To date, it is unclear that cellular automata, neural networks, or the like can do anything that Universal Turing Machines cannot. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I didn't mean to suggest that I think neural nets can do things that a Turing machine couldn't do in principle. Remember I was talking about "the way human thought really works".

We don't have thinking based on Turing machines. We have thinking based on neural networks, and understanding the nature of the more analogish sort of information processing that occurs in neural networks is conducive to improving one's understanding of oneself.

For example Peter Tse's book The Neural Basis of Free Will: Criterial Causation discusses aspects of understanding free will, in light of scientific understanding of the way we think. It's not the sort of free will that many people want to believe in, but there is a lot of pragmatic value in understanding it.

I don't claim any expertise on the thread topic, but is there a reason to think that the 'wisdom of crowds' doesn't merit serious consideration here?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisdom_of_the_crowd

The wisdom of the crowd is the collective opinion of a diverse independent group of individuals rather than that of a single expert. This process, while not new to the Information Age, has been pushed into the mainstream spotlight by social information sites such as Quora, Reddit, Stack Exchange, Wikipedia, Yahoo! Answers, and other web resources which rely on collective human knowledge.[1] An explanation for this phenomenon is that there is idiosyncratic noise associated with each individual judgment, and taking the average over a large number of responses will go some way toward canceling the effect of this noise.[2]

:fire:

Why no popcorn emoji?

Beware the jabberwock my son...

According to wikiquote that statement that you are propagating, as being from Heisenberg, is misattributed.

Yes. And ever changing. If psychology is affected by culture (and I'm certain it is) then what was true yesterday in psychology might not be true today. We're playing catch up. — Isaac

Good point about the moving target. Furthermore, I'd think propagation of psychological understanding itself contributes to the target moving.

Corrective rather than constructive, and the consistency being enforced is that of the narrative your current model is organized around, rather than "the way the world really is" or something. — Srap Tasmaner

For me at work, it is often a matter of a 'picture' rather than a narrative, and I am trying to bring my mental image of how an electronic gizmo works into better compliance with how thing work in the world. If my mental image is out of compliance with the way things actually work in the world, the world may well inform me of this with flames, puffs of smoke, or minor explosions. (Although more typical is that the circuit just doesn't work as expected.)

That said, I agree with most of what you said, inasmuch as I am interpreting it correctly.

Pattern recognition. Thats a huge part of what the brain does and it’s so dedicated to finding patterns that it will even see patterns that aren’t there, optical illusions etc. — DingoJones

:up:

In case anyone is interested the following link will take you to a forum thread where I make use of evolutionary psychology based thinking:

Does being in a blaming state of mind amount to Monkey Mindedness?

I'm afraid it starts off quite inchoate, and there is a lot of context behind some comments that I'm not going to try to fill in. Still, perhaps some will recognize some usefulness to it.

But beyond the general idea of it, it seems very speculative, and it seems inherently so - I don't see a path out of the speculation for most hypotheses in the evo-psych realm.

I think that pretty much sums up what I think of evo psych - the basic tenet of it is pretty much obviously true, but any specific hypothesis is probably untestable, unverifiable, unsatisfiable. — flannel jesus

Perhaps it is important to mention that what can be learned about human nature from evolutionary psychology is only a portion of a large complex picture.

I don't know of any evolutionary psychologists, who if asked, "Nature or nurture?", are going to respond with 100% nature. or even 50% nature. EP is most appropriately understood as simply a part of a very complex picture.

I tend to frame the effect of reason in terms effects on our priors, so reasoning is still post hoc, but has an effect. Basically, if the process of reasoning (which is effectively predictive modeling of our own thinking process), flags up a part of the process that doesn't fit the narrative, it'll send suppressive constraints down to that part to filter out the 'crazy' answers that don't fit. — Isaac

:up:

I'd likely have said "intuitions" rather than "priors" but there is a lot of overlap at the very least.

What I'm convinced doesn't happen (contrary to Kahneman, I think - long time since I've read him) is any cognitive hacking in real time. I can see how it might cash out like that on a human scale (one decision at a time), but at a deeper neurological scale, my commitments to an active inference model of cognition don't allow for such an intervention. We only get to improve for next time. — Isaac

I don't recall getting such an impression from Kahneman, but because Kahneman seems to have come to his conclusions from a more psychological than neurpsychological direction I wouldn't be too surprised if he made such a mistake.

