[ cross-posted from Zenpundit — about the book (or post-book project) i seem to be writing — based on Sembl thinking — which offers a grand slam intro to an array of box-free contemplative and artistic approaches to creative thinking, and hence opens fresh angles on intelligence ]
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One thing I can promise: whatever this project turns out to be, it won’t be predictable.

credit for this incredible image: Roger Dean

This project won’t take you over familiar territory, congratulating you on holding the same opinions as the author and adding in enough choice details to keep you interested. I’m not aiming to teach you the same thing you already know, only better, more interestingly, more precisely, or in greater detail. I’m aiming to question you, challenge you, and give you a whole new range of optics through which to view the world.

So, here we go.

I think I am finally at the point where the book (or whatever it is) I’ve been gathering inside me all these years is ready to be written. Some of it has already emerged in earlier posts here on Zenpundit — you don’t known and couldn’t count how many thanks, Mark — and this is certainly where I’ve been developing the style of integrated visuals and verbals that gives the project its flavor — so I’d also like to use my posts here to discuss the thing with you as I go along.

The project is about intelligence in the widest sense, including heart and mind, and with particular focus on creativity. I’m addressing this from two standpoints that mesh together well, and I’m addressing it to two audiences that I believe also mesh together well.

The standpoints are (i) meditation and (ii) the arts, and the audiences are (i) the “intelligence community” and (ii) bright people in general.

I believe that meditation cultivates a spacious mind-set in which we can hold multiple concerns in mind at the same time – the opposing needs of different people, stakeholders, sections of society, the environment, etc – thus seeing things from multiple angles and in balancing & thus balanced ways. And I think the arts serve as the primary means for expressing these balances with all their nuances and shadings, and that techniques from within the arts such as polyphony, chiaroscuro, formal constraint and pattern can teach us to shape multi-faceted insights like these into rich and complex understandings – complex patterns that respond to complex situations. I’ll go into all this in detail as we move along, with examples.

I also believe that this kind of creatively patterned insight — embodying artistic methodology in the context of complex problems with a “fresh” and open mind – will be of interest beyond the intelligence agencies and policy-makers, to business people, artists, and also — importantly — the bright general public, which I take to be a far larger subset of the population than we commonly think, and always eager for reading that doesn’t talk down to them but appreciates their own intelligence and good will.

For now let me just say that I’m very excited, because this seems (at last) to be a project that ties together my game-work with Sembl, the think-tank side of me which has been monitoring religious violence, jihad and terror and working towards nuance, understanding and peace these last dozen years — and my sense of creativity as a writer and poet.

Ripeness is all: I suspect the time for this venture has arrived.

Here’s the single page overview I’ve written, with a working title:

Intelligence is Zen: understanding our complex world with koans in mind

Just a few days ago, the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, referenced Pirsig‘s book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, as key to the Intelligence Community’s work in understanding and adapting to the many, varied, intersecting problems we face in the world today. As I noted, Clapper was focused a bit more on the biker wisdom than the Zen to be found in Pirsig’s book, but he does raise a question I’ve been addressing for some years now:

What does the contemplative mind have to offer in terms of understanding a complex world?

To my mind, the creativity which is all the buzz of the business world, aimed at solving what are called “wicked problems” — problems that feature multiple stakeholders with multiple aims and objectives, aims and objectives which themselves shift over time so the problems are “never the same river twice” – requires a major mental and emotional shift. Reverie and meditation free us up to make the shift: the shift itself is poorly understood.

Our present, mostly linear way of thinking favors either/or side-taking, dubious cause-and-effect expectations which fail to take complex feedback loops into account, followed all too often by a rush to judgment. We need a whole new – old, even ancient – way of thinking.

Our problems are complex because they overlap, they ripple through one another. In Buddhist terms, they are “interdependently arising.” Not surprisingly, the way of thinking that is required to gain a deeper insight into “interdependently arising” problems can be found in explicit form in such contemplative traditions as Madhyamika & Zen, Taoism, Sufism, and their Abrahamic contemplative analogs. At the heart of these systems is fresh thinking – thought refreshed by quiet.

Furthermore, the shaping of insights in an open field of thought is something the world’s artistic traditions have long dealt with, and there are schools of insight not just available but recorded in exquisite detail in the world’s traditions of poetry, music, painting, theater, film… in patterns that are found in nature, in culture, and in the very turbulence we now must learn to flow with.

The project therefore takes a meditation-influenced approach to intelligence, both in the sense in which Clapper would use the word, relating to the intelligence analysis which develops and influences our decision-makers’ understanding of what’s needed, and in the more general sense of those capable folk with bright minds, keen insights, sharp instincts, warm hearts.

