Computationally adapted mind

Summary

How the Mind Works

• Evo-devo compares developmental processes of different organisms to infer ancestral relationships and how the developmental processes evolved.  Important impacts of evo-devo include:
  • Deep homology indicating that genes controlling the development and operation of apparently dissimilar organs are closely related:
  • Eyes of: Cephlapods, Insects, Vertibrates; generated by pax-6. 
    
  • Discovery of homeotic genes
    
  • Presence of an evo-devo gene toolkit - a toolkit that is reused in cascades within an organism.  New species emerge when the
    
  • Tools are expressed in new networks, or
    
  • The toolkit genes acquire more functions
  • Species do not differ significantly in structural genes
  • Genes for enzymes are all closely related
  • Species differ in how gene expression is regulated. 
    
  
  
• Epi-genetics represent state surfaces within cells and eggs which can be operationally modified so as to provide a heritable structure.  DNA, histones and other stable structures provide surfaces where these states may be setup.  Egg carriers are in a particularly powerful position to induce epi-genetic changes.  Sapolsky notes [childhood] events which persistently alter brain structure and behavior via epi-genetic mechanisms including: pair-bonding in prairie voles, as they first mate, is supported by changes in oxytocin & vasopressin receptor gene regulation in the nucleus accumbens. 
  
  
• Neural-plasticity refers to lasting changes to the brain that occur throughout the life span of the organism.  Many aspects of the brain can be altered into adulthood.  Almost anything in the nervous system can change in response to sustained stimulus.  And in a different environment the changes will often reverse.  The changes include:
  • The strength of dendritic input alters due to genetic, neural and hormonal signals
  • Hebb notes that memories require strengthening of preexisting synapses.  Glutamate responsive neurons' post synaptic dendritic spines have two types of receptor: non-NMDA and NMDA.  NMDA channels are responsible for this strengthening mechanism.  LTP then occurs to prolong the increase in excitability of the synapse. 
    
  • The LTP operation results in calcium diffusion which triggers new spine formation in adjacent parts of the dendrite.  Eventually that can stimulate dentrite growth enabling more neurons to connect. 
    
  • Short term stress promotes hippocampal LTP.  
  • Sustained stress promotes:
    
  • Hippocampal & frontal cortex  LTD & suppresses LTP.  Subsequent reductions in NCAM then reduce dendrite and synapse density. 
    
  • Amygdala LTP and suppresses LTD boosting fear conditioning.  It increases BDNF levels and expands dendrites in the BLA. 
    
  • Depression and anxiety reduce hippocampal dendrite and spine number by reducing BDNF. 
    
  • The axon's conditions for
    
  • Initiating an action potential. 
    
  • Progesterone boosts GABA-ergic neurons response to GABA decreasing the excitability of other neurons over a period of hours. 
    
  • Duration of a neuron's refractory period.  Testosterone shortens the refractory period of amygdala and amygdala target neurons over a period of hours. 
    
  • Synaptic connections being constantly removed and recreated
  • Synapses being created or destroyed.  Stimulation generates additional dendritic spines which become associated with a nearby axon terminal and within weeks a synapse forms.  The synapse then contributes calcium diffusion through LTP triggering more spine formation.  When dendritic spines recede synapses disappear. 
    
  • Cortical maps change to reflect alterations in the inputs and outputs from the body. 
    
  • Birth of brain cells in many areas of adult brains: the hippocampus (where 3% are replaced each month) and olfactory bulb and lesser amounts in the cortex. 
    
  • Restructuring after brain damage including axonal plasticity.  Distant rerouting of axons is observed but no mechanism has been identified yet. 
    
  • Vision is plastic in predators, where the eyes are moved during final development.  Dehaene argues for neuronal recycling supporting reading.  
  
  
• Moral psychology
  

Standard Equipment

• Identify where objects are located in the visual field. 
  
• The agents in complex adaptive systems (CAS) must model their environment to respond effectively to it.  Samuel modeling is described as an approach. 
  
  Model and resolve, in most cases, the illumination of the objects to predict the brightness. 
  
• Recreate the depth of objects. 
  
• Recognize the objects. 
  
• Highlight high level perceptions of reality instead of the low level details of the two dimensional image hitting the retina.  

• Arms - become valuable once the geometric issues caused by their movement are solved by our brains. 
  
• Legs - are highly adaptable to the real environments experienced by our forebears in the African savanna is the environment where hunter-gatherers primarily evolved.  Its grassland supported large herbivores that could be hunted.  Clumps of trees & rocks supported places to hide from large carnivores.  Streams and paths add to the signals enabling orientation. 
  .  But similarly require software to
  The agents in complex adaptive systems (CAS) must model their environment to respond effectively to it.  Samuel modeling is described as an approach. 
  
  model,
  This page discusses the interdependence of perception and representation in a complex adaptive system (CAS).  Hofstadter and Mitchell's research with Copycat is reviewed. 
  
  coordinate and control. 
  
• Hands - provide us with huge
  To benefit from shifts in the environment agents must be flexible.  Being sensitive to environmental signals agents who adjust strategic priorities can constrain their competitors. 
  
  flexibility in interacting with the physical world.  

Reverse-engineering the psyche

• Inverse optics requires the brain to supply best guesses of what would be likely to generate the pattern on the retina.  These are:
• World is smooth
• World is uniformly lit
• Most of the components are rigid and smooth.  With these assumptions holding true for most of history natural selection can 'design' these assumptions into an optical analyzer. 
  
• Inverse kinematics and dynamics requires natural selection to build in assumptions about bodies in motion. 
  
• Common sense about other people depends on:
• Guesses about their beliefs and desires
  
• This helps drive our own emotional are low level agents distributed across the brain and body which associate, via the amygdala and rich club hubs, important environmental signals with encoded high speed sensors, and distributed programs of action to model: predict, prioritize guidance signals, select and respond effectively, coherently and rapidly to the initial signal.  The majority of emotion centered brain regions interface to the midbrain through the hypothalamus.  The most accessible signs of emotions are the hard to control and universal facial expressions.  Emotions provide prioritization for conscious access given that an animal has only one body, but possibly many cells, with which to achieve its highest level goals.  Because of this emotions clash with group goals and are disparaged by the powerful.  Evolutionary psychology argues evolution shaped human emotions during the long period of hunter-gatherer existence in the African savanna.  Human emotions are universal and include: Anger, Appreciation of natural beauty, Disgust, Fear, Gratitude, Grief, Guilt, Happiness, Honor, Jealousy, Liking, Love, Rage, Romantic love, Lust for revenge, Passion, Sadness, Self-control, Shame, Sympathy, Surprise; and the sham emotions and distrust induced by reciprocal altruism.   reactions.  
• Learning is made possible by innate machinery designed to do the learning. 

• Identify what kinds of biologically reachable designs are better suited to obtaining the goal. 
  
• Show they achieve: specialization, reliability, efficiency, precision and complexity in solving the assigned problem.  

• Over thousands of generations.  For humans most of this selection pressure occurred in the African savanna is the environment where hunter-gatherers primarily evolved.  Its grassland supported large herbivores that could be hunted.  Clumps of trees & rocks supported places to hide from large carnivores.  Streams and paths add to the signals enabling orientation. 
  when we were hunter gatherers.  More modern environments including
  Peter Turchin describes how major pre-industrial empires developed due to effects of geographic boundaries constraining the empires and their neighbors' interactions.  Turchin shows how the asymmetries of breeding rates and resource growth rates results in dynamic cycles within cycles.  After the summary of Turchin's book complex adaptive system (CAS) theory is used to augment Turchins findings. 
  
  farming and
  Sven Beckert describes the historic transformation of the growing, spinning, weaving, manufacture of cotton goods and their trade over time.  He describes the rise of a first global commodity, its dependence on increasing: military power, returns for the control points in the value delivery system(VDS), availability of land and labor to work it including slaves. 
  
  He explains how cotton offered the opportunity for industrialization further amplifying the productive capacity of the VDS and the power of the control points.  This VDS was quickly copied.  The increased capacity of the industrialized cotton complex adaptive system (CAS) required more labor to operate the machines.  Beckert describes the innovative introduction of wages and the ways found to mobilize industrial labor. 
  
  Beckert describes the characteristics of the industrial cotton CAS which made it flexible enough to become globally interconnected.  Slavery made the production system so cost effective that all prior structures collapsed as they interconnected.  So when the US civil war blocked access to the major production nodes in the American Deep South the CAS began adapting. 
  
