Humans are artifact adoring artisans

[coberst]

Humans are artifact adoring artisans

Humans are meme (idea) adoring creators.

Humans create symbols (abstract ideas) upon which they place value sufficient for killing and dying.

Americans create a flag (an artifact of cloth) which symbolizes the value they place in a nation (artifact, idea, meme) for which they will really kill and die (nothing artificial here).

Humans require meaningful symbols upon which to give life sufficient purpose for living, dying, and killing.

Because humans can create their own meaningful artifacts why does our species place meaning into such dangerous artifacts (memes, ideologies) as religion, nation, capitalism, communism, etc?

The freedom we have to create that which is meaningful to us is poorly used, why?

Why do we waste such a precious freedom on such dangerous toys?

We do so because we lack the courage (self-reliance) to go against the flow.

Our adaptation to society as infants and children has left us without the courage and confidence required to go against the flow of society. We have the freedom but not the energy and courage to overcome the blind habit of conformity.

We are not determined atoms; we do have the potential to do much better. How can we overcome what we have become and thus become something better?

We can overcome our present predicament by creating a new reality, a new set of meaningful symbols that we choose to give value.

Imagination is the instrument by which we can overcome.

[NecronLord]

Have you ever heard of anyone giving their life to protect a flag, save where that flag can be expected to affect the course of a pre-existing battle? People are willing to fight over what it represents, not the cloth itself.

[Starglider]

Are you determined to copy and paste the entire content of your favourite philosophy/cogsci book to this BBS? This isn't a peer review committee. Why don't you go somewhere like this instead?

[coberst]

Are you determined to copy and paste the entire content of your favourite philosophy/cogsci book to this BBS? This isn't a peer review committee. Why don't you go somewhere like this instead?

Well said. They are willing to kill and die for the abstract idea of a nation.

[coberst]

Are you determined to copy and paste the entire content of your favourite philosophy/cogsci book to this BBS? This isn't a peer review committee. Why don't you go somewhere like this instead?

But if I did not write about this new paradigm for CS how would you ever become conscious of these revolutionary ideas?

[Starglider]

But if I did not write about this new paradigm for CS how would you ever become conscious of these revolutionary ideas?

You know you sound exactly like Arthur Murray. Regardless of whether the ideas are others or your own, or decent or worthless, spamming mutliple topics and quoting short passages which you expect to have self-evident intrinsic insight looks crankish. The book works (to a large extent) because the authors start with simple examples, cite tons of case studies and build up to these things. Particularly on this forum, skipping that will just get lots of 'prove it prove it prove it' complaints, which you can only answer by copy-pasting the whole damn 600 page book.

For an interesting discussion I suggest you cite the various experiments and studies Lakoff+Johnson did, and ask 'how should we interpret these results', not skip ahead to the boiled-down end product (and rather subjective) conclusions.

[Coyote]

coberst--

Here's a li'l story, with a bit of advice wrapped around it.

A few years ago, I had a girlfreind that had just graduated with her degree in psychology. She'd obviously had to read a lot of books on psychology and learn a lot of basics on psychology. This gave her a vast plethora of basic terms, ideas, and means to apply them.

Armed with this new-found knowledge, she was what one might say a little over-eager to apply it. From then on everything became a basis for analysis; there was no longer any room for whimsey or accident. Everything, every little nuance and every little miscue was supposed to be a window into a deeper meaning. Accident and randomness had been utterly removed from life.

Fortunately, this time was brief for her, and she realized that not everything was a part of a vast web of psychoanalytic...stuff. She was able to apply her knowledge in controlled doses as actual need arose. She eventually went on to her Master's and begun her doctorate, and is on her way to becoming a Psychotherapist.

Now...

You seem to be an eager student of cognitave sciences, which is all well and good. But you also seem to be a person who, like my previous girlfriend, has learned a lot of fascinating knoweldge in a very short time, and has become over-eager to apply it.

But here's something to bear in mind-- when you artificially create an experimental arena to test subjects, the subjects are aware of the test and they do not act in their natural manner. They act to the test. You get contrived answers to the contrived environment and questions, especially in an environment where no one really felt the need to "go on the couch".

Now, the best way to approach your cognative theories might well have been to come here to the board and simply observe for awhile (which you may well have done) but instead of clumsily blathering out a statement or academic challenge, it might have been better to just get involved in pre-existing threads and insert topic-appropriate ideas to see what the reactions might be. People unaware they are serving as a testbed for your research would be able to respond in a more honest (and scientifically useful/valid) manner.

However, at this stage, the li'l mice in the cage are completely on to the prescence of the incredibly clumsy researcher in theri midst. With your intent now so obvious, pretty much any thread you participate in from now on will be viewed with suspicion-- negating any realistic benefit from observation that may have been had.

So--

If you have a point to being here besides all this, by all means come on out and state it. Maybe even join in the discussions... honestly. But if you're here to play with your freshly-digested knowledge, then I say the well is pretty much poisoned (or at least we've caught on that there's something that smells of almonds) and you'd be best served by finding another board to play theorist at. Preferably by not blowing your cover this time.

[coberst]

But if I did not write about this new paradigm for CS how would you ever become conscious of these revolutionary ideas?

You know you sound exactly like Arthur Murray. Regardless of whether the ideas are others or your own, or decent or worthless, spamming mutliple topics and quoting short passages which you expect to have self-evident intrinsic insight looks crankish. The book works (to a large extent) because the authors start with simple examples, cite tons of case studies and build up to these things. Particularly on this forum, skipping that will just get lots of 'prove it prove it prove it' complaints, which you can only answer by copy-pasting the whole damn 600 page book.

