- Details
- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Ideas & Questions
- Hits: 1397
At the moment I'm reading Carl Jung 's "Memories, Dreams and Reflections". And I'm loving it. It suits the cast of my mind perfectly, it was written for me.
And it stirs the thought of how out of fashion Freud and Jung have become.
Personally, I've always been a fan. "But the times, they are a changin" and you don't get blog anywhere now-a-days without a CGI of a firing neuron or an MRI scan. It would help to know a little NLP.
I'm not dismissing these advances, they are great advances, but as much as they sift and measure there seems to be equally much that they miss.
Freud. Very unfashionable, with his Ego, SuperEgo, Id, Eros and Thanatos. SO much mumbo jumbo....Many new psychologists know of him only by reputation, he is studied anecdotally in university, superficially, there are different theories, Stanley Milgram, BF Skinner and Bandler and Grinder amonst them, that are far more "current" and "hip".
That's not to deride or undervalue them. But Freud and Jung were amonst the first to move into this area. And they were mapping the human mind, the landscape of the unconcious, the soul. And they did great work. Great work.
My boy, at 4, maybe 5 years old, we're out camping in Jasper and I'd been teasing him. He has a fit, a rare (for him) tantrum - "I'm going to poke your eyes out with this stick, then kill you and marry my Mom.!" That's a quote. I watched him while I sipped my coffee, unable to express the impression his outburst registered. It was a classic Freud moment. Up until then I'd been a little leery, I had my own theories as well. That changed everything.
They studied the layering and ordering of personality, the concious and unconcious motivations. They were, in a sense, adventurers mapping an unknown, undiscoverd world. And, with the tools they had, pen and paper, conversation, patients, they did a remarkable job. An incredible job. Think of drawing a map of the world, without Google Maps or an Atlas to aid you, you have to discover it all yourself first. A very big job.
They were working on the big picture. I read studies now, they are tiny pictures, parts of a mosaic. Elements of personality and intelligence mapped by divisions of psychologists, psychiatrists and neurosurgeons in different universities. There is no "Whole Theory of Human Personality", just as there is no "Unified Theory" in physics. But these guys, Freud and Jung, they were undertaking the tremendous task of mapping the entire human personality. In Carl Jung's case, the "Soul".
If you doubt Freud's substance or impact try reading Bruno Bettelheim's "The Uses of Enchantment". It sits on my folklore and fairy tales shelf in the office. No, you can't borrow it, buy your own. It's a masterpiece. It doesn't tell you anything you didn't know already, that you didn't intuit or understand or somehow in a deep way comprehend. But it uses Freud's theories to reveal plain truths in plain language, which in itself is a sort of genius. Think of Newton and the Apple. He was not the first to discover gravity, but he certainly was the first to notice it.
SO it's back now to reading Carl Jung. He suits me, somehow, his stories, experiences are not mine, but the world's. And while I don't recognize the events, the places or time, I recognize the humanity and emotion in his writing. The commonality of our experience. It's a great read.
Quotes: Carl Jung
"The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed."
"The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves."
"Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment and especially on their children than the unlived life of the parent."
"The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it."
Quotes: Sigmund Freud
"America is a mistake, a giant mistake." and "America is the most grandiose experiment the world has seen, but, I am afraid, it is not going to be a success." and "Yes, America is gigantic, but a gigantic mistake."
"Everywhere I go I find that a poet has been there before me."
"I have found little that is "good" about human beings on the whole. In my experience most of them are trash, no matter whether they publicly subscribe to this or that ethical doctrine or to none at all. That is something that you cannot say aloud, or perhaps even think."
"If you can't do it, give up!"
"Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar."
"The mind is like an iceberg, it floats with one-seventh of its bulk above water."
"Time spent with cats is never wasted."
"What a distressing contrast there is between the radiant intelligence of the child and the feeble mentality of the average adult."
"What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books."
"The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest until it has gained a hearing."
"The first requisite of civilization is that of justice."
- Details
- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Ideas & Questions
- Hits: 1403
A fascinating, albeit old (late 60's/early 70's) idea in mathematics is the evolution of extraordinary complex systems from a few initial set rules and conditions.
One such fascinating example is Conway's "The Game of Life".
From the few initial rules below:
For a space that is 'populated':
Each cell with one or no neighbors dies, as if by loneliness.
Each cell with four or more neighbors dies, as if by overpopulation.
Each cell with two or three neighbors survives.
