A Smelling Bee

A Smelling Bee is the level on which the real W.O.R.K. operates. (W.O.R.K., being the acronym used by Jan Cox for Way of Real Knowledge)

Jeopardy quiz show was lots of fun

The Jeopardy quiz show was lots of fun. I refer especially to the shows featuring IBM's natural language computer. It was fun to watch, not for the answers, but for the players, and by that I mean the host, and the IBM programmers interviewed. The conclusion to the game seems to be that the computer beat the people playing the game. But that is not what happened, and thereby lies entertainment on another level.

The answers Watson the computer, gave, were easy because all the answers in its databanks were "correct." The computer could only chose to answer the question based on picking an answer supplied in some gigaencyclopedic dump. Nothing required an intelligence that observed, that experimented, that could come up with something new. Neither can a human, of course, using their own binary verbal intelligence. But while humans can come up with answers regardless of their own pervasive ignorance of their intellectual wiring, a computer can only, ever, rearrange the pieces on the board, the chalk lines on the grass, and never really deal with the new, that breath of the future that prevents the whole house of cards from collapsing on itself. Jan Cox found the whole idea of artificial intelligence amusing, and I suspect my points above may have been part of the reason.

Is 'Watson" the heart of human intelligence?

Is "Watson" the heart of human intelligence? This is the description given by an IBM engineer involved in developing this computer. The answer would depend on one's ability to appreciate the nature of human rationality---the human brain has a verbal level which depends on binary thought. A common assumption among academics is that this verbal level is the depth and dimensions of human intelligence.  Actually those academics are incorrect, but let's pretend there is some legitimacy to this stance. Watson's success in answering natural language questions is a sham. All the answers have already been stored in the computer. There is no environmental interplay and learning which involves dealing with a chaotic interface to an external world. All the answers Watson discovers are right, because the computer only has RIGHT answers stored in it. A human binary brain, may seem limited compared to have have a million encyclopedias scanned into one's cranial cap, but even at the most limited view of the human brain, the view which actually ignores human experience and history, even this binary rattletrap, learns by interacting with a multivalent flow of energies which is only artificially divided into external and internal. Take the answer given on the Jeopardy show----Toronto. A mistake you say, but Toronto is the right answer to some question, just not the one that was asked. The human players on this revered game show, had to pick the right answer, not from a finite list of correct answers, but a infinite list of almost correct answers, mixed into the imbroglio. Reality at even the binary level is only superficially composed of alphabetical blocks. At any juncture there is an infinity of answers, which the players pick from, a job made easier by mechanical intelligence, but only superficially does this ease get confused with the crisp matrix of yes and no which the Watson engineers only can guess is the nature of reality.

But wait, the patient reader may protest, weren't you going to keep your response within the artificial and unreal limits of binary thought. Are you not pointing beyond the rational mind when you point out the chaotic edges of reality.

No. And I say no, we are still talking about binary thought, because the thinker can only ever stay with the limits of binary thought by imaginatively ignoring the reality that his cranial canvas is something unique to him. Since the binary thought extends from a broader organism called humanity, even the fiction that binary thought is the way a man thinks can only be maintained by allowing his individuality to remain unexamined. The human binary mind, can be compared to the natural language computer, ---both mechanical, both blissfully unaware of their limitations, but the human binary mind, still must, thrive, in a chaotic situation, or else the most mechanical mind, could not breathe.  Like slats in a fence perhaps, all measured out and fixed side by side, and nailed against a cross beam at intervals,  is that human mind at its most mechanical, but even then, and this is the point, it has to have slits between the slats, a view of a real chaos of the unexpected, to perform its mechanical function. Like a bee, adorablly mechanical, must still search for new flower patches.

And of course, we let up on Watson, just so we could make the argument seem fair. The human mind is not just a binary machine, though such is the main part of the verbal structure. And who will be able to see this point?

Is there a word that describes "it all?"

Is there a word that describes "it all?" A word like cosmos, but a
word which hints at the mechanics of reality, not just the beauty. You
might suggest verbalizable, but this does not suggest that which is
not verbalizable. The word that occurred to me is "knock-off." Jan Cox
expressed a comparable idea when he pointed out that without real gold,
there would be no market for counterfeits. The thought that the world we talk about is a knock-off suggests a reflective quality of words. At the same time knock-off suggests there is a world which is unmediated by thought.

