August 08, 2006: Embracing Chaos

I would like to continue my reflections on Isaiah Berlin's Crooked Timber of Humanity, briefly alluded to yesterday. This time I would like to explore his idea that the conception of knowledge that came out of the Romantic Sturm und Drang movement in Germany is grounded in chaos, rather than order. Here is a relevant passage from Berlin (not as terse and therefore rather more typical than the one cited yesterday):

For Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis, for Wackenroder and Tieck and Chamisso, above all for E. T. A. Hoffmann, the tidy regularities of daily life are but a curtain to conceal the terrifying spectacle of true reality, which has no structure, but is a wild whirlpool, a perpetual tourbillon of the creative spirit which no system can capture: life and motion cannot be represented by immobile, lifeless concepts, nor the infinite and unbounded by the finite and the fixed. A finished work of art, a systematic treatise, are attempts to freeze the flowing stream of life; only fragments, intimations, broken glimpses can begin to convey the perpetual movement of reality. The prophet of Strum und Drang, Hamann, had said that the practical man was a somnambulist, secure and successful because he was blind; if he could see, he would go mad, for nature is ‘a wild dance’, and the irregulars of life – outlaws, beggars, vagabonds, the visionary, the sick, the abnormal – are closer to it than French philosophers, officials, scientists, sensible men, pillars of the enlightened bureaucracy: ‘The tree of knowledge has robbed us of the tree of life.’ The early German Romantic plays and novels are inspired by an attempt to expose the concept of a stable, intelligible structure of reality which calm observers describe, classify, dissect, predict, as a sham and a delusion, a mere curtain of appearances designed to protect those not sensitive or brave enough to face the truth from the terrifying chaos beneath the false order of bourgeois existence.

In twentieth-century America this spirit may best have been captured by Henry Miller (yes!), who, in Tropic of Capricorn, wrote, "Confusion is a word we have invented for an order which is not understood."

I have to insert a digression here. My first teaching job was at the Technion in Haifa. I began in the fall of 1971, and the first course I had to teach was in data structures. At the time the only source was Fundamental Algorithms, the first volume of Knuth's uncompleted project, Art of Computer Programming. This book was both too expensive and too locked into Knuth's own invented machine language to serve particularly well as a textbook, so I prepared my own notes to distribute to the students. However, I was inspired by Knuth's indulgence in literary quotations (as were many of my contemporaries); so I could not resist showing off my reading background. Therefore, I began my notes with the above quotation from Tropic of Capricorn, a book that did a lot to help me maintain my personal sense of identity and sanity during my first experience as an expatriate!

I think it is important to appreciate the significance of the Miller-Berlin perspective because we are seeing the anarchic nature of the Internet coming into confrontation with our "inescapable universal" (to borrow a phrase from Max Weber) fixation on bureaucratic organizational forms in the worlds of both work and government. After all, the Internet is probably the only successful anarchy the world has seen since the Ancient Greeks took it upon themselves to invent the concepts of government and politics; but we are so terrified by the prospect of "an order which is not understood" that we desperately try to impose it on the Internet, whether through the Semantic Web, "neutrality" regulation, or God-knows-what-else.

This is not to say that anarchy is not scary. Berlin is right: It takes bravery "to face the truth from the terrifying chaos beneath the false order of bourgeois existence." If it is any help, we can bear in mind the principle that the order is not so much false as it is subjective. One of the things that Jeff Hawkins did not seem to get in all of his waxing on intelligence is that our brains have a natural inclination to impose order on their stimuli. Gerald Edelman called this perceptual categorization and made it the foundation of his own attempts to model the nature of intelligence (which he has tried to substantiate with studies of "wet brain" behavior). What we fear, then, is not that we cannot grasp order in the midst of the confusion but that the order that I grasp may not (probably will not) be the same order that you grasp. Now back in the Sturm und Drang days, Fichte tried to teach us that we should not fear this, that it is through this I-you opposition that each of us develops our own self-awareness (and, while Edelman does not explicitly invoke Fichte, his model of consciousness is definitely sympathetic to Fichte's philosophy). Thus, we can understand the confusion; and, if we are bold enough to let our understanding confront the understandings of others, then we can only benefit from the growth of our own self-awareness. Given all the different ways in which both government and media seem hell-bent on cultivating a culture of fear, the last thing we need to do is waste our cycles on fear of anarchy.

One final point: The way in which Berlin characterizes the Strum und Drang conception of reality is very much verb-based, rather than noun-based. On the other hand the whole "culture of organization," which has invaded our educational system as much as the worlds of business and government, is, by its very nature, noun-based. We have to get beyond the myth we have cultivated that reasoning can only take place when we "freeze the flowing stream of life." Berlin demonstrated how to get beyond the myth in his "Political Judgement" essay. Perhaps it is time to unravel (with "burning patience," as Neruda put it) all of his elaborate sentence constructions and see what those sentences are actually structuring!

