A Silly, Oversimplified Theory of Mind for You to Challenge and Me to Refine

I think other people think processively.  Today I learned most other people don't.  They neither think processively themselves nor do they think other people think processively.   What do I mean? 

The Short Version

You are more knowledgeable today than you were yesterday.  I'm not characterizing the knowledge you've acquired as academic.  You might only know more about the North Ryoshima Coast in Okami.  That counts.  No matter how hard you try to learn nothing, you acquire more knowledge every day.  You have a view of the world modified by the circumstances you encounter in it.   

If you think X about politics and then watch CNN, Blitzer will confirm or deny the validity of X.  Even though Blitzer confirmed or denied X yesterday, and even though the khokhem will continue to confirm or deny X indefinitely, every independent confirmation or denial strengthens your belief in X.  Your feelings about X have changed with the acquisition of new knowledge. 

Happens every day.  So when you write about someone else's ideas it only makes sense to treat them developmentally.  To wit: "He believed Y on the morning of 2 January 1900, but that afternoon read a book about Z which modified his feelings about Y.  Thus when he awoke on 3 January 1900 his belief is best characterized as Y + Z."   Every day brings new modifications.

Note that I write "modifications."  I'm not claiming we'll all be smarter tomorrow for having lived today.  The knowledge we acquired might have made us dumber by lending further credence to confirmation biases.  (Tell a person the media covered a Bush initiative unkindly and they'll glower at Brian Williams for a night.  Teach them to ignore evidence and they'll howl against the MSM for a lifetime.)  Our knowledge develops without necessarily progressing. 

This is why professors cringe when you say you read their article and point you to the revised version of it in their book.  Or when you say you read their book they cringe and point you to their latest article. 

Yet we commonly encounter and produce statements which deny this basic fact.  We read that so-and-so thought such-and-such and write about this another so-and-so who thinks his predecessor disowned such-and-such and embraced this-and-that. 

We ignore lived perturbating in favor of artificial pat. 

This is my implicit theory of mind.  It's why every one of my chapters tells the story of a confused person who figured it out only to lose it in the subsequent tumult. 

I sing of surety and its inevitable failure.

The Long Version

It involves Darwin and Lamarck and Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior and as the above strongly witnesses I lack the wit to tackle heady matters today.  I'll try again yesterday.   (When I will have been smarter.) 

Comments

[Rich Puchalsky]

I know that you inoculated yourself against critique by describing this as silly and oversimplified. I don't even really disagree. Still, I had to laugh. And laugh. It turns out that you were anticipated by the wit and wisdom of (drum roll) A. E. Van Vogt! At his usual gee-this-will-impress-the-fanboys shtick.

I quote:

"For the sake of sanity, DATE: Do not say, 'Scientists believe. . .' Say, 'Scientists believed in 1956. . .' 'John Smith (1956) is an isolationist. . .' All things, includings John Smith's political opinions, are subject to change and can therefore only be referred to in terms of the moment."

That's from pg. 74 of my copy of his The Players of Null-A. And it's in italics, so it stands out. It's General Semantics, which is probably a highly authoritative science of some kind. And it probably is supposed to be going through the mind, or something , of Gilbert Gosseyn. Gosseyn, Go-Sane, get it? That's neat, and would you disbelieve an apothegm from someone like that? Who's always so cool and collected and sane as he blasts his way through -- hey, what about the cortico-thalamic pause, man? Before anyone makes fun of this -- what about the cortico-thalamic pause?

This all sticks in my head because Rich Puchalsky (1974) believed that all this was quite gosh wow, and Rich Puchalsky (1975) looked at it and said, wait a minute. Or maybe I was older than that, into my teens, I don't know. Anyways, it suddenly seemed kind of needlessly picky and, well, obvious. Yes, people change their minds about things over time. Um, OK. Attaching dates, keeping it always in mind that people may change their minds in ways large or small day by day -- well, it suddenly seemed like the kind of thing that I quickly identified as "the kind of thing that A.E. Van Vogt thinks that fanboys will find impressive."

[Ahistoricality]

We ignore lived perturbating in favor of artificial pat.

Worse: our present culture actively valorizes ahistorical patness (patism? paticity?), categorizing all perturbations as mere flipfloppery and construction vast networks of intellectual, cultural and political influence on the basis of passing (physical, intellectual and temporal) acquaintance.

