The Forking Path oF Human Intellect and Technology

I found the discussion topics for this week to be very interesting and stimulating and I think I was not alone in this belief and can point to the increased activity on the discussion board to prove my point.
Throughout the discussion, readings and exercises from this week, one notion that continued to stand out in my mind is from Jorge Luis Borges’ “The Garden of Forking Paths” in the New Media Reader on pp 29-34.
“I lingered, naturally, on the sentence: I leave to the various futures (not to all) my garden of forking paths. Almost instantly, I understood: ‘the garden of forking paths’ was the chaotic novel; the phrase ‘the various futures (not to all)’ suggested to me the forking in time, not in space. A broad rereading of the work confirmed the theory. In all fictional works, each time a man is confronted with several alternatives, he chooses one and eliminates the others; in the fiction of Ts’ui Pen, he chooses – simultaneously – all of them. He creates, in this way, diverse futures, diverse times which themselves also proliferate and fork,” wrote Borges.
After reading this passage, I envisioned the internet as a garden of forking paths since you can start on one subject and take any direction you want. And at every turn you are presented with another fork.
“The Garden of Forking Paths is an incomplete, but not false, image of the universe as Ts’ui Pen conceived it,” wrote Borges.
I believe we can relate this to the internet and computers in general in the sense that computers are also an incomplete representation of all human knowledge, as discussed this week. They are incomplete pictures of human knowledge because they can not represent dreams, associations, memory fragments and illusions of the human mind. This is where the path of the computers capabilities to represent all of human knowledge stops.
Everyone who responded to this question on the discussion board agreed that computer’s process and interpret data much faster than the human mind but can not duplicate the human mind when it comes to emotions, sensations and irrational thought. Computers and machines follow a logical thought process and humans sometimes don’t.
In order to continue to build these paths within the capabilities of the computer to represent all of human knowledge, I believe we must further examine our own thought process. And this leads to our second discussion topic for the week, “do you consider using the computer as part of your thinking process, in other words do you think through the computer?”
Some of the response indicated that they use the computer in their thinking process, but don’t think through it. Others believe that they don’t think through the computer. I believe that the increased reliance on computers in our everyday lives has incorporated the computer into part of our thinking process whether we want to admit it or not. In order to continue to develop the computers capabilities to represent all of human knowledge and expand its “paths” we must first examine our own thought process and break it down so that we can build it again in the form of a computer.
Take dreams for instance. They are random thoughts on the surface, but really it is the bodies way of analyzing and making sense of what is going on with our lives. The brain accomplishes this by utilizing our own data banks of memories and experiences and then producing a dream that can help us interpret issues within our own lives.
Robin Robertson further explains the importance of dreams in the article entitled “Computer Viruses and the Human Mind” found at http://www.goertzel.org/dynapsyc/1997/virus.html.

“In our dreams, we see a reflection of the total psyche's response to where we are and where we need to be going. If we are stuck in some problem situation in our life, our dreams, unconstrained by conscious do's and do's, are able to access the total memory bank of our mind, body, and (if Jung is right) the collective evolutionary history of our species, to solve that problem. Beyond that, dreams are able to try out variations on that solution, until it finds one or more which seem adequate to the problem. All of that goes on beneath the surface of consciousness, certainly in our dreams, and probably at every minute of the day when the psyche is not occupied with other actions,” stated Robertson.

In a sense, our own computer uses dreams to troubleshoot any problems and issues in our own lives by creating images and situations that help alert us and bring recognition to these problems. I think studying the process of dreams can help us map out how the human brain connects random thoughts. This blueprint would then be helpful in taking on the enormous task of replicating this in a computer. Just as the brain pulls on past experiences and knowledge to a create a dream, a computer also has the same ability to pull on data and interpret information. Taking this information in computers and adapting it to a conversation context is the next challenge.