8 ms·

A revolution in our sense of self

59 points by kawera 9y ago

deleted 9y ago
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ganzuul 9y ago
This article begins by observing that we can not learn the motivations of a fictional character because the character died and her motivations were not written in. It then imagines a fan-fiction continuation for the character then concludes that we cannot learn anything more. This keeps on going, apparently trying to ascribe self to the characters in the author's imagination. They seem to be terrified of the idea that the self is alone within the body and in response invent an elaborate fiction for why 'self' doesn't exist. - A common fear, but I suppose they are brave for exposing it even in part.
- barrkel 9y ago
  This notion of self - the idea of an inner homunculus with agency - has always struck me as off, since I ever could think about it. My self is an observer of my thoughts and actions; to the degree that I feel involved it is in being part of an action / reaction loop. I have a thought, observe it and react to it, which is another thought. The feeling of reaction is my self.
  - creep 9y ago
    You've probably heard of the concept of ego. The idea is that the ego reacts to thoughts and observes itself and thinks it is the self, but beneath the ego is the true self-- whatever it may be. So the ego in this case would be a tool. There's also the idea that thoughts don't come from the ego, or the self, or what-have-you; the idea that the "I" does not have thoughts, that perhaps thoughts are randomly generated and something compels us to follow one thought or another, so that we think an "I" is having a thought.
  - rocqua 9y ago
    You've probably heard of this, but if not this might be an interesting link: http://www.consciousentities.com/bats.htm http://www.consciousentities.com/bats.htm It is "What Is it Like to Be a Bat?" by Thomas Nagel. It is explores the experience of self. Even the opponents of this viewpoint call it "the most widely cited and influential thought experiment about consciousness." (wikipedia).
creep 9y ago
I found this article quite annoying. The author seems to be evaluating mind on whether or not it is rational, and taking reason as motivator for depth in the sense that there should always be reasons for our actions and beliefs. Of course the mind is irrational. And of course our sense of self is an illusion. That does not imply lack of depth. Depth in the mind is precisely NOT based on reason. It is all dynamic; chaotic in the mathematical sense. There is no "theory of mind" and there is no philosophy that could explain the self or the mind because it is in a way an abyss, full of elements of time, emotion, sensory input, and randomly arising thoughts that may or may not originate from the "self". That doesn't mean we should dispose of philosophy altogether. Philosophy and psychology are moved by and created in the energy of the era. It is important to continuously reevaluate what we think the mind is because it is representative of how we see the world. And here we have a theory of mind in our author's little article too. I see nothing in this article other than an exemplary case of being able to explain something in any way you wish.
- zerostar07 9y ago
  Depth, irrational, dynamic, chaos. I dont see how this approach helps in making any meaningful statements. Its the typical ‘unable to define it argument which is tiring.
  - creep 9y ago
    I'm not trying to make an argument.
  - creep 9y ago
    But on that note, do you think the mind can be defined? I'd be interested to see if you could do it "objectively".
    - zerostar07 9y ago
      No, which means maybe we should stop arguing about it. 'Mind' is primarily a word. EDIT: i seem to be restricted from replying further: We can discuss everything, but the argument goes in circles around non-duality, hard problem of consciousness, subjective experience, and keeps moving the goalpost of the "mind" to increasingly subjective and impossible to examine-or-falsify definitions. We can equally discuss about any kind of fiction. You also have another beast: define "definition" and "objectively". Those are not concrete entities that can be probed in the real world, they are convenient shortcuts to our mental processes that may well be flukes.
0xcde4c3db 9y ago
At the risk of making a middlebrow dismissal, it seems like the author is dancing around the Buddhist doctrine of anattā / anātman (oversimplified: "self" doesn't actually exist) [1] without actually confronting it. I guess that's fair inasmuch as concepts like the existence of a soul are nominally not part of the field of psychology (though a bunch of clinical psychology constructs don't really make sense without some kind of soul-like entity, so the issue is there implicitly). But without following through on the implications, I'm not sure what makes this a "revolution". His description of GOFAI also doesn't ring true to me, but maybe that's a matter of interpretation. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatta https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatta
zerostar07 9y ago
> Don’t despair. This does not mean there isn’t something we can define as a “self”. If Nietzsche were alive today, he would substitute 'god' for 'self' and would declare "Self is dead". Philosophers of mind have spent the latter part of the 20th century arguing about their intuitions despite contradictory evidence and really not much progress has been made apart from getting in arguments with the 'explanationists' like Dennett. But it could spark a whole new set of questions if they shifted focus from the elusive self back to the whole (which, ironically would revive god).
