Curious Wonder web notes

...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   ...

  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...

 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 ...