Back to School or Rising From Summer Hibernation

So, the busy life is starting again for most of you. You need to start dragging your ass to class and staying awake to study instead of partying. To revitalize the blog, here's a few links for help on getting back on that horse:

Living Healthy on College Campus

College is full of temptations, including, but not limited to credit cards, alcohol, study drugs (and otherwise), and frat parties on weekdays. Why complicate that with an unhealthy life otherwise?

Social Flash Carding

FlashCardMachine lets anyone create study flash cards and share them with others for free. Sign up and create your own flashcards in different subjects, organize them into sets, reorder and copy cards within a set and insert images and audios. You can share your flashcard set(s) with others who study the same subject by forwarding its URL, which they can access and study without registering.

How To Take Notes

If your note-taking skills are suffering from summertime rigor mortis, now's as good a time as any to throw a new technique into the mix. Let's take a look at some new and old tools for improving your ballpoint repertoire.

What Needs to be Done in the First Week

With the start of the academic year, it's time to switch out of vacation mode—pronto. What you do the first week of classes can majorly impact your grades four months from now, so don't skip these first week must-dos

Keep an eye on LifeHacker's Back to School Section and HackCollege in the next few weeks for more tips and tricks, that's what these sites are good for.

I will attempt to write at least two posts per week, one covering Aesthetics and one covering Artificial Intelligence (as these are my two classes this semester.)

Take care all, keep your noses in them books!

Philosophy Tuesday: Beckett's Waiting for Godot - May 12th

The folks at ##philosophy would like to invite you all on our first Philosophy Tuesday, hoping to set up a trend of constructive discussions aiming to enlighten the world of philosophy in a more informal manner.

We've decided to kick it off with Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett, a staple of the literary cannon, which we hope will offer us provocative views and much food for thought.

The first part of the first act of the film can be watched on YouTube here.
We will post the remaining acts during the presentation and will be posting them in real-time the channel. You can find them yourself in the Related Videos section in the YouTube link.

We hope you will all us join on Freenode's ##philosophy channel on Tuesday, May 12th at ___PM EST.

To join the channel through Mibbit (In-Browser)
http://mibbit.com/chat/?server=irc.freenode.net&channel=%23%23philosophy

Through your favorite IRC Client:
Server: irc.freenode.net
Channel: ##philosophy


Watch Waiting for Godot:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WoC9Kx5QvK0

Read on Waiting for Godot:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waiting_for_Godot
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Beckett

Storytelling Philosophy

I speak here of 'philosophy' in the 'way of life' sense, rather than a psychological model of common man. Not everyone can follow this path, but creatives who feel the calling will find life to be sublime in its essence. It is beautiful in its flow, but potentially deadly for the characters in it.

From my point of view,
There is my body and motor functions, the character in a story. The Actor.
There are my senses, receiving the constant unfolding of the story. The Audience.
There is the feedback between the Actor and the Audience, influencing the story together. The Creator.

The goal of the Creator is to make it the most beautiful story, as a somewhat structured narrative. The beauty of it can only be gazed upon from my own point of view, since there is no way to transfer my senses on another medium, short of reducing the quality drastically (like writing the story or making a play.) It is important to highlight the fact that it is the beauty of the story that is important, and not the happiness of the Actor as such. I am but a tool to my own story, if there would happen to be suffering, the story will not take a hit, for the beauty lies in the patterns of highs and lows, as a note is not beautiful alone, while melody is exquisite in its arrangements.

Of course, there is only a somewhat limited influence from the Actor toward the story. There is much of the story that is unpredictable, but that only makes it more interesting. The Creator struggles to fit themes and order in the chaotic environment that surrounds the story, leaving trails of plot holes and unfinished storylines.

More on the ramifications and disadvantages of that later.
Have a nice evening.

[On a side note, An Evening with Kevin Smith in Toronto today was highly entertaining. Charismatic man and disturbingly in love with Wayne Gretzky and his father.]

Turing's 'What seems like consciousness should be treated as if it is consciousness'

One of Turing's main argument for the Turing Test is proposed like so:

"According to the most extreme form of this view the only way by which one could be sure that a machine thinks is to be the machine and to feel oneself thinking. One could then describe these feelings to the world, but of course no one would be justified in taking any notice. Likewise according to this view the only way to know that a man thinks is to be that particular man. It is in fact the solipsist point of view. It may be the most logical view to hold but it makes communication of ideas difficult. A is liable to believe 'A thinks but B does not' whilst B believes 'B thinks but A does not'. Instead of arguing continually over this point it is usual to have the polite convention that everyone thinks." (1936)

Art
It seems that Turing makes no distinction between the intent behind the action and the action itself. If you take art for example, can we say that something is art if the author of the piece did not have an intent based on emotion?
John Lennon's quote can help us bring into light what we are trying to convey here.

