Themes How the Mind Works

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• Bruce LaDuke – May 11 2008

  Karl,
  
  I do agree with your modeling/memetics view, which I see as a behavioral perspective of knowledge working. And I think you do a really good job simplifying this in your examples.
  
  But I do think this is still only part of the story. I'll try to take your example of the boy finding a new way to fish to expand upon your thoughts.
  
  Missing from this popular view is an accurate understanding of knowledge creation, questioning, social acceptance, and knowledge interactions.
  
  The boy that came up with the new idea on how to fish took on the role of knowledge creator. He has the option on whether or not to transfer that knowledge to society. If he chooses not to, it is lost until someone else comes up with the same idea. If he transfers the new knowledge to the other boy, and the other boy accepts it, that boy is learning. He is learning new knowledge though, not existing knowledge...and social acceptance was required for that boy to receive that knowledge.
  
  Imagine now that this boy that had the idea of a new way to catch fish, instead of telling his friend, carved instructions on a rock and didn't tell his friend. This is the start of a library or a knowledge base in a crude sense. He might direct his friend to the writing, in which case he has taken on the role of instructor. Or he might leave it and his friend might happen upon it, accept it, and instruct himself. Again, social acceptance is required.
  
  The concept could be inscribed into the rock in either images or in text. Both of these are symbols used in knowledge transfer. Knowledge can only exist through symbols and can only be transferred through symbols. Complex video or holographic imagery is also a complex symbol, so I'm using the term symbol very broadly.
  
  Now let's say that three other boys came into the mix. They each had a different fishing method. They all decide that one of these new three boys had the best idea and they left the codified method on the rock. In this case, they (society) have rejected new knowledge--Even though it was true, practical, and codified, it was not received into the social knowledge base.
  
  So then let's take it even further. Let's say three of the boys decide to codify their three views of how to fish on stone tablets. Now we have a full-fledged library. The knowledge was in their minds, but they centralized sharing of it by 1) codifying it and 2) by centralizing it. That's basically what a library is....a centralized codification of knowledge. Now any of these boys, or when they grow up and raise new boys, can all access this codified knowledge for as long as they share this same language and the media of stone tablets lasts.
  
  But then, another boy might come along with a brand new idea on how to fish and write it also on a stone tablet, but the 'status quo' may feel threatened by this new knowledge and reject it. Or they may declare that this boy is not an 'expert' and therefore reject it. Or they may vote him out. Or they might test it, prove it, and accept it. Or they might accept it not knowing it doesn't work. The thought is that there are a myriad of possibilities, but they all follow a basic process that I described earlier. Knowledge flows:
  
  From Individual:
  - An individual creates knowledge
  - An individual delivers knowledge to society
  
  To Society:
  - Society accepts or rejects new knowledge
  - Society stores accepted knowledge
  
  And Back to Individuals:
  - Stored knowledge is learned by individuals
  - Knowledge is applied by learned individuals and social groups within industry or society
  
  (Source: http://hyperadvance.com/blog/?p=27)
  
  Behavior is really only a complication to the knowledge working process. Knowledge is created, stored, and learned by well-defined processes, but society tends to complicate these definable processes with things like politics, governent/rules, expertise (which is a political status), consensus, etc. Not that these things are bad for society, but the point is that they are not part of the knowledge working process. Knowledge working is optimized when it can escape all of this.
  
  Singularity will be the point in time when we learn to mechanize this logical knowledge working process such that it can gather data, create knowledge, codify that knowledge, and then centralize it to the limits of its storage capacity. The point there being that the knowledge working process is machine-like and predictable...folks only think it is fluid because they haven't fully understood iit yet and we are using crude languages for knowledge transfer. As computing power increases, this will become more and more evident. The advent of the 'semantic web' is the start of this process.

• karl jansson – May 8 2008

  Jason,
  I think that it's always good to know how the mind works. As I tried to illuminate in my previous post, knowing that to transfer information you have to engage the fantasy in the receiving subject to get it to build its own model of the knowledge could influence both teaching and everyday conversation. Mostly we are oblivious to that. I see that the ones that has the knowledge of thow the mind works will have the edge over those that have not. Also it may give you an understanding of why not to use drugs. Many people have phobias which could be better handled with a bit of understanding of the mind. It would also surely expose and undermine many faith based teachings.

