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What you can’t imagine clearly, you value less

nautil.us

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Re: What you can’t imagine clearly, you value less

#51

Post by mathstuf »

alar44 wrote: post #46
menotyou wrote: post #40

I am an aphant, I can not imagine anything. While I can appreciate to have a good income and always had good paying jobs, I was never really interested in making a career and becoming filthy rich. Possibly because I can not imagine myself in this situation. On the other hand I was always better then others on making long term strategic plans. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia

I'm so sick of hearing this. You can imagine things. That's not even what Aphantasia is.

Sure. I have aphantasia too. I cannot, for the life of me, picture or accurately describe my mother's, wife's, or child's face from memory. They're as abstract as a random actor's face to me in those ways. I know details about them, but it's like remembering a list of items, not describing a picture I'm looking at. I can recognize them faster than others, but good luck getting a police sketch of them from me.

What I do have are notions and feelings about things when I think about them. If you ask me my favorite foods, I have to sit and remember how I feel about various foods like some kind of rolodex (though over time I'll remember the items from repetition, any such rankings are like this). I don't know how to compare the "vividness" of such things beyond notions of "that seems familiar" or "I don't remember ever encountering that", so this article doesn't really feel like it's about me at all. Of course, I'm also one of the most patient people around, so maybe it's just that the difference between "2x later" and "1x now" is close enough for me to wait in more instances than most since they're both just evocations of feelings and notions rather than things I can literally visualize and compare like some mental "spot the differences" puzzle.

Re: What you can’t imagine clearly, you value less

#52

Post by oneoff786 »

MrPatan wrote: post #49
club_tropical wrote: post #3

Behold, one of the most dangerous and toxic forms of stupid: the LABCOAT-FLASHER. Do not fall for the verbal trickeries and hypotheticals - they are the syntactic sugar masking various POISONS: 1) There is no “you” that is meaningfully apart from “your brain”. This trickery is meant to dissociate you from your body and backdoor sneak-in the labcoat-flasher as a co-conspiritor against yourself. It is every bit as gasl…

A thousand times yes. Another set of "philosophical muggings" that use the same trick and drive me nuts that people just accept them are trolley problems. "Why shouldn't the surgeon kill a healthy person to save 5 others with his organs?". Duh, because the surgeon doesn't know what's going to happen and there's a high chance he's going to end up with 6 corpses, plus his own when anybody fins out. "No, you don't under…

> Why shouldn't the surgeon kill a healthy person to save 5 others with his organs?". Duh, because the surgeon doesn't know what's going to happen and there's a high chance he's going to end up with 6 corpses, plus his own when anybody fins out.

You really think it’s this, and not that the surgeon doesn’t want to kill people?

Re: What you can’t imagine clearly, you value less

#53

Post by [deleted] »

club_tropical wrote: post #3

Behold, one of the most dangerous and toxic forms of stupid: the LABCOAT-FLASHER. Do not fall for the verbal trickeries and hypotheticals - they are the syntactic sugar masking various POISONS: 1) There is no “you” that is meaningfully apart from “your brain”. This trickery is meant to dissociate you from your body and backdoor sneak-in the labcoat-flasher as a co-conspiritor against yourself. It is every bit as gasl…

[deleted]

Re: What you can’t imagine clearly, you value less

#54

Post by [deleted] »

MadScott wrote: post #37

"Lee and his colleagues confirmed this by looking at people’s brain activity with an fMRI when they’re making decisions about the future. They used a brain decoder to detect a “neural signature of the vividness of prospective thought” What twaddle. fMRI will tell you quite a bit about blood flow etc. but "brain decoder" is bullshit. It's like taking a thermal image of the primary PCB and saying you've just backed all…

[deleted]

Re: What you can’t imagine clearly, you value less

#55

Post by pmichaud »

pixl97 wrote: post #6
telesilla wrote: post #2

From what I know about the brain, it is more of a prediction machine than anything else, based on prior input. It seems reasonable for the majority to be unconcerned with what cannot be reasonably predicted, and as the article states, for artists to imagine possible futures on our behalf.

