"We have a false model of what thinking is"

This is a tasty excerpt from a great interview with David Graeber:

We have a false model of what thinking is. Because you can't really think by yourself, can you? You have to create someone else in your mind to explain things to, and to have an imaginary conversation with. This idea was inspired in part by the philosopher of cybernetics, Andy Clark, who proposed something he calls the extended mind hypothesis. Basically, the argument goes like this: Say you're doing long division on a piece of paper instead of doing it in your head. Clark asks why the piece of paper is not just as much a part of your mind while you're doing that calculation as the part of your brain that's doing the math. He says there's no reason at all.There are a million similar examples that philosophers like to trundle out—you have a bad memory so you write everything down. Is that piece of paper then part of your mind?

"Mind" isn't "brain"— the brain is just an organ; your mind is the dynamic interaction of various moving elements that culminates in thought. Philosophers like Clark are willing to take that argument this far, but the question that never seems to occur to them is this: when you're having a conversation with someone else, is their mind part of your mind? Nowadays, many philosophers of consciousness like to note just how razor-thin this thing we call "consciousness", that self-aware part of our mental operations, really is. The average person can rarely hold a thought for more than three or four seconds, eight at the most, before the mind wanders. It's very unusual to be fully conscious for more than a tiny window of time. That is, unless you're having a conversation with someone else, in which case you can often do it for long periods of time, especially if the conversation is with someone you find particularly interesting. In other words, most of the time we're conscious is when we're talking to someone else, or otherwise interacting intensely; during moments in which when we're not clear whose mind is whose. So consciousness is interactive, it's dyadic or triadic. It's a fallacy to imagine that thinking is something you largely do alone. On some level, of course, we already know that. But I don't think we've even begun to explore the full implications.

What's wrong with PHP?

Just as it's easy to completely write off a band you don't care for (because they sold out? or their singer meets with world leaders and has a terrible op-ed album in the New York Times), the same often happens with technologies and languages.

For example, there was some point in my life where I told myself I would avoid any project heavily involving PHP.

But why? What's wrong with PHP? Yahoo and Facebook use it...and I haven't used it enough to warrant such strong feelings.

I wanted to explore this (baseless?) apprehension further, and I thought of this characteristically absurd/profound quote from Perl creator Larry Wall:

"Perl is worse than Python because people wanted it [to be] worse."



Larry Wall

The goodness of Perl v. Python is a common religious argument. The above quote squelches the debate once and for all, but begs further questions.

Who is they? Why did they want Perl to be worse? Do the words I added ([to be]) change what Larry actually meant?

Consider this Mind Hacks post about trends and their origins; the concepts extend to any sort of idea that can grow legs. Trends in technology are the same way, and spread because a distant idea reached some critical mass of connectivity and settled in with your own circle of peers.

Developers can vote for or against any technology by speaking for or against it, but their most powerful influence is in choosing which technologies to devote their energies toward learning and improving. Enthusiasm for a project leads to expertise contribution, and contribution leads to enthusiasm.

Conversely, people who have a distaste for a technology will discourage others. They (the technologies) will languish if their community does not grow.

In other words, labeling a technology good or bad is a self-fulfilling prophecy given enough influence and/or critical mass. Soon companies using the "good" technology will flourish with resumes and job postings for "bad" technologies will receive lesser attention, serving only to reinforce existing stereotypes.

I'm largely paraphrasing Paul Graham. He wrote a great essay on this phenomenon, which he calls "The Python Paradox".

I believe this is what Larry was getting at. And it explains my own PHP aversion, as my experiences were underwhelming at worst, but the number of developers I've heard lament PHP convinced me to stay away, as if it's the bad part of town.

Arguing over which language is better or worse is a waste of time; what matters is the consensus of the larger community (see wikiality). Even if it's unjustified. But just like a neighborhood can turn around, opinions change, and that's why phrases like "JavaScript Renaissance" are thrown around. And although I can't shake all the PHP prejudice, I wouldn't make a point of avoiding it (PHP that is), either.

