The Evolution of I/O Function - Computers and Us

In the first computers, the processor directly controlled peripheral devices. The processor used to be busy with I/O most of the time. Then an I/O module got added to the architecture and the processor started using programmed I/O but the processor still was busy with I/O. Interrupts came in next followed by DMA making the processor more and more efficient and making I/O devices more independent and intelligent. Now, I/O devices are mini computers with processors and memories of their own.

Perhaps similar phenomena happened in the human body. Cognition is far more complicated than what most super computers can do today. But, imagine, what will happen if the brain starts making our sense organs more independent. Right now, the sense organs gather data and the brain is responsible for integrating the data and making sense of the impressions. A first step towards making the sense organs more independent would be to integrate them because cognition is almost always the result of a combination of sense perceptions. So, there will have to be ONE sense organ that can touch, see, hear, smell and taste. Lets assume that the human skin is that organ. It assimilates all the sense perceptions and transfers the data to the brain. Lets look at how our lives as these evolved human beings will differ...

Our vision will be panoramic and phenomenal. If naked, we'll be able to see 360 degrees all around. Our concepts of back and front will be altered. Back stabbing won't be possible anymore! Eyes will not be as delicate and vulnerable. After all, if you lose a part of your skin, you can always see from another part!! But yes, skin diseases will be the biggest problem of our lives. Looking into dark corners will just mean fingering around!

Of course, it'll naturally force us to shed our clothes, since we can't cover our eyes all the time!! And the parts that are covered will have to see the back of our clothes all day!! That'll probably start off a new fashion trend - clothes with pleasing designs on the reverse!! Or clothes with books or movies on the reverse, so that part of the skin is reading or watching movies while its clothed!! Scope for new technology as well!!
Touching an apple will tell you how it looks closely, feels, smells and tastes! Selecting fruits and vegetables will be easier!! For the first time, you'll be able to look into your shoes while wearing them! And, after a long day's work, your legs will have to suffer their smell and taste!! Aaaargh!! Shaking hands with another person will involve not just knowing their touch but also their taste and smell!! And sex will really involve "perceiving" your partner deeply and completely!!!

Our face will not have ears, nose, mouth and eyes. Probably just an opening for chewing and swallowing. Heads will be much smaller - only small knobs resting on the shoulder and containing the brain. All humans will look more or less the same - only changes being in the size and shape of the body and the color of the skin. That'll have tremendous impact in fashion, advertising, movies and all industries that need human faces!! Well, identification might become a problem. A person's identity will then consist of his/her shape, size, smell, texture, taste and sound. The face will be an insignificant part.

More can be thought of - I request readers to add more. Overall, I feel it will be a better I/O model!!

My Theory of Maya

When a man ‘interacts’ with (for example) an apple –

• he can “see” it,
• he can “touch” it,
• he can “smell” it,
• he can “hear” it (when the apple touches another object)
• he can “taste” it,
• he can think about it.

Apart from these six ‘sensations’, man cannot be sure of anything else. In fact, that all human beings have the same sensations (?) on seeing the same object only shows that the human beings in question have similar methods and apparatus of perception (his senses and mental processes). It does not prove the existence of the apple.

Hence, existence of an entity is relative to the existence of perceptions that can form mental constructs corresponding to that entity. Different animals and plants perceive the apple with different kinds of percepts. Even non-living things perceive the apple (due to forces of gravitational attraction etc.). These percepts differ from each other, sometimes contradictorily. Again, only these percepts exist and not the apple. The same logic can be extended to every entity on earth – animate as well as inanimate.

With the advancement of scientific measurement techniques, man can perceive an object in different and more powerful ways, thereby increasing the range of his perception. Thus, the apple can be perceived through other quantifiable measurements (like the electron density of the apple,…). That only increases the number of “percepts” that man has with respect to the apple. It still does not prove that the apple exists!

