Mr. Gore acting as Philosopher

I read this in a coffee shop earlier today:

To understand the final reason why the news marketplace of ideas dominated by television is so different from the one that emerged in the world dominated by the printing press, it is important to distinguish the quality of vividness experienced by television viewers from the "vividness" experienced by readers. I believe that the vividness experienced in the reading of words is automatically modulated by the constant activation of the reasoning centers of the brain that are used in the process of cocreating the representation of reality the author has intended. By contrast, the visceral vividness portrayed on television has the capacity to trigger instinctual responses similar to those triggered by reality itself--and without being modulated by logic, reason, and reflective thought.

So says Mr. Al Gore in the Introduction to his book The Assault on Reason. I am not going to comment on the rest of the book, for I have only just begun reading it, but this paragraph stuck out fiercely in my mind. In fact, it me so hard, I put down my cup of hot chocolate that I was enjoying at Victor's (I was trying to add a link to Victor's coffee in Redmond, WA but Blogger's software is so shitty that it can't even handle links that I add in using their own editor, sheesh.) and came home to post this entry.

The reason it excites me so much is that I have spent a good amount of time considering Jeff Hawkin's ideas from On Intelligence, and the research his company Numenta is pursuing. His ideas can be (poorly) summarized as follows:

• The neo-cortex of the brain functions similarly to a Neural Network.
• The composition of the neo-cortex is homogeneous (that is, the same "cortical algorithm" is processed in all parts of the brain in the same fashion).
• The differences between the two lies primarily with the use of feedback in the neo-cortex (outputs from higher up nodes in the hierarchy become inputs to nodes farther down).

This view of the brain allows one to imagine how the brain is able to develop invariant forms of objects (a cat is a cat regardless of how it appears), how it can store massive amounts of information (lower nodes capture invariant representation of simpler objects, nodes higher up use those representations to develop even more complex representations, etc.)

Really, I can't do it justice here primarily because I want to get back to Mr. Gore's quote.

In the Hawkin's model of the brain, varying sensory inputs are treated homogeneously -- hearing is processed similarly to sight, sight is processed like touch, nervous reactions (pain) are again processed similarly. Imagine the brain as one huge neural network that's constantly consuming input (of any kind!) and that is constantly driving outputs (feedback to lower neurons, drive currents for muscles).

This model of the brain explains a lot, but conscious thought is still something that is very difficult to subjugate to the cortical algorithm. Perhaps it's my desire that there is more to being human than simply containing an over-grown neo-cortex. I don't know, but I feel that there is more to me than a simple state machine.

Enter Al Gore's argument. He was in the process of exposing the reader to the fact that the American population has become numb to government and (perhaps rightly) politics. Part of his argument rests in the reader believing his point that television is a one-way medium and that we have become robots digesting our programming.

Given Hawkin's theory of cortical algorithm amplifies Mr. Gore's thesis. If our brain is just one big neural network -- feedback or not -- it will adapt to its sensory input. I will become emotionally attached to Peter's plight against Sylar, and I will wonder what exactly the Cylons intend to do next...

But there is this annoying consciousness of mine. The one that keeps nagging at me saying things like "people can't fly", "given a design capability beyond what we have today, super-intelligent robots would not re-create themselves in our image", "a Gundam's cockpit would place too much strain on the pilot", "Cheney looks creepy", "those angry people with the swords and guns don't seem to be getting any less angry".

It seems to me that Al Gore is stating that reading the written word naturally invokes this aspect of our brains while TV keeps us happy in the cortical algorithm.

God, I hope you were able to make sense of any of that. I apologize for the side topic, it just seemed interesting to me. Stay tuned for more programming-related fun. To keep this site balanced, I'll even throw in some pointer-arithmetic in the next post.