@T: ALWAYS THE TWAIN

This post is for the super-smart AI specialists I’ve recently befriended, prompted by Barry Robson (CEO of Dirac Foundation; Strategic Advisor at IBM TJ Watson Research Center; and more) sending us all the link to the ‘Principles Versus Patterns’ paper by Carlo Pescio which highlights how the Feigenbaum Bottleneck affects our ability to collectively find solutions. This blog post is also related to Rob’s pointers on cross products and he’ll probably LOL when he sees what’s been distilling and mapping in my mind, byte size by byte size over 5+ years. Hopefully, Paul will also LOL when I offer my answer to the “Nature or Nurture?” question and special thanks to Pedro for reminding us of the power of language as re-imagined across cultures. Some of the best brains in the world and they’re generous in allowing me to add to the mix with my relative inexperience and ignorance.

It’s only in 2010 that I’ve allocated any time to the maths and technicalities behind my thinking; before I liked it being in conceptual free form that (like a magpie) I’d collect the super-shiny scintillating strands and commit to twaining together when the timing was better and when I met fellow protagonists who could and would enlighten me.

Now the Feigenbaum Bottleneck states: as domain complexity grows, it becomes more difficult for human experts to formulate their knowledge as practical strategies (as human “say-how”). It is easier to demonstrate by doing (“show-how”) and most people can also make good choices between alternatives (“say-what”).

Admittedly, this is the first time I’ve happened upon the Feigenbaum Bottleneck; this is what happens when a person doesn’t do a PhD in maths / computing and doesn’t have the opportunity of exposure to it during the course of their career………….until now that they happen upon exceptional thinkers.

Well, naturally,  all this “show-explain” categorization referenced by Feigenbaum made me immediately think of first principles in film-making — whether we’re the scriptwriter, the producer, the director, the SFX supervisor, the makeup, the actor etc……………”SHOW + TELL”.

At this point, it may be worthwhile to provide context for Barry and other new friends. There is a running joke amongst friends of mine who’ve known me for a few years longer. There’s something called “SHOW + TWAIN“. This is my habit and practice of trying to make sense of multiple elements into some sort of coherent whole and putting that into pictographic form that’s actionable.

The pictographic habits are probably explained by my Chinese heritage and the fact that in the segments of visual spatial reasoning for IQ tests I do unusually well — for a female and we’re not supposed to be good map readers either :*).

Anyway, I do “show + twain” almost all the time. I can write reams of text and prose but I much prefer pictographic representations.

As a reference example, one of my closest friends met me randomly and serendipitously on a flight almost a decade ago. He’s a well-established figure in the hedge fund industry and he assumed that I was a Bohemian art student for the simple reason that I was doodling in my notebook — albeit it was like a project management version of all the Severinis, Dalis, Max Ernsts, modernism etc. that I’d just seen inside the Guggenheim Venezia, Accademia and Biennale.

So across 2 pages I’d creatively mapped out artworks into a differentiated perspective that made sense to me.

Partially, this habit arose because when I was 5 my father taught us how to play chess and years before my mother taught us how to play card games as a way to encourage us to count and do mental arithmetic. Therefore, as a kid I had to make sense of complex scenarios: board, pieces / 52 cards, rules of game, patterns, risks, strategies, trade-offs, seemingly random moves by the other competitor, reading human emotion (not necessarily via face), sportsmanship etc.

I developed these skills not via “say-how” text form (no chess books for child Twain) but by a cross-pollination of pictorial memory capture with context tagging and random referencing to other sports (basketball, hockey, netball) and other topics (e.g., watch a crowd crossing at a crossroads when the lights are still green, the cars are still go and……… navigation strategies and purpose emerge). The most efficient, safe route to the other side of the street is an analogy for pawn to Queen conversion, by the way.

“Say-how” to me is what happens before we set-up a chemistry or physics experiment: we list the apparatus and the instructions we’re going to follow but we have no idea of whether the results will concord with our planning because there are risks of random impurities affecting our experiment. In some cases, like in crystallization, these “random impurities” are actively encouraged / seeded. In other cases, we remove all possibilities of random impurities because we’re after specific results — so by extension, we’re already precluding the experiment to fit in with our “say-how” rather than allow it to be stochastic.

As an adult these childhood habits translated into a part of my career being dedicated to…….synergizing corporate strategy and transaction negotiations — of the type where I now classify the way Facebook is differentiated from what I’m doing like so:

Rest assured the way I classify and contextualize data for purpose is not to be found in most database sources or risk management solutions (from Bloomberg to VentureOne to CapitalIQ).