I’ll propose a series of ways of looking differently – with application for anyone, whether artist, intel analyst, businessman, policy-maker, or lover – that cut to the essence of creativity: lateral, analogical, holistic thinking, witnessing pattern beneath the surface of things. My examples will be mainly drawn from terrorism, which I have been monitoring for a dozen years: my style is that of a poet and an eccentric Englishman.

My subtext, my subliminal message, will be contemplation and artistry as profound common sense.

According to 25 Years of Super Mario Bros: A Look Back Through Mushroom Kingdom History, from which I grabbed the Mario Bros portion of the graphic at the foot of this page, “Since 1985’s release of the second-most selling console game of all-time, over 200 Nintendo titles have featured the eponymous Mario Bros” — on which I’ve played perhaps three or four levels of one or two early versions.

The Super Mario Bros side-scrollers (image above, left) are the work of the brilliant Shigeru Miyamoto, and part of what I find so fascinating about them is the way in which they resemble the mind-blowing practice known as Parcours (image, right), which apparently developed from the work of one David Belle, born in 1973 — who would have been 12 when the first Super Mario Bros game came out.

Let’s take a look at Super Mario Bros and Parcours, and then move on to the issue of parcours for the adventuring mind.

First, for those of you who don’t remember them, here’s what the early Mario Bros games were like…

I don’t think there’s much doubt that the Super Mario Bros games are essentially digital versions of Parcours, and you can see by comparing the video above with this next one:

Finally, this video from Jesse La Flair confirms the comnnection, at least in the mind of one top flight traceur:

My own question is: what would a mental parcours game look like?

I was thinking for a while last week about what a Mario-like side-scrolling game of mental parcours would be like. We already have the “creative leap” side pretty well covered with the various variants of Sembl we’ll be developing, so I thought about other types of mental agility, and what a game might look like if it incorporated a bunch of them — induction? deduction? causality? the sorts of pattern skills that go into IQ tests? — in a side-scroller with playful graphics…

Two things:

One: my friend Derek Robinson pretty quickly informed me that the actual build of such a game would be enormously complex — I resisted him, saying I wasn’t aiming to build the entire game, just to get the idea down on paper to see whether we could get the initial phases funded…

And two: I ran across Lumosity:

Let’s just say Lumosity seems to have a variety of cognitive skills well in hand, which leaves me free once again to concentrate on what Derek calls the mind’s opposable thumb.

That’s a brilliant concept, I think, and gets to the heart of what we’re working on with Sembl.

The various other conceptual skills that essentially add up to linear thinking — Mark Safranski of Zenpundit calls it vertical thinking, see this helpful diagram — are important, and well-studied. They work best where what you are talking about is quantifiable and amenable to logic and cause and effect analysis, and is explored within fields, not across them.

But lo, that approach may help you quantify the trees and evaluate them as board feet of lumber, but consistently misses the forest, the greater context, the big picture –the combined systemic impact of many tiny details, insects, mosses, the tree as ecosystem within an ecosystem, and the ecosystems within that – the time scale, the slow growth, the root system, the transformation of mulch into nourishment, the sudden spurt of tiny leaves in spring, the photosynthesis — and the human wonder — the glory, dappled sunlight on fallen leaves, the shelter afforded to lovers by a weeping willow (I’m thinking of one willow in an Oxford college garden, but I’m time-traveling and I digress) – the poetry, of beech and birch, copper beech and silver birch, the trees, the words, the metals…

Context, quality, complexity, systems, dynamics, process, simplicity, value, passion, poetry – these are the things linear thinking has problems with. Poetry, passion, value, simplicity, process, dynamics, systems, complexity, quality, context – these are the things horizontal thinking does best.

That’s it.

Oh, and hey — just because I like the tiny antics they’re getting up to in the graphics:

I’d like to turn our focus here to the Glass Bead Game as Hesse describes it in his novel, Magister Ludi, and in particular to the range of play, and the nature of moves: putting that in game designer’s terms, I’d like to talk about the gameplay as Hesse envisions it.

First, the subject matter of which the games are composed. Hesse wrote:

The Glass Bead Game is thus a mode of playing with the total contents and values of our culture; it plays with them as, say, in the great age of the arts a painter might have played with the colors on his palette. All the insights, noble thoughts, and works of art that the human race has produced in its creative eras, all that subsequent periods of scholarly study have reduced to concepts and converted into intellectual values the Glass Bead Game player plays like the organist on an organ. And this organ has attained an almost unimaginable perfection; its manuals and pedals range over the entire intellectual cosmos; its stops are almost beyond number. Theoretically this instrument is capable of reproducing in the Game the entire intellectual content of the universe.

That’s the range of cultural themes that Hesse’s game players are playing with. But what kinds of moves do they make with them?

Hesse tells us that the most basic form of play is (i) the juxtaposition (in symbolic form) of (ii) cultural items which are deeply similar, (iii) across wide disciplinary boundaries:

Beginners learned how to establish parallels, by means of the Game’s symbols, between a piece of classical music and the formula for some law of nature.

