Why are we here?

Darwin:

• Natural selection is about survival
• Natural selection rewards tiny changes
• Natural selection explains how but not why
• We are here only long enough to pass on our genes
• This is the reason we are here

Richard Dawkins provides an answer to this existential question from a scientific perspective. Dawkins argues that we appear to be breaking Darwin’s rules through technological progress. What does this mean? In Dawkins view, evolution explains how we came into the world with the basic goals to survive or reproduce. But we freed ourselves from spending all our time passing on our genes. The thing that freed us from our genes was also the result of natural selection: the human brain. Natural selection rewarded a genetic advantage. Our brains got bigger and evolved the ability to set goals. We evolved the capacity to seek, to strive, and to set up short term goals in support of long term ones. The brain also gained the capacity to ask why. We were no longer content with what nature told us to do. Language became a tool. We adopted purposeful behavior through the communication of goals that benefit more than an individual. We accelerated the pace of evolution through technology which is currently evolving millions of times faster than genetic evolution. We created a technological world that enabled us to move faster, alleviate hunger, and cure disease. We started living longer. We invented with purpose. There was no purposeful design in nature. Powered by our technical progress, we explored the universe. We looked across the vacuum of space, backward in time to the birth of the universe. At the other extreme we looked at sub-atomic particles. We dissected the living cell and unraveled the digital code of genes. We hacked ourselves.

Dawkins explains that we provide the purpose in a universe that would otherwise have none. We are in charge. Why we are here resides in us.

The Emotion Machine: Consciousness

The word consciousness troubles Minsky in Chapter 4, The Emotion Machine, as do other words that are often used to describe what's going on inside our brains. Minsky calls them “suitcase words”. That is, words that have been around for centuries and carry too much meaning, like intelligence or cognition. These words point to multiple levels of mental activities, but too often over-simplify rather than explain. Suitcase words need to be unpacked. Chapter 4 argues that suitcase words may also preserve outdated concepts. Long ago, it was thought that a “vital force” explained life in living organisms. A vital force simply infused with the body of an organism to give it life. This belief was widely held before biology explained life as a massive collection of different processes that go on inside cells and membranes replete with intricate biological machinery. Consciousness, Minsky argues, doesn’t explain what happens inside the brain any more than the vital force explains what happens inside living organisms. It’s simply an outdated concept.

Also, an insight about brain evolution in this chapter suggests that the structures in our brains are massively redundant as “large parts of our brains work mainly to correct mistakes that other parts make” because “while some structures worked well in earlier times, they now behave in dangerous ways, so we had to evolve corrections for them.” This is one reason Minsky thinks human psychology is so difficult, because for every rule of thought that psychologists define, there are long lists of exceptions, given our evolutionary brain baggage. As soon as I find a good example of a dangerous behavior that evolution has corrected, I'll capture it.

The Emotion Machine

Read the first two chapters of The Emotion Machine, Minsky 2006. Chapter 1, “Falling in Love”, explains love in mechanical terms and argues that machines could possess the capacity to fall in love, simply by abandoning their critical faculties and forsaking most of their usual goals: “Love can make us disregard most defects and deficiencies, and make us deal with blemishes as though they were embellishments.” Love is a state in which the usual questions and doubts about someone are suppressed. Minsky describes the emotions we usually associate with love: passion, devotion, allegiance, affection, companionship, connection, as a variety of processes, that once triggered, lead us to think in different ways:

When a person you know has fallen in love, it’s almost as though someone new has emerged--a person who thinks in other ways, with altered goals and priorities. It’s almost as though a switch had been thrown and a different program has started to run. 

Minsky questions our understanding of loaded words such as emotion. We can’t learn much from a dictionary definition of  the word because a definition only hides what is really a “range of states” too complex to comprehend. He explains mood changes, say from angry to happy, as highly complex mental state changes. And mental states, in Minsky's theories of the mind, are based on the use of many small processes.

The idea of an instinct machine is introduced in this chapter. Minsky explains that three things happen inside an instinct machine: it knows how to recognize situations through sensors, it has some knowledge about how to react to them, and it uses muscles or motors to take action. In an instinct machine, sensors activate motors.

In trying to understand an emotion, an old question, what are emotions and thoughts? should be replaced by what processes are involved in an emotion?

The Emotion Machine

Started to read The Emotion Machine, by Marvin Minksy, first published in 2006. I remember the first time I read about Minsky. It was in Steve Levy’s Hackers, the chapter about the old days at MIT, during Richard Greenblatt’s sophomore year when he wrote a FORTRAN compiler for the PDP-1:

Someone like Marvin Minksy might happen along and say “Here is a robot arm. I am leaving this robot arm by the machine.” Immediately, nothing in the world is as essential as making the proper interface between the machine and the robot arm, and putting the robot arm under your control, and figuring a way to create a system where the robot arm knows what the hell it is doing. Then you can see your offspring come to life.

- Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, 1984

Book Structure

Considering “The Impact of 3D Printing” as a possible subject for a book. Also giving consideration to different book structures, division into chapters, and basic metrics per chapter, per paragraph, to support an argument, to make points, provide insights, and to cite sources. I wrote a 10-page article a while back that was divided into four main sections wrapped by an introduction and a conclusion. Simple. Each of the sections barely scratched the surface and I had a single source cited in the introduction. For a book-length project, 200-300 pages, I simply can’t begin without defining an overall structure.

How many sources? How about ten books (or sources) per chapter? A 10-chapter book would then cite 100 books (or sources). If each chapter devotes 5 paragraphs to a book or to a source, that works out to 50 paragraphs per chapter. A five-paragraph treatment of a book is a mini-essay. Let's say a mini-essay is structured as an opening argument paragraph, followed by three supporting paragraphs, and a conclusion paragraph. Since a single page accommodates around 2 paragraphs, and a full chapter would contain 50 paragraphs, every 2 mini-essays would span 2 double-sided pages or 15 pages per chapter. You can then think of the book as a series of 5-paragraph, 2 and a half page mini-essays. The book would contain 10 x 10 (10 mini-essays x 10 chapters), or one-hundred mini-essays. That’s 150 pages. With a 10-page intro and a 10-page conclusion, that’s a 170 page book right there.

So I would need to focus on writing 5-paragraph mini-essays. Once I write 100 of these and connect them, I will have a book length work. How long will it take? I think I can write 2 high quality mini-essays per week. I’m talking really polished here. That’s just 10 paragraphs a week, or, 50 weeks total. That also works out to 4 essays per month, or, a chapter every 2.5 months.

Now, this breakdown is calculated as if I were making steady progress like a well-calibrated little writing machine. But I know that I will write absolutely nothing on some days, not a word, and maybe write 5-times the required daily average on others.

Amazon books came in Monday 12/15! When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management (2001) by Roger Lowenstein,  Myths of Rich and Poor:Why We’re Better Off Than We Think  (1999) by W. Michael Cox and Richard Alm, and The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains (2010) by Nicholas Carr.

Read chapters 1 through 7 of Lowenstein’s Rise and Fall of LTCM. Also read the first five chapters of Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows while note taking in the margins and underlining this and that. Carr hasn’t talked about the brain as much as I thought he would have in the first five chapters. He cites some study about monkeys with severed hand nerves and the corresponding rewiring in the brain at  the synaptic level, but there’s not much science there.

Found several The New Yorker pdf torrents. Printed at work. Also read a few New York Times book reviews from 100 Notable Books of 2014. Started "Book Log" blog entries to hone in on a research topic.

Books

Ordered several books cited by Lanham in The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information (2006). Also found a chapter from Katherine Hayles How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis (2012), in pdf. Read carefully and extracted citation styles, that is, how she cites research. Also bought a copy of: The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains (2011) by Nicholas Carr. A trip to Barnes and Noble’s “Science” shelves, opposite “Math”. The Math section is replete with Dummies books.

Giftedness

My daughter was identified as gifted in the 3nd grade and was enrolled into California's Gifted and Talented Education (GATE) program. Some quotes, definitions, and general descriptions of giftedness:

Like a talent, intellectual giftedness is usually believed to be an innate, personal aptitude for intellectual activities that cannot be acquired through personal effort.

Gifted individuals experience the world differently, resulting in certain social and emotional issues. 

Joseph Renzulli's (1978) "three ring" definition of giftedness is one well-researched conceptualization of giftedness. Renzulli’s definition, which defines gifted behaviors rather than gifted individuals, is composed of three components as follows: gifted behavior consists of behaviors that reflect an interaction among three basic clusters of human traits—above average ability, high levels of task commitment, and high levels of creativity. 

Generally, gifted individuals learn more quickly, deeply, and broadly than their peers. 

They may also be physically and emotionally sensitive, perfectionistic, and may frequently question authority.

Many gifted individuals experience various types of heightened awareness and may seem overly sensitive. For example, picking up on the feelings of someone close to them, having extreme sensitivity to their own internal emotions, and taking in external information at a significantly higher rate than those around them. These various kinds of sensitivities often mean that the more gifted an individual is, the more input and awareness they experience, leading to the contradiction of them needing more time to process than others who are not gifted.

Healthy perfectionism refers to having high standards, a desire to achieve, conscientiousness, or high levels of responsibility. It is likely to be a virtue rather than a problem, even if gifted children may have difficulty with healthy perfectionism because they set standards that would be appropriate to their mental age (the level at which they think), but they cannot always meet them because they are bound to a younger body, or the social environment is restrictive. In such cases, outsiders may call some behavior perfectionism, while for the gifted this may be their standard.