For an interesting discussion I suggest you cite the various experiments and studies Lakoff+Johnson did, and ask 'how should we interpret these results', not skip ahead to the boiled-down end product (and rather subjective) conclusions.

Why do you suggest that I do that? Why don't you do that?

[coberst]

Coyote

Well thought out advice. Thank you.

[Starglider]

Why don't you do that?

This isn't an appropriate forum for it. SD.net centers around making fun of moronic arguments, both as a spectator and a participatory sport. This board does 'rip apart arguments that any rational person would find stupid' very well. It's pretty good for versus debates of the flamewar-but-not-content-free type and adequate at the kind of things most large sci-fi-oriented BBSes have (fanfics, news commentary, discussion of movies etc). It sucks for anything speculative, exploratory or relying on an expert audience; the board culture just isn't set up for it. Which is fine; scientific conference proceedings aren't sprinkled with swear words and one-line retorts for a reason (and it's not that scientists have fragile egos), but ripping apart fundies and trektards would be rather less fun and more tedious if people had to stick to those standards. If you really want long involved discussions about speculative cogsci concepts, go find a forum that focuses on doing that well. I'm on several and I'm trying to get out of the habit of expecting to have the same kind of debates here.

[Darth Wong]

Humans are artifact adoring artisans

Humans are meme (idea) adoring creators.

Humans create symbols (abstract ideas) upon which they place value sufficient for killing and dying.

Americans create a flag (an artifact of cloth) which symbolizes the value they place in a nation (artifact, idea, meme) for which they will really kill and die (nothing artificial here).

Humans require meaningful symbols upon which to give life sufficient purpose for living, dying, and killing.

Because humans can create their own meaningful artifacts why does our species place meaning into such dangerous artifacts (memes, ideologies) as religion, nation, capitalism, communism, etc?

The freedom we have to create that which is meaningful to us is poorly used, why?

Why do we waste such a precious freedom on such dangerous toys?

We do so because we lack the courage (self-reliance) to go against the flow.

Our adaptation to society as infants and children has left us without the courage and confidence required to go against the flow of society. We have the freedom but not the energy and courage to overcome the blind habit of conformity.

We are not determined atoms; we do have the potential to do much better. How can we overcome what we have become and thus become something better?

We can overcome our present predicament by creating a new reality, a new set of meaningful symbols that we choose to give value.

Imagination is the instrument by which we can overcome.

Instead of watching you and Starglider fellate each other, it would be nice to see one of you actually state something concrete and useful. In engineering, if it ain't useful, you're just wanking to hear yourself talk. That's a really strong impression that I get from both of you.

As an example, let's just take one of the empty-headed lines above: "create a new reality". What the fuck does that mean? How about "Imagination is the instrument by which we can overcome"? These are not useful ideas; they are vacuous catch-phrases, utterly devoid of any remotely useful application. So vague and so far removed from any kind of remotely useful suggestion that I cannot see any possible way not to classify it as intellectual masturbation.

Here's an idea: why don't you take a specific example of social iconography, discuss what's wrong with it, and then discuss ideas on how one might try to replace this iconography in some more socially beneficial way, instead of this vague airy-fairy "imagination will set us free" bullshit? You're like the entrepreneur whose idea of a business plan is to spout buzzwords but has no projections, no ideas on how to solve problems, nothing useful at all.

[Starglider]

Instead of watching you and Starglider fellate each other, it would be nice to see one of you actually state something concrete and useful.

Unfortunately the state of the more abstract end of cogsci is such that even the 'useful' stuff isn't all that concrete. I've waded through literally hundreds of thousands of pages of books and papers like this, and they're mostly pet models with minimal supporting proof and fuzzy definitions, garnished with cod philosophy. The better ones include a detailed neural basis, which is still highly speculative. 'Useful' for me is something that inspires a real piece of AI code. 'Useful' for the field is any incremental advance towards something testable. SD.net doesn't seem like a good place to go into either of those 'uses'. Something like 'Godel Escher Bach' is an intellectually stimulating read and is packed with interesting ideas, is considered a landmark book in both the field and as a popsci work, but it has no direct practical applications or emprical models/equations (of course Hofstadter did follow up with concrete AI work later, unlike a lot of his contemporaries).

In engineering, if it ain't useful, you're just wanking to hear yourself talk.

I like this argument in AI, where you can always say 'show me the code' (and I do). Some areas of science (e.g. superstring theory, arguably mathematical wanking) just can't meet this standard though. It doesn't render them worthless, just immature - pure mathematicians generally prides themselves on not targetting practical uses, but the field has indirectly formed the basis for a lot of directly useful disciplines. Frankly I don't thing I could do this sort of abstract cogsci because I want to build stuff that actually demonstrably works, but insight is a precious commodity in AI, and I'm prepared to plough through it in search of that.

As an example, let's just take one of the empty-headed lines above: "create a new reality". What the fuck does that mean? How about "Imagination is the instrument by which we can overcome"? These are not useful ideas; they are vacuous catch-phrases, utterly devoid of any remotely useful application. So vague and so far removed from any kind of remotely useful suggestion that I cannot see any possible way not to classify it as intellectual masturbation.

To be fair that's mostly Coberst's fault not Lakoff & Johnson. The book does have an annoying amount of philosobabble, but it's not that vapid. Their arguments just don't boil down to catchy context-free one liners. I personally found PITF pretty much useless (for AI purposes), but I recognise that the authors have made important contributions to the field.

