Thu 25 Apr 2002 16:42
my entire being is balanced, vital, and healthy!

nose wise, eating wise, things are well. I did eat more sunflower seeds yesterday than I would have liked, and perhaps today a little more sardines than I would have liked, but not to the point of having ill effects.

The question I'm considering is whether I should spend $1000 to start taking courses at City College this summer working slowly toward a master's degree in computer science, or is my money and time better spent in another way?

looking at a cost of $12,000?

no word from Joanna-


from:
http://www.cognitivearts.com/
(Roger Schank)

Another key design principle of the Cognitive Arts' approach is that learning is failure driven. In other words, when learners reach an impasse or experience an unexpected outcome, they're more receptive to learning because they want to know what to do next or where they went wrong.

In a goal-based scenario, mistakes trigger coaching or "war stories" from industry experts and/or veteran practitioners within your organization. Stories, as opposed to straightforward facts, provide the learner with the context or "hook" they need to retain and recall the information from memory.

To be effective, learning-by-doing must be goal-based.

from http://www.edge.org/documents/ThirdCulture/q-Ch.9.html
Scripts are interesting not when they work but when they fail.

When people say they're bored, what they mean is that there's nothing to learn. They get unbored fast when there's something to learn. The important thing about learning is that you can learn only at a level slightly above where you are. You have to be prepared.

My most important work is the attempt to get computers to be reminded the way people are reminded.

interestingly, collecting head grease in my fingernails--scalp scratching--has been my frivolous activity recently (observational study of studying behavior).

I was interested in the question of how, when you understand a sentence, you extract meaning from that sentence independent of language.

It would have to ask questions. Have conversations. The concept that machines will be intelligent without that is dead wrong. People are set up to be capable of endless information accumulation and indexing; finding information and connecting it to the next piece of information ó that's all anyone is doing.

I don't think there should be a curriculum. What kids should do is follow the interests they have, with an educated advisor available to answer their questions and guide them to topics that follow from the original interest. Wherever you start, you can go somewhere else naturally.

At the Institute for the Learning Sciences, at Northwestern, we designed a new computer program to teach biology, in which you get to design your own animal.

What you need are computer programs that can do the kind of one-on-one teaching that a good teacher could do if he or she had the time to do it.
 
which means that I would forever think about consciousness in his metaphor. This is useless to me, if I want to be creative.

I don't see the point of reading his book unless at this moment I've thought about consciousness and am prepared to see what he thinks.

The MIT linguist Noam Chomsky represents everything that's bad about academics.

Part of Chomsky's cleverness in referring to deep structure was to use these wonderful words in a way that everyone assumed to be something other than what he meant.

Chomsky has always adopted the physicist's philosophy of science, which is that you have hypotheses you check out, and that you could be wrong. This is absolutely antithetical to the AI philosophy of science, which is much more like the way a biologist looks at the world. The biologist's philosophy of science says that human beings are what they are, you find what you find, you try to understand it, categorize it, name it, and organize it. If you build a model and it doesn't work quite right, you have to fix it. It's much more of a "discovery" view of the world, and that's why the AI people and the linguistics people haven't gotten along. AI isn't physics.
(?)

Murray Gell-Mann:
As we know, there is not really such a thing as education.

There is only helping somebody to learn, and the learning process is a complex adaptive system: fooling around, making mistakes, somehow having contact with reality or truth, correcting the mistakes, assuring self-consistency, and so on.

You can go through that with a machine without being subjected to ridicule.

At the same time, the machine can keep track of your thought processes if necessary.

When certain thought processes are in error, the machine can tell you that, so that you can change them.

I've always thought that university education, including full-scale lecture courses covering the ground of well-known subjects on which excellent books have been published, are simply an illustration of how the universities have failed to adapt,

But the idea that at each college and university some professor has to give a series of lectures covering the ground of a subject such as electromagnetic theory seems totally insane to me.

Marvin Minsky on R. Schank:
He's changed his focus from year to year, so that in each of several different periods he would train a new generation of students in different theories. Then he would force them to build computer models of those theories, so that the rest of us could see for ourselves what these models could and could not do. Most of the models were based on novel ways to represent the meanings of verbal expressions.

I once asked Roger why so many of his examples were so bloodthirsty. He replied, "Ah, but notice how clearly you remember them!"


Francisco Varela:
that "mind" is fundamentally not rational. It's not a decision-making, software-type process. In that sense, Schank serves as a sparring partner.

Steven Pinker:
He said, "A theory like Chomsky's doesn't help me solve my problem; knowing the universal constraints on grammars of all languages isn't going to help me devise a program that can understand stories in English. Therefore Chomsky was wrong about language."

W. Daniel Hillis:
The interesting thing about Roger Schank, something he shares with Minsky, is the fact that he's produced an incredible  string of students. Anybody who's produced such a great string of students has to be a constructive pain in the ass. He's always taken an adversarial stance in his theories. He doesn't just say, "Here's my theory." He says, "Here's why I'm right and everybody else is an idiot." He's often right.

Daniel C. Dennett:
Part of Roger's view is that the mind is an amazing collection of gadgets, held together with some very interesting sorts of baling wire. With that sort of view, of course, you can't have a systematic scientific research program, so he doesn't try to.

Excerpted from The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution by John Brockman (Simon & Schuster, 1995) . Copyright © 1995 by John Brockman. All rights reserved.

Perhaps now I shall attempt to install linux... after pausing to daydream for a bit, about what is meaningful and important to me in life.

Anthony had a love story to tell me this morning at the pool! As is my tendency I amplified any doubts he might have had (about his new love) and perhaps added a few. But also discussed this tendency of mine--clearly not in line with Leonard's Listening Ideal. Anthony said he didn't think it negative and that he thought there were times to just listen, and other times to respond and react.

