Month: September 2013

In Like Flynn

Mark DavisLeave a comment

The exceptionally interesting James Flynn explains the cognitive history of the past century and what it means in terms of human intelligence in this TED talk:

What does the future hold? While we might decry the “twitch” generation and their inundation by social media, gaming stimulation, and instant interpersonal engagement, the slowing observed in the Flynn Effect might be getting ready for another ramp-up over the next 100 years.

Perhaps most intriguing is the discussion of the ability to think in terms of hypotheticals as a a core component of ethical reasoning. Ethics is about gaming outcomes and also about empathizing with others. The influence of media as a delivery mechanism for narratives about others emerged just as those changes in cognitive capabilities were beginning to mature in the 20th Century. Widespread media had a compounding effect on the core abstract thinking capacity, and with the expansion of smartphones and informational flow, we may only have a few generations to go before the necessary ingredients for good ethical reasoning are widespread even in hard-to-reach areas of the world.… Read the rest

Contingency and Irreducibility

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JaredTarbell2Thomas Nagel returns to defend his doubt concerning the completeness—if not the efficacy—of materialism in the explanation of mental phenomena in the New York Times. He quickly lays out the possibilities:

  1. Consciousness is an easy product of neurophysiological processes
  2. Consciousness is an illusion
  3. Consciousness is a fluke side-effect of other processes
  4. Consciousness is a divine property supervened on the physical world

Nagel arrives at a conclusion that all four are incorrect and that a naturalistic explanation is possible that isn’t “merely” (1), but that is at least (1), yet something more. I previously commented on the argument, here, but the refinement of the specifications requires a more targeted response.

Let’s call Nagel’s new perspective Theory 1+ for simplicity. What form might 1+ take on? For Nagel, the notion seems to be a combination of Chalmers-style qualia combined with a deep appreciation for the contingencies that factor into the personal evolution of individual consciousness. The latter is certainly redundant in that individuality must be absolutely tied to personal experiences and narratives.

We might be able to get some traction on this concept by looking to biological evolution, though “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” is about as close as we can get to the topic because any kind of evolutionary psychology must be looking for patterns that reinforce the interpretation of basic aspects of cognitive evolution (sex, reproduction, etc.) rather than explore the more numinous aspects of conscious development. So we might instead look for parallel theories that focus on the uniqueness of outcomes, that reify the temporal evolution without reference to controlling biology, and we get to ideas like uncomputability as a backstop. More specifically, we can explore ideas like computational irreducibility to support the development of Nagel’s new theory; insofar as the environment lapses towards weak predictability, a consciousness that self-observes, regulates, and builds many complex models and metamodels is superior to those that do not.… Read the rest

Signals and Noise, Chapter 00000011 (Cavern)

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cover-design-epubThe cavern of Zach’s room, his private space, is rarely invaded by his mother. He feels confidently, quietly isolated there, protected and enwombed as he reaches out through the broadband into the virtual caves of the web, into blogs, AetherFaces, AetherFaces, IRC chat rooms, web sites, and secure shells into compromised foreign computer systems. Visually, there is warmth to the space because of the dun shade over the compact fluorescents and the wall hangings in bands of color. Under pressure from a compact, oscillating fan, stellated icosahedrons in pocked metal and wood drift like interlopers to the solar system of the collections of plastic superheroes and creatures from horror movies perched along every available surface.

There was an era not long ago when a teen inordinately quiet, obsessively detailing balsa wood planes or role playing miniatures, would have been worried over by a parent from a generation before, whose parents were themselves worried that their own children were listening to radical hippie music, but Zach’s mom was too distracted by the pressures of her job as a marketing VP to be able to divert her energies to worrying over Zach. Zach was used to it. It rarely bothered him. He had his cave, school, self-determination and a private life. Her comings and goings were barely noticeable for weeks on end, though she often sent him tight, loving text messages reminding him of deadlines and updating AetherFaces with ecstatic praise and notes about her own complicated life. He was at the top of her to-do list, but just one more project in a cataract of them. Even his very existence was a project of sorts. Zach’s father was a sperm bank and he had been conceived out of a scheduling lull and nagging insecurity on his mother’s part that her biological clock was moving out of range of thoroughly healthy outcomes.… Read the rest