Anyway, I don’t always produce structured MBA-level strategy slides because sometimes breaking the professional norms / standards / conventions allows a person to be free, to be brave, to explore, to reflect, to appreciate the conflagration of other influences, to contextualize, and essentially  to……………innovate.

So here’s some of that free form thinking and “show + twain”:

So within my lifetime I hope to help realize…….The Conscious Web of We (CWOW).

Maybe I could have entitled it: “Twaining a Conscious Web”

I decided to write this post because of the passionate debates a handful of us have been having about AI, NLP and resolving the reducibility question. At the surface, this may seem strange or over theoretical but at its core it goes into how much more powerful and intelligent the machines we build can be and also whether there is such a thing as data consciousness, context and the ability to compute every theory.

If any readers think that 50-100 comments on a thread is substantial (and whenever I’m on a thread, they do seem to attract more comments from others — it’s quite bizarre how interested people become and want to actively contribute which is good), this seriously smart debate is a 530+ strong comments thread!!! So…………..at some point we’ll be able to solve the question of how the Universe was created — LOL.

Essentially, there are two key players whose work is being debated:

* Gregory Chaitin — data is not reducible and there are some things we just can’t know.

* Stephen Wolfram (of Wolfram Alpha) — data is reducible and we can compute the answer to every question.

Computer scientists are currently trying to break data down into forms and associations that can be more readily computed, connected and extracted. It’s well known that in NLP, meaning extraction is still proving to be problematic. Additionally, we have to factor in Nicholas Taleb’s “Black Swan” type probability anomalies if we’re going to be able to compute everything, apparently.

[Twain's observation: we can't currently compute the answer to every question --- for example, how much and why we love our parents, the existence of a Supreme Being or anything involving subjectivity that's culture affiliated --- and what we should be doing is innovating algorithms to contextualize as much of the data points as possible. Moreover, data is reducible and can be transformed for smarter extraction in ways we haven't explored yet.]

As well as the Chaitin and Wolfram, we also have to throw Godel’s two Incompleteness Theorems — which work their way through mathematical logic like so:

After all that (con)textual mathematics, here are the key Chaitin videos which encapsulate his position on “maximum unknowns”.

Now here’s Stephen Wolfram explaining the computability of everything:

So then how does social science and psychology strand into what is high-end mathematics? Well……….

Those of us who’ve studied macroeconomics are aware of the J curve theory from John Maynard Keynes:

A country’s trade deficit will worsen initially after the depreciation of its currency because higher prices on foreign imports will be greater than the reduced volume of imports.

The J curve theory has been adapted by management consultants like Gartner into a theory about technology hype cycles:

Meanwhile, Otto Scharmer in organizational behavior has proposed a different letter from J, U, to explain how we examine ourselves, our perspectives on the world and the way in which we solve problems:

Since both camps (vectorial scale algorithms approach to data reducibility versus Quantum Mechanics approach) have merits, I wrote:

This thread is observing a classic W approach to problem-solving: two schools of thought, approaching from either end, drilling down and shifting their vectorial positions as time elapses and finally inflecting upwards (with views on what their prior slopes looked like) until the two schools converge and are on a different plane from where each and both started.

Wrt whether the Semantic Web can become an inference engine………….not if it continues to deploy the taxonomies and categorizations it does because that still roots us in probabilities, correlations and the other facets of it being actually no fundamentally different from Google (which itself is a difference engine just as Babbage postulated — albeit instead of absolute real numbers and binaries, it’s about the difference between statistical points).

Now, if it was a …..true DIFFERENTIATION ENGINE, this would be a real leap forward rather than an imaginary one.

We cannot infer until we can differentiate and the Semantic Web cannot do this (yet).

Specifically on data reducibility and context, this is what I offered to the debate:

The dimensions of context for each of us is personal, experiential, spiritual / emotive and cultural.

Conversely, the dimensions of computing are impersonal, iterative, rational and culture agnostic.

Explications which seem clear, obvious and even underpinned by established/irrefutable science and mathematical equations are fine to follow if we’re conversing with another person schooled with the same scientific reference points as us. They’re not so clear, obvious and irrefutable when we’re conversing with a lawyer, a photographer or a linguist because their context points for deduction, perspective and language will be distributively different.

