Dowell ” by Elizabeth F . Cooke , she notes : “ Our experience of surprise from a first-person point of view tells us that we often do make incorrect judgments about the world and feel compelled to rescind them . And for error recognition to occur , some things must be in place : an inquirer with concepts and a set of beliefs , as well as a nonego acting on the inquirer . The subject ’ s experience is partly of the self as an object in relation to the world . [...] Surprise is felt as causal and conceptual within experience and provides conceptual friction with the world . It serves as an empirical self-corrective insofar as it is forced by a nonego , yet still conceptual . |
|||
English cultural theorist Mark Fisher explores the haziness of surprise ’ s adjacent experiences such as the weird and the eerie , and how weirdness notes a feeling ‘ this does not belong ,’ and the intertwining of the historical ideas of the weird and of fate itself .” |
|||
|
Jeanette Andrews
On Surprise
After having spent the past year researching surprise through the lenses of science , philosophy , sociology , and innumerable conversations , I feel little closer to a grasp of this slippery experience . To summarize a few quick thoughts :
From a scientific standpoint , in the study “ Intuitions about magic track the development of intuitive physics ” by the team of Casey Lewry , Kaley Curtis , Nadya Vasilyeva , Fei Xu , and Thomas L . Griffiths , they note that : “ However , there is some debate surrounding the extent to which looking time is an accurate measure of surprise . Wang et al . ( 2004 ) note that when they refer to violation-of-expectation paradigms as measuring infants ’ surprise , ‘ surprise ’ is shorthand for a state of attention or interest . While there is wide
|
consensus that a difference in looking time indicates detection of a difference between the two events , some have argued that this attention or interest could be caused by familiarity with the event or prediction of an event , rather than by surprise at a violation of an expectation , thus providing no evidence for an understanding of the physical principle in question ( e . g ., Bogartz , Shinskey , & Speaker , 1997 ; Jackson & Sirois , 2009 ). However , as Hamlin ( 2014 ) explains , the evidence for infants ’ surprise at an event is distinct from evidence for infants ’ prediction of an event , and well-designed research can distinguish between these two interpretations .”
Research on the phenomenology of surprise holds ideas based on the richness of the lived , embodied experience . In “ Phenomenology of Error and Surprise : Peirce , Davidson , and Mc-
|
Finally , in many conversations with lay people across a broad spectrum of industries , ages , etc ., there seems to be no shortage of interest and opinions on this topic . I have encountered sentiments along a full spectrum that surprise is nothing more than a biological being startled , to the feeling that all experience is emotion driven and thus surprise is a personal and cultural fleeting experience .
Magic , Machine Learning , and Surprise
My thoughts on these topics converged in spring of 2021 . I was fortunate enough to be named as an Affiliate of metaLAB ( at ) Harvard , the greatest honor of my life to date . One of the original Principals of the lab , the ever-inspiring Matthew Battles , posed the question to me whether the original Victorian parlor “ Imitation Game ” was similar to the parlor magic of the era and further : A ) if this style of magic was in my wheelhouse and B ) if using parlor magic might be an interesting way to explore these ideas of surprise and computational intelligence .
I was taken aback by this beautiful line of thought and began an immediate deep dive into the relationships between magic , surprise , and machine learning . Could I design an algorithm to generate descriptions of novel magic effects with varying levels of surprise factors ? This is what I set out to do . After reaching out to some brilliant computer scientists and coders , my initial thought was to join with them to create algorithms : inspired by some of Griffiths ’ thoughts on interestingness , and to also weave in my own ideas on the properties of objects noted in his studies
|
79 |