"My role in society, or any artist's or poet's role, is to try and express what we all feel. Not to tell people how to feel. Not as a preacher, not as a leader, but as a reflection of us all.")

What if computers could make art that is based on emotions? In this case, what the computer is doing is not a reflection of itself, but a reflection of the subject, based on the emotion-cues it has received from him. It would then be possible to have an object of art created by a machine that is based on emotion, but we're still stopping short of what we humans do when we create art, what is lacking is 'the spirit with which we are moved by art' inherently in the machine.

Perhaps what we need is a model based on art created to convey meanings that cannot be expressed in words, a computer with its symbol system based off sensory cues (not only words) would produce its own point of view, its own synthesis of the world impressed by his senses. In which case, it would also have a hard time explaining succinctly what it is trying to convey into words (Perhaps it would even have to create new words if he tried to convey everything into word).

What we might be looking for is not only a system that can make and understand metaphors using that symbol system, but also one that is not meta-goal oriented. A machine that does not inherently have one goal that takes priority over all the other ones (or one that makes its own meta-goals, although this could lead to a Paperclip Universe)

The fact remains, it seems that the general consensus is that a computer that cannot make art cannot be fully conscious, let alone pass for a human. Art is deeply ingrained in our way of being (I'm particularly a fan of Goffman's Dramaturgical Model)

Neural Networks

It seems that much advance has been done in trying to reproduce the workings of the brain into a neural network, so as to give rise to consciousness.

The human brain takes care of many more things than simply the mind or its intelligence. Jeff Hawkins, the founder of Palm Computing, has delved on the origin of human intelligence in his book 'On Intelligence'. He advances the idea that what is needed to create an intelligent being like a human is a neocortex, the thin, outer layer of our brain. Of course, the rest of the brain is needed to support this neocortex, but when we learn the algorithms behind the model, we can learn how to build one without the need for the biological support. After all, if it were to be built in a virtual environment, there is no reason for the created mind to obey the same constraining laws we have in our own mortal state.

Jeff Hawkins sets up the neocortex as a system of biofeedback in which neurons receive input from sensory organs and are able to "call back" those inputs in a series of hierarchal ordered layers which we perceive as our imagination and thought. This gives rise to self-reflection and a self-reliant process of possible reorganization of these layers. In order to reproduce this effect, we would not need to recreate the thirty billion cells of our neocortex and their interactions. We could simply recreate the hierarchical system that the neocortex implements.

One of the most interesting neural models is The Liquid State Machine. It is based on the idea that one stimulation on one part of the machine will 'ripple' throughout the rest of the machine, as a rock dropped on the surface of a liquid.

More on this later.



Works Cited

1. Turing, Alan. Computing Machinery and Intelligence. 1936
http://www.loebner.net/Prizef/TuringArticle.html

2. The computer that paints emotions - London blog - on Nature Network (at network.nature.com)
http://network.nature.com/hubs/london/blog/2008/01/25/the-computer-that-paints-emotions

3. Computer understanding of conventional metaphoric language - CiteSeerX (at citeseerx.ist.psu.edu)
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.30.7354

4. Dramaturgy (sociology) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dramaturgy_(sociology)

5. Kogs' Happy Blog: The Philosophical Implications of the Mind Modeled as a Machine
http://kogsworth.blogspot.com/2009/01/philosophical-implications-of-mind.html

6. Liquid state machine - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_state_machine

A Fresh Start

Hello philosophers,

It seems that if you truly love wisdom, as the philosopher's name suggests, you would not keep it to yourself as a jealous lover might. It would seem most natural to share and enjoy the noble pursuit of Knowledge and Truth.

That is why we, the people on Freenode's ##philosophy channel, have taken it upon ourselves to spread the channel discussions to anyone willing to lend an ear (or an eye, to be precise).

Feel free to comment, discuss and eat up as much philosophy as you can, for it would be hard to find more noble an action than the spreading of love, be it of wisdom or of any other good.

Thank you, hope you'll keep reading!