The SmartS Club

Artificial Intelligence is a misnomer. Does anybody have an idea of what human intelligence (the non-artificial one) is? Over here in Germany Intelligenz is absolutely not the same thing as intelligence represented with a capital I in CIA, for example. That CIA-one was most probably the intelligence that was meant to be artificially emulated in the 50s, 60s, 70s... And quite successfully so. Today, AI is widely perceived to be an imitation, a parallel realization, or even a substitute of the human intelligence that suposedly sets us apart from every other rock. Remember the times when your science-inclined parents explained to you how the behavior of snails is nothing more than the output of a hardwired machine? Same for the canary, the turtle under you bed, and the dog. (It was hard to believe how the malevolent fits of my cat were hardwired and not real, genuine evil. But it was.) Intelligence was nicely reserved for us humans. That appears to get questioned. The definition of intell...

The air is clear and warm. No artificial lights anywhere. The moon is lingering lazily in the trees lining the river. Some fireflies are having a good time, switching their glow on and off rather randomly - in one group they seem to synchronize but then it is random again. It reappears: a few bugs are flashing simultaneously at first, then more of them join in, and then even more until a huge cloud of insects is flashing in tune. Are they doing this on purpose? Do they even know that they are glowing? Do they have a will to turn their light on and off?  Obviously they do communicate. But why? How do they do it?  Or don’t they? 

On a wonderful summer night you lie in the grass - gaze into the dark sky, and let your thoughts wander - that shiny thing over there is an airplane, this a distant star, ISS disappears in the earth’s shadow - what a tiny box to be in! - where are the planets, how far can I see? You observe falling stars that are whizzing through the atmosphere at a delightfully high rate.  Why are there so many of them that night? Why do comets return? When? What is this strange thing called infinity. And why does infinity only go one way - infinitely into the future, but not infinitely into the past; infinitely far away, but not infinitely close, infinitely hot, but not infinitely cold, infinitely loud, but not infinitely silent? Why do things never end but did start at a certain point?  Why? The air is clear and warm. No artificial lights anywhere. The moon is lingering lazily in the trees lining the river. Some fireflies are having a good time, switching their glow on and off ...

We got this great side-board from a friend. He moved and had no place to put it. We moved and had no furniture. The classical win-win situation. We now had a stylish, perfect 70s norwegian beauty in our living-room. An expensive piece that conoisseurs would kill for. It is great, it is elegant, it is big.  Way too big for our apartment as it turned out. So we put it in the basement. As the basement is dark, humid, moldy - home of vicious spiders and man-eating multi-legged creatures crawling up the brittle walls and scurrying behind decaying cardboard boxes whenever you put a foot on the ground, sometimes getting inside your shirt or attacking your calves... (but this is another story) - we called my friend weekly to have him rescue that treasure. I really felt bad about it. But now my favorite source for ultimate taste, the treehuggers (oh, click here and there ), tells me that we are way ahead, style-wise... Some italian designers are sporting moss-covered furn...

Cabdrivers internationally are artists, musicians, dancers, writers - anything but cabdrivers. That was different in pre-oh-so-hip, pre-wall-came-down Berlin, where cabdrivers (east and west) used to be just angry, crabby old cabbies, and proud of it. They were eloquent only when it came to convincing every happy visitor why it is no good idea to be a happy visitor, ultimately proving their point by ridiculously overcharging for an annoying ride. General misanthropy wasn't fashionable only in a tiny yellow car - it was a hallmark of Berlin. Yep, east and west. A colleague of mine, coming from the Netherlands, got a convincing performance at the fish-counter of a local supermarket. When he tried to strike a jolly conversation by asking:"what goodies have we got today?!" he was served the perfectly berlinesque response: "fish.". (period.). With the wild and art-packed Berlin going down the drain so disappears this element of style and so mutate the cabdrivers. ...

Someone said every good blogpost starts with blood. And that guy's blog is insanely popular for good reasons. In contrast, Richard Dawkin's blog is popular for god reasons (yeah, that was cheap). While scrolling through my twitter timeline I am getting a bit tired of the religiously fervent atheism of @RichardDawkins whom I admittedly pity as he just completed his transformation from an interesting thinker to a t-shirt salesman. Glittery, silver double helix neclaces, bold atheist-'A' bumper stickers. Boring stuff. He must have fired his best ghostwriters after the n-th remake of his smart bestsellers (you do remember them, don't you?). Fortunately, before wasting too much thought on why elderly men tend to get so narrow-minded, self-pitying, and self-centered (and while laboriously calculating my own age) I was getting aware of a conversation at a nearby table in the run-down coffee shop that serves the most intense espresso in town - 'so strong, they ba...