At one point, he gives as an example the discovery of “the most striking congruences” between “the rhythmic structure of Julius Caesar’s Latin” on the one hand, and “the results of well-known studies of the intervals in Byzantine hymns” on the other. And this is by no means as far fetched as it might at first seem. In 1978, the University of Wisconsin Press published volume 9 in their “Literary Monographs” – a book by Jane-Marie Luecke OSB entitled Measuring Old English Rhythm: an Application of the Principles of Gregorian Chant Rhythm to the Meter of Beowulf (see this review in Speculum).

Further, Hesse suggests that in play, this process of continual juxtaposition will lead to what is essentially a meditative experience of the sacred:

Every transition from major to minor in a sonata, every transformation of a myth or a religious cult, every classical or artistic formulation was, I realized in that flashing moment, if seen with a truly meditative mind, nothing but a direct route into the interior of the cosmic mystery, where in the alternation between inhaling and exhaling, between heaven and earth, between Yin and Yang, holiness is forever being created.

How do our own concepts of a playable version of the Glass Bead Game embody these ideas?

Some time in the mid to late 1990s, I raised this question on the Magister-L mailing list with six or seven friends who had designed Glass Bead Game variants, and proposed a specific, particular juxtaposition of two parallel “cultural themes” to them, asking how their game variants would handle a move that made this particular linkage.

The answer in four cases, including my own, were fairly straight forward, and can be found about half way down the page where I laid out the question: A Test Case for Glass Bead Game Design. I suggested there that this move could be made in a Sembl-type game by playing emergence of trance in a voodoo seance in one position and emergence of the solo in a jazz session in an adjacent position, and it would be notated with a prose comment elaborating Ventura’s point, possibly with quotations from his brilliant essay. And I imagined that “the same” move could be made in one of Ron Hale-Evans‘ Kennexions games, and that it might for instance, be formulated in the kenning:

voodoo : trance :: jazz : solo

Two friends with particularly intricate GBG variants — one involving the development and use of a “constructed language” and the other a skillful blending of chess and I Ching — responded, and the ways in which they would handle a move linking these two themes in their own games can be found at A GBG Test Case Move: Mark Line’s Game and William Horden’s Intrachange.

I think it’s fairly clear from these six examples that this “test move” can do a pretty good job of helping us see how a Glass Bead Game move would work in practice, in a wide range of possible GBG implementations – and I’d like to present it again here, fifteen or so years later, to see what ideas it might elicit this time around.

Here, then, is the Test Case – the “case” being the two themes to be juxtaposed, and the “test” being how each individual would tackle the job of playing these two moves within their own concept of the GBG.

The Case:

Michael Ventura has a very interesting observation in the wonderful essay Hear that Long Snake Moan which can be found in his book, Shadow Dancing in the USA.

His insight is based on the idea that Dixieland jazz emerges from Voodoo seances in New Orleans: at a time when voodoo was strongly prohibited, the drums of the sacred dance continued to beat as the drums of the secular — and that when the drumming reached such a pitch that in voodoo one of the dancers would become possessed by a loa, in jazz a soloist would take flight.

In Ventura’s view, the relationship between ensemble dancing and the emergence of individual trance in voodoo, and ensemble playing and the emergence of the solo in jazz is not merely a fortuitous and close parallelism, but the direct translation of the moment of ecstatic breakthrough from one medium to the other.

The Test:

I would like to propose this insight as a sort of test case for our various game approaches, so that I could ask you these questions:

• in your game, would this move be possible?
• if so, how would it be notated?
• if not directly, is there a move in your game which would capture the essence or the structure implicit in this move?
• if so, how would it be notated?
• if not, then what example can you give me of the kind of move that would be possible in your game?
• and how would this sample move be notated?

In asking these questions, I don’t wish to imply in any way that games which can include this move are superior or inferior in kind to those which cannot: my purpose is simply to clarify what kinds of move are possible in each of our games — or would be possible in each of our approaches.

And I should perhaps add that there are other aspects to Hesse’s game that I am not attempting to capture here — notably the use of glyphic beads, so well illustrated in Joshua Fost‘s Towards the Bead Game variant.

[ cross-posted from SmartMobs – this post is not about the tragic Aurora shooting, but about internet advertising mechanics and unthinking juxtapositions ]

If you know the Sembl project, you know we’re always on about juxtaposition as a means of generating a sort of stereoscopic depth of understanding from two similar — or opposite — ideas, images etc.

And yes indeed, the juxtaposition of ideas and the creative leaps that juxtaposition generates are at the heart of the Sembl game approach that Cath and I are prototyping.

-- ..... image: board for an iPad Sembl game + detail of single move

But look, you need to have some sense of context.

