From Bacteria to Bach and Back - Revision history

Robert.adlington: /* 15. The Age of Post-Intelligent Design */

2025-04-16T15:15:21Z

15. The Age of Post-Intelligent Design

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 * Domingos: “All knowledge - past, present, and future - can be derived from data by a single, universal learning algorithm.
 * We have seen how Bayesian networks are excellent at teasing out the statistical regularities that matter to the organism - its affordances. Animal brains, equipped by natural selection with such networks, can guide the bodies they inhabit with impressive adroitness, but by themselves have scant ability to adopt novel perspectives. That, I have argued, requires an infestation of memes, cognitive competences (habits, ways) designed elsewhere and installed in brains, habits that profoundly change the cognitive architecture of those brains, turning them into minds, in effect. So far, the onlhy animals whose brains are thus equipped are Home Sapiens.
-* Just as the eukaryotic cell came into existence in a relatively sudden instance of technology transfer, in which two independent legacies of R&D were united in a single stroke of symbiosis to create a big leap forward, the human mind, the comprehending mind is -  and had to be - a product of symbiosis, uniting the fruits of two largely independent legacies of R&D. We start, I have argued, with animal brains that have been, to a considerable extent
+* Just as the eukaryotic cell came into existence in a relatively sudden instance of technology transfer, in which two independent legacies of R&D were united in a single stroke of symbiosis to create a big leap forward, the human mind, the comprehending mind is -  and had to be - a product of symbiosis, uniting the fruits of two largely independent legacies of R&D. We start, I have argued, with animal brains that have been, to a considerable extent, redesigned to be excellent bases for thinking tools designed elsewhere - memes. And chief among them, words.

Rob: /* 15. The Age of Post-Intelligent Design */

2025-04-16T13:27:49Z

15. The Age of Post-Intelligent Design

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	* We have begun designing and producing artifacts that can design and produce artifacts (that can design and produce artifacts...)		* We have begun designing and producing artifacts that can design and produce artifacts (that can design and produce artifacts...)
	* Mainly, for the moment, we are producing artifacts that provide push-button automated processes that replace thousands of days of brilliant drudgery.		* Mainly, for the moment, we are producing artifacts that provide push-button automated processes that replace thousands of days of brilliant drudgery.
	* The operators of these artifacts are using Darwin's methodical selection - the selective force of natural selection is focused through the nervous system of a discerning, purposeful, foresighted agent, using cascades of uncomprehending generate-and-test cycles that gradually refine the search process		* The operators of these artifacts are using Darwin's methodical selection - the selective force of natural selection is focused through the nervous system of a discerning, purposeful, foresighted agent, using cascades of uncomprehending generate-and-test cycles that gradually refine the search process.
			* Five tribes of machine learning:
			** Symbolists - the descendants of GOFAI - the only ones that aren’t bottom-up, needle-in-haystack-finding repetetive churnings that gradually, with great reliability, home in on good (or good enough) answers to daunting problems.
			** Connectionists - the descendants of logical neurons
			** Evolutionaries - genetic algorithms and their offspring
			** Bayesians - using practical algorithms for achieving the competences of hierarchical networks of Bayesian expectation-generators
			** Analogizers - the descendants of nearest-neighbor algorithms.
			* Things we make by hand (boats, bridges, engines, symphonies) we can (more or less) control as we construct, understanding each step along the way. Things we make “the old-fashioned way” (children, grandchildren) defy our comprehension because of our obliviousness to the details of the processes that create them. Today, we are generating brain-children, brain-grandchildren, etc, that depend on processes we cannot follow in detail, even when we can prove that the results are trustworthy.
			* We can think of machine learning as the inverse of programming, in the same way that the square root is the inverse of the square, or integration is the inverse of differentiation
			* Domingos: “All knowledge - past, present, and future - can be derived from data by a single, universal learning algorithm.
			* We have seen how Bayesian networks are excellent at teasing out the statistical regularities that matter to the organism - its affordances. Animal brains, equipped by natural selection with such networks, can guide the bodies they inhabit with impressive adroitness, but by themselves have scant ability to adopt novel perspectives. That, I have argued, requires an infestation of memes, cognitive competences (habits, ways) designed elsewhere and installed in brains, habits that profoundly change the cognitive architecture of those brains, turning them into minds, in effect. So far, the onlhy animals whose brains are thus equipped are Home Sapiens.
			* Just as the eukaryotic cell came into existence in a relatively sudden instance of technology transfer, in which two independent legacies of R&D were united in a single stroke of symbiosis to create a big leap forward, the human mind, the comprehending mind is - and had to be - a product of symbiosis, uniting the fruits of two largely independent legacies of R&D. We start, I have argued, with animal brains that have been, to a considerable extent

