A LUCILIUS PARABLE: CHAINED ATTENTION

July 26th, 2020

Lucilius gazed at the worn skin beneath the hot iron rings shackled round his wrists.  The skin was bruised and crusted with blood.   His hands were curled beyond, pressing a wider shape on the outer rim of each shackle, pushing each up and off from the centre of each pained part of his wrists.  He breathed a light sigh, and closed his eyes, feeling the weight of his chest slowly drop.  He took in the of the colosseum again, the stagnant taste, in the gated wings, now sweet to the one who could feel such simple pleasure.

He was to be put in the arena, with what he had no notion.  Some terrible fate, he supposed, awaited him.  He’d been living now for so many strange years, and despite the youth he could still taste in the air, it didn’t strike him as much of a bother that these moments might be his last.  They were moments like any other - to be missed and lost in thought, of to be settled to see what those moments had.  Dust filled air.  The taught sheets of old light pulled out from the cracks in the wooden gate.  The nervous smell of sweat among the other men worrying about nearing moments beyond the door, the hot iron round his wrists.  No matter his fortune, the moment was much the same as any other.  His eyes meandered shut and once again he was among coarse sheets, hot with different sweat.  Light fingers grazing his brow as he felt himself nearly gripped by sleep.  His eyes opened then to the touch and met softer eyes, a face so calm in its beauty, as though fascinated by the common lines of his own face.  Hoe long ago those tender moments had been.  And now, here he was at the end of such a common twist of fate.  But such was the ways of states, conquered and subsumed, enslaved by those foreign men who braved their own borders, pushing them ever farther into others.

He heard common screams and cheers.  The commotion of the arena was not new to Lucilius, though now it was odd to hear it from that machine’s own bowels as he waited to be fed into the heart of its purpose, its mission of violence.

Finally, the sheets of light began to tilt and the door to the arena was pulled wide.  He, along with all the other chained slaves were hustled out into sand pit, where pools of blood caked spots of ground with new and simple mud.  

They were all still shackled and it was to be a common slaughter, the cheapest of thrills during that day, and when the executor, mounted upon his horse started towards them to cut them down, there then rang out a rare horn, and the charging blade held up.

There was commotion among the crowd in a language Lucilius did not know.  A solitary voice called out in announcement, further words Lucilius was blind to.  He merely stood in the sand pit among others, waiting.

But the blade never came, and Lucilius along with the other gang of slaves was rounded up, and with an enraged owner screaming at a government official, they were marched off across an immense distance, the lot of them being rotated in wagons while others walked in order to speed the process.

It was months before Lucilius and the others glimpsed the ramparts of the capital in the distance.  And there within the immense city they were herded before the capital building aside hundreds of thousands of other people: slaves, commoners, visitors, of all kinds.  Ferried into the bowels of the empire, Lucilius supposed, to be fed into a thicker need of thrill.   And then this new arena towered stories above any Lucilius had ever seen, and again, he found himself sitting in the rank wings, waiting for death.  Each of the men before him was lead one after another into the wide baked pit of sand where it seemed to Lucilius, each perished, until it was his own turn.  A guard unlocked the iron rings that Lucilius had grown so accustomed to and as he walked out onto the sand he held up his wrists to watch what he could only feel: the delight among this worn part of his body, lifted by being lighter without the weight of iron.  He smiled, as it seemed he walked out to his death.

There, on all sides, were more people than Lucilius had ever seen.  Whatever it was they screamed, Lucilius knew none of these foreign tongues, but the sound, the swelling of yells, the dip between it’s surges - he knew the words they probably used, but even here, in this terrible place, Lucilius could only but wonder what else might be musing in the stands - what other person might share a thought with him.

And then the mounted warrior jostled his horse into position yards before Lucilius.  When the crowd finally reached its crescendo, the warrior charged at Lucilius, but he did not move, but simply watched the sweating horse, blindly charge his way.  

