More Soul, More Youthful Thinking and More Thinking Among Machines

Posted on February 19, 2017 by Thinkibility

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What is artificial intuition?

How can it be developed?

What if machines not only learn like children but also think like children?

What would happen if machines started to think together?

Bill Gates has suggested that robots should be taxed and that the money should be used to pay the people who have lost their jobs to robots. On the one hand, it makes sense to suggest that if robots will be depriving humans of work, then the company should simply pay tax for using their skills, and the money should be put into supporting the rest of society. He also believes that certain jobs cannot be replaced by robots such as nurses and teachers.

Yet, perhaps we are just simply missing the point with using AI – Artifcial Intelligence. Perhaps AI offers a spark to kickstart a new way of building a society. A new way to ensure that everyone has a roof over their head and food on the table. New ideas are needed rather a simple application of the old practices.

The same thing could perhaps also be said about the way we think about machines and the way we design robots. If we look at perhaps the most transforming part of human history it is that we are not relying on individual thinking. Instead, the collaborative and collective thinking is one of driving forces behind our remarkable progress.

So perhaps we should focus on what potential there are among machines rather than within machines.

Moreover, the focus is often on building machines that can deal with increasingly higher volumes of data. Yet, to explore ideas such as building artificial intuition, may require that we instead look into ways that machines that use as little data as possible. Thin-slicing is a powerful concept. Designing machines that can improvise, without a script or a plot and react to new environments require new ways to approach the way we think about AI.

What if several machines could be connected to work intuitively on little information? Perhaps a solution could not be found by using this approach but maybe new insights and ways to approach a problem would emerge.

Children are the best learners. Developmental cognitive scientists and computer scientists have been working together to figure out how young children can learn so much so quickly. A problem with AI is that it has been very difficult to predict what aspects that would be most difficult to solve. Problems such as how to play chess and to detect statistical pattern have turned out to be fairly easy task to solve – admittedly. they could still be improved upon. Yet, a limited generalise can only be achieved from statistical learning, this is regardless of whether you are a child, an adult or a computer.

Children are often good at inventing new concepts and often their thinking is non-conventional – out-of-the box thinking. They link ideas and say things that do not make sense. Creating machines that could create new concepts and explore hypotheses that are not obvious could, just like listening to children, result in new insights.

What if you could transform the way we build AI? What would you do?

(Suggestion, read our other posts about intuition…..)

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Framing = To Lure into Deception

Posted on November 19, 2016 by Thinkibility

In this Thinkibility Boost we will explore the relation between thinking and framing.

In visual arts and particularly cinematography, framing is the presentation of the visual element in an image, especially the placement of the subject in relation to other objects.

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Framing can make an image more aesthetically pleasing and keep the viewer’s focus on the framed object(s).

Something similar happens with mass communication. In essence, framing theory suggests that how something is presented to the audience (called “the frame”) influences the choices people make about how to process that information. The basis of framing theory is that the media focuses attention on certain events and then places them within a field of meaning. Framing involves social construction of a social phenomenon – by mass media sources, political or social movements, political leaders, or other actors and organizations.

Framing is in many ways tied very closely to Agenda Setting theory. Both focus on how media draws the public’s eye to specific topics – in this way they set the agenda. But Framing takes this a step further in the way in which the news is presented creates a frame for that information.

Political Framing

This is usually a conscious choice by journalists – in this case, a frame refers to the way media as gatekeepers organize and present the ideas, events, and topics they cover.

Most of the time framing is a technique used by politicians or their advisers to favor a wished representation of the facts, usually when things went wrong.

Political Spinning

This is called spinning. The main objective is to lure the public into believing propaganda. A standard approach used in “spinning” is to reframe, reposition, or otherwise modify the perception of an issue or event, to reduce any negative impact it might have on public opinion.