In any case, I very much agree that shifting our fast thinking (or deep learning) generally takes a substantial amount of time. Though there can be sudden epiphanies, where a new paradigm 'snaps into focus', the subconscious development of the intuitions underlying the new paradigm may have been taking place over the course of many years.

It appears like the cellular responses (so-called learning) took five times longer to occur in living tissue than it took in prior studies inanimate mass, "in vitro". That is very clear evidence that the relationship between stimulus and effect, is not direct. The cause of this five-fold delay (clear evidence that there is not a direct cause/effect relation) is simply dismissed as "noise" in the living brain.

Furthermore, it is noted that the the subjects upon which the manipulation is carried out are unconscious, and so it is implied that "attention" could add so much extra "noise" that the entire process modeled by the laboratory manipulation might be completely irrelevant to actual learning carried out by an attentive, conscious subject. Read the following:

"It is important to note that these findings were obtained in anaesthetized animals, and remain to be confirmed in the awake state. Indeed, factors such as attention are likely to influence cellular learning processes (Markram et al., 2012). — Metaphysician Undercover

How is is it that you learned about these confounding factors?

From the "devious" scientists.

Noam Chomsky argued:

"You find that people cooperate, you say, 'Yeah, that contributes to their genes' perpetuating.' You find that they fight, you say, ‘Sure, that's obvious, because it means that their genes perpetuate and not somebody else's. In fact, just about anything you find, you can make up some story for it."[43][44]
— Chomsky — schopenhauer1

So you look deeper and learn about how our closest living relatives live in relatively small cooperative bands in territories bordering on the territories of other small bands of chimps, and while there is cooperation within a band there is 'murderous' hostility towards chimps from neighboring bands. Then you look at the way humans behave.

Us and Them

Most of them were published subsequent to 2005, from what I can see. David Chalmer's article was published in 1996. I think much of the literature reflects that, as it was an influential article and put the idea on the agenda, so to speak. — Wayfarer

Again you are demonstrating that you don't know much about neuroscience. Off the top of my head, the Libet experiment made use of first person report more than a decade before Chalmer's paper was published. Split brain studies making use of first person report go back to the 1960s.

Did Chalmers write any papers as an infant?

That's very deceptive use of equivocation. — Metaphysician Undercover

Unless you are able to present some evidence, that animal learning does not supervene on cellular learning it's a bit ludicrous to call it very deceptive use of equivocation.

It looks to me like you simply have a bias against science.

Did you read the article that this thread is about? Do you have any idea of what the issue being discussed is? — Wayfarer

What was it you said about being condescending?

Yes I read the article and a variety of things have been discussed. Are you trying to gaslight people into thinking that the subject of the thread is what you say it is?

I think you equivocate. Neural networks of AI are said to be "trained". But we weren't talking AI, we were talking about biological neurons, involved in a person reading. — Metaphysician Undercover

Would you elaborate on how it is that you think I am equivocating?

Perhaps the article, Neuroscience: How to train a neuron will help.

OK, I should have written 'excludes consideration of the first-person perspective....' — Wayfarer

But neuroscience does consider first person perspectives and is learning much about them. You can Google "neuroscience first person perspective" and see for yourself. Instead you are making up stories about a science you don't demonstrate much understanding of.

Yes, similar to that, but not quite the same. An individual is trained, a person or some other being. We do not train a part of a person. I find that to be an absurd usage of the term to say that a person trains a part of one's body, like saying that a man trains his penis when to have an erection and when not to.

Anyway, it's off topic and I see that discussion with you on this subject would probably be pointless, as you seem to be indoctrinated. — Metaphysician Undercover

Dude, it's just a matter of the vocabulary used in discussion of neural networks. It has a fairly specific meaning in that context. You may be closed minded towards looking into the subject and developing an understanding of how training is used in the context of that subject, but don't mistake whatever your hangup is, for me being indoctrinated.

