Inkquisitive

Leon Wieseltier Responds to Steven Pinker's article on Scientism

Here is the article in pdf format:

Download Leon Wieseltier Responds to Steven Pinker's on Scientism | New Republic 3 September 2013

Here is a link to the New Republic Article:

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/114548/leon-wieseltier-responds-steven-pinkers-scientism

Steven Pinker: Science is not the Enemy of the Humanities

Here is a link to the article in pdf format:

Download Science is not the Enemy of the Humanities | New Republic 6 August 2013

Here is a link to the article in the New Republic:

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/114127/science-not-enemy-humanities

Do Elephants have Souls?

Here is article in pdf format: 

Download Do Elephants Have Souls? - The New Atlantis - Winter_Spring 2013

Here is link to New Atlantis Article:

http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/do-elephants-have-souls

Mad at Canal Rocks August 2013

Brainlike Computers, Learning From Experience - NYTimes.com

At http://nyti.ms/KccNvp

Brainlike Computers, Learning From Experience

Erin Lubin/The New York Times

By JOHN MARKOFF

Published: December 28, 2013 

PALO ALTO, Calif. — Computers have entered the age when they are able to learn from their own mistakes, a development that is about to turn the digital world on its head.

The first commercial version of the new kind of computer chip is scheduled to be released in 2014. Not only can it automate tasks that now require painstaking programming — for example, moving a robot’s arm smoothly and efficiently — but it can also sidestep and even tolerate errors, potentially making the term “computer crash” obsolete.

The new computing approach, already in use by some large technology companies, is based on the biological nervous system, specifically on how neurons react to stimuli and connect with other neurons to interpret information. It allows computers to absorb new information while carrying out a task, and adjust what they do based on the changing signals.

In coming years, the approach will make possible a new generation of artificial intelligence systems that will perform some functions that humans do with ease: see, speak, listen, navigate, manipulate and control. That can hold enormous consequences for tasks like facial and speech recognition, navigation and planning, which are still in elementary stages and rely heavily on human programming.

Designers say the computing style can clear the way for robots that can safely walk and drive in the physical world, though a thinking or conscious computer, a staple of science fiction, is still far off on the digital horizon.        

“We’re moving from engineering computing systems to something that has many of the characteristics of biological computing,” said Larry Smarr , an astrophysicist who directs the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology , one of many research centers devoted to developing these new kinds of computer circuits.

Conventional computers are limited by what they have been programmed to do. Computer vision systems, for example, only “recognize” objects that can be identified by the statistics-oriented algorithms programmed into them. An algorithm is like a recipe, a set of step-by-step instructions to perform a calculation.

But last year, Google researchers were able to get a machine-learning algorithm, known as a neural network, to perform an identification task without supervision. The network scanned a database of 10 million images, and in doing so trained itself to recognize cats.

In June, the company said it had used those neural network techniques to develop a new search service to help customers find specific photos more accurately.

The new approach, used in both hardware and software, is being driven by the explosion of scientific knowledge about the brain. Kwabena Boahen , a computer scientist who leads Stanford’s Brains in Siliconresearch program, said that is also its limitation, as scientists are far from fully understanding how brains function.

“We have no clue,” he said. “I’m an engineer, and I build things. There are these highfalutin theories, but give me one that will let me build something.”

Until now, the design of computers was dictated by ideas originated by the mathematician John von Neumann about 65 years ago. Microprocessors perform operations at lightning speed, following instructions programmed using long strings of 1s and 0s. They generally store that information separately in what is known, colloquially, as memory, either in the processor itself, in adjacent storage chips or in higher capacity magnetic disk drives.

The data — for instance, temperatures for a climate model or letters for word processing — are shuttled in and out of the processor’s short-term memory while the computer carries out the programmed action. The result is then moved to its main memory.

The new processors consist of electronic components that can be connected by wires that mimic biological synapses. Because they are based on large groups of neuron-like elements, they are known as neuromorphic processors, a term credited to the California Institute of Technology physicist Carver Mead , who pioneered the concept in the late 1980s.

