Posted on 2/23/2012
I'll start from the obvious and perhaps trend towards the obscure. This website is my expression and interactive window to the rest of humanity and like many others in Cyberia I know we're all looking to signify and leave a footprint during our short visit here. Yes I have chosen this font for a reason...It is informal, it is of a notebook in appearance. This is more or less an open notebook for you to read..,,Not necessarily a blog...I think we're all getting weary of the format and the the conventions of blogging.....Well for what it's worth, I am. I'll do what I can to organize it so if someone actually stops in to take a look they can find their way around.
Now instead of the about me stuff...that will happen over-time and if anyone cares to visit once in a while who I am will be revealed bit by bit as it is with most of us when we start interacting with another person...A constant effort of mine throughout this process will be to purposely stay away from the rules of the road and the standards and norms...For example: Just starting a blog is a pain...The first thing urged upon you is a Title. So you try to think of something to catch the eye, to shock, to intrigue, to mortify..whatever...it is so so tedious...I know the blog is one of the first steps we take into the technological space...and we've all be prompted and advised by the gurus that from day one we have to think about defining the Brand. We're all brands out/in here...right..hit the mark..quirky, serious, engaging, disruptive...what's your brand man! Come on, you gotta be a brand, if you're not a brand no one will know you, no one will find you...no one will pay you money for doing shit that they could do themselves but would rather have the fella or gal with the more relevant brand to handle the particulars of whatever that guy or gal is interested in out-sourcing..Whew! went on little bit of a rran...no tirade. yes a tirade...I went on a little tirade there...again the standards and norms...everybody is ranting these days..rant or die...well I prefer a good old fashioned tirade myself. So back on track...the blog title..
I chose Black-Bird and I'll tell you why...It's a reference and tip of the hat to Nassim Taleb of Black Swan fame. The theory and the thoughts made intuitive sense when I first read the book. (I think this is the first place in my notebook where, if any number of people are reading it, some of them will stop and never visit again) I followed up on his evidence and my views on the validity of the theory grew. Then I read Hahneman, and Airely...and that about cinched it for me... If you don't know anything about the Black Swan or Hahneman or Airley they're linked now so so can read and decide for yourself That and the incredibly, heated and overwrought harangues on line and off by the people who are opposed to his ideas... As always, these bloggers always seem to sound more jealous of the man's fame or determined to prove once again how rebellious they are and how their intelligence is manifestly more superior to his or heaven forbid those of us who might occasionally argue in favor of the Black Swan Theory. If there is one thing that is obvious about the Internet it's that you can't argue or change the minds of anyone who actually comments on websites..or blogs...I can guarantee that in almost all cases the back and forth commenting between two commentators on different sides of an issue will turn into a pissing match in 3 to 6 moves....
Probably writing way to much here...but What the Hell this is a notebook......my notebook.........that.. if anyone cares to take a peak, is invited to do so. Despite what you may have gathered I sincerely am trying to achieve something here...which is to get somewhere without knowing where I'm going. This is one of the reasons, and I think I just figured this out, that I don't want to necessarily start with the whole about me thing. I think what I am trying to do is to get somewhere without really starting from anywhere... And to get some where without the target of where that somewhere is.
It does have sort of Zen like quality to it..... it also feeds into my contrarian mindset....which is to do or think as often as possible contrary to or even opposed to what most of you out there are doing. Now it works as a skeptical thinking approach but it can't become a reflex...the majority does get things right sometime. Better to just go with the old stand by and if a label is necessary here I'll go with free-thinker....and this effort I am engaged in now is to behave as if I have a point or vis versa...If that is possible.
Now for anyone that is still with me...this notebook won't be a continuous string of stream of conspicuously conscious thoughts...oh no no no no nooo....it will also include thoughts delivered in various digital formats...like sketchcasted thoughts, plain old drawn thoughts, podcasted thoughts, guest thoughts, thoughts in song. and thoughts as thoughts...Cool...not to bad
Done for now if you want to find out "about me" go read a blog and find out about them...you read enough of them you'll get a sense of who I am...which is to say human. Fare thee well until later..probably...ok and you saw my little tirade on comments so there won't be any on this site//again..if you want to do that then go to a nearby blog and comment away about them as they comment about you commenting on them...It seems that whatever endeavor people create, or engage or get involved in eventually settles into a bunch of primates bickering about something essentially meaningless...especially when the primary goal of the mission was to create a sense of purpose and...meaning.