Understandable, I think understanding human motivation and the human condition is valid. I do it all the time. Evo-psych basis for things is harder to prove. — schopenhauer1

Science doesn't prove things. In many cases science can provide pretty overwhelming evidence in support of a theory, but that isn't sufficient to consider a theory proven. Psych theories are certainly less accurate than theories about things which are much less complex than human beings, but that's not surprising.

I personally use psychology to tune up my intuitions about myself and other people, while taking it all with a grain of salt.

Eek, that doesn't seem like good science. — schopenhauer1

No, it's not science. It's just living in the world and paying attention.

Absolutely. The thing about psychological theories is that everyone has them, you have to have, otherwise your strategies when interacting with others are random. We don't just throw darts blindfold when deciding how to respond, we have a theory about what our actions/speech is going to do, how it's going to work. That's a psychological theory. — Isaac

Exactly. Furthermore, it seems worth pointing out that everyone has one, but some are based on looking into the evidence and some aren't. (Not that I need to tell you that.)

If psychology fails, it is its methodology that's at fault, not it's objectives. — Isaac

"If psychology fails" to me, seems a question that would come out of an excessively dichotomous way of looking at psychology. I'd think a more relevant question is whether there is progress in psychology. From my perspective its pretty undeniable that progress is ongoing in psychology. We are fantastically complex creatures though, so of course progress takes time.

Have a great trip! We'll be here when you get back. — Srap Tasmaner

I'm not leaving until Saturday, and now I'm done with trip prep for the day. So perhaps I'll get somewhat caught up with responding to you before I go.

I take it seriously, on the basis of looking at a lot of the relevant science. I've also made many empirical observations of my own. I've been testing my intuitions on the subject for a long time. Furthermore, I make use of my understanding that we are social primates - including here on TPF. Sometimes subtly and other times not so subtly.

thread where I'm pissing on the law of non-contradiction: — Srap Tasmaner

Yeah, just did some pissing of my own. I need to throw my Kindle in the toilet now, and try to break my TPF addiction.

The LNC however does affirm that it is not possible to hold a belief that A with .90 probability while at the same time holding a belief that A with .10 probability. — javra

This looks like magical thinking about the LNC to me. Humans aren't binary logic machines.

Something else I want to bring up for consideration, is that issues in communication are not so simple as being a matter of differing sets of intuitions. Another important factor is variation in the constellations of cognitive strengths and weaknesses people have.

I have visuo-spatial strengths, and often I have the experience of thinking, "How can you not see that?", because it is difficult for me to imagine what it is like to lack the visuo-spatial abilities I take for granted. On the other hand I have weaknesses in processing speed, and would be a horrible umpire, with people yelling at me, " How can you not see that?"

So an aspect of communicating skillfully for me, is to develop some sense of where an individual's cognitive strengths and weaknesses lie. With at least some sense of an individual's cognitive strengths and weaknesses, I can try to capitalize on the strengths of the individual and work around the weaknesses to improve communication. Perhaps we all do this subconsciously to some extent, and pragmatically we don't tend to have much other option than to go with our intuitons on such matters. I just wanted to point out this complicating factor, because I'm a complicator and that's what I do. :wink:

"Okay, everyone, you all need to move back now, that's it, move on back now, DON'T GO IN THE WOODS!" Just ever so slightly lost his cool as this grizzly ambled toward us, it was awesome. — Srap Tasmaner

That is awesome.

I just got the bear spray I ordered last Friday. I'm hoping we get to see grizzlies in the wild. The Lamar Valley in Yellowstone, has been called the Serengeti of North America. Spending at least one day there watching wildlife is part of the plan. Yellowstone (and Grand Teton NP) is so huge that I suspect two weeks isn't going to seem like enough time.

That's actually not bad, and less hand-wavy than I thought. — Srap Tasmaner

It's very good. I love the way you are off and running with this.

I do plan on responding to your earlier posts in a more in-depth way. However, I spent all day yesterday on the forum, and my 17 year old son and I are going on a two week tent camping road trip to Yellowstone next Saturday, and I have a lot of organizing and packing to do. (I don't suppose you live somewhere between Indiana and Wyoming? It would be fantastic to be able to talk to you in person. Although I do like forum style communication a lot, because it allows for input from a wide variety of perspectives.)

