(no subject)

[zalena]

Also, the Beloved Professor is back. Check this post from his blog:

http://ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com/2009/10/cant-get-no-satisficing.html

I can't speak to the veracity of his account of the Turing test, can any of you?

Camille's letters column this morning was not particularly interesting, but I did want to take note of the below mention of Blake:

Letter: Superb evisceration of the Democrats. I, too, have indelible memories of the risky, ecstatic mysticism of the late '60s (trivialized by younger baby boomers who turned hallucinogens into party drugs) and often wonder where that mystery depth dimension went.

But there is a sense in which that spirituality was only another affluence-subsidized consumer good, the Davy Crockett coonskin cap of our adolescence. And I'm afraid what our generation meant by "freedom" turned out to be little more than the freedom from responsibility and commitment and the freedom to get it on. Adolescent demands.

That's not fair, I realize. Breaking out of rigidified, oppressive notions about race, authority, women and nature was a true and very American liberation. Too bad those insights have now rigidified into new pieties that are as codified, unimaginative and oppressive as those they overthrew.

Camille's response: What you have described is the Orc-Urizen cycle, a pattern identified by the great Romantic poet and visionary artist William Blake after the French revolution. Blake saw every radical impulse toward freedom eventually ossifying and turning back on itself in a new oppression and tyranny. You are quite right to detect adolescent naiveté in many demands of white middle-class young people in the 1960s. We had been overprotected by our parents, who had suffered Depression and war for most of their lives and were determined to give us something better. Unfortunately, the result of this well-intended paternalism was a cultural banality and stifling conformism that the '60s tried to destroy by any means necessary. But it is still puzzling why that dissident generation so enamored of freedom would have drifted toward today's speech codes, thought control and ideological intolerance.

Comments

[jofish22.livejournal.com]

I can speak to it! I feel he's missing that it's not man vs. woman, but rather embodied vs. disembodied. I think he's correct that about the influences of Turing's own experiences as a gay man, but it seems to me much clearer and simpler to recognize that what Turing creates is a point about intelligence and humanity being a function of disembodied communication, regardless of the body you find yourself in. Which has both good and bad implications, and I really think we're only just now starting to explore what embodied computing and intelligence might look like - the Wii, as a trivial example - and recognize that cognition and intelligence resides not just in the brain but in the body too.

[ng-nighthawk.livejournal.com]

"Where is my mind?

Way down in the water, see it swimmin'."

That song led to a great discussion about where your mind is with my 4 year old son. He was pretty sure it was in his head. I'm pretty sure it extends even outside of my body.