Neurons Gone Wild • Hacker News Board

Re: Neurons Gone Wild

#31

Post by ttctciyf » Wed, Mar 04, 2015, 1:56 PM UTC

> [Agency is] built into the brain's fabric and architecture. Because even neurons have agency

It seems like a borderline category mistake to claim that because the components of some system have property P then that system is somehow better fitted to have property P itself. There are exceptions (like P="reliability", or P="speed", thinking of transistors in a chip, perhaps) but in general, it doesn't seem to follow. Few transistors have Turing completeness, for example, but could be components of a system possessing that property. I don't see prima face why Agency should belong to the class of properties that transfer upwards from component to composed system.

Anthropomorphizing neurons by ascribing "selfishness", "adventurousness", and so on to them seems to compound this error in an effort to persuade. I doubt Dennett intends this in the excerpted quote.

Anyway, the "heterarchy of agents" view of mind doesn't need personality-endowed neurons, and has some compelling features which are explained pretty well in the article.

Regards "level 4, the self", though, I wonder how well evidenced a "prime-ministerial agent" type of self is. The article seems to take that on faith versus alternate models such as a set of competing high-level agents that compete or cooperate to occupy the driver's seat. Equating this with abnormal states of affairs like schizophrenia or demonic possession seems a bit facile.. (even disregarding the implied antique three-faces-of-Eve view of schizophrenia.)

Just because there aren't gross changes in behaviour or mentation, how would you know that a single top-level agent is consistently running the show? We're all familiar with mood-swings and role strain, but our strongly held belief in a ruling self makes us attribute these to other factors than agent swap-out. I think it's equally plausible that pathological multi-agency could be ascribed to abnormally divergent agents, rather than the mere existence of more than one top-level agent.

Maybe swapping top-level agents in and out is SOP, and a uniquely privileged Self should be treated with caution as a possible metaphysical fiction.

Re: Neurons Gone Wild

#32

Post by beobab » Wed, Mar 04, 2015, 2:10 PM UTC

I love the similar hypothesis put forward by Robert Kurzban in "Why Everyone (else) is a Hypocrite" that the conscious mind (the self) is simply a "press secretary" for the modular parts of the human brain, and literally doesn't know what's going on in most of it, but can invent reasonable justifications for a behaviour after the fact if questioned about a particular act.

Re: Neurons Gone Wild

#33

Post by beobab » Wed, Mar 04, 2015, 2:11 PM UTC

Gurkenmaster wrote: post #27

TeMPOraL wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except it's not always true. A little bit of alcohol can take the edge off, reduce the stress. I don't know about you, but I myself am like 20 IQ points dumber when stressed out.

That's the ballmer peak

Obligatory xkcd reference: http://xkcd.com/323/

Re: Neurons Gone Wild

#34

Post by ZeroFries » Wed, Mar 04, 2015, 3:06 PM UTC

plaguuuuuu wrote: post #19

acjohnson55 wrote: post #11

It's a very thought provoking piece. I stop short of fully endorsing it because it postulates a lot of things without much appeal to real science, despite portraying itself as scientific. In particular, I'm not sure how much of the brains characteristics can truly be attributed to fractal extrapolation of (idealized) behavior of individual neurons. That complaint aside, at the consciousness level, I do think the mult…

The article is not necessarily scientific in that I'm not sure how you'd test or falsify the ideas, but at the same time it's a very interesting and perhaps very useful philosophical piece. Often, ideas for science come from logically robust philosophical reasoning. I mean, sometimes they come from freak accidents also. But there's definitely validity in the simple (and awesome) exploration of cool ideas, as long as…

I also experienced some depersonalization thinking deeply about this.

Re: Neurons Gone Wild

#35

Post by ZeroFries » Wed, Mar 04, 2015, 3:45 PM UTC

ttctciyf wrote: post #31

> [Agency is] built into the brain's fabric and architecture. Because even neurons have agency It seems like a borderline category mistake to claim that because the components of some system have property P then that system is somehow better fitted to have property P itself. There are exceptions (like P="reliability", or P="speed", thinking of transistors in a chip, perhaps) but in general, it doesn't seem to follow.…

If we agree that system A possesses agency, then either the components possess it, or at some level of abstraction it emerges from the relations of the components.

The property of wetness emerges from the relations and mechanics of water molecules interacting with other water molecules. A hydrogen or oxygen element does not posses wetness, nor does it emerge from the interaction between a hydrogen and 2 oxygen.

However, wetness is a binary category, where as agency as defined in the article is a continuous category. We say that a slave has some agency, but less agency than their master. If we define 0 as no agency whatsoever and 1 as ultimate agency, then it's likely that everything in the universe has agency 0 This of course still doesn't show that agency necessarily increases as you go up the abstraction stack. Does a city have more agency than it's citizens? What about the set of all living things? I would say that the molecules of a rock have more agency than the rock itself.

I think the agency property really breaks down when you look at it hard enough.

Re: Neurons Gone Wild

#36

Post by anon4 » Wed, Mar 04, 2015, 5:36 PM UTC

swamp40 wrote: post #2

Couldn't help but think of this (apocryphal apparently, huh?) story: One night at Cheers, Cliff Clavin explained the "Buffalo theory" to his buddy Norm: "Well ya see, Norm, it's like this. A herd of buffalo can only move as fast as the slowest buffalo. And when the herd is hunted, it is the slowest and weakest ones at the back that are killed first. This natural selection is good for the herd as a whole, because the…

I feel the assumption that alcohol kills only the weakest cells is probably false. However, it does give me the idea of a mental boost supplement snake oil scheme...

