

Alan Kay on 'Learning to See' - espeed
http://www.forbes.com/sites/chunkamui/2012/06/12/alan-kay-on-learning-to-see/

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drostie
It always takes me a while when I'm watching Alan Kay deliver prepared remarks
because his emphasis doesn't seem to match the emphasis of his speech.

In this case it strikes me that he's trying to evoke the _enormity of human
history_ \-- hundreds of thousands of years -- and the surprise that we've
only really been trying to "step outside ourselves" for about five hundred.
Somehow at least 99.5% of that time has been spent in the fogs before enquiry
and only the last 0.5% have we really seen the explosion of mathematics, the
emergence of science, and the industrial revolution. That we can fool
ourselves allows us to dream of the world to come, but it also eats itself: it
locks us in a prison of our own minds. So that is the emphasis that I see in
this talk, after puzzling through it in my head for a bit.

This may be true, but I worry that this has been too limited an approach to
history. As an artist whose works will likely be lost to history, I must
object that there seem to be more artists than ever talked about, more soul-
seekers lighting fires than fires that burned across history: most trickle
away into embers.

What if the problem isn't that we're always fooling ourselves -- i.e. that we
never light fires -- and rather that we have simply not had the right
environment for the fires to explode the way they do? What if, say, ideas
became properties of trade routes rather than properties of cultures, and the
Dark Ages somehow stabilized these trade routes so that the ideas could
finally diffuse from one route to another?

It's only a half-baked idea at present, but I'm just not sure that this
relatively recent explosion in innovation is due entirely to the fact that
people got locked inside their own beliefs. Perhaps that is me getting locked
inside my own beliefs though -- beliefs that we are all cosmopolitan and
curious and earnest inside.

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pattangal
Interestingly, we humans do literally have to learn to see, including updating
our preferences about where to rotate our eyeballs.

Also interestingly, we perceive nothing directly. The role of sense organs is
to _rule out_ possibilities. So everything that remains must be internally
generated (i.e. conjectural). Before we can see something we must first have
an idea about it, and all such ideas come from guesswork.

When we observe correctly we can say that the internal perception corresponds
to external reality.

Another property of humans is that our perceptions are distorted by strong
emotions such as fears and desires. Overly ambitious people, for instance,
perceive the world differently. I wonder whether this goes all the way down to
the level of apples and oranges (e.g. not seeing an apple if it is not in my
'interest' to do so).

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apitaru
This struck a chord: "We are the species that fools itself”

I think this is at the heart of how we are capable of creating something from
nothing ('create wealth' as pg would say).

There's also a dark side - I've come to notice that people who cannot 'fool
themselves' are less happy, and at times dangeruosly so.

We are indeed a self-winding spring.

