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7 min read 36

UofWinds 394, Week 36: Your brain does not process information and it is not a computer, Moleskine Mania, Solar will get too cheap to connect to the power grid


Good morning. I'm up early but rather than waiting until my designated writing time of 8am, I have decided to get right into it. I know it is not a good habit, but rather than finding rest when I can, I hold off as I don't like to give myself permission to relax until I've made all my deadlines. The last two weeks has felt like a constant sprint as everyone in the house has had to get ready for the first week of school. But after this newsletter is sent out, I will downshift the gears.

Maybe I will bake? The weather has turned cool and I'm already under a blanket in the study. From the open window, I can hear eerie plaintive sounds from what I believe is the distillery on the river. It just stopped so now I can properly enjoy this morning soundtrack from a rooftop in London.

Your brain does not process information and it is not a computer


My daughter is in her junior year of high school, although everyone here calls it Grade 11. She is considering enrolling in psychology when she goes to university as she has an interest in studying cognition. For all of the investment and hoopla over artificial intelligence, we seem to have forgotten about the everyday miracle of the mind.

From Ted Chiang's Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art:

In 2019, researchers conducted an experiment in which they taught rats how to drive. They put the rats in little plastic containers with three copper-wire bars; when the mice put their paws on one of these bars, the container would either go forward, or turn left or turn right. The rats could see a plate of food on the other side of the room and tried to get their vehicles to go toward it. The researchers trained the rats for five minutes at a time, and after twenty-four practice sessions, the rats had become proficient at driving. Twenty-four trials were enough to master a task that no rat had likely ever encountered before in the evolutionary history of the species. I think that’s a good demonstration of intelligence.

Now consider the current A.I. programs that are widely acclaimed for their performance. AlphaZero, a program developed by Google’s DeepMind, plays chess better than any human player, but during its training it played forty-four million games, far more than any human can play in a lifetime. For it to master a new game, it will have to undergo a similarly enormous amount of training. By Chollet’s definition, programs like AlphaZero are highly skilled, but they aren’t particularly intelligent, because they aren’t efficient at gaining new skills. It is currently impossible to write a computer program capable of learning even a simple task in only twenty-four trials, if the programmer is not given information about the task beforehand.

This is as good a time as any to remind ourselves that "your brain does not process information, retrieve knowledge or store memories. In short: your brain is not a computer":

A few cognitive scientists – notably Anthony Chemero of the University of Cincinnati, the author of Radical Embodied Cognitive Science (2009) – now completely reject the view that the human brain works like a computer. The mainstream view is that we, like computers, make sense of the world by performing computations on mental representations of it, but Chemero and others describe another way of understanding intelligent behaviour – as a direct interaction between organisms and their world.

My favourite example of the dramatic difference between the IP perspective and what some now call the ‘anti-representational’ view of human functioning involves two different ways of explaining how a baseball player manages to catch a fly ball – beautifully explicated by Michael McBeath, now at Arizona State University, and his colleagues in a 1995 paper in Science. The IP perspective requires the player to formulate an estimate of various initial conditions of the ball’s flight – the force of the impact, the angle of the trajectory, that kind of thing – then to create and analyse an internal model of the path along which the ball will likely move, then to use that model to guide and adjust motor movements continuously in time in order to intercept the ball.

That is all well and good if we functioned as computers do, but McBeath and his colleagues gave a simpler account: to catch the ball, the player simply needs to keep moving in a way that keeps the ball in a constant visual relationship with respect to home plate and the surrounding scenery (technically, in a ‘linear optical trajectory’). This might sound complicated, but it is actually incredibly simple, and completely free of computations, representations and algorithms.

I love the example above because it is one of the few times I've come across when the results of a scientific experiment and lived experience intersect perfectly. When you give advice to someone on how to catch, you don't tell them how to do math better; you tell them to keep their eye on the ball.

Imagine a future in which we worked in spaces that encouraged public thinking and learning by moving objects around in our shared sight, rather than having to do calculations and math. You can see a prototype of what this might look like in the first 30 seconds of this updated 6 minute introduction to Dynamicland.

