Composer, sculptor, painter, poet, prophet, sage — these are the makers of the after-world, the architects of heaven. The world is beautiful because they have lived; without them, laboring humanity would perish.

– James Allen

Neural Bandwidth, Prediction and the Nature of Experience

Andy Clark has posted a clear and interesting piece on neural bandwidth, prediction and the construction of experience by the brain.

Perception may best be seen as what has sometimes been described as a process of “controlled hallucination” (Ramesh Jain) in which we (or rather, various parts of our brains) try to predict what is out there, using the incoming signal more as a means of tuning and nuancing the predictions rather than as a rich (and bandwidth-costly) encoding of the state of the world. This in turn underlines the surprising extent to which the structure of our expectations (both conscious and non-conscious) may quite literally be determining much of what we see, hear and feel.

Finally, perception and understanding would also be revealed as close cousins. For to perceive the world in this way is to deploy knowledge not just about how the sensory signal should be right now, but about how it will probably change and evolve over time. For it is only by means of such longer-term and larger-scale knowledge that we can robustly match the incoming signal, moment to moment, with apt expectations (predictions). To know that (to know how the present sensory signal is likely to change and evolve over time) just is to understand a lot about how the world is, and the kinds of entity and event that populate it. Creatures deploying this strategy, when they see the grass twitch in just that certain way, are already expecting to see the tasty prey emerge, and already expecting to feel the sensations of their own muscles tensing to pounce. But an animal, or machine, that has that kind of grip on its world is already deep into the business of understanding that world.

Nathalie Miebach: Art Made of Storms

Artist Nathalie Miebach creates complex sculptures and musical scores from weather data. The brief video below is a nice introduction.  For more, go to nathaliemiebach.com.

Philobolus: Symbiosis

Alan Kay

The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
– Alan Kay

Alan Kay is a pioneering computer scientist known primarily for his work on object-oriented programming and graphical user interfaces. While at Xerox PARC, he led the team that developed Smalltalk, the first purely object-oriented, dynamically typed and reflective programming language. Moreover, the Smalltalk windowing system was a precursor to today’s ubiquitous graphical user interface.

Kay is also an accomplished jazz guitarist and classical organist.

In this insightful and entertaining lecture on Programming and Scaling, Kay reflects on past and future paradigms for the development of large-scale software systems.

The Illusion of the Self

A fascinating discussion of the “self model” by philosopher Thomas Metzinger:

The Illusion of Control

Many people are scared to acknowledge their essential interconnectedness, because it means they must admit they don’t have complete control over how they think and act. This makes them feel powerless. However, the illusion of being in control is just that — an illusion. And a harmful one at that, because it encourages self-judgment and self-blame. In reality, it doesn’t make any more sense to harshly blame ourselves than it does to blame a hurricane. Despite the fact that we give hurricanes names like Katrina and Rita, a hurricane isn’t a self-contained unit. A hurricane is an impermanent, ever-changing phenomenon arising out of a particular set of interacting conditions — air pressure, ground temperature, humidity, wind, and so on. The same applies to us: we aren’t self-contained units either. Like weather patterns, we are also an impermanent, ever-changing phenomenon arising out of a particular set of interacting conditions. Without food, water, air, and shelter, we’d be dead. Without our genes, family, friends, social history, and culture, we wouldn’t act or feel as we do.

 – Kristin Neff, Self-Compassion