> On 1 Jan 2015, at 2:52 pm, 'Chris de Morsella' via Everything List
> <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>
>
> From: [email protected]
> [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of meekerdb
> Sent: Wednesday, December 31, 2014 4:30 PM
> To: [email protected]
> Subject: Re: "Animals think like autistic humans"
>
> On 12/31/2014 4:00 PM, Kim Jones wrote:
> Thinking, however, is a highly evolved skill of many parts involving values
> and beliefs and motivations and agendas and theories and risk-taking. Lifting
> a cup to your lips to swallow a liquid requires no thinking. The skill is
> embedded since infancy, so it is with savants.
>
> But there's not a sharp distinction. Many skills must be developed
> thoughtfully and then they can become automatic. Riding a bicycle is the
> paradigmatic case, but it probably applies to drinking from cup too.
>
> Taking what Brent said a step further; there is no clear sharp line for
> thinking itself! The mind/brain is far more extended than the self-aware
> voice boxes we all inhabit… looking out from within. Lifting the cup to drink
> may not require conscious thought, after it has been learned, but watch an
> infant try to do it their first times and witness a conscious struggle as the
> wee little young forebrain neural synaptic dynamic circuitry tries to
> coordinate that human mastered trick of life.
You are describing skill-acquisition. You could just as well point to someone
learning to play scales in time to a metronome. This requires careful
monitoring - by thinking - of perception, otherwise there is risk that the
wrong algorithm or faulty algorithms will get embedded or learnt. Athletes
always learn their complex and otherwise dangerous routines with someone
continually guiding their perception. Some children do fail to learn how to
drink from a cup correctly. You will always come to a conclusion based on your
perception, not your thinking, so perception without thinking can be and is
dangerous. If you play your scales continually the wrong way, you become an
expert at playing your scales wrong, but that is the fault of perception which
is kind of your inflated self-belief. Perception says what something is.
Thinking says what something can or could be.
> When we speak of “thinking” it is incumbent to remain clear that the mind is
> far greater than the conscious tip we are conscious about. Our self-aware
> conscious selves, in many cases, can be shown to only become aware of events
> and decisions, measurably lagging behind preceding bursts of neural activity
> lighting up in glorious cascades of network activity within the mind/brain.
> How much of our thinking makes it to the level of the executive
> self-narrating forebrain centered self awareness; versus how much of life’s
> thinking and executive decisions, including complex algorithmic tasks – such
> as drinking from a cup – are instead performed without bothering the
> self-aware {sub-part} of the larger mind/brain/organism.
> -Chris
You seem to be saying that we can do nothing new about thinking. Well, I
suppose you can adopt this attitude to it. The mind is infinitely mysterious
and like the ocean, we will never get to the bottom of it. "It all happens
inside this black box".
Or, alternatively, you could say that the mind is something that is easy to
understand when viewed as a pattern-reading and a pattern-generating system.
Now we can easily see something of benefit: that we are excellent at the former
but particularly weak at the latter. Here is where we can improve our thinking
without bothering about the unconscious mind and other dirty sewers that we at
other times love to thresh around in philosophically.
Thinking is the exploration of experience for a purpose. OK, there are things
tugging at us that we cannot know about or understand. We are free to define
the purpose of thinking but to get better at it we need to be better explorers
of experience. You can argue about what's on the map or what the map means, but
someone has to make the map for there to be something to argue about. Thinking
is the channelling or the processing of perceptions in some way. The result is
a map that is supposed to give insight into possibilities for action.
Creativity needs to be considered as part of thinking as well to avoid the
limitation of always seeing everything via the routine or the standard or
existing patterns of recognition. Generative thinking: the least developed and
the least understood part of our minds. Perception says what is (recognition).
Thinking allows the PATTERNING OF perception to form concepts and ideas that
contain already compressed versions of the initial perceptions.
K
>
>
>
> Brent
> The nipple is the only truly intuitive interface.
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