  Beckert describes the global reconstruction that occurred and the resulting destruction of the traditional ways of life in the global countryside.  This colonial expansion further enriched and empowered the 'western' nation states.  Beckert explains how other countries responded by copying the colonial strategies and creating the opportunities for future armed conflict among the original colonialists and the new upstarts. 
  
  Completing the adaptive shifts Beckert describes the advocates for industrialization in the colonized global south and how over time they joined the global cotton CAS disrupting the early western manufacturing nodes and creating the current global CAS dominated by merchants like Wal-Mart pulling goods through a network of clothing manufacturers, spinning and weaving factories, and growers competing with each other on cost. 
  
  Following our summary of Beckert's book, RSS comments from the perspective of CAS theory.  The transformation of disconnected peasant farmers, pastoral warriors and their lands into a supply chain for a highly profitable industrial CAS required the development over time: of military force, global transportation and communication networks, perception and representation control networks, capital stores and flows, models, rules, standards and markets; along with the support at key points of: barriers, disruption, and infrastructure and evolved amplifiers.  The emergent system demonstrates the powerful constraining influence of extended phenotypic alignment. 
  
  
  industrial economies do not accurately reflect the
  This web page reviews opportunities to find and capture new niches based on studying fitness landscapes using complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. 
  
  niche we are designed for. 
  
• Rather than oppose the direct thrust of some environmental flow agents can improve their effectiveness with indirect responses.  This page explains how agents are architected to do this and discusses some examples of how it can be done. 
  
  Indirectly on
  The complexity of behavior is explored through Sapolsky developing scenarios of our best and worst behaviors across time spans, and scientific subjects including: anthropology, psychology, neuroscience, sociology.  The rich network of adaptive flows he outlines provides insights and highlight challenges for scientific research on behavior. 
  
  Complex adaptive system (CAS) theory builds on Sapolsky's details highlighting the strategies that evolution has captured to successfully enter niches we now occupy. 
  
  
  behavior.  Natural selection designs the generator of behaviors: the package of information processing, goal pursuing mechanisms Pinker calls the mind. The mind evolved and it supports our behaviors.  As Dawkins explained in the Selfish Gene, genes selfishly spread themselves by the way they build our brains.  By making us enjoy: life, sex, health, friends and children; genes help themselves get into the next generation.  So our goals are about health, lovers, children and friends.  Our mind's strategies do not have to be selfish. 
  

Thinking Machines

• A production machine is Pinker's key analog of the brain
• It senses changes in its world
• It determines actions to perform
• Based on memories in the brain includes functionally different types: Declarative (episodic and semantic), Implicit, Procedural, Spatial, Temporal, Verbal; Hebb noted that glutamate receptive neurons learn by (NMDA channel based) synaptic strengthening.  This strengthening is sustained by subsequent LTP.  The non-realtime learning and planning processes operate through consciousness using the working memory structures, and then via sleep, the salient ones are consolidated while the rest are destroyed and garbage collected.   it has previously made; all details which Pinker views as posted on a blackboard for other modules to retreive and process further.  
  
• Correlations of causes and effects support the production machine's determinations

Natural computations

The defending champion

1. John Searle developed the
   John Searle's influential thought experiment implied to him that computers cannot understand.  Complex adaptive system (CAS) theory indicates that this is not the case. 
   Chinese Room to show that a machine cannot be intelligent enables the achievement of goals in the face of obstacles.  The goals are sub-goals of genes' survival and reproduction and include:
   • Obtaining and eating food
   • Sex
     
   • Finding and maintaining shelter
     
   • Fighting for resources - in the preferred hunter gatherer environment loss of resources was critical while possession was often transient. 
     
   • Understanding the proximate environment
     
   • Securing the cooperation of others 
   .  
2. Roger Penrose's "The Emporer's New Mind" argues that Godel's theorem relates the paradox of self-reference of "this statement is false" to the proposition about Principia Mathematica that "This formula is unprovable by the rules of Principia Mathematica."  Godel realized he could map the symbolic logic with numbers, turning Pricipia Mathematica on itself.  Godel showed that his formula was true, differing subtly from a paradox and that it could not be proved with the rules of the system. 
   shows that mathematicians are not computer programs.  His argument depends on:
   
• Computer operation depending on consistency and representing truth.  This is not a requirement or true of digital computers, neural networks are representational models that achieve high performance on difficult pattern recognition problems in vision and speech.  But they need specialized training methods such as greedy layerwise pre-training or HF optimization.   or neurons, specialized eukaryotic cells include channels which control flows of sodium and potassium ions across the massively extended cell membrane supporting an electro-chemical wave which is then converted into an outgoing chemical signal transmission from synapses which target nearby neuron or muscle cell receptors.  Neurons are supported by glial cells.  Neurons include a:
  • Receptive element - dendrites
    
  • Transmitting element - axon and synaptic terminals
    
  • Highly variable DNA schema using transposons. 
    
  . 
  
• Mathematicians being certain that the system of rules they apply is consistent.  
• Instead Penrose suggests consciousness is a quantum mechanical effect of microtubules, the components providing the skeleton of neurons. 
  

Replaced by a machine

• Using probabilistic thresholding. 
• Making each bit represent some object is a collection of: happenings, occurrences and processes; including emergent entities, as required by relativity, explains Rovelli.  But natural selection has improved our fitness by representing this perception, in our minds, as an unchanging thing, as explained by Pinker.  Dehaene explains the object modeling and construction process within the unconscious and conscious brain. 
  or property. 
  

1. It is reconstructive and content addressable making it robust
   
2. It degrades gracefully
3. It can perform constraint satisfaction in parallel
   
4. It automatically generalizes
5. It can learn by example by being fed both inputs and correct outputs.  Such a network structure is a Perceptron. 
   

1. The concept of the individual is significant.  It has a unique history.  Two individuals can't be in the same place at the same
   Carlo Rovelli resolves the paradox of time. 
   Rovelli initially explains that low level physics does not include time:
   

   • A present that is common throughout the universe does not exist
     
   • Events are only partially ordered.  The present is localized
   • The difference between past and future is not foundational.  It occurs because of state that through our blurring appears particular to us
   • Time passes at different speeds dependent on where we are and how fast we travel
     
   • Time's rhythms are due to the gravitational field
     
   • Our quantized physics shows neither space nor time, just processes transforming physical variables. 
     
   • Fundamentally there is no time.  The basic equations evolve together with events, not things 

   Then he explains how in a physical world without time its perception can emerge:
   

   • Our familiar time emerges
     
   • Our interaction with the world is partial, blurred, quantum indeterminate
     
   • The ignorance determines the existence of thermal time and entropy that quantifies our uncertainty
   • Directionality of time is real but perspectival.  The entropy of the world in relation to us increases with our thermal time.  The growth of entropy distinguishes past from future: resulting in traces and memories
     
   • Each human is a unified being because: we reflect the world, we formed an image of a unified entity by interacting with our kind, and because of the perspective of memory
     
   • The variable time: is one of the variables of the gravitational field.  With our scale we don't register quantum fluctuations, making space-time appear determined.  At our speed we don't perceive differences in time of different clocks, so we experience a single time: universal, uniform, ordered; which is helpful to our decisions

   
   
   time.  Mothers track their children within a group.  But hidden layers will aggregate individual representations with other similar objects is a collection of: happenings, occurrences and processes; including emergent entities, as required by relativity, explains Rovelli.  But natural selection has improved our fitness by representing this perception, in our minds, as an unchanging thing, as explained by Pinker.  Dehaene explains the object modeling and construction process within the unconscious and conscious brain. 
   . 
   
2. Compositionality allows representations where the meaning comes from the meaning of the parts and the way they are combined.  It depends on differentiating subject, object and assigning roles.  Thoughts are assembled out of components. 
   
3. Quantification - a combination of individuality & compositionality.  Propositions, which act like individuals, express existence of x or for all x.  An idea can be captured in a proposition including ordered and correctly bracketed symbols for concepts, roles, quantifiers and variables.  Homogeneous neural networks are representational models that achieve high performance on difficult pattern recognition problems in vision and speech.  But they need specialized training methods such as greedy layerwise pre-training or HF optimization.   representing individual propositions suffer cross-talk. 
   
