Brains are like computers in that the hardware can do all kinds of stuff in principle, but each one tends to run through some particular patterns of activity repeatedly. For computers you can change this by changing programs. What are big ways brain ‘software’ changes?
Some I can think of:
Intentional practice of different styles of thinking (e.g. meditation)
Intentional practice of different trains of thought in response to specific stimuli (e.g. CBT, self-talk)
Changing the high level situation, where your brain automatically has different patterns for each (e.g. if you go from feeling like a child to like an adult maybe a lot of patterns change)
A change in a major explicit belief (e.g. if you go from expecting your project to work out to believing otherwise, your patterns of attention might naturally change)
Learning that the world isn’t as you intuited (e.g. if you are constantly worrying about people wronging you, but everyone is kind to you, this worry might become unappealing)
Intense experiences causing inaccurate updating (e.g. trauma)
Identifying differently (e.g. if I think of myself as a good student, I might have different mental patterns around studying than when I thought of myself as a bad student)
Adopting a new goal (e.g. deciding to be a musician)
Getting a new responsibility (e.g. a child)
Getting a new obsession (e.g. a crush, a hobby)
Changing social groups (e.g. among jokers it is more tempting to think of jokes, though in my experience among philosophers it might have been less tempting to think of philosophy)
Interacting with a really compelling person
Drugs (e.g. alcohol, adderall, LSD both short term and long-term)
Religion, somehow
I feel like people talk about many of these as important, but not in one view. I rarely hear someone say, “My brain software seems suboptimal, what are my options for changing it?”, then go down the list. Instead I suppose one hears from a friend that this book helped them, or one decides to have a therapist, and the book or therapist turns out to be one that focuses on CBT, so one does that. Or one changes social groups or responsibilities for some other reason, then remarks that this was a good or bad side-effect. Maybe that makes sense—‘stuff my brain habitually does’ is pretty broad.
I’d be interested to know which things do in practice change people’s mental patterns the most.
I feel like items on your current list have <10% of the responsibility for what I’d consider software updates in humans, and that it sorta fails to address almost all the ordinary stuff that goes on when individual humans are learning stuff (from others or independently) or when “humanity is improving its thinking”. But that makes me think that maybe I’m missing what you’re going for with this list?[1] Continuing with the (possibly different) question I have in mind anyway, here’s a list that imo points toward a decent chunk of what is missing from your list, with a focus on the case of independent and somewhat thoughtful learning/[thinking-improving] (as opposed to the case of copying from others, and as opposed to the case of fairly non-thoughtful thinking-improving)[2]:
a mathematician coming up with a good mathematical concept and developing a sense of how to use it (and ditto for a mathematical system/formalism)[3]
seeing a need to talk about something and coining a word for it
a philosopher trying to clarify/re-engineer a concept, eg by seeing which more precise definition could accord with the concept having some desired “inferential role”
noticing and resolving tensions in one’s views
discovering/inventing/developing the scientific method; inventing/developing p-values; improving peer review
discussing what kinds of evidence could help with some particular scientific question
inventing writing; inventing textbooks
the varied thought that is upstream of a professional poker player thinking the way they do when playing poker
asking oneself “was that a reasonable inference?”, “what auxiliary construction would help with this mathematical problem?”, “which techniques could work here?”, “what is the main idea of this proof?”, “is this a good way to model the situation?”, “can I explain that clearly?”, “what caused me to be confused about that?”, “why did I spend so long pursuing this bad idea?”, “how could I have figured that out faster?”, “which question are we asking, more precisely?”, “why are we interested in this question?”, “what is this analogous to?”, “what should I read to understand this better?”, “who would have good thoughts on this?”
I will note that when I say <10%, this is wrt a measure that cares a lot about understanding how it is that one improves at doing difficult thinking (like, math/philosophy/science/tech research), and I could maybe see your list covering >10% if one cared relatively more about software updates affecting one’s emotional/social life or whatever, but I’d need to think more about that.
it has such a focus in large part because such a list was easy for me to provide — the list is copied from here with light edits
two sorta-examples: humanity starting to think probabilistically, humanity starting to think in terms of infinitesimals
I think I get most value from other people—hearing about their perspective, getting encouragement and being kinda held responsible—but it is difficult to meet the right kind of people.
Related phenomenon where romantic partners influence each other towards an ideal version.
I give those as vague examples—they might work through the pathways mentioned in the post:
Reading books I mean reading things like Dostoevsky, or Tolstoy, anything that dives deep into introspection and shows various ways to live a life
Interacting with art
Recording your states of mind (note taking) and reading those notes, noticing patterns