They are not “programmed.” Rather the connections between the circuits are “weighted” according to correlations in data that the processor has already “learned.” Those weights are then altered as data flows in to the chip, causing them to change their values and to “spike.” That generates a signal that travels to other components and, in reaction, changes the neural network, in essence programming the next actions much the same way that information alters human thoughts and actions.

“Instead of bringing data to computation as we do today, we can now bring computation to data,” said Dharmendra Modha , an I.B.M. computer scientist who leads the company’s cognitive computing research effort. “Sensors become the computer, and it opens up a new way to use computer chips that can be everywhere.”

The new computers, which are still based on silicon chips, will not replace today’s computers, but will augment them, at least for now. Many computer designers see them as coprocessors, meaning they can work in tandem with other circuits that can be embedded in smartphones and in the giant centralized computers that make up the cloud. Modern computers already consist of a variety of coprocessors that perform specialized tasks, like producing graphics on your cellphone and converting visual, audio and other data for your laptop.

One great advantage of the new approach is its ability to tolerate glitches. Traditional computers are precise, but they cannot work around the failure of even a single transistor. With the biological designs, the algorithms are ever changing, allowing the system to continuously adapt and work around failures to complete tasks.

Traditional computers are also remarkably energy inefficient, especially when compared to actual brains, which the new neurons are built to mimic.

I.B.M. announced last year that it had built a supercomputer simulation of the brain that encompassed roughly 10 billion neurons — more than 10 percent of a human brain. It ran about 1,500 times more slowly than an actual brain. Further, it required several megawatts of power, compared with just 20 watts of power used by the biological brain.

Running the program, known as Compass, which attempts to simulate a brain, at the speed of a human brain would require a flow of electricity in a conventional computer that is equivalent to what is needed to power both San Francisco and New York, Dr. Modha said.

I.B.M. and Qualcomm, as well as the Stanford research team, have already designed neuromorphic processors, and Qualcomm has said that it is coming out in 2014 with a commercial version, which is expected to be used largely for further development. Moreover, many universities are now focused on this new style of computing. This fall the National Science Foundation financed the Center for Brains, Minds and Machines , a new research center based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with Harvard and Cornell.

The largest class on campus this fall at Stanford was a graduate level machine-learning course covering both statistical and biological approaches, taught by the computer scientist Andrew Ng . More than 760 students enrolled. “That reflects the zeitgeist,” said Terry Sejnowski , a computational neuroscientist at the Salk Institute, who pioneered early biologically inspired algorithms. “Everyone knows there is something big happening, and they’re trying find out what it is.”

 

David Walsh of MONA interview with Philip Adams March 2013

This is my transcript of parts of the interview. Here is the full audio of the interview.

