TED Community » Andrew Tam
About Me
- Location:
- United States, Plainsboro, NJ
- Gender:
- Male
- Areas of expertise:
- Engineering - Civil
- Universities:
- The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art
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TEDCred score: +2.50 TEDCred reflects your contribution to the TED community.
A reply on Conversation: How does virtuality translate into reality?
Your comment reminds me a lot about one of the dream argument, which Descartes' addresses in his "Meditations on First Philosophy." In "reality," we have our five senses, and we use these to give ourselves an understanding of what is going on around us. In dreams, we possess the same five senses and again, use them to understand our surroundings. The upshot of this is the following: if in either case we feel like we are in reality, then it should be impossible to for us to claim with certainty that we are currently in a state of "reality" and not dream.
The brain is powerful enough to create for us this "alternate reality" (a dream) and trick us into believing it is "reality." Who is to say its not doing so right now?
So what is real and what is not real? It seems very subjective - we choose to make real what we are comfortable with. We make inferences and we fill in gaps. For instance, with the virtual cathode / anode, we don't know that an actual cathode / anode is created, hence the "virtual." We simply invent the idea in order to explain the phenomena. We do this even outside of science (ghosts, the supernatural, religion, etc.).
For all of these things, we cannot prove that they are of "reality," but at the same time, we cannot prove that they are "outside of reality." Thus, the choice is ultimately ours - how we put the pieces together and form conclusions. I don't believe that there is one universal or absolute truth; rather, as many others have said, we interpret what happens in our lives how we choose to.
A reply on Conversation: Can we "engineer" our own interests through repeated exposure?
I think you bring up a good point. We can't know we are interested in something we don't know about, thus our interests arise in the set of things that we do know about. In the twin example, it may be true that we are genetically disposed to take greater interest in certain subjects over others. However, as Cal pointed out, the way this interest develops varies widely, and is largely related to culture.
Suppose we are never exposed to something that we should genetically be inclined towards - then we shall never find out that we had a disposition towards it to begin with.
With this information, it seems to me that we cannot engineer our own interests. If genes do carry these inclinations towards particular subjects, than I would say that we can't engineer our own interests, as our interests have already been engineered by our genes. What we can do is choose the pool of topics that we could potentially find interest in. If we inherently dislike a particular subject, I don't think we can genuinely force ourselves to like it.
A reply on Conversation: Does society need more interdisciplinary work? Or more well-rounded individuals working together?
I think both, the humans' innate drive and the structure of the education system, push us towards specialization. As Fritzie said, we tend to have a "taste for depth," but usually for only a couple of subjects. Through life we experience a lot of things but, for me at least, not everything catches my attention. When things do interest me, I try to learn more about them; and when they don't interest me, they just drift out of sight. The point here is that specialization does for me seems to be innate.
The education system seems to foster this innate tendency towards specialization. Perhaps this is why we must declare majors upon entering college. We can't just go to school, learn a little bit about everything, and then get a degree in general knowledge; it has to be something specific. Even If the innate tendency towards specialization was not already there, school forces it in that direction. The top of the education hierarchy (PhD) does not promote an increase of knowledge in all subjects, but rather an extreme specialization in one topic. It is tough for people just looking to learn about everything because as one climbs the educational hierarchy, the focus seems to get more and more narrow.
A reply on Conversation: How are different body parts connected to the emotions we traditionally associate with them?
I think its interesting how all of these relationships between body parts and emotion seem to emerge. However, it seems like there are two distinct groups present: there are the scientifically driven cases, and then the experience driven cases.
The article you posted reminded me immediately about an experience driven case, palm reading, for some reason. Palm reading has been around for a long time, and it is still around today. However, I couldn't find any kind of scientific studies that relate brain activity or personality to the patterns on our hands.
To bring relevance to our bioelectricity class, this whole idea seems to parallel the inverse and forward problem. Given our knowledge of the brain, we can say, to some extent, that left handed people think more creatively while right handed people think more logically. Along the same lines, palm reading attempts to conclude things about us by presupposing that the hand lines are influenced by the brain and our behavior.
Just as we study EKGs to learn more about the heart, we should be able to learn about us by studying our eyes, as your article showed.
Although Christophe has shown that the particular experiment done does not reveal much, from a scientific stand-point, that's not to say that we can't use science to keep trying to figure it out.
Suppose for some reason palm reading or eye reading were a field as large as heart studies - given that we pooled enough time and resources into research, do you think we would ever find a relationship between iris features and personality (in the same way that we are trying to learn about the heart from EKGs)? Or do we leave it as a more experience-based thing, e.g. this pattern means this, that pattern means that, etc.?
