Your typical supernova occurs when a massive star suffers gravitational collapse resulting in a transient luminosity comparable to an entire galaxy. It is probably the root of the phrase "going out with a bang". What makes it so incredible is that after about a month all the matter fades away through the powerful vacuum of the resulting black hole.
Nature's largest thermonuclear bomb goes off in spectacular pyrotechnics followed by nothingness, vast substance silence.
That's what makes the recent images provided by NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory so unique. This time it appears that when supernova SN2006gy occurred the star spewed its remains into space over 70 days creating a radiance 100,000 million times as bright as the sun.
"'In terms of the effect on the universe, there's a huge difference between these two possibilities," said Dr Nathan Smith of the University of California at Berkeley. "One pollutes the galaxy with large quantities of newly made elements and the other locks them up forever in a black hole."
Makes you think that maybe stars are just hanging out in the universe deciding if they want to quietly into the night or live on in former self fragments of planets and asteroids. In fact maybe our humble planet earth is the result of just such a choice 4.5 billion years ago. And maybe the ancients weren't so crazy with their sun gods of Apollo, Helios, Ra, Inti, Surya and the rest after all.
Labels: religion, science
Tensions in academia between science and social theory are largely the result on an over-inflated sense of righteousness and self-importance from both sides towards the other. Sometimes they have far more in common than they are willing to admit.
For example here at Goldsmiths computing research is developing an
algorithm for beauty, assuming that by analysing beautiful things it will be possible to create beauty through rules-based models. The assumption that beauty can be contained in variables and fixed definitions is almost laughable to social theorists considering the subjective experience and context. And the technology, as almost always, seems grossly optimistic. After all image recognition software can
barely decipher (
looking for a job?) what objects are in a photograph let alone identify the social and cultural representations that go into ephemeral beauty.
But the real issue is not if it is currently possible to do such a thing but whether it is possible at all. To that question the scientific community would advice constant testing and advancement, moving forward all the time, largely discarding the notion that not all variables in beauty can be eventually counted. When unaccountability is apparent science devises names for things that can be inferred like Dark Matter. Basically we don't know what it is (or its partner in darkness Dark Energy) but we know it is Dark Matter. After all in all the known universe only about 4% of total energy density can be seen directly, about 22% is inferred as dark matter and the remaining 74% inferred as dark energy. It sounds a bit like how sociologists view society with about 4% of what is going on obvious and directly observable, the rest inferred. Journalists love the idea by describing anything that is not observable as "the dark matter of ...".
That's what makes the as yet untested theoretical physics concept of a "Theory of Everything" so engaging as a scientific topic. Personally I would not be happy with any theory of everything that doesn't definitively explain why all belly button fluff is blue or why bullets fired into the sky never seem to hit anything on the way down. And from what I have read this one doesn't seem to be able to do that. Instead it is a hypothetical theory that would make any postmodern proud. The idea is that everything around you is made up of tiny strands of energy that vibrate at different frequencies. Kind of like all the people on earth vibrating in their own frequency to make up the complexities of social life. It grafts together quantum mechanics with relativity in an attempt to explain the fundamental interactions of nature. It brings a new meaning to being strung out if we consider that if the universe collapses on itself after expansion (a Big Crunch) superstring theory suggests that the universe can never be smaller than the size of a string before expanding again. If you are imaginative you can imagine us all just hanging out on that string, chilling and waiting for the universe to get a bit bigger so we can fit a few couches in.
To date superstring theory has launched a number of best-selling scientific texts and television programs, most notably The Elegant Universe, while continuing to struggle with the fact that it makes prediction that cannot be tested. But in an academic paper appearing in the January 26 edition of Physical Review Letters a test has been proposed. It involves use of the incredible Large Hadron Collider, a subatomic particle collider scheduled to be fully operational in early 2008. Weaving under the borderlands of France and Switzerland, the CERN based 27-kilometer tunnel will collide bunches of protons and observe the results. It takes a proton around 90 microseconds (one millionth of a second) to travel around one uber half-marathon lap of the circuit. In tests of the Theory of Everything observations will input to substantiating the canonical forms of string theory.