Anyway, I'm going to have to limit my forum time for awhile, and clearly you are well setup to do a lot of very productive thinking without further input from me.

It's not appropriate to say that a neural net is "trained". Nor is it appropriate to say that a neural net performs word recognition. — Metaphysician Undercover

I don't know what you mean by "not appropriate". I take it you are expressing disapproval. However there is a large community of people in AI and neuroscience who see things differently than you do, and provided human civilization doesn't collapse, thinking in such terms is going to become more and more a matter of common knowledge.

To me it sounds like you are saying something like, "It is inappropriate to talk about riding in a car, because riding is something which is done on a horse, or in a carriage drawn by a horse.

So I'll just say that your post is an attempt to simplify something very complex and the result is a gross misrepresentation, and leave it at that. — Metaphysician Undercover

Absolutely, it is an attempt to simplify something enormously complex. Certainly it is simplistic and open to misinterpretation by people who don't educate themselves on the subject.

Here is one way people who want to know what is going on in the 21st century can educate themselves.

As I said I see it not as being a presupposition, but as a recognition of something necessary to thought and discussion. — Janus

I think you are likely correct to see it as a matter of recognition. I was discussing my ideas on that with Srap here.

I wanted to provide a social explanation for reason, but leaving it more or less intact -- and this is the aporia that Lewis ran into, that he couldn't directly link up the convention account of language to the model-theoretic account he was also committed to. — Srap Tasmaner

I don't know what you had in mind regarding a social explanation for reason, but I do see there being a very strong social explanation for reason, in that logic is deeply tied in with our use of language. I speculate that logic becomes a matter of undeniable intuition as we are grasping the relationships between language about reality and reality itself. Because our intuitions about logic develop alogically when we are young, as recognition of patterns in how language relates to facts about the world, by the age we start thinking 'metalogically', those intuitions have the 'feel' of apriori knowledge.

That is very much a matter of intuitive speculation though, and not something I feel equipped to make an evidential case for. So please point out any holes that might seem obvious to you.

I expect this to sound like a strange request but... Please see here for an explanation as to why, not knowing you at all, I would find it difficult to explain. There is an important sense in which I need to know my audience in order to communicate with any meaningful degree of success.

I think that what it reveals is that the process is noy like we think it is. And I guess that's why we have different opinions about it, no one really knows how they read. — Metaphysician Undercover

Hmm. I see it is as revealing that the process is a lot like I think it is.

Trained neural nets can have a lot of 'fault tolerance', which is easy to say, but not so easy to explain. Anyway, as skilled readers we have neural nets that have been effectively trained at word recognition and automation of that recognition so that we don't need to consciously recognize each letter. I only need my trained neural nets to reveal the word in my lexicon that has the closest pattern match that also fits semantically with what I had already read.

I just bought the book, after looking at the Amazon description. But I've had a lot of time to think about this sort of stuff on my own. I do see some wisdom in you waiting awhile to develop your own view a bit more, in order to be better able to critically evaluate the book.

I will say, that what I read of the book's focus on human interaction, matches up well with my view. In fact, in discussions of free will, I've often referred to myself as an interactive determinist. The interaction part is important. Anyway, I could go on about this at length, but I'm hopeful Mercier and Sperber will give me tools for communicating about it more effectively, so I'll hold off for now.

And I'm glad Gibson bolted from Bladerunner because I loved the uniqueness of his vision.

Not everything can be made explicit. — Srap Tasmaner

Feeling some poetry...

From The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran, On Teaching:

No man can reveal to you aught but that which already lies half asleep in the dawning of your knowledge.

The teacher who walks in the shadow of the temple, among his followers, gives not of his wisdom but rather of his faith and his lovingness.

If he is indeed wise he does not bid you enter the house of his wisdom, but rather leads you to the threshold of your own mind.

The astronomer may speak to you of his understanding of space, but he cannot give you his understanding.

The musician may sing to you of the rhythm which is in all space, but he cannot give you the ear which arrests the rhythm nor the voice that echoes it.

And he who is versed in the science of numbers can tell of the regions of weight and measure, but he cannot conduct you thither.

For the vision of one man lends not its wings to another man.

And even as each one of you stands alone in God's knowledge, so must each one of you be alone in his knowledge of God and in his understanding of the earth.

