Humans have many delusions, i.e., mistaken beliefs they are especially reluctant to correct. To understand such delusions, it helps to understand the many layers that make up the human mind. In the following I outline my best guesses, ordered roughly by time/layer. (I’m especially interested in what I’ve missed or mis-classified.)
That's a good question. I'd guess it arose with farming, since it correlates with farming-era values: "people who ... believe in a just world also tend to be more religious, more authoritarian, more conservative, more likely to admire political leaders and existing social institutions." To strengthen the power of social norms, we came to believe those who follow social norms are rewarded, those who do not are punished, more so than they actually are.
To understand such delusions, it helps to understand the many layers that make up the human mind.
Does it? For example, I can trace my father's belief that the Black Panthers are going to take over society in a civil war to the primate layer: "Primates can thus be deluded about who supports which coalition, and how strong are coalitions." But how does that help me understand it?
To make sure you haven’t missed any, you should make sure all the entries over at the self-delusion blog, http://youarenotsosmart.com/, fit into your groupings.
Animal: "Animals usually act as if things not directly in view don’t exist. Embedded in brain architecture, these mistakes are hard to correct." This is an odd comment as applied to human psychology. We are constantly, routinely aware of the existence of things not currently visible.
Socialite: "Social mammals use a standard stress response for social stress; being disliked hurts health as if others had psychic powers." I suppose the cognitive error in this is actual belief in the psychic powers of other people. This has been widely overcome in the civilized world. Of course, you are claiming only that overcoming it was *hard*, not that it was *impossible*. The vagueness of your claim makes it hard to evaluate.
Primate: "Primates can thus be deluded about who supports which coalition, and how strong are coalitions." We are also prey to many other sorts of overconfidence. But some people are chronic self-doubters; where do they fit your scheme?
Talker: "We . . . are often deluded to think reality divides neatly according to our word categories. . . . We . . . are deluded to think we reason more to find truth than to win arguments, and to think reality constrain[]s shared beliefs more than it does." These seem like philosophical errors, of little practical importance.
I have realized that superstimuli play an absolutely central role in conscious experience - to wit, we are all under the control of superstimuli! Evolutionary psychology may point to the central importance of sex, but remember, the female form itself (sex symbols) becomes a superstimuli when make-up is applied (blusher, lip-stick etc. etc).
In short superstimuli weld gobsmacking power over the human mind.
"...which rich low-self-control folks eagerly consume, at the expense of work, kids, and work-like-hobbies."
And that's just human created superstimuli. Imagine what superstimuli a transhuman could create. Actually we probably couldn't imagine. Suffice it say the prols could be easily controlled, without any actual coercion or even without people realizing they are under control.
The propoganda techniques first discovered accidently by Nazi Germany actually had their origins in the arts - Hilter was a failed artist and Goebbels was an arts aficionado. Arts are based on the principles of superstimuli. Consider that the ability to weld superstimuli effectively literally did enable these evil folks to conquer half of Europe.
The amount of consumption of superstimuli and the power they weild seems to be massive and out of all proportion ( sports, drugs and pop culture are only the beginning, consider again political propganda, and the example given above)...
Consider the sales figures of two different books...
E.T. Jaynes' "Probability Theory: The Logic of Science" (a few thousand copies)
J.K.Rowling "Harry Potter" series (400 million copies)
Something is going on here that even the Hansons and Bostroms have missed, no?.
Considering the power of superstimuli and its association with arts and the cognitive skill of categorization should give Bayesian fan-boys very serious pause as to whether theirs is the ultimate cognitive power. Black swan warning sirens are wailing somewhere in the distance. Think it through folks.
> For example, we can be terrified> of heights, even when we “know”> we are safe.
Putting the word "know" in quotation marks suggests you don't intend it to be taken seriously, i.e. we think we know, we say we know, but maybe we don't really. Is that what you meant? Quotation marks tend to de-emphasize a word.
