Pro wrestling. People watch pro wrestling... although they know it is mostly a show and there isn't almost any real competition in it. Competition... hmm... which one do people prefer, watching a show or watching a competition? It appears that the activities that are moving in between the lines of being a show or being reality, cause the most interest among people. Pro wrestling is more fun to watch than normal wrestling.. but probably still more fun than a movie about pro wrestling... people do not want to watch real talks between people a lot, and certainly would not enjoy watching a movie about normal affairs between normal people, but look at the audience of the Jerry Springer show ... Jerry .. Jerry... what does that mean??? "Thank you for providing an atmosphere for fooling me... Jerry !!" ... or yet the reality shows in the TV can be compared to normal scripted serials or game shows.... they definitely beat both of them ... something is secretly happening in the borders between reality and pure scripted show.
Maybe when we know something is a pure show... then the conscious part of our brain ignores it every once in a while and the part which enjoys viewing beautiful things can't get all the fun ... but when something pretends to be real, for a few moments the conscious part does not interfere and lets the other part have fun.
Some insights into the above paradox (if it really is a paradox) can be found in this quote from the movie Presige:
"Every great magic trick consists of three parts or acts. The first part is called "The Pledge". The magician shows you something ordinary: a deck of cards, a bird or a man. He shows you this object. Perhaps he asks you to inspect it to see if it is indeed real, unaltered, normal. But of course... it probably isn't. The second act is called "The Turn". The magician takes the ordinary something and makes it do something extraordinary. Now you're looking for the secret... but you won't find it, because of course you're not really looking. You don't really want to know. You want to be fooled. But you wouldn't clap yet. Because making something disappear isn't enough; you have to bring it back. That's why every magic trick has a third act, the hardest part, the part we call "The Prestige""
Showing posts with label Mind. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mind. Show all posts
Thursday, May 08, 2008
Thursday, April 17, 2008
Synaptic Magic
This has been one of the hottest topics for the "over the lunch" discussions in our little kitchen at Fanafzar. One that leads to lots of discussions and no results.
I am almost certain that the answer to this question can never be found, the question being: "Do we have real randomness in this world or is everything acting in a deterministic fashion?"
The most important corollary to this question is the existence of Free Will. Is there such a thing as free will or is everything predefined and every little movement in this world is deterministic and randomness is only an illusion for us since we don't know much about the causes and reality. Einstein's famous sentence is regarding the same question "God does not play dice!". Quantum mechanics talks about uncertainty and indeterministic behaviors but it doesn't shed light on the fact that whether this randomness seems random because we can not measure and our measurements change everything or is it random in its pure nature?
Rudy Rucker recently had a talk about these topics where he believed everything in the world is computational and hence purely deterministic. This should be what the majority of scientists and philosophers believe.
The answer to this question can have many different consequences, even some in ethics. Would you ever punish someone knowing that everything in this world is predetermined and no one can change anything? Modern science will be heavily jeopardized since all of a sudden we will be faced with a phenomena which has absolutely no reasons why it happened. Not something the scientists are used too.
In our minds, if free will is to be accepted, then that would mean some magic would happen in the synapse of the neuron in the brain. Where in a fully deterministic world, a synapse would fire an electric shock to the next synapse based on some deterministic rules and the input and its state would define its output, in the world with potential uncertainty, the synapse would fire or not fire (maybe randomly) based on the same input and in the same state, this behavior is what I find magic as the best description for it so far. Synaptic Magic!
This discussion can be thought about with a simple mind puzzle, if the world repeats from the same status that it had in the big bang, will everything happen again the way it did or will somethings change?
I am a big believer of free will and I do believe in the synaptic magic although I am almost sure that the real answer can never be solved, at least not by us as we know ourselves today. I am "almost sure" because I believe in uncertainty ;). ... oh and do I believe in magic !? Hell yeah ...
Friday, January 25, 2008
Type Master Type !!
It is interesting how in most Hollywood movies, whenever some guys is trying to work with a computer, they usually type everything and don't use the mouse. In normal life, people mostly use the mouse to interact but for some reason in movies, it is always typing, whether they are opening windows, selecting files, zooming in/out, etc. it is always fast typing. :)
I think one reason for this fact is that the movie is trying to convince us that the person interacting with that computer is really an expert and experts need to type! Is this correct? Well I think it is since the nature of clicking is selecting, it is selecting a feature which has been thought about before and prepared for you mostly in the form of menus and buttons. It is a kind of selection, selecting something very normal, selecting a series of Yes or Nos. However with typing and positioning some symbols in any state, you can come up with new ideas and innovation, and this is the nature of the type of actions an expert needs, something that ordinary people can not do, thinking about new possibilities using typing which is actually defining a special process. The solution space is much more complex due to the infinite possibilities for arranging the design elements and this complexity needs creative and deducting thinking. (Not really infinite and bound to the syntax and grammar of the supporting scripting language that the expert is writing the commands in)
When you think about this from another angle, you see that in essence what is happening in software is transformation of all these possibilities into pre-defined buttons and UIs that only need to be selected, and selection doesn't need as much thinking as describing a process and thinking about the solution in time. Somehow like the transformation of imperative languages to declarative languages. Dumbing down in other words. Just like what happens in other technologies, we are eliminating the requirements for thinking constantly and replacing it with products, now is this a good thing? Is it really bad? Just do this and that and the result will be this. Memorize this and you're fine. Don't need to think and analyze yourself, that takes time and you might not do what you are supposed to do and come up with ideas that might jeopardize the system... is this what the modern system wants from people? Can we just get rid of the CPU part of our brains and be satisfied with the RAM part? Or do we even need the memories to be internal in our brains, they can be external in user documents or in these days on the web... what I find on google as a complete solution is what I need in life !? .. this study is related to the subject.