“Our work shows that, in principle, string theory can be tested in a non-trivial way,” said Ira Rothstein, co-author of the paper and professor of physics at Carnegie Mellon. Now that's some postmodern dark matter.Labels: academia, science, sociology
There is a tendency in current sociological theory to wax on endlessly about the 'western' influence on the world and the importance of not looking at the world through 'western' filters. I'm not sure if there is a fundamental lack of understanding about the changing socio-demographic and socio-political makeup of the global community, or if the discourses are simply lagging behind the reality. Like how the Chinese Government is a bigger threat to the emerging open-standards and interconnectivity of information and knowledge than the Fortune 500 put together.
Maybe it will be more obvious when South Korea, the world's most wired country,
puts a robot in every home by 2015. And not just the $500 robots who sweep and clean the house, using sensors to chart a path around the kitchen table, but robots that teach and converse in dozens of languages, sing and dance for children when they are bored and patrol public areas.
That's right folks. The future is here. Well not here really, but in South Korea. As we speak, South Koreans watch free government-subsidized TV over cellphones, are connected anytime, everywhere, through blanketed national high-speed wireless Internet access, and over 40% of the population has a home page. Every school is interconnected by high speed Internet and collaborative educational initiatives. Homemakers enroll regularly in IT courses targeting use in real life situations and low-income families receive tax credits and subsidies for the purchase of hardware and software to participate in the national explosion in digital data.
But perhaps the most interesting developments are in the service sector initiatives to create robots capable of integrating into daily life. According to the South Korean Ministry of Information and Communciation, instead of operating independently, these service robots derive their information from being part of a network - a kind of collective robotic intelligence.
So beware to 'western' sociologists. The time for self-loathing and great laments on what we have done and what we should never do again is nearing an end. Soon we will speak of how the Koreans thrust their robots upon us and we scrambled around in a disoriented, robotic state.Labels: science, sociology
Just finished reading the
Seven Daughters of Eve by
Brian Sykes, professor of human genetics at Oxford University. It weaves a fantastic account of human history as revealed by the mitochondrial DNA inherited from mothers to daughters. Sykes finds that "almost everyone of European origin is descended from one of seven ancient women" who lived 45,000 to 10,000 years ago.
Every person on earth is, in turn, the descendent of one of only 33 women, who are themselves the matrilineal ancestors of "
Mitochondrial Eve", a common ancestor of all living humans.
So it turns out that as factions in the world continue to tear each other apart along perceived racial, geographical, economic, and religious grounds, we're actually all brothers and sisters from the same mother. And while we are reaching back in time to learn from modern science, why not grab some language from the epic poet Homer: "A sympathetic friend can be quite as dear as a brother". Be sympathetic and compassionate with your fellow human beings. We're all in this together.Labels: history, literature, science
Stakes are high in the skyscraper business. According to Lewis Mumford in The Culture of Cities (1938): "The very notion of a modern monument is a contradiction in terms: if it is a monument, it cannot be modern, and if it is modern, it cannot be a monument."
But what else to call these man-made monumental structures underway or finished in 2006.
- Current world-record holder (for height not size) at a comparatively paltry 508 meters (1,667 feet), the Taipei 101 Tower is about to be surpassed by a host of current projects. The Burj Dubai, planned to be ready in 2009 will reach half-a-mile into the sky, and host Armani hotels, commercial and residential properties. A paragon of capitalism this building unashamedly speaks to perceptions of success in this culture of consumption and self-interest: "Burj Dubai will be known by many names. But only a privileged group of people will call it home. There are a select few who possess the vision, resources, and the opportunity to live in the world's tallest building . If you have that opportunity, you are assured not just unparalleled luxury, but a place in history."
