FAVORITE QUOTES
INSPIRATIONAL
ON SCIENCE, PERCEPTION AND INTELLIGENCE (HUMAN AND ARTIFICIAL)
INSPIRATIONAL
CALVIN COOLIDGE
PRESS ON!
Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence.
Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not;
unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts.
Persistence and determination alone are all powerful. The slogan 'PRESS ON!' has solved and
always will solve the problems of the human race.
H. ROSS PEROT
The first EDSer to see a snake kills it. At GM, the first thing you do is organize a committee on snakes.
Then you bring in a consultant who knows a lot about snakes. Third thing you do is talk about it for a year.
FORMER CONGRESSMAN JAKE PICKLE
JAKE by Jake Pickle and Peggy Pickle, 1997 (p. 57)
It's only later that you don't know how you accomplished a hard thing.
When you're young, you think you can do anything, and often you can.
THEODORE ROOSEVELT
It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled,
or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man
who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who
strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; who knows the great
enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who, at the best,
knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least
fails while daring greatly.
AUTHOR UNKNOWN
Never wrestle with a pig. You both get dirt all over you, and the pig LIKES it.
ON SCIENCE, PERCEPTION AND INTELLIGENCE (HUMAN AND MACHINE)
RENÉ DESCARTES
excerpted from Discourse on Method (1637)
as translated by Lafleur (1960).
If there were any machines which had the organs and appearance of a monkey
or of some other unreasoning animal, we would have no way of telling that it
was not of the same nature as these animals. But if there were a machine
which had such a resemblance to our bodies, and imitated our actions as far as
is morally possible, there would always be two absolutely certain methods of
recognizing that it was still not truly a man. The first is that it could never
use words or other signs for the purpose of communicating its thoughts to
others, as we do. It is indeed conceivable that a machine could be made that it
would utter words, and even words appropriate to the presence of physical acts
or objects which cause some change in its organs; as, for example, if it was
touched in some spot that it would ask what you wanted to say to it; if in
another, that it would cry that it was hurt, and so on for similar things. But it
could never modify its phrases to reply to the sense of whatever was said in its
presence, as even the most stupid of men can do. The second method of
recognition is that, although such machines could do many things as well as,
or perhaps even better than, men, they would infallibly fail in certain others,
by which we would discover that they did not act by understanding or reason,
but only by the disposition of their organs. For while reason is a universal
instrument which can be used in all sorts of situations, the organs have to be
arranged in a particular way for each particular action. From this it follows that
it is morally impossible and clearly incredible that there should be enough
different devices in a machine to make it behave in all the occurrences of life
as our reason makes us behave.
BEACH COMMENT:
René, René, your reasoning abilities were astonishing, but 360 years
later I find your argument lacking. You see, we discovered this neat little trick
to harness electricity, and it powers our computing machines in ways you could never
have imagined. I believe it is only a matter of time before someone will read your statement
aloud to a computer, and listen to its assessment of your belief.
By the way, I hope you have no hard feelings toward me for energetically invoking your name in the
heat of my SQL encounters with "Cartesian products".
DAVID HUME
An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748)
ed. Charles W. Hendel (1955)
...though our thought seems to possess this unbounded liberty,
we shall find upon a nearer examination that it is
really confined within very narrow limits, and that all
this creative power of the mind amounts to no more than
the faculty of compounding, transposing, augmenting, or
diminishing the materials afforded us by the senses and
experience.
EDWARD B. MONTGOMERY
The Foundations of Access to Knowledge (1968)
As cited in Glynn Harmon, Human Memory and Knowledge (1973)
Our spans of attention and detail limit how much we can
observe, and of how much we can be aware. Our mental
processes in some way resemble those of a small bug
crawling over an enormous canvas. At any given moment
the bug (and we) perceive only a narrow horizon.
PERCY W. BRIDGMAN
Philosophical Implications of Physics (1950)
As cited in Glynn Harmon, Human Memory and Knowledge (1973)
It is impossible to transcend the human reference
point...the structure of nature may eventually be such
that our processes of thought do not correspond to it
sufficiently to permit us to think about it at all...We are
now approaching a bound beyond which we are forever
estopped from pushing our inquiries, not by the construction
of the world but by the construction of ourselves.
BEACH COMMENT:
Our short-term memory does indeed seem to be a bottleneck (the 7 plus or minus 2 chunks limitation in capacity).
Perhaps computer programs, unhindered by such a limitation, can be set loose to gambol about in the knowledge landscape,
where they can collect information too complex for humans to perceive, then organize that information and feed it
back to us in digestible chunks.