It's very hard to find out the correct answer and it needs quite some thought and again more thought (AKA thought++).
I think one reason for this fact is that the movie is trying to convince us that the person interacting with that computer is really an expert and experts need to type! Is this correct? Well I think it is since the nature of clicking is selecting, it is selecting a feature which has been thought about before and prepared for you mostly in the form of menus and buttons. It is a kind of selection, selecting something very normal, selecting a series of Yes or Nos. However with typing and positioning some symbols in any state, you can come up with new ideas and innovation, and this is the nature of the type of actions an expert needs, something that ordinary people can not do, thinking about new possibilities using typing which is actually defining a special process. The solution space is much more complex due to the infinite possibilities for arranging the design elements and this complexity needs creative and deducting thinking. (Not really infinite and bound to the syntax and grammar of the supporting scripting language that the expert is writing the commands in)
When you think about this from another angle, you see that in essence what is happening in software is transformation of all these possibilities into pre-defined buttons and UIs that only need to be selected, and selection doesn't need as much thinking as describing a process and thinking about the solution in time. Somehow like the transformation of imperative languages to declarative languages. Dumbing down in other words. Just like what happens in other technologies, we are eliminating the requirements for thinking constantly and replacing it with products, now is this a good thing? Is it really bad? Just do this and that and the result will be this. Memorize this and you're fine. Don't need to think and analyze yourself, that takes time and you might not do what you are supposed to do and come up with ideas that might jeopardize the system... is this what the modern system wants from people? Can we just get rid of the CPU part of our brains and be satisfied with the RAM part? Or do we even need the memories to be internal in our brains, they can be external in user documents or in these days on the web... what I find on google as a complete solution is what I need in life !? .. this study is related to the subject.
It's very hard to find out the correct answer and it needs quite some thought and again more thought (AKA thought++).
Wednesday, December 26, 2007
Tennis of the masters
You are faced with a problem and you try to come up with a solution. From the moment you decide that you want to solve, till the exact moment that you solve it, what really happens? When you say that "I'm thinking", what are you really doing?
It seems like there are several things going on. In fact it's like a tennis match between two major players... between critical thinking and creativity. These two players have other forms and looks which I'll describe soon.
Critical thinking is about reasoning. Putting together the pieces of data (information) that we have and concluding. It is talking about convergence. Creativity on the other hand is finding new theories and information, lateral thinking. It is talking about divergence. A very nice article can be found here which talks about their differences.
So it thought process goes something like this, you see the problem ... try to see if you have the basic rules to apply to it and come up with a solution (Critical Thinking). If you have it, then everything is done, a lot of times these basic rules are what you know and hence considered part of your knowledge. (Related to the memory of your brain)
This would be what an expert could do very well, having domain specific knowledge and applying it for solving problems.
Although in many cases, problems will not be solved this way, there could be many reasons for that and a simple one being the problem is just too complex and using the normal rules that we know is not going to work. This is the time for creativity and it goes something like this: You shoot a method for solving or a seemingly unrelated rule and see how you can get closer to the solution, then you evaluate what you did, if you were not successful, you'd go to the first step again, so what we have here is a repeating loop of firing ideas and testing them. This process is not very much sequential like critical thinking.
Lets go a under the hood now. The left brain is known to take care of logical deductions and language and the right brain for holistic and simultaneous understandings. Critical thinking is powered by the left brain and creativity seems to be based in the right brain. Critical thinking is a conscious behavior and you can even talk about its steps but in creativity a lot of times something happens which we are unconscious about, an example would be : "you can't exactly describe how you came up with a piece of code."
The left brain being the source of language is known to be responsible for conscious behavior too so it seems to be the reason critical thinking is a conscious process for us but for creativity we have to dissect it a little more.
In fact creativity has been described as a four or five step process:
The first and last part are conscious behaviors, you can talk about them and they are rather sequential activities, however the big unknown is the second and third parts. It has even been said that Incubation happens while you are not directly thinking about the problem, under a shower, during sleep or while walking home. So actually the full creativity process should start from the left brain, followed by the right brain and then again the left brain.