4. Recursive ideas are hard to represent in a general neural network.  Each kind of recursive structure would imply a different hard-wired neural network.  The recursions can be easily represented with a recursive transition network but they must be specially assembled. 
   
5. Fuzzy logic and crisp versions of the same category are present side by side in our minds.  This is hard to represent with a homogeneous neural network.  All such collections lack a single defining feature but overlap in many features.  

Aladdin's Lamp

• Intelligence enables the achievement of goals in the face of obstacles.  The goals are sub-goals of genes' survival and reproduction and include:
  • Obtaining and eating food
  • Sex
    
  • Finding and maintaining shelter
    
  • Fighting for resources - in the preferred hunter gatherer environment loss of resources was critical while possession was often transient. 
    
  • Understanding the proximate environment
    
  • Securing the cooperation of others 
  - synonym
  
• Self-knowledge
  
• Access is, argues Stanislas Dehaene, when some attended information eventually enters our awareness and becomes reportable to others.   to information - is
  Consciousness has confounded philosophers and scientists for centuries.  Now it is finally being characterized scientifically.  That required a transformation of approach. 
  Realizing that consciousness was ill-defined neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene and others characterized and focused on conscious access. 
  In the book he outlines the limitations of previous psychological dogma.  Instead his use of subjective assessments opened the window to contrast totally unconscious brain activity with those including consciousness. 
  He describes the research methods.  He explains the contribution of new sensors and probes that allowed the psychological findings to be correlated, and causally related to specific neural activity. 
  He describes the theory of the brain he uses, the 'global neuronal workspace' to position all the experimental details into a whole. 
  He reviews how both theory and practice support diagnosis and treatment of real world mental illnesses. 
  The implications of Dehaene's findings for subsequent consciousness research are outlined. 
  Complex adaptive system (CAS) models of the brain's development and operation introduce constraints which are discussed. 
  
  
  Crick & Koch's synchronization of neural firing in identity theory is Frances Crick's astonishing hypothesis that neurons are the substrate of the mind, with no emergent phenomena needed.  .  Pinker notes four features:
1. Awareness
2. Portions of the information we are aware of becomes the focus of our attention is the focusing of our mental resources onto a specific piece of information.  Attention uses valuations assigned to each potential object of thought by the basal ganglia. 
   .  
3. The sensations and thoughts include emotional flavoring.  These information streams are of intermediate level avoiding a potential combinatorial explosion of conjunctions. 
   
4. The executive "I" makes choices about consequent behaviors.  It will be a single low level agent that shifts control to the loudest reflects the energy of a tone, but is an emergent psychological construct. 
   , fastest, or strongest agent one level down.  Pinker says it corresponds to our having one body to act with.  Coherence demands a unitary executive. 
   
• Sentience - subjective experience, phenomenal awareness, Raw feelings.  Pinker accepts the experience is self evident but finds no link between the findings of neuroscience and psychology and sentience. 
  

Combinatorial explosion of conjuctions

Revenge of the Nerds

• Resist the idea of the 'great chain of being' culminating in man.  
• Accept life is better represented as leaves on a tree.  
• Know particular features are driven by
  This web page reviews opportunities to find and capture new niches based on studying fitness landscapes using complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. 
  
  characteristics of particular niches and
  This page discusses the impact of random events which once they occur encourage a particular direction forward for a complex adaptive system (CAS). 
  
  frozen accidents.  
• Brains aren't a goal of
  This page reviews the implications of selection, variation and heredity in a complex adaptive system (CAS).  The mechanism and its emergence are discussed. 
  
  evolution.  They only exist because they helped at some point with survival and replication in a specific niche.  

Life's designer

• Dog breeding
  
• Artificial life
  

Instinct & intelligence

• Olfactory bulbs are reduced in size,
  
• Cortical vision areas are reduced,
  
• Movement management areas are reduced,
  
• Complex-form processing areas expanded, Multi-sensory integration areas within the tempero of the cerebral cortex is involved in associating sensory input with comprehending language (TEO), storing new memories, visual memory, emotion and deriving meaning.  The temporal lobe is located bellow the parietal lobe, and between the frontal lobe and occipital lobe. 
  -parietal of the cerebral cortex is at the back of the brain divided into two.  It associates sensory signals of various modalities with:
  
  • Details about the location of the body and
    
  • Models interpreting touch, visual signals, language and mathematics.  
  lobes expanded,
  
• Hearing and speech areas expanded,
  
• Deliberative thought & planning areas of prefrontal cortex have massively expanded.  And Pinker asserts that the
  
• Connections among neurons, specialized eukaryotic cells include channels which control flows of sodium and potassium ions across the massively extended cell membrane supporting an electro-chemical wave which is then converted into an outgoing chemical signal transmission from synapses which target nearby neuron or muscle cell receptors.  Neurons are supported by glial cells.  Neurons include a:
  • Receptive element - dendrites
    
  • Transmitting element - axon and synaptic terminals
    
  • Highly variable DNA schema using transposons. 
    
  will reflect major different combinatorial arrangements. 

The cognitive niche

• The manufacture and use of
  Tools and the businesses that produce them have evolved dramatically.  W Brian Arthur shows how this occurred.
  
  tools and intuitive reasoning. 
• Language, which allows knowledge to be easily exchanged.  
• Prolonged childhood, which allows apprenticeship, to build knowledge and skills benefits from:
  
• Males who invest time in their offspring instead of just fighting over females. 
  
• A long life to allow
  Carlo Rovelli resolves the paradox of time. 
  Rovelli initially explains that low level physics does not include time:
  

  • A present that is common throughout the universe does not exist
    
  • Events are only partially ordered.  The present is localized
  • The difference between past and future is not foundational.  It occurs because of state that through our blurring appears particular to us
  • Time passes at different speeds dependent on where we are and how fast we travel
    
  • Time's rhythms are due to the gravitational field
    
  • Our quantized physics shows neither space nor time, just processes transforming physical variables. 
    
  • Fundamentally there is no time.  The basic equations evolve together with events, not things 

  Then he explains how in a physical world without time its perception can emerge:
  

  • Our familiar time emerges
    
  • Our interaction with the world is partial, blurred, quantum indeterminate
    
  • The ignorance determines the existence of thermal time and entropy that quantifies our uncertainty
  • Directionality of time is real but perspectival.  The entropy of the world in relation to us increases with our thermal time.  The growth of entropy distinguishes past from future: resulting in traces and memories
    
  • Each human is a unified being because: we reflect the world, we formed an image of a unified entity by interacting with our kind, and because of the perspective of memory
    
  • The variable time: is one of the variables of the gravitational field.  With our scale we don't register quantum fluctuations, making space-time appear determined.  At our speed we don't perceive differences in time of different clocks, so we experience a single time: universal, uniform, ordered; which is helpful to our decisions

  
  
  time to capture back the huge investment in development is a phase during the operation of a CAS agent.  It allows for schematic strategies to be iteratively blended with environmental signals to solve the logistical issues of migrating newly built and transformed sub-agents.  That is needed to achieve the adult configuration of the agent and optimize it for the proximate environment.  Smiley includes examples of the developmental phase agents required in an emergent CAS.  In situations where parents invest in the growth and memetic learning of their offspring the schematic grab bag can support optimizations to develop models, structures and actions to construct an adept adult.  In humans, adolescence leverages neural plasticity, elder sibling advice and adult coaching to help prepare the deploying neuronal network and body to successfully compete. 
  . 
  
• Kinship is important to both sexes and all ages. 
  

• Visual
  
• Amplified by group living - which copes with predators who target one weak member of the group
  
• Assisted by the human hand - having evolved due to history of hanging in trees is very flexible and makes intelligence useful
  
• Assisted by an upright stance - from hanging in trees allows hunter gatherers to free hands to carry and manipulate the environment
• Catalyzed by savanna grass - regenerates quickly sustaining large herbivores that can be hunted by groups of males. 
  
• Enhanced by hunting:
  
• Adaptive to alternate niches: Fish, Birds etc.
  
• A group activity, and encourages sharing
• Provides high energy foods that successful males can trade for sex. 
  
• Meat allows
  Carlo Rovelli resolves the paradox of time. 
  Rovelli initially explains that low level physics does not include time:
  

  • A present that is common throughout the universe does not exist
    
  • Events are only partially ordered.  The present is localized
  • The difference between past and future is not foundational.  It occurs because of state that through our blurring appears particular to us
  • Time passes at different speeds dependent on where we are and how fast we travel
    
  • Time's rhythms are due to the gravitational field
    
  • Our quantized physics shows neither space nor time, just processes transforming physical variables. 
    