David Walsh Late Night Live March 2013

 Walsh - We are designed by arbitrary systems which happen to produce pretty good outcomes. The earth will cope with our accidentally malicious intervention, but it’ll produce a new biosphere and it might just not be suitable for us. Adams - Do you find some attractions in some of the Catholic power structures? Walsh - Definitely no. We happen to be able to cognitively explore places that evolutionary strategies can’t so that information can be created by the human mind and I don’t know whether that is interesting as a tool for understanding. There is certainly a biological compulsion to try to garner some power and I think most people feel it and I think I’ve started to feel it but prior to building MONA I didn’t expect anyone to care what I thought. Building it was about entertaining and educating me. I think power structures very often revel in uncertainty. A sensible way of engaging the world is really just to be doubtful. I once believed that someone else said this but I’ve got a feeling now that it is a confabulation on my part. That is that being an atheist is no more a belief that not playing chess is a hobby. So it’s the act of not doing something. Where does the burden of proof lie? It always lies with the contention, not with those who don’t believe it. Adams - But in the crazy real world its rather upside down on this issue - it’s always the atheist that’s seen as the asserter. Walsh - Yes, that’s absolutely right. It may well be that the natural biological state for humans beings is to believe. There may be evolutionary pressure. Atheists are like a herd of cats. You can’t get them to go in the same direction and that’s a good thing and it’s a virtue, but it’s not a virtue if you’re talking about armies of conquest. To a whole bunch of people [engaged in a conquest of some sort] you are better off all believing the same thing rather than not the same thing .... This museum is a mausoleum to curiosity. Adams - You force people to be curious. There are no labels on the walls informing people about the items. Walsh - The thing about MONA compared to a State museum is that a State museum is an engagement in certainty. It protects the belief in what good taste is:  “Enter our portals and be enlightened”. So that is essentially autocracy. We are essentially an artist. We give you the capacity to form your own opinions and we are so uncertain, we engage so obviously in doubt that you feel empowered. If we don’t know what we’re talking about, why should you be worried about feeling wrong or ill-informed or devastated or even fearful of being right occasionally.  I guess I give people an opportunity to just have an opinion. ... [On humanism] When these conceited atheist types decide to call themselves bright, it makes  me chuckle. You know the analogy about Melbourne trying to build an Opera House and continually failing. You can’t create something with an iconic status of something like Gaia deliberately. It has to be an emerging process. When you’re that self aware, you just become self-indulgent. So I don’t much care about the terminology. The term “humanism” is loaded with moral content, this idea that you can engage the world without belief. I would say that if you’re afraid of being punished for a misdeed that’s not a moral act - it’s a compelled act. It’s a natural term because Faius (?) and Gaias (?) have typically suggested that atheism can’t be inherently moral so that you may as well load the terminology but loading the terminology deliberately rather than it emerging is to me a dangerous game. I don’t care what I keep calling myself, I just believe in the sort of thing that these days has lost currency, in such things as reductionism, rationalism. I believe that the world is inherently elegant. Adams - You don’t take the next step that my old mate Paul Davies does and insist that that elegance must have an author? Walsh - It has an author and the author is that abundance rules and that the universe confines itself. If it could go anywhere it wouldn’t be interesting. It is constrained and the constraints are inherently appealing because any system that we inhabit will be apparently perversely suited to our inhabiting it. Adams - Is it possible that there may be other systems where we wouldn’t fit in? Walsh – Yes, but if they were capable of being inhabited and they were inhabited they would be inhabited in a way that would be appropriate for them. In most universes that could emerge, you change any of the constants just a little bit - and this is the thing that gets Paul Davies - they don’t work any more. That to me means one of two things. Either there are a lot of universes, or that there are mechanisms that we are not yet aware of that tune the constants appropriately. What he’s doing is essentially "god in the gaps". You know, throughout the last umpteen thousand years the reason for believing in something beyond the realms of rationality has reduced and reduced and reduced to the point where it’s just a glimmer of hope and that’s where people like Mr Davies reside. I’ve always had trouble reading him. He writes about exactly the things that I want to read about but I always get a bad taste in my mouth because I always think there is an element of superciliousness in his overlay of belief. I’m sure he’s a very nice bloke. [On death] (He refers to a friend of 35 years who had cancer.) He wasn’t afraid and he became afraid, he turned inwards and then outwards. I’m afraid of engaging myths. I suspect I won’t, but I don’t want to do myself the indignity of suddenly believing that something will save me. I’m afraid of death but one of the things I celebrate is the incredible good fortune. I’m the product of 1.2 billion years of successful sexual mating. Look at the space base that I’m dealing with and the unlikelihood of having been here in the first place. It’s an incredible thing and to me I can’t deal with the misfortune that my inevitable death will bring me without considering how incredibly fortunate I was to be here in the first place. If you go back 1.2 billion years to the sexual strategy invented by the species (he refers to names I did not recognise). If you run history backwards you see how incredible it is. But wherever it went there would have been something and wherever it went that something, if it became cognitive, is eventually going to be surprised that it is here. You know we are infinitesimally unlikely but the face base (?) is enormous and if you multiply a very large number by a very small number you get a probability that might be close to one, we don’t know. It might still be infinitesimal and that’s a very real question. Have we inherently been lucky or is it certain or nearly certain that something would have happened that’s cognitive. Quantum mechanics may well require cognition to have waves collapse to improve the probability to become reality? That’s one interpretation of quantum mechanics. Adams - Do you understand quantum mechanics? Walsh - Well I understand the mathematics of it. That’s a difficult question. Its like saying “do I understand an erection”. I know what its for and I can certainly see applications of it. I can follow the mathematics - quantum mechanics is essentially mathematical but I can’t necessarily visualise all the consequences. I can describe them. Literally every day there are consequences of quantum mechanics that we didn’t know before. (They go on to talk about whether Walsh will ever build a museum to mathematics - yes, if there is a corrupt official somewhere with a spare half a billion dollars, he’ll do it for him.) Adams - Are we surrounded by mathematics here? Yes, every artist engages the biochemistry and all the works are based on an elegantly structured universe. The thing that I wonder about is whether all the particles and matter and all the things - you know the waves we create when I speak to you and the electrons created by the microphone - are all of these things really information in mathematical language? Is reality imbedded in the mathematical substrates of the universe rather than the universe being a virtual reality system with somewhat more depth than the ones we can dish up? This is something that doesn’t explain anything because at some point it’s an infinite recession because at some point you have to find who or what imbedded the mathematics in the system or the system in the mathematics. The opportunity is to try and understand. When there’s revelation - when things are given to you - that satisfaction is a lot like, to use a musical analogy, a lot like being able to play the piano without learning. What good is that? How satisfying it is to just have something? Nothing shits me more than being described as having a gift. Genius isn’t a real thing. The attitude that genius is being able to hit a target that no one else can see just shits me to tears. [They go on to use Michelangelo as an example of someone who worked hard at what he was good at.] He was the first person in the west to start doing abstract sculptures when he was in his eighties. His physical dexterity vanished so he found something else to do. That’s a real interesting “something else”. Necessity - the mother of invention - made him continue to create and innovate but it took him 60 years to get somewhere that we now consider a fundamental invention of the twentieth century when we ignore things in tribal and other cultures that also had abstraction in their and our pre-history. So the myth of discovery we gradually learn.