One of the conclusions of this article is that the reason Einstein was such a creative person was because of the strong connections between the left and right hemispheres of his brain. This has been experimented.
Still going under this layer and into the brain module layers, the firing of ideas happens in our frontal lobes and the assessment and domain specific knowledge exists in the temporal lobes of our brains. So in creative thinking, the frontal lobe is firing and the temporal lobe is evaluating what has been fired. The faster new ideas are fired, the faster evaluation has to be done.
You might have seen some people that come up with a lot of different ideas but never actually follow one .. well maybe the frontal lobe is firing too much and the temporal is not capable of handling it.
Some might be able to reason very well but don't come up with new ideas much, in which case indicates a quiet frontal lobe.
Interesting thing is that these two regions inhibit one another so you can suppress (naturally or by drugs) one to increase the other, this is why incubation and illumination in creative thinking can happen while you are doing something else, which means your temporal lobes are resting and not inhibiting the frontal lobe, the frontal lobe can dance in the infinite possibilities of the indeterminate world.
Too much new ideas from the frontal lobe makes you lose attention and focus and too much processing in the temporal lobe prevents you from looking at the problem from other angles, so what really needs to be done is a cooperation and collaboration by these two different masters that we all have in our heads. The faster both of them work, the better we can be at problem solving, which is the major activity related to thinking.
So let them play their tennis, as hard as they can, and we'll get nice solutions to our problems as a result.
It seems like there are several things going on. In fact it's like a tennis match between two major players... between critical thinking and creativity. These two players have other forms and looks which I'll describe soon.
Critical thinking is about reasoning. Putting together the pieces of data (information) that we have and concluding. It is talking about convergence. Creativity on the other hand is finding new theories and information, lateral thinking. It is talking about divergence. A very nice article can be found here which talks about their differences.
So it thought process goes something like this, you see the problem ... try to see if you have the basic rules to apply to it and come up with a solution (Critical Thinking). If you have it, then everything is done, a lot of times these basic rules are what you know and hence considered part of your knowledge. (Related to the memory of your brain)
This would be what an expert could do very well, having domain specific knowledge and applying it for solving problems.
Although in many cases, problems will not be solved this way, there could be many reasons for that and a simple one being the problem is just too complex and using the normal rules that we know is not going to work. This is the time for creativity and it goes something like this: You shoot a method for solving or a seemingly unrelated rule and see how you can get closer to the solution, then you evaluate what you did, if you were not successful, you'd go to the first step again, so what we have here is a repeating loop of firing ideas and testing them. This process is not very much sequential like critical thinking.
Lets go a under the hood now. The left brain is known to take care of logical deductions and language and the right brain for holistic and simultaneous understandings. Critical thinking is powered by the left brain and creativity seems to be based in the right brain. Critical thinking is a conscious behavior and you can even talk about its steps but in creativity a lot of times something happens which we are unconscious about, an example would be : "you can't exactly describe how you came up with a piece of code."
The left brain being the source of language is known to be responsible for conscious behavior too so it seems to be the reason critical thinking is a conscious process for us but for creativity we have to dissect it a little more.
In fact creativity has been described as a four or five step process:
- Preparation
- Incubation
- Illumination
- Evaluation
The first and last part are conscious behaviors, you can talk about them and they are rather sequential activities, however the big unknown is the second and third parts. It has even been said that Incubation happens while you are not directly thinking about the problem, under a shower, during sleep or while walking home. So actually the full creativity process should start from the left brain, followed by the right brain and then again the left brain.
One of the conclusions of this article is that the reason Einstein was such a creative person was because of the strong connections between the left and right hemispheres of his brain. This has been experimented.
Still going under this layer and into the brain module layers, the firing of ideas happens in our frontal lobes and the assessment and domain specific knowledge exists in the temporal lobes of our brains. So in creative thinking, the frontal lobe is firing and the temporal lobe is evaluating what has been fired. The faster new ideas are fired, the faster evaluation has to be done.
You might have seen some people that come up with a lot of different ideas but never actually follow one .. well maybe the frontal lobe is firing too much and the temporal is not capable of handling it.
Some might be able to reason very well but don't come up with new ideas much, in which case indicates a quiet frontal lobe.
Interesting thing is that these two regions inhibit one another so you can suppress (naturally or by drugs) one to increase the other, this is why incubation and illumination in creative thinking can happen while you are doing something else, which means your temporal lobes are resting and not inhibiting the frontal lobe, the frontal lobe can dance in the infinite possibilities of the indeterminate world.
Too much new ideas from the frontal lobe makes you lose attention and focus and too much processing in the temporal lobe prevents you from looking at the problem from other angles, so what really needs to be done is a cooperation and collaboration by these two different masters that we all have in our heads. The faster both of them work, the better we can be at problem solving, which is the major activity related to thinking.
So let them play their tennis, as hard as they can, and we'll get nice solutions to our problems as a result.
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