| Topic: |
Science > Philosophy |
| User: |
"Paleo-Conservative" |
| Date: |
26 Nov 2004 08:03:43 PM |
| Object: |
PHILOSOPHICAL Perspective On the Human Brain |
A scientist gives a philosphical explanation of the human brain from a
evolutionary and computer science point of view:
The following is from http://www.neoeugenics.com/
What Is Thought? By Eric B. Baum, 2004
Book review by Matt Nuenke
This book is about how the brains of all organisms, including humans,
evolved over millions of years to design genetic code that is modular,
compact, and that has captured the highly constrained physical world
that it must decipher in order to engage it to survive. These mental
modules, in a highly orchestrated manner between themselves, capture a
representation of the world that is accurate enough for a seemingly
single conscious organism to act upon the world. As humans, feeling
like we are free agents, the mind "feeds" us filtered data—but keeps
us unaware of how that information is captured, processed, and
presented to us.
Jumping ahead, Baum concludes: "So, when we ask questions of
ourselves, when we introspect, when we describe our thought processes
to others, when we talk about what we are feeling—all of this is
controlled by the upper-level code, the upper-level modules. These
upper-level decisions and computations are what we report because the
upper-level modules are doing the talking. Indeed, 'upper-level' may
be a slight misnomer. Speech and action are controlled by modules
specifically evolved for controlling speech and action, which may be
deliberately fed disinformation by other modules, specifically to
control what we say and do in a manner advantageous to our genes. What
we are verbally aware of, then, is the disinformation, not the true
information only known to the subconscious processes that direct the
flow of information. So, it is not clear in what sense we can say that
our verbal awareness is at the very top of some hierarchy."
The above statement should seem confusing, as it is counterintuitive.
That is the reason What Is Thought? is much more than a book on how
the mind works. It is also a book about science and knowledge itself.
What I will attempt to do is review this book for its intended
purpose, while also discussing human rejection of the scientific
method in most areas of our lives where it impacts our "humanness."
Science is embraced by all in the pursuit of material well being
alone: cars, television, food production, going to the moon, etc.—that
is anything that most people want to have or achieve. It becomes
highly volatile however, when it touches any of our cherished, but
false belief systems. When science bumps up against race,
intelligence, religion, eugenics, economics, politics, human worth,
….. (the list is endless) humans will rebel against science to pursue
their own goals. I do not mean to say that science should tell us how
to behave, only that science is the only system where knowledge can be
gained without resorting to false beliefs.
Many people think that at least modern educated people are open to
scientific methods, but I contend that this also is a false belief.
Again, the list is long so this is just a sample:
—> Those who believe in one of the many religions that reject
evolution;
—> Marxists who reject any economic system that does not put them in
complete control;
—> Advocates for the poor, who blame the well-off for all of the
poor's problems;
—> Postmodernists, who openly reject all science for a myriad of
Leftist positions;
—> Multiculturalists and diversity advocates who claim it is good but
provide no proof;
—> Educators who still believe in naïve environmentalism and reject
any role for genes in intelligence and learning;
—> Environmentalists who want all humans to return to living in caves
because the earth is alive and we may be killing it (literally);
—> Politicians, who ignore research on human nature then pass
legislation that does more harm than good;
—> Anti-racists who reject any genetic differences between the races;
Etc.
That leaves very few people left who are in a position to reach
Stanovich's third level of insight, those who are capable of
questioning their own beliefs (Stanovich, 2004).
As part of another project, I did a Questia search for articles
dealing with "critical race theory (CRT), and I will use this new
discipline as just one example how science is rejected by many of
today's academics. (For political and economic systems see Darwinian
Politics: The Evolutionary Origin of Freedom by Paul H. Rubin, 2002.)
Critical Race Theory (Jump to excerpts available on my web site).
The following quotes are a good introduction to CRT:
"Critical race theory (CRT) is an exciting, revolutionary intellectual
movement that puts race at the center of critical analysis. Although
no set of doctrines or methodologies defines critical race theory,
scholars who write within the parameters of this intellectual movement
share two very broad commitments. First, as a critical intervention
into traditional civil rights scholarship, critical race theory
describes the relationship between ostensibly race-neutral ideals,
like 'the rule of law,' 'merit,' and 'equal protection,' and the
structure of white supremacy and racism. Second, as a race-conscious
and quasi-modernist intervention into critical legal scholarship,
critical race theory proposes ways to use 'the vexed bond between law
and racial power' to transform that social structure and to advance
the political commitment of racial emancipation.
"More centrally, the use of critical race theory offers a way to
understand how ostensibly race-neutral structures in
education—knowledge, truth, merit, objectivity, and 'good
education'—are in fact ways of forming and policing the racial
boundaries of white supremacy and racism.
"A recent compilation of CRT key writings points out that there is no
'canonical set of doctrines or methodologies to which [CRT scholars]
all subscribe.' However, these scholars are unified by two common
interests—to understand how a 'regime of white supremacy and its
subordination of people of color have been created and maintained in
America' and to change the bond that exists between law and racial
power."
Like religion, assumptions are made on faith alone. It is taken as a
fact, not explored in any scientific way, that all racial problems
flow from some sort of White conspiracy—normally called White
supremacism or White privilege. Somehow, some unexplainable system was
put in place by Whites in the past, which continues to oppress people
of color, disabled people, all women, homosexuals, and other groups
being added as needed to fill the anti-white-male ranks.
It's not the premise that is disturbing, because humans are capable of
all kinds of misdeeds where one group harms another. It is that CRT
denies any need for evidence, and concludes that any search for
evidence in the traditional scientific sense is just more White
supremacism at work.
The old Marxists have moved to this new position for a very good
reason—they have lost every battle in which they tried to turn back
neo-Darwinism and now genetics. Every obstacle that they put in its
way is obliterated with new research from academics in virtually every
field that is not on the Left fringe. Science has some very simple
rules, these new neo-Marxists cannot win the debates using these
simple rules, so they have gone back to religious faith to reinforce
their position.
As Farber and Sherry note in The Radical Assault on Truth in American
Law, 1997:
"As Bell's story illustrates, these radical multiculturalists believe
in particular that western ideas and institutions are socially
constructed to serve the interests of the powerful, especially
straight, white men. This leads them to attack such core concepts as
truth, merit, and the rule of law. Catharine MacKinnon, the well-known
feminist theorist, says that traditional standards of merit for jobs
and school admissions are merely 'affirmative action for white males,'
reflecting what white males value about themselves. This theme has
been repeated by a number of other feminists and critical race
theorists, who have seemingly been blind to its anti-Semitic
implications. Others attack the concepts of reason and objective
truth, condemning them as components of white male domination. They
prefer the more subjective 'ways of knowing' supposedly favored by
women and minorities, such as storytelling like Bell's. As to the rule
of law, it is an article of faith that legal rules are indeterminate
and serve only to disguise the law's white male bias. In short,
radical multiculturalism includes a broad-based attack on the
Enlightenment foundations of democracy….
"We are not trying to play the victims' one-upmanship game or ask why
some disadvantaged groups have succeeded where others have not. Nor
are we accusing the radicals themselves of being personally racist or
anti-Semitic. We are simply suggesting that their theory—which
attributes all success to power—cannot account for groups that surpass
white gentile America without resorting to racism and anti-Semitism.