He felt his arm light up with pain, and to it he looked to see deep coloured blood streaming down the length of his arm.  The mounted warrior had sliced his shoulder open.  And before all that pain blistering through his mind Lucilius wondered at the strangeness of the strike.  It was unusual custom in this new capital, he figured, to be slowly torn down with nicks and simple cuts instead of the gore he knew the crowd wanted.  

The mounted warrior rounded and returning upon Lucilius, he opened up the side of his leg.  Lucilius felt that side of his body crumple, the stance now inoperable from the new wound.  From his rest on the folded leg, he looked at the new wound, the hot sand caking dark beneath him.  Surely the next blow would be the end of this strange execution, he wondered and look up to find the warrior bearing down upon him.  The horse slowed, and the warrior swung over his leg and fell to a stance upon the sand.  He walked up till he stood above Lucilius, and there he raised his sword.

Lucilius looked up at the man, squinting, and as he took in the sight, he couldn’t help but yawn.  The air filling him seemed the most delicious thing he’d ever had, and in those dwindling moments, Lucilius felt the smile of his mind, grateful for that last moment before the sword: how lovely it was to close out such a long life while still in the present.

But as the raised blade was unhooked form that position, a whistle sang out from somewhere high in the stands.  Lucilius was grabbed and pulled up by other men and after he was dragged off the sandy arena, he was patched and bandaged and left to rest in a cell.

The next day, upon waking, he was pulled from the cell and confined to a carriage that bumped along the cobbled streets and when he was pulled forth again, he was before the grand palace.  He was lead up the hundreds of tiers and there left before the grand entrance, already open and wide.  

A courtier was there, waiting and after the guards left Lucilius, he beckoned him to follow.  He was lead into the splendid hall of marble and was told in his own language to sit before a spread of meats and grapes with clean water and wine also left before him.  But Lucilius took none of it, gazing upon the fine craftsmanship of stone all around him.  The courtier seemed to have a constant stream of attendants added to a line, waiting to his attention, and with each he attended to the scroll they held while he waited with Lucilius.

And finally, the emperor emerged.  The courtier raised himself to attention, but Lucilius remained seated, entranced by the fine work of the emperor’s clothes.  The guards to either side of the emperor moved to haul Lucilius to his feet, but the emperor waved them off, and then the man decked in splendour spoke to Lucilius, the language ever new and unknown to Lucilius.  At length he went on, until he nodded and then left.

Lucilius looked to the courtier.

“You will need to learn the emperor’s language,” the courtier said.

“For what reason, why am I hear?” Lucilius asked.

The courtier looked displeased.  He glanced up from the scroll he held and exchanged it for the next in line.

“The emperor has decided that you shall be his spiritual advisor.”

“But why?” Lucilius asked.

The courtier looked back at him briefly before resuming his study of the scroll.  “Of thousands of men, you were the only one who did not cower before blade and death.  The emperor has been searching for you, and now you will teach the emperor to be like you, to find peace with his fear.”

COUNTERING INTUITION

July 25th, 2020

Should you always trust your gut feeling?  This feeling is trusted and queried beyond most all other sources of insight, commonly interpreted as though it were a kind of portal and connection to a deeper logic of the universe.  What’s the reason for this all-encompassing trust?  Do we prize this oracle because it’s never or rarely lead us astray?  How does the answer to that question truly surface if we’re honest with ourselves?  Is it possible that our intuition has been a terrible guide plenty of times, but we still heed its direction merely because of the way it presents?  It’s the antithesis of human operation to do something you don’t feel like, and at the same time, the widespread attempt to figure out how to hack our individual systems and do things we don’t feel like doing but know we should is universally acknowledged as the key to individual progress.

This might be too broad of a description for something as hallowed as intuition.  The protests are easy to imagine: the desire to stay on the couch and let the next episode autoplay isn’t intuition.  The feeling we get in our gut is something that only occurs during special circumstances: when faced with a choice, a fork of fate, framed by an aura of suspense where the possibilities of life burn, waiting in the wings, standing attention for the cue to grip the universe and haul it in a new direction.

