RE: "Animals think like autistic humans"

Fri, 02 Jan 2015 21:29:29 -0800 

 

 

From: [email protected] 
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Kim Jones
Sent: Wednesday, December 31, 2014 8:55 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: "Animals think like autistic humans"

 

 

 

On 1 Jan 2015, at 2:52 pm, 'Chris de Morsella' via Everything List 
<[email protected]> wrote:

 

 

From:  <mailto:[email protected]> 
[email protected] [ <mailto:[email protected]> 
mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of meekerdb
Sent: Wednesday, December 31, 2014 4:30 PM
To:  <mailto:[email protected]> [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. 

 

And you are describing how you describe it. A lot of life is about skill 
acquisition. But the point, which may have slipped by you, is that, even after 
a skill has been acquired and the conscious executive self-aware narrator is no 
longer – CONSCIOUSLY – engaged in the often complex, sequenced and 
choreographed sets of inter-acting behaviors and actions that comprise this 
acquired skill, that the brain mind is still very actively performing 
algorithmically complex and sequenced series of processing steps in order to 
accomplish the end goal. ALL of this *thinking* is still happening – each and 
every time you raise that cup to your lips to take a sip.

 

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. 

 

And you *are providing your definitions* for what you believe perception and 
thinking are. That’s okay, but it is also open to question and debate. 

Perception is very different from species to species. In most species 
perception is primarily a sensorial driven process reflected into simple fight 
flight decisional networks, but in our species with our highly developed 
self-awareness and introspective inner life perception is molded by our 
intellectual expectations to a greater degree than most people realize. Think 
of how our *hearing* exquisitely cancels out noise we are not interested about 
(such as the sound of a random passing car on the road outside). We don’t 
actually *hear* a lot of the impinging sound waves that setup vibrations in our 
cochlear glands; just as we do not actually *see* a lot of what excites the 
rods & cones in our retinas. In humans to a much greater degree than other 
species the mental intellectual frame of reference colors and edits our 
perception. Often to the extent that we do not *hear* or *see* what is plainly 
audible or clearly there in plain sight. There are some rather famous 
experiments that demonstrate this uncanny “ability” of human test subjects to 
fail to see the obvious, because they are busy looking for something else.

So does perception really “say what something is” after all? Or is it more 
accurate to define perception as being the minds reified model of what the 
subjective mind believes to be important for its rendition of reality. What is 
more this exquisite balancing act of mental censorship is itself dynamically 
changing according to how the mind judges in any given moment the relative 
importance of the myriad multitude of things impinging on it in this on-going 
continuous avalanche of the senses that we exist within. But which the mind 
then edits, censors and reconstructs to render within the beautifully rendered 
scene of reality as our minds perceive it.

With “thinking” you seem to want to exclude all mental processing that does not 
occur within the constricted realm of the very small part of our minds that our 
self-aware self-perception is consciously aware about from the set of *{that 
which is thinking}* -- if this is in fact your view – it is not one which I 
share. Much thinking goes on without any accompanying meditated self-awareness. 

 

 

 

 

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. 

No, not that at all. I am saying that first we need to understand what thinking 
really is and move beyond our primitive anthropocentric views that have come to 
us from our past. We have a long heritage of thinking about what thinking is, 
so lots of material to draw from. 

The more humbly we come to understand that our self-aware inner dialogue is the 
mind’s (simplified and summarized) narration of a deeper and much vaster non 
verbalized intelligence which is that which is doing the individuals *thinking*

I believe it is better to get past the misconception that the inner voice we 
casually *sense* as being ourselves is the actual repository our being.

 

 

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".

 

With every year it is becoming less and less of a black box though! Are you 
saying that neuroscience will  never figure out how the mind works in the 
brain? I disagree, it is really hard to try to keep up with the pace of what is 
going on in brain/mind science; at every orthogonal level; from ever finer 
grained knowledge, to the incredible advances in available experimental tools.

 

 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. 

 

Why must you pose this as an unavoidable alternative; as being an either or 
proposition. That is a Manichean way of viewing things – IMO. Seeing the mind a 
s a pattern recognition; patter generating machine is useful *at times* but 
just because some intellectual tool is useful for some tasks does not mean that 
it must therefore become the only metric and means by which we view the mind. 
To state it in those either/or terms is highly limiting. 

When you need a hammer, by all means use a hammer, but just because a hammer is 
the best tool for some jobs does not mean a hammer makes the best toothpick!

 

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.

 

I find it highly curious how you describe the unconscious mind as being a dirty 
sewer – speak for yourself Kim.. where you see a sewer I see endless unfolding 
wonder… an inner kaleidoscope beckoning and waiting discovery.

 

Thinking is the exploration of experience for a purpose. 

 

Kim… you seem to have a habit of saying what thinking is and is not… think 
about it J

Is what you think thinking is the end all and be all of thinking – or is it how 
your mind has come to terms with the unfathomable mystery of life? Thinking is 
many things and takes many guises.. thinking is not even necessarily verbal – 
or do you exclude musical and visual genius from thought?

Kim what do you really know about thinking? The fact that you want to pin it 
down into a small bullet list indicates to me that you seem driven by an inner 
need to order it and classify it. You are like a thought librarian trying to 
categorize it and put it in a neat order arrayed according to some Dewey 
Decimal System. 

Don’t get me wrong – this is not bad in and of itself. Classifying and ordering 
plays a part in understanding. I think you take your classification system a 
little too seriously though, because more than you may know life is a laugh.

 

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. 

 

No arguments with that… but how to become better explorers of experience? I 
think each of us may have his or her own best way (or path if you will) and am 
not arguing that your methodology is worthless. Clearly I agree that the mind 
is a superb pattern recognition engine for example; or that that the distilling 
optic of reductionism is a valuable tool in arriving at a clear headed 
understanding of reality. 

What I am communicating to you is that sometimes it is good to set the tool 
aside to steep in the awareness of the greater self that transcends the tool… 
the verbal symbolic reifying tool of our self-narrating minds.

 

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. 

 

And the map is being made – at the micro and nano scale of the brain. We are 
mapping the brains connectome and classifying the many various types of 
neurons. We are gaining clearer understanding of synaptogenesis and all the 
other nano scale dynamic processes at work in the brain; of its micro structure 
at the level of individual neuron columns arrayed in a vast interwoven matrix 
of such columns.

The map is being made. But it is not the map you are speaking about. Though 
there is nothing inherently wrong with your attempts at devising an (or 
communicating an existing) über classification system, I believe it is the 
wrong approach to building a map of the mind. Better to build that based on the 
brain – IMO – e.g. from the physical measurable quantifiable entities of the 
physical brain that give rise to and upon which exists the dynamic network that 
we perceive as our minds.

 

 

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.

 

Why the need to classify the mystery of the mind according to some arbitrary 
intellectual ordering? Seems like you want to squeeze the poetry out of 
existence in order to tidy it up a bit.

-Chris

 

K





 



Brent
The nipple is the only truly intuitive interface.

-- 
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups 
"Everything List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email 
to [email protected].
To post to this group, send email to [email protected].
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

-- 
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups 
"Everything List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email 
to [email protected].
To post to this group, send email to [email protected].
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

-- 
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups 
"Everything List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email 
to [email protected].
To post to this group, send email to [email protected].
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

-- 
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups 
"Everything List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email 
to [email protected].
To post to this group, send email to [email protected].
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

Reply via email to