For a space that is 'empty' or 'unpopulated':
Each cell with three neighbors becomes populated.
follow strangely 'alive' patterns that resemble cells seen under a microscope.
Of course, there need to be the initial "seed cells", which determine which shapes will 'evolve' and which shapes will 'die off'.
If you've never tried or played with this, try it here or here . (*Note: both of these link to older webpages - circa early 2000 - and programmers aren't always artists or graphic designers. Don't be dissuaded, great ideas are great regardless of how ugly the webpage is. And also note there are hundreds, if not thousands, of similar applications on the net - a quick google search will turn them up for you.)
Having run the application you'll see a variety of shapes emerge from whatever initial "seed" you draw onto the page.
Some of the more common ones:
Above: The first 3 cells are static - having evolved they are no longer changing, unless they collide with a larger and active body of cells. The 4th cell in is a 2 phase "Oscillator" - jumping between 2 states. Some groups of cells will find an equilibrium and oscillate between 2 or more shapes. The final group on the right represents f-pentomino - a simple starting position that gives rise to shapes and patterns that don't stabilize over 1000+ generations
Should you have difficulty getting started (ie: your first few attempts result in life "dying off" or stablizing too quickly to be of any interest), try the F-Pentomino shape, which evolves quickly and produces a wide variety of "lifeforms".
Now you should probably take a break from this post and play with the applications linked above before coming back and reading the rest of it - it'll make a lot more sense.
There are a variety of initial rules - elaborations upon Conway's basic rules, which give rise to even more interesting shapes and configurations - some resembling coral, others resemble arial views of cities and other geometric structures. And, depending on how fortunate you were in your initial "seeding" of the graph, you may have seen other such shapes as "gliders" and "spaceships" that wriggle across the screen like primitive forms of cellular life. But as intriguing as this is, note that the simulation you are running is 2 dimensional, presumes an initial cell shape that is square and a view of the universe that is essentially 2 dimensional (an X axis, a Y axis and the element of time).
Now imagine this simulation run perhaps with different shapes - for example tiled triangles, hexagons, pentagons, whatever.
And imagine that it's played in 3 dimensions - with an x, y and now z axis, over time. What patterns and shapes could you expect to see evolve then?
This game layed the foundation for Stephen Wolfram's theory that the universe itself is, in fact, a kind of "cellular automation".
Now, as thought provoking as this simulation is, it's only a simulation, really, a visual example of how extraordinarily complex patterns, shapes and "behaviours" can evolve from the simplest of rules and initial starting conditions. It has no practical purporse other than to illustrate this point. But it fascinates me nonetheless - and here are a few of the reasons or possibilities I see in it:
- Note there is no value within the game to survival - cells "live" and "die", but they on their own take no action - what if there were a rule in place, that when a group of cells reached a certain "size" (ie: 7-11-13 connected cells) they then began to take pains to ensure they did not die off or fall into a static state?
- IN the simulation the only requirements for growth are space and an initial population of 3 cells. What if, for a cell to survive, it needed to consume another cell (and thereby grow into the bargain)? How could you programatically encode senses into the cells so that they could "read" the neighboring spaces and search for food?
- What if the rules evolved along with the cells within the game - for example, at certain critical masses groups of cells would find themselves subject to different rules of growth and population - as in the real world? For example, cells in our bodies, microbes in the air, etc. are not subject in any great sense to the rule of gravity. But as they group together and form increasingly complex organisms the force of gravity becomes something to be reckoned with. In addition, how do cells on the interior of an organism arrange for delivery of food, and what is the simplest way programatically to allow for this eventuality? Or would it evolve?
- And some of the above are covered in this, but what if, in every X generations of the simulation, or when cells reached again that critical mass or size, they were allowed to change the rules to favour their survival? To write their own rule(s) and append it to their own organization?
- The simulation, as it is viewed in the links above, happens in 2 dimensions + time. We can visually imagine, and there are programs written, that replicate the simulation with various rules in 3 dimensions. But in the purest form the game does not require a graphical display, and computers can handle processing multi-dimensional arrays - as many as current technology will allow it to run. What if the the animation were run across 10, 100, 1000 dimensions, each "cell" possessed of n(10Nth) "dimensions" - adding "dimensions" as it grew or ran out of "space" in the dimensions it occupied? What if the requirements were changed from "Space" on a graphical display to "space" on a hard-drive - or linked over the internet a variety of hard drives - with both survival and the acquisition of knowledge/information it's initial conditions? What if it were given the ability to write and rewrite (making it more compact, freeing space and allowing for it's growth) it's own source code? Could it be expected we would at any time see anything approaching intelligence or evolution?