Perhaps it’s a counter-intuitive mistake when we fail to realize that the universe is getting hauled in a particular direction when we lazily let Netflix force-feed our next half hour of existence.  It feels normal, it feels like nothing special.  Intuition need not be used here, I’m just passing a little time.  Where’s the harm in that?

As a point of definition, it’s always a circumspect exercise to examine what’s going on under the hood with the actual word.  Intuition, from late middle English conveys “insight and spiritual perception,” originally with a theological connection.  This derives from Late Latin intuitio, “a looking at, consideration” from the Proto-Indo-European root en- meaning simple “in” fused with -tueri meaning ‘to look at, watch over”, the same root that gives rise to the word tutor.

This is a comforting root.  It evokes the sense that some sort of higher power is looking out for us.  It’s easy to see how archetypes like guardian angels and gods can pop out of this concept and vice versa.  Everything is so much easier when you have guidance, like when a tutor is leading you through a lesson, or when a parent shepherds you safely through the world while you figure things out, or when Netflix gives you every signal that it’s safe to just stay where you are and relax, I got you, I know just what you want, and it’s going to start playing in 5, 4, 3, 2. . . 

Intuition seems as though it’s a system of understanding and judgement that we slowly create as we move through experience.  It’s a time-saving system composed of heuristics that we trust to take in all the information we have and generate a good or bad feeling about the choices at hand.

But the experience of a feeling is tricky.  Nothing is more persuasive and convincing than a feeling that pervades your entire sense of experience.  In some sense we become intoxicated with the current feeling.  When we are enraged with some circumstance, ideas about what to do and how to act pop into our mind and they seem satisfied, or at least justified.  But often in retrospect, these choices seem terrible, whether they were acted upon or not.  But then again, people don’t associate the intuitive choice while angry with Intuition with a capital ‘I’.  We differentiate them, which seems like a gross oversight on closer examination.  What feels intuitive in a circumstances (like being very angry) doesn’t seem like a good choice later, but in such a case the context has radically changed.  So,

is intuition context dependant? 

A better way to approach and pin intuition is with the counter-intuitive example.  What does it mean when something is counter-intuitive?  It’s when something operates in a way that isn’t in line with our intuition or common sense.  So how do we come to understand it?  If something doesn’t make sense, but it works, is it a matter of failed intuition or understanding?  And furthermore, can our intuition improve?  And if so, how exactly does it improve, and most importantly, how are we aware of a weakness in intuition and the congruent need to update or improve that intuition?

Simply:  how do we detect the counter-intuitive?

Luckily, we have this handy, albeit exhausting ability to thoughtfully consider things in a way that puts emotion on a back-burner.  The easiest way to detect the counter-intuitive is to simply make the intuitive choice and thoughtfully note when the consequences of that choice don’t roll out in line with the original intuition.  Left to it’s own devices, our feelings are likely to lead us down the same hallway of mistakes over and over.  We see this in the lives of friends and family all the time: making the same bad choice over and over, as though they expect that some magic instance of time will finally procure the result they expect.  Could it be as simple as bad intuition?  And the inability to realize that the remedy to a repeated mistake requires a counter-intuitive path?

Yes.  After repeated mistakes, we’re bound to keep the broken record going if we don’t thoughtfully examine all areas of the loop in order to find the break.  But after such conscientious effort - once we understand, we’ve built an intuition, and when circumstances blossom once again to reveal the key colors of that understanding, we gain the ability to respond differently because we feel differently when we see those colors.

Detecting counter-intuitive circumstances ahead of time is perhaps impossible.  We might only really learn through mistakes.  It’s possible to pinpoint the reasons for failure, but it’s impossible to pinpoint the reasons for success: failure is in the details, success is the entire circumstance.

This is also why we are predisposed to the negative: success emerges as we tend to failure in detail.

It’s counter-intuitive but by ignoring the worst we risk perpetuating it.  But instead of emotional reaction, the sort of attention required is slow, thoughtful and full of effort.  The intuitive response to the worst is of course, to simply react as we feel in the moment.