- Doctors versed in cures for altitude sickness and oxygen bars will be available to first-class passengers from July 2006 on the world's highest railway in China. Coach travelers will naturally fend for themselves. The 1,100km (680 mile) of track passes over the haunting Tanggula Pass at 5,000 meters (16,400 feet) through the peaks and valleys of the Himalayas and connects Qinghai with the Tibetan capital of Lhasa. There is plenty of hand-wringing going on worldwide on the implications for Tibetan people. Clear the tracks, the Iron Horse is arriving from on high.
- Over 7,000 workers will live on a converted ferry moored alongside the artificial Palm Islands, the latest larger than Manhattann. The locals and other soon-to-be residents like footballers David Beckham and Michael Owen don't want the roads clogged up with commuters at rush hour. The development in the shape of a palm leaf is the latest project of Shaikh Mohammed. He's a great man. Just asked your local unbiased newspaper. Apparently there is a clash of the titans occurring in our midst as Singapore and Dubai jostle for the world title of most dangerous place to drop a candy wrapper. Just ask the Lutherans.
OK. Maybe we should stop asking and start answering for ourselves. The jackhammers of global growth are pounding away. If you can't hear them just keep your eyes pealed for a billion-dollar ($$) artificial island, half-mile tall building or tracked stairway to heaven near you. Or just lay back and forget about it all sipping on fresh-fruit juice in your room atop the Burj Dubai and wonder if Armani or Versaci should do the design of your place while hollering out at the slightest provocation... "Let them drink freshly squeezed juice!" That is ... if you have the money. The moola.
And if you do have that kind of cash have I got a project for you. We're going to rebuild Atlantis see, but with a twist. It's all going to be one huge bloody underwater casino and you can only teleport to it, which costs a fair bundle of course. But trust me. Atlantis City. It's going to be one hell of a monument to something.
Labels: science
You can tell by the way he theatrically rolls up his sleeves when finished the lecture and ready for questions. He secretly loves the controversy.
Two men in crumpled jackets settle deep in their chairs in the third row and can be overheard: "we've come to refute him". A young couple playfully join in the fun near the back: "Am I staring at you? ... Yes? ... No? ... Am I
staring at you? ... Yes? ... No?"
Enter the world of
Morphic Resonance -- the theory that all species draw upon a collective memory -- and you enter the world of Dr Rupert
Sheldrake, a biologist with a
bulging academic resume and one of the world's most influential paranormal
researchers.
The basic theory follows up on Carl Jung's notion of a collective unconscious, but extends it beyond humans to all living matter. Dr Sheldrake believes that memory is inherent in nature and that the brain emits morphic fields of mental activity, not unlike the way magnetic or gravitational fields extend out from the surface of objects. The fields of our minds extend out from our brains and we are in constant contact with the sum of all this activity, we simply don't often recognize it.
Through morphic resonance, the patterns of activity in self-organizing systems are influenced by similar patterns in the past, giving each species and each kind of self-organizing system a collective memory. This memory manifests itself in habits, not laws which are inherently human, and a natural selection of habits occurs over time resulting in not just biological but social, cultural, mental and cosmic evolution.
Dr Sheldrake's rigorous intellectual defense of these theories, most recently in a convened session at Goldsmiths College, University of London as part of the Whitehead Lectures on Cognition, Computation and Creativity, makes it more difficult to dismiss than traditional paranormal fare. Tune into his debate with Professor Lewis Wolpert at the Royal Society of the Arts in 2004 for a sample and see if you'd like to go head-to-head with the Harvard/Cambridge scholar.
But a lot of resistance remains to the metaphysical, not traditionally scientific, grounding of Morphic Resonance. Probably the most famous scientific application has been Dr Sheldrake's studies of people being stared at and how we are aware of this phenomena without traditional sensory input.
He finishes his Whitehead lecture giving a robust history of western thought from the greeks to present. His description of global scientific/philosophical history is engaging and descriptive. The world is in the midst of a huge clash between the "two tectonic plates" of understanding, those who see the world as always changing and those who see it as always staying the same. "Every government in the world" has followed on Thomas Hobbes and self-interested cooperation. A few hands dart up and others are more slowly raised from the audience of assembled academics.