This is why when we surface a piece of raw data in a search engine list – suppose something as simple as the number 2 – the context of it is going to be interpreted in diverse ways. The literally-minded will perceive it just as the number after 1 with a value of 2. The mathematically-minded will think of it as being a prime as well as in terms of power series, halves and double integrals. The literately-minded will automatically associate it with ‘Tale of Two Cities’, “To be or not to be”, JRR Tolkien (‘Two Towers’) and “it takes two to tango”. The artistically-minded will see the image of a swan or one half of a heart because that’s the shape of a 2. The Spanish-speaking computer scientist will think of it as being DOS (Disk Operating System). The classical scholar will reference it to Janus, the god of two faces. The romantic would tie it with coupledom…..etcetcetc………Whilst the Chinese would word associate it with the homophone for “fish”, “happiness” and “prosperity” all intrinsically bound to each other.

So that’s an example of raw data carrying implicit context which is not currently being included in or extracted explicitly by algorithms.

How to resolve this so we can compute this context and not only the raw data?

I’m working on it, as they say.

And so……………..I am………………

Readers may have seen Google celebrating the 30th anniversary of the Pac-Man game yesterday in the shape of Google Doodle’s interpretation of it on Google’s homepage. At first, the interactivity of Google’s logo completely passed me by until someone flagged it in an email so I decided to play the game for about half an hour (the results can be seen below). Incidentally, just as Apple has Jonathan Ive as one of its genius designers so Google has Dennis Hwang, whose work with their corporate logo everyday tells us something wonderful about the human mind: WE HAVE IMAGINATION AND IT’S EQUALLY AS ELEGIAC AS FUNCTIONAL!

Now readers should know that as kids my parents encouraged us to play lots of sports and games, including Pac-Man. Most weekdays I was in training either at dance classes, chess club or the athletics track. Weekends we spent at the beach or hiking up hills where my father would teach us about different plants and flowers and how to differentiate between cumulus and cirrus clouds. In many ways we were seriously lucky that we didn’t have a sedentary existence and they encouraged us to stimulate our intelligence and to be ACTIVE. This activity included playing handheld, card and computer games like “bomb catcher”, Nim’s Gate and various shoot-em-ups as well as what now constituent the role-playing, problem-solving scenarios of MMORGs like World of Warcraft.

That’s right, I was a sporty nerd child and I’ve never understood illogically imposed social constructs — such other people telling us we either have to be sporty, non-academic and popular OR nerdy, brainy and socially awkward. Actually, since our brains are adaptable and our limbs are flexible……..We can do whatever we want, including be sporty, nerdy and popular.

LOL, :*).

In recent years some neuroscientists like Baroness Susan Greenfield have openly criticized digital developments, games and social networks as potential sources of what they call the “infantilization of the brain” as well as encouraging what they regard as “destructive nihilism” that desensitizes us when we play these shoot-em-up or  ”be greedy, gobble everything in sight” games. It’s obvious that Pac-Man is part of the latter grouping of games, :*).

Needless to say, whilst I respect a lot of neuroscience research, there are personal experiences which mean that I don’t accept all of their theories or findings. Sometimes, some of them seem to be killjoys or fuddy-duds who weren’t lucky enough to enjoy games when they were kids and now want to prevent others from participating in some mental stimulation! In a sense the question for neuroscientists isn’t about which faculties of the brain that such games destroy or arrest, it should be questions along the lines of:

* How does it develop co-ordinated dexterity (audio-visual and manual movements of the mouse/joystick)?

* What problem solving or strategic development is happening in each game scenario?

* Where and why are the emotional chemical releases happening, and could excitement stimulus induced by such games be re-applied to make cancer sufferers (or others recovering from injury) motivated?

Let me explain this in more detail. When I play sports or computer games I can sense the adrenalin increase inside as well as whichever chemicals are associated with competitiveness. I’m rarely competitive against others but consistently competitive about improving on the way I performed before. Male testosterone is said to rise when we compete and I’d say that there’s probably female oestrogen since, within game play, we can feel very fiercely protective of our team and also defending a score line if we’re in the lead and these traits of protectionism are female. In both cases of testosterone and oestrogen release I feel motivated to DO.

Ergo, there’s every reason that sports and computer games can be appropriately used as motivation stimulus for those recuperating from illness.

Anyway, readers are probably wondering how I fared in my Pac-Man games. Below are some screenshots of my live games and it may be helpful if I provide some game tips here to reflect on how I played:

(1.) Before the game starts, survey the maze terrain your Pac-Man must navigate.