The radical theories inescapably imply that Jews and Asians enjoy an
unfair share of wealth and status. Thus, the necessary normative
implication of the radical theory is that steps should be taken to
redress the balance more in favor of white gentiles. In addition, the
radicals cannot easily explain Jewish and Asian success."
Like all religions then, the faithful must ignore science, but again
they have no church to hole up in, so how do they rationalize their
religion? By redefining the quest for knowledge through narrative,
story telling, and most importantly never stooping to using the White
man's scientific tools like computer modeling, brain imaging,
statistical analysis, cognitive neuroscience, genetics, etc. Story
telling is the only method that is viable because it allows the
radicals to gain knowledge by sharing their "own unique ways of
knowing." Therefore, they use just-so stories to express their own
"ways of knowing" but make no effort to understand how humans come to
know anything in the first place—ergo pure religion.
As John Fonte explains it in Policy Review:
"Gramsci's observation, is exercised by privileged groups or classes
in two ways: through domination, force, or coercion; and through
something called 'hegemony,' which means the ideological supremacy of
a system of values that supports the class or group interests of the
predominant classes or groups. Subordinate groups, he argued, are
influenced to internalize the value systems and world views of the
privileged groups and, thus, to consent to their own marginalization….
"The metaphysics, or lack thereof, behind this Gramscian worldview are
familiar enough. Gramsci describes his position as 'absolute
historicism,' meaning that morals, values, truths, standards and human
nature itself are products of different historical epochs. There are
no absolute moral standards that are universally true for all human
beings outside of a particular historical context; rather, morality is
'socially constructed….'"
Funny how the radicals can often agree perfectly with the empirically
minded neo-Darwinists, except for a minor point—human nature evolved.
Both Darwinists and cultural relativists agree that much of what we
value, adhere to, and believe in is a product of our culture. The
difference is that science is able to separate those facets of
humanity that reside in our genetic code, by accident, through
cultural change (memes), or yet to be determined. Science therefore
makes progress with regards to knowledge, while these religions just
keep revolting against an unstoppable juggernaut—knowing reality as it
really is by scientific means.
I used CRT to introduce the notion that most people reject science
when it gets in the way of their false beliefs. President Reagan was
noted for his metaphors and story telling, so there is nothing unique
about most people naturally preferring just-so stories to communicate
gossip and political policy alike. Everywhere one looks we see humans
acting irrationally, preferring false beliefs to scientific
explanations. These false beliefs however quite often turn out to be
disastrous for humans, like the war in Iraq. False beliefs on all
sides may now slip us into a new world war as the Islamic world
rallies around some hope of success in destroying the great Satan.
Even our scientific societies have trouble with the reality of nature.
"In a recent issue of Current Anthropologist, two Stanford biologists,
Paul Ehrlich and Marcus Feldman, wrote that 'the concept of overall
heritability should be restricted in its employment to plant and
animal breeding. . . . [When it comes to humans] genes can control
some general patterns ... but they cannot be controlling our
individual behavioral choices (Marcus, 2004).'" Why not? It is just
accepted that humans must be different, we have escaped our genes
because that is just the way it is. No proof is provided other than
endless just-so stories that mix metaphors with wishful thinking
without scientific rigorous proofs.
Marcus goes on: "People don't want to accept that genes play an
important role in our mental life because this notion challenges our
sense of being able to shape our own destinies. But it is patently
clear that genes do shape our mental lives. Although Ehrlich and
Feldman are, strictly speaking, correct—genes certainly don't control
our destinies—genes do contribute to our personalities, our
temperaments, and the qualities that make each individual unique, as
well as to the qualities that make the human species unique. Modern
science has revealed dozens of ways in which genes have a demonstrable
effect on mental life."
He goes on to explain how newborns can imitate facial gestures, how
they know the difference in rhythms between different languages, how
they know when someone is looking at them or at something else, etc.
Study after study shows that newborns come into the world already
knowing about the world and ready to learn specific things about the
environment. At birth babies already know about "faces, words, and
maybe even sentences." Studies on newborns and child development all
point to an organism that enters the world with a genetic code made
for this world, and ready to learn about it. It enters the world
expecting the world to be as it is with language, objects, faces and
other organisms expected to act as they do—babies are preprogrammed to
learn about a known world, taught by evolution by the trillions of
organisms that came before them.
It is also becoming abundantly clear that intelligence is genetic.
There has been a great deal of debate on hard evidence connecting
intelligence with differences in brains, and that evidence is rolling
in as well. Recent studies are now showing that brain size versus
intelligence is weakly correlated because there are specific areas of
the brain—gray matter patches if you will—that are correlated with
intelligence. The rest of the brain is devoted to tasks that are
common among all animals. Human cognition or the ability to plan, see
the future, and pass on knowledge from one person to another through
language and symbols is very recent and located in definable areas of
the brain.
As Marcus explains, "Now, here's the rub. Every genetic process is
triggered by some sort of signal. From the perspective of a given
cell, it doesn't matter where that signal comes from. The signal that
launches the adjust-your-synapse cascade, for example, may come from
within, or it may come from without. The same genes that are used to
adjust synapses based on internal instruction can be reused by
external instruction." That is, it is not just the genes that we have
that is important, it is also the switches that activate the genes
that are important, and they also are part of the DNA that makes us
tick. These IF statements are activated by the DNA itself and by
external events—like learning to speak by hearing others speak.
Nevertheless, none of this learning is done without the aid of genes
being activated. The naïve environmentalist position of humans being
born as blank slates should finally be put to rest.
As much as we feel like we have total free will, that we think before
we act, that we behave as rational agents in the world, all of the
evidence indicates that we live a lie. In WHY WE LIE: The Evolutionary
Roots of Deception and the Unconscious Mind by David Livingston Smith,
2004, he states, "Deceit is the Cinderella of human nature; essential
to our humanity but disowned by its perpetrators at every turn. It is
normal, natural, and pervasive. It is not, as popular opinion would
have it, reducible to mental illness or moral failure. Human society
is a 'network of lies and deceptions' that would collapse under the
weight of too much honesty. From the fairy tales our parents told us
to the propaganda our governments feed us, human beings spend their
lives surrounded by pretense." So much for rational man.
So, do we have a problem here or not? We certainly don't want to be so
open that we speak our minds in every situation. In dealing with
others, deception is probably necessary. However, when deception and
self-deception interferes with rational behavior that results in bad
science, bad political decisions, bad crime control, bad economics,
bad educational programs—then our irrational systems cause real harm.
Smith states, "I don't for a minute believe that we can be taught not
to deceive ourselves, and even if we could (by whom?), it would
probably result in widespread unhappiness. We are all frail creatures
who need something to get us through the night. But surely, we can get
rid of some of our surplus self-deception. Tolerating a measure of
self-deception is one thing, but actively promoting it is quite
another. At a minimum, perhaps we can help each other to acknowledge
that we are all natural-born liars."
