Other Titles > Neuropath
Read This Book
What Came Before:
--- Quote from: Jorge ---
--- Quote from: Callan S. ---I prefer horse over elephant, as my analogy of choice. You ride atop the horse - you do not control it's every leg movement.
--- End quote ---
You ride on top of it, or are dragged behind it? The horse is the brain and environment, the rope represents the 'neural correlates of consciousness', and our soul is the poor sod getting dragged along the rocks.
Go back to the opening of The Darkness that Comes Before and read the Nietzsche passage that starts the book. Then read it again. Read it again, and again, and again until the dark genius of a dead madman shows you just how bleak things look for 'volition'.
--- End quote ---
What Came Before:
--- Quote from: Callan S. ---I think your attributing me some sort of dualist position, Jorge? I'm more describing a smaller computer riding a larger computer (such is an ugly descriptor - but we are not complex enough to understand how complex we are). I'm not sure about volition - when I try and figure what others mean when evoking the word, it seems to come to mind as something I don't think of. Not that most AI you run across isn't crappy and not honestly a decent comparison, but what is it when an AI switches targets or such (due to various weight shifts in values)? To me, that idea of volition doesn't look bleak at all?
--- End quote ---
What Came Before:
--- Quote from: Madness ---See - again these are leading edge questions - I have to wonder if we can have a serious effect on the elephant, horse, or small computer?
Since I caused a little hubbub, I'll post my original question again:
--- Quote from: Madness ---For instance, assuming the brain is completely plastic 100% of the time, excepting old age, disease, and certain exponential developmental bursts, doesn't this imply that everything about our selves - what we think about, what we talk about, how we use our bodies, our habits and abstractions - are all inscribed in our brains? Inscribed might be a word with misleading connotations, of course.
--- End quote ---
The part which you took issue with, Jorge, was actually a secondary question, assuming the truth of this one and leading up to question 2.1 up top of my post here.
Thank you, Callan, for keeping me on track.
Also, sideline, I'd be very interested if you'd hazard some guesses, Jorge, on what part of non-conscious might make those decisions for you. I mean musical ability - the level which life-long pianists or violinists achieve - is thought to be one of the most superfluous adaptation.
--- End quote ---
What Came Before:
--- Quote from: jvj ---
--- Quote from: Madness ---Also, sideline, I'd be very interested if you'd hazard some guesses, Jorge, on what part of non-conscious might make those decisions for you. I mean musical ability - the level which life-long pianists or violinists achieve - is thought to be one of the most superfluous adaptation.
--- End quote ---
Although it wasn't addressed to me, I'll pipe in with an opinion anyhow. Sorry in advance.
I think the argument you're making for musical ability can pretty much be made for any ability humans tend to decide to spend a long time getting good at, and that does not seem to enhance said humans genetic fitness in any overt fashion. (Even though being really good at playing a musical instrument in particular can have pretty overt effects on your genetic fitness. You'll recognize this if you've ever been to a music festival of some sort and observed what happens to ladies when a long-haired dude with chiseled abs starts playing Wonderwall on the guitar he just so happens to always have casually slung over his right shoulder.)
Personally I think the answer to many of those things lie within the realm of cultural evolutionary adaptations. I believe culture has adapted much in the way biology and psychology have. And as such, musical ability to the point where you have practiced for most of a life-time, might very well have grown to become a position of reasonably high status in our culture, possibly because having such individuals in your society somehow proven itself beneficial. (To pull a pseudo-Darwinistic imaginable benefit out of my proverbial butt, one might argue that the shared mass-consumption of art helps create cohesion in the society thus furthering group mentality etc. etc. etc.)
Basically I believe that most personality traits that seem nonsensical in terms of adaptability and evolution are most likely byproducts of some other useful adaptation or variations on the same theme, as with cultural evolution.
--- End quote ---
What Came Before:
--- Quote from: Madness ---
--- Quote from: jvj ---I think the argument you're making for musical ability can pretty much be made for any ability humans tend to decide to spend a long time getting good at, and that does not seem to enhance said humans genetic fitness in any overt fashion. (Even though being really good at playing a musical instrument in particular can have pretty overt effects on your genetic fitness.
--- End quote ---
No apologies necessary, jvj. Join in, please.
You captured my conception well enough in your sentence. I enjoy your thoughts on cultural evolutionary adaptions because memetics, while young, is a very, very interesting lens. I also like considering social abstraction through lens like systems and game theory but I very much like where memetic study is at in terms of explanations through metaphor and analogy.
However, many of the current arguments in cognitive theory have "calcultated," in different ways quantified, that the evolutionary benefits of musical virtuosity - my metaphor of choice, which you aptly highlighted as "any ability humans tend to decide to spend a long time getting good at, and that does not seem to enhance said humans genetic fitness in any overt fashion" - peak (probably somewhere around that shirtless dude playing Wonderwall) and there seems no "genetic prowess" arguments left - certainly, none that feed, fight, flee, fuck brain is capable of achieving in this society.
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