Moleskine Mania: How a Notebook Conquered the Digital Era


My second favourite passage from the your-brain-is-not-a-computer-article is about how our memory works. Or more accurately, how memory doesn't work:

In a classroom exercise I have conducted many times over the years, I begin by recruiting a student to draw a detailed picture of a dollar bill – ‘as detailed as possible’, I say – on the blackboard in front of the room. When the student has finished, I cover the drawing with a sheet of paper, remove a dollar bill from my wallet, tape it to the board, and ask the student to repeat the task. When he or she is done, I remove the cover from the first drawing, and the class comments on the differences...

... Jinny was as surprised by the outcome as you probably are, but it is typical. As you can see, the drawing made in the absence of the dollar bill is horrible compared with the drawing made from an exemplar, even though Jinny has seen a dollar bill thousands of times.

We don't remember everything we see. We can't remember everything we read. Which is fine. We can extend our cognition with humble tools like the notebook.

My own interest in notebooks had also progressed beyond the commercial. I read Samuel Pepys, loving the unfettered way in which he documented work, home, leisure, his urban environment, and his sex life; then I discovered my grandfather’s eye-opening pre-war diaries, just as wide ranging, although much briefer. So I started keeping my own journal in 2002, and each year added to a steadily growing heap of battered notebooks.

Writing a diary made me happier; keeping things-to-do lists made me more reliable (which, in turn, made those around me happier), and I learned never to go to a doctor’s appointment, or a meeting of any kind, without taking notes of what I heard. But there appeared to be creative benefits too. Every artist I met seemed to have a sketchbook to hand, as did graphic designers—and even web designers, whose product was entirely digital. Authors all kept notebooks, as did journalists, critics, and other creative types—and the more assiduously they used those notebooks, the better their work seemed to be. The same applied to my colleagues’ work: playful lists, diagrams, and sketches regularly disgorged surprisingly good ideas.

When notebooks appear on the scene, interesting things happen. To open up to the blank page and interact with it takes energy and sometimes a little courage.

The above is from The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper by Roland Allen. (published by Windsor's own Biblioasis). I've almost finished Allen's book and have found every chapter as both illuminating and entertaining so I will recommend it here. What I have particularly enjoyed about this work is that Roland spends most of this book exploring the social impact of the humble notebook rather than what it might mean to a single person. In doing so, I am being introduced to histories and stories that I had never heard before, despite being a librarian and someone who has been following PKM (personal knowledge management) for some time now. I can't wait to finish this book today.

Solar will get too cheap to connect to the power grid


Last week I read this article from the CBC: Rules discourage Canadians from generating more solar power than they use. It begins,

Canada needs more clean power to meet growing demand, while aiming for net-zero emissions to fight climate change. ¶ Many Canadians want to install rooftop solar panels to help. But while that can lower their electricity bills, they can't actually get paid for it — because many jurisdictions limit the power generation of a rooftop solar system to the amount you consume, and customers can only be compensated in bill credits, not cash.

Hydro-Quebec puts it this way: "The customer's goal must be self-sufficiency and not sales." ¶ Darren Chu, managing director of Calgary-based Utility Network and Partners, says similar rules in Alberta are frustrating. ¶ "We have lots of customers who come to us and say, 'Well, I have all this roof space and I'm only allowed to cover a small portion of it with solar panels because that's all my consumption will allow me to do. How come I'm not allowed to export more?'" he said.

The article goes on to give some of the technical reasons why every consumer solar system might not be able to connected to our existing grid. But as this is a news story, the article doesn't really consider an even larger question: what if solar power is destined to be disruptive to the current economic model of our electrical grids.

That's a question I didn't properly consider until I read Ben James cheeky visual essay, Solar will get too cheap to connect to the power grid.

We don't have solar panels on our roof yet, but I'm saving up so we can install some in the future, regardless of whether I can get an additional discount from our utility company.

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