  • Fundamentally there is no time.  The basic equations evolve together with events, not things 

  Then he explains how in a physical world without time its perception can emerge:
  

  • Our familiar time emerges
    
  • Our interaction with the world is partial, blurred, quantum indeterminate
    
  • The ignorance determines the existence of thermal time and entropy that quantifies our uncertainty
  • Directionality of time is real but perspectival.  The entropy of the world in relation to us increases with our thermal time.  The growth of entropy distinguishes past from future: resulting in traces and memories
    
  • Each human is a unified being because: we reflect the world, we formed an image of a unified entity by interacting with our kind, and because of the perspective of memory
    
  • The variable time: is one of the variables of the gravitational field.  With our scale we don't register quantum fluctuations, making space-time appear determined.  At our speed we don't perceive differences in time of different clocks, so we experience a single time: universal, uniform, ordered; which is helpful to our decisions

  
  
  time to train offspring. 
  

The Mind's Eye

Deep eye

• Three dimensional object is a collection of: happenings, occurrences and processes; including emergent entities, as required by relativity, explains Rovelli.  But natural selection has improved our fitness by representing this perception, in our minds, as an unchanging thing, as explained by Pinker.  Dehaene explains the object modeling and construction process within the unconscious and conscious brain. 
  resolution onto the retina
• Stereo depth perception from two forward facing eyes are major sensors in primates, based on opsins deployed in the retina & especially fovea, signalling the visual system: Superior colliculi, Thalamus (LGN), Primary visual cortex; and indirectly the amygdala.  They also signal [social] emotional state to other people.  And they have implicit censorious power with pictures of eyes encouraging people within their view to act more honorably.  Eyes are poor scanners and use a saccade to present detail slowly to the fovea.  The eye's optical structures and retina are supported by RPE.  Eyes do not connect to the brain through the brain stem and so still operate in locked-in syndrome.  Evo-devo shows eyes have deep homology.  High pressure within the eye can result in glaucoma.  Genetic inheritance can result in retinoblastoma.  Age is associated with AMD. 
  
  
• Projection of double images as depth indicators
• Correspondence in human vision asks how the marks on the retina of one eye are matched up rapidly with the marks in the other eye's retina.  The stereo disparity of a pair of marks is difficult to calculate until you pick the marks to compare.  But there are sometimes thousands of candidates, and the brain does not know how far away the marks are.  With many candidates for pairing a combinatorial explosion is probable.   between marks falling on the retina of one eye and marks in the other eye generating cyclopean vision processing is the ability to see shapes in stereo that neither eye's visual data can represent in mono. 
  

Lighting, shading, shaping

1. Perspective - 3 dimensional objects is a collection of: happenings, occurrences and processes; including emergent entities, as required by relativity, explains Rovelli.  But natural selection has improved our fitness by representing this perception, in our minds, as an unchanging thing, as explained by Pinker.  Dehaene explains the object modeling and construction process within the unconscious and conscious brain. 
   present a 2 dimensional projection.  The most probable state of the world can be deduced from the evidence in the retina with Beyes theorem specifies a conditional probability P(A|B) the posterior belief = (P(B|A) the likelyhood * P(A) our prior belief) /P(B).  This says our belief in hypothesis A is updated in light of new evidence B.  The power of Bayes rule is that often P(A|B) may be difficult to compute directly but can be calculated from P(B|A).  For example:
   • A is the event a person has cancer. 
     
   • B is the event a person smokes. 
     
   • If 10% of people who enter a clinic have cancer then P(A) = 0.1;  Assumed accurate Baysian prior. 
     
   • P(B) is the percentage of people who smoke = 0.5; Assumed accurate prior. 
     
   • P(B|A) = 0.8 is the proportion of smokers among those diagnosed with cancer at the clinic from the clinics records.  
   • P(A|B) = (0.8 * 0.1)/0.5 = 0.16.  With evidence that a person is a smoker we revise our estimate of P(A) from 0.1 to a posterior probability of 0.16.  
   (prior, likelihood).  The shape analyzer is equipped with probabilities about projection (likelihoods) and some probabilities about the world (priors).  Many physical and biological laws encourage the formation of standardized shapes: Motion, Tension, and Gravity; make straight lines.  Cohesion makes smooth contours.  Moving organisms develop symmetry.  Such attributes are captured by natural selection as prior assumptions in the line analyzer. 
   
2. Reflectance - provides predictions about surfaces (color, lightness).  The visual system supports processing of visual data into what and how.  To do this it has two distinct paths: The ventral path and the dorsal path. 
   's reflectance is the amount of radiant energy reflected from a material surface relative to the incident electromagnetic power. 
   specialist factors out levels of illumination.  Land's Retinex theory developed by Edwin Land aims to effectively describe how reflectance of the viewed scene is processed by the human visual system.  It assumes: Earth's illumination includes a large mix of wavelengths; Gradual changes in brightness & color across the visual field are produced by illumination, while abrupt transitions indicate boundaries and earth's surface is a big flat plane.  But the mind has a shape analyzer that bends perceived surfaces and surfaces are often slanted from the viewer which compromises the predictions of the theory.   effectively removes lighting gradients similarly to the brain.  But the mind also applies 3-D shaping to the object.  And the mind accounts for the effect of slant on the reflectance. 
   
3. Slanting - assumes: Surface lighting is uniform, Surfaces are matte. 
   

Seeing in 2.5 dimensions

• vastly contrasting details from different parts of the retina, with the eyes are major sensors in primates, based on opsins deployed in the retina & especially fovea, signalling the visual system: Superior colliculi, Thalamus (LGN), Primary visual cortex; and indirectly the amygdala.  They also signal [social] emotional state to other people.  And they have implicit censorious power with pictures of eyes encouraging people within their view to act more honorably.  Eyes are poor scanners and use a saccade to present detail slowly to the fovea.  The eye's optical structures and retina are supported by RPE.  Eyes do not connect to the brain through the brain stem and so still operate in locked-in syndrome.  Evo-devo shows eyes have deep homology.  High pressure within the eye can result in glaucoma.  Genetic inheritance can result in retinoblastoma.  Age is associated with AMD. 
  saccading are the small jerky steps by which we reorient our eyes gaze.   and the
  
• details captured in an oval shaped by the layout of the eyes

• That we see only what is in front of our eyes are major sensors in primates, based on opsins deployed in the retina & especially fovea, signalling the visual system: Superior colliculi, Thalamus (LGN), Primary visual cortex; and indirectly the amygdala.  They also signal [social] emotional state to other people.  And they have implicit censorious power with pictures of eyes encouraging people within their view to act more honorably.  Eyes are poor scanners and use a saccade to present detail slowly to the fovea.  The eye's optical structures and retina are supported by RPE.  Eyes do not connect to the brain through the brain stem and so still operate in locked-in syndrome.  Evo-devo shows eyes have deep homology.  High pressure within the eye can result in glaucoma.  Genetic inheritance can result in retinoblastoma.  Age is associated with AMD. 
  .  It is
  
• Accurate only in the fovea is the central part of the retina.  It is the only region that is dense in high-resolution photo receptor cells.  It is the only part of the retina that is useful for reading.  Our eyes are in constant saccades as we read to present text to the fovea. 
  . 
  
• Transient.  As we move our head
  Consciousness has confounded philosophers and scientists for centuries.  Now it is finally being characterized scientifically.  That required a transformation of approach. 
  Realizing that consciousness was ill-defined neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene and others characterized and focused on conscious access. 
  In the book he outlines the limitations of previous psychological dogma.  Instead his use of subjective assessments opened the window to contrast totally unconscious brain activity with those including consciousness. 
  He describes the research methods.  He explains the contribution of new sensors and probes that allowed the psychological findings to be correlated, and causally related to specific neural activity. 
  He describes the theory of the brain he uses, the 'global neuronal workspace' to position all the experimental details into a whole. 
  He reviews how both theory and practice support diagnosis and treatment of real world mental illnesses. 
  The implications of Dehaene's findings for subsequent consciousness research are outlined. 
  Complex adaptive system (CAS) models of the brain's development and operation introduce constraints which are discussed. 
  
  
  conscious access of the last view is lost. 
• Seen in perspective
• Seen in two dimensions plus depth for objects is a collection of: happenings, occurrences and processes; including emergent entities, as required by relativity, explains Rovelli.  But natural selection has improved our fitness by representing this perception, in our minds, as an unchanging thing, as explained by Pinker.  Dehaene explains the object modeling and construction process within the unconscious and conscious brain. 
  in attention is the focusing of our mental resources onto a specific piece of information.  Attention uses valuations assigned to each potential object of thought by the basal ganglia. 
  . 
  