projektir 9y ago
Before you breach this subject you should first define the terms you use, otherwise you just end up with gibberish. These articles are often insufferably vague and unspecific in what they're trying to say. 1) What is a "self"? 2) What is a "rich inner world"? Define these and all your problems will go away. A lot of the time these terms are diffuse metaphors for a collection of things, so it's not surprising you can't find them. > But did she really want to die? This question, again, only gains complexity if you do not properly define what you're asking. What does "really want to die" mean? Create a definition, such as "a person really wants to die if they have been contemplating suicide for the past 6 months", and, again, your troubles disappear. If you don't know if Anna had such a desire for 6 months, then you're just lacking information. Nothing magical. Philosophy, psychology, sociology, etc., are complicated precisely because they are vague enough fields that we still need to look at them through an intuitive lens a lot of the time, rather than the plain logical lens. It just comes with the territory. All it means is that we do not understand the field very well. > But, as likely as not, Anna will be as unsure as anyone else about her true motivations. This is not interesting. All that is happening here is that the entity in question does not have the hardware needed to understand its own hardware. A car doesn't understand itself, either. And humans do not fully understand their brain. Most entities are like this. This doesn't meant the car is magical and non-understandable, it just means there's no need to keep the hardware and its own understanding at the same level of complexity. Don't ask the car how it works, ask someone smarter, the human. Don't ask the human how it works, as someone smarter, the world. > Why this sofa? Why Bach, not Brahms? Why this choice of career? Why children or not? Why evolution, not creationism? How does a bicycle work, or a violin, or a currency? And each justification can be buttressed with further justifications, caveats and clarifications, and each of these be defended further, seemingly without end. I wouldn't mix these things up. Most people don't introspect much, and most people adapt to their environment. You will have a lot of issues socially if you don't have some simple answer to a question like "why this choice of career". You're generally conditioned to pick a tribe, so what you believe in can be important. Basically, these justifications have arisen due to pressure to create them, they're entirely unrelated to the "self". Saying "I don't know why I like this sofa" is not fashionable, even if it's very much the truth. And there's nothing wrong with that: we don't understand our hardware, which is fine. Understanding of diffuse things like "currency" is, if anything, one of the more impressive functions of the brain that I'm not sure how long it will take for AI to replicate.
JacksonGariety 9y ago
Not a psychological theory. And certainly not a "revolutionary" one. This article is a crude, philosophical "argument" for the non-existence of qualia. It follows from his conclusions that sunsets can't really be beautiful, citizen kane can't really be a good movie, and so on.
- deleted 9y ago
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- zerostar07 9y ago
  > the non-existence of qualia Or that they are crude approximations of more fundamental neural activations. Like how clouds follow the laws of physics. edit: (i seem to be restricted from posting) i m not claiming clouds are an illusion, that's a strawman, but that studying the shape of clouds is the wrong way to go about physics. I also don't understand the arguments for 'inner life'. as far as neuroscience of the brain is concerned that's an interpretation of brain dynamics. It has been given too much undeserved attention in philosophy imho. Inner life is defined as opposed to what? outer life ? as far as the brain is concerned there is no external world, it processes neural signals that are generated entirely inside the organism, sometimes in response to external stimuli like light. Why would it be impossible for it to process the neural activity of itself the same way that it processes the neural activity of the retina.
  - danaliv 9y ago
    And yet no one has ever seriously claimed that clouds are an illusion. I don't understand this need that behaviorists have to not just set the inner life aside but to claim that it doesn't even exist. It clearly does. It's the one thing each of us knows with utmost certainty. Just because there might be an explanation for it based on more fundamental principles—principles which, I might add, we are nowhere near understanding—doesn't mean it's not real.
  - danaliv 9y ago
    (Replying to your edit) Studying clouds may not be a productive way to explore physics, but it is absolutely a productive way to explore clouds! Such study may very well be informed by physics, but the study of clouds (and related phenomena) is a field in its own right. All of that is to say that I don’t find statements like “X is just <some underpinning of X>” to be particularly consequential, even if such a statement is true. The higher-level phenomenon is still worthy of study in its own right.