Robert.adlington: /* 15. The Age of Post-Intelligent Design */

2025-04-16T07:49:57Z

15. The Age of Post-Intelligent Design

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 === 15. The Age of Post-Intelligent Design ===
 [[Category:Consciousness]]
 [[Category:Books]]

Robert.adlington: /* 14. Consciousness as an Evolved User-Illusion */

2025-04-15T14:08:57Z

14. Consciousness as an Evolved User-Illusion

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	* Our access to our own thinking, and especially to the causation and dynamics of its subpersonal parts, is really no better than our access to our digestive processes. Consciousness is not just talking to yourself; it includes all the varieties of self-stimulation and reflection we have acquired and honed throughout our waking lives. These are not just things that happen in our brains, they are behaviors that we engage in, some instinctively (thanks to genetic evolution) and the rest acquired (thanks to cultural evolution and individual self-exploration).		* Our access to our own thinking, and especially to the causation and dynamics of its subpersonal parts, is really no better than our access to our digestive processes. Consciousness is not just talking to yourself; it includes all the varieties of self-stimulation and reflection we have acquired and honed throughout our waking lives. These are not just things that happen in our brains, they are behaviors that we engage in, some instinctively (thanks to genetic evolution) and the rest acquired (thanks to cultural evolution and individual self-exploration).
	* We cushion our ignorance with a false - but deeply tempting - model. We simply reproduce, with some kind of hand waving and apologies, our everyday model of how we know about what is going on outside us. The relative accessibility and familiarity of the outer part of the process of telling people what we see conceals us from the utter blank of the rest of the process. We have no more privileged access to that part of the process than we do to the complicated processes that maintain the connectivity between a telephone contact and us.		* We cushion our ignorance with a false - but deeply tempting - model. We simply reproduce, with some kind of hand waving and apologies, our everyday model of how we know about what is going on outside us. The relative accessibility and familiarity of the outer part of the process of telling people what we see conceals us from the utter blank of the rest of the process. We have no more privileged access to that part of the process than we do to the complicated processes that maintain the connectivity between a telephone contact and us.
			* Explanation has to stop somewhere, and here it is in the familiar mentalistic language of knowing and seeing, noticing and recognizing, and the like. The problem with the first-person point of view is that it is anchored in the manifest image, not the scientific image, and cannot avail itself of the resources of the scientific image. You can ask yourself what your subjective experience is, and see what you say. Then you can decide to endorse your own declaration, to believe it. You can do this by talking alound to yourself, talking silently to yourself, or "just thinking". We just look and learn, and that's all we know
			* "Blurts" are proto-speech acts generated internally and tested to see whether they should be uttered overly.
			* For Hume, the impression of causation we experience comes from inside, not outside. It is, itself, an effect of a habit of expectation that has been engrained in us over many waking hours. We are born with a sort of automatic causal sense, like a reflex, that is ready to "see" causation whenever our senses are confronted by the right kind of sequence of stimuli. This is part of the typically unexamined assumption that all perceptual representations must be flowing inbound from outside.
			* Our ontology, in the elevantor sense, does a close-to-optimal job of cataloging the things in the world that matter to the behavior our brains have to control. Among the things in our Umwelt that matter to our well-being are ourselves! We ought to have good Bayesian expectations about what we will do next, what we will think next, and what we will expect next! And we do!
			* Consciousness is a channel designed not for scientific investigation, but for handy, quick and dirty use in the rough and tumble of time-pressured life. Evolution has given us a gift that sacrifices literal truth for utility. The manifest image that has been cobbled together by genetic evolutionary processes over billions of years, and by cultural evolutionary processes over thousands of years, is an extremely sophisticated system of helpful metaphorical renderings of the underlying reality uncovered by the scientific image. The manifest image composes our Umwelt, the world we live in for almost all human purposes - aside from science.
			* By presupposing that we normal folks are rational and hence have understanding (not just competence), we tacitly (and invalidly) endorse our everyday use of the intentional stance as the plain truth about human minds.
			* By furnishing our minds with systems of representations, this architecture furnishes each of us with a perspective - a user-illusion - from which we have a limited, biased access to the workings of our brains, which we involuntarily misinterpret as a rendering (spread on the external world or on a private screen or stage) of both the world's external properties (colors, aromas, sounds, ;;;) and many of our own internal responses, (expectations satisfied, desires identified, etc). The incessant torrent of self-probing and reflection that we engage in during waking life is what permits us, alone, to comprehend our cometences and many of the reasons for the way the world is. Thanks to this infestation of culturally evolved symbiont information structures, our brains are empowered to be intelligent designers, of artifacts and of our own lives.

