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The Splintered Mind: When Are Introspective Judgments Reliable?
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First, I believe our judgments about conscious experience ("phenomenology") are reliable when we can lean upon our knowledge of the outside world to prop them up.
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Second, I believe that our judgments about phenomenology are reliable when they pertain to features of our phenomenology about which it's important to our survival or functioning to get it right.
Overcoming Bias: Beware Detached Detail
Robin Hanson continues his speculation on near/far thoughts. Our effort to appear to have good near thoughts might lead to detatched details that look good but have low impact on near decisions and low resource costs.
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If our far thoughts are more distorted to present good images, then the next step down the rabbit hole is this: to judge how we will typically act, others should prefer to see our near thoughts, at least if they can distinguish near versus far thoughts. After all, near thoughts drive most day to day actions. And we should each look more to our own near thoughts to judge our own sincerity.
Once we evolved to weigh near others' thoughts more heavily, the next step would be to look for cheap ways to have good-looking near-thoughts, without paying the full price of distorting important actions. That is, our mind designer would look for ways to show "detached" near thoughts, consistent with good-image far-thoughts, but not actually impacting much on important near decisions.
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A movie can let you feel not only that people in distant times and places should fight Nazis or free slaves, but that if you were actually in such situations with near systems fully engaged, you would actually do such things. But of course since the movie's scenario has little overlap with your real life, there is little risk that near habits acquired would interfere with your usual near actions. You rarely watch movies about, say, helping poor neighbors or illegal immigrants, since those stories are less detached from your ordinary life. There is a reason they call it "escapism," after all.
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Overcoming Bias: A Tale Of Two Tradeoffs
Robin Hanson posits two mental tradeoffs among social animals and speculates on their interactions. 1) making good decisions and presenting good images to others 2) greater resources required for more detailed descriptions/thoughts. Leads to detail thinking for 'near' objects/events/people etc., and sparse thinking for 'far'.
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The first tradeoff is that social minds must both make good decisions, and present good images to others. Our thoughts influence both our actions and what others think of us. It would be expensive to maintain two separate minds for these two purposes, and even then we would have to maintain enough consistency to convince outsiders a good-image mind was in control. It is cheaper and simpler to just have one integrated mind whose thoughts are a compromise between these two ends.
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The second key tradeoff is that minds must often think about the same sorts of things using different amounts of detail. Detailed representations tend to give more insight, but require more mental resources. In contrast, sparse representations require fewer resources, and make it easier to abstractly compare things to each other. For example, when reasoning about a room a photo takes more work to study but allows more attention to detail; a word description contains less info but can be processed more quickly, and allows more comparisons to similar rooms.
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infinite thØught: brentano and chance
book and article recommendations on two philosophy topics - Brentano and phenomenology; plus philosophy of chance
Qualia (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
"Philosophers often use the term ‘qualia’ (singular ‘quale’) to refer to the introspectively accessible, phenomenal aspects of our mental lives. In this standard, broad sense of the term, it is difficult to deny that there are qualia. Disagreement typically centers on which mental states have qualia, whether qualia are intrinsic qualities of their bearers, and how qualia relate to the physical world both inside and outside the head. The status of qualia is hotly debated in philosophy largely because it is central to a proper understanding of the nature of consciousness. Qualia are at the very heart of the mind-body problem."
Overcoming Bias: In Praise of Boredom
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I have a small unreasonable fear, somewhere in the back of my mind, that if I ever do fully understand the algorithms of intelligence, it will destroy all remaining novelty - no matter what new situation I encounter, I'll know I can solve it just by being intelligent, the same damn thing over and over. All novelty will be used up, all existence will become boring, the remaining differences no more important than shades of pixels in a video game. Other beings will go about in blissful unawareness, having been steered away from studying this forbidden cognitive science. But I, having already thrown myself on the grenade of AI, will face a choice between eternal boredom, or excision of my forbidden knowledge and all the memories leading up to it (thereby destroying my existence as Eliezer, more or less).
/Message: Arrington on Scoble, FriendFeed, And The Web Of Flow
The transition from a web-of-pages, where the principal source of critical information is found on static, unitary web pages, generally written by a single owner/author, and where comments are left on those pages by 'visitors', to the web-of-flow, where conversation has left the web-of-pages and moved into flow applications, like Twitter and Friendfeed. Robert has moved into this new context, more or less organically, and he now spends his time chatting instead of writing blog posts. Arrington is principally ranting against this transition to flow, making the case that Scoble to helping Friendfeed enormously without recompense, and losing all the traffic that he might have passing by a blog where he could make money selling ads, like Arrington does.
The Blue Marble: The Gift of Nature
Walking in a park in any season or even viewing pictures of nature helps improve memory and attention by 20 percent. All it takes is 30 minutes. Even when it's cold. Even when we don't enjoy it. The study by U of Michigan researchers found that effects of interacting with nature are similar to meditating.
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