Slashdot Mirror
Review:How the Mind Works
Book reviews often start "If you only read one book this year...", but considering the slashdot readership, I'll amend that to: "If you only read one non-fiction book not published by O'Reilly this year, this one would be a good choice." The second chapter is about computers, and the second to last chapter is about sex, so a geek's gotta love it.
Though to be honest, the computer bits aren't terribly technical. They focus on the computational theory of the mind, and how as a theory, it gives us a useful, but woefully incomplete understanding of the human mind. There is, however, a fascinating technical explanation of stereo vision and how stereograms (magic-eye pictures) work, why some people can't see them, and a great explanation of how to do the trick with your eyes that you need to see them - the stereogram in the book is the first one I've ever been able to see, and it's almost worth the cover price just for that.
Reading Stephen Pinker, I always get the impression that his style comes from years of trying to keep his first-year university psychology class awake on a Monday morning at 9am. He does this with a combination of some very challenging ideas and highly entertaining writing.
In the first chapter, he makes the somewhat radical claim that innate biology has an equal, if not greater role than culture in shaping our desires, thoughts, and actions. He then spends the next 500 pages convincing us with a combination of well reasoned arguments and the results of rigorous scientific studies. He is, however, careful to remind us regularly of the limits of scientific enquiry, and of how much we still don't know "Virtually nothing is known about the functioning microcircuitry of the human brain, because there is a shortage of volunteers willing to give up their brains to science before they are dead." (p. 184)
His main thrust throughout much of the book is to debunk the "natural = good" equation that is quoted to so often these days. Aggressiveness, for instance, especially in male humans, is 'natural' in the sense that it was once adaptive (i.e. a trait that allowed it's organism to reproduce more successfully). Aggressiveness, is therefore 'natural' to male humans. This doesn't mean that men "can't help" being aggressive, or that men who beat their wives are somehow not at fault because it is "in their genes". As Pinker puts it:
"...happiness and virtue have nothing to do with what natural selection designed us to accomplish in the ancestral environment. They are for us to determine. In saying this, I am no hypocrite even though I am a conventional straight white male. Well into my procreating years I am, so far, voluntarily childless, having squandered my biological resources reading and writing, doing research, helping out friends, and jogging in circles, ignoring the solemn imperative to spread my genes. By Darwinian standards I am a horrible mistake, a pathetic looser, not one iota less than if I were a card-carrying member of Queer Nation. But I am happy to be that way, and if my genes don't like it, they can go jump in the lake."Having explained how the brain thinks and how the eyes see, he goes on to consider how the capacity for emotion may have been adaptive (and therefore selected for) in our early evolution, and starts with a great example: "the yuck factor". We get a very cool theory of why we find certain things disgusting, why what's considered disgusting is highly cultural, and why the thing that elicits the strongest "yuck factor" response is food.
The first six chapters have covered key aspects of the human condition:
Chapter 1: The Standard Equipment talks about how the brain is wired Chapter 2: Thinking Machines covers the "human mind as computer" and the computational theory of the mind Chapter 3: Revenge of the Nerds explains Pinker's theory of how early humans prospered by exploiting what he calls the "cognitive niche" Chapter 4: The Mind's Eye explains the role that vision, and in particular colour, stereo vision as one of the factors that allowed humans to evolve such prodigious brain-power Chapter 5: Good Ideas is about how we use logic, comparison, and statistics in interpersonal relationships Chapter 6: Hotheads deals with the gamut of human emotions from altruism to envy
All this has laid the groundwork for the second to last chapter, which he calls "Family Values". Some theories in the social sciences claim that people are born as virtually "blank slates" and that their upbringing, socialisation, education, etc. accounts for the way they 'turn out'. Criminality, substance abuse, and even the more petty human failings such as greed and vanity are assumed to have psychological underpinnings that come from one's childhood experiences. Pinker claims instead that some parts of the 'dark side' of being human is genetically encoded. He emphasises that this does not in any way excuse anti-social behaviour, but is simply another way of looking at what our conscience is up against when we feel the urge to take the credit for another's idea, sneak onto the subway without paying, help ourselves to the larger piece of cake, or cheat on our partner.
It's a long book, and it may take a little perserverence to get though it, but it's worth the effort because Pinker's ideas are interesting, challenging, and thought provoking. I don't agree with everything he says, and I think he sometimes over-simplifies an example to the point where it's no longer valid. Often, I found myself thinking "But human being are more complicated than that!" when he was explaining some facet of modern human behaviour in terms of the selection pressures of hunter-gatherers on the savannah. But all-in-all it is well worth reading. And at the end of it either you'll be able to see stereograms or you'll know exactly why you can't. To pick this book, head over to Amazon.
Actually, It does- I have read this book, and it talks about the phenomenon of running amok. Amok is a papua New Guini(sp) word for going crazy and killing everyone in sight.
Very good book, I highly recommend it.
Perhaps the desire to be associated with a socially unacceptable underground movement - and progressing from there. (h/p/a/v culture is perhaps the same phsychology?)
Of course they shot themselves at the end.
Doesn't seem to be a reproductively motivated act....
Try explaining the young men's suicides. Suicide is not explainable (as far as I know) through evolutionary psychology. If these young men were only following the pattern of agression to acquire the opportunity for mating, then it would follow that they would have raped some of the girls to garner what they couldn't get before. I do agree that the whole "jocks get the girls" factor was a real influence, but humans are much more complicated than a set of contemporary psychological theories to rationalize this horrible event as "natural".
How much more time will it take mankind to realize the mind is not the brain?
Lets hope the 19th century psychology "science" doesn't carry us too far into the new century.
I'm off the opinion the brain is a nerve control center that you use to operate your body. The mind is your recording of everything you've ever done. It is /you/ that reviews the mind's storage, move the body about and actually make the decisions.
:)
IMO, The brain is probally the second most over-hyped piece of meat man has ever gotten involved with
One thing I've been wondering is why these mass school
murders generally seem to occur in small towns. In places
like LA or NY, you see killings due to gang rivalries, but you
don't seem to see nut cases killing strangers. Anyone care
to offer an explanation?
I saw Pinker give a speech a few months ago. The entire speech demonstrated all of the testable hypotheses his theory had, and the statistical data to back it up.
For instance, his theory on irregular grammar, such as irregular verbs, was backed up by extensive statistics and cross language studies.
His theory is very appealing and accounts for data that doesn't fit, like General Relativity accounts for the orbit of Mercury.
If you've got some credentials and some counterarguments to Pinker's theory, present them, don't just sit back and call someone's theory bogus without giving a counter argument.
Who the hell are you anyway? What is your background? Where are your published papers?
For sake of discussion, assume
me/you == spiritual entity
mind == collection of pictures you've carried for
lifetimes
brain == the control center for the current body you are amusing yourself with (massively overrated)
Those are the givens I opened this thread on.
I think it's the students having cars. At the city schools I'm familiar with (in Rochester, New York) parking is scarce, and most families can't afford cars for their kids. I can't imagine any of these trenchcoat brains loading up with a long gun, several handguns, pipe bombs and other weapons and walking down a busy street, or getting on a city or school bus, and getting very far. In the 'burbs, load up your BMW and drive right up to the door.
The opposing, NRA approved viewpoint is that the students in the city schools would have been carrying also, and would have been able to return fire.
GeorgeH, trying not to be an AC
Damn it, not the Chinese Room AGAIN...
Look, this is relatively simple.
By Searle's argument, the man inside the room just has a lookup table in his book. That is, if he gets "squiggle", he outputs "squaggle", always. Searle is absolutely correct in saying that that man doesn't understand anything; unfortunately, this picture has nothing to do with reality, since neither brains nor computers actually work this way.
Even if we fix Searle's analogy so that the man inside the room is running some sort of a program, all we have succeeded in doing is "proving" that HUMANS don't understand anything, either. The key idea here is that the entire system (man, room, program) understands Chinese, not any single one of its components.
A more modern objection to the CRA is that the brain (and the Internet) is a vast neural network, not just a single man running a program, and so the analogy does not hold.
Pinker's basic theory states that human intelligence
derives from multiple brain centers.
These in turn are adapted from earlier brain functions that may have been used differently.
Its an interesting hypothesis,
but is any of it testable to decide the truth
or falsehood.
I recommend his other other book too.
I think it is less speculative than the brain book.
Pinker looks at the biological aspects of the minds
evolution, while Hofstader is from logic and Denner from philosophy.
I can't help but comment here. As a person who became a Christian through evidence concerning the divine origins of the Bible, I understand these comments about Creationism as a "cute story." However, it saddens and confuses me when I see discussions about a disproven theory: Evolution by means of natural selection. I know this is a little off the topic, but maybe it will add something to the whole discussion
Darwin's theory of evolution should result in several transitory fossils being found. That is, natural selection is a slow process, so as fish began to turn into land animals, there should be plenty of fossils of these fish/land animal hybrids. However, that is not the case.
Given the inherent problems with Darwin's theory, I do not see how it could be used to explain any human behavior without creating "a cute story" with no evidence to back the story up. Even more recent theories (e.g., punctuated equilibrum) are variations of natural selection.
However, I do see one connection between the Colorado incident and Darwin: racism. As the news agencies have reported, the boys were out to get minorities "and" jocks. Someone earlier posted the theory that the boys targeted jocks because the jocks were having sex and the boys were not. I guess this idea was supposed to fit into the Darwinian notion of survival of the fittest (i.e., he who has the most offspring is the fittest). But how do minorities fit in? Is sex the answer there too?
As some people may know, the original title of Darwin's book was "On the Origin of the Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of the Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life." Darwin wrote that he envisioned the European race wiping out inferior, dark-skinned races. To see Darwin's views on this, you can see his entire book on-line at several sites.
While I'm rambling on this topic, I wanted to mention the connection to Hitler (and racism) since it was also stated that the boys committed the crime on Hitler's birthday. Hitler borrowed the concepts of eugenics (i.e., breeding human to possess certain traits or to eliminate certain traits) from America. I believe the person who first discussed eugenics in scientific terms was a Harvard professor by the name of Agassiz. Of course, Hitler took the conceps to a horrible new level.
Just some food for thought. I hope this adds to the discussion.
"Philosophy in the Flesh" is $21.00 @ Amazon.
Neither God nor I cares preciely what went on in the brains of the "Trenchcoat Mafia". It's obvious enough that the secular humanist rejection of life played a role, but that's not really important.
What matters is this: In a free society, the other students would have gunned those killers down almost immediately. This tragedy was caused by a coercive government that denied those students the right to defend themselves. Klinton and her husband are directly and personally responsible for this tragedy. The blood of these innocents is on their hands. The war crimes tribunal which eventually sentences them will be sure to take this crime into account.
How long must it be before the ocean of innocent blood shed by the liberals is acknowledged and justice is done? How long before the divinely-ordained sanctity of life is writ large in the blood of tyrants?
Amok is a Vulcan word meaning "terminally horny".
True, but they got it from New Guinea or wherever.
>In an AP article on yahoo; one one of them was quoted saying "I hate niggers" before firing his gun.
One of the most disturbing (to me) implications of explaining much of human behaviour through evolution is that racism is probably an evolutionary advantage for genes. People who look like you are more likely to have similar genes to you than those who don't. So killing those who don't look like you, once your niche is established, may work out to be advantageous for your genetic survival.
Your claims about "missing transitional fossils" are quite common and quite wrong. I don't think they're addressed in any one place in the talk.origins FAQs, but you can start with Five Major Misconceptions about Evolution and Observed Instances of Speciation.
As to the rest of your points: I think it's stupid to try to shoehorn human behavior into a Darwinian straitjacket, nor does evolutionary theory require human behavior to be dictated solely by evolved reactions to environmental pressures. However, it would be equally stupid to deny that biology can and does play a role in human behavior (e.g., hormonal influence of emotions), and those things often are related to evolutionary pressures.
Finally, those who advocate "social Darwinism" (such as wiping out "inferior" races) fundamentally misunderstand evolutionary theory, which does not proscribe morals nor even speak of "inferior". (It speaks of "less well adapted" species in the technical sense that they are poorer at reproduction.)
Incidentally, natural selection may not be the whole story when it comes to evolution; other mechanisms (such as self-organization as espoused by Kauffman) may play a role. As for the punctuated equilibrium you mention, you might want to see the talk.origins FAQ on Punctuated Equilibrium since it is often misunderstood.
Why is everyone afraid to hold parents accountable for kids having enough spare time on their hands to plot mass executions, assemble pipe bombs with timers in their own homes, and accumulate weapons and ammunition? Bill Clinton has done a wonderful job of teaching us all how to blame everyone else for anything we do wrong.
"Stand on Zanzibar" by David Bruner
Haven't read it, though. Is it good? I last remember seeing it in bookstores around 1983 or 1984 . . . I was young at the time and, probably for no good reason aside from appearances, wrote it off as "boring pseudo-literary" (a.k.a. "British"
Standard anti-liberal accusations. It's just as simple-minded to blame "liberals" for the ills of society as it is to blame "society" for the crimes of individuals. (And I didn't see Bill Clinton telling people to blame society for what those kids did.) You're looking for a scapegoat just as much as you claim others are. Rather hypocritical, I'd say.
uh, isn't the above person saying the parents should be accountable????
"Klinton and her husband are directly and personally responsible for this tragedy. The blood of these innocents is on their hands. The war crimes tribunal which eventually sentences them will be sure to take this crime into account." Okay, it is a troll. That'll teach me to read more than one sentence into something before I start replying to it.
Well, in that case, I'm sure you won't mind if we pin you down and ask you to cite some specific examples of Pinker's deficiencies, so we can be sure that you're not conveniently allowing yourself to be "right" while "debunking" Pinker's theories by portraying them in the worst possible light.
I love it. First, right-wingers howl about "responsibility" -- and then they blame absolutely everything on liberals, blacks, homosexuals, foreigners, pornography, violence on TV, atheism, you name it. Of course, the great crime of all these guilty parties is supposed to be that they don't accept responsibility for things. When you get to the end of the rant, you can't help noticing that right wingers absolutely never accept any responsibility for anything themselves. It's true. All of our problems are caused by somebody else. The poor innocent right wingers are just victims of the big bad liberals. And this hypocrisy is drummed into everybody by the media to the point where hardly anybody notices the details any more.
Another closely related little nugget of hypocrisy is the fact that the right wing blames sex, violence, drug abuse, and homosexuality on books television. Why would they want to ban gays on TV if they actually believed that our environment is not responsible for our actions? Why ban Catcher in the Rye if J. D. Salinger is not actually responsible for what his readers do? That would make no sense. They want to have their cake and eat it: When black kids commit crimes, they howl for "personal responsibility", but when their own kids commit crimes, they blame it on TV. Cute. And we're letting them get away with it, too.
Oh, yeah, and what about all the genetics-govern-behavior crap? If my genes completely determine what I'm going to do with my life, who cares what my environment is like? Ha. I'm missing the point, of course. The point is that the genetics thing is convenient when an excuse is needed to blame poverty on poor people. For most other issues, it serves no purpose and so it stays on the shelf, replaced by other orthodoxies which explicitly contradict it.
He's saying that Bill Clinton made the parents not hold themselves accountable. So the parents are accountable for the actions of their kids, but Bill Clinton is accountable for the actions of the parents. Actually, that's consistent, in a surrealistic right-wing sort of a way.
Oh brother...
Okay, it is a troll.
Yep. Right on the money.
I posted it, and I'm sorry. I thought it was funny at the time. In retrospect, I'm not so amused any more. I don't believe a word of what I posted, and I think that your points are pretty reasonable.
Note the first reply to your post; it's time to stop the madness when somebody genuinely mad shows up to agree with you.
By the way, though, the riff about "Klinton and her husband" is pretty close to a direct quote from a militia web page. There are people out there, mostly in places like Michigan, who say those things in a very sincere and serious way. They are not joking. That's the scary thing: My troll was not an exaggeration.
Disgusting site. Supposedly the two killers were members of this group. They had a message up there last night supporting the actions of the shooters. Why hasn't the FBI taken these guys down. Seems to me free speech doesn't apply when you are directly advocating the killing of innocent civilians and public officials.
That's why I fell for it -- it wasn't an exaggeration. I know people who think like that. But I started suspecting when it started getting as far out as the "Klinton" thing; I doubt a nutcase that extreme would be the sort to hang out on Slashdot.
Seems to me free speech doesn't apply when you are directly advocating the killing of innocent civilians and public officials.
Oh, I don't know. The papers seem to print a lot of opinion in favor of killing Serbian innocents and officials.
In fact the whole idea of "transitions between species" is rather ill-defined; nature doesn't put up nice neat dividing lines between species.
Learn some biology.
the basic concept of natural selection isn't so hard to understand. look, a bat with a gene that suppresses all sperm production will die without having any children. any bat with that gene will have no children. this is natural selection. it implies no conscious guidance and needs none.
