On the dangers of seeing human minds as predictive machines
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Re: On the dangers of seeing human minds as predictive machines
#2More and more I'm convinced that in the set of all possible search spaces, the most important is the pleasure-driven search space. But some well constructed knowledge skeleton let's one explore it (starting) at a higher level.
That's how I see it: to build the scaffolding on ratio, and start flying from there. But it's always important to be able to land back and not to get lost completely - because the outer space is simply uncomfortably unknown.
That's why amongst all the writers (or more generally - creators) I enjoy most those who have both solid knowledge and brave imagination.
Re: On the dangers of seeing human minds as predictive machines
#3The author writes about how describing humans as predictive engines will 'encourage us to reduce our fellow humans to mere pieces of machinery'
^ this is pretty much a fluff statement. it's basically a hand-wavey sliperry slope argument that can be made about any theory in animal/human research.
i could also make the claim that thinking about humans as predictive learning engines will encourage to consider our deterministic nature and have more compassion for eachother <-- both my and the author's claims lack any substantial evidence
Re: On the dangers of seeing human minds as predictive machines
#4"..it becomes all too easy for us to slip into adversarial and exploitative framings of the human"
That is inherent in the structure of society and largely supported by worldviews in many cases unfortunately.
Personally I think that there are a couple of problems. One is with worldviews that oversimplify along the dimension of cooperative versus competitive. The second part which reinforces the first is that it's actually quite difficult to make a framework that really works without being overly competitive or cooperative or tending towards extreme centralization.
My worldview is centered on technology and so of course I think that is a key part of the solution. Money and government must become high technologies. Decentralized approaches have the potential to provide not only the freedom to evolve but the capacity to operate holistically at the same time.
Re: On the dangers of seeing human minds as predictive machines
#5If I've understood this article correctly, the thesis is that we should avoid trying to understand the mind, because understanding the mind is inevitably about controlling and subverting human behaviour to worse ends, and that it also legitimizes those ends by dehumanizing people.
I am, mind, not totally sure I have understood the article, because the article is not written very clearly, as the point is never stated without vagueness and allusion. Perhaps this comes from the author's worries about the negative effects of understanding things.
Re: On the dangers of seeing human minds as predictive machines
#6René Descartes ruined the perception and healthcare of mental illness. Patients and even a few doctors would be more informed if they understood the symptoms of mental illness occur because of physical changes in the brain. Instead a misinformed belief of a chemical imbalance exists and is assumed as a truth by some physicians & nurses.
Society is basically brainwashed into believing everyone has free will. The result is that people with the most capital prosper and I assume the foregoing wouldn't be the case if everyone was a determinist.
Re: On the dangers of seeing human minds as predictive machines
#7If I've understood this article correctly, the thesis is that we should avoid trying to understand the mind, because understanding the mind is inevitably about controlling and subverting human behaviour to worse ends, and that it also legitimizes those ends by dehumanizing people. I am, mind, not totally sure I have understood the article, because the article is not written very clearly, as the point is never stated…
This reminds me of the typical criticisms that Daniel Dennett[0] has faced throughout the decades where he tried to argue the point that we can talk about consciousness through similar tools as those of computation (amongst other things) and that there isn't a reason to put humans on a magical pedestal of immunity from further understanding.
There's some anchored belief that humans are somehow sacred beyond understanding and that logic that we happily apply to a cricket or a star has to be thrown out the window when we try to touch the sanctity of humanity. I recall Dennett pointing out how starting from Descartes the whole meme of the person within your brain doing things (present day example: see Pixar's Inside Out) is a way to put a wall around the thing that scientists want to poke at for more understanding. The guy turning switches in the brain is God, and you just can't test it and should accept it as gospel, i.e. the "don't question God" type of thing.
Making the unknown a thing from beyond is how we (used to) avoid being scared of death too. I've always been wary of that attitude, and the tech world is not immune to that by the way (these days a good one is "don't question the absolute power of technology to solve the climate crisis").
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Dennett#Philosophy_of_m...
Re: On the dangers of seeing human minds as predictive machines
#8Best line: "If software has eaten the world, its predictive engines have digested it, and we are living in the society it spat out."
Re: On the dangers of seeing human minds as predictive machines
#9René Descartes ruined the perception and healthcare of mental illness. Patients and even a few doctors would be more informed if they understood the symptoms of mental illness occur because of physical changes in the brain. Instead a misinformed belief of a chemical imbalance exists and is assumed as a truth by some physicians & nurses. Society is basically brainwashed into believing everyone has free will. The resul…
> if they understood the symptoms of mental illness occur because of physical changes in the brain. Instead a misinformed belief of a chemical imbalance exists
What's the difference? And how does that difference impact how people are treated by physicians and nurses?
Re: On the dangers of seeing human minds as predictive machines
#10René Descartes ruined the perception and healthcare of mental illness. Patients and even a few doctors would be more informed if they understood the symptoms of mental illness occur because of physical changes in the brain. Instead a misinformed belief of a chemical imbalance exists and is assumed as a truth by some physicians & nurses. Society is basically brainwashed into believing everyone has free will. The resul…
> if they understood the symptoms of mental illness occur because of physical changes in the brain. Instead a misinformed belief of a chemical imbalance exists What's the difference? And how does that difference impact how people are treated by physicians and nurses?
I read “physical changes” as structural changes in neurons and neural connections themselves, as opposed to the (at least popular) thinking that mental illness is down to imbalances in neurotransmitters. There’s at least some research around this related to addiction, namely that overexpression of ΔFosB produces changes to neurons in the reward pathways.