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Yeah but there's more to mental states than how they make us feel. They have content and meaning. Which may affect subsequent and contingent feelings, for examp
by winchling 7y ago
Yeah but there's more to mental states than how they make us feel. They have content and meaning. Which may affect subsequent and contingent feelings, for example.
>Our outdated brains are built to handle the realities of ancient societies. Our brain is supposed to be really good at certain things like escaping a lion attack, finding a mate, or sharing a common meal.
So, in discovering the laws of thermodynamics, evolution and quantum theory, which our brains presumably weren't designed for, we were just being lucky? When will this luck run out, exactly, and how?
- Bakary 7y ago>Yeah but there's more to mental states than how they make us feel. They have content and meaning. Which may affect subsequent and contingent feelings, for example. Could you explain the distinction?
- winchling 7y agoWe're learning creatures. But the knowledge we gain can't be predicted in advance. So if I'm aiming for a mental state I'm not going to know in advance all the features of that state. If I could, it would have to be an undesirable state since I wouldn't be learning anything. I can only go for a feeling. Yet the choices of subsequent future mental states based on the feelings I predict they will elicit will depend on details of what I learned last time. So we're not really aiming at mental states. Nor are we accumulating them because in reality we forget most of the details of our experiences.
- bigiain 7y agoYou _can_ hammer a nail in using a power drill. But that doesn't mean there aren't better tools for hammering nails with, or jobs that a power drill does way better than hammering nails. (I'm not _really_ convinced that pop psychology explanations involving our brains being optimised for not-getting-eaten-by-lions are necessarily correct, but I certainly acknowledge that some of our physiology like our vision system and muscle makeup have evolved under different conditions to sitting in a university with instructions to "Write down the problem. Think really hard. Write down the answer.", as Feynman characterised the process of discovering modern physics...)
- coldtea 7y ago>So, in discovering the laws of thermodynamics, evolution and quantum theory, which our brains presumably weren't designed for, we were just being lucky? No, it was using a tool evolved over million years for something else, and very good at that something else (that it can even do it instinctively), to do another task. And that task only 1 in millions of us can do (how many "discovered the laws of thermodynamics, evolution and quantum theory"?) that have uniquely smart brains, and that even them had to undergo years and years of training to perform them. Case in point, billions of people can predict where a baseball would fall instinctively, thanks to their brain's evolutionary capabilities, without solving the physics equations. But to do it with solving the equations takes years of training. Even in Einstein or Feynman or whatever, their basic evolutionary capacities and instincts (hunger, anger, lust, fight or flight, etc) would trump their physics prowess anytime...
- winchling 7y agoNah, learning where a ball will land takes years of training too.