DNA requires no 'intelligent' or conscious agent to 'interpret' it. it's called RNA, it synthesizes proteins using the DNA as a "blueprint" (blindly and without any little homunculus to drive the synthesis i might add.)
part of why it's so difficult to figure out what any gene is "for" is because DNA isn't REALLY blueprints, it's not really made for being read.
organ formation in turn is driven by these synthesized proteins, not 'random permutations.'
the present form of these organs, however, is said to be the product of many millions of years of evolutionary change.
you haven't addressed the questions everyone else is talking about, but you have managed to say some very stupid things about biology.
i'm no biologist but i can see very clear errors in what you're saying.
there's no evidence for any "magical force" organizing the growth of babies. your argument runs: "scientists don't know everything about how babies develop. so their theory is bad. because their theory is bad we must believe the only alternative, which is that god is growing the babies."
sorry, you have to provide proof for your own positive assertions. too bad.
you also misunderstand the black box concept. the whole point of the black box is that you don't know what is inside, not that there is nothing inside. since you can't know what's inside, the only way to make any inferences about the internals is by analyzing inputs and outputs.
learn some philosophy too while you're at it.
the following Books:
-In search of the Miraculus, Fragmet of an unknown
teching, Ouspensky (hard to read)
-Gurdjieff's books (hard to read)
-Neuro Lingiustic Programming, Richard Bandler
(hard to read, powerful techniques)
(nb. i'm absolutely serious), maweb@hotmail.com
As the physicist John Wheeler said, "More is different". An individual particle doesn't have a temperature, but lots of them put together do.
"The situation is somewhat like trying to explain what a computer does by playing with the GUI, but no clue about the implementation levels underneath. There would be a lot of guesses you would have to make, and a substantial number would likely be wrong. "
Very good. A good reverse engineer wouldn't make unsubstantiated guesses, though. You don't *have* to make any guesses, although in order to make any sort of useful model tentative inferences would be necessary.
A good reverse engineer would figure out a great deal about the internals of the computer by strategic inputs and measured outputs. he wouldn't know everything for certain, but given a good amount of time and freedom with that computer he could construct a very good model.
reverse engineering is a fine metaphor for psychology. the point is, it would be very nice to know exactly how memory works in every detail. but we hardly know anything right now, and will most likely never know *everything.* in the meantime, we can construct good working models from the information that is available to us.
incomplete information should cause us to approach the problem with caution, not just throw up our hands and say "we can't make any psychological statements until we know every last detail of how the brain works."
That said, coming up with post hoc evolutionary stories explaining why X, Y, and Z news items happened definitely smacks of silliness. the stories can't be verified empirically at all.
that's the weakness of considering people (or their behavior, or their minds) from an evolutionary perspective.
the strength lies in building theory. based on the premise that people evolved, and based on information about the environment they evolved in, you can make useful (and testable) inferences about how people work.
the idea that evolutionary psychology mainly consists of a lot of post hoc storytelling that immediately explains mysteries of human behavior is a caricature and a straw man. evolutionary thinking is just as essential to the study of human behavior as it is to the study of squirrel behavior. it simply requires more care.
While I'm not a connectionist and don't think that everything about the mind can be explained in terms of neural networks, it doesn't seem at all implausible that memory could work like an associative neural network does. But then, I'm completely ignorant of neurobiology.
I don't agree with that either.
That quote was from a live CNN interview, the answer was response to the specific question of whether the shootings were motivated by race or "clique".
OK, so what's your position--are the parent's of the TCM accountable?
I don't agree with that either.
Nor do I, but the overthrow.com goons seem to think that they're quite literally at war with rational people, so therefore what's the difference? I dunno. I'm not so crazy about censorship, anyway. Maniacs don't need idiots to tell them to kill. They'll figure it out on their own. And if there were no militia web sites, the rest of us would be a lot less aware of the fact that those psychos are out there. IMHO Mama may very well know best, but I'd just as soon be able to find things out for myself, directly.
(Did you read much on overthrow.com? Their "leader", Bob White (IIRC), goes on talk shows and erupts into howling obscene tirades, putatively in order to prevent them from making him look foolish and/or crazy. Uhhh, okay
I know this may be getting a little off the thread but I do believe that it is relevant. I first heard of this story this morning as my radio is broken in my car and I happened to stay away from the TV. I heard conversations on morning radio and turned on CNN to get conversations and facts about the incident. CNN was well into their umteenth hour of continous coverage and was digging into seemingly irrevelant trivia about the incident. and making irresponsible speculation about the motivations of the perpetrators based on a few hours of hastily gathered "facts".
The sickest thing in my mind was the fact that CNN was already patting themselves on the back because they were the first to scoop the story because some kids in the school call CNN BEFORE THE POLICE!!! from their cell phone. this was followed by media experts proclaiming that the availability of technology will allow us to have live footage of this the NEXT TIME IT HAPPENS.
1) I'm saddened that a few hours after a terrible incident rather than mourning the loss CNN seems to be saying "dont turn that F___ing dial because next week it will be your son' school"
2) What kind of "if it bleeds, It leads" society are we living in that a kid calls to report the incident rather than call for help. I bet the little bastard asked how much he would get paid for the scoop. " but the guy with the Rodney King tape got $5Million"
3) and Finally ****My impressions of the actions of the "trenchcoat Mafia" (good to see we have a cute moniker)******
Bottom Line: I see a lack of morality in youth today. Maybe my parents saw it in my generation. they don't know the difference between right and wrong. Specifically where their rights end and other peoples rights begin. I heartily believe that I have the right to do Whatever I want, PROVIDED THAT MY ACTIONS DO NOT INFRINGE ON ANOTHERS RIGHT TO DO WHATEVER THEY WANT.
at the risk of generalizing I see a trend in kids today that they don't know or respect the rights of others. What causes this? lack of Parenting. When I was there age i read Soildure (sp?)of fortune, played paintball, launched bottle rockets and (gulp) made a pipe bomb or twoand I pulled my share of pranks against people I "hated" (usually at the expence of the functionality of there automobile). I was curious rebellious and stupid, but I knew well enough where to draw the line. and that line was drawn well before I was certainly capable of blowing up a person or school but I knew better. (Thanks Dad) I think I got in to a lot of those things because i was a latchkey kid.
Here's a better example: when i was in highschool as with most of us, when you got in an argument it may lead to a fight. If you got you butt kicked, you learned "next time Ill avoid getting in a fight" and you usally had a black eye for a week to remind you. On time at school there was a fight one guy was a "skinhead", still new to Mid-america(circa 1985) any way this guy was getting a lesson in conflict avoidance when one of his buddies jumped in to bail him out...Two on one...an ugly precidence. soon after that became te norm. You're buddies getting beat up, hop in, outnumber the opponent and stomp his head in. this escalatted in to blackjacks, knives, and now where kids feel obligated to bring guns and hommade explosives to make it a level playing field.
Whatever got us to where we are today, we need to turn things around, I think the only way to do that is to to our kids.
" today I am grateful to be alive"
...and I didn't have sex with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky either!
OK, so what's your position--are the parent's of the TCM accountable?
IMHO: I suspect that they probably went wrong somewhere (or at least dropped the ball), but I'm in no position to make any claims. I know nothing about these people, I've never even met them. Some parents shit on their kids, and the kids turn out badly because of it. Other kids get the same treatment and turn out relatively well. Some kids are treated well and turn out like utter swine. In my own family, the range of how we (kids) turned out is quite broad, but we all share certain learned traits as well. Human behavior is so damned complex, that I really can't see any way I can sit here at the other end of the continent and decide who to blame. The "blame Clinton" poster seems to think that it's because the kids had too much time on their hands -- as if everybody who's bored uses the time to build bombs. That's nonsensical; I had loads of time on my hands at that age. I spent it reading and playing guitar. (Creepily enough, I had friends who wore black trench coats and DID make pipe bombs, but they never did anything violent, except for one who killed himself).
In a nutshell, it is my belief that genetic factors play some kind of a role (e.g. depression is often chemical in nature), but so does one's environment. Parents are a big part of that environment, but not by any means the only part. Depression may be induced by brain chemistry, but it is handled by the individual, who learns how to handle it from his or her parents.
Anybody who thinks s/he has a simple, elegant, and complete explanation for something like this has gotta be on crack.
And that's my position.
Here are some gun quotes.
"The great object is, that every man be armed. [...] Every one who is able may have a gun."
-- Patrick Henry, speech of June 14 1788
"Rifles, muskets, long-bows and hand-grenades are inherently democratic weapons. A complex weapon makes the strong
stronger, while a simple weapon -- so long as there is no answer to it -- gives claws to the weak. "
-- George Orwell, "You and the Atom Bomb", 1945
"To make inexpensive guns impossible to get is to say that you're putting a money test on getting a gun. It's racism in its worst
form. "
-- Roy Innis, president of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), 1988
"Americans have the will to resist because you have weapons. If you don't have a gun, freedom of speech has no power. "
-- Yoshimi Ishikawa, Japanese author, in the LA Times 15 Oct 1992
"The world is filled with violence. Because criminals carry guns, we decent law-abiding citizens should also have guns.
Otherwise they will win and the decent people will lose. "
- James Earl Jones
"Arms in the hands of citizens may be used at individual discretion for the defense of the country, the overthrow of tyranny or
private defense. "
-- John Adams, 1794, "A Defense of the Constitution of the Government of the USA", 471
"(Those) who are trying to read the Second Amendment out of the Constitution by claiming it's not an individual right (are)
courting disaster by encouraging others to use the same means to eliminate portions of the Constitution they don't like. "
-- Alan Dershowitz, Harvard Law School
"No kingdom can be secured otherwise than by arming the people. The possession of arms is the distinction between a freeman
and a slave. "
-- "Political Disquisitions", a British republican tract of 1774-1775
"To disarm the people... was the best and most effectual way to enslave them."
-- George Mason, speech of June 14, 1788
I disagree.
Conservatives don't "blame everything on liberals, blacks, homosexuals,...". But they ARE concerned with people turning to the government to solve our problems, which does nothing but increase the size , complexity and power of our government, which in turn takes away more and more of our freedoms.
What liberals tend to do (and I'll group them all into one pile just as you did right-wingers, which ironically is what liberals typically accuse conservatives of doing) is re-frame arguments in such a way that they accuse conservatives of hating all of the groups you mentioned above, when it is not the case.
That's civil war!!!
not crime.
The governments don't want to call it civil war.
It gives credulance to the rebellous faction.
Everyone being armed deters violence.
It does not deter social unrest.
a good economy and good opportunities can deter it, but sometines fail (American Civil War)
Yeah, conservatives are supposed to be for small government and nothing more, but I'm sorry, they do often end up blaming other people, particularly liberals, for social problems. Far more so than liberals accuse conservatives. And it's not really true.
Where I live in TX, when people heard about more gun control, they said, "They can take my guns. When they pry them from my cold dead fingers."
In this state (in rural areas) there are probabably more guns than people in the whole state.
"...but if they show up for exercises (once a year for everybody, IIRC) with the seal broken on the ammunition, they catch hell over it."
Well, if someone hoses down a high school with the same ammunition, he can expect to catch hell over it, too. Doesn't look like "catching hell" is much of a deterrent, does it?
Must be something else.
In Colorado the police in schools are not allowed to have guns.
All this could have been prevented if the police officer had had a gun when it started.
The operating system on my computer just spontaneosly
evolved from Windows 95, MSDOS and other more primitive
forms. The kernel obviosly took millions of years to evolve
to develop multitasking. Eventually it evolved a GUI front end
from the more primitive command line interface of its distant
ancestors. Occasionally the software that is evolving on my
machine gets a core dump. But that must just be another
evolutionary trait that cannot be blamed on the software.
Where do you people get off trying to tell me that all of this
was created by some fictional being called Linus Torvalds?
Why does my software occassionally try to give credit to this
fictional being (among others ) when it so obviously
evolved from MSDOS all by itself.
Poster's Law:
It's always the longest comments that are posted twice.
a good definition is they're the same species if they can mate (and produce offspring)
Are dogs and wolves the same species?
Am I the only one that is EXTREMELY angry at being lumped in with mass murderers?
I hung out with kids like that in high school. A couple of them did actually make a couple of pipe bombs, but they just set them off out in the woods and nobody got hurt. They were never violent towards anybody (with one sort-of-exception noted below). These kids were not murderers. Buttheads, maybe (though I thought they were pretty cool at the time, being one of them
I'll bet that a lot of high-school kids in black trench coats take a lot of abuse over this, up to and including getting beaten up. Lots of brainless high-school administrators will inevitably ban trenchcoats in school, too (as if it were the trenchcoats that made them do it). In general (I predict), kids who wear clothes like that will be "punished" and kicked around, by way of "doing something about the problem". It's really sick. Preemptive punishment is retarded and counterproductive at best, even in the extremely rare cases where those who are punished might do what they're accused of being capable of doing.
This all looks a little bit familiar to me; one of the above-mentioned black-coat kids who I knew in high school killed himself, and they really cracked down on anybody in school who was perceived as "weird". I was weird enough to make the cut and I got hassled endlessly for some really moronic reasons. The school administration was so clueless, it was just beyond belief. Their way of "preventing" it from happening again was to single out anybody who struck them (in their cluelessness) as "high-risk", and do all they could to alienate those kids even more -- just so we'd know who was boss and we wouldn't try anything, I guess. Sheer idiocy. What a miserable time high school is.
I'm aware that this is extremely off the topic of the book, but I feel it warrants expression.
It does, very much.
Evidence, eh? Would you mind sharing?
Conservatives don't "blame everything on liberals, blacks, homosexuals,...". But they ARE concerned with people turning to the government to solve our problems, which does nothing but increase the size , complexity and power of our government, which in turn takes away more and more of our freedoms.
That's an oversimplification, of course, but those conservatives who do object sincerely to government, tend to blame a lot of their problems on it (in addition to gays, blacks, etc.). There's a little extra bonus hilarity in this, because right-wingers have absolutely enormous influence in this government which they claim to distrust. Running for office on an anti-government platform (e.g. the GOPAC zombies of 1994, and others since) is almost too good a joke to be true.
The central point of my argument was the fact that right-wingers never, ever take responsibility for anything, while they're always glad to spread blame around far and wide on others. Thanks for providing me with a convenient example of that kind of behavior.
. . . you're a retard if you really believe what you said.
True. Fortunately I don't believe it. It was a parody/troll. See posts entitled "TROLL! Apology" above. I have a weird sense of humor, that's all.
In Colorado the police in schools are not allowed to have guns.
All this could have been prevented if the police officer had had a gun when it started.
The only question is, how paranoid should we be? I don't pretend to have an answer for that, by the way.
"intelligent". From what I've read they were
Neo-Nazi losers.
In an AP article on yahoo; one one of them was quoted saying "I hate niggers" before firing his gun.
Intelligent? No.
I KNOW. These kids were such goobers. I mean, when I first heard about them I thought they might have been pretty decent...black trenchcoats...cool! But then I heard that they were giggling while they gunned down their schoolmates, that's so lame. Icy stares, those are cool. Evil grins, yes indeedy, but giggling? How unprofessional. And, alright, they had possession of a building with 900 schoolkids in it, they were heavily armed, and yet they managed to get only 25 of them. Dumb dumb dumb.
I suppose we've gotten lucky with this rash of shootings..."Bob" help us if we ever get a crazed highschool gunman with an iota of intelligence. Or style, but that's another story.
Hmm, the astounding thing about Linux isn't that it's well-adapted or complex, but rather that it's well-adapted, complex, and was written in only a few years. The formation of a complex and well-adapted [x] takes either a talented author or time, but enough of one can most likely overcome the lack of the other.
--
Anonymous Coward
"God doesn't exist, and anyway he's stupid." -Kevin from VALIS.
What's so interesting about this whole thing is that everyone seems to be blaming everyone but the kids themselves. Those of you who believe that a parent can control a High School age kid (15 to 18) are full of shit. If you're one of those people who think you CAN control a 15/16 yr old, you better hope you *NEVER* have a kid like was. :)
:) Anyhow, when I got the 486 I had it when I was in 8th grade, and I got into bbsing and the Internet a little bit. As I learned more about computers I got that much more interested in them and before I was even 15 I built another machine, which again my Dad paid for, provided I went to school (which I did attend a little more). Anyhow, by the time I was 15 I started going to High School. You have to remember that for the majority of my life I was *ALWAYS* depressed, I always got in fights at school, I always did mean things people and animals. By the time I was in High School and I was attending at lest a few times a week and then one day I just snapped. I refused to go to school, all the nice social workers told me I'd go to jail, my parents told me this, everyone told me what bad things would happen to me if I didn't attend school, my parents even had me going to Physiologists about this too. So at the time I think I told them to blow me in response to what they said. :) So instead of blowing all the jocks because the hot babes wouldn't put out for me I stayed home and hacked away at my computer. To my parents at lest I was *ALWAYS* home just I was the computer all day long and all night long instead of going to school. Hey, at lest I wasn't blowing away other kids right? :-> As I got older I eventually became less depressed I actually ended up finishing up High School before I was supposed to anyway. I even got some College credits as well (about 60 now).
:->
So anyhow I'll just leave a story about myself then you can decide if you as a parent could control this...