laretluval 9y ago
I'm sympathetic to all Nick Chater's evidence that our conscious explanations for behavior, as expressed in natural language, have nothing to do with their actual causation. But it doesn't follow that humans don't have "beliefs" and "motivations". The human brain implements a policy which can be seen as maximizing some utility function: that's where the "hidden motivations" of e.g. Freudianism come into play.
- rocqua 9y ago
  > The human brain implements a policy which can be seen as maximizing some utility function That needs quite a bit of extra nuance. Certainly, our brains don't actually find optimal solutions. We do not reliably maximize some utility function. Instead, it seems our behavior can be explained much like some recursive approximate optimization algorithm. In this version, we have some utility function, and we do our best to optimize it. Each step being made with the presumption it will indeed optimize. But at that point, it becomes a lot harder to justify that such a utility function exists. Especially because you need concepts like 'intent' or 'belief'. But those are terms of human behavior, reducing human behavior to human behavior isn't very helpful. There are arguments that go around this. One can say that 'intent' or 'belief' come from our creator. Or, one can say these are the results of evolution. It should be noted that going from evolution to 'intent' and 'belief' is really non-trivial. As such, one might consider that perhaps, explaining humans as 'optimizing some utility function' isn't the best theory. Personally, I happen to believe the story of 'intent' arising from evolution, but it isn't clear-cut.
  - laretluval 9y ago
    Cool ideas. I think we have to place extremely high prior probability mass on the hypothesis that humans enact policies that optimize a utility function determined by evolution, for the simple reason that an organism that does this will do a lot better than one that doesn't. This thinking is reducing "human behavior to human behavior" in the sense that you'd still be using the language of intents. But if we determine intent through empirical analysis of behavior and inference of the utility function, then the content of that intent may be very very different from what we express verbally. This doesn't mean humans are irrational, just that there's a mismatch between our true goals and our verbally stated goals. Now inference of the utility function doesn't have to depend on an assumption of perfect optimization (it could be a softmax policy or something like that). Nor would it have to be trivial: to prevent trivial solutions I think you'd have to make strong assumptions about the space of plausible utility functions, such as simplicity assumptions, or maybe evolutionary assumptions. Sounds like a cool PhD project.
barrkel 9y ago
Your unawareness of your own motivations is hardly news - psychoanalysts have been making hay here for decades - but it's not evidence of lack of motivations. A behaviourist has the hammer of behaviour, and is trying to treat the mind as his nail. But he missed the mark right from the outset, for me. I don't think his defence of human creativity is on strong grounds either. Association and generative application of patterns are pretty key to creativity to my mind; what we lack is a high enough tower to properly guide intention in our pattern systems, primarily because of the inefficiency in training I suspect.
- StanislavPetrov 9y ago
  Its one thing to claim that people are "unaware of their own motivations" and quite another thing to claim, as this author does, that those motivations don't actually exist.
  - barrkel 9y ago
    There's no difference to a behaviourist...
StanislavPetrov 9y ago
This article is trash. The author is projecting his vapidity on the whole human race. >One crucial clue that the inner oracle is an illusion comes, on closer analysis, from the fact that our explanations are less than watertight. Indeed, they are systematically and spectacularly leaky. Now it is hardly controversial that our thoughts seem fragmentary and contradictory. The author may be accurate in stating that his thoughts and "explanations" are fragmentary and contradictory - but that doesn't mean the thoughts of everyone are. Indeed, logical consistency among one's thoughts, positions, and expositions is, to me, the most important standard when it comes to judging "intelligence". >I can’t quite tell you how a fridge works or how electricity flows around the house. I continually fall into confusion and contradiction when struggling to explain rules of English grammar, how quantitative easing works or the difference between a fruit and a vegetable. Clearly QE and rules of grammar aren't the only thing this author is confused about. Perhaps the author shouldn't pretend (even to himself) to understand things that he doesn't and he won't end up rationalizing and inventing fantasies to fill in the gaps in his knowledge. There's nothing wrong with acknowledging, whether to yourself or others, that you don't know how something works. Everyone has gaps in their knowledge - the world is a big place, its impossible to know everything. The difference lies in people who come to grips with their limits and abilities, and think rationally about them, and people who float through life without giving anything much "deep thought", and instead simply "wing it", and end up (like the author) constantly generalizing and making rationalizations about whatever is currently in front of their nose.
