Thursday, September 14, 2006

 

MY COMMENTS TO LIANE´S WORK

Liane Gabora’s thesis

Chapter 5

Each

“One could take this idea even further and say that if, say, a diary or tape recording can function as an externalized form of memory, then perhaps we each function as an externalized form of memory for each other”. /what is marked red I do not understand/

5.1.

Exemplar theories, A might simply remind B

Thinking developed from only mere and simple reaction to some stimulus; as I have written earlier. A certain sound, or certain colour was for some reason perceived as positive, e.g. sound of water presenting the possibility to drink, some sounds might have been perceived as negative; some other sounds might have during evolution change their meaning or have both, positive and negative, depending on some other factor, e.g. the sound of fire. The intensity of sound of fire might be such a factor; if the sound of fire is too intense, it might mean danger, if less intense, it might mean warmth, warm meal, light etc.

This “A reminding B” might be of high importance.

Shocking, I have just written this example and on the next page in your thesis you have extremely similar example with Mary and John; Mary showing water fountain to John and he takes a drink…..I will get mad…sometimes we think extremely similar

5.2.2

Chunking is a great idea…corresponds with my experiences

5.4.2

Content addressability

this seems true to me too, or feasible, BUT there must be some biases, it happens too often that we can remember the film, the total content of the film, names of three actors, the whole plot but we cannot recall the name of the actor playing the main character, spite we like him/ her, and we know that we know the name, but just cannot recall…so there must be a kind of pitfall to the hypercube, at least from time to time, sometimes it must be so that the activation of nerves does not function properly, but why??

Yesterday I had an idea, instead of this cube, I would make a comparison to a absorbent paper /blotting paper, tablet or sinking paper – which ever of these words is still used/ . Imagine this paper standing for our memory and the ink blot as the “meme”, the cultural information, if we get two or more pieces of CI then, the paper can take up all inks of different color, and they are overlapping sometimes and sometimes not, but there is the total information stored.
In order to make it a bit more three-dimensional, compared to the paper, nearly only two-dimensional, it might be a sponge, instead of absorbent paper, and I would come pretty much closer to your hypercube, but sponge is easier to understand.
This uncertainty aspect of memory reminds me of quantum physics “unschärfe”, and it might slightly correspond with the ideas of Prof. Hameroff. This is really a good idea!

5.4.3
“It seems reasonable that the surviving subset of the M possible inputs to each neural pathway is determined by biological and cultural selective pressures, instead of at random.” Perfect!!!! This is what I have said already before about sounds and light signals, waves, perceiving stimuli through our senses, actually our senses have developed in order to be able to perceive that type of signals which is normal here. Out of which there would be one really interesting conclusion: anywhere in the universe, if the laws of physics are the same there as here / which as far as I know must be so / the “creatures” organisms living there / if any / must function on the same basis as here on earth.

We have our senses, say hearing and seeing, limited to certain waves which can be perceived; somewhere in the universe there might be organisms capable of perceiving waves which we do not. Or, the second possibility, we do perceive all the wave spectrum, BUT unconsciously, we do not know it and cannot work with such information being transmitted to us in the wave lengths we are not capable of working with,

5.5.1

Liane you are great! I had similar ideas some 18 years ago, about parents. I came up with the following idea: Whatever parents do while teaching their child is wrong, only sometimes it can happen that they “hit” the proper point in the child’s mind. The problem is that we do not know what all information are stored in the brain of a child when it is born, then we do not know, and cannot know, what will happen when the child has some experience and how through the mixture of inherited stuff and experienced stuff the “worldview” develops, therefore we cannot properly take care of our children.


“Actions influence culture by affecting other individuals directly, as in dance or displays of affection or aggression, or indirectly, via artefacts such as buildings or art.”

Here I do not agree fully, I believe that any kind of communication is INDIRECT, there is always a kind of coding involved, and this coding can be made responsible for some interference, misunderstandings. The only DIRECT communication which I can imagine would be telepathy, and even that might appear later as indirect way of communication, most probably. Maybe the direct communication does not exist at all or maybe only inside of each single organism. And maybe even this would be indirect.