Gain some understanding of where the exits are on either side of the board. Also, notice the awkward corners, blind alleys and cul-de-sacs where you don’t want your Pac-Man to be trapped by the ghosts.

Obviously identify the corners where the big gold discs are. When your Pac-Man eats these then the ghosts will turn a royal blue color and give you an opportunity to earn lots of points by catching them.

(2.) Make good use of the three lives your Pac-Man is allocated.

Apply your survey of the game terrain and divide it into three target territories. Then prioritize which of these the Pac-Man should try to eat all the gold coins first.

Square it with yourself from the outset that you will lose Pac-Man lives. Your objective is to preserve each life for as long as possible so avoid pathways that will take you directly into the clutches of the ghosts.

(3.) Be aware of the ghosts’ positions and when they become potential targets for your Pac-Man.

Here, the main trick is to avoid any pathways where two ghosts can double-up on your Pac-Man and trap him. Therefore, when running away from the ghosts stay on circular routes without cul-de-sacs. Wherever possible, escape via the exit on either side of the board and make use of this feature intelligently so that your Pac-Man ends up on the opposite side and far away from his nemesis ghosts.

When they become royal blue ghosts, capture as many as possible since they can add up to 400 points to your score whilst a gold coin is only 10 points. Also watch out for the appearance of fruit in the maze. Eating these will add 100 points.

SO………instead of arresting my neural development as a child — like some of the neuroscientists’ today fear and expound —…..Pac-Man actually helped me develop spatial reasoning, numeracy and quantity (because each ghost, coin and fruit has a numerical value), map reading, conditioning for loss of a Pac-Man life, protectiveness of that life as far as possible and productive competitiveness (it’s fun to be able to outsmart games systems whether that’s chess, cards or Pac-Man).

:*).

As readers will see, during my games, I managed to eat all the gold coins without being caught by the ghosts, earned extra fruit and got fairly high marks. My best score was 19,220 for a single player:

For 2-players it was 18,880 (18,260 and 620) for a game in which the board was cleared once and most of those points were obtained from eating the ghosts. The 620 occurred because blue ghosts would hit the pathway of the second Pac-Man — although the one I was navigating scored 18,260 on its own.

Here’s how to have a good fun game…………………….

(i.) The game starts with your three Pac-Man lives. One game typically takes less than 5 minutes.

.

(ii.) Clear everything on the left-hand side:

If you manage to do it well — like in this example — you might have 4,500 points with 2 Pac-Man lives still remaining:

(3.)  Next clear everything in the middle and as much of the right-hand side as possible:

(4.) Now try to clear the board!

You might even have 7,750 points by the time you clear the board:

(5.) Once this happens, a new board appears and you’re still in play. The extra fruit is the strawberry as shown in bottom right corner above the cherries.

If you manage to clear this board as well………..You’ll get a pineapple in the new board. This is what I managed to do on 9,110 points with one Pac-Man life left:

Ah and before the third board appears there’s a little animation sequence you get to see which you wouldn’t if you don’t make it to the third board.

(6.) Keep playing until your Pac-Man loses all three lives. The highest score I’ve gotten so far is 19,220 which is quite good, :*).

Now the worst-case scenario is not actually being trapped or caught by the ghosts. It’s actually when your Pac-Man manages to clear the board………..except for a single gold coin! Can readers spot it?

Good luck to any readers who plan to spend half an hour today playing Google-PacMan and here’s a YouTube video to prep you before you embark on some fun and brain training!

Yesterday in the Times there was an article entitled, ‘Babies’ brains are more sophisticated than we ever believed’:

* http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/families/article6793658.ece

Quite a few of the readers’ comments on the Times’s article are interesting, revealing and worth reading.

TWAIN’S VIEWS

Well, I’ve known how much brighter babies are than adults give them credit for ever since I was a baby myself, later when my younger brother was born and now when I see babies out and about. Yesterday, the whole of London seemed to bloom with babies since the sunshine brought out all their proud parents and their prams. Some were also in harnesses on their mothers’ backs or making their first attempts at walking. One little baby girl in a bright pink baby suit decided she couldn’t figure out which order her feet were supposed to go to make a step, so she plunged herself onto her derrière in protest — LOL. She’ll probably grow up to be a campaigner and do sit-ins. Another baby decided he wanted to show off his ability to put his big toes into his mouth. Cute.

