This is an experimental blog post. The idea was to simply talk about a range of issues with the aim of creating a "mind map", then using the map to create traditional posts that are more structured and focused. But along the way, I wondered if I could post the original voice note So, to test this, click on the link below, which will show you a LINK to the audio Store that and play it. Your machine will probably have an app that plays audio. In my case, it's iTunes. This talk can be indexed just like a text essay. In the long run, the plan is to take notes on my own "rant" in mind map form (which can also be shown in the blog). A Random Talk

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'...

Daniel Dennett likes to give Jaynes the benefit of the doubt: “There were a lot of really good ideas lurking among the completely wild junk.” As Dennett hints (with typical subtly), there is a lot of "junk philosophy" around the subjects dear to Jaynes' heart. In this post, I'd like to extract one of Jayne's ideas and wipe a bit of "junk" off it to see where it gets me. At the center of Jayne's theory is the "bicameral mind", which is firmly based on the idea that we have a "right brain" and a "left brain" with notably different capabilities, each capable of acting somewhat on their own. The "right brain" is good at seeing the "big picture" and sends its judgments to the left brain, where they are perceived as speech - sometimes the speech of the Gods. As things get historically more complicated, we evolve our present day "inner chatter", no longer attributed to the Gods (if we are sane), b...

I can never tell if my "hits" are from robots or human beings. Please do me a huge favor and leave a comment, however short, to tell me someone is out there reading this stuff ... I owe Hofstadter a huge debt of gratitude for his "Surfaces and Essences" and, to a lesser extent "I Am a Strange Loop". He points out the central role that analogy plays in our thinking and, in Strange Loop, the fact that we "bootstrap" our idea of what it is to be human through an analogy between our own experience and that of others.  Our conviction that the world is full of folks like us and that we are a person such as those around us is ultimately based on analogy. We then proceed to endlessly refine this most fundamental of analogies. What is it like to be somebody else? Let me explain what it is like to be me. I wonder what it would be like to be James Bond? Or Superman? Or God? Such curiosity leads us quickly into deep trouble. By analogy, we ask ourselves how ...

The Ravenous Brain Bor loves the " Prefrontal parietal cortex " PPC, which he identifies as the seat of "working memory". In turn, the concept of awareness, consciousness and working memory a so closely intertwined that research in any of these subjects is, by default, research in all the others. In this book, he makes a strong case. It turns out that we can be conscious while missing big chunks of our brain. Evidence from such sad situations, along with EEG and fMRI studies, allow us to zero in on the brain functions that are necessary and sufficient for consciousness. Bor provides extensive examples of experiments that reveal the limits of consciousness and how it can be "taken apart" in various ways. One of is central ideas is "chunking". He visualizes working memory has having a limited capability to handle "chunks" - perhaps just 4 at a time (whatever "chunks" are). To deal with this limit, the brain (mainly the PPC), det...

The idea of a meme was introduced by Richard Dawkins in a final chapter of his popular 1976 book on genetics: "The Selfish Gene". Dawkins kicks around the meme idea with philosopher Daniel Dennett here . Even after 40 years, Dawkins still brings up the meme constantly, especially when he's talking about religion as a meme that "infects" the human brain. The word "meme" is now tossed around quite freely, almost a synonym for "idea", but usually confined to a "big idea" or at least one that is effectively communicated from person to person and somehow "survives" competition with competing ideas. Given " Surfaces and Essences " (S&E), we can immediately see that the meme is an explicit analogy with the gene. We can also ask if it's a very good analogy. Does it lead us to understand anything about ideas that we can't easily see without it? Does it mislead us to think that ideas have properties or behavior...

I'm beginning to feel the need to organize my ideas into some kind of structure. Let's call that structure "M1". The name comes from "M for Mind and 1 for the primacy of the first person experience". This should probably be document in a Web Site, rather than a blog, but such a site needs a few initial ideas and some sketch of what it's about. In any case, documentation of M1 needs to be on an interactive platform (not a paper book) to allow dynamic growth and interaction with interested individuals. Mind Maps One key tool on the site should be the "Mind Map", which allows us to draw informal diagrams of the relationship between ideas. This is considerably less formal than UML (Universal Modelling Language) that I was first tempted to use. It takes considerable training to understand a UML diagram and there are subtle objections to the ultimate trap of equating an "idea" with a UML "class". The Mind Map allows us to informal...