Daniel Kahneman: The riddle of experience vs. memory

Everybody talks about happiness these days. I had somebody count the number of books with "happiness" in the title published in the last five years and they gave up after about 40, and there were many more. There is a huge wave of interest in happiness, among researchers. There is a lot of happiness coaching. Everybody would like to make people happier. But in spite of all this flood of work, there are several cognitive traps that sort of make it almost impossible to think straight about happiness.

And my talk today will be mostly about these cognitive traps. This applies to laypeople thinking about their own happiness, and it applies to scholars thinking about happiness, because it turns out we're just as messed up as anybody else is. The first of these traps is a reluctance to admit complexity. It turns out that the word happiness is just not a useful word anymore because we apply it to too many different things. I think there is one particular meaning to which we might restrict it but, by and large, this is something that we'll have to give up and we'll have to adopt the more complicated view of what well-being is. The second trap is a confusion between experience and memory: basically it's between being happy in your life and being happy about your life or happy with your life. And those are two very different concepts, and they're both lumped in the notion of happiness. And the third is the focusing illusion, and it's the unfortunate fact that we can't think about any circumstance that affects well-being without distorting its importance. I mean, this is a real cognitive trap. There's just no way of getting it right.

Now, I'd like to start with an example of somebody who had a question and answer session after one of my lectures reported a story. [unclear ...] He said he'd been listening to the symphony and it was absolutely glorious music and at the very end of the recording, there was a dreadful screeching sound. And then he added, really quite emotionally, it ruined the whole experience. But it hadn't. What it had ruined were the memories of the experience. He had had the experience. He had had 20 minutes of glorious music. They counted for nothing because he was left with a memory; the memory was ruined, and the memory was all that he had gotten to keep.

What this is telling us, really, is that we might be thinking of ourselves and of other people in terms of two selves. There is an experiencing self, who lives in the present and knows the present, is capable of re-living the past, but basically it has only the present. It's the experiencing self that the doctor approaches -- you know, when the doctor asks, "Does it hurt now when I touch you here?" And then there is a remembering self, and the remembering self is the one that keeps score, and maintains the story of our life, and it's the one that the doctor approaches in asking the question, "How have you been feeling lately?" or "How was your trip to Albania?" or something like that. Those are two very different entities, the experiencing self and the remembering self and getting confused between them is part of the mess of the notion of happiness.

Now, the remembering self is a storyteller. And that really starts with a basic response of our memories -- it starts immediately. We don't only tell stories when we set out to tell stories. Our memory tells us stories, that is, what we get to keep from our experiences is a story. And let me begin with one example. This is an old study. Those are actual patients undergoing a painful procedure. I won't go into detail. It's no longer painful these days, but it was painful when this study was run in the 1990s. They were asked to report on their pain every 60 seconds. And here are two patients. Those are their recordings. And you are asked, "Who of them suffered more?" And it's a very easy question. Clearly, Patient B suffered more. His colonoscopy was longer, and every minute of pain that Patient A had Patient B had and more.

But now there is another question: "How much did these patients think they suffered?" And here is a surprise: And the surprise is that Patient A had a much worse memory of the colonoscopy than Patient B. The stories of the colonoscopies were different and because a very critical part of the story is how it ends -- and neither of these stories is very inspiring or great -- but one of them is this distinct ... (Laughter) but one of them is distinctly worse than the other. And the one that is worse was the one where pain was at its peak at the very end. It's a bad story. How do we know that? Because we asked these people after their colonoscopy, and much later, too, "How bad was the whole thing, in total?" and it was much worse for A than for B in memory.

Now this is a direct conflict between the experiencing self and the remembering self. From the point of view of the experiencing self, clearly, B had a worse time. Now, what you could do with patient A, and we actually ran clinical experiments, and it has been done, and it does work, you could actually extend the colonoscopy of Patient A by just keeping the tube in without jiggling it too much. That will cause the patient to suffer, but just a little and much less than before. And if you do that for a couple of minutes, you have made the experiencing self of Patient A worse off, and you have the remembering self of Patient A and lot better off, because now you have endowed Patient A with a better story about his experience. What defines a story? And that is true of the stories that memory delivers for us, and it's also true of the stories that we make up. What defines a story are changes, significant moments and endings. Endings are very, very important and, in this case, the ending dominated.

