I have been
thinking about some things today, and I feel the need to
jot them down somewhere. Perhaps later coherence will
sink in. Perhaps not.
About a week ago I finished Pirsig's Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenence, since then my mind has been on something of a metaphysical bender. The day before yesterday, the interrelatedness of intelligence, individuality and information struck me.
The three concepts, and the gut feeling that there was some relationship between them, had been floating around in my head all throughout the class. To pass time I did some rough sketchy definitions of the three:
I saw information as the manipulation of a priori and a posteriori (see: Immanuel Kant) concepts in a rational fashion to produce an end-product. For example, that day I saw a Van Gogh painting. I asked myself, "What is it that makes this painting so profound?" I concluded there must be some form of information lurking in that painting. Not just the obvious "This is a Van Gogh," or, "This is a painting," information, either. No, there is much more. Emotions, even ideas have been expressed in paintings. Yet, they are not explicit properties. In other words, there are no "emotion" or "idea" molecules floating around in the paint or the paintbrush. Therefore, it must be that Van Gogh's painting relies in part on the knowledge (a priori) of the subject, in relationship to the experience (a posteriori) of the painting itself. So far, So good, So what?
From here, my mind began to wander a little bit. I felt compelled to ask, "Well, how do I know this is a Van Gogh? How do I know it's not just paint that randomly fell onto some canvas somewhere?" This was where the first interrelatedness came from. Obviously, I knew this was a Van Gogh for some complex reasons, but, in abstraction, I knew this was a painting because it conveyed an intelligent design. That's what I had been looking at. This brought me to asking, "How do I know if this painting has intelligent design?"--I was cut short here, as coffee break was over and the teacher wouldn't take too kindly to me staring at a painting for the next few hours.
Some time before this, I was thinking about the imaginary line between "order" and "chaos". At first, I was puzzled at how we can draw lines between what is orderly, what is, in some ways, "intelligent," and what is chaotic, what is just line noise. I had used another analogy from Art, that of Jackson Pollock. If a Pollock painting landed on, say, Mars, and Martians poked it and smelt it and puzzled over it, they would probably be no closer to figuring out it was a painting, or anything that Pollock had meant to convey through it. In effect, I had thought tht the orderliness of Pollock's painting was only evident in the eyes of a Pollock-educated observer. This was something Hofstadter had said before; again, So What? I began to get some grandiose visions about trying to develop a universal orderliness translator capable of sorting out what really is noise and what we just don't quite grasp. I started thinking I should go checkout some books on P vs. NP Problems and artificial intelligence and then go crazy in Montana figuring it all out. Then I stumbled upon the idea that chaos really didn't exist, but was just a word thrown around for everything we don't understand, and so, my house of cards crumbled.
--In observing the line between intelligent and unintelligent I seemed to be right at the same point again, only with different, less defined words. After class I thought more about intelligence and proceeded to try to define what properties, imbued in an object or concept, convey intelligent design. I concluded that intelligent design was what we see when reason and rationlity are used as organizers. Both Van Gogh's and Pollock's paintings conveyed intelligent design because, at some underlying level, they were applying the laws of reason to information. This sounds very familiar. In fact, it sounds a lot lke what I said information was. In the words of Larry Wall: I was either onto something, or on something. I was leaning towards the latter...
This also sounds a lot like something Pirsig had said. He mentioned Poincare, and his ideas about aesthetics and how we all have built-in subliminal "feelers" that go out and recognize what is aesthetically pleasing. In Pirsig's case, he was describing how these subliminal feelers recognize what appears to be designed by reason. Ding-dong. Bells started ringing, since Pirsig had written his whole damn book on reason.
The last bit I mentioned, individuality, came very easily. I had been thinking about something Hofstadter had mentioned aways back. About how individual self-subsystems of the mind can duplicate subsystems that are note innate to the "individual" owner of the mind. Hofstadter uses the analogy of how he can anticipate the responses a close friend might have, even in hypothetical situations. Hofstadter goes on to show how this may be because he actually has a smaller variant of his friend's mind in his head. This proposition of multiple intelligences within the mind of one individual led me to ask, "Where do we draw the line between 'I' and 'you'?" In other words, if we can both share the same self-subsystems, how do we deliniate individuality amongst us? Following Pirsig's analogies about reason, we come to point where he and Poincare define a divergence of reasoning. A Non-Euclidean line in the sand. In a haze, this made sense. The difference between individuals doesn't lie in their Hofstadterian subsystems, it lies in their Poincare intelligence-feelers. In less mumbo-jumboey speak: Individuals are not distinct by what their heads contain, but rather, by how their heads comprehend things.
Whee. Now, to today, I had gone to Jack in the Box to get some McFood. I had been bored, listening to Thelonious Monk and waiting for my number to be called when I gazed at the floor. The floor was tiled in a simple, geometric pattern. Because of that geoemtric pattern it harked me back to my ramblings on Non-Euclidean rationality, at which point, I was struck with a something. I could tell this tile was of intelligent design, according to my own definition, because it was designed in adherence to certain Euclidean geometric laws. 360 degrees to a square. Perpindicular lines bisecting the square into quadrants meet at a parallelogram where each angle is bisected by each line--blah, blah, blah. What was interesting, was how this intelligent design could be totally inobservable from a wholly different vantage point. Were I a nanobot, looking at this tile would infer nothing about geometry at all. Intelligent design of that sort would be something, quite literally, beyond my grasp. I wondered, "How far can intelligent design, and, therefore, reason, be quantified?" This sounds familiar yet again, infact, it sounds very much like what I said about Pollock and Martians. The main difference here being that, instead of our Poincare reasoning-feelers being different, our physical perspectives of things were different.
On the walk back home, to the tune of Criss-Cross, I started getting some whacky ideas about the general relativity/quantum mechanics incongruity and its relationship to the capability of reason to be quantified. But at that point I knew I was departing from the world of regular mumbo-jumbo and into the world of innane, New Ager mumbo-jumbo. Then I came back home, ate the McFood and wrote this up.
Since all of this was just spurred by reading a book, and because all of this seems to be running in circles I am rather sure I'm just making up mumbo-jumbo. But, like I said, I felt compelled to write it down. And, if nothing else, it has made for good mental exercise.