Category Archives: Wonders

Book Review: What to Think About Machines That Think

Intelligentsia impresario John Brockman has done an admirable job of assembling some very impressive thinkers for his web site Edge.org. Although most are scientists, there is a fair number of people from the other estates, and the cross-fertilisation of ideas frequently draws even hardened specialists out of their shells, to make pronouncements on things well outside their fields of expertise.

Hal and Dave
Hal and Dave

Although this is not always a good thing, it does make entertaining, stimulating discussion, and I can recommend the site wholeheartedly.

Every year Brockman sets a current question to his group (whose members are, cringingly, called “Edgies”), and turns the resulting answers into a book. This year’s question, and the book’s title, is “What do You Think About Machines That Think?”

The responses, which take the form of short essays, are only very roughly organized by theme. These themes bleed slowly from one to another, without dividing section headings. This provides a surprisingly effective minimalist structure to the book, hinting at emergent concepts that transcend the distinct points made by individual authors.

There are so many excellent ideas presented in the book, that I can recommend it, too, without reservation. So rather than write a normal critical review here, I thought it would be more useful to look at these themes, especially how the thinkers have thought through them, rather than just analyse what they’ve written. From this we can glean a lot about the state of the fields of AI and machine intelligence.

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Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 14, Opus 131 I

In 1826, a year before his death, Ludwig van Beethoven completed his string quartet number 14 in C# minor, opus 131.

Although it was not well received by the general public upon its first performance, a rather large number of quite significant musicians seem to have thought highly of it in their time.

Beethoven String Quartet 14, Opus 131, first movement

Beethoven String Quartet 14, Opus 131, first movement

When Schubert first heard the piece, he is reported to have said, “After this, what is left for us to write?” And as he lay dying, a year after Beethoven’s own death, Schubert asked for it to be played, and his closest friends obliged him. It was very possibly the last piece of music Schubert heard in his life.

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A Note On Timelines and Measures

Different cultures have different ways of expressing common concepts. One of the most interesting aspects of this cultural relativism arises when it comes to notions of number, small sets, plurals, and so on.

Prague Astronomical Clock

Prague Astronomical Clock

For example, in English, we have the concepts of singular and plural. If there is one of something, it is singular; any more, and it is plural.

One stone; two stones.

Russian, on the other hand, includes a concept of “twoness” before moving on to the more generic plural. It is as if we had a construct like…

One stone; two stonae; three stones.

One finds other differences, especially when cultures are viewed historically: how the concept of number and measure has changed over time. As is well known, it took a long while for the concepts of zero and infinity to be invented.; Roman numerals are particularly difficult to use to do math; the mathematical community needed many years to come to grips with the notion that the square root of a negative number could in fact be a pretty useful concept (if you didn’t let its inherent weirdness bother you too much).

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Mindfulness Meditation and Detachment I

Mindfulness Meditation and Detachment I

I wonder if there isn’t a certain danger of arriving at a position of emotional and intellectual detachment if one follows the precepts of Mindfulness Meditation as outlined by its founder and chief spokesperson, Jon Kabat-Zinn.

Before saying even a single word more, I’d like to list my qualifications for making such an accusation:

I have none whatsoever.

I have never done a formal Mindfulness programme, have only read one of Kabat-Zinn’s books (the unfortunately-titled Full Catastrophe Living), and of the secondary descriptions and articles I have read – many in scientific journals — pretty much all of them have been very, sometimes wildly, favourable.

Here’s a fact about Mindfulness: It works.

Moreover, if I do have any kind of valid criticism, I am not all that sure I am justified in laying it at the feet of Kabat-Zinn himself, nor his many followers and practitioners. Quite the opposite: I am pretty sure he is not preaching detachment, or at least wouldn’t want to. But as I said in the opening paragraph, I fear that through following the programme, there is a danger of arriving at that position.

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Mindfulness Meditation and Detachment II

In the first part of this essay, I wondered whether the practice of Mindfulness runs the danger of developing into a detached position (a term I shall explain shortly) but then spent the vast majority of the remaining paragraphs describing Mindfulness in very positive terms. I related my own beneficial experience of it. I stated twice: “Mindfulness works.” Finally, I ended with the rhetorical question,

“What’s not to like?”

It is time to answer that question now.

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