Do you understand german? Be happy if not. If you do you might be tempted to read this interview with the philosopher Patrick Spät . This young chap is so overconfidently bashing 'physicalism' that he doesn't stop himself from saying things like "already atoms have fundamental mental properties" (ah, I see, it is in the word 'fundamental').  I once met an esoterically enlightened person, who made quite a shipload of money claiming that photons obviously possess a free will as they can willingly decide whether to be particle or wave. Spät might like that idea. Remember, his atoms have mental properties. Mentality, he says, is a natural property just as charge, mass or spin. Sure. Go, measure it. Those properties then add up and the more atoms you have, the more mental you get. Great! What a huge mind my favorite skyscraper represents! And I always knew that my short cousin couldn't be as smart a smart-S as I am - simply because she lacks the number...

A neuroscientist I was talking to recently complained that the Higgs-research,even the Neutrino-fluke at CERN is getting humungous funding while neuroscience is struggling for support at a much more modest level. This, despite the undisputed fact that understanding our brain, and ultimately ourselves, is the most exciting challenge around. Henry Markram of EPFL in Switzerland   is one of the guys aiming for big, big funding to simulate the complete brain. After founding the brain institute and developing methods to analyze and then reconstruct elements of the brain in a supercomputer he now applies for 1.5 Billion Euro in EU-funding for the 'flagship-projects' of Blue Brain -and many believe his project is simply too big to fail. Some call the project daring, others audacious. It is one of the so very few really expensive life-science endeavours. Why aren't there more like that around? Why do we seem to accept the bills for monstrous physics experiments more easily? Is...

The neat thing with consciousness is: it is so undefined that everybody can speculate wildly about it. You could locate your conscious self in the paw of your dog, your aquarium, your pinky... anywhere - and write books about it, sell books about it - thousands! It is just so heartwarming to chat about consciousness, to bash science on the way and to patronize. And who does it best? Right, the aggregators at bigthink.com. Megan Erickson asserts us (by quoting Alva Noë ) "just as love does not live inside the heart, consciousness is not contained in a finite space". We should not look for it inside our brain, or even our body - but in some intricate interwovenness of our cells and the outer world. What is the proof? None. Just pure sci-fi, touchy-feely chatter. Nice and maybe right or maybe wrong... Do you remember the first step for explaining, for proving or disproving something? Yep: have a hypothesis. Write something down. And then write how you (or anybod...

Already in the 30's of the last century it was observed that an injured fish can trigger a fright-reaction in the members of his school. Nobody really understood why or how this was communicated but it was speculated that some substance must be released that instills fear in others. That substance was adequately called "Schreckstoff" (german for 'fear-stuff'). And, indeed, injecting skin-samples of an injured fish (well, how could he then *not* be injured?) into water, scared the §$%* out of the otherwise relaxed co-fishes. Up to now the chemistry behind that reaction was unclear. Suresh Jesuthasan of the National University of Singapore and coworkers have isolated one component (the glycosaminoglycan (GAG) chondroitin) from Zebrafish that turns out to be important as messenger . While the evolutionary advantage of Schreckstoff for the survival of the school is obvious (run!) the fate of the injured fish is sealed when he is left alone - showing that evolu...

If you are about to wallow in a moment of tearful self-pity, I highly recommend enhancing the experience by this little sound-track: "Why me?! - Again!" - enjoy.

As I sit cheek-to-cheek side-by-side with my wife, we both working on our very own projects at our very own computers and she starts telling me about some coding-trick she just discovered, I hiss "could you, pleeze!, let me work on my stuff - I am busy!!" - and as she glances over she sees that personalized ad on a financial website I just sift through: some voluptuous, smiling girls and the line "looking for an exciting date?". AHA! You are busy, huh? Damn! What can I do about the Ads google pushes there? Oh, she is not stupid, types the same URL in her identical browser and at the position where I have that click-for-chicks-Ad she gets a cute little advertisement on health-food. :/ I reload my site. "time for nature - discover marokko" - ha! She reloads "investment-strategies", I "cars"…. and on we go, fortunately diving deep into randomness. So, obviously, our privacy-settings are good enough to feed us not-so-personalized adv...