2/24/12
I'm back for more...Totally liberated by this experience...Well now to get to the nitty & gritty of things.. I'm working on several projects and by that I mean they have been on stand-by for a while..but now back on track...I've got some writing to do. - an interactive digital story of a sort which will use, at least in it's initial form, many different digital tools to make happen.....Now for the Love of your God's...don't get your backs and asses up in and prepare to send a 500 page dissertation and criticism about the fact that these I ideas aren't original...that's something that really gets the I don't do shit with my life so I'm qualified to act as a critic and plain old asshole of anyone elses ideas or efforts to achieve anything...relax and bug another...(again the reason for no comments allowed)...So here's my qualifier...I make no pretensions as a n originator of ideas that I put forth in this notebook...I am fully aware of all the other minds out there...most I'm sure far more inventive and creative than my humble collection of neuron meat located at the top end of my spinal column...so don't think it...I know it..
Ok..now back to my notes...an interactive story using sound music, visuals, animation, written words, game mechanics and interaction...some AI possibilities...yes that seems like an interesting idea to explore...applying Non Player Character type AI..to an interactive story...but no in the usual context as seen in RPG games...but an interactive story you read...as a book and as you move through the story world...told in this case with words literally be created on the reading device screen as the reader looks at it in real time....the story is driven by the dialogue and interactions between the reader and the characters in the book
2/27/2012
To continue the idea here...I have avision of an idea for teh first book...the book will acommentary on belief and God. Within the this context is the theme that God exixts but counter to teh wishes of the faithful...God is a usuually ambilvalent behavior...whicg when puirposely focused is evil and Psycho Pathic...as if we are being ruled by a God come Caligua.....IN fact what if thru teh magic of imagination that Caligula achieves his earthly wish and does indeed become God......
Movie...Leonardo diCaprio as the Caligula GOd...which leads me to another idea...which I think Di Caprio and martin Scorcese would jump at...at a bio film on Caligula...Scorcese directs -Dei Caprio stars...could be done either in the period or drive the story in the present or near future. I'll write the script...maybe with collaborator...Deserves a project in my Behance Action method.....I believe it is also time for another satire of Hollywood and or Broadway....specifically the lack of originality...they have become retread engines..remake....
note again to readers...thsi is an open brain notebook...if looking forward continuity...by a finished and published book...go to Fast Company magazine which makes it look like teh creatives just stand in the shower and completed idea...implemented marketed and perfected...fall out of their asses....No...this is the moist, sticky, floor of the movie theater after a kid's movie, place that actual ideas emerge....ass first and horribly distorted amd most dead shortly after from asphyxiation or murdered by the mother and tossed into the dumpster. which is a nice seque to my next thought...found a nice quote on the central problem challege all my creative efforts will essentially have in it's distant and targeted sites;
from V.S. RAMACHANDRAN:
"Let me tell you about the problem confronting us. The brain is a 1.5 kilogram mass of jelly, the consistency of tofu, you can hold it in the palm of your hand, yet it can contemplate the vastness of space and time, the meaning of infinity and the meaning of existence. It can ask questions about who am I, where do I come from, questions about love and beauty, aesthetics, and art, and all these questions arising from this lump of jelly. It is truly the greatest of mysteries. The question is how does it come about?"
Nicely summed up I think....
I just left my desk in the pause there and thoughts entered my mind now it's entered my mid before but made a hasty escape before I could capture it...but i think I've gat it by teh ears now at least (not necessarily a good place to grab an idea by the way...ideas are a lot like tigers or wolves...better to tranquilize them before taking a closer look...much more dangerous to grab them by a body part...OK bak to the thought.