	=== 15. The Age of Post-Intelligent Design ===		=== 15. The Age of Post-Intelligent Design ===
	[[Category:Consciousness]]		[[Category:Consciousness]]
	[[Category:Books]]		[[Category:Books]]

Robert.adlington: /* 14. Consciousness as an Evolved User-Illusion */

2025-04-15T11:12:44Z

14. Consciousness as an Evolved User-Illusion

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 == Part III: Turning Our Minds Inside Out ==
 === 14. Consciousness as an Evolved User-Illusion ===
 === 15. The Age of Post-Intelligent Design ===
 [[Category:Consciousness]]
 [[Category:Books]]

Robert.adlington: /* 13. The Evolution of Cultural Evolution */

2025-04-14T15:46:07Z

13. The Evolution of Cultural Evolution

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	* The multi-dimensional Design Space in which the Tree of Life has grown has now generated a daughter Design Space, for our brainchildren, and it has more dimensions and more possibilities than its parent, and we are (so far) the only species that can explore it.		* The multi-dimensional Design Space in which the Tree of Life has grown has now generated a daughter Design Space, for our brainchildren, and it has more dimensions and more possibilities than its parent, and we are (so far) the only species that can explore it.
	* Steven Pinker is right that the human brain really is a designer, but this should be seen not as an alternative to the memetic approach, but as a continuation of the memetic approach into the age of gradually de-Darwinizing semi-intelligent design. Our traditional vision of genius portrays it as completely unlike natural selection in its creative powers, and it is no accident that genius is often see as divine, supernatural, Godlike. After all, we created God in our own (manifest) image, a natural overextension of the intentional stance into the cosmos.		* Steven Pinker is right that the human brain really is a designer, but this should be seen not as an alternative to the memetic approach, but as a continuation of the memetic approach into the age of gradually de-Darwinizing semi-intelligent design. Our traditional vision of genius portrays it as completely unlike natural selection in its creative powers, and it is no accident that genius is often see as divine, supernatural, Godlike. After all, we created God in our own (manifest) image, a natural overextension of the intentional stance into the cosmos.
	* Our ancestors at the dawn of human culture didn't need understanding to acquire the new competences, and they didn't gain much understanding from having the new competences. As memes accumulated and became more and more effective at inhabiting their hosts. The		* Our ancestors at the dawn of human culture didn't need understanding to acquire the new competences, and they didn't gain much understanding from having the new competences. As memes accumulated and became more and more effective at inhabiting their hosts. The manifest image became populated with more and more affordances, more and more opportunities to track, more and more things to do things with, more and more things - words - to use as tools to help keep track of things, and so forth. Some memes were tools, some toys, some were distractions, some were crippling parasites. They all depended on cultural replication to survive.
			* We can see how a gradual, growing sophistication of behavior could arise by small innovations, adjustments, and refinements, building excellently designed cultural habits and institutions without much help from intelligent design. "First learning, then adaptations from learning.
			* One of the most valuable innovations was the practice of putting marks in the environment to take a load off personal memory, one of the first forays of "the extended mind".
			* Within a few millenia, we have Socrates and Plato and Aristotle talking about talking, thinking about thinking, imagining republics, theorizing about tragedy and comedy. The age of intelligent design is in full swing. Merely Skinnerian and Popperian creatures couldn't keep up with Gregorian creatures, their minds overflowing with new tools for making ever swifter and more accurate assessments of the complex environment confronting them. Brute force trial and error would no longer suffice; you had to comprehend to compete.
			* We swim in an ocean of semi-intelligently designed, hemi-semi-demi-intelligently designed, and evolutionarily designed competitors, all still dependent on getting into new human brains to continue their lineages.