Now, the experiencing self lives its life continuously. It has moments of experience, one after the other. And you ask: What happens to these moments? And the answer is really straightforward. They are lost forever. I mean, most of the moments of our life -- and I calculated -- you know, the psychological present is said to be about three seconds long. Which means that, you know, in a life there, are about 600 million of them. In a month, there are about 600,000. Most of them don't leave a trace. Most of them are completely ignored by the remembering self. And yet, some how you get the sense that they should count, that what happens during these moments of experience is our life. It's the finite resource that we're spending while we're on this earth. And how to spend it, would seem to be relevant, but that is not the story that the remembering self keeps for us.

So we have the remembering self and the experiencing self, and they're really quite distinct. The biggest difference between them is in the handling of time. From the point of view of the experiencing self, if you have a vacation, and the second week is just as good as the first, then the two week vacation is twice as good as the one week vacation. That's not the way it works at all for the remembering self. For the remembering self, a two week vacation is barely better than the one week vacation because there are no new memories added. You have not changed the story. And in this way, time is actually the critical variable that distinguishes a remembering self from an experiencing self. Time has very little impact on this story.

Now, the remembering self does more than remember and tell stories. It is actually the one that makes decisions because, if you have a patient who has had, say, two colonoscopies with two different surgeons and is deciding which of them to choose, then the one that chooses is the one that has the memory that is less bad, and that's the surgeon that will be chosen. The experiencing self has no voice in this choice. We actually don't choose between experiences. we choose between memories of experiences. And, even when we think about the future, we don't think of our future normally as experiences. We think of our future as anticipated memories. And basically you can look at this, you know, as a tyranny of the remembering self, and you can think of the remembering self sort of dragging the experiencing self through experiences that the experiencing self doesn't need.

I have that sense that when we go on vacations this is very frequently the case, that is, we go on vacations, to a very large extent, in the service of our remembering self. And this is a bit hard to justify I think. I mean, how much do we consume our memories? That is one of the explanations that is given for the dominance of the remembering self. And when I think about that, I think about a vacation we had in Antarctica a few years ago, which was clearly the best vacation I've ever had, and I think of it relatively often, relative to how much I think of other vacations. And I probably have consumed my memories of that three week trip, I would say, for about 25 minutes in the last four years. Now, if I had ever opened the folder with the 600 pictures in it, I would have spent another hour. Now, that is three weeks, and that is at most an hour and a half. There seems to be a discrepancy. Now, I may be a bit extreme, you know, in how little appetite I have for consuming memories, but even if you do more of this, there is a genuine question. Why do we put so much weight on memory relative to the weight that we put on experiences?

So I want you to think about a thought experiment. Imagine that your next vacation you know that at the end of the vacation all your pictures will be destroyed, and you'll get an amnesic drug so that you won't remember anything. Now, would you choose the same vacation? (Laughter) And if you would choose a different vacation, there is a conflict between your two selves, and you need to think about how to adjudicate that conflict, and it's actually not at all obvious because, if you think in terms of time, then you get one answer. And if you think in terms of memories, you might get another answer. Why do we pick the vacations we do, is a problem that confronts us with a choice between the two selves.

Now, the two selves bring up two notions of happiness. There are really two concepts of happiness that we can apply, one per self. So you can ask: How happy is the experiencing self? And then you would ask: How happy are the moments in the experiencing self's life? And they're all -- happiness for moments is a fairly complicated process. What are the emotions that can be measured? And, by the way, now we are capable of getting a pretty good idea of the happiness of the experiencing self over time. If you ask for the happiness of the remembering self, it's a completely different thing. This is not about how happily a person lives. It is about how satisfied or pleased the person is when that person thinks about her life. Very different notion. Anyone who doesn't distinguish those notions, is going to mess up the study of happiness, and I belong to a crowd of students of well-being, who've been messing up the study of happiness for a long time in precisely this way.

