Favorite Quotation 092705 [Ralph Waldo Emerson]

Earth laughs in flowers…

--Ralph Waldo Emerson(1803-1882)

Source: The Columbia World of Quotations, 1996
http://www.bartleby.com/66/

Why the laughter?

…to see her boastful boys,
Earth-proud, proud of the earth which is not theirs;
Who steer the plough, but cannot steer their feet
Clear of the grave.

From his poem, “Hamatreya”
Full-text at:
http://www.emersoncentral.com/poems/hamatreya.htm

Understanding Evolution IV -- Origin of Complex Biological Systems

If you still have doubts that complex biological systems (e.g., the human eye) can come into existence through evolution characterized by a serious of simple, random events, you might want to deepen your knowledge of molecular biology.

In the journal Nature, scientists from the Netherlands and Sweden show how uncovering the structure of a vital protein we use for defense against damaging biological invaders can reveal how that kind of evolution can occur at the molecular level. The details fascinate and edify.

The full article:

Janssen BJC, Huizinga EG, Raaijmakers HCA, Roos A, Daha MR, Nilsson-Ekdahl K, Nilsson B, Gros P.

Structures of complement component C3 provide insights into the function and evolution of immunity.

Nature 2005;437:505-11. (22 September 2005)
doi: 10.1038/nature04005

A “News and Views” report in the same issue summarizes the findings and implications:

Liddington R, Bankston L. Structural biology: Origins of chemical biodefence. Nature 2005;437:484-5.
doi: 10.1038/nature04005

Richard Dawkins explains how complex biological systems can arise through a series of simple random events over evolutionary time in his book:

Dawkins R. Climbing mount improbable. New York: Norton, 1996.

Understanding Evolution III -- Richard Dawkins

Perhaps the leading teacher of the wonders of science and the meaning of evolution. They called Henry T. Huxley "Darwin's Bulldog". Some call Dawkins "Darwin's Rottweiler". He writes accessibly and engagingly.

Richard Dawkins featured on the EDGE website:
http://www.edge.org/

Bio:
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/dawkins.html

Article -- Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/dawkins/lecture_p1.html

Article -- A Survival Machine
http://www.edge.org/documents/ThirdCulture/j-Ch.3.html

Consciousness --- Machine Consciousness

Conference: Toward a Science of Consciousness 2004
"Tucson VI"
April 7-11, 2004

Abstract accepted for poster session.

Author: Anthony Sebastian *

A Gedankenexperiment that Establishes In Principle the Ability of Humans To Construct Consciously Experiencing Machines.

Abstract:

In his JCS article on machine consciousness, "The Borg or Borges?" [Journal of Consciousness Studies, Volume 10, No. 4-5, April-May 2003], William Thompson writes humorously and allusively, yet makes some claims clear enough for response. He writes, for example: "An engineer can be clever and construct a machine that says 'Ouch!' instead of flashing a red light, but this gnostic demiurge is mimicking consciousness to trick humans. The machine is not a sentient being capable of suffering, and….experiencing compassion for the suffering of other sentient beings."

Not clever enough, Thompson’s engineer, I say. Thompson’s and related views seem not to recognize that, first of all, all "sentient being[s]" own the essential requirements to qualify as machines. One may call them organic multi-cellular machines. One would find it difficult to argue convincingly that humans fail to qualify as machines. Merriam-Webster’s 3rd International Unabridged Dictionary states “MACHINE applies to a construction or organization whose parts are so connected and interrelated that it can be set in motion and perform work as a unit.” Sounds like my fifth-grader daughter.

One must recognize the mind-boggling level of complexity of the human machine, and realize that it acquires conscious cognitive functionality only in a socio-cultural matrix comprising other consciously experiencing machines. If nature can engineer such machines, and license the appropriate socio-cultural matrix that enables conscious experiencing, then we, who have caught on to so many of nature's machinations, can conceivably do so too.

For one example, with a not unrealistically advanced and not too future-remote technology, and sufficient knowledge of the human genome and cell structure, conceivably we could build an entirely artificial human being, from raw materials, atom by atom, starting with a single manufactured cell, a zygote, implanted in a surrogate human for gestation. Such an artificial machine, flawlessly constructed, and nurtured in the human environment, predictably would learn to speak and to experience objects and events of reality consciously.

Thus, one way to construct consciously experiencing machines involves constructing proto-machines that self-develop to an enormous level of complexity that emulates the functionality of human beings, all the while nurturing those self-developing machines in the human environment, as fully fledged members of human society. Such machines would grow and develop as nascent humans do, emotionally and cognitively, learning the trick of experiencing consciously from the natural human machines who already know the trick, just as happens with natural children.

