Hi everyone,

This is my official first blog post and I have been hemming and hawing a bit about what I’d like to write about. I probably won’t get very far with this but at least I’ll use it to mention a few things that I have been thinking about lately and that I might take the time to pursue a bit further. In no particular order, here are some things that have been on my mind.

  1. code. I confess to being endlessly fascinated by code. I am finally learning javascript for real, but have spent much time over the last twenty years bashing code around in one way or another – HTML, css, linux, bash scripting, Makefiles, WordPress, B2Evolution, LaTeX, and more recently markdown, hugo, and a little bit of MongoDB. Maybe I’ll do more than sample these and gain enough knowledge to shift directions and actually become a web developer. But then I’d have to get a real job. Maybe I’ll just take a taste here and there and marvel at the sheer complexity of the symbolic systems us humans have created in the last three quarters of a century. Anyway, that’s one topic I’d like to explore here.
  2. mental templates. Along with my obsession with the programmatic ways in which we communicate with the logic machines that have taken over our lives has been a parallel obsession with understanding things like political ideology, religious belief, and even rote, everyday conversation. We all seem to be following mental templates most of the time and rarely even notice this. It seems to me that most of the time, most people are not actually doing any real thinking at all, at least if thinking involves deliberately following thoughts explicitly and consciously. Instead we mostly recite scripts and repeat recycled ideas however incoherent they may prove to be on closer examination. And even more, most people believe that they are really thinking for themselves and NOT just following formulas. What gives?
  3. embodied intelligence. Why is it that our intelligence is so different than that of the machines I have been talking about? It seems to me that a large part of the answer has to do with the fact that our minds are just as much in our bodies as in our heads, operating according to the physical, emotional and kinaesthetic constraints built-in to our bodies. And besides this our minds are just as much outside of our heads and bodies as they are inside, influenced in all kinds of ways by the languages we speak, the social codes and conventions we internalize, and the stories we tell about ourselves and each other. We not only think, but we care about what we think and what others think that we think and that sets us apart from our machines. I wonder if true machine intelligence might involve getting the machines we build to care. Is that an essential part of any intelligence or an accident only connected with the biological origins of ours?

Well this is getting a bit carried way. There’s is so much to explore and speculate on, and I’ll write more when I am feeling more focus. So much for a first post.

よろしくお願いします！