The distinction between the happiness of the experiencing self and the satisfaction of the remembering self has been recognized in recent years, and there are now efforts to measure the two separately, the Gallup Organization has a world poll with more that half a million people have been asked questions about what they thing of their life and about their experiences. And there have been other efforts along those lines. So in recent years, we have begun to learn about the happiness of the two selves. And the main lesson I think that we have learned, is they are really different. You can know how satisfied somebody is with their life, and that really doesn't teach you much about how happily they're living their life, and vice versa. Just to give you a sense of the correlation, the correlation is about .5. What that means is if you met somebody, and you were told, oh his father is six feet tall, how much would you know about his height? Well, you would know something about his height, but there's a lot of uncertainty. You have that much uncertainty. If I tell you that somebody ranked their life eight on a scale of ten, you have a lot of uncertainty about how happy they are with their experiencing self. So the correlation is low.

We know something about what controls satisfaction of the happiness self. We know that money is very important, goals are very important. We know that happiness is mainly being satisfied with people that we like, spending time with people that we like. There are other pleasures, but this is dominant. So if you want to maximize the happiness of the two selves, you are going to end up doing very different things. The bottom line of what I've said here is that we really should not think of happiness as a substitute for well-being. It is a completely different notion.

Now, very quickly, another reason we cannot think straight about happiness is that we do not attend to the same things when we think about life, and we actually live. So, if you ask the simple question of how happy people are in California, you are not going to get to the correct answer. When you ask that question, you think people must be happier in California, if, say, you live in Ohio. (Laughter) And what happens is when you think about living in California, you are thinking of the contrast between California and other places, and that contrast, say, is in climate. Well, it turns out that climate is not very important to the experiencing self and is not even very important to the reflective self that decides how happy people are. But now, because the reflective self is in charge, you may end up -- some people may end up moving to California. And it's sort of interesting to trace what is going to happen to people who move to California in the hope of getting happier. Well, their experiencing self is not going to get happier. We know that. But one thing will happen. They will think they are happier, because, when they think about it, they'll be reminded of how horrible the weather was in Ohio. And they will feel they made the right decision.

It is very difficult to think straight about well-being, and I hope I have given you a sense of how difficult it is.

Thank you.

(Applause)

Chris Anderson: Thank you. I've got a question for you. Thank you so much. Now, when we were on the phone a few weeks ago, you mentioned to me that there was quite an interesting result came out of that Gallup survey. Is that something you can share since you do have a few moments left now?

Daniel Kahneman: Sure. I think the most interesting result that we found in the Gallup survey is a number, which we absolutely did not expect to find. We found that with respect to the happiness of the experiencing self. When we looked at how feelings vary with income. And it turns out that, below an income of 60,000 dollars a year, for Americans, and that's a very large sample of Americans, like 600,000, but it's a large representative sample, below an income of 600,000 dollars a year...

CA: 60,000.

DK: 60,000. (Laughter) 60,000 dollars a year, people are unhappy, and they get progressively unhappier the poorer they get. Above that, we get an absolutely flat line. I mean I've rarely seen lines so flat. Clearly, what is happening is money does not buy you experiential happiness, but lack of money certainly buys you misery, and we can measure that misery very, very clearly. In terms of the other self, the remembering self, you get a different story. The more money you earn the more satisfied you are. That does not hold for emotions.

CA: But Danny, the whole American endeavor is about life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness. If people took seriously that finding, I mean, it seems to turn upside down everything we believe about, say for example, taxation policy and so forth. Is there any chance that politicians, that the country generally, would take a finding like that seriously and run public policy based on it?

DK: You know I think that there is recognition of the role of happiness research in public policy. The recognition is going to be slow in the United States, no question about that, but in the UK, it is happening, and in other countries it is happening. People are recognizing that they ought to be thinking of happiness when they think of public policy. It's going to take awhile, and people are going to debate whether they want to study experience happiness, or whether they want to study life evaluation, so we need to have that debate fairly soon, How to enhance happiness, goes very different ways depending on how you think, and whether you think of the remembering self or you think of the experiencing self. This is going to influence policy, I think, in years to come. In the United States, efforts are being made to measure the experience happiness of the population. This is going to be, I think, within the next decade or two, part of national statistics.

