The other day a question arose during a discussion: am I a genius? I immediately flinched at the question and expressed my intense discomfort with the very idea. When asked why, I paused and thought for a while. This goes way back in my history. I was definitely smart when I was a kid, and I was pretty proud of myself. My father jumped all over me when I boasted about being smart. He really pounded on me not to be egotistical, and I internalized that shaming so fully that nowadays saying the words “I am a genius” makes me cringe in shame.
I feel a lot of shame. Perhaps a dozen times a day, I recall something stupid I did earlier in life and snort in angry shame at myself.
But the conversation made me realize something. While I was still an undergraduate, my personal studies of neurophysiology led me to form a hypothesis about neural organization that could account for the plasticity noted by a Russian doctor named Luriev, if I recall correctly. That hypothesis I called “Schemolics”, and I have written about it here. I discussed it with a professor, but he told me that what my idea was merely a version of something called a ‘Perceptron’ and somebody had published a paper proving that Perceptrons couldn’t work. I continued to mess with the idea, running various simulations in grad school and later while I was at Atari.
It turns out that my idea was very similar to the concepts that underly deep learning AI systems. I didn’t develop them that far, but I had the core idea down pat—about fifteen years before the computer science community figured out how to make it work.
Then in 1976 I came up with another idea, succinctly expressed in the title “The Second Law of Thermodynamics is a Quantum Mechanical Effect”. It’s quite radical, and so when I wrote up the paper and shipped it off to a scientific journal, it was rejected. But it appears that physicists are finally cottoning to the notion. They’re coming at it from a completely different direction, thinking in terms of information content. But their thinking appears to parallel my own—several decades later.
My latest big idea is the biggest of all, and I think the most important. The key concept is explained on this page, but you really should read the pages around it to fully grasp the significance of the idea. I wrote all this up about 18 months ago, and so far about 250 people have looked at the page. I believe that this idea is of profound significance, yet I have been unable to interest people in it.
Of course, the main reason for this is that I’ve made no attempt to sell the idea. I simply wrote it up and put it on my website. I suppose that, were I to jump through the appropriate hoops, I could garner more interest for the idea. But that is beneath my pride; I am a thinker, not a salesman. I refuse to promote myself. I put the idea before the world and the world can take it or leave it. The world mostly leaves it.
But sometimes I wonder if I do not have some moral obligation to promote my ideas. Wouldn’t computer science have been better off if I had developed and pushed my schemolics idea sooner? Wouldn’t physics be better off if I had gotten down and dirty and fought, kicked, and shoved my thinking on 2nd Thermo into their faces? Wouldn’t computer software be vastly improved if people understood the deep concepts I have developed about Objects Versus Processes?
I am reluctant; I hate having to depend upon anybody else for anything. I don’t want my success or failure to be determined by the idiots who populate this planet. Will Durant wrote:
“After every idea has had its day with us and we have fought for it not wisely or too well, we in our turn shall tire of the battle, and pass on to the young our thinning fascicle of ideals. Then we shall take to the woods with Jacques, Jean-Jacques, and Lao-tze; we shall make friends of the animals, and discourse more contentedly than Machiavelli with simple peasant minds; we shall leave the world to stew in its own deviltry, and shall take no further thought of its reform.”
Still, I wonder if I shouldn’t try to express the ideas on these pages as videos. Young people these days, I am told, are illiterate and cannot understand the written word. They can learn only from video. So should I speak to them in the language they understand?
Yes, I probably am a genius—but the issue is meaningless. It doesn’t matter how smart or stupid I am. What matters is what I accomplish in making the world a better place. I have done good things, but I have not done enough to bestow them effectively on the world.
