The Neural Code of Brains that Bootstrap Themselves
Two fundamental mechanisms: (1) The recognition of self and non-self and (2) the recognition of past, present and future.
A self that cannot distinguish time is a self that isn’t alive.
Greater intelligence is a consequence of (1) an increase in the scope of the self and (2) an increase in time horizons.
In both cases, complexity increases, and therefore a more capable intelligence must evolve.
Biological brains are hive minds that are contained in the same mind. Civilizations and the internet are hive minds that are distributed across many self-contained minds.
The recognition of both, specifically the non-self, the now and the future demands that an organism develop a prediction mechanism. It must navigate the environment it lives in that is also composed of other-selves that are making similar predictions.
One can make the argument that consciousness is that user interface that the mind creates to allow it to predict other minds (including itself).
Jayne’s Bicameral mind is that kind of conscious mind that isn’t aware that the voice speaking in their head is actually their own unconscious. This kind of consciousness disappeared with widespread literacy.
Reading habituates the minds to introspect thoughts that appear without consciousness. We can read something with the feeling that the author is speaking to us, or we can read with the feeling that we are speaking to ourselves. Eventually, the difference is blurred.
Have you ever tried to argue with someone who could not connect the arguments together? Like literacy, there are a lot of people who haven’t practiced enough to think systematically. They think with their gut most of the time.
Thinking is at its core, an unconscious intuitive mechanism. A mechanism that is tuned with practice. So if so people rarely practice thinking rationally, then one shouldn’t be surprised that this ability to be absent in their thinking.
Here’s the rub, the feeling of consciousness is an unconscious mechanism. We are so habituated with introspecting our own thoughts that it is just an automatic thing that we do. Of course, it’s all just an illusion.
Just as Jaynes has shown us that our ancestors had a different kind of consciousness, it is likely also true that people will live with today have different kinds of consciousness. It is not uncommon to find people always having an inner voice.
There are others that have no inner voice. We habitually make up these mental gadgets that appear to be our thoughts but are just constructs of habit. It is just like sub-vocalizing when reading. We don’t really have to do this, it is just a bad habit that speed readers avoid.
That feeling of consciousness (that hard problem) is just a habit that we’ve become accustomed to. Red feels like red because it is what we are used to feel when we see red. We are habitually accustomed to feeling different about a lot of things.
Some people are just faster thinkers than other people because they simply haven’t developed bad habits of thinking. I admit that I am not a fast thinker. This is because I’ve got a bad habit of sub-vocalizing my thoughts. I know that it’s not necessary, but I grew up with it.
It’s like saying ‘uh’ when you speaking or gesturing. We make up actions to help us think, yet some of these actions are sometimes not very helpful! When I write this, I’m subvocalizing. I guess I’m doing this to edit as I write. Is this really necessary?
I seem to also have good ideas when I tweet. Perhaps the 140 character limit forces me to be more precise. Perhaps the gaps between tweets are useful. I don’t know, it’s just a habit I picked up!
Some people prefer to talk over voice instead of instant messaging. I prefer the reverse. I’m a slow thinker and the pauses allow me to compose my thoughts. We become comfortable with certain cadences.
I guess it’s like playing speed chess and playing normal chess. A certain cadence gets one in the flow and another kind we find disruptive.
When we grow up, we aren’t given an instruction manual on how to think. We are just given all kinds of thinking problems to solve and we just make up different kinds of ad-hoc thinking styles to pretend our way into actually thinking. Sometimes they are useful, sometimes not.
Then we encounter these great thinkers who someone have to devise their own methods. C.S.Peirce is one that I’ve encountered recently. The guy was bordering on madness, and couldn’t hold a steady job. But it is just amazing what this he’s conjured up.
Then there’s this Ludwig Wittgenstein character. That everyone seems to think is a genius at the same time his ideas appear to border on madness. He’s got this style where he keeps demolishing his preconceived notions. The ultimate reductionist at work.
All I’m saying here is that these great thinkers have developed their own method to their madness. It’s a kind of thinking style that leverages and fine-tunes their intuition. The rest of us mere mortals have invented our own random haphazard methods.
Nobody really tells us how to play chess. We just make up our own heuristics on how we perform a depth-first tree search. Some do it better than others simply because they’ve learned good heuristics on how to do it.
Then there are folks like Ramanujan. Who gets his intuition about infinite series through a kind of god speaking to him. He got lucky, he got the right kind of heuristics about math that got pre-wired into him.
Einstein was fascinated with this idea about how does it appear when you are riding on a photon (or was it a light wave?). It eventually leads him to relativity. This kind of abductive thinking where you imagine non-intuitive scenarios is what gets one to revolutionary ideas.
I have an analogous question. A question that is asked from a subjective perspective. How does a mind, that comes without an instruction manual, know how to construct itself to eventually start thinking? If genes are for evolution and memes are for culture then what is the equivalent neural code for brains?