CA: Well, it seems to me, this issue will, or at least should be, the most interesting policy discussion to track over the next few years. Thank you so much for inventing behavioral economics. Thank you Danny Kahneman.

What I wish I wroteon innovation

Steve Wozniak developed the Apple computer. Steve Jobs, et al, were business partners. Read the Wozniak history. He did not develop the hardware and software because of a "culture of moral materialism," honed with complicated drama queens. For openers, he learned how raster scanning worked in a TV service class and he used that knowledge to control the scanning electron beam. He also figured out how to make the compact disk drive and even offered it to his employer, Hewlett Packard, who declined interest in it. The Apple Computer growth really began to bloom when users heard about and than ran VisiCalc spreadsheet program on the computer. That program, also required a lot of seat-of-the pants learning and then implementation.

The thesis my thesis adviser wouldn't let me do in grad school was on how Americans were beginning to believe their myths; how we were deifying our great inventors instead of learning how they actually did it. Productive innovation is the result of learning all you can, parking the seat of your pants in a chair and mastering the intricate and subtle details, doing experiments, keeping records and constantly asking what step to take next to achieve the desired goal. It typically means developing a wide-ranging knowledge.

Those who fail usually lack the self-discipline to stay focused. You make it sound like the keys to success in innovation are paisleys, long hair, incense, sandals and the right groove.

Author: Jumper from South Carolina

On the limitations of empirical studies

Here's an excerpt from a blog entry by James Kwak, co-author with Simon Johnson at the Baseline Scenario:

I finally got around to listening to Planet Money’s interview with Russ Roberts from December. Russ Roberts and I are pretty sure to disagree on almost any actual policy question. But what I liked about his interview was that he basically admitted that policy questions cannot be settled by looking at the empirical studies. On whether the minimum wage increases or decreases employment for example, he says that he can poke holes in the studies whose conclusions he doesn’t agree with, but other people can poke holes in the studies he agrees with. In Roberts’s view, people’s policy positions are determined by their prior normative commitments.

I don’t completely agree. I don’t think that these questions, like the one about the minimum wage, are inherently unanswerable in the sense that the answer does not exist. But I agree that empirical studies are unlikely to get to the truth, particularly on a politically charged question, because there are so many ways to fudge an empirical study. As one of my professors said, there are a million ways you can screw up a study, and only one way to do it right. But I agree with the general sentiment. We are living in an age of numbers, where people think that statistics can answer any question. Statistics can answer any question, but they can answer it in multiple ways depending on who is sitting at the keyboard.

The drama of most consultants

As the economy keeps pushing people into consulting, let me share this thought:

Usually, a consultant can only be as smart/[descriptor] as his dumbest/[opposite-descriptor] paying client.

What's in between mathematics and politics? Humankind.

What's politics? Applied religion.

How many Destroy&Rebuild Cycles it takes?

How many times have you said/been told, NO!, It doesn't work this way!, Neither that!, Nor the other!?

Few, a few, a hundred?

Check out to see what the late conductor Sergiu Celibidache had to say:

From the comments, submitted by one of his students:

What a great fortune and honor has been for me studying with him, even if briefly!

Every time I see this video I remember how many times he told me to quit smoking ...

How many memories. Thank you, Maestro, to have existed. And thanks for letting me meet the fate.

He was a man who could destroy you in the most violent and terrible ways. But he never did with malice, he did it to destroy your beliefs that were almost always wrong, and then rebuild. And when you rebuilt, he did it with love and dedication that was really touching. One minute he spoke sternly terrifying, the next minute we were close and I smiled with great love. He lives until today; I feel his love in me.

Sergiu Celibidache -- Teaching Session

Transcribed from Audio Recording Conducted in English, Curtis Institute of Music, February 1984

This is a small glimpse of what happened during the classroom sessions at Curtis in 1984. There were two sessions each day, each lasting two to three hours. And this went on for about ten days. Even so, this short excerpt presents some points fundamental to Celibidache's teaching. In particular, it was essential to understanding Celibidache to distinguish between sound as an acoustic phenomenon and sound asexperienced by the human mind. The fact that these two things are not the same is now completely uncontroversial. However, it is amazing the degree to which music students continue to find it a baffling thought!

