Difficulties in Later Learning of 'Technical' Languages?

I'm wondering, since we have trouble mastering a spoken language if we start learning it after the end of puberty (or thereabouts, as I understand it), does this apply to what you might call 'technical languages' such as the concepts in something like statistics or other branches of maths? Is it that if we learn them later in life we are not able to think with them as dexterously? Even though we treat these things as distinct from spoken language, it's not obvious (to me at least) that the brain necessarily should. I'm wondering what research has been done into this, or what knowledge might give us clues to the answer?

'Inner voice' as General purpose Intra-brain Communication Mechanism?

No time to write this up properly.... I wonder if one of the major reasons for our 'inner voice' is as a general purpose means by which information can be communicated between the various brain 'modules'?

It seems likely to me that the information 'vocalise' through our 'inner voice' is processed and filtered through to all parts of the brain that would normally receive information about the sounds (and thus speech) that we would hear through our ears. This would mean that if the brain can internally produce information and turn it into speech the 'inner voice' that all these areas of the brain can be informed of that.

Though I don't have time to try and think of what the reasons for this are, this seems more likely to me than always having all of these special purpose communication channels through the brain (perhaps it is because that might be duplication? Also, note that I'm not trying to deny the existence of special purpose communication channels).

I have heard that the 'inner voice' was likely to have been a later evolutionary development than the ability to hear and process language or language-like statements, and this intra-brain communication usage would thus have been one of the benefits it could have brought.

I don't know what might have been written about this idea already, and all I can say is that I have read a few things that I think ought to have mentioned such an idea if the author had been aware of it.

Example of Thought Substituted With Judgements Based on Perceived Characteristics

The italicised text in the following quoted passage is pointing out an example of the lazy substitution of thought with judgements based on perceived characteristics.

It's showing a case where, rather than thinking about whether a certain classification (in this case ‘art’) is appropriate in a particular case, this decision is made only by looking for certain characteristics that we take as markers for that classification.

We'll automatically perceive something as being, or not being, of that classification on the basis of the presence or absence of these characteristics.

Howard Jacobson writes:

We are right to shrink from the very idea of a "funny" book. There should be no such genre. We should expect laughter to be integral to the business of being serious. We are back in a new dark age of the imagination. We read to sleep. Either we refuse the idea of art altogether (something we do with every page of a Dan Brown novel we turn), or we confer integrity on it from outside, allowing it to be art only by virtue of the pre-determined importance of its subject matter, or the acceptability of its attitudes. This is a species of censorship to which we have all acceded. (my emphasis)

---

The article this passage is quoted from is here. I actually have only skimmed through it -- it's just that that sentence caught my eye.

""

All times come

(...sounded nice...no idea whose lines I might be repeating here)

Venter, Kurzweil and Brooks on the Cutting Edge of Biology

A long but exciting article on how Craig Venter, Ray Kurzweil and Rodney Brooks envisage the cutting-edge path being marked out in the combination of biology and information technology. For example, Venter talks about some very interesting techniques being developed to attack cancer.

Room for Rent - Toowong

Large room in furnished two bedroom unit

• Room has built-in wardrobe / storage space, nice views from window
  
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• Located in Explorer Street, 10 mins walk from buses, trains and shopping center
  
• Share with PhD student in mid twenties - i.e. me :-)

Availability

• Male or female
  
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• Available 21 July

$115 / week, plus bond and utilities

Contact: 0403 939 167 / 3371 8052 / gmail: james.cole

Facade - a one-act interactive drama

Facade - a one-act interactive drama. Sounds interesting.

"Facade calls itself a one-act interactive drama, and is an attempt to create realistic 3D AI characters acting in a real-time interactive story, where you can talk to them via a natural language text interface. The player is cast as a visiting longtime friend of Grace and Trip, a couple in their early thirties, and ends up in a verbal crossfire resulting from their failing marriage." (via Slashdot)

It's available as a free 800MB download, or on 2 CDs by mailorder.

Genetic Algorithm Deathmatch

Seeing this Slashdot story on this use of machine learning in a computer game, made me wonder if anyone has tried to do anything like use genetic algorithms to control and evolve AI players in something like a Quake deathmatch?

Chuck a bunch together with random algorithms... the players that survive longer get duplicated and modified. The appealing thing about that is that the players would be in a fairly complex environment, which might help drive towards fairly complex behavior, and that it could be fully automated - the players, the selection and modification. The complexity of the environment includes the 3D environment, other AI players, their strageties, how they handle the various types of situations that come up, etc etc.

