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You are what you read, even if you don't always remember it

blog.jim-nielsen.com

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Re: You are what you read, even if you don't always remember it

#81

Post by rramadass »

thorum wrote: post #27

One form this takes is that, even when you forget the details, you retain the general shape of the subject matter. You might not remember all the details about XYZ, but now at least you know XYZ exists: your internal map of the world is expanded and corrected, even if parts are a bit fuzzy.

Well put! This is exactly why i tell people to always get a book on any subject that catches their fancy and browse them at the very least. Many parts will be fuzzy if you are not using/working with them but that is no excuse for not knowing about them. Once the mind is exposed to various concepts/ideas it automagically stitches them into a coherent whole without you being conscious of it.

A good way to think about it is the description of Mycroft Holmes by Sherlock Holmes;

"The conclusions of every department are passed to him, and he is the central exchange, the clearinghouse, which makes out the balance. All other men are specialists, but his specialism is omniscience. We will suppose that a minister needs information as to a point which involves the Navy, India, Canada and the bimetallic question; he could get his separate advices from various departments upon each, but only Mycroft can focus them all, and say offhand how each factor would affect the other. They began by using him as a short-cut, a convenience; now he has made himself an essential. In that great brain of his everything is pigeon-holed and can be handed out in an instant."

Re: You are what you read, even if you don't always remember it

#82

Post by graycat »

Common current computing can greatly ease the effort to "remember" what have read, written, thought, learned, etc.

E.g., to help "remember" I have a general purpose file that I read/write with my favorite text editor and with some surprising statistics:

Date started: September 2nd, 2005

Number of entries: 8412

Number of lines: 60,436

Number of bytes: 4,736,380

Really simple. Works really well.

A little laptop computer handles this file for zero apparent effort.

Of course, a lot more can be done, e.g., something like everyone having a Google just for their own life, but it is shocking how much can be done with just the statistics here.

Re: You are what you read, even if you don't always remember it

#83

Post by somenameforme »

nikkwong wrote: post #73
nyokodo wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Free will hasn’t been proven. Free will is something that we experience which provides extremely compelling evidence that it is true. Things don't have to be empirically proven in order to be true, if that were the case then empiricism itself would fail the test as it has never been established to be true empirically.

How do you know you experience it beyond a reasonable doubt? Thoughts and intentions just seemingly appear in consciousness, without any explanation as to how they arose. Feelings are like this too; we don’t determine how we feel, we are simply served them. When experiencing a negative emotion, some people seem to believe they can ‘free will’ their way out of it by thinking positively or something there over, but tha…

Hrm? When I think of things I tend to see multiple possibilities at once, and then decide which I think is the most reasonable, and go from there. Similar for emotions. I'm well aware of my emotions but can control them. And I think not doing so would be quite a poor way to behave.

Perhaps it's that we all think in somewhat different ways, yet because our own mind is the only one that we will ever know - we simply posit that everybody else must think the same way, or at least quite similarly. For instance there's that weird datum that supposedly some huge percent of people don't have an inner monologue, at all. I find it extremely difficult to believe, but if it were true then it would certainly be much easier to understand how somebody else might not believe in free will.

Re: You are what you read, even if you don't always remember it

#84

Post by piloto_ciego »

NERD_ALERT wrote: post #54
sublinear wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the blog post necessarily supports this view. You still have your free will. Your past experiences also teach you what to ignore. You are free to do that to my comment. :)

Free will hasn’t been proven. It’s up in the air how much is predetermined, and how to even define “free” in the context of free will. Even if we do have free will it’s still influenced to some degree by our biology.

My Diogenes answer would be to walk across the room and slap you: “if I didn’t chose to do it you cannot be angry at me.” That’s tongue and cheek sure, but the point I feel stands.

Free will is certainly constrained, and our material and biological conditions do matter - there’s no amount I can will to make myself fly, but they are not necessarily as rigid of constraints as many would have you believe. We can overcome our biology, our predilections, and many of our shortcomings. We have to consciously choose to do so though.

Re: You are what you read, even if you don't always remember it

#85

Post by piloto_ciego »

ixsploit wrote: post #75
nyokodo wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Free will hasn’t been proven. Free will is something that we experience which provides extremely compelling evidence that it is true. Things don't have to be empirically proven in order to be true, if that were the case then empiricism itself would fail the test as it has never been established to be true empirically.

How are you experiencing free will? You have no idea what your next thought will be, nor can you control it. You have the opinion that you have free will, but that doesn't mean it's true.

You can’t choose what you will think about? How do you get through the day? Are you just frequently blindsided by random non-sequiturs that derail you for hours? I routinely chose things to think about or things to concentrate on.

