Recursive

Interpretive Dance Class 1949

 I wanted to talk about the word "recursive." It's a word that's come up a lot, and because it sounds a little like a Times Table, I have glossed over it once too often. The trouble is when "they" talk about neural networks of the various gradations of complexity, from simple to complex, in the evolution of neural networks, the most complex allow for "recursion."  This means that to wax lyrical and with tremendous elan on the role communication has played on the Genesis of Species I have to know what recursion means when applied to cognitive function, so I don't stick my foot down my throat.

To avoid an error of comprehension in the definitions here, my own thoughts return to the Post Structural European thinkers who began to understand the words in language as Jacques Lacan's irascible Symbolic Form notable for its fluidity that was better understood as an order of meaning rather than anything that had the nerve to claim a certainty of meaning. What did we use to say in those happier days?

We found faith in Lacan. For him language is a vast network of words, sounds, structures that shape our reality, forms the unconscious, gives structure to the world around us, it's where meaning arises, and of course in this tidal pool of interactions between something and emptiness words happen and become lodged in the memory.

Neural Networks are pathways in the brain for processing information. There's a backwards and forwards, up and down. The word recursive in a Recursive Neural Network, whether the network is artificial as in the big computer or in part of a body that belongs to you or I, puts an equal weight on the backwards and forwards, upwards and downwards of bits of information that's traveling around the network and as a result the network builds hierarchical tree like structures like sentences, not vague half backed whiffs that go around and round just thoroughly enjoying a symbol-less expression of itself for which, aggravatingly and possibly neurotically, there is no explanation. 

In our minds, recursion is something that makes sense or begins to make enough sense to pass as sense. In the new world of automation, failure of "recursion" as it currently stands means insufficient data to achieve a solution. And the thing about our Recurring Neural Networks, as opposed to those other ones, as long as we are alive our constant symbolizing of the real never actually comes to a comfortable end. Instead of ending to it all as quickly as possible and switching ourselves off, we come up with things like interpretive dance and  when that's not available we call forth words like curiosity, creativity, special, passionate and onwards. 

The Invisible Hand, Lovely Form and Francis Hutcheson

Sundown

 Francis Hutcheson was a preacher, a thinker and teacher who when he was 52, died on August the 8th 1746 in Dublin. He had a thing for the senses and in his Essay on the "The Nature and Conduct of the Passions" he worked on a list of six "Senses."

 The first was Consciousness. By which a man had a sense of himself and all that is going on in his mind.

The second was an internal sense of Beauty. This sense allowed a man to sense beauty in objects. It was internal because it was a little bit personal.

The third sense was, sensus communis. This was "a determination to be pleased with the happiness of others and to be uneasy at their misery."

The Fourth sense was also a sense of beauty to the extent, as Hutcheson saw, we people had a moral sense of beauty in "actions and affections, by which we perceive virtue or vice, in ourselves or others."

The fifth was a sense of honor, which Hutcheson thought of as the other side of shame. He saw it as the pleasure of doing the right thing as opposed to the discomfort of doing the wrong thing.

A sixth sense was the sense of the ridiculous, which in Hutcheson's day was a word more closely aligned to an ancient idea that imbalance in the humours, or bodily fluids, could be cured by amusement and laughter.

The thing about Hutcheson, his influential thinking gave the minds he impressed with his charismatic teaching and his writing a sense of an enlightened world that he saw as having been designed by an " Author of nature... who had....  much better furnished us for a virtuous conduct than our moralists seem to imagine, by almost as quick and powerful instructions as we have for the preservation of our bodies. He has made virtue a lovely form, to excite our pursuit of it, and has given us strong affections to be the springs of each virtuous action."

Adam Smith who wrote Wealth of Nations, and coined the phrase "The Invisible Hand," had been taught Moral Philosophy by Hutcheson at Glasgow University..

A Universe of Constant Transition and the Golden Calf

Moses Indignant at the Sight of the Golden Calf,

William Blake 1757-1827

Lacan talked about lacking, Borges talked about the nothingness of personality, Heidegger addressed meaning, Sartre went on about a nothingness he compared to being, and we've enjoyed Bertrand Russell's disappointment with Wittgenstein's passionate explorations of language. Now we need to go back a bit and have a peep at the Golden Calf, specifically the Psychology of the Void.

