Superficial intelligence,

I often wrote about things I had no clue about. An example is this article on artificial intelligence on which I probably read up more than I did for a tutorial that was due around the same time. And here is one that discusses research, which ‘proved’ the superiority of the white race, based on skull size. I don’t have the whole article with me any more but hopefully you’ll find enough to chew on.

Size of skull has nothing to do with race of intelligence

For he truly believed in his science, belonging to his own race afforded him immense pleasure, and boy did he blush at his own sight! One day he was scrutinizing the unworthy skull of a brigand when he had the kind of joyous insight that occasionally. marks serendipitous discovery but more regularly signals crackpot invention. Thus was born Cesar Lambroso's celebrated theory of L'uamo delinquente, crime and the man, which posited that criminals were but evolutionary throwbacks in our midst, the straggling biologically retarded who had failed to fully traverse the distance between ape and man.

Nature however, had been merciful to the authentic Homo sapien and cursed the delinquents with visible anatomical signs that automatically revealed their atavistic criminality. Some of these giveaways included large jaws, relatively long arms, precocious wrinkles, low and narrow forehead, large ears, darker skin, thick skull and inability to blush. The theory secured Lambroso's place in history.

Biology determines society, or the credo that innate, inborn and inherited biological distinctions are accurately mirrored in society, as political, economic, cultural and most significantly racial hierarchy was a keynote in Darwin's century. Our society has always been infatuated with gradation and Darwinian advances seemed to hint that the people left in the wake by modernization must rank lower on the biological scale. The level headed Darwin himself did not escape the tenor of his times when he wrote of a future when the gap between humans and apes would increase with the extinction of such intermediaries as the Hottenentots and aborigines.

Nineteenth century was also the age of hardboiled empiricism and mere theories unsubstantiated by clinching 'facts' carried no weight. The proponents of biological determinism chose the measurement of intelligence as a single quantity as the means to establish the chasm between races and to this end generated two major sources of scientific data -- craniometry (or the measurement of skulls) and certain styles of psychological testing. The methods were clearly founded upon the gospel that all there was to intelligence was what lay in the head and external, unquantifiable vagaries like environment or culture had no say in the matter of gray matter.

The white man's burden was a popular truism at the time and most erudite hypotheses suggested the following pecking order -whites way up, the rest in the pits. To prove this, scientists scurried to their skull collection and research data and soon arrived with empirical evidence that whites had larger brains and superior cranial index (the ratio between the maximum length and width the skull) while the poor blacks were destined to slave in the fields and had their miseries compounded by mysterious diseases like ‘dyesthesia' a diseases that caused inadequate breathing and ‘drapetomania' or the insane desire to run away from their benevolent masters.

Brain size was crucial, as a diligent scholar had recently managed the impossible feat of establishing that European brain size had increased with the progress from feudalism to modernism. The jaws and facial angle of the blacks confirmed their stature as groveling idiots and IQ tests proved their moronic sensibilities. The theory of recapitulation, which showed that black adults were like white children, reinforced black imbecility and the theory of neoteny, which showed that white adults were like black children, reinforced white acumen.

Sensibly and understandably, the rigors of modern science and social education have relegated such fact finding to naught and their exponents to historical footnotes. Intelligence is not a measurable thing like height or weight and the idea of measuring heads is rather preposterous. Brain size does not vary with race or correspond to gifts. Indeed the human body can be measured in a thousand different ways and a randomly determined small scale of measures almost always toes the line of the prevalent paradigm while being purblind to alternatives.
It may embarrass scientists now but entirely specious marvels like the distance between the navel and the penis were once bruited to countenance white nobility whilst an equally ludicrous rejoinder could well have been made that whites were simian as they had thin lips -a Chimpanzee trait. IQ tests being culture specific were similarly misleading and sometimes even ‘neutral' questions were but glimmers of the examiner's biases.

Science is often a powerful ally of entrenched institutions and the quandary that is ours is whether the scientists involved were racists? Most of them were bitterly opposed to the rising ethical hopes of equality and their scientific pronouncements had several tragic consequences on state policies like slavery, immigration, colonialism etc. It is little known that millions of Jews from Central and southern Europe who, anticipating the holocaust, had sought to emigrate to the US were often denied on specious eugenic grounds, and thus virtually condemned by votaries of science.