- dgreensp 9y ago
  “The author is projecting his vapidity on the whole human race.” Yes. Thank you. Does the author think nobody knows how a fridge works, and actually there is nothing to know? I recognized immediately in the metaphor of “selves as fictional characters” that the author would be arguing we are all “spin all the way down” — just stories we tell ourselves. If you work on stripping away the stories, you will find there is a “you” underneath, after all. A lot of the things we tell ourselves are not true, but that doesn’t mean there is no truth of the matter. You can even ask yourself, when you are telling yourself a story, is that really true? And you may find yourself answering, “Well, no...” You have to at least believe in yourself (so to speak) to make progress in knowing yourself, getting along with yourself, and loving yourself.
YetAnotherNick 9y ago
WARNING: contains spoiler for Anna Karenina. Man, I was just thinking of starting that book.
crispinb 9y ago
I find it strange that so many of the comments, for & against Chater, are expressed with such certainly. Philosophy and religion (lots of overlap) have been discussing these issues without resolution for millennia, psychology for decades to centuries (depending on your definition), neuroscience is starting to contribute but is still in its infancy. Thousands of minds (of various degrees of brilliance), hundreds of subcultures, dozens of nations have made busy on the topic, without anything having emerged to compel agreement, yet a substantial minority of readers here seem to think they definitively know the answer. Why is it so hard to admit ignorance? Especially in a culture claiming to vaunt science (especially here, I would have thought), whose very basis is admission of the limits of the egoistic individual to cognise reality? After a couple of centuries of incredibly promising empirical work in so many fields, it should be really, really easy to say or write “I’m not sure”. The following step (“how can we devise a way to ask nature what’s true here”) may well be a matter for specialists. But one might have hoped the initial questioning open stance would have seeped, just a little, into the culture by now. We have a long way to go.
- truculation 9y ago
  >Why is it so hard to admit ignorance? The author could help by retracting his prophecy: >The amazing creativity of your brain, as it helps us improvise our way through daily life, won’t be replicated in silicon in the near future, perhaps never. He's claiming to know the unknowable here. Indeed, it's possible that AGI has already been implemented on silicon chips and we just haven't heard about it yet.
- verylittlemeat 9y ago
  When you live in a culture that deeply believes in the idea of progress* it's blasphemous to give time to ignorance. If you believe in progress you can be humbled by ignorance but not awed by it. In the west we know of other cultures (past and present) that chose to be complacent and live in ignorant comfort but we know that they chose that path at the expense of truth. We know that our striving for truth is the reason we destroyed and dominated those who chose complacency. There is a lot of cultural superiority wrapped up in why we can't admit ignorance. In the west we believe in cavemen. We think people with spears and grass skirts are "lesser" civilizations. Even if you are the least bigoted person in the west you still feel a sense of cultural pride that you live in a world ruled by the scientific method and not by gods. You pity the natives because they lived and died and created no objective truth, they left no enduring mark on humanity. In terms of human progress they are the before and we are the after. "Cultural relativism" is a phrase many people have no time for in the west. We shouldn't long to live like the "noble savage" but I think we have serious problem in the west appreciating our cultural reality isn't the one true cultural reality. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idea_of_progress https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idea_of_progress
dgreensp 9y ago
Wait, what if we’ve just been anthropomorphizing ourselves this whole time?? That’s right, treating humans as if they have human traits like beliefs and intentions.
gcb0 9y ago
tl;dr psychologist that teaches at a business school finds out about gestalt and proceeds to sell truckloads of books by dressing it in inflamatory know it all afirmations, proved by optical ilusions (how else can you prove gestalt?) ps: same tactics applied to this comment, minus optical illusions
js8 9y ago
Does it really matter that much whether, in our minds, there is a single network ("service"), which handles both decision-making and self-understanding, or these are two disparate networks that work in tandem? It actually reminds me of adversarial networks (like AlphaGo), you could also ask why there should be two networks that encode good game states, isn't it a waste? Maybe each network knows something that the other doesn't. Likewise, in our minds, maybe sometimes the decision-making network produces such crap that it needs to be tested first on a fictional model human, our own sense of self, before it can be vetted enough to be sensible to be actualized on the environment and other people.