You're like the entrepreneur whose idea of a business plan is to spout buzzwords but has no projections, no ideas on how to solve problems, nothing useful at all.

Regrettably that works a lot more often than it should, at least for raising VC capital.

[Spyder]

We can overcome our present predicament by creating a new reality...

Post modernist thought needs to be killed with fire.

[SirNitram]

What this lacks in use this certainly makes up for in self-important jargon. I love the attempt to belittle the board into nothing but a sci-fi hobby and a flamewar pit, though. Why deal with the fact useless back-patting has no objective value when you can decry your naysayers and trivialize them?

[Stark]

As someone who just opened this thread and has no context whatsoever about Coberst's post... what the FUCK is he even TALKING about and why does he think I care? I'm serious. It all looks like pop philosophy nonsense to me. I personally love how he says 'the universe isn't deterministic at all' and doesn't bother showing why.

All his replies strike me as massively pretentious. Simply in replying to him, Starglider has introduces far more actual content, and demonstrated more actual understanding of concepts: all Coberst does is snip soundbytes and posture.

Here's a big fucking tip for Coberst. Try explaining things in your own words, instead of throwing a bunch of seemingly unconnected, contextless, unsupported statements. This isn't the sort of place where people are going to nod and say 'wow that's deep thanks'.

[Ar-Adunakhor]

Why don't you do that?

This isn't an appropriate forum for it. SD.net centers around making fun of moronic arguments, both as a spectator and a participatory sport. This board does 'rip apart arguments that any rational person would find stupid' very well. It's pretty good for versus debates of the flamewar-but-not-content-free type and adequate at the kind of things most large sci-fi-oriented BBSes have (fanfics, news commentary, discussion of movies etc). It sucks for anything speculative, exploratory or relying on an expert audience; the board culture just isn't set up for it. Which is fine; scientific conference proceedings aren't sprinkled with swear words and one-line retorts for a reason (and it's not that scientists have fragile egos), but ripping apart fundies and trektards would be rather less fun and more tedious if people had to stick to those standards. If you really want long involved discussions about speculative cogsci concepts, go find a forum that focuses on doing that well. I'm on several and I'm trying to get out of the habit of expecting to have the same kind of debates here.

I would daresay that if one did come in and post experimental evidence (and this would apply to a wide variety of subjects) and ask for conclusions, the board would be perfectly capable of providing well-versed debators on it. Especially if the conclusions you drew from said evidence were wrong. A large problem here, however, is he sounds exactly like thousands of other post-modern philoso-tards and provides no evidence for any of his assertions. Not even a consistent logical framework.

That is generally seen as trolling, and unlikely to earn you any serious replies.

[Stark]

I just want to know if - in all honesty - his OP would be seen as 'good' or 'interesting' or 'worthwhile' on a 'cogsci board'. Is it acceptable to have no context, no support, no references, etc? Starglider only knew what he was talking about BECAUSE HE'D READ THE BOOK IT'S SNIPPED FROM. That's utterly worthless for 'discussion', and frankly Coberst hasn't shown any evidence AT ALL that he can 'discuss' jack shit.

[Darth Wong]

Unfortunately the state of the more abstract end of cogsci is such that even the 'useful' stuff isn't all that concrete. I've waded through literally hundreds of thousands of pages of books and papers like this, and they're mostly pet models with minimal supporting proof and fuzzy definitions, garnished with cod philosophy.

Yeah, we have a term for that: useless.

I like this argument in AI, where you can always say 'show me the code' (and I do). Some areas of science (e.g. superstring theory, arguably mathematical wanking) just can't meet this standard though. It doesn't render them worthless, just immature

No, it renders them worthless until such time as they actually become more than pure speculation.

- pure mathematicians generally prides themselves on not targetting practical uses, but the field has indirectly formed the basis for a lot of directly useful disciplines.

Mathematics is a tool that is often used for useful purposes, even though any particular mathematical theorem may not be devised for a practical purpose. But a scientific theory is different. It is not just a logic tool; it is supposed to have direct application to reality or else it really is totally worthless, because that's the definition of science.

To be fair that's mostly Coberst's fault not Lakoff & Johnson. The book does have an annoying amount of philosobabble, but it's not that vapid. Their arguments just don't boil down to catchy context-free one liners. I personally found PITF pretty much useless (for AI purposes), but I recognise that the authors have made important contributions to the field.

"Important contributions" ... that's the same thing psychology apologists say endlessly about every quack psychology theory in history, right back to Freud and his ridiculous "penis envy" bullshit.

Regrettably that works a lot more often than it should, at least for raising VC capital.

Well it doesn't fly here.

[Darth Wong]

I just want to know if - in all honesty - his OP would be seen as 'good' or 'interesting' or 'worthwhile' on a 'cogsci board'.

It would be if those boards are full of self-indulgent wankery.

[Starglider]

We can overcome our present predicament by creating a new reality...

Post modernist thought needs to be killed with fire.

True but I think that's one of Coberst's personal extrapolations. I don't recall Lakoff and Johnson getting that vapid.

What this lacks in use this certainly makes up for in self-important jargon.

Actually, no. CogSci is packed with jargon and buzzwords, but Coberst doesn't seem to be using any of them (though again, these particular authors don't tend to either). Which is telling; jargon is at least precise, buzzwords less so but at least you can cross-reference them to the papers of whichever research group coined them. This is just philosobabble in obfuscated plain English.

