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POST NAMER TBC-- work harder, meme!

Welcome back, anyway! Chat fandom, media, creative things, weirdness from around the net, funny stuff, anything! Meme awaits!

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From: (Anonymous)

Picked up again; finally finished the chapter.

Not much to report. Though I did just realise that the probable reason he keeps using comparisons involving the British Empire is as a pun; he's describing an *Empirical* theory of mind. 😑 (He's using it as an example of a distributed system where you can't say that some property was true of the system at some specific time, because the property became true of different parts at different times and the system was the sum of its parts. In this respect, he's comparing the brain to an empire.)

From: (Anonymous)

That is excellent and I am slightly motivated to pick this up now. Will have to wait until after this (much more mindless) Lockwood & Co reread.

From: (Anonymous)

Lockwood and Co, yay! :D I've read the first 3; have the rest waiting and am looking forward to the right moment to race through them. :))) Am also curious about his series about outlaws...

From: (Anonymous)

I read them years ago and reread them on vacation this month. They held up! I really hadn't remembered much beyond the first two so there were plenty of fun twists.

One thing that I newly appreciated is the depiction especially in book 3 of female adolescent jealousy. I think it captures that awkward mix of admiration and annoyance, and the consequent avoidant and dishonest behaviors, fairly well.

From: (Anonymous)

Onto Chapter 7 - The Evolution of Consciousness.

I'm enjoying this chapter more. Less repetition so far, and more interesting examples. Learned some stuff I didn't know about brains. Due to current context, I keep abstracting everything he's writing about organisms protecting themselves, in order to replicate, to apply it to the arts. He talks about organisms needing a way to distinguish friend from foe, to avoid or embrace; I immediately apply this to literary awards groups, and the tactics they ought to take to survive. :P (namely: not creating environments in which writers wither. Ho-hum) This is a fun chapter to read when viewing humans as nodes in a network, as neurons are, and viewing human behaviors as contributing to (or detracting from) a civilizational immune system. His description of how always-on consciousness formed to provide organisms with better information, to aid their survival, sounds very much like the way feminist groups formed in response to an existential threat. There was no 'HQ' tying strands of info together... until it was needed. Then more organized hubs sprung up. And now this dan uses them as a source of info, even in cases where their initial purpose seems less pressing, because they have been more reliable sources of info about the world than various sources that preceded them. In this way, the collective acquires more complex consciousness (and arguably gets smarter :P).

He describes brains as anticipation-machines, viewing+analyzing their environment and predicting the future, to aid survival. He mentions that you can roughly split brains into two systems; dorsal and ventral; dorsal handles the background processes (he analogizes them to collision-detection) that stop you falling off cliffs and things in real time; ventral handles slower info-gathering and analysis. This makes me picture a continuum, 'open to experience' vs 'treating every new thing as danger', where there's a sweet spot where you learn but don't get eaten. Presumably the more you're willing to investigate and ignore the output of a dorsal system, the more a ventral system gets to do-- unless you fall off a cliff. Made me think about the specific dangers faced by overthinkers who neglect the background processes that keep them alive. :P (and vice versa; being too alert to danger can restrict a system's input and restrict how much it can learn).

He describes complex conscious systems as having evolved from less complex ones, and outlines two strategies for survival: recognize an attack and hide (eg: clam clamping down shell), or predict it in advance and evade it. Claims latter approach evolved in beings that started with the former. Again, much you can enjoy analogizing and drawing conclusions from. With previous chapters, I felt like I was just condensing them when writing notes here; this time, I'm missing a lot of the good stuff, and it's worth reading in full. Haven't finished the chapter, yet.

Also enjoyed this:

"The juvenile sea squirt wanders through the sea searching for a suitable rock or hunk of coral to cling to and make its home for life. For this task, it has a rudimentary nervous system. When it finds its spot and takes root, it doesn't need its brain anymore, so it eats it! (It's rather like getting tenure.)"

From: (Anonymous)

(He also claims that you need to recognize 'self' from 'other' in order to survive. I'm not sure this follows; you need to be able to recognize 'friend' from 'enemy', but I'm not sure you *need* a self/other distinction for that, or if it's just contingent. Hell, I'm not sure if it's even contingent.)

From: (Anonymous)

He claims animals are sensitive to vertical symmetry, because back in the day, most things with vertical symmetry were other animals, and it was useful to know if one was looking at you; it might want to eat you, or you might want to eat it, or you might want to shack up. I need to look into whether this applies to horizontal symmetry; since he mentioned vertical, specifically, I assume not, but then if we were all in the sea at some point, you'd think both would be useful, otherwise a predator could just evade detection by rotating a bit.