59 points by kawera 9y ago

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

This article begins by observing that we can not learn the motivations of a fictional character because the character died and her motivations were not written in. It then imagines a fan-fiction continuation for the character then concludes that we cannot learn anything more. This keeps on going, apparently trying to ascribe self to the characters in the author's imagination. They seem to be terrified of the idea that the self is alone within the body and in response invent an elaborate fiction for why 'self' doesn't exist. - A common fear, but I suppose they are brave for exposing it even in part.

barrkel 9y ago
This notion of self - the idea of an inner homunculus with agency - has always struck me as off, since I ever could think about it. My self is an observer of my thoughts and actions; to the degree that I feel involved it is in being part of an action / reaction loop. I have a thought, observe it and react to it, which is another thought. The feeling of reaction is my self.
- creep 9y ago
  You've probably heard of the concept of ego. The idea is that the ego reacts to thoughts and observes itself and thinks it is the self, but beneath the ego is the true self-- whatever it may be. So the ego in this case would be a tool. There's also the idea that thoughts don't come from the ego, or the self, or what-have-you; the idea that the "I" does not have thoughts, that perhaps thoughts are randomly generated and something compels us to follow one thought or another, so that we think an "I" is having a thought.
- rocqua 9y ago
  You've probably heard of this, but if not this might be an interesting link: http://www.consciousentities.com/bats.htm http://www.consciousentities.com/bats.htm It is "What Is it Like to Be a Bat?" by Thomas Nagel. It is explores the experience of self. Even the opponents of this viewpoint call it "the most widely cited and influential thought experiment about consciousness." (wikipedia).

creep 9y ago

I found this article quite annoying. The author seems to be evaluating mind on whether or not it is rational, and taking reason as motivator for depth in the sense that there should always be reasons for our actions and beliefs. Of course the mind is irrational. And of course our sense of self is an illusion. That does not imply lack of depth. Depth in the mind is precisely NOT based on reason. It is all dynamic; chaotic in the mathematical sense. There is no "theory of mind" and there is no philosophy that could explain the self or the mind because it is in a way an abyss, full of elements of time, emotion, sensory input, and randomly arising thoughts that may or may not originate from the "self". That doesn't mean we should dispose of philosophy altogether. Philosophy and psychology are moved by and created in the energy of the era. It is important to continuously reevaluate what we think the mind is because it is representative of how we see the world. And here we have a theory of mind in our author's little article too. I see nothing in this article other than an exemplary case of being able to explain something in any way you wish.

zerostar07 9y ago
Depth, irrational, dynamic, chaos. I dont see how this approach helps in making any meaningful statements. Its the typical ‘unable to define it argument which is tiring.
- creep 9y ago
  I'm not trying to make an argument.
- creep 9y ago
  But on that note, do you think the mind can be defined? I'd be interested to see if you could do it "objectively".
  - zerostar07 9y ago
    No, which means maybe we should stop arguing about it. 'Mind' is primarily a word. EDIT: i seem to be restricted from replying further: We can discuss everything, but the argument goes in circles around non-duality, hard problem of consciousness, subjective experience, and keeps moving the goalpost of the "mind" to increasingly subjective and impossible to examine-or-falsify definitions. We can equally discuss about any kind of fiction. You also have another beast: define "definition" and "objectively". Those are not concrete entities that can be probed in the real world, they are convenient shortcuts to our mental processes that may well be flukes.

0xcde4c3db 9y ago

At the risk of making a middlebrow dismissal, it seems like the author is dancing around the Buddhist doctrine of anattā / anātman (oversimplified: "self" doesn't actually exist) [1] without actually confronting it. I guess that's fair inasmuch as concepts like the existence of a soul are nominally not part of the field of psychology (though a bunch of clinical psychology constructs don't really make sense without some kind of soul-like entity, so the issue is there implicitly). But without following through on the implications, I'm not sure what makes this a "revolution". His description of GOFAI also doesn't ring true to me, but maybe that's a matter of interpretation. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatta https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatta

zerostar07 9y ago

> Don’t despair. This does not mean there isn’t something we can define as a “self”. If Nietzsche were alive today, he would substitute 'god' for 'self' and would declare "Self is dead". Philosophers of mind have spent the latter part of the 20th century arguing about their intuitions despite contradictory evidence and really not much progress has been made apart from getting in arguments with the 'explanationists' like Dennett. But it could spark a whole new set of questions if they shifted focus from the elusive self back to the whole (which, ironically would revive god).