The next step in human "evolution" is already available, and it actually requires intentional altruistic mutation-- done now-- rather than arm-chair philosophizing, technology, or anything of the like. Such a mutation is not just the next step, by the way, but the final as well; it spells the end of human evolution (because perfection cannot evolve). It is with great delight that I am able to say with empirical proof that said "next step" is possible for anyone able to read and understand the contents of this web-site:
I take it you don't believe that there is any human endeavor taken for entirely personal reasons or reasons that are only indirectly connected to signaling?
The explanation of signaling does not map well with our intuitions about human behavior, our internal dialogue on human behavior, nor entirely with formal study of human behavior.
I'm not saying that our psychology isn't built on tribal evolution but our mental states today are not simple signaling mechanisms, they are complex emergent states that no longer map perfectly to their simplistic roots.
In other words I think you have taken your eliminative reductionism too far.
Surely the biggest problem we face is that much of the enjoyment we gain from life is down to satisfaction of basic animal impulses (social interaction, physical activity, sustenance, procreation etc.) and that fulfilment of those skews much of our economic organization and therefore resource use.
To move "beyond" that into your transhuman phase would not be very fulfilling for human beings... as Keynes so rightly said, we have seen the future already and it is the rich. He wasn't being optimistic...
(Incidentally, ironic that an activity like hunting could remain an "aristocratic" or elite activity for millennia past its functional expiry date.)
You might want to take a look at an old essay that David Hays and I published in the old Journal of Social and Biological Structures: Principles and Development of Natural Intelligence (download here): Here's the abstract:
The phenomena of natural intelligence can be grouped into five classes, and a specific principle of information processing, implemented in neural tissue, produces each class of phenomena. (1) The modal principle subserves feeling and is implemented in the reticular formation. (2) The diagonalization principle subserves coherence and is the basic principle, implemented in neocortex. (3) Action is subserved by the decision principle, which involves interlinked positive and negative feedback loops, and resides in modally differentiated cortex. (4) The problem of finitization resolves into a figural principle, implemented in secondary cortical areas; figurality resolves the conflict between pro-positional and Gestalt accounts of mental representations. (5) Finally, the phenomena of analysis reflect the action of the indexing principle, which is implemented through the neural mechanisms of language.
These principles have an intrinsic ordering (as given above) such that implementation of each principle presupposes the prior implementation of its predecessor. This ordering is preserved in phylogeny: (1) mode, vertebrates; (2) diagonalization, reptiles; (3) decision, mammals; (4) figural, primates; (5) indexing. Homo sapiens sapiens. The same ordering appears in human ontogeny and corresponds to Piaget's stages of intellectual development, and to stages of language acquisition.
That'll only give you "five" layers, but then your scheme includes cultural developments. I've got an old paper that does some of that in terms of narrative and personality: The Evolution of Narrative and the Self (download here). Abstract:
Narratives bring a range of disparate behavioral modes before the conscious self. Preliterate narratives consist of a loose string of episodes where each episode, or small group of episodes, displays a single mode. With literacy comes the ability to construct long narratives in which the episodes are tightly structured so as to exhibit a character's essential nature. Complex strands of episodes are woven together into a single narrative, with flashbacks being common. The emergence of the novel makes it possible to depict personal growth and change. Intimacy, a private sphere of sociality, emerges as both a mode of experience depicted within novels and as a mode in which people read novels. The novelist constructs a narrator to structure experience for reorganization.
Humans have many delusions, i.e., mistaken beliefs they are especially reluctant to correct.
Indeed. I fear that many postings of the LW/OB crowd will confirm this for future historians all too well.
The 'Overcoming Bias' postings seem to be dangerously close to conflating what is evolutionary adaptive with what is good. Personality, I don't give a toss about evolution or 'reproductive fitness' and neither will the posthumans.
Industry has devised hyper-stimulating food, art, stories, sport, games, drugs, etc.,
Great! Personality I find reality dull by comparison. Super-stimuli are good because they form the basis of positive conscious experience, I say the more super-stimuli the better (within certain limits). I'm not saying we should retreat from reality - certain contraints will always tie us to reality to some extent, but these contraints are ultimately weak - the only real limit I would set is that consumption of superstimuli should not compromise our individual survivial - but this condition is not the same as the evolutionary one (genetic fitness).
