Ben/MT: Cog sci treats humans as if we are rational, consistent thinkers/ computers.
No, it just doesn't. This is an egregious oversimplification and mis-analysis of the cognitive science community and its research and ideas. Look at the heuristics and biases literature, for one thing... and the literature on analogical reasoning ... on the cognitive psychology of emotion ... etc. etc. etc Ben, I suspect this is a similar misunderstanding to Richard's response to the above, long ago - and it's an important subject. Cog sci is obsessed with the many irrationalities of human thinking, yes. That doesn't mean it doesn't see humans as basically rational, consistent, computer-like thinkers dealing mainly with rational problems. The irrationalities are seen as so many bugs that can, ideally, be fixed. Classic example of this attitude: "More puzzling is myopic discounting: the tendency in all of us to prefer a large late reward to a small early one, but then to flip our preferences as time passes and both rewards draw nearer. A familiar example is deciding before dinner to skip dessert (a small early reward) in order to lose weight (a large late one), but succumbing to temptation when the waiter takes the dessert orders. Myopic discounting is easy to produce in the lab: give people (or pigeons, for that matter) two buttons, one delivering a small reward now, the other delivering a large reward later, and the subject will flip from choosing the large reward to choosing the small reward as the small one becomes imminent. The weakness of the will is an unsolved problem in economics and psychology alike." Pinker - How The Mind Works Cog sci. sees all this as puzzling and can't solve the problem of "the weakness of the will", because none of it makes sense within a rational thinker paradigm, and "myopic discounting" clearly can't be "fixed". I am advancing an alternative paradigm in which it all does make sense. We aren't rational (or irrational) at all for the most part; rational (eg logicomathematical) problems are only half at most of the problems we have to deal with. Actually, we are creative thinkers, dealing mainly with creative problems, (like what to eat tonight as well as how to write a post or design an AGI ), and we are designed to be fundamentally and permanently conflicted, (and therefore erratically "strong"/"weak"-willed and "unfixable" like democratic systems), in order to deal with those problems. (And AGI too is about creative not rational problems). ------------------------------------------- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=108809214-a0d121 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