"So you obviously don't believe in life on other planets or surely we would know all they know through morphic resonance and would therefore have nothing to learn?"
"Very good question." ... Rupert Sheldrake takes off his jacket and rolls up his sleeves ...Labels: science
Look up into the daytime sky tomorrow (at 2:30pm GMT to be exact) and the sun will appear 7%-8% larger. The New Year starts us off with Perihelion, the point of closest approach of the earth's orbit to the sun. On January 4, 2006 the earth will be 147.5 million km from the sun, while on July 3, 2006 we experience Aphelion or the farthest point at 152.6 million km away from the sun.
- The phenomena applies to any celestial object in an elliptical orbit. In astronomy, an Apsis (plural apsides "ap-si-deez") is the point of greatest or least distance of the elliptical orbit of a celestial body from its center of attraction (the center of mass of the system).
- Each planet revolves around the Sun in an elliptical path, with the Sun occupying one of the foci of the ellipse (see Kepler's 1st Law of planetary motion)
- Northern summer on earth is 5 days longer than northern winter as planets move more slowly at aphelion than they do at perihelion (see Kepler's 2nd Law of planetary motion)
- Seasonal weather patterns are shaped primarily by the 23.5-degree tilt of our planet's axis, not by the Earth's elliptical orbit. That's why it is not hotter for us Northern Hemispheres in January compared to July.
- The exact dates of Perihelion and Aphelion vary each year as do Equinoxes and Solstices
Labels: science
What could possibly bring together the new Pope, Lance Armstrong, Hermann Hesse, astrophysics, and the little German town of Tubingen? Hop on to our lightspeed mad bicycle to find out!
Researchers in the department of Theoretical Astrophysics at the University of Tubingen, Germany have developed a
speed-of-light simulator, that takes you through the streets of Tubingen in southwest Germany, at near light speeds. It opened on May 7th through the end of 2005 as an exhibition at the Deutsches Museum, Munich providing museum-goers the opportunity to hop on a stationary bike, accelerating to 30km/h to witness the effects on perception of travel at 99% the speed of light as the view is projected on a large screen in front of you in real time. The engineers have created a correlation between traveling 30km/h on the bike and witnessing light speed on the screen. That provides the seedling idea for this thought experiment.
Everyone knows that six-times Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong can ride a bike forever at incredible speed. He reaches speeds in excess of 75km/h on descents. So what would happen if we put Armstrong on the exhibition bike and instructed him to tide forever at incredible speed? Einstein's Special
Theory of Relativity provides some clues.
For example if your spaceship were to leave earth traveling at 98% the speed of light, the pace reached by any biker experimenting with the Tubingen simulation, and you took a one year journey, when you returned five years on earth would have passed. But that's taking us in the wrong direction. While it might be interesting to explore participation in an accelerated future, what about journeying to the past? Aren't the technical challenges insurmountable? And why might we want to do this, especially if we were only able to navigate the winding cobblestone paths of little Tubingen?
There are likely countless good reasons why visiting this German town in the past on our light bike could be interesting and enjoyable. Near the borders of Switzerland and Austria and overlooking the Neckar and Ammer rivers, Tubingen is richly vested in history and an ideal site for time travel. For our purposes we will concentrate on two key personalities who touched ground in the town, already connected over boundaries of time and space - the newly elected Pope Benedict XVI, formerly Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger and author Herman Hesse.
But first just how possible is our little thought experiment?
We are after all speaking of generating an infinite source of energy to drive our infinite mass (as objects approach the speed of light mass increases with velocity, going to infinity at the speed of light). Also approaching light speed means that thoughts, heart beat and movements would slow as well. But we were never thinking very quickly anyhow and surely there is nothing more massive than Lance Armstrong's thighs. Plus we have already seen Captain Kirk, Superman and even Chubaka of Star Wars fame reverse time with a flick of a switch or cape so it is clearly possible, despite what any 'earthbound' physicist might say.