-- Paul Henry Smith

Celibidache: If you look in an encyclopedia under phenomenology, it is sixty pages long in order to explain it. But what we intend under phenomenology is the approach to the sound and all its aspects. What is sound? Not the physical definition of sound, or the acoustical definition. This is of no value for us. Secondly -- the main object of phenomenological study -- how does sound work in the human mind? And in order to make it less abstract, yesterday I gave an example of repetition. There is not such a thing like repetition. When we hear something we got already fecundated. Our sensibilities are engaged; the second time it's different. So, the third time it does not interest us because a repetition is not a fact in itself. It finds itself in a context. So, what about the third time? It depends what comes. The most critical object of that view is the fact of sequences. Bach said that more than three sequences will let anything down. This did not stop Vivaldi from making eleven sequences! He was a man who didn't have any idea of harmony or whatever his style understood under harmony. He had no idea of music.

So, on one side: the study of sound. On the other: how does sound work on us? And the results are away from any form of individualism. They work on you as they do on me. For example, we have a melodic interval [descending minor third]. It is definitely so that I hear the second phenomenon [i.e., note] in function of the first. For the first has left already an impression on me. This is "priority in time." You, me and him -- it makes no difference -- we all hear the first note first.

Due to Husserl we came away from the idea of an objectivity in itself. And we came higher by the following idea: I have to find myself in you and you have to find yourself in me. The only tie that makes that objective is the fact that it's not dependent only on me, but on you also. He calls it, "intersubjective Betreffbarkeit."

Questions please.

Q: You spoke of the necessity to empty our minds. I recall having read about the alpha waves from the human being from birth to adulthood and that from birth to about age six these alpha waves are the slowest --

C: Yes, but it's not the same process. No, alpha waves cut you away. They dominate you and cut you away from the world. You are nearly asleep when you are in that state. It's not it at all.

Q: That's not the emptiness you were -- ?

C: Not at all! My emptiness -- "my" ... I cannot call it "my," but -- the emptiness we're thinking of is the highest activity. When Brentano says "every consciousness is a consciousness of something" and we learn every day through yoga that there is a consciousness that is a consciousness of nothing, it does not make sense intellectually. You're away. You do not want. No, no, no, no -- in order to say a perfect yes.

Myself, for instance: Before we start a concert, if I do not succeed in emptying myself, it will be memory. "I know the horn starts. I know the ..." No. This is against me. It will materialize out the function of memory. Music hasn't got anything to do with memory. Memory is related to the past. Hope is related to the future. Music is not related to anything. It is a spontaneous process of creation. The performer creates. What has the composer done? Shown you the way: "Look, if you go over those stages, those conflicts, you might come to this point."

Q: So, basically you're saying that you have to put yourself --

C: Yes, but if you say, "you have to put yourself" it looks like an act of will. It is not. The more you want to get empty, the less you are. You are possessed by a strong wish: to be empty. That is wrong. How one comes to it nobody will ever be able to explain.

Q: Could you describe the difference between spirit and all the bunches of experience that make our consciousness?

C: Very complicated approach. I hate to talk about spirit because in Germany there is nothing but spirit. And nobody knows what spirit is. What is spirit in your idea?

Q: Well, you can relate some of my idea if you read the bible where it says, "God created man in his own image." Which image? Is it the nose, the hair or the eyes? Well, not in MY mind.

C: But you still do not answer my question. What is spirit?

Q: [no reply]

C: You see, in the whole philosophical generation (I cannot speak about the States) there is not one who will find out what it is. We all talk about spirit. "You should think in the spirit of Washington." "You are a man without spirit." "A performer who sticks the visible aspect of music is not in the spirit of Beethoven." What is spirit, finally? This is the most devalued notion philosophically and also in the field of phenomenology. Yes, but if I relate the facts and if I go through the whole devaluation of that notion, everybody is right. This is what is spirit. And when the French say "vous avez de l'esprit," they mean you are very funny.

