Topic: Cognitive Science
Quotes
Roy Baumeister & E.J. Masicampo, “Conscious Thought Is for Facilitating Social and Cultural Interactions: How Mental Simulations Serve the Animal–Culture Interface” (2010)
- Conscious thought is for incorporating knowledge and rules for behavior from culture. Over time, automatic responses then come to be based on that new input.#
- Brains facilitate survival and reproduction by making helpful links between sensory input and motor output. . . . Therefore, the basic design problem for a brain is to link each stimulus to the relevant response—that is, to get the important incoming information about the environment connected to the proper place(s) in the brain where relevant knowledge is stored and optimal responses are prescribed. . . . As the brain becomes larger and more com- plex, with more different sets of information stored in various places, the difficulty of this problem (of linking stimulus to optimal response) increases exponentially#
- Conscious thought is often synonymous with reportable states.#
- Early hominid communication may have used increasingly specific gestures (sign language) augmented by vocal sounds, which over time was reversed so that, as today, people communicate mainly by speech while still using hand gestures to enhance expression. The evolution of the human brain for speech may have caused the prevalent right-handedness that is normal among humans but not found in other species.#
- Phenomenal awareness is not just seeing what is there. Rather, the conscious experience has already had the benefit of extensive interpretive work, drawing on memory and knowledge to react appropriately to the incoming sensory data #
- The mind is actively creating sensations, not merely attending to or noticing them. As Humphrey (2006) put it, sensations are not something that happens to a person but rather are something that a person does.#
- Episodic memory may be a by-product of the capacity to simulate future events.#
- Division of labor can be achieved without theory of mind, as ant colonies show, but it must rely on fixed action patterns and therefore is limited.#
Posts
Strategies Are Not Algorithms
Institutions in economics are commonly modeled as repeated games, and strategies in repeated games are modeled as algorithms. Algorithms are explicit sequences of instructions that map from an input to an output. But in a world of open-ended affordances, Goodhart’s law implies no finite-length algorithm can maintain cooperation in large . . .
Money and its Institutional Substitutes: The Role of Exchange Institutions in Human Cooperation
This paper offers an increasing returns model of the evolution of exchange institutions building on Smith’s dictum that “the division of labor is limited by the extent of the market”. Exchange institutions are characterized by a tradeoff between fixed and marginal costs: the effort necessary to execute an exchange may . . .