I'm not that interested in spending the time to seriously look into this but I did this google search, which seems to include a few such things, such as the work described in this paper.

A Less Obvious Use of Logging Information

I think a lot of good things could come if applications kept more detailed logging information, as Jon Udell has talked a bit about recently. Imagining the sorts of uses such logging could be put to is difficult, however, I think, and this post is simply about one posisbility.

Temporal organisation of, and access to, of information seems to be pretty powerful. We seem to fairly good at associating things with a time period, or at least a position relative to other temporal items.

I was trying to find some things I'd written somehwere in all my PhD-related files, sometime mid-late last year, but there wasn't any easy way to find them because the temporal information in the system is too meagre.

Windows keeps the date of the last update to a file, but that is not very useful for this purpose. A simplified explanation of why is that even though the majority of the text in a file might have been written back then, I might have made some minor update or change to the file at any time since then, so the date of last update is not really a very good indicator of when text in the file was written.

What I need to be able to do is ask the system when the majortiy of the text (say 70% or more of it) in the file was last updated. Without going into all the sorts of technical issues, if you kept detailed logging information about changes to files, you could do this.

User Interface Principle: Operations Applicable to Representations in Any Context

Here's a user-interface principle: if you can do some operation X to some reprepresentation of some thing, A, in some context, then you should be able to do X to any other representation of A in any other context, unless there is a reason not to. My impression is that in most programs, which of the representations of an item you can perform an operation on is a fairly ad-hoc.

Here's an example of where I'd like such a design. I use Winamp (v5.04) to play MP3 files, and when you search for files, you can right click on an item in the results and choose to move that file to after the current song (being played) in the playlist. But if you right-click a file that's in the playlist itself, there's no option to move it to after the current song, which I often find frustrating.

I'm not up on writings on UI stuff, so I have no idea what might have been written about this kinda idea...

Causes Can be Effects

Causes can be effects

When you find the cause of an effect it's easy to think that's the end of the story, but we need to realise that that cause may itself be an effect of another cause... and so on. The most significant of the causes of an effect may be a number of steps back in this chain.

A Fair Perspective On Increasing Diversity of Choice?

Negative effects of change impinge on our consciousness and we are all prone to seeing this change as those negative effects, and the prior situation in a positive light -- as their absence. We do not compare the positives and negatives of the change against those of the prior situation. Virginia Postrel points out some thinking that's fallen into this trap with respect to the increasing diversity of choice in modern life. (via A&L Daily)

Aim low and you shall achieve

A Reciprocal Deal

When naturalistic methods of obtaining knowledge suggest a different view from religious ones, should they respect those views and not try to compete with them? Salmon Rusdie says that it might be fair to answer "yes" but only if there was a reciprocal deal, with a "yes" answer to the flip-side: should religious views respect the naturalistic ones and not try to compete with them?.

Showing Date of Most Recent Contents Modification

It would be good if Windows Explorer could, when it's listing the details of a folder, optionally show the time of the most recent update to the folder's contents. By the most recent update I mean the modification time for the most recently modified file within the folder's (transitive) contents. This way, when I’m backing up folders, I can easily tell whether any changes have been made within a folder since I last backed it up.

Another use for such a detail would be sorting folders based on how recently an update was made to them. I think this would be quite useful, as only a small majority of folders are that actively used, if my experience is anything to go by, and if you equate activity with relevance then such sorting would allow you to more easily focus on these relevant folders and ignore the less relevant ones.

Short Article Critiquing Intelligent Design Movement

A very nicely written, well argued, piece on why the Intelligent Design movement has a flawed and rather underhand modus operandi.

Requirements on Understanding for Software Brains?

Ricky writes: "Until we fully understand how the human brain operates, I don't see how it is possible to download somebody's mind and have it do anything constructive."

Ray Kurzweil believes that we can do it without needing to understand how it works. He thinks that if we can have high-enough resolution scanners, such that we can get an accurate scan of the physical structure of the brain, we can -- basically -- encode and simulate that structure within a computer. Doing this would of course require a suitable understanding of the way the low-level physical structures work, but it would not require an understanding of what the actual neurones and higher-level structures were doing.

Do I think this is possible? I don't know whether it is possible, but I'm not aware of anything that could rule it out. That is, it seems to be a matter of "we'll have to wait and see".