• Jason Newcombe – May 8 2008

  I see potential value in understanding how the mind works as a core topic for at least high-school students (albeit age appropriate but without loosing the essential principles). If school is where neural structures are created, then it may be that increasing likelihood of doing this well is to inform students exactly what we understand is going on in their heads. Is there potential to influence other areas of life, like various recreational behaviors that affect health?

• karl jansson – May 5 2008

  Bruce,
  
  I think the modelling view is quite powerful,
  and can be used for illuminating some of the why and how information is transferred.
  
  For example think of the following hypothetical example of cultural exchange:
  
  Consider two boys, best friends living on some remote beach.
  One of the boys discovers a new better way of catching fish, perhaps by building
  some kind of stone trap for catching fish when the tides goes out.
  
  What happens in his mind now: This sets off a sets of trajectories in his model,
  simulating his triumphant return to his family. He of course already now gets a
  lot of gratification just by the simulation since it includes his family and how
  the model predicts that they will behave.
  He now spawn off a simulation of him telling his best friend. This of course already
  now generates even more gratification.
  
  Happy from all virtual gratification he runs over to his friend and tells him how its done.
  
  If we now focus a bit what is taking place.
  The boy is about to try and transfer a chunk of his model to his friend so that the friend
  can also build traps and catch fish.
  
  Now, since the boys are really close friends they have very similar models.
  They also have really good models of each others models
  (i.e.they know what the other know and don't know).
  
  So the sender now invokes his model of the "knowledge". That is, follows trajectories in
  patternspace of this particular model where he builds the trap, etc. His model contains a
  lot of information that cannot just be transfered. First it has to be passed though a
  bottleneck which strips off much of the information, that is, convert selected parts into words.
  While the recipient decodes this information of words he is also busy building a model based on his
  existing knowledge and the new information arriving. No doubt will he in his minds eye see
  himself doing what he is told by the friend. You can see it as if he is executing a simulation,
  which will be a first approximative addition to his model about how to build and operate such a trap.
  
  So we can see that what is transferred is a small description of the senders model, that is recreated
  in the recipients model. Its easy to see that for this to work so easy, both their models must
  be fairly similar. The sender must know a lot of the others model in order to evoke the correct
  trajectories in the recipients pattern space.
  
  An attempt for a definition of this knowledge transfer could be something like:
  A transfer of information from one individual to another that recreates a model that
  allows the recipient to express the same purposeful activity in the same way as the sender can.
  
  Or, a unit of cultural information spreading between minds causing some behaviour, I.e. a meme.
  
  Karl

• Bruce LaDuke – May 4 2008

  Karl,
  
  You've given a good description of the human mind processing reality and I like the way you deal with the concept of consciousness. I would like to add another dimension to these thoughts.
  
  Somewhere in this experience you describe, knowledge is formed. I won't go into this too deep here, but suffice it to say that it either emerges from empirical or rational thought.
  
  When humans were hunter/gatherers, knowledge was likely inherited from generation to generation. But with the advent of writing, humans 'pooled' there thoughts by codifying it in a social knowledge base. For thousands of years, this central 'library' has been through parchment or paper, but in the 'information age' it became electronic. And for thousands of years it was fragmented into social divisions, but the electronic world is allowing it to become truly one, which is the natural state of knowledge.
  
  But exactly how does the individual interact with this central knowledge base? In a nutshell, knowledge flows between the individual and the group as follows:
  
  From Individual:
  
  - An individual creates knowledge
  - An individual delivers knowledge to society
  
  To Society:
  
  - Society accepts or rejects new knowledge
  - Society stores accepted knowledge
  
  And Back to Individuals:
  
  - Stored knowledge is learned by individuals
  - Knowledge is applied by learned individuals and social groups within industry or society
  
  (Source: http://hyperadvance.com/blog/?p=27)
  
  This is a gross over-simplification, but I use it to illustrate that there is an succinct set of 'interactions' between the individual person and social knowledge.
  