Spinning might be discovered by misleading or false

Metaphors: To give an idea or program a new meaning by comparing it to something else. See for an analysis of political metaphor here.
Stories (myths and legends): To frame a subject by an anecdote in a vivid and memorable way. For an introductory text, see story telling in politics.
Traditions (rites, rituals and ceremonies): To pattern and define an organization at regular time increments to confirm and reproduce organizational values.
Slogans, jargon and catchphrases: To frame a subject in a memorable and familiar fashion. Here a list of political slogans, catch phrases, buzzwords and jargon.
Artifacts: To illuminate corporate values through physical vestiges (sometimes in a way language cannot). Look here for 25 Amazing Political Artifacts From the New-York Historical Society
Contrasts: To describe a subject in terms of what it is not. For an introduction read Contrast in Presentations Creates Contour

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The Charm of Imperfection

Posted on July 16, 2016 by Thinkibility

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In an earlier post about focus, we stressed the importance of paying attention to the focus of the thinking. Taking a problem or challenge unquestioned as it exposes itself may lead to brilliant solutions for the wrong problem. It is therefore required to pay substantial time and effort to (re)define the focus of the thinking.

The problem of attention is best illustrated by the figure-ground phenomenon: it is known as identifying a figure from the background. For example, you see words on a printed paper as the “figure” and the white sheet as the “background”. However, it is possible to define the white sheet as the “figure”and the “background” as the printed words. Some examples of figure–ground perception shift are:

Figure–ground perception can be expanded from visual perception to include abstract (i.e. non-visual) concepts such as melody/harmony, subject/background, and positive/negative space. The concept of figure and ground fully depends on the observer and not on the item itself.

In art, is the space around and between the subject(s) of an image. Negative space may be most evident when the space around a subject, not the subject itself, forms an interesting or artistically relevant shape, and such space occasionally is used to artistic effect as the “real” subject of an image. It is called Negative Space. The Japanese word “Ma” is sometimes used for this concept, for example, in garden design.

With respect to presented information we called this phenomenon “Left Out” and “Cassandra information“: What is not there?

What is not mentioned in the report, intentionally or unconsciously?

We will take the figure-ground reversal a little bit further. Normally, we strive for perfection– broadly, a state of completeness and flawlessness. We value strength, beauty, completeness, velocity, winning etc. Let’s shift focus to the negative face. What is the beauty of imperfection? Amazingly, there is no such page in Wikipedia neither in the Encyclopedia Britannica.

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Ripping or distressing of jeans, though also arising naturally as a result of wear and tear, is sometimes deliberately performed by suppliers – with distressed clothing sometimes selling for more than a non-distressed pair. For example, Pucci sold “embellished mid-rise boyfriend jeans” for $860 USD. In other times it would be a sign of poverty.

The Golden Raspberry Awards is an award ceremony in recognition of the worst in a film. Most winners do not attend the ceremony to collect their awards. Notable exceptions include Tom Green (Worst Actor/Worst Director), Halle Berry and Sandra Bullock (Worst Actress), Michael Ferris, Joe Eszterhas (Worst Screenplay), and Paul Verhoeven (Worst Director)

“The Bad Hemingway Contest” is an annual writing competition that has been held for nearly thirty years, the contest pays mock homage to Ernest Hemingway by encouraging authors to submit a ‘really good page of really bad Hemingway’. Also to mention the “Hemmingway Look-alike Society”, a bunch of “portly gray-bearded old men.”: not being unique is the pursue, but striving for the likeness of someone else is worth pursuing.

It is all about focus shift

It is all about perception shift. A shift from looking for perfection to valuing imperfection. In Japan, it is called Wabi-sabi, the acceptance of transience and imperfection. The aesthetic is sometimes described as one of beauty that is “imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete”

What about the 25 inventions that are completely pointless, as a Car Exhaust Grill or a sadomasochistic tea kettle?

Leaning towers seem to attract a lot more visitors than towers standing upright.

A choir for people who cannot sing and are tone deaf was started by Nadine Cooper, 48, who wanted to join a singing group but never had the courage because she was aware she could not stay in tune. Her self-consciousness started when she was a child after a music teacher ordered her to keep her mouth shut because of her awful singing.A tuneless choir for those who . . .well can’t sing: Listen, this bunch is really hair-raising the roof!

What Is Consciousness?

Posted on December 21, 2014 by Thinkibility

Will we ever discover what consciousness is? For these days of reflection at the end of 2014 we collected some TED-talks as an introduction to the subject.

John Searle: Our shared condition — consciousness

David Chalmers: How do you explain consciousness?

David Brooks: The social animal

Antonio Damasio: The quest to understand consciousness

Graham Hancock – The War on Consciousness

On “Signatures of Consciousness: A Talk by Stanislas Dehaene”

Innovation and Lucid Dreaming

Posted on January 22, 2014 by Thinkibility

Does the idea of conspicuously dreaming up the next innovation appeal to you? Does it sound tempting to build storm proof cities in your mind? Solve mathematical problems? Or simple find a creative solution to the dripping tap while you are consciously influencing your dreams?

