Tag Archives: self awareness

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Getting in Touch With Our Consciousness

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A body welcomes the chance to hear from a consciousness that is not interrupted. Walking or taking a hike without devices is a good start.

A declining capability to focus on just one thing takes us away from a useful form of consciousness that allows discoveries that a fragmented thinker may never find.  We may claim full in control of our own awareness. But modern life means that we are now up against devices that too often succeed in vying for our limited and precious attention. Losing track of our own thoughts and feelings is always too high a price to pay. To cite just one measure, American adolescents reportedly check their phones one to several hundred times a day. This is part of the digital treadmill makes us less centered than we should be.

By definition, distractions of this sort are usually detours away from focused attention. The resulting fragmentation of our time happens when the optimal continuity of some effort is broken by the wish to shift attention elsewhere. I see the pattern in myself when I notice that I am less anxious to sit through a full-length film. Short videos or articles can seem more inviting. But this website is dedicated to communicating in “the age of distraction”—be it advertising, social media, too many texts or e-mails. In the interests of our sanity, we should seek to join the declining numbers of individuals who find ways to resist most of this cultural noise. Some may try meditation, mindfulness exercises, or even taking a nap.

Of course, the goal of continuous attention to one thing must pay off with something that is worthy of the time. Given my own preferences, this would rule out video gaming, endless video watching of the ‘lowest common denominator options,” or any other sponge on time that has greater costs then benefits.

One answer to this problem is to discipline ourselves to follow a more linear pattern of involvement, even though cultivating this kind of thinking cuts against the grain of the culture. Walking or taking a hike sans phone can be a start. Your body would welcome the chance to hear from your uninterrupted consciousness.

Linear thinkers take many forms:  avid readers content to devote large chunks of time to a single work, artists happily left alone to sort out decisions that will end up on canvass or as musical notation, writers who must carefully consider their words. And of course, we’ve enshrined the image of the “mad scientist” as a loner following the threads of their research with long hours in the lab, leaving family and friends to fend on their own.

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Distraction puts us behind our ancestors, who were often better at action, meaning ownership of capabilities to deal with our place in the physical world.  By contrast, we cope with distraction by reaction to continuous inundation from the digital world.

George Frederick Handel wrote the great oratorio Messiah in spurt of nearly unbroken concentration, finishing in just over three weeks.  And imagine the sustained effort required by William Lamb’s architectural firm, who designed and prepared drawings for New York City’s Empire State Building in an incredibly short two weeks. The iconic skyscraper was completed in just over a year. Such dedication to a single task can be scaled down to what many writers sense when they don’t notice the passage of time because of their focus on their work.

Linear thinkers look forward to clearing the decks sufficiently to be able to see an unobstructed view of the horizon. Undisturbed concentration gives them the powers of insight and discovery. This is a realm of a consciousness that a fragmented thinker may never find. Unbroken attention to a task allows a first effort to build on the synergies that gather when clarity allows us to see connections that others may miss.

This ability to concentrate is more or less the reverse of the kind of segmentation of effort that is now embedded in our work and so much of our media. A reader’s time on a single web page is usually under a minute. And we are getting cues from all over that we’re not noticing our preference for hyper-compression. Consider, for example, the New York Times reporter who recently noted in passing that an individual “argued” a point on what was then Twitter.”  Really? Can a person “argue” in the traditional sense of the term—which includes asserting a claim and its good reasons—in a verbal closet of what was then a limit of 160 characters? This kind of limit is common on television news, where news “sound bites” from policymakers have been averaging around eight seconds. Meanwhile, standard editing for entertainment television has the length of individual shots lengths of two or three seconds. It is still a cinematic novelty to see a tracking shot that runs close to a minute. We now think of a Ted Talk with a maximum running length of 18 minutes as an “in depth” discursive form. No wonder college students typically dread the idea of a 70-minute lecture or a 40- page chapter. These relatively open expanses of investigation seem like the same kind of alien experience a person might experience if asked to walk for miles in Death Valley.

Sherlock Holmes wikimedia

Interestingly, one of the features sometimes seen in a person at the higher end of the autism spectrum scale is a consuming and total passion for one thing. Autism can produce laser-focused interests, making a person a challenging fit for a culture that rewards constant pivots to completely different people and activities. Psychological historians believe we can thank mild forms of autism for the achievements of Mozart, Beethoven, Charles Darwin, and Lewis Carroll. And it seems to be the dominant trait of the world’s favorite sleuth, Sherlock Holmes.

Given the misplaced importance of multi-tasking across the culture, it makes sense that there is building interest in novel ideas like the self-driving car. Negotiating roads and traffic should be linear processes. But phones, google maps and searchable music files have impaired us. Focused navigating and defense driving are increasingly at odds with what have become our current trained incapacities.  Soon it will probably be better to let a computer handle a task that we used to manage themselves. Distraction puts us behind our ancestors, who were often better at action.  Now we must engage in reaction to deal with the continuous inundation of electronic media.

If we think we have identified a significant problem here, we probably should be humbler and note that these few words on the attributes of linear thinking illustrate the reverse. The concept deserves a book more than a short essay.

