Really Hard Sums

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The video in my last post, and Christopher Richards's blog from which I nicked it, have really got me thinking about creativity, inspiration, and analytical thinking. My own creativity is woeful and worsening. Is this a common feeling amongst adults? Why do most of us stop painting as we grow up? Is it because we learn, or adopt social conventions, of what is a "good" or "bad" painting? Why do we stop writing stories (pace Christopher) and poems, playing make-believe with our friends, and having wild daydreams?

I wish I could remember where, but I once read that 90% of mathematicians think in images during the creative stages, and only in symbols and logical manipulations when they are tidying things up for presentation to others. I'm one of the other 10%. Why? Did I unlearn an image-based way of thought as I progressed through school and its exams? Can I (re)learn to be in touch with the wellspring of vivid imaginal inspiration apparently gushing within us all?

One of Christopher's other blogs mentioned the book Hare Brain Tortoise Mind by Guy Claxton which I promptly borrowed and am reading through (slowly, yay me). The book is a wonder. It gathers together a welter of scientific studies which reveal the bubbling, brilliant, and bizarre unconscious which underpins true creativity as outlined in anecdotes from the arts and sciences. It seems that not only can our unconscious be more "intelligent" than our consciousness, outperforming it under all sorts of circumstances, but that it acts independently of our consicous cognition. In this way, unconscious intelligence outperforms and overrides conscious cognition without our consicous perception of it, and consciously-held facts and beliefs seem not to influence it. A strange world indeed. I haven't begun to do the book justice, but I strongly recommend you to read it.

I would like to tag Christopher for a post on messiness and creativity. For motivation, here's a photo of Einstein's office on the day he died:

(downloaded from http://faculty.rmwc.edu/tmichalik/einstein.htm). Einstein is widely regarded as being an individual of fabulous imagination. His revolutionary breakthroughs in physics came largely from strong pictorial imaginings while staring into space (literally and figuratively). He also is quoted as saying "If a cluttered desk signs a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk a sign?" I keep my own desk scrupulously tidy, but am in a tiny minority amongst my colleagues in doing so, as well as being in the minority who don't think in images. Is there a link? What about in other areas of life? What does messiness speak of creativity?

One of the most wonderful and stirring short speeches you are ever likely to hear on the subject of reforming our flawed educational systems in favour of rewarding creativity was given by Sir Ken Robinson at a TED conference.
I came across this video at the new Creativity? blog of Christopher Richards, he of slowdownnow.org fame.

Michael Shermer of Skeptic Magazine writes an open letter to Messrs Dawkins, Dennett, Harris and Hitchens in the Skeptic column of Scientific American. He argues that we should avoid defining ourselves as anti-religion, instead outlining what we support (presumably rationality and having the strength of character to see the world as it truly is). Quoting von Mises, Darwin, Sagan, and Luther King Jr he argues that what stands above science and religion is the freedom to think, believe, and behave what and as we wish, so long as exercising that freedom does not impinge upon the freedom of others.

Hear, hear.

A recent amazing series of computer simulations performed by a team of physicists from Russia, Germany and Australia reveals that dust clouds in space can harbour spiral structures capable of reproducing - and being selected - in the same way as terrestrial DNA. Read an Institute of Physics news article here, and read another brief article with useful links and discuss the implications at the Foundational Questions Institute (FQXi) community forum here.

The following image was lifted from the IOP article, but is presumably copyright the authors of the article which prompted the IOP news piece.

I really should have mentioned this before, but so slowly am I reading the thought-provoking free ebook "A Guide for the Godless" by the philosopher Andrew Kernohan that I would like to bring your attention to it now, and perhaps we can get some discussion going. The table of contents reads as follows.
     Preface

1. Meaning
2. Purpose
3. Death
4. Self-Realization
5. Pleasure
6. Desires
7. Reasons
8. Emotions
9. Judgements
10. Holism
11. Beliefs
12. Truth
13. Meaninglessness
14. Justice
15. Choice
16. Commitment
17. Culture
18. Happiness
    References
    Index
    

The ever-wonderful Nick Bostrom, who to my knowledge was the first to argue scientifically that we are overwhelmingly more likely to be living in a computer simulation than otherwise, has a short essay on his hope that we are alone in the universe. The hinge of his argument is the existence of a "Great Filter", some step along the path from planetary formation to the emergence of intelligent, space-colonizing life requiring such an improbable amount of luck that it almost never occurs. If life existed on Mars or elsewhere in our cosmic backyard, then this Great Filter is most likely to remain ahead of us.

While sorting through my oh-too-many pdfs with the brilliant Yep, I came across the following story I wrote about a year ago, imagining a realistic dystopian future. Comments are welcome!