projektir 9y ago

Before you breach this subject you should first define the terms you use, otherwise you just end up with gibberish. These articles are often insufferably vague and unspecific in what they're trying to say. 1) What is a "self"? 2) What is a "rich inner world"? Define these and all your problems will go away. A lot of the time these terms are diffuse metaphors for a collection of things, so it's not surprising you can't find them. > But did she really want to die? This question, again, only gains complexity if you do not properly define what you're asking. What does "really want to die" mean? Create a definition, such as "a person really wants to die if they have been contemplating suicide for the past 6 months", and, again, your troubles disappear. If you don't know if Anna had such a desire for 6 months, then you're just lacking information. Nothing magical. Philosophy, psychology, sociology, etc., are complicated precisely because they are vague enough fields that we still need to look at them through an intuitive lens a lot of the time, rather than the plain logical lens. It just comes with the territory. All it means is that we do not understand the field very well. > But, as likely as not, Anna will be as unsure as anyone else about her true motivations. This is not interesting. All that is happening here is that the entity in question does not have the hardware needed to understand its own hardware. A car doesn't understand itself, either. And humans do not fully understand their brain. Most entities are like this. This doesn't meant the car is magical and non-understandable, it just means there's no need to keep the hardware and its own understanding at the same level of complexity. Don't ask the car how it works, ask someone smarter, the human. Don't ask the human how it works, as someone smarter, the world. > Why this sofa? Why Bach, not Brahms? Why this choice of career? Why children or not? Why evolution, not creationism? How does a bicycle work, or a violin, or a currency? And each justification can be buttressed with further justifications, caveats and clarifications, and each of these be defended further, seemingly without end. I wouldn't mix these things up. Most people don't introspect much, and most people adapt to their environment. You will have a lot of issues socially if you don't have some simple answer to a question like "why this choice of career". You're generally conditioned to pick a tribe, so what you believe in can be important. Basically, these justifications have arisen due to pressure to create them, they're entirely unrelated to the "self". Saying "I don't know why I like this sofa" is not fashionable, even if it's very much the truth. And there's nothing wrong with that: we don't understand our hardware, which is fine. Understanding of diffuse things like "currency" is, if anything, one of the more impressive functions of the brain that I'm not sure how long it will take for AI to replicate.

JacksonGariety 9y ago

Not a psychological theory. And certainly not a "revolutionary" one. This article is a crude, philosophical "argument" for the non-existence of qualia. It follows from his conclusions that sunsets can't really be beautiful, citizen kane can't really be a good movie, and so on.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
zerostar07 9y ago
> the non-existence of qualia Or that they are crude approximations of more fundamental neural activations. Like how clouds follow the laws of physics. edit: (i seem to be restricted from posting) i m not claiming clouds are an illusion, that's a strawman, but that studying the shape of clouds is the wrong way to go about physics. I also don't understand the arguments for 'inner life'. as far as neuroscience of the brain is concerned that's an interpretation of brain dynamics. It has been given too much undeserved attention in philosophy imho. Inner life is defined as opposed to what? outer life ? as far as the brain is concerned there is no external world, it processes neural signals that are generated entirely inside the organism, sometimes in response to external stimuli like light. Why would it be impossible for it to process the neural activity of itself the same way that it processes the neural activity of the retina.
- danaliv 9y ago
  And yet no one has ever seriously claimed that clouds are an illusion. I don't understand this need that behaviorists have to not just set the inner life aside but to claim that it doesn't even exist. It clearly does. It's the one thing each of us knows with utmost certainty. Just because there might be an explanation for it based on more fundamental principles—principles which, I might add, we are nowhere near understanding—doesn't mean it's not real.
- danaliv 9y ago
  (Replying to your edit) Studying clouds may not be a productive way to explore physics, but it is absolutely a productive way to explore clouds! Such study may very well be informed by physics, but the study of clouds (and related phenomena) is a field in its own right. All of that is to say that I don’t find statements like “X is just <some underpinning of X>” to be particularly consequential, even if such a statement is true. The higher-level phenomenon is still worthy of study in its own right.