I love the attempt to belittle the board into nothing but a sci-fi hobby and a flamewar pit, though.

Oh get over it. No forum is going to be simultaneously an entertainment venue for flamewars and fundie-taunting as well a location for serious professional debate. Pointing out that SD.net is optimised for the former isn't 'belittling' any more than saying that comp.ai would be a bad place to argue Guri versus Data. That isn't a tactic to use against your opponents, that's just saying that Coberst would be better off somewhere else.

As someone who just opened this thread and has no context whatsoever about Coberst's post... what the FUCK is he even TALKING about and why does he think I care?

He's trying to summarise a 600 page book on how thought is built around language, which starts fairly well with actual studies, goes through very speculative models and ends up in philosobabble, into a few sentences which he believes carry intrinsic insight and will cause people to go 'wow, that's so deep man'. This never works. Frankly it wouldn't work even if you said 'light travels at the same speed in all reference frames' and 'gravity is a curvature of space' to a random collection of educated people in 1900, so it's hardly going to work in a less concrete field.

It all looks like pop philosophy nonsense to me.

Yep. As I said, it tends to happen to cogsci researchers who get a bit too full of themselves towards the end of their careers and make a bid for being renowned intellectuals and philosophers. The only good thing about this is that it annoys the full-time philosophers nearly as much as it annoys us when they come in and try to say something meaningful about AI.

I personally love how he says 'the universe isn't deterministic at all' and doesn't bother showing why.

That's utterly irrelevant to the L&Js actual theories. I don't recall them saying anything so stupid, but I'm not going to reread the whole book just to check. If you're going to persist in this Coberst at least cite page numbers so we can tell what you're quoting and what you're pulling out of your ass.

I just want to know if - in all honesty - his OP would be seen as 'good' or 'interesting' or 'worthwhile' on a 'cogsci board'. Is it acceptable to have no context, no support, no references, etc?

No. He looks exactly like a very common form of troll, who turns up and blathers endlessly about their non-empirical and usually non-sensical personal theory of AI/the mind/whatever, without ever providing anything useful. These people tend to be utterly covinced that they have The Answer and in some cases that there is a conspiracy to ignore them etc - just like the physics cranks and the maths cranks, but you can't shut them up quite as quickly in cogsci because it's not so immediately obvious that they're worthless. You can't do a cursory check of their equations because they don't give equations - the best you can do really is point out the previous 10 trolls they sound exactly like. In AI you can say 'show me the code', but that usually results in an endless amount of 'It'll be done any day now, in the mean time here is another slice of nonsense' (see the Arthur Murray FAQ I linked).

Latching onto other people's work as the basis for this sort of behaviour doesn't really make it any better.

Starglider only knew what he was talking about BECAUSE HE'D READ THE BOOK IT'S SNIPPED FROM.

I recognise the book and the general concepts. But I don't remember it being that bad. As I said, page numbers please Coberst, if I'm going to have to defend L&J from your characterisation.

I would daresay that if one did come in and post experimental evidence (and this would apply to a wide variety of subjects) and ask for conclusions, the board would be perfectly capable of providing well-versed debators on it. Especially if the conclusions you drew from said evidence were wrong.

If I was inclined to quote cogsci stuff here, I'd quote Kahneman and Tversky. Their books are collections of papers that go experiment, experiment, interpretation with graphs and equations, experiment, experiment, interpretation etc. The overarching stuff is kept to a minimum, mostly just 'here is our list of pervasive human reasoning errors'. I imagine that would go down fine, and anyone who bitches about how it's unfair can be smacked down by referencing another 10 studies by people replicating the results.

What won't work is 'overarching theory of the mind' stuff. Cogsci authors don't tend to put this in papers (occasionally they try and get it past peer review piecemeal) because it takes a huge book to lay out and join up all the pieces. It's still wildly speculative after they've done all that. You would't get one chapter into such an attempt here before being buried in 'proof proof proof' and 'wanking wanking wanking!' posts. This kind of thing isn't necessarily useless - I've dug out and adapted a lot of useful ideas from assorted non-AI papers, as have various colleagues - though a fair amount of it is.

Yeah, we have a term for that: useless.

This is another one of those annoying times where I'd agree with you if you weren't so extreme. I have a reputation for insulting philosophers (by pointing out how useless they are, which seems to be considered bad form), ripping apart newbie attempts at mind models (which is for some reason considered harsh) and hounding AI researchers who never actually deliver the code. But on this forum I'm overly polite and tolerant of speculation. Science doesn't magically pop out as neat and correct or even testable equations. Even what you see in peer reviewed papers (which can be pretty damn speculative) is the end product of a filtering process. Historically, we only got the field of chemistry through a slow reform of alchemy which became possible as the tools improved. As a mechanical engineer you have the luxury of working well within the boundaries of the proven, to the point where everything you need is in handy textbooks and reference tables. AI engineering does not; for the most part we're trying to design useful mechanisms without adequate supporting theory. When we look to science for support, the morass of high-level cogsci is the best that's available. It is however vastly better than it was before the computational and evpsych revolutions in psychology (and to a limited extent, the Bayesian revolution still in progress). I've read a smattering of 60s and 70s attempts at this and they were genuinely worthless.

No, it renders them worthless until such time as they actually become more than pure speculation.

