Here is an improved version of an article about education I have wrote some time ago. If anyone is curious, this is the abstract:
Abstract
This paper proposes a model of higher education that uses emergence and constructionism as the guiding design principles and takes the current computational technologies and networks as the technological base to distribute and generate information and knowledge.

This is a small review about Ivan Illich's book, Deschooling Society. One of the best books I've ever heard about the negative effects of the current educational system.

The author explains exactly what the book is about:

School groups people according to age. This grouping rests on three unquestioned premises. Children belong in school. Children learn in school. Children can be taught only in school.

I think these unexamined premises deserve serious questioning.

Most of the text is dedicated to question, very skillfully in my opinion those premises. The author anarchist/libertarian tendencies show in the book, in the sense that most emphasis is directed to the free choice of the individual in detriment of institutions. But I think one would be wrong to say that Illich has an agenda other than point out the evils of a systematic enforcement of teaching:

To understand what it means to deschool society, and not just to reform the educational establishment, we must now focus on the hidden curriculum of schooling. We are not concerned here, directly, with the hidden curriculum of the ghetto streets which brands the poor or with the hidden curriculum of the drawing room which benefits the rich. We are rather concerned to call attention to the fact that the ceremonial or ritual of schooling itself constitutes such a hidden curriculum.

We cannot begin a reform of education unless we first understand that neither individual learning nor social equality can be enhanced by the ritual of schooling. We cannot go beyond the consumer society unless we first understand that obligatory public schools inevitably reproduce such a society, no matter what is taught in them.

Illich goes very keenly to the core of the damages that the paternalistic system of education do to a person.

The man addicted to being taught seeks his security in compulsive teaching. The woman who experiences her knowledge as the result of a process wants to reproduce it in others.

In fact, healthy students often redouble their resistance to teaching as they find themselves more comprehensively manipulated. This resistance is due not to the authoritarian style of a public school or the seductive style of some free schools, but to the fundamental approach common to all schools-the idea that one person's judgment should determine what and when another person must learn.

From every single source about pedagogy I have ever heard, this book is the one to learn about why the current situation is fundamentally broken, why it is harmful to society and to the individual.

But school enslaves more profoundly and more systematically, since only school is credited with the principal function of forming critical judgment, and, paradoxically, tries to do so by making learning about oneself, about others, and about nature depend on a prepackaged process.

It is a very profound responsibility of the individual, to take charge of his own education, and you could say the same about freedom. It is hard work to be a free person, and you cannot be a free person if others control what, how and when you should learn something.

Only liberating oneself from school will dispel such illusions. The discovery that most learning requires no teaching can be neither manipulated nor planned. Each of us is personally responsible for his or her own deschooling, and only we have the power to do it. No one can be excused if he fails to liberate himself from schooling. People could not free themselves from the Crown until at least some of them had freed themselves from the established Church. They cannot free themselves from progressive consumption until they free themselves from obligatory school.

This is a life changing book, and I guess Illich's works will only increase in importance the deeper we go into the knowledge age.

Hello there.

Just giving a heads up on a good article I've read recently called Emergent Design and learning environments: Building on indigenous knowledge by David Cavallo.

It tells the story of a constructivist project in Thailand, and it is a great read if you want to get a better grip on education as Seymour Papert dreamed it could be. One small quote from the article, about the difference between constructivism (Jean Piaget) and constructivism (Papert):

Constructionism builds upon principles in constructivism. While constructivism holds that the learner constructs new knowledge based on the existing knowledge he or she has, constructionism builds on this idea by maintaining that this process happens particularly well when the learner is in the process of constructing something.

Just finished reading one more article in my quest for understanding Alan Kay's Xerox park advances (I should in the future write a post about the quest itself).

I'll summarize here a part of the article, particularly the part regarding education, a little enticement for the whole deal. Sincerely, just go ahead and read the article if you are the least curious about the words here.

