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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Jun 27, 2017 - 08:46pm PT
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Jun 27, 2017 - 09:07pm PT
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Indeed.
But sometimes objective evidence is needed.
I did not realize that my mind had gone wondering and got lost until I found among papers in my room:
I have no idea where it came from.
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Jun 27, 2017 - 09:53pm PT
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Wouldn't want to touch that with a ten foot pole.
(She is such a flirt!)
;>\
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Ward Trotter
Trad climber
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Jun 28, 2017 - 03:10pm PT
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I've been in a bad mood ever since the US lost the America's Cup-- and now this!
LOL
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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Jun 28, 2017 - 04:20pm PT
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It occurs to me that those of us who believe that mind is simply a product of biological evolution on this earth really don't believe in "mind" other than as a more or less Platonic ideal. What biological evolution produces are organisms with minds. The plural is the key. Each has it's own history, if nothing else.
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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Jun 28, 2017 - 05:18pm PT
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Okay, so back to sexual selection. Here's my current view. The predator-prey dynamic is probably largely responsible for setting up the whole "imaging of the other guy" apparatus in certain lines of mammalian evolution, including ours. It set the stage for the jump from imaging the other guy to imaging yourself in human evolution. Imaging yourself in the context of other humans is what humans can obviously do. It is evolved behavior, of course, and humans are, above all, social animals (well maybe not above the bees or the ants or the Borg).
Something that is not absolute but typical in mammals is for the females to be the selecting agent in the male-female relationship. It is true of humans, of course. I can see where intelligence might be selected for over and above good survival genes, particularly in times of plenty, where surviving isn't the main driver. Good looks and/or intelligence ("he makes me laugh") may be more important in these situations. My guess is that there are relatively long times of plenty followed by short, catastrophic times of decidedly not-plenty, where the pure-survival genes are more important (natural selection). Frankly, it's not much of a stretch.
It occurs to me that this is how it might work with females. Let's say that they have just two response algorithms; 1) go with the guy I am most attracted to or 2) go with the guy that is most likely to ensure the survival of me and my children. I can see how epigenetics could be employed to make the female adopt one or the other based purely on outside stimulus.
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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Jun 28, 2017 - 05:41pm PT
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I didn't get it at first (because I'm a big dope), MH2. Way to transition poignantly.
Been here and gone.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Jun 28, 2017 - 07:37pm PT
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Been here and gone.
But remembered.
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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Jun 28, 2017 - 07:39pm PT
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Minds can remember and hold dear.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Jun 28, 2017 - 07:44pm PT
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I remember a student (or professor) of evolutionary biology saying:
For males (of the primate variety) it is thought that the best strategy for passing along the genes is to put maximum effort into supporting the survival of the offspring. However, a quite different strategy may also work: mating with as many females as possible and putting no effort at all into taking care of the young.
Very different strategies can co-exist in the gene pool of a population.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Jun 28, 2017 - 08:01pm PT
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It's been an interesting couple days teaching a literary non-fiction symposium here in Colorado, and watching the student's work rapidly evolve and improve as they become conscious and understand limiting habits - for example, using the passive voice, etc.
I have long known that the brain is quite capable of "writing" in an almost purely mechanical mode, basically on auto-pilot, requiring little conscious input aside for holding attention to the page and letting the brain basically dictate. The work starts to evolve once a writer can shift out of auto-writing and start consciously doing the work - always a matter of degrees. There is a remarkable feedback loop that starts up once a writer consciously starts managing all the options that geyser up from the brain. More on this later but the back and forth between consciousness and brain during the creative process is an adventure to watch once you can grock onto it.
I first got onto the feedback loop idea through neurobeedback and later just simple biofeedback, when you are dealing with primitive and largely automatic biological responses. Lacking a higher level feedback loop, when problems arise, the body can get locked into deleterious patterns - like anxiety, depression, fear responses. Once the brain is made aware of these responses, and is encouraged ("entrainment") by way of reward tones and so forth, to produce alternative responses, you can induce pattern interupts leading to a biological shift.
Curiously, the more you "try" and evoke the shift through will power and so forth, the slower the patterns shift. All that is necessary it to consciously pay attention to the feedback, and led by the tone, the brain will figure out how to effect the change it had not considered sans feedback. Not surprisingly, the moment your attention strays, the brain automatically reverts back to the problematic pattern - an example of observer dependent processing.
More on this later.
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Jun 29, 2017 - 12:23am PT
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1) go with the guy I am most attracted to or 2) go with the guy that is most likely to ensure the survival of me and my children.
Or, from a sperm competition perspective, do both and be more likely to do the former when ovulating...
The Manchester Study I linked earlier is worth a read.
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Ward Trotter
Trad climber
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Jun 29, 2017 - 12:10pm PT
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Recently discovered that this piece could receive a public performance, perhaps by the end of this year. We'll see.
Today I set up this page strictly for my concert instrument compositions.
Feel free to download. Don't bother about the "buy now" stuff. Tell all your friends!