Perhaps the war in Iraq is a debatable good, and not as irrational as
I perceive it to be. However, the government's program No Child Left
Behind is so patently wrong that it is inexcusable that no one has
exposed this fraud. The reason that some schools cannot teach children
to the level expected to be the norm, is because the norms are all
standardized on the average for Whites. Blacks, Amerindians
(Mexicans), American Indians, Puerto Ricans, etc. all have different
average intelligences and though some individuals may be able to reach
expected levels, on average these minorities cannot meet expectations.
Instead of admitting this, which psychometricians readily know, our
whole educational system is in denial of the facts. Now, we are seeing
the program falling apart, causing disruptions, blaming schools and/or
school teachers for the failure instead of facing reality. We as a
society accept the collective lie that all races have the same average
intelligence. All of the research however says otherwise.
As Smith observes, "The most dangerous forms of self-deception are the
collective ones. Patriotism, moral crusades, and religious fervor
sweep across nations like plagues, slicing the world into good and
evil, defender and aggressor, right and wrong." Collective
self-deception is obviously the most dangerous—it is what politics,
the media, government and national conflicts are all about.
Collectives are also the solution to self-deception, IF the collective
is free to challenge false beliefs. Moreover, this is where the
zealots from politics, the Left, the religious, and the self-serving
advocates promote false beliefs by condemning or just ignoring
science.
The scientific method includes creating hypotheses that are
falsifiable and therefore testable. It includes open debates using ALL
available tools and disciplines to challenge the alternative
hypotheses. This includes not attacking the messenger but challenging
the hypotheses themselves. Note that this is not how the academic
left, even those in the biological sciences, have conducted
themselves. Ever since science started aggressively challenging
Boasian naïve environmentalism in the 1960s, the academic left has
used specious arguments, ignored research, maintained intellectual
boundaries around protected disciplines like CRT and cultural
anthropology (that is heavily Marxist), and most effectively, stifling
the distribution of research by attacking the scientists themselves.
That is, they attack the scientists motives rather than the data
itself.
Another diversionary tactic in this "collective fraud" is to keep
generating ever-new hypotheses or theories that are eventually
overturned or refuted. With regards to the debate over intelligence
testing and racial differences, we have seen numerous new excuses
trying to refute the importance of intelligence and/or finding new
environmental explanations for racial differences. Unfortunately, all
of these attempts eventually end up as just-so stories. The charade
however is continued by providing the media with new explanations that
the media can report to the public, while refusing to even mention the
mainstream research on intelligence. (Maybe if enough teachers get
tired of being blamed for the No Child Left Behind failures, they will
start to collectively challenge the false assumptions that it is based
on.)
What Is Thought?
Baum begins, "My goal is to lay out a plausible picture of mind
consistent with all we know, and in fact to lay out what I argue is
the most straightforward, simplest picture of mind. I accept no
mysticism; assume that we are just the result of mechanical processes
explainable by physics; accept that we were created by evolution;
accept some unproven hypotheses for which there is near-consensus
among the computer science community on the basis of strong evidence
(such as 'the Church-Turing thesis' and 'PNP,' both of which I
explain); and bring to bear whatever seem like hard results from a
variety of fields, including molecular biology, linguistics, ethology,
evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, and computational
experimentation."
In essence, Baum will argue his case based on the scientific method
alone, without resorting to false-beliefs, or a personal agenda based
on values rather than facts. As he proceeds to show how he views how
the mind works, he also explains how science works. I don't think it
was his intent, but nonetheless it is a good example of how a
scientific book should be written. At no time, as far as I could tell,
did he slip into some moral stance for the sake of political
correctness or political viewpoint. This is rare even among some of
the best researchers—they lapse into one or more of their own false
beliefs buried deep in what is otherwise very respectable scientific
hypothesis testing.
Baum uses the term semantics for what is real in the world. He wants
to look at how the syntax of our language matches what has "real
meaning in the world." He argues that evolution over millions of
years, while interacting with the real world, has been able to capture
the real world's highly constrained structure, and mold this
information into highly compact genetic code. That is, as organisms
interacted with the world, those that "captured" the real meaning of
the world and evolved compact code that best represented the world
lived on, while other organisms vanished.
Baum states, "Physics is a good analogy here. Physicists have written
down a short list of laws that allow them to predict the outcomes of
many experiments. Thus, they believe that the world really does have
an underlying simplicity described by these simple laws. I argue here
that mind is a complex but still compact program that captures and
exploits the underlying compact structure of the world. I refer to
this principle as Occam's razor."
Baum uses Occam's razor throughout the book, and it is another pillar
of the scientific method (also spelled Ockham's razor and also known
as the law of parsimony). It is defined as "A rule in science and
philosophy stating that entities should not be multiplied needlessly.
This rule is interpreted to mean that the simplest of two or more
competing theories is preferable and that an explanation for unknown
phenomena should first be attempted in terms of what is already
known."
Using Occam's razor he contends that, "If we look for a compact
description underlying mind, one stands out like Venus on a moonless
night. With its myriad of neurons and connections the brain is huge,
but its DNA program is much smaller—at first glance quite surprisingly
small when one analyzes its function. So I argue that, counter to some
of the folk wisdom in the computational and cognitive science
communities, mind is essentially inherent in the DNA in some detail.
There is no doubt that learning during life is important, but because
the DNA is the compact program that is the core, learning during life
is essentially guided and programmed by the DNA—a phenomenon called
inductive bias. We learn extremely rapidly, much more rapidly than
computer scientists have been able to explain, because our learning is
entirely based on and guided by semantics. The reason we learn so
fast, the reason our learning is guided by semantics, is that the
compact DNA code has already extracted the semantics and constrains
our reasoning and learning to deal only with meaningful quantities."
This is a profound statement, but it is in keeping with what numerous
other researchers have been reporting. There is no separation between
what any organism is in terms of their DNA and what we report to be a
feeling of being in control of our past, present and future. The mind
and the brain are one in the same, humans are not any different than
other organisms, and any attempt to separate humans from the chain of
evolution is just a false belief that we are somehow outside or stand
aside from nature as some special type of being. Yet, that is exactly
what cultural anthropologists (and many others) contend, that the laws
of biology do not pertain to human behavior.
Baum explains, "Mind understands the world in terms of meaningful
concepts and is able to reason so fast because it only searches
through meaningful possibilities…. By producing a program with many
subroutines corresponding to meaningful concepts, evolution produced a
program that is compact because it reuses these subroutines in
multiple different contexts."
When reading this I thought about how people deal with others while
driving a car versus how they deal with each other walking on the
street. In large urban areas like Chicago where I live, both walking
and driving can be chaotic and rude. Yet, most of the symbolic anger
shown by one person to another is when they are driving a car. While
walking, people tend to be less confrontational. However, at a bar at
night, fights do break out between people that know each other. This
is a good example of the mind behaving according to rules laid down
thousands of years ago, and how those rules sometimes have to be
applied under new contexts like being separated from each other by
encapsulating ourselves inside of moving vehicles. Our mental modules
for social interaction were designed for hunter-gather communities,
not millions of people on congested roadways.
Baum also exposes the fraud behind the argument that there are "ways
of knowing" that are different between genders, races or ethnicities.
There most certainly are differences, but they are not readily known
by the mind. The differences consist of a dollop of difference in life
experience, and significant differences between individuals and
between races. Evolutionary psychology studies those older mental
modules that are the same in most people, while behavior genetics
studies the genetic differences between people[s]. Both approaches are
valid and informative.
