional language behavior of our own grays in the light of recent Rival-Model Learning discoveries.

ALEX, early years and environment:

ALEX was raised in Dr. Pepperberg’s laboratory, surrounded by students and researchers who kept him busy, interacting nearly all day as they explored his cognitive abilities, and as he learned to use human language. His was a formal, academic society. He lived a life of protocols, affection, repetition of protocols, affection, rest, and he slept alone, retiring gratefully (or so he seemed to indicate) to his cage at night. He did this work five days or more per week for thirty years.

There were also times when he visited friends with Dr. Pepperberg for days at a time. There were hours spent in the care of avian veterinarian Dr. Marjorie McMillan. , and many hospital days in Chicago, There were times he was interviewed in the company of strangers in small rooms or many in large auditoriums; he did not often disappoint.

He befriended Alan Alda, and it appears that ALEX impressed him, but more to the point ALEX made Alda laugh. That Alda laugh—that easy accepting sound—that accompanies so much of what he does, expresses his curiosity, and his pleasure in discovery. ALEX seems to have provided him with all of this in each meeting. Documented evidence of ALDA’s intelligent use of human language can be found on the Discovery Channel, and on video.

Nashi, early years and environment:

Nashi, my own African Grey Parrot is the same species (Psittacus erithacus) as ALEX, but she has had a different kind educational history, physical setting and social environment. Nashi’s life has not only been unlike ALEX’s, but also quite different from the lives of most domestically raised African Gray Parrots, and radically different from her conspecifics in wild flocks.

The Twain Shall Meet At Last!

It has been a guiding principle in our learning, drummed into our brains during primary school years, that one cannot compare apples and oranges because they are different (despite similarities obvious to any schoolchild), and that ‘never the twain shall meet’— that because of these differences they can never be usefully compared or combined. Soon we will all know that it has always been a lie. The twain shall be tied together by Twine.

Today, within minutes after I received my notice that Twine was being demoed At the Web 2.0 conference on Friday, October 19, ’07, I entered the search terms (Twine, radar,) into Google. What I got were eight references to today’s Radar Network’s announcement of the pioneering product Twine, along with an overwhelming number of references to all sorts of things I don’t want to bother with from nubs of string to space-aliens. Google brought me far too many irrelevant pages-full-of-pages, signifying nothing. Google regurgitated the whole hairball including some few useful threads that were not always up front, or even within the first few pages.

That problem, and others, have been addressed by the new product, ‘Twine’, developed by Nova Spivack and his team at Radar Networks. Twine will accomplish at least three grand feats.

Reading Eudora Welty

My library, wedged into cardboard boxes since a flood in the studio nearly a year ago, is at last released onto new shelves. Each book was acquired to answer, at a moment of question or desire, a need to telescopically reach beyond my own vision or understanding. Despite being carefully grouped and labeled in boxes they had become mysterious and weighty, not merely heavy. They stacked up like obligations that waited silently for more comfort, order restored, fresher air, light and freedom. And the relief of a reader.

In two days with an assistant who loves books they were released and placed in stacks. I have never been able to scan a conventional bookcase, as in the stacks of a library or bookstore without neck-twisting that made me have to leave unsatisfied. My bookstore and library ventures have never been leisurely browses but are either a dyslexic, efficient and purposeful mission, or a quick impulsive raid. So my own shelves carry their books flat, with the text on their spines arrayed so I can read them. Each shelf is a paragraph of ideas. Each book is an individual treasure. I have abandoned those I would not lend out or read again except for reference texts. In this small library their spines and my own are untwisted.

Touching and remembering these books whose contents have nourished my mind, the information having passed from their pages into my brain’s cells, was a neural re-gathering, a reunion of associations. Now that I am old enough to forget even my own thoughts unless typed-down immediately (I am intentionally filling magnetic memory as a prosthesis that will support failed biological memory later) there is more surprise and delight in the sight of an old familiar but forgotten book-cover, or the handwritten note of an author.

Books must be categorized but ideas should not. Neither books nor ideas fit easily into classifications, they merge into each other suggestively, breaking through the bookends. A book on child development is also a book about the sensory world of the classroom and it’s physical environment, but that may only be one of it’s syncretic connections to many other books. The whole library, mine, yours and worldwide, is a single networking of human ideas present and past, a record of what we are and who we are likely to become again. We do not know it’s whole value unless we keep re-reading.