i'm walking down the corridor (classic 21 st century cubicle farm layout...square cubicles, 90 degree angles, rectangular floor space...Terry Gilliam's Brazil with better lighting) and it ambushes me...the enormity of the cosmos...wrapped around our little planet with 7 billion of us and several more billion other animate creatures...trodding swimming and flying about.....each so cosmically insignigicant that even to be considered obscure would be akin to global clebrity here...and my mind; walking down this corridor is engulfed by this......Engulfed by infinity and the warpping and folding of layers of inconceivable dimensions of time...and it's as if you feel you are alone.... but wondering if others of similar insignificance sense the bizarre and out of context product of this equation and you feel like shouting it or at least sharing it with another but you sense that others would see your very communication of this realization as bizarre and out of context......Which is the riddle that wraps around itself, the joke as setup and punchline merged...the setup is punchline and the is setup. As if it is possible to be bizarre and out of context within a bizarre and out of context reality which is so comically for some and tragically for others interpreted and perceived thru painfully imperfect senses within a mysterious and deeply flawed yet marvelous black box....the shear meaningless of this experience fosters an intensity of meaning... because if we are certain of anything it is that our insignificance and our knowledge of it; our experiencing of it is a painfully temporary circumstance and we will know no other. Whew...got it out now I need to dine on the carcass of that for a while and see what mind mind can do with the trasmute the raw materials into tangible ideas...Whats great about thhis little screed is that it is teh closet I've gotten to articulating the essence of my project within this exixtence...i've been working on it since birth....or i should more rightly say I have had the subjective sense that i have been pursing this since birth since i can not know..or have no control over the the actual causation of my will to do this my concious response to the unknown stumulis is to live to articulate this central idea in all my projects. feels great I've made some significant progress today in regards to making something.....happen.... I'll articulate and make manifest this central theme through the title or categorization of a "Professional Creative-Artistic-Designer...So this is what i do..this is what goes on the business card..
More on Black Bird..- Primary Purpose of this company will be to work in the area of Neuro-technology, Engineering and modeling Brains and Minds, searching for consciousness..writing thinking creating and innovating in this field...i'm focusing here...but will use my thought inclinations and imagents (tangets of imagination to project games, products, stories, film, etc...anywhere the path leads
2/18/12
My company is evolving...calling it Black-Bird Neuro-Design & Innovation...Working in the Neuro-ware space to innovate, design and evangelize for seamless human - machine intelligence interaction design...
A team that is Thinking, Innovating, Imagining, Designing and Implementing INTELLIGENCE as a service/product/application for the present and future the coming biological and machine intelligence symbiosis...in order to promote and foster the well being of all conscious entities on our planet
Think of intelligence as an app....that is to say...Intelligence as we understand it today is coming from a mass of evolved inanimate matter that through the combination of a distributed networked architecture (made up of hardware) and biochemical interactions (the protocols layers, gates and switches) manifested as an output we call the mind and this mind (we can call it an operating system) supports the suite of applications which constitute consciousness and self awareness the subjective and internal experience of being who you are.
Lately I'm listening to Jeff Hawkins and his work to establish a framework for thinking about brains and intelligence...Now I saw his presentation from 2003 (TED talk) he seemed a bit more enthusiastic then and downplayed the arguments that the brain is too complex to boil done to a theory or framework... In the last presentation I saw he seems to be a bit more respectful of teh complexity he is running into during his research but importantly is not detered...because although it is complex it is certainly within our capabilities to understand and if understand to create and innovate intelligence outside of brains...and possibly in the near future to build brains.
my interpretation and possibly additional thoughts on his are that: the brain is a product of the evolutionary process and up to now we have a very robust understanding of the primary mechanisms of this process even to the point of some level of predictability...
We can and I am sure are using this understanding to consider how the brain evolved.
The raw materials
The mutations (design deadends and successes)
The knowledge that brain itself was not the product of an intelligent designer...so you must consider the solutions derived from this process are not the outcome of picking the best solution a through strictly quantifiable analysis...who knows... consciousness may have been a piggybacked attribute rather than primary....i am in awe of the brain and it's powers and full of questions about how it does what it does and how it got here but at the same time..how it does what it does should not be idealized or should it be always viewed as the best and only why to handle the design challenge...the reason we animals have brains is because having brains provided some evolutionary advantages....advantages that were built upon through successive generations....so when design and developing brains we should not necessarily try to imitate biological brains...It's quite possible to conceive that animation, consciousness and intelligence can be achieved through other means as well...
