Alan Kay on 'Learning to See'

It always takes me a while when I'm watching Alan Kay deliver prepared remarks because his emphasis doesn't seem to match the emphasis of his speech.

In this case it strikes me that he's trying to evoke the enormity of human history -- hundreds of thousands of years -- and the surprise that we've only really been trying to "step outside ourselves" for about five hundred. Somehow at least 99.5% of that time has been spent in the fogs before enquiry and only the last 0.5% have we really seen the explosion of mathematics, the emergence of science, and the industrial revolution. That we can fool ourselves allows us to dream of the world to come, but it also eats itself: it locks us in a prison of our own minds. So that is the emphasis that I see in this talk, after puzzling through it in my head for a bit.

This may be true, but I worry that this has been too limited an approach to history. As an artist whose works will likely be lost to history, I must object that there seem to be more artists than ever talked about, more soul-seekers lighting fires than fires that burned across history: most trickle away into embers.

What if the problem isn't that we're always fooling ourselves -- i.e. that we never light fires -- and rather that we have simply not had the right environment for the fires to explode the way they do? What if, say, ideas became properties of trade routes rather than properties of cultures, and the Dark Ages somehow stabilized these trade routes so that the ideas could finally diffuse from one route to another?

It's only a half-baked idea at present, but I'm just not sure that this relatively recent explosion in innovation is due entirely to the fact that people got locked inside their own beliefs. Perhaps that is me getting locked inside my own beliefs though -- beliefs that we are all cosmopolitan and curious and earnest inside.

Interestingly, we humans do literally have to learn to see, including updating our preferences about where to rotate our eyeballs.

Also interestingly, we perceive nothing directly. The role of sense organs is to rule out possibilities. So everything that remains must be internally generated (i.e. conjectural). Before we can see something we must first have an idea about it, and all such ideas come from guesswork.

When we observe correctly we can say that the internal perception corresponds to external reality.

Another property of humans is that our perceptions are distorted by strong emotions such as fears and desires. Overly ambitious people, for instance, perceive the world differently. I wonder whether this goes all the way down to the level of apples and oranges (e.g. not seeing an apple if it is not in my 'interest' to do so).

This struck a chord: "We are the species that fools itself”

I think this is at the heart of how we are capable of creating something from nothing ('create wealth' as pg would say).

There's also a dark side - I've come to notice that people who cannot 'fool themselves' are less happy, and at times dangeruosly so.

We are indeed a self-winding spring.