And then, the pieces click together...
I just finished re-reading Ted Chiang' "Story of your life", and a number of things clicked in my head.
You may have picked up that I read this novel at the same time as I was working on my Ph.D. research. You may have picked up that this research was MY research topic, but I had not written yet that I did hunt for a supervisor all around the planet in order to fidn a slot where I could actually learn how to do research (the very essence of a Ph.D. is to learn how to do research independently β a goal/purpose that the current system doesn't do anymore βΒ my guess is that the next generation of proper researchers will learn the stuff outside of the system βΒ in the meantime science produces sh8t). And I found this slot on the other side of the planet, and I did learn the stuff, and that is how I became so critical of science-as-it-is-done-today, as many much younger Ph.D. students I met during my own research. That is context. Keep up with me please.
This context is worth mentionning because at that time I had found out that the reaction times of all my 30 neurons organisms were all greatly (<<) inferior to the actual physical time required to traverse the network of neurons from the concerned sensory to motor neurons involved, and for all the 5 behaviours making the ethogram of the little devils. That had seriously puzzled me and I seriously doubted of everything I had done until that point, that is for at least 3 years.
It's been 8 years now that I defended my thesis, that I laid out my findings and my predicament to the jury, in writing and verbally, and I remained puzzled until this morning.
I studied optics. I have been familiar with the law of refraction and Fermat's theorem for over 30 years. I read a large part of Feynman's Lectures on Physics βΒ a book that I gifted to myself for one of my birthdays, around my 40ieth, and I remember reading his presentation of the principle of least effort. That was approx. 15 years ago. It's all connected, all facets or colours or...[insert your own concept here] ... of the same underlying stuff. We don't need one gospel view of everything we experience around us. Instead, we need many perspectives at the same time, for everything that touches us. I agree with the views of Edgar Morin and Herbert Marcuse on embrassing complexity, even if none of us can stuff it all in the limits of the mind-body complex that is our vehicle on this Earth. Having teh ability to have more than one angle on everything allows us to connect more easily with the other humans around us, whether they can reciprocate or not. Reciprocating is important but not mandatory β especially at this point of humanity's development, because honnestly we need to practice as much as we can if we want to raise the bar in non-trivial non-marginal measures.
[Digression] Before diving in my Ph.D. subject, I studied the convergence algorithms that are actually the crucial bits we should talk about instead of talking about "neural networks", I studied Cybenko's theorem and the numerous almost-trivial spin-offs, I studied many of the salient and less-salient statistical approaches to analysing datasets, and then I figured that all these techniques are only {facets, perspectives, colours, your-choice} of the same stuff. I started to work at bridging the weights resulting from successful convergence algorithms with the outcomes of statistical methods and conditional probabilities, but never finished. I know it's there. I just need to get back to it with method instead of instinct (because it's in the domain of axiomatics and it is a much smaller domain than the domain of semantics where my instinct lives). This digression links to other things I wrote, and provides yet another anecdote to illustrate how much consideration I have for many of the techniques that people take geat pride to be skilled at (it's been going on for roughly 20 years), when they actually don't see further than the tip of their nose.
And so I am coming back on track: the fiction's fictional teleogical language Heptapod B is what Humanity needs, in order to find a common purpose, in order to individually align actions on the common purpose, in order to find peace. This is not advocacy for becoming a ant colony or a bee swarm. Acting in conscience in order to minimise/maximise something that is ultimately beneficial to all instead of beneficial to an individual with total disregard for the rest has nothing to do with free will and freedom... even freedom of speech (I'm laughing so much when writing this last one).
We need it because we lack a global common goal with (not from) natural (not logical) actions, where goal and actions melt together instead of being bogged down by the chicken and egg perspective. If you are puzzled by that sentence, just know that there is no direction for time in physics equations. Take the simple equation of freefall, vertical or with an angle to the horizontal, and you will see that your projectile can move forward and backward without causality related to time. Well, it goes much further than that, in physics, and in biology. This is where I close the loop (for performative purpose): when a nervous system is in tune with its environment, I now see that necessarily million year old co-evolved behaviours have minimised or maximised something that I haven't qualified yet, but this min/max optimisation exists under the (current) surface, and the hint is that the reaction time can be shorter by several order of magnitude than the physical time it takes for the last bit of information to go from the sensors to the motor neurons. In a purely causal perspective that can not be, but when purely causal perspective fails to explain millions of observations, then this perspective β that is merely a practical shorthand and an excuse to not dig deeper β must be thrown away to make space for a better approach to understand what we can not deny.
It happens that we also see this happening in genetics. There are beautiful pictures out there of in-cell DNA replication: find them, look at them, try to explain the absence of beginning and end. I am still laughing on this one. But back to the point: I am still doing research, though this is neither a full-time or a paid occupation. I am researching how to make a DNA model that fits all the funny observations that textbooks don't mention (there is no amount of second hand books and stochastic optimisation that any thing can ingest and perform which will allow it to cross the hard frontier that first hand experience of being human in a co-evolved Earth gives to humans everyday). It took me some time to finally lift off the formatting rails of thinking pervasive to everything I know-used-created with regards to algorithms. The hard problem in my Ph.D. thesis was to find which parts of the current neruscience dogma must be thrown away. That is done. The same must be done for the DNA modeling problem. But I want to rephrase that: I have the goal to build a DNA model that will allow me to build bigger similar silicon-based nervous systems while minimising the resources to do so, and all the actions I do in my life β whatever they are β were/are/will be concurrent to realising this goal if this goal makes sense at a bigger scale than my personal ambition. And may be, my goal as I perceive it today, is just a tangential approximation for what I will aim for later on, as I realise actions that seem related and unrelated to the goal I perceive today.
The only thing I am sure of is, that most of us perceive much more than the constructions inherited from our education allow us to accept. This is certainly not an argument for the "my ignorance is worth as much as your knowledge" paradigm exposed by Isaac Asimov in a full page column of Newsweek in the 80s. To the contrary. This is an argument for education to focus more on cultivating the number of perspectives students gather during their trainings (academic and vocational) rather than to teach them one technique after another to solve this typical mathematical equation or to make sense of this kind of creative writing. This is an argument to cultivate the multiplicity of hows rather than skills, to cultivate a perspective of self-growth over a decade or more rather than the performance achieved during a 1-2-4-6 hours test.
This is my first attempt at tranforming my expression into an action-goal approach without making one or the other the beginning or the end, or one or the other more important. Just the beginning of becoming conscious about something I have done in several domains for a very long time, and this consciousness of doing it gives me a sense of why I am doing it. Now I put words on it.
It is time to invest some of our time in forms of communication that do not rely on physical means like postcard, smoke signals, WiFi, speech... What's difficult is to put our body into it, and leave the brain away. Last bit to illustrate the point: in the Mantis prey and many other insect species, the male's head contains the reproductive inhibitor. The female gets rid of the male's head, then the copulation can happen and the gene transfer at the same time. Humans and insects are animal species that share numerous biological similarities, and millions of years of co-evolution. Food for thoughts :)