Artless and Mindless

What is this website and weblog Arts and Minds all about? in this blog I examine connections among art, mind, thought, technology and behavior.

When we think of ancient civilizations or primordial peoples and their cultures we think, first, of their arts. We search for a historical record of their sculpture, painting, their dance, their technology and their way of life. We have archive and study treasured examples of their poetry and other writing.

Bimodal Minds in the Prevailing Linear Monoculture

Human brains and minds appear to be inherently capable of at least two quite different kinds of processes and reasoning, The first kind, the one we have come to regard as normal, is predominantly linear and logical. The second process is more non-linear. It is often labeled “sloppy,” disorganized, and is considered by many as slow to learn. In school it does appear to be inefficient when compared to the linear. It is called learning disabled, and specifically often diagnosed as dyslexia, dyscalculia, and attention deficit disorder.

While these non-linear processes, may be responsible for some of the disadvantages within the ‘learning disabled’ brain, they may also underlie certain creative advantages in those same brains and minds. Ideally all brains would be able to utilize both types of processes as required, employing a balancing act that keeps the mind on track. But brains differ—some are weighted toward one process, some to the other. In extreme circumstances, a brain may be uni-modal. Most healthy minds are to some degree bi-modal, but are prioritized for one or the other modality. We may advance education by recognizing that if we provide support in both modalities, we bring the potentials of both groups, and both modalities in each person to a higher level, with subsequent benefits to the whole classroom, to each individual student and to society.

Everybody’s Out Of Step But You

As a child I often felt humiliated by a parent or teacher who used the phrase 'everybody’s out of step but you' in response to my questions, beliefs, or criticisms of the world around me, or in reaction to my own actions. It is a dangerous phrase, one that assumes the correctness of the assumptions upon which it is based, and the context out of which it arises.

Are Emotions The First Layer of Meaning in Mind-Space?

Are emotions the primary filters or categories for meaning in experience?
Are experienced sense data recorded into long-term-memory and rendered recallable only after they are tagged with emotional meanings? Learning and remembering may require us to sort among experiences, sorting them by our associations to their emotional meanings, in order to create our knowledge and understanding of the world. I suspect that we depend upon the strength of our emotional responses to direct and mediate the assignment of experiences to memory, and for building connections among those experiences.

Feelings and emotions appear to define and determine the meaning of sensory events (or percepts). It is hard to think of any exceptions. Mathematical thinking, the realm of ‘purest’ logic, comes first to mind as a system of thought so removed from everyday life that emotion could hardly play any role in mathematical thinking. Were it true it might offer proof that this, at least, might be the exception where emotion holds no sway in meaning or memory. However, mathematicians are often moved or motivated by the beauty and elegance of great mathematical propositions. Mathematicians and musicians (music is a first cousin to mathematics) share similar aesthetics of form, order, proposition (musical theme), development, and resolution. Our aesthetic responses to music are rich with emotional overtones and impressions. To be motivated by these same aesthetic qualities in mathematics, engineering, physics, chemistry, or any ‘pure’ science may provoke deep emotional responses to discoveries of the order and patterns in the universe we explore: Q.E.D.; ahhh!

Metaphor, Simile, And Analogue

Perhaps the mental functions of metaphor and of simile and analogue, are those of grouping, gathering, estimation and approximation.

BOUNDARIES: A Field-Guide To The Associative Nature Of Our Own Minds.

The brain has no hard edges; neither does information. There are no gray interior walls to prevent ideas from wandering across the boundaries between and among fields. Many paths of curiosity lead to intellectual, artistic and scientific questioning, and onward to understanding. For many of us and for our children, these curious pathways are barred by signs that say: “Private Property—Do Not Enter Without Permission”). In the words of a song: “We have to be carefully taught.”

What does the term syncretic mean?