As Baum explains it, "Occam's razor is the well-known and intuitive
prescription that, given any set of facts, the simplest explanation is
the best. Occam's razor underlies all of science. It is, for example,
the way in which physicists come to their small collection of simple
laws that fundamentally explain all physical phenomena, how chemists
arrive at the periodic table, why biologists believe in heredity.
Newton's laws, for example, are simple in the sense that they can be
written down on a single page, yet they explain a vast number of
physical experiments and phenomena.
"Occam's razor further underlies all of human reasoning. It is why,
for example, jurors do not reach for some Rube Goldberg hypothesis
that is consistent with any evidence that could possibly be presented
and also exonerates the accused. An explanation that is too complex is
judged to be 'beyond reasonable doubt.'"
And yet, that is just the opposite approach taken by those who decry
eugenics or deny racial differences in intelligence. What we know
about breeding improved organisms and plants is opposed by complex
arguments that go off in all kinds of directions, predicting various
forms of doom if applied to humans. With the well-documented
heritability of intelligence, the radical environmentalists conjure up
complex causations that are endless and unfalsifiable, or just-so
stories. They violate the fundamentals of scientific inquiry. If the
heritability of intelligence is to overturned by another theory, it
must be done with a similar simple model like that developed over the
last hundred years—the theory of mental ability or g for general
intelligence as defined by Jensen and others (Jensen, 1998).
Baum writes, "To recap the argument to this point, I have proposed
that the mind is an evolutionary program. Because it has a very
compact description, the syntax of the program corresponds to real
semantics in the world. Because the world has structure, and because
the program of mind has evolved to exploit that structure, it is able
rapidly to compute and output algorithms for addressing problems in
the world. Understanding comes from the compactness and the ability to
exploit structure for computation. The program has a modular
structure, with modules corresponding to concepts calling other such
modules. I say concepts because they can be seen as having semantic
meaning, which has arisen during the production of compact code
capable of dealing with vast numbers of situations."
Underlying Baum's argument is that this evolutionary program occurred
over millions of years, and the human mind is almost identical to
other organism's minds. They must be born ready to know the world that
they are entering. Because humans have children that are slower to
fine-tune this knowing the world, it has been assumed we are
different. We are not; we have all of the machinery found in other
organisms, with just a larger volume of brain mass devoted to what is
called general intelligence. And that general intelligence was also
molded over thousands of years just like any other module.
Humans are like a society of bats who could also think, looking around
at all other species, and thinking that because of the miraculous
ability to use echolocation, they are unique. They might say, "yes,
most of the lower level brain is like other organisms, but heredity
has nothing to do with our miraculous flying abilities using our ears
and our vocal chords to project sounds. We learn how to do that
because our brains are so large and we are so malleable."
The miraculous inventions that humans likewise create are really built
by a collective of specialized individuals, each one doing or knowing
a small piece of the puzzle. Like Baum points out, no one person even
knows how to make a pencil. The expertise and the parts come from
distant places, then assembled. The greatness of humans is not that
they have such incredible minds that are that unique or different, it
comes from the fact that incremental advances by humans are passed
along and built upon. Other organisms, even though some do acquire
culture and pass on that culture to the offspring, they have no
language to do it efficiently. We have evolved language modules, and
that is what makes us so unique. Unique in language and the generation
of knowledge because of language—but still very much a part of the
genetic code that provides the semantic power for all organisms to
exist.
As Baum puts it, "Adam Smith's 'invisible hand' organizes widely
distributed knowledge to perform a computation, the mass production
and distribution of pencils, that would be called cognitive if a human
being were even capable of it…. To state this in a slightly different
way, human thought is fast because we search only possibilities that
make sense. That is, our thought is organized to search semantically
meaningful possibilities only, as units. Semantics arises because the
world is highly overconstrained, and by finding code that knows how to
deal with the world but is extremely compact, evolution has captured
and learned to exploit those constraints. Evolution built creatures
that had to do the right thing and do it fast."
That is, the greatness of human achievement is due to many people
individually doing their own thing well, because most of what we do we
do naturally. We talk, we gossip, we size up dangerous animals and
situations, we can throw a spear or drive a car, or become upset if it
feels like we are being rejected by someone we thought liked us. This
is all part of the primitive brain similar to how even our dogs react.
When we get down to real difficult mental tasks, we rely on our serial
processing mode to hold a few ideas in our head and manipulate them—a
slow and pondering process.
This also addresses the conspiracy theories that humans are so
inclined to believe in. The problem is that humans while quick to join
coalitions and movements, are unable to coordinate their collective
actions to actually really do anything. Most of what humans do they do
for themselves, not as collectives. When people do form coalitions,
they are not well adapted to think in terms of collective goals but
rather are programmed to act as members of tribes practicing the same
forms of alliance building, deception, intrigue, back biting,
dominance maneuvers and counter maneuvers, censoring cheaters, and
moral one-up-man-ship that still prevails today. To convince any group
of people that if they all concentrated on doing X in a coordinated
way, they could move mountains is often tried but seldom successful
unless a real threat and present danger is making them take a fighting
stance.
People however assume that whatever good happens to them is due to
their own efforts, but whatever bad happens to them is other's fault.
Often this other cannot be identified as an individual but other
forces like racism, capitalist greed, out of control cops, etc. The
reality is that humans are more like ants, doing what they do from the
bottom up, form the modern ant hill, that seems so well coordinated by
each one doing what they are programmed to do. No guiding hand is
needed to coordinate each ant's activities. In fact, it is suspected
that people join political parties or political movements more for the
opportunity to meet others for their own sexual/social needs more than
for some public good. And the mind is a lot like this social chaos. As
Baum explains it:
"Looking at mind from this evolutionary point of view makes natural
something that some authors defending strong AI seem skeptical about:
the unity of self. Daniel Dennett and Marvin Minsky, for example, have
emphasized that the mind is a huge, multi-module program with lots of
stuff going on in parallel. They doubt there is any single individual,
any single interest; rather, they see a cacophony of competing agents.
But, as we found in our economic simulations, the coordination of
agents is crucial in exploiting structure. The program of mind was
designed for one end: to propagate the genome. The mind is indeed a
complex parallel program for reinforcement learning, but it comes
equipped with a single internal reward function: representing the
interest of the genes. Thus, the mind is like a huge law office with
hundreds of attorneys running around and filing briefs but with a
single client, the self. Because we are designed for complex and
long-range planning—representing our genes' interests over generations
and in widely different circumstances—exactly what the interests of
the self are differs from individual to individual and over time.
Suicide bombers, mothers, and capitalists are all striving to advance
the interests of their genes as their respective minds compute those
interests. But for all the modules in the mind and all the many
computations going on in parallel, there is one central self focusing
all the computation—one central reward being optimized—the resultant
of the interests of the genes."