There are different ways of communication coding, some permit for higher bias and some are more precise, nevertheless, even these codes permit for misinterpretation: Word, language as a system of communication permits for extremely high bias, pictures for less and picture sequences, videos for even less.

It would be interesting to find out how many errors in communication happen e.g. in our immune system, or somewhere else, in our body.

5.5.2

“One’s conceptual network is in an ongoing process of responding and adapting to the world around it, and these changes in turn affect the impact it has back on the world.”

Only one comment here: extremely perfect!!

I only understand this also from the evolutionary perspective; this is also the “drive” or the way how we have developed, or as everything has developed.

“The correlation between the relativity concept of one instant and the tiger perception-concept of the next instant would be almost zero. Since bodily protection is higher on the hierarchy of needs at that instant than the need to continue with the theory of relativity, his momentous conceptual lineage would come to a screeching halt. But would it be lost forever? No. Sooner or later, once the tiger situation was taken care of, the relativity stream of thought would inevitably resume itself.”

Well, here I have some problems, to accept this without at least a small protest. I think that this can but does not have to happen. The reason again is the coding. If we have an idea in our head in words and someone disturbs, it can really happen that you will never get back onto the absolutely same train of thoughts…similar ...ok maybe but the good idea is lost, and I think in your brain then forever, some other brain might overtake the job some time later while reading your ideas and based upon them create “NEW OWN” idea that is exactly the one you lost some time ago.

The reason is according to my thinking that the “feeling”, the “perfect emotion” is lost.

What do you think of this??

Actually you confirm this a bit in the next subchapter

5.5.3
“Even the recollection of a previous episode is a construction event. Heraclitus said ‘You never step into the same stream twice’, and this applies to streams of experience as well as streams of water.”

Strange, I wanted to quote him too, in order to support my slight protest above.

5.5.4

This activation threshold you write about, is only another way of a system permitting for misinterpretation, because it is again only a different kind of coding

Any time we must apply some kind of coding it permits for misinterpretation, and we code basically everything and in “multi-level-coding” system, Thus our whole system of cultural communication consist of many subsequent coding systems depending on each other, and each of them permits for errors and misinterpretations.
Gosh, you bring me to unbelievable heights in my brain activity performance.

6.1
I am not sure but that what you write here - “In other words, when it comes to creativity, how your ‘beer cans’ are connected together is as important as how many of them there are.”- reminds me of the relation of quantity and quality in philosophy.

6.1.3

This example of yours, about noticing blue and torn book, and the boy who did not notice that at all, and the fact that then later the girl need not consciously recall that the other girl was sloppy /as you said/, is in fact that what I call emotions, the girl will be careful in giving things to the other girl, WITHOUT knowing why. BUT she will try to give a logical answer when asked, and this logical answer can be absolutely MADE UP; made up based on feelings, emotions which were stored together with the blue and torn book.

6.1.4

Here I found information that I did not know; the correlation of intelligence and creativity being correlated up to IQ of 120 and by higher IQ they are not correlated anymore. It is shocking for me. I tell you why. Without knowing this I maintain that the voting right can be given to people with higher IQ than 120 plus passing a test.

I feel that democracy today means that the majority that means people with less creativity and less intelligence decide about the future of those who are remarkably better.

6.1.5
Extremely interesting idea, I think it fits with my observation in economics and some others too; basically, if I understand you well, it says, the smarter you are, the deeper and the more complex your abstractions are, the MORE of new ones you can make. In simply words, the smarter you are, the faster your development will be, relatively to others.
This is also valid for an economy; the stronger an economy is, the faster it can grow compared to other economies in the world, typically US economy compared to other economies in the world, if there is a free trade.
Such “evolutionary” behavior or development can also be explained in even simpler example: a man who is strong and is using his strength at work and even in his leisure will constantly gain strength, / or will not loose it with progressing age / compared to a man who is not so strong and therefore cannot work so hard, and with the age he will loose his strength.

6.2.1 and on
Your example with the “Beer” in Goosehead Breweries is absolutely excellent, our creativity really depends on whether there is or not something within the reach in our brain; this wording is really good.

