Posts tagged Books
And everything under the sun is in tune
But the sun is eclipsed by the moon
Rubens came upon an old collection of photographs of President John Kennedy: the photos were in color, there were at least fifty of them, and on all of them (all, without exception!) the President was laughing. Not smiling, laughing! His mouth was open, his teeth bared. There was nothing remarkable about it, that’s what contemporary photos are like, but the fact that Kennedy laughed in all of them, that not a single one showed him with his lips closed, gave Rubens pause. A few days later he found himself in Florence. He stood in front of Michelangelo’s David and tried to imagine that marble face laughing like Kennedy. David, that paradigm of male beauty, suddenly looked like an imbecile! Since then, he had often tried in his imagination to retouch figures in famous paintings to give them a laughing mouth; it was an interesting experiment: the grimace of laughter could ruin every painting! Imagine Mona Lisa as her barely perceptible smile turns into a laugh that reveals her teeth and gums!
Even though he spent so much of his time in galleries, it took Kennedy’s photographs to make Rubens realize this simple fact: the great painters and sculptors from classical days to Raphael and perhaps even to Ingres avoided portraying laughter, even smiles. Of course, the figures of Etruscan sculpture all have smiles, but this smile isn’t a response to some particular, momentary situation but a permanent state of the face, expressing eternal bliss. For classical sculptors as well as for painters of later periods a beautiful face was imaginable only in its immobility.
Faces lost their immobility, mouths became open, only when the painter wished to express evil. Either the evil of pain: the faces of women bent over the body of Jesus; the open mouth of the mother in Poussin’s Slaughter of the Innocents. Or the evil of vice: Holbein’s Adam and Eve. Eve has a bland face and a half-open mouth revealing teeth that have just bitten into the apple. Alongside, Adam is a man still before sin: he is beautiful, his face is calm, and his mouth is closed. In Correggio’s Allegories of Sin everyone is smiling! In order to express vice, the painter must move the innocent calm of the face, to spread the mouth, to deform the features with a smile. There is only one laughing figure in the picture: a child! But it is not a laugh of happiness, the way children are portrayed in advertisements for diapers or chocolate! The child is laughing because it’s been corrupted!
—Milan Kundera - Immortality (1990)
ACHILLES: I know the rest of you won’t believe this, but the answer to the question is staring us all in the face, hidden in the picture. It is simply one word—but what an important one: “MU”!
CRAB: I know the rest of you won’t believe this, but the answer to the question is staring us all in the face, hidden in the picture. It is simply one word—but what an important one: “HOLISM”!
ACHILLES: Now hold on a minute. You must be seeing things. It’s plain as day that the message of this picture is “MU”, not “HOLISM”!
CRAB: I beg your pardon, but my eyesight is extremely good. Please look again, and then tell me if the picture doesn’t say what I said it says!
ANTEATER: I know the rest of you won’t believe this, but the answer to the question is staring us all in the face, hidden in the picture. It is simply one word—but what an important one: “REDUCTIONISM”!
CRAB: Now hold on a minute. You must be seeing things. It’s plain as day that the message of this picture is “HOLISM”, not “REDUCTIONISM”!
ACHILLES: Another deluded one! Not “HOLISM”, not “REDUCTIONISM”, but “MU” is the message of this picture, and that much is certain.
ANTEATER: I beg your pardon, but my eyesight is extremely clear. Please look again, and then see if the picture doesn’t say what I said it says.
ACHILLES: Don’t you see that the picture is composed of two pieces, and that each of them is a single letter?
CRAB: You are right about the two pieces, but you are wrong in your identification of what they are. The piece on the left is entirely composed of three copies of one word: “HOLISM”; and the piece on the right is composed of many copies, in smaller letters, of the same word. Why the letters are of different sizes in the two parts, I don’t know, but I know what I see, and what I see is “HOLISM”, plain as day. How you see anything else is beyond me.
ANTEATER: You are right about the two pieces, but you are wrong in your identification of what they are. The piece on the left is entirely composed of many copies of one word: “REDUCTIONISM”; and the piece on the right is composed of one single copy, in larger letters, of the same word. Why the letters are of different sizes in the two parts, I don’t know, but I know what I see, and what I see is “REDUCTIONISM”, plain as day. How you see anything else is beyond me.
