The 22nd Design Fundamentals Seminar "Design of Natural Born Intelligence"

It would seem that design cannot escape from the structure of pre-defined purposes and conditions. In other words, it only by being within this structure that the true value and order of design can be shown. This is not the case. Then, what is the intelligence of us who is natural born in such a way that we deviate from all structures, or rather, design of deviation?

Lecturer

Dr. Yukio-Pegio Gunji

Professor, Department of Intermedia, Art and Science, School of Fundamental Engineering, Waseda University.
http://www.ypg.ias.sci.waseda.ac.jp/index.html

Date

Oct 29th, 2021: Opens at 17:20 p.m, performance starts at 17:30 p.m. in Japan Time.

Venue

Online

Review

What is Natural-Born Intelligence (NBI)?

According to Gunji (2019), intelligence that considers what is truly present and latent is “natural-born intelligence (NBI).” In his book, Gunji compared NBI, artificial intelligence (AI), and natural intelligence (NI) to show the state of intelligence and their creativity. However, Gunji considers that the synonym for AI is NI, and not NBI. Artificial intelligence (AI) deals with constructing a knowledge world “for me.” On the one hand, NI comprehensively accumulates knowledge to understand the world. Therefore, NI builds a knowledge world “for the world” (Gunji, 2019). The premise of AI is only concerned with data that can be perceived, whereas NI is only motivated by what is perceived as a problem or mystery. On the other hand, NBI can be motivated about what it cannot see (Gunji, 2019). “Natural Born” is a Japanese expression that ridicules out-of-focus senses, but NBI is a form of intelligence that can deviate from the immediate, logical, and perceptible world and connect only with the invisible outside, that is, outside the perceived and objective reality of this world, while accepting this world.

Thinking styles of natural-born intelligence and artificial intelligence

In his lecture, Gunji contrasted both AI and NBI designs. He demonstrated that in AI design, “the designer’s own way of thinking about form and the context of the client’s needs are reconciled and completed.” Alternately, in natural intelligence, design is “generated by a sudden flash of inspiration between the designer’s own ideas about form and the context requested by the client.”

Citing Brooks, Gunji found the Roomba vacuum cleaner to be a design example based on AI. If we can define what constitutes garbage, we can state it is “what the vacuum cleaner Roomba sucks up.” However, when Roomba recognizes trash, it sucks the trash on the floor that is large enough to be sucked up. However, even if there is something that is not considered trash, such as a small piece of lost jewelry, Roomba will suck it up as trash. By contrast, it does not perceive large pieces of trash, such as plastic drink cups, even though they are trash. Human beings make similar mistakes. We tend to regard the recognizable and understandable as the world and ignore the incomprehensible and unrecognizable as “nothing.” In his book, Gunji criticizes Kagan who says, “Philosophically, death does not exist, so there is no need to fear it” (Gunji, 2020). To think that the world is only what we can perceive is to believe and see a pseudo-world that is only understandable. This is similar to the definition of garbage perceived by Roomba.

The world is connected to an imperceptible but existent outside realm. Living in a world that accepts such an outside environment is where the design of NBI comes into play. Gunji cited Alexander as an example of a famous designer/architect who shifted from the AI to NBI way of thinking (Gunji, 2022). In the early period , Alexander used design mathematics to develop and validate an architectural theory or “pattern language.” The method of embedding patterns, which are local structures, in semi-lattices builds a logical homogeneous space in which there is no room for outside participation. However, Alexander himself rejected the earlier theory and presented “The Nature of Order,” a method for creating a “living structure” called the later Alexander . Gunji showed this later design method as “positive/negative antinomy,” which led to the development of a concrete method of designing using NBI.

Positive/Negative Antinomy

Gunji’s examples of positive/negative antinomy include a dialogue with a friend with developmental disabilities, an improvisational form of dance called “contract improvisation,” the NHK TV series “Welcome Back Mone,” and a Japanese painting by Kyoko Nakamura showing the “Kakiwari” perspective. This review focuses on Nakamura’s “Kakiwari” as an example of positive/negative antinomy. Originally used as a stage backdrop, a Kakiwari is a painting on a flat board, where the landscape is painted only on one surface, which represents the landscape as a space of the world only from this side view. In the painting of a mountain range in a write-only style, there is inherently a large distance between the top and foot of the mountain, which separates the distance between the distant and near views, yet the painting takes the style of a single board with the distance reduced to zero. This state of “being both distant and near” is called positive antinomy, in which both are established. By contrast, if you turn the painting over, there is nothing drawn on the reverse; that is, there is no space on the reverse side. Different both either not established and it is called negative antinomy in which a state that does not define a distance is established. It is theoretically impossible for both positive and negative antinomies to coexist at the same time, because when one exists, the other disappears. However, a situation in which both are established simultaneously occurs in the thinking style of NBI. Gunji found this in Nakamura’s work (Guji & Nakamura, 2021).

In her work, Nakamura abandons the concepts of perspective and nearness, brought about by the use of perspective and created paintings that actively construct the world of Kakiwari. This is because there is no reverse side = no other side; in other words, the outside that cannot be perceived is shown through the plane of Kakiwari. Gunji discusses a situation in which positive and negative antinomies are simultaneously established by deviating from the concept of perspective. By expressing the simultaneous establishment of positive and negative antinomies, the outside is created. This is the meaning of creativity. Thus, “design which is alive” is the concept of positive/negative antinomy as a mechanism to create the external. In a recent research finding, Guji also showed that a logical structure quantum theory, called an orthomodular lattice, appears when the relations that cannot be related as positive/negative antinomies are expressed as binary relationships (Guji & Nakamura, 2021).

Finally, as a familiar example, Gunji illustrated the instance of a folding knife. When considering the design of a knife that is sharp and well-designed, let us assume that the design is shown in the handle of the knife. At this time, we will ensure the antinomy that each cutting edge (sharpness)/handle (design) is positively established. The design of the folding knife is such that the danger of the blade is denied, and the ornamentation of the inside of the handle cannot be demonstrated, which establishes both negative and positive antinomy. Gunji explains that natural intelligence is about concentrating on the inconsistency between the designer’s own ideas about form and the context required by the client, and then turning it around and proposing unexpected ideas. Gunji calls this a “traumatic structure” because it is traumatic to be in a situation where positive and negative antinomies are simultaneously established, where things do not make sense or seem reasonable. The outside will “come” only after we accept the trauma, and “polish” the overwhelming intense trauma.

(Kyoko Nakamura)

References

• 郡司ペギオ幸夫 (2019)『天然知能』講談社メチエ
• 郡司ペギオ幸夫 (2020)『やってくる』医学書院
• 郡司ペギオ幸夫（2021）表象文化論学会第15回大会報告「パネル4 脱創造：外部と接続するための創造的営為」https://www.repre.org/repre/vol43/conference15/4/
• Gunji, Y. P. & Nakamura, K. (2022) Kakiwari: The device summoning creativity in art and cognition. In: Unconventional Computing, Philosophies and Art (Adamatzky, A. ed.) World Scientific, Singapore (in press).