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The Metaphorical Mind (excerpt)

 We are almost ready to dissolve Wallace's paradox that a forager's mind is capable of calculus. The human mind, we see, is not equipped with an evolutionarily frivolous faculty for doing Western science, mathematics, chess, or other diversions. It is equipped with faculties to master the local environment and outwit its denizens. People form concepts that find the clumps in the correlational texture of the world. They have several ways of knowing, or intuitive theories, adapted to the major kinds of entities in human experience: objects, animate things, natural kinds, artifacts, minds, and the social bonds and forces we will explore in the next two chapters. They wield inferential tools like the elements of logic, arithmetic, and probability. What we now want to know is where these faculties came from and how they can be applied to modern intellectual challenges. Here is an idea, inspired by a discovery in linguistics. Ray Jackendoff points to sentences like the following:   ...
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Moral Prescriptions

Rules: sets of instructions, that when followed, will guarantee a specific correct result. Often Idealized to facilitate understanding. Idealization: generalization and simplification of concepts into forms that are easier to understand, transmit, explain, remember. Abstractivity: an interpretation of reality that involves arranging information into concepts and idealizing on them.  We often hear that we cannot derive an ought from an is, this is Hume's Guillotine and it is the philosophical principle that we cannot derive prescriptions solely from factual descriptions. A description of the world is necessary because without them prescriptions would not have any content to target nor any context to be relevant. In addition to descriptions, a second missing piece is also needed to form prescriptions: information processing into idealized rules. However, information processing is something a bit more complex, some groundwork needs to be set first in our origins. Origins   ...
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Variable [C]: The Cost of Loss

  This variable can be measured by quantifying 3 subvariables :    Uniqueness : How many others like it there are available and how many different or similar features the item has from others.   Replaceability :   How much effort, time, energy or resources are needed to (re) create.       Importance : How much use, in time and instances, the item had. The amount of increase/decrease in efficiency with or without it. The consequence of its absence.      Imagine the following two scenarios involving the loss of a pencil.   You're about to draw something as a hobby but notice you've lost your pencil, you have a pack of 10 pencils of this same type, so you just grab another one. The store where you bought them is also around the corner, so grabbing another pack is also a simple task.   You're about to take a test, which requires a no.2 pencil. You managed to buy the last no.2 pencil they had at the store, wh...
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Cheater Detector (quote)

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 Some areas of knowledge have their own inference rules that can either reinforce or work at cross-purposes with the rules of logic. A famous example comes from the psychologist Peter Wason. Wason was inspired by the philosopher Karl Popper's ideal of scientific reasoning: a hypothesis is accepted if attempts to falsify it fail. Wason wanted to see how ordinary people do at falsifying hypotheses. He told them that a set of cards had letters on one side and numbers on the other, and asked them to test the rule "If a card has a D on one side, it has a 3 on the other," a simple P-implies-Q statement. The subjects were shown four cards and were asked which ones they would have to turn over to see if the rule was true. Try it:                    Most people choose either the D card or the D card and the 3 card. The correct answer is D and 7. "P implies Q" is false only if P is true and Q is false. The 3 card is irrelevant; the rule ...
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Moralistic Emotions (quote)

Follow up to  Reciprocal Altruism  Humans are, of course, a brainy species, and are zoologically unusual in how often they help unrelated individuals (Chapter 3). Our lifestyles and our minds are particularly adapted to the demands of reciprocal altruism. People have food, tools, help, and information to trade. With language, information is an ideal trade good because its cost to the giver—a few seconds of breath—is minuscule compared with the benefit to the recipient. Humans are obsessed with individuals; remember the Blick twins from Chapter 2, one of whom bit a police officer but neither of whom could be punished because each benefited from reasonable doubt that he and not his twin did the deed. And the human mind is equipped with goal-setting demons that regulate the doling out of favors; as with kin-directed altruism, reciprocal altruism is behaviorist short hand for a set of thoughts and emotions. Trivers and the biologist Richard Alexander have shown how the demands of ...
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Definitions

We often hear people ask to define certain words before diving into complicated topics, or people will say "by definition" as some defeater to an argument. In the former case, it seems this is done because certain words can mean different things in different contexts and it cannot always be guaranteed that everyone will have the same understanding of the word, so asking for a definition from someone is an effort in reaching consensus in parlance and making contexts clear so that people don't talk past eachother. In the latter case, the person seems to be implying that a consensus of a word has already been reached and that the definition of the word must set further grounds of the debate or discussion. When we provide a definition in case one, we often just go by the consensus given by a trusted authority, like wikipedia, or provide context if the authority has more than one available. However, imagine that someone has discovered something new and has to come up with a de...
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Variable [B]: Game Theories

 This variable can be measured by accounting for the types of game theories that can be possible in a given context, the consequences of the possible dicision makers, and the alignment of nash equilibriums with the stability of modules in variable A and the low cost of loss in variable C. The following are examples of game theories with some moral relevance. Conflict games . (cells to nations, any system that can make decisions) In contests of strategy, as opposed to contests of skill, strength or intellect; in contests where two or more players have partly conflicting and partly shared interests, the winning strategies tend to include a self handicapping to make threats and promises credible.  Read Schelling's "The Strategy of Conflict"  Tragedy of the Commons . (communities) Commons like public water fountains, restrooms, parks, are services provided by governments as a public reward. Their survival is dependent on the restraint of players and the perceived availa...
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Wikipedia

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