One of the problems for a loose leaf collection of brick making people lost in the desert is when their temperamental and possibly insane self appointed leader occasionally disappeared for forty days and forty nights. They were basically left in the middle of nowhere. On one occasion, the brick-makers, while he was gone, collected the gold and silver earrings and bangles from family collections, melted it all down to make a golden calf, who they hoped would be an infinitely more reliable figurehead and guide through the tribulations.

When Moses finally got back from the mountain, he did not think it funny. As he explained in his biography he went into one of his yellow faced rages, he started yelling about having no other god but me, he broke important legal documents which had been written in stone, he burned the Golden Calf which he then had ground into a powder and he forced everyone to drink, and he was obliged to ask the Levites to make sure the traditional 3000 people were slaughtered.

The point is, by building a golden calf the average brick-maker didn't actually think he was breaking a law. What he thought they were doing was filling a void. They were trying to mend a broken circuit, they were materializing the infinite, they'd reconnected and golly, how happy they were when they thought they'd fixed the loop, they sang and danced. The Golden Calf wasn't a conduit to a Voice dictating laws from on the top of a mountain it was a genuine, in-place, ill-defined Noun, who could do weddings, provide a moment of calm and stuff.

Mind you John Walking Stewart would have been persuaded to suggest that by taking circulating precious metals and fusing them into a Golden Calf it would have been a crime against sensate atoms, a crime against moral motion, not something the Laplanders would have engaged in.

Not absolutely certain that the Stone Tablets were any different, but Moses had half a point, this Golden Calf was vibrationally dead, it pretended that something permanent could exist in a universe of Constant Transition, and if you had megalomaniacal leanings, as a source of meaning the Golden Calf was individualistic, it wasn't down from on high and potentially it was incredibly subversive. 

Prediction Centers and Sensate Atoms

Ant Work

 Our issue is of course simple. "Love, purpose, beauty and the Everywhen, don't leave a footprint in the sand or in laboratories." At least not yet.

An argument suggests that the brain is a "Prediction Center." It makes stuff up and if this stuff seems roughly correct it becomes fixed as a belief which is difficult to dislodge. We, possibly more linear thinkers are inclined toward what we nobly call evidence, the world is obviously flat otherwise we'd fall off it, wouldn't we. The claim that possibly non-linear thinkers, who are more open minded are more likely to believe stuff unsupported by evidence is a tempting one. And in my role as a fuddy-duddy, the thing to remember is that through our history we have always been a species that cleaves to neither linear nor non-linear ways of thinking, there are two sides to our brain and we embrace both.

Perhaps a more interesting aspect of our many ways of being is explored under the subtitle of "Tribal Handshake" which is the understanding that a shared belief is more valuable than a belief supported by facts, and here it seems that when you as an individual see your group agreeing on something your brain releases the cuddle hormone, otherwise known as Oxytocin. So, it's not what the brain believes, it's the cohesion the belief creates that puts the glee into the gathering of irrational masses. And as we all know Oxytocin is psychologically addictive.

There are some, in their search to unearth the home of emotions, look for the tension between the Limbic system, where emotions are made, and the right brain, where the poetry of the non-linear lives and the left brain, where the step by step of the linear lives. The Model is called the Approach vs. Avoidance model. It's very tempting, but a tad too insular. This is how the model sees the tensions: the emotion emerges from the Limbic system, the right and left sides of the brain either approach them to the point of intimately engaging with them or having appraised the emotion in the context of a wider world avoids it. Here the left brain might relish Greed as a necessary ingredient to a line of thinking, and the right brain might eschew greed to the point of arguing against Greed as a guarantee of eternal life amongst the hoarders and spendthrifts in the Fourth Circle of Hell. 

For Walking Stewart who died in the 1820's, Moral Motion and the Great Circulation, we as people are far too interrelated with the whole, you can't go round saying this brain part does x and this brain part does y and this brain part makes emotions. Oh No! We people are far too flexible and responsive to the contexts of our thoughts, there's absolutely no chance of you or I ever being able to come up with a stable moral response to a circumstance. Certainly not! We can justify anything. What happens is that something like the emotion of greed messes with the circulation, and the reality of Moral Motion is that good things make the universe better and bad things make the universe badder. The point being it's the society, the lives we live in the society that determines whether we are Beasts of the Forest or whether, like the Laplanders, we are contributing to the tranquility of sensate atoms.