Re:Thinking Differently about Thinking: The Mind-Expanding I...
by eli_gottlieb on Tuesday March 27, 2018 @11:41AM
(#16689563)
Indeed. As Clark always points out, the brain is three pounds of meat trapped in a black box made out of bone, given a few wires to the outside. A logically necessary part of its job is figuring out how to extend its reach outside the skull and entangle itself usefully with the inward-facing and outward-facing faculties of the body, and thence, via those outward-facing faculties (ie: motor systems in your arms or whatnot), with other stuff in the external world (not so different, since it's all outside the black box of bone, is it?) that can be organismically valuable, like a bicycle.
Re:Thinking Differently about Thinking: The Mind-Expanding I...
by Maybestring on Tuesday March 27, 2018 @01:03PM
(#16690505)
I notice that when I hit a bump on my bicycle I don't feel a force in my hands and conciously deduce that this must have been caused by the bicycle's tire hitting something. It seems more like I just feel it in my wheel.
Re:Thinking Differently about Thinking: The Mind-Expanding I...
by eli_gottlieb on Tuesday March 27, 2018 @09:03PM
(#16694273)
I go "ouch" when my wife runs over a pothole while driving. It's a very neat trick, even after I've read things like Surfing Uncertainty and have an idea how it's done.
And the tools don't just exist without, your mind is built from tools within as well. There is a part of your mind that rationalizes things, for instance. Rationalization is a tool that other parts of your mind can draw on. I think this is quite clear if you've spent a good amount of time having to argue with your own thoughts, maybe that isn't a very common experience though.
Similarly there's a part of your mind that simulates experiences. It can be used by the part of your mind that makes predictions, and it can be used by the part of your mind that recollects.
Some people's minds use visual or auditory processing components to aid in arithmetic. It's sort of the human equivalent of doing computation on the GPU.
The biggest myth we tell ourselves, on which so much flawed philosophy is based in my opinion, is that we're a single thing. We like to think that what we are is something that is a whole unto itself, that can be isolated, and not, like everything else in the universe, a collection of interactions viewed from a particular perspective.