As I say this, I'm reminded of a family (They were a highly Christian family btw) that I used to have as friends when I was a few years younger. The mother was telling me that when their kids were younger than 10 they would spank them, then when they got older they would pull out a fishing pole and whip their butt with it until they were about 15. I told the mother that if I was her kid and she tried that I'd take that fishing pole and start whipping *HER* with it. She got very shocked when I said that and didn't really know what to say. For Those if you think I wouldn't have done that, you can go ask my parents about the 20 to 30 holes in the wall, broken TV sets, broke dishes, etc for every time they *TRIED* to even ground me for as punishment for whatever lame thing I did at the time. I really destroyed their house for every time they did try punishing me.
When I was about 14 yrs old my Dad bought me a new computer and at the time it was JUST when the 486's came out and he paid a LOT of money for it. (Previously I had a 286 for school when I did attend). I'm sure he figured that maybe having a new computer would encourage me to attend school and such. Both my parents were trying everything to calm me down. I was on tons of different anti-depressant drugs that never seemed to work. So it's not like they didn't try or anything. I was a problematic kid from the start if I remember right.
Now, 5 years later, I'm an IT guy, making a lot of money and I do a good job at it too. In fact, all the time I spent hacking away at Linux and anything else I could get my hands on actually taught me something more than school probably would have ever taught me anyway. It gave me the knowledge to perform my job to the fullest and I make a lot of money doing it too. Perhaps I should have gone to jail for all the things I did (I seemed to get out of it because I was getting older as each day passed and you know how slow the courts are), but the question is, is how would I have turned out sitting a juvenal detention with a lot of gang members who probably already killed 2 or 3 people by the time they were my age? Maybe I wouldn't have grown up, gotten a clue, and actually started becoming a productive member to society. All through my so troubled youth I never yet once did think about killing ANYONE, nor harming anyone. Which is maybe the sole factor of why I never did anything so terrible like what these kids did. I did grow up in a time of Wolf 3D and Doom though and those are things that people want to blame for why kids blow away other kids.
I think the issue is more complex and more involved than we can imagine. When it really comes down to it these people went utterly crazy and killed something like 25 other people. The best explanation that I can come up with for what they did is they went nuts and those of who think you can blame society, movie makers, game makers and the like are just plain stupid. When are we as a society going to stop blaming everyone but himself or herself for what they have done and account for our own actions? I have no one else to blame for what I did when I was younger other than myself. I did much worse things than destroying my parent's house than what I explained above but this is already long enough (I even tortured my pets too). One could argue that they could have done one more thing or done something different than what they did. The bottom line is I am accountable for the actions I did, not my parents, not ID software, not the president (As much as I can't stand him), not congress, not anyone other than myself. I think everyone should take responsibility for what THEY have done instead of blaming everyone and their grandma.
- Just my two cents.
- Women are like a box of chocolates; you can't help it to just eat them.
What i wonder is if we arent chasing the wrong goat
Right or wrong, I like the phrase.
Could having smaller schools with a closer student body help prevent the allienation that seems to be a common factor in the many school shooting's?
That's probably a better solution than banning guns (which those kids probably weren't "allowed" to have anyway, and see what that accomplished), and a much, much better solution than banning fucking black trenchcoats, which is what most school administrators will probably do. Morons.
The problem is that schools like Columbine are tremendously expensive, new, shiny, etc. This is America: Bigger is better, and biggest is best. There's no way you'll ever convince a school board that bigger schools aren't better, and even if you could, they'd never abandon a capital investment that size. Which is depressing, because I really think you've got a point. Even if you're right, it's not the whole solution, but it's a good step for all concerned (except for the ROI thing, damn).
In repsonce to your "....he said that from the day they started school they were beaten and ridiculed relentlessly an example he threw out was that one of them was held down and given an enema...."
Well for most of us, I'm sure if you were beaten and held down and given an enema You surely want to have who every did this to you to pay for it. However, going and killing 25 for it? Perhaps that isn't the best way. I guess I'm reminded of the "do unto others...." Whole bit. I guess bottom line, is, is if you want to give someone an enema for kicks and beat the shit out of them, perhaps you should make sure they aren't going to blow you away for it? It still doesn't excuse what they did, just at some point people *DO* snap.
I've never used drugs and it makes a whole lot of sense to me.
Start judging people on a personal basis instead of just perpetuating bullshit stereotypes. Get to know a "right-winger". You just might like them.
I see it now, sorry.
-- AC, putting knee back in joint
I think an important criterion for species has been omitted. The two organisms must be able to produce viable and FERTILE offspring. For example, a horse and a donkey can mate and produce a viable mule or hinny (depending on which parent is which) but neither of these hybrid offspring can produce offspring of their own.
Also, even if two animals are able to mate and produce viable, fertile offspring, they are not necessarily genetically identical (and, in fact, unless they are twins they are almost certainly not so) they are just members of the same species.
There was an off duty cop there as a security officer and he was armed. Maybe we should of had two armed cops.. No wait that wouldn't have stopped them either.. How about a swat team stationed at the school? Possibly.. Hey, I've got it... Why don't we start posting army units at public high schools? Yeah.. Safety, Security and a real life lesson on heavy handed government oppression...
I happen to live pretty close to littleton, and I am well known for being a big KMFDM fan, so understandibly I was outraged to here the local newscaster(Ward Lucas) say that those kids listened to "Neo-nazi music such as KMFDM". Anyone who has listened to much KMFDM knows that their message is one of understanding and peace(underneath some heavy-metal of course). Now everyone in my home town probably thinks I'm racist. Goddamn Media!! You just made my life alot harder.
signed--
A Peace loving Socialist.
sorry chump i bealive more in the constitution then in your little theroy
How does Darwinian evolutionary theory explain the phenomenon of suicide? If, as the last post propounds, the two "Trench Coat Mafia" members committed their crimes to increase their social status (and their chances of "getting laid"), then why would they then take their own lives? Something's amiss here, and I don't think the answer is as simple as some would like it to be.
Unfortunately for your thesis, the worst mass murders in US history have been committed with gasoline ("Happyland" night club arson in New York in the 80s) and fertilizer (Murrah Federal Building bombing in Oklahoma City). Both of these incidents together resulted in an order of magnitude more deaths than all of the firearm-committed mass murders in the US in the past decade.
But thanks for playing.
First, there are pathological conditions, such as diabetes. The existence of this disease does not preclude evolutionary reasons for the way a healthy metabolism works. There are also once-healthy processes which are now inappropriate. Our sweet tooth once meant a hunter gather would climb a tree and eat an orange. Now he/she stops at Dunkin' Donuts and...
Suicidal behavior is likely analogous to either or both of these. A process gone bad, or a process no longer appropriate for the current circumstances.
What's the alternative - there *is* no reason for the way we are?
- freehand
If you want a good overlook, read David Marr's "Vision". Marr was an electric engineer (his mentor was Minsky) who hooked up with some neurologists (Poggio, to name one) to study vision.
If you can read just one part of "Vision", read the introduction. Marr explains the different levels (implementation, representation, something else?), and how knowing about the implementation level isn't always necessary.
To translate this to SlashDot terms, the folks at WINE don't need to see the source code (implementation level, although this is software, we'll make it analogous to hardware) of Windows to reverse engineer it and understand how it works.
Yes, knowing the implementation level helps, but it isn't always neccessary. To turn things around, imagine you were just studying the implementation level (the flesh) of the brain. It would be damn hard (and damn near impossible, but possible nonetheless) to figure out what that mass of wiring (err..neurons) does.
Now, if you can throw some stuff at the black box (Pschophysics, Cognitive Psychology, etc.) and see what comes out, you'll have an easier time of thing. Now, if you can use your knowledge of the hardware to constrain your theories (and vice-versa), you're a lot better off.
This question is easy. In a large town, with a diverse population of people and their interests, it is much easier to find a large group of people that will accept you. In a small town, you're much more likely to get a few big groups of friends (the jock group, the neo-hippie group, the prepie group) and everyone who doesn't fit in with them is an outcast. And if they find theirselves at extreme odds with one of the groups, because that group made too much fun or something, then they might snap.
When I was in high school (had about 400 people in it) there was a kid that nearly everyone (and I don't exagerate: freshmen, sophomores, juniors, seniors, and occasionally teachers) made fun of and knocked around because he was gay. I was afraid the whole time I was there that he was just going to snap start killing people, out of sheer hate.
While it's not bad as that last example for most pariah type kids, high school is/was still complete hell on earth for a good deal of us. It should almost be expected that every once in a while taking all of that shit stops being worthwhile, and it's time for revenge.
TIA
I think you're being a little unfair and a little harsh. From what I can see, his objections revolve around the philosophical "why?" rather than the strictly scientific "what?". I agree that we are 'built' on DNA, that structural blueprints are provided and that we are manufactured according to these blueprints. I don't even have a problem with 99% of evolution.
... yet ... but that doesn't mean it can't exist), and it's a pretty theory.
... why?" You may consider the question to be meaningless, I don't.
However, I do remember biology teachers telling me that they couldn't really explain the transition from simple monocellular life to, for example, an organism capable of detecting visible light, sorting the light into useful patterns and reacting accordingly. Infinite permutations may get you from one to the other but I'm simply not sure. DNA has to develop, it doesn't just spring into existence and frequently there's no explanation as to why it develops consistently in a given direction; a deeper structure perhaps?
Additionally, there are aesthetic questions being raised. Everything may be the product of pure chance, but is that the kind of universe you want to live in? I believe that he is right in that the world is a product of our mental space; 'reality' (for want of a better word' is filtered to such an extent by our perceptions and desires that we are entitled to reject ideas because they are ugly. I don't believe in a 'life force', but, equally, I've seen nothing to disprove it (yes, I know, it's terribly convenient that you can't measure it
The world is a complex place and everyone is entitled to their opinion; it's worth bearing in mind, however, that two people with contradictory opinions may both be right. We are entitled to say to a scientist "Yes, your theory satisfactorily explains WHAT happens, but
What I remember from thermodynamics-class:
An individual particle (for instance an electron) has a temperature which can be calculated from that particle's kinetic energy.
Also his: "The Sheep look up" was awesome
Classification glitch? :)
To all you who've never been in the real world
the shooting incident in Litteton, Colorado
is something people in "bad places" have to
go through every single day. What are the
bad places? Think! Its the places you dare
not to go. East Palo Alto, South Central
and East L.A., etc... You never hear
of them because the damn media likes to give
out the image that YOU MUST be this color
or have this much Ben Franklins to be featured
in the ten O'Clock news.
The 'why' question is often just as scientific as the 'what' question--a perfectly acceptable answer to the question 'why did this thing happen?' is to give a causal explanation (a list of the event's causes) which is an eminently scientific task.
Additionally, there are aesthetic questions being raised. Everything may be the product of pure chance, but is that the kind of universe you want to live in?
Unfortunately, what kind of world we want to live in has little to do with it. The facts determine themselves independently of what we want or what we think. The presence of tragedy should be enough to establish that. If we really are 'entitled to reject things because they're ugly', why can't we reject those things in the world which are ugly, or vicious, or pointlessly cruel? Many of us would like to, but we can't--the way the world is is the way the world is, will we or nill we.
I realise that i've taken what you said very literally, but that's because i can't figure out any way to understand it more charitably. if you had something else in mind, please clarify. There is room for more than one opinion; but which one is right is settled independently of any human squabble.
"That's not the why I'm looking for" (sorry). No, really, I agree that I should have been clearer. It'll be easier if I deal with both points at once.
I think it's necessary to distinguish between an event, i.e. a set of spatial and temporal co-ordinates, and our perception of that event. "X" happens, and the actual X may be extremely simple. For example, an object moves through space and kinetic energy is transferred: a man slaps a woman. The event can be described relatively simple, using language or scientific notation. However, the most important element of the event - its explanation - is conveyed by neither.
In other words, the event in itself has no meaning. Admittedly, another branch of science - based on psychology - could attempt to explain the event in another way. and a neuropsychologist might disagree with the explanation given by a "conventional" psychologist. The point I'm sidestepping around is that there are a large number of explanations/opinions for any given event, and a much larger number as soon as consciousness of any sort is involved.
If you agree so far, I would go further and say that (most) events are therefore open to interpretation, even on a causal level. It's possible that (the early) Wittgenstein was right, and that a thing can be wholly described by a list of properties, but I don't think so, and besides such a list would either be infinitely long or (value judgement, sorry) utterly useless, since it would convey no meaning we could use. For me, reality is perceptual, not causal. We live inside our own headspaces and are thus required to give our own interpretation to 'mere' events.
This is what I mean when I talk about opinion, and the possibility of multiple correct opinions. I don't believe in "universal truth" since truth, outside of pure logic and (perhaps) mathematics is extremely hard to define and use. Perhaps I'm talking about a weaker (i.e. relative and not absolute) notion of truth than you are?
I'll also admit that I use the word "aesthetic" in a slightly unusual way; we're back to interpretation again. For me, aesthetics includes the "spin" or usual interpretation that we place on events, i.e. our perception of that which is external.
As the original poster to the article, let me first thank you for replying. I appreciated the information you provided about the Talk. Origins website. I read the FAQs you mentioned and I was quite pleased with the fact that they did not contain "rants" about Christianity. I hope we can keep that type of dialog going. However, as to the points contained within these FAQs, I have to respectfully disagree. Let's take two points in particular: the efficacy of natural selection and the fossil record.
... so will natural selection, if it be a true principle, banish the belief of the continued creation of new organic beings, or of any great and sudden modification in their structure."
With regards to natural selection. As you suggest, other biologists have proposed other mechanisms (e.g., Gould punctuated equilibrium), but natural selection, in one form or another is still the dominant mechanism taught in biology textbooks. As you know Darwin sought to avoid any recourse to "saltations" (i.e. sudden leaps by which a new organism appears in a single generation). For example, if a snake laid an egg and a chicken emerged, there would be no way to distinguish this act from divine intervention. Thus, as Darwin wrote:
"Natural selection can act only by the preservation and accumulation of infinitesimally small inherited modifications, each profitable to the preserved being;
Darwin also wrote:
"If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down."
But, natural selection has precisely that problem. Complex organs such as the eye, or a wing, require complex support structures which must be in place for that organ to operate. As Denton wrote in Evolution: A Theory in Crisis about the avian lung:
"Just how such a different respiratory system could have evolved gradually from the standard vertebrate design is fantastically difficult to envisage, especially bearing in mid that the maintenance of the respiratory function is absolutely vital to the life of an organism."
In addition, bird and bat wings appear in the fossil record already developed and there is no evidence that wings, or other complex organs, have ever developed by gradual evolution.
Regarding the fossil record, Darwin himself asked the question:
"Why, if species have descended from other species by insensibly fine gradations, do we not everywhere see innumerable transitional forms?"
I read the list of proposed transitional forms on the Talk.Origins web site and could not find any evidence that these proposed forms were transitional. While the proposed list was extensive, it was also deceptive in its assertion that the transitions were "fact" (i.e., testable in some way). Let's take the transitional forms supposed to be ape-to-man. Solly Zuckerman, a noted British scientist, subject one probable ancestor, Australopithecines to years of biometric testing to determine the validity of the transition. He concluded that:
"the claim that they walked and ran upright like man is much more flimsy than the evidenced which points to the conclusion that their gait was some variant of what one sees in subhuman Primates, that it remains unacceptable."
In addition, the Transitional FAQ itself always points to gaps in the primate sequence when there would be a proposed transition. Once again, we get back to Darwin's question of about the need for innumerable transitional forms. Which leads me to the following points about the fossil record: (1) Many of the proposed forms are in doubt about their classification and (2) The fossil record should contain so many examples as to remove all doubt about the first point.