Anyway, I didn’t need any Barbies / Sindys / teddy bears as a kid because I had a real live, kicking, screaming, gurgling, learning human (Twain) experiment, bundle of joy in our family in the shape of our youngest. There was enough of an age gap between us for me to actually treat him like a scientific study case rather than just go “Goo-goo-ga-ga, awwwwww,” over him!

I used to put him through his paces to test his mental, physical, audio-visual and emotional dexterity and consciousness. That started happening when he was 3 months old and my parents decided they could trust us to help him do his muscle strengthening exercises. This involved putting him on his back and gently stretching out his limbs, whilst counting to him in Mandarin with each movement and then holding up brightly colored objects to see whether he was:

(1.) able to follow the object around;

(2.) able to detect when an object had been swapped; and

(3.) able to anticipate whether we were going to put the object near his nose / his hands / us.

He was pretty good at all of these tests. His special talent was more audio than visual, though. Once he could walk the first thing he tried to do was switch the TV on for the sound. Maybe that explains his musical talents now.

Before he arrived though, I’d been experimental with kids younger than me when I was about 4. I babysat a neighbor’s little 2-year-old and earned HK$2 per day for my efforts. That baby, though, was definitely not as bright or inquisitive as my younger brother. She was quieter and more introspective.

With my own children — the ones that will make my mother a grandmother — I plan to record and document all my experiments with them. That’ll be fun!

T-MODEL OF CONSCIOUSNESS

So I was thinking about this whole issue of, “What’s consciousness and where is it,” my father’s coma situation and was also wondering whether the Internet’s version of the Global Brain might enable us to produce a proxy for our natural brain, the location of consciousness and this is what’s emerging as my model:

By medical definition, my father was considered to be “unconscious” which meant that the ECG (electrical conductivity graphs) couldn’t detect any discernible voltage that might indicate electrical activity in his brain. He also seemed to be unresponsive to instructions and actions from the nursing staff. Yet when I visited I got the distinctive impression that he was conscious so I set about doing my own experiments to test for his responsiveness — over and above whatever the ECGs and daily physical routines / procedures the hospital staff were doing.

I reasoned that, according to medical literature, we’ve identified certain areas in the brain which relate to cognisance (or recognition of faces / voices), communication and command/control over our physical limbs. Similarly, in the way in which the Net is forming we have ways of cognisance (via avatars and images), communication (text, images, IMs, emails etc) and a command/control function in the coding which paths all those IF mouse is clicked, XYZ happens or WHEN text is input, insert into database type commands which appear in Boolean, Javascript, AS3, Squeak and every other OOP (object-oriented program) which makes up what we call the World Wide Web or Net.

So I started to make the connections between all the literature (including business psychology models) I’d read since childhood, my own observations of how the brain works in situ (including young children and spending time with my grandparents as much as daily interactions with people @ work and @ play), my father’s situation and my work on the Net and this realization sparked:

* WE HAVEN’T DISCOVERED CONSCIOUSNESS YET BECAUSE WE’RE LOOKING IN THE WRONG PLACES AND WITH THE WRONG TOOLS! What if it’s not via ECGs and MRIs alone?

Then the challenge becomes, “Well what model or framework can we build to detect it and guide us to finding the right tools?”

Through the interactions with my father it became apparent that he had cognisance of who I was and also of Elvis and Pavarotti when I plugged in his music headset. His facial expressions would change subtly but perceptibly. There was also moistness which formed in his eyes and showed up on his lashes. He could sense and was moved by the music, that’s how I interpreted this moistness. I can imagine how frustrating it must have been for him: an intelligent and articulate person who was in a vegetative state.

To the hospital staff, he was a patient number. To us, he was ORGANIC: our fellow journeyer through Life’s ups and downs, evolving and mutating along the way. He was the one who — together with our mother — taught us how to walk, talk, read, write, laugh, cry, imagine, be and a billion other shared experiences (good and bad). Just as he had comforted us, washed our faces and held our hands when we were relatively young and dependent, so it was our turn to hold his hand, wash his face and do whatever we could to comfort him. The sensation of touch was another way for me to gauge his state of being.

Here too I got the sense that he was conscious and aware he wasn’t alone and that we were with him. He couldn’t grip my hand back but occasionally there was a pulsation on the tips and it would become warmer.

After a few days, it struck me that whilst he’d lost functional ability of his communication, command/control, collaboration and coherence faculties I didn’t (and still don’t) personally believe that he’d lost consciousness entirely — only the consciousness as currently defined by medical information and the tools available.

