kokoroZendo

“One morning an irrestible force propelled MIT Professor Marvin Minsky to one corner of his class room and pinned him there as securely as a butterfly impaled in a museum showcase. It was force of habit – a brand new habit imposed upon him on the spot by a group of playfully experimental students. The boys had him at their mercy, as if he was a robot slave and they the masters at the controls.

They ‘robotized’ Minsky with a psychological ruse much like the methods for teaching rats to run through a maze, or training a dog to fetch a newspaper. Soon after the class began, a few students started manipulating him. Whenever he paced to the right, they whispered softly to each other, rustled papers, dropped pencils, and created other minor distractions. But when he happened to take a few steps to the left, they sat up and paid close attention to the lecture. In short they conditioned Minsky by repeatedly punishing him for moving in one direction and rewarding him for moving in the opposite direction. Within half an hour he stopped pacing altogether and stood like a cigar store Indian near the left hand edge of the black board. So subtly had he been habituated that he did not realize an experiment was in progress, and that he was the guinea pig – ironically , since Minsky is a leading authority on the theory of automations.” (Think, November – December 1969).

By all accounts, Minsky is not one of those ordinary Steve and Charlie. Minsky is listed on Google Directory as one of the all time top six people in the field of AI. Isaac Asimov described Minsky as one of only two people he would admit were more intelligent than himself, the other being Carl Sagan. Patrick Winston has also described Minsky as the smartest person he has ever met. That is some CV, I should say.

Now the pertinent question to ask is where does that leave us? I.e. You and me? When someone like the caliber of Minsky was so easily susceptible to environmental conditioning? How free we are? “Free Will”, “Clear thinking” , “ Seeing it as it is”, “Objectivity” – Are these just yearning s of a mind which is a prisoner of Conditioning. Some of it inherited. By Nature. And some of it acquired thru Nurture.

Are n’t we living the lives of Somnolence, as programmed characters in a Shakespearian drama. Conditioned to see what we want to see, hear what we want to hear and feel what we want to feel.

Perhaps we fail to understand that these conditionings act as Filters between us and the “Real world out there”.

In all reality, it is in our arrogance, we added one of the many meaning of the word Twist “to alter or distort the intended meaning of”.. It suggests that human beings do that only intentionally and deliberately. All other times they seem to claim as they get the Meaning as it is! As one of the best examples of cultural conditioning, it still holds out against some 2500 years of “Experiential Wisdom” of one Sidhartha Gautama who suggested it all starts with having “Right View”. The “Meaning of Meaning” proposed by I.A. Richards, which literally suggested that meaning resides in people and not in Words. It all boils down to same. We create our own Worlds in our Brain, which could be an absolutely distorted version of the real World out there. The realization that our own conditioning and filters Twist (the way I see that) and distort reality may be the sign post at the fork between freedom and free-doom.