I'd say two things. Filter and predict. Both of these things are done to conserve energy and survive.

My guess is that filtering is downstream of prediction, because filtering is making a prediction about which input will be useful, then acting on that prediction.

Re: What you can’t imagine clearly, you value less

#56

Post by coldtea »

lostmsu wrote: post #33
coldtea wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Obviously false statement, given the genre of fiction. Obviously we are aware of the genre of fiction. Or science fiction for that matter. Or superhero comics, or supernatural stories, and so on. So my point wasn't that e.g. vampire fiction doesn't exist or isn't interesting to writers and reader. But nothing in the genre of fiction is really about the impossible. That is just metaphor and plot device for what was,…

Art is background. Without background Romeo and Juliet is just "love could be a strong feeling", and Back to the Future is "time travel has an unsolved grandfather paradox".

You got it backwards here. The heart of the art is in the intra-personal conflicts and human aspect observations, and the skeleton is the plot.

The background is just (literally) a backdrop. Which is why you can set Romeo and Juliet in 20th century America, or Antigone in space - as many have done, and the heart of the work is still there just fine.

Re: What you can’t imagine clearly, you value less

#57

Post by theptip »

pmichaud wrote: post #55
pixl97 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say two things. Filter and predict. Both of these things are done to conserve energy and survive.

My guess is that filtering is downstream of prediction, because filtering is making a prediction about which input will be useful, then acting on that prediction.

I think the Predictive Processing model would describe it as each layer only signaling “surprisal” to the layer above when the input diverges from the prediction. You could call this filtering if you like, or just an efficient delta representation.

Re: What you can’t imagine clearly, you value less

#58

Post by sniperjoe360 »

The way I see it, this whole article seems to reframe the age old debate between utilitarians and deontologists (moralists) He tries to bridge the two philosophies by suggesting a more vivid imagination of the future consequences increases the present utility. Then you will do what you ought to do, not just out of duty, but also out of a better appreciation of how to maximize future utility for others.

But in the end, such an approach is a bit unsatisfying. Like the trolley problem, such a framing of consequences in purely utilitarian terms comes out ultimately to be value judgement on the threshold of utility that would cause you to act. A value judgement is subjective, and how do you make the subjective decision? Utilitarian or deontology?

Do I have a solution? Absolutely not. Just pointing out this just a reframing of an old dilemma.

Re: What you can’t imagine clearly, you value less

#59

Post by lostmsu »

coldtea wrote: post #56
lostmsu wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Art is background. Without background Romeo and Juliet is just "love could be a strong feeling", and Back to the Future is "time travel has an unsolved grandfather paradox".

You got it backwards here. The heart of the art is in the intra-personal conflicts and human aspect observations, and the skeleton is the plot. The background is just (literally) a backdrop. Which is why you can set Romeo and Juliet in 20th century America, or Antigone in space - as many have done, and the heart of the work is still there just fine.

> The heart of the art is in the intra-personal conflicts and human aspect observations, and the skeleton is the plot.

Precisely what makes it art is the background though.

> The background is just (literally) a backdrop. Which is why you can set Romeo and Juliet in 20th century America, or Antigone in space - as many have done, and the heart of the work is still there just fine.

Yeah, and I even told you what the heart is.

Re: What you can’t imagine clearly, you value less

#60

Post by MrPatan »

oneoff786 wrote: post #52
MrPatan wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A thousand times yes. Another set of "philosophical muggings" that use the same trick and drive me nuts that people just accept them are trolley problems. "Why shouldn't the surgeon kill a healthy person to save 5 others with his organs?". Duh, because the surgeon doesn't know what's going to happen and there's a high chance he's going to end up with 6 corpses, plus his own when anybody fins out. "No, you don't under…

> Why shouldn't the surgeon kill a healthy person to save 5 others with his organs?". Duh, because the surgeon doesn't know what's going to happen and there's a high chance he's going to end up with 6 corpses, plus his own when anybody fins out. You really think it’s this, and not that the surgeon doesn’t want to kill people?

Well there you go, I'm glad you don't need convincing that "killing" and "letting people die by not giving them fresh organs" are not the same thing at all.
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