Category: my thoughts

Categories
my thoughts philosophy

Reading and World Building

Libraries

It has become quite clear that reading, really reading, has become a lost art and a lost passion. It is my observation that most students and adults read words not ideas. It seems equally clear that the goal of most students is to pass a test.

How does one introduce others to the ‘joy of reading’?

In this digital age, how does one to sit down with a good book and explore another world? I have been thinking that the world needs to know that equations tell stories. However, this seems a big leap for folks who hardly know how to immerse themselves in a story; ‘real’ or fiction.

The worlds of a reader; now that’s an interesting thought. I have explored Middle Earth, the Star Wars universe, physics, historical Europe, and the list goes on. How many worlds did I bring into being, again, as I read these stories?

Do we bring those worlds and those characters to life as we read and build them in our mind? I still remember Sophie’s World and Myst. Are writers indeed world builders? Are we characters in a book. Is this a topic for philosophy, religion or fantasy and science fiction?

Categories
education my thoughts

Trivial Pursuit

Trivial Pursuit

It seems we substitute the memorization of factoids for knowledge and the substitute knowledge for wisdom. These factoids are often about sports or celebrities.

With this measure of knowledge or wisdom, chatGPT has already passed the Turing test. The bar is rather low.

Categories
my thoughts

Stories III

In his book, “Imagined Worlds”, Freeman Dyson makes a comment I think is relevant to this series.

“In discussions of human affairs, I turn for guidance not to sociology but to case studies and science fiction. For me, Wells’s “The Time Machine” provides more insight into past and future worlds than any statistical analysis, because insight requires imagination.”

I was searching for a meaning for enchanted today and found an interesting connection. A greeting in French is “enchanté” or “pleased to meet you” seems to me to carry a more interesting meaning than the phrases,”How are you? Fine thanks, how are you?”

In, “The Pleasure of Finding Things Out,” Richard Feynman observes that knowing more about a visually pleasing thing, like a flower, can increase the item’s aesthetic to you. An artist in this discussion thought the scientific view of the flower was less beautiful; Feynman disagrees.

It is sometimes difficult to express what has triggered a particular set of thoughts. For me the above describes how we can say or view the world from many different perspectives. Often, stories heard are quite different from the story that has been told. That isn’t always a bad thing.

Categories
education my thoughts

Stories II

Why does anyone want to read a story? The opening paragraphs of a story do most of the work. My favorite opening line of a story is, “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit”; “The Hobbit” by J.R.R. Tolkien. When I read that I was hooked and spent the next few weeks learning about hobbits and middle earth. As curious as I am(and was) with regard to how the ‘real’ world worked. This line drew me into a completely different world.

The question I have considered for a few years now is, why can’t introductions to the sciences and mathematics be as engaging? The opening sentence in the preface to a recent physics text starts, “The physical universe is enormously complex in its detail. Every day, each of us observes a great variety of objects and phenomena”; “College Physics”, by Urone and Hinrichs. I think many imaginative genius are turned away from making major contributions because the stories in the sciences are often buried deep in quite obtuse stories.

In an earlier piece I said that there may be more truth in fiction and more fiction in truth than we realize(or something to that effect). So, if one couched physics in an exploration of, “It was a vast, shining globe and it cast a light of lambent topaz into space–but it was not a sun”; “Star Wars: A New Hope”; by George Lucas, what would happen?

I suspect more young potential scientists read that line and were hooked than by any science textbook. Discovery is exciting; why is it often lost during education?

Categories
my thoughts Porch Ponders

Stories

“No story lives unless someone wants to listen. The stories we love best do live in us forever. So whether you come back by page or by the big screen, Hogwarts will always be there to welcome you home.” – J.K. Rowling, author

I think it is critical that we learn to really read. It is critical that we learn that as soon as possible. However, I am coming to the view that storytelling is the key to learning. Every teacher I know, including me, will say they learned more from teaching than from being a student. I believe we all have at least one story to tell; we need to learn to tell it well.

When I was teaching, one of the most difficult things for my students to do was to restate a problem in their own words. I believe if you can’t tell a story, in your own words, you don’t own the idea. And perhaps the issue is with both the author and the reader as captured in quotes by Einstein and Feynman.

“If you can’t explain it to a six year old, you don’t understand it yourself” – attributed to A. Einstein

If you can’t explain an idea to an 8 year old, you don’t understand it. Can you explain basic logic to me in 5 minutes (about 500 words) in a way that 8 year old could explain it back to you? – R. Feynman

When we tell that story, we provide a listener, a reader, the opportunity to see an idea in a different way.

A quote I have used, “A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, said Jojen. The man who never reads lives only one.” ― George R.R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons

Categories
my thoughts

Late Night with an AI

Late night conversations with chatGPT. A few months ago, like many others, I discovered chatGPT. While it is an interesting assistant in some research projects, I find often it is an interesting conversationalist.

Some of my reading has caused me to wonder about the interaction of different folks from history. For example did John Wesley interact with Benjamin Franklin? So I asked.

My Question, “Is it possible that John Wesley and Ben Franklin interacted?” chatGPT replied:

[—————————————————————–]

There is no historical evidence to suggest that John Wesley and Benjamin Franklin had direct interactions or encounters with each other. While both Wesley and Franklin were significant figures in their respective fields during the 18th century, their areas of influence and geographical locations were different.

