Today I've been watching two movies at the same time, zapping between the one and the other with my remote control. Both movies were interesting. One movie was about a famous club called studio 54. The owner was rich, famous, eccentric, addicted. He hand-picked his guests every night. Of all the hundreds of people shouting in the line, only few would get in. His 'door-policy', was the key to the succes of the club, however unfair such a policy might be, of course. Reflecting on it, I thought about how the talent for one specific thing might build you a complete empire (and bring you tons of money). Even being the famous owner, he still hand-picked the guests. This made the club special, attracting more special people (with money). He created a myth, but I did so by doing just one thing: going out there picking his guests. Of course he could not hand over this task to someone else, because the club was built on *his* talent and this talent was personal, which made the club personal, and the personality (unicity) of the club was the fundamental reasion why people wanted to be there in the first place. The great thing about going to this club is that once you were in, you knew that you had been 'handpicked' by this one guy.
The club, as it evolved, was driven entirly by a talent (based on intuition) and a forceful internal drive for success, and a continuous need for having more and more of it. Talent, intuition, need for succes; these are concepts completely alien to most of cognitive science. But as this movie shows: such human characteristics drive large parts of our society (the club being just an example, perhaps even a metaphor, of the human ways in general).
The other movie was about a guy who lied about almost everything, pretending to be a school-teacher, a crook, a policeman, and at some point even being appointed a doctor in a hospital, without having had the education (learning to talk and act like a doctor from television shows). Reflecting on this, I thought about how a pattern of behavior, on the outside, can be so completely fundamentally not be the same as "the real thing", which is somehow defined "on the inside". He was not a real doctor, but nobody noticed, since he said the right words. He even got somebody the right medicin or cure just by 'going with the behavioral flow' of things. Did he actually cause anything functional to happen in that hospital? Is it possible to get the effects using a system in which there is 'nobody home'? Ultimately, at least in this movie, his scheme exploded, something was bound to go wrong at some point, and it did. But if that wouldn've happened, would we have a right to say that this guy was not a doctor? Or should we accept the idea that a doctor is however does exactly as a doctor should do? What I ask here is of course exactly what Turing has asked of computers in his famous thesis on artificial intelligence: a classic.
The two movies, in all, couldn't have been more different. The one being about basic internal human capacities that are unexplained by objective science, the other being about the objective behavioral view of a human being, knowing that inside there is no body home. Objective science versus human intuition. Although I'm a real scientist, I liked the Studio 54 movie better. Why would that be?
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