ACHILLES: I know what is going on here. Each of you has seen letters which compose, or are composed of, other letters. In the left-hand piece, there are indeed three “HOLISM”s, but each one of them is composed out of smaller copies of the word “REDUCTIONISM”. And in complementary fashion, in the right-hand piece, there is indeed one “REDUCTIONISM”, but it is composed out of smaller copies of the word “HOLISM”. Now this is all fine and good, but in your silly squabble, the two of you have actually missed the forest for the trees. You see, what good is it to argue about whether “HOLISM” or “REDUCTIONISM” is right, when the proper way to understand the matter is to transcend the question, by answering “Mu”?
CRAB: I now see the picture as you have described it, Achilles, but I have no idea of what you mean by the strange expression “transcending the question”.
ANTEATER: I now see the picture as you have described it, Achilles, but I have no idea of what you mean by the strange expression “mu”.
ACHILLES: I will be glad to indulge both of you, if you will first oblige me, by telling me the meaning of these strange expressions, “holism” and “reductionism”.
CRAB: Holism is the most natural thing in the world to grasp. It’s simply the belief that “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts”. No one in his right mind could reject holism.
ANTEATER: Reductionism is the most natural thing in the world to grasp. It’s simply the belief that “a whole can be understood completely if you understand its parts, and the nature of their ‘sum’”. No one in her left brain could reject reductionism.
CRAB: I reject reductionism. I challenge you to tell me, for instance, how to understand a brain reductionistically. Any reductionistic explanation of a brain will inevitably fall far short of explaining where the consciousness experienced by a brain arises from.
ANTEATER: I reject holism. I challenge you to tell me, for instance, how a holistic description of an ant colony sheds any more light on it than is shed by a description of the ants inside it, and their roles, and their interrelationships. Any holistic explanation of an ant colony will inevitably fall far short of explaining where the consciousness experienced by an ant colony arises from.
ACHILLES: Oh, no! The last thing that I wanted to do was to provoke another argument. Anyway, now that I understand the controversy, I believe that my explanation of “mu” will help greatly. You see “mu” is an ancient Zen answer which, when given to a question, unasks the question. Here, the question seems to be “Should the world be understood via holism or via reductionism?” And the answer of “mu” here rejects the premises of the question, which are that one or the other must be chosen. By unasking the question, it reveals a wider truth: that there is a larger context into which both holistic and reductionistic explanations fit.
ANTEATER: Absurd! Your “mu” is as silly as a cow’s moo. I’ll have none of this Zen wishy-washiness.
CRAB: Ridiculous! Your “mu” is as silly as a kitten’s mew. I’ll have none of this Zen washy-wishiness.
—Douglas Hofstadter - Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid (1979)
The “understand-the-brain” jigsaw puzzle is particularly daunting. Lacking a good framework for understanding intelligence, scientists have been forced to stick with the bottom-up approach. But the task is Herculean, if not impossible, with a puzzle as complex as the brain. To get a sense of the difficulty, imagine a jigsaw puzzle with several thousand pieces. Many of the pieces can be interpreted multiple ways, as if each had an image on both sides but only one of them is the right one. All the pieces are poorly shaped so you can’t be certain if two pieces fit together or not. Many of them will not be used in the ultimate solution, but you don’t know which ones or how many. Every month new pieces arrive in the mail. Some of these new pieces replace older ones, as if the puzzle maker was saying “I know you’ve been working with these old puzzle pieces for a few years, but they turned out to be wrong. Sorry. Use these new ones instead until further notice.” Unfortunately, you have no idea what the end result will look like; worse, you may have some ideas, but they are wrong.
New York is probably […] the strangest city in the world, so many of its denizens living as they (we) do among the unreconstructed remnants of nineteenth-century sweatshops and tenements, the streets potholed and buckling while right over there, around the corner, is a Chanel boutique. We go shopping amid the rubble, like the world’s richest, best-dressed refugees.
Every new achievement of AI can be dismissed by pointing out other goals that have not yet been accomplished. Indeed, this is the frustration of the AI practitioner: once an AI goal is achieved, it is no longer considered as falling within the realm of AI and becomes instead just a useful general technique. AI is thus often regarded as the set of problems that have not yet been solved.