In fact, much of behavioral science is all about rebelling against the
interest of the genes, to take control away from the genes to serve
the person. Unfortunately, in order to do so, humans have to continue
to struggle against the myriad of false beliefs, irrational behavior,
deception and self-deception that motivates us. The vast majority of
people don't even understand that they serve a master other than
themselves. Other organisms are ready to comply with the genes'
directives, but humans have discovered (a few humans that is) that
there is a raging battle between themselves and their genes. Our
sensations of being autonomous are blind to the machinery of the mind
that underpins that sensation—we have no conscious awareness of the
mechanisms that produce our goal driven behaviors. They can only be
observed through scientific investigations that are intuitively wrong
from our human perspective, just like black holes, dark matter,
anti-matter, and all the other scientific discoveries that could only
be unraveled by collective efforts that build extensive networks of
experimentation, testing, and research.
In fact, what separates science from politics, law, religion, social
sciences, and other narratives about what is real from a human
perspective, is that the artist's canvas portraying the world must
actually map onto the world in science. If there is any deviation
between the theory and its correlation with the real world, then the
data has in some way been questioned or falsified, and the theory is
altered. This can only happen when everyone in the scientific
community can judge the data with additional experimentation. If the
data stands up against numerous challenges, it is accepted at the time
as the best explanation. If not, other hypotheses are considered and
tested.
Most people just keep trying to get answers to their own and other's
often strange behavior by telling endless stories based on anecdotal
evidence or folk beliefs about human nature. Baum explains why this is
so:
"Incidentally, if we are going to understand the mind as an
interaction of many subprocesses, there is no reason to be surprised
that we might have multiple personalities, and indeed there is some
question about what it means to have one personality. In each of us,
there might be multiple agents with different goals. At one time one
wins, at another time another wins. The mediation process is then of
some interest. I discuss why these different agents typically act in
consort: they are programmed by genes for the benefit of the genes,
and the genes' survival ultimately benefits from the interest of the
one body they control. Therefore it makes sense that they compute some
notion of 'self' and coordinate their actions so as to act in 'the
self's' interest. Later I also discuss how these different agents are
coordinated and how the hard computational problems are factored into
such interacting modules and solved. For now I want to stress only
that the picture muddies Searle's implicit assumption that there is
one unique 'me' that can be isolated clearly."
Baum explains how humans are not very adept at statistical inferences
in most cases (see others on heuristics and biases research). We need
to make decisions that optimize our gains based on real probabilities,
and yet our minds are biased for certain types of inferences that are
irrational. A good example of this was the O.J. Simpson trial. The
probability that the police could plant O.J.'s blood at the scene,
without some elaborate plot ahead of time to obtain his blood, was not
credible. Yet, the jury, suspect of the motivations of the police, saw
a conspiracy that could not have taken place in all probability. A
well-defined theory Baum explains, is one that has few parameters,
because the fewer the parameters or complexities the greater the
theory maps onto the real world. Complex (or conspiratorial) type
theories do not reflect the real world, which is highly constrained by
how humans behave in fact on a day-to-day basis. Our primitive brain
biases direct us to behave in rather predictable manners.
Baum explains, "What is important to evolution, what affects an
individual's chances of reproducing, is its behavior. Evolution
created our minds for the purpose of having us behave well. What
thought is ultimately about is behavior, taking actions."
Our primitive minds then often supercede what our rational minds tell
us we should be doing. For example, pay attention to how we deal with
food now that food is abundant. It would make rational sense for us to
"downgrade" our obsession with food preparation, sharing reciprocity,
attention, etc. What we find however is that we over emphasize
providing food for relatives, friends and/or guests. At parties, there
is far too much food usually. We still behave as if food was a valued
commodity in short supply. It appears that even with regards to food,
and the fact that most of us eat too much, even here we are unable to
unlearn our past.
Baum: "As I have already mentioned and argue at some length later in
the book, most of the compression, most of the learning, that goes
into human understanding of the world was done at the level of
evolution. Only a little bit of the work is done through what is
generally regarded as learning, that is, the learning done during a
lifetime."
Most people don't recognize the irrational games that humans play from
the learning that took place thousands of years ago. Interaction with
the world then is still based primarily on the emotions of the limbic
rather than rational behavior. Even so, if Whites acted in such a way
as to better themselves at the expense of other races, as CRT
theorists contend, that action whether it came about because of a more
primitive ethnocentrism rather than a rational decision at resource
acquisition would make little difference. What CRT fails to provide is
any reason whatsoever why any individual or group would voluntarily
harm themselves to help others that they have little interest in. In
fact, the real mystery with regards to human behavior and
egalitarianism, is why would a person in country A send money to help
some unknown person in country B? This behavior can only be explained
by a combination of political indoctrination along with primitive
innate tendencies that evolved in hunter-gatherer tribalism that
included many modules for empathy, assistance of kin in need, sharing,
controlling dominance, etc. That is, we are just beginning to
understand why humans are as generous as they are.
As Baum clearly states, "Human beings plan. We look at the world and
imagine transformations on it, and imagine paths to achieve various
subgoals en route to an overall goal. Several comments are worth
making regarding this. First, it is important to note that although
human thought is sometimes reflective, the great bulk of it is in fact
reactive. We can look at pictures of random objects: the Eiffel Tower,
Albert Einstein's face, a dog, a stone, and identify them within
tenths of a second, after enough time for a neural cascade at most a
few dozen neurons deep. When we speak, words come into our mouths in
real time, with no subjective reflection, without our knowing where
they come from. So, whatever program we discover for the mind should
mostly have this property, that for most things it computes very fast,
without huge logical depth."
If this is so, that the primitive brain provides the immediacy of
human emotion to act in certain ways to achieve "goals", it is hard to
imagine whereby the White race has somehow conspired to oppress all
people of color in the world? Humans still behave irrationally in most
instances, unable to weigh decisions using a purely analytical
methodology.
Baum continues, "There is some code in the human mind corresponding to
objects in the world because such code evolved, because it is useful
for earning rewards in the world. It automatically corresponds to real
objects because otherwise it wouldn't exist in a compact encoding,
just as the slope of a line that fits a lot of data in a
classification problem really corresponds to something. This object
code interacts with all kinds of modules for manipulating it that
themselves reflect reality for the same reason." That is, humans do
not individually learn new ways of behaving, as each new world is
entered by a newborn. Children come into the world already knowing
that world, and prepared only to learn the current state of a highly
constrained world.
This picture of the brain as a highly modularized machine also begs to
know how is it that the fact that some past humans were enslaved or
colonized, now makes their offspring unable to act in the world in an
efficient manner? This Lamarckian view of causation is nonsensical and
yet it persists in rationalizing away human failure. The individual is
discounted in terms of "knowing the world." They fail from some
historical mechanism that no one can quite explain, but we are berated
to believe or else we are accused of racism. It is a moral, not a
rational argument.
If anything, some ethnic groups fail in the modern world because they
evolved in a world that was less cognitively demanding. Baum explains
that, "The program in your mind maintains a compact description of the
world. The objects in the world are elements of that compact
description, but they correspond to reality because of Occam's razor,
because the program is a compact description reflecting training on
vast amounts of data." But the training was different for different
population groups because they evolved under different ecologies. If
in fact Blacks or any other people of color fail in the present world,
it is because they are adapted to a different world than Whites, East
Asians or Jews. In fact, we are all different behaviorally and
cognitively to some degree because we all evolved to varying degrees
in different parts of the world under different environmental
conditions—including cultural differences.