In conclusion, I have attempted to show that the two main pillars of evolutionary theory: the method of natural selection and the fossil record have serious problems. While others, such as Gould, have proposed explanations for both, even these new proposals have a similar void of evidence. Please let me know what you think.
all this is premised on one very big assumption - that matter is primary, and consciousness is an attribute arising from a complex enough assembly of purely physical/electronic (and biologic) processes. the book does not address this, but simply ASSUMES this, and goes on its merry way. what is not considered is that perhaps consciousness is primary and matter condeneses as a manifestation of this consciousness.
for example, if we take the lungs. you can look at it in two ways.
the mechanic (i.e. scientist) looks at a lung, and makes a machine
which has a pair of balloons, and a diaphram to expand and collapse
those balloons based on the principle of air pressure. as the
articulated branching structure expands and collapses, air is
pumped in and out. they determine the air flow as a by-product of
movements from without created by mechanical processes. then they
say they have made a lung. but this entirely leaves out of the
question how a real lung could put all their technical knowledge
to shame by virtue of the fact that a real lung has no engineers
building it up from outside, but rather it GROWS without any
external assembly-type process (even with nanotechnology, the
assemblers are still just smaller external machines, not actually
growing like a real lung). if the scientists tinker with
biology enough, they find a way to redirect the growth to their
purposes, but they still don't fundamentally know WHY it grows
any more than they know WHY gravity makes massive objects attract.
now, looking at this another way - within the lung, the air flows
move in and out of the lung in a cyclic fashion. the air moves
through the lungs rhymically, and distributes in a branching
pattern to meet up with the air sacks in which the oxygen is
exchanged into the bloodstream, and then is breathed out again.
now, imagine if you will this air pattern continuing to flow in
cyclic fashion without the attendent lung apparatus through
which it flows. i.e. air flowing in and out of lungs in exactly
the same shapes and patterns, with the lungs themselves not present.
if you could imagine water flowing into and out of the branching
structure, and leaving a small deposit of sediment with each
cycle of the breathing, you would find that the lung structure
would slowly begin building itself up from the very process of
the breathing itself! you could then say: "the movement exists;
and the organ forms around it."
this is analagous to the fashion in which i believe the universe
is composed. the LIFE consciousness exists, the strucuture of
the universe forms around the life process as a by-product of
life's activities (think of the development of a baby in the
womb - just *what* directs this development? scientists, at a
loss point to DNA, but who coded the DNA which takes thousands
of scientists years and years just to figure out the code, and
still have no idea how the code is translated into the dynamic
process of organ formation - if it takes intelligence to decode
it, how can we say it was created by random permutation? it is
about as ridiculous as to say that enough monkeys typing at
random will regularly output highly intelligent novels and
scientific papers). similarly, *thinking* is not an attribute
of the brain, but rather the brain's structure and electrical
activity is determined by pre-existent THOUGHTS. the course
of evolution is not determined by CHANCE as the darwinists
would suppose, but rather -- changes in evolution are a natural
outcome of a change in configuration of life consciousness
itself - or put another and somewhat more poetic way: the
universe is the outworking of god's thoughts. the fine tuning
then is therefore not "amazing" at all, but rather to be
expected. it just depends on which side you approach the
problem intially: matter on up, or vice-versa.
the funny thing is the person sitting here ("you"), typing
into a keyboard can't explain his own thoughts or existence
by empirical methods - because consciousness cannot be proven
empirically. you simply know you exist. but only once you
exist can you look for a reason for WHY you exist. so again,
science is at a complete loss to explain the WHY of life,
even if it is very clever at explaining that when a cow
kicks a can, the can tips over. but they don't know WHY
the cow wanted to kick the can in the first place.
(this, of course actually goes on into a discussion of
thoughts, and if all thoughts are simply an: i) input,
ii) black box, iii) output - type of unconscious reaction.
but that ignores the fact of what happenes when one *chooses*
to respond in full conscious awareness to what proceeds in
the thought process. the tricky thing about consciousness is
that you can observe your own thinking, and even stop it
and who is doing that!?).
the assumption that the aggregate
organisation of complex molecules leads to a development
of consciousness as an attribute of the complex organisation.
but that still is far from being demonstrated in any way. in fact, it has failed in the utmost to explain the actual observed facts.
johnrpenner@earthlink.net
Posted by FascDot Killed My Previous Use:
"Mind's I", which I've read more than once, is a good introduction to the subject. It has some good thought experiments and essays that point out the issues but don't come to any conclusions.
"How the Mind Works" goes into a great deal of cognitive detail and is excellent as a technical background.
"Consciousness Explained" is one good attempt at pulling everything together.
Posted by FascDot Killed My Previous Use:
1) I also highly recommend his "The Language Instinct".
2) Someone below asked if HTMW can explain Columbine. As a matter of fact, there is a section on emotion from the perspective of game theoretic strategies that covers things very much like this.
Posted by FascDot Killed My Previous Use:
Pinker comes from that Chomskyite school where everyone is willing to pontificate/argue about anything -- provided they can avoid getting pinned down on a testable hypothesis.
On the contrary, even HTMW (a non-academic setting) contains a number of testable (and tested) hypotheses. For instance, check out the section on rotating figures.
We don't really know how the mind works, but we do know enough to say that easy answers are wrong answers.
I'd say that if a dense book like HTMW can only provide a cursory overview of a theory, it must not be supplying the "easy" answers.
Posted by FascDot Killed My Previous Use:
Those are the givens I opened this thread on.
Yes, I know. And I'm attacking those premises since they give rise to false conclusions.
For instance, where does the mind store these pictures, if not in the "massively overrated" brain? The liver? How does a purely "spiritual" (undefined term, BTW) interact with the physical "control center" in order for you to move your arm? Etc.
Posted by Karym:
:)
If it was available in english, I would recommend Henri Laborit's "La Nouvelle Grille" which basically superseeds what I read of the review. I'm actually even thinking to myself whether Pinker translated it and adapted it to his words. Even the part about aggressiveness being part of human nature has been said by Laborit. The stuff pretty much resembles Laborit's claims, except that Laborit wrote his book in 1973. Not only does he make the "radical claim" of how much biology influences our actions, he even goes so far as saying that it dictates our actions and that, in fact, we don't really have any "freedom" in our choices more than an electron has of turning around a nucleus. If you really want to learn about the brain and how it influences social behavior, etc. you probably should start by learning french
Posted by Lord Kano-The Gangster Of Love:
>>Hmm. Maybe I just fell for a troll. You don't actually believe that, do you? Having every member of society including adolescents and other pre adults be constantly armed with lethal range weapons?
This is not a troll. ALL law abiding adults should be armed at all times.
To paraphrase Thomas Jefferson, it's not only out right but our duty.
LK
Posted by Lord Kano-The Gangster Of Love:
Cartoonish it may be, but it still happens.
I've had people call me a nigger, to my face. Usually it's white people who've come to my defense when it's happened.
Our home grown, specially brewed, hand crafted racists can often be pieces of work, but all to often they're just pieces of shit.
Intelligent and rational don't mean the same thing.
Consider Hitler for example, by any measure the man was a sociopath, his irrational hatred of the Jews is the supreme example of this, but the mad had to be a genuis to take the broken nation of Germany and make it an industrial and military power.
LK
Posted by Lord Kano-The Gangster Of Love:
>>Darwin's theory of evolution should result in several transitory fossils being found. That is, natural selection is a slow process, so as fish began to turn into land animals, there should be plenty of fossils of these fish/land animal hybrids. However, that is not the case.
Why fossils? We have living examples in reptiles, amphibians, and fish like the Siamese walking catfish.
What makes you think that we won't find the fossils of which you speak, let's just think for a moment, the oldest land animals we've found are in the hundreds of millions of years old. How deep beneath the surface of the earth do you think a 3 billion year old fossil would be? What makes you think that after 3 billion years any of the remains would be intact?
Artifacts that have been on the ocean floor for a few hundred years disintegrate after only a few hours of exposure to air. How about remains which have been under the sea for several billion years?
>> As a person who became a Christian through evidence concerning the divine origins of the Bible
Evidence, like what? Rev. Jones says so? I'm a person who became a pagan because of evidence that the Bible was written by men to serve their own means.
Perhaps the Bible and other religious texts were devinely inspired, but like all men, the people who put pen to paper added their own biases in prejudices to the work.
LK
Posted by Lord Kano-The Gangster Of Love:
>>Better yet, please name a single counterexample from any place or time in the entire history of the human race.
Thank you for asking.
SWITZERLAND! The swiss are required to have "Assault" rifles and ammunition. They live in peace with a low crime rate and even Hitler was afraid to anger them.
LK
Posted by Lord Kano-The Gangster Of Love:
I'm @ work right now, but I'll get the source fot eh Jefferson quote and post it.
LK
Posted by Lord Kano-The Gangster Of Love:
"The constitutions of most of our States assert that all power is inherent in the people; that... it is their right and duty to be at all times armed."
http://www.self-gov.org/good/a0224.html
It's about two thirds the way down, and they list where they found it as well.
LK
Posted by Lord Kano-The Gangster Of Love:
>>By the way, though, the riff about "Klinton and her husband" is pretty close to a direct quote from a militia web page. There are people out there, mostly in places like Michigan, who say those things in a very sincere and serious way. They are not joking. That's the scary thing: My troll was not an exaggeration.
You don't have to be a "militia type" to believe that the Clintons are corrupt. Or to believe that constitutional rights are important.
You also don't have to be a "right wing extremist" to believe that we are all the militia.
"[The] governor [is] constitutionally the commander of the militia of the State, that is to say, of every man in it able to bear arms."
--Thomas Jefferson to A. L. C. Destutt de Tracy, 1811.
LK
Posted by Lord Kano-The Gangster Of Love:
>>That's why I fell for it -- it wasn't an exaggeration. I know people who think like that. But I started suspecting when it started getting as far out as the "Klinton" thing; I doubt a nutcase that extreme would be the sort to hang out on Slashdot.
Why is one who sees the Clinton for the scum that they are a "nutcase"?
LK
Posted by FascDot Killed My Previous Use:
I suggest you read "Consciousness Explained" by Dennett for an excellent debunking of Cartesian dualism (especially the modern, silent variety).
Posted by FascDot Killed My Previous Use:
I didn't realize anyone besides Searle actually still clung to that argument.
You should read some of Hofstadter's (or even Pinker's) material regarding The Chinese Room--I think you'll find that in order for Searle to be as wrong as he is, he'd almost have to be trying to deliberately mislead people.
The basic counter-argument is: The whole analogy is false since it presupposes a homunculus in my brain that does the understanding "for me". I think it should already be obvious that "understanding" is not the function of some part of the brain, but a whole brain function. Thus, mapping back to the Chinese Room we might be able to say that the entire system (man, books, paper, pencils, door, etc) does in fact "understand" Chinese.
Of course, the many many concommittant "implementation" problems of Searle's formulation make this a difficult proposition at best. For instance, just how big would The Chinese Room have to be? And how long would it take the man inside to craft a response?
BTW, neither Dennett nor I am a "functionalist" if by that you mean "operationalist".
Did he really say he was a "pathetic looser"? Or did Janice mentally change loser to spell it like a geek would?
Big city schools have security guards and metal detectors.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
um.
Divine origins of the Bible?
divide any circumferences by diameters lately?
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
um.
Canis lupus
Canis familliaris
nope. Same, um (kingdom,phylum,class,order,family,genus,species)
Genus. but they can breed?
whussup wid dat?
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
I blame the Jocks.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
I haven't read the Pinker book and can't comment on its quality, but wanted to respond to your statement "Pinker's book is more than a year old and I can't figure out why slashdot would give it this kind of bandwidth." I don't think reviews need to be of books that are necessarily new; they should be concerned with books that are interesting, no matter what their age. Much of my reading consists of remaindered books that looked interesting, so I'm usually reading books that are a few years old, yet many of them are excellent and deserve attention.
This sounds like an entertaining read. I just finished "Phantoms in the Brain" by V.S. Ramachandran (ISBN: 0688152473), and would highly recommend it. I was wondering what to read next, and it looks like this might be the one.
Thanks for the pointer and review!
Check this out. Ramachandran is a neuroscientist and relays some interesting information. I'm not studying philosophy, psychology, or anything else for that matter. But this book is an excellent read.
--Homer Simpson
To anyone interested in AI and such, I recommend Goedel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadler. An intriguing and highly challenging book on minds and machines in the spirit of Lewis Carrol.
Something that's worth remembering with all these recent books about "evolutionary psychology" (really, just 1970's "sociobiology" trying to make a comeback, which in turn was just a rehash of ideas floating around practically from the time of Darwin himself) is just how speculative they are.
We know next to nothing at this point in time about the genuine biological causes (if any) of aggression and other human behaviors. Certainly one can postulate an evolutionary origin for them, but really this is no more "scientific" than traditional psychological explanations for aggression such as bad childhoods or too much movie violence. If we can find a series of genes involved in aggression *and* we can find versions of these genes in other animals *then* we can have meaningful research into the evolution of aggression. This is the level of evidence required by modern biology. Until then the subject belongs more to science fiction than science.
As a biologist who has written papers concerning molecular evolution, it worries me that from books like "How the Mind Works" and "The Moral Animal" the general public thinks evolutionary biology is nothing more than coming up with cute stories. No wonder Creationism is still thriving -- if people think evolutionary biology is just a matter of cute stories they feel free to choose another cute story instead.
support gun control: take guns from cops
You're all right; I read a very good refutation of this by Larry Hauser today. I guess it's obvious I don't keep up.
support gun control: take guns from cops
Had you read the complete post you would have read his explanation
--- "The problem is not that the world is full of fools, it's that lightning isn't being distributed correctly." -- Mar
This is sitting on my shelf, but I haven't got round to it so far .
I've read and enjoy Hofstadter, anyone care to compare and contrast this to Hofstatdter and Dennet's "The Minds I" or Dennet's "Conciousness Explained" ??
Does it say much new compared to those two ??
I spent a lot of money on booze, birds and fast cars. The rest I just squandered. - George Best
>>... and I suggest you read John Searle's "Chinese Room Arguement" that debunked just about
.... file it along with Edward De Bono's simplistic and patronising works.
Spare me, not Searle and his "foolish schoolboy error".
As for Penrose, he might be a good mathematician (and friends at Oxford tell me he is) but his "E-N-M" book is the biggest load of twaddle I've seen in a long time.
This is the only book I've _ever_ taken back to a book shop and asked for my money back, 500 pages of "my version of a popular intro to Quantum Mechanics" followed by some garbage about "a brand new physics" based on the basic Searle error on page 27 or so
Tim
I spent a lot of money on booze, birds and fast cars. The rest I just squandered. - George Best
The problem with TLI is the content, not the presentation. While the universal grammar stuff seems to fit reasonably well to English, it starts falling apart (even to a layman such as myself) when considering Hebrew (my other language). This is particularly surprising in view of the fact that Chomsky knows Hebrew. I can only imagine what happens to the theory outside of its cosy English-Japanese-Hebrew playpen.
:-)
The popular anti-nativist work is _Educating Eve_, by Geoffrey Sampson. Unfortunately, both sides of this debate use very poor scientific arguments. The "argument from lack of data" (note the medievalist-sounding name) is a fine example: Nativists (Chomsky etc.) claim that there are insufficient data available to a child learning a language, particularly with regard to incorrectly-formed sentences (the child never hears someone being corrected for saying "the the the an orange chimpanzee", yet still knows it's wrong). Therefore, there's got to be some innate knowledge. The empiricists (anti-nativists, in this case) claim that grammar is the "simplest" explanation of the sentences presented to the child, so it gets selected.
But both sides present depressingly unscientific arguments! You'd think someone would go out and CHECK what children actually hear, but Sampson gives an example where Chomsky couldn't possibly have seen data for what he's claiming (creating the yes/no question for a sentence; you need to ask about the main verb, not about the first verb, and Chomsky claims that most children won't have heard a single example). Sampson gives examples of plausible sentences which would settle the matter. Of course, neither side has bothered to check it in the field.
But still, the empiricists seem to have it right
2 dashes and a space, or just 2 dashes?
Hofstadter is more speculative. He's not talking very much about the actual mechanisms of cognition (well, some of the essays in Mind's I do), but largely doing Philosophy of Mind in discussing the philosophical consequences of materialist models of the mind and consciousness. Also, Hofstadter is more involved in computational models (although he is largely from the pre-connectionist school) Dennett is also a philosopher, not a scientist; Consciousness Explained is more an argument against other models of consciousness than an explanation of the neurology of consciousness.
The Dennett book is more of a cogsci primer: there are other good ones out there, too. The "Invitation to Cognitive Science" series by MIT is a good one.
I don't think evolutionary biology can really go that far in explaining the kind of alienation that creates these events - the American school system is a bizarre social pressure cooker; coupled with the transience of American society, in which people don't know their neighbors and other people are viewed as rivals, threats, or outsiders instead of members of the same community, is a product more of social evolution than anything else.
However, if you really want to work the theory, consider that their suicide-mission has increased "respect" (fear of and alpha-identity for) their "tribe." Which increases the breeding success for the whole type, which makes the latent suicide-mission response an adaptive one.
No, the mind is simply one of the brain's more important tasks.
Agreed. To that end, the Rethinking Innateness book by Elman et al - shipped along with some very good neural net tools and tutorials - makes for interesting reading that looks beyond some of the current straightjackets.
Word.
Stephen Pinker is a very good scientist; however, lest everything he say be taken at face value, it should be noted that there are some other perspectives on cognition and language that don't always get represented by the Chomsky/Pinker/MIT school.
They tend to be modularist in their perspective - claiming that the ability to perform syntax is a product of the development of specialized structures that organically develop to do them. While there's definitely a component of syntactic ability that is modular, there's also room for questioning how extensive that modularity is. Also, Chomsky/Pinker et al tend to leave semantic ability out of the picture.
Structured connectionism offers a plausible explanation for semantic ability - see Terry Regier's "The Human Semantic Potential" for some viable models using neural networks, that do excellent jobs of understanding, for example, the difference between "on," "above" and "over" with fairly quick learning, and distinguishing between the German "auf" and "an". Also, I recommend the work of George Lakoff, especially "Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things - What Categories Reveal About The Mind."
Nor does it explain the horrifying level of violence that always seems to result when everybody is armed all the time
Perhaps you could give us some examples of places where everyone is armed all the time and the resultant "...horrifying level of violence..."
"Heavens, it appears that my weewee has been stricken with rigor mortis!" -- Stewie Griffin
I have read most of Hofstadter's books (GEB,
Mind's I, the one about fonts, and Metamagical Themas). I'm too scared by the size of LTDBM to pick it up just yet.
