Thinking

Why so angry bro?
chill.
Calm down.
The nonsense is getting to your brain. smoke a splif…or whatever you kids call it nowadays.

I wish I could take it back…

Hush…go to church tomorrow and beg for forgiveness from your god.
I’ll feel it.

Ok…

Hey Dan, long time etc. how are you doing…?

Yes to all, maybe a quibble with…

I think it has a lot of redundancies built in, like most of the body’s systems. I think it’s more like -

“The human mind is layered. One part usually performs one particular task better than the other parts, and becomes attuned to that role for as long as it continues to out-perform the rest.”

but y’know, wordy.

And…

I wonder why it became this way, or was forced to.

I been feeling great.
I been playing robotrek, factorio, civilization 5,
All great games.

The reason why I say what i say,
is because i was taught that the various regions of the brain cover varions functions.
One aspect of the brain is facial recognition, for example.

I think it was neither natural selection nor God.
Just something to do with probability.
Probability shapes our life more than natural selection id say.

Am glad to see you here.
I’m a mod at the religion area.
It’s been over a year since i was elected.
I am proud of it.

Nice. =D> Tough job I imagine.

I read around a bit and there seems to be some flexibility, when damaged the brain can sometimes make up for loss of function by co-opting other areas, but some damage is irreparable - neglect types for example, where the brain seems unable to comprehend some things, strange things like anything to the left of the field of view say. They can be circumvented behaviourally, training yourself to move your head to scan, but not always. The concept of ‘left field’ disappears, along with any sense of its loss. Having no sense of something lost, consciousness seems to just ‘think’ there is nothing wrong, nothing to compensate for or rewire.

Long shot - have you ever read “being no-one” by thomas metzinger…? Insanely hard book to get through usefully. Took me 6 months on and off and was still incomprehensable pretty much when I turned the last page. Sort of attention schema theory on steroids.

And wow. I don’t think I’ve come across anyone share my ideas about probability in a very long time. I’m officially happy.

Good to see you again Dan.

Can You summarize the book, like You know Metzinger made simple?

Lol god no. I remember it having words in it. Then it summoned cthulhu.

I can go with those images.
This made me think of the issue or organization. Most minds will present themselves as organized, especially with minds that mind doesn’t know well. Like ‘all my opinions are logical’ and ‘I am consistant (that is, my thoughts and opinions don’t contradict each other’. But I don’t think this is the case, ever. Of course some minds are more organized than others and some minds try to be more consistant and to weed out ‘irrational’ thoughts. There is a heuristic that a streamlined mind with one philosophy is better than other minds.

I am not sure that is the case.

Further, I think having a mind that even has contradictions may well be very useful.

Of course I am on the pragmatist end of things. If it works, well, ok. So, ontology A may indicate that X does not exist, but it if works acting like it does, I don’t care, and I feel in no rush to prove ontology A, and I may use ontology B on another occasion.

That all my models work well together is a lower priority than things working well for me.

Tab,

Perhaps the human needs to compartmentalize. It keeps our mind to a certain extent organized and structured and neat. Like shelves in a room. Messy is not good. Everything identified and in its own particular place. A survival strategy of sorts?

But then lost in similitude ? The very expanding family of resemblances that purport to explain what things mean?

Like putting things away into different niches, fhen forgetting them. for not having used them a while?

Nice seeing You Arcturus, long time no hear!

Although the brain is its own individual thing,
it has specific qualities per space.
Regions, hemispheres, etc.
A human mind has more than one type of thinking.
Example : dreaming. Much different than when awake.

And instinctual knowledge, like boobs are for suckling.

I often wonder if dreaming is pre-literate thinking.

Maybe, but how does one express such thinking except inside literate thinking? Which dominates? Amygdala or Cortex? At what point do we cross over from instinctual behavior to sentience?

Lol, call me insane, but I have spent some time off and on over the years thinking about how a dog-pack for example would ‘think’ just using emotion and remembered events.

Initially words in my view are short cuts, wiped of much of their emotional context, which would speed up/enrich/diversify/ thought. Imagine if you had to parse that last sentence into emotional/memorized event language. :smiley: Beyond remembering seeing a chihuahua, and the last time they cut their paw, and maybe running… It gets real abstract real quick.

“Eating too much is bad for you” is easier though. That would translate.

“Bravery is an admirable quality” would also translate.

Thinking for yourself is one thing, communicating the product of that thought to others without physically demonstrating it in context is another. What spoken language did for us was to link up our isolated brains into one big uberbrain. Massively boosting our species. Writing set us free from death, at least knowledge-wise anyway.

I kinda think that any lifeform over a certain brain size, that runs/swims/flies in groups and demonstrates some kind of social order, is probably sentient. I mean still dumb as fuck compared to even the dumber among us, but still. We should feel bad about what we do to many animals just because they can’t shout “Oi!!! please don’t kill me.”

I don’t wanna drag this thread off in looking at all the possibles. That’s a first for me, but I’m still confused as to how we sort out thinking from non-thinking? Dan suggests a difference between instinctual and thinking states of being without any real clarification as to when and where he thinks that might occur - in humans. But what about every other living species? What is the definition of thinking?

A scout bee discovers a field of flowers full of pollen. He can and will return to the hive and “communicate” the direction and distance (by way of angle to the sun) to the rest of the hive. Upon discovery of the pollen source did he stop and think about relaying info back to his hive mates? Or, was it some sort of ingrained instinctual behavior? We call it thinking when humans all flock to the best taco stand, but it is the same thing the bee is doing. If there is a difference, what is it?

Just for a small cloud of confusion, do Androids dream of Electric Sheep?

I read a sci-fi novel once, I forget the title. But in it, someone built a computer out of a garden. Questions were parsed into the equivalent of toxic chemical punch-cards, introduced into the ecosystem, and the outputs read out as the ecosystem evolved solutions to restore homeostasis.

There’s ‘fast’ thinking, such as we recognize, and ‘slow’ thinking that a hive might undertake, but not on the individual bee level, more on a species level. It’s all about what you define as thinking, and your capacity for patience.

It’s more the subject of the thought that sets humans apart from anything else we’ve come across. A raven or a squirrel might ‘think’ about how to get that nut from the feeder, but they ain’t never gonna think about alternate endings for the last avengers movie.

That aside I think the hallmark of thinking must be change. You do something. You think about the results and the situation. You change what you did and try it again. You could argue that thinking is an instinct though lol.

Let’s try this analogy on for size. What we have in our heads is a shaker. In it we put symbols corresponding to all the elements we can perceive about whatever situation is important to us at the moment, and throw in some extra ones corresponding to elements perceived in situations similar we’ve encountered in the past, or heard about or read about etc.

The act of thought is just repeatedly shaking the shaker, dumping it out on the table, until suddenly, Shakespeare occurs.

Thinking begins as genetic information.
Organs form via genetic code to do tasks.
One task is produce new useful thoughts.
It’s all about the information.
Gene → Cell mass → Organs → Brain and Heart.