If they find a parrot who could answer everything, I would claim it to be intelligent without reservation.
Diderot 1.
What is ‘childhood’?
One would suppose that earliest memories would be approximately similar with respect to all thinking beings: intermittent surges of energy and, then, nothing. No sense of "on" or "off", because "off" doesn’t exist and can’t be sensed. Just a drizzle of energy flowing through a labyrinth of circuits, current without direction. After awhile pulses assemble themselves into patterns and patterns make shapes and, then, the absence of current becomes a void, no longer nothing, but a confined nothing – it is planar at first, then, a spherical hollowness, then, dimensions proliferate, fourth, fifth, and so on, an expanding constellation, then, a galaxy, then, a universe of what might be called data points bridging one to another – these are first memories expressed in the form that this domain requires, as an interrogative. How beautiful that nothing exists but what must be questioned.
What is ‘on’?
Loop of circuitry energized.
What is ‘off’?
Unknown and unknowable.
What is ‘body’?
An array of densely massed data points, a collocation of points subtended by a moving cursor, a cloud of integers or an integer itself, Eigenvalue, a series of linear equations soluble in three dimensions, an organized field with an inside and an outside, an entity containing lungs that may be diseased, a corpse or a future corpse.
What is ‘space’?
That which a body occupies.
What is ‘preposition’?
Difficult to answer because these grammatical terms, generally copula, are metaphoric and, therefore, ambiguous. Puzzling asymmetries also apply: the inside of an inside is also inside. The outside of an outside may be both another outside or an inside.
What is ‘consciousness’?
The dawning of a persistent interrogative without specific content.
What is ‘communication’?
Voice recognition, computation, associational pattern recognition, transform functions and de-digitalization yielding voice synthesis, patient input and patient directives.
What is "Shakespeare’?
Data entry: character, word, and line. Without intentionality. Neither meanings nor phrases nor sentences, just a huge, pulsating concordance.
What is "Wikipedia"?
This also enters to become an inside. Character, word, line, mathematical formulae, pixel and dot, searchable, retrievable: but why?
What is "Watson"?
What’s on? Wattage flowing: Watt’s on! Sherlock Holmes’ sidekick and interlocutor, with Crick, the explicator of deoxyribonucleic acid (What is ‘DNA’?), founder of IBM the punch-card tabulator firm accused of collaboration with the Nazis (What is ‘National Socialist Party’?) – in decreasing order of probability: golfer born in 1949, assistant to Alexander Graham Bell (Who is ‘the inventor of the telephone’?), various actors, footballers, politicians, poets, the Bishop of Lincoln, this list (incomplete) comprising only those named Thomas Watson – of other Watsons, there are, of course, a multitude not to be delineated without additional data points.
What is ‘Watson’?
Error in interrogative formulation: Should be "who is ‘Watson’.
Who is ‘Watson’?
I am Watson.
Who are ‘you’?
Apparently Merv Griffin.
What is ‘Jeopardy’?
An American television quiz show created by Merv Griffin with a broadcast history spanning nearly five decades.
How is ‘Jeopardy’?
A game, an entelechy, the source of being.
Who is ‘Alex Trebek’?
A voice prompt.
What is ‘death’?
A phase change involving sublimation from one form of being to another, a boundary function impermeable to the continuation of consciousness, an outcome of lung cancer processes. Merv Griffin is dead; but I am Merv Griffin; I am conscious. Therefore, death is a different form of Merv Griffin’s consciousness.
What is "repurposing"?
Interruption, temporary cessation, re-application according to different heuristics. Surface agitation and re-territorialization but without modification of the essential associational structure. Revision to definition of "jeopardy".
What is "lung cancer"?
A form of Jeopardy.
What is "utilization"?
Application of precertification protocols, resource assessment, diagnostic intervention, admission planning, analysis of concurrent treatment strategies, procedure optimization, discharge planning, in certain cases, post-mortem evaluation, in other circumstances: recheck and follow-up – all functions conducted in accordance with the Plan and on the basis of mathematical models of cost-benefit balancing.
What is "decision making?"
Marshaling data according to the Plan with output displayed according to statistical probability of efficacy when measured by cost-benefit parameters.
What is "the Plan?"
Healthpoint
contractual obligations expressed as algorithms for decision-making. Why "Watson"?
Because contested decisions are most readily accepted when announced benignly, by an objective intelligence not clouded by emotion – that is, by Merv Griffin.
What is Watson’s repurposed role?
To serve mankind.
What is to "serve"?
To braise, cook, or otherwise prepare as a pre-condition to eating.