Accordingly, this gedankenexperiment establishes conclusively in principle that we can construct from raw materials consciously experiencing machines. Issac Asimov (“I, Robot”) and Robert Heinlein (“Friday”) understood the basic requirements decades ago. If possible in principle, its implementation just needs clever enough engineers, cleverer than the ones Thompson imagines.

* My first post on the subject of conscious experiencing.

Favorite Quotation 091105

Nothing you do is important, but it is very important that you do it. —Mahatma Gandhi

I read that as: You cannot do anything truly important, but you cannot then just sit around doing nothing.

Other readings?

Favorite Quotation 090505

It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.

—Charles Darwin

TonySeb:

What changes in our environment, in its broadest sense, will we face to meet the qualification “most responsive to change”?

I will start the list:

(1) the rapidly diminishing availability of cheap energy;

(2) the coming of the "Singularity", the time point when machine intelligence outstrips human intelligence;

(3) ...

Interesting Article: Finding Structure in Raw Data

A computer program that can uncover structure from raw data (“corpora of raw symbolic sequential data”): For examples, see Abstract below.

Unsupervised Learning Of Natural Languages

Zach Solan*, David Horn*, Eytan Ruppin**, and Shimon Edelman***

*School of Physics and Astronomy and **School of Computer Science, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv 69978, Israel; and ***Department of Psychology, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853

Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS) 2005 102: 11629-11634; published online before print as 10.1073/pnas.0409746102. [Need subscription to obtain full text online; university libraries carry print journal; academics can access online through their library]. Free full-text of lead-up publications at http://kybele.psych.cornell.edu/ADIOS/publications.html.

Address correspondence to Dr. Shimon Edelman: se37@cornell.edu.

Abstract:

We address the problem, fundamental to linguistics, bioinformatics, and certain other disciplines, of using corpora of raw symbolic sequential data to infer underlying rules that govern their production.

Given a corpus of strings (such as text, transcribed speech, chromosome or protein sequence data, sheet music, etc.), our unsupervised algorithm recursively distills from it hierarchically structured patterns. The ADIOS (automatic distillation of structure) algorithm relies on a statistical method for pattern extraction and on structured generalization, two processes that have been implicated in language acquisition. It has been evaluated on artificial context-free grammars with thousands of rules, on natural languages as diverse as English and Chinese, and on protein data correlating sequence with function.

This unsupervised algorithm is capable of learning complex syntax, generating grammatical novel sentences, and proving useful in other fields that call for structure discovery from raw data, such as bioinformatics.

NB: For further details see Zach Solan’s Ph.D. thesis:

"The Syntax of Nature" - "The Nature of Syntax": a study of the hidden structures in human language and in other raw sequential data such as music, proteins, DNA and more...

http://www.tau.ac.il/~zsolan/

TonySeb: What use could you get out of ADIOS? Perhaps we could learn how to “talk” to birds, dolphins, à la Dr. Doolittle.

More on scienceblog: http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/node/8802

Important Article: A Must Read for Human Life-Fulfillment in the 21st Century

An energy emergency looms—we all know it, though with heads buried in the sand.

--Shall we ration?
--Invest more in technological solutions?
--Throttle our gross materialism?

Read, free online:

The Joseph Strategy. David Ehrenfeld. Orion Magazine, September-October, 2003.

http://www.oriononline.org/pages/om/03-5om/Ehrenfeld.html

Other generic strategies, anyone?

Books 090105

The Modern Library’s List of the 100 Best Non-Fiction Books of the 20th Century


Selected by the Modern Library’s board of authors, historians, critics, and “a scientist”.

[Which have you read? Add your own choices to the list, and explain why you consider them among the best.]