Hypotheses don't pop out of nowhere. You see this in physics; back in the 1800s it wasn't necessary to engage in wild speculation about superstrings and grand unified theories, because incrementally pushing the boundaries with simple local theories and experiments worked quite well. Today, it doesnt. The hundreds of theoretical physicists tied up on 'uselessly speculative' superstring and GUTs are necessary to provide the requirements for the latest particle physics experiments and provide some framework for interpreting the results. Otherwise we'd just be staring at terabytes of numbers. In mechanics you can plot the points on a graph, spot the simple mathematical relationship and you're done. Biology is messier and it's hard work isolating one pathway out of the millions in a cell, but hard work and trial and error will take you a long way. Fields with enough irreducable complexity need the overarching speculation for most of their progress, which means cogsci and currently particle physics.

Mathematics is a tool that is often used for useful purposes, even though any particular mathematical theorem may not be devised for a practical purpose. But a scientific theory is different. It is not just a logic tool; it is supposed to have direct application to reality or else it really is totally worthless, because that's the definition of science.

Most of the data that can usefully be gathered by putting rats or undergrads in odd situations and seeing how they react (i.e. most of experimental psychology) has been gathered. It's enough to rule out a lot of nonsense, but not enough to select between any of the hundreds of remaining basically-plausible high-level cogsci models. The only way to justify these things are to scan a human brain down to the synapse level and get one of these models to the point where it predicts the data, or to build an AI that embodies the model and acts intelligently (which only confirms that it could work, not that humans work that way). Philosopher-wannabes excluded, the assortment of geniuses in high-level cogsci (and it does attract a lot of very bright people, but then so did medieval theology) desperately want to do real science, but the tools and evidence just aren't there for absolute discrimination yet, so there is a fair amount of flailing about and resort to emotional appeals. Various borders of science has this. It'll get resolved into concrete textbook stuff eventually, and quicker than it would be if no one was allowed to do cogsci until we had the complete neural scans first.

"Important contributions" ... that's the same thing psychology apologists say endlessly about every quack psychology theory in history, right back to Freud and his ridiculous "penis envy" bullshit.

The problem with Freud, Jung etc is that there are still idiots who think that this is somehow valid. They're almost entirely discredited within psychology, but people still cite them, for no good reason I can determine. Historically, some attempt at empirical modelling was better than none; even Freud was an advance over detail-free 'immortal soul' or 'humours'. The physical equivalent would be the early Greek natural philosophers. But that's a bit off the point, 'cognitive science' isn't really psychology. Traditional psychologists call it 'computational psychology' and wail about the fact that we've thrown 90% of their lingering historical crap in the trash. All of the mind models in the list of books I cited early share basic neuroanatomical facts and interpretations of experimental results that some 'traditional' psychologists would still consider assumptions (or inconvenient facts to be ignored, for the dualists). Hopefully they'll all die off and/or get dumped into the humanities faculty over the next couple of decades.

It would be if those boards are full of self-indulgent wankery.

There are lots of idiotic new-age philosophy type boards. Newsgroups in the sci.* hierarchy tend to have a core of decent scientists but hordes of trolls that occasionally overwhelm sane discussion. Serious cogsci boards do not have what I'd call 'self-indulgent wankery'. They have plenty of self-important people, but that's hardly a problem unique to the field. You might call it that, but no one is asking you to go there nor will a field of tens of thousands of people grind to a halt because you don't like it. I've already suggested that the Coberst take his philosobabble elsewhere and that I try to refrain from detailing any cogsci that's too speculative, what more do you want? I'd much prefer to talk about AI, which is concrete and well defined and in which I do have plenty of positions I actually want to defend. But the opportunity hasn't come up, other than that one HAB thread.

[Spoonist]

Humans are artifact adoring artisans

False. Just because we structure our interpretation of the world using mind-artifacts, doesn't make us adore that nor does it make us artisans. Quite the opposite, our wetware design is to simplify too much.

Humans are meme (idea) adoring creators.

Again False because you add the word adoring to an otherwise working sentence.

Humans create symbols (abstract ideas) upon which they place value sufficient for killing and dying.

Of course, that is psychology 101. Animals and insects do the same. That is why it is a competitive tactic to mimic the behavior of something else. It is also why conditional reflexes (like Pavlov) work.

Americans create a flag (an artifact of cloth) which symbolizes the value they place in a nation (artifact, idea, meme) for which they will really kill and die (nothing artificial here).

False. You are doing too big a generalization for the assumption to be correct. The artifact/meme is created by individuals in a cultural context with a specific purpose, other individuals within their own cultural context then chose to respond to that in different ways.

Humans require meaningful symbols upon which to give life sufficient purpose for living, dying, and killing.

False. You are adding value added words where they are not necessary. This is correct:[Humans require artifacts/memes to function properly] By adding "meaningful", "sufficient" and "purpose" you are trying to pass an argument for a statement of fact, by which you are adding complexity easily proven false. For instance; It takes less artifacts/memes to trigger a killing than it does to prevent it.

Because humans can create their own meaningful artifacts why does our species place meaning into such dangerous artifacts (memes, ideologies) as religion, nation, capitalism, communism, etc?

Because we can. Most of us are actually intelligent enough to understand that those memes actually makes a real difference in our lives and those of our ancestors who used them in the right way was more successful than those who didn't making it an evolotionary important trait to adopt to. Simply put; Memeplexes has been the most effective way of creating complex societies.

The freedom we have to create that which is meaningful to us is poorly used, why?

This question demonstrates a complete misunderstanding of basic human-to-human interaction. We are usually selfish and our interaction is based on subjective interpretation. By design this has been the most effective way to do it. To ask this question you make a false assumption that something else would be better ignoring the fact that if that 'something else' existed it would have outcompeted the current way.