2002-04-25-2242
as you can see, I'm violating again. Ate way too much apparently and spent much of a long walk from the end of the (1) line to the end of the (2) line and the long subway ride back having my stomach push it back out... It didn't seem like I ate much more than the day before...

left a message for Joanna, but clearly, she has not called back.

the reason I am here:

_At a Journal Workshop_
writing to access the power of the unconscious and evoke creative ability
Ira Progoff, Ph.D.

Jeremy P. Tarcher/putnam
(c)1992
some 375 p!
p12
Once you have learned how to use it, the Intensive Journal method becomes like a musical instrument you can play; and its melodies are the themes and the intimations of meaning in your life. Going to great heights and to great depths, the life music that persons find themselves playing upon their Intensive Journal instrument is often startling. They did not expect to find in themselves sounds of such strength or such sweetness, such sensitivity in the midst of pain, such capacities for harmony or such inner vision.
p18 emerson: self reliance: nothin can bring you peace but yourself.

p23 They perceive the contents of their lives as being not the major realities but merely the raw materials of the process by which their artworks and other achievements are brought to fruition.

p 23 Outward activity propelled from within is the the essence of the creative existence. Thus one of the main indications of the strength of creativity in individuals is the degree to which they have brought themselves into connection with the multiple and interrelated movement of the mini-processes in their lives.

amazing he got this monster published as it is-- it should be severly cut.

p 24 the feedback effects of the Intensive Journal method:
(1) effect that is achieved simply by writing down nonjudgemental entries that record the inner and outer events of our lives.
(2) effect of reading these entries back to ourselves in our silence
[I haven't called that feedback--but it is /can be an interesting and wonderful experience, and a primary reason for the existence of this web site]
(3) effect of reading aloud the entries that we have written. We may read them aloud in private or in the presence of a group. Additionally, we may read our entries into a cassette recorder and then play them back to ourselves.


p26 the ultimate task of the new psychology is to reestablish man's connection to life, to the sustaining forces beyond all intellectual doctrines.

p26 the Period Log
    the Daily Log
    the Dream Log
    Twilight Imagery Log
    Life History Log
    Meditation Log

    In each of these we record the facts of our inner experience from a particular vantage point, always without judging, censoring, embellishing, criticizing, justifying, or interpreting the facts.

    we make our entries as objectively as we can, recording what occurred briefly and directly. the raw empircal data of our lives.

The Feedback sections are where we carry out the active feedback exercises.

p26 In the course of this process of feeding in and feeding back, a significant transformation takes place in the nature of the material.

Ira P. speaks repeatedly of mini-processes without giving concrete examples of what he means--or did I miss it?

the sections are focused on the inner movements of experience

the feedback sections carry the mini-processes of lives-in-motion.

p27
this feeds into the larger process by which the contents of experience are consumed as logs [ha] in the fire of our individual existence, generating light and heat, awareness and emotion as they provide the energy that carries life toward its meaningful unfolding.

p27 the Drew Institute studies of creative persons indicated four main types of inner movement taking place simultaneously. Four dimensions of inner experience.

Life/Time Dimension
Depth Dimension
Dialogue Dimension
Meaning Dimension

progoff likes to babble...

p28 dimensions are self-contained realms of experience each with its characteristic contents and style of unfolding.

Life/Time Dimension
inner continuity of a person's life history.
our lives take place in chronological time on the outer level of experience.
on the inner level our experiences take place in terms of subjective/qualitative time. The interior perception and experience of the movement of time is what we mean by Life/Time.
The various mini-processes of the Life/Time Dimension are:
Steppingstones
Life History Log
Intersections
Roads Taken and Not Taken
Time-Stretching: Backward and Forward

Dialog Dimension
deals with the connective relationships within our personal life
the realm of interior communication
processes that either draw us together with harmonious relationships within ourselves, or keep us split and inwardly distracted.

opening channels for interior communication, and of providing techniques by which a vital inner contact can be maintained among the various parts of our lives.

the realization that our existence unfolds as persons in the universe.

p29 As we move more deeply into our lives, it becomes apparent that not only human beings but work that we do, institutions in which we believe, situations in which we becom involved also have life histories. To that degree, human or not, they also are persons, and they can be related to as persons.

Dialog with Persons
Dialog with Works
Dialog with the Body
Dialog with Events, Situations, and Circumstances
Dialog with Society

Depth Dimension
where processes move in terms of symbolic forms.
as an inpiration is hidden in a person who has not yet had even the dream by which the new idea will be awakened.

a dream by which a new idea will be awakened?

Dream Log
Dream Enlargements
Twilight Imagery Log
Imagery Extensions
Inner Wisdom Dialog

p30
nonconscious levels of the psych from which consciousnes comes
sleep dreams, waking dreams, intuition varieties.

obscure symbolic contents
source of creative and spiritual life

characteristic style of movement is allusive and metaphoric
not direct and literal.
processes are elusive.

Meaning Dimension
Meditation Logs
Connections
Peaks, Depths, and Explorations (PDE)
Mantra/Crystals
Testament

p32 quality of being which Henri Bergson envisioned.

p33 (atmosphere of a journal workshop) image of a well connected to an underground stream

each of us must therefore go down our own well, and not the well of someone else's life.

We are engaged in entering the well of our life and in reaching as deeply into its sources as we can.

p34
While the outer events of our lives take place at the surface of the well, we go inward to the underground stream to reach our deep sources, and to have the revitalizing experience of reconnecting ourselves with the larger unity of life. Having broken through the walls of individuality to enter the deep source, we then return to live our personal existence in the world of external reality.



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