Distributed computing - runtime polymorphism

A: You must minimize object creation to make your java code efficient.
B: How can so many people have so many different thoughts. If there were a comprehensive mental space of all the minds in the world, then surely it must be humongous and chaotic.
A: My eyes are itchy - nowadays roads are horribly polluted. Some wretched dust particle must have gone into my eye.
B: AHA! At last I had pineapple juice after so long. Its been ages!
A: Day before yesterday, my sister came back from Normandy. She's really gone down. Must have had a tough time at work.
B: I read Jonathan Livingstone Seagull last night. The pictures are beautiful but I couldn't make out much in the story. Whats the whole point in glorifying flight??
A: Train no. 4568, Guwahati - Bangalore express, scheduled to arrive at Bangalore at 6:30 pm is running 3 hours late and is expected to arrive at 9:30 pm.
B: Why do come home so late nowadays, dear? And you look so exhausted!! I'm really concerned about your health! Don't you think you need a break. We should go out on a holiday - How about Kashmir? We haven't been there since our honeymoon.
A: Fifteen men on the dead man's chest! Yo Ho Ho! And a bottle of rum! Drink and devil had gone for the rest! Yo Ho Ho! And a bottle of rum! (courtesy: Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson)
B: Children! This is the fourth time I am teaching you the concept of percentages. Yet not one of you can solve this simple problem!! You must be ashamed of yourselves!
A: Oh my God!! Our house has been stolen! Look at the mess! And my jewellery! Everything is gone!! We are doomed!
B: The realization of one's self is the greatest bliss one can have on this earth. Once you have understood the nature of your soul, you will no longer be unhappy or perturbed. Yoga is the path to realization.
A: The town you are seeking is just across the bank. You will get ferries to cross the river. Ask the ferry man and he will show you the way.
B: Good bye! My time has come!
...

Words and meaning

A word and its meaning are inseparable in common life. Utter a word and its image, its meaning is in your brain. Well, its not always an image - it is a mental construct which has images, sound, feelings and other sensations. So, every word is associated with its mental construct in the mind.
The interesting thing about this construct is that it varies from one person to another. For example, the word "computer", could produce one or more of the following constructs in a person's mind:
1. The desktop PC, black colored monitor, dusty keyboard, mouse wheel stuck, smell of old books lying beside, black coffee while emailing, yahoo!, ...
2. Intel x86 architecture, Motorola micro-controllers, embedded systems project, boring classes, beautiful gardens outside the class,...
3. An incomprehensible box, stupid pop-up messages, mysteriously located data, pots of money for software engineers, none for me,house in a mess, unpaid bills,...

My hypothesis is that when we recall a word, all the mental constructs associated with that word are "loaded" into the current, active part of the brain. As life progresses, the number and variety of mental constructs for the same word changes continuously.
Now, the meaning of a word is very closely connected to the set of mental constructs one has for that word. And since the mental constructs differ from one person to another the meaning of the same word differs too. There are some of the mental constructs that are common among the vast majority of the people who use the word. For example, the word "bucket" conjures at least one common mental construct among the people who use the word - i.e. a kind of container with a set of shapes. (that in turn is made up of quite a complicated set of constructs)
But, what is meaning? If it is a set of mental constructs that vary from person to person, then it something much more interesting than a dictionary listing.
How does someone understand the "meaning" of a concept? When a child is shown a picture of 2 sheep in order to teach the child the concept of numbers, and in particular, the number "two"- observe the number of concepts impinging on the child's mind - the green background color of the picture, white sheep, all the various body parts of the sheep, wool, and the fact that there are "two" sheep. How does the child understand the concept of the number "two" in the mess of all the concepts presented?
I guess, it doesn't happen with just one attempt. The child is presented with a number of such examples with so many different concepts. And then - this is the wonder of the human brain - it abstracts the concept of the number "two". Probably, it recognizes that the construct corresponding to the concept "two" is the intersection of all the mental constructs derived from all the various examples.
But then, still the concept of meaning is not clear. What is meaning? Lets take a look at the computer. What is "two" for the computer? It is a binary nibble - "0010", which in turn is a a particular combination of voltages in the electronic circuitry. When you write the number "2" in a text document, the computer understands (of course, because man programmed it to) that it is the same "0010".
I noticed a splendid semblence. The meaning of "two" is merely a representation, a particular pattern, beyond which it has not esoteric "meaning". Could that be true for the human brain as well? Our concepts, meanings, understanding - they are all patterns that have been formed through evolution. The moment we encounter a concept, the associated pattern is recalled. Nothing has any meaning implicitly, its just the collection of mental constructs that are stored physically in the brain. Meaning has really no meaning!