So, Alan's words about the principles they used for education in the Xerox park:

These ideas are found in many places and many cultures. We came to them from our own experiences, the Suzuki violin method, O. K. Moore, Piaget, Furth, Bruner, Minsky, Papert, and others.

Here are them, enumerated:

1. Listen to the student.

Since we believe that teaching involves helping a student adapt his knowledge structures to a new situation, we can guarantee ourselves (not to mention the student) an unpleasant journey if we don't try to understand these gossamer schema at the outset.

Many of the current ways that things are done in Smalltalk come directly from listening to the kids. Smalltalk, as an "extensible" system, can easily "be" any kind of tool that we wish. We ourselves have remolded it several times.

2. Never teach anything which has to be unlearned later.

In our experience, humans are very poor at unlearning any kind of skill, whether it be muscular or mental. This principle is well understood by every teacher of music. "Tempting analogies" which later come back to haunt are especially to be avoided.

We teach "straight" Smalltalk, the very same system which adults learn. The very first examples and methods to which the kids are exposed resemble strongly the most sophisticated adult systems.

3. Never pace a student in a way that will require future remediation.

Principle 2. basically says: don't simplify to the point of a lie; Principle 3. is a corollary of this which states: don't put the student into a situation where he will feel dumb and inept because a good enough foundation has not yet been laid. Most kids do not understand the distinctions between skill, structure, and intelligence any better than adults do and are apt to feel stupid rather than unskilled in new situations.

4. Hook on to existing fruitful structures when possible; if unfruitful concepts exist, don't unteach them, rather supply completely fresh orthogonal concepts.

Most kids know about dictionaries and looking up the meaning of a word. The meaning can be an explanation of a passive relationship or a dynamic act. In fact, every idea in mathematics and in programming can be easily explained in dictionary oriented terms alone; this is a fruitful, useful concept, and it makes sense to use it with kids.

Many other "natural language" linguistic structures are ultimately deadly and we avoid them.

Examples are: "nouns", "verbs", "pronouns", inflections, and their counterparts in most programming languages: data structures, functions and control structures, variables, tagging type to names, etc. Instead, we immediately give children a running example which directly exhibits the more fruitful notions of states-in-process communicating-with-messages found in Smalltalk.

5. Do not look over the student's shoulder.

Aside from the obvious reason of avoiding "putting the student under the gun", there is also a great difference between performing and creating. In music, this is known as the difference between improvising and composing (and a greater difference could hardly be found, as any musician will attest). We are much more interested in the design-oriented and planning processes associated with unhurried goal-directed reflection than in the more shallow though flashy effects obtained by virtuoso "thinking on one's feet".

6. Teach and Show Multiple Perspectives of Situations.

A typical problem with fledgling designers of all ages is a strong tendency to commit all of their short term memory to a given perspective of a Situation. If it happens to be an unfruitful view it might be very difficult for them to "bail out" or even tell that it is unproductive. We feel that the Piagetian example of the tilted glass is much more the result of lack of practice in multiple viewing than the result of physiological immaturity.

One of the striking things about design methodology is that "simultaneous" use of a perspective and its dual is remarkably more rewarding than using either separately.

A very global example is the duality of wholes-as-collections-of-parts found in Western science and wholes-as-wholes found in Eastern philosophic thought.

The former has an important dualistic aspect itself: analytic (or top-down) vs. synthetic (or bottom-up); both of these emphasize differences and boundaries: a corpuscular theory. The Eastern philosophy emphasizes samenesses and connection: a field theory. As more complex systems are studied, the apparent differences between the two schools of thought blur in the underlying sameness that characterizes duals

The content of the computer is descriptions of processes; the ability of computers to simulate the details of any descriptive model means that the computer, viewed as cc medium itself, can be all other media if the embedding and viewing methods are sufficiently well provided.

Those principles show a very pragmatic way to teach any skill, not the least programming, mathematics, epistemology and so forth. They are imbued with respect for both the student and the concepts needed for a citizen in the knowledge age to make informed decisions.