Very very insightful, and you are recognizing things that I only recognize as making a lot of intuitive sense, as a result of you having put things in your own words. It's so cool that your background knowledge allows me to communicate with you about such things, with such productive results.

I suspect I'll have more to say after I've had some time to reread and cogitate more on your response, but I wanted to say that much for now.

I want to bring your views into alignment with mine, and that's why I make arguments in favor of my belief. — Srap Tasmaner

I have an atypical perspective on communication and strategies for communicating and I don't know how likely it is that I can convey much understanding of it, or that others will be able to make use of it. However, I'll give it a shot.

It seems that for me an aspect of being on the autism spectrum, is a lack of a model for 'the generic person'. This manifests as me tending to be very quiet IRL around people I don't know, because I tend not to see clear ways to express myself without some specific knowledge of the other person's way of looking at things.

I think an aspect of how I have learned to cope with autism is to be somewhat hyperattentive (in some regards) to what individuals say, and what that tells me about how that individual thinks about things, and (to some degree) what 'subconscious hooks' in their thinking I can make use of in conveying things to them. IOW, to have much ability to communicate fluently with someone I need to know something about how they specifically are likely to connect the dots.

For example, because of our exchanges in the past, in talking to you I can refer to Capablanca as making use of the subconscious/intuitive hooks of other expert chess players, to convey an understanding of a particular endgame, by setting up the relevant chess pieces in a particular way. An aspect of communication for me is a sort of planting of seeds in people's subconscious, such that an intuitive recognition might occur at some point. I see it as analogous to Capablanca setting up the chess position. If you had not written the things you did about Capablanca I'd guess that I wouldn't be writing this, because I would not know how to convey what it is I'm trying to convey to you.

Inasmuch as I'm talking about a communication strategy, I'll point out that it is often a long game strategy where I'm not expecting to have much impact on a person's thinking in the short term. In many cases I don't have much expectation of seeing results, because I'm relying on the other individual's life experience to fill in the 'intuitive dots' and perhaps result in an epiphany at a later date. I don't even expect people to recognize that I've set them up to have whatever epiphany they might have.

I've seen plenty of evidence for the effectiveness of this style of communicating in changing people's intuitions to some degree, though I'm not going to present the evidence because it would be too much like presenting psychological case studies of people I care about. Besides, if things work as I think they do, I think it likely that you will develop a recognition of how this style of communicating can be effective without anything additional from me.

and I have both been frequent posters on another forum for a long time. So I replied to him:

1) with the assumption that he had relevant background knowledge about my perspective that I didn't need to elaborate on.

2) with knowledge of his specific background that led me to think a succinct response might be sufficient.

Where you live is, in part, your perception of that light right now. — Ø implies everything

Right. My point was that there are complicating factors, in translating between an external world scientific reference frame and one's subjective seeming reference frame. Do you agree?

I suspect other members might have a very different impression of my tendency to politesse... — Isaac

LOL

If you have any particularly edifying examples, I'd be interested in taking a look. (But maybe PM?) I have autistic standards of politesse myself, so to me you seem fairly circumspect.

People don't like psychology as rule. I think there's something immediately offensive about someone claiming to know how you think. — Isaac

It does seem to be an acquired taste, and some psychologies make acquisition much less likely. Still, there are those times when you can lead someone to a more accurate understanding of their own nature and change the rest of their lives for the better.

I'm more keen to just learn how different people respond to interrogation, that's my wheelhouse really (one of them, anyway). How people defend and attack beliefs in a social context - the rules of engagement, the tactics, the impacts... that sort of thing. — Isaac

This has been a big interest of mine for a long time as well, albeit from a strictly amateur and eclectically educated perspective in my case.

It's a rare thing that a thread addresses this directly as this one has, but really, there's more meat to found on the ones that are talking about something else. — Isaac

I think I know what you mean. People behave in more informative ways in other contexts.

That said, if you have a specific question, I'm happy to risk it, but fair warning, the answer will be about narratives and won't mention Freud once, unless in place of an expletive. — Isaac

I'm really enjoying participating on TPF, and I've already received a warning for bringing up a psychological topic, so perhaps later in a different context.