I just finished reading Goedel Escher Bach

GEB alternates dialogues and essays on the author's staggering range of fixations and obsessions in which Hofstadter adds his own remarkable insights and comparisons on topics including music, art, mathematics, genetics and philosophy. GEB's sprawling nature follows tangled paths but eventually loops back to the question of intelligence, souls, free will and self-awareness.

The unorthodox structure is what sets the book apart, but the braiding of ideas may lead to a takeaway of: "Ok, that's interesting, and you're clever, but what is the chief takeaway here?"
This is a common criticism which led led Hofstadter to author the psuedo-sequel "I Am a Strange Loop" (which I haven't read), in which he distills his arguments more directly and concisely (and personally -- he imagines a low-resolution "simulation" of his wife's mind within his own after her death).

Anyone who completes GEB comes away with an honorary computer science degree, as there's a heavy focus on computability theory, data and data structures, natural language processing, AI, recursion, memory, hardware, software, all under the guise of philosophy and investigating what gives rise to self-awareness and intelligence.

On top of this, the GEB reader receives an introduction to the art of Escher, Magritte, Bach, John Cage, as well as some basics of neuroscience, boolean logic, zen philosophy, number theory, music theory and molecular biology.

Although the number theory and biology chapters dragged, I was fascinated by the discussion of the Goedel incompleteness proof and the implications it had for the mathematics community at the turn of the century. There is also a fascinating section on AI that starts with Turing tests and pattern recognition and ends with the remarkable conclusion that a truly AI may be terrible at all the things that people may struggle with as well, such as rapid computation or chess playing.

At the least, GEB presents a multitude of ideas and food for thought. At its best, it instills lucid notions of how our minds work and what gives rise to life, language and intelligence.

Smack talkin' D.R. Hofstadter delivers sick iceburn on R. Kurzweil

This is a profound interview with Douglas Hofstadter, author of Goedel Escher Bach and I Am a Strange Loop.

Money Quote/Excerpt:

I think Ray Kurzweil is terrified by his own mortality and deeply longs to avoid death. I understand this obsession of his and am even somehow touched by its ferocious intensity, but I think it badly distorts his vision. As I see it, Kurzweil's desperate hopes seriously cloud his scientific objectivity.

...Kurzweil sees technology as progressing so deterministically fast (Moore's Law, etc.) that inevitably, within a few decades, hardware will be so fast and nanotechnology so advanced that things unbelievable to us now will be easily doable. A key element in this whole vision is that no one will need to understand the mind or brain in order to copy a particular human's mind with perfect accuracy, because trillions of tiny “nanobots” will swarm through the bloodstream in the human brain and will report back all the “wiring details” of that particular brain, which at that point constitute a very complex table of data that can be fed into a universal computer program that executes neuron-firings, and presto — that individual's mind has been reinstantiated in an electronic medium...

Rather ironically, this vision totally bypasses the need for cognitive science or AI, because all one needs is the detailed wiring plan of a brain and then it's a piece of cake to copy the brain in other media. And thus, says Kurzweil, we will have achieved immortal souls that live on (and potentially forever) in superfast computational hardware — and Kurzweil sees this happening so soon that he is banking on his own brain being thus “uploaded” into superfast hardware and hence he expects (or at least he loudly proclaims that he expects) to become literally immortal — and not in the way Chopin is quasi-immortal, with just little shards of his soul remaining, but with his whole soul preserved forever.

Well, the problem is that a soul by itself would go crazy; it has to live in a vastly complex world, and it has to cohabit that world with many other souls, commingling with them just as we do here on earth. To be sure, Kurzweil sees those things as no problem, either — we'll have virtual worlds galore, “up there” in Cyberheaven, and of course there will be souls by the barrelful all running on the same hardware. And Kurzweil sees the new software souls as intermingling in all sorts of unanticipated and unimaginable ways.

Well, to me, this “glorious” new world would be the end of humanity as we know it.

Hopefully you're hooked by now, so read the rest!