July 11, 2006: Whose Intelligence is it Anyway?

My primary reaction upon completing Jeff Hawkins' On Intelligence seems to be, "I should have stopped after Chapter 6!" My "corollary" reaction, so to speak, is one of my favorite clichés: "To a small boy with a hammer, everything looks like a nail." If Hawkins were an admirer of Keats (which I suspect he is not), he would probably say, "Intelligence is neocortex; neocortex is intelligence. That is all you know on earth and all you need to know."

The problem is that this does not necessarily wash. As I had previously observed, when you take such a narrow view of the brain, that brain may as well be in a vat; and, when Hawkins turns his attention to "The Future of Intelligence" (Chapter 8), it seems as if he does not think that such a vat is that bad an idea. Now I do not want these final remarks on Hawkins' book to be a matter of choosing sides. I think that there is a lot of subtle philosophy that still needs to be worked dealing with the relationship between mind (wherever it may reside, if it "resides" at all) and body and the implications of that relationship upon being itself. This is neither the time nor the place to deep-end on that philosophy (although Hawkins has certainly provided me with the incentive to study it in greater depth)! Instead, I shall bring my own rant to closure through a single observation:

The Hawkins model of intelligence is totally autonomous: Intelligence emerges through sensorimotor interactions with the rest of the world, but I doubt that anyone (including Hawkins) would call such interactions "social." So, for the sake of argument, let us assume that we all live long enough to see Hawkins' model implemented in some realistically operational fashion; and let us further assume that his implementation has at least some of the scale-up properties (such as capacity or speed) that interest him so much. Would we (the all-too-human) be able to engage with these artifacts for our own benefit? My guess is that we would not. We probably would not even be able to communicate with them in natural language because of our radical differences in context. (This would be a living example of the Wittgenstein quip: "If a lion could talk, we would not understand him.") So it could very well be that Hawkins knows how to build devices that would make the world a better place, but who's world would it be? This is not meant to be a defeatist position that celebrates weaknesses that we have that we may never overcome; it is just a pragmatic suggestion that all of us can do no better that play with the cards dealt to us. At the end of the day, I suppose I am just a Voltairian meliorist!

June 15, 2006: On Intelligence?

I have to begin by saying that I am always skeptical when anyone, even a close friend, tells me I absolutely must read a book. This is the way I was introduced to On Intelligence, by Jeff Hawkins (with the assistance of Sandra Blakeslee); and I am writing this to give some sense of the way I felt when I checked the book out of the San Francisco Public Library. While I do not always judge a book on the basis of the most immediate first impressions, the "Prologue" had such an impact that I figured I had better set down my thoughts while they are fresh. My most important observation is that I think I have already read the punch line (the memory-prediction model, or at least something with a strong family resemblance to it). I had to do a bit of digging; but I am pretty sure I came across this story in Karl Pribram's Languages of the Brain, which I read when I was teaching at the University of Pennsylvania. This book came out in 1971. On the one hand I am surprised that Hawkins did not find it in his local library, since the timing would have been about right; and I remember Pribram being the first author I encountered who tried to write with clarity about how the brain worked. (A major theme in Hawkins' "Prologue" is that he decided to write this book because he has been looking for a book about how they brain works ever since his youth.) On the other hand I discovered that the book was neither in the San Francisco Public Library or in any of the on-line collections I managed to find with the help of My Web 2.0. I have not kept up with my reading of Pribram to determine whether his more recent stuff still holds to the same model; but the appearance of "holonomy" in the subtitle of Brain and Perception leads me to believe that his basic theme is still there.

So I am not going to fault Hawkins for being unaware of Pribram, even if I find it a bit strange that he did not encounter the material over the last 25 years. (Pribram seems to have been on Howard Gardner's radar.) Where I am more skeptical is what I would call the extreme reductionism of Hawkins' position that essentially abstracts out anything that has to do with behavior. The result is that "it's all about the brain;" and that brain may as well be in a vat, rather than integrated into a "whole body" system. (Having made that extreme reduction, I can then appreciate that he takes it one more step to "it's all about the neocortex.") So he writes off the body as relevant context for the brain, which means that he also writes off the social context of the body.

None of this means that I shall dismiss the book. I intend to take advantage of the fact that I have it for at least three weeks. However, both my enthusiasm and my expectations have diminished. I am still willing to believe that there is value in what Hawkins has achieved, but the framework may be narrower than the title leads one to believe. This, I fear, is a standard symptom of techno-centric thinking: Carve off the slice of the problem that you think you can work and then posit it to be the whole ball of wax!