What’s irrefutable is that we haven’t definitively found consciousness or its location yet. If we had, I’d probably have read about it in The Lancet, New Scientist, Wired, Nature, Scientific American, British Medical Journal, Neurosurgery Quarterly etc. (i.e., any of the specialist medical publications listed here: http://www.medic8.com/Journals/All.htm).

So I started to think about, “What are the core elements of consciousness then — if the medical one is incomplete? Maybe once we find the core elements we might be able to narrow down the zones within the cortex where consciousness is triangulated.”

Culture, I thought, must be in there somewhere. Each of us is born into a particular culture and that DNA inherited from our parents must contribute to our consciousness, its course and its shaping in our histories, here and now and futures.

My father had a sense of his own culture because when I spoke with him in Chinese, again there were those subtle changes in his face. When the nurse(s) came to follow through with their procedures and addressed him in English I could see that his face was expressionless. If I read a passage to him from a book on plants, that expression was different from when I read a passage from a historical Chinese novel. When he was listening to Pavarotti there was a glow to his face which was different from if I played a Chinese female singer from the 1940s and 1950s.

Anyway, more recently whilst tracking developments on the Net and the building of “The Global Brain” I realized that culture is a core component here too. We talk about Semantics and yet the definition of semantics means different things to different people (around the world, across genders, traversing cultures and educational / professional reference points).

To Tim Berners-Lee and the W3C it means a set of ontologies to help us classify data objects. To me, it means those ontologies PLUS taking into account cultural and perceptual factors like subtle nuances, double entendres, potential lost in translations, the differences between male-female communication etc.

I think also of the coherence component. We can have ontologies which stand up in their own right and yet are not coherent in the whole. So, for example, the logic of their classification doesn’t synch with another’s. Paris in RDF form is a location, a proper noun and a fictional character from Homer’s Odysseus but, presently, if we went on the streets and asked people, “What does Paris mean to you?” the answer would not be “Capital city of France / Paris Hilton / Paris, Prince of Troy.” John / Jane Doe on the street is more likely to say:

* It means romance.

* It means the Eiffel Tower / Sacre Coeur / the Louvre / La Rive Gauche (the Left Bank) etc.

* It means Sartre / Voltaire / de Beauvoir etc.

* It means an eye line that’s different / compact / elegantly distinguishable from London, New York and Toyko: fewer skyscrapers, more central planning.

* It means expensive / chic / beautiful / etc.

So is this set of classifications coherent with the noun set? No, it’s not. That’s because the adjectives set hasn’t yet been accounted for in the W3C design (I’ve accounted for it, though, in my model and algorithms).

Within the coherence component we also have to think about the clustering approach and whether the Bayesian tree filter approach is the optimal model for clustering. I would argue not (but that’s another post and some more emails between me and the MIT Collaboratorium team).

Once we crack the coherence component, the next ones to focus on would be consideration and creativity. What tools can be developed to harness or enhance those?

Again, if we compare the Net’s potential Global Brain with the actual human brain we can see that according to my model, if we can establish the definitive components and where they reside (cognisance, communication, command / control, collaboration, coherence, creativity, consideration and culture) we may pinpoint the holistic manifestation of consciousness itself.

That’s something good and positive to work together towards…….

Here’s a photo of the central lounge of the location where we shot my segment of the documentary on global consciousness, how it applies to the Internet and what I hope the future holds.

On the day we went to do some location reconnaissance a handful of paparazzi were lurking in wait outside. Not for me, of course; I’m simply a Jane Doe. It was for a singer/reality TV/gossip tabloid regular called Peter Andre, who’s estranged from his glamor model/reality TV/gossip tabloid regular wife, and who was apparently in the building for lunch.

The juxtaposition of this made me LOL. Here we were creating a documentary involving consciousness, intelligence, sharing knowledge (art, science, culture, business and the Internet) and the evolution of our species, and outside was a pap pack interested in capturing Peter Andre’s state of being over his estranged wife’s new involvement with……………….a cage fighter.

LOL — life IS weird and its weirdness is what makes it so wonderful!

Anyway, during the shoot itself we were in one of the meeting rooms where the director (Alex) and his editor/assistant (Bron) set-up the lighting and decided how they wanted the visuals. They made it a really relaxed and enjoyable experience which was great. I’ve seen and read about the hectic and pressurized nature of film shoots involving up to 1000 people with mechanical cranes holding equipment to control the lighting, sound and cameras so it was quite interesting to experience a small crew.

