Ladies and Gentlemen,
I am told that one of the criteria for membership in your organization is the demonstration of relatively high IQ. This instantaneously makes me apprehensive, for it recalls vividly the only time in my school career that I was sent to see the school principal on a disciplinary basis. Long years ago in St. Louis, when I was in one of the upper grades of elementary public school, it was ordered that all students must take an extensive IQ examination. Shortly after completing the exam, I was sent to see the principal on charges of presumed cheating, it being presumed that a student would not make a very high score on such an examination honestly. There was then retesting and a new score of 154, as I recall it, that was considered guaranteed honest and all was forgiven, but I think you can see why I have never felt comfortable with such tests since.
Is it possible that one ought to seek diligently for theoretical insight into the algorithmic principles underlying this vaguely defined formal school “intelligence” or ability to learn, to discover its several modalities and their interactive strategies?
It is my thesis today that we can by-pass one layer of intellectual translation by acknowledging initially that our mental set of available figures of thought all arise initially from a genetically provided start-up code and primitive data base that are boot strap, first into simple machine language operation and then into successively higher level internal languages of reasoning, all limited by the original machine and code.
It may sound implausible that one should attempt to put together into one intellectual package such disparate concepts as theory of invention, design of higher education, generation of effective regulatory law, diagnosis of heart and central nervous disease, exercises in mental jogging, design of a computer-aided system for health care in the home and systems inventions of a Center for Innovation and Technology Utilization, yet I think I will be able to show you how these all flow from the Biomimetic Engineering concept.
This concept acknowledges that everything we think and do as individual and social organisms arises, with the possible exception of occasional mutational perturbations, out of our individual genomic start-up code and computational system, parlayed with the aid of intensive feed-back and feed-forward interrogation of the environment, into higher and higher level languages of internal computation, memory and control. Consequently each of us has a moderately compatible input-output code available for communication with fellow humans of his own community and one progressively adaptable to humans more remote socially in language, ethnic origins or geographical place of training. We even share enough genetically with does and porpoises to do quite well in communicating with them, but can empathize only poorly with sea anemones or sunflowers.
Have you ever noticed that in meeting a new person or in conducting an extended
or multi-person meeting or panel discussion, that each person must have an opportunity
to make a “station announcement” and that we always start with trivial conversation
about ambient weather, state of health or Iranian politics in order to establish
a working communicational code or language of the day. We then get down to the
business at hand.
I often find that by switching my buzzword usage in this introductory period, I can establish myself in the mind of the beholder from cardiologist to electrician to computernik to aeronautical engineer to neuro-physiologist and so on and on. Unfortunately many of us do not appreciate the pleasure of this multidisciplinary schizophrenia and so make hard work of reinventing what is already available in other scientific, technical or social jargons.
I want to concentrate on level III in our formal and informal educational process which Involves using what one has learned in one Internal or external language and using it in another, especially where the other is an, as yet, unestablished realm. Some call this imaginative thinking, some call it Innovation, others call it adaptability, yet it is almost totally neglected in our formal higher education. My father left school at the sixth grade level, yet was extremely adaptable in using his skills in a dozen different trades and was quite innovative in business, animal breeding and local politics.
To make sure we are on common ground with respect to levels of education, let me define by categories. Level I education, primarily in the lower grades, occupies itself largely with establishing a data base of facts and. standard “Figures of Thought”. Level II education develops a family of skills and accepted success procedures: how to program computers, how to sell insurance, how to teach school, how to impress and persuade people. Much of our advanced and even graduate study specializes but remains in this track of learning to imitate.
Level III education shifts into initiative with imagination and technology or ideological transfer, usually requiring the reformulating of mathematical, engineering, business or legal principles. It involves especially the deliberate generation of a new language or machinery of understanding or control.
Most of our graduate students are appalled at the idea of generating new conforming ad hoc mathematics to make simple the understanding of a problem, especially if it is a “people problem”. The idea of developing the architectonics of a new breed of computer to solve a new problem shocks them. They would far rather fight an old familiar formula or a known machine into doing the job even though miserable approximations and inexact equivalencies have to be accepted.
This level I believe we can and should teach instead of leaving it for intelligent,
imaginative and uninformed individuals to do by artistic and craftsman intuition.
Fortunately modern medicine preserves some of this craftsmanship to assist its
limited body of algorithmic scientific base.
Level IV education, training for high level induction, creative synthesis and unifying generalization, I will leave for another time. I feel hopeless about teaching it but believe it should be recognized as a real goal and nurtured when it displays itself even in the artistic, intuitive, not yet mathematically formulated versions.
Now, how can we test and popularize Level III education and application? There are several routes but unfortunately all of them will take an average of fifteen years to realization unless they are “forced” by social pressure --military or economic emergency, a social bandwagon phenomenon, or a designed social innovation program.
I have been busy lighting fires in this education program at level III for over thirty years. Some early areas caught fire and grew rapidly and spontaneously, for example, electronic circuits and devices imitating the trigger-like action of the nerve axon excitation, the cathode or emitter follower that imitates the proprioceptor monitored powerful constriction of an arm muscle, the perspiration cooling imitated by the electronic vapor cooling.
Others have simmered into gradual acceptance, as for example the concept of the generalized common code transducer concept in physiology and in technology. The formalized theory of feed-forward control is only now gaining acceptance and the concept of hierarchical feed up - feed down adaptive control is still in its infancy. Indeed, it is easier to get empathy and understanding of multi-hierarchical level mental processing -parallel, sequential or alternate, with parity or majority logic checking from a well informed and communicative yogi transcendental meditationist than it is from a good computer designer or electronic communication scientist.