We spend around 6 years of our lives dreaming. Yet we know very little about dreaming and we rarely consider ways to use our dreams.

A framework has been developed based upon Stephen LaBerge’s laboratory work at Stanford University where he mapped mind/body relationships during the dream state (read more in the books Exploring the World of Lucid Dreams and Lucid Dreaming: A Concise Guide to Awakening in Your Dreams and in Your Life.

Lucid Dreaming refers to:

any occasion when the sleeper is aware they are dreaming.
the idea of being able to control those dreams

This concept has lead to the development of ideas such as such smartphone apps and specialist eye masks to enhance REM sleep.

Like most things in life, being able to quickly distinguish dreams from reality requires practice and discipline. To start with you need to make a Dream Journal and learn to distinguish between dreams and reality.

Photo: “Sleeping Mask On Face” by adamr

Thin-slicing : the power of intuition – Thinkibility Boost

Posted on November 13, 2013 by Thinkibility

Building up Intuition is “thin-slicing”

In an earlier post, we discussed the relation between Reasoning and Intuition on the basis of Kahneman’s two interrelated thinking systems. One is fast, intuitive reactive and emotional. The other is slow, deliberate, methodical and rational. Although he acknowledges that the mind functions thanks to a delicate, intricate and sometimes difficult balance between the two systems, his book Thinking, Fast and Slow is mainly about biases of intuition. And to prevent them, we ought to be less thinking-lazy. That is to say that we must mobilize more often System 2: the laborious process of analysis. We recommended this book in our post Reasoning versus Intuition.

Basically, from childhood on a mindset is stamped in the brain “Don’t trust your Intuition”. It is a result of the scientific revolution. The result is that intuition is highly undervalued. But there are many situations where there is no room for rational thinking, yet there have to be an action, a judgement or a decision. In such a situation the use of intuition is a last resort and we had better to be trained for it.

there is too little information available
there is too much information
the situation is too complex to analyse methodically
a quick reaction is required
a situation wherein someone is overwhelmed by emotions

There are also many positives of using intuition:

it allows for a much broader and sensitive exploration of a subject or situation
it can grasp soft notions about a subject or intangible aspects
it is very useful in situation when something cannot be caught in words
it draws on valuable experience
non-verbal clues (smell, taste, bodily signals) are mostly not available in language
it is less likely to get caught up in red herrings or distractions
there is no need for justification (that is per definition impossible and not to trust anyway if tried)

There are not merely advantages of intuitive thinking. Sometimes it even outperforms rational systematic thinking.

In an earlier blog post Inteligent Gossip by the Watercooler we mentioned already Blink, The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, a 2005 book by Malcolm Gladwell. It is all about mental processes that work rapidly and automatically from relatively little information. Although a substantial part of his book is addressing the pitfalls of intuitive thinking such as priming and stereotypes we recommend this book because it illustrates the powerful performance of what Gladwell calls “Thin-slicing“.

Thin-slicing or Rapid Cognition refers to the ability of our unconscious to find patterns in situations and behavior based on very narrow slices of experience. It is the power of knowing in the first two seconds. It is a system in which our brain reaches conclusions without immediately telling us that it is reaching conclusions. Whenever we meet someone for the first time, we interview someone for a job, we react to a new idea or face with a decision quickly and under stress we use this “split second” system. When we leap to a decision or have a hunch, our unconsciousness is sifting through the situation in front of us, throwing all that is irrelevant while we zoom in on what really matters. However, it is buried somewhere in our unconscious, and we couldn’t dredge it up.

This skill is not magically given to a couple of fortunate people. It is a skill that we can all cultivate by ourselves. Snap judgement and first impressions can be educated and controlled. It is possible to learn when to listen and when to be wary of it.