Those physicists who dare to explore thought experiments in violation of the laws of physics, like Doc Brown in Back to the Future, suggest that if we could exceed 140% of the speed of light time will go faster than the stationary frame, in effect reversing time. With Armstrong traveling furiously over 200% the 30km/h speed of light requirement in the German museum we look well set to exceed that threshold. And now for the real kicker. He would pedal backwards, clearly a recipe for taking us backwards through time.
So that's sorted out and now on to our personalities. Pope Benedict XVI is already 78-years-old so we'd be unlikely to encounter him if we started Armstrong speeding back to the future. He's probably a fairly interesting character to meet in current time 2005, setting the stage and foundation of beliefs for over 1 billion Catholics worldwide. But to truly understand the essence of the man who would be pope we might need to travel back to 1968, a point in history often signaled by biographers as a critical juncture in the development of his philosophical perspective.
Joseph Aloysius Ratzinger was teaching at Tubingen when Marxist student protests broke out in the late 1960s, the European equivalent to the student protests in Italy, France and the US at the same period. As power was questioned in all its forms Ratzinger was scared by the upheaval and became gravely concerned with the consequences of a system free of a strong hand of structured order. He called the revolts "a radical attack on human freedom ... a deep threat to all that is human".
Shortly after he is said to have adopted the Conservative views that led him to his taskmaster position in the Church under John Paul II, effectively the Party Whip.
Charles Moore in the Daily Telegaph muses that "his experience of the subsequent turmoil in the Church has taught him that Western culture is profoundly hostile to the message of Christianity".
According to Moore, Pope Benedict XVI is said to be fascinated with Herman Hesse's Steppenwolf, with its portrait of Harry Haller embracing the meaninglessness of life. If this is true, and we have no reason to suspect otherwise, perhaps Ratzinger feels special affinity for the character who balances self-affirmation with self-destruction and individuality with convention.
Perhaps he also feels special affinity for author Hesse who apprenticed for four years at the Buchhandlung Heckenhauer (still standing today in Tubingen on the Holzmarkt Square) from 1895-1898, in a common practice for young writers. Hesse led a wandering life but, like Ratzinger, was crucially formed by his contemplative years in the Black Forest bordertown before the start of WWI, against which Hesse furiously spoke out in Switzerland. Ratzinger deserted the German army during WWII and was briefly held by American forces as a POW.
Hesse received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1946 after his works had been put out of print in Nazi Germany from 1939-1945 by authorities. His literary canon is defined by a range of beautiful texts but it is Siddhartha, a fictional account of the early spiritual wanderings of Gautama Buddha, and Steppenwolf that must have touched Ratzinger.
And so it is with great ferocity that Armstrong pedals our lightspeed bike backwards to 1968 to find the young theologian deep in a Martin Luther-like trance, driven to action but now feeling the weight of consequence, searching for a reconnection to God.
In a Time Magazine interview with a friend, Wolfgang Beinert, working in Tubingen at the time, Ratzinger's dilemma emerges:
"Ratzinger had advocated -- was known for advocating -- a greater openness and a loosening of ecclesiastical authority, the Tubingen strikes triggered a huge fright. Ratzinger believed that he was in some way responsible, guilty of the chaos, and that the university and society and church were collapsing."
Did he clutch Steppenwolf to his chest and chart a new path of authority and strict convention, his reputation as a institutional disciplinarian strengthened with each new promotion within the Church hierarchy?
Perhaps we should accelerate Armstrong's reverse still further, calling for one of his mythical climbs on Alpe d'Huez to take us still further back to Hesse, sitting contemplative, a lonely figure publishing his first poems in 1898, "melancholy neo-Romantic lyrics expressing Hesse's uneasiness with the world".
But a closer look sees figures clasped hand in hand across a table and over Hesse's shoulder, shadowed faces flickering in the firelight. Steppenwolf and Siddhartha sat cross legged speaking in turn.
SW: Our whole civilization is a cemetery where Jesus Christ, and Socrates, Mozart and Haydn, Dante and Goethe were but the indecipherable names on moldering stones; and the mourners who stood round affecting a pretense of sorrow would give much to believe in these inscriptions which once were holy.