Countering-intuition by honestly recognizing it’s fallibility and honestly examining it’s mistakes is the only way we improve it.  And in order to do that we have to acknowledge the counter-intuitive fact that intuition can misguide us.

PRESENTATIONAL REQUIREMENTS

July 24th, 2020

Levels of understanding are normally bound to attention investment.  Our likelihood of gaining a new level of understanding on a given topic goes up if we focus more attention on that topic.  Seems fairly straight forward: Experts invest more and more attention to achieve mastery of terms of a particular field and the inner workings of those terms.  But compare this to the rare insight, the revolutionary new perspective that is by no means guaranteed to anyone.

What is the nature of correlation between a rare new insight and levels of understanding of a particular field?  Each person understands a subject in their own way, and we generally accept that these understandings can be roughly imagined as levels, hence the levels of difficulty generally attributed to the educational system.  A master’s degree is a level of understanding generally regarded as ‘higher’ than what a student explores in an undergrad.  So do levels of understanding in a given field have any correlation to that rare field-changing insight?

Approach the question from a completely different tangent:  Does a homeless individual suffering from mental illness ever strike upon insight that could substantially help humanity?

The answer seems as though it’s probably ‘no’.

But.  How can we verify this?  Such ‘disabled’ individuals often lack the presentational requirements for such ideas.  Even if such an individual can get ahold of a keyboard, can the notion be successfully worded with an understanding of other people’s context that’s rich enough to create a bridge over which the new idea can be injected into our context?  If someone tells you the answer to all your problems, but does so in Japanese, and you don’t know Japanese, how useful are those ‘answers’?  Furthermore, imagine that instead of Japanese, it’s a language that no one else knows and no one has ever heard of.

The possibility of our understanding expanding beyond its own context remains cloistered within it’s own context.

So we arrive at a different question: how does the context of a particular level of understanding expand in order to achieve a new level of understanding in a new context?

The process of learning does seem to be demarcated with swift and dramatic jumps in our level of understanding.  We squint and scratch our heads, confused with a new concept that is beyond what we currently know, and then like seeming magic, after enough head banging, boom, suddenly it seems to make sense.  We test that understanding, we get a predictable answer, and it’s verified:  we understand on a new level.

The transmission of understanding between people clearly has requirements.  One of the most obvious requirements is language.  It’s always an adorable sight when people who have utterly no knowledge of each other’s language are trying to help and get help, as with, asking for directions in a foreign country.  The game becomes an unpracticed exercise in charades.  

Of course, language isn’t necessarily a requirement.  It’s not difficult for someone who doesn’t speak your language to teach you a specific dance.  There the requirement is vision, and one of movement, and the amount of information that is ricocheted back and forth by simple eye contact and head nodding can be quite amazing.  It’s like a game of Marco Polo but administered through ‘yeses’ and ‘noes’: encouragement and discouragement - perhaps the most fundamental form of evolution.

Now let’s apply these musings to conversation:

How does someone achieve the ability to understand what you are saying?

Does the success of your message depend more on your ability to articulate your idea or your understanding of the listener’s perspective?

Do we speak in a way that builds bridges between our own perspective and the perspective of another?  Or do we speak in a way that merely reinforces our own context?

A useful concept at this point is the echo-chamber.  Most of us just talk and talk as though a thorough description of our perspective is somehow going to invade and conquer the opinions and ideas of other perspectives.  But our context often just becomes self-reinforcing when it doesn’t have access to other contexts.  Access to those other contexts is also key to convincing someone to see something from a different point of view.  

If you want to give someone a new perspective, wouldn’t it be helpful to understand what their current perspective is?  

Would we not be better equipped to get someone to see something differently if we first asked some questions to get an understanding of what’s going on in their mind?

We might even get lucky.  If our ability to form questions is well practiced, we might be able to form questions that simultaneously achieve two ends:  We become acquainted with the mind of the other person, and their consideration of our question also casts a new light on their own understanding.

