"what did you say?" - my question to my barber
Some of the most interesting conversations that I have been involved in have taken place in barber shops. Friday when I was getting a haircut was no different.
Several people came in and we worked on solving the world's problems. I eventually disconnected and started looking through a magazine. Then I heard it...
The conversation between the barber and the client invoved the idea of a thought. How does one know that they are having a thought. I immediately thought about what makes a thought a thought.
In my doctoral work I worked with artificial neural networks(ANN). The idea is to create an artificial brain(software) and train it using input output pairs until the pattern matching error is minimal. The network goes back and forth until the error between what it outputs and what is actual is minimized. This is kind of like you seeing enough examples of some idea until the idea registers.
Then the ANN is exposed to new inputs which it has never seen but for which the outputs are known and the performance of the ANN can be determined. This is like you testing yourself to see if you actually understand the idea by actually trying to solve a problem that involves the concept.
It all boils down to how representative the original input output pairs are to the test data. The closer the better the ANN will perform. Same for humans. If we attempt something outside of what we have learned then our success is reduced.
But the idea of what makes thought thought is different. You have done the training and you feel that you understand a concept. So how do you get that original thought? I believe that once we have the pattern we must be exposed to a mutation in our thought process in order to come up with some new thought. The spark is initiated by exposing yourself to other ideas.
Today's question is
"How do you get that thought spark?'
Some of the most interesting conversations that I have been involved in have taken place in barber shops. Friday when I was getting a haircut was no different.
Several people came in and we worked on solving the world's problems. I eventually disconnected and started looking through a magazine. Then I heard it...
The conversation between the barber and the client invoved the idea of a thought. How does one know that they are having a thought. I immediately thought about what makes a thought a thought.
In my doctoral work I worked with artificial neural networks(ANN). The idea is to create an artificial brain(software) and train it using input output pairs until the pattern matching error is minimal. The network goes back and forth until the error between what it outputs and what is actual is minimized. This is kind of like you seeing enough examples of some idea until the idea registers.
Then the ANN is exposed to new inputs which it has never seen but for which the outputs are known and the performance of the ANN can be determined. This is like you testing yourself to see if you actually understand the idea by actually trying to solve a problem that involves the concept.
It all boils down to how representative the original input output pairs are to the test data. The closer the better the ANN will perform. Same for humans. If we attempt something outside of what we have learned then our success is reduced.
But the idea of what makes thought thought is different. You have done the training and you feel that you understand a concept. So how do you get that original thought? I believe that once we have the pattern we must be exposed to a mutation in our thought process in order to come up with some new thought. The spark is initiated by exposing yourself to other ideas.
Today's question is
"How do you get that thought spark?'
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