3 ms·

Alan Kay on 'Learning to See'

56 points by espeed 14y ago

losethos 14y ago
The Bible makes sense if Jesus made the blind see and deaf hear. Falic symbols are one thing you learn to see. The other is seeing faces ... in people, animals... like they had done a photoshop morph. Hearing? "Born again" reminds me of my birds and how they view reality. Stop for a moment and imagine what my birds think of my computer screen. That's how reality is for me with angels, CIA, FBI, psychiatric nurse actors, psy-op torturers, aliens, Jews, secret service, Brits, Catholics... I'm hopelessly confused. God says... 3:18 And the fruit of righteousness is sown in peace of them that make peace. 4:1 From whence come wars and fightings among you? come they not hence, even of your lusts that war in your members? 4:2 Ye lust, and have not: ye kill, and desire to have, and cannot obtain: ye fight and war, yet ye have not, because ye ask not. 4:3 Ye ask, and receive not, because ye ask amiss, that ye may consume it upon your lusts. 4:4 Ye adulterers and adulteresses, know ye not that the friendship of the world is enmity with God? whosoever therefore will be a friend of the world is the enemy of God. 4:5 Do ye think that the scripture saith in vain, The spirit that dwelleth in us lusteth to envy? 4:6 But he giveth more grace. Wherefore he saith, God resisteth the proud, but giveth grace unto the humble.
drostie 14y ago
It always takes me a while when I'm watching Alan Kay deliver prepared remarks because his emphasis doesn't seem to match the emphasis of his speech. In this case it strikes me that he's trying to evoke the enormity of human history -- hundreds of thousands of years -- and the surprise that we've only really been trying to "step outside ourselves" for about five hundred. Somehow at least 99.5% of that time has been spent in the fogs before enquiry and only the last 0.5% have we really seen the explosion of mathematics, the emergence of science, and the industrial revolution. That we can fool ourselves allows us to dream of the world to come, but it also eats itself: it locks us in a prison of our own minds. So that is the emphasis that I see in this talk, after puzzling through it in my head for a bit. This may be true, but I worry that this has been too limited an approach to history. As an artist whose works will likely be lost to history, I must object that there seem to be more artists than ever talked about, more soul-seekers lighting fires than fires that burned across history: most trickle away into embers. What if the problem isn't that we're always fooling ourselves -- i.e. that we never light fires -- and rather that we have simply not had the right environment for the fires to explode the way they do? What if, say, ideas became properties of trade routes rather than properties of cultures, and the Dark Ages somehow stabilized these trade routes so that the ideas could finally diffuse from one route to another? It's only a half-baked idea at present, but I'm just not sure that this relatively recent explosion in innovation is due entirely to the fact that people got locked inside their own beliefs. Perhaps that is me getting locked inside my own beliefs though -- beliefs that we are all cosmopolitan and curious and earnest inside.
pattangal 14y ago
Interestingly, we humans do literally have to learn to see, including updating our preferences about where to rotate our eyeballs. Also interestingly, we perceive nothing directly. The role of sense organs is to rule out possibilities. So everything that remains must be internally generated (i.e. conjectural). Before we can see something we must first have an idea about it, and all such ideas come from guesswork. When we observe correctly we can say that the internal perception corresponds to external reality. Another property of humans is that our perceptions are distorted by strong emotions such as fears and desires. Overly ambitious people, for instance, perceive the world differently. I wonder whether this goes all the way down to the level of apples and oranges (e.g. not seeing an apple if it is not in my 'interest' to do so).
apitaru 14y ago
This struck a chord: "We are the species that fools itself” I think this is at the heart of how we are capable of creating something from nothing ('create wealth' as pg would say). There's also a dark side - I've come to notice that people who cannot 'fool themselves' are less happy, and at times dangeruosly so. We are indeed a self-winding spring.
deleted 14y ago
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redwood 14y ago
Very cool, also very 60s. Tune in, turn on :)

56 points by espeed 14y ago

The Bible makes sense if Jesus made the blind see and deaf hear. Falic symbols are one thing you learn to see. The other is seeing faces ... in people, animals... like they had done a photoshop morph. Hearing? "Born again" reminds me of my birds and how they view reality. Stop for a moment and imagine what my birds think of my computer screen. That's how reality is for me with angels, CIA, FBI, psychiatric nurse actors, psy-op torturers, aliens, Jews, secret service, Brits, Catholics... I'm hopelessly confused. God says... 3:18 And the fruit of righteousness is sown in peace of them that make peace. 4:1 From whence come wars and fightings among you? come they not hence, even of your lusts that war in your members? 4:2 Ye lust, and have not: ye kill, and desire to have, and cannot obtain: ye fight and war, yet ye have not, because ye ask not. 4:3 Ye ask, and receive not, because ye ask amiss, that ye may consume it upon your lusts. 4:4 Ye adulterers and adulteresses, know ye not that the friendship of the world is enmity with God? whosoever therefore will be a friend of the world is the enemy of God. 4:5 Do ye think that the scripture saith in vain, The spirit that dwelleth in us lusteth to envy? 4:6 But he giveth more grace. Wherefore he saith, God resisteth the proud, but giveth grace unto the humble.

drostie 14y ago

It always takes me a while when I'm watching Alan Kay deliver prepared remarks because his emphasis doesn't seem to match the emphasis of his speech. In this case it strikes me that he's trying to evoke the enormity of human history -- hundreds of thousands of years -- and the surprise that we've only really been trying to "step outside ourselves" for about five hundred. Somehow at least 99.5% of that time has been spent in the fogs before enquiry and only the last 0.5% have we really seen the explosion of mathematics, the emergence of science, and the industrial revolution. That we can fool ourselves allows us to dream of the world to come, but it also eats itself: it locks us in a prison of our own minds. So that is the emphasis that I see in this talk, after puzzling through it in my head for a bit. This may be true, but I worry that this has been too limited an approach to history. As an artist whose works will likely be lost to history, I must object that there seem to be more artists than ever talked about, more soul-seekers lighting fires than fires that burned across history: most trickle away into embers. What if the problem isn't that we're always fooling ourselves -- i.e. that we never light fires -- and rather that we have simply not had the right environment for the fires to explode the way they do? What if, say, ideas became properties of trade routes rather than properties of cultures, and the Dark Ages somehow stabilized these trade routes so that the ideas could finally diffuse from one route to another? It's only a half-baked idea at present, but I'm just not sure that this relatively recent explosion in innovation is due entirely to the fact that people got locked inside their own beliefs. Perhaps that is me getting locked inside my own beliefs though -- beliefs that we are all cosmopolitan and curious and earnest inside.

pattangal 14y ago

Interestingly, we humans do literally have to learn to see, including updating our preferences about where to rotate our eyeballs. Also interestingly, we perceive nothing directly. The role of sense organs is to rule out possibilities. So everything that remains must be internally generated (i.e. conjectural). Before we can see something we must first have an idea about it, and all such ideas come from guesswork. When we observe correctly we can say that the internal perception corresponds to external reality. Another property of humans is that our perceptions are distorted by strong emotions such as fears and desires. Overly ambitious people, for instance, perceive the world differently. I wonder whether this goes all the way down to the level of apples and oranges (e.g. not seeing an apple if it is not in my 'interest' to do so).

apitaru 14y ago

This struck a chord: "We are the species that fools itself” I think this is at the heart of how we are capable of creating something from nothing ('create wealth' as pg would say). There's also a dark side - I've come to notice that people who cannot 'fool themselves' are less happy, and at times dangeruosly so. We are indeed a self-winding spring.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

redwood 14y ago

Very cool, also very 60s. Tune in, turn on :)