This is true especially when it comes to religion, politics, gossip,
relationships, kinship, patriotism, morality, ethics, sociability,
etc. As Baum explains, "We are equipped with an inductive bias, a
predisposition to learn to divide the world up into objects, to study
the interaction of those objects, and to apply a variety of
computational modules to the representation of these objects. For
example, we apply modules for counting, mentally rotating,
manipulating, and so on, to our mental representations of objects. We
expect to learn about categories of objects and how to use categories
of objects in functional ways."
Humans evolved under tribal conditions, where tribal warfare was
common so there had to be a great deal of hate for others while
maintaining coalition building among tribal members. Individuals had
to be willing to fight and die for the tribe. That is, humans have in
them both modules for hate and aggression for warfare and modules for
tribal cohesiveness, along with numerous other socializing modules to
keep the tribal group alive as a group, along with another large
number of modules for competition between members of the tribe. What
we see being played out today is humans reacting to these modules in
Bizarro World—Instead of tribes of about 50 people, we live now in a
global-market world that is highly technical. These modules evolved
for one purpose, to keep the genes' vehicle alive so that the genes
could live on into perpetuity. The vehicles (all organisms) were
expendable.
Baum states, "The picture here suggests the following. There is a
physical world that behaves in an ordered fashion. The mind is an
evolved program that reflects and exploits the structure of this
world…. While the concepts in our minds reflect structure in the
world, they need not reflect it perfectly. The program in our minds is
merely the program that evolution has created, which is likely to be
some kind of local optimal solution."
Baum goes on to explain how this does not make us rational, just
because our evolved systems found a local optimal solution to
survival. Religion for example is irrational, but it hitched a ride
along with our evolving a language. In fact, we are irrational in many
areas of our collective lives. We passionately take sides in sports,
politics, religion, etc. As Baum points out:
"Now, it is true that the human mind is by no means rational, logical,
or always right, even when it is completely convinced it is. Our
errors come from at least two distinct sources. One source is that the
evolution process that produced us does not select for rationality, it
selects for survival and propagation. But logic and survival can
actually work at counter-purposes. Sometimes you are more likely to
survive and propagate if you believe a falsehood than if you believe
the truth. I discuss the proposal of Trivers that we have been evolved
to consciously believe as fact things that are not only untrue but
which are known to be untrue at some level of mind, simply for the
purpose of better lying to others. It is quite plausible that we have
likewise evolved other counterfactual beliefs: there is some evidence
for an evolved module for religious faith, which might well exist
whether or not there is in actuality an anthropomorphic god. Evolution
has, in many ways, selected precisely for nonobjectivity: our beliefs
reflect what is good for us or our kin, not necessarily objective
truth…."
"Our political reasoning is a particularly good example of our
illogicality. It can't possibly be fully logical: half the people are
on one side of any issue and half on the other, which implies that
they are not all logically correct, and in fact there is no particular
reason to believe that any of them are logically correct. People are
simply not evolved to reason logically about politics. And yet, they
often feel particularly strongly that their case is logically airtight
and their opponents wrong, as Lakoff himself does. On rare occasions
an individual may change her political views 180 degrees, and almost
always has even stronger confidence then that she is infallible after
the change—the conviction of the convert. The convert may wonder how
she could have been so deluded for so many years, but still it rarely
occurs to her to question whether she is deluded now. I suspect these
phenomena occur partly because we are trapped in inappropriate
metaphors, as Lakoff suggests, but also they reflect the specific
evolution of political feelings: evolution of modules for teaming up,
for example. In fact, people's discussion of political views often
seems to me to have more an aspect of sexual display than of rational
argument. (The sexual display aspect would explain why college
students are so politically active, why people relatively rarely marry
someone of opposite political persuasion, and why people often get
involved with politics explicitly to find sexual partners—the old and
often true excuse of those accused in the McCarthy trials of having
attended Communist events.)"
The above also plays out I believe in many of the so-called humanist
and environmental movements that keep cropping up. However, I will
speculate from some anecdotal evidence that there is somewhat of a
gender imbalance of purpose, at least for older people. I suspect that
women tend towards activism based a bit more on the need to feel safe
in the world (the egalitarian stance in case they need assistance) and
men lean towards activism because they can persuade females that they
are morally superior males and will obtain sexual favors for being
"good" men. (This probably explains why there are so few females in
current inegalitarian movements like libertarianism or eugenics. This
can be overcome by establishing safety nets within the community.)
Baum explains, "We believe things strongly because we are evolved to,
not necessarily because they are true…. So, we should be careful when
reasoning—especially when reasoning about mind, or politics, or God,
or about any subject where we have personal interests at stake—to take
into account the possibility that we are mistaken. There is an
objective world out there, and we can access it with experiments and
predictions that can give us confidence we are not deluding ourselves.
People do apparently have a capability for rationality, for logical
reasoning, and we can sometimes work things out logically. But we have
to proceed with care, recognizing that we are after all only a
program, a program built to have confidence in its logical correctness
far exceeding any guarantees that can be offered."
So how do we become more rational? I am convinced that many people are
not interested in doing so. We come into this world already knowing
how to behave and feel for the propagation of our genes. There is no
module for "trying to be rational." The only reason we are able to
counter false beliefs is through the collective—a coming together of
scientists to test our belief systems against what we see under our
collective microscopes. In search of counterintuitive systems of
reality, science builds upon itself through rigorous hypotheses
building and testing, then passing that knowledge onto the next
generation of scientists for further refinement.
Who are these scientists capable of counterintuitive thinking? They
are the (usually mathematical) geniuses that are capable of holding in
their minds large chunks of data for serial processing that can
overwhelm quick and biased modules from our more primitive brain.
Without geniuses we probably would have continued to tinker with new
tools, slowly bred new crops and livestock, and stumble upon folk
remedies for curing some minor diseases. However, we would never have
been able to conquer our false beliefs even if a few people could see
them. The primitive modules would keep emerging and creating new gods
for us to follow.
As Baum explains, "…learning is a computationally hard problem. It
requires vast computational resources. But the overwhelming majority
of the computational resources have been applied to evolving the DNA,
not to learning during life. Most of what we learn, we learn rapidly
with little computation." This also means we would have just kept
passing on our false beliefs, like religion, to generation after
generation, in an endless chain of irrationality. No doubt, we would
have had art and music, poetry and warfare, but we would never have
found out that the universe started with a big bang, and is about 15
billion years old, or that we are made up of a genetic code. This
"counterintuitive" world would never have been revealed without the
work of the scientific genius.
So packed into our DNA code, the human is born with "ways of knowing"
about the world. Baum states, "Inductive bias is a predisposition to
come up with one explanation rather than another. Any program that
hopes to look at data, to interact with the world and come to
understand it, learn about it, or be able to predict it essentially
has to have built into it some expectation of what it is going to see.
If it doesn't have any ordering of expected hypotheses, then all
possible classifications of observed data are equally possible, and it
can learn nothing.