Almost the day when SmartS got it's remarks on emergence out, the follower-crowd got interspersed by a significant number of psychoanalysts and 'quantum-esoterics' guys. While we happily welcome every lost sould searching for wisdom also in our utterances, I, personally, get scared. Not because of the psychoanalysts. I actually might need them. But because of the scientoid babble of the others. The guy who delivers his revolutionary thoughts in 7MB chunks to the mailbox is easily complimented to the door of the spam folder (even though the subject-line is somewhat mouthwatering "polarities cosmic physics are contrary to the physical plan of expression of earth. Cosmic physics in the positive attracts positive and negative attracts the negative"). But some not-so-asked-for wisdom strains the patience of even the most diplomatically trained reader: In one mail I had to endure some lecturing about the *free will* of photons (!) (yes! PHOTONS!). Photons *obviously...

At a wonderful summer night I was lying in the grass, my little son beside me. We were staring into the dark sky, debating infinity, other planets, the origin of everything, observing falling stars that were whizzing through the atmosphere at a delightfully high rate. Why did we see so many of them that night? What are falling stars? What are comets. Why do comets return and when? The air was clear and warm. No artificial lights anywhere. The moon was lingering lazy in the trees across the river. Some fireflies were having a good time, switching their glow on and off rather randomly - in one group they seemed to synchronize but then it was random again. It reappeared: a few bugs were flashing simultaneously at first ... it started to expand, it was getting more. A whole cloud of insects was flashing in tune. Are they doing this on purpose? Do they have a will to turn the light on and off? How do those fireflies communicate? And why? Do they communicate at all? My son pointed at a fie...

Rather involuntary train rides (especially long ones, going to boring places for a boring event) are good for updates on some thoughts lingering in the lower levels of the brain-at-ease. My latest trip (from Berlin to Bonn) unearthed the never-ending squabble about the elusive 'free will'. Neuroscientists make headlines proving with alacrity the absence of free will by experimenting with brain-signals that precede the apparent willful act - by as much as seven seconds! Measuring brain-activity way before the human guinea pig actually presses a button with whatever hand or finger he desires, they predict with breathtaking reproducibility the choice to be made. So what? Is that the end of free will? I am afraid that those neuroscientists would accept only non-predictability as a definite sign of free will. But non-predictability results from two possible scenarios: a) a random event (without a cause) b) an event triggered by something outside of the system (but caused). ...

A computer, no matter how fast and complex it might be, will at best simulate consciousness and imitate intelligence since - by the way a computer is constructed and used today – the computer is a generator for objects and states in a virtual reality. Virtual reality adds to but does not overlap with the physical reality (corporeality) of our everyday life. Intelligence and consciousness are products of corporeality and are therefore separate from the virtual world computers produce and play in. The border between these realities is sharp and clear and can not be transcended. As long as a computer is the medium for a simulation, imitation, visualization it will produce objects well within the virtual world. It will never produce intelligence or show consciousness. But is the computer doomed to be a medium only? No. Aren't our brains also just media for the play of sensations, thoughts, feelings? No. The difference lies in the way of operation. Todays computers have separat...

A stone is dropped into a pond creating a perfectly circular wavefront that propagates radially away from the point of impact. The speed of wave-propagation, the amplitude and wavelength can easily be modelled by a wave-function - a computer can simulate the wave-pattern on the water and display a virtual lake with breathtaking similarity. But it remains a simulation. The lake does not solve a wave-equation in order to show a wave-pattern. The propagation of a water-wave is the consequence of an inherent property of the water itself. The description by a wave-equation - as accurate as it might be - is a model of the real thing, a simulation - not even an imitation. These are two completely different - and absolutely not comparable - paths to the image of a water-wave. The simulated wave shows the same imagery as the real one, the wave-propagation looks identical, the optical reflections will be perfectly similar, it might even be possible to predict some wave-behavior. But the simula...

On June 22, 2010 David Gelernter presented his thoughts on Artificial Intelligence - the capability of computers to show intelligent behaviour - in a talk on invitation by The American Academy and FAZ in Berlin. The title "Dream Logic, Software Minds, and the Poetry of Human Thought" gave a hint at what to expect. He went deep into his rather personal understanding of intelligence and consciousness. Gelernter attempted a definition of 'thinking' (as opposed to the simulation of thinking) by deep introspection and analysis of his thought-processes. The result was a rather romantic, very anthropocentric praise of creativity, dreaming and intuition. Something tightly connected to feelings, emotion and unpredictability - a collection of elements a computer does arguably not have. A thinking computer, he inferred, should 'know' or 'feel' that he is thinking - thereby connecting thinking to consciousness. But is this the right approach? David Gelernter...