My grandmother suffered from Dementia. For a period of a couple of years I would call her every Friday, and we would have literally the exact same conversation each time, including her making the same jokes at the same points in the conversation, using the same phrasing. I concluded that people are in fact pretty deterministic, even over the long term.
(Sorry in advance for any perceived dehumanization of your grandma)
This is not only a vote for deterministic tendencies, but also a function of architecture.
Assuming she only expressed the non-glitchy neural pathways available to her (since if she accessed a glitchy pathway it would fizzle and not rise to consciousness/motor cortex speech expression), she already has a smaller subset of tree paths available to her to begin with.
Depending on the dementia, she could theoretically have fewer and fewer functional pathways available over time. That makes the same conversation use pathways that for some reason were “glitch-proof”.
So, if in the conversation you always prompted her with the same prompts, it would make sense that as the pathways diminish, the same ones would be used over and over again.
The guiding neural pathways responsible for getting consciousness to function must over time be conditioned to select the working pathways, and actively avoid the random intrusion of other networks whose firing would cause novelty and creativity, for fear of hitting a glitchy pathway and fizzling out before consciousness.
So, determinism as a defense mechanism against decay.
I wish I’d thought of that with my mother’s dementia; I noticed a similar effect on the scale of minutes (hers was already quite severe by the time of the diagnosis), but I didn’t plan anything and I didn’t take enough notes at the time, so all I have for this is the anecdote.
My grandmother suffered from Dementia. For a period of a couple of years I would call her every Friday, and we would have literally the exact same conversation each time, including her making the same jokes at the same points in the conversation, using the same phrasing. I concluded that people are in fact pretty deterministic, even over the long term.
(Sorry in advance for any perceived dehumanization of your grandma)
This is not only a vote for deterministic tendencies, but also a function of architecture.
Assuming she only expressed the non-glitchy neural pathways available to her (since if she accessed a glitchy pathway it would fizzle and not rise to consciousness/motor cortex speech expression), she already has a smaller subset of tree paths available to her to begin with.
Depending on the dementia, she could theoretically have fewer and fewer functional pathways available over time. That makes the same conversation use pathways that for some reason were “glitch-proof”.
So, if in the conversation you always prompted her with the same prompts, it would make sense that as the pathways diminish, the same ones would be used over and over again.
The guiding neural pathways responsible for getting consciousness to function must over time be conditioned to select the working pathways, and actively avoid the random intrusion of other networks whose firing would cause novelty and creativity, for fear of hitting a glitchy pathway and fizzling out before consciousness.
So, determinism as a defense mechanism against decay.
I wish I’d thought of that with my mother’s dementia; I noticed a similar effect on the scale of minutes (hers was already quite severe by the time of the diagnosis), but I didn’t plan anything and I didn’t take enough notes at the time, so all I have for this is the anecdote.