Perceptual Adaption At Work

Just a quick observation... I often work on my PhD stuff at a local coffeeshop, and sometimes it's a bit nosiy so I listen to music on headphones...

at first I have to have the music fairly loud to block out the other sounds enough but there's a quite noticable difference that occurs after some amount of time -- I dunno, maybe 5-10 minutes -- where the music sounds a lot louder and I can turn it down a fair bit but still effectively block out the sounds.

The transition is not that noticable, but that there has been a change (no doubt a gradual one) is. What seems to be happening is that my brain is adapting to the headphone sounds, and getting better at focusing on them and at filtering out the other sounds.

Re: Language for Talking, and Thinking, About Evolution

A reply to a comment from Bevan on my last post:

>Comments:
>Some interesting thoughts here James, I've got some of my
>own opinions :-).
>
>In the first section (situation instead of environment) I
>would more carefully consider who is using the term
>environment when analysing the correctness of its usage. I
>certainly consider environment to be more than the physical
>landscape. My housemate for example is doing her PhD in
>ecological modeling. She (and people in similar fields) do
>use the term environment correctly. Factors such as
>biodiversity, population distribution and the presence of
>predators / prey are all important consideration for them
>when talking about environment. You are certainly not going
>to convince them to change their correct use of environment
>to situation because a portion of population use the term
>incorrectly. Isn't it a matter of educating / correcting
>people on the proper meaning the of term rather than consider
>it tainted and ditch it for a new one?

I don't want to imply that nobody uses it correctly, but I still think that in practice people -- even some experts -- think of the envrionment in a too narrow way (regarding my note of 'even some experts', I think, for example, that some such mistaken thinking by experts was cleared up by John Maynard-Smith's Evolutionarily Stable Strategies (except I don't think that article describes it very well, but it was the best link I could find) concept).

If this is the case then of course their notion of 'environment' needs correcting. But with respect to describing evolution, I think that even if with a proper understanding of 'environment', the notion of 'situation' is a more /appropriate/ (not more correct) term.

I should also make it clear that I'm not trying to change anyone else's vocabulary, I'm just trying to figure out what I think is the clearest way of thinking about these concepts.

>Regarding the use of increase and optimise - note the s not
>the z you seppo :-). I agree that changes due to natural
>selection is better expressed using "optimise" rather than
>increase. There are however cases where an organisms fitness
>does increase due to natural selection. If a change in the
>organism results in that organism being far more successful
>in its environment does this note denote a increase in the
>fitness with respect to that environment? Success can be

I don't have any problem with the concept of fitness as something that can be increased or decresed. I think that optimisation -- with an 's' just for you! :-) -- leads to increased fitness. I think that it can cause problems however, to characterise evolution as a process that "increases fitness".

I think that doing so paints a picture of fitness as something like a numerical quantity that can be increased or decreased, and where you can compare these numerical values across different environments and species. I think that talking of evolution optimising fitness helps avoid these problems. Any particular optimisation will lead to an increase of fitness. But there's no universal measure of fitness that is you are constantly bumping up.

I think it's easy to misunderstand this point, and think that it implies some sort of extreme "fitness relativism" where there's no means to make any comparison in terms of fitness or in terms of other concepts such as "sophistication" or "complexity" of design.

Fitness may be relative to situation, and no two situations may be /completely identical/, but situations can share a lot of similarities. After all, every situation in this universe is under the same laws of physics (or at least I don't think we have any reason to believe otherwise). And there are surely certain types of abstract problem solving abilities that have a very broad range of applicability, to give another example.

>measured in a number of ways of course: population density,
>height in the food chain, susceptibility to harsh
>environmental changes, etc. Take the example of a carnivore
>diversifying its diet to become an omnivore. This will likely
>come about due to changes in its environment, e.g. lack of
>prey. If by widening its diet it really begins to flourish
>could this not be called an increase in the fitness with
>respect to its environment?
>
>There is some really good reading about this: Carl Sagan's
>book Cosmos (first 50 pages for so I think) has a very good
>argument for natural selection and explanation of how it
>happens. Jared Diamond's books 'The Rise And Fall Of The
>Third Chimpanzee' and 'Guns, Germs And Steel : A Short
>History Of Everybody For The Last 13,000 Years'. For
>something easier and more entertaining I've got the David
>Attenborough's 'Life of Mammals' DVDs. They've got some
>interesting explanations about the evolution of mammals.