3 Billion Years to Go

Planetary science reveals that life on Earth is already middle aged. It arose around 3 billion years ago and has roughly the same stretch ahead of it. Over that time the sun will slowly, almost imperceptibly, heat up. Eventually, it will become hot enough to scour Earth clean of life. Complicated animals such as humans, animals and most plants have even less time left: perhaps a billion years or so. As the sun gradually brightens, the level of carbon dioxide in the air will fall, regardless of any temporary, millennium-long blips caused by footling things such as a civilisation based on fossil rules. One day, far into the future, the plants that form the base of the food chain will find themselves no longer able to photosynthesise. Then, complex life will die out and the bacteria will re-inherit Earth. (From Five Billion Years of Solitude: The Search for Life Among the Stars by Lee Billings - Financial Review Review  18 October 2013 p2)

Bart Cummings

When early in his horse training career a government health inspector declared that he had too many flies in his stables, Cummings asked, "How many am I allowed to have?'  

 

When jockey Darren Beadman announced his retirement in 1997, saying he had been called by God to the Christian ministry, Bart told him to get a second opinion.

Darwin's Rejection of Christianity

I can hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true for if so the plain language of the text seems to show that men who do not believe - and this would include my father, my brother and all my best friends - will be everlastingly punished and this is a damnable doctrine.

 

… But then in life is the doubt. The doubt is whether the human mind can be trusted on this subject. May not all this be the result of a connection between cause and effect which probably depends on inherited experience: the probability that the constant inculcation of a belief in God in the minds of children producing so strong and perhaps an inherited effect on their brains not yet fully developed that it would be as difficult for them to throw up their belief in God as it would be for a monkey to throw off its instinctive fear and hatred of a snake. (From Darwin's autobiography as read from by Emeritus Professor Keith S Thompson in the second of the Terry Lecture Series - Big Ideas on Radio National May 2013)

Life is ....

... a sexually transmitted disease with a 100% mortality rate.