Frames of reference

• Cyclopean eye is the ability to see shapes in stereo that neither eye's visual data can represent in mono. 
  frame - Vision is represented relative to the eyes are major sensors in primates, based on opsins deployed in the retina & especially fovea, signalling the visual system: Superior colliculi, Thalamus (LGN), Primary visual cortex; and indirectly the amygdala.  They also signal [social] emotional state to other people.  And they have implicit censorious power with pictures of eyes encouraging people within their view to act more honorably.  Eyes are poor scanners and use a saccade to present detail slowly to the fovea.  The eye's optical structures and retina are supported by RPE.  Eyes do not connect to the brain through the brain stem and so still operate in locked-in syndrome.  Evo-devo shows eyes have deep homology.  High pressure within the eye can result in glaucoma.  Genetic inheritance can result in retinoblastoma.  Age is associated with AMD. 
  and the position of the head and body.  Eye movement is removed from the high level representations by a frame shifter which reports on the movement of the eyes. 
  
• World view frame - where the cyclopean eye's perspective view is mapped to one where parallel lines appear parallel. 
• Gravity frame - supported by the balance sensors in the ear canals which gives a Cartesian representation (x, y, z).  This is used to represent the gravity relative position of the head and body.  It rotates the visual field whenever the head isn't perpendicular.  This frame is used to keep the body upright.  Pinker notes that natural selection places a high priority on the gravity frame.  Whenever it appears misaligned with the cyclopean eye frame the brain induces motion sickness is an evolved response to detecting a disconnect between the visual cyclopean eye frame of reference and the gravity frame of reference.  In the African savanna the signals about gravity from the ear canals were typically valid.  It was likely that the disconnect between the visual and gravity representations resulted from ingesting toxins, so the body is signalled to get rid of the contents of the stomach.  This problem impacts virtual reality illusions which disconnect the visual and gravity representations.  .  

Animal crackers

1. Multiple-view theory suggests that a seperate memory representation is created for each orientation in which a visual object regularly appears. 
   - habitually seen views are rapidly identified and shaped. 
   
2. Mental-rotation theory suggests that people rapidly identify upright objects, but when the objects are rotated people perform a rotation in their minds to bring the object into its upright position to allow shape recognition.  - in odd rotational views people perform mental rotations in their minds. 
   
3. Geon theory - is used for some shapes.  

Imagine that!

• Cheves Perky proposed that mental images are faint experiences, and demonstrated it in the Perky effect is the interference by a conscious mental image, of seeing faint & fine visual details.  It was first identified by Cheves Perky, but has since been validated with modern experimental design. 
  .
  
• Visual motor coordination suffers when people are attending to details of a mental image. 
  
• Mental images of lines alter perception and can induce illusions. 
  

• Mainly images appear to be fragments of observed scenes and are represented as a concrete pictorial matrix rather than a sentence of a grammar.  But Pinker notes
  
• Each image is represented in a propositional superstructure which allows the mental images to be found quickly.  This superstructure may be 'chunked' with practice.  Pinker notes that
  
• Images are geometric without any associated meaning but they can be compared and reasoned with.  And they may be manipulated by well-defined operations: Rotation, zooming, shrinking, panning, scanning, tracing, coloring; that can be strung together.  Rotation is incremental and time consuming.  
  This page reviews the implications of selection, variation and heredity in a complex adaptive system (CAS).  The mechanism and its emergence are discussed. 
  
  Evolutionarily significant features: cat claws, bees' stingers; are registered in a conceptual database via an explicit statement.   Otherwise the image must be reviewed and the shape analyzers applied.  Pinker argues that discovering previously missed features is a key value of recalling mental images. 

Good Ideas

Intuitive theories explained

• It is most useful to effectively understand what, based on history, is currently happening in a specific situation.  
• Academic knowledge is costly to procure.  It requires carefully designed experiments covering all the dependent scenarios.  And it is only beneficial once it can be leveraged across a large group, and many scenarios. 
  
• Human brains are shaped for
  This web page reviews opportunities to find and capture new niches based on studying fitness landscapes using complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. 
  
  fitness, not truth.  Indeed we will often lobby for our 'version' of the truth to be accepted.  If we need to understand an unfamiliar object is a collection of: happenings, occurrences and processes; including emergent entities, as required by relativity, explains Rovelli.  But natural selection has improved our fitness by representing this perception, in our minds, as an unchanging thing, as explained by Pinker.  Dehaene explains the object modeling and construction process within the unconscious and conscious brain. 
  we will consult an expert, who will project 'their truth,' about the object. 
  
• Good science is pedantic, expensive and subversive.  Illiterate foraging bands would not experience it as a selection pressure. 
  

Little boxes

1. Stereotypes with fuzzy boundaries and family like resemblances.  These are useful because they predict from similarity. 
   
2. Definitions with in-or-out boundaries.  These allow discovery of laws of the structural clusters.  They fall out of the intuitive theories that guess at the operating mechanisms of the world.  These are useful because of their deductive power. 
   

Core curriculum

• Objects and forces
  
• Animate things
  
• Artifacts - are
  Russ Abbott explores the impact on science of epiphenomena and the emergence of agents. 
  
  emergent entities,
  Tools and the businesses that produce them have evolved dramatically.  W Brian Arthur shows how this occurred.
  
  tools that folk psychology associates with an essence. 
  
• Natural kinds: Animals, Plants & minerals. 
• Minds - which natural selection helps us understand with folk psychology mental modules:
  
• Modes of thought
  
• Feelings for danger, contamination is a universal human emotion.  Pinker notes it has its own facial expression and is codified in food taboos.  The mind must be associated with the proximate environment and parents minimize the risk for their omnivorous children by teaching them what foods to eat and what to avoid.  The children's minds are initially receptive to trying all foods but their brains subsequently lock in on the foods they have experienced.  These parental choices are affected by schematic influence on what has been beneficial.  Adolescent's brain developments undermine these constraints enabling intergroup transfers.  Disgust is modulated by the insula cortex which projects signals to the amygdala. 
  , status, dominance, fairness, love is an emotion, which generates a feeling of pleasure at a genetic relative's well-being and pain in their harm.  An inseminated human female is genetically a full relative of her partner since she carries his germ-line gametes.  From any of their pooled gene's perspective the offspring have a one-in-two chance of including the specific gene.  Hence love supports kin selection driven by the selfish actions of genes.  Emotions, including love and anger, help drive the interactions between people.  Compassionate love also supports the symbiotic partnership of true friends built on fairness and trust.  Sapolsky notes the opposite of love is indifference, not hate.  The amygdala's projection into the locus ceruleus drives autonomic intensity. 
  , friendship, sexuality is a passionate emotion reflecting the risky agreement to commit resources to the long term activity of raising children.  , children, relatives & the self.  

Objects and forces

• Infants see objects is a collection of: happenings, occurrences and processes; including emergent entities, as required by relativity, explains Rovelli.  But natural selection has improved our fitness by representing this perception, in our minds, as an unchanging thing, as explained by Pinker.  Dehaene explains the object modeling and construction process within the unconscious and conscious brain. 
  , remember them and expect them to obey the laws of continuity, cohesion and contact. 
  
• Matter is assumed to collide with other matter. 
  

Animate things

Models of beliefs & desires, interpreting other's signals

Modified trivium - logic

Modified trivium - mathematics

Modified trivium - probability

Metaphorical mind

• Ideas are food, buildings, people, plants, products, commodities, money, tools, fashion
• Love is a force, madness, magic war
• The visual field is a container
• Self-esteem is a brittle object
• Time is money
• Life is a game of chance. 
  

Eureka!