What does the term syncretic mean, and what does it mean as used in the context of this writing? Here are some definitions loosely extracted from the Random House Dictionary of the English language. They give us the following understanding:

WE FORGET PROPER NOUNS

REFLECTIONS OF REALITY: Some Notes On Archetypal Place And Syncretic Process: Proper Nouns:
The mind hides its deepest structure. We cannot remove it from our thoughts to see or know nature (or our own nature) 'clearly', for the structure holds our thoughts together. When things make sense, they make this particular structural sense. We cannot isolate this structure for examination because without the foundation, the building of our mind collapses in upon itself. It’s presence is so pervasive and we are so embedded in it, that if we were able to remove these deep foundations, we would cease to exist as the individuals who entered upon this quest. However much we become aware of structure, our very awareness is based upon our own ontological self-creation of structure. A frame fabricated to support what has been learned; it is the lens, the language, the embedded concepts and the constant and dependable floor of our lives. I have read numerous neurological case-histories that present patients who have memory loss of various kinds and degrees. In some cases the report asserts that amnesia is nearly complete. The observer fails to mention, almost universally, that the patient retained language, knew how to sit in a chair, and when asked to name the president, did not reply: “what’s a name?”—“what is a president?”—“what is what?”.

Many Level Thinking: The Meaning Of Bats In The Belfry

I have a longtime friend who thinks in seven levels at once. He is not admired for this ability, instead, most people find his conversation confusing; he skips around from subject to subject, changes times of reference, sensory modalities, and other dimensions of normal conversation. His discussion drifts, we are soon in a sea of ideas, lost. I ask: “what were we talking about?” He looks at me as if I were simple. Have I been inattentive? I am unsure and confused, after half an hour, I think I am losing my mind.

MEMORY AS MEANING

When first my consciousness surfaced this morning from the night-long swim through sleep, I directed my attention to remembering a photograph of a woman who has been traveling much too long, someone I love, whose photograph I have looked at often, and with serious consideration during the writing of these essays.
While these sentiments may be important to her and myself, they are also important to my subject. I have been motivated to regard this image, to find charming details, new discoveries, to memorize it. I know this photograph. I have searched it almost microscopically for meaning. I also know other photographs, for there are many photographs that I admire as art, that I have examined carefully. This one is not art, only a snapshot. Before opening my eyes I readied myself to observe the experience of remembering this photograph. It happens fast. First there is no photo, then as I become aware that I intend to remember it, it is there in memory. But what has “appeared”, and where is it? What kind of representation am I examining so earnestly? Can I actually see it “in my minds eye”?

The Mind Sees A Mirror

The Mind Sees A Mirror

Publishing a web-log has shifted some gears in my mind— from neutral into first gear. It has also put me in touch with an audience that I have not had in forty years. Even one serious reader can make that happen.

I think that no one can be a writer unless they first love reading wonderful writing by others. That is not a sufficient criterion by itself, but it does ensure an occasional artistic warmth and generosity among otherwise often crusty competitors. Necessary for the ‘natural’ or real writer is a compulsive need to remember and refine, by means of ‘writing it down’, thoughts that come in waves, often in storms of waves, threatening to swamp and drown one another in foamy confusion leaving nothing on the beach for the next day. Writing, my own included, is therefore narcissistically not very generous (that is not to imply it is un-generous), and self-inventing. What can save a sinner like me are intellectually and artistically generous friends who are fine writers and who will ungrudgingly read one’s work. So for the first time, when I write, I imagine the eye and mind of one who will read and comprehend, whereas before I always wrote into the abstracted impersonal void. I never imagined an audience. Maybe my writing will become simpler and more personal for this favor—and personal writing demands more courage than writing impersonally.

Breaking Boundaries - The Syncretic Mind In Search Of Meaning

One Node in a Network of Thought-Experiments, Hypotheses, and Essays

© Mayer Spivack 1996

Definitions of the term syncretic loosely extracted from the Random House Dictionary of the English language give us the following understanding: “Syn-cre-tism...1. the attempted reconciliation or union of different or opposing principles, practices, or parties, as in philosophy or religion. 2. Gram. The merging, as by historical change in a language, of two or more categories in a specified environment into one...”

In a series of posts, beginning with this one, I will publish thoughts and essays on syncretic and associative learning that I call "Breaking Boundaries". This writing will explore how meaning and creative process germinate and bloom in the mind. I offer the proposition that syncretic association is a mental process essential to both art and science, and suggest that it is the means by which our associative minds seek meaning in a world of disorganized raw information. Until we have detected some order within the chaos of raw experience, and have begun to form patterns that are significant to our understanding of that experience, we have only made simple percepts that are without meaning. I am exploring how the detection of pattern and order—the finding-out of cognizable features (that may be inherent in the fractal ‘raw’ experience of nature)—are synonymous with the detection and invention of meaning, and how they, together, may constitute the organic process of our creativity.