Cognition (18)

Thinking machines

Submitted by kratib on Tue, 2008-02-26 00:25.
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Humans are thinking machines, among other things. We think, we learn how to think, we are asked to think (or not). Some would go as far as saying we think therefore we are.

Why think?

We think to solve problems.

What is thought?

Psychological evolution through offspring

Submitted by kratib on Sat, 2008-02-23 23:16.
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We all carry psychological baggage. Unresolved issues from the past that make us vulnerable to the uncertain future. There are many ways to find shelter from these vulnerabilities, including families, therapy groups, workaholism, etc. Still, most of us will carry these unresolved issues to the grave.

When the birth of a habit is the death of hope

Submitted by kratib on Fri, 2007-05-18 12:39.
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Among my saddest moments are those when I realize that people who are dear to me have succumbed to negative habits, beyond redemption. I feel it as yet another victory of the dark unconscious over consciousness.

What is a habit? It's a tendency to react in a specific way to a specific set of circumstances - but that actively discards all other possible ways to react. In that sense, it's like an alien living inside our mind. When I get home from work, tired and tense, I will reach frantically for that first cigarette because I know that it will make me calmer. I'm possessed.

A habit starts as a behavioral trait that occurs only occasionally, and that can be debated consciously, both internally inside the subject himself, and between the subject and his peers. It makes me think of the famous movie line:

You know you're an infojunkie if...

Submitted by kratib on Wed, 2007-05-16 20:05.
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10. The main intellectual activity of your childhood consisted of making lists, from airplane models to French words of Arabic origin.
9. Your parents took you in their Trivial Pursuit team, encouraging you to memorize all the cards.
8. Your high school teachers gave you books that you keep rediscovering every decade.
7. Now that you've grown up, your innocent list-making has turned into an addiction for collections: music, books, films, whatever can be acquired into a hierarchy of categories.
6. With the advent of the Internet, your addiction has taken a turn for the worse. You've now become a multimedia pirate but you're spending unreasonable amounts of money on bandwidth and disk space.

Glimpses of an ontological model of cognition

Submitted by kratib on Sat, 2007-05-05 14:11.
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Here are just notes to help me remember some observations for arguments of a speculative model.

Memory and sensations

Hardly an easy entry point to start with, but a vivid one nonetheless.

Sensations occur to the sensory organs of the human body (its inputs). Interestingly, the external human body is, as a whole, a sensory organ because the sense of touch applies to all of its external cells. Of course, internal organs as well have sense, exemplified by the sense of pain. So we can say that each cell receives sensations.

Furthermore, it is noticeable that when we remember past events, our sensory organs that were involved in the event undergo a soft of re-enactment of the original event, but dampened. For example, remembering eating chocolate. It is thus fair to say that the cells, those sensory organs, keep a record of how they behaved in the past.

Next-generation information processing

Submitted by kratib on Sat, 2007-05-05 13:47.
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Taking clues from human thinking, I will go out on a limb and suggest that the next generation of information processing systems will manipulate structural information, not just factual data. For example, applications will constantly reorganize their own data model, as data accumulates, in order to efficiently store, query, and update the information. This will have to do with modifying the relationships between entities, and redefining what makes an entity. Automatically, and in real time.

Human information process

Submitted by kratib on Sat, 2007-05-05 13:44.
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The best model we have for an information processing system is the human machine itself. I am not saying human brain or human mind because human information processing is performed in the brain as well as in the body. A good illustration of how the two are related lies in the various states of behaviour (consciousness?) that we can be

  • State of concentration: in which we can focus on one thread of thought. It seems that while we concentrate, our senses - pieces of hardware - actually filter out external stimuli to minimize the interruptions of the main thread of thinking.
  • State of anger: in which the rational subsystem is overriden by what appears to be lower-level, reactive instincts. Also, the level of readiness for violent action increases, which must mean that most energy is being redirected to the motor organs of the body. Can lead to a state of fury when the rational subsystem is completely shutdown.

The natural groove

Submitted by kratib on Sat, 2007-03-17 13:06.
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We (humans) use many expressions in our everyday life related to rhythm:
"Miss a beat"
"Find my rhythm"
"Go at your own pace"
"Get into the groove" ;-)

In my experience, I've noticed that external events can happen either on the beat or the off-beat. Which beat you ask? Well, take a conversation between two people for example. When we speak, we do so at a certain pace, which immediately implies a beat (and associated off-beat). If I want to interrupt you while you're talking, I should choose an opportune moment where you'll be least likely to react in time to continue talking, which is on the off-beat of your speech. There are classic movie moments that illustrate this phenomenon:

The dilemma of racism

Submitted by kratib on Tue, 2007-02-20 23:43.
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Humans seem to organize their thinking in terms of hierarchies, classes and levels. This particular structure is quite useful in tackling problems related to the physical world, where manifestations exhibit a natural order that is intelligible to us. Specifically, manifestations seem to exist as clusters of mostly similar patterns, with few features distinguishable across the classes. This is obviously a computer programmer talking.

Like man organized for example the order of life forms in the phylogenetic tree, it was natural for him to undertake an organization of society, the grouping of man. And thus men were organized (by man) according to their geographical location, state allegiance, ideology, bank account, favourite soccer team, and physical features.

Being quantum

Submitted by kratib on Wed, 2006-06-07 08:03.
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How do I know we're quantum beings? Because we can sense we're being observed.

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