Daniel Dennett describes symmetry breaking using the neologism 'strange inversion of reasoning'. He describes theories from Darwin, Turing and Hume as examples of these.
Competence without comprehension is shared by Darwin and Turing's theories. Hume argues that habitual anticipation is how humans recognize causality. Habits lead to competence. Comprehension is an illusion.
Intuition involves the unconscious. It is below our conscious awareness. It is unknown for the conscious, but known for the unconscious. It is the unknown known.
Intuition is forged through constructive experience. The learning brain is live wired to its world. The illusions that we create of this world arise from interactive and empathic emergence.
Minds invent meaning in this world through the illusions that we create. What we call reasoning is based on the illusions that we've invented. We act in surprise or in disgust when these illusions are broken.
New discoveries in science have the effect of breaking human habits of thinking and thus our illusions. The feeling of the loss of meaning in this world is a consequence of modern life demolishing our previous illusions.
The unconscious mind is driven by a systematic inference process that is informed by the cognitive biases or habits that are formed through experience. Unconscious inference does not imply non-systematic thought.
Geniuses like Einstein who have spent years spent in the habits of systematic thought have developed a systematic intuitive mind. Systematic conscious thought leads to a systematic unconscious mind.
AlphaZero the chess playing system from @deepmind is a synthetic demonstration of how a systematic thought process (i.e. tree search and self play) leads to a systematic intuition.
It is indeed unfortunate that a majority of humanity is immersed in the notion that all relevant thought is conscious. In reality, all relevant thought is unconscious. Our consciousness exists to find explanations for these unconscious thoughts.
Kahneman's book 'Thinking Fast and Slow' that is meant for a popular audience if virtually unknown by most people. I did not know of it until I tried to attempt an understanding of Deep Learning technology.
It was only in the last few years that even DL researchers began to see the parallels with dual-process theory. The fact that human thought is mostly system 1 thinking comes as quite a shock. Even Kahneman himself in a recent AI debate had to revise his thinking.
An 'inversion of reasoning' or a 'symmetry breaking' happens when we discover what we previously thought to be true was in fact wrong. It comes as a shock to many that we are indeed intuition machines.
I suspect there is a misconception that system 1 (intuitive) is mapped to the right brain and system 2 (deliberate) is mapped to the left brain.
The left brain is livewired to be competent in sequential thought while the right brain is livewired to be competent in parallel thought. One is egocentric and the other is allocentric. One is symbolic and the other is empathic.
One is reductionist and the other is holistic. One is noun-centric and the other is verb-centric. One emphasizes individuality and the other the collective. We can make many analogies about the dichotomy between the two hemispheres of the brain.
Damasio in his book 'The Strange Order of Things' argues that the core of condition lies in homeostasis. I agree with this generalization. But let me work out in a tweet storm how consciousness relates to homeostasis.
Human consciousness is related to awareness of surprising or threatening observations. It's an error-correcting mechanism that lends attention to discrepancies of our expectations of the world.
The mind is composed of many layers of cognition. Also, its massive parallelism implies reducing the conditional checks required for error correction.
What can we learn from $GME about investing. The key take away that the trade that can set you up for life can be found with good research and positioning months before the actual event.
It mirrors the Big Short movie where several researchers came to the same conclusion. Coincidentally, Michael Burry was involved in both trades.
But it's conceptually the same thing. A lot of institutional investors crowding together on the wrong side of a trade. In the Big Short it was emergent risk created by the housing bubble. For GME it was the excessive bets against a company far from bankruptcy.
We have to first admit that Americans have their own unique culture. Individualism, distrust of authority, pragmatism, not knowing how to do nothing, verbal orientation, etc. combine to create a kind of personality that perhaps creates a natural inhibition for 'real talk'.
Facebook epitomizes and maginfies this personality for all to see. What is seen in FB are the lives of the idealized self of its users. It shows only a world of perfection. An image of oneself that self-actualization is reached by doing more stuff than anyone else.
The interview with CNBC of @chamath is a much watch because there is so much insight hidden underneath.
There are many things that caught my attention. The one thing was the abstraction that hedge fund strategies are all 'momentum' plays. What it seems to imply is that the marshaling of resources at an opportune time drives the future behavior of a stock.
From basic physics, we know that momentum is mass times velocity. So any 'momentum' tactic employs the variation of mass, velocity or both. Wrt stocks, mass is money and velocity is speed of trade.