Curious Wonder web notes

The computational theory of mind also rehabilitates once and for all the infamous homunculus. A standard objection to the idea that thoughts are internal representations (an objection popular among scientists trying to show how tough-minded they are) is that a representation would require a little man in the head to look at it, and the little man would require an even littler man to look at the representations inside him, and so on, ad infinitum. But once more we have the spectacle of the theoretician insisting to the electrical engineer that if the engineer is correct his workstation must contain hordes of little elves. Talk of homunculi is indispensable in computer science. Data structures are read and interpreted and examined and recognized and revised all the time, and the subroutines that do so are unashamedly called "agents," "demons," "supervisors," "monitors," "interpreters," and "executives." Why doesn't all this ...

Hume's Guillotine proposes that there is a gap between what can be described in our world as "what is" and what can be prescribed as what "ought to be", the gap is meant to symbolize a causal disconnection. However, the three points below show a causal connection, making the gap an illusion. 1. It's impossible to have any notion of what ought to be without a description of what is.  The prescription "people ought not steal" requires, for its own existence, a description of what it means to steal: to own something and for someone to take without consent and/or payment. This means that moral prescriptions don't exist in a moral realm separated by the is-ought gap; instead they exist as a consequence from descriptive reality where the is-ought gap is simply one of ignorance. Analogous to the fossil record gap that causes some skeptics to doubt the link between humans and apes. 2. The conclusion of how the world ought to be is simply a description ...

...a brain wired by information in the genome to perform computations on information coming in from the senses could organize the animal’s behavior in a way that allowed it to capture energy and resist entropy. It could, for example, implement the rule “If it squeaks, chase it; if it barks, flee from it.” Chasing and fleeing, though, are not just sequences of muscle contractions —they are goal-directed. Chasing may consist of running or climbing or leaping or ambushing, depending on the circumstances, as long as it increases the chances of snagging the prey; fleeing may include hiding or freezing or zigzagging. And that brings up another momentous 20th-century idea, sometimes called cybernetics, feedback, or control. The idea explains how a physical system can appear to be teleological, that is, directed by purposes or goals. All it needs are a way of sensing the state of itself and its environment, a representation of a goal state (what it “wants,” what it’s “trying for”), an ability ...

Existence: Moral Realism~Social Construct Morality exists as a suite of several subconcepts that grade between prescriptions to evolved to fundamental. Moral Prescriptions - Prescriptions, like money, are social constructions that tend to matter because everyone treats them like they matter, and everyone treats them as such because they are useful. The prescription "people ought not steal" itself is not structured to have truth value, it is structured like a warning or advise, but instead has implications about human social life regarding consequences of behavior ( var b ), an aversion to harm/loss ( var c ), and an intuition to detect entropy ( var a ). These prescriptions are tools that result from mental  processes supported by moral instincts which are sourced from evolution. Evolved Morality -  Humans evolved as social creatures interested in survival and reproduction, which can be idealized as well-being and prosperity. This interest leads people to behave...

 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:   ...

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   ...