I have gotten a lot of emails about my comment on how intelligence is really created by the ability to comprehend pattern recognition. If you want to understand something, you have to reduce it to its seed. How do we even have the idea of future without grasping the existence of a present and past? There are two critical components to intelligence – (1) the realization of TIME, and (2) the observation of PATTERNS.
If we have no concept of TIME than we do not understand a future and therefore we plan for nothing and just live from one step to the next as government employees who assume the state is there to take care of them forever. Grasping the idea of TIME enabled man to plant crops realizing he will have something at the end for his labor and effort. This is essential to the development of intelligence. The second mandatory requirement is PATTERN RECOGNITION. Without that, we will continue to repeat the same thing over and over. Indeed, you have people just looking at the chart of the US share market proclaiming it will crash and burn all based upon the patter of 1929 they are desperately waiting to repeat within understanding the complexity behind it.
This raises an important question that has been the reason WHY I have sought to create a real intelligent computer that learns from experience as an individual does and hopefully demonstrate to the world that there is something we are losing in the process of creating civilization – accumulative knowledge. The old say – Ah. To be young again, but to retain what I now know today. Therein lies the truth. We grow wiser with experience (not all) for that is the pattern recognition process of been there – done that. This process bonds and establishes a personal knowledge-base that we try desperately to pass on to our children, but in reality, everyone still has to stick their finger into a flame of the candle to make sure it is true – fire hurts.
We live and then we die and what vanishes for most of us is that precious knowledge-base. A few of us write down our discoveries and in the world of real science (physics) we build upon the knowledge passed down from those before us and hence we advance. In social science, we do nothing of the sort. Personal bias plagues politics and analysis as people pound their chests and say they are right and the other guy is wrong. Just look at the Goldbugs and how they refuse to quote me because the forecasts disagreed with what they WANTED to happen. This sort of bias plagues everything in social science and dooms civilization condemning us to repeat the same mistakes over and over again. You can prove the gold promoters are wrong every time, but they would NEVER acknowledge such a truth. There is no collective process of passing on the knowledge from one generation to the next. Marxism has killed so many people in revolutions yet we still hear the same solution proposed from Picketty to Obama – get the rich (but not us of course).
Edward Gibbon in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire noted how the Rule of Law collapsed. Once the law only protects government, the end is near for not merely do your human and civil rights vanish, you cannot protect your property of anything else for that matter. Capital hoards and investment declines. This is happening right now with the enactment of FATCA. Everything around us from LIBERTY to PROPERTY is subject to the arbitrary whims of government agents. Gibbon noted that appointing judges who were dependent upon the state was the end of times for the rule of law. We simply cannot have judges appointed by government for then they are dependent upon the favor of those in power to rule against the people.
Edward Gibbon wrote: “Suspicious princes often promote the last of mankind, from a vain persuasion, that those who have no dependence, except on their favor, will have no attachment, except to the person of their benefactor.”
Edward Gibbon wrote of him: Each
“distinction of every kind soon became criminal. The possession of wealth stimulated the diligence of the informers; rigid virtue implied a tacit censure of the irregularities of Commodus; important services implied a dangerous superiority of merit; and the friendship of the father always insured the aversion of the son. Suspicion was equivalent to proof; trial to condemnation. The execution of a considerable senator was attended with the death of all who might lament or revenge his fate; and when Commodus had once tasted human blood, he became incapable of pity or remorse”
(Book 1, Chapter 4).
The defense lawyer James Otis in Boston during February, 1761, pronounced that the writs of assistance of the king were “the worst instrument of arbitrary power, the most destructive of English liberty, and the fundamental principles of law, that ever was found in an English law book.” These writs of assistance allowed government employees to do whatever they wanted as we have going on right now. It is our burden to prove we have any rights – not their’s to restrain themselves. This has placed “the liberty of every man in the hands of every petty officer.” Future President John Adams was there listening to Otis arguing in court, which of course he lost with the judge only ruling for the king. “Then and there,” said John Adams, “then and there was the first scene of the first act of opposition to the arbitrary claims of Great Britain. Then and there, the child Independence was born.”
We have no collective accumulative knowledge-base. We repeat history over and over again BECAUSE we lack the component of intelligence on a collective basis – pattern recognition. Chimps are capable of learning only a limited set of sign language symbols. They are limited with complexity of knowledge structures for they can only express a simple noun-verb sequences. A dog learns to associate a human word with an object. We cannot say get the ball, run upstairs get my shoes, and then bring them both to me now. Collectively, we seem to be stuck in this same rudimentary level of limited association of a single event at one time unable to grasp complexity. Perhaps as society we cannot move forward and are condemned to repeat the past over and over again without the capability to even see the patterns repeat.
Machine knowledge can advance only through pattern recognition. It is the way intelligence is formed. Unfortunately, collective society may be condemned to constantly repeat the past as the rest of us are condemned to sit on the side-lines and what the morons repeat the same thing time and again.