"Say you have no inductive bias whatsoever. I show you a bunch of
examples of some concept you are trying to learn, say, chairs. Here is
a thing that I tell you is a chair. Here is another thing that I tell
you is not a chair. And so on. Now I present a new object to you, an
object that you haven't seen before, and I ask you whether it is a
chair. If you don't have any bias, you have no basis to say whether it
is a chair or not. Whatever hypothesis you may form about what is a
chair from the data you've seen, there is another hypothesis that
classifies everything in the world the same way as that one except
that it classifies this particular object as not a chair. If you don't
have any bias about which hypothesis is better than another, you have
no way of judging which of those two is better, so there is no way you
can ever learn. If you do have some way of arriving at a choice
between these competing hypotheses, that is what we call an inductive
bias."
What Baum means is that when a child is born, developmentally they are
primed to learn certain things at certain times. The stages are
programmed in such a way that language is acquired quickly not only
because we have language acquisition modules, but we already have
objects in our minds that we want to put labels on. We know the
objects, all we need to do is put tags on them—the objects are known,
they just need words attached to them.
This phenomenon is observed quite frequently by dog owners. Teaching a
dog a very large vocabulary is difficult because there are few objects
to tag. But let me give an example of how it does work. A cat strayed
into my yard one day, I picked it up, and wanted to show it to my
German Shepard so he wouldn't attack cats in general. While holding
the cat, I said something like "this is a cat, a nice cat….etc." Then
the cat got frightened, clawed at me, and I let go of it. Of course,
my dog also went ballistic, and never forgot the tag "cat" for the
animal. From that point on, and mention of the word "cat" from anyone
in the dogs presence and there was stirrings for attack. Likewise for
other words like "squirrel," "pigs ear," and "park."
Baum explains, "Again, such concepts predate language. It seems
evident that dogs understand height to a reasonable degree. Dogs are,
for example, very conscious of whether another dog is taller or
shorter; this strongly affects their perception of the dominance
relationship between them. Dogs also have a good understanding of the
height of fences and tables, for example, of what they can and can't
jump onto or over or safely off from." I guess this is a "dogs way of
knowing."
We are just now starting to unravel these modules in our brains,
trying to determine how old they are, why we and other animals have
them, etc. Our consciousness then is made up of 99% ancient modules
and 1% rational man (metaphorically). Baum states, "Consciousness has
many aspects. We are aware of our world and our sensations. We have a
sense of self. We have goals and aspirations. We seem to have free
will and moral responsibility. Yet, as I've said, the mind is
equivalent to a Turing machine. Moreover, we have arisen through
evolution and are descended from microbes by a smooth chain of
evolution, with more complex mental processes at each stage evolved
from the processes at the one before. Where in this process did
consciousness enter? Why are we conscious? What is consciousness?"
To be human then is to react to the world as a robot, unless we
consciously try to overcome our irrational inner workings. "Thus, from
the earliest creatures, the programs were constructed so that they
focused on internally specified goals. I call this agency, making
complex decisions to achieve or attempt to achieve internally
specified goals. The simplest way to look at this is that the entity
is conscious: it has wants and it is scheming how to achieve them…. An
alternative way of saying this is that our notion of consciousness is
a concept (some code in our minds) that we use to understand entities
engaged in behavior guided by sophisticated computations toward
internally generated goals. This concept is very useful. We interact
daily with agents whose behavior can be predicted by assuming that
they have wants and will scheme to achieve them. Predicting this
behavior is crucial to understanding our environment and to our
reproductive success."
Again, back to causes and activism. We can be pretty sure that much
so-called benevolence on the part of humans is serving the vehicle,
not some higher purpose. Whether terrorist or anti-globalist, the
individual is scheming to achieve ends for themselves. One of the
givens in universal Darwinism is that no organism is purely
altruistic. Likewise, humans seeming to act altruistically are living
a lie (Smith, 2004). Humans are mostly about deception and
self-deception.
Robert Trivers solved the reciprocal altruism problem mathematically.
The rest of the picture, thanks to numerous scientific disciplines
triangulating on the subject, are coming to a strong consensus. Baum
explains what is commonly known now, "Trivers's argument is that an
individual can be most effective at deceiving others when he himself
believes that what he is saying is true. At the same time, if the mind
is to accurately calculate how best to pursue the individual's
interest, it should not simply discard true and relevant information
and believe disinformation. If Machiavelli were designing the mind
best to achieve its genes' purposes, the mind should contain a portion
where the true information is stored and another portion believing
disinformation that it wishes to convey. Trivers suggests that this is
exactly what has happened: our awareness module controls communication
and believes disinformation in our favor for the purpose of conveying
it to others, much as a method actor 'becomes' the character she is
portraying. Meanwhile, deeper levels of the mind know the dark truth
and decide what to pass on to the awareness module."
Humans then, like all organisms, want to influence and control others
for the benefit of themselves. That may mean sending other people's
sons to war or a male seducing a female by feigning a love for
children. Humans are walking deceptions, and the only way to become
more rational is through collectively putting this strange puzzle
together. Perhaps it is no wonder that so many people embrace religion
rather than accepting the harshness of this reality—we are not what we
seem.
Baum observes that, "The conclusion that we do not really have free
will, discussed earlier in the context of classical physics, quantum
physics, and algorithmic information theory, is after all a very
abstract conclusion, of interest only to philosophers and stoned
college students late at night. Whether all my actions are completely
predictable given the quantum state of my brain is of no practical
interest to my genes or to any ordinary person. For all practical
purposes, we have free will. There is no experiment I can propose that
will show directly, and simply that we don't. The lack of free will
only follows from lengthy, complex, abstract arguments. These
arguments are almost surely correct: the physical arguments make a
vast number of verified predictions along the way, the mathematical
arguments have been scrutinized and seem airtight. But who really
cares, for all practical purposes? It's much more reasonable and
practical for my genes to build me believing in free will, and for me
to act and think as if I have free will."
The question then becomes, are we going to be greedy capitalists, rock
throwing anti-globalists, or just a die-hard soccer fan? It doesn't
really matter if one succumbs to their genes' goals rather than
rebelling against those genes. On a personal note, where it does pain
me to see irrational behavior, is when it harms everyone and helps no
one. I am sure that there are many happy people who are completely
unaware of evolution or much of any science at all. However, for those
who do feel trapped in a bizarre world of irrational people, people
who prefer ignorance to understanding, it seems that escape is the
only way out.
Perhaps the gulf is so wide between the scientific mind and the common
man, so many more of them than of us, that if we don't break away from
the masses they will only drive us mad. Maybe eugenicists need to form
their communities not for lofty goals, but for survival. To finally be
surrounded by others who want to understand the world as it is, not as
our inner selves try to present it to us. Communities where
coevolution takes place as we shrug off our primitive brains, and
expand our executive brains to take over the decision-making from our
genes.
---
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| User: "Sir Frederick" |
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| Title: Re: PHILOSOPHICAL Perspective On the Human Brain |
27 Nov 2004 05:21:08 AM |
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Does he discuss qualia?
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| User: "Wordsmith" |
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| Title: Re: PHILOSOPHICAL Perspective On the Human Brain |
27 Nov 2004 01:22:13 PM |
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Sir Frederick <mmcneill@fuzzysys.com> wrote in message news:<4logq0th7e936rnsj4pcl7ectdncpigv4q@4ax.com>...
Does he discuss qualia?
"Qualia" is just a story...and a likely one at that.
