Daniel C. Dennett on an attempt to understand the mind; autonomic neurons, culture and computational architecture (tnx Adriano) - http://aminotes.tumblr.com/post...
Jan 27, 2013
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"We’re beginning to come to grips with the idea that your brain is not this well-organized hierarchical control system where everything is in order, a very dramatic vision of bureaucracy. In fact, it’s much more like anarchy with some elements of democracy. Sometimes you can achieve stability and mutual aid and a sort of calm united front, and then everything is hunky-dory, but then it’s always possible for things to get out of whack and for one alliance or another to gain control, and then you get obsessions and delusions and so forth.
You begin to think about the normal well-tempered mind, in effect, the well-organized mind, as an achievement, not as the base state. (...) You’re going to have a parallel architecture because, after all, the brain is obviously massively parallel. It’s going to be a connectionist network. (...)"
- Amira
"[Y]ou begin to realize that control in brains is very different from control in computers. (...) Each neuron is imprisoned in your brain. I now think of these as cells within cells, as cells within prison cells. Realize that every neuron in your brain, every human cell in your body (leaving aside all the symbionts), is a direct descendent of eukaryotic cells that lived and fended for themselves for about a billion years as free-swimming, free-living little agents. They fended for themselves, and they survived.
They had to develop an awful lot of know-how, a lot of talent, a lot of self-protective talent to do that. When they joined forces into multi-cellular creatures, they gave up a lot of that. They became, in effect, domesticated. They became part of larger, more monolithic organizations. (...)
Maybe a lot of the neurons in our brains are not just capable but, if you like, motivated to be more adventurous, more exploratory or risky in the way they comport themselves, in the way they live their lives. They’re struggling amongst themselves with each other for influence, just for staying alive, and there’s competition going on between individual neurons."
- Amira
"As soon as that happens, you have room for cooperation to create alliances, and I suspect that a more free-wheeling, anarchic organization is the secret of our greater capacities of creativity, imagination, thinking outside the box and all that, and the price we pay for it is our susceptibility to obsessions, mental illnesses, delusions and smaller problems.
We got risky brains that are much riskier than the brains of other mammals even, even more risky than the brains of chimpanzees, and that this could be partly a matter of a few simple mutations in control genes that release some of the innate competitive talent that is still there in the genomes of the individual neurons. But I don’t think that genetics is the level to explain this. You need culture to explain it."
- Amira
There's an interesting parallel to sickness in the body coming from this barely controlled conglomeration of cells to the failure modes we see in large organizations of people. The strength and power of organizations inherently carry their own destruction.
- Todd Hoff
[Updated] Daniel Dennett: “Natural selection is not gene centrist and nor is biology all about genes, our comprehending minds are a result of our fast evolving culture. Words are memes that can be spoken and words are the best example of memes. Words have a genealogy and it’s easier to trace the evolution of a single word than the evolution of a language.” (…)
I don’t like theory of mind. I coined the phrase The Intentional Stance. [Dennett’s Intentional Stance encompasses attributing feelings, memories and beliefs to others as well as mindreading and predicting what someone will do next.] Do you need a theory to ride a bike?" http://www.guardian.co.uk/science...
- Amira
Bernard Williams: “The generic human need to make and listen to music, for instance, might be explained at the level of evolutionary psychology, but the emergence of the classical symphony certainly cannot. In fact, the insistence on finding explanations of cultural difference in terms of biological evolution exactly misses the point of the great evolutionary innovation represented by Homo sapiens, the massive development of non-genetic learning.”
— Truth and Truthfulness, Princeton University Press, 2002, p. 28.
- Amira