I was pleasantly surprised to see this review, and then this thread, since this book has also been sitting on my shelf for months and on my mental list of books to read for what seems like a year. By the way, why is this review appearing now when the book isn't all that new?
I guess I had nothing of substance to say except, Ra ra ra!
"Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn't." --Erica Jong
I'm sorry. That quote is NOT Homer Simpson. I forget who it is but I used to have it on my favorite quotes page and I know it much older than the Simpsons.
"Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn't." --Erica Jong
Did anyone actually like this book? It seems to me that Penrose spent most of the book providing a lackluster introduction to modern physics and computational theory. Then he basically says that we don't understand quantum gravity, we don't understand the mind, so (much hand waving) they are obviously related.
The book left a bad taste in my mouth. Remember, this is the guy who sued a toilet paper company.
Scuttlemonkey is a troll
Penrose, a fine mathematician, came up with a non-repeating tiling. A toilet paper company apparently thought it was neat, so they stuck it on their product - I guess toilet paper needs texture or something. Penrose was upset by this, sued, but I think it settled out of court. Almost as funny as Apple's prototype named Sagan. Carl Sagan filed suit, Apple changed the name of the prototype to "Butthead Astronomer"
Re: Emperor's new Mind, I agree that if the human mind works in a fundamentally different way than computers, then we shouldn't be surprised if computers cannot emulate them. However I never quite saw Penrose do anymore than throw out lamebrained theories regarding what those different fundamental processes are. I don't have the book with me at school right now so I am going off the top of my head right now.
Scuttlemonkey is a troll
The only thing I have to contribute to your comment is my disagreement of abstract thought (as you defined it) occurring after/during adolescence. I've tutored low-GPA 3rd graders and easily taught them about x=5, but then x=3 in the next problem. And then showed them how if x=3, then x^3=27, etc. I've found these particular kinds of abstract thinking are pretty easy to teach if you have the time and good nature to explain it in a way they can understand.
Work is for people who lack the imagination to play.
You can't (accurately) determine someone's intelligence based on whether you agree with them.
Work is for people who lack the imagination to play.
Yes, that's probably why you don't think everything about the mind can be explained in terms of neural networks.
Let me just point out to you that current computer models of neural networks are not quite the same as animal brains. Computer connection machines like neural networks are all synchronous and therefore deterministic. They are actually Turing machines. However animal brains are asynchronous and chaotic, not deterministic. They are not Turing machines and may therefore compute things that Turing machines may not compute.
However, computer neural networks can serve as a useful and illustrative schematic model of how some low-level structures (cell assemblies) in "wet" neural networks do operate. This much has been proven experimentally.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
a better solution than banning guns (which those kids probably weren't "allowed" to have anyway, and see what that accomplished),
Oh how typical. It seems that there are people brought up in your culture who are completely unable to think from any other perspective than 'guns are good'.
Why don't you try reasoning for once.
(1) In any society there is always a small proportion of lunatics and wired misfits.
(2) A lunatic with empty hands or even with a knife is dangerous but a lunatic with a gun is an order of magnitude more dangerous in terms of the number of people he can kill before he is forced to stop.
(3) If guns are generally available in society, anyone will be able to get one if they want to; the law just means they have to steal one or buy one illegally.
Therefore - and for the hard of thinking, it really is this simple - if you make guns generally available then you will always see atrocities like this.
For the even more stupid who maintain that all the students should have been armed as a matter of self defence - and I know there are Americans who say things like that - how many students do you suppose would have been killed or injured in that school in the last five years due to accidents, grudge shootings and spontaneous gun battles?
Its time America grew up a bit and realised it's not the Wild West any more. People living in cities have to live by civilised rules, and walking around armed to the teeth is not civilised by any stretch of the imagination.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
I'm sorry to be the one to have to tell you, but there is no evidence concerning the divine origins of the human bible. For an observation to be considered as evidence it has to be independently reproducible or otherwise verifiable. If such evidence were found we would all know about it and believe me I would be very interested. Third-hand accounts of supposed eyewitness testimony many years after the event are not 'evidence'.
Organisms transmit their biological characteristics to their offspring. That is why your children look like you, and that is why selective breeding of domestic animals has been successfully practised for millennia. Genetics has even become an applied science at the molecular level. To deny the validity of this theory is to deny the evidence of your own eyes. It isn't even worthy of debate. By the way, the 'father' of genetics, Gregor Mendel, was a monk.
Natural selection merely states the obvious fact that those organisms who produce no offspring having died young or having been unable to win a mate, will not transmit their biological characteristics to the next generation. Natural selection certainly was and continues to be a major factor in the way species evolve, because ultimately it is only a description of this obvious and observable fact about population dynamics. By the way, Charles Darwin was a deeply religious man throughout his whole life. If you really read his writings you would know this.
I don't deny the possibility of God's existence. I'm not even going to argue about the likelihood (or not) of His Direct and Personal Intervention in the evolution of species on this planet as it would take up too much space. Let's just agree that it can't be ruled out. But whether he did or didn't intervene, evolution would still have happened by the ebb and flow of population dynamics modulated by changing environmental conditions (like climate) and spiked by the very occasional random mutation. We know from common experience and experiment that all these things happen and we also know that when they do they affect the shape of successive generations.
Where does that leave God in terms of a role in evolution? As a 'God of the Gaps'. I don't have any particular philosophical difficulty with that although some do. But throughout history, as these gaps in our knowledge have been progressively illuminated by new discoveries the God of the Gaps has like the darkness been steadily driven away.
At the end of the day I doubt I can convince you because the only line of reasoning that can sustain a viewpoint like yours is a closed and circular one that denies all experience and all logic. But think on this:
There is an epistemological viewpoint that the 'truth' of any theory cannot be regarded as an absolute because we can never know everything there is to know, and some as-yet-unknown fact may just be lurking around the corner waiting to overturn the applecart of that particular theory. Therefore we can only evaluate theories in terms of how useful they are - not merely in providing an explanation of our observations, which could be a false explanation - but in terms of whether they allow us to make accurate predictions of that which is not yet known directly, and in terms of whether the theory can be applied to create new useful technologies.
The scientific community admits that the theories of evolution and the origin of life on Earth are not yet complete. However what is 'known' about them is enough to be usefully applied in selective breeding, genetic engineering and the treatment of genetic diseases. Moreover paleontology has been assembled into a successful and mostly self-consistent picture of biological history. Gaps and a few inconsistencies in the model at any given time do not invalidate the usefulness of the whole theory as long as most of its predictions continue to be in agreement with new discoveries.
What useful predictions and tricks can you or anyone else do with your 'theory'? You can't answer that, can you!
That is the real difference between a a community operating under careful peer review to develop a theory based on solid evidence, and a horde of self-deluded halfwits with a book of ancient fairy stories. Between fact, and fantasy.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Idiot! The US Constitution is a statement of position, not of proposed fact. You can't believe that a statement of position is "true" or "not true". So how can you make any comparison?
What you are saying is that, for you, no logical reasoning can ever provide a higher authority than the Constitution as it is today. Interesting. I do believe there were a number of amendments made to the Constitution over the last two hundred years, precisely because good men debated the merits of making these changes and it was in each case decided that the Constitution could be improved upon.
Thank heaven people like you don't run the world.
I guess you learned how to think at the same institution where they taught you how to spell, huh?
If your people don't amend that 'right to bear arms' nonsense then innocent civilians - including children - will continue to die painfully and horribly. Is the right of aggressive lunatics to strut around like Rambo worth that cost?
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
That's very interesting. But you're failing to take into account all the other deaths from gunshot wounds that have happened because somebody with a grudge or a bad temper had access to a gun.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
firearm-committed mass murders in the US
like the ones in Colombia, south-east Turkey, El Salvador and Yugoslavia?
The US is a culture of extreme violence. It has always relied on force for the subjugation of the legitimate owners of raw materials, of labour organizations, and of potential "good examples" of independent development.
Ever played "Cowboys and Indians", boys?
Money talks. So do guns.
Jonathan
the man had to be a genius to take the broken nation of Germany and make it an industrial and military power.
Not really. It was very obvious public policy: spend lots on public works and armaments. Boost investment prospects with public spending to attract foreign capital. Make sure everybody was occupied and/or intimidated so that no-one would object to what *else* was going on. Steal land, capture slaves, take revenge on the enemies you respect and bring them under your wing.
But he didn't have to be a genius to throw it all away in a ridiculous conquest of the largest territory on earth, committing two-thirds of his country's armed forces in uncontrollable territory along a front four thousand kilometres long. *That* was the act of a fanatical madman who really thought that Germans could beat numerically and industrially superior forces simply by virtue of being superior Aryans. Stalingrad proved it.
The Swiss culture of violence is one of disciplined self-defence. These people take oaths to defend their community, and they have an active democracy where every adult (until recently, only every man, but it's only men who are required to be armed) has a say in decision-making. While Swiss capitalism has a lot in common with the American one (free markets for everyone else, protection and subsidy at home), wealth is fairly evenly distributed amongst the population.
The American culture of violence is one of conquest and coercion. American democracy is a farce. Important decisions are made by investors and corporate lawyers, while politicians rubber-stamp them and rant at the public about religion, sex and "freedom" which means, protect the power of investors at all times.
The kind of ranting about the right to arm bears which many Americans go on with is purely selfish. It has nothing whatsoever with respecting the integrity of other citizens, let alone other *people*.
Jonathan
Even the most intelligent among us are often possessed of opinions that are demonstrably wrong, or at least, unpleasant. Dismissing neo-nazis as stupid is a dangerous underestimation.
Their attack took, at the very least, a fair amount of dogged planning. It sounds like some of the explosive devices they came up with took a lot of research and a fair amount of intelligence. Dismissing them as 'stupid' is just a 'they aren't like me, I would never do anything like that' response. In an attempt to understand, a response like that isn't very helpful.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
This was a gang rivalry. An oversimplification is that gangs are just what cliques are called when the participants are of a lower social class.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
He's mostly known for "discovering" the Ice Ages. Nobody took him seriously in Europe, and he ended up at Harvard where he was received more favorably. I guess you don't believe in glaciation, either, since it's supposed to have taken place so long ago. If that's the case, are you familiar with all of the evidence? It's a bit hard to explain in any other way.
As for Agassiz' racism, I've never heard about that, but I'm not an expert on the man by any means. All I know about him I learned from John McPhee's writings about geology.
Darwin's theory of evolution should result in several transitory fossils being found.
Ummm . . . no. It suggests that such transitory organisms existed at some point, but a theory of natural selection makes absolutely no predictions about which fossils must necessarily survive until the 20th century, or which surviving fossils must be found. If such fossils have not at this point been found, that does not prove that they don't exist. I never heard of Columbine High School until this morning. So what? It existed anyway.
I really don't know whether fossils of that sort have been found or not, because I don't follow paleontology very closely.
Finally: Like a lot of theories, evolution is the best explanation that we have for the facts available to us. It makes a hell of a lot of sense. Also like all theories, it's probably not perfect. Do you know how many theories have come and gone trying to explain the building of mountains? The one we've got now looks pretty good, and I'm betting that it will turn out to have been substantially accurate, but no responsible geologist will tell you that he knows the absolute and final truth about it. This is where religion and science part ways. Religion demands a "final truth"; science does not. This is where creationists are coming from when they criticize evolution: They see a discrepancy somewhere, and they conclude that therefore the theory is not the absolute final truth. As religion, evolution is therefore unacceptable. So they reject it. The problem is that it isn't meant to be religion. It's science. Scientists aren't looking for an infallible moral compass, they're just trying to explain what they've observed as best they can.
Evolution fits the evidence reasonably well, while creationism requires us to ignore a massive body of evidence. As for me, I'll go with the one that doesn't ask me to forget half of what I know.
"Once a solution is found, a compatibility problem becomes indescribably boring because it has only... practical importance"
"Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law." --
ALL law abiding adults should be armed at all times.
To paraphrase Thomas Jefferson, it's not only out right but our duty.
Would you mind citing where Jefferson said that? Or are you paraphrasing him to the point of semantic alteration?
This is not meant to be a flame. I just have a hard time believing that Jefferson actually said that. The "right to keep and bear arms" is one thing; the obligation to be armed every moment of one's life is another thing entirely. Why would it be a duty anyway? What would be gained? Or is it a disembodied moral imperative?
Of course, even if Jefferson did say it, that doesn't make it true. Nor does it explain the horrifying level of violence that always seems to result when everybody is armed all the time.
"Once a solution is found, a compatibility problem becomes indescribably boring because it has only... practical importance"
"Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law." --
. . . one one of them was quoted saying "I hate niggers"
Do people ever really talk like that? It seems so cartoonish. All the racists I've known have been very respectable types and/or loudmouthed pseudo-libertarian morons, neither of which will ever admit it as explicitly as that. They always say "I'm not a racist, but . .
Then again, maybe I've led a sheltered life.
"Once a solution is found, a compatibility problem becomes indescribably boring because it has only... practical importance"
"Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law." --
the whole idea of "transitions between species" is rather ill-defined; nature doesn't put up nice neat dividing lines between species.
Yeah, as I understand it, that's what led poor Plato astray. If A is a horse and B is a horse, but they're not identical, why are they both horses when C (a goat, also not identical) is not a horse? Eek! Well, jeez . . . So Plato went through all these contortions trying to kludge a way to postulate a hard-and-fast line between horse and not-horse. In fact, the right way to look at it is that "A and B are pretty goddamn horsey, while C isn't very horsey at all (while still being horsier than a fruit-bat)". That's all you get. Ha ha, you see what you learn from reading a popular book on fuzzy logic? Yeah!
"Once a solution is found, a compatibility problem becomes indescribably boring because it has only... practical importance"
"Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law." --
Some student said he said that, true. I was wondering if the student was possibly misquoting? But that really doesn't make much sense, does it.
Not that anybody here would know for sure anyway, of course.
I think I was asking more of a rhetorical question than anything else, based on aghast disbelief that people can really be such overt, knowing dumbasses. Then again, these kids were shooting people right and left, weren't they, and that's a bit of a dumbass move to begin with.
What really freaked me out was a quote on cnn's website, from one of the students who escaped:
". . . these guys shot to kill, for no reason.
Note that the second ellipses are not mine; they are there in the article that I'm quoting. That having been said, maybe I'm too sensitive, but it looks to me almost as if the kid is implying that if they were shooting people on the basis of their race, it would somehow make sense. That's weird. Then again, a quote mangled in a hurry by journalists can't be taken too seriously anyway. We don't know what, or how much, is missing where it's elided. Some of the rest of the CNN articles about this are downright incoherent in spots; obviously CNN was in a hurry to get things in print.
Oh, well.
"Once a solution is found, a compatibility problem becomes indescribably boring because it has only... practical importance"
"Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law." --
Cartoonish it may be, but it still happens.
Ugh. How depressing. I mean, if they're "polite" about it, that at least implies that they know there's something wrong with it. It suggests that they're not inhabiting a perfect moral and intellectual void. Of course, IMHO those are the most dangerous, because you can't always see them coming. Being more respectable, they gather a lot more power.
Intelligent and rational don't mean the same thing.
True.
Consider Hitler for example, by any measure the man was a sociopath, his irrational hatred of the Jews is the supreme example of this, but the man had to be a genuis to take the broken nation of Germany and make it an industrial and military power.
I don't know. I think a lot of what he did was just getting everybody moving in the same direction, enthusiastically. Morale is worth a lot, and it still works if it's based on psychotic premises. I often think that psychological manipulation is such a delicate art that you just can't do it in a calculated way, much like playing music (but with more destructive results). Still, I really don't know. If we knew exactly what happened there and how and why, we'd be a lot better off.
"Once a solution is found, a compatibility problem becomes indescribably boring because it has only... practical importance"
"Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law." --
Perhaps you could give us some examples of places where everyone is armed all the time and the resultant "...horrifying level of violence..."
The African-bloodbath-nation-of-the-week, anytime in the last ten years. See CNN for particulars. The Balkans (before NATO), ditto CNN. Russia in 1917 and for a few years after. Afghanistan in recent years. Also any place, any time where there's no reasonably strong and stable central government.
Better yet, please name a single counterexample from any place or time in the entire history of the human race.
"Once a solution is found, a compatibility problem becomes indescribably boring because it has only... practical importance"
"Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law." --
a good definition is they're the same species if they can mate (and produce offspring)
Yeah, I think that is the standard thing, but it has to be viable offspring. But what if they don't turn each other on? What if they're tired, or they have a headache? Even at best, you'll have to wait for the offspring (if any) to reproduce successfully before you've got an answer. It's a lot easier to just compare it to the Archetypical Horse and blow off the details.
"Once a solution is found, a compatibility problem becomes indescribably boring because it has only... practical importance"
"Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law." --
Duh. I knew that :) Yeah, they all do have such weapons -- but if they show up for exercises (once a year for everybody, IIRC) with the seal broken on the ammunition, they catch hell over it. Furthermore, they aren't required to carry their rifles at all times; far from it. The guns stay in a closet or under the bed.
Still, it's valid (none of the above caveats would ever prevent anybody from doing what the kids in Colorado did) and I feel kinda stupid for forgetting about it.