Motivational stories or fables

Is there any theory on how and why motivational stories and anecdotes affect human minds and why they are created at all?
They are usually an account of a specific experience. They are narrow in scope and many a time cannot be generalized easily.
(Extrapolation - the boon of engineering and the bane of science - are fables an engineering approach to moral science :)) )
There are two parts to a fable - the story and the moral. The leap from one to the next is the most interesting aspect of a fable! For example, consider the story outlined in my previous post. (See below)

I can think of the following morals that I can draw from the story alone:

For man:
- Do not decide your course of action without complete knowledge of the situation.
- Mind your own business. Leave moths alone.
- Its high time biology found the way of way of forcing fluid from the body of the moth into its wings so that it would be ready for flight anytime during the moth's life cycle so that man can help a moth whenever he wants!
- Define "help" based on the definition of help of the person you are helping and not your own.
- Create moth simulations that allow man to help moths without harming them.
- Do not waste time gaping at moths.
- Beware of scissors!

For moth:
- Find other ways of cocoon-exit without hampering your flight.
- Its high time moths start studying the structure and physiology of moths.
- Beware of man!
- If a hole is made on one side of the cocoon, abandon exit from there and start making another hole.
- Learn artificial aviation (Create society, universities, and phd programs on artificial moth aviation which extends to artificial moth life itself. Start by experimenting with various other creatures e.g. the attempts of man to fly - frenetic algorithms,....)

Jokes apart, the leap from story to moral is indeed an absurd one (absurd as used by Albert Camus in "The Myth of Sisyphus"). The story usually has a sprinkling of pointers to the moral and thereby the story leads to the moral at the end. If the story were to be stripped to its bare-bones and then viewed distinctly from the derived moral, the absurd leap will be apparent.

A logical way to approach the fable would be to inquire whether the story really justifies or is enough proof for the moral. Indeed, in most cases I have found that it is not.
Just because a moth (a creature that is way behind in the evolutionary path and hence, if the theory of evolution is correct, inferior to us) struggles its head off to come out of a hole at its birth, why should we conclude that (even sometimes) struggle is good for human beings!!

What about morals without stories - aphorisms. Well, lets see it next time.

Struggle

A man found a cocoon of an emperor moth. He took it home so that he could watch the moth come out of the cocoon. On that day a small opening appeared, he sat and watched the moth for several hours as the moth struggled to force the body through that little hole.

Then it seemed to stop making any progress. It appeared as if it had gotten as far as it could and it could go no farther. It just seemed to be stuck. Then the man, in his kindness, decided to help the moth, so he took a pair of scissors and snipped off the remaining bit of the cocoon. The moth then emerged easily. But it had a swollen body and small, shriveled wings. The man continued to watch the moth because he expected that, at any moment, the wings would enlarge and expand to be able to support the body, which would contract in time. Neither happened! In fact, the little moth spent the rest of its life crawling around with a swollen body and shriveled wings. It was never able to fly.

What the man in his kindness and haste did not understand was that the restricting cocoon and the struggle required for the moth to get through the tiny opening was the way of forcing fluid from the body of the moth into its wings so that it would be ready for flight once it achieved its freedom from the cocoon. Freedom and flight would only come after the struggle. By depriving the moth of a struggle, he deprived the moth of health.

Sometimes struggles are exactly what we need in our life. If we were to go through our life without any obstacles, we would be crippled. We would not be as strong as what we could have been. Give every opportunity a chance. Leave no room for regrets.

-Author Unknown