Shortcuts

The obsession with numbers, he said, means we don’t trust or even look for the intangibles that can’t be measured, like wisdom, judgment and expertise.

~ Tugend

Denial

It is the mistaken view that there are propositions, Quine mantains, that results in a mentalistic view of meaning and what he refers to as "the myth of the museum". This myth holds that there are specific mental states, for example, ideas or thoughts, that we express when we use language. Quine claims this is a mistake because, just as we can translate sentences in another language differently depending on which translation manual we choose, we can interpret the sentence we use to specify the content of a propositional attitude differently depending on which interpretation manual we choose. (Interpretation, for Quine, is logically comparable to translation. In both cases we are equating one set of words with another.) Imagine that someone tries to tell us that he or she believes that evolution ocurred by natural selection. Because Quine claims that we can give alternative interpretations, in our own words, of the sentence representing what is believed, he denies that there is anything determinate that the person believes. Because we can apply the indeterminancy thesis to our own inner discourse by translating our own words into different words in our language, Quine further denies that there is something determinate that we believe.

In the place of science of intentionality, Quine proposes the development of a thoroughly behavioristic analysis of human behavior. He acknowledges that we do use intentional idioms like believes in daily life to describe ourseleves and other, but, because such terms are groundless,they must be dispensed with when we return to science: "If we are limning the true and ultimate structure of reality, the canonical scheme for us is the austere scheme that knows no quotation but direct quotation and no propositional attitudes but only the physical constitution and behavior of organisms".

~ Quine

Interactivity

We can find a similar account of simulation’s sex appeal in the rise of multimedia computing, particularly for websites. Here the measure of computing power is most often presented in terms of “interactivity.” Yet formal assessments for interactivity, as could be produced through the Chomsky hierarchy, are never brought to bear. To understand this, it is useful to first examine similar questions about the assessment of intricate behavior in simple biological organisms. Spiders are not taught how to spin a web; the behavior is genetically programmed. Even semi- learned behaviors such as bird songs are often characterized as the result of a “serial pattern generator.” Tightly sequenced behaviors such as spider webs and bird songs can be modeled as finite state automata, because they require little adaptive interaction with their environment. They may appear to be complicated but they are in fact a “preprogrammed” sequence of actions. This stands in strong contrast to animal behaviors that require spontaneous interaction, as we see for example in the social cooperation of certain mammals (wolves, orca, primates, etc.). Even lone animals can show this kind of deep interactivity: A raccoon learning to raid lidded trash cans is clearly not clocking through a sequence of prepared movements.

In the same way, our interactions with websites can vary from “canned” interactions with a limited number of possible responses—pressing on various buttons resulting in various image or sound changes—to truly interactive experiences in which the user explores constructions in a design space or engages in other experiences with near- infinite variety. Such deep interactivity does not depend on the sophistication of the media. The 1970s video game of Pong, with its primitive low- resolution graphics, has far greater interactivity than a website in which a button press launches the most sophisticated 3- D fl y-though animation. As Fleischmann points out in his analysis of web media, rather than measure interactivity in terms of two- way mutual dependencies, commercial claims for interactivity depend on an “interrealism effect” that substitutes flashy video streaming or other one- way gimmicks for user control of the simulation. Such multimedia attempts to create the effect of interactive experience without relinquishing the producer’s control over the simulation. At least speed, for all its elitist ownership, has a quantitative measure that allows us to compare machines; for interactivity we have only the rhetoric of public relations. Even in cases in which we are not duped by this interrealism effect, and strive for deep interactivity, the informational limits of interactive computing power (the bandwidth of the two- way communication pipeline) is carefully doled out in accordance to social standing, with the most powerful using high- speed fiberoptic conduits of Internet II, lesser citizens using cable connections on Internet I, and the poorest segments of society making do with copper telephone wires—truly a “trickle- down” economy of interactivity.

~ Ron Eglash, 2008

User, goes here.

A	User-friendliness is a word that never should have been invented.
Q	What word should have been invented to connotate the idea?
A	The idea is wrong! It is a long story about the user, which I will try to condense. The point is that the computer user, as functioning in the development of computer products is not a real person of flesh and blood but a literary figure, the creation of literature, rather poor literature. 15 years ago I Inoticed that Dutch computer scientists developing products, when talking of the needs of the user would use—in the middle of a Dutch sentence—the American word user, which of course is perfectly translatable, as you and I both know. Our cigarette packages have english on them as well.........; but then I discovered that in spite of their anglophobia, the word user is perfect French. Then I discovered that it is also perfect Russian and the two of us also know more Japanese than you think. Well the mere fact that that little word is not translated, but it is taken over as a foreign body, in Dutch, French, Russian and Japanese discussions, means that it has lost its original meaning. Now, if you start to analyze the many character traits of that literary figure, you discover that he is most uninspiring. He is stupid, education resistant if not education proof, and he hates any form of intellectual demand made on him, he cannot be delighted by something beautiful, because he lacks the education to appreciate beauty. Large sections of computer science are paralyzed by accepting this moron as their typical customer. Rare are the computer companies that are prepared to make a Mercedes, the analog the high quality product for the discerning customer. As it turns out, particularly in the USA mathematics is the pinnacle of user unfriendliness, if you read the catalogs of text book publishers, then it is quite clear that the major recommendation that they give a book is that it is a-mathematical, that it does not require mathematical knowledge, etc. So, user friendliness is, among other things the cause of a frantic effort to hide the fact that eo ipso computers are mathematical machines.