(My information is from La Place de la Concorde Suisse by John McPhee, by the way. If you haven't read it, it's a cool look at the Swiss military, with incidental material on general Swiss history, wine, and scenery. It was written IIRC in the early 80's.)
"Once a solution is found, a compatibility problem becomes indescribably boring because it has only... practical importance"
"Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law." --
Other than that, IMHO most of the rest are a matter of opinion. Actually, Dershowitz' line is a matter of opinion, too -- but IMHO (I have a lot of humble opinions
As for Orwell, if you haven't read Homage to Catalonia, read it immediately. It's way cool and he says even better things about armed citizens in there.
"Once a solution is found, a compatibility problem becomes indescribably boring because it has only... practical importance"
"Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law." --
Well, if someone hoses down a high school with the same ammunition, he can expect to catch hell over it, too. Doesn't look like "catching hell" is much of a deterrent, does it?
Must be something else.
Read my post again. I already said that: "none of the above caveats would ever prevent anybody from doing what the kids in Colorado did."
"Once a solution is found, a compatibility problem becomes indescribably boring because it has only... practical importance"
"Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law." --
Everyone being armed deters violence.
In theory that's true, but unfortunately the theory is based on wishful thinking rather than facts.
The few real-world examples where an armed society is actually polite, are atypical in a lot of ways. For example, the Swiss aren't being deterred from violence by the presence of arms in their homes; they're simply too fat and happy for violence to be appealing. They also have a far more civilized culture than the U.S., which is a hairs-breadth from barbarism at best. There are a hell of a lot of armed societies that are absolute bloodbaths.
It does not deter social unrest.
Please clarify that.
"Once a solution is found, a compatibility problem becomes indescribably boring because it has only... practical importance"
"Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law." --
I've gone full circle from finding obscene stupidity angering to merely fascinating.
...suckling from the sweet amnion of life...
a good definition is they're the same species if they can mate (and produce offspring) - saw this in some museum or other
stay frosty and alert
I've not read the book but wanted to respond to your comments concerning the shooting.
/.
The explanation that they targeted jocks because jocks have increased mating opportunities seems plausible, but may be oversimplifying and/or innacurate. There are multiple factors to consider:
- Kids at that age are incredibly cruel. The pointless insults that adults hold in check are often not held back during adolescence. Humor at the expense of others (because they wear a black trenchcoat, for instance) is easy to add to the "warchest" and is not a tool only for jocks.
- A society that glamourizes adult desires (sex, power) while simultaneously limiting their adult privileges (drugs, alcohol, driving, the ability to make money).
- A society of increasing complexity (technology, legislation) that must seem insurmountable to some at that age, with the full expectation that they will be thrown into it after graduation.
Anyway, just some random thoughts. BTW, this is one of the best threads I've ever seen on
Slashdot: Liberal News for Nerds. Liberal Stuff that Matters.
Hear hear, thank you for a delightful review of a truly captivating book; I'm glad to see the academic athiests finally getting some coverage of their books, as I am terribly sick of reading all the /. reviews of books like "finding god in the web" and other such drivel.
As for the tragedy yesterday and how an understanding of it can be approached from an "evolutionary psychology" perspective, I'll take the first stab at it:
After immediate survival, the next most important goal of the human psyche is to increase social status among peers, which in turn results in increased mating opportunity. There are many tools in the "mental warchest" that humans employ to achieve this goal. Arguably, it is for these very reasons that the human brain has exploded in size over the last million years or so (see Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow): Not as a tool of survival in "the wild", but as a tool to manipulate and influence other humans.
The willingness to employ physical violence is one of the natural tools with which we are endowed; particularly among men, there is a certain thrill to the kill of another man, powerful, confidence inspiring, and impressive amongst others (usually both male and female). Witness professional sports, or Quake: A stage upon which to play out all of the symbols of violence, without the actual death. Why do we love to play out these symbols? Because jocks get laid.
And these kids didn't get laid. (Seen their pictures?). And they targeted jocks in their killing spree.
Consider what would have been the outcome of their carefully planned attacked in the "ancestral environment", in which your world consisted of 100-200 persons, all of whom you knew and would likely live your entire life with.
The jocks, who had all of the mating opportunity in your little community, would be conveniently removed from society, while at the same time the killers would wear new mantles of (fearful) respectability.
From natural selection's standpoint, what happened yesterday was a viable and intelligent career move.
From "our" standpoint, however, the evolutionist's mantra must be repeated: " "is" does not mean "ought" ", in other words, to say that we ARE a certain way (in a "natural sense") does not mean we SHOULD be that way, or that we SHOULDN'T bother to try to work against our "natural" inclinations in order to foster a more amicable society. This is why we have laws, against killing for example.
Reason clearly shows anyone who reflects upon it that the "strategy" employed yesterday, although instinctive and "natural" from an animal sense, would be pointless in modern society, in which we have arranged things such that those who commit physical violence are guaranteed to have zero future mating opportunity. And, not seeing any other solution to their "problem", they concluded that their own lives were not worth continuing, thus ending the day in suicide.
There, I hope I have done a decent job "spinning" yesterday's awful events in a style congruent with Pinker's "How the Mind Works". If anyone else (who has actually read the book, please!) can do better, I'd love to hear it.
Ok, so point us to a comparable text on evolutionary psychology.
Try "The Adapted Mind" by Tooby & Cosmedes.
Very gnarly.. Goes into mucho detail.
--
-- Spankmeister General
> Could having smaller schools with a closer
> student body help prevent the allienation that
> seems to be a common factor in the many school
> shooting's?
No, no, no. The smaller your school is, the more likely people won't be able to find a group they can be part of, be comfortable with. If I go to a school with, say, 100 people, and 99 of them are total tools -- sports, pop music, GAP jeans, the whole nine yards -- am I, as a nonconformist, more likely to turn into a conformist and join your "closer student body" or am I more likely to just hate and fear all of the tools?
Or, conversely, if I'm in a school with 10,000 people in it, am I more likely to be an outcast and never find anyone that agrees with me or thinks like me, or am I more likely to find twenty kids who know where I'm coming from and like me?
Don't force us to be "close" to each other and therefore just like each other, like tools on a shelf. Let us be as dissimilar as the myriad flakes in a snowstorm, and as beautiful.
I graduated 1998 from a school which had around 500 students, in a town with about 6400 inhabitants. It was in Kansas, a state not well known for tolerance (or much of anything else :-). I, also, speak from experience.
Our tools didn't accept anyone who didn't fit one of their molds, they instead ridiculed them and cast them out. If you didn't play a sport, go to one of their churches, and agree with most of what they agreed to be truth, then you were only barely acceptable as a person, and you certainly weren't invited to be *friends* with them.
Also, there was more than one operative clique in the school. We also had this group who liked to feel different -- they listened to NIN and wore either black leather or flowers in their hair -- but had nearly the same rules as the preps. The significant change was that you didn't have to play a sport, but you had to have some feature that let them know how different you were.
My point is that stratification is going to happen no matter what the size of the student population is, but if it's bigger instead of smaller you don't get as many strata with only one person on them. My point is NOT that people only get along with people from their own strata, and should be closed minded to all others, please don't read it that way; I had friends and acquaintances that were totally nothing like me.
If you think that your small school is special, and that it's not like that where you're from, you might try a little ad hoc experiment of mine. Look around a crowded room, like your lunch room or some such, and pick out five people that you don't know very well or don't like. Tally all of the parties you've been at and they were there, all of the clubs/teams that you're both on, and all of your mutual friends. Now pick out five people you like and hang out with. Not your best friend or anything that might throw off the numbers, but friends. Add up the same number for them.
LOOK! The number for the strangers is far, far less than the number for the friends, because you are on different social strata! You might not consider those strangers bad people or worthless people, but they certainly aren't nearly as close as the people in your clique. Don't be ashamed of being in a group, be happy, you are cool enough, and a good enough person that you were able to go this long without even noticing the strata!
I've actually done a lot more thought and writing about high-school stratification than I want to express in this little tiny slashdot box. Email me (blaze@sunflower.com) and we can talk about it at greater length if you please.
Along with Stephen Jay Gould, Pinker makes the mistake of putting forward his views as fact. I liked the book (as I like Gould) but felt a little annoyed at the way he arrogantly assumes his theories are truer than anyone else's without any compelling evidence. That said, the book's a great way to think about how we'd grow an AI.
- Read fiction at www.espressostories.com
I agree that there is a lack of rigour in the definitions of "modularity" and hence a confusion in classifications that use this term. I don't understand your "innativity vs. adaptivity" though: I see adaptation as a process that results in, and acts on, innate structures. Perhaps you are using adaptive in some other sense? Is this a common one in cog.sci.? My perspective comes exclusively from molecular evolution.
No, Amok is a Vulcan word meaning "terminally horny".
--
Evan "Useless post, but then, I just woke up" E.
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
Pinker is to cogsci as Pournelle is to compsci -- lots of name recognition, completely clueless, perfectly happy to speak ex cathedra for all that.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
> Care to back that up? Pinker does have an easygoing & accessible writing style, but he's also got the credentials to back it up.
Pinker comes from that Chomskyite school where everyone is willing to pontificate/argue about anything -- provided they can avoid getting pinned down on a testable hypothesis. This conveniently allows them to be "right" in perpetuity. Meanwhile they "debunk" competing theories that do make testable hypotheses by portraying the failures in the worst possible light, portraying exceptional failures as the typical case, and using them as subject matter for jokes in order to ridicule them.
Meanwhile, if you start looking at the assumptions they build their own theories on -- if I may so stretch the use of the word "theory" -- it always turn out to be ungrounded intuitions and lame arguments of the "it must be the case" type. Moreover, the analogies dragged in for support are not always apt, and the anecdotes are subject to shallow, a priori analyses.
The whole genra smacks of Plato's juvenile analysis of the way the world works. In fact I recommend treating Pinker and the rest of that tribe just the way Plato should be treated: entertainment, if you go for that kind of thing, but not science. Pinker is a pop star, not a scientist.
> You're not a closet Behavioralist, are you?
Nope. I figure investigating cog sci is like walking a tightrope over Hell, with a demon called "Skinner" below you to one side and another called "Chomsky" on the other. You've got to stick to the straigt and narrow. We don't really know how the mind works, but we do know enough to say that easy answers are wrong answers.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
> They tend to be modularist in their perspective ... there's also room for questioning how extensive that modularity is.
FWIW, my current thinking is that we've got to get away from thinking in terms of "modular" vs. "not modular". It seems that for every observation supporting modularity, there's another observation supporting plasticity/distributivity. Ditto for innativity vs adaptivity. I suspect we've come up against some analogs of the wave-vs-particle question that exercised physicists for so long, and that we won't make any real progress until we throw out this intuitive taxonomy of organizational possibilities.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
> I don't understand your "innativity vs. adaptivity" though
No, I wasn't using the term as trade jargon, nor talking about evolution. I was thinking in terms of the ability to process language in the right hemisphere when a problem prevents it from working in the (default) left hemisphere, self-organization, "re-adaptation" of parts of the cortex in response to an injury, and all that kind of stuff.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
> Evidence: grammars are so complex, babies wouldn't stand a chance with just general-purpose reasoning capacaties.
That's my problem with their whole school of thought: this isn't (IMO) "evidence", but rather "Chomsky's claim". Just because Chomsky doesn't think kids are smart enough doesn't mean that they aren't. The only observable evidence is that childern do learn their languages; it is nothing more than an unsubstantiated assumption to claim that they could not do so without some built-in help.
In the absence of a biological demonstration of such a helper organ, and/or a convincing argument that one really is needed, I feel like Occam would prefer we proceded without positing one (I would certainly prefer it!).
In the running skirmish between Pinker, Fodor, and that lot vs. the connectionists, every time the one side points out a flaw in the latest connectionist model and says "Ha! Your networks could never do X", the other side comes back with a new model that does in fact do X.
But such arguments are not diagnostic: it seems that either side can up the ante on the other, and there's no indication of who'll be last in the ring.
I ramble...
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Hmmm, I was thinking more along the lines of Roger Penrose. I read with fascination his musings in "The Emporer's New Mind" and I'd be curious to see how this book compares.
Admit nothing, deny everything and make counter-accusations.
I really dug it and didn't see any of what I would consider hand waving. Yes, it was pretty longwinded and he used a very roundabout path to get where he was going, but I thought it was an interesting path. I perceived his argument as more along the lines of: deep down, the mind doesn't work like a digital computer, it works more like a quantum computer so we can't expect a digital computer to mimic the operation of an intelligent mind.
Now his follow-up book left me in the dust; I barely understood a word of it. That smacked of hand waving I suppose, but I attributed it to my quantum computer not having enough states.
Didn't know about the toilet paper suit - that's funny. What was it all about? (Not that it has anything to do with this thread)
g
Admit nothing, deny everything and make counter-accusations.
Well, this is kind of getting off topic, but...
After Dark (the screen saver) had a Penrose tile option. It's a wonder he didn't sue them too! That would be like Einstein suing someone for using E=mc^2.
I don't have the book in front of me either and it's been a while since I read it. But iirc his assertion was that the brain solves problems in a quantum manner. All 'possible' solutions exist simutaneously in a state of superposition until the state vector collapses to a single solution. This effectively parallelizes the solution to the problem. One manefestation of this process is when solutions pop into your head out of the blue when you're thinking about something else entirely.
I'll agree that the evidence of all this was less than overwhelming, but he admitted that in the book. I think it was mostly presented as food for thought and to try to spur on some research in directions heretofore unexplored. He may have modified this argument somewhat in the second book, as I said, I understood little of that one.
In any case, along the way I learned a lot about chaos, number theory, relativity & quantum mechanics, all of which I find more interesting than AI anyway.
g
Admit nothing, deny everything and make counter-accusations.
I was lucky enough to be in an undergrad linguistics class that reviewed the manuscript to HTMW over a couple months, and then met with Pinker for discussion. Having spent that much time and effort working through the material, I give it an unqualified thumbs-up. After 3 years of studying cognitive science, I was still able to learn tons from Pinker's work, yet it's accessible enough that my mother (an english major in college) was able to get into it.
For those whose interest is focused more on linugistics, Pinker's earlier work The Lanugage Instinct is also very highly recommended.
completely clueless
Care to back that up? Pinker does have an easygoing & accessible writing style, but he's also got the credentials to back it up. You're not a closet Behavioralist, are you?
I didn't think his book was groudbreaking
Ok, so point us to a comparable text on evolutionary psychology. Whoops, there aren't any.
He didn't make any substantial claims
Pinker claims that the conditions present for evolutionary humans have a strong and direct causal link to our current psychological / cognitive reality, and that this link's explanatory power allows us to understand psychology / cognition more thoroughly than we could with out it.
didn't have any facts to back up his claims
Look at the copious footnotes to each chapter. I defy you to show one significant claim that isn't thoroughly defended. (note also that this complain contradicts your previous complaint)
Very weak bit of trolling.
Due to the density of your commentary, excuse me if I don't continue the quote/retort technique.
Briefly -
1. Yes, there certainly are other works on the influence of evolution on the mind. You miss the word comparable, however - I'm somewhat familiar with the Dennett and Churchland texts you cite, and they argue for quite different points.
2. OK, you got me there, I haven't read up on all of the dead people in the field, just the more prominent active members. I'll put Casti on my reading list, I promise.
3. Footnotes vs. unshakable proof - I agree that the presence of footnotes is not sufficient grounds for accepting a statement as fact. My recollection, however, is that HTWM, like the rest of Pinker's works, is well-supported, meaning that relevant studies are cited in intellectually honest ways, so that Pinker can reasonably point to support for his claims (and not everything in HTWM is a claim, to be sure; some of the content is clearly more speculative).
I think the problem you (and the other detractors here) are having is that HTWM is a higher-level text that explains aspects of Pinker's theories to a more general audience, and these theories are different than the ones you hold. Because the text aims to explain to a neutral audience, not win over a hostile one, you may find its rigor lacking; it does not have answers for all of your attacks. The same thing happens to me when I read stuff by the Churchlands.
I keep hearing that these kids were supposedly
"intelligent". From what I've read they were
Neo-Nazi losers.
In an AP article on yahoo; one one of them was quoted saying "I hate niggers" before firing his gun.
Intelligent? No.
One of the most disturbing (to me) implications of explaining much of human behaviour through evolution is that racism is probably an evolutionary advantage for genes. People who look like you are more likely to have similar genes to you than those who don't. So killing those who don't look like you, once your niche is established, may work out to be advantageous for your genetic survival.
Right. What you've said was one of the most disturbing things I felt when reading The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins. I think that type of backwards thinking is a vestige of "inclusive fitness" that Dawkins talks about.
Of course as an advanced society we should have evolved beyond that...
It's the article titled
15 Dead in Colo. School Shooting - AP (04/21/99)
Article at Yahoo.
To quote the relevant part...
Cohn said one killer put a pistol to his head but did not shoot him. Instead, he said, the shooter turned his attention to a black student, saying, ``I hate niggers.'' Cohn heard three shots but couldn't see what happened.