Why do we waste such a precious freedom on such dangerous toys?

False. We do not waste them, they are not toys and there is no "freedom" involved in the process.

We do so because we lack the courage (self-reliance) to go against the flow. Our adaptation to society as infants and children has left us without the courage and confidence required to go against the flow of society. We have the freedom but not the energy and courage to overcome the blind habit of conformity.

This is just plain stupid bullshit. We comform to society because that is one of its purposes, without it society would be a moot concept and be well aware that society as a concept is brilliant at competing against so called "self-reliant" individuals. You are making the false assumption that just because society requires conformity it lacks adaptability, which is stupid. Society and its memeplexes change all the time or they are outcompeted by those who do. If you look at the most successful societies it is easy to see that they encourage individuals to change societies' memeplexes to the better.

How can we overcome what we have become and thus become something better?

Simple, do the same thing as humanity always have done. It has worked fine so far. We are getting better and better all the time. Intelligence is tricky that way, by conditioning our offspring with more conditioning/artifacts/memes they actually become better and better at themselves create new and improved conditioning/artifacts/memes for their offspring and so on.

We can overcome our present predicament by creating a new reality, a new set of meaningful symbols that we choose to give value.

That is just plain stupid. Do you even realise what you are saying? Either it is totally redundant because it is already happening all the time, we are literally changing our reality over and over again through technology and social interaction, or you are suggesting the rise of a new totalitaritan system that would have to use mindcontrol/brainwashing and selective breeding to change us.

Imagination is the instrument by which we can overcome.

Again, this is either a total understatement since humanity and its societies are using their imagination all the time to overcome their present difficulties, or it is plain ignorant of how things work.

You sound dangerous, because you sound as if you exactly represent those you advocate against. Why memplexes like religion/politics/ideologies/etc are as effective as they are is exactly because of what you have recently experienced. You have been introduced to a memeplex that your brain has interpreted as a refined artifact/meme to filter parts of reality by, this has given you a rush of thoughts and ideas comforming to this new memeplex, while along the way you have subjectively interpreted the memeplex to better suit the rest of your memplexes/artifacts, and then your wetware has given you a positive kick out of this and you have started to introduce this memeplex to other individuals to make them comform to your new version of reality.

[Darth Wong]

This is another one of those annoying times where I'd agree with you if you weren't so extreme. I have a reputation for insulting philosophers (by pointing out how useless they are, which seems to be considered bad form), ripping apart newbie attempts at mind models (which is for some reason considered harsh) and hounding AI researchers who never actually deliver the code. But on this forum I'm overly polite and tolerant of speculation. Science doesn't magically pop out as neat and correct or even testable equations. Even what you see in peer reviewed papers (which can be pretty damn speculative) is the end product of a filtering process. Historically, we only got the field of chemistry through a slow reform of alchemy which became possible as the tools improved. As a mechanical engineer you have the luxury of working well within the boundaries of the proven, to the point where everything you need is in handy textbooks and reference tables. AI engineering does not; for the most part we're trying to design useful mechanisms without adequate supporting theory. When we look to science for support, the morass of high-level cogsci is the best that's available. It is however vastly better than it was before the computational and evpsych revolutions in psychology (and to a limited extent, the Bayesian revolution still in progress). I've read a smattering of 60s and 70s attempts at this and they were genuinely worthless.

How do you know it's better, if it's still so hard to separate the wheat from the chaff as per your earlier statement? If there are some models in there which seem to have genuinely useful predictive capability, that would be great. But if (as you seem to suggest) it is more of a morass of competing and (for the time being) equally groundless ideas, how are you supposed to make use of it?

Hypotheses don't pop out of nowhere. You see this in physics; back in the 1800s it wasn't necessary to engage in wild speculation about superstrings and grand unified theories, because incrementally pushing the boundaries with simple local theories and experiments worked quite well. Today, it doesnt. The hundreds of theoretical physicists tied up on 'uselessly speculative' superstring and GUTs are necessary to provide the requirements for the latest particle physics experiments and provide some framework for interpreting the results.

I never said that no one should be even working on this; I said that it's useless until they can come up with something substantial. That applies just as well to superstring theory (another source of incredible wankage) as it does to what you call "cogsci". The problem I have with fringe areas of research is not the guy in the lab working on what he hopes will become a real theory someday; it's the people who are prematurely quoting it in public as if it has already become a real theory.

Most of the data that can usefully be gathered by putting rats or undergrads in odd situations and seeing how they react (i.e. most of experimental psychology) has been gathered. It's enough to rule out a lot of nonsense, but not enough to select between any of the hundreds of remaining basically-plausible high-level cogsci models. The only way to justify these things are to scan a human brain down to the synapse level and get one of these models to the point where it predicts the data, or to build an AI that embodies the model and acts intelligently (which only confirms that it could work, not that humans work that way). Philosopher-wannabes excluded, the assortment of geniuses in high-level cogsci (and it does attract a lot of very bright people, but then so did medieval theology) desperately want to do real science, but the tools and evidence just aren't there for absolute discrimination yet, so there is a fair amount of flailing about and resort to emotional appeals. Various borders of science has this. It'll get resolved into concrete textbook stuff eventually, and quicker than it would be if no one was allowed to do cogsci until we had the complete neural scans first.

So you're saying it's like trying to do astronomy before the telescope was invented. Fair enough, but the same objection applies: why should anyone take any of the ideas seriously when the necessary tools do not yet exist? Sure, maybe you can rule out certain stupid bullshit, just as you didn't really need telescopes to rule out the Moon being made of green cheese, but most of that bullshit was obviously stupid upon first glance anyway. Again, much like the green cheese.

