[P&N] Preface

Citation: Edward A. Lee, 2017: Plato and the Nerd - the creative partnership of humans and technology. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA

I began to read this book completely out of chance and out of my respect to Lee.

Recently, I am reading a book wrote by my professor Edward A. Lee - PLATO AND THE NERD, which is subtitled by “The Creative Partnership of Humans and Technology”.

First I was amazed by the title of this book - “What the heck does Plato do here? I thought he was the ancient greek philosopher! And it turns out to be the famous philosopher himself, out of question. Why would a book talking about science, engineering, and technology has something to do with Plato? I began to read the book with that question.

After reading the Preface, I got the answer:

The title of this book comes from the wonderful book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan (Taleb, 2010), who titled a section of the prologue “Plato and the Nerd.” Taleb talks about “Platonicity” as “the desire to cut reality into crisp shapes.” Taleb laments the ensuing specialization and points out that such specialization blinds us to extraordinary events, which he calls “black swans.” Following Taleb, a theme of my book is that technical disciplines are also vulnerable to excessive specialization; each speciality unwittingly adopts paradigms that turn the speciality into a slow-moving culture that resists rather than promotes innovation.

As far as I am concerned, this is something like thinking out of the box, but much more subtle than that, it could have many layers of meanings. It consists two contradictory but somewhat consistent notions - knowledge and technology consisting of the platonic ideals independent from humans and that humans create rather than discover those purported knowledge and technology, in which nerds act as the creative force that stimulates innovations instead of the miner of preexisting so called truths.

To me, this is an very interesting thought, because I used to believe that the law of nature are definitely discovered by humans for they are fixed and static, somewhat deterministic, at least to my knowledge(though modern physics might give me a big slap). I must admit, to some extent, the theories and theorems created by humans are probably just an illusion created by human beings to force everything make sense, which is very much likely just a wishful thinking. However, I still believe everything has to have its own disciplines, and the universe is somewhat under control. Despite these beliefs of mine, I am very happy to change my opinion if convinced. So, let’s see.

I think the most important thing in the preface are discussed above, but there still are several things I am very interested in:

Driven by the immense potential of computers, this enthusiasm has led to unjustified beliefs that go as far as to assert that everything in the physical world is in fact a computation, in exactly the same sense as in modern computers. Everything, including such complex phenomena as human cognition and such unfamiliar objects as quasars, is software operating on digital data. I will argue that the evidence for such conclusions is weak and the likelihood is remote that nature has limited itself to only processes that conform with today’s notion of digital computation(I couldn’t agree more). And I will show that this digital hypothesis cannot be tested empirically, and therefore can never be construed as a scientific theory. Because the likelihood is remote, the evidence is weak, and the hypothesis is untestable, these conclusions are an act of faith.

I argue that the goal of artificial intelligence to reproduce human cognitive functions in computers is misguided, is unlikely to succeed, and vastly underestimates the potential of computers. Instead, technology is coevolving with humans, augmenting our own cognitive and physical capabilities, all the while enabling us to nurture, evolve, and propagate the technology. We are seeing the emergence of symbiotic coevolution, where the complementarity between humans and machines dominates over their competition.

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