Liane, this is absolutely the best thing I have ever read about this topic, perfect, perfect, perfect. !!!

6.4.4
“The fact that ideas are not independently self-replicating like genes does not prevent them from proliferating.”

Here I have my problems. I believe genes also do not independently self-replicate. We only think they do because our knowledge is too poor. For sure there will be a system behind that, but a system that we do not know of now, and of course we do not know how such system works.

I would assume that there will be a sort of “outside” influence on stirring up all genes and creating new set of them, similar as the one about ideas.

From evolutionary point of view there must be some possibility for genes to evolve, to develop. This might be done by several “epigenetic” steps, multi-level coding of important information.

“Our worldviews overlap to the extent that similar experiences and genetic make-ups cause our brains to process information similarly. But they don’t overlap perfectly; each individual’s train of thought traces out a unique trajectory through conceptual space. It can be useful to think in terms of not only the worldview of an individual, but also the worldview of a group or even human society at large, wherein all frontiers of human endeavour are incorporated.”

This is in other words what drives me to understand this topic, the worldviews of different societies, nations, where the language builds up the relative border between geographically neighbouring nations. There is a funny thing to think of: there are no problems of mixing genes among members of neighbouring nations, but there are huge problems in accepting “MEMES” of the neighbour, mostly. Pretty often this incapability is blended over by seemingly proper behaviour, but mostly it is only about economic advantage. Basic examples of this is Mexico and the USA, or The Czech Republic and Germany / meaning only former West Germany, as former East Germans are about the same as Czechs, but they have the advantage of language./ Next example might be North and South Korea, and there might be other examples unknown to me, or where the difference is so subtle that we do not perceive these differences.

There is one more interesting phenomenon that I can see: since the unification of the two German states, it seems to me that the traits, memes, ideas of easterners / East Germans/ infects the minds of West Germans and not vice versa It might be explained by the fact that the eastern ideas are somewhat better for getting the survival advantage over the other. They are more comfortable, one does not have to strive too much, just only steal or betray, and the result comes fast, one does not have to wait.

It is a bit like destroying a car, where you see the result of your action immediately, but it takes hell of a time to construct one yourself. Some people need this fast “REWARD” for their actions Therefore, also there are extremely many people who start to learn a foreign language, but only few go through that, most of them drop that goal pretty soon; reason being it takes too long to learn a language.

6.6.

“To return to the Bob and Doug MacKenzie parlance, culture may have begun with the emergence of a ‘plastic thingy’—a hierarchical network of abstractions that unifies memories into an interconnected web.”

The beginning of culture in this sense according to my understanding of evolution is actually the first kind of a protocell that was capable of perceiving some kind of coding, even without knowing what information that coding carries; waves of sound or some similar waves, as that coding was the drive for the protocell to develop something to decode the signals.


7. and 8.

It seems to me that the problem of OOL and OOC could be solved by the law of change in quantity changing into new quality, German philosophers.


MY REMARKS

Here I believe I start to understand your autocatalytic systems. I believe I had similar idea but another approach. I just imagined something whatever, might be some of polymers e.g., in the unpleasant environment on earth at that time, and found out that already there interaction between this polymer and the outside world had to happen, and it was possible only respecting and making use of the laws of physics, basically waves; waves of light and waves of sound.

As far as passing on the information from one generation to another, I found out that it is not only this “hard heritage”, but also the “soft” one; soft heritage standing for epigenetics. Then I realized the system substance of the whole problem, any organism is a system, it must permit for development but also it must provide for stability, these is valid basically for all systems, in economics too. So gene provide hard heritage, thus taking care of the stability of the system. Epigenetics stores and passes over information which can cause changes.

I even believe that this must be multi-level system, only genes and “epigenes” would be too little for me. There must be more stages, maybe 4 or 5 or even more. A new impact of the outside world upon the living system must prove in time that it makes sense to code it “hard” into genes in many levels. I also believe that in humans and maybe in some animals too, the “soft” heritage contains also the mental information.

