arguablyclever - Tumblr blog

[arguablyclever]

Blogs-R-Us #2

Another word vomit paper. You know the drill. [Word count starts here]

The first half of this class was about categorization and trains of thought, for the most part, about which I complained for a long while about how one cannot and should not make assumptions about how the minds of others work due to some pretty clear and obvious signs that you could not under almost any circumstance logistically claim that the way your own mind works is the way that others’ minds work even in the simplest and smallest of ways, especially regarding simple shoutouts and quick thinking.

This second half of this class has been about music, empathy, space, and technology, for the most part. Interestingly, the papers we have been reading as of late have not been very often about only the author’s self and their experiences in their own mind like I was complaining about in the first blog post, but instead about the genuine experiences of a group, sometimes with actual scientific research to back it up instead of only thought experiments. This is greatly helpful, as we are completely unable to discuss anything in class together, as this class has no lectures, no group assignments anymore after the beginning of the quarantine, and not a single Zoom meeting to make up for any of that. But I’m not complaining. There’s no need, at least for these papers, as most of them back themselves up with more reasonable arguments than just “But my brain works this way, so I must be right!” They’re backed up with research or discussing the minds and tendencies of a group outside of oneself.

That is, of course, mostly with the exception of the paper we read specifically on interstellar empathy. I could not believe some of the things that person was saying. Essentially, all the things that they were including as important for interspace communications, as in capable of communing with humans on an empathic level, were things that not even humans do. My sister and I read through the paper, trying to work out what such an alien would have to be like, and the closest thing we could come up with was that the person wanted us to find pretty much solely some sort of hyper-empathic übervulcans. We were so confused as to why the standards were set so high! I’m still confused! No Earth creature is that empathetic. Are we thus not fit for intercommunication?

...Come to think of it, maybe we aren’t. I certainly don’t think that we’re exactly ready for “disclosure,” as people tend to call it.

Okay, in that case, my consideration and enjoyment of that particular paper rides entirely on whether or not their claim involves humans as being ready for alien contact in the first place.

In another class, we had been doing a group project involving music being processed in much the same way as language, and in another class last semester, I had learned that there is a running theory that language activates the same areas of the brain as the movements that language discusses. For instance, if you say the word “kick,” the same areas of the brain that would control a kicking motion are activated by the word being heard or said. Similarly, that paper discussed the activation of areas of the brain involving movement upon hearing music, as though it is instinct for a human being to dance. It also adds to the theory and evidence that language and music are processed the same way.

The one about artificial intelligence was intriguing and a bit frustrating to me. See, my dad is a bit of a pioneer in artificial intelligence, in that he is trying to create a system that has the power of deduction and, by extension, theoretically, the power of true learning. Under the assumption that human beings are essentially blank slates at birth, such a program should be able to adapt, grow, and gain personality over time. It would be interesting to see “grow” in a humanoid robotic body. Would the algorithm be able to create what we humans consider to be a mind? Would we be able to create something with its own independent thought process? Humans work on a certain kind of algorithm, right?

What annoyed me about this particular paper was the fact that one of the main claims given by the author regarding whether or not something was living was specifically stated to be whether or not it had exchangeable or reusable parts. If you could exchange or reuse parts in a different “body,” that was not considerable as a living thing. However, we reuse and exchange parts all the time. Transplants and transfusions are exchanging and reusing parts in a different body, and in regards to doing so in different kinds of bodies, such as a clock gear or spring being used in an entirely different machine, not only can you give a cat dog’s blood in a transfusion, but you can also give a human being certain pig and alternate primate organs, or give a human a blood transfusion using coconut water. Xenotransplantation is nothing new, and fits the definition the author describes just fine. Not only that, but there are humans who cannot reproduce. Beside that, even cellular reproduction requires outside sources, and there could theoretically be machines in the future that self-replicate. Are barren persons thus machines and not animals? These are horrible definitions for these things, especially considering that there could be biologically based technology, especially in the future.

The next question is: how can I link this new information to the old information? Well, in most cases, I didn’t understand the hilariously circular rants of multiple authors chasing the answer before the evidence, so I hesitate to call it “information,” as opposed to “wordy musings.” Metacognition about oneself posed at others in hopes of finding shared experience or hitting the goldmine in terms of theorizing about others. Hoping that the inner machinations of their own mind happen to fit with others’; but you already know my feelings on this matter. I hate it.

[Word count: 1009]

[arguablyclever]

Blogs-R-Us #1 (Assignment)

Roughly, the assignment here is to write at least a thousand words of free-flowing thought (ie word vomit) onto a blog about Cognitive Science and essentially hope for the best. So. Here goes.