	== Part III: Turning Our Minds Inside Out ==		== Part III: Turning Our Minds Inside Out ==

Robert.adlington: /* 13. The Evolution of Cultural Evolution */

2025-04-14T14:03:54Z

13. The Evolution of Cultural Evolution

← Older revision		Revision as of 14:03, 14 April 2025
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	* Darwinian evolution by natural selection, lacking all foresight, rolls through populations that also lack foresight. The survivors are lucky. With us, there are well-developed traditions of gathering and passing along new advice as soon as it becomes available.		* Darwinian evolution by natural selection, lacking all foresight, rolls through populations that also lack foresight. The survivors are lucky. With us, there are well-developed traditions of gathering and passing along new advice as soon as it becomes available.
	* Political advisors and advertisers, trend analyzers, and speculators aggressively observe and perturb the memosphere, prospecting for new moves, new opportunities, new cracks in the armor of skepticism and caution that all but the most naive people use to protect themselves. Everybody wants to go viral with their pet messages, while finding new ways of ignoring the surfeit of attention-grabbers that assault them. This fluidity of information transmission in human culture, and its use in combatting, discrediting, discarding, but also revising, improving, adapting and spreading new memes pushed Darwinian meme evolution into the background.		* Political advisors and advertisers, trend analyzers, and speculators aggressively observe and perturb the memosphere, prospecting for new moves, new opportunities, new cracks in the armor of skepticism and caution that all but the most naive people use to protect themselves. Everybody wants to go viral with their pet messages, while finding new ways of ignoring the surfeit of attention-grabbers that assault them. This fluidity of information transmission in human culture, and its use in combatting, discrediting, discarding, but also revising, improving, adapting and spreading new memes pushed Darwinian meme evolution into the background.
	* Pinker restricts our attention to cultural treasures only, and exaggerates the role of intelligent design in creating these. But we have a demand for reasons that outstrips our ability to feed it.		* Pinker restricts our attention to cultural treasures only, and exaggerates the role of intelligent design in creating these. But we have a demand for reasons that outstrips our ability to feed it. The normativity of reason-giving imposes itself even when we are at a loss for an answer. There is an obligation to have reasons that you can give for your behavior. This is the intentional stance in action, always presuming rationality. There must be a good reason or we wouldn't be doing it this way! From when children begin to speak, we begin to give them reasons: Don't touch - hot! Don't touch - dirty! Eat - it's good for you! Obedience, even blind obedience, is useful as a basis; there will be time for explaining and arguing later. Because I said so! is an important stage. And then, as we grow up, we are introduced to the norms of human society, which include, preeminently the presumption of rationality in each other, especially in adults.
			* This is an ineliminable feature of language use; the presumption of comprehension is the default, so much so that when it is violated, we can become disoriented. We lead our daily lives bathed in the presumption of understanding. We expect people to expect us to have reasons, reasons we can express for whatever it is we are trying to do, and we effortlessly make up reasons - often without realizing it - when a query catches us without a pre-though answer. It is against this background that memetics looks so wrongheaded, so subversive, as Pinker says. We are the reasoners! We are the intelligent designers! We are the explainers of everything. It is an affront to suggest that some of our brainstorms are just that: cerebral disturbances caused by invading memes duking it out for dominance. We are in charge!
			* And we are in charge, to a gratifying degree, capable of accepting and rejecting the ideas we encounter, discarding or developing them for reasons we can usually express.
			* When a GOFAI tells you something, you can, in principle, always demand a reason, and it should be forthcoming. But the advent of LLMs with deep learning and Bayesian methods means that they won't be able to tell us.
			* Long before we had designer brains, we had brains that were acquiring design-without-a-designer in the form of invading memes.
			* A curious feature of our appreciation of wit or genius is that we prefer not to know how it is done. Timing is important for almost any intelligent act - which is why it is intelligent to anticipate and presolve problems wherever possible. All intelligent responses depend on costly R1D, and it doesn't make much difference how the work is distributed in time so long as the effects are timely.
			* We want our minds to be "inspired" and "uncanny".
			* Whether the "inspiration" is 1% or 99%, it must be a feature of a vehicle for exploring Design Space that has its own nonsupernatural R&D history, typically an unfathomable combination of genes, education, life experience, mentoring, and who knows what else - diet, the change overhearing of a strain of music, emotional imbalances temporary or permanent, and, yes, sometimes "insanity" - mental illness or pathology that has fortuitous benefits (for the art world if not for the artist).
			* The multi-dimensional Design Space in which the Tree of Life has grown has now generated a daughter Design Space, for our brainchildren, and it has more dimensions and more possibilities than its parent, and we are (so far) the only species that can explore it.
			* Steven Pinker is right that the human brain really is a designer, but this should be seen not as an alternative to the memetic approach, but as a continuation of the memetic approach into the age of gradually de-Darwinizing semi-intelligent design. Our traditional vision of genius portrays it as completely unlike natural selection in its creative powers, and it is no accident that genius is often see as divine, supernatural, Godlike. After all, we created God in our own (manifest) image, a natural overextension of the intentional stance into the cosmos.
			* Our ancestors at the dawn of human culture didn't need understanding to acquire the new competences, and they didn't gain much understanding from having the new competences. As memes accumulated and became more and more effective at inhabiting their hosts. The