  Terms like tacit and explicit knowledge...or genetic, extragenetic, and extrasomatic knowledge...have been used for a long time to describe this distinction between individual knowledge (internal) and social knowledge (external).
  
  But all of the viewpoints today built on these distinctions are largely troubled by an unclear understanding of the knowledge creation interaction. The popular view of knowledge creation today is a loose amalgamation of cognitive and industrial concepts. ....And that's pretty much where everyone is stuck. The key to getting 'unstuck' is to define the question.
  
  Here's the flow to fully understanding knowledge working in the context I've described above:
  
  - Defining the question we can clearly see what knowledge creation is.
  - By understanding knowledge creation, we can clearly where knowledge comes from and then how it flows between individual and society.
  - In fully defining these interactions between individual and society, our society can better work knowledge cooperatively and exactly.
  - True 'artificial intelligence' can only emerge from the keys above. Most everything propagated in AI circles today is mimmicking intelligence, not creating it. Since folks don't understand knowledge creation, they simply leave it out of their theories.
  
  The descirption you provided below is the 'human machine' processing or modeling reality. Think of this other piece as what humans do with it after it is processed or modeled.

• karl jansson – May 4 2008

  I think the mind can be better understod if you try to develop a model and vocabulary that allows you to think and reason about it.
  
  If you take the following view you can do some serious thinking:
  The mind is continously trying to model the world from the data it receives by the senses. The model it creates is different for different animals in a way that best fits the niche of the animal, as evolved by evolution.
  Exactly how that modelling is done is, I belive, not really known in detail, but its a safe bet that it is taking place, otherwise we would not be able to function in this world.
  Now, the modelling machinery models everything it receives data about, trying to fit the data into a model as best as possible.
  This means all the external world data and everything it can get information about from the internal world, the body etc.
  To model more complicated things the model include itself, or parts of itself in the model. That is, a meta model. This probably goes down several levels depending on the kind of data that needs modelling.
  From the modelling machinery point of view the data that needs modelling is the data that is available, nothing more.
  Now, a model of a model seems like someone observing herself, which is why I think that the consciousness is actually taking place in the meta model, and that is where each of us lives, in our own model of our model of the world.
  What we perceive, and the only thing we can perceive, is the model in which we live, which is generated from sensory inputs received from the outside and from the body itself.
  So all stuff we perceive are illiusions: colors, sounds, heat, cold, taste, etc. However, they are very useful illusions. They help us survive and breed successfully.
  So what is in the model?
  The model is the stored patterns of neural activation that takes place in response to some stimuli.
  Note that the stimuli can also come from the meta model, i.e. thinking, planning etc.
  A stimuli sets of a set of continous trajectories in pattern space, some which models the ouside world with a the patterns that best fit the input from the senses, some trajectories models the internal states,
  and some models the models which gives the illusion of consciousness.
  And of course there is always some stimuli present so the process never stops.
  
  Some of the talks shown at TED shows illusions where a picture is perceived switching between two different intepretations, or when an object is rotated it gives the illusion of switching between a 3D picture and something else.
  It's easy to understand this now. In both cases the trajectories in the model are changed, which causes the experience to change. Bear in mind that the trajectory is the one that is activated by the input data.
  That is, the trajectory that best fits the input data, i.e. the parts of the neural network in the brain that responds to the data.
  In the first case the trajectories changes because of neural exhastion. When the first trajectories get "tired" others take over which produce the second interpretation, back and forth until you get tired of it.
  In the second case the input data simply changes which produces a new set of trajectories which gives a new experience.
  
  This view can also explain why we are so gullible when presented with changes in scenery in some sequence of film(there were some speaker that had this as a number). There can be rather big changes without us noticing this.
  Well, the input sets of a set of best fit continous trajectories, which we, living in our metamodel experiences. As long as most of the trajectories making up the experience can flow without interruption
  we experience this as continous logical complete scenery. I believe that you can also say that this effect is caused by neural networks capacity to generalise from bad or inconsistent input.
  
