I’m gonna cheat. I’m gonna look ahead to your response to Arc. You call it a “stem”. You say that O is not only less than B but integrated into B. So maybe something like: if it’s a dog, then it’s an animal. And if it’s an animal, then it’s a life form.
What? Think of human brains as computers or design computers to not make mistakes or have opinions?
I remember listening to a lecture by John Searle once in which he quoted an ancient greek writer (I forget who): the brain is like a catepolt, he said. Searle’s point is that throughout history, we’ve always compared the brain to the latest, most advanced, technology of the time. Why? Partly because we didn’t understand how the brain works (thus comparing it to something “sophisticated” or “complex”) and partly because in seeking out an explanation (of anything) we look for mechanical cause/effect accounts. We stay away from magic or spontaneous/causeless accounts because that’s more akin to saying “there is no explanation.”
But I think with computers, we’re not just repeating the same pattern. I think there is something to computers that makes them good for comparison to brains–namely, internal information processing. When we design a computer to carry out complex mathematical algorithms, we are modeling the design after what we see going on inside our minds (introspection). Furthermore, like all other tools, we design computers to perform the tasks that we would otherwise have to do ourselves (laborously). We’ve built a machine that can solve really complex mathematical and logical problems so that we don’t have to go through all the trouble of doing it in our heads (and possibly making mistakes). Therefore, of course the brain is like a computer… because we designed computers to be like brains.
Of course, we’ve designed computers to model the brain in specific ways only–doing math, solving logical problems, and even doing things like rendering art and running video games–all things that the human brain can do but much better. This more or less addresses the second part above–why we don’t design computers to make mistakes or have opinions–because at the end of the day, they’re still tools. We design and used them as replacements to our own manual efforts–and not just because we’re lazy, but because we make mistakes. We also leave out the ability of computers to form their own opinions because, as tools, we want to have full control over them. We want them to do exactly what we tell them, like mechanical slaves. Programming them to have their own opinions which might conflict with ours (e.g. Me: I want you to allocate $500,000 to defense spending. Computer: in my opinion, I think that money would be better spent on education) is avoided because that too would make them less tool-like and more of an “equal” (who could use us as tools just as much we can them).
You mean like: please go get [food item X]. ← This matches past patterns of requests to get food items in which the person went to the grocery store to fulfill the request. And thoughts that evolve–epiphanies–is this the brain doing the occasion break from following patterns? Finding whole new patterns? Like: I could go to the grocery store, but if I gut the neighbor’s cow, the meat will be a lot more fresh and no unhealthy additives! ← Or is that more insanity than novel thinking?
Wow, that’s interesting. How do they scan the brain in order to identify pattern matching?
Thank you!
Hmmm… well, if you can remember the source, I sure would like to know about this. I took a course in statistics for my psyc undergrad, and I remember one of our projects was to look for studies and find at least 5 in which the authors made really blatant mistakes like that. You’d be surprised how many articles out there draw causal conclusions based on a correlation only. It wasn’t hard to find all 5. Other mistakes included “fudging” statistical significance–as in: their study could not prove that their conclusions had a 99% chance of being right so they lowered the standard to a 95% chance of being right. Or increasing the sample size: did you know that you can prove a correlation exists between any two arbitrary variables you want so long as your sample size is large enough? (whether that correlation is positive or negative is another matter).
Anyway, back to QM, if they’re really scrupulous about being scientific, then the way you establish a cause (and not just a correlation) is by setting up the experiment so that you clearly have a dependent variable (the effect) and an independent variable (the cause). The assumption is that the independent variable has its own cause which determines it (you!) leaving no other option than to identify the independent variable as the cause of the dependent variable. Philosophically speaking, you could question this assumption, but it seems reasonable enough to me to justify the identification of a cause. So long as QM experiments are adhering to this design, I’d say they are in the right to identify the independent variable as the cause.
I would not doubt that. Though I would expect many parts of the brain to be involved in processing poetry and metaphor. I’d also point out that the neocortex constitutes a huge portion of the brain, so it’s probably involved in a whole bunch of mental processing (in fact, it’s been proven). How it processes poetry and metaphor is a more interesting question (at least for me) and I’m sure you’re on the right track in your investigations into pattern matching.
Well, that certainly makes sense. Makes me wonder: do you think this is typical of people who form their thoughts and opinions “on the fly” so to speak? As opposed to people who draw from long held beliefs and opinions that have remained more or less “solid” over the years. In the latter case, I would expect those people to know exactly what they were talking about even when revisiting old posts after a long period of absence. But if you form your thoughts and opinions more or less “on the fly” then they’re more likely to be ephemeral, and you most likely won’t remember what you were thinking if you came back to the post after a long period of absence.