Greg Detre
Wednesday, March 12, 2003
do spicy foods activate your pain or your temperature receptors?
why do we
have feelings at all, as opposed to being zombie machines?
just because you can imagine a person without feelings, doesn�t mean
that that�s evidence for something
after all, how can you really imagine that, when you have no idea how
(and can�t imagine how) a person works at all?
what about the people who think they don�t have any feelings?
called alexathemia(sp???)
and if you can�t imagine something, that�s just because you have too
weak a imagination
when he
imagines people with totally flat emotional affect, he thinks their cascades
don�t work
he thinks
feelings are how your various self-models describe your activities � they�re
not primitive
pain,
rather than being atomic, is difficult to talk about because it�s a linguistic
shortcut for something very complicated spread over so many different brains
systems
apparently,
there�s a narrow band of frequency of laughing, and if you laugh at that
frequency you start to find things funny
different
theories of emotion:
james-lange � I�m happy because I smile etc.
emotions as the valencies (presumably of reward) attached to cognitive
things
emotions as the kind of thinking that you use when you�re facing a
conflict that needs to be resolved
reference: How
to Solve it, Induction and analogy in mathematics
Poincare (Science
and hypothesis, late 19th century, pre-Freud) � mechanics, topology � gets
mentioned in ch 7
Poincare discusses preparation, unconscious, revelation (looking for
patterns that indicate a solution, set up in preparation phase),
criticism/evaluation
seems to ascribe importance to the unconscious process that works in the
background � but he then debunks it on the next page
what should
they teach children in elementary school about thinking???
doesn�t know � some skills you practice little by little �
give them really hard problems, then give them hints � rather than
problems that are carefully-graded in difficulty
the most important thing to teach is enjoying getting a wrong solution
and finding out exactly why it�s wrong
two
alternative types of school
montessouri � start early with mathematical types of problem
kid started to build with these arithmetic blocks and the teacher said
�no, those aren�t toys� J
waldorf � less structured, explore creativity
synectics �
brainstorming company in Boston
start by just freewheeling crazy ideas, then critical, then split into
groups
most people may go through these in microphases, a few every second
his theory is that manic-depressives� cycles of these are skewed
some psychologists try to get people to talk out loud about their
thought processes, e.g. while packing clothes into a suitcase
but getting people to try and speak out loud about their unconscious
processes is a bad method of testing people
where do
people have their best ideas?
intoxicated in a bar, and on the toilet
locked up in a room, and in social isolation
Minsky: gets ideas in the shower, perhaps because of sensory deprivation
(noise of the shower)
you need to
brainstorm at different levels � spend at least a few minutes a day looking at
the big picture
Don Norman
fired by Apple � why???
finding things wrong with OS 9 � Minsky thinks they�ve been made worse
he doesn�t like the dock
aliasmenus, even better than fruit menus
in hard sci-fi, you�re only allowed one invention, and then you spend the time working out its implications � you�re more likely to get something useful if you only break one rule
Inspiration
� mind-mapping package
Fitzgerald-Lorenz
contraction came before the Theory of Relativity � but they considered it just
a fudge factor whereas he took it seriously
Clarke
eventually gave up on the space elevator because of terrorism
the reason that Godel�s theorem isn�t a problem is because it only applies to consistent formal systems � so if the brain is algorithmic, but inconsistent
certainty vs truth
maths as consensus until someone points out an error
an algorithmic mind/machine throws out lots of true statements about mathematics, and a few false ones
defines a formal system as set of expressions and a set of rules to transform them
all of maths as proving tautologies
build an inconsistent formal system on top of a consistent system
he says that there�s lots of bits of tEM that should be taken out because they�re only there to irritate people J
minsky's talk of pain-behaviour as not needing to feel painful is surely nonsense - it allows implicitly for the idea that there are some behaviours that are/aren't conscious
i feel as though his claim that consciousness is not one-dimensional is either very right, or very wrong
let�s say we did build this extra system that served the same function that our pain-system serves now � wouldn�t that be conscious too???
well, as long as the higher levels are able to reason about it, certainly
perhaps assume it�s kind of like pain asymbolia
are the
people with pain asymbolia motivated to avoid the pain though???
he says apparently not
does he have a cutoff point for which levels are conscious and which aren�t???
almost certainly not, because he wants to say that consciousness is not only a continuum (presumably), but multi/high-dimensional, and that any cutoff point would be terminological
is there more to suffering??? is it a unitary feeling???
presumably he�d say that the nature of your suffering depends on the nature of the constriction placed upon your thought processes???
is it an epiphenomenon??? is it designed into the system???
how does he
argue for our multiple selfs all feeling like a single self (I�ve
forgotten)???
emotions are just ways of thinking � but there are lots of ways of thinking that aren�t emotions
question: emotions as ways of thinking that activate your autonomic system �
Minsky: but where does the autonomic system start?
reference: Damasio on anasognosics
apparently Christopher Reeve can breathe for 30-40 mins at a time
he�s currently interested in trying to classify things we don�t have names for
e.g. the principle 50 critics that we use for �
teach them AI so that you can pin down the different types of frustration, anger, and the particular critics
interesting that there�s no word for these critics
would you expect to find these kind of domain-general critics though???