Jack:
First about the Sherry Turkle article. It reminded me immediately of a
famous experiment conducted by experimental psychologists quite a few
decades back. It involved the attachment of monkeys to wire-frame
surrgogate mothers and the effect of clothing it with a fabric. Guess
what? Draping the frame with soft towel did wonders for affection. I
should be able to get a proper reference if you want me to.
I know, I know, Prof. Turkle looks not at soft cloth, but at electronic
intelligence as a discriminating factor in affection. Might it have
something to do with Kurzweil also hailing from MIT? Just suspecting.
As for your TSC, I sincerely believe that you may be better of looking
for the kind of connectiveness you are enquiring into in the domain of
evolutionary psychology - looking along the vector of time rather than
across it, so to speak. Before making any recommendation I want to be
absolutely sure people understand that I am not schooled in psychology
other than having taken a course in the now thoroughly damned
behaviorist school of educational psychology. (I like to believe my mind
has not been warped by that anymore than by programming in BASIC.)
Now the recommendation (which would be some years out of date by now):
there is a book of papers edited by Jerome H. Barkow, Ledas Cosmides,
and John Tooby that is called "The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology
and the Generation of Culture." One of the most captivating phrases in
it is the title of a paper by Barkow, "Beneath new culture is old
psychology." Because I sensed the subject matter to be important to my
personal, 15-year-old belief that people do well to augment themselves
with on-the-person computers, I extracted a bit of he book in short
"report" under the heading, "The bias that got us places (or Some
booby-traps on the way to spiritual machines)."
http://www.fleabyte.org/archives-computing_to_a_purpose-1.html#The bias
that got us places
As for man-machine affection, you may find some personal affinity in
"Roots: Why Fleabyte?"
http://www.fleabyte.org/archives-computing_to_a_purpose-3.html#Roots,
Why Fleabyte
I salute you in your TSC efforts.
As for my "expertise," I cannot enough emphasize a disclaimer, but
whenever circumstances permit I like to have at least a sense of what's
going on in important domains of human society, and what of it makes
sense or not - regardless of what makes us tick.
Henry
P.S. Thanks for that note I didn't have to write.
Jack Park wrote:
> I have, for more than a dozen years, been evolving a theory with which
> I could construct a program I call The Scholar's Companion (TSC). TSC
> was always intended to be an IQ-enhancement tool. I have been sold on
> the notion of "apparent IQ" -- that of the combined efforts of a human
> and a computer working together to solve some problem, learn something
> new. Along the way, I became acquainted with the work of N.
> Raschevsky, and R. Rosen. Rosen took Raschevsky's Relational Biology
> to its current incarnation complete with a mathematics founded in
> Category Theory. Of course, I have been studying just what it would
> take to incorporate this thinking in TSC. Today, I stumbled upon a web
> site (http://www.edge.org), and a talk by Sherry Turkle, "A new kind
> of object: From Rorschach to Relationship." I am beginning to view
> the OHS/DKR, and TSC, from a viewpoint articulated in this paper.
> I'll be interested in the comments of others with respect to her
> views. Jack
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