Another aspect I think important is to look to teh flaws to understand and isolate the mechanics of brains...Consider for example trying to create a program that usually gives you the wrong answer but on occasion can make a mistake...if we can model that mistake we can get a window into the programming.....the mistakes and illusions we can induce from a brain show (thanks in great deal to the work of Kahneman and Tversky) that the brain is a short cut machine...probably why so many of us get bored or overwhelmed by repetition and minutia l detail.....Heuristics...Always important to remember what the brain has evolved to do....it has evolved to allow us to make decisions based on circumstances in a dangerous world where we can be eaten or if we don't eat than we starve....if we are eaten or starve we don't mate and our genes don't move into the next generation....That's the high level summary of what our brains are good at doing as far as evolution is concerned...so besides keeping us personally survivable it also allows for cooperation, communication, altruism, tribalism, selfishness and importantly the capacity for different levels of decision-making.. As Jeff Hawkins points out this is the process or mechanism that is at the core of what we do better than any other living thing on this planet.....we higher very flexible and adaptable...and part of that decision-making process or apparatus are the , elements of consciousness, imagination, reasoning, problem-solving.....I intuit that this process of mind decision-making (DM) is the key...and really the basis for what we have come to define and recognize as intelligence.....Excellent progress here...Now to my oterh sites and potentially...a company website...to advance these thoughts and turn them into a life-that's left for me work.
3/9/2012
It's been awhile since I was here...a bitten over a week, but I have not been dormant...continued thinking on the places i want to go in terms of design, independence, freedom free thinking and creating that life style for myself. I've been doing plenty of research and have created and am continuing to build on a list of projects...to work on as well as self education...In the areas of machine intelligence, robotics, neuro design..I've started teaching myself programming (in Python 2.72 to be precise)...I have also started working on build an autonomous 'earth rover' I'll link anyone that is interested to the planned website when it is up....Looks of other items on the front burner now as well...learning animation in Anime Studio Pro 8...Lots of reading on consciousness, as well the mind, cosmology and physics as well as returning to read Hitchens, and Sam Harris with some Richard Dawkins thrown in for good measure...So many projects and so little time to work on them all. The important part of rolling all these ideas around is to turn them into a money generating activity.....So that's my report for now...back to work learning and creating. I am now using a project (Action Method) system to focus my ideas and project and have set target dates because if nothing gets implemented than nothing is really getting done..That is my primary goal is to get my work and thought out there so...it might be rough..but as this is the age of prototypes....bak to it..I'll report tomorrow or in in teh next couple of days.
I'll start from the obvious and perhaps trend towards the obscure. This website is my expression and interactive window to the rest of humanity and like many others in Cyberia I know we're all looking to signify and leave a footprint during our short visit here. Yes I have chosen this font for a reason...It is informal, it is of a notebook in appearance. This is more or less an open notebook for you to read..,,Not necessarily a blog...I think we're all getting weary of the format and the the conventions of blogging.....Well for what it's worth, I am. I'll do what I can to organize it so if someone actually stops in to take a look they can find their way around.
Now instead of the about me stuff...that will happen over-time and if anyone cares to visit once in a while who I am will be revealed bit by bit as it is with most of us when we start interacting with another person...A constant effort of mine throughout this process will be to purposely stay away from the rules of the road and the standards and norms...For example: Just starting a blog is a pain...The first thing urged upon you is a Title. So you try to think of something to catch the eye, to shock, to intrigue, to mortify..whatever...it is so so tedious...I know the blog is one of the first steps we take into the technological space...and we've all be prompted and advised by the gurus that from day one we have to think about defining the Brand. We're all brands out/in here...right..hit the mark..quirky, serious, engaging, disruptive...what's your brand man! Come on, you gotta be a brand, if you're not a brand no one will know you, no one will find you...no one will pay you money for doing shit that they could do themselves but would rather have the fella or gal with the more relevant brand to handle the particulars of whatever that guy or gal is interested in out-sourcing..Whew! went on little bit of a rran...no tirade. yes a tirade...I went on a little tirade there...again the standards and norms...everybody is ranting these days..rant or die...well I prefer a good old fashioned tirade myself. So back on track...the blog title..
