Jad Abumrad: The Unquantified Self

From crayfish hairs to monkey neurons, Radiolab host and producer Jad Abumrad shares examples of how sound has been used to make scientific strides. Along the way, he explains how audio can convey failure or express error.

Thinking about his upcoming appearance at IdeaFestival Bluegrass, I remembered this older IdeaFestival blog post about a talk given by Jad Abumrad. As a fan of his and of David Chalmers' formulation of the 'hard problem' of consciousness, I thought I'd re-post it today. I hope you enjoy it.

Wayne

Would a perfectly faithful replica of you, a clone, really be you? It's an age old question that is answered in a rather unexpected way here. In this amazing video, journalist, sound enthusiast and host of Radiolab, Jad Abumrad, suggests that it's the noise, failure and broken bits that extend to us individuality as well as infinite possibility.

Beginning with a couple audio examples of machines failing, Abumrad points out that data visualization and sonfication has emerged as a scienfitic tool. I immediately thought of my favorite example of this, the Allosphere, which makes astro- and quantum-sized data available in a human readable format - that is, visually and sonically - in a four story dome like structure on the campus of the University of California, Santa Barbara.

"Sonfication" has become a fertile area of collaboration between artists and scientists, used for example by researchers to listen to the sun.

Turned inwardly, one can also use the techniques to hear neurons firing in the head of a monkey making a choice during a simple game, as Abumrad demonstrates. Incredibly, out of the stochastic chaos one actually hears a decision pop out of the static. Similarly, he demonstrates that at the bottom of the protein producing machine that is you there are, biologically speaking, errors and broken, redundant and incomplete genetic material (defective mechanisms like the ability manufacture vitamin C, that, I might add, we know work perfectly well in other mammals). Abumrad plays sounds of our bodies at work. Where one might expect a rhythmic, factory-like order to the stuff of life, syncopation prevails.

But rather than focus on the signal, it's the indecipherability of the noise that so interests Abumrad.

Listening to these noises creates a sensation of the vastness of things, like listening, one might imagine, to messages received by the SETI project. What interests me is that this thinking also fits nicely with what some philosophers of mind argue is the case when it comes to the first-person experience. Our conscious, reflective interior worlds are unique to each of us, and even a molecule-by-molecule reconstruction of a brain, a perfectly faithful replica, would not reproduce the same inward experience in any two people. Listening to molecules at work, it's hard to argue with the suggestion.

Abumrad says, concluding:

You will find scientists who will tell you, and they deeply believe it, that we are quantifiable. We are knowable. They will say 'If I could take a high enough resolution picture of you I could tell you everything about who you are and everything you will be..... What this tells me is no! No. All the way down at the bottom of our thoughts there's just more mystery, there's just more randomness, just more fluctuation. Just like white noise is a smattering of all different frequencies.... perhaps this noise right here represents on some level infinite possibility that can never be known.

Isn't that wonderful?

Abumrad will be appearing at EKU for IdeaFestival Bluegrass, talking about the creative process and "gut churn." You can find out more about this April 21 event and his talk here.

Stay curious™

Wayne

Google Belief

If you understand everything, you must be misinformed - Japanese proverb

When does fact become knowledge?

TechRepublic has published a very nice interview on "Google-belief" and what can be known or truly understood by you and me. This section on accessible fact and creativity is particularly interesting.

Hope Reese:

You say an overreliance on this form of knowing is weakening our other senses. What kind of creative thinking are we losing? Is there a way to get some of that back?

Michael Lynch:

One of the things that I'm very concerned about is the fact that, like everything else in life, when we find something that works really well for certain purposes, we tend to get so excited about it, so reliant on it, that we tend to value it more. We think it solves more problems than it might actually do.

Google-knowing has given us lots of benefits, but it doesn't allow us to synthesize those facts all by itself. It can give us more facts, more stuff into the hopper, but in and of itself it doesn't tell us how to understand what we're processing. That is something that in a sense involves a whole different set of cognitive abilities, some of which are connected to creativity.

Right now we're talking a lot about analytics that we're able to use on massive sets of data. The internet of things is producing more data, which we are then able to employ our mathematical techniques on to find incredibly helpful and predictive correlations. That knowledge of how things hook together is the sort of thing that only can come through what I call understanding. Understanding is not the kind of cognitive ability that's being exercised or used when you're just passively receiving information (emphasis supplied).