And neither current algorithms nor remote humans seem to be terribly good at this.

The Celeb Boutique tweet above was posted when the word Aurora started trending after the recent awful cinema shooting, and was up for an hour before someone realized how inappropriate it was and took it down. In subsequent tweets, the boutique apologized and noted “our PR is NOT US based and had not checked the reason for the trend…”

I think that’s extremely unfortunate, but somewhat understandable: human error, outsourced.

The humans in question should have been as savvy as Paul Coelho, who counseled (just a day earlier, if I’m getting my dates right) as follows:

Then there was the Christian Science Monitor‘s article, Colorado shooting: A rare glimpse into Mitt Romney’s Mormon faith, which showed up on my friend Critt Jarvis‘ monitor with this ad:

Again, that’s unfortunate — but the CSM’s ads are presumably chosen by algorithm, and I wouldn’t know where to send an algorithm to repent if I met one and it was sincerely apologetic…

The CSM website does offer us humans an opportunity to object to ads we find tasteless and inappropriate, however:

The Monitor is committed to showing only those ads that meet our standards for appropriate content. These particular ads are sold by internet advertising partners who share the revenue with The Christian Science Monitor. We have implemented filters with them that are designed to prevent unacceptable advertising from showing on the site. If you feel an inappropriate ad is being displayed, please contact us immediately using the form below. Ads that violate our acceptance standards will be removed from the site and our filters will be adjusted to help prevent a recurrence.

So humans can backtop the algorithms when they play foul… that’s good.

But all this just reinforces my appreciation for Cath Styles‘ tweet last week, after she met with Mel from Serena (neat video, btw!):

There’s still no machine substitute for human wit and wisdom.

Daffy Duck teaches Sembl to the kids. screenshot h/t Wm Benzon

I’ve been playing what we’d now call Sembl games for years now, sometimes online and sometimes on napkins in cafes, and because the basic board for this kind of play just consists of some circles with lines joining them — what mathematicians would call a graph — I’ve designed a few boards myself, and found a few ready-made in interesting places.

In fact, part of the fun for me in developing the TenStones > HipBone > Sembl game concept has been precisely in running across graphs that “look like” boards… like the board Daffy Duck is playing on in the screen-cap above.

Quite often the boards I’ve run across have been humorous, as in this example, where the cartoonist [double Pulitzer-winner Steve Breen] portrayed George W Bush as linking Al-Qaida to Iraq because they both had a Q in their name:

In the original, Breen had merely circled the Qs in the two words –I added the red circles and linking line to make the point that Breen himself was playing a bit of a Sembl move.

Sometimes the boards are entirely serious, like this one drawn from a diagram in an article in a science journal, which I call the Hamiltonian board:

What’s interesting about this particular board is that it assigns directions to the linkages — which sets me thinking about the ways in which one thing being like another can be a one-way or two-way street.

When Shakespeare says, “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” the poet is definitely telling the beloved about his enduring love (“thy eternal summer shall not fade”), not using his beloved to explain global warming (“Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines”). His metaphor moves from summer to beloved, not the other way around.

But that’s not always the case by any means. I’m not much of a mathematician, but as I understand it when Taniyama conjectured that every rational elliptic curve corresponds to a modular form, uniting two previously distinct branches of mathematics, the relationship went both ways

Okay.

This week, two teams of researchers at the CERN Large Hadron Collider claimed they had very likely found the Higgs Boson — a hitherto elusive particle which in theory accounts for the mass of other particles, and thus the overall coherence of our world.

Here’s a diagram of the elementary particles, as they are understood in terms of the “Standard Model” in particle physics [for comments on the diagram, see Wikipedia Talk]

Of these, only the Higgs Boson remained to be discovered — until this last week!

Physicists broke out the champagne, science journalists had breathless ledes, sailors asked whether anyone had seen the Boson’s Mate, Catholics made jokes about the Higgs boson being Catholic because without it there’d be no Mass… and I found a new and intriguing board for fans of Sembl thinking:

Pretty obviously, I’ll have to call it the Particle Board. But what most interests me about it is the fact that it contains loops — in Sembl terms, implying moves that connect only with themselves — at W, G and H.

I’ve given that idea quite a bit of thought, as it happens. some statements are self-referential — Doug Hofstadter makes a big deal of them in his book, Godel, Escher, Bach. They embody paradox, they astonish, confound or amuse us…

And in a game played on this particular board (pun definitely intended), the three “looped” moves would need to have this strange and charming if quirky quality of self-reference.

The self-referencing thought is in fact the simplest form of Sembl move, since it would be played on a board that consists of one circle connected by a line to itself.

I’ll use one of my own poems as an example:

Is that a self-eating watermelon?

Not exactly. It’s the ourobouros, the serpent of mythology which eats its own tail…

But I do see the family Semblance!