BOXES One fanciful vision of the (flat) Earth was that it was supported on the back of a turtle, which was, in turn, standing on another turtle and so on:  Turtles all the way down . Similarly, I find it useful to think of "boxes within boxes all the way down." Box 1 is the world we experience "in our head," which includes all experience and everything we know. In particular, it includes what we have been taught and what we have been taught to assume, which is, to a certain extent, " programmed ". Box 1 is the " matrix " of individually shared reality. But, unlike the Matrix of Science Fiction fame, our matrix depends deeply on the "real world" outside and our senses within, as eloquently explained by Antonio Damasio . Our evolutionary survival strategy involves survival as a member of a group, or " super person ". Not only do we not "think for ourselves," we can't . We experience ourselves as o...

We all know what we are saying when we talk about what is meaningful to us. These are first-person statements. If the Universe is imagined as "outside" and the mind is "inside", meaning is on the "inside". Einstein remarked that he was amazed that the fundamental laws of nature are discoverable and, by the way, beautiful. There is something behind this observation that seems almost spiritual - in fact, people talk about " Einstein's God ". Wilczek asks the same question on " A Beautiful Question ". He's noting the same deep beauty Einstein is talking about and asking the subtle question - is the Universe "really" beautiful? So here's a possible road to a "solution" to the hard problem: How do we experience meaning in the Universe? How does it feel to find meaning? Damasio builds his account of "mind" on this very question. This is not merely an "outside" mechanical idea. It...

This blog started three years ago as " Dragon Theory ". I was particularly taken by the " corporation ", a legal "person" with rights powers vastly exceeding ordinary persons. Then and now, I consider the "corporation" to be a threat to individual rights and freedoms. I was also inspired by the ultimate evil in the Star Trek series: the Borg . As time went on, I became more curious as to how people are assimilated into "the dragon". By 2017, assimilation had become my focus and I changed the name of the blog to " The Programmable Ape ". I had come to look beyond the mass phenomena like the corporation to see that humans are uniquely engineered to be "assimilated". Our language is a way of "programming" us. This involved a subtle change in outlook. What does it feel like to be programmed? Is it possible to have a thought, experience or perception that is not deeply colored by the thoughts of others? "...

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...

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...

This talk introduces a recent book by Dennett, rehashing and updating his theories on the mind. I have the hard copy of the book on order. These comments refer to his summary of it delivered as part of the Google Talks series. It is much to Dennett's credit that, as he goes along, his ideas become more precise and articulate. His examples are more apt, his analogies closer to the "essence". He never seems to say, "I was totally wrong about this", but he does make progress - partly by not taking himself too seriously. It is much to Dennett's credit that he is rarely caught in an "argument" -- he sees an element of truth in almost everything, always putting his own ideas on the table without allowing opposition to get personal. This is good because he gets a lot of opposition. " Consciousness Explained " (1991) was a serious over-reach. Rather a mess that didn't come close to delivering on the promise in its title. Yet, in the interveni...