August 25th, 2006
Do you know what the definition of "twit" is? I mean the noun "twit", not the intransitive verb which is short for "twitter" and can mean either the sound of twittering, or someone who is incessantly -er- nattering.
No, this is the definition of "twit" that I am thinking of: A person educated beyond his intelligence.
Hee hee, that really does cut through a lot of the awkward half-definitions flying around. And it nicely distinguishes the twits from the twonks. (Not to mention the tinks, whom I personally don't have anything against.)
But today I overheard two former co-workers talking, and for a moment I thought they were talking about me. Until I realised they were talking about an industry "expert" (who, it turns out, is anything but an expert), I thought they were both agreeing that I was a twit.
Far from being hurt (or even particularly surprised) I sat down to think about it: Am I, by my own definition, a twit? Do I have knowledge that exceeds my lateral thinking skills to synthesize and process and (more importantly) reinterpret and redefine it? After all, anyone can know something. I mean, here is something I can drag out of my mind from my days in university when I was studying Communications Theory:
One of the characteristics of The Theory of Mind is that there is an assumption, not explicitly stated, that there is a synergistic connection between my understanding of my own mind and the belief in my understanding of another mind. It is a way of knowing, and described as "intuitively deduced", that the other mind and my mind have a real and genuine connection only because they are both minds with self-awareness. The commonality they share from both being minds is an indicator that there are emotional, cognitive, perhaps intellectual connections as well.
But maybe I am just parroting back words from memory that I picked up in a text-book. I mean, as much as I'd like to believe that I don't just walk around all day repeating words and phrases I've heard before ... how can I prove it, even to myself? Certainly, I have convictions and strong opinions ... I have my own political bent on the world, and I even walk around saying things that surprise others ... but still, am I just emulating an unconventional person? Am I really just an Alpha-Semi-Moron myself?
The Turing Test, in case you've never heard of it, is the ultimate way to distinguish computer-based intelligence from clever software mimicry of a human mind. Sit at a computer and spend a few minutes blindly typing messages back and forth with someone else on the "other end". If, after that time you cannot tell whether or not you were chatting with a machine or a human, then the machine will have passed the Turing Test, and can be certified as truly intelligent. Great, but if you were to perform the same test with me at the other end, you would also (hopefully) conclude that I was a real person. But what if I am just a really clever machine myself? What if I am the very twit I thought my former coworkers were calling me? How would anyone (including me) know?
What if the Turing Test doesn't determine intelligence at all? What if it only determines how human-like the other conversationalist is? Then we could all be artificial intelligences, couldn't we? We might all be machines repeating things we've heard before and never laying out a single track of originality in our minds ... because we wouldn't even have minds in the first place! And, worse, we would never know for sure ....
As Robert Heinlein's character Michael Smith from his novel Stranger in a Strange Land might ask, "Do you grok?" That is, do you understand my points at a fundamental level, and not just know what each of the words means?
You do? Oooh, maybe I'm not a twit after all!
- Rate my blog - Sign my guestbook -
Email me -
Go back to index