Re: Neurons Gone Wild

#37

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Mar 04, 2015, 5:42 PM UTC

vinceguidry wrote: post #13

I once created a tulpa through a technique called muscle testing. You most commonly see it using demonstrations where one person holds his arm out and the other person tries to press down on it. You get either a 'weak' response or a 'strong' response. You can 'ask' the muscle test yes or no questions and the body will answer you. I used a variant of this test that you can perform by yourself, described in this video:…

[deleted]

Re: Neurons Gone Wild

#38

Post by michaelsbradley » Wed, Mar 04, 2015, 6:19 PM UTC

NobleLie wrote: post #30

michaelsbradley wrote: post #24

A fascinating piece, even if I don't hold the author's materialistic views. Regarding exorcisms, one aspect that is not addressed is sometimes external manifestations of demonic activity/presence not explainable (or seemingly not explainable) by biochemical processes. Now, one can dismiss such claims out of hand if one considers a priori that such occurrences are impossible (i.e. that the super-natural does not exist…

One interpretation that you seem to overlook in favor of an external demonic possession: he has sociopathic tendencies (perhaps spying on you) and was attempting to manipulate you into thinking he is/was possessed. Maybe you even got wasted with Jim once and let out some secrets. Anyway, I If true, he succeeded in defending his criminal behavior by outsourcing his internal evil on bogus societal constructs such as re…

Actually, I didn't overlook the "spying" interpretation. It's certainly a possibility given Jim's tendency to compulsive and obsessive behavior. But as I noted, the things he related were not accessible in any recorded medium, nor did I speak of them to Jim nor anyone else during the time I knew him. Prior to that, I lived in a different part of the country and was even out of the country for awhile. Some of the things I'm fairly certainly I never related to anyone at any time.

I was never intoxicated during the time I knew Jim – I gave that up several years prior.

Jim never claimed to be possessed, nor anything like that. He would have found the idea repulsive. On the contrary, he generally considered himself to have a privileged relationship with God – a not uncommon delusion among persons suffering from severe mental illness. At the same time, I never heard him justify his personal behavior on that basis. Generally, Jim seemed to believe that other people, especially the police, had serious moral and intellectual defects which caused them to misunderstand and persecute him. He also displayed paranoia (sometimes extreme, to the point of self-harm) about most everything and everyone.

Finally, I never gave (and don't give) Jim a "pass" because I believe he was possessed. In fact, I'm not sure he was. The only thing I am certain of is that he displayed all the signs of serious, prolonged and untreated mental illness. I also thought he was deeply spiritually troubled – so I prayed for him a lot (still do) and I tried to encourage him to seek the counsel and ministry of a couple of wise pastors in the area. However, for all his hyper-religiosity, Jim displayed a strong aversion to church and to authority figures in general. The incident I described previously did make me consider that some aspects of his malaise might be related to demonic influence, and the events seems to defy a natural explanation, but I cannot presume to know for certain.

Re: Neurons Gone Wild

#39

Post by vilhelm_s » Wed, Mar 04, 2015, 6:20 PM UTC

ttctciyf wrote: post #31

> [Agency is] built into the brain's fabric and architecture. Because even neurons have agency It seems like a borderline category mistake to claim that because the components of some system have property P then that system is somehow better fitted to have property P itself. There are exceptions (like P="reliability", or P="speed", thinking of transistors in a chip, perhaps) but in general, it doesn't seem to follow.…

Clearly it can't be agents "all the way down" (in any case, the component parts of the neurons do not have agency), but the idea that it will be easier to evolve a high-level agent if the components themselves are agent-like seems coherent. It would be interesting if this could be sharpened into a testable prediction, in some kind of toy model.

I could see it go the other way too--for example large companies and states struggle to act as coherent agents, because the individuals and business units inside them scheme against each other, pursuing their own agendas. In order to maintain high-level agency they need to suppress low-level agency, e.g. armies training their soldiers to blindly follow orders.

Re: Neurons Gone Wild

#40

Post by NobleLie » Thu, Mar 05, 2015, 5:25 AM UTC

michaelsbradley wrote: post #38

NobleLie wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One interpretation that you seem to overlook in favor of an external demonic possession: he has sociopathic tendencies (perhaps spying on you) and was attempting to manipulate you into thinking he is/was possessed. Maybe you even got wasted with Jim once and let out some secrets. Anyway, I If true, he succeeded in defending his criminal behavior by outsourcing his internal evil on bogus societal constructs such as re…

Actually, I didn't overlook the "spying" interpretation. It's certainly a possibility given Jim's tendency to compulsive and obsessive behavior. But as I noted, the things he related were not accessible in any recorded medium, nor did I speak of them to Jim nor anyone else during the time I knew him. Prior to that, I lived in a different part of the country and was even out of the country for awhile. Some of the thin…

Fascinating story. Thanks for sharing, though I hope you understand my general doubt. But you'd expect that since I'm so far away from these strange occurrences.

Getting back to the point of this thread: when you pray, are you praying to something external, or are you praying to an internal divided, yet more divine, disconnected self?