The knowledge gained, say, from 30 years as a furniture maker is different from that of a courtroom attorney. But the two occupations, different as they are, do share a commonality. Every experience is a mediated experience. Information immediacy is not the same as knowledge. We are changed by experience, shaped by the tools we use, whether those tools be a finely tuned bench plane or a trained and nuanced argument before the bench. The question, which is perhaps too often forgotten today, and the one I was gratified to see addressed in the interview with Lynch, is this one: how are we changed?

Sense making only comes from the testing or exercise of what has been received. Do you dance? Dance! Do you build? Build! Do you explore? Leave your figurative shore for deeper waters.

Some of you may recognized the byline in this particular interview, Hope Reese, who, along with Jason Hiner, attended and wrote several articles about the IdeaFestival last October for TechRepublic.

Read her entire interview with the philosopher Michael Lynch here.

Stay curious™

Wayne

Mercy Algorithm

Image: Some rights reserved by chadmiller

Computers will never lose quietly like humans sometimes do - GoGameGuru

I won't pretend to know anything about the ancient and complex game of Go, which exceeds chess - so I've been told - in the sheer variety of potential outcomes. But I do love thinking about thinking. So I was interested to read an account of a win by a human master of the game, Lee Sedol, against his competitor, AlphaGo, in the Google Deep Mind Challenge, which matched silicon and biological wits for Go survival.

It was alas the only win for Sedol in the competition. This thought on thinking, though, grabbed my attention. GoGameGuru:

As we’ve discussed before, the algorithms which guide computer Go players seek to maximize the probability of winning. The margin of victory or defeat is irrelevant.

This leads to a behavior where computers usually 'win small, or lose big'. When computers are behind, they takes risks in an attempt to catch up, sometimes crazy risks which make it easier to shut them out of the game.

For the most part though, this is the behavior you want to see. Computers will never lose quietly like humans sometimes do.

To "lose quietly" could of course mean to lose meekly, or to leave defeated.

It seems to me that a distinguishing feature of the human mind is not an ability to surmount any problem, to succeed figuratively or literally in not dying, but in an ability to relinquish an advantageous position in favor of something else. Altruistic behavior or cooperation among individuals, or between groups, confers more than mere survival. It makes it possible to flourish. Can those actions be accounted for mathematically? Perhaps they can.

Can a conditional directive - if this, then that - for an unconditional exchange be mapped upon hardware? I don't know.

Is there a mercy algorithm?

Stay curious.™

Wayne

Remembering Sir George Martin

I awoke this morning to the sad news that Sir George Martin... the groundbreaking producer for the Beatles died at age 90. I was a Beatles child, a lucky kid who came of age with the Beatles music as the soundtrack to life, first loves and adolescent heartaches.... in my case, mostly heartaches. The first time I heard "I Want To Hold Your Hand" I was not only blown away by the song (as only a twelve year-old boy still dreaming of his first kiss can be) but also that unique, incredible sound... and that sound and production was George Martin.

In 2004 George Martin presented at the IdeaFestival. He delivered an amazing ninety minute multi-media talk full of Beatles songs on the making of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band... complete with many of the creative ideas and experiments that went into making that iconic album.

But it gets better.

He and his gracious wife spent nearly four-days in town for the IdeaFestival. During that time I had the opportunity to spend time with him in casual settings, talking over dinner and martinis. He talked about the early days of his time with the band, the actual backstory of meeting the "lads" (at the end of one their initial meetings he asked if anybody had anything else they wanted to add... and George said "I don't like your tie"), the early ideas, struggles, successes and of course, the music. And in the end I believe that's how George would ultimately want to be remembered.... for the music.

Kris Kimel, Founder of the IdeaFestival and President, Kentucky Science and Technology Corporation

"Success" is the Next Step

Image: Some rights reserved by Cazadora de Fotos

I had to share this article from Creativity Post on success strategies, not the least because of one rather compelling book title.

Citing the strategy cited by a variety of successful people, the piece argues that too often we think about success in the terms of the future while ignoring the present. Yet success requires many individual steps along the way, each of which require something that is completely within your power to do: choose differently. Exercise, for example, isn't about losing those stubborn pounds, it's about what, in the moment, you will decide to do. Nothing more, nothing less.

If it helps you to get up on that bike, or to walk or run, or to swim, give yourself permission to quit before you start.

Then go. Success is what happens next:

When it comes to our actions, disorder and distraction are death. The unordered mind loses track of what’s in front of it—what matters—and gets distracted by thoughts of the future. The process is order, it keeps our perceptions in check and our actions in sync....

Getting it right from meal to meal, meeting to meeting, project to project, paycheck to paycheck, one day at a time.

That wonderful book title is The Obstacle is the Way.

Stay curious™

Wayne