W :)
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| User: "Sir Frederick" |
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| Title: Re: PHILOSOPHICAL Perspective On the Human Brain |
27 Nov 2004 10:18:17 PM |
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=
Does he discuss the likely story "qualia"?
On 27 Nov 2004 11:22:13 -0800, (Wordsmith) wrote:
Sir Frederick <mmcneill@fuzzysys.com> wrote in message news:<4logq0th7e936rnsj4pcl7ectdncpigv4q@4ax.com>...
Does he discuss qualia?
"Qualia" is just a story...and a likely one at that.
W :)
--
Best,
Frederick Martin McNeill
Poway, California, United States of America
mmcneill@fuzzysys.com
http://www.fuzzysys.com
http://members.cox.net/fmmcneill/
*************************
Phrase of the week :
Well, a significant percentage of people who have manic depressive illness also have an underlying exuberant temperament. But most people who are exuberant do not have manic depressive illness. So exuberance is far from a pathological state for most people who have it - it is a highly valued and integral part of who they are. And if you understand the role of exuberance in manic depression then you do get a perspective on exuberance because extremes in behaviour will always illuminate normal behaviour. It's just that there are limits to the comparisons.
-- Kay Redfield Jamison, interview New Scientist (2004)
:-))))Snort!)
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| User: "Paleo-Conservative" |
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| Title: Re: PHILOSOPHICAL Perspective On the Human Brain |
28 Nov 2004 01:05:07 PM |
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"Qualia"
What is Qualia?
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| User: "Sir Frederick" |
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| Title: Re: PHILOSOPHICAL Perspective On the Human Brain |
29 Nov 2004 09:33:57 AM |
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On 28 Nov 2004 11:05:07 -0800,
(Paleo-Conservative) wrote:
"Qualia"
What is Qualia?
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qualia/
--
Best,
Frederick Martin McNeill
Poway, California, United States of America
mmcneill@fuzzysys.com
http://www.fuzzysys.com
http://members.cox.net/fmmcneill/
*************************
Phrase of the week :
Well, a significant percentage of people who have manic depressive illness also have an underlying exuberant temperament. But most people who are exuberant do not have manic depressive illness. So exuberance is far from a pathological state for most people who have it - it is a highly valued and integral part of who they are. And if you understand the role of exuberance in manic depression then you do get a perspective on exuberance because extremes in behaviour will always illuminate normal behaviour. It's just that there are limits to the comparisons.
-- Kay Redfield Jamison, interview New Scientist (2004)
:-))))Snort!)
*************************
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| User: "dsmith" |
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| Title: Re: PHILOSOPHICAL Perspective On the Human Brain |
06 Dec 2004 08:40:55 PM |
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Some comments on "What Is Thought?"
Paleo-Conservative wrote:
(...Skipping Sociological Issues)
As much as we feel like we have total free will, that we think before
we act, that we behave as rational agents in the world, all of the
evidence indicates that we live a lie. In WHY WE LIE: The
Evolutionary
Roots of Deception and the Unconscious Mind by David Livingston
Smith,
2004, he states, "Deceit is the Cinderella of human nature; essential
to our humanity but disowned by its perpetrators at every turn. It is
normal, natural, and pervasive. It is not, as popular opinion would
have it, reducible to mental illness or moral failure. Human society
is a 'network of lies and deceptions' that would collapse under the
weight of too much honesty. From the fairy tales our parents told us
to the propaganda our governments feed us, human beings spend their
lives surrounded by pretense." So much for rational man.
I see in at your case this may be true! For your conlusion, that
argument leaves me unconvinced. Sure there is a lot of illusion in
human beliefs -- that seems fairly obvious, but that is very much
different that claiming man is not capable of rational behavior or
thought.
Smith states, "I don't for a minute believe that we can be taught not
to deceive ourselves, and even if we could (by whom?), it would
probably result in widespread unhappiness. We are all frail creatures
who need something to get us through the night. But surely, we can
get
rid of some of our surplus self-deception. Tolerating a measure of
self-deception is one thing, but actively promoting it is quite
another. At a minimum, perhaps we can help each other to acknowledge
that we are all natural-born liars."
Widespread unhappiness? What positions are he claiming to be the "true
ones", and would these necessarily cause unhappiness?
I think what he may be trying to get at is this:
Logic/Reason is really just a mechanism to reforumlate knowledge about
a given domain. Unless there is cause to "reason" about something,
there is no proper motivation. We could endlessly churn out logical
extensions of the facts we know ("self-deceptively" or not), but to
what end? In our human minds, reasoning is driven by goals.
To say these goals are irrational is besides the point.
We as a
society accept the collective lie that all races have the same
average
intelligence. All of the research however says otherwise.
Define intelligence. I think it's too complex a concept to be
quantifed by a single number (even if IQ tests really were testing the
right things).
The reason we learn so
fast, the reason our learning is guided by semantics, is that the
compact DNA code has already extracted the semantics and constrains
our reasoning and learning to deal only with meaningful quantities."
Yes. But, so what? Here's to taking this idea a step further:
Psychological tests have demonstrated that the quantity of information
we are able to retain/learn is astonishingly small. But, then, why are
people so good at information processing? It's our resourcefulness and
internal mechanisms that give us this power: The ways our minds
represent information allows us to exploit the meaning of what we
learn. In other words, though our sensory organs may transmit "1 bit"
of data (a distinction between two things), the way that is represented
in our minds can be many times greater than that. And, when we think
about it (creating and reorganizing representations) that number can
increase many times more.
As Baum explains it, "Occam's razor is the well-known and intuitive
prescription that, given any set of facts, the simplest explanation
is
the best. Occam's razor underlies all of science.
Side note: In Baum's book, he uses the term "Occam's razor" about
twice each paragraph. Sometimes incorrectly too.
As Baum puts it, "Adam Smith's 'invisible hand' organizes widely
distributed knowledge to perform a computation, the mass production
and distribution of pencils, that would be called cognitive if a
human
being were even capable of it.... To state this in a slightly
different
way, human thought is fast because we search only possibilities that
make sense.
.... within our given context. Given a context and a goal, the number
of possibilities are reduced by several orders. Thought is not
searching expanding trees that grow exponentially (what would happen if
it were?). This brings us back to the "frame problem" of AI.
Daniel Dennett and Marvin Minsky, for example, have
emphasized that the mind is a huge, multi-module program with lots of
stuff going on in parallel. They doubt there is any single
individual,
any single interest; rather, they see a cacophony of competing
agents.
But, as we found in our economic simulations, the coordination of
agents is crucial in exploiting structure. The program of mind was
designed for one end: to propagate the genome.
The conclusion Baum draws next is wrong. It's true that we have many
different goals and it's also true that there is a common origin for
these (evolution by natural selection -- we are organisms to perpetuate
our genes). But, however, that does not mean that all of our goals
have the same interest.
Our goals (eg, hunger, thirst, sexual desire, sleep, and fear) can
compete and often do conflict. That does not mean they interfere with
the end result (propagation of the genome), but they operate without
this specific higher-goal in sight. There's no underlying "super-goal"
behind our thinking that says: "before all else, ensure survival of
species". That's an emergent property from our other goals.
Dustin
---
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