Fantasies and Recollections is a piece for Woodwind Quintet I composed about 2 years ago in standard notation on some fairly unwieldy software (using dynamics was really dodgy). I look forward to hearing it performed by human musicians.
Woodwind Quintet consists of Flute, Oboe, Clarinet, French Horn, and Bassoon. I swapped out the bassoon for the contrabassoon, which is in a lower register, deeper tones, but less agile. As with all these instruments the composer must always keep the breath in mind, especially with the Contrabassoon.
https://wardtrotter.bandcamp.com/track/fantasies-and-recollections
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Jun 29, 2017 - 07:12pm PT
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I have long known that the brain is quite capable of "writing" in an almost purely mechanical mode, basically on auto-pilot, requiring little conscious input aside for holding attention to the page and letting the brain basically dictate
Perhaps, if you're just weaving sentences together gracefully and hoping for a cogent product. "Non-fiction" science and math are quite the opposite. Try doing those on auto-pilot. But sometimes I think it must happen when writing advanced material for I certainly have less than fond memories of reading a single paragraph of advanced math over and over, and letting it slowly sink in. Was it poor composition, where several paragraphs with examples might have been much clearer, or auto-pilot by an authority who simply assumed the reader knew more of the subject than reasonably expected?
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Jun 29, 2017 - 08:36pm PT
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Actually John I was talking about literary non-fiction. Fiction writing could probably never happen as anything but an observer-dependent product. Thing is, conscious awareness can to some degree direct and target what content the brain churns up. When I "mail it in," I just go with the first thing the brain serves up and the product is likely derivative from past work. Anything creative and "original" requires conscious participation, or else get ready for a pastiche.
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Dingus McGee
Social climber
Where Safety trumps Leaving No Trace
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Jun 30, 2017 - 04:26am PT
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Largo,
some words from Csikszentmihalyi, Flow : Conscious awareness can process about seven bits of information and takes about 1/8 sec to recognize one set of bits from another. Think of this time constant 1/8 sec as the persistence of consciousness. This amounts to 126 bits per sec. Listening to one person speak takes some 40 bits of that capacity so maybe we can simultaneously listen to 3 people talking at one time?
MikeL,
this processing rate makes for 185 billion bits in a lifetime which is a little short of infinite. And so is seven bits per chunk somewhat less than infinite.
But what is our unconscious[non conscious awareness] processing rate?
I see the rate used for a simple robot: The robotic control stream requires < 50 Kbps. . An upper bound but useful.
There are no robots that can come close to being able to ski yet alone bump ski -- but likely eventually one will be able. What is the bid rate for this activity? Likely >> seven bits per chunk per 1/8 sec.
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yanqui
climber
Balcarce, Argentina
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Jun 30, 2017 - 04:39am PT
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healyje: I just looked at this, and thought about it a little bit. It is math (or maths if you like) but the the computer's role is still just crunching numbers.
Let me explain. The question is (from the arxiv article): if we have a set of natural numbers of the form {1,2, ...,n} could it be true for that set, that every time we split it into two disjoint parts at least one of the parts will have numbers a,b,c (the numbers will have to be distinct: see last edit) that satisfy the pythagorean equation a^2 + b^2 = c^2?
For example the division {1,2,3}, {3,4} shows {1,2,3,4,5} doesn't work since 1^2+2^2=5 not 3^2=9.
I have no idea why anyone should be interested in such a property (see the second to last edit for clarification), but one observation that makes it interesting from a mathematical point of view is that if we can find one set where it works then it is clear that it works for every bigger set. The reason is that when we divide the bigger set into two parts, this induces a division on the smaller set, and the answer is already there. This realization, although it could be formalized with induction, has to do with the way human beings think about math (we don't have computers that work like this yet).
So anyways, now the question is: if we program a computer to crunch out the cases, case by case, will it stumble on a set that works? What the computer science guys found out is: yes. The first set that works is: {1,2,...,7285}. Just getting to there took ingenious programming techniques and massive computing power: state of the art.
However, the work (or role) of the computer in proving this theorem is light years away from what Perelman did when he got interested in and proved the Poincare conjecture. I doubt this computer will be offered tenure at the MIT math department and left to pursue its own mathematical interests.
Edit to add: From the definition in the arxiv aricle the numbers a,b,c don't have to be distinct but they will be distinct because they are natural numbers (see last edit).
Edit to add: Too stupid to leave in print!
Edit a third time: I should think more before I post, but I just looked at the link healyje posted. The other smart part of the solution was to frame the coloring problem in terms of the partition problem (something human beings did). I'm sure this equivalence is easy to see, but I gotta get back to work!
One more edit: Jesus H Christ I say some stupid things when I don't think them through! If (a,b,c) are natural numbers that satisfy a^2 + b^2=c^2 they have to be distinct. The Greeks already knew this 2500 years ago. So while the article in arxiv does not assume that Pythagorean triples are distinct numbers, it turns out they are, because they are natural numbers. At any rate, none of this changes the basic significance of my original post (which was actually OK, in retrospect, had I made the observation that when Pythagorean triples are natural numbers, they have to be three distinct numbers).
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