Pop Rocks & Poetry
When I was a kid, I used to buy Pop Rocks candy. Life was good on Pop Rocks. Pour some “rocks” into your hand, pop them into your mouth, and then just wait a minute or so for the fun to begin. As the candy melts, the carbon-dioxide bubbles in it explode, delivering a sparkling experience. And for just a few minutes, it’s the 4th of July in your mouth. More interestingly, this whole experience is staged and delivered to you by a body. In fact, this is a distinguishing feature of human intelligence. Surprise! Your intelligence comes packaged in a body, quite unlike that of a computer fabricated from silicon, glass, plastic, and aluminum.
For many years, practically no one in the field of AI paid any attention to this fundamental difference. It was as if it did not matter. It did not exist. But that is beginning to change. The field of embodied cognition has recently emerged, and AI researchers are beginning to pay attention. Key thinkers in this field include George Lakoff & Mark Johnson (Metaphors we Live By), and Benjamin Bergen (Louder than Words). Bergen is especially interesting in that he advances the idea that the human brain is a simulation machine. By the early 2000’s, research on embodied cognition took off. More recently, Lawrence Barsalou’s article, Grounded Cognition, makes a key contribution as well as Mark Johnson’s latest book, Embodied Mind, Meaning, and Reason. All of these are interesting reads if you have the time. But back to our Pop Rocks…
Now if the brain is in fact a simulation machine – as Bergen holds – then Pop Rocks are a special kind of fuel. As they pop in the mouth, nerve endings in the oral cavity capture those sensations and send them on to the brain. The brain, in turn, generates that 4th of July experience I described earlier. Because each of us is unique, the experience differs from person to person. What cognitive scientists have discovered, however, is that the same parts of the mind that are active when one is engaged in physical activity also come alive when reading about it. So hopefully, my written description of the Pop Rock experience set your mind in motion, delivering a simulated experience minus the candy. Well, did it?
Great poets have exploited this unique feature of human intelligence for thousands of years. In fact, the Pop Rock effect is similar in many ways to evocative poetry. With poetry, the words “pop” as they sit in one’s thoughts, acting as a catalyst, facilitating a chain reaction aimed at generating a simulation of the scene in the mind’s eye. That’s why humans love great literature, poetry, and art. They power our imagination, allowing us to create new and exciting worlds.
Currently, computers and large language models like ChatGPT do not have the ability to experience a Pop Rock moment. ChatGPT can describe the experience. I know because I asked. Yet the model experiences nothing, knows nothing, understands nothing. How can it when it has no body? In future posts, I plan to explain how AI models actually work. In the meantime, you may encounter someone who tells you that the singularity is near, that AI will soon rule planet earth. And when they ask what you think, just smile and say, “Pop Rocks.”