I have good faith the documentary’s going to be successful and will challenge us all to re-imagine what consciousness means to each of us, to others and what we can do about contributing to global consciousness about major issues which need solving. Plus simply as a piece of directorial art it’s going to work well, even if my segment isn’t going to be as visually amazing as some of the other contributors’.

The documentary will be showcased in September (more details later).

MY HANDS AND FEET

Readers may have noticed that in my own mini videos I never appear onscreen. Only my hands and my feet are given any airtime so the documentary will be a first: the first time my face appears. I only decided to agree to this because the subject matter is a serious one, “What is global consciousness and what should we individually and collectively do about harnessing it in relation to the Internet?”

The reason only my hands and feet have appeared to-date is because I believe we’re not about how we look. Who we are and what we mean and represent is about the journeys of our lives, the people we touch and what we can do that’s of value — hence hands and feet.

Yes, I do have very distinctive, smooth and expressive hands. Alex the director called them “particular”. Over the years people have suggested that I could become a hand model for adverts and magazine shoots. I just regard my hands as the vessel through which I can write, type, paint, code, knit, cook, hold / shake people’s hands, take out the trash, move objects around and play instruments with.

In fact, they’re not that special. It’s my brain that’s really “particular” — except that can’t be seen on screen except me as a “talking head”.  LOL.

Would be quite interesting to see a scan of my brain when it’s twaining concepts…………….Ha ha!

I’m currently making arrangements to catch-up with someone I haven’t seen or thought about much in many many years. She’s the person for whom I wrote the poem, When, and was Master of Ceremonies for at her wedding ceremony. The poem was my insight on how people from completely different worlds can collide, discover that what they share in common matters more than differences, fall in love and have hope for their family’s futures.

A lot has changed between us since then…………….

===============================================================

WHEN (© Twain, 08/2000)

When we first met you were a stranger,

A danger,

A possibility unknown,

Alien to my senses,

A million miles from home.

—

When our eyes first met,

A thought revolution,

A friend or foe,

A million questions manifold,

An open invitation to explore.

—

When we first spoke,

A free fluent tongue,

A question, an answer flowing to and fro,

A whisper of insignificant differences,

A stepping stone to new sensations.

—

When we first laughed,

An infectious explosion,

An expansion of warm friendship,

A bridge between life’s wonders,

A reminder of shared similarities.

—

When we first fell in love,

A moment continuous eternal,

A collection of experiences and conversations,

A promise of sharing life,

A synchronicity of separate souls.

—

When we first imagine,

A marriage everlasting,

A happy future for our family,

A circle of contentment unconditional,

A memory of today.

ADDENDUM

When we are no longer as One,
Away,
Apart,
Afar,
Alone will — forever — be a stranger.

Feel free towards the forces of love,
That shine through and show the way once more.

===============================================================

I added the addendum because recently I had a dream. In the dream, her husband appeared to me for the second time in a year.

Readers should be aware of — but not spooked out by — the fact that her husband passed away several years ago. The circumstances I don’t know and I didn’t ask; if she wants to tell me when we meet she can. Although at some period in our histories we were close, by the time he passed away, we were no longer in touch and I discovered purely by accident that she’d been widowed; the photographer at their wedding told me.

They were a well-suited, intelligent and glamorous couple: both doctors, both from “good families”, both professionally driven. Now, she’s a widow at a young age — too young.

Naturally, I sent my condolences but I have to be honest and say I had no particular desire to see her again and to be reminded of memories which were upsetting for me. The last time I saw them both I demanded to be let out of their car at a busy roundabout because I didn’t want to listen to them any more and I walked to the nearest metro in the pouring rain.

Her husband had spent some time trying to get me to leave my job in the big bank to do something for them. I refused, sense prevailed and we broke off contact.

Anyway, her husband has appeared in my dreams in what I interpret as seeking my forgiveness and my help to enable his wife to overcome her grief and to move forward in Life. He knows well that I have the ability to transform situations and people, to make things good and whole again — not in some supernatural / religious / mumbo jumbo way but simply with my humanity, my humor and my smart sense.

The reason they asked me to be Master of Ceremonies was because as he said, “You’re the only person we trust to make sure everything runs smoothly on the day, to give everyone a great time and be the person who ensures war doesn’t break out amongst our families and friends.” In fact, her parents and most of her other friends disapproved of their union and I was the only one who was steadfastly there for them throughout their courtship.

