Original Thinking, Innovation and Imagination in the Complex World by Lawrence B. Kilham
An evolving book about imagination and innovation in the complex world. What are imagination and innovation, how to foster them, and their promise to solve pending crises.
Thinking about thinking has always fascinated me. It started
when I was in graduate school at MIT in the mid-60's where I modeled the human
mind mathematically. One day, at a campus gathering, I was asked whether I
preferred human or computer computation and problem solving. I said, "The
computer should do what it does best and the same for the human." It seemed to
me like a patronizing and simplistic statement, but to my amazement many big
thinkers thought it was rather profound.
The major sea change over 40 years ago is the emergence and
pervasive use of the world wide web. Additional web-related developments that
are important to my thesis are sophisticated search engines like Google, much
better understanding of the brain's thinking mechanisms developed through new
analytical tools such as fMRI brain scanning, and the growing awareness that
the significant problems of our time are so complex that creative solutions by
lone geniuses are still possible but less and less likely.
I have come to the conclusion to be explored and explained in my forthcoming book that at least in theory a thinking machine can be devised for any
thinking task that can be done by a human, but the stupendous scale of
everything required limits its application in many challenging applications.
The optimum solution is to combine humans with computing systems working
together as one connected intelligence and thinking engine. The lone geniuses
are as important as ever but increasingly in a role as the thought process
manager embedded in a sea of data and computing power.
I have always loved to fly. The part I like is looking out the plane's window and seeing a marvelous earth kaleidoscope. As the plan changes altitude, and as it turns, new perspectives appear. Whatever the landscape, there is a beauty and wholeness about it all. It is as if everything you have ever known is lurking out there, and if you shout your story everyone in the whole world will hear and benefit. If I were interested in bacteria rather than geology, I might achieve the same mind set looking through a microscope at a culture, or if I were interested in semiconductor circuit elements I might study a photograph taken through a scanning electron microscope of a semiconductor chip. In the old days of mechanical inventions, one immersed oneself in mechanical drawings and models.
I am projecting my mind into an external space somewhere outside of my head and my surroundings. This space could be invention space if I am creating new products. It could be stage in artistic space if I am composing an opera. It could be inside a black hole if I am a physicist working on a new theory. In each case I am striving to be imaginative and creative by wholly submersing my mind's eye in the space immediately surrounding what's being analyzed and for endless periods periods of time. I analyze all combinations of the data and search for clues to the breakthrough I am hoping for while unsociably avoiding distractions.
Computers were not designed
for inferential and associative information analysis nor easy communication
between them and humans. This barrier is falling away through improving search
engines by the improvements of the Semantic Web. The Semantic Web will have languages for
communicating between computers and for the use of browsing robots. The Semantic Web should also allow reasoning
and inference capabilities to be added to pure descriptions. Large numbers of
humans and computers will be able to freely communicate with the huge search
engines. These engines will have infinitely expanding data bases accessible by
semantic languages, and this will lead
to a collective intellect larger than the sum of its parts.
What humans can do is
synthesize, imagine, create, invent. We don't think this is a significant
capability of animals. Probably the reason is that we can associatively infer
from diverse packets of information and communicate with our self and others
about what we provisionally conclude. Language is essential to this whether it
is innate in the human or acquired. Animals don't have the language capability
to any significant degree because of either lacking mental facilities or ways
of speaking words.
Creative thought, imagination, creativity, invention and even possibly self-consciousness come from the mental power to extract important new ideas or visions from an apparent void. The void actually harbored a large body of information, much of it forgotten. The relevant information is retrieved and synthesized from several different regions of the brain.
Sense of self and self consciousness depends on language (which probably only humans have). It manifests itself as a person talking to himself, or to another person sometimes. This "dialog" routes an inquiry through various memory caches in the brain - like doing a Google search in the brain.
Imagination is seeing beyond mere recollection or simple association. Projecting the mind's eye to another person's point of view, or to another point in space and time. Construcvting a mental picture of vision without complete data or information.
Creativity is solving a problem or constructing a work of art without a compolete set of instructions or recipe. Using imagination to make an appealing or useful whole from a set of components that would not appear to be adequate for the job.
Invention is developing a new product or process using creativity, experimentaion and persistence.
Human minds will get so connected to the Internet Mind that young people may loose imagination and creative. They won't know when a major real problem has emerged or how to deal with it. (see more on this subject in "Recent Postings" to the right.)
The problem at this critical point in civilization's history is that more and more people who are the next generation of designers and facilitators may be loosing the will for creative thinking. If computers can apparently match human thinking, and if an infinitude of data bases have the answer to any query, why struggle? This is thought to be an accidental world and so why not live each day as it comes. Go to the politically expedient obvious solution to a problem and not the more lasting optimum solution. Feed the people virtual reality and electronic games, and they will be content. Productivity falls because simply increasing efficiency will not overcome the decline in creativity, risk-taking and innovation. (See more on this subject in "Recent Postings" to the right.)
I first read it in Scientific American: Bonnie Bassler,
professor of molecular biology at PrincetonUniversity, discovers that bacteria
talk to one another. Professor Bassler put it this way: "There are 600
species of bacteria on your teeth every morning, and they are in exactly the
same structure every single time: this guy is next to that one, is next to that
one. It just seemed to us that you can't do that if the only thing you can
detect is yourself. You have to know 'other.'" This biological phenomenon
is known by its researchers as "quorum sensing," where a number of
similar organisms aggregate by sensing mutual presence to attack, defend, and
presumably do anything else of mutual interest to microbes.
Whenever civilization was bogged down and the good life seemed over, it seems that major innovations provided a rebirth giving people more efficiency, variety, and, importantly, hope.
As the world cruises towards seemingly intractable problems such as overpopulation, depleted resources, and overwhelming pollution, we will increasingly need breakthroughs of the kind that have been produced by ingenuity and innovation. In the times past, they made timely breakthroughs. Running out of water? Invent dams. Need a tool material? Invent steel. Need transportable energy? Invent steam power. Troubled by diseases? Invent antibiotics. (See more on this subject in "Recent Postings" to the right.)
Since the earliest times, man has had the itch
to explore and then report his findings. In the earliest times, he
communicated and maybe computed on the walls of caves. Now we can
synthesize information from unimaginably huge outer space with
information from miniscule nano inner space. The result is a worldwide
data base capable of supporting the theories of anything and
everything. Information is the commodity, and its direction and use is
still in the province of man.
There is a pressing challenge to deal with computer
and information issues now because we have been in materials and energy
ages and now these resources are disappearing. Much of the technology
advantage to be exploited is through mega thinking and intellectual
breakthroughs. How do we promote powerful new thinking? What
can be done to head off the many basic problems confronting
civilization? Let's explore these things.
This book will describe my odyssey to find the
thinkingest computer and to try to sort out what is best done by man
and what is best done by computer. Human aspects to consider are
invention, creativity, perception and free-will. Computer strengths are
more in data files, relational data bases and high speed information
processing. The new inventions that this age requires and the challenge
of the computer brings us to reflect on exploration, creativity, and
invention. I don't know where truth ends and fiction begins, but let's
explore together. (See more on this subject in "Recent Postings" to the right.)