It’s not like all thoughts leap into my mind fully formed either. Hell, I edited this message before hitting reply.

Re: You are what you read, even if you don't always remember it

#86

Post by mo_42 »

Is this actually true? I know the text sounds really nice. Also citing nicely crafted words from famous poeple helps.

I guess roughly, this is right. But there's more to add. I have a brain with a certain configuration. This configuration is partly genetic and partly environmental. The environmental part has been shaped by every sensory input so far, including all the books. However, some books resonate well. They make me think about the topic weeks after finishing them. Other books don't resonate at all. My brain's is not fit for them. It just ja sequence of words (e.g., the books my high school literature teacher made me read).

I guess humans aren't a ANN that treats every training sample equal. Our brain has a mechanism to put more or less weight on sensory input given previous input. Some ideas are utterly confusing and don't stick at all. I think this happens a lot when people of different religions or political camps interact.

Re: You are what you read, even if you don't always remember it

#87

Post by affgrff2 »

somenameforme wrote: post #74
y04nn wrote: post #25

Don't forget that you are the result of all the past sensory interactions that you experienced in your whole life, people you interacted with, books you read, advertisements, songs, news headlines, etc. Even if you think you don't remember them, at one point in your life it was processed by your brain and may have changed some posterior decisions you made, thus making you what you are now. Since I realized this, I am…

I'd challenge this with a thought experiment. Imagine we put a group of toddlers on an island and somehow give them knowledge of language (and enough sustenance to survive), but absolutely 0 external input otherwise. These people, as they grow, would gradually develop their own views, values, and perspectives. Do the exact same thing on another island and you'd get entirely different results! One can see this very th…

This thought experiment is deeply flawed as it assumes that what you propose is possible and the outcome would be as you suggest. I am not convinced that people can bootstrap themselves like this and that language itself does not contain views, values and perspectives.

Re: You are what you read, even if you don't always remember it

#88

Post by nlitened »

somenameforme wrote: post #74
y04nn wrote: post #25

Don't forget that you are the result of all the past sensory interactions that you experienced in your whole life, people you interacted with, books you read, advertisements, songs, news headlines, etc. Even if you think you don't remember them, at one point in your life it was processed by your brain and may have changed some posterior decisions you made, thus making you what you are now. Since I realized this, I am…

I'd challenge this with a thought experiment. Imagine we put a group of toddlers on an island and somehow give them knowledge of language (and enough sustenance to survive), but absolutely 0 external input otherwise. These people, as they grow, would gradually develop their own views, values, and perspectives. Do the exact same thing on another island and you'd get entirely different results! One can see this very th…

Giving a knowledge of a language is a _huge_ external input, intertwined with culture and life experience of the language teacher.

And the smaller the external input we give to this group of toddler, the more they will resemble a violent pack of chimps in the end. Unlikely to develop their own values and perspectives.

Re: You are what you read, even if you don't always remember it

#89

Post by eszed »

gverrilla wrote: post #41
akashkahlon wrote: post #37

I realised this some years back, after an advise that if you find reading hard, read faster. Don't spend too much time understanding each word and line. Good advise

That will only work if the author also rushed to write the piece. Understanding is more desirable than finishing a book.

I'd take issue with your first sentence. The most challenging task is to distill a difficult topic into something that can be quickly understood. That inevitably takes time. When I write rapidly and unreflectively I often make readers confused.

Re: You are what you read, even if you don't always remember it

#90

Post by cdrini »

mo_42 wrote: post #86

Is this actually true? I know the text sounds really nice. Also citing nicely crafted words from famous poeple helps. I guess roughly, this is right. But there's more to add. I have a brain with a certain configuration. This configuration is partly genetic and partly environmental. The environmental part has been shaped by every sensory input so far, including all the books. However, some books resonate well. They ma…

I think everything you're saying is correct, but doesn't discredit what the post says. I think even books we don't necessarily resonate strongly with can have small, hidden impacts on our behaviour and thinking. They might give us an example of what a person does in a certain situation, and we internalise how we might respond in a certain situation. In this I think it is kind of similar to an LLM, where we kind of predict what our response to something should be, drawing from our past experiences on an abstract level.

I think books we do resonate with can have a larger impact for the reasons you mentioned, but I think they all have an impact.

I like to think of books as planets, and you're a spaceship. If you're not paying attention, as you graze a planet it'll slightly alter your course. Maybe in perceptibly so. If you are aware of it and resonate with it, you can kind of use its gravity to swing you into a different direct -- presumably onto a direction you want to go in.

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