January 07, 2004
Nature and Beauty
"If nature were not beautiful, it would not be worth knowing.
If nature were not worth knowing, life would not be worth living." Henri Poincare
"Beauty is the internal conformation of the various items of experience with each other, for the production of maximum effectiveness…. Thus the parts contribute to the massive feeling of the whole, and the whole contributes to the intensity of feeling of the parts…. The teleology of the Universe is directed to the production of beauty.
Creation is the intensification of beauty"
Whitehead, "Adventure of Ideas." (pgs. 341, 324)
Theories about theories
Still Mitchel Resnick: "....move away from the notion of a single, absolute, unifying conception of knowledge, arguing instead that knowledge is constantly constructed and reconstructed in a more decentralized way."
Example: Literary Criticism
"Traditional theory of literature assumed that meaning was created by an author and conveyed through the author's writings. According to this view, reading is a search for inherent meaning in a document, an attempt to decipher the intention of the author. But modern school of literary criticism -- such as poststructuralism, reader-response theory, and deconstructionism - adopt a very different stance. These movements all focus on readers (not authors) as the main constructors of meaning. In this new view, text have little or no inherent meaning. Rather, meaning are constantly reconstructed by communities of readers through their interactions with the text. Meaning itself has become decentralized."
Another example: feminist studies
"Since different voices are often valued differently in our society, the idea of multiple voices takes on a political edge. Formal, logical, abstract, and analytical ways of thinking, typically associated with men, have been privileged in our society -- viewed as superior, more advanced, more likely to lead to "truth." On the other hand, relational and contextual ways of thinking, typically associated with women, have been undervalued and discouraged. "
" the "dominant epistemology" that grants privileged status to abstract, formal, and logical ways of thinking" are now being challenged. The idea of "alternative epistemology" is that there are multiple ways of thinking and knowing. "People are recognizing that knowledge speaks not with a single voice but with many."
Self and Mind
From Resnick: "Relationships with people in the world are internalized as agents or objects within the mind. ......the self emerges from the interactions among the internalized objects."
"Current models of the mind differ significantly from one another. For example, neural networks are based on an architecture of simple, homogeneous, highly connected components, while the Society of Mind is based on an architecture of complex, specialized, semi-insulated subsystems."
January 06, 2004
Images of Networks
This is the image gallery of Self-Organized networks.
And this is from
Physics Department, University of Notre Dame.
"Mediology" Link
You cannot say you like the sound of this word but curious about what it means. From another Norweigian blogger Joe Hoem you have found this old article in 1995 Wired and this relatively new book by Lev Manovich.
Twenty-seven years ago, French radical theoretician Régis Debray was sentenced by a Bolivian military tribunal to 30 years in jail. He had been captured with the guerrilla band led by Ernesto "Che" Guevara, Fidel Castro's legendary lieutenant. Released after three years, largely because of the intervention of compatriots such as President Charles de Gaulle, André Malraux, and Jean-Paul Sartre, Debray returned to writing. (His 1967 Revolution in the Revolution is considered a primer for guerrilla insurrection.) He spent five years in the early '80s as a special advisor on Latin American relations to French President François Mitterrand.
Creating a discipline he calls "mediology," Debray has investigated how it is that abstract ideas can end up as world-changing ideologies. Today, he is developing a new theory of the transmission of ideas through history, to grasp how words become flesh, ideas ideologies.
(X: Coming back to Six Degree again. Ring a bell?)
Régis Debray: "I would make an analogy between what I call mediology and the strategy of the neurosciences. While the neurosciences are dedicated to overcoming the inherited duality between mind and brain, mediology tries to view history by hybridizing technology and culture. It focuses on the intersections between technology and intellectual life."