The presentational requirements for ideas, perspectives, opinions, are quite substantial.  And with much of human dialogue, we are simply steamrolling these requirements in a vain attempt to convince  by brute force.

Unfortunately, this strategy often just backfires.  By ignoring the presentational requirements, we build echo chambers, we weld doors of perspective shut, we lower the blinds, and we become ignorant to the art of building bridges.

OUT OF REACH

July 23rd, 2020

Is inspiration a passive phenomenon or does it require an active pursuit?  Both possibilities place that inspiration in a similar place.  When we are without inspiration, it is out of reach, and it’s odd to contemplate it’s location when we aren’t in it’s spell.  Where exactly is inspiration when we aren’t inspired?

To be perfectly honest, this line of questioning was prompted by The Tinkered Question app, which Tinkered Thinking is developing.  (Check out the previous episode - episode 829 - for a full discussion of what this app is and what it does.)  

It’s been a long day, and as happens more than preferred, the daily writing has been shuffled to the end, when the creative capacity is certainly less than ideal.  

That age-old question stands guard to a temple of exploration and insight:  what to write about?

Well, it just so happens there’s this neat tool in the window behind the text document here, and it generates interesting questions at the touch of a button. I inputed “writing prompt” just to see what would happen.

One of the questions that popped up was: Are we trying to access something that is out of reach?

Yes, that’s exactly right, in fact.  But the question illuminates an interesting aspect of the conundrum.  Where exactly is inspiration when we are without it?  And how do we know which direction to reach?  And even more importantly: how can you reach for something that is totally unknown?  It’s a bit of chicken-and-egg problem: if you knew what was going to inspire you, than you’d already be inspired.

Trying to find inspiration is a bit like trying to predict your next thought: It’s perpetually out of reach unless it’s fully within your grip - there is no in between.  Thoughts, and likewise, inspiration teleport into our arena of consciousness, or so it seems.  We don’t see them coming, and we don’t have a way of checking what is about to walk through the door.  Our experience is simply a constant stream of life through a doorway that has no door to close.

So is it out there? Beyond that door?  Is that where inspiration lies when we sit idle and unmotivated?  Is our job to just wait until something worthy walks through the door?  That seems to make sense, but it’s also abundantly clear from practice that Tinkered Thinking would emphatically not have 830 episodes if inspiration was something to be waited for every time.  Yes, inspiration can walk through the door at any moment.  But that doesn’t mean we should always sit and wait.  The paradox of that door of life through which life streams is that if you try to run through it, you can’t, but instead, more floods through the door.

Jack London once said “You can’t wait for inspiration, you have to go at it with a club.”

He’s right, there is an important active component that inspiration responds too, but it’s not like you ever actually run through that door to go hunt down some leviathan of an idea or coax some muse back into your mind.  

The orientation is all wrong.  Inspiration isn’t really “out there”.  Much of what seems to come through that door is really arising from within our own mind.  It’s a kitchen that’s constantly cooking up mediocre meals.  Inspiration is about staying right where you are and plying the tools of the mind to itself in a new way.

This is the logic behind The Tinkered Question app.  The right question doesn’t necessarily provoke us to write about a potential answer - it might, but an interesting question can simply make the mind feel differently.  It’s subtle, like walking into a kitchen, smelling something delicious in the works and suddenly realizing how hungry you are.  A question, even a mediocre one, can wrinkle our thoughts just enough to create gaps at the edges where other thoughts and visions, feelings, hunches and shades of concept seem busy in the concealed depths of our own mind.  The initial question can lose all relevance as we pull back the sheet of current thought and venture behind it in order to explore an entire new perspective, and then, before you know it, another episode of Tinkered Thinking has been written.

THE TINKERED QUESTION APP

July 22nd, 2020

Tinkered Thinking is developing a small simple app as an experiment to try and put GPT-3 to good use.  

(I promise Tinkered Thinking is not going to go one and on about GPT-3 forever.)