The problem with Freud, Jung etc is that there are still idiots who think that this is somehow valid. They're almost entirely discredited within psychology, but people still cite them, for no good reason I can determine. Historically, some attempt at empirical modelling was better than none; even Freud was an advance over detail-free 'immortal soul' or 'humours'. The physical equivalent would be the early Greek natural philosophers. But that's a bit off the point, 'cognitive science' isn't really psychology. Traditional psychologists call it 'computational psychology' and wail about the fact that we've thrown 90% of their lingering historical crap in the trash. All of the mind models in the list of books I cited early share basic neuroanatomical facts and interpretations of experimental results that some 'traditional' psychologists would still consider assumptions (or inconvenient facts to be ignored, for the dualists). Hopefully they'll all die off and/or get dumped into the humanities faculty over the next couple of decades.

I do agree that as messy as this field sounds, it doesn't sound half as fucked-up as psychology.

There are lots of idiotic new-age philosophy type boards. Newsgroups in the sci.* hierarchy tend to have a core of decent scientists but hordes of trolls that occasionally overwhelm sane discussion. Serious cogsci boards do not have what I'd call 'self-indulgent wankery'.

If they took coberst's incoherent ramblings as a useful post, they would be.

[brianeyci]

I took second year cognitive science and we learned about Searle's Chinese Black Box and the Turing Test and case studies of guys with pikes and poles in their heads surviving accidents and parts of the brain.

So is it bad that I don't know what the fuck coberst is talking about? Damn, maybe my education sucks and I need to learn how to talk more with snippy meaningless catchphrases.

[coberst]

I took second year cognitive science and we learned about Searle's Chinese Black Box and the Turing Test and case studies of guys with pikes and poles in their heads surviving accidents and parts of the brain.

So is it bad that I don't know what the fuck coberst is talking about? Damn, maybe my education sucks and I need to learn how to talk more with snippy meaningless catchphrases.

Cognitive science has two paradigms, symbol manipulation aka Artificial Intelligence and conceptual metaphor. You class work was evidently in the cognitive science of AI.

Jim is a young boy who considers his home to be a place to eat and to sleep and of little more. Jane is a young girl who considers her home is where she lives, plays, learns, is security, is where her family engages one another, where her parents interact and are sympathetic to her and her siblings’ needs and desires.

The ‘conceptual metaphor’ driven cognitive science considers the body and the mind to be one. The body and mind is a gestalt, the mind and body go together “like a horse and carriage”. Home determines to a large extent ‘who is Jane’; the body determines to a large extent ‘what is mind’.

It appears to me that cognitive science has two paradigms; symbolic manipulation, which is also called AI (Artificial Intelligence) and the second paradigm, is called ‘conceptual metaphor’.

I shall try to use Jim and Jane as an analogy to illuminate some of the difference between the two paradigms.

Western traditional philosophy and the philosophy supporting AI are more like Jim than Jane insofar as the mind body relationship is concerned. For AI the body is a machine that functions with software that is used for mental operations. Like our PC the body is hardware that performs the operations the software dictates. As Jim considers home to be a place to eat and sleep so AI considers the body is a place for satisfying the need for a place for the mind to abide.

We have in our Western philosophy a traditional theory of faculty psychology wherein our reasoning is a faculty completely separate from the body. “Reason is seen as independent of perception and bodily movement.” It is this capacity of autonomous reason that makes us different in kind from all other animals. I suspect that many fundamental aspects of philosophy and psychology are focused upon declaring, whenever possible, the separateness of our species from all other animals.

This tradition of an autonomous reason began long before evolutionary theory and has held strongly since then without consideration, it seems to me, of the theories of Darwin and of biological science. Cognitive science has in the last three decades developed considerable empirical evidence supporting Darwin and not supporting the traditional theories of philosophy and psychology regarding the autonomy of reason. Cognitive science has focused a great deal of empirical science toward discovering the nature of the embodied mind.

The three major findings of cognitive science are:
The mind is inherently embodied.
Thought is mostly unconscious.
Abstract concepts are largely metaphorical.

“These findings of cognitive science are profoundly disquieting [for traditional thinking] in two respects. First, they tell us that human reason is a form of animal reason, a reason inextricably tied to our bodies and the peculiarities of our brains. Second, these results tell us that our bodies, brains, and interactions with our environment provide the mostly unconscious basis for our everyday metaphysics, that is, our sense of what is real.”

All living creatures categorize. All creatures, as a minimum, separate eat from no eat and friend from foe. As neural creatures tadpole and wo/man categorize. There are trillions of synaptic connections taking place in the least sophisticated of creatures and this multiple synapses must be organized in some way to facilitate passage through a small number of interconnections and thus categorization takes place. Great numbers of different synapses take place in an experience and these are subsumed in some fashion to provide the category eat or foe perhaps.

Our categories are what we consider to be real in the world: tree, rock, animal…Our concepts are what we use to structure our reasoning about these categories. Concepts are neural structures that are the fundamental means by which we reason about categories.

Quotes from “Philosophy in the Flesh” by Lakoff and Johnson

[Starglider]

How do you know it's better, if it's still so hard to separate the wheat from the chaff as per your earlier statement?