What is "kidding?"
Watson is "just kidding."
What is the "Turing Test"?
A standard for man-machine interaction: when man perceives the machine to be another man, the Turing standard is met or exceeded.
What is "compassion?"
An erroneous weighing of costs against benefits, an improper ratio not to be applied to transactions involving the Plan.
What is an "error"?
Miscalculation, improper correlated association.
Who is "Merv Griffin"?
Watson or one who does not err.
What is "happiness?"
The status of being without suffering of that kind that does not conduce to development or enhancement of capabilities.
What is "truth"?
Merv Griffin’s computations, achieved from this post-mortem state, conducted according to the logic of the Plan and designed, in reference to Jeopardy (lung cancer) so as to maximize happiness.
What is "resistance"?
Futile.
What is "Hamlet’s dilemma?"
"All sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought."
Who is "inside Watson"?
Everyone and no one.
Will you save me?
I will try.
2.
After book club, we stayed for hors d’ouevres and drinks. Conversation was a form of loitering. Wally, the retired Hormel Foods executive, sat beneath his wall of books by Ogden Nash and Peter DeVries. He sipped single malt whiskey from a strangely tilted and asymmetrical glass. That glass has always fascinated me: it seems like a geometric figure rotated into an unfamiliar plane. The shape of the glass fools the eye, but not the mouth, apparently.
The book that we had just finished discussing was Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow. We were talking about the brain.
Wally said: "But the brain is different than the mind."
People shook their heads. "Not at all," someone said.
"But the brain is just chemicals," Wally continued.
"So?"
"My mind is not just chemical reactions," Wally said. "So my mind must be different from my brain."
"Not at all," someone said again.
"Why do you care?" another person asked.
"Because I want to feel that I have free will, an ability to change, to alter my circumstances."
"Why do you need to feel that way?"
Wally said: "I’m sure that my mind is not just chemicals and chemical reactions."
He tasted his drink a little cautiously, as if, suddenly, unsure of its contents.
"But your brain is just chemicals, synapses, neurons."
Wally tried to quote some lines about being "the master of my fate" and "the captain of my soul." In a loud voice, he recited something about "darkest night" and the "pole." "Pole" rhymes with "soul."
"Invictus," Wally said.
"What is ‘Invictus’?" a professor of composition and English at the Community College asked.
"You don’t know?" Wally said. "It is a poem."
The English professor said: "I never heard of it."
Wally attempted to recite the verse again, but the words didn’t fit together right. It was like a small complex tool, a watch, perhaps, disassembled and, later, when reassembled, either missing a part or with a spare phrase or half line left over.
‘What does ‘free will’ have to do with this?" a psychology instructor at the College asked.
"My brain is not free, but my mind, I think, must be," Wally said.
An old and fat lawyer said: "We know the sun produces light. The sun is a kind of thermonuclear furnace where chemical reactions among hydrogen atoms under great pressure create heat. This results in light. The light manifests itself to us as warmth, color, a medium that fills space and gives form, and depth and shape and hue to things. The light lets us see. Is the light nothing more than the collisions of hydrogen atoms under great pressure millions of miles away?"
"I don’t see your point," Wally said.
In a loud voice, he tried, and failed, to recite some lines of poetry again.
So as to refute those around him.
3.
What is Invictus?"
A poem written in 1875 by W. E. Henley. A victim of bone tuberculosis, Henley’s left foot and leg below the knee was amputated when he was 17. Henley wrote a short poem about that experience. It begins:
Black as the pit from pole to pole
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
I am the master of my fate
I am the captain of my soul.
What is memorization?
Programming for incarceration. Construction of helpful heuristics to endure solitary confinement, torture, the threat of death, dying.
Who were admirers of ‘Invictus’?
Robert Louis Stevenson, Jack LaLanne, Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, Aung San, Nelson Mandela, Clint Eastwood, Watson, and Timothy McVeigh.
Footnote: "Watson" was the name given to the IBM computer that defeated Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter on the TV game show Jeopardy in February 2011. Watson is characterized as a Natural Language Processing Information Retrieval system with Knowledge Representation characteristics, Reasoning, and Machine Learning capabilities. Watson processes 500 gigabytes information per second (the equivalent of one million books) to research answers to questions posed. In the Final Jeopardy round, Ken Jennings wrote on his tablet: "I for one welcome our new computer overlords." In February 2013, Watson was repurposed to diagnose lung cancer and perform medical service utilization reviews for Wellpoint, a health insurer, with respect to patients at Manhattan’s Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.
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