31–40 of 42 posts
Brains are survival engines, not truth detectors. If self deception promotes fitness, the brain lies. Stops noticing irrelevant things. Truth never matters. Only fitness. By now you don’t experience the world as it exists at all. - Peter Watts "Blindsight"
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> The whole thing reads as being rushed and superficial. Journalism tends to reward this. I used to work in a much more public-facing field where we would regularly get calls from local journalists about projects we were involved in. The journalists never printed the quotes from the engineers who gave thoughtful, measured, and accurate answers. They always quoted the blowhards and the charlatans in our office who'd i…
"Journalism" doesn't tend to reward this. It is a tautological statement than faster is better, all else being equal, for any type of work. In this case, the article is by a guest author. They are not a journalist and this isn't, technically, "journalism". "Journalism" also isn't monolithic enough to warrant the accusation that the trade itself is lowering its standards across-the-board. There are plenty of examples…
It certainly feels that way to me. There are still holdouts of really good journalism, like Reuters, but even the likes of the New York Times seems to have significantly degraded. Good journalism seems to be the exception rather than the rule.
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> The whole thing reads as being rushed and superficial. Journalism tends to reward this. I used to work in a much more public-facing field where we would regularly get calls from local journalists about projects we were involved in. The journalists never printed the quotes from the engineers who gave thoughtful, measured, and accurate answers. They always quoted the blowhards and the charlatans in our office who'd i…
> A journalist's job is to sell newspapers, or clicks, not to keep anyone informed. Yes. And to propagandize on behalf of his and his organization's preferred political views. Seldom do they probably consciously realize they are doing this. The echo chamber synergizes with their prejudices and steers them in that direction. And for them, it's a job. Their reward is the editor's approval, or at least the absence of hi…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The whole thing reads as being rushed and superficial. Journalism tends to reward this. I used to work in a much more public-facing field where we would regularly get calls from local journalists about projects we were involved in. The journalists never printed the quotes from the engineers who gave thoughtful, measured, and accurate answers. They always quoted the blowhards and the charlatans in our office who'd i…
"Journalism" doesn't tend to reward this. It is a tautological statement than faster is better, all else being equal, for any type of work. In this case, the article is by a guest author. They are not a journalist and this isn't, technically, "journalism". "Journalism" also isn't monolithic enough to warrant the accusation that the trade itself is lowering its standards across-the-board. There are plenty of examples…
Since the former has become the norm, and the latter the exception, the former has become, technically, "journalism". Just another case where a word's meaning has changed due to ubiquity.
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Then the same applies to Mr. Watts’ statement, and we are therefore under no obligation to take it as true.
Not sure I follow your logic. Watts is essentially using deductive reasoning: 1. The set of beliefs that are true are not equivalent to the set of beliefs that promote fitness 2. The brain is designed to promote fitness 3. The brain may hold beliefs that are not true You are saying that Watts' statement is undermining itself, that the conclusion undermines either of the premises. But neither 1 or 2 is in contradictio…
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Is that a true statement? Has Peter Watts transcended his humanity and entered the ethereal realm of gods where he is no longer subject to that which he claims humans are subject?
Aside of what the other commenters replied (in support of the assertion), please bear in mind "Blindsight" is a scifi novel. Peter Watts is not a scientist, he's a writer of fiction. Whether he believes what he wrote in his book is uncertain, but remember this is primarily a work of fiction.
It's a work of fiction but it is one that folks in graduate neurophysiology courses have been encouraged to read.
and it has a bibliography at the end
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And how would you solve the compression problem of dealing with all that data? Our brains are running a similar algorithm to mpeg-4 where we discard redundant data and make some basic predictions about movement. If they didn’t we’d waste a lot of time paying attention to unimportant things in our visual field.
Those are not necessarily unimportant things. These are just things we don't have a capacity to notice because of crap hardware we have to process this information. We don't conciously process 2% of what we see because only 2% is relevant. We do that because hardware needed to process more wouldn't pass through birth canal.
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Those are not necessarily unimportant things. These are just things we don't have a capacity to notice because of crap hardware we have to process this information. We don't conciously process 2% of what we see because only 2% is relevant. We do that because hardware needed to process more wouldn't pass through birth canal.
The 2% off visual data that we process is essentially just the stuff that is changing. It’s not some secret hidden knowledge, we can still intentionally examine things closely and see all there is to see.
After you give up counting them, here is an explanation: https://www.sciencealert.com/here-s-why-you-can-t-see-all-12...
Brains are survival engines, not truth detectors. If self deception promotes fitness, the brain lies. Stops noticing irrelevant things. Truth never matters. Only fitness. By now you don’t experience the world as it exists at all. - Peter Watts "Blindsight"
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not sure I follow your logic. Watts is essentially using deductive reasoning: 1. The set of beliefs that are true are not equivalent to the set of beliefs that promote fitness 2. The brain is designed to promote fitness 3. The brain may hold beliefs that are not true You are saying that Watts' statement is undermining itself, that the conclusion undermines either of the premises. But neither 1 or 2 is in contradictio…
In what way is the object in your first premise perceptible to the subject in Mr. Watts’ quote? It would require a faculty “higher” than the brain, which is restricted in access to only a subset of the object, no?
I would argue that this is irrelevant. We would only need to demonstrate one belief that is useful for fitness but that is factually untrue in order to prove the first premise. The belief that bad spirits cause disease is untrue but useful as it compels you to avoid dead bodies which actually may cause disease. We have now (in an admittedly loose sense of the word) proven the first premise.
Unless we assume 3 implies a Pascal's demon scenario where all attempts to identify any set of beliefs and evaluate their truth value or usefulness for fitness will only provide illusory insights I believe that 3 does not contradict 1.