I chose Black-Bird and I'll tell you why...It's a reference and tip of the hat to Nassim Taleb of Black Swan fame. The theory and the thoughts made intuitive sense when I first read the book. (I think this is the first place in my notebook where, if any number of people are reading it, some of them will stop and never visit again) I followed up on his evidence and my views on the validity of the theory grew. Then I read Hahneman, and Airely...and that about cinched it for me... If you don't know anything about the Black Swan or Hahneman or Airley they're linked now so so can read and decide for yourself That and the incredibly, heated and overwrought harangues on line and off by the people who are opposed to his ideas... As always, these bloggers always seem to sound more jealous of the man's fame or determined to prove once again how rebellious they are and how their intelligence is manifestly more superior to his or heaven forbid those of us who might occasionally argue in favor of the Black Swan Theory. If there is one thing that is obvious about the Internet it's that you can't argue or change the minds of anyone who actually comments on websites..or blogs...I can guarantee that in almost all cases the back and forth commenting between two commentators on different sides of an issue will turn into a pissing match in 3 to 6 moves....
Probably writing way to much here...but What the Hell this is a notebook......my notebook.........that.. if anyone cares to take a peak, is invited to do so. Despite what you may have gathered I sincerely am trying to achieve something here...which is to get somewhere without knowing where I'm going. This is one of the reasons, and I think I just figured this out, that I don't want to necessarily start with the whole about me thing. I think what I am trying to do is to get somewhere without really starting from anywhere... And to get some where without the target of where that somewhere is.
It does have sort of Zen like quality to it..... it also feeds into my contrarian mindset....which is to do or think as often as possible contrary to or even opposed to what most of you out there are doing. Now it works as a skeptical thinking approach but it can't become a reflex...the majority does get things right sometime. Better to just go with the old stand by and if a label is necessary here I'll go with free-thinker....and this effort I am engaged in now is to behave as if I have a point or vis versa...If that is possible.
Now for anyone that is still with me...this notebook won't be a continuous string of stream of conspicuously conscious thoughts...oh no no no no nooo....it will also include thoughts delivered in various digital formats...like sketchcasted thoughts, plain old drawn thoughts, podcasted thoughts, guest thoughts, thoughts in song. and thoughts as thoughts...Cool...not to bad
Done for now if you want to find out "about me" go read a blog and find out about them...you read enough of them you'll get a sense of who I am...which is to say human. Fare thee well until later..probably...ok and you saw my little tirade on comments so there won't be any on this site//again..if you want to do that then go to a nearby blog and comment away about them as they comment about you commenting on them...It seems that whatever endeavor people create, or engage or get involved in eventually settles into a bunch of primates bickering about something essentially meaningless...especially when the primary goal of the mission was to create a sense of purpose and...meaning.
2/24/12
I'm back for more...Totally liberated by this experience...Well now to get to the nitty & gritty of things.. I'm working on several projects and by that I mean they have been on stand-by for a while..but now back on track...I've got some writing to do. - an interactive digital story of a sort which will use, at least in it's initial form, many different digital tools to make happen.....Now for the Love of your God's...don't get your backs and asses up in and prepare to send a 500 page dissertation and criticism about the fact that these I ideas aren't original...that's something that really gets the I don't do shit with my life so I'm qualified to act as a critic and plain old asshole of anyone elses ideas or efforts to achieve anything...relax and bug another...(again the reason for no comments allowed)...So here's my qualifier...I make no pretensions as a n originator of ideas that I put forth in this notebook...I am fully aware of all the other minds out there...most I'm sure far more inventive and creative than my humble collection of neuron meat located at the top end of my spinal column...so don't think it...I know it..
Ok..now back to my notes...an interactive story using sound music, visuals, animation, written words, game mechanics and interaction...some AI possibilities...yes that seems like an interesting idea to explore...applying Non Player Character type AI..to an interactive story...but no in the usual context as seen in RPG games...but an interactive story you read...as a book and as you move through the story world...told in this case with words literally be created on the reading device screen as the reader looks at it in real time....the story is driven by the dialogue and interactions between the reader and the characters in the book
2/27/2012
To continue the idea here...I have avision of an idea for teh first book...the book will acommentary on belief and God. Within the this context is the theme that God exixts but counter to teh wishes of the faithful...God is a usuually ambilvalent behavior...whicg when puirposely focused is evil and Psycho Pathic...as if we are being ruled by a God come Caligua.....IN fact what if thru teh magic of imagination that Caligula achieves his earthly wish and does indeed become God......