Hotheads

• Impending harm (fear is an emotion which prepares the body for time sensitive action: Blood is sent to the muscles from the gut and skin, Adrenalin is released stimulating: Fuel to be released from the liver, Blood is encouraged to clot, and Face is wide-eyed and fearful.  The short-term high priority goal, experienced as a sense of urgency, is to flee, fight or deflect the danger.  There are both 'innate' - really high priority learning - which are mediated by the central amydala and learned fears which are mediated by the BLA which learns to fear a stimulus and then signals the central amygdala. 
  )
  
• Leveraging the suburban savanna (appreciation of natural beauty is an emotion which derives from the benefit to hunter gatherers of recognizing and seeking out the African savanna setting in which humans evolved. 
  )
• Food for thought (disgust is a universal human emotion.  Pinker notes it has its own facial expression and is codified in food taboos.  The mind must be associated with the proximate environment and parents minimize the risk for their omnivorous children by teaching them what foods to eat and what to avoid.  The children's minds are initially receptive to trying all foods but their brains subsequently lock in on the foods they have experienced.  These parental choices are affected by schematic influence on what has been beneficial.  Adolescent's brain developments undermine these constraints enabling intergroup transfers.  Disgust is modulated by the insula cortex which projects signals to the amygdala. 
  )
  
• The happiness treadmill (happiness is an emotion which functions to mobilize the mind to seek capabilities and resources that support Darwinian fitness.  Today happiness is associated with Epicurean ideas that were rediscovered during the renaissance and promoted by Thomas Jefferson.  But natural selection has 'designed' happiness to support hunter-gatherer fitness in the African savanna.  It is assessed: Relative to other's situations, Based on small gains or losses relative to one's current situation; and so what makes us [un-]happy and our responses can seem a counter-productive treadmill.  For Pleistocene hunter-gatherers in the savanna there were many ways for losses to undermine fitness and so losses still make us very unhappy.  Smoking, drinking and excessive eating were not significant and so don't make us unhappy even though they impact longevity.  )
  
• The Sirens' song (self-control is an emotion, the ability to trade current for future use of resources.  Hunter-gatherers are likely to benefit from immediate use of resources, since they have little opportunity to store them.  Otherwise the resources, including men & women to reproduce with, may be lost, stolen or degrade.  Since the intense drive for men to breed with any available woman can lead to costly disputes and lack of focus on strategic activities, self-control is promoted by parents and other powerful group leaders.  But the frontal cortex can promote willpower to increase self-control.  Genes also allocate more resources early in the life-cycle to avoid compounding failure to leverage resources to reproduce, with agent accidents and deaths.  )
• I and Thou (anger is an emotion which protects a person who has been cheated by a supposed friend.  When the exploitation of the altruism is discovered, Steven Pinker explains, the result is a drive for moralistic aggression to hurt the cheater. 
  , gratitude is an emotion that sets the strength of the desire to reciprocate a favor based on the costs and benefits of the earlier gift.  When a favor helps a lot and is costly to the giver we are very grateful.  , love is an emotion, which generates a feeling of pleasure at a genetic relative's well-being and pain in their harm.  An inseminated human female is genetically a full relative of her partner since she carries his germ-line gametes.  From any of their pooled gene's perspective the offspring have a one-in-two chance of including the specific gene.  Hence love supports kin selection driven by the selfish actions of genes.  Emotions, including love and anger, help drive the interactions between people.  Compassionate love also supports the symbiotic partnership of true friends built on fairness and trust.  Sapolsky notes the opposite of love is indifference, not hate.  The amygdala's projection into the locus ceruleus drives autonomic intensity. 
  )
  
• Sham emotions (sympathy is an emotion, the desire to help those in need.  Steven Pinker suggests it may develop into a sham emotion to earn gratitide.  Sapolsky adds that it can describe someone with the power to help, but who choses not to.  Alternately it can indicate feeling sorry for someone elses pain while not understanding it, in contrast with empathy.  Or it can mean the emotionally distanced sense of feeling for someone.  Or the state of feeling their pain as if it were happening to you where it may cause such distress as to focus you onto alleviating you own distress. 
  , niceness)
  
• Strategic conflict and doomsday machines (passion is a doomsday machine emotion, providing the participant in a strategic conflict with a constraint on rational arguments. 
  , revenge, or vengeance, is a doomsday machine emotion.  In hunter gatherer bands the major constraint on a relative or loved one being murdered was the 'guarantee' of revenge.  Revenge pairs with the emotional signal honor.  It must be advertised and hard to turn off.  Traditional societies incorporate it into legal frameworks as retribution, a legitimate goal of criminal punishment. 
  & rage is a doomsday machine emotion of uncontrollable righteous anger.  )
  
• The caprice of romance (romantic love is a passionate emotion reflecting the risky agreement to commit resources to the long term activity of raising children.  )
  
• The punishment of grief 
• Kidding ourselves (self-deception is an emotion, the ability to hide your intentions from your self so as to effectively hide them from others. 
  )
  

Suburban savanna

• Desert, which lacks water
• Temperate woodland, which locks up the resources in wood. 
  
• Rain forests, which keep the resources in the canopy.  But he notes that the mind provides competitive intelligence enables the achievement of goals in the face of obstacles.  The goals are sub-goals of genes' survival and reproduction and include:
  • Obtaining and eating food
  • Sex
    
  • Finding and maintaining shelter
    
  • Fighting for resources - in the preferred hunter gatherer environment loss of resources was critical while possession was often transient. 
    
  • Understanding the proximate environment
    
  • Securing the cooperation of others 
  allowing humans to compete effectively with focused occupants of these alternative niches.  

Food for thought

Impending harm

Happiness treadmill

Sirens' song

I and Thou

• The ability to recognize individuals.  
• The ability to grant a large benefit at a small cost.  Meat from large animals & information allow this capability. 
  
• Roles must commonly reverse. 
  
• Memory in the brain includes functionally different types: Declarative (episodic and semantic), Implicit, Procedural, Spatial, Temporal, Verbal; Hebb noted that glutamate receptive neurons learn by (NMDA channel based) synaptic strengthening.  This strengthening is sustained by subsequent LTP.  The non-realtime learning and planning processes operate through consciousness using the working memory structures, and then via sleep, the salient ones are consolidated while the rest are destroyed and garbage collected.   to recollect who owes what to whom. 
  

Sham emotions

Doomsday machines

• Honor is a doomsday machine emotional signal, which Pinker explains as an advertisement of the desire to publically avenge even minor trespasses and insults.  , called patriotism if for a society
  
• Lust for revenge, or vengeance, is a doomsday machine emotion.  In hunter gatherer bands the major constraint on a relative or loved one being murdered was the 'guarantee' of revenge.  Revenge pairs with the emotional signal honor.  It must be advertised and hard to turn off.  Traditional societies incorporate it into legal frameworks as retribution, a legitimate goal of criminal punishment. 
  
  
• Passion is a doomsday machine emotion, providing the participant in a strategic conflict with a constraint on rational arguments. 
  
  
• Rage is a doomsday machine emotion of uncontrollable righteous anger.  .  When it is apparent that your opponent's rational control will be lost by further pressing the current reasoning any negotiation becomes constrained to the advantage of the headstrong party.  In this situation power and ability to communicate become liabilities. 
  

Fools for love

Punishment of grief

Kidding ourselves

Family Values

• Prestige & status is a publically accepted, signal that one possesses assets: wealth, beauty, talent, expertise, access & trust of powerful people; to be able to help others. 
  
  
• Inequality of power & wealth is schematically useful information and its equivalent, schematically useful energy, to paraphrase Beinhocker.  It is useful because an agent has schematic strategies that can utilize the information or energy to extend or leverage control of the cognitive niche.   
  
• Property
• Inheritance
• Reciprocity
• Punishment
• Sexual: Modesty, Regulations, Jealousy is an emotion driven by the large investment by parents in their children's development combined with a human sexual asymmetry: fertilization occurs inside the female's body, so a male can't be sure it is supporting its own ofspring. 
  , Male preference for young women for sexual relations;
• Division of labor by sex:
• More childcare by women
• Greater public political dominance by men
  
• Hostility to other groups: Violence, Rape, Murder;
  
• Conflict within groups
  

Kith and Kin

• When men are confident they are the fathers of their wives' children, nuclear families generally form near the husband's extended kin. 
  
• When men are typically away performing farm labor or military service, families form near the wife's kin.  The wife gains support from her kin in any dispute.  In either situation the children feel solidarity with both sets of kin.   
• No one can be certain a spouse will be loyal and live long enough to fully invest in the children.   Emotions and marriage contracts have developed to encourage and sustain the bond. 
  
