Words&Dirt

“It strikes me that although we occasionally carp about Having To Suffer, and moan about never producing real Art, and become despondent or try too hard to compensate, we are indulging in our usual trick of synthesizing something to worry about, and should really be thanking ourselves that we live the life we do. We may think ourselves parasites, complain about Mind-generated tales, and long for ‘genuine’ feelings, ‘real’ emotion, but we are missing the point, and indeed making a work of art ourselves in imagining such an uncomplicated existence is even possible. We have the best of it. The alternative is something like Earth, where as much as they suffer, for all that they burn with pain and confused, bewildered angst, they produce more dross than anything else; soap operas and quiz programmes, junk papers and pulp romances.

Worse than that, there is an osmosis from fiction to reality, a constant contamination which distorts the truth behind both and fuzzes the telling distinctions in life itself, categorizing real situations and feelings by a set of rules largely culled from the most hoary fictional clichés, the most familiar and received nonsense. Hence the soap operas, and those who try to live their lives as soap operas, while believing the stories to be true; hence the quizzes where the ideal is to think as close to the mean as possible, and the one who conforms utterly is the one who stands above the rest; the Winner…

They always had too many stories, I believe; they were too free with their acclaim and their loyalty, too easily impressed by simple strength or a cunning word. They worshipped at too many altars.”

––The State of the Art, by Iain M. Banks, pg. 201-2

“What happens if you’re in a room and you see a telephone, or you see a chair, an object, you wouldn’t understand what the chair is if you only saw it one way. You might see it as four sticks (and there’s a chapter on this in Society of Mind talking endlessly about a chair), but you see that thing as a structure there is a rigid horizontal platform, you know enough about sticks that somehow they hold the chair up. I don’t understand how chairs work actually because there are no triangles in them, and it’s amazing that they work at all. But you also understand it in a dozen other ways, you understand that the seat of the chair is this far off the floor and that is just about the same as the distance from your heels to your knees so it allows you to…your legs are independent from your hips, so it’s comfortable and there’s this back you can lean back on so that your vertebrae feel better and so forth. In other words, to understand a chair you have to know what a person feels like at different times, when you’re tired and so forth, and you also know how much it costs, and a dozen different things.

That is what Searle was missing, there was no such thing as understanding but what there is, I think, in the brain, one of the things that happens in these 400 different computers is that there are probably 5 or 10 different ways to represent…whenever you learn something, you not only learn it, you learn it in different representations. I know what that chair is like in the visual sense, I know what it feels like, how stiff the materials are, I know what happens when I walk across the room in the dark and stub my toe on it, because there is a correlation between walking in the dark and not having shoes on. The point is that no one way will tell you much.

Now why it is good to represent things in several ways? I bet that in this part of the brain you are representing things in terms of long-range planning, in scripts, the way the great Roger Shank describes. In another part of the brain, maybe around the language area, you are representing them as semantic networks which are not so well understood. Probably toward the back of the brain you are representing them in a sort of pictorial fashion, like when people are basically very bad at three dimensions, but you have little blotches of two dimensions and when you think of a chair you can think of how it looks from the front and from the side, and a little bit like this. So the reason why you can convince yourself that you can imagine the chair is because you have these many different ways of representing it.”

–– “Why Freud Was the First Good AI Theorist,” by Marvin Minsky, The Transhumanist Reader: Classical and Contemporary Essays on the Science, Technology, and Philosophy of the Human Future, eds. Max More and Natasha Vita-More, pg. 172-3