Can an Idea Exist Without a Mind?
To question: “Can an idea exist without a mind?”
not only probes the definition of an idea, but the nature of a mind.
Is an idea the product of language?
Is representation required to think?
Is memory a representational map of our experience?
If the computer is empowered with a robot, so that it can do something
about the programmes it contains and uses to process data, is it like us?
What about values? What about significance?
What about meaning? What about ideals?
When or how does a computer understand the information it contains?
Is it a matter of relationship between the instructions
in the algorithmic sequences?
Is it that the computer is so serial,
linking only one instruction to the next instruction
that leaves it with too few relationships to understand?
Perhaps the branch, the loop, the value threshold,
these are the beginnings of understanding, of intelligence?
Perhaps the programme, the algorithm, needs to come to a stage in its sequence
where it is told, wait, go to storage,
hold until another process generates a data field,
when that data field arrives, use the formula you have derived so far
to process that data field, produce a new data field with formula parameters, etc.
For example, with a videocon, scan the images of the surfaces before you,
identify contrasts with this degree of contrast,
the kind of contrast (e.g. darkness, lightness, continuous or discontinuous,
graded change or abrupt change).
Trace the contours of contrast.
Presume object-like nature of a bound form. Test for mobility.
Certainly what computers do is similar to what people do, at least in part.
Certainly, computers do some of those things faster.
When we convert from analogue value gradients to digitized quantities
with a resolution of 40,000 to 100,000 samplings per second,
we produce sound qualities that are very difficultly distinguished
from the motion of the surfaces of the musical instruments in an orchestra.
The fidelity becomes a compound question of what can be generated?
what can be transmitted, what can be sensed or received?
This can be recorded.
Can the computer judge a good performance from a poor one?
Can a computer identify a great piece of music?
Can it analyze all great pieces of music and generate another one?
These are not distant or deficient questions to ask nor to answer.
A computer can be programmed to identify certain qualities of performance.
It can even be programmed to applaud a good performance.
The issue of composing a great piece of music comes down
to the vast number of possibilities of tones from 20 hertz to 20,000 hertz
with durations from milliseconds to minutes,
with tonal variations from the purity of a flute
to the complex overtones of a violin,
from never changing rhythms to constantly changing rhythms, etc.
The possibilities are so numerous.
In just this way the artist starts with numerous possibilities,
what media? what scale? what proportions? what textures? what colours?
Art is like that.
The possibilities are numerous.
Similarly, a writer starts from such a vast array of possibilities.
Where to start? What sequence to follow? At what rate? With what detail?
To combine every art in a single medium, film, cinema, opera, the play,
the theatre, now the numerous possibilities are compounded.
copyright 2011, 2013, ECOhealth / Eve Revere