	== Part III: Turning Our Minds Inside Out ==		== Part III: Turning Our Minds Inside Out ==

Robert.adlington: /* 13. The Evolution of Cultural Evolution */

2025-04-14T09:41:06Z

13. The Evolution of Cultural Evolution

← Older revision		Revision as of 09:41, 14 April 2025
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	* The ability to treat whatever topic is under consideration as itself a thing to be examined, analyzed, inventoried. These are meta-competences, in which we use our thinking tools to think about not just food, shelter, doors, containers, dangers, and the other affordances of daily life but also about thinking about food and shelter, and about thinking about thinking about food and shelter.		* The ability to treat whatever topic is under consideration as itself a thing to be examined, analyzed, inventoried. These are meta-competences, in which we use our thinking tools to think about not just food, shelter, doors, containers, dangers, and the other affordances of daily life but also about thinking about food and shelter, and about thinking about thinking about food and shelter.
	* I can't just install my meme in your brain and let it run. I have to secure your attention, your cooperation, evn - to some degree - your trust, because you are and ought to be vigilant against possible manipulation by other agents.		* I can't just install my meme in your brain and let it run. I have to secure your attention, your cooperation, evn - to some degree - your trust, because you are and ought to be vigilant against possible manipulation by other agents.
	* Human culture is accelerating at an ever swifter pace, since more directed search and more top-down problem-setting leads to more efficient problem-solving. Among the enabling innovations were such brilliant "inventions" as writing arithmetic, money, clocks, and calendars, each contributing a novel and fecund system of representation that provided our manifest image with ever more portable, detachable, manipulable, recognizable, memorable things to do things with		* Human culture is accelerating at an ever swifter pace, since more directed search and more top-down problem-setting leads to more efficient problem-solving. Among the enabling innovations were such brilliant "inventions" as writing arithmetic, money, clocks, and calendars, each contributing a novel and fecund system of representation that provided our manifest image with ever more portable, detachable, manipulable, recognizable, memorable things to do things with, to exploit in our growing mastery of other things. These were, so far as anyone can tell, Darwinian "inventions", that is inventions without inventors or foresighted authors, more like bird wings than helicopter blades.
			* The free-floating rationales of the features and structures of these inventions have been gradually captured, represented, and celebrated by later beneficiaries, retrospective reverse engineers who could explain to the world the particular utility of phonemic representation of words, zero as a number, hard-to-counterfeit coins, representing time with a line or a circle or a volume, using a fixed short cycle of names for days. All of these culturally transmitted artifacts, abstract or concrete, are unmistakeably well-designed tools for thinking, but they were not the brainchildren of particular individual intelligent designers.
			* The lore that builds up around these artifacts is the product of retrospective theorizing, not original invention, in most cases, byproducts of attempts to pass on the skills to apprentices, second-hand commentaries that may improve the understanding of the whole process - or may be "false consciousness", persuasive but mistaken theories of the topic. Sometimes problem "solvers" stumble on solutions without noticing or while misunderstanding what they have done. There is a general generous tendency to credit innovators with more prior comprehension than they actually deserve.
			* The undeniable attractions of the rationality assumption. When we look at traditional accounts of cultural evolution, in the neutral sense of cultural change over time, the dominant theme is the economic model - as if all human cultural evolution took place near the ceiling of comprehension.
			* We are indeed living in the age of intelligent design, and it goes back several millenia - as far back as we have documentation. From Aristotle's day to the present, the explanations and justifications of our storehouse of general knowledge are a kind of Whig history, written by the victors, triumphantly explaining the discoveries and passing over the costly mistakes and misguided searches. This huge backlog of nearly invisible cultural accumulation plays a role not unlike that of all the organisms in all the species who died childless but whose competition tested the mettle of those whose descendants live on today. Haydn and Mozart and Beethoven had to grow their talents in a world that included lots of slightly less talented or maybe just unlucky composers.
			* But even in the most bureaucratic and rationalized of institutions, there are patterns of change - of evolution - that resist capture by the economic model, that appear as mere noise or happenstance, driven not by the rational pressures of the marketplace, but by arms races of Darwinian memetic evolution.
			* Descending from the ceiling of pure rationality and looking at the middle ground, where semi-comprehending agents engage in semi-well-designed projects that generate a host of goibles, fresh new targets to attract foible-exploiters, equally semi-comprehending agents who sense, with varying degrees of accuracy, that their interests will be well served by adopting memes, adapting memes, revising memes designed (by a mixture, now, of natural selection and intelligent design) to take advantage of the weaknesses they seem to detect in their quarry. These arms races are the latest wave in the creative arms races that have driven genetic evolution for 3bn years, and they differ mainly in involving a significant degree of comprehension to lubricate and accelerate the innovations and reactions. This comprehension is overwhelmingly the product of language and other media of communication.
			* Darwinian evolution by natural selection, lacking all foresight, rolls through populations that also lack foresight. The survivors are lucky. With us, there are well-developed traditions of gathering and passing along new advice as soon as it becomes available.
			* Political advisors and advertisers, trend analyzers, and speculators aggressively observe and perturb the memosphere, prospecting for new moves, new opportunities, new cracks in the armor of skepticism and caution that all but the most naive people use to protect themselves. Everybody wants to go viral with their pet messages, while finding new ways of ignoring the surfeit of attention-grabbers that assault them. This fluidity of information transmission in human culture, and its use in combatting, discrediting, discarding, but also revising, improving, adapting and spreading new memes pushed Darwinian meme evolution into the background.
			* Pinker restricts our attention to cultural treasures only, and exaggerates the role of intelligent design in creating these. But we have a demand for reasons that outstrips our ability to feed it.