What a coincident! He came to my school to give a lecture just yesterday. My impression is that he
is a very good and entertaining speaker (and probably writer too). The theory I got from his
lecture is that human behaviors are the results of
biological adaptation of our hunter-gather ancestor. And he listed experiments on vision, emotions and etc as proof of his theory.
However, to me (as a psychologist/neuroscientist), what he said actually is nothing revolutionary.
Interpreting social and behavioral phenomena on
the grounds of evolution and biological necessity
has had a very long history. Only somehow in the modern age United States, this school of theory is particular popular.
Personally, I usually find general thoeries of
human and social behavior not particularly useful and prefer leave arguments on such a macroscopic level to philosophers or sociologists (who usually do a better job than us psychologists). Psychologists and neuroscientists now usually ask the question "how the brain work?" Using a computer metaphor: we all know that the purpose of a word-processor program; the interesting thing is how the program does it.
On the other hand, Dennet writes like a philosopher, using a style very similair to Socrates, using logic to make his arguements.
Also, Dennet's books tend to be a much quicker read. =)
http://www.csupomona.edu/~hsilberman/webstuff/read .html
The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins
The Dragons of Eden by Carl Sagan
the best books ever written about the evolution of intelligence... hands down...
vassago
i am... therefore i think
all of the complex systems you deal with including yourself and the people around you are a function of structure... structure of neurons, cells... matter--all of it.
get over it. it's a product of scientific endeavor and it is this endeavor which has unearthed nature's greatest mysteries. Sure, it has not yet unearthed _all_ of natures mysteries, but this is no reason to discard it in the wholesale fashion you seem to suggest.
your lung argument is a hundred years late. read "The Blind Watchmaker" by Richard Dawkins and you will have your answer to "who" created all of this. you fundamentally misunderstand darwinian evolution.
you speak of the "life consciousness" as if it is a real thing. has it ever registered in anyone's experiments? does it yield to some system of modeling maybe in physics? chemistry? biology? I don't think so. It is clear now--thanks to science and only science--that all of biology (including your brain) is reducible to chemistry. All of chemistry is reducible to physics. Period.
What is so terrible about science, after all? It has allowed us to harness electricity, refine manufacturing methods, and ultimately put your computer on your desk. Ditto for your television, microwave oven, processed foods, medications, automobile, i dare say, every human product you can possibly lay your hands on in your home has been accelerated in discovery and quality by science.
Why not argue against science in a sane manner? how about making some points about nuclear weapons and responsibility? global warming? human experimentation? gene therapies? cloning? your arguments are boring because they are not arguments at all--only complaints brought about by your own misunderstanding of the subject.
i am... therefore i think
[nt]=no text
Just one quick comment:
What if, instead of our genomes containing all the pertinent information, they simply contain the basic seed, and the instincts can reliably grow from that. (i.e.:We have an equation for a fractal, then can take that relatively small amount of data and create an infinite and complex item).
Excuse me if this sounds at all stupid to you, but I've got a chem exam tomorrow and I'm tired.
--FroBugg
From a computational perspective it's all very natural that a complex system is distributed, and yet it is modular... On the other hand, from the same perspective 90% of all psychologists seem very idiotic; they are awed at the most trivial of computational facts, and laws. They would not truly understand any theorem on Turing machines and still claim to be investigating limits of computation. And I'm bored of the way connectionists try to discover some magic aspect of mind. I can't understand how they can expect some very elementary model to scale up to a human mind. On the other hand, linguists and logicists are seeking something else entirely. Just a few remarks, take 'em easy said...
--exa--
Of course you don't mean that philosophy is for entertainment. Talking about old philosophers is fun, but not because they are simple minded or foolish. It gives a chance to see how ideas are developed... On the other hand, I also think that there is a lot of crap philosophy around. Stuff with neither strong background nor rigorous investigation. You know what Einstein once said about being simple. He actually meant that you should be sufficiently articulated in order to succeed in your work. So I greatly appreciate your observation about some theories of mind.
--exa--
Lucky you... Pinker agrees. He devotes a large section of his book to discussing just how connectonist networks work, and what they can and can't do given the size of the human brain. He, too, thinks that connectionism is a big part of the way the mind works, but his emphasis is on the "structured" part of "structured connectionism."
Pinker is giving a series of lectures here at Yale this week. His lecture yesterday basically outlined his book, and his lecture today will discuss how his theory relates to the question of human values. If it's interesting, I'll post a summary here.
When I moderate, I only use "-1, Overrated". That way, I never get meta-moderated!
In the first part of his book he talks about the standard social science model, which argues that human nature, to the extent that there is one, is a blank slate, and why he disagrees with that model. He also argues that there is no justification for discrimination on the basis of race, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, etc. and that no biological finding will refute that moral fact. He also points out that many people make the naturalistic fallacy (assuming that what is natural is what is right) when dealing with questions of human evolutionary psychology, and that this fallacy should be eliminated from our discussion in order to put our science and our ethics on stronger territory. Finally, he talks about the existence of moral responsibility when we fully understand the causes behind a person's actions. Pinker argues that to understand is not to forgive, and that just because we know why someone did something does not mean that it is morally justifiable.
Like I say, if you find these ideas interesting, go pick up his book: he said nothing in the lecture that wasn't there.
When I moderate, I only use "-1, Overrated". That way, I never get meta-moderated!
I wonder how this looks in light of those shootings in Columbine High School (Across town from where I live)? Can it exlplain the capacity to plan and cold bloodedly carry out mass executions? Can it explain not only why but how someone can be so intelligent yet so evil? Can it explain the immediate political response of "ban the guns" when all the things carried there were already illegal? Unlike the NRA, the gun-banners, the God squad, and the atheists, I dont have any pat answers.
How is the brain involved in moral decisions - is morality a fiction?
I've gone way off topic. Just rambling and still in shock from the carnage in my back yard.
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo! http://goo.gl/J9bkO
i took a lakoff class at berkeley (intro to cogsci) and his position boils down to this: the mind is embodied i.e. abstract thought is based on image schemas that arise from our physical interaction with the world. these basic schemas (see mark johnson's book the body in the mind) are NON-MODULAR in that they need to be seen as a gestalt to be understood i.e. the containment schema only makes sense when there is a containing structure and a contained/noncontained structure. these schemas are extended up via metaphor to form abstract thought. the levels are physical, social, epistemic, then speech-action. programmers tend to operate in the epistemic realm. metaphor is not just something from shakespeare, but is how we extend ALL knowledge from one realm to another. a list of the common metaphors in the western world is found here . This stuff is interesting because it turns out that artificial intelligence is not possible. lakoff and crew are doing interesting work called the neural theory of language project (NTL) where they are building software models of thought this is the page. more metaphor stuff is found here . lakoff and mark johnson have a new book called philosophy in the flesh , the premise is that western philosophy is based on the false premise that the mind exists independently of the body, that there is a gods-eye view. this stuff is NOT post modern however, as social facts can impact life etc. okay i need to get back to work, this is internet after all
-- your knees hurt, don't they?
The situation is somewhat like trying to explain what a computer does by playing with the GUI, but no clue about the implementation levels underneath. There would be a lot of guesses you would have to make, and a substantial number would likely be wrong.
My opinion then is that Pinker and others probably have very bad theories about how the mind works, but they are best ones we have until the mapping from neurons to mind is better understood. For those of us who are not strugging with the scientific or the philosophical problems, these books are best viewed as entertainment, not as firmly grounded theory to explain teenage shootings or ethnic cleansing.
I've always found evolutionary biology to bring a clear, simple, and logical reasoning to the complexities and ill-logic of human beings. When it all comes down to it - I think our behaviors and emotions are all fairly simple.
While I'm against randomly killing people, you have to wonder sometimes if being condemed to Hell is OK as long as you save the Earth from just a few of your classmates. You seriously think killing them is a good thing!
And to add a little perspective on the whole "...how could this ever happen in this perfect small town" thing - I'm from a small town. Small towns are not happy and healthy. There is no anonimity or privacy - everyone knows everything about everyone, drug use and crimes are becoming very common simply because it's boring, and High School boys, especially jocks, are all very cruel to each other, but no one cares - "it's their nature". I've never seen anything as evil or uncaring as the small town High School.
Since the subject was brought up...
What exactly is the goal that these school shooters had in mind? I've assumed that the goal was always to kill as many people as possible, but these shooters always do such a horrible job of that. (Remember the "crack shots" that managed to only kill two people.)
Why don't they just put bombs on the bottoms of the school bleachers during a pep rally, or flood the school with chlorine gas? Are they stupid or do they just like guns?
I dont mean to get off topic guys but im curiouse. I live in Beaverton, A suburb of Portland Oregon. In school today we talked about the shooting at Columbine High. We talked about the plans our school district had in place for similar situations and how students felt about the general safety of our schools. The School that i go to is the smallest high school in out district, we are an options high school where every student has chosen to be there. We also have the highest rating of students feeling that the school enviroment is safe. (The district poll's yearly for this and other information from students)
What i wonder is if we arent chasing the wrong goat when pointing to stricter gun laws as prevention for this sort of action. Could having smaller schools with a closer student body help prevent the allienation that seems to be a common factor in the many school shooting's?
Just my 16 year old 2 cents worth.
Lissell (where have all the cowboys gone?)
Have you ever gone to a small school? It is more likely in a smaller enviroment that the "tools" will be more willing to be diffrent and more willing to accept people who dont think like them. When you are in smaller enviroment you realize that all the people are diffrent. Some are conformists, some are non-conformists. And wether you are a conformist or not you learn to except people as people.
You dont have the "jocks", "goths", or "preps" so prevelant in larger high schools. Instead you have a friend who wears black and likes metalica, a friend who loves basketball, and a friend who is fascinated by wall street. There arent nearly as many "cliques".
In a large setting like high school you almost have to find a group that you can fit into. If you dont then you dont have any friends, or you form your own "clique". The benefit of smaller settings is that there are not enough people to make viable "clique's". You are very un-likely to find seven other people who think the same way you do about almost everything. It just doesnt happen.
And yes, I am speaking from experience.
Lissell (where have all the cowboys gone?)
I wonder how this looks in light of those shootings in Columbine High School (Across town from where I live)? Can it exlplain the capacity to plan and cold bloodedly carry out mass executions? Can it explain not only why but how someone can be so intelligent yet so evil?
Yes, it can. The thing to remember is that the incident in Denver wasn't an overnight decision. There had to be literally _years_ of buildup to that kind of behavior, including but not limited to: lack of social acceptance, weak personality development, possible peer abuse (you can kid around with your friends, tossing insults back and forth, but to someone who's not playing the game, it makes everyone look like complete assholes), poor home life, etc. The only real way to get to the bottom of this would be to have a series of psychological interviews with the students, the parents, the teachers, and most of all the suspects. Unfortunately, since they killed themselves, the mindset of the attackers will be forever left to conjecture.
But yes, you can troubleshoot psychological issues just like troubleshooting software, hardware, and network issues. The tools may be different (and the medium radically so), but in the end, the mind works on rigidly defined principles just the same.
me/you == spiritual entity
mind == collection of pictures you've carried for
lifetimes
brain == the control center for the current body you are amusing yourself with (massively overrated)
no no no... You're approacing the issue from the wrong direction:
Brain = Layers 1/2/3/4/5 (base hardware and hard-coded communication protocols)
Mind = Layer 6 (the core OS, all subconcious processing, involuntary responses, handles image lookup, waveform matching, linguistics processing, sensory input sorting)
You = Layer 7 (the top level, what a person percieves as themselves, the voice you hear when speaking in your head. notice just how fast you can think w/o having to slow words down for speech)
this comparison isn't completely accurate, since the hardware eventually accelerates stuff normally handled in software. As an example, I noticed one day (by trying to read upside down and backwards) that my visual cortex has a small window used for text processing. It sits slightly below and off to the right of the center of my vision. What it seems to do for me is allow text in that area to be fast blitted into memory with very little overhead. When reading in the opposite direction (right-to-left and bottom to top), I found that in order to simply have captured the bitmap took more concentration than reading normally. This apparently holds true in the general case, as I tried it with cyrillic fonts and then Kanji to remove the possibility that it was the language and character set that made this happen.
Try it yourself...
In "Stand on Zanzibar" by David Bruner, they have a word for them, muckers :)
It goes into a description of the word amok.
Its just scary to see the predictions (made in this book) come true..
Driving backwards on the highway of life
Take three entities growing.
One just spreads. Like a cancer or an avalanche or glass shards when a glass shatters. Certainly strong and robust but intelligent? No.
One has a feedback loop. Like the sense of balance. Or some sort of sense of danger. Strong or robust? Maybe. Ability to adapt? Yes. Intelligent? Not quite yet.
Finally, the last one has several inputs, a tool with which to coordinate inputs and build other soft inputs or interpretive strategies, and a storage mechanism. Its growth constantly causes slight distortions in the information received making it much easier to identify and classify the information. Its growth also requires a renewal mechanism that allows old information to be replaced. This in effect constitutes a feedback mechanism. Strong and robust? No way to tell without seeing it. Ability to adapt? Mostly involuntary adaptation, however it can learn about itself and train itself. Intelligent? Depends on its training and education. Self-aware? Maybe, maybe not.
The ship sank. Get over it. (This sig was cut out from another's shirt and painstakingly hand-posted)
Some find it easier to hold onto the superficial image of the world that they see without reflecting and stepping out of the immediate world to a more general perspective.
Take Ptolemy. Sure his twisted geo centric planetary system was reasonably mathematically equivalent to Copernicus' But what a lack of intuition.
Take Emil Zola (the evil naturalist). Ok so he says all we have is our ears, eyes, skin, nasal passages, and taste buds. Imagination, ESP, souls, all those are nonexistent as far as he's concerned. Art ought to be a science that treats people's relationship difficulties as if they were symptoms of diseases.
Hmm, so why is it a blind man given his sight at a late period in his life wishes it taken away? Because he doesn't know how to use it. Our senses are man made. Our inputs are given to us by our DNA. I could bet Zola never had a sense of humor.
The ship sank. Get over it. (This sig was cut out from another's shirt and painstakingly hand-posted)
It often amazes me how chemists all get so excited about this and that molecule doing whatever it does when in fact the properties of the molecule and its atoms are not inscribed on the molecule's forehead but are a result of the number(a quantity not a quality) of protons and neutrons in those atoms.
But that's because we see colors not frequencies.
The ship sank. Get over it. (This sig was cut out from another's shirt and painstakingly hand-posted)
Right now physicists invent a new particle every time there's a kink in their theories and only their particles are valid. Science that focuses on one level of emergence instaed of another belongs in practice not research. If I want to become a chemist or biologist I should get the education that will make me ready to meet day to day challenges. Studying subclasses of chemistry fits in that case. If I want to do research I should have some theoretical background besides studying reasearch itself.
The way theoretical physicists do their work it seems as if they never studied research. I get the impression they should be doing applied physics not theoretical. If you sent them out into a park and had them measure distances between trees they'd come back with names for each measured distance not numerical data.
In that same vein I don't see the validity in hypothesizing more complexity into the THEORY of the mind than there really is.
Sure, we have emotions, thoughts, and sensory impulses. But these things are not manifested in separate entities. They appear within the same field. Sensory information is lie a bunch of points. We can say my foot hurts just above the ankle. The sensory system simply registers information.
The emotional system deals with expectations, reflex, predictions, and some emotions are identified by the fact that nothing is explicitly expected. If you take an emotion out of context it collapses into the change in intensity of some sensation. That slight ache in one's leg after strenous exercise might not be pleasant, but that same ache after sex, is a whole other story. Talent with such trickery gives us our musicians, dancers, painters, etc. Nevermind sense of humor.
The intellect or mind, is the formation of relationships between elements one happens to be considering at some point in time. It's dangerous to talk of distances between neurons representing a real world geometry because as anyone knows the brain is noodles. But it is possible to talk about weighted neurons that tend to communicate with each other. The neurons themselves represent nothing but they can be used to reconstruct an idea or a model.
I think once theory and application are easily identifiable, studying either or becomes much less confusing.
The ship sank. Get over it. (This sig was cut out from another's shirt and painstakingly hand-posted)
if you're *really* interested in the bases of abstract thought, check out _Philosophy in the Flesh_ by Mark Johnson and George Lakoff. it runs circles around everything Pinker has to say (both in "How the Mind Works" and "the Language Instinct") and sheds much more light on the everything pinker deals with.
pinker's a good writer, and somewhat enjoyable, but he's largely deluded.
west coast cogsci is where it's at!
Agreed - Pinker is smart and interesting, but IMHO often wrong - too Chompskian.
Lakoff's "Women, Fire and Dangerous Things" is also an excellent book.
Scientific progress is often made when we "get over" questions, not answer them.
If you're asking the wrong question, you're never going to get the right answer.
Try explaining traffic flows on your morning commute by solving schoedringers equation. Protons and neutrons are just as arbitrary a level of emergenence as are characteristics of chemical compounds or bulk matter...
Quantity does, thru emergence, give rise to quality. You don't see much "liquidity" in a single water molecule. Qualities on one level of emergence are no less real than those on another.
