On 11/28/06, Philip Goetz <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I see evidence of dimensionality reduction by humans in the fact that adopting a viewpoint has such a strong effect on the kind of information a person is able to absorb. In conversations about politics or religion, I often find ideas that to me seem simple, that I cannot communicate to someone of a different viewpoint. We both start with the same input - some English sentences, say - but I think we compress them in different, yet internally consistent, ways. Their viewpoint is based on a compression scheme that simply compresses out what I am trying to communicate.
Be careful drawing conclusions about what the brain _can_ do from what it _does_ do when talking about politics and religion - in those domains you hit "that's a feature not a bug" issues like self-deception, perceived social allegiance, the "bozo bit" etc, adaptations that explicitly disable a lot of our normal cognitive abilities. To draw conclusions about our full cognitive potential you really need to look at performance in complex but politically neutral domains. ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303