[John Emerson]

Karl Popper and Donald Campbell developed a complete evolutionary theory of thought and history:

http://elm.eeng.dcu.ie/~tkpw/hk-ies/n15/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_epistemology

I think that you should rewrite your thesis within this framework.

[read]

oh i love to read blogs

[SEK]

read, that's a damn fitting 15,000th comment.

Ahistoricality, yes, there's always a worse ... until the Messiah arrives come November. Wait, I don't believe that in the least, unless by "Messiah" I mean "not 'a worse,'" in which case, maybe I do. (Believe that.)

Rich:

It turns out that you were anticipated by the wit and wisdom of (drum roll) A. E. Van Vogt!

I don't quite think I inoculated myself against criticism so much as I opened myself up to. I embraced it! That said, I'm not sure we're on the same page here. I don't actually believe people change their minds. I think they think they do, but I don't buy it. Because it's Sunday morning, I'll play the tired sociobiologist and make an analogy:

Everything you learn leaves a mark on your brain. Now, you can learn something else, and that'll make another mark, but it doesn't remove the first. That neuronal pathway's still there. You might not ever use it again -- my brain's criss-crossed with Latin conjugations, for example -- but it's there.

Obviously, not using something is a sure-fire way to unremember it; but it does make re-learning something less of a re-learning and more of a re-remembering ... like Latin conjugations, which I've unintentionally brushed up on as the wife studies Latin. It's still absolutely horrifying how much Latin I've lost, but still, if I really wanted to -- I don't -- I think I could do it fairly easily. Compared to the first time.

I realize I'm but a hop-skip away from a psychoanalytic unconscious here, so let me disavow it: I'm not headed in that direction. In fact, I don't really know what direction I'm headed in with this; certainly not a legitimate theory of mind, as that's not my ken; and certainly not a meta-historical methodological investigation about the transmission of cultural ideas, as that's not my ken either. I suppose, for lack of a better word, you can call this "noodling," since I'm trying to figure out what it is I'm trying to figure out.

[JPool]

Well, now I'm even more confused about what you do and don't believe and buy. This makes earnest response tricky, but I'll stumble ahead in a couple directions anyway.

The model you initially offered isn't actually process-based, it's additive, and this is the problem. We don't actually learn new things all the time. Mostly we try and sort our experiences into the things that we already know. We change our minds sometimes as the result of new experiences or data, but also because we try out a new set of relations between the things we already know. We do this, trapped as we are in our own skulls, but alwys in conversation with others (anthropological thinking about personhood would come in here). Somewhere in here too is Renan's point about the social value of forgetting.

Anyway, not everything makes the same kind of mark on the brain. I'm told that this is true neurologically, that knowledge/memory are stored and encoded in different parts of the brain with different ... somethings. If you're looking for something stimulating and relaxing to listen to for about an hour, Radio Lab had a nice program on memory and forgetting that makes some interesting neurobiological points about the creative nature of memory.

Finally, you'll know that you've truly become a historian wehen you can switch on and off that portion of your brain that cares about whether your subjects "got it right."

[Ahistoricality]

I don't actually believe people change their minds. I think they think they do, but I don't buy it.

"Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof." -- John Kenneth Gailbraith

"A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices." -- William James

That said, I'm not sure I buy the idea that our previous beliefs and knowledge remain "at hand" after long enough: I know that my knee-jerk reactions to certain basic things are different than they once were. I may not have changed my mind, but my mind has changed.

[Rich Puchalsky]

"I don't actually believe people change their minds. I think they think they do, but I don't buy it."

So, whenever they apparently change their minds, they really haven't, they really have just been the passive receptor of additional tidbits of outside information? Seems... overly Newtonian. And unfalsifiable.

But since you evidently are concerned about these matters, I will continue to give you the advice that will turn into -- a well-trained superman! From the same source as above:

"For the sake of sanity, use QUOTATIONS: For instance, 'conscious' and 'unconscious' mind are useful descriptive terms, but it has yet to be proved that the terms themselves accurately reflect the 'process' level of events. They are maps of a territory about which we can possibly never have exact information. Since Null-A training is for the individuals, the important thing is to be conscious of the 'multiordinal'-- that is the many valued--meaning of the words one hears or speaks."

That's deep, isn't it?