Penrose doesn't want to believe that computers will ever be able to do what the human brain can, and wrote a book to try to prove that. He failed.
Penrose's tortuous computability proofs have been theoretically debunked.
Penrose wants you to believe that the brain doesn't operate in the realm of classical physics, but rather utilizes large scale quantum phenomena.
Common sense says that the repeating microcolumns of the cortex, and their distinctive interconnect patterns evolved for a reason. This level (and above) is where we should be looking for explanations of brain function. Penrose doesn't want to believe this. He *really* doesn't.
Thanks for the recommendation - my copy is on its way from amazon.com :)
The mind is the dynamics of the brain. The brain's key evolutionary benefit is the ability to model the environment so as to be able to react to it in more advantageous ways. A key factor in being able to model the environment is the ability to predict what comes next, which comes from recognising causal (or more accurately correlational) relationships. This is largely subconsious - if a bat hits a ball, we correlate the ball's motion to that of the bat and infer a causal/correlational relationship. We correlate our actions to the preceding decision to act, and infer a causal relationship. /you/ is simply the mental construct to which "your" decisions to act are attributed. /you/ therefore becomes the actor in all "your" actions, and the center of "your" episodic memory. It is not /you/ who "reviews the minds storage"; /you/ are _part of_ the minds storage.
>Ok, so point us to a comparable text on evolutionary psychology. Whoops, there aren't any.
The Tangled Wing--a bit dated, but quite comparable. There's nothing new in the claim that psychology is shaped by evolution--that has been an active field of study for decades, though it is possible that cogsci has overlooked it in the past (with cogsci's tradition of being more concerned with implementation than origin).
I get less and less comfortable with the way the way the kid's who commited this act are being marginalized in the media as psychotic, random, killers acting out. I watched all that unfold on CNN and over and over again i heard the students being interviewed describe them as "social outcasts" and over and over it was brought up that they didn't participate in school activities like that was something that made them pariah. Maybe it's just because i wen't to a white slum high school who's best credentials were mangaging to score the highest student pregnancy rate in the nation while i attended and having the most losing record of any high school football team in the state but i don't remember things being that heirarchal. I really thought that was something people had made up to sell "the breakfast club" and "heathers" I have an aquaintance on irc that lived a few blocks from the high school and knew the kids that did the shooting, he said that from the day they started school they were beaten and ridiculed relentlessly an example he threw out was that one of them was held down and given an enema. If i had went through something like that, i could easily understand wanting to hurt people. Maybe i'm out of touch, maybe thats just the structure most people live in and that it's shocking that someone on the bottom of a social pyramid would object to being beaten, ridiculed and sexually violated. I'm sure most of what they did was horrible misplaced aggression, but i'm starting to feel that some of it may have been right on target if massively excessive. There's a point where the human mind snaps and it sounds like they might have been pushed passed it. It's also possible that the depiction of their treatment i got from a third party is inaccurate or misleading, but i know that my sympathy quotient for that school took a nose dive.
1. AI is a misnomer. It should really be called Intelligence Mimicking Heuristics and Algorithms, as we DON'T have a scientific definition of what intelligence is (otherwise we would be able to MODEL it in an acceptable manner).
So we can't have an ``artificial'' version of something that really can't be defined, can we?
so AI is a meta-meta-terminology..... ugh.
2. G.E.B is a long book, entertaining at times but is not really intended as a serious book on IMHA (or AI, if you prefer) A large chunk of the material is metaphorical in nature, not scientific.
Yes, I thought the Language Instinct was one of the best popular science books I'd ever read. He's very good at distilling complex concepts down to the readers level with losing content. The main idea of that book was that the basic structure of language is inborn and all human languages are really just variations within that structure. I've been consiously listening to the way people speak ever since I read it.
I may have to go out and get this new book.
I didn't think his book was groudbreaking Ok, so point us to a comparable text on evolutionary psychology. Whoops, there aren't any. You clearly have no familiarity with the field. Evolutionary psychology, and all of its related fields (ethobiology, sociobiology, etc), have been studied in academia and massively popularized in the last 20 years. Try Ed Wilson's 'Sociobiology'. Or Dennett's 'Darwin's Dangerous Idea' and 'Conciousness Explained', both of which directly tie natural selection to cognition. Or Francis Crick's 'The Astonishing Hypothesis'. Or Pat Churchland's 'Neurophilosophy'. Or John Casti's 'Paradigms Lost'. Philosophy of mind is by nature a highly interdisciplinary field, touching on everything from evolution and biochemistry to neural network and genetic algorithms. Pinker's book falls into the same class, though it tends to be a broad and shallow survey. Pinker claims that the conditions present for evolutionary humans have a strong and direct causal link to our current psychological / cognitive reality, and that this link's explanatory power allows us to understand psychology / cognition more thoroughly than we could with out it. And he's not the first, by ANY means. In fact, when Ed Wilson proposed that evolution might have some impact on psychology (in the late 70's), he was attacked by his Harvard collegues, including notables such as Stephen Jay Gould and Rich Lewontin. Read Casti's book for more. didn't have any facts to back up his claims Look at the copious footnotes to each chapter. I defy you to show one significant claim that isn't thoroughly defended. (note also that this complain contradicts your previous complaint) You seem to think that a footnote sets a scientific fact in stone. Sorry, but much of research contradicts each other in this relatively young and complex field. And Pinker does tend to make longer interpretive leaps than his 'footnote supporters' would like, a phenomenon common in popular science and often harmful to the field. Very weak bit of trolling. Yes, it was.
I read How the Mind Works a couple of years ago (It was a gift from my father) and I found it absolutely fascinating. He offers trememdous insight into the workings of the brain and into its evolution.
If you've ever been curious about the topic, the book is not only well-written and very readable, it is difficult to put down -- which says a LOT for a non-fiction work.
Now, reguarding Biomorph's evolutionary psychology...I would argue that once you leave the realm of pure survival, and start what Pinker describes as a "cognitive arms race" your foundations are not quite so stable. "Evolution" in these area of emotions, abstract thought, stategies, etc. has been fast and furious and not necessarily proven.
Let's consider brain development. I these adolescent years, the human brain is developing many new capabilities....abstact thought for example. A friend's parents tried to teach her some algebra around the time she was ten. They solved the first problem : x=5. She went to the next problem, immediatly assumed x=5 for that one too. She was too young to abstact the variable x....this is one of the things that happens during adolescence.
If you made it through that age, look back at your journal or letters from those years...everything seemed so dire and immediate...events that today you would shrug off, seemed so huge. Consider the idea that many different emotional attributes also develop during these years....and none of them at the same rate.
This can lead to a mental/emotional house of cards....all the right pieces are there, just not properly developed.....and in a "social pressure cooker" like high school you are likely to get one or two to snap.
Ug. All these ideas and the best that I can come up with is "they snap".
Sorry about the rambling, I just think that humans and consciousness are just too complex to try to explain by a handful of heuristics about DNA that wants to reproduce. There are other factors like brain development during adolescence and the relative newness of all psychological strategies(compare how long it took evolution to produce the human form with how long it took evolution to teach us to build social structures)
My example sucks, the idea remains.
Just a little idea.
this is an interesting question, which actually ties into a lot of what elman has to say about non-representational innateness... there -are- ways to get interesting constraints on development which don't involve prespecification of synaptic connections (what elman calls architectural and chronotopic constraints, as opposed to the representational constraints which pinker and others seem to want). In this way, representations can be acquired through minimal genetic representations which -interact- with information present in the environment, or with physical laws, etc. to produce effects which contain much more information than the genome by itself. But the environmental interaction necessary here is just the sort of thing that people like pinker want to deny; what's innate here is the method of development, not what's developed.
Now, the question i take it you're asking is whether there isn't possibly some extremely compressed form in which to store the information in the genes--eg. the fractal equation. I'm not sure exactly how plausible this is; one question is whether the synaptic connection specification that actually gets you the results you want can be specified with that type of thing.
This is an empirical question (and i'm inclined to be sceptical until there's some kind of demonstration; though i certainly wouldn't rule it out), but i think one of the strength's of elman's account is that we no longer -need- this amount of information. the architectural and chronotopic constraints do all the work; we don't need to specify the representations. So, if elman is right, that type of information compression would be superfluous. Though that isn't to say wrong; all this is just speculation on my part.
Stephen Pinker is notorious in many circles for his sometimes wild speculation about innate knowledge, predispositions, reactions, etc. (cf. his recent New York Times article explaining exactly why, in evolutionary terms, women might discard newborn babies (as has happened in a few very publicised cases).)
There are a few problems with the arguments used to support all of this innateness (or:nativism). Most importantly, it's generally based on questionable assumptions about the data (e.g. the language samples to which children are exposed) and the power of the learning device (the brain) which has to extract patterns from the data. Jeffrey Elman et. al. present a very interesting criticism of this common nativist argument in "Rethinking Innateness: A Connectionist Perspective on Development". Basically, they show that many of the functions that are supposedly impossible, and many of the strange patterns in learning which supposedly can only be accounted for by innate predispositions and knowledge can actually be simulated very well in neural networks which don't build in -any- knowledge of the subject area (e.g., they aren't born knowing Universal Grammar, yet Elman provides an example of a network which has managed to sort linguistic data according to grammatical category. This ability was not programmed in--it was independently learned by the network). Of course, all this is preliminary--we certainly don't have neural nets that can simulate human behaviour in total, or even close. But the assumption that we -need- innate knowledge to account for this type of stuff just doesn't fly.
An interesting point that Elman et. al. mention is that the genome just doesn't contain enough information to specify brain representations--it's not possible for this sort of knowledge to be encoded in the genes. 'Wiring of the microcircuitry'--i.e. specification of synaptic connections--'is essential if language, the quintessential higher cognitive process, is an instinct...' (Pinker, The Language Instinct, 93, 97). But, genetic prespecification of synaptic weights in the brain is just too much information for genes to carry--such specification could reasonably require on the order of 10 trillion base pairs of DNA just for our brain--and that's more than we have for our whole body.
Elman et.al. make another major contribution to the debate by describing an interactionist framework, where outcomes may be highly constrained and universal, but not themselves directly contained in the genes (or the brain) in any domain-specific way. (Notice that this is exactly the faulty inference of which Pinker and many other nativists are guilty.)
In sum, I think that Rethinking Innateness is an extremely valuable contribution to the old nativist/empiricist debate, most especially for their dissection of the concept 'innateness', which nativists use with abandon, but which really is ambiguous between a large number of possible interpretations.
Please keep in mind that I am not attacking anyone's religeon. I only with to point out the errors of the previous post: 1. A theory is not a scientifically proven fact, it is just a hypothesis that happens to fit observations and has stood up to rigourous attempts to disprove it. Only certain theories ever become Laws- like Gravity because they have stood up to all attempts at disproving them. 2. Evolution has been difficult to prove because we have limited life spans. We cannot observe directly the course of evolution but we can infer from reliable methods of short term observations. The Galapagos islands variation of species, animal husbandry, and the proliferation of breeds of domesticated animals adds solid and ample evidence to support evoltion. Did you know that all dogs and wolves are genetically the same? Dogs are only domesticated wolves, that is why they can interbreed and have viable, reproductive offspring. 3. The fossil record thus far disciovered has been limited because it is a hit or miss proposition. Even with the best technology, it is still hampered by the enourmous surface area of the Earth. Geology has also made it difficult to find fossil records.
Glaciation, Volcanic eruptions, Plate Tetonics, Erosion have all served to hide the complete fossil record. The average age of the surface of the earth is only a few hundred million years in comparison to the surface of the moon which is over 4 billion years old. The lack of complete fossil records or even trackable progression can be accounted by geologic phenomena. Since 99% of all life forms that have ever lived are now extinct, it would be presumptuous to think that the fossil record would be found every where if you factor in geological progress. You should also consider that the majority of life on earth has a body mass of less than 1 kilogram- microbes, insects, etc.
There is one theory that accounts for that lack of slow progressive fossils-- punctuated equilibrium. This theory of evolution states that long periods of little or no change is riddled with moments of abrupt change. The fossil record of sponges and even the propogation of species in the Galapagos Islands support this. Fossil records would be drastically changed due to dramatic genetic mutations (the biological mechanism of evolution).
I do not wish to insult your faith or opinions but please be careful when trying to make assumptions about scientific theories. In science the worst mistakes often resulted from assumptions. Just look at the Michealson-Morely experiments with trying to find the Aether at the turn of the 19th century.
Romanes eunt domus? People called Romanes, they go the 'ouse? It says Romans go home. No it doesn't. What's Latin fo
Which brings me to a comment that I've been ranting at the television since last night. Am I the only one that also happens to wear a trench coat, wears black, listens to hard rock music, and would be considered a "social outcast" in the high school world of popularity and cliques? Also, am I the only one that is EXTREMELY angry at being lumped in with mass murderers? I'm aware that this is extremely off the topic of the book, but I feel it warrants expression.
Meghan
Okay, so let me get this straight. You think this never would have happened if we gave guns to *everyone*? If I'm correct in my understanding of your comment, then I would *love* to know what drugs you're on and where I could get some. Giving out MORE handguns isn't going to solve a damn thing. Getting guns *away* from little psychopaths and their peers would seem to be the solution to me. I'm all down with arming yourself, if you happen to be a relatively sane and responsible adult, but giving guns to kids is falt out stupid. "I don't want a C on my paper! *bang*" I try to avoid throwing insults around in a public forum, but you're a retard if you really believe what you said.
Meghan
I know already that one local high school here (Maryland, just outside DC) has banned trench coats, saying that it symbolizes "gang racism." As usual being "not cool" is a means torment and suffering for us quiet little geeks that sit in the corner.
Meghan
First off, I wouldn't call Littleton a "small town". It's just a suburb of Denver, and thus part of a much larger community, albeit smaller than LA or NY.
As for the motivations of the nut case killers versus the gangs, here's a stab at it...
Notice that most of the "nut case" school shootings over the past few years have occured in predominatly white, middle/upper class communities. As my boss, a former cop, pointed out yesterday, "gangs are easy to figure out; their motivation is usually based on survival". I am not defending gangs, but for a lot of kids gangs have become surrogate families where they have some sense of belonging and protect it.
As for the senseless killings by otherwise "normal" middle class kids, certainly the "cult of the individual" so prevalent in our society has something to do with it. If all you do is spend your time immersed in your own individuality, it's hard to look out and have any natural feeling of compassion for others. This isolation and competitiveness when carried to an extreme (as in most high schools) could certainly lead to the tragedy that happened in Littleton.
Just my 2 cents...
I don't agree this was a gang rivalry (or clique, or whatever else you want to call it)... more a couple of frustrated kids who went off the deep end. After all, how many times have you seen gang members go on suicide missions committed to taking as many people as possible with them?
Pinker's book is more than a year old and I can't figure out why slashdot would give it this kind of bandwidth.
I didn't think his book was groudbreaking or even all that interesting. He didn't make any substantial claims and really didn't have any facts to back up his claims.
For my money, I would read Daniel Dennett. Darwin's Danegous Idea, Kinds of Minds, and his latest, Brainchildren are much better reads.
I pretty much agree... I read this book as an amateur, and as such, I had a good time. It seems like current models are closer than they were 10 years ago, but it might be another 10, or 50 years until reasonably good understanding of the process is achieved.
Not Quite. Creatures of the same genus (one level up from species) are commonly able to mate and produce viable offspring. For example dogs & wolves are known as Canis Familiaris & Canis Lupus respectively, ie. they are of the same genus, but are of different species. They are also capable of producing offspring.
No, it is not necessarily the case that they are of the same species. Wolves are of species lupus, while dogs are of species familiaris. Yet wolf/dog crossbreeds product viable, -fertile- offspring.
Yep. Both The Language Instinct and How the Mind Works are great books.
Programming style was one thing that I thought about when reading the language instinct -- Some of the ideas of making good English could be equally applied to making clear and readable code. For instance, a sentence is much more readable when it's (uh, i forget the exact words here) left-based or right-based rather than having its recursion right in the middle of the sentence. I'm sure someone else could explain this better.. But I generally find code where you have a functions inside functions only hard to decipher if the inner functions are someone in the middle of the arguments is a function, and it has more functions as arguments in the middle of it.. or something like that... something similar goes for loops within loops. I could probably give some examples if I had the book in front of me.
Anyone care to share their views?
Pengo (of pengo.net)
[MIT] Language is built up out of domain- specific, innate modules which are evolved into the genome and are hard-wired into the brain at birth. Evidence: grammars are so complex, babies wouldn't stand a chance with just general-purpose reasoning capacaties.
[UCSD] Language is built up out of domain-general neural hardware which is neither innate nor hard-wired. We can thank the genome for general-purpose reasoning, but it is not correct to attribute language-specific neural wiring to evolution. Also, generative grammars *are* hard. Luckily only linguists (not babies) have to worry about generative grammars. Evidence: young children can lose the parts of their brains where the innate modules are supposed to be, and still do language.
These are not vanilla "nurture/nature" claims but rather substantive claims about how cognition work. Furthermore, they are important because they drive research in cognitive science and (American) linguistics. Finally (unlike much of generative grammar) they are testable claims. So let's continue to test them.