So, again, the consciousness in exercise of its absolute freedom. Now, why freedom? Because any other approach will be influenced by your personal bunch of aversions and acceptances. It is then that you will be able to follow the creative processes of the composer. You know, there is no definition for it. There is no definition for so many other things.

Q: What sort of preparation is necessary before a performance for one to be free and have a successful performance?

C: Before I will find an answer for you, I will be God in heaven! I cannot tell you more than how I do it myself. And this is not a method to be tried! "I sleep. I do not eat. I --" This will not touch it.

Q: I'm speaking in terms of the music and the instrumentalist or performer, conductor or --

C: Yes, but you can apply it on any field. So, when we do music, we must bring those people out of the state of "receivers of orders." Everyone in the orchestra is a performer accompanied by all the possibilities of that task. If they are not free, the whole performance will be an imitation of something --either the idea of the conductor, or the idea of the score. "For me the clarinet is important there." What is not important!? All the degrees of importance obey a state of priority. So, I can't tell you how we should prepare, but I can tell you one thing: the whole study of phenomenology will show you what music is not. What is a rehearsal? A series of no's. "No, you are too loud." "Too quick." "Not at the point." "No, no, no!" We never say what it is. We never say, "yes." A yes is what he does when he matches the exigences of the piece. The whole study is nothing but, "no, no, no, no."

Q: Is that necessary?

C: No, it's not necessary. I contend that people have never performed the 9th of Beethoven yet, and I'm going to prove that to you with the score. Are you content with that? Are you content that an idiot like Toscanini ruled sixty years long above everybody else? I am not. I am not content that the world has not discovered that music is not an amusement or a source of joy or satisfaction. It is much higher than that.

Q: But what I'm trying to get at is instead of saying "no," if you do what you did last night, then ...

C: You do not say "no," you open all the doors to a definite and eternal "yes." You do not say "no."

Q: Well, I'm talking practically now --

C: Yes, practically!

Q: Rather than say "no," say what the positive things are that you want in order to get your ...

C: What which is positive? "I want you to be spiritual." How does he manage that? But, if I tell him,"Look, you are the third part of a string quartet. If you pull on the D too much bow, the harmonics disappear. They stay in the air. They do not mix with the others." How could he know when they do mix? "You should play less and on the top of the bow ... Yes, can you hear something? Once again, 1st violin and 2nd violin alone ...Can you see what they do? The 2nd violin contradicts a little bit the 1st, then neutralizes, and then finally they go together. So, you are the third part which is supposed to back, to influence, and to put into value this little quartet. If you pull your bow (considering your heart is alright and the bow is not rough) and you do not hear how much damage is done by your individual position, I could offer you any theory and you will not buy it. But if I say, "A bit more. No, that's too big." (All of a sudden something comes out). Have you heard it? "Yes!" "Who played that?" Nobody did. But you structured so perfectly well that those values came out.

There is not one orchestra where two instruments will go together from this spiritual point of view. Together rhythmically ... no problem, and America is perfect. Technically, pitch ... perfect.

What's it all about? What is the second movement of Eroica? Is it a march? This is good for the press and for young, unsatisfied girls. What are you looking for, the pleasure of C minor with G major? It is a pleasure. Nobody will be able to destroy it. Even a military band will get it. Even a child playing the piano gets that primitive stuff. But how are they related to each other? From C
minor to G major what happens to the tension? Does it increase, or does it stay the same, or does it go down? Who taught us this? Nobody. Who taught us to find the end in the beginning? How does that happen? Who taught us that the essence of it is simultaneity?

Q: It seems to me that part of what you're saying related very closely to a sculptor who is involved with chipping away everything that doesn't belong in order to arrive at what does.

C: Yes, but what does not function is that the sculpture appears to you statically, and music doesn't. Music originates in time (whatever you understand under "music"). This is a static idea when I say "a landscape." "Every piece of music has a landscape." This is not correct, but I don't have another possibility to illustrate to you that there IS something which you cannot touch.

Q: But, perhaps it is not static to the sculptor, only to the person who is perceiving it. So, if it is not static to the sculptor, how would he bring the person who looks upon it to look upon it the same way he sculpted it?

