Sunday, January 1, 2023

2023 New Year's Thought: What does it mean to be curious?

In the pre-dawn quiet, somewhere on the north coast of California, I looked up into the soft, cold, gentle mist… 

Rainy day on the Northern California coast


... letting it play over my face.  It’s a reflective gesture, especially on New Year’s Eve when all of the year is worth rethinking.  Rain has fallen since the dawn of the Earth, and I’m just feeling the latest cycling of water from sea to sky to land back to sea.  But it puts me in a deeply contemplative state of mind.  What happened this year that was different from the year before?  How can I make next year even better?  What have I learned?


You might wonder about all of those questions, but as I lifted my face to the sky, I could feel each tiny raindrop strike my cheeks—a kind of constant spray where each pinpoint of rain registered—dot.. dot.. dot.. dot..—quietly making every point of my skin register a tiny scintilla of cold and wet.  You might think of this as a kind of celestial scanning of your inner self, the rain gods probing every square millimeter of your face and your life.  It felt a bit like video static on my skin.  



It felt like that image of William Gibson in Neuromancer, “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.”  I realize that there are people who have never seen the black and white video static of a dead television channel.  For you, here’s a YouTube video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubFq-wV3Eic (It’s a handy concept to have—the rapidly alternating pixels of black and white, rapidly flipping in a random order, flickering chaos. I don’t quite know how to convey that sense in words—video static as a phrase will have to do.)  


But the thing that popped into my mind was this: I feel as though the droplets are tiny and rapid and random and dense, but I also know the spatial resolution of touch on the skin of my face is pretty low. So how can I feel as though I’m in a shower of tiny video static droplets?  And while I’m thinking about that, I also start wondering how I can feel the cold of each droplet as it splashes down.  How fast are my cold receptors?  Can I actually FEEL each of those tiny droplets as a touch and as a chill, or is my perception a kind of synthesis of all the drops over a short period of time?  How much of my perception is accurate and how much is just made up by my sensory system?  


A psychologist would call this a question of veridical perception—that is, the direct perception of stimuli as they exist in the world.  Am I actually feeling what my perception actually indicates, or does my nervous system do a kind of quick extrapolation from the perceived reality to create the sense of video static on my skin?  


Naturally, I then spent a couple of hours doing a bit of research into the spatial resolution of touch. Doing the obvious queries on Google and reading widely in neuroscience and perception. I learned about the “two-point discrimination test” [1], and that we have different receptor neurons for heat and cold, yet again different receptors for touch and different ones for touch, different ones for stretching, and different ones for sensing vibrations.  Fascinating stuff, but in the end, I had to do my own two-point discrimination test on my face to determine what the spatial resolution is on MY face.  After using an incredibly sophisticated two-point testing device (that is, a paperclip I bent into parallel arms whose distance I could vary) I found that my cheek can tell touchpoints that are around 6 mm apart—around 0.25 inches.  This means that my face can only register drops that are 6 mm apart from each other.  Since my face is around 254 mm wide (assuming a circular face), I can really only feel around 42 different droplets from one side to the other. On the other hand, my lips can determine one- versus two-points with only a 1mm separation, so my face is at different spatial resolutions!  


But that’s not the way it feels.  I can't feel the difference in resolution--it's all of one piece.  I would have naively guessed that I could uniformly detect 100 drops of rain from cheek-to-cheek. The pattern of rain certainly feels that way as the rain washes across—it feels like a fairly dense spray of droplets—I would have thought I should feel at least 1000 droplets as the morning rain falls from heaven.  


And what about the cold? A little more research tells me that cold receptors are even farther apart, and much slower to react than touch. So, the sense I have of small cold drops hitting my face in a dense, random pattern can’t possibly be accurate. The rain is cold, certainly, but when the drop hits my skin, I register the drop’s strike, and the cold perception comes much later, probably right around the time another drop hits the same point.  


Once you start thinking about this, you also have to wonder—what is the composition of rain?  Are all drops the same size?  I noticed in the heavier rain that came later that there were also lots of little drops as well.  Are they shards from collisions of large raindrops, or did they never get merged into a big drop?  


Questions, always questions. 


This year I’ve spent a lot of time writing my SearchResearch posts—more time than I’d care to admit, but it’s worth it.  The process satisfies this deep inner itch I have--I want to understand the world.  


The nature of my curiosity is to constantly ask “Why?”  It’s an everpresent question that’s always on the periphery of my lived experience.  This year I walked through a park and thought “why is there an odd, flat space in the middle of the park?”  Or, seeing gnats swarming on the beach I wonder “Why do they do that?”  Seeing a horse in a nearby meadow leads me to recall from an adjacent memory about horses that while there are horse fossils in North America, and yet there were no horses here when the Europeans arrived:  Why?  