[Word count begins here] Essentially, cognitive science, as I know it so far, is the study of metacognition, not just cognition as a whole. Nearly every framing device (ha ha) that we use to study these concepts seems to be about how people think about thinking, and not just patterns of free-form thought. Nearly every paper that we have read has been about a thought experiment in which the writer discusses their own thinking, and not much at all about their understanding of others’ experience being different than the writer’s own without some extenuating circumstance, such as hypothetical persons with and without Alzheimer's Disease keeping one of them from being able to remember anything without some external device to remind them. I mean, I certainly need reminders quite regularly, and to my knowledge, I have ADHD, not Alzheimer's. It has been rather frustrating throughout this class to read a lot of these papers, as the way they are written is circular logic, extremely convoluted in design and extremely difficult to read and at all understand; most of the other students with whom I have discussed these papers agree that most of it has just been a confusing mess. Nearly every single paper could be summed up in a matter of two sentences and still get the entire point across. I don’t know what was up with that guy and boats? Nearly the whole thing was about.... boats? I’m still not sure what he was talking about, or what he was getting at. All I can remember from it, even after going over it twice with a philosophy tutor, is boats. If he had summarized what he meant, it would be a lot less confusing, and maybe I’d remember what he was even talking about (beyond boats, of course). In short: I feel like it all should have been a lot more straightforward. And, as I continue to essentially rant out my frustrations with these papers, why is nearly every single one so self-centric? I understand the fact that people cannot escape their own minds, but I feel that there’s a limit to how much you can use yourself as an example of the populace. In psychology, at least, you need a sample size of at least thirty to be able to start any sort of survey or experiment. Self-examination may be a start to trying to figure out what to study, but in nearly all of these, the authors are essentially making themselves a case study equal to the entire populace of their culture! It just makes no sense to me. It may very well be, though, that I am saying so as someone who personally knows their own neurodivergences. I know for a fact that I have a number of neurodivergent qualities that make me rather different from the populace as a whole, and thus, I have the frame that I, personally, cannot ever use myself as an example of the populace. Thus, I am projecting that quality onto others; I cannot assume my mental state as it functions fits the pattern of functioning of others’ brains due to neurodivergence, but can neurotypicals safely make such assumptions? I have decided not, and here is why: sometimes, neurodivergences are minor, or otherwise impossible to detect. There is also no guarantee that the majority of the populace is not neurodivergent in some way, and very few neurodivergences, even with the same diagnosis, are that similar in symptomology. ADHD, for instance, has a very wide range of possible symptoms, even in adults, each of which can be present (or not!) in different people. And that’s not even a spectrum disorder! This, of course, isn’t even to mention my being called upon in class multiple times, and ending up with a very different answer than most others in our class. During the Framing lesson, for instance, I was called upon twice: once to draw a “vehicle,” and once because I chose a strange answer to a very generic question. Upon being asked to draw a “vehicle,” my mind went through a variety of hoops: Firstly, I do not drive, and while at school, am not driven about much. I personally do not consider things a “vehicle” unless they have a motor or other mechanical self-propulsion of sorts (though possibly fuel-based), and by golly, that must mean that more motors makes something more “vehicle!” Not only that, but as a child, I spent quite a bit of time playing a game called Spore, wherein there are three types of vehicles one could have in the Civilization stage of the game, being land vehicle, water vehicle, and air vehicle, the best and most versatile of which is, of course, the air vehicle. Thus, my first instinct when told to draw a “vehicle,” is to draw an airplane, much to the surprise and, frankly, dismay of my classmates, who all imagined that I would draw what they would: a blocky mid-sized sedan. An airplane has, often, four motors (double a hybrid car’s two), ten wheels, many passengers to carry about, plenty of cargo space, brakes, gas, et cetera. To me, it’s the quintessential “vehicle.” Upon being asked to write down one zoo animal, my instinct was “meerkat,” which was specifically pointed out and stated to be strange. The reasoning, of course, was that the San Diego Zoo has a very high-end Africa-centric exhibit area, which includes a wide field for meerkats. Most zoos have lions, tigers, bears (oh my), penguins, giraffes, elephants, zebras, the works, but the San Diego Zoo is known for a lot more. I’m not there to see those other exhibits I could see anywhere else. I want to see the strange and new when I go to look at an exhibit somewhere. Thus, meerkat is my first instinct when I hear “zoo.” It had not occurred to me before that even my most instinctive shout-outs would be so different from even the rest of the class in a school filled with people I had thought were so much like me. In short: don’t assume your brain and other brains work the same way, no matter who you are. They don’t work the same way, and pretty provably. See example: neurodivergences. [Word count: 1034]