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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

#31

Post by abellerose »

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…

The understanding of free will being an "illusion" opens a few doors for approaching life. One of them being how society is structured and regarding healthcare, housing, finances, education..

Anyway, people cast their votes by the beliefs as well and currently we're living in social systems designed from the belief of have free will. The idea of someone earned what they have, contrary to someone worse off and people aren't just destined by their life circumstances to end up homeless. Genetics, environmental factors and all proceeding moments are factored from the preceding forces.

Well, when you realize the foregoing about free will is untrue and you really take the time to adapt your thinking to the understanding of free will being illusion. I assume you become more compassionate because you're actually observing reality for how it truly is awful to some and those people had no control for their misfortune. I know from my own life when I understood it took a few years to truly get "it" but after I deeply feel more empathetic and disgusted by the current systems that refuse people the medical help they need or getting someone shelter & food.

Everyone is just assigned a life at birth without any say and that's the same to what happens after without any real control existing to alter your destiny. So a nihilist can say well so what?..everything is just destined. But that doesn't mean we should keep stalling people from being educated of how reality happens to be and designing better social systems that adapt to the true reality of the universe. Anyway that's my long rant/suggestion on it.

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

#32

Post by Sparkyte »

Is it really predictive or just conformative? It's kind of bad nomeclature to assume that an outcome is guaranteed. We asses and weigh circumstances that's not predictive that's coping. We as human cope within a conformed environment and that's how we think. Failure to act accordingly is punishment and correctly reward. All learned coping behaviors.

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

#33

Post by Layke1123 »

Layke1123 wrote: post #29
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?

Can someone point out why I'm being downvoted? Or respond to my comment rather than just shutting down discourse?

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

#34

Post by passivate »

0thgen wrote: post #3

The 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 determ…

A few non-fluff sentences:

"Consequential decisions in law enforcement, military and financial contexts are increasingly influenced by automated assessments spat out by proprietary predictive engines."

"These prediction engines have primed us to be receptive to the idea of the predictive brain. So too has the science of psychology itself, which has been concerned since its founding with the prediction and control of human beings. ‘All natural sciences aim at practical prediction and control, and in none of them is this more the case than in psychology today,"

"Advertising agencies would fund their own experiments by researchers such as Watson to test the laws of the consumer-machines that they targeted, rationalising their understandings of phenomena such as habitual product use, targeted messaging and brand loyalty."

" Simulmatics has become, in Lepore’s words:

    the mission of nearly every corporation. Collect data. Write code: if/then/else. Detect patterns. Predict behaviour. Direct action. Encourage consumption. Influence elections. "
"Scientists might believe that they are simply building conceptual and mechanical tools for observation and understanding – the telescopes and microscopes of the neuroscientific age. But the tools of observation can be fastened all too easily to the end of a weapon and targeted at masses of people. If predictive systems began as weapons meant to make humans controllable in the field of war and in the market, that gives us extra reason to question those who wield such weapons now"

>" thinking about humans as predictive learning engines will encourage to consider our deterministic nature and have more compassion for eachother"

OK, let us consider that too. What would be the underlying mechanism of this? How would we be primed/conditioned into adopting this behavior? Examples? Proposed models/theories/etc?

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

#35

Post by Thiez »

yters wrote: post #25
cmehdy wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

Is there any reason to believe that the human mind has these amazing computation-transcending powers? What would be the mechanism behind it?

Unless there is evidence for these suggested special powers of the human mind, it looks to me like another instance of Russell's teapot.

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

#36

Post by wizzwizz4 »

Layke1123 wrote: post #33
Layke1123 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Can someone point out why I'm being downvoted? Or respond to my comment rather than just shutting down discourse?

Perhaps your criticism of the bad comment was too rhetorical.

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

#37

Post by wizzwizz4 »

Layke1123 wrote: post #30
SummerlyMars wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Never underestimate the adaptability of rhetoric.

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

#38

Post by [deleted] »

passivate wrote: post #34
0thgen wrote: post #3

The 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 determ…

A few non-fluff sentences: "Consequential decisions in law enforcement, military and financial contexts are increasingly influenced by automated assessments spat out by proprietary predictive engines." "These prediction engines have primed us to be receptive to the idea of the predictive brain. So too has the science of psychology itself, which has been concerned since its founding with the prediction and control of…

[deleted]

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

#39

Post by meowkit »

Layke1123 wrote: post #33
Layke1123 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Can someone point out why I'm being downvoted? Or respond to my comment rather than just shutting down discourse?

You write dismissively of capitalism is my first note.

Capitalism isn't the boogie man people make it out to be. It's the optimization criteria for increasing financial capital over other forms of capital (natural, labor, etc), and corporatocracy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporatocracy

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

#40

Post by pdonis »

abellerose wrote: post #31
SummerlyMars wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The understanding of free will being an "illusion" opens a few doors for approaching life. One of them being how society is structured and regarding healthcare, housing, finances, education.. Anyway, people cast their votes by the beliefs as well and currently we're living in social systems designed from the belief of have free will. The idea of someone earned what they have, contrary to someone worse off and people…

> when you realize the foregoing about free will is untrue and you really take the time to adapt your thinking to the understanding of free will being illusion. I assume you become more compassionate

You assume wrong. The most brutal totalitarian governments in history have been built on the same understanding of humans that you describe. So that understanding can go either way: it can make you more compassionate, or it can make you much less so.

Free will is best understood not as a "fact" but as a right. Every person has the right to make their own choices instead of someone else making those choices for them. And the most dehumanizing thing you can tell a person is that they are "destined by circumstances" (your phrase) to be in the situation they are in, instead of having the power to change it by the choices they make.

Sure, the power to make one's own choices is not unlimited. We can't choose to not be affected by gravity. We can't choose to be omnipotent or omniscient. And, most important, we can't choose how other people will make their own choices (more on that below). But that doesn't change the fact that people do make choices, and can change their situation by doing so. The proper role of compassion and charity is to help empower people to make better choices for themselves.

And the proper understanding of situations where some people are deprived of basic necessities through no fault of their own is not that it was just "destined by circumstances", but that other people made choices that created those situations. Trying to hand-wave that away and pretend that things like famines and homelessness are just accidents of nature, instead of products of deliberate choices made by particular people in power--the whole "how society is structured" that you slide by without really looking at where it comes from--only makes those problems worse.

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