Curiosity is more than just asking random Why questions—it often builds off of something else you know.  In the park, there were no other flat places like that one—it just looked wrong: Why?  In the case of the beach gnats, I saw them all over the beach, but it wasn’t one giant beachball of swarming gnats, but several gnatty swarms in different places.  To ask the Why question about horses, I had to know that in 1492, there were no native horses in North America, and that there were horse fossils littering museums all over.  Why?  

Horse fossil from the La Brea tar pits in Los Angeles; Miocene.


Asking curious questions means noticing something about the world; it means knowing something is out of place, doesn’t fit, or doesn’t agree with another thing you know, or recognizing that you really don’t know how something works.  Then, ask that question, follow-up with a bit of looking.    


Fortunately, we live in a time where online resources let us do a bit of desk research and find the answers to these curious questions.  


What questions will you ask in the year ahead?  What role does innate curiosity play in your life?


-- Curiously yours 

-- Dan 

== 

1. That is, how far apart do two points have to be on your skin before you feel them as two points rather than one? Answer: it varies widely, from 1 mm at the fingertip to 40 mm on the skin of your thigh).  I also learned that a “receptive field” is the region that’s sensed by a touch receptor.  For more details:  http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Receptive_field  


 

11 comments:

  1. Happy New Year 2023!

    Always interesting, Dr. Russell. And you made me remember good times with static sound and make me wonder if there was a difference between this sound and white noise. While searching, found definitions, examples, unrelated topics and ways in which white noise can help.

    Also made me remember SMPTE bars.

    Thinking about curious questions, my guess is that we let them go because it's hard or impossible (at least to me) to get to an answer. Your process, as an example, is something only a few can do to fin the answer.

    In my life curiosity takes me to read, find discover. Also to make connections.

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  3. already, my soggy resolution to be "curious-lesser" in the new year is washed away…
    a different version of your experience…
    Rain in the Face
    Itonagaju
    Scholarpedia is something
    the 'umbrella'
    Carmel-by-the-Sea, coincidence?
    1957 Jaguar XK 150 Drophead Coupé
    Misty
    when Tom Cruise/Hanks/Skerritt/Selleck does the remake; something more modern
    What role does innate curiosity play in your life? unfortunately, not as much as inane curiosity…
    even the guard rails didn't prevent crashing into the sea and bursting into flames… a waste of a Jaguar…
    produced before the onset of haptic sensors…
    from the Greek: ἁπτικός (haptikos), means "tactile"
    as Buzz Lightyear mutters: "to infinity and not one mm beyond"
    (now I'm curious about the presence of deletion...)

    chatgpt, initial effort lacks the poetic nature of the rain... ;
    what is the nature of curiosity and what are the strengths & weaknesses
    Curiosity is a natural drive or desire to learn or know more about something. It is often characterized by a desire to explore, ask questions, and seek out new information or experiences. Curiosity can be a powerful motivator for learning and can lead to the discovery of new ideas and knowledge.

    Some of the strengths of curiosity include:

    Encouraging a love of learning: Curiosity can foster a lifelong love of learning and exploration, as people are naturally drawn to things that interest them and want to learn more about them.

    Promoting problem-solving skills: Curiosity can lead people to ask questions, consider different perspectives, and seek out new information, which can help them solve problems more effectively.

    Facilitating creativity: Curiosity can encourage people to think outside the box and consider novel ideas and approaches, which can foster creativity.

    Some potential weaknesses of curiosity include:

    Distraction: If not managed effectively, curiosity can distract people from their current tasks or responsibilities and lead them to pursue tangents that may not be productive.

    Lack of focus: People who are overly curious may find it difficult to focus on a single task or topic for an extended period of time, which can be a disadvantage in some situations.

    Risk-taking: Curiosity can sometimes lead people to take unnecessary risks in pursuit of new knowledge or experiences, which can be dangerous or unwise.,

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  4. only the 2nd day & I am reduced to prattle… a Quixotic search (& am Sancho-less)
    the micro-drops of rain formed a brick wall of sorts between the face and all that was behind it and the storm/chaos
    that lay beyond… it was in that interface that the thought began, took root, developed into a scheme and then
    was washed away, leaving only the notion of if…
    flotsam and jetsam and lagan… if only, if always, if never ∈∈ℵ0ℵ0ℵ0ℵ0ℵ0
    and looping back to the sea…
    marine debris… non-poetic

    almost a year ago…
    IF
    Benedikt Löwe
    U of Amsterdam
    UNESCO, World Logic Day, 14 January
    Alex Bellos's Monday puzzle
    losing focus…
    tied to '1923' (Brandon Sklenar storyline) & prior sRs
    1985, W. Gibson
    "metoda aksjomatyczna, w logice, procedura, za pomocą której cały system (np. nauka) jest generowany zgodnie z określonymi regułami poprzez dedukcję logiczną z pewnych podstawowych twierdzeń (aksjomatów lub postulatów), które z kolei są zbudowane z kilku terminów przyjętych jako prymitywny."
    audio story
    Adele Porkert
    an 'if' marker/stone, Princeton, New Jersey
    a summary


    playing detective…
    Carolina
    paleoaltimetry
    longleaf pines & cyclones
    UNM, dude
    UT,
    Dendroarchaeology
    Kat Napora, UGA? - Georgia coast - used dendroarchaeology + hurricanes
    UGA, Center for Applied Isotope Studies
    likely?
    Claudia I. Mora, UT-Jackson School of Geosciences