Those are just a few of the possibilities inherit in the simulation. Note that on a computer it would quickly fill the hard-drive, the challenge would then be to somehow limit the "evolution" to those groups of cells or ideas you thought had the most potential.
Trivia: When Conway first devised the game he ran the simulations over a "Go" gameboard, and by drawing the cells on a blackboard and erasing them. There weren't computers (not household, anyways) back then.
- Details
- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Ideas & Questions
- Hits: 1249
Then there is the idea of "impossible".
We live in an impossible world. So much of what we take for granted - at one time or another, was considered to be "Impossible". And, with time and consistent effort, every impossibility has yielded, and become not only possible, but commonplace. Think of automobiles, airplanes, computers, cell phones. The list is endless.
The most important aspect of "Impossible" is the fact that whenever anything is generally accepted as "impossible", it generally is.
There are a few ideas as to why this might be, the most obvious is that most people will not spend time addressing the impossible, prefering to address the easy and difficult possibilities instead. And so unaddressed it remains impossible. But once addressed, impossible frequently proves to be a mirage, a problem with our thought or approach. We've created our own limits and boundaries. Impossible, then, becomes the easy answer to the flawed question.
Here are a few phases that relate to the challenge of impossible:
Phases:
#0: Not even considered. Of course, nothing is possible until first there is the idea or recognition of it; it must first be thought of.
#1: Out and out dismissal- not possible. As noted above, the problem or issue needs to be addressed before it can solved. Hence in this phase things tend to remain impossible.
#2: Rationalized: Considered, but dismissed as impossible. Impossible things are speculatively considered, but dismissed as impossible. Circuitous thinking at it's best (or worst)...
#3: The Challenge. The Impossible is attempted, usually with poor results. But as much depends on the approach, the next phase is crucial. Here you should have in your mind the fleeting and grainy black and white film image of a man flapping wax, paper or cardboard wings leaping off of a pier....
#4: Reconsidered, reapproached. retried. The impossible is approached from a different angle. Now consider the more lasting image of the Wright Brothers.
#5: Perhaps failure again. If failure, redo step #4. [Note: often things end here because people keep retrying the same approach. Key is knowing when to vary approach and effort.]
#6: Success
Once conquered, you have the exception, you've disproved the rule, it is no longer impossible, and with patience and continued effort the exceptional will become the rule.
Find something impossible to do. Then give it a try. It might be easier than you think.
- Details
- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Ideas & Questions
- Hits: 1577
Fractals are shapes (2 or 3 dimensional) wherin each part of the shape resembles or recreates the whole.
Looking at the image to the left, you will see that each piece of the picture taken seperately resembles the whole.
The Fibonocci Series is, in a sense, fractal, as the patterns or geometry created by the series of numbers will be the same across infinite scales.
Like the Fibonocci series Fractals are found throughout nature - from patterns in the florets of broccoli, the patterns within lightening, to the clustering of stars and galaxies at the outer edges of the universe. Undoubtedly you've had that conversation with a stoner friend that conjectures atoms are really suns, their electrons are planets and if only we could build a microphone small enough we could possibly talk to them...
Horton hears a Who, anyone?
Fractals have what could be described as a self-symmetry across scale...
What are other, less noted, examples of fractals? Are there examples of fractals, for example, in Music? Could time in any sense be fractal?
What does this suggest about the nature of the universe?
And for more great images of fractals, check the Wiki.
- Details
- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Ideas & Questions
- Hits: 1447
Common among artists, Synesthesia is a cross wiring of the senses that allows the Synesthete to experience one sense (for example colour) in conjuntion with another (such as taste or sound). For example, a Synesthete might describe the color red as being hot, brown as being slick, and blue as making a ringing sound akin to a telephone, another might describe the sound of C Sharp as "tasting salty". Various explanations exist for the condition.
Famous synesthetes include Vladimir Nabokov (see his autobiography "Speak Memory"), Duke Ellington , David Hockney and Richard Feynmann.
Further links and videos are listed below.
Brief definition with examples at: Absolute Astronomy
Website for Synesthetes: www.synesthete.org
YouTube clip explaining: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DvwTSEwVBfc