Paleolithic Sex

An artistic carving on a reindeer antler has been evaluated by archeologists, and their report will soon be published in the March issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science, The picture accompanying this preview is crucial to appreciating the points made below. So look at it. The scholarly concensus seems to be that this carving is 10,900 years old (radio carbon dating) and that the subject is a woman with spread legs. The symbolic value would seem to be a fertility ritual. Okay, if you have looked at this picture, and read the article accompanying it, you will notice, perhaps, that there could be other interpretations. First off----that is a figure of a woman and man in one body, and a quick guess would be it represents a union of natural and/or spiritual forces. That is not what the article says, but that part seems obvious to me, just from the photograph of the carving.

The meaning of the universal zigzag pattern around the figure is illuminated, by the stick figure,  if I am correct. You have the opposition of angles in the zigzag itself, perhaps connoting a recognition of the duality of forces controlling the world.Duality as in light/dark, male/female, hunger/satiation, etc.  If  (IF) this is an early evidence for man's rational intellect (binary thought, there are only ever two options) it would have been more powerful and creative at it's inception, and therefore more able to deal with complex spiritual realities (as opposed to today's mechanical intellect where binary connotes an inability to deal with novelty.) My thought that the figure represents of union, a transcendence of the dueling dualities, is strengthening by the positioning of the stick figure in relation to the zigzag. Notice the legs of the figure align with the zigzags opposite it, (to make a new pattern) and also there is a rhythmic flow with a different stretch of zigzag and the legs of the figure, so the effect is of a continuous zigzag pattern. 

Although modern academe would not appreciate the next point, I am comfortable stating that for the early thinkers of our species (and up until modern times) there was no opposition between facets of living, such a sex versus art versus religion versus science. The moment was whole and holy for those who were going to live a longer life than their neighbors. A focus on reality meant increased survival odds, as opposed to the modern era, where, at least temporarily, the silly and the irrelevant often thrive. 

There is a somewhat different version of this post at another blog of mine, at http://strangefactsandnewtrivia.blogspot.com/.It is just the last paragraph that is changed.

Robert Burns on Mirror Neurons

[from a Burns poem apparently criticizing Alexander Pope's ideas (the proper study of mankind is man)]

....

What pity, in rearing so beauteous a system,
One trifling particular, truth, should have miss'd

him;
For, spite of his fine theoretic positions,
Mankind is a science defies definitions.

....
In the make of that wonderful creature, call'd Man,
No two virtues, whatever relation they claim,
Nor even two different shades of the same,
Though like as was ever twin brother to brother,
Possessing the one shall imply you've the other.
....

Burns here is critiquing Alexander Pope (author of "The Proper Study of Mankind is Man")
I am not sure of the title of the poem this is excerpted from, so here is the citation:
The works of Robert Burns: with Dr. Currie's memoir of the poet, and an essay on his genius and character, Volume 1, 1843
page 101. (free at books.google.com)

A Name for that Hue

Since the 1850's historians have discussed whether color vision was a capapcity of the human brain which had only recently been developed.  The evidence for the idea that our ancestors saw the world in fewer colors than those we see looking out on the world, is literary----the references to colors in texts.  Apparently black and white and red may have been the only colors apparent to the historic Greeks, for instance. 

So we may have misimagined the world of those we credit with inventing the modern world.  Regardless of the soundness of such surmises,  the spectrum of change intorduced by the discussion is provocative.  About the same time these ideas were tossed out, Darwin's idea that species could evolve was also bruited about.   Notice though that in the century plus since, no one has suggested that man's recent (since writing was invented)  mental capacity, his ability to reason, has also altered along with this flux glimpsed by the scientists and historians.  What if the ratiocinative powers of the human mind is itself mid evolution, what if there are colors of cerebral delights which man has yet to perceive.(experience in an ordinary and communal acceptable manner). What if the lonely philosopher who speaks of mysticism is merely an early evidence of intracranial evolution which will manifest in most people in coming centuries? What if the comments of a philosopher like Jan Cox, that ordinary man can only "count to two." (that is never see more than two choices regardless of the complexity facing that person) is evidence for my scenario. For one thing such a change might throw previous conclusions into doubt, make even a simple sentence subject to fracture on the racks of reality.  To absorb the significance of the idea the rational brain itsef is subject to something new under the black hole, is to confront the chance that all your conclusions could be flawed, retgardless of the extent a populace has embraced them. It may even be possible that change could happen mid sentence, and