I knew Schizophyllum when she was 23. I will skip the story between us for now and,
one day...
She was roaming along the corridor, one of the ways back home. Questions do random walk in her mind severely.
"what if you come across a creative rut? " "jump out of the bed and walk around, call someone you can complain your rut to" she reminds one suggestion from her favorite writer phoebe waller bridge. So she picked up the phone, started sending those questions&self answers out loud to her few trusted friend and postgraduate roommate——Me. it was through "audio messaging".
She was so fragile to express her vague ideas, which always are, under baking.
Schi: “Ok let's start with ‘knowledge’ you mentioned (though she knew it was her excuse to start talking about what interests her the most, not necessarily my topic) , this is a very interesting topic…
what do you think the knowledge is?”
(silence on my side...i knew she doesn't expect an answer)
Schi: “I think it is the atomic unit of human thoughts or ideas or whatever representing one's mind that can be re-used...no matter what form or how complete it is... yeah reusability is important…
but how do people know it is reused? (she continues) Of course if we finish this process in our brain without anyone else's noticing, it's fine, as long as it functions anyway. But what if we can see it, the whole process via some magic technology?”
Schi: “it's a very natural process when people generate thoughts, like liver secrets bile. But under what condition am i referring? When people naturally generate thoughts? Definitely not in the state of ‘working’ or ‘forcing to work’.
Machines take this mind state and they are doing what human tells them to do, and man also expects some intelligence emerging along the way while the term "intelligence" is not well defined.
I read from somewhere about NLPs "The data preparation phase uses a large number of manual hours to label the data and produce a training data set. Afterwards, the ‘intelligence’ of the computer is used to learn the patterns in the data set." i got confused when they described the labeling as a "work", from there they expect to form a dataset for the machine to learn.
Oh there are also specific cases of those labeling work by many professionals in different fields, but they are still ‘work’, isn't it? “
(still silence on my side...i closed the drama m watching coz her messages are too noisy)
Schi (she continued): “My point is ,thoughts can be generated via natural moments , sort of out of conscious? ... what conditions do we have such moments and also they are not guided by algorithms? ... i guess tools for thoughts should capture/cover those moment...and it should be some natural and logical annotation behavior. Anyone who is willing to mark up a piece of information is using the arithmetic power of his brain.
AI model is based on the default hypothesis on "working" and "functioning", while there is another way to start from "natural annotation" via the power of human brain (again free from pre determined algorithms).
So, back to knowledge (she tried to get back to the original topic, always is) , i think it is the basic unit of creativity or intelligenta, no matter you call it thoughts, ideas, whatever. From what behavior could we abstract that intelligenta, and then we could use technology to make it visualized, felt, seen.”
Schi: “So i m thinking of reading and writing, a behavior chain instead of either one because writing is a feedback loop for what you read. Also writing is a visible process that can be seen, tracked, reused and connected.
One of the classic example is the citation system in academic writing. For a small and professional network it's good to credit each other but i want something that works across the web (for every one with writing ability) to refer each other with notice(+1)... i think that's the magic brought by bi-directional links…
Imagine afterwards, any commercial or economic benefits can be distributed via this knowledge reference network, those relating reusability and bi-directional links could share the money.”
(gosh should i say something?)
Schi: “Oh there is another be-a-utiful question… (seems no need😅)
i wanna share…i haven't got to summarize it until yesterday: what's the difference of knowledge kept in printed paper from the knowledge kept in the digital media? it's a simple question and 1000 people will have a 1000 answers, but for me is the connection.
How to understand connection? the connection between the dead and the live (not flaunting i m alive), the connections of the lives through the dead or the live. Again if we just finished this in our brain without noticing or visualizing, we won't be bothered using the technology... we use technology to make it visible and interactive through time and space.
I m so interested in words (or say text), which reflects our mind in a mysterious way. I love a professor's saying ‘As long as our brain is a mystery, the universe - the reflection of the structure of the brain - will also be a mystery.' We are vague, non-linear, as Virgina Woolf senses herself in those fissures, in those fragments, in those lacunae, in the interstices, in the gaps, in the moments when we fall down the hole and drag ourselves up again, using words. We want to show how the mind itself, the most complex object in the known universe, does not manage linear time very well at all.”
Schi: “now i think i should learn things around text, how do people interpret people ('s thoughts) in the first place, then we understand the machine. i don't know what it is but it's probably some mixture of psychology neuroscience linguistics network science and so on...oh i probably will learn about the computation history, you know what, maybe programming language develops with the driving of certain purposes. Like the wars, World War II spawned the Turing machine, so we understand machine coz we need machines to work work efficiently, it's urgent purpose at that time.
So what's the purpose in the past 20-30 yrs, and what about now?”
(she seems finished)
I don't know what to say to her, and i don't understand her through over 30 audio messages. But i knew she didn't intend to make me understood, she just want me, there. I replied a photo of my breakfast in a Singapore’s style (we both like), and said i would listen later (i probably won't) . She sent me her breakfast photo with a smiling face🙂.
Opps...finally we ended this convo. Food solves everything, as always.
I opened my drama again, and one line comes to me:
If life is not more interesting than drama, what’s the point of living it?