[-empyre-] sidebar - continued discussion between John KlimaandBill Seaman - part 2

[Bill Seaman <bseaman@risd.edu>]

Marcus wrote:
I am curious about the limits of this model. Some descriptions of
mental processes deal with the hypothesis that meaning is not fully
controllable (and that it is not immanent, not once fixed, generated,
and from then on stable). In other words, it might not be possible to
fully sense what enables sentience.

Seaman:

I often think about this. It came up a few times 
in my recent conversations with otto Rössler. 
There is a part of the 
mind/brain/body/environment relation that goes to 
work on problems beneath the surface of conscious 
thought. So as a writer/artist (Rössler dubbed me 
a Theoretical Humanist) you load the fields with 
potentials of ideas and approaches but somehow 
this higher, hidden level comes into play. In 
particular I often find myself working in my 
sleep, in a near dream state and solutions to 
problems arise out of higher level realm that is 
inaccessible to conscious grasp. I imagine very 
high level pattern matching and recombinant 
patterning processes goes on here. How can we get 
at this? Yes - an excellent question.

The aha moment that arises. Einstein says this 
happens in the 3 Bs  - the Bed, Bus, and Bath. ---
so now I often assign my students a time to take 
a break, go for a walk, visit the beach at the 
height of their thesis work --- they often get 
better work done in an "off moment" where the 
solution to a creative problem just arrives...

Do we have a name for this phenomena --- hyper-consciousness?

------

To bridge code and mind for a moment:

In his paper Mathematical Thinking & the Brain
David Tall talks about resonance:

R. R. Skemp [6] has given a different analogy for resonance by likening it to
the resonating of the undamped strings of a piano when a sound is made. The
piano strings respond with a given sound. In this analogy the resonance is
limited by the physical configuration of the piano. The mind is more subtle
because its resonance configuration changes with experience and time. Unlike a
passive piano which only responds to the actions upon it, the mind is active,
with much of this activity being subconscious. The process of long-term
memory storage takes several hours, as can be shown by the common
occurrence of loss of memory after concussion. Experimental evidence has
indicated that memory fixation occurs over a period of thirty minutes to three
hours [4, p. 239]. Problems which are attempted sometimes prove intractable at
the time, yet a solution can leap to mind after a 
considerable period, indicating
possible subconscious activity during at least part of the intervening time.
University lecturers teaching difficult subjects such as analysis consider the
need of a long period of study before the basic concepts are understood, again
understanding can occur after a period of relaxation away from the topic (given
some work on it in the first place!)

In considering the long-term activity of the brain, new sensory input, or
brain activity itself, may change the possible resonance configurations. Given
an established resonance, an alternative may develop, and during the period
when two (or more) alternatives are possible, a slight change in sensory input
may cause a dramatic change from one resonance to the other. The passage of
time may lead to the dominance of a new resonance and the decay of the old.

http://www.warwick.ac.uk/staff/David.Tall/downloads.html

For me - the best authorship sets this resonance shifting process into motion?

As an author of creative systems, in a sense we 
load the mind with all of the variables we are 
interested in, but it is a higher level mind that 
does the deep pattern assessment and out of 
nowhere the "intuition" or idea arises. Our minds 
may protect our consciousness from this higher 
level activity... the question is - can we make 
AI systems that have analogues to all levels of 
the mind/brain/body/environment relation? I would 
suggest making an environment that takes what we 
do know about mind/brain/body/environment 
functionality at the highest level and exploring 
it, that potentially this hyper-level may arise 
on its own. Thus far, it hasn't. (It took us 
awhile to achieve it...) and it may not happen in 
my lifetime but it is still something interesting 
to chip away at... time is long.

To my mind this element of resonance is active 
both in the production and the reception of 
works... and seems central to our discussion.
b

--
Professor Bill Seaman, Ph.D.
Department  Head
Digital+ Media Department (Graduate Division)
Rhode Island School of Design
Two College St.
Providence, R.I. 02903-4956
401 277 4956
fax 401 277 4966
bseaman@risd.edu

http://billseaman.com
http://www.art.235media.de/index.php?show=2
http://digitalmedia.risd.edu