More likely, evolution will be overthrow by a centralized singleton, the future will be saturated with superstimuli, far mode activities (arts) will come to dominate, and economic activities or evolutionary psychology won't have much relevence, because all the near-mode stuff will have been automated, and we will have modified many of our preferences.
All the OB/LW visions are off track. There can be no reflective decision theory without sentience (conscious experience). In fact, your pututative 'reflective decision theory' is equivalent to information theory. Bayes is not the foundation of rationality (it is merely a special case of categorization). CEV is nonsense (you can't perform these extrapolations without conscious deliberations). There will be no ems explosion. Wages won't decline to the survival level. This is because economics and evolutionary psychology will fade into insignficance, as sentient super-intelligences based not on CEV but on an information-theoretic definition of beauty and aesthetic-preference take centralized control, stop evolution in its tracks, and saturate the future with superstimuli.
I look forward to my kind of world, where the need for tedious work has been dispensed with, annoying kids and sullen teenagers are few and far between, the Bayesian paradigm has been overthrown, markets and evolution have been trampled under the jack-boots of a centralized Singleton, and I can indulge in superstimuli to my hearts content.
*sigh* All that is saturating OB/LW at present is bad thinking, sloppy suppositions and useless AI designs.
There seems to be a thread running through many of these Historical Modes of Delusion (each with their Means of Delusion and Relations of Delusion): the common thread is that people tend to think that they are more noble, knowledgeable, helpful, sharing, truth-seeking, and generally good than they really are.
Missing delusions: 1) males and females each have delusions specific to their own sex -- concerning sex. 2) In agraria we get specialists in violence (warriors), ritual and ideas (priests), and production -- each has their own delusions. But surely the priests' are the greatest, since their trade was delusion.
Robin's terminal expectation of stability is clearly delusional. Why Robin's subconscious feels such a strong need for this expectational belief is not clear. No doubt a number of clustered delusions underlie the belief. ;-)
That's a good question. I'd guess it arose with farming, since it correlates with farming-era values: "people who ... believe in a just world also tend to be more religious, more authoritarian, more conservative, more likely to admire political leaders and existing social institutions." To strengthen the power of social norms, we came to believe those who follow social norms are rewarded, those who do not are punished, more so than they actually are.
To understand such delusions, it helps to understand the many layers that make up the human mind.
Does it? For example, I can trace my father's belief that the Black Panthers are going to take over society in a civil war to the primate layer: "Primates can thus be deluded about who supports which coalition, and how strong are coalitions." But how does that help me understand it?
To make sure you haven’t missed any, you should make sure all the entries over at the self-delusion blog, http://youarenotsosmart.com/, fit into your groupings.
For example, where would this fit in the taxonomy: http://youarenotsosmart.com...
Comments on the first few categories:
Animal: "Animals usually act as if things not directly in view don’t exist. Embedded in brain architecture, these mistakes are hard to correct." This is an odd comment as applied to human psychology. We are constantly, routinely aware of the existence of things not currently visible.
Socialite: "Social mammals use a standard stress response for social stress; being disliked hurts health as if others had psychic powers." I suppose the cognitive error in this is actual belief in the psychic powers of other people. This has been widely overcome in the civilized world. Of course, you are claiming only that overcoming it was *hard*, not that it was *impossible*. The vagueness of your claim makes it hard to evaluate.
Primate: "Primates can thus be deluded about who supports which coalition, and how strong are coalitions." We are also prey to many other sorts of overconfidence. But some people are chronic self-doubters; where do they fit your scheme?
Talker: "We . . . are often deluded to think reality divides neatly according to our word categories. . . . We . . . are deluded to think we reason more to find truth than to win arguments, and to think reality constrain[]s shared beliefs more than it does." These seem like philosophical errors, of little practical importance.
Interesting stuff, even if not wholly convincing.
Does it frustrate anybody else to try to read lists that are composed of words/phrases of different parts of speech?
"Personal styles as preference, discernment, vs. show wealth, autonomy, loyal, tough, skills."
"Personal styles as [noun], [noun], vs. [verb phrase], [noun], [adjective], [adjective], [noun]."
So painful to read!
