Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 14, No. 550.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
<http://www.princeton.edu/~mccarty/humanist/>
<http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/>
Date: Sat, 09 Dec 2000 06:26:40 +0000
From: "Osher Doctorow" <osher@ix.netcom.com>
Subject: Information, Knowledge, Emotion
From: Osher Doctorow osher@ix.netcom.com, Thurs. Dec. 7, 2000 11:17AM
I read the interest Humanist story about the Berkeley "How much information
is there?", and it fits in somewhat with my current interest in both
knowledge and emotion. Latent variable theory in
psychological/measurement/educational testing theory has something close to
the concept of knowledge, but not sufficiently well spelled out. I think
that the humanities' conception of knowledge is probably much deeper than
the computer/engineering/mathematics conception of information/entropy,
which is a type of concrete surface scratching ("tip of the iceberg") of
knowledge. Even in the physical sciences, there are now so many types of
"noncommunicating" entropy (that is, the disciplines do not communicate)
that it is quite remarkable. I think that the "final word" on knowledge
will probably not come until emotion is better understood. It may seem
old-fashioned to argue (as did Isaac Asimov) that humans have something
beyond robots called emotion, although Asimov eventually gave one his robots
(Giskard) telepathy and apparent emotional empathy. Indeed, emotion is a
two-edged sword which has usually gone the wrong way in history - when
combined with ignorance, greed, narcissism, neurosis, psychosis, anger,
blame, it seems to have produced nothing but tragedy and fear in history.
Yet when all is said and done, I think that the British conception of "a
little emotion" comes closest to the ideal. It is something like a little
salt or a little pepper or a little spice. For example, there is currently
an intellectual confrontation between the Simplicity and Complexity
theorists in both physical and biological sciences (which of course do not
communicate very well usually both in the latter and former cases). If I
referred to this as an Intellectual War, I would probably be accused of
exaggeration. Yet we need a little exaggeration sometimes, we need words
that we can associate with more concrete events sometimes, especially when
there is really something important going on. It so happens that the
simplest continuous type of probability (don't worry about the word
continuous for now) is the uniform probability distribution (uniform for
short). It essentially says (roughly, but that is not bad) that everything
has the same probability of occurring. It has now been found, in one of the
most "explosive" (emotion again?) research areas in probability/statistics,
that the uniform probability ties in with brownian bridges, fractional
brownian bridges, and fractal brownian bridges, which are based on random
zigzag motion like that of dust particles in a glass of water, and that
through these brownian bridges we are able to analyze how trends and
processes (technically, "time series", etc.) become disrupted and even to
predict when and where they get disrupted. Most important of all, we can do
this even with events which are highly
dependent/related/influenced/influencing rather than
independent/unrelated/uninfluenced/uninfluencing - which until very recently
was "impossible". My field of LBP (logic-based probability) leads directly
to these results, and I can think of nothing that led me in this direction
more than a combination of "a little emotion" and "a lot of non-mainstream
research". These results come from the Simplicity School. The other
school, the Complexity School, is allied with concrete computer-oriented
Artificial Intelligence (AI) people and receives most of the publicity and
many if not most of the research grants. They are trying to build computers
and computer programs which will imitate life and then hopefully go beyond
it, although there are some variations in which computers go in a different
direction. Since their graphic programs show very concrete and colorful
animation and their ingenuity at computers cannot be doubted, it is quite
easy to be convinced that they are on the right track. The wiser voices
such as those of Professors Tripathi and McCarty, and the voices of the
Simplicity School will, in my opinion, soon spill over massively into AI.
Assuming that there will not be a prolonged economic battle for resources
(always possible!), there is a basis for restrained optimism.
Osher Doctorow
Doctorow Consultants, West Los Angeles College, etc.
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