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    1. I am absolutely amazed, impressed, and stunned! I think it’s best if I let it go at that.

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  5. was looking at how the octopus perceives its surroundings...
    does it form questions?
    the questions indeed

    Rain falls on the sea
    Octopi sense the change within
    Seeing rain's cool kiss

    courtesy of chatgpt

    "No one has solved Nagel’s problem — the minds of non-human species remain ultimately off-limits. Scientific advances may someday break down the wall that stands between us and the subjective experience of “the other,” including the octopus. But until then, those who know them best can’t escape the feeling that they aren’t so “other” at all.

    “There’s just something about them,” Sivitilli says. “They’re different, but familiar.”"
    https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/how-do-octopuses-experience-the-world
    https://journals.biologists.com/jeb/article/218/10/1513/759/Eye-independent-light-activated-chromatophore#ref-8
    https://www.mdpi.com/2673-4087/2/3/20

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  6. more chatgpt: imagine a UI that uses 8 tentacles...
    do octopi function at an intellectually high level
    Octopuses are highly intelligent animals that are capable of exhibiting a wide range of behaviors and adapting to their environment. They are known to be curious, playful, and resourceful, and they are able to learn and solve problems through trial and error.

    Octopuses have complex nervous systems and are able to coordinate the movements of their tentacles and other body parts in order to interact with their environment. They are also able to remember and recognize objects and patterns, and they have been observed exhibiting complex behaviors such as opening jars to obtain food, escaping from enclosures, and even playing with toys.

    Overall, octopuses are highly adaptable and intelligent animals that are able to function at a high intellectual level. They are capable of exhibiting a wide range of behaviors and adapting to new situations, and their complex nervous systems and ability to learn and solve problems make them one of the most intelligent groups of invertebrates.

    Octopi watch and wait
    As rain strikes the surface of the sea
    Off the coast of California's north

    Their tentacles dance
    To the rhythmic pitter-patter beat
    Of the rain's aquatic play

    They blend into the waves
    As they shift and change their hue
    Mimicking the shifting sky

    Through the crystal veil
    They watch the storm roll by
    Octopi of the northern coast

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  7. a couple other prompts
    contrast the ideas of if or but
    The word "if" is a conditional word that is used to express a condition or possibility. It is often used in conjunction with the word "then" to form a conditional statement. For example: "If it is raining, then I will bring an umbrella." In this sentence, the condition "if it is raining" is being expressed, and the statement "I will bring an umbrella" is being presented as a consequence of that condition being met.

    The word "but" is a conjunction that is used to introduce a contrasting or qualifying statement. It is often used to indicate that one statement is being qualified or modified by another. For example: "I would like to go to the beach, but it is raining." In this sentence, the statement "I would like to go to the beach" is being qualified or modified by the statement "it is raining."

    Overall, the words "if" and "but" have distinct meanings and functions in language. The word "if" is used to express a condition or possibility, while the word "but" is used to introduce a contrasting or qualifying statement.


    explain how if was used by Godel
    Gödel's incompleteness theorems are a pair of theorems that were proven by mathematician Kurt Gödel in the 1930s. These theorems demonstrate that, within any given formal system (such as a set of axioms or rules for logical reasoning), there will always be certain statements that cannot be proved or disproved within the system.

    Gödel's incompleteness theorems are based on the concept of "if" and the idea of self-reference. In order to prove the first incompleteness theorem, Gödel used a technique called "diagonalization" to construct a statement that refers to itself within a formal system. This self-referential statement, which is known as the "Gödel sentence," is then used to demonstrate that there will always be certain statements that cannot be proved or disproved within the system.

    Overall, Gödel's incompleteness theorems are a significant and influential result in the field of mathematics, and they have had a lasting impact on the study of logic, computation, and the foundations of mathematics.

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  8. moving fast - text & images... Dan will have his hands full being the search satisfaction anthropologist...
    https://www.marktechpost.com/2023/01/03/google-ais-lamda-vs-openais-chatgpt/

    https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jan/02/robot-leonardo-da-vinci-masterpiece-ai-human-creativity-artists

    https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/dec/08/the-guardian-view-on-chatgpt-an-eerily-good-human-impersonator

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