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"Several recent discussions on a variety of unrelated topics with different people have gotten me thinking about two different attitudes towards dialectical processes. They are generalized versions of the professional attitudes required of lawyers and judges, so I’ll refer to them as lawyer mind and judge mind.
In the specialized context of the law, the dialectical process is structurally constrained and the required attitudes are codified and legally mandated to a certain extent. Lawyers must act as though they were operating from a lawyer-mindset, even if internally they are operating with a judge-mind."
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The lawyer mind allows you to make up the best possible defense or prosecution strategy with the available evidence. Within limits, even if the defense lawyer is convinced his client is guilty, s/he is duty-bound to make the best possible case and is not required to share evidence that incriminates the defendant or weakens the case.
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The judge’s nominal role is to act as a steward of the dialectic itself and make sure it is as fair as can be at any given time, without attempting to push its limits outside of certain codified mechanisms. The judge is charged with explicitly driving towards the “truth” in the particular case, and also improving the system’s potential — it’s dialectical vitality — so that it discovers the truth better in the future
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"Mindapples helps people look after their minds. We encourage people to take better care of themselves, and educate the public about how our minds work and how to manage them. We want to make looking after our minds as natural as brushing our teeth, by asking everyone: “What's the 5-a-day for your mind?”"
"Mind arises within a social process, originally in the interaction of the infant and its care-givers, and subsequently broadening out to include the whole of society. You didn't work out the Periodic Table, but you know it; likewise much else that's in your head. Not many of us, after all, coin new words, at least not words that come into general use. In a sense, your conscious experience doesn't belong to you, and that's why consciousness seems ghostly and weird."
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When I got home I checked out the recommended reading for the event, and found right at the end a link to a work of Soviet psychology, and from that a whole archive of links to the works of Vygotsky and the school of thought he founded and the astonishing and inspiring humane applications that it led to, and the terrible vicissitudes of this school of psychology before and after it made its way to the West. Strangely enough, the very same view of consciousness that Vygotsky pioneered and that I heard Stuart Derbyshire outline can be found in all the boring Brezhnev-era textbooks of dialectical materialism.
By what a frail aqueduct did the fallen empire convey to a future civilization that most surprising discovery of Marxism-Leninism: the individual human consciousness, the soul!
"Amanda Knox was convicted of murder and her reputation sullied around the world, in large part because of her facial expressions and demeanour. Her story reveals how our instincts about others can be dangerously superficial, writes Ian Leslie"
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In 2008 a group of Norwegian researchers ran an experiment to better understand how police investigators come to a judgment about the credibility of rape claims. Sixty-nine investigators were played video-recorded versions of a rape victim's statement, with the role of victim played by an actress. The wording of the statement in each version was exactly the same, but the actress delivered it with varying degrees of emotion. The investigators, who prided themselves on their objectivity, turned out to be heavily influenced in their judgments by assumptions about the victim's demeanour: she was judged most credible when crying or showing despair.
In reality, rape victims react in the immediate aftermath of the event in a variety of ways: some are visibly upset; others are subdued and undemonstrative. There is, unsurprisingly, no universal reaction to being raped. The detectives were relying on their instincts, and their instincts turned out to be constructed from inherited and unreliable notions about women in distress.
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Emily Pronin, a psychologist at Princeton University, points out that there is a fundamental asymmetry about the way two human beings relate to one another in person. When you meet someone, there are at least two things more prominent in your mind than in theirs – your thoughts, and their face. As a result we tend to judge others on what we see, and ourselves by what we feel. Pronin calls this "the illusion of asymmetric insight".
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Sparrow sums it up best: “[Our] results suggest that processes of human memory are adapting to the advent of new computing and communication technology. Just as we learn through transactive memory who knows what in our families and offices, we are learning what the computer “knows” and when we should attend to where we have stored information in our computer-based memories. We are becoming symbiotic with our computer tools, growing into interconnected systems that remember less by knowing information than by knowing where the information can be found.”
"Technology is indeed our friend, but it can become a dangerous flatterer, creating an illusion of control. Professors and librarians have been disappointed by the actual search skills even of elite college students, as I discussed here. We need quite a bit in our wetware memory to help us decide what information is best to retrieve. I've called this the search conundrum.
The issue isn't whether most information belongs online rather than in the head. We were storing externally even before Gutenberg. It's whether we're offloading the memory that we need to process the other memory we need. Strangely enough, Google Book Search still doesn't display a full copy of Malton's over 200-year-old masterpiece. Let's have it online soon. But let's not forget that healthy sense of "insufficiency.""
Either way, this cognitive capacity, this theory of mind, has baked itself into our heads when it comes to our pondering of life's big questions. Unlike any science-literate generation that has come before, we now possess the intellectual tools to observe our own minds at work and to understand how God came to be there. And we alone are poised to ask, "Has our species' unique cognitive evolution duped us into believing in this, the grandest mind of all?"
"In recent years popular science writing has bombarded us with titillating reports of discoveries of the brain’s psychological prowess. Such reports invade even introductory patter in biology and psychology. We are told that the brain — or some area of it sees, decides, reasons, knows, emotes, is altruistic/egotistical, or wants to make love. For example, a recent article reports a researcher’s “looking at love, quite literally, with the aid of an MRI machine.” One wonders whether lovemaking is to occur between two brains, or between a brain and a human being.
There are three things wrong with this talk."
psychology and multiple selves, self-identity
Summarizes and discusses N. Katherine Hayles, Andy Clark (on extended mind) and Terence Deacon and Merlin Donald on evolution of symbolic communication.
Stuart Kauffman weighs in on mind-body problem and quantum effects.
Since Descartes' dualism, with his res extensa and res cogitans, six fundamental problems in the philosophy and natural history of mind are these: 1. how does mind act on matter? 2. If mind does not act on matter is mind a mere epiphenomenon? 3. What might be the source of free will? 4. What might be the source of a responsible free will? 5. Why might it have been selectively advantageous to evolve consciousness? 6. What is consciousness? I approach the first five of the above six problems based on two physical postulates. First the mind-brain system is a quantum coherent, but reversibly decohering and recohering system. This allows me to answer 1) above, mind does not act causally on brain at all, rather it acausally decohers to classicity (for all practical purposes), hence has consequences for brain and body as matter. Epiphenomenalism is averted. A quantum mind, because it is acausal on Copenhagen including Born, yields a free will, but a merely random free will, not a responsible free will. Second, the most radical part of this article proposes that the quantum classical interface is not always describable by a law: specifically in a special relativity setting, no function, F, maps the present state of the system mind-brain into its future. In its place is a nonrandom yet lawless process. I seek in this non-random yet lawless process a source for a responsible free will. Finally, if the quantum-classical boundary can be non-random yet lawless, then no algorithmic simulation of the world or ourselves can calculate the real world, hence the evolutionary selective advantages for evolving consciousness to know it may be great. I make no progress on problem 6, the hard problem of qualia.
As it turns out, the way that the human brain goes about the task of “remembering the past” is actually very similar to how it goes about “imagining the future.”
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