As it turned out, their wedding day was simply………..BRILLIANT and beautiful and a triumph of love. My MC-ing and coordinating of the guests, the caterers, the band, the photographers, etc. went well. Luckily, the sun also contributed a lot to the success of the day.

I am “different” and I’ve always had some awareness of this. My friend herself has commented on my uniqueness and how special I am — like others whose life paths have crossed mine. My brother says that I’m the “driver of our family”; that is, when I’m at the driving wheel of anything, we all journey and get to the right destinations on time. When I’m not, things don’t get done with the same effect. My dearest friend GC noted that it took me 8 hours to produce a strategy for Project ART which would have taken him 8 years to (and he’s got 50+ years of professional experience, lol).

None of this means that my ego shoots off for Pluto. Instead, I’m conscious of my responsibilities, my relative position in our colony of billions of ants, bees, ladybirds, locusts, spiders and butterflies, my Life’s purpose and what really matters.

So I will see her to be that connection, that conduit, that channel from loss to love again.

What recent events reminded me of is that our lives and we are constantly evolving and moving forward, but sometimes we need to reach a hand out to the past too. That hand that may help someone get back up onto their feet and be ready to walk the path(s) of their own Life and discover its wonders once more.

For them to become conscious and to love instead of going through Life as sheep, robots or sleepwalkers. To actually…………LIVE and not simply exist.

Viva la consciousness.

This morning I decided to update my blog design to a newspaper format created by Christian Gnoth and available under GPL with WordPress. Naturally, I went into the CSS stylesheet and customized the fonts, colors and margins for personal choice.

I hope you all like the new design!

YouTube is refusing to play ball with the “TWAIN IT!” video, so it may not be posted today, :*(.

This morning whilst shooting my video to explain how I’m discovering and solving the missing keys to the Global Brain, Semantic Web and 360-2020 consciousness with my perception-emotion tool, I happened upon this comment on my knol:

Hi Twain

My name is Alex Gabbay. I am a filmmaker based in the UK currently making a film on consciousness. The idea sprung from a forthcoming exhibition on the brain involving eminent scientists and artists. I am contributing to the exhibition by making a film on consciousness that provokes discussion but does not pretend to have the answers.

For it, I am talking to neuroscientists, artists and anthropologists about their work on consciousness. I was extremely happy to find your knol on the Global Brain, while researching Berners-Lee and other contributors. I feel it is extremely important to include this perspective in the film.

Your own personal motivation in the introduction was moving. My motivation is to provoke discussion on a subject that to most of us defies definition and yet defines us and our world.

Is there anyway of getting in touch with you for further discussion re the film?

Alex

Okay, now I’m going to Google him and see what films he’s made previously…………….

Oh and when I release my video, it will become crystal clear that I didn’t write it as some purely theoretical construct or critique of current limitations.

I have “Twained” the various concepts with CODE and implementable solutions which will transform

LINKING DATA ===> MEANINGFUL DATA

(and I don’t mean NLP taxonomies and ontologies alone) . I mean a perception, emotion, relation and contextualization matrix / dimension that synchs with the way the Web currently works and can move it closer to TRUE SEMANTICS, wherein man-to-machine and man-to-machine across different media more accurately interpret the other’s meaning.

Watch Twain space and playpen……………..:*)

And so my month-long vegetarian trial draws to a close…………

It’s been something of a revelation about how the human mind and body can adapt to a new situation and sensation. As I mentioned in my June 30 post, my mother said I woudn’t be able to complete it because of our family’s intrinsic love of seafood and meats:

* http://www.alwaysthetwain.com/blogs/2009/06/30/twain-vegetarian/

However, I have managed to be disciplined and innovative with meat alternatives as these photos and videos show:

I could quite happily continue with vegetarianism. It’s helped with my sleeping patterns, female cycles and sense of healthiness. However, I am also aware that there are essential nutrients which are found in seafood and meats which are good for my physiology so I’ll be returning to those sources tomorrow.

A major lesson I learnt is that, psychologically, I can deal with less meat than I previously thought so even after I return to eating meats, I’ll be consuming less of it and try to be as free-range and line caught as possible for the sake of animal welfare and the environment.

Now, what I have a serious hunger for is my Golden Aroma Chili Crab:

So that’s what I’ll be making this weekend — hurrah!

Shooting a long video to show how I’m applying AJAX, PHP, AS3 and SQL in my perception tool and where that will complement and advance Semantic Web frameworks. Plus the video covers some other cool Ajax for UI design.

Hopefully will post it on Saturday 1st August 2009.