You can also see the notion of the computer as a form of media (think speech, printing press, dance, etc) and how that concept is a very powerful idea, that can give rise to a new age of human perception and civilization. Again, read the article to gain a bit of insight on how a group of 25 people 30 years ago created tools and concepts that kept entire fields busy ever since.

Introduction

This is a small review of Society of Mind(SoM). I urge anyone who is looking for a more in depth analysis to check Push Singh (R.I.P) review or just to read the book itself. It is the magnum opus of Marvin Minsky, and it is more a philosophical and psychological venture into the nature of the mind than a technical AI work.

There are very few works around like this one. It basically sets a very abstract framework of how he thinks the mind works. The ground that is covered in the book is staggering, and I think it is one of the reasons why this book is not as famous and cited as it should. It is the culmination of the ideas of two genius, Minsky and Papert, on how the mind structure itself, the world, time and beyond.

The structure of the book is also something very uncommon. It is organized in several mini ideas, one per page, and those ideas are themselves organized in larger modules or chapters. So Minsky used his society idea for the structure of the book itself. What that results is there are technical aspects that are not immediately clear, but run through the book, much like a though.

So, it is a difficult book to understand, but one that is easy to read I guess. I'm going to try and give some insights from several quotes I have gathered in my path in the book. It is very disconnected and floating around, but the book is in this format, and I for sure lack the competence to formulate a coherent string of though were Minsky himself failed to. Like he says:

My explanations rarely go in neat, straight lines from start to end. I wish I could have lined them up so that you could climb straight to the top, by mental stair-steps, one by one. Instead they're tied in tangled webs.

Well, I'll use his justification also:

I'm inclined to lay the blame upon the nature of the mind: much of its power seems to stem from just the messy ways its agents cross-connect. If so, that complication can't be helped; it's only what we must expect from evolution's countless tricks.

:)

The book

The book provides several kind of falsifiable (perhaps some are too abstract) theories and hypothesis floating around the book, but don't worry, Minsky is well aware of how science marches

The only course left for us is to study the mind the way scientists do when something is too large or too small to see - by building theories based on evidence.

That is not what the book is about of course, like I said before, it provides a framework, or several frameworks and hypothesis, to begin building experiments and improving the hypothesis and frameworks(or destroying them).

There is a lot of talk about what things mean, and how meaning is merely the connections that one does between scarcely existing things.

The secret of what anything means to us depends on how we've connected it to all the other things we know. That's why it's almost always wrong to seek the ''real meaning'' of anything. A thing with just one meaning has scarcely any meaning at all.

This connectionism is keenly related to Papert's principle and to how people learn (the ideas that grew into this book originated from Papert and Minsky dialogues, but they went into separated directions, Papert went into pedagogy and the applications of these ideas into constructionism, Minsky remained interested in the construction of an intelligent machine).

I disagree with what Minsky's concept of intelligence.

Our minds contain processes that enable us to solve problems that we consider difficult. ''Intelligence'' is the name for whichever of those processes we don't yet understand.

Then he goes and adds

Like the concept of ''the unexplored regions of Africa'', it disappears as soon as we discover it.

I think that our concept of intelligence is flexible and mutable, but it is not bound to disappear, it will just change with our perception of the world.

There is also several Buddhist quotes, mostly about the nature of suffering (attachment). Since I identify a lot with those though, I'll cite one of them:

Do not become attached to the things you like, do not maintain aversion to the things you dislike. Sorrow, fear and bondage come from one's likes and dislikes.

The most interesting part for in was the description of what is called Papert's principle:

Some of the most crucial steps in mental growth are based not simply on acquiring new skills, but on acquiring new administrative was to use what one already knows.

