When I saw this cartoon a bell rang in
my mind – there's something there I should think about – and
during a restless nigh the ideas came rushing out. The whole idea
behind my “Trapped in the Box” blog is that we are all
constrained by what we do, and how we think, by our experiences and
the environment in which we find ourselves. Our brains have evolved
to learn about the world we live in, in order to survive and as a
result we are always having what to us are “original ideas” to
add to our personal brain model of our surroundings. We feel we can
be certain of known knowns, and we can ask questions about known
unknowns – but we have no way of exploring unknown unknowns until
something unexpected happens to highlight a gap in our personal
knowledge base.
Of course the cartoon is not concerned
with these personal “original ideas” but rather with ideas which
changes the way that the scientific society thinks about the world.
But we must be careful to distinguish between new knowledge about the
universe we live in and fundamentally new ideas. Modern science has
become a knowledge factory because some great ideas have created an
almost infinite number of new “known unknowns” and there must be
millions of people who in one way or another have been dotting the
“i”s and crossing the “t”s of the story of evolution. Some of
the discoveries on the way have been of enormous significance – but
one must ask whether, in this kind of situation, any good scientist,
or scientific team, would have come to the same conclusions.
The interesting “landmark” original
ideas in science were not really original. The problems Galileo had
were not that his ideas were new, as he was not the first to think
that the earth went round the sun. The real problem was that to the
establishment it was a known known that the human race occupied the
centre of the universe and that even questioning this indisputable
“fact” was fundamentally wrong. Modern astronomy has made us see
our status in the universe in a very different light. Darwin's theory
of evolution similarly questioned the establishment's known knowns
about how the species (including humans) came into existence – and
it took him years – and a nudge from possible competition –
before he had the confidence to publish. I am sure that the problem
with “original ideas” is not having the idea in the first place –
but in the ability to fight and win the battle against the
establishment's established and well defended position.
It is perhaps worth asking whether any
area of research is currently hampered by a “known known” which
relates to the “superiority” of human beings. We all know that
we are very intelligent – don't we – in fact far more intelligent
than animals. Isn't it obvious? And look what our great intelligence
has done in the way we have modified the world to help in increasing
our population. There can be no doubt whatsoever that there is
something very special about our brains to make us different – and
so we must look very hard to try and find what this very special
something is. And the harder it is to find the more special it must
be.
Yet if you look at current brain
research there is a black hole in the middle. We are discovering more
and more of the detail round the edge – such as how the neurons
work - but for example there is no clear pathway to link how the
neurons work to natural language. The more carefully you look at most
artificial intelligence research the more obvious it becomes that
most of it is very definitely artificial. Perhaps we need to put even
more money into brain related studies to find this mysterious special
factor that makes us different.
Perhaps we should step back and try to
take a “outsider view” of the situation – and put our puny
intelligence into context. The basic quadruped mammal form has been
modified by evolution in many ways - with the extremes being the
larger whales and the smaller bats. In some cases, such as the
elephant's trunk and the giraffe’s neck one organ has been expanded
to extreme proportions. Seen in this light the human species is
nothing special. The only distinguishing feature is that it has
expanded its brain rather than its nose or its neck. Of course,
because it is a social animal which has also developed the ability
to exchange information between generations it needs a bigger brain.
At some point there will be a tipping point where there is a
significant evolutionary advantage to being able to exchange and used
exchanged information – and once this stage is reached the pressure
for the brain to develop more capacity will be enormous...
I am currently exploring this approach
and would love to hear from others who have similar ideas.
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