Crick of Nobel
I’m sitting there once working the second shift on Digital Design and NPR is on I got a cold chill. The spine chill of the kind once evoked by The Shadow, but seldom from The NPR. Why you ask? It was Marvin Minsky talking, and it got me frightened. It was probably about the time [1986] of the publication of The of Society of Mind, and Marvin was being interviewed, and the topic was AI, and what is self, and what if the next step in evolution was machines. And, says, Marvin, drolly, why not?
This is the point where I get off the cybernetic boat and start swimming for land, with Tahitian beauties singing Christian chorals. I am interested in the intersection of art and science, as this weblog attests, but there is a time to bail.
Then it happens again. The chill factor. When? Last week. Whilst checking in on the Noble Dr. Crick in the N.Y.T., I read more about his long-arduous work on consciousness.
Now, the more I look at the literature of consciousness the more it seems to me the scientific and artistic neuronauts alike both seem to becoming to a like state – to a view of consciousness as flashing chains of images that mean something to those involved. And Crick’s work is somewhat on this path. But he seems a real certain and a little gleeful that consciousness will eventually be unveiled as an artifact.
No mysterious consciousness is supposed to=no soul=no persons. Let us let the Doc do the talking:
"The view of ourselves as `persons' is just as erroneous as the view that the Sun goes around the Earth," he said. He predicted that "this sort of language will disappear in a few hundred years."
Chill! Mooohaaaha!
Guess he didnt see Uma Thurman in Gattica.
Well there it is. The man did knock over some mysteries in his time – but the doors on the other side of DNA have proved pretty archly mysterious too. I think Crick uses the term mystery like Minsky did in Society of Mind. It is a weakness and conviieniienc [the heck with the spell checker!] of a form of human. Retro form. [Minksy expanded on this notion in famous SciAm article Will robots inherit the earth? Ray Kurzweill has had a go at this vein too.]
Crick uses mystery – like Marvin in book: as self-perpetuating and an end in itself, as long as it is outside of the scientific realm, apparently. Of course, the Zen folk are not an unspiritual lot, and they have been about doing away with this ‘self’ and ‘person’ stuff for some time. So I guess I will remain open minded as long as I have one.
Someday you may go to the mall and no one will be there. That day might be yesterday. But did it happen? [No animals were hurt during the production of this essay.]
RELATED
What underlies everything -This Weblog, Feb 22, 2004
On Crick and Watson upon reading Mayr; The Growth of Biological Thought - This Weblog, Oct 21, 2002
Conscious machines, by Marvin Minsky - uidaho.edu
Society of Mind on amazon.com
Will Robots inherit the Earth? from Sciam - on MediaLab site
Crick on path of being - NYT, Apr 13, 2004
TECHNOLOGY
Test Webcast - Requires Flash
Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) will rip through retail and merchandising IT operations like an invading army. Or, RFID will simmer on the back burner - and flame out after some modest improvements in bar-code scanning appear.
I recently recast an ADTMAG colum[ http://download.101com.com/ADT/LBS/rfid.swf ] on the topic of RFID as a Flash presentation. I first did it on Feb 22 as a a 699K download but seems to work fairly well even under the least robust Internet connections. [That file was deleted to make way for an update linked-to above. I used PPT and RoboFlash to make it, so I havent' really learned Flash. But it seems to have a lot of potential as a communications mechanism. Hope to improve quality of presentation again later. Doing recordings within PPT is new to me, and the volume seems amiss. Also created a few plosives. This is only a test. Click to access Test Webcast
8:43:15 PM 
|