I think the development of this principle is one of the aspects of the book who is most valuable in a profound personal way. It is, as Papert would say, a powerful idea

This idea, in my opinion, is the embryo that gave birth to constructionism. There is several ideas that resonate with those found in other works by Papert, specially Mindstorms. Like for instance

Our best ideas are often those that bridge between two different worlds!

The book goes on through a lot of ground. Sincerely there is quite a lot to learn, even from casual reading, like this little pearl from Buddha:

If the mind were an ego-personality, it could do this and that as it would determine, but the mind often flies from what it knows is right and chases after evil reluctantly. Still, nothing seems to happen exactly as its ego desires. It is simply the mind clouded over by impure desires, and impervious to wisdom, which stubbornly persists in thinking of ''me'' and ''mine''.

Well, I'll say it one more time, Minsky is a genius, one of the greatest minds to work on AI and psychology. This is a great work, so go ahead and fetch it! My bet is that this book and its successor will still be studied for decades, and will be looked back as reference for a lot of subjects.

The present and the future

There is a successor for the book, and I have it in hands, so there will be a review of it in the future. Not that I have digested the SoM, but perhaps a little peek on the development of the ideas will make me understand them better.

This book is a point of view from an AI father about intelligence, and it is a must read. But there is a lot of finer tools for analysing the brain these days. My hope on cracking the intelligence and consciousness enigma is to look at the brain with those tools and frameworks like those shown in this work.

One last quote:

One can acquire certainty only by amputating inquiry.

Go ahead, read the book with a lot of inquiry, and enjoy!

This book is a very interesting reading for everyone who wants to get a hold of a emerging framework for understanding intelligence, specially as a it emerges from a common algorithm in the neurocortex.

The neuro and cognitive sciences are, by the experts own admission, lacking a common and powerful framework where to try out the large corpus of data that exists and continue to be collected. This book presents a very compelling hypothesis for one. Basically Jeff argues that

The neocortex areas act as one single mechanism.

and that its main function is to recognize patterns and elaborate predictions based on them. Roughly there is a upward flow of information in the neocortex from the diverse senses and a downward flow that fills information and elaborates predictions (this is overly simplified, you should really grab a copy of the book and read the whole argument). Here is a small quote that tries to clarify this point:

Think about information flowing from your eyes, ears, and skin into the neocortex. Each region of the neocortex tries to understand what this information means. Each region tries to understand the input in terms of the sequences it knows. If it does understand the input, it says, "I understand this, it is just part of the object I am already seeing. I won't pass on the details." If a region doesn't understand the current input, it passes it up the hierarchy until some higher region does. However, a pattern that is truly novel will escalate further and further up the hierarchy. Each successively higher region says, "I don't know what this is, I didn't anticipate it, why don't you higher-ups look at it?" The net effect is that when you get to the top of the cortical pyramid, what you have left is information that can't be understood by previous experience. You are left with the part of the input that is truly new and unexpected.

One thing that the reader should be aware is that the book is a new framework proposal, so there is a lot of assumptions going on. That is not to say that Jeff is wrong, but simply that there is not enough compelling evidence for the framework yet. He honestly admits that on chapter 6 (where he presents the kernel of the framework) of the book:

To find and establish a new scientific framework, it is necessary to look for the simplest concepts capable of uniting and explaining what were large quantities of disparate facts. It is an unavoidable consequence of this process that the pendulum swings too far toward simplification. Important details are likely to be ignored, and facts will be misinterpreted. If the framework takes hold, refinements and fixes will inevitably be found showing where the initial proposal went too far, didn't go far enough, or was in error. In this chapter, I have introduced many speculative ideas on how the neocortex works.

Jeff also makes a very interesting analysis of creativity and why it is so mystified:

Isn't creativity some extraordinary quality that requires high intelligence and giftedness? Not really. Creativity can be defined simply as making predictions by analogy, something that occurs everywhere in cortex and something you do continually while awake. Prediction by analogy— creativity— is so pervasive we normally don't notice it.