SH: All the voices, all the goals, all the yearnings, all the sorrows, all the pleasures, all the good and evil, all of them together is the world. All of them together was the stream of events, the music of life...then the great song of a thousand voices consisted of one word: Om - perfection
Hesse doesn't seem startled by our presence: "We won't bring them," motioning towards his characters. "Ratzinger already knows them."
A whirl of the pedals and Armstrong has us on our way back to unite the characters of our Tubingen time-traveling drama, over time and space. Ratzinger doesn't seem startled by our presence.
Hesse: People with courage and character always seem sinister to the rest
Ratzinger: Having a clear faith, based on the creed of the church, is often labeled today as a fundamentalism... Whereas relativism, which is letting oneself be tossed and 'swept along by every wind of teaching,' looks like the only attitude acceptable to today's standards.
Hesse: Yet it is possible for one never to transgress a single law and still be a bastard
Ratzinger: Because in today's world the theme of truth has all but disappeared, because truth appears too great for man, and yet everything falls apart if there is no truth. We are moving toward a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal one's own ego and one's own desires.
Hesse: Within us there is someone who knows everything, wills everything, does everything better than we ourselves.
Shortly they fade from view and earshot, walking arm and arm, no longer two isolated, inspirational men but now joined forces, stretched by lightspeed over Tubingen.
One can't help but think that commuters in the congested cities of the world like London, Tokyo, Los Angeles or Mexico City, might benefit more from getting around on a 'bike' traveling at light speed than the 85,000 residents in this idyllic old town. But the next time you visit Tubingen allow your senses to open and seek the Om that came that day when Pope Benedict XVI and Hermann Hesse met and walked together, speaking in turn, listening all the time.
As for us, we sped off on our lightspeed bike in time to get it back to the Deutches Museum before opening the next morning. It's there waiting for you when you're ready to conduct your own thought experiment. But you better get out practicing on your bike as Lance Armstrong has a seventh Tour de France to win this summer and he's a little busy.
Labels: literature, religion, science
Can we ever create a machine that is indistinguishable from a human? Discussions on this topic, already a classic 20th century philosophical and scientific polarizer, promises to be one of the most inspired debates of the 21st century.
The tools necessary to enter into a discourse on this subject at first appear daunting and plentiful. Knowledge of the cognitive sciences, logic theory, proof theory, mathematics and physics would be a good starting point. Follow that-up with an informed firm positioning on the nature/nature discussion, skillful application of formal theories of computation, comfort with design of functioning machines to implement formally specified computations, and knowledge of the philosophical foundations of asyntactic, representational view of the relation of mind to reality, embodied by for example Wittgenstein's
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, and the opposed neuroscientist intuition that artificial intelligence can be created by modeling the brain, fuzzy logic neural nets working a process of computation not akin to formal deduction. Not stopping there, the social sciences will cry out for among others the inclusion of perspectives of epistemology (Foucault), Chomskian linguistics, and notions of refiguring the body that reject the subjugation of the body to a tool, or machine, at the disposal of consciousness.
Phew! While probing these philosophical avenues can be immensely rewarding they require a certain dedication of subject, an immersion into artificial intelligence as a field of study. This can be thought of more broadly as the study of the science of intelligence that has been a fascination of philosophers from Plato to Hobbes and Leibniz. But this daunting topic is actually accessible to anyone with a healthy curiosity about what makes us human.
The central question is whether mind and intelligence can be defined through a functionalist approach regarding mental processes as discreetly specifiable procedures and mental states as defined by their causal relations with sensory input, motor behavior and other mental states. In other words are our minds nothing more than sophisticated computers that can be simulated in machines? Can machines
understand and have cognitive states because such understanding is actually a functional mental process that can be theoretically simulated.
Let's look at a couple of recent examples that have gained some notoriety. Perhaps the most famous example of man vs machine is the
1997 chess match between high-performance computer Deep Blue and reigning World Chess Champion Garry Kasparov. With a dramatic victory in Game 6 Deep Blue took the match 3.5-2.5 and afterwards Kasparov was quoted as saying the machine had "played like God" while its inventors at IBM downplayed there machine capabilities as being stunning at solving chess problems but "less intelligent than even the stupidest human".