Personal judgement. That's why cogsci debates look like lots of people saying 'but I believe that' and 'wouldn't it be better if' and hardly anyone saying 'this clearly disproves the work of X, Y and Z'. You can make some headway with Occam's razor, but that's all. It's vaguely irritating that you think this troll and I are 'fellating each other' just because I held off on the insults to see if he produced anything to back up his point. What genuinely is a group masturbation session is the blurbs you get on the back of these books. All the usual suspects chime in and talk each other up despite the fact their models are largely incompatible. For example, this is the full text on the back of 'Consilience, the unity of knowledge' (picking on this because it's one of the worst 'high concept no content' offenders to get general praise from Cogsci people, and because it caught my eye on the shelf):

'This new book is a work to be held in awe, to be read with joy and attentiveness, to be a celebrated and challenged and returned to again. It is in short an act of cosummate intellectual heorism'

'This masterfully written book is nothing less than a daring challenge to the prevailing world view. It proposes in its place a grand, coherent conception encompassing the sciences, the art, ethics and religion. The reader feels lifted up to a high peak from which today's fragmented intellectual landscape below can be seen, and understood, in an entirely new way'

'In this beautifully written book, E. O. Wilson, one of the twentieth century's greatest thinkers, attempts nothing less than a synthesis of all ways of knowing. Read it, enjoy and ponder!'

'A provocative book, worth reading simply for the opportunity to spend time with one of today's great scientific minds'.

'The optimistim of this book is breathtaking... The richness of its ideas, the elegance of its prose, the urgency with which it compels attention... It is a book of immense importance.'

'Few have done more to open our eyes to the magnificene of nature's handiwork and to the terrible risk of its unraveling. Here, Wilson pleads passionately and persuasively that if we are to save our common home, we must seek not only common ground, but a common system of knowledge. Whether one's beliefs are rooted in science, religion or the humanities, we owe it to ourselves and future generations to heed its call'.

That is an intellectual circle-jek, much worse than the usual round-robin citation cliques. The book itself incidentally I found mildly interesting but monstrously pretentious and ultimately useless.

'Personal judgement' works for me (and colleagues in a similar position) because I'm mining these books for ideas that I can translate into algorithms, or at least which cause me to think of useful AI architecture concepts by analogy. Trained intuition is a perfectly good way to do that; I have enough experience of what works and what doesn't to make educated guesses, which I can then translate into exploratory prototypes. Some of the worse stuff I can disregard because it's clear that the author hasn't kept up with recent neurophysiology findings and/or has no understanding of information theory and neural networks (i.e. their proposed physical basis is a joke), but beyond that I can't do any better at discrimination than anyone else. Fortunately I don't have to; I wouldn't want to be on a cogsci grant allocation board. I know enough about the subject and the expected debating style to participate in cogsci theory discussions, but I shouldn't have let myself get sucked into defending positions here that I would be ripping apart elsewhere.

If there are some models in there which seem to have genuinely useful predictive capability, that would be great. But if (as you seem to suggest) it is more of a morass of competing and (for the time being) equally groundless ideas, how are you supposed to make use of it?

It says a lot about how immensely hard the general AI problem is that this kind of thing is still better than nothing as inspiration. That said, 'Philosophy in the Flesh' is at the low end of the scale (though not the extreme low end). Stuff like Edelman and Calvin's neural darwinism concepts though speculative do at least provide mathematical models of neural networks that translate fairly directly into code, and keep the philosophising to a chapter or two at the end.

The problem I have with fringe areas of research is not the guy in the lab working on what he hopes will become a real theory someday; it's the people who are prematurely quoting it in public as if it has already become a real theory.

Yes, that's irritating. It's even more irritating to the neurophysiology and evpsych people doing genuine empirical work (I know, I've asked a few). If there was less 'look at my amazing model of the mind that explains all and will transform the world' and more 'here's an interesting model I came up with, what do you think, plausible? any ideas how I could test it?' (the way all the non-crank superstring/GUT theorists present their work) the field would be far less annoying and (presumably) more respectable. But it seems that attitude doesn't sell books.

So you're saying it's like trying to do astronomy before the telescope was invented.

Yes. Specifically, astronomy around the time of Galileo; the first crude telescopes are becoming available, but they're rare, interpretation of the results is at an early stage and there's an old guard of theorists who like neither the theories, the results or the whole 'falsification through empirical testing' methodology.

AI doesn't really fit into the analogy. I suppose it's like building orreries, but ones which have lots of independent uses besides weak confirmation for any scientific theories they may be based on. I would not have done the amount of reading I have in cognitive science if it wasn't for the fact I'm trying to push the state of the art in AI; I'm not personally interested in creating speculative models of the human mind so many logical steps away from the available concrete data. It's like deliberately sticking your head in Occam's guillotine. I just want mechanisms that work on concrete problems.

Fair enough, but the same objection applies: why should anyone take any of the ideas seriously when the necessary tools do not yet exist?

If by 'seriously' you mean 'take them as obviously correct and structure their life on that basis', I don't know. For the same reasons people go for religion and philosophy I suppose, because they demand answers to questions and jump at anything they can get. This is a step up from religion in that it's an honest attempt to model real physical processes constrained by all the available evidence, and that these models are causal ones with component parts and interactions you can manipulate (but with too many degrees of freedom to make strong predictions testable by current instruments), but taking any of them too seriously is still stupid.

If they took coberst's incoherent ramblings as a useful post, they would be.

No, but tolerance for 'non-useful posts' is generally a lot higher than here (but then, that can be said of 90%+ of forums). If you haven't already followed my link to the Mentifex FAQ you might like to, it's a fairly short and amusing portrait of a typical long-term cogsci/AI (he straddles both) troll.