That lead to some insight on how to improve one's creativity

First, you need to assume up front that there is an answer to what you are trying to solve. Second, you need to let your mind wander. You need to give your brain the time and space to discover the solution.

what mind is and some warnings about the failings of the brain/mind:

I hope I have convinced you that mind is just a label of what the brain does. Our brains are always looking at patterns and making analogies. If correct correlations cannot be found, the brain is more than happy to accept false ones. Pseudoscience, bigotry, faith, and intolerance are often rooted in false analogy.

I did had a problem with his Einstein example:

It had more support cells, called glia, per neuron than average. It showed an unusual pattern of grooves, or sulci, in the parietal lobes— a region thought to be important for mathematical abilities and spatial reasoning. It was also 15 percent wider than most other brains. We may never know why Einstein was as creative and smart as he was, but it is a safe bet that part of his talent derived from genetic factors.

Given the brains plasticity, we cannot be sure that Einstein's brain differences are genetic in nature or the result of his efforts and focus on creative process.

His framework is sound and very promising, and this book is probably a landmark in neuroscience study. I did have a couple of problems with the book though.

He is careful to make a distiction between intelligence and intelligent behavior. That is paramount and of course there is a difference. But his failing in this case is to use The Chinese Room argument to illustrate his point. I think that argument is a fallacy, and I use Jeff's own words to illustrate why it is a fallacy:

There is a single powerful algorithm implemented by every region of cortex. If you connect regions of cortex together in a suitable hierarchy and provide a stream of input, it will learn about its environment.

Here he makes a case where intelligence is rested on a given algorithm. Well, the same could be said about the chinese room, invalidating it's supposed conclusion that computers cannot be intelligent.

The second point I would critisize is his suggestion to read Hubert Dreyfus in the end of the book. For anyone interested in a thoughful analysis on Dreyfus ideas and why they are filled with fallacies I suggest and old work by Seymour Papert.

To summarize, it is a great reading, his framework sounds very promising and a new encompassing algorithm was really needed in the field. Go ahead, it is more than worth the money and time. And if you feel curious, fetch his article explaining in more depth his theories.

Recently I've bought the translation of Children's Machine by Seymour Papert in Portuguese for my girlfriend. Having a justifiable belief on Papert's ideas obviously I've read it the fastest as I could also ;)

This is a classic from the point of view of pedagogy. But let me first give some context. Papert (www.papert.org) is the father of constructionism, LOGO and a lot of powerful ideas. His beliefs on the power of technology, if used to enhance human capabilities as a support for creativity, to produce mega change in School (with a capital S to mean our current educational system) are developing since the 60's. In my opinion his works are paramount if one wants to understand the technology world as it is, because they influenced directly Alan Kay at his time at Xerox, and lead to the personal computing revolution.

The children's machine was written in 1993, before the web and when the PC revolution was in full motion. In it we encounter a very friendly and close dialog with one of the greatest genius of the computer age. We encounter several insights about epistemology, some of them dating from the time Papert spent with Piaget in the 60's, but updated to the current times.

Papert also makes explicit something that was more hidden in his other book Mindstorms, the concept of demanding permissiveness. Basically that means that a more libertarian and open education does not mean less work and responsibility. Much to the opposite, even though the results are more fun and efficient. One analogy that I found useful is that even though a system can have many successful outcomes, that does not mean that it has no unsuccessful ones.

His concept of mathetic is also La borated more profoundly. He argues that there is a word for the art and science of teaching (pedagogy) but not one for learning. He then proposes Mathetic (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathetics) as a good candidate. The purpose is not to establish mathetic in itself, but to get some term to mean it, to make thinking and having a point of view about it more easy and feasible. (As Alan Kay says, a point of view is worth 80 IQ points)

I'll follow the translator in his recommendation of the book for teachers, parents, educators and professionals of TI. I'll add that it is crucial for anyone who want to know how to better learn anything. That audience I believe includes anyone who wishes to live a better life.