Revised to capture Varela's self-referentiality->closure->autopoiesis->autonomy
Self leads to modularity. The Self with Others leads to conflict. Empathy leads to a resolution between the Self and Others.
1) a minimal or cellular unity, 2) a bodily self in its immunologic foundations, 3) a cognitive perceptuo-motor self associated to animal behavior, 4) a sociolinguistic ‘I’' of subjectivity, and 5) the collective social multi-individual totality.“ - Varela
It's difficult to explain cognition without using metaphors that relate to existing human metaphors of human cognition. When I use the word 'empathy', I imply a continuous spectrum that describes the overlap of an agent's model and its perception of the world.
Organisms derive meaning through the interaction of their self-models with their environment. These interactions are constrained by the organisms existing understanding of their worlds (i.e. umwelt).
An organism can only understand the world if their models of the world overlap with the world. Hence I use the word empathy for lack of a better word.
Note that in Peirce signs, icons and indexes imply an cognitive ability to recognize an overlap (i.e. a similarity) and a causal relation respectively. To emphasize with an other, one recognizes similarity and predicts consequences of subsequent interactions.
If a person is described to lack empathy, then it is intuitive that the person is detached from this world. Detached in a manner that is unable to recognize the subjective perspective of another.
Kegan expressed the development of self as a widening empathy with one's world:
The self interacts with its society that also has its development path. Formulated in Spiral Dynamics:
The problem of today's society that is grossly ignorant of frameworks of complexity is that they inhabit one of the 3 bottom layers. Unfortunately, each layer is only able to comprehend the layer below it and not the layer above.
If self is a process of identity. Then a society's development of identity is a kind of self.
We use the word causality as a means of understanding cognition but we don't really understand its distinctions. Let's look at what C.S.Peirce had to say about causality.
What @yudapearl says is that to understand a system one needs to hypothesize a model of the system and then see how this model is in agreement. Statistics is just one of the methods of testing. But it's not how one formulates the original model.
Peirce called this cognitive capability to hypothesize about the world as Abduction. Bayes rule is in fact a kind of abduction. When Bayesians talk about formulating priors, they are actually implicitly talking about an impoverished form of abduction.
(1) All technologies are combinations. Individual technologies are combined from components. (2) Each component of technology is itself in miniature technology. (3) All technologies harness and exploit some natural effect or phenomenon.
His framework is general enough so that we can recognize things that we don't conventionally consider as technology. These include culture, human organizations, processes, language and biology.
John Krakauer in a recent Learning Salon conversation focused on the huge gap between participatory learning and propositional learning. It occurred to me that propositional learning is a kind of hypnosis!
Coincidentally, today's currents events are a consequence of hypnosis. @scottadamssays was the first to notice Trump's apparent use of hypnosis methods. fortune.com/2020/09/27/don…
Both evolution and the brain are massively parallel discovery processes. But what is the difference between the two?
As a model to understand evolution, let's take the super organism known as bacteria and its adversarial viruses. This process involves horizontal gene transfer and endosymbiosis. Often overlooked by many models of evolution that confine themselves only to mutation.
In an abstract sense, the 3 mechanisms of evolution to drive innovation involves: chance (i.e. mutation), local information propagation (i.e. HGT), information reuse (i.e. Endosymbiosis). What are the equivalences for this in brains?
In this episode, @JohnCLangford proposes Reinforcement Learning to be essential to intelligence. An ambiguous statement however since RL isn't precisely defined by him in the talk.
This is opposition to @ylecun icing on the cake analogy. @KordingLab chimed in with an excellent argument against the cake analogy. He insightfully proposes however the immense capability of evolution to absorb information about causality.
What is the difference between these verb pairs? Hearing-listening, touching-feeling, thinking-understanding, talking-explaining?
There's a difference between the verb we use that can only be understood by grounding in this world.
It tried to see what GPT3 understood about exploiting and exploring. Here is the association made by GPT3. Exploring->investigating,analyzing. Exploiting->caring,using,respecting,testing.