Below are some examples of Thin-slicing:

By a “Blink of an Eye” an art historian outperformed months of scientific analysis of a piece of art that turned out to be a forgery.
In an experiment with manipulated game cards sweat glands below the skin in the palms of hands of gamblers were measured. It proved that they knew unconsciously forty cards before they were able to say that they the cards were manipulated. But moreover, they begun to behave accordingly to their unconscious stress reactions, long before they became consciously aware of what adjustments to make.
Marriages have a distinct pattern, a kind of DNA that surfaces in any case of meaningful interaction. After training it is possible to “read” or “decode” those patterns and predict divorce within 3 minutes, without asking husbands and wives questions about the state of their marriage. In another experiment non-experts were given a list of emotions to look for. They predicted with better than 80 percent accuracy which marriages were going to make it.
It showed that in a hospital that more information did not lead to better diagnoses. Actually, the role of much in itself relevant factors was small in determining what was happening. An accurate diagnosis could be made without them. It showed also that many times doctors would do better if they knew less about their patients. The very desire for confidence by doing more tests and gathering more information from the patient was precisely what ended up undermining the accuracy of their diagnosis.
In an electronic war game one aircraft carrier, ten cruisers and five out of six amphibious ships were sent to the bottom of the Persian Gulf in the span of just one hour, resulting in the virtual death of over 20.000 US service personnel. It showed the failure of a doctrine which is called Information Dominance: databases and matrices and methodologies for systematically understanding the intentions and capabilities of the enemy. The conducting of a thoroughly rational and rigorous analysis that covered every conceivable contingency apparently destroyed the capabilities of rapid cognition.

First impressions are notorious difficult to put into words. Some people always make a note of the first word that goes through their heads. In others a visual image imposes itself automatically. Some people get it hot or cold. Others experience abdominal or stomach spasm. Others experience a strong emotion or get dizzy.

The information is in a thin-slice

It is interesting to ponder about the consequences of living in a world that assumes that the quality of a decision is directly related to the time and effort that went into making it. That it is much easier to listen to scientists and lawyers because they could provide pages and pages of documentation and conclusions than “reading your inner state”.

Could we design “structures of spontaneity” where improvisation, without a script or a plot, and reacting to the environment is less calculated and rationalized but instead promote picking up instinctively a truth?

Could we develop intuition systematically?

World Thinker’s Ideas – Rethink and Re-examine

Posted on September 8, 2012 by Thinkibility

Where does the mind dwell? This question has occupied the best brains for thousands of years. Now, a patientwho is self-aware – despite lacking three regions of the brain thought to be essential for self-awareness – demonstrates that the mind remains as elusive as ever.

Alva Noë, part philosopher, part cognitive scientist/part neuroscientist, explores why we need to rethink our assumptions about consciousness and the brain in the book Out of Our Heads . He argues that we need to rethink and re-examine basic assumptions. Scientists and humanists need to work together to enhance the understanding of consciousness.“The science of mind could benefit from interruption. It is time to slide our chairs back from the table and to invite intelligent latecomers to join our circle. In cognitive science, specialist jargon and technical details are too often an impediment to clear and honest thinking” (p. xiv)Alva Noë challenges the traditional way of separating scientific and humanistic styles of thinking. The common goal is understanding and by working together scientists and philosophers can advance our understanding. Scientific research rests on assumptions and it is vital to have an open mind to the value and correctness of these assumptions.

Assumptions need to be true, but it is crucial not to regard them as “the truth”. When our understanding is changing, it is vital to re-examine underlying assumptions. Rethinking assumptions may be necessary but it is easy to suggest a similar idea. The only difference may be the introduction of new terms. Alva Noë argues that the suggestion that our joys and sorrows are nothing more than a vast assemble of nerve cells shares similarities with René Descartes’ idea that each of us in a thinking thing. Francis Crick’s idea that our mind is nothing more than the activity of nerve cells, glia cells and molecules may have been described as an astonishing hypothesis yet one mystery have only been replaced by another. The common assumption, shared by Descartes and Crick is that consciousness happens inside our head.

Brains do not have minds but people and animal do. The world is there for us and we can be open to it. Our body is not a robot where the brain is placed. Instead, our brain is part of what we are. Body, brain, and world play a role in making us. The brain does not alone hold the answer to the question of how the world shows up for us. The brain is necessary but it is part of a whole system. Consciousness does not simply happen to us. It is something that we do and what we do depends on the environment and the context. Consciousness is not something that happens in the brain. Taking a wider view of the whole organism interacting with its environment makes sense.

Many of us may argue that the weak point of this idea is “How can you imagine a mind anywhere else than in our head?” Where would you suggest? And is this a valid question?

Photo: “Paragliding ” by graur razvan ionu

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