--

Q

Speaking of programming bottlenecks—what will the impact of the research in artificial intelligence be?

A

Can you research something that is not science? I feel that the effort to use machines to try to mimic human reasoning is both foolish and dangerous. It is foolish because if you look at human reasoning as is, it is pretty lousy; even the most trained mathematicians are amateur thinkers. Instead of trying to imitate what we are good at, I think it is much more fascinating to investigate what we are poor at. It is foolish to use machines to imitate human beings, while machines are very good at being machines, and that is precisely something that human beings are very poor at. Any successful AI project by its very nature would castrate the machine.

~ Dijkstra

M

El gran enemigo de la creatividad es una buena memoria.

Oscar Wilde

Aquí

Pido perdón a los niños por haber dedicado este libro a una persona mayor. Tengo una seria excusa: esta persona mayor es el mejor amigo que tengo en el mundo. Tengo otra excusa: esta persona mayor es capaz de entenderlo todo, hasta los libros para niños. Tengo una tercera excusa: esta persona mayor vive en Francia, donde pasa hambre y frío. Verdaderamente necesita consuelo. Si todas esas excusas no bastasen, bien puedo dedicar este libro al niño que una vez fue esta persona mayor. Todos los mayores han sido primero niños. (Pero pocos lo recuerdan). Corrijo, pues, mi dedicatoria:

A LEON WERTH

CUANDO ERA NIÑO

"El hombre absurdo no puede sino agotarlo todo y agotarse. Lo absurdo es su tensión más extrema, la que él mantiene constantemente con un esfuerzo solitario, pues sabe que, con esta conciencia y esta rebelión, día a día testimonia su única verdad, que es el desafío." El Mito de Sísifo

El inmortal

Solomon saith: There is no new thing upon the earth. So that as Plato had an imagination, that all knowledge was but remembrance; so Solomon given his sentence, that all novelty is but oblivion.

Francis Bacon

más cerca

El mal radical

Que el mundo está en mal es una queja tan antigua como la historia; incluso como el arte poético, más antiguo aún; igualmente vieja incluso que la más antigua de todas las poesías, la Religión sacerdotal. Sin embargo, todos hacen empezar el mundo por el bien: por la Edad de Oro, por la vida en el Paraíso o por una vida más dichosa aún, en comunidad con seres celestes. Pero dejan pronto desaparecer esta dicha como un sueño; y es entonces la caída en el mal (el mal moral, con el cual siempre fue a la par el físico) lo que para desgracia hacen correr en acelerado desplome, de modo que ahora (pero este ahora es tan antiguo como la historia) vivimos en lo último del tiempo, el último día y la ruina del mundo están a la puerta y en algunos parajes del Indostán el juez y destructor del mundo Ruttren (también llamado Siba o Siwen) es venerado ya como el dios que ahora tiene el poder, después de que el mantenedor del mundo Vischnú, cansado de su cargo, que recibió del creador del mundo Brahma, se ha desprendido de él ya desde hace siglos.

Más nueva, pero mucho menos extendida, es la opinión heroica opuesta, que ha encontrado sitio sólo entre filósofos y en nuestra época particularmente entre pedagogos: que el mundo progresa precisamente en dirección contraria, a saber: de lo malo a lo mejor, sin detenerse (bien que de modo apenas observable), que al menos se encuentra en el hombre la disposición a ello. Con seguridad, esta opinión no la han obtenido de la experiencia, si se trata del bien o el mal moral (no de la civilización); pues la historia de todos los tiempos habla demasiado poderosamente en contra; más bien se trata, probablemente, de un benévolo supuesto de los moralistas, de Séneca a Rousseau, para impulsar al cultivo infatigable del germen del bien que se encuentra quizá en nosotros, con tal que se pudiese contar con una base natural para ello en el hombre. A ello se añade que, pues hay que aceptar al hombre por naturaleza (esto es: tal como habitualmente nace) como sano según el cuerpo, no hay ninguna causa para no aceptarlo igualmente como sano y bueno por naturaleza según el alma. Así pues, para desarrollar en nosotros esta disposición moral al bien, la naturaleza misma nos sería propicia. Sanabilibus aegrotamus malis nosque in rectum genitos natura, si sanari velimus, adiuvat,* dice Séneca.

* «Sufrimos de males curables, y la naturaleza, si queremos ser curados, nos ayuda, a nosotros, que hemos sido engendrados para el bien.»

Immanuel Kant.

From that place

Whenever I recall it,

I become painfully aware that I am not who I was before.

~ The Voice of Being ~

Program morality

Premature optimization is the root of all evil.

Donald Knuth