"As Thomas Edison said a century ago, "whoever controls the film industry will control the most powerful influence over people." And today that means everyone on the planet. Images govern our dreams, and our dreams drive our actions. "
"The machine offered Descartes a model for thinking about the human body. It later provided British mathematician Alan Turing with a model for intelligent behavior. But machines will never be able to give the thinking process a model of thought itself, since machines are not mortal. What gives humans access to the symbolic domain of value and meaning is the fact that we die. "
(X: Freeman Dyson had a same point about beauty in his Disturbing the Universe.)
January 05, 2004
eLiterature
Electronic Literature Organization has been there for a while. You just heard this project from tonight's dinner.
......a new, reader-influenced way of story-reading......Often thought of as a mere resource for fact-finding, the Web is fast becoming a place where cutting-edge authors and poets can create literature using hypertext as a whole new set of tools -- with a whole new set of problems.
According to Robert Coover, "......hypertext, in its most simple way, is a multi-linear set of images or texts navigated by links. And it's the link that's the key to hypertext. A link is also that very peculiar element of the computer itself. "
游戏高手初听关联论
《复杂》节选 ：“他记得这项研究始于1952年春季，当时他正在听麻省理工学院心理学家利克莱德（J．C．R．Licklider）的演讲。利克莱德前来访问普夫吉普斯实验室，同意就当时该领域最热门的话题，蒙特利尔麦克吉尔大学的神经生理学家唐纳德·希伯（Donald O．Hebb）关于学习和记忆的新理论，做这个演讲。”
”利克莱德解释说，问题是，在显微镜下，大脑的大部分都呈现出一片混沌，每一个细胞都随意发出数千条纤维，与数千计其他神经细胞随意相连。然而，这些稠密相连的网络又显然不是随意组成的。一个健康的大脑能够前后连贯地形成感觉、思想和行动。更重要的是，大脑显然不是静止不变的。它可以通过吸取经验来改善和调整自己的行为。它可以学习。但问题是，它是怎样学习的？
在三年前的1949年，希伯在他出版的《行为组织》（The Organization of Behavior）一书中作出了他的回答。他的基本思想是，假设大脑经常在“突触”上做些微妙的变化。突触是神经冲动从这个细胞跳到那个细胞的连接点。这个假设对希伯来说是非常大胆的，因为当时他对此还没有任何证据。但希伯为这一假设阐述说，这些突触上的变化正是所有学习和记忆的基础。比如说，通过眼睛视觉的感官冲动会通过加强沿途所有突触的方式在它的神经网络上留下痕迹。差不多的情形同样会发生在由耳进入的听觉神经系统、或大脑内其它脑际活动。结果是，随意启动的网络会迅速将自己组织起来。通过某种正反馈，经验被积累了起来：强健的、经常被使用的突触会变得更强健，而弱小、不经常使用的突触会萎缩。被经常使用的突触最后强健到一定程度以后，记忆就被锁定了。这些记忆反过来又会布满整个大脑，每一个突触都与一个复杂的突触形态相对应，这些突触形态包含了成千上万个神经元。（希伯是最先描述这种分布记忆的人之一，这种描述后来被称为“关联论”（connectionist）。）
但希伯的思想还不止这些。利克莱德在演讲中还解释了希伯的第二个假设：有选择的突触强化会导致大脑自组成“细胞集合”——几千个神经元的子结合，其中循环神经冲动会自我强化，继续循环。希伯认为这些细胞集合就是大脑基本的信息建设砖块。每一个细胞集合都与一种声调、一束光线或某种思想的一闪念相对应。但这种细胞集合在生理上并没有特别之处。确实，它们相互重叠，任何一个神经元同属于好几个细胞集合。而且因为如此，一个细胞集合的行动势必带动其他细胞集合的动作，这样，这些基本的建设砖块就会迅速自组成为更大规模的概念和更复杂的行为。总之，细胞集合就是思想的基本量子。
荷兰德坐在听众席上听得呆若木鸡。 “
January 04, 2004
A brief crack of light
"The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more clam than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour)."
----- Vladimir Nabokov 《Speak Memory》p19