C: Yes, for the sculptor it's not static because the whole process, the whole biography of how the piece comes into being is a time condition. He starts somehwere. This after that. Each alternative a time condition. For us it is "yes, I like it" or "yes, I do not." I cannot have the same approach to music. Where is the fifth of Beethoven? You think on the records? My goodness, this is the wrongest falsification of any musical truth. There is no substitute for space. So, what you've got is a kind of photography on the record. And then, who makes the record? How far is that man, concerning the structure of music? Most all of them are out. They stick to the notes because they do not know what else to do.

So, about the static: Music hasn't got a single static element. Even a constellation of different sounds is not static. So, what is finally the question? The sculptor's creative work is in time. But when he chops away the first piece, he knows how the head should lie at the end. So, it's identity -- end in beginning. But not for us, because we see the final result. (But there is an American, McClosky[?], who said that the whole biography of the scrap of hair is alive and that you should find out where it started and where it ends.

Q: What would be an ideal performance for you? Do you try to communicate anything to the audience?

C: I do not have any intention to communicate anything.

Q: Why perform for an audience, then? Why are they there?

C: Because they want to do the same as me.

Q: You would like them to experience music as you would?

C: No, no, not at all. I cannot think for them. I am one consciousness only. If they want to do the same as I do, they can. I cannot control what brings an individual to a concert. But, if I judge from the short span of my life, they try to find something which I already know. Many of them do. Like the Queen of Hanover who said "Maestro, it IS so." If she made that perception, then she was as free as I was. So, I cannot animate myself by the desire to give them something. Through my concentration (or whatever it is) something comes into being, and they might get it.

Q: So you are just presenting them with something?

C: What is there to be presented? That's static. Something, with your help, my help, and the musicians' help might come into being. I follow the recommended line of the composer and I could feel, more or less, what moved him to do so. So, if you (the audience) can do the same, it's all right. But I do not do it for you.

Termites and Towers

Termites and Towers
Originally uploaded by jurvetson

Follow the link for some notes, taken by Steve Jurvetson, from a brain spa at the Santa Fe Institute, a weekend symposium on the multi-dimensions of evolution.

For an early taste, check out:
The trickle down theory of creation was “obvious” to people.
The bubble up theory of creation provides one unified perspective, one elegant synoptic model.
Darwin and Turing present a strange inversion of reasoning.
Turing showed that the computer does not need to know what arithmetic is. Computers have competence without comprehension.
Understanding is the effect, not the cause.
Natural selection is an automatic reason-finder. It doesn’t have to know what it is doing. The “Need to Know” principle in the intelligence community has an analog in the biosphere, driven by thrift rather than security.
We attribute more understanding than there needs to be. We lack a familiar conceptualization of semi-understood quasi-representations.
Like life being made of non-living parts, comprehension can be made from non-comprehending parts.
Our brains are more like termite castles than Turing’s computers.
Italian newspaper headline, translated: “Yes we have a soul, but it’s made of lots of tiny robots.”
Branching neurons are descendants of free-swimming organisms.
When running cultural software, brains become minds.
It’s not magic; it’s teamwork.
Words are memes that can be pronounced.
For evolution, you need high-fidelity copying, but it can’t be perfect copying.
The sea shapes the designs of Polynesian boats. If the boat makes it back home, copy it.
Memes are software viruses.
We are the first intelligent designers in the tree of life.

In response to my question about inscrutability of evolved artifacts:
“Yes, reverse engineering the brain may prove infeasible.”

This was Daniel Dennett quoted by Steve Jurvetson

Barbara Liskov on helping the mind go the distance

During the question-and-answer session that followed the talk, Liskov was asked the secret of her success. Part of her answer — which must have chagrined some members of the audience — was that “I don’t work that many hours a day.” “I always went home at night, and didn’t work in the evening,” she said. “I always found that downtime to be really useful.” She also, however, emphasized the importance of pursuing research that’s interesting — rather than, say, the research that will generate the most publications. That way, she said, “at the end, if you fail, at least you did something interesting, rather than doing something boring and also failing.” After the laughter died down, she added, “Or doing something boring and then forgetting how to do something interesting.”

Barbara Liskov, winner of the Turing Award, instrumental in laying the foundations for today’s programming languages