Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

On the dangers of seeing human minds as predictive machines

aeon.co

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 172 posts

Re: On the dangers of seeing human minds as predictive machines

#21

Post by abellerose »

psyc wrote: post #19
abellerose wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Person with gender dysphoria here. I've still heard the phrase in Canada by nurses & staff. Also heard it several years ago when living in USA by doctors & staff. Unsure why you think I was referring to internet forums? I thought those were deprecated since 2009.

https://www.google.com/search?q=chemical+imbalance+theory

Unsure why you're linking that. Do you not realize by my first comment that I'm describing the theory as nonsense compared to what I wrote? edit: ah thanks for the clarification.

Re: On the dangers of seeing human minds as predictive machines

#23

Post by UnFleshedOne »

zoomablemind wrote: post #16

> "...Human beings aren’t pieces of technology, no matter how sophisticated. But by talking about ourselves as such, we acquiesce to the corporations and governments that decide to treat us this way. When the seers of predictive processing hail prediction as the brain’s defining achievement, they risk giving groundless credibility to the systems that automate that act – assigning the patina of intelligence to artific…

Like any technology I'm sure such understanding will be used for all of the above and then some.

Re: On the dangers of seeing human minds as predictive machines

#24

Post by SummerlyMars »

abellerose wrote: post #6

René 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…

> 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.

Why do you assume this? If everyone believed in determinism rather than free will, couldn't those with the most capital (deterministically) say "Well, that's just the way it should be. They can't choose to be different."

I'm not inclined to think that will is all that free, but I can't seem to see the connection between that and capitalism.

Re: On the dangers of seeing human minds as predictive machines

#25

Post by yters »

cmehdy wrote: post #7
Veedrac wrote: post #5

If 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 understan…

It could also be the case the human mind transcends computation, i.e. a transfinite, yet limited, halting oracle, and as such is logically impossible to reduce to a Turing machine. To insist this is not the case merely based on materialism is begging the question. It is a very simple and formally rigorous point, but gets obscure by high fallutin philosophical language like "reductionism".

Re: On the dangers of seeing human minds as predictive machines

#26

Post by psyc »

dboreham wrote: post #20
psyc wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mentally ill person here. I haven’t heard a mental health professional use the phrase ‘chemical imbalance’ or anything similar in 20 years. It’s my understanding it has been deprecated. It’s mostly repeated by laypeople in ignorance. It’s hard to flush something like that out of the popular lexicon, once established. There’s a lot of maddeningly persistent misinformation about mental health on Internet forums.

I'm fairly sure I've seen tv drug ads in the past few years use the phrase "chemical imbalance".

They have a clear incentive to exaggerate a) the effectiveness of the drugs, and b) how well they understand how they work. There is an important distinction between knowing how drugs affect brain chemistry, vs knowing how they alleviate symptoms. The latter is still more empirical than theoretical.

Re: On the dangers of seeing human minds as predictive machines

#27

Post by psyc »

abellerose wrote: post #21
psyc wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.google.com/search?q=chemical+imbalance+theory

Unsure why you're linking that. Do you not realize by my first comment that I'm describing the theory as nonsense compared to what I wrote? edit: ah thanks for the clarification.

My intent was to support your comment, not contradict it. By reassuring anyone who might read this that the chemical imbalance angle has rightly fallen out of favor.

Re: On the dangers of seeing human minds as predictive machines

#28

Post by SllX »

Veedrac wrote: post #5

If 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…

Well, depends on your moral strictures.

A functional understanding of how someone else thinks whether on a personal basis or more generally or categorically is useful and actionable information.

What you do with that is up to you, but if you’re not using information, someone else is.

Re: On the dangers of seeing human minds as predictive machines

#29

Post by Layke1123 »

rck wrote: post #13

Many words, few ideas. I was hoping for an argument based on ... well, anything. There's no real criticism of the scientific support for the idea that human minds are predictive. Just some vague connections to economics and a vocabulary that suggests anti-capitalist sympathies. Your attention is better spent elsewhere.

If our attention is better spent elsewhere, why then did you spend effort and attention reading it and then trying to relate anti-capitalist rhetoric here? Is it possible that you have an overly attached fondness to the term capitalism and can't handle any rebuke of the term?

Re: On the dangers of seeing human minds as predictive machines

#30

Post by Layke1123 »

SummerlyMars wrote: post #24
abellerose wrote: post #6

René 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…

> 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. Why do you assume this? If everyone believed in determinism rather than free will, couldn't those with the most capital (deterministically) say "Well, that's just the way it should be. They can't choose to be di…

They will think its justified, just like the masses will justify taking all the hoarded wealth. Fairly distributing capital and power is the only reasonable solution in a world that is so obviously deterministic.
Post reply on HN