William James at CERN
Some Examples of Selection in Minds and Computers
1. William James
Principles of Psychology
This is obviously true of action. Whatever views your views on free will, it is indubitable that differing options occur to us, that we compare them, that we prefer some to others, that eventually we elect one and dismiss the rest. More interestingly, James describes the role of selection in perception, and finds it at every level of neural and mental life. The sense organs, to begin with, are insensitive to almost all that happens around them. When they are excited and transmit nervous impulses to the brain, these are sifted for significant patterns (often found on dubious grounds). News of these is relayed to other parts of the brain, which look for more subtle, more detailed, and more broad patterns, until at last we reach our perceptions, grouped together by another process of selection into things. Some of these we attend to; the rest we ignore.
``The mind is at every stage a theatre of simultaneous possibilities. Consciousness consists in the comparison of these with each other, the selection of some, and the suppression of the rest by the reinforcing and inhibiting agency of attention. The highest and most elaborated mental products are filtered from the data chosen by the faculty next beneath, out of the mass offered by the faculty below that, which mass in turn was sifted from a still larger amount of yet simpler material, and so on. The mind, in short, works on the data it receives very much as a sculptor works on his block of stone. In a sense the statue stood there from eternity. But there were a thousand different ones beside it, and the sculptor alone is to thank for having extricated this one from the rest. Just so the world of each of us, how so ever different our several views of it may be, all lay embedded in the primordial chaos of sensations, which gave the mere matter to the thought of all of us indifferently. We may, if we like, by our reasonings unwind things back to that black and jointless continuity of space and moving clouds of swarming atoms which science calls the only real world. But all the while the world we feel and live in will be that which our ancestors and we, by slowly cumulative strokes of choice, have extricated out of this, like sculptors, by simply removing portions of the given stuff. Other sculptors, other statues from the same stone! Other minds, other worlds from the same monotonous and inexpressive chaos! My world is but one in a million alike embedded, alike real to those who may abstract them. How different must be the worlds in the consciousness of ant, cuttlefish, or crab!''
I propose, now, to see whether these ideas of selection shed any light on the various uses of ``thinking machines,'' that is to say, computers.
2. The Julia Set
The reader is almost certainly familiar with fractals, whether of the abstract or the naturalistic variety, but is perhaps less likely to know that computer programs have written verse (rhymed, blank and free), short stories, and even a novel. Art critics --- and more particularly, theoretical art critics --- have been understandably interested in these developments. Some have dismissed them as, at best, amusements for the boys in the basement computer lab across campus, a folk art for those whose native language is C. Others --- such as the late O. B. Hardison Jr., whose views are set forth with admirable clarity in Disappearing Through the Skylight --- have been thrown into a kind of ecstasy of obsolescence. ``Gazing at the thirty-nine sea-horses of the Mandelbrot set,'' they say in effect, ``we can see that human art, Art with a capital A, is at an end, not perhaps this week-end, but soon: it is later than you think. The day will come when a human artist could no more rival a computer than than a sprinter out-race a Ferrari. The coming art will be digital, perfect, timeless, inimitable, perhaps incomprehensible. We and all our works shall pass to dust, and only they will remain, dreaming their silicon dreams of unknown space.'' Such, in essence and composite, is the rhetoric. It seems to me to miss the most interesting aspect of the new computer art, which is its human angle, and with it the most plausible future.
The connection between selection and art is, to revert to James, ``obvious''.
... continue reading