laretluval 9y ago

I'm sympathetic to all Nick Chater's evidence that our conscious explanations for behavior, as expressed in natural language, have nothing to do with their actual causation. But it doesn't follow that humans don't have "beliefs" and "motivations". The human brain implements a policy which can be seen as maximizing some utility function: that's where the "hidden motivations" of e.g. Freudianism come into play.

rocqua 9y ago
> The human brain implements a policy which can be seen as maximizing some utility function That needs quite a bit of extra nuance. Certainly, our brains don't actually find optimal solutions. We do not reliably maximize some utility function. Instead, it seems our behavior can be explained much like some recursive approximate optimization algorithm. In this version, we have some utility function, and we do our best to optimize it. Each step being made with the presumption it will indeed optimize. But at that point, it becomes a lot harder to justify that such a utility function exists. Especially because you need concepts like 'intent' or 'belief'. But those are terms of human behavior, reducing human behavior to human behavior isn't very helpful. There are arguments that go around this. One can say that 'intent' or 'belief' come from our creator. Or, one can say these are the results of evolution. It should be noted that going from evolution to 'intent' and 'belief' is really non-trivial. As such, one might consider that perhaps, explaining humans as 'optimizing some utility function' isn't the best theory. Personally, I happen to believe the story of 'intent' arising from evolution, but it isn't clear-cut.
- laretluval 9y ago
  Cool ideas. I think we have to place extremely high prior probability mass on the hypothesis that humans enact policies that optimize a utility function determined by evolution, for the simple reason that an organism that does this will do a lot better than one that doesn't. This thinking is reducing "human behavior to human behavior" in the sense that you'd still be using the language of intents. But if we determine intent through empirical analysis of behavior and inference of the utility function, then the content of that intent may be very very different from what we express verbally. This doesn't mean humans are irrational, just that there's a mismatch between our true goals and our verbally stated goals. Now inference of the utility function doesn't have to depend on an assumption of perfect optimization (it could be a softmax policy or something like that). Nor would it have to be trivial: to prevent trivial solutions I think you'd have to make strong assumptions about the space of plausible utility functions, such as simplicity assumptions, or maybe evolutionary assumptions. Sounds like a cool PhD project.

barrkel 9y ago

Your unawareness of your own motivations is hardly news - psychoanalysts have been making hay here for decades - but it's not evidence of lack of motivations. A behaviourist has the hammer of behaviour, and is trying to treat the mind as his nail. But he missed the mark right from the outset, for me. I don't think his defence of human creativity is on strong grounds either. Association and generative application of patterns are pretty key to creativity to my mind; what we lack is a high enough tower to properly guide intention in our pattern systems, primarily because of the inefficiency in training I suspect.

StanislavPetrov 9y ago
Its one thing to claim that people are "unaware of their own motivations" and quite another thing to claim, as this author does, that those motivations don't actually exist.
- barrkel 9y ago
  There's no difference to a behaviourist...

StanislavPetrov 9y ago

This article is trash. The author is projecting his vapidity on the whole human race. >One crucial clue that the inner oracle is an illusion comes, on closer analysis, from the fact that our explanations are less than watertight. Indeed, they are systematically and spectacularly leaky. Now it is hardly controversial that our thoughts seem fragmentary and contradictory. The author may be accurate in stating that his thoughts and "explanations" are fragmentary and contradictory - but that doesn't mean the thoughts of everyone are. Indeed, logical consistency among one's thoughts, positions, and expositions is, to me, the most important standard when it comes to judging "intelligence". >I can’t quite tell you how a fridge works or how electricity flows around the house. I continually fall into confusion and contradiction when struggling to explain rules of English grammar, how quantitative easing works or the difference between a fruit and a vegetable. Clearly QE and rules of grammar aren't the only thing this author is confused about. Perhaps the author shouldn't pretend (even to himself) to understand things that he doesn't and he won't end up rationalizing and inventing fantasies to fill in the gaps in his knowledge. There's nothing wrong with acknowledging, whether to yourself or others, that you don't know how something works. Everyone has gaps in their knowledge - the world is a big place, its impossible to know everything. The difference lies in people who come to grips with their limits and abilities, and think rationally about them, and people who float through life without giving anything much "deep thought", and instead simply "wing it", and end up (like the author) constantly generalizing and making rationalizations about whatever is currently in front of their nose.

