Ambition
At the age of may be 7, I have no personal recollection, I have only heard the stories from my parents, I dismantled the family vacuum cleaner in the middle of the night because I was curious about how it works. A week or so later I built a miniature vacuum cleaner using 2 ice-cream cups, a motor taken out from an old toy, drinking straws, a toy windmill, and toilet paper for filtering; all somehow held together with large quantities of superglue.
Soon after, I was exposed to my first concept of intelligent life other than human beings through a cartoon series called Transformers (currently there are three very well CGI animated movies derived from the original series, quite entertaining, I recommend everyone to watch them). According to my parents, my first question was to ask how do they work (of course that was the case with almost everything I saw around me), to which my parents replied that they didn’t really know and I instantly decided that when I grow up, I will make walking, talking and thinking robots like the Transformers.
Till this date, my entire life has been directed towards that goal, to learn, understand and research on how intelligence works (currently I’m obsessed with simulations of swarms and how intelligent behavior patterns emerge). In pursuit of that passion I have focused on the sciences throughout my school years, studied Computer Science (for my Bachelor’s degree) and have got back to completing my Master’s degree (again in Computer Science) after 8 years of working in the industry. The purpose of these 8 years was to save enough resources to fund my stay in Europe while I concentrate completely on my Master’s studies.
As I grew up, I’ve been intrigued by science, its methods and the answers it provides. I have been inspired by the scientists and engineers who have dedicated their lives to pave the way forward. I look at the mountain of knowledge piled before me by hard working men and women, some scientists, some engineers, some not, from the entirety of human existence; and think to myself, “I want to climb that mountain!”, understand every nook and carny my little 1.5 kilograms of grey matter can allow… Or at the very least climb to the top of the tiny part of that mountain that is my specialized field of expertise and lay down one small brick… Stand on it, piss around it, mark my territory, and claim that “THAT” is my brick!
Having said that, I need PHD / research funding!
Ambition
29/01/2012 at 16:46
love this post Shup! good luck with finding so me funding soon
btw, love the whole dismantling story, I wonder what it means for my son since he’s just obsessed with playing computer/ps2/psp games to the exclusion of everything else, like most of the kids of his generation.
17/01/2012 at 15:26
Nice imagery there…
I was going to ask for your thoughts on the research that freewill and the like might not exist (due to neuroscientific research). As our intelligence becomes more like that of a computers circuitry.
Anyway I thought I’d bring this up as well:
“If I have seen further it is only by standing on the shoulders of giants.” – Isaac Newton.
Your mountain reminded me of it.
17/01/2012 at 15:56
Thanks! I do truly think that freewill as we classically like to think of doesn’t exist. Brain circuitry, composed of neurons, work just as deterministically as computer circuitry using regular transistor.
Intelligence to me is simply an emergent phenomenon of large scale interactions of small components. So many that its simply impractical to predict the system’s state at any one given point in time. But theoretically, if all the variables can be known, both internal and external factors, then I think we can predict our future sequence of behaviors exactly.
17/01/2012 at 16:57
Theoretically, to take this a step further, if ALL of the variables were known, we could predict any of the future outcomes in all of time.
This is probably going to be one of my next posts.
17/01/2012 at 21:29
Actually that’s not true for the universe at large, because at the nano scale and lower quantum effects start acting up and we have a problem with determinism. We can only predict relatively macroscopic scale of events.