Movie...Leonardo diCaprio as the Caligula GOd...which leads me to another idea...which I think Di Caprio and martin Scorcese would jump at...at a bio film on Caligula...Scorcese directs -Dei Caprio stars...could be done either in the period or drive the story in the present or near future. I'll write the script...maybe with collaborator...Deserves a project in my Behance Action method.....I believe it is also time for another satire of Hollywood and or Broadway....specifically the lack of originality...they have become retread engines..remake....
note again to readers...thsi is an open brain notebook...if looking forward continuity...by a finished and published book...go to Fast Company magazine which makes it look like teh creatives just stand in the shower and completed idea...implemented marketed and perfected...fall out of their asses....No...this is the moist, sticky, floor of the movie theater after a kid's movie, place that actual ideas emerge....ass first and horribly distorted amd most dead shortly after from asphyxiation or murdered by the mother and tossed into the dumpster. which is a nice seque to my next thought...found a nice quote on the central problem challege all my creative efforts will essentially have in it's distant and targeted sites;
from V.S. RAMACHANDRAN:
"Let me tell you about the problem confronting us. The brain is a 1.5 kilogram mass of jelly, the consistency of tofu, you can hold it in the palm of your hand, yet it can contemplate the vastness of space and time, the meaning of infinity and the meaning of existence. It can ask questions about who am I, where do I come from, questions about love and beauty, aesthetics, and art, and all these questions arising from this lump of jelly. It is truly the greatest of mysteries. The question is how does it come about?"
Nicely summed up I think....
I just left my desk in the pause there and thoughts entered my mind now it's entered my mid before but made a hasty escape before I could capture it...but i think I've gat it by teh ears now at least (not necessarily a good place to grab an idea by the way...ideas are a lot like tigers or wolves...better to tranquilize them before taking a closer look...much more dangerous to grab them by a body part...OK bak to the thought.
i'm walking down the corridor (classic 21 st century cubicle farm layout...square cubicles, 90 degree angles, rectangular floor space...Terry Gilliam's Brazil with better lighting) and it ambushes me...the enormity of the cosmos...wrapped around our little planet with 7 billion of us and several more billion other animate creatures...trodding swimming and flying about.....each so cosmically insignigicant that even to be considered obscure would be akin to global clebrity here...and my mind; walking down this corridor is engulfed by this......Engulfed by infinity and the warpping and folding of layers of inconceivable dimensions of time...and it's as if you feel you are alone.... but wondering if others of similar insignificance sense the bizarre and out of context product of this equation and you feel like shouting it or at least sharing it with another but you sense that others would see your very communication of this realization as bizarre and out of context......Which is the riddle that wraps around itself, the joke as setup and punchline merged...the setup is punchline and the is setup. As if it is possible to be bizarre and out of context within a bizarre and out of context reality which is so comically for some and tragically for others interpreted and perceived thru painfully imperfect senses within a mysterious and deeply flawed yet marvelous black box....the shear meaningless of this experience fosters an intensity of meaning... because if we are certain of anything it is that our insignificance and our knowledge of it; our experiencing of it is a painfully temporary circumstance and we will know no other. Whew...got it out now I need to dine on the carcass of that for a while and see what mind mind can do with the trasmute the raw materials into tangible ideas...Whats great about thhis little screed is that it is teh closet I've gotten to articulating the essence of my project within this exixtence...i've been working on it since birth....or i should more rightly say I have had the subjective sense that i have been pursing this since birth since i can not know..or have no control over the the actual causation of my will to do this my concious response to the unknown stumulis is to live to articulate this central idea in all my projects. feels great I've made some significant progress today in regards to making something.....happen.... I'll articulate and make manifest this central theme through the title or categorization of a "Professional Creative-Artistic-Designer...So this is what i do..this is what goes on the business card..
More on Black Bird..- Primary Purpose of this company will be to work in the area of Neuro-technology, Engineering and modeling Brains and Minds, searching for consciousness..writing thinking creating and innovating in this field...i'm focusing here...but will use my thought inclinations and imagents (tangets of imagination to project games, products, stories, film, etc...anywhere the path leads
2/18/12
My company is evolving...calling it Black-Bird Neuro-Design & Innovation...Working in the Neuro-ware space to innovate, design and evangelize for seamless human - machine intelligence interaction design...
