Man – Mind
Action
“Man Must Act”
(dark forces of need, time, and ignorance)
|BEHAVIOR| property(acquisition/defense) > prey drive > gender drive > cooperation drive > personality > intuition > reason > calculation > computation > markets > symmetries.
Minds
( … )
Brain
HUMAN FACULTIES
1. sense (neurons-nerves)
2. disambiguation (constant relations – cortex),
3. perception(integration-prediction – cortex),
4. intuition (auto-association-prediction) (hippocampus-cortex + valuation(emotion))
5. attention (attention-prediction) (thalamus-hippoampus-cortex),
6. will (recursion-prediction) (prefrontal, thalamus, hippocampus, cortex)
7. and release of actions;
Consciousness
THE RULES OF CONSCIOUSNESS
WHEREAS
1. Our attention rotates in a competition between sensation(observation and construction by prediction and reward identification), imagination (possibility by association), holding attention on a goal (possibility by continuous opportunity seizure), and releasing predicted actions (in pursuit of the goal).
WHEREAS
2. We rotate between sensation (observation and construction by prediction), anticipating (goal prediction), and storing (remembering by stimulating and rehearsing), on a 1/10th of a second rotation (Theta) creating competition and choice.
AND WHEREAS
3. There is no observer, other than the memory of an observation.
4. There are no observations other than sequences.
5. There is no comparison of observations other than to previous sequences.
6. There is no order in sequences other than that created by sequences.
7. There are no sequences other than those of sensations.
8. There is no existence sensed, other than those changes in time.
9. Without change we cannot sense time.
THEREFORE
Existence is a verb
Experience is a verb
Imagination is a verb
Consciousness is a verb.
Because Acting is a verb – and we can only act in time.
AND THEREFORE
Without action, we produce no existence, no experience, no sequence, no memory, no consciousness.
AND THEREFORE
There is no observer other than the observations (hierarchy of increasing of sequences of memories in time.
AND THEREFORE
We see what the camera sees.
We do not record images, but sequences of related stimuli.
“I AM, MEANING, I EXIST AS, THE HIERARCHY OF MY MEMORY IN MOTION”
Arousal is not Consciousness
Confusing Arousal with Consciousness is like confusing the light switch with the light. Just ’cause we can turn off the switch doesn’t tell us how the light is created.
We can interfere with any number of parts (Colostrum) and shut down experience. That doesn’t tell us anything.
The question is, how does that mushy wetware synthesize past memory present experience, and future prediction, from millions of nerves (measurements) into our rather amazing conflated experiences of past, present, and future? (cortical hierarchy, parahippocampal, perirhinal, entorhinal cortices, and subiculum.)
How do we shift between narrow focus, near perception, environmental perception, self-perception, and deep introspection and imagination? (thalamus)
Why is it we can react so quickly that we can hit a curveball with a bat? (basal ganglia, cerebellum, and cortical prediction)
How do we Assemble memories and experience them? (Hippocampus)
What is that feeling of me? (mostly, hippocampus)
Why can’t we pin it down.
“Cause it’s a verb not a noun”.
The continuous change in state in a hierarchy of ever smaller cycles of time….
Attention
Neural Economy
( … ) Hayek’s knowledge, tradition, habits…. limiting burden of reason.
The Will To Act
(necessary … preservation of the will to act … dunning kruger confidence )
—
SYSTEMS vs THE RIDER AND THE ELEPHANT
System G (genes),
System 0 (property),
System 1 (intuition/search/continuous recursion),
System 2 (steering, reason, calculation, computing)
The ‘puppeteer’ (returns search results constantly)
The mind handles exceptions (or disparate choices)
Negotiation (morality) is an exception handler.
I disagree with Chomsky, and I am fairly sure that Jeff Hawkins, and Kahnemann and his references, are correct: we just constantly search and re-search memory, and we pre-load any sequence of actions that have high value and then we become aware of the predicted outcome, and we choose to accept the proposition of our search, or we reject it, or we weigh it (research it, and reason with it).
I like the “Systems” metaphors because they’re abstract. It is easier to understand the “Elephant and Rider” metaphor. And the ‘puppeteer’ metaphor is probably attributing too much agency to our intuition when it is just an acquisition machine.
We act on behalf of our genes. The conscious mind (system 2: reasoning search) rides on the elephant of intuition (system 1: intuitionistic search), which is informed by our desire to acquire, inventory, and defend, which is biased by our reproductive strategy, which is biased by our genes.
MAN IS A VICTIM OF HIS GENETIC BIASES
[W]e intuit that people – we and others – have agency. That the rider dominates the elephant. That is very hard to demonstrate, when it appears the opposite.
Developing Agency depends on the biological ability to do so, the market demand to do so, and the discipline to do so. So the elephant is a very simple machine, and the rider (consciousness) but a tool with which the elephant identifies opportunities, negotiates cooperation and executes conflict.
In other words all we think and do as JUSTIFYING the commands of the elephant. And that very, very few of us are fully human and able to transcend the elephant. And that propertarianism is a means, like stoicism, like mathematics, of transcending the elephant – or rather COMPLETING THE TRANSCENDENCE OF MAN.
All learning is continuous recursion. Epistemology and neurology are the same subject.
THE CONSPIRACY OF THE ELEPHANTS
[T]here is no conspiracy among peoples with genetic and cultural homogeneity, any more than there is a conspiracy between women against men, or predators against prey, or competent against incompetent.
We demonstrate differing degrees of neoteny, different moral intuitions, differing brain distributions, different endorphin distributions, and different morphology distributions for ancestral reasons.
We all participate in the unconscious persistence of genetic, class, cultural, mythological, and institutional strategies. We can enumerate the properties of different group strategies, right down to the grammar of the speech and the methods of arguments, and the distributions of cognitive biases people and peoples use (which is one of the research programs what I work on).
All of these properties and in group differences are both measurable at the individual and observable at the collective. One does not blame a dog for dragging it’s backside on the carpet. It’s a dog. One simply teaches the dog not to do so. One does not blame women for feminine cognitive biases and life preferences – they were an evolutionary necessity. One does not blame a competing group for pursuing it’s genetic interest at others expense – one simply creates norms, traditions, laws, institutions, and knowledge to prevent murder, violence, theft, fraud, fraud by omission, free riding, socialization of losses, privatization of commons, conspiracy, rent seeking, producing pseudoscience, pseudo-rationalism, propaganda, systemic lying, advocating or practicing moral and ethical irreciprocity, attempts at conversion, at institutional erosion, asymmetric reproduction, invasion, conquest, war, and genocide in either short term or long term means.
Either a group can defend itself against destructive, parasitic and predatory competitors or it can’t. Groups compete. They compete by the means available to them. And groups learn to exploit every possible niche, from the most high trust, innovative, and productive, to the most low trust, parasitic, and destructive. But we cannot blame others for their immorality (free riding, parasitism and predation). We can only seek to defend ourselves against the immoral. There are no conspiracies. All our talk is just smoke and negotiation and deception on behalf of our genes. We are under the illusion that the rider drives the elephant, but the rider (our consciousness) is just a passenger on the elephant of our genes. Genes don’t conspire. They can’t.
THE ILLUSION OF CONTROL
[S]peech provides the illusion that the rider controls the elephant, when in fact, there are very, very, few of us whose elephants correspond to reality, and as a consequence so do our riders. There is a reason that the animals do not argue rationally – because they lack agency, and because they lack agency, they are not in fact humans