I have realized that superstimuli play an absolutely central role in conscious experience - to wit, we are all under the control of superstimuli! Evolutionary psychology may point to the central importance of sex, but remember, the female form itself (sex symbols) becomes a superstimuli when make-up is applied (blusher, lip-stick etc. etc).
"Industry has devised hyper-stimulating food, art, stories, sport, games, drugs, etc.,"
In short superstimuli weld gobsmacking power over the human mind.
"...which rich low-self-control folks eagerly consume, at the expense of work, kids, and work-like-hobbies."
And that's just human created superstimuli. Imagine what superstimuli a transhuman could create. Actually we probably couldn't imagine. Suffice it say the prols could be easily controlled, without any actual coercion or even without people realizing they are under control.
The propoganda techniques first discovered accidently by Nazi Germany actually had their origins in the arts - Hilter was a failed artist and Goebbels was an arts aficionado. Arts are based on the principles of superstimuli. Consider that the ability to weld superstimuli effectively literally did enable these evil folks to conquer half of Europe.
The amount of consumption of superstimuli and the power they weild seems to be massive and out of all proportion ( sports, drugs and pop culture are only the beginning, consider again political propganda, and the example given above)...
Consider the sales figures of two different books...
E.T. Jaynes' "Probability Theory: The Logic of Science" (a few thousand copies)
J.K.Rowling "Harry Potter" series (400 million copies)
Something is going on here that even the Hansons and Bostroms have missed, no?.
Considering the power of superstimuli and its association with arts and the cognitive skill of categorization should give Bayesian fan-boys very serious pause as to whether theirs is the ultimate cognitive power. Black swan warning sirens are wailing somewhere in the distance. Think it through folks.
> For example, we can be terrified> of heights, even when we “know”> we are safe.
Putting the word "know" in quotation marks suggests you don't intend it to be taken seriously, i.e. we think we know, we say we know, but maybe we don't really. Is that what you meant? Quotation marks tend to de-emphasize a word.
The next step in human "evolution" is already available, and it actually requires intentional altruistic mutation-- done now-- rather than arm-chair philosophizing, technology, or anything of the like. Such a mutation is not just the next step, by the way, but the final as well; it spells the end of human evolution (because perfection cannot evolve). It is with great delight that I am able to say with empirical proof that said "next step" is possible for anyone able to read and understand the contents of this web-site:
http://actualfreedom.com.au/
Ain't life grand?
"fun" eh?
I take it you don't believe that there is any human endeavor taken for entirely personal reasons or reasons that are only indirectly connected to signaling?
The explanation of signaling does not map well with our intuitions about human behavior, our internal dialogue on human behavior, nor entirely with formal study of human behavior.
I'm not saying that our psychology isn't built on tribal evolution but our mental states today are not simple signaling mechanisms, they are complex emergent states that no longer map perfectly to their simplistic roots.
In other words I think you have taken your eliminative reductionism too far.
Surely the biggest problem we face is that much of the enjoyment we gain from life is down to satisfaction of basic animal impulses (social interaction, physical activity, sustenance, procreation etc.) and that fulfilment of those skews much of our economic organization and therefore resource use.
To move "beyond" that into your transhuman phase would not be very fulfilling for human beings... as Keynes so rightly said, we have seen the future already and it is the rich. He wasn't being optimistic...
(Incidentally, ironic that an activity like hunting could remain an "aristocratic" or elite activity for millennia past its functional expiry date.)
Nice and ambitious post.
Hi Robin,
You might want to take a look at an old essay that David Hays and I published in the old Journal of Social and Biological Structures: Principles and Development of Natural Intelligence (download here): Here's the abstract:
The phenomena of natural intelligence can be grouped into five classes, and a specific principle of information processing, implemented in neural tissue, produces each class of phenomena. (1) The modal principle subserves feeling and is implemented in the reticular formation. (2) The diagonalization principle subserves coherence and is the basic principle, implemented in neocortex. (3) Action is subserved by the decision principle, which involves interlinked positive and negative feedback loops, and resides in modally differentiated cortex. (4) The problem of finitization resolves into a figural principle, implemented in secondary cortical areas; figurality resolves the conflict between pro-positional and Gestalt accounts of mental representations. (5) Finally, the phenomena of analysis reflect the action of the indexing principle, which is implemented through the neural mechanisms of language.