So while they took completely different approaches to the game -- Kasparov evaluating two or three positions per second, Deep Blue looking at 200 million per second -- the matches were extremely competitive. And it raises the question of whether Deep Blue
actually understands chess. While it primarily uses brute force to evaluate moves it has also been programmed with about 6,000 co-efficients (if-then statements like if your king is in check then protect it) as a kind of grandmaster rule book it is likely that Deep Blue could pass a Chess Turing Test by combining programmable rules with brute force computing.
In asking the question "Can Machines Think?" Alan Turing (Nazi codebreaker, creator of Turing Machines, et al) created an "imitation game" where an interrogator is connected to one person and one machine via a terminal with a soundproof wall in between so both counterparts cannot be seen. The task is to find out which is the machine and which is the human, only by asking questions to each. If the machine can fool the interrogator (the interrogator cannot accurately tell the difference), according to Turing it is intelligent. This test remains relevant in studies of artificial intelligence and
The Loebner Prize is an ongoing formal instantiation of the Turing Test (TT) that promises a Gold Medal to any machine that 'passes' the test. None have come close so far but each year the respondents score higher and higher. And we can see by the previous example that as Kasparov felt he was playing God it is unlikely he would have been able to distinguish Deep Blue from a human opponent and thus the machine exhibited chess intelligence, indistinguishable from human chess intelligence.
And if you are just thinking to yourself, "yes, while that is chess, particularly suited to that kind of simulation",
researchers in South Korea are working as this is written on robots that address the "essence" of man and have developed a series of artificial chromosomes that will allow robots to
feel lusty, and could eventually lead to them reproducing out of a
feeling of desire. The italics in the previous sentences are mine because the reality is that these robots are also just working out a combinations of rules and brute force in establishing emotions and feelings through computer code.
In
Minds, Brains and Programs, a seminal essay in the field of artificial intelligence, John Searle discarded the Turing Test as a reliable method of assessing intelligence or cognitive understanding by creating an ingenious thought experiment, his
Chinese Room analogy, in which an English speaker, knowing no Chinese, blindly follows a set of rules to always give the right answer in Chinese to questions posed in that language. Searle argues that the English speaker can clearly be shown not to understand Chinese even though an outside observer would not be able to differentiate between his responses and those of a fluent Chinese speaker. Hence the Chinese Room argument suggests that just passing a Turing Test does not show understanding and is thus not a good evaluator for artificial intelligence (technically Strong AI).
Few in the discussion of artificial intelligence will deny that it is likely that we will be able to create machines that can pass the Turing Test or even the Total Turing Test (TTT includes sight and thus includes robotics ... imagine the same experiment as the one described in the TT but this time remove the soundproof wall and also allow the interrogator to ask the subjects to physically act out as rerquested, playing golf for example and speaking about it afterwards).
So this extends the debate further into what additional (if any) qualities are part of the human mind. The
most typically cited qualities are subjective rather than objective qualities, like free will and sentience as well as 'qualia' like the sound of Beethoven, the sound of waves crashing on a beach (those simulators never quite reproduce it), or the smell of home cooking. So while a machine might smell home cooking and identify it as home cooking, does it really understand what that means?
It is a debate that it unlikely to be resolved conclusively anytime soon. But it is of interest to all of us humans to recognize that as technology, robotics and computing advances so too will opportunities for artificial intelligence. Decide for yourself if there is to be any difference between man and machines and if so how will you tell the difference?
For those interested in further readings or information on more detailed concepts of artificial intelligence email me at blog at chrisbrauer.com. In the meantime the following represents a good starting point for anyone interested in introductory reading on the topic:The Emperor's New Mind - Roger Penrose
The Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence - Ed. Margaret Boden (including Searle and Turing)
Views into the Chinese Room - Ed. John Preston and Mark Bishop
Labels: computing, science