A team that is Thinking, Innovating, Imagining, Designing and Implementing INTELLIGENCE as a service/product/application for the present and future the coming biological and machine intelligence symbiosis...in order to promote and foster the well being of all conscious entities on our planet
Think of intelligence as an app....that is to say...Intelligence as we understand it today is coming from a mass of evolved inanimate matter that through the combination of a distributed networked architecture (made up of hardware) and biochemical interactions (the protocols layers, gates and switches) manifested as an output we call the mind and this mind (we can call it an operating system) supports the suite of applications which constitute consciousness and self awareness the subjective and internal experience of being who you are.
Lately I'm listening to Jeff Hawkins and his work to establish a framework for thinking about brains and intelligence...Now I saw his presentation from 2003 (TED talk) he seemed a bit more enthusiastic then and downplayed the arguments that the brain is too complex to boil done to a theory or framework... In the last presentation I saw he seems to be a bit more respectful of teh complexity he is running into during his research but importantly is not detered...because although it is complex it is certainly within our capabilities to understand and if understand to create and innovate intelligence outside of brains...and possibly in the near future to build brains.
my interpretation and possibly additional thoughts on his are that: the brain is a product of the evolutionary process and up to now we have a very robust understanding of the primary mechanisms of this process even to the point of some level of predictability...
We can and I am sure are using this understanding to consider how the brain evolved.
The raw materials
The mutations (design deadends and successes)
The knowledge that brain itself was not the product of an intelligent designer...so you must consider the solutions derived from this process are not the outcome of picking the best solution a through strictly quantifiable analysis...who knows... consciousness may have been a piggybacked attribute rather than primary....i am in awe of the brain and it's powers and full of questions about how it does what it does and how it got here but at the same time..how it does what it does should not be idealized or should it be always viewed as the best and only why to handle the design challenge...the reason we animals have brains is because having brains provided some evolutionary advantages....advantages that were built upon through successive generations....so when design and developing brains we should not necessarily try to imitate biological brains...It's quite possible to conceive that animation, consciousness and intelligence can be achieved through other means as well...
Another aspect I think important is to look to teh flaws to understand and isolate the mechanics of brains...Consider for example trying to create a program that usually gives you the wrong answer but on occasion can make a mistake...if we can model that mistake we can get a window into the programming.....the mistakes and illusions we can induce from a brain show (thanks in great deal to the work of Kahneman and Tversky) that the brain is a short cut machine...probably why so many of us get bored or overwhelmed by repetition and minutia l detail.....Heuristics...Always important to remember what the brain has evolved to do....it has evolved to allow us to make decisions based on circumstances in a dangerous world where we can be eaten or if we don't eat than we starve....if we are eaten or starve we don't mate and our genes don't move into the next generation....That's the high level summary of what our brains are good at doing as far as evolution is concerned...so besides keeping us personally survivable it also allows for cooperation, communication, altruism, tribalism, selfishness and importantly the capacity for different levels of decision-making.. As Jeff Hawkins points out this is the process or mechanism that is at the core of what we do better than any other living thing on this planet.....we higher very flexible and adaptable...and part of that decision-making process or apparatus are the , elements of consciousness, imagination, reasoning, problem-solving.....I intuit that this process of mind decision-making (DM) is the key...and really the basis for what we have come to define and recognize as intelligence.....Excellent progress here...Now to my oterh sites and potentially...a company website...to advance these thoughts and turn them into a life-that's left for me work.
3/9/2012
It's been awhile since I was here...a bitten over a week, but I have not been dormant...continued thinking on the places i want to go in terms of design, independence, freedom free thinking and creating that life style for myself. I've been doing plenty of research and have created and am continuing to build on a list of projects...to work on as well as self education...In the areas of machine intelligence, robotics, neuro design..I've started teaching myself programming (in Python 2.72 to be precise)...I have also started working on build an autonomous 'earth rover' I'll link anyone that is interested to the planned website when it is up....Looks of other items on the front burner now as well...learning animation in Anime Studio Pro 8...Lots of reading on consciousness, as well the mind, cosmology and physics as well as returning to read Hitchens, and Sam Harris with some Richard Dawkins thrown in for good measure...So many projects and so little time to work on them all. The important part of rolling all these ideas around is to turn them into a money generating activity.....So that's my report for now...back to work learning and creating. I am now using a project (Action Method) system to focus my ideas and project and have set target dates because if nothing gets implemented than nothing is really getting done..That is my primary goal is to get my work and thought out there so...it might be rough..but as this is the age of prototypes....bak to it..I'll report tomorrow or in in teh next couple of days.