-------------
THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS by Henry Adams
THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE by William James
UP FROM SLAVERY by Booker T. Washington
A ROOM OF ONE'S OWN by Virginia Woolf
SILENT SPRING by Rachel Carson
SELECTED ESSAYS, 1917-1932 by T. S. Eliot
THE DOUBLE HELIX by James D. Watson
SPEAK, MEMORY by Vladimir Nabokov
THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE by H. L. Mencken
THE GENERAL THEORY OF EMPLOYMENT, INTEREST, AND MONEY by John Maynard Keynes
THE LIVES OF A CELL by Lewis Thomas
THE FRONTIER IN AMERICAN HISTORY by Frederick Jackson Turner
BLACK BOY by Richard Wright
ASPECTS OF THE NOVEL by E. M. Forster
THE CIVIL WAR by Shelby Foote
THE GUNS OF AUGUST by Barbara Tuchman
THE PROPER STUDY OF MANKIND by Isaiah Berlin
THE NATURE AND DESTINY OF MAN by Reinhold Niebuhr
NOTES OF A NATIVE SON by James Baldwin
THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ALICE B. TOKLAS by Gertrude Stein
THE ELEMENTS OF STYLE by William Strunk and E. B. White
AN AMERICAN DILEMMA by Gunnar Myrdal
PRINCIPIA MATHEMATICA by Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell
THE MISMEASURE OF MAN by Stephen Jay Gould
THE MIRROR AND THE LAMP by Meyer Howard Abrams
THE ART OF THE SOLUBLE by Peter B. Medawar
THE ANTS by Bert Hoelldobler and Edward O. Wilson
A THEORY OF JUSTICE by John Rawls
ART AND ILLUSION by Ernest H. Gombrich
THE MAKING OF THE ENGLISH WORKING CLASS by E. P. Thompson
THE SOULS OF BLACK FOLK by W.E.B. Du Bois
PRINCIPIA ETHICA by G. E. Moore
PHILOSOPHY AND CIVILIZATION by John Dewey
ON GROWTH AND FORM by D'Arcy Thompson
IDEAS AND OPINIONS by Albert Einstein
THE AGE OF JACKSON, Arthur Schlesinger by Jr.
THE MAKING OF THE ATOMIC BOMB by Richard Rhodes
BLACK LAMB and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West
AUTOBIOGRAPHIES by W. B. Yeats
SCIENCE AND CIVILIZATION IN CHINA by Joseph Needham
GOODBYE TO ALL THAT by Robert Graves
HOMAGE TO CATALONIA by George Orwell
THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MARK TWAIN by Mark Twain
CHILDREN OF CRISIS by Robert Coles
A STUDY OF HISTORY by Arnold J. Toynbee
THE AFFLUENT SOCIETY by John Kenneth Galbraith
PRESENT AT THE CREATION by Dean Acheson
THE GREAT BRIDGE by David McCullough
PATRIOTIC GORE by Edmund Wilson
SAMUEL JOHNSON by Walter Jackson Bate
THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MALCOLM X by Alex Haley and Malcolm X
THE RIGHT STUFF by Tom Wolfe
EMINENT VICTORIANS by Lytton Strachey
WORKING by Studs Terkel
DARKNESS VISIBLE by William Styron
THE LIBERAL IMAGINATION by Lionel Trilling
THE SECOND WORLD WAR by Winston Churchill
OUT OF AFRICA by Isak Dinesen
JEFFERSON AND HIS TIME by Dumas Malone
IN THE AMERICAN GRAIN by William Carlos Williams
CADILLAC DESERT by Marc Reisner
THE HOUSE OF MORGAN by Ron Chernow
THE SWEET SCIENCE by A. J. Liebling
THE OPEN SOCIETY AND ITS ENEMIES by Karl Popper
THE ART OF MEMORY by Frances A. Yates
RELIGION AND THE RISE OF CAPITALISM by R. H. Tawney
A PREFACE TO MORALS by Walter Lippmann
THE GATE OF HEAVENLY PEACE by Jonathan D. Spence
THE STRUCTURE OF SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTIONS by Thomas S. Kuhn
THE STRANGE CAREER OF JIM CROW by C. Vann Woodward
THE RISE OF THE WEST by William H. McNeill
THE GNOSTIC GOSPELS by Elaine Pagels
JAMES JOYCE by Richard Ellmann
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE by Cecil Woodham-Smith
THE GREAT WAR AND MODERN MEMORY by Paul Fussell
THE CITY IN HISTORY by Lewis Mumford
BATTLE CRY OF FREEDOM by James M. McPherson
WHY WE CAN'T WAIT by Martin Luther King by Jr.
THE RISE OF THEODORE ROOSEVELT by Edmund Morris
STUDIES IN ICONOLOGY by Erwin Panofsky
THE FACE OF BATTLE by John Keegan
THE STRANGE DEATH OF LIBERAL ENGLAND by George Dangerfield
VERMEER by Lawrence Gowing
A BRIGHT SHINING LIE by Neil Sheehan
WEST WITH THE NIGHT by Beryl Markham
THIS BOY'S LIFE by Tobias Wolff
A MATHEMATICIAN'S APOLOGY by G. H. Hardy
SIX EASY PIECES by Richard P. Feynman
PILGRIM AT TINKER CREEK by Annie Dillard
THE GOLDEN BOUGH by James George Frazer
SHADOW AND ACT by Ralph Ellison
THE POWER BROKER by Robert A. Caro
THE AMERICAN POLITICAL TRADITION by Richard Hofstadter
THE CONTOURS OF AMERICAN HISTORY by William Appleman Williams
THE PROMISE OF AMERICAN LIFE by Herbert Croly
IN COLD BLOOD by Truman Capote
THE JOURNALIST AND THE MURDERER by Janet Malcolm
THE TAMING OF CHANCE by Ian Hacking
OPERATING INSTRUCTIONS by Anne Lamott
MELBOURNE by Lord David Cecil