	== Part III: Turning Our Minds Inside Out ==		== Part III: Turning Our Minds Inside Out ==

Robert.adlington at 09:03, 14 April 2025

2025-04-14T09:03:51Z

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	* When, if ever, do any two speakers speak exactly the same language? We could say that each speaker has an idiolect, a dialect with a single native user		* When, if ever, do any two speakers speak exactly the same language? We could say that each speaker has an idiolect, a dialect with a single native user
	* If we reposition Chomsky’s Merge, or something like it, as an early candidate for a transitional innovation on the way to modern languages, then we can reconcile early and late Chomsky by saying the “intricate structure of specific rules and guiding principles” are not so much explicit rules as deeply embedded patterns in ways of speaking that consist of a series of improvements wrought by evolution, both cultural and genetic, in response to the success of protolanguages.		* If we reposition Chomsky’s Merge, or something like it, as an early candidate for a transitional innovation on the way to modern languages, then we can reconcile early and late Chomsky by saying the “intricate structure of specific rules and guiding principles” are not so much explicit rules as deeply embedded patterns in ways of speaking that consist of a series of improvements wrought by evolution, both cultural and genetic, in response to the success of protolanguages.
	=== The Evolution of Cultural Evolution ===		=== 13. The Evolution of Cultural Evolution ===
	* Animals have some memes but they do not, in general, open up opportunities for further memes the way words do. There is none of the snowballing effect like language permits.		* Animals have some memes but they do not, in general, open up opportunities for further memes the way words do. There is none of the snowballing effect like language permits.
	* Displaced reference is a giant step in Design Space.		* Displaced reference is a giant step in Design Space.
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	* If Grice’s theory was a performance theory, it would be applicable to a small minority of speakers.		* If Grice’s theory was a performance theory, it would be applicable to a small minority of speakers.
	* The free-floating rationale of the design of some of our practices is unimagined by us. Grice can be seen to have worked it our, seen the “order which is there” when people engage in nonnatural meaning, and simply presented it as an account of their intentional states at the time - overendowing people with reasons!		* The free-floating rationale of the design of some of our practices is unimagined by us. Grice can be seen to have worked it our, seen the “order which is there” when people engage in nonnatural meaning, and simply presented it as an account of their intentional states at the time - overendowing people with reasons!
			* Proto-labelings pave the way for labelings, and proto-requests pave the way for requests. It may take hundreds of hours of conversation before the child really gets the hang of it, and even longer before they understand what they are doing when they are having a conversation.
			* It is one thing to hear yourself speaking and quite another to notice that you're saying something. Think of the double-take, too late: "Did I just say that? Did I really utter those words?"
			* Early language users may only gradually have come to recognize retrospectively, what they have been doing. There was a gradual, incremental process of growing competence leading to self-monitoring, leading to reflection, leadining to the emergence of new things to think about: words and other memes in our manifest image.
			* How can talking to yourself help? We may know things in one part of our brain that cannot be accessed by other parts of the brain when needed. The practice of talking to yourself creates new channels of communication that may, on occasion, tease the hidden knowledge into the open. The next time you try to solve a puzzle, consider indulging in a vocalized soliloquy: it's a good way to notice gaps in your thinking.