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Artificial Intelligence Reconsidered Eight Years Later

Second Thoughts Banner[My confidence in 2015 that we have nothing to fear from Artificial Intelligence may look distinctly antique in light of the warnings now coming from A.I. researchers. Even Elon Musk is calling for a moratorium in the implementation of dense generative language systems that can replicate the words, sounds and images of humans. Maybe the confidence expressed in the piece below is a tad high. And my examples are dated. But let me take a minority view and argue that most of the claims made below still hold. We can now surely pass off good fakes. Humans have always had a knack for that. But it remains true that machines and software lack a self. What is essential to the human experience is our natural impulse to interpret others. This capacity has no meaningful counterpart in machine-generated language; machines lack the features of human character that always give our thoughts tendencies. We are interpreters more than recorders of our world.
There is another problem in the current hand-wringing that I have seen. Everyone seems to be describing humans as information-transfer organisms. But, in truth, we are not very good at creating reliable accounts of events. What we seem hardwired to do is to communicate our understanding of events around us. Human understandings come from prior experience. For example, does a chatbot “like” the music of Franz Joseph Haydn? I could care less. Judgments and understandings about human products must be made by other humans.]

We are awash in articles, books and films about the coming age of “singularity:” the point at which machines will supposedly duplicate and surpass human intelligence. For decades it’s been the stuff of science fiction, reaching perhaps its most eloquent expression in Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 motion picture, 2001: A Space Odyssey. The film is still a visual marvel. Who would have thought that Strauss waltzes and images of deep space could be so compatible? Functionally, the waltzes have the effect of juxtaposing the familiar with a hostile void, making the film a surprising celebration of all things earthbound. But that’s another story.

The central agent in the film is the HAL-9000 computer that begins to turn off the life support of the crew during a long voyage, mostly because it “thinks” the humans aren’t up to the enormous task facing them.

Kubrick’s vision of very smart computers is also evident in the more recent A.I., Artificial Intelligence (2001), a project started just before his death and eventually brought to the screen by Steven Spielberg. It’s a dystopian nightmare. In the film intelligent “mechas” (mechanical robots) are generally nicer than the humans who created them. In pleasant Haddonfield New Jersey, of all places, they are shot on sight for sport.

watson wikipedia.org
                        Watson wikipedia.org

Fantasies of machine intelligence have lately given way to IBM’s “Big Blue” and “Watson,” mega-computers with amazing memories and—with Watson—a stunning speech recognition capability that is filtering down to all kinds of devices. If we can talk to machines, aren’t we well on our way to singularity?

For one answer consider the Turing Test, the challenge laid down by the World War II code-breaker Alan Turing. A variation of it has been turned into a recurring world competitions. The challenge is to construct a “chatterbot” that can pass for a human in blind side-by-side “conversations” that include real people. For artificial intelligence engineers, the trick is to fool a panel of questioners at least 30 percent of the time over 25 minutes. According to the BBC, a recent winner was a computer from the University of Reading in the U.K. It passed itself off as a Ukrainian teen (“Eugene Goostman”) speaking English as a second language.

Machines Lack a Self

In actual fact, humans have nothing to fear. Most measures of “human like” intelligence such as the Turing Test use the wrong yardsticks. These computers are never embodied. The rich information of non-verbal communication is not present, nor can it be. Proximate human features are not enough. For example, Watson’s “face” in its famous Jeopardy challenge a few years ago was a set of cheesy electric lights. Moreover, these smart machines tend to be asked questions that we would ask of Siri or other informational databases. What they “know” is often defined as a set of facts, not feelings. And, of course, these machines lack what we so readily reveal in our conversations with others: that we have a sense of self, that we have an accumulated biography of life experiences that shape our reactions and dispositions, and that we want to be understood.

Just the issue of selfhood should remind us of the special status that comes from living through dialogue with others. A sense of self is complicated, but it includes the critical ability to be aware of another’s awareness of who we are. If this sounds confusing, it isn’t. This process is central to all but the most perfunctory communication transactions. As we address others we are usually “reading” their responses in light of what we believe they already have discerned about us. We triangulate between our perceptions of who we are, who they are, and what they are thinking about our behavior. This all happens in a flash, forming what is sometimes called “emotional intelligence.” It’s an ongoing form of self-monitoring that functions to oil the complex relationships. Put this sequence together, and you get a transaction that is full of feedback loops that involve estimates if intention and interest, and—frequently—a general desire born in empathy to protect the feelings of the other.

It’s an understatement to say these transactions are not the stuff of machine-based intelligence, and probably never can be. We are not computers. As Walter Isaacson reminds us in his recent book, The Innovators, we are carbon based creatures with chemical and electrical impulses that mix to create unique and idiosyncratic individuals. This is when the organ of the brain becomes so much more: the biographical homeland of an experience-saturated mind. With us there is no central processor. We are not silicon-based. There are the nearly infinite forms of consciousness in a brain with 100-billion neurons with 100-trillion connections. And because we often “think” in ordinary language, we are so much more—and sometimes less—than an encyclopedia on two legs.

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