[Above: still images from the 2010 South Korean film Quiz King, also known as The Quiz Show Scandal. See the note at the bottom of this post for more information.]
From whiskey river:
We are born for wonder, for joy, for hope, for love, to marvel at the mystery of existence, to be ravished by the beauty of the world, to seek truth and meaning, to acquire wisdom, and by our treatment of others to brighten the corner where we are.
(Dean Koontz)
…and:
You have to take seriously the notion that understanding the universe is your responsibility, because the only understanding of the universe that will be useful to you is your own understanding.
(Terence McKenna)
Not from whiskey river:
Indeed, the only truly serious questions are ones that even a child can formulate. Only the most naive of questions are truly serious. They are the questions with no answers. A question with no answer is a barrier that cannot be breached. In other words, it is questions with no answers that set the limits of human possibilities, describe the boundaries of human existence.
(Milan Kundera [source])
…and:
Coming Your Way
A woman walks, absorbed in the air
of her ill fortune, absorbing
the clean breeze in the sunlight
of a small town, seeing what she sees
through the lens of what she’s seen before,
as through glasses custom-made
for someone else. For someone else,
surely, because the events
that brought her here didn’t suit her
in temperament, conditioning, appetite.
Was it her fault she’d been so unhappy?
Were the events, the people, so bad?
Think of the results of good perfume
at the wrong time; the bitter mouthwash
of wine after a glass of milk.Too bad if our schedules keep us
up late, coffee in our cups,
when we like to turn in early.
Or force us to commute in bad traffic,
in bad air, the first and last hours
of daylight, small birds flying
out of focus on the flat white sky
as we idle and surge and idle, staring
at the changeless billboards and exit signs
we can never get to in time,
causing us to hate our jobs
and speak tensely to our loved ones,
who perhaps love us
too irritatingly well, too calmly…We adjust as we can to what nears us.
We turn, and turn, like leafy plants
to the sun of our circumstance,
hardly noticing the gradual alterations
to our tastes in music, recreation,
food, even forms of intimacy.
Women who live together align cycles.
Men who drink together every week
begin to laugh in roughly the same way:
the new half-scornful laugh
that alienates an office superior
or close friend, or a wife.And now this woman whose good intentions
have soured through bad alloys
of companionship, diet, occupation —
she is new in town and is looking around
mistrustfully, but with a shred of hope
as fine as the unraveled strand of hair
that lifts and falls, troubling her cheek
as she walks slowly but steadily
across the green, heading for this very spot.She will turn to one of us
and one of us will turn to her
or away. Look at your blank faces!
Why are we all gathered here
if not to couple souls on earth?
Who among us can convertJ
without a single touch
the sour in her thwarted self
to sweet? You? You?
(J. Allyn Rosser [source])
…and:
[British mathematician Alan] Turing proposed an experiment. A panel of judges poses questions by computer terminal to a pair of unseen correspondents, one a human “confederate,” the other a computer program, and attempts to discern which is which. There are no restrictions on what can be said: the dialogue can range from small talk to the facts of the world (e.g., how many legs ants have, what country Paris is in) to celebrity and heavy-duty philosophy — the whole gamut of human conversation…I am participating in [the 2009 competition], as one of four human confederates going head-to-head (head-to-motherboard?) against the top AI programs. In each of several rounds, I, along with the other confederates, will be paired off with an AI program and a judge — and will have the task of convincing the latter that I am, in fact, human.
The judge will talk to one of us for five minutes, then the other, and then has ten minutes to reflect and make his choice about which one of us he believes is the human. Judges will also note, on a sliding scale, their confidence in this judgment — this is used in part as a tie-breaking measure. The program that receives the highest share of votes and confidence from the judges each year (regardless of whether it “passes the Turing test” by fooling 30 percent of them) is awarded the “Most Human Computer” title. It is this title that the research teams are all gunning for, the one that the money awards, the one with which the organizers and spectators are principally concerned. But there is also, intriguingly, another title, one given to the confederate who elicited the greatest number of votes and greatest confidence from the judges: the “Most Human Human” award.
(Brian Christian [source])
_______________________
Note: About the Image
First, there was Robert Redford’s respectable (and respectful) drama, Quiz Show. Then in 2008, we got Slumdog Millionaire, the British/Indian “epic romantic drama adventure film” (as Wikipedia classifies it) about a contestant in the Indian version of the TV show, Who Wants to be a Millionaire? Then in 2010, along came the South Korean comedy Quiz King, also called The Quiz Show Scandal… Here’s what BeyondHollywood.com says of it, in part:
The film kicks off late one night in Seoul, with four cars getting into an accident and somehow all managing to hit the same young woman… Whilst trying to figure out the mysterious woman’s identity, the police come across a flash drive in her handbag, which once unencrypted reveals what appears to be the answer to the final, 10 million dollar question on the country’s most popular television quiz show. Of course, this still leaves another 29 questions to get through, so the motley crew all rush off to try and cram as much trivia into their heads as possible before putting themselves forward for the program.
