Ok, lets say you are right that there does not exist perfect theoretical rationality in your hypothetical game context with all the assumptions that helps to keep the whole game standing. Nice. So what?
BiasedBayes
Suggest best book as an introduction to computational neuroscience
Thanks hyporational ! It is exactly same here. Cognitive biases, heuristics, or even Bayes Theorem (normative decision making) is not really taught here.
Also I once argued against some pseudoscientific treatment (in mental illnesses) and my arguments were completely ignored by 200 people because of argumentum ad hominem and attribute substitution (who looks like he is right vs. looking the actual arguments). Most people dont know what is a good argument or how to think about the propability of a statement.
Interesting points Anders_H, I have to think about those littlebit.
Help with relevant rational decision making research ideas
Nature publishes an article about alternative therapy
You are right sir. I think we might have different opinions about the ways/angle to approach the issue of right normative moral code. If I interpret it right I would be sceptical about authors idea “to employ our usual mix of argument, intuition and experience” in the light of knowledge of the limits and pitfalls of descriptive moral reasoning.
Thanks for the reply. My point was that evolutionary system 1 thinking and morality does not necessarily even correlate. Descriptive intuitive moral decisions are highly biased and can be affected for example by the ingroup bias and framing.Moral intuitions are there to better own reproduction/survival not to make good moral and ethical decisions.
Yep :) You are definetely right career wise. Problem for me was the 200 other people who will absorb completely wrong idea of how the mind works if I wont say anything. Primum non nocere.
But yeah, this was 4 years ago anyway...just wanted to mention it as an anecdote of bad general reasoning and biases :)
Learning social dynamics from the book Game is like trying to learn science from clickbait media.
Try David Buss: Evolutionary psychology—the new science of mind (newest edition)
Is this supposed be little cute side notion or powerful counterargument?
Its possible to have better and worse ontologies even if philosophers cant solve what is the right theory of truth. One could answer to the liars paradox based on Russells, Tarskis, Kripkes or Priests ideas but this is irrelevant IF one is interested about actually having accurate beliefs. It is not necessary to have completely water tight necessary and sufficient theory of the truth to be able to rank beliefsystems based on evidence at hand and evidence about human cognitive tendencies to create predictable folk theories.
Then why not to state exactly that position in the article ? To answer to your question i dont if you mean every possible crazy hypothesis being in the space of possible hypothesis but disagree if you mean in terms of pragmatic usefull hypothesis being well resolved. There is not a single doubleblinded RCT on smoking causing cancer as far as I know, but its pretty resolved that smoking causes cancer, agreed?
Im curious about your view. Do you think that we cant say its a moral fact that its better (1) to feed newborn baby with milk from its mother and sooth it tenderly so it stops crying compared to (2) chop its fingers of one by one slowly with a dull blade and then leave it bleeding? And this moral evaluation depends on your state of mind?
Thanks for the post, I really liked the article overall. Nice general summary of the ideas. I agree with torekp. I also think that the term consciousness is too broad. Wanting to have a theory of consciousness is like wanting to have a “theory of disease”. The overall term is too general and “consciousness” can mean many different things. This dilutes the conversation. We need to sharpen our semantic markers and not to rely on intuitive or prescientific ideas.Terms that do not “carve nature well at its joints” will lead our inquiry astray from the beginning.
When talking about consciousness one can mean for example:
-vigilance/wakefulness
-attention: focusing mental resources on specific information
-primary consciousness: having any form of subjective experience
-conscious access: how the attended information reaches awareness and becomes reportable to others
-phenomenal awareness/qualia
-sense of self/I
Neuroscience is needed to determine if our concepts are accurate (enough) in the first place. It can be that the “easy problem” is hard and the “hard problem” seems hard only because it engages ill posed intuitions.
I have been reading Memory and the Computational Brain: Why Cognitive Science will Transform Neuroscience by Gallistel and King.After that I will read Olaf Sporns book you recommended.
Just actually listened Brainscience podcast where Olaf spoke about his work.Thanks a lot!
Thanks for the info :) Yes, thats true. I ordered Theoretical Neuroscience couple of days ago together with Mathematics for Neuroscientists by Gabbiani and Cox. No one teaches computational neuroscience in our university, so i have to try to learn this field by myself.
Awesome! Judging by the first 30 pages this is gold. Very nice, thanks a lot!
Thinking “probability exists only in the territory” is exactly taking the idea that probabilities exists as “things itself” to the extreme as i wrote. This view is not a strawman of dogmatic frequentists position, as you can see from the John Venn quote.
I feel the need to point that i have tried to describe the context of the debate where the heuristic: “uncertainty exists in the map, not in the territory” was given in the first place. This whole historical debate started from the idea that probability as a degree of belief does not mean anything. This was the start. “Fallacious rubbish”, as Fisher puts it.
I have tried to show that one can have this very extreme position even if there exists only epistemic uncertainty. One can answer to this position by describing how in some situations the uncertainty exists in the map, not in the territory. This is the context where that general heuristic is used and the background that it should be judged against.
“A rational decision maker genuinely needs both the concept of frequency and the concept of belief.” Amen!
If you mean me and you...well we dont. I agree. But maybe one should ask that having Ronald Aylmer Fishers ideas about Bayesian statistics in mind: “the theory of inverse probabilities must be fully rejected”
Let me reprhase my quote: The heuristic “uncertainty exists in the map, not in the territory” is in the first place meant to be an heuristic against dismissing Bayesian concept of probability.”
Upvoted. The heuristic “uncertainty exists in the map, not in the territory” is in the first place meant to be an heuristic against frequentist statistics. One can argue that probabilities are properties of the things itself also in situations of purely epistemic randomness. The argument “uncertainty exist in the map, not in the territory” is used in this context to show that thinking probablilities existing as “thing itself” can lead to weird conclusions.
Hello all!
Im a medical student and a researcher. My interests are consciousness, computational theory of mind, evolutionary psychology, and medical decision making. I bought Eliezers book and found here because of it.
Want to thank Eliezer for writing the book, best writing i have read this year. Thank You.