KENNETH BOULDING
General Systems Theory - The Skeleton of Science
General Systems, First Yearbook for the Society for General Systems Research (1956)
As cited in Glynn Harmon, Human Memory and Knowledge (1973)
One wonders sometimes if science will not grind to a
stop in an assemblage of walled-in hermits, each mumbling
to himself words in a private language that only he
can understand...The spread of specialized deafness
means that someone who ought to know something that
someone else knows isn't able to find it out for lack of
generalized ears.
BEACH COMMENT:
The problem of specialized deafness isn't just about science. Read on to the next (H.G. Wells) quote.
H. G. WELLS
World Brain (1936)
Possibly all the knowledge...needed to establish a wise and stable settlement of the world's affairs in 1919 existed
in bits and fragments...but practically nothing had been done to draw that knowledge and these ideas together
into a comprehensive conception of the world...
...without a World Encyclopedia to hold men's minds together in something like a common interpretation
of reality, there is no hope whatsoever of anything but an accidental and transitory alleviation of any of our world
troubles.
BEACH COMMENT:
In light of today's rapid internet expansion, the quote bulges with meaning. We are building
the infrastructure for the electronic world brain. I like to think that the solutions to many
of our problems are out there on the internet right now in bits and pieces, and waiting for some
tireless entity to discover the puzzle pieces and assemble them.
Maybe an Oklahoman high school student's
web page describes the confusing results of a "failed" chemistry experiment--results which, when viewed in light
of the incompleted work of a Pakistani theoretician, open the door to revolutionary discoveries in materials science.
Maybe the web already contains the data which will be instrumental in cures to the most devastating diseases,
but no single person is yet aware of all the key data, or has not yet viewed the data in a comprehensive, organized
fashion.
As for politics, the future of civilization may well be significantly
influenced by the belief system of the inventors who first imbue the internet with distributed
artificial intelligence. Wells mentions "a wise and stable settlement of the world's affairs",
but "wise and stable" can have many different interpretations depending upon one's background and
philosophies. I may be slightly biased, but I hope that any such AI would announce itself to the world
in a warm, friendly, Texan drawl. ;-)
FRED HOYLE
Element 79 (1967)
The popular news media were back on the job now. Displaying to the full their twin
characteristics, incredible persistence and the incredible inability to see the point, they
clamored for an answer to the absurd question: Could Martian computers be said to be really alive?
The theoretician, hopelessly harassed by every newspaper from the Herald to the
Calgary Eye-Opener , by gangs of men--camera men, sound men, photographers--who had
descended on his home, replied that since life was no more than organized data-processing, in accordance
with some preassigned program, this could be done just as well by a computer as by a human.
He was asked to put it in terms that could be understood by the ordinary housewife.
Well, hadn't a computer just won the world's chess championship? But was winning a chess
game the same as being alive? Anyway, wasn't it necessary to instruct a computer about how
to play chess? Wearily, the theoretician explained that humans too were instructed, they had
been programmed by millions of years of evolution. In any case, what was the aim of a commercial
on T.V., what was the aim of an ad in the newspapers? Surely to program people.
BEACH COMMENT:
"If man were meant to fly, why, he'd have wings!" "Men walk on the moon? You must be joking!"
"Computers will never perform at the level of a human chess champion." "Computers will never
achieve a level of general intelligence comparable to our own."
Maybe not soon, but computers will surpass general human intellectual abilities (assuming the human
race avoids stupid cataclysmic mistakes). I like the way the Hoyle story throws a kink into the
discussion of machine intelligence: by forcing us to contemplate the intelligence of a machine from Mars.
We are less likely to belittle the abilities of a machine intelligence built by mysterious alien scientists of another
planet; (of course we will have no qualms arguing about the inadequacies of a machine intelligence designed by
our geeky cousin/uncle/aunt/niece/nephew/friend).
By the way, Mr. Hoyle, excellent call on the computer's conquest of the chess championship. What
a difference a few decades makes!
SEBASTIAN VON HOERNER (1961)
As cited in James E. Gunn, The Listeners (1974)
Science and technology have been advanced, in large
measure, though not entirely, by the fight for supremacy
and by the desire for an easy life. Both these forces
tend to destroy if they are not controlled in time; the
first one leads to total destruction and the second one
leads to biological or mental degeneration.
BEACH COMMENT:
Kind of a dour assessment, no? But one we should remember as we
carefully steer a course into the future.
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Page Last Updated: Sept. 5, 1997