The Quiz Show Scandal is a film very much in Jang Jin’s style, being a genre blending piece that starts off in typically eclectic fashion, introducing a disparate set of characters that include, but are not limited to, a gambling addict, a genius college student, the wife of a woman in a coma, four members of a depression support group, and two gangsters with a man tied up in the boot of their car. This certainly gives the film the feel of an old fashioned caper, as it flits between the cast as they go about their shenanigans, usually accompanied by light hearted and wacky music.
It does sound like a funny set of premises. But I haven’t seen the film, and am honestly not sure how much I’d enjoy myself for the entire two-hour length. (I finally found some clips online, but they’re not English-subtitled. General impression, however: think It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World, turned up to 11.)
Nance says
“You have to take seriously the notion that understanding the universe is your responsibility, because the only understanding of the universe that will be useful to you is your own understanding.” True, dat. I’ve cycled through a ton of other people’s understandings, but in the end, if it doesn’t jibe with my own, I can do no more than entertain it and move on. I must ask me.
“A question with no answer is a barrier that cannot be breached.” The question I’ve been struggling with these last few days (months, years) is: What are the elderly (a category we are joining sooner or later) supposed to think and how are they supposed to feel in order to be considered “healthy normal”? Because my age cohort is joining at a rather difficult time and no generation prior to this one has ever been so concerned to be healthy and normal. Once again, there’s an eerie coincidence at work in the timing of our posts, for I wrote mine today before reading this one.
The Rosser poem is what my father used to call, when he wanted to describe something that overwhelmed him, “something else.” I’ve snatched it as an addendum to my New Year’s post, because I can’t help it; the post insisted.
John says
I’d probably be alarmed about these coincidences if they didn’t please me so much. :)
What exactly, or even approximately, is “healthy normal”? I don’t think I know the answer, so I’m not about to volunteer it. But one aspect of Boomers’ unhealthy normality seems to be the quest to know ourselves — our minds and spirits — in ways which are flat-out impossible. (There’s a passage somewhere in Alan Watts’s writings about the slippery futility of a mind’s trying to understand itself; he compares it to a flame trying to burn itself, or (I think) a fingertip trying to touch itself.) Because that’s been our default setting our whole lives, now that we’re aging we hope (if not expect) to be granted wisdom about our new place in the universe simply through introspection (and then, further, through conversation about the introspection).
A memorable science fiction story, by Alfred Bester, is called “The Pi Man.” Its narrator has this extremely odd psychological tic: he’s obsessed with patterns. (He says he’s gifted, or afflicted, with “extrapattern perception.”) When he finds something in nature or the man-made world which is unpatterned, he tries to fix it. Here’s a short example:
That story was published in 1959 but it’s almost scarily prescient about our generation’s determination, as adults, that the outside needs somehow to be brought into alignment with the inside.
marta says
I just listened to a story about the Turing Test! Really, like last night. I think. On radiolab.
And a lecture about it has been used on the TOEFL test, which I sometimes teach.
Anyway, the McKenna quote fits my view of things, and why I so hate giving advice.
Having a child I appreciate the Kundera quote.
The Rosser poem brings to mind all those people who blame the poor for being poor as if the only factor ever to consider are factors in one’s control.
As for the Korean film–I’ll have to ask my students about that.
John says
I think the “Can a computer be indistinguishable from a human?” — not physically, of course (not yet) — is one of the absolutely favorite questions in all of geekdom. An interesting and quasi-recent novel about it is Richard Powers’s Galatea 2.2: a literature professor (?) gets all caught up in a project to “teach” a computer to pass a Master’s exam. Along the way, the computer starts to ask some very difficult questions. (It — the computer in the book — actually managed to pluck at my heartstrings a little… which, in a way, might be one of the Turing test’s challenges.)
Jayne says
It was Kurt Gödel who, in 1931 as a young mathematician, proved there are limits to what we can ever know (Gödel’s incompleteness theorems). I think his theorems can be extended to knowing oneself also.
(I read a fascinating story about Gödel and Alan Turing–A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines, by Janna Levin, several years ago. If you haven’t read it, it’s worth the time.)
Kundera’s quote resonates. Those hard questions. What’s a parent, who also has no answers, to say? I am always amazed by the depth of a toddler’s soul, and the seriousness in which they process the world. Makes me feel like the answer had better be right (as if I’d know). Or at least optimistic.
John says
That Madman/Turing book looks pretty good! Very… different. Thanks for the recommendation. A preview is also available on Google Books, which, hmm, I see is now letting the preview be embedded in a Web page… let’s try this:
(If that works, thank you again for leading me to the experiment!)
Have you ever tackled Douglas Hofstadter’s Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid? Non-fiction — and mind-bendingly idiosyncratic, unlike anything else I’ve ever read (except possibly Hofstadter’s other work!). Honestly, in some of it — the heaviest-going passages discussing and using the language and tools of symbolic logic — my mind glazed over. But the rest…!
John says
The embedded preview did work — thanks again!