A reply on Conversation: What is the power behind a shared experience?
These have not been accounted for, perhaps, because they are legitimate answers to the question at hand; and this is good - thank you bringing them to my knowledge!
I agree with you completely: the visual, auditory and tactile stimuli are all parts of a shared experience, and it is the empathy / mirror neurons that may explain the lowering of resistance between people.
I think the TEDtalk that Maria posted (Charlie Todd: http://www.ted.com/talks/charlie_todd_the_shared_experience_of_absurdity.html) thoroughly demonstrates this.
With the experiments demonstrated in his talk, its difficult to know whether or not people laugh because it is funny individually, or because other people are there and it becomes funny together.
Perhaps two individuals will find it funny, but not show it - only when they acknowledge each other do their empathy / mirror neurons kick in, and they will show each other that they both find it funny, and then more people will tag on, and it becomes contagious.
At least for the Improv All experiments, the shared feeling is one of laughter, and because people are experiencing it together, they feel more connected to one another.
In particular I really liked the high fives up the staircase act, because the initial shared experience of a gloomy, monotonous morning commute to work was changed to one of "alright, I'm gonna get a high five!" and everyone really seemed to be enjoying the experience together as opposed to suffering together.
A reply on Conversation: How does life/death manifest itself in the human brain? Is brain death the ultimate end stage of life?
I think the most confusing thing about this discussion is how we choose to define everything. With that said, I agree with many of the terms that you have laid out.
I too would define life as the flow of conscious experience. Only when this ceases, would I consider it to be death. Someone could be paralyzed in all of the five senses, but if they still had the ability to think, and at least be conscious of their surroundings although unable to interact with them, I would say they are still alive.
Thus to me, if it is the brain that allows us the ability to think, then the death of the brain is death in general, regardless the state of the body.
You brought up another good point about defining these terms -- if there is something worse than death (like having death of brain but not body), then perhaps death should remain defined as it is, the cessation of brain function.
A reply on Conversation: Can technology replace human intelligence?
You bring up a lot of great points. However, you mentioned that emotion is linked to instinct and intuition; do you think that each of these are independent of the brain? If so, what exactly are they? If they are part of the brain, then there must be some neuronal structuring / firing pattern that is responsible for our instincts and intuition and thus emotion. If this is the case, exact replication of that structuring or firing should allow some form of AI to replicate the instinct of intuition of people.
Furthermore, I agree that AI seems more rule based whereas human intelligence is more context based. But, do you think that there are some overarching rules that govern our context based intelligence? What says that our decisions and intelligence are not composed of quasi-infinitely large conditional statements?
If we can associate some kind of cause effect relationship between neurons and human behavior, I think we will definitely be able to replicate human behavior with AI. The only question would be how long will it take.
This article talks about a new machine under development that has the capability to learn:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/rogerkay/2011/12/09/cognitive-computing-when-computers-become-brains/
A reply on Conversation: Will we ever truly be able to model nature?
Looking back from our vantage point, we might be able to reason why some developments happened; we can logic and think our way through them. However, what nature did was different; evolution seemed more or less like a "go with the flow" kind of process. There was no real thought process or brain power behind it, it just happened, maybe instinctively. I think this difference alone is enough to set us apart from nature - nature always seems to be one step ahead of us without thinking, while we think and struggle only to make less than perfect imitations of what nature has already provided.
A reply on Conversation: Where does our identity as being "human" come from?
I agree with the definition you have laid out. However, I would add onto it that our reactions and responses to this information also shape our identity. To take a step even further back, I'd like to relate this to Adriann's comment above. Our reactions and responses are results of the human mind and its complexity.
For a class on the human mind that I was enrolled in last semester, I read an article titled "Minds, Brains and Programs," by John Searle. In it, he discusses that it is really the mere presence of our brains that makes us human. In what other species/technology is there something so sophisticated as our own brain? Here's another question that we struggled with in the class: if we could replicate the brain exactly, and put it inside a robot, it would theoretically think, feel, move, and do everything exactly as we do. Given these circumstances, do you think we could consider the robot as having a human identity?
A reply on Conversation: What makes an idea spread? Duration? Quality? Loudness?
Maybe I'm kind of gullible, but I like to trust the things I see on TV. Of course if something just sounds ridiculous and too good to be true, its going to go over my head, but there are plenty of ideas that have been presented via mass media that seem credible.
Suppose most people are distrustful of the mass media: doesn't this give us reason to do our own research to figure out what is true? I think mass media does a great job with spreading ideas, or at least planting the seeds for an idea to be spread, regardless how correct or incorrect the ideas are. If we don't believe it, we will try to seek the truth, and if we do believe it, we might spread the word.