Science, it must be remembered begins from the void of ignorance and chases the truth by ceaselessly falsifying its own assumptions. The scientist involved published all their data, hid nothing and truly believed in the validity of their assumptions. Scientists themselves are prisoners of their own cultural condition and the truth they seek can never be 'pure', sullied as it is by the vision of their times.

Computers cannot handle every hue of human behavior

The dream of a mechanical mind is centuries old and since the industrial age humans have fastidiously held that the brain, the seat of thought -- which in the 19th century was described as a property at par with electricity, the faculty of motion and impenetrability --could be duplicated. The dream of mechanized thought, however, began to resemble a vision only towards the close of the last century when Charles Babbage, with suitable encouragement and inspiration from Lady Lovelace, invented the 'difference machine' that could, at the heave of a designated crank, tabulate any function, and in principle even perform that most emblematic of all intelligent activities - play chess.

Then came the World Wars. The immense logistics involved hastened the development of number crunching computers. Meanwhile, on another arena in the war theatre, scientists examining the plethora of brain damaged patients thrown up by the fighting concluded that the operations of a nerve cell and its connection with other nerve cells could be shown in terms of logic. Thereon it was deducted that intelligence could be shown in purely mathematical or computational terms. Thus was the cast assembled.

The creators of artificial intelligence did not seek to merely design efficient goal-oriented machines, like say the pocket calculator, but their ambition was to replicate the human thought process itself and thus provide scientific answers to the philosophical questions concerning the nature of knowledge that had gripped mankind down the ages. They believed that they had hit upon the pivotal idea that what distinguished human intelligence from its animal counterpart was its innate ability to manipulate symbol systems such as those found in math and logic. The machine's other human propensities included its apparent mimicry of the human thought process during a chess game as it sought to process information over time in a logical manner by decomposing the task into sub-tasks.

The cardinal sin of such a serial-device was its obeisance to the Greek dictum of men as rational beings, and the concomitant fallacy that the mass of men leads a mental life as logical and rule governed as a chess-game. And lest the reader deem himself an acolyte of the perished Greek tradition, a sucker-punch: Four cards, with a number on one side and a letter on the other, are laid out on the table with their faces displaying respectively; E, K, 4 and 7. The given rule is, "If a card has a vowel on one side, it has an even number on the other. One is permitted to turn over two cards to determine the validity of the rule.

Now you perhaps realize that the card marked K is superfluous to the rule and that it is imperative to pick the card marked E. The trick lies with the numbered cards and if your mind is attuned to the vast majority of your brethren you are likely to dump logic for intuition and rush to read between, above and below the lines and conclude that the rule logically implies that even numbered cards have a vowel on the other side and thus fatally plump for 4. The right choice, however, is 7 because while a consonant on the other side would be irrelevant to the rule, a vowel would falsify it.

Surely this is not a conclusive example of human irrationality but computers imprisoned by an absolute contrary faith were indubitably destined to fall short, especially with the rigid programming condemning the machines to endless repetition of processes minus any learning and improvisation.

Quite obviously toy problems like chess did grave injustice to any simulacrum of the human mind and the need was to locate real world issues like perception. Soon came the imaginatively termed 'society of minds' theory, wherein the brain was reckoned to be not a general unambiguous processor of all information but a repository of myriad agents that could selectively handle different kinds of information simultaneously, and thus serial symbolic machines were abandoned in favor of parallel processing machines.

Since computation was achieved by the excitatory and inhibitory interaction among a network of competing cooperating neuron like units that depended upon the statistical properties of the entire ensemble to meet the target, information ceased to inhere in a specific locus and the need for symbolic processing was obviated in favor of direct perception models. There was thus no need of any separate knowledge store, it simply resided in the strength and appropriateness of the connection between simple neurons and dedicated to specific functions.

But will a computer ever learn to discern animals in the shape of clouds, faces in stone or drama in inkblots? Or find the way through a forest? A great deal of human knowledge is biologically learnt and culturally transmitted, something, which a computer cannot mimic.

It would be imprudent to expect artificial intelligence to handle every hue of human behavior and those who sought a facsimile of the human mind in artificial intelligence must resign themselves to the fact that human beings may be an amalgam of several kinds of computers and may indeed be at odds with any computer hitherto designed. There are certain ways in which our thought process has an affinity with computer framework but there are also basic incompatibilities. Paradoxically, there is little semblance the human mind bears to a computer.