It's called the " Flynn effect " — the fact that each generation scores higher on an IQ test than the generation before it. Are we actually getting smarter, or just thinking differently? In this fast-paced spin through the cognitive history of the 20th century, moral philosopher James Flynn suggests that changes in the way we think have had surprising (and not always positive) consequences.                    -  Ted Talk by James Flynn James Flynn It is well established that we are, as a culture, getting better at IQ tests. There is a lot of debate over this effect, but I like the explanation offered by Flynn himself.  He takes the bold position that we are, in fact, getting smarter - not just better at taking IQ tests. In a nutshell, he claims that we have more powerful intellectual tools. Every member of this culture is trained in these tools from birth. The tools are shared. This has profound implications for one of he centr...

In Alien 1979, we were introduced to a creature that invades its host and connects itself so deeply to the host's internal organs that removal of the invader will kill the victim. When religion is installed in the mind of a baby and left to grow for years, disentanglement seems close to psychological suicide. The human "self" is so entangled with the invader that survival without the resident alien seems impossible. In fact, the invader has become the "self". The alien egg is planted soon after birth. The victim is raised in a deeply religious household that is itself part of a religious culture. Inside the bubble, the fantasy is daily reality. This is particularly insidious for women, who may find themselves mothers in their early teens, saddled with caring for (and infecting) families of their own long before they develop brains that are capable of "pushing back" against bubble-think. Religion tends to be "hard wired" into generations of wo...

I encourage you to listen to the CBC Ideas segment:   Challenge of Words   about how language works according to those who use it expertly.  The discussion touches on several issues of interest for this blog: How we "think in words" and the language we think in makes a difference; How we use both pictures and words to express ideas. Pictures can be vague but words demand precision, even though precision is elusive; How words can be used to create a totally imaginary world; The importance to a writer to find at least one person who "gets it" - the need to write; Difficulty for the writer to meed the expectations of the reader for narrative and a story that "makes sense"; How language is ultimately limited in its ability to express what we want to share.

I was thinking about coming up with a unifying theme for the history of mind and the history of computation and the term "emergence" seemed appropriate for both. However, my imagination took the wrong off ramp as it often does and I started visualizing the physical emergence of man as it would be seen by a Man from Mars. He would discover evidence of termites or algae not just by finding the "organism" but by discovering their impact, constructions and byproducts. Even if time had erased all direct evidence of human organisms, there would be no problem discovering Man, just as we discovered dinosaurs. There is a link between this view and the problem we have fining boundaries for "mind". I think that "mind" cannot be seen as "emergent" in one organism but something that happens in a society of organisms, especially in their language or technology. Similarly, what an organism is - what counts as species for all other living things - is ...

The idea of the meme was invented by Richard Dawkins and hammered into its most robust form by Daniel Dennett. It is an extended analogy that claims that human ideas are somehow like genes and have their own process of evolution independent of the evolution going on in their "hosts", the human race. It's an attractive idea and it works well as a rhetorical device, especially the way that Dawkins and Dennett use it to attack religion as an infection of the brain. True believers in "memetics" claim that all of human thought is "infection" by memes - a strong claim that memetics is a fundamental explanation of mind. Memeticists claim that the brain is a "meme machine". The problem comes when you try to apply memes outside of the examples trotted out by the "founders". Personally, I can't figure out what a "meme" is. The old words of ideas, doctrines, theories and especially paradigm seem perfectly serviceable and don'...

" Paradigm " is a word that refers to the grand unifying ideas that underpin our understanding of a phenomenon - perhaps all phenomena. Paradigms shift slowly as the old "believers" die and a new generation is open to new ways of thinking. "Understanding" in this case is mostly about language: about how we talk to each other. If two people  subscribe to the same paradigm what they say to each other is intelligible - it "makes sense". Challenges to the paradigm always come in the form of impertinent questions. Why impertinent? Because the question comes out of left field. It makes no sense. A successful challenge to the paradigm expands and revises language itself, so that it becomes possible to speak in new ways that "make sense". In the new paradigm, the old language is no longer intelligible. For example, we don't expect to see references to " phlogiston " or the " luminous aether " in modern scientific journa...

I'm wary of the term "evolution" - especially when it is used in a vaguely Darwinian sense to sprinkle scientific fairy dust over wild speculation. I think it makes sense to use "evolution" in a fairly narrow sense, in which we can see that some object, "thing" or situation exhibits the following qualities: It's in some "state" of current interest. The analysis of the "state" has some non-trivial explanatory power over the thing in question even when it is considered as a current, static object. The "thing" has obviously, necessarily undergone change over time - it wasn't always the same as it is now. It must have been in some other state, usually a simpler state, at some time in the past. There is strong evidence that the thing has undergone versions , where one version incorporates design features of previous versions. It is legitimate to ask what changes have taken place over time to get from the "simpler...

Computer architecture represents the latest technology supporting some trends that go back a long, long way. Whatever one might think of Jaynes' version of human history, he does get us thinking about the emergence of language. Obviously, there was a time when it was simpler and, if we don't blow ourselves up, it gets more rich and complex as we go along. I have a whole blog about " programming " the mind. Language plays a key part. Imagine language in software terms. There are about 180,000 words in the English language. On the "back of a napkin", allowing for 10 bytes (characters) per word, that's 1.8 megabytes. If we imagine the Oxford English Dictionary to be equivalent to the "database software", it's 22,000 pages. allowing 1000 characters per page, that's 22 megabytes. In a very rough way, we could say that the "software" of the English Language is implemented in less than 50 megabytes - far less in any particular brain ...

This was originally posted in its own "Zen of Value" blog but has been moved here for sake of integration and connection. It turns out that I don't have much more to say about the "Zen of Value". Discussions about how money originates often start with the fable that it evolved to facilitate trade and "store value". Otherwise, so the story goes, you and I would simultaneously want something somebody else had (say, you have more fish than you need and I have extra sheep). There is scant evidence that "cash" arose out of this situation. This can be seen when "cash" is in short supply or in small groups (families, neighbors) who exchange goods and services without cash, even indignantly refusing cash when it would be perfectly sensible when interacting with a stranger. We also have times, such as the "Dirty 30's" where, for technical reasons, nobody had "money" but everybody had more than they need of some things...

Provably Beneficial AI | Stuart Russell Single valued "value" function Optimizing model Role in whole society is simplified to the point of a cartoon No mention of fundamental issues either of values or computation We see a lot of speakers talking about somehow programming ethics into the machine. To me, this is essentially the same problem as programming ethics into a bureaucracy. The Bureaucracy uses the computer and becomes more efficiently evil in the process. Problems with "optimization" ... "Value" is relative - dependent on who is doing the valuing and even when the valuing takes place. It is not subject to amalgamation, averaging or optimization over populations.  Money is a bad proxy for "value" but is often assumed to be identical with value. I have a whole blog on this. Whatever you are trying to do and whatever goals you are trying to model, both the machine and the individual must be considered to be embedded in society (or even the ...

The project draws an extensive parallel between computer technology, specifically computer programming languages and the open-ended aspect of culture that includes language but also the wider methods, especially those aspects of technology that are used to explain or communicate culture. Humans interact with computers in many other ways, including paying for them and using them to "make money" (computers become actors in the "real economy" with huge impact on the "economy", which is right-wing word for "society").You can't entirely ignore the broad issue of "automation", which is perhaps the topic of most interest to the average reader. Seen from this angle, Part 1 (below) is a primer on the nature of automation, especially "computerization". Most primers on computers ignore the way computers actually "work" in the world and focus on aspects that most people do not need to know (such as CPU's, disks, RAM etc....