  It can also explain other things like a painting that a some distance seems to contain a certain scenery, but when you get close you see that what you thought was people or other things is just dabs of paint.
  The input changes, so the best fit trajectories changes which changes the experience rather abrubtly.
  
  Another example:
  You drive along the motorway and see car in the distant road. suddenly you realise that the distant car is a bug on the windshield. The best fit trajectories changes.
  
  Yet another example:
  There is well known picture with black and white patches. After looking at it for a while you see dalmatian dog. I have seen one with cows as well. Once you have seen the dogs or cows you can not switch back to the black and white patch picture again, its impossible.
  So, at first the trajectories does not represent anything but patches of black and white.
  After a while the trajectories for the dalmation are "aroused" enough to take over.
  This is now committed to memory, i.e. has become a part of the model for this particular trajectory. So from now on you can not see anything else but the dogs.
  
  This last example is important since it also shows that the model is constantly being updated.
  
  Another interesting thing is that much of what we perceive in the model is probably a prediction of what to come, so we most of the time live in a prediction of our model of the world.
  A way to see this is to fool the modeling machinery. This is exceedingly difficult to do since it must be totally unexpected and also involve a strong emotional component.
  I have once experienced it when I swiped a glass of a table and just some milliseconds before impact instinctively caught the glass. For a fleeting instance in time I both saw and heard the glass explode on the floor.
  This I have learned is called "representational momentum".
  
  Now, I'm not a scientist so you have to take this for what it is, my personal thoughts, influenced or intermixed with things I have read,etc.
  
  Karl

• Chris Williams – May 3 2008

  I am in he process of studying and watching videos (on Oprah's web site) related to Eckhart Tolle's book called "New Earth, Awaken to your Inner Purpose". This book has been extremely helpful for me to be in he present moment. It also corresponds very much to the philosphies of great eastern teachers, such as the Dalai Lama.

• Bruce LaDuke – May 2 2008

  Hi David,
  
  Thanks for your thoughts on my post below. If I'm understanding you correctly, I would absolutely agree that, e.g., quantum logic or spiritual knowledge or even consciousness could transcend the body of rational and empirical knowledge that comprise our apparent mental reality.
  
  But when I say 'knowledge is one' in the post below I'm talking about the sum of rational and empirical knowledge. This can all be categorized into one taxonomy, so it is one knowledge. Uncategorized knowledge, as many would describe it, is a form of a question, which is the perceived lack of knowledge structure. Structuring questions creates new knowledge. Scholars today muddle the concepts of knowledge and the question and few attempt to define the question at all.
  
  This isn't a popular statement and I hesitate to post it because it tends to start a firestorm of debate, but I personally think that the bulk conventional language related to the mind and thinking today is rooted in an illogical construct.. Cognitive scholarship today rests on 2,000-year old terms and definitions of terms that I believe are largely erroneous. See this post on 'Synonym Soup' for some high level examples of this: http://hyperadvance.com/blog/?p=68
  
  Questions are as ubiquitous as knowledge, but few scholars approach the topic. But the definition of the question is the key that unlocks pure logic and language in this sphere. Without a clear and logical definition of the question, any knowledge model or theory or philosophy or construct is fundamentally flawed.
  
  There is no accepted unified theory of knowledge because scholarship has failed to define the question. When this is appropriately understood, we will understand where the real line is between 'logic' and bio-'logic.'

• David Douglas – April 16 2008

  If you "knew everything", I don't you'd have much reason to do anything.
  
  Luckily for us humans, knowledge comes not "a priori" but from experience. In the paradoxical words of Steven Colbert--"I trust the gut"....it's funny how modern neuroscience (specially, the "constructionist" theory, or whatever it's called, which I'm told is dominant right now in the debate) and the truth of moral relativity in cultures leads you BACK to "the gut". Brrr college terrors, it's a good thing it's another objectified term in the Academic Lexicon--"Existential Angst". Thank god for objectification, in the end, it turns about to be a weapon, best to be used on "enemies".

• David Douglas – April 16 2008

  Oh my goodness, it turns out I'm not really even necessarily disagreeing with you, at least in immediate reaction....
  
  Oh well, I just fought a paper tiger in my mind. We should be knifing the phantoms anyway.