Ah, all books that I would like to read but haven't yet :-). "Guns, Germs and Steel" in particular.

>Good luck with the PhD...

Thanks.

Language for Talking, and Thinking, About Evolution

A lot of people recognise that the language we use to talk about evolution is, if taken literally, quite inaccurate. The following are some musings, hastily written up, on how to more accurately describe what is going on. I haven't thought these things through much, and I haven't really looked at whether the suggested alternatives would be suitable for practical situations (like considering whether they are too unweildly or not).

Use 'Situation' instead of 'Environment'

We talk of the creature's environment setting up the selection pressures. Properly understood, there's nothing wrong with this. At the same time, I think the conception of 'environment' most people have can mislead them when thinking about this. The term 'environment' can conjure up the environment of the landscape around the creature, the other plant and animal species. That it can tend to obscure is that the other members of the same species are part of the environment, and that the results of the creatures own behavior is also part of its environment. I think it can also obscure the fact that the environment is not just the physical place, but the unfolding and changing environment over time (over time the selection pressures will change). For these reasons, I think the reality is better captured by the term 'situation'. The creature's situation sets up the selection pressures.


Use 'Optimize' rather than 'Increase'

We tend to say that evolution works to increase a entity's fitness. I think there are two reasons why this can be misleading. It implies that there is some one dimensional value that is being increased... which is okay if you understand that value as an "abstract" fitness. It's just that it doesn't capture well the multidimensionality of the factors that actually make the difference to survival and propagation. "Increase" also suggests a ladder and some path of progress... but this is a bit misleading. For fitness is always relative to the current environment, and what is fit will change as the environment changes. It is not so much that we have steadily increasing fitness, but that the system's fitness "tracks" the changes in the environment. (this is not to say that because 'localized changes' don't always lead to greater general sophistication the biosphere will not end up creating greater complexity over time). For this reason, I think that it is better to talk of creatures fitness being continually optimized rather than continually increasing.


Talk of Natural Selection and Evolution as Products Not Forces, and of optimization potentials instead of implicit goals

When we talk of evolution at work, we tend to say things like "evolution created eyes so animals could hunt their prey". This language is inaccurate because it implies there's an active force pushing, or trying to push, the evolution in a particular direction. But natural selection and evolution is not so much a force that does things, but the product of certain types of situations.

It's the product of situations containing the three factors of variation, heridiblity of that variation, and, basically, competition for survival. When these three factors are present, natural selection and the evolution of forms are the consequences. That is, the natural selection process and the evolution of forms are emergent phenomena.

I started reading Stuart Kauffman's At Home in the Universe last night, and I think there is some of this confusion about evolution in his consideration of how self-organising systems relate to evolutionary processes, though I don't have time to go into the details here (so you can ignore this statement if you want :-)).

We talk of creatures, or evolution itself, evolving some feature for some purpose. This is really just a way of talking and is quite inaccurate. Creatures can't direct their evolution like this, and neither can evolution itself. Evolution does not have goals, and even if it did, it doesn't have any foresight that it could use to reach them. (thinking about evolution as if it did have goals and/or foresight seem to be very common problems). We can much more easily see this when we understand that natural selection is an emergent phenomenom, and I think part of the reason this problem occurs is because of seeing it as some sort of force at work.

It seems difficult to talk of evolution without talking about goals. We talk of evolution as coming up with solutions to problems (it's goals are to solve those problems). What's really going on, however, is that a particular situation provides certain opportunities for creatures to evolve in certain ways. That is, in any given situation, there might be various ways that a creature could potentially evolve that would improve its fitness. If the appropriate mutations happen to occur, the species will move in one or more of those directions. So it's not so much that there is a problem to solve -- a goal to be attained by solving it -- but that the environment possesses opportunities that creatures can happen to evolve towards. I would describe these opportunities as optimization potentials (and remember of course that any change in the environment, including the evolution of a particular species, may change the optimization potentials for it). So natural selection may end up meeting optimization potentials. So perhaps you can say something like "the unfolding situation made use of an optimization potential to evolve feature Y in Xs".

So we can say stuff like "The situation selected for Y", "Optimization emerges from a situation", "Xs evolved feature Y by natural selection's optimization".... but as I said at the start I haven't really thought about using this language in a practical context... and I don't have time for this right now.