Practice of these alternative mental processing patterns that I call Mental Jogging can be productive in mental skills that are not commonly developed and can certainly be more fun than dreary physical jogging, especially along snow and ice filled streets in competition with momentum and speed advantaged automobiles.
Scholars have often been satisfied to develop fine concepts and advanced understandings with no desire to put them to work. Medieval intellectuals often resorted to anagrams and other encryptments to document their discoveries without revealing the idea unless a key to the code was supplied.
I am too much an engineer to be satisfied with such goals, yet I am unwilling
to invest a lifetime in one single invention. Indeed, most inventors are one-invention
inventors. I find on the membership questionnaire of more than one Inventors
Society: What is your invention? in obvious expectation of a singular response.
I would like to have a lifetime record of at least one important invention,
concept, device and systems innovation brought into productive reality per year.
This, at least for so called systems-inventions, can be accomplished by putting together even a rather shabby, not extensively publicized, financed and institutionalized feasibility demonstration of the system in full expectation that In five to ten years, capable, eager, dedicated or even profit-motivated individuals will pick it up, reinvent it under a new name, and run with it.
Several of these projects are now cooking on the back or front burner and perhaps I can best spend the remaining minutes I have with you describing a few of these level III projects and seeking your ideas and constructive criticism for their implementation.
First let me describe the quiet “Santosha Program” that was brought into being a half dozen years ago when I realized that in Health and Social Sciences we ignore the great success that Physical Science has had with requiring that all quantities entering into equations and even formal inequalities be examined for match in dimensions and in scale. The equation is regarded as meaningless if the two sides do not match in dimensions such as length, energy, force or potential and in “Units” such as centimeters, ergs, degrees or volts.
The Santosha Index, derived from a Sanskrit word that means euphoria in the honest Greek sense of all around goodness and satisfaction instead of the popular euphoria of drug-induced carefree dissociation, is intended to quantitate the individually and societally parameterized attributes of satisfaction and to give us powerful selection standards to bargain for a life most rewarding consistent with associated harm or discomfort negative components. It introduces the idea of collecting good epidemiological data on human satisfaction and displeasure to accompany the extensively studied mortality, morbidity and dollar cost studies to which we now confine ourselves.
We need not only data banks but manipulative algorithms for processing this
data, including means for applying catastrophe theory and topology to human
and community interests. The figures of thought for this pursuit are really
the quantitative equivalents of our everyday decisions of what to do today and
how to do it fast and with limited cost in effort and risk, but we are unfamiliar
with quantitative treatment of such problems and almost automatically fall into
equating these Santosha considerations with dollar dimensional cost-benefit
analysis. The key to the analysis is the recognition of the objective
function as a vectorial, not simply factorable function . Obviously we could
talk at length about means for Implementing this Santosha procedure.
We have had some success in translating this optimization procedure into the field of regulatory legislation and enforcement where we discover that Santosha thinking requires the regulatory agency to take on the uncomfortable and unfamiliar task of optimizing its regulations, not basking In the comfortable adversary role of merely making regulations stringent enough to absolve the agency from blame even if the regulations kill the industry and the clients to whom the regulations apply.
A set of ten commandments for writing good regulations embodies much of this thinking and is available for your examination.
Again we worried about the vast national cost of making repeated, redundant medical measurements on individuals with records kept in a myriad of inaccessible hospitals and doctors' offices with no overall access and requirement for preservation and communication. This results in the system concept of a Personally Portable Whole Life Medical History Passport. This systems invention is growing slowly into reality and should in five to ten years be available nationally and eventually internationally.
A more sweeping Level IV system innovation is the Family Participating Computer-Aided Health Care in the Home concept. Here, home care, loving and inexpensive, replaces expensive and competent but impersonal professional care in a remote service center such as clinic or hospital.
This kind of system, beside making the public a body of informed clients instead of submissive patients, could save billions of dollars annually from our escalating above inflation health care costs. I will gladly deluge you with examples of the monitoring, therapy, data accumulating and tutorial as well as “How goes it?” modes in which such a modularly designed system can work.
Finally I would like to introduce the concept of a Center for Innovation and Technology Utilization on which I am working busily at the present time. This Level III systems Innovation design incorporates features that are at the common sense level but somehow fail to be included in our big picture and are expected to come about by good luck and common sense.
Let me give you a few examples. It is obvious that an endeavor that affects the welfare of all of Minnesota to a major extent must have the understanding and commitment in a coordinated way of at least four segments of the community if it is to be successful. It needs industry - production, marketing, transportation, computation, energy - it needs legislative and regulatory cooperation, it needs two way communication with the individuals and special interest clusters of the community and last, but not least, it needs the multidisciplinary contribution of the University in Its research, teaching and public policy contributory roles.
This I am trying to implement on a least centered mass basis that I would be glad to share with you and would hope to profit from your contributions. Inputs to this Center concept come from amazingly diversified sources. Prom our American, ourJapanese, our German, our French and other foreign colleagues we hear about their parallel successes and failures. From our local large high technology corporations we have strong input. In contrast we hear from our individual inventors via the Inventors Congress and the Small business Administration. We hear from our newly enlarged and stimulated Minnesota Science Museum of its ability to contribute to public understanding of systems innovation. We even have professional Social Inventors.
I have drafted a list of over a dozen types of task to which such an Innovative Center could usefully address itself and I am sure you can and will contribute more ideas.
Some day I would like to address you on Level IV education but that may be years in the future.
I would welcome your extensions, reinterpretations, or even reinvention of
these Level III objectives and hope we can find time to have many individual
interactions in the future.