These principles have an intrinsic ordering (as given above) such that implementation of each principle presupposes the prior implementation of its predecessor. This ordering is preserved in phylogeny: (1) mode, vertebrates; (2) diagonalization, reptiles; (3) decision, mammals; (4) figural, primates; (5) indexing. Homo sapiens sapiens. The same ordering appears in human ontogeny and corresponds to Piaget's stages of intellectual development, and to stages of language acquisition.
That'll only give you "five" layers, but then your scheme includes cultural developments. I've got an old paper that does some of that in terms of narrative and personality: The Evolution of Narrative and the Self (download here). Abstract:
Narratives bring a range of disparate behavioral modes before the conscious self. Preliterate narratives consist of a loose string of episodes where each episode, or small group of episodes, displays a single mode. With literacy comes the ability to construct long narratives in which the episodes are tightly structured so as to exhibit a character's essential nature. Complex strands of episodes are woven together into a single narrative, with flashbacks being common. The emergence of the novel makes it possible to depict personal growth and change. Intimacy, a private sphere of sociality, emerges as both a mode of experience depicted within novels and as a mode in which people read novels. The novelist constructs a narrator to structure experience for reorganization.
Humans have many delusions, i.e., mistaken beliefs they are especially reluctant to correct.
Indeed. I fear that many postings of the LW/OB crowd will confirm this for future historians all too well.
The 'Overcoming Bias' postings seem to be dangerously close to conflating what is evolutionary adaptive with what is good. Personality, I don't give a toss about evolution or 'reproductive fitness' and neither will the posthumans.
Industry has devised hyper-stimulating food, art, stories, sport, games, drugs, etc.,
Great! Personality I find reality dull by comparison. Super-stimuli are good because they form the basis of positive conscious experience, I say the more super-stimuli the better (within certain limits). I'm not saying we should retreat from reality - certain contraints will always tie us to reality to some extent, but these contraints are ultimately weak - the only real limit I would set is that consumption of superstimuli should not compromise our individual survivial - but this condition is not the same as the evolutionary one (genetic fitness).
More likely, evolution will be overthrow by a centralized singleton, the future will be saturated with superstimuli, far mode activities (arts) will come to dominate, and economic activities or evolutionary psychology won't have much relevence, because all the near-mode stuff will have been automated, and we will have modified many of our preferences.
All the OB/LW visions are off track. There can be no reflective decision theory without sentience (conscious experience). In fact, your pututative 'reflective decision theory' is equivalent to information theory. Bayes is not the foundation of rationality (it is merely a special case of categorization). CEV is nonsense (you can't perform these extrapolations without conscious deliberations). There will be no ems explosion. Wages won't decline to the survival level. This is because economics and evolutionary psychology will fade into insignficance, as sentient super-intelligences based not on CEV but on an information-theoretic definition of beauty and aesthetic-preference take centralized control, stop evolution in its tracks, and saturate the future with superstimuli.
I look forward to my kind of world, where the need for tedious work has been dispensed with, annoying kids and sullen teenagers are few and far between, the Bayesian paradigm has been overthrown, markets and evolution have been trampled under the jack-boots of a centralized Singleton, and I can indulge in superstimuli to my hearts content.
*sigh* All that is saturating OB/LW at present is bad thinking, sloppy suppositions and useless AI designs.
There seems to be a thread running through many of these Historical Modes of Delusion (each with their Means of Delusion and Relations of Delusion): the common thread is that people tend to think that they are more noble, knowledgeable, helpful, sharing, truth-seeking, and generally good than they really are.
Missing delusions: 1) males and females each have delusions specific to their own sex -- concerning sex. 2) In agraria we get specialists in violence (warriors), ritual and ideas (priests), and production -- each has their own delusions. But surely the priests' are the greatest, since their trade was delusion.
Everything is always so dystopian in Robin's world.
Robin's terminal expectation of stability is clearly delusional. Why Robin's subconscious feels such a strong need for this expectational belief is not clear. No doubt a number of clustered delusions underlie the belief. ;-)