dgreensp 9y ago
“The author is projecting his vapidity on the whole human race.” Yes. Thank you. Does the author think nobody knows how a fridge works, and actually there is nothing to know? I recognized immediately in the metaphor of “selves as fictional characters” that the author would be arguing we are all “spin all the way down” — just stories we tell ourselves. If you work on stripping away the stories, you will find there is a “you” underneath, after all. A lot of the things we tell ourselves are not true, but that doesn’t mean there is no truth of the matter. You can even ask yourself, when you are telling yourself a story, is that really true? And you may find yourself answering, “Well, no...” You have to at least believe in yourself (so to speak) to make progress in knowing yourself, getting along with yourself, and loving yourself.

YetAnotherNick 9y ago

WARNING: contains spoiler for Anna Karenina. Man, I was just thinking of starting that book.

crispinb 9y ago

I find it strange that so many of the comments, for & against Chater, are expressed with such certainly. Philosophy and religion (lots of overlap) have been discussing these issues without resolution for millennia, psychology for decades to centuries (depending on your definition), neuroscience is starting to contribute but is still in its infancy. Thousands of minds (of various degrees of brilliance), hundreds of subcultures, dozens of nations have made busy on the topic, without anything having emerged to compel agreement, yet a substantial minority of readers here seem to think they definitively know the answer. Why is it so hard to admit ignorance? Especially in a culture claiming to vaunt science (especially here, I would have thought), whose very basis is admission of the limits of the egoistic individual to cognise reality? After a couple of centuries of incredibly promising empirical work in so many fields, it should be really, really easy to say or write “I’m not sure”. The following step (“how can we devise a way to ask nature what’s true here”) may well be a matter for specialists. But one might have hoped the initial questioning open stance would have seeped, just a little, into the culture by now. We have a long way to go.

truculation 9y ago
>Why is it so hard to admit ignorance? The author could help by retracting his prophecy: >The amazing creativity of your brain, as it helps us improvise our way through daily life, won’t be replicated in silicon in the near future, perhaps never. He's claiming to know the unknowable here. Indeed, it's possible that AGI has already been implemented on silicon chips and we just haven't heard about it yet.
verylittlemeat 9y ago
When you live in a culture that deeply believes in the idea of progress* it's blasphemous to give time to ignorance. If you believe in progress you can be humbled by ignorance but not awed by it. In the west we know of other cultures (past and present) that chose to be complacent and live in ignorant comfort but we know that they chose that path at the expense of truth. We know that our striving for truth is the reason we destroyed and dominated those who chose complacency. There is a lot of cultural superiority wrapped up in why we can't admit ignorance. In the west we believe in cavemen. We think people with spears and grass skirts are "lesser" civilizations. Even if you are the least bigoted person in the west you still feel a sense of cultural pride that you live in a world ruled by the scientific method and not by gods. You pity the natives because they lived and died and created no objective truth, they left no enduring mark on humanity. In terms of human progress they are the before and we are the after. "Cultural relativism" is a phrase many people have no time for in the west. We shouldn't long to live like the "noble savage" but I think we have serious problem in the west appreciating our cultural reality isn't the one true cultural reality. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idea_of_progress https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idea_of_progress

dgreensp 9y ago

Wait, what if we’ve just been anthropomorphizing ourselves this whole time?? That’s right, treating humans as if they have human traits like beliefs and intentions.

gcb0 9y ago

tl;dr psychologist that teaches at a business school finds out about gestalt and proceeds to sell truckloads of books by dressing it in inflamatory know it all afirmations, proved by optical ilusions (how else can you prove gestalt?) ps: same tactics applied to this comment, minus optical illusions

js8 9y ago

Does it really matter that much whether, in our minds, there is a single network ("service"), which handles both decision-making and self-understanding, or these are two disparate networks that work in tandem? It actually reminds me of adversarial networks (like AlphaGo), you could also ask why there should be two networks that encode good game states, isn't it a waste? Maybe each network knows something that the other doesn't. Likewise, in our minds, maybe sometimes the decision-making network produces such crap that it needs to be tested first on a fictional model human, our own sense of self, before it can be vetted enough to be sensible to be actualized on the environment and other people.