If this were true it might become the explanation for the well-known recalling of one’s past live. Actually these people do not recall THEIR past live but they recall the stored mental information passed on them by all their predecessors.

Links:
http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/news/story.html?id=fd13d82d-ac11-40f4-a856-44a7bbe18f56

Text of the link

'Second genetic code' shakes heredity theory
OTTAWA -- Arturas Petronis and Moshe Szyf know a little something about the fads of science. As pioneers in the budding field of study known as epigenetics, they took their share of abuse for supporting scientific theories that, for many years, were considered heresy by most scientists.

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/medicalnews.php?newsid=49112

http://news-info.wustl.edu/news/page/normal/7408.html


There is a lot of new information on epigenetics. Extremely interesting and it highly supports my thinking, I hope at least.

I have also a section of epigenetics in my blog, about one year old, but I have not written too much on epigenetics.

Now I am somewhere in the middle of chapter 8, you are great, I like your way of thinking.


Chapter 10

“Physicists too are interested in how micro-physical entities change, and describe it as a process of either collapse or dynamical evolution. Is there anything all these supposed evolutionary processes have in common? Perhaps not. On the other hand, perhaps the time is ripe for a more general framework for evolution, of which biological, cultural, and physical evolution are but different manifestations.”

I would say you are absolutely right here, I have come to the sane idea, only I word that slightly differently; I say that evolution is always based on the same principle, only slightly modified by the system in which it is active.

What I mean is the following: people must communicate, they have different languages to use for communication, and these languages do differ but in a sense they are the same; they represent a code, a code with certain rules which one must apply, but the codes did develop in a different types of codes. So the base is the same, but the obvious part of it is different.

Directed mutation

This is excellent thought, I am used to say that there can be some randomness but also some kind of guided evolution, only we do not understand the rules of it, and therefore it appears to us as random: basically it is like the tow famous mistakes in statistics, the first one: we accept a theory that is wrong, and second, we deny theory that is ok, because there is no chance to know, right now. Maybe in future we will be able to understand the rules and then we will know that evolution is only a certain reaction of “something” in feedback to its surroundings.

As I see it this is also the way how senses were created, they are only a reaction to the surrounding; if there is a possibility of transporting sound by pressed air, some kind of sense will develop to catch these waves and decode the signal they carry, etc.

Page 153

“Since acquired traits are not heritable, the only contextual interactions that exert much of an effect on evolution are those that affect survival or the procurement of a mate.”

Well, this is what I do not believe, “acquired traits” must be heritable, as they are they are the expression of adaptation of the organism on its environment, and thus improving the chances of the next generations. I think that this happens in multi-level-transmission, one of the levels being epigenetics, or maybe epigenetics itself is multi-level system. So the heritage of traits might show up in the 5th or 10th generation, so that we cannot check on it, but it is in the logic of evolution and systems, the traits are passed over in steps, multi-level transmission system.

A trait is already obvious reaction to the environment, but before it becomes “visible” it must go through several stages, levels of information transmission, fro the outside world into the first level. If the signal of the environment keeps working, then it is moved one level higher, etc, until it gets into genes. It is only how information is passed over from the outside world into the genetic substance in order to get better adjusted to the environment.

If acquired traits were not heritable there would not be evolution “directed” by the environment. The problem is we do not see it properly. But some evidence is interesting: dogs can pass “the lid test”, cats cannot, cats can count up to four, minimum, like small children, dogs understand human signs, as pointing with the arm and finger somewhere, chimps cannot, and, even small puppies can understand human pointing with hand, it seems that this is inherited.

Most probably the problem is what you exactly call “traits”. Walking on our feet is a trait, to be equipped with the potential to learn a language is a trait specific for humans, animals do not have it, or on a much lower level of coding, and all these traits are inherited.

The sentence that acquired traits are not heritable can be viewed as true when we consider only one, two or three generations, but what when we will take into account 200 or 500 generations or 5000?? Ok, we live too short time to be able to take this really into account, but there is logic in it, I would say. Therefore I do not agree that acquired traits are not heritable, they must be heritable.

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