-_-_-_-_-

“To your right. No, your other right.”

Folks, we’ve all been there. We give a simple direction to a friend or futurefriend, only to see them turn in the opposite direction! In the Dark Days, you will remember from the History Before the Bright Smile module, such an encounter would have led to frustration boiling over into physical violence. People didn’t smile enough in the Dark Days; they would hurt each other instead! But we know that cannot happen now, so we don’t need to talk about it, do we? Let’s get rid of those nasty thoughts: smile!

But some things never change, unless we help them along, so just how often do such encounters actually occur? How often do otherwise intelligent and law-smiling citizens of Great Brightain make such an elementary error? No-one is yet suggesting that these mistakes are evidence of the mental delinquency which takes so many forms and which we
have worked hard together to Smile Away, but quantifying this phenomenon may help us be on the guard against the future.

Gathering such data in the Dark Days would have been nearly impossible, despite the then increasing use of rudimentary SmileCams. In those frowny days, SmileCams were cryptically referred to as CCTV and were only thinly spread amongst the population. Imagine, even right before the Bright Smile, Dark Days Dwellers still just outnumbered SmileCams, and there were several hours every day when people were painfully separated from the safety of being Smiled Upon. Folks, this is scary stuff and I apologise for talking to you about it during your SmileSachet time, but come on: eat up, and together let’s smile those fears away!

Let’s smile on some data points together. Here’s a great example from the smiling community of Little Grinning. Of course, we can never give away personal details of SmileSiblings on the SmileNet, so let’s just say that our subject is a 32 year old blonde male, married, no children, and living on the west side of Brightness Road, close to the corner. Smiling Sibling A, or SSA, as we shall call him, was SmiledUpon last week as he enjoyed some intimate SmileTime with his wife. Let’s play the recorded data now. We start with SSA’s wife murmuring her encouragement.

“A little to the right.”

At this point, we overlay the data from the seven SmileCams in the room, some of which employed their infrared, X-ray, and ultrasonic functions to really penetrate to the nub of the issue. Slowing the data stream down, we can zoom in and continue:

“Ow! No, your other right.”

Nasty! Motion-tracking softAware, our artificially intelligent but genuinely smiling software, easily saw that coming, but SeniorSmileSiblings would never intervene directly. We just SmileUpon, as you know! Smile! Sadly, SSA’s worrying mistake led to a loss of smiles all round, as these blood-flow diagrams show. This is one tragic tale of smileless mental delinquency, but how common is this dangerous error in the population at large?

We have collected the names and addresses of all citizens who have displayed this hideous delinquent behaviour over the past six months. Folks, we were so surprised we almost let our smiles slip! Haha, no, of course we’re not confessing to such delinquency as not smiling on data happily gathered by our SeniorSmileSibling colleagues, but the results were shocking, folks, no doubt about it.

Fully one fifth of you have committed this appalling show of insubordination to our SmileSir and his glorious Smile in the past six months alone! Folks, please remain calm and smile. Come on, put some effort into it! We’re SmileUponing you right now, so make sure those blood-flow and muscle-monitoring data streams convince your SmileFlat’s softAware that you mean it! That’s the stuff!

This disgusting and base affront to SmileSiblings everywhere will be removed without trace from our SmileSociety. We reserve the right to impose the greatest punishment on those who infringe our national dignity so: we will strike hard, fast, and wipe the smile off their faces!

If you are still receiving this transmission, you have been identified as a Smileless Mental Delinquent, charged, tried, and convicted of the crime outlined above. It is now 1830 hours and so you have just finished ingesting your daily SmileSachet. Although it arrived in the usual way at the usual time, and although you sat in your usual SmileSeat before this SmileScreen, the SmileSachet was laced with sedative. There is no way to run or fight: your SmileSeat has already numbed your thighs, buttocks and back, and woven your skin to itself with carbon nanothread. You will wake in the morning far from your friends, far from your SmileFlat, far from every smile you have ever seen, and in this Smileless place of pain, you will never smile again.

Are we too parochial in our search for alien life? Can we define life, can we set limits on where it can or cannot exist, on what chemicals and in what environments it can and cannot persist? I'm put in mind of the engineers who believed train travel would be impossible for human passengers because above 25mph all the air would be forced out of the carriages. More probing analysis of the alien life question is here at the FQXi community blog.

Here is an article from Scientific American which struck a chord with me for two reasons. Firstly, it explains the rapid increase in the vocabulary of toddlers, a breathtaking phase my son is currently blossoming through. Secondly, it does so without any fancy hypothetical linguistic white elephants, but merely with a common statistical entity: the bell curve.