Does anyone ever become conscious of how they know how to ride a bicycle? Have you ever tried explaining to a child how to ride a bicycle? The child learns when they overcome their fear rather than understanding your explanation.
We understand how to ride a bike becoming familiar with the interaction. Although a bike is an unnatural thing with wheels, we are still able to mentally make it an extension of our bodies.
We are never really conscious of how we are able to do many things we do in life. If we did, then we could easily specify the rules for a robot to do the same thing. But we don't know how we do things.
Many of the things that we think are commonsense and easy to do are things that are very difficult to reproduce in a machine. The reason most people do not understand the advances in AI is that they are completely unaware that their entire sensorimotor experience is unconscious.
In fact, all cognition is unconscious. Even conscious cognition is a consequence of unconscious processes. Unfortunately, the modern doctrine would like one to believe the opposite. That is, our consciousness is always in the driver's seat.
What's worse, Psychologists like Freud treat the unconscious like it's some unwieldy, unmanageable, and potentially destructive part of the human condition. It's in fact the complete opposite. What achieves balance with our environments is our unconscious.
We balance ourselves with our world in an unconscious manner. It is like riding a bicycle. Our constraint satisfaction algorithms are performed at a surface that is below our conscious awareness.
We navigate ourselves in our social and narrative contexts using our unconscious intuition. The tweets, memes, and jokes that catch our attention are the information streams that are familiar to our intuition but novel enough to break into our awareness.
Jonathan Haidt argues that our moral compasses originate from our personal intuitive models of the world. It is almost impossible to change attitudes through systematic arguments. Attitudes are only changed through actual participation in this world.
Unfortunately, the prevailing working model of civilization is based on a cartesian model of the mind. This perspective drives our religions, cultures, and even sciences. It is so pervasive that it is inextricable from our language. We are unable to think outside of this box.
This model of cognition (i.e. thinking fast and slow) is in fact a subversive enough of an idea that it is systematically dismissed by existing hierarchies of inquiry. This is because it intuitively feels like an irrational kind of inquiry.
This is a problem with fields of inquiry like enactivism, ecological psychology and biosemiotics. They are all based on the notion of interactive emergence. They differ from conventional modes of explanation by emphasizing a subjective framing of cognition.
This is unfortunate in that our current framing of science is devoid of a humanistic alignment. This has also lead to an unfortunate pushback that our humanities are devoid of systematic thinkers.
Furthermore, the soft sciences in order to tackle the immense complexities of their area of study have adopted bogus kinds of systematic thinking like Bayesian thinking. The absurdities about in the hard and soft sciences as well as the humanities. All of academia is complicit.
So we find ourselves in a civilization with impoverished models of the world. Our intuitions continue to fail us as our technology grows exponentially. We are heading downstream in a canoe without a paddle.
How do we know that our models of the world are impoverished? This is because we intuitively know that our modern world has lost its balance.
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Completed and extended here: Cognition as Unconscious Constraint Satisfaction link.medium.com/pgPoygIBzdb
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