			* Once you have a habit of going into question-posing mode, all your R&D becomes much more top-down, using more directed search, and relying less on random variation and retention. The search space can be squeezed by using information already acquired in other contexts to rule out large regions as unlikely or irrelevant - but only if the thinker can be reminded of it in a timely fashion. Talking to yourself, asking questions, or even just the inner rehearsal of relevant words ("key words"), is an efficient way of probing the networks of associations attached to each word, reminding you of overlooked possibilities that are likely to be relevant to your current perplexity.
			* the ideal of a conscious human mind is one in which all its knowledge is equi-accessible, always available when needed, never distorted, a pandemonium of experts ready to lend a timely hand. An adult mind can - on rare occasions - exert significant discipline on the crew, prioritizing, squelching wasteful competition, and organizing the search parties.
			* The ability to treat whatever topic is under consideration as itself a thing to be examined, analyzed, inventoried. These are meta-competences, in which we use our thinking tools to think about not just food, shelter, doors, containers, dangers, and the other affordances of daily life but also about thinking about food and shelter, and about thinking about thinking about food and shelter.
			* I can't just install my meme in your brain and let it run. I have to secure your attention, your cooperation, evn - to some degree - your trust, because you are and ought to be vigilant against possible manipulation by other agents.
			* Human culture is accelerating at an ever swifter pace, since more directed search and more top-down problem-setting leads to more efficient problem-solving. Among the enabling innovations were such brilliant "inventions" as writing arithmetic, money, clocks, and calendars, each contributing a novel and fecund system of representation that provided our manifest image with ever more portable, detachable, manipulable, recognizable, memorable things to do things with


	== Part III: Turning Our Minds Inside Out ==		== Part III: Turning Our Minds Inside Out ==
	=== 13. Consciousness as an Evolved User-Illusion ===		=== 14. Consciousness as an Evolved User-Illusion ===
	=== 14. The Age of Post-Intelligent Design ===		=== 15. The Age of Post-Intelligent Design ===
	[[Category:Consciousness]]		[[Category:Consciousness]]
	[[Category:Books]]		[[Category:Books]]

Rob: /* 12. The Origins of Language */

2025-04-13T17:07:16Z

12. The Origins of Language

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 * Grammaticalization takes frequently replicated combinations and gradually hardens them into units that can then replicate on their own as combinatorial units
 * When, if ever, do any two speakers speak exactly the same language? We could say that each speaker has an idiolect, a dialect with a single native user
-* If we reposition Chomsky’s Merge, or something like it, as an early candidate for a transitional innovation on the way to modern languages, then we can reconcile early and late Chomsky by saying the “intricate structure of specific rules and guiding principles” are not so much explicit rules as deeply embedded patterns in ways of speaking that consist of a series of improvements wrought by evolution, both cultural and genetic, in response to the success of protolanguages
+* If we reposition Chomsky’s Merge, or something like it, as an early candidate for a transitional innovation on the way to modern languages, then we can reconcile early and late Chomsky by saying the “intricate structure of specific rules and guiding principles” are not so much explicit rules as deeply embedded patterns in ways of speaking that consist of a series of improvements wrought by evolution, both cultural and genetic, in response to the success of protolanguages.
 == Part III: Turning Our Minds Inside Out ==