As was mentioned in the previous episode about GPT-3, it’s pretty easy to imagine how it could be put to wicked use.  That’s ‘wicked' in the New England sense of wicked cool, but also the New England sense from the 1690’s, which means: we should probably burn it at the stake.  It’s a tool that’s sharp which can be both very useful and very dangerous depending on how we ply that edge.

Constraints are key to GPT-3 use.  The prompt that it is given is essentially a constraint through what we might think of as context.  The idea that Context is everything seems to hold pretty solidly when we examine the constructed perspective of something that is not human.

The app in development is an experiment on several levels.  But first, what’s the app do?  The concept is very simple: The right question changes the course of our thinking.  The imagined use is for writers, artists and creatives of all types to enter a topic, question or short idea when they are feeling ‘stuck’.  The Tinkered Question App will then use the magic of GPT-3 to generate 3 insightful questions that provoke our bogged-down creative to think about their artistic situation in a new way with a new perspective.

A great question doesn’t merely create a void where we should imagine an answer; a great question is an open-ended concept that creates forward momentum.

The question, as a concept and a tool also has one subtle aspect which functions like the flux-capacitor at the heart of it’s magic:  a question changes the context of our thinking without explicitly introducing a new idea.

This is a sly hack that seems to have arisen within human thinking.  We’re all familiar with the itchy experience of going to a friend for help and getting a bunch of suggestions that just don’t jive with our thinking.  The experience seems to be symmetrical: it’s equally frustrating to give a friend a bunch of suggestions to their problem and see each great idea fall flat before their unimpressed psyche.  

But an insightful question seems to have a unique ability to thread itself through this prickly gulf of incongruent perspectives.  It’s the trojan horse of dialogue: the well formed question sneaks into the other person’s mind under the guise of their context, but then warps it, bends it.

The first experiment is this issue of context, and it’s not a puzzle in terms of coding but in terms of language.  In order for GPT-3 to produce questions that are impressive, insightful, and ultimately helpful, then there needs to be a context larger than the user input for this to occur.  This fascinating challenge might end up being the heart of apps that utilize GPT-3.  The difficulty or ‘value’ of such an app might not be the coding -which many coders can easily accomplish- but with the unique language construct that is used to unlock GPT-3 in a very specific way, complete with tone, character, flavour and depth of insight.  This challenge presents an interesting crossroads between the world of coding and the humanities.  As powerful as GPT-3 is, it’s not a mindreader and it emphatically won’t do exactly what you want, nor plan.  It’s a bit like another person in that you have to coax it into a certain mood and mode of thought with your own flavour of language.

The second experiment that lends well to this idea is that it can generate a massive number of questions, and if users enjoy the app, they will be able to highlight their favourite questions, thereby creating a filter for output which can than be used recursively to redesign the unique, hardcoded prompt for GPT-3, and on top of that, the database of questions lends itself well to research about the nature of questions themselves, which is a major source of interest for yours truly.  

The third experiment, is obviously, the business potential behind an app.  Such products have laughably manageable costs for getting up and running.  The only downsides are really time spent actually building the app and tinkering with the hardcoded prompt and any other hoops that might be required to jump through.  It’s a bit like a lottery ticket which costs only the amount of time it takes to fill out, but perhaps with better odds, who knows?  The real question isn’t why build it?  The real question is why not?

The shift between these two questions really occurred after witnessing McKay Wrigley build one of the first GPT-3 apps and publicly share it online, an app called LearnFromAny1 which allows you to enter a well-known person’s name and a topic and have returned an explanation of that topic in the manner of the person.  The speed at which he was able to bring something to a stage where it could be demoed spoke for itself:  the effort is just not that much of an investment and certainly presents no loss at all.  It’s thanks to McKay that focus went from the questions why, or what, to why not?!  And this is exactly the sort of shift in thinking that is at the heart of hope for this app: is it possible to give people a tool that helps them ask better questions?

If this app sounds interesting to you, and you think you’d like to be part of the beta-testing group once OpenAI gives the green light for that phase of the process, then please subscribe to Tinkered Thinking on the website.  Beta-testers will be drawn exclusively from the subscriber group.