• Stepparents gain a spouse at the cost of an unrelated child.  All cultures is how we do and think about things, transmitted by non-genetic means as defined by Frans de Waal.  CAS theory views cultures as operating via memetic schemata evolved by memetic operators to support a cultural superorganism.  Evolutionary psychology asserts that human culture reflects adaptations generated while hunting and gathering.  Dehaene views culture as essentially human, shaped by exaptations and reading, transmitted with support of the neuronal workspace and stabilized by neuronal recycling.  Sapolsky argues that parents must show children how to transform their genetically derived capabilities into a culturally effective toolset.  He is interested in the broad differences across cultures of: Life expectancy, GDP, Death in childbirth, Violence, Chronic bullying, Gender equality, Happiness, Response to cheating, Individualist or collectivist, Enforcing honor, Approach to hierarchy; illustrating how different a person's life will be depending on the culture where they are raised.  Culture:
  • Is deployed during pregnancy & childhood, with parental mediation.  Nutrients, immune messages and hormones all affect the prenatal brain.  Hormones: Testosterone with anti-Mullerian hormone masculinizes the brain by entering target cells and after conversion to estrogen binding to intracellular estrogen receptors; have organizational effects producing lifelong changes.  Parenting style typically produces adults who adopt the same approach.  And mothering style can alter gene regulation in the fetus in ways that transfer epigenetically to future generations!  PMS symptoms vary by culture. 
    
  • Is also significantly transmitted to children by their peers during play.  So parents try to control their children's peer group.  
  • Is transmitted to children by their neighborhoods, tribes, nations etc. 
    
  • Influences the parenting style that is considered appropriate. 
    
  • Can transform dominance into honor.  There are ecological correlates of adopting honor cultures.  Parents in honor cultures are typically authoritarian. 
    
  • Is strongly adapted across a meta-ethnic frontier according to Turchin.  
  • Across Europe was shaped by the Carolingian empire. 
    
  • Can provide varying levels of support for innovation.  
  • Produces consciousness according to Dennet. 
    
  view the arrangement with suspicion. 
  
• Pinker notes the asymmetric conflict of parents giving and children taking are supported emotionally for genetically related offspring but not otherwise.  
• The merging of networks from marriage supports highly strategic opportunities:
• Parents aim to get back some of the investment they have made.  And in-laws vary in their impact.  When nuclear families settle near the husband's family,
  
• Marriage of cross cousins is the child of your mother's brother or father's sister.   builds on a trusted relationship.  
• Marriage of parallel cousins is a child of your mother's sister or of yor father's brother. 
  brings in no external goods when both of the betrothed fathers are brothers or else is a marriage to a clan of strangers.  
• The spouses do not accept their parents' choices passively.  Romantic love is a passionate emotion reflecting the risky agreement to commit resources to the long term activity of raising children.  cements their own choices and they lobby their parents.  In traditional societies when the children elope it is a disaster for their parents: 
  
• The parents have lost a key opportunity to leverage their investment. 
  
• Defaults on marriage agreements are a leading cause of feuds and warfare in traditional societies. 
  

Parents and children

Brothers and sisters

Men and women

1. A single male can fertilize more than one female.  This generates competition between males for the available females.  They can fight each other or court the females for access. 
   
2. Reproductive success of males depends on how many females they mate with.  So females are more discriminating, looking for signals of good genes and, in humans and birds, a willingness to feed and protect the offspring.  Males woo females and mate with all that will let them. 
   

Mating asymmetries in apes

• Gorillas live on the fringes of forests with a male monopolizing a few females and fighting other males.  So males are much larger than females. 
  
• Gibbon females are solitary and widely dispersed so males find a female and act as a faithful consort.  So males are similar in size to females. 
  
• Orangutan females are solitary but close enough to each other that males monopolize two or more.  So males are almost twice the size of females. 
  
• Chimps live in large unstable groups which no male can dominate.  But they fight other males and are larger than the females.  They also compete to fertilize the eggs with large testes. 
  
• Human males are unique among apes, due to the characteristics of the cognitive niche is Tooby & DeVore's theory that reflects a flexible competitive strategy, described by Steven Pinker, which leverages the power and flexibility of intelligence to defeat the capabilities of genetically evolved specialists focused on specific niches.  , in investing in their offspring.  So human females will benefit from judging males on their ability to invest in the family, as well as their ability to win fights and provide food for her.  And attentive males must worry about being cuckolded.  
  

Mating asymmetries in humans

• Women contribute nine months of pregnancy and two to four years of nursing. 
  
• Men contribute sperm.  They contribute huge investments in their families relative to other apes. 
  
• Men are 1.15 times the size of women so men competed to capture more than one female from other males. 
  
• Humans live in bands but the size of our testes indicates that women were less promiscuous than female chimpanzees.  
• Humans developed marriage to contractually protect the investment made by the parents. 
  
• Hunter gatherer women married soon after puberty.  
• Children were breast fed.  Babies and toddlers stayed with their mothers and other women. 
  
• Men hunted and women gathered.  
• Sex meant reproduction.  

• How many partners to want? 
• Men are keen to have sex with any female - especially new ones named after the US President, is the human male desire for new partners.  Males find the concept of a new person sexually stimulating, while a regular partner becomes less so over time.  Natural selection captures the increased likelihood of replication of the genes supported by additional partners in this mental drive. 
  . 
  
• A man's genes can benefit from a relationship with a married women whose husband then brings up the child. 
  
• Seek status is a publically accepted, signal that one possesses assets: wealth, beauty, talent, expertise, access & trust of powerful people; to be able to help others. 
  & Power
• In a hunter gatherer society this increases the likelihood of males attracting mates
• Can also aim to limit others access to power
• Males pay for sex with equivalently rated females - with meat in hunter gatherer societies.  
• Males must be ready to mate.  They are easily aroused by details implying anonymous females eager for casual sex.  Women will have no interest of this sort. 
  

Husbands and wives

Internal fertilization, male investment in children & Jealousy

Rivals

1. Dominance signals the power to hurt a rival.  Maynard Smith & Parker explain that in group situations females compete for food and males compete for females.  Maleness is a huge factor for violence.  Fighting to the death is costly for all participants so instead they indicate:
   
   • Size and weapons to demonstrate who will win.  Males who are, or look like, better fighters: Large heads, Big men, Height; gain in dominance. 
     
   • Political acumen to demonstrate they won't be pushed around and have the support of other powerful groups.  Dominant males push other rivals aside and gain interest of females, enabling themselves to replicate more.  Being a signal its authenticity can be challenged and so must be defended to remain credible.  Hotheads leverage the doomsday machine to constrain rational challenges.  Bands and cultures leverage honor.  Youth and lack of resources reduce the power of rivals' political constraints. 
     
   - who can hurt you?  Humans leverage strategic tools provided by natural selection.  Except for recent situations of state domination,
   Peter Turchin describes how major pre-industrial empires developed due to effects of geographic boundaries constraining the empires and their neighbors' interactions.  Turchin shows how the asymmetries of breeding rates and resource growth rates results in dynamic cycles within cycles.  After the summary of Turchin's book complex adaptive system (CAS) theory is used to augment Turchins findings. 
   
   warrior aristocracy fight duels to maintain honor is a doomsday machine emotional signal, which Pinker explains as an advertisement of the desire to publically avenge even minor trespasses and insults.  .  Males use augmentation to coerce sceptics into accepting natural dominance signals. 
   
2. Status is a publically accepted, signal that one possesses assets: wealth, beauty, talent, expertise, access & trust of powerful people; to be able to help others. 
   - who can help you?  Status signalling assets are fungible and encourage
   This page discusses the effect of the network on the agents participating in a complex adaptive system (CAS).  Small world and scale free networks are considered. 
   
   network formation.   Shrewdness & discretion are valuable attributes of hunter gatherer leaders aims to develop plans and strategies which ensure effective coordination to improve the common good of the in-group.  John Adair developed a leadership methodology based on the three-circles model. 
   , who can build alliances to help compete against those displaying dominance assets.   Pinker notes leaders of hunter gatherer tribes show off and waste their assets - to demonstrate how vast their assets are, just like the philanthropic wealthy in the first world and animals who use bright colors to highlight they have significant assets, or resemble other animals who do.   Veblen's conspicuous: Leisure, Consumption, Waste; indicate high fashion's support of status signalling.  Bell is Quentin Bell's explanation of the development and dynamics of fashion.  In 'On Human Finery' he demonstrates that only one explanation holds: the rule is Try to look like the people above you; if you're at the top, try to look different from the people below you.  It encapsulates sexual selection's signal of fitness. 
   adds conspicuous outrage which signals confidence of outsize talent, wealth is schematically useful information and its equivalent, schematically useful energy, to paraphrase Beinhocker.  It is useful because an agent has schematic strategies that can utilize the information or energy to extend or leverage control of the cognitive niche.   , popularity and connections. 
   