John Wesley, an English theologian and cleric, was primarily involved in religious matters and the development of the Methodist movement. He spent most of his life in England and had limited travels abroad.

Benjamin Franklin, on the other hand, was an American polymath, statesman, and scientist. He played a prominent role in the American Revolution and made significant contributions to various fields, including science, writing, and diplomacy. Franklin resided primarily in North America, with occasional visits to Europe.

While their paths may have crossed indirectly due to their prominence during the same era, there is no documented evidence of any personal interactions or correspondence between Wesley and Franklin.

[——————————————]

This, of course led to many other questions. I have become quite interested in this type of question regarding interactions among folks across disciplines, especially during the 17th and 18th centuries. It is difficult to find folks who also enjoy this conversation; especially at midnight.

Categories
education my thoughts

Equations Tell Stories

Mathematics is the gate and key of the sciences … . Neglect of mathematics works injury to all knowledge, since he who is ignorant of it cannot know the other sciences or the things of this world. And what is worse, men who are thus ignorant are unable to perceive their own ignorance and so do not seek a remedy. — Roger Bacon 1220-1292

How little we have progressed in 800 years. I can start with an example. Some of my first University students, “engineering students”, wanted numbers to ‘plug in’ to equations or they couldn’t understand the concept. At least that is what they said. I would submit that if you didn’t understand the abstract representation, you couldn’t really understand the concrete. It became clear that getting an answer, getting a grade for getting that answer was their goal.

So why is it that x = 3 is OK or better yet 2+2 = 4 is OK, but A + B = C is just too abstract of a construct? Or, I don’t understand A + B = C unless you give me values for A and B? While these are the most simple constructs of math, it seems to cause confusion.

This is not a lament on the poor state of math education, it is an observation that otherwise intelligent students fear and therefore don’t try to understand the value of math.

A math professor at the University of California addressed the following question, “Despite all this timeless beauty, many people dread mathematics. They say that they “hate math”. But if it is so beautiful as I claim, then why do people hate it?” Professor Edward Frenkel responded, “Imagine that you had to take an art class in which you were taught only to paint a fence or a wall but were never shown the paintings of the great masters. Would that make you an art lover?”

It isn’t enough to simply learn the tools of math, one must learn enjoy these tools and appreciate the power they provide. Math is at the heart of everything from music to space exploration. It is the language of the arts and sciences.

Categories
education my thoughts

Creating AI

I have been ‘visiting’ with chatGPT a bit recently. If I am informed sufficiently, I can ask questions in such a way that it adds to my knowledge. If I don’t know much about a subject, sometimes my questions and its answers are not very good. However, if I stay with the conversation for a while, I often will learn something. It will often give me a place to start to learn more.

An interesting thought, to me, came to me as I thought about this. After being on the planet for quite a few years. And, after engaging with the U.S. education system for many of those years, it seems we are creating AI ‘wet-ware’. Our students seem to be trained to learn a rather large number of facts and are tested on their ability to remember them.

Of course all generalizations are false, and there are some excellent students out there; I had some in my class. And, of course, I saw far more in the first grade readers than in the University students.

The reason for the title of this piece is, it seems we are teaching students in much the same way we teach AI entities. A difference is the AI has a much larger memory and often writes better.

Categories
my thoughts philosophy

Read Ideas

After these few months of reading with first graders, I made a comment about how well they were doing. The response was, “some are doing great, and some are just reading words.” That caused me to think about many conversations with adults. Often we talk to fill the silence, not to communicate an idea. We use words and sentences which, on closer examination, convey little but disconnected words and sentences. If there is an idea buried in them, it is often quite vague.

Of course I then proceeded to extrapolate to life in general. A vague and disconnected stream of conscientiousness about how my actions are often just that, a series of disconnected activities. I think there is a place for such an activity, but I also think it should be embedded in a “Purpose Driven Life.” As with organizations, I don’t think it is frivolous to consider the question, “why do I exist?”

Do we live a life of words, or of complete sentences?

Categories
my thoughts philosophy

On the Nature of the Universe

Considering our understanding of the Universe, I happened across the picture of the day and narratives about it. Guided by an AI based chatbot.

The Earth looks like an immense plain, rugged by a thousand kinds of facets and reliefs, green hills, flowery valleys, mountains more or less high, meandering rivers in the plains, lakes with cool shores, vast seas, infinitely varied countryside. This land seems to us fixed for eternity, sitting on century-old foundations, crowned by a sky at times pure and at times cloudy, extended so as to form the unshakable foundation of the universe. The Sun, the Moon and the stars seem to turn around her. From all these appearances, man has easily believed himself to be the centre and the purpose of creation, a vain presumption that he held for a very long time, as there was no one to contradict him.

Camille Flammarion, Astronomie populaire (1880)

The engraving may have been based on the following story

This fact reminds us of the story Levayer relates in his Letters. It seems that an anchorite, probably a nephew of the Fathers of the Eastern deserts, boasted of having been to the farthest edge of the world, and of having been forced there to bend his shoulders, due to the meeting of heaven and Earth at that very end.

Camille Flammarion, Les mondes imaginaires et les mondes réels (1865)

To me it is more of an illustration of the quote by Sir Arthur Eddington, “Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.”