Friends and acquaintances

Allies and enemies

• Increases the numbers of offspring carrying genes for war,
  
• More than offsets the impacts of deaths of combatants on average for the gene pool.  Indeed the deaths increase the odds of getting an additional wife for the survivors. 
  

• Men are more willing to go to war when their group is secure in food, ensuring they can sustain the extra women they capture and children they intend to produce. 
  
• Females don't naturally go to war, since their genes gain nothing and they risk death.  So societies find sending women to war disconcerting. 
  
• Foragers typically have similar weapons and tactics so numbers are the key to success in war.  Big groups are more successful.  
• Potential fighters must see there is an equitable distribution of risk and reward.  Certain death should result in desertion of the coalition. 
  

Humanity

Meaning of life

• Recreational drugs target the pleasure receptors directly
  
• Senses take in environmental stimuli that initiate internal signals to the pleasure receptors: Sugary & fatty foods, Pornography, Art;  

Arts & entertainment

Music

1. Language - Pinker notes it must align: Dylan & Cole Porter play masterfully with this need. 
   
2. Auditory scene analysis - Auditory analyzers must build up the natural scene from the jumble of notes that are detected by the ears sensors. 
   
3. Emotional calls - music can utilize detectors of: whispers, crying, weeping, moaning, groaning, etc. 
   
4. Habitat selection - music can leverage the pleasure generated by detectors for fitness enhancing habitats. 
   
5. Motor control - music taps into the motor control of rhythm. 
   
6. Resonance to explain the specific nature of rewarding sounds and hence music. 
   

Fiction and movies

What's so funny

Inquisitive in pursuit of the inconceivable

Pinker's analysis and explanation of the hard problem

CAS constraints on the mind

• Cotton exchange appears analogous to
  Consciousness has confounded philosophers and scientists for centuries.  Now it is finally being characterized scientifically.  That required a transformation of approach. 
  Realizing that consciousness was ill-defined neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene and others characterized and focused on conscious access. 
  In the book he outlines the limitations of previous psychological dogma.  Instead his use of subjective assessments opened the window to contrast totally unconscious brain activity with those including consciousness. 
  He describes the research methods.  He explains the contribution of new sensors and probes that allowed the psychological findings to be correlated, and causally related to specific neural activity. 
  He describes the theory of the brain he uses, the 'global neuronal workspace' to position all the experimental details into a whole. 
  He reviews how both theory and practice support diagnosis and treatment of real world mental illnesses. 
  The implications of Dehaene's findings for subsequent consciousness research are outlined. 
  Complex adaptive system (CAS) models of the brain's development and operation introduce constraints which are discussed. 
  
  
  conscious access binding together the current signals to decide on strategic and operational responses. 
  
• Merchants appear analogous to sensory neurons representing invariant models of objects is a collection of: happenings, occurrences and processes; including emergent entities, as required by relativity, explains Rovelli.  But natural selection has improved our fitness by representing this perception, in our minds, as an unchanging thing, as explained by Pinker.  Dehaene explains the object modeling and construction process within the unconscious and conscious brain. 
  . 
  
• Ports and towns equate to structurally positioned neural circuits, a network of interconnected neurons which perform signalling, modeling and control functions.  In Cajal's basic neural circuits the signalling is unidirectional.  He identified three classes of neurons in the circuits:
  • Sensory, Interneurons, Motor; which are biochemically distinct and suffer different disease states. 
    
  that can be
  Agents use sensors to detect events in their environment.  This page reviews how these events become signals associated with beneficial responses in a complex adaptive system (CAS).  CAS signals emerge from the Darwinian information model.  Signals can indicate decision summaries and level of uncertainty. 
  
  signalled, and respond with their own signals
• Ships correspond to axon, a long extension of a neuron which has a membrane constructed to support the uni-directional flow of action potential from the dendritic tree and cell body to the synaptic terminals.   and synaptic, a neuron structure which provides a junction with other neurons.  It generates signal molecules, either excitatory or inhibitory, which are kept in vesicles until the synapse is stimulated when the signal molecules are released across the synaptic cleft from the neuron.  The provisioning of synapses is under genetic control and is part of long term memory formation as identified by Eric Kandel.  Modulation signals (from slow receptors) initiate the synaptic strengthening which occurs in memory. 
  signal carriers
  
• Representations and conventions are analogous to the neuron's genes, epigenetic structures and synaptic chemical structures including long lived prions. 
  

• Genetically positioned neural circuit, a network of interconnected neurons which perform signalling, modeling and control functions.  In Cajal's basic neural circuits the signalling is unidirectional.  He identified three classes of neurons in the circuits:
  • Sensory, Interneurons, Motor; which are biochemically distinct and suffer different disease states. 
    
  based
  Plans are interpreted and implemented by agents.  This page discusses the properties of agents in a complex adaptive system (CAS). 
  It then presents examples of agents in different CAS.  The examples include a computer program where modeling and actions are performed by software agents.  These software agents are aggregates. 
  The participation of agents in flows is introduced and some implications of this are outlined. 
  
  agents supporting gene based
  The agents in complex adaptive systems (CAS) must model their environment to respond effectively to it.  Samuel modeling is described as an approach. 
  
  models of primitives, such as visual neuron signals from detecting bars of light etc. recorded neuronal activity in the primary visual area of the cat in the 1960s.  They noted that these neurons signalled in response to simple bars of light.  This ground breaking insight induced researchers to explore the temporal cortex and eventually led to Tanaka's identification of neuronal alphabets.   to be receiving input signals from the raw visual stream and
  
• For these agents to be configured to send output signals back to the mosaic neurons.  When a top down model agent signals its seen its target representation the mosaic neuron knows positionally that it is representing part of an object is a collection of: happenings, occurrences and processes; including emergent entities, as required by relativity, explains Rovelli.  But natural selection has improved our fitness by representing this perception, in our minds, as an unchanging thing, as explained by Pinker.  Dehaene explains the object modeling and construction process within the unconscious and conscious brain. 
  . 
• These same high level, top down signals can be used to represent a mental image to a mosaic neuron. 
  

• Bodanis's description of Einstein's genius for modeling situations far outside the bounds of natural selection: Travel at the speed of light, Special and General relativity; and using the resulting insights to transform abstract physical laws provides a compelling alternate vision. 
  
• We see Pinker's neural computer with multiple frames of reference oriented around a cyclopean eye is the ability to see shapes in stereo that neither eye's visual data can represent in mono. 
  as helping to close the explanatory gap. 
  This page discusses the mechanisms and effects of emergence underpinning any complex adaptive system (CAS).  Key research is reviewed. 
  
  Emergent representations
  This page discusses the interdependence of perception and representation in a complex adaptive system (CAS).  Hofstadter and Mitchell's research with Copycat is reviewed. 
  
  can be iteratively built from low level percepts allowing
  Plans change in complex adaptive systems (CAS) due to the action of genetic operations such as mutation, splitting and recombination.  The nature of the operations is described. 
  
  genetic operators to add new alternatives and drop, or deprioritize old ones as long as the addressing scheme remains consistent.  To represent a mind with the Copycat architecture it must be possible to show that
  This page describes the Copycat Workspace. 
  The specialized use of the Workspace by the adaptive web framework's (AWF) Smiley is discussed. 
  How text and XML are imported into the Smiley Workspace is described. 
  Telomeric aging of schematic structures is introduced. 
  The internal data structure used to represent the state of each workspace object is included. 
  The Workspace infrastructure functions are included. 
  
  Workspace percepts can be built with neural circuits, a network of interconnected neurons which perform signalling, modeling and control functions.  In Cajal's basic neural circuits the signalling is unidirectional.  He identified three classes of neurons in the circuits:
  • Sensory, Interneurons, Motor; which are biochemically distinct and suffer different disease states. 
    
  . 

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