Steven Pinker's 'How the mind works'
A few ideas in the book I found interesting. (Though I don’t fully understand or accept/agree with them all)
Page 25:
The Computational theory of mind resolves the paradox. It says that beliefs and desires are information, incarnated as the configurations of symbols. The symbols are the physical states of the bits of matter, like chips in a computer or neurons in the brain. They symbolize things in the world because they are triggered by those things via our sense organs and because of what they do once they are triggered. If the bits of matter that constitute a symbol in just the right way, the symbols corresponding to one belief can give raise to new symbols corresponding to another belief logically related to it, which can give rise to symbols corresponding to other beliefs, and so on. Eventually the bit of matter constituting a symbol bump into bits of matter connected to the muscles, and behavior happens.
Page 28:
Just as it is easy to multiply some numbers and announce the product but impossible to take a product and announce the numbers that were multiplied to get it, optics is easy but inverse optics is impossible. Yet your brain does it every time you open the refrigerator and pull out a jar. How can this be? The answer is that the brain supplies the missing information, information about the world we evolved in and how it reflects light.
Page 35:
The families of neurons that will form the different mental organs, all descendants of a homogeneous stretch of embryonic tissue, must be designed to be opportunistic as the brain assembles itself, seizing any available information to differentiate from one another. The coordinates in the skull may be on trigger for differentiation, bu the pattern of input firings from connected neurons is another. Since the brain is destined to be an organ of computation, it would be surprising if the genome did not exploit the capacity of neural tissue to process information during brain assembly. … To make precise connections, though, the baby neurons must begin to function, and their firing patters carries information downstream about their pinpoint connections. This isn’t “experience”, … brains modules assume their identity by combination of what kind of tissue they start out as, where they are in the brain, and what patterns of triggering input they get during critical periods in development.
Page 39 (Couldn’t help this one):
The barf-up-your-baby theory.
Page 44
Our goals are subgoals of the ultimate goal of the genes. … sometimes the most selfish thing a gene can do is to build a selfless brain. Genes are a play within a play, not the interior monologue of the players.
Page 62:
Intelligence, then, is the ability to attain goals in the face of obstacles by means of decisions based on rational (truth-obeying) rules. … intelligence consists of specifying a goal, assessing the current situation to see how it differs from the goal and applying a set of operations that reduce the difference. … We have a set of desires, and we pursue them using beliefs, which when all goes well, are at least approximately or probabilistically true.
Page 65:
Intelligence comes from a different commodity, information. Information is a correlation between two things that is produced by a lawful process.
Page 66:
Our rational machine owes it’s rationality to two properties glued together in the entity we call a symbol: a symbol carries information, and it causes things to happen.
Page 70:
If one string of words in English can correspond to two meanings in the mind, meaning in the mind cannot be strings of words in English. Sentences in a spoken language are cluttered with grammatical boilerplate. They are needed to help get information from one head to another by way of the mouth and the ear, a slow channel, but they are not needed inside the head where information can be transmitted directly by thick bundles of neurons. So the statements in a knowledge system are not sentences in English but rather inscriptions in a richer language of thought, “mentalese”
Page 71:
Symbols both stand for concept and mechanically cause things to happen
Page 78:
And then came computers: fairy-free, fully exorcised hunks of metal that could not be explained without the full lexicon of mentalistic taboo words. … The more complex the system the more expert the user, the more their technical conversation sounds like the plot of a soap opera. … A computer is the most legalistic, persnickety, hard-nosed, unforgiving demander of precision and explicitness in the universe.
Page 80:
… how the marks scribbled and erased by demons inside a computer are supposed to represent or stand for things in the world. … There are two common answers. One is that symbol is connected o its referent in the world by our sense organs. … The other answer is that the unique pattern of symbol manipulations triggered by the first symbol mirrors the unique pattern of relationships between the referent of the first symbol and the referent of the triggered symbol.
Page 112 - 126:
Does the content of our common-sense thoughts require a computational device designed to implement a highly structured mentalese, or can it be handled by generic neural-network stuff: connectoplasm. Raw connectoplasm has trouble with five feats of everyday thinking. One feat is entertaining the concept of an individual. The second problem for associationism is called compositionality: the ability of a representation to be built out of parts and to have meaning that comes from the meanings of the parts and from the way they are combined. Another such feat is another mental talent known as quantification. It arises from a combination of the first problem, individuals, with the second , compositionality. The fourth feat, the trick that multiplies human thought into truly astronomical numbers is not the slotting of the concepts into three or four roles but a kind of mental fecundity called recursion. The final feat is the mental faculty to be ale to entertain both fuzzy and non-fuzzy thoughts simultaneously. People think in two modes.They can form fuzzy stereotypes by uninsightfully soaking up correlations among properties, taking advantage of the fact that things in the world tend to fall into clusters. But people can also create systems of rules - intuitive theories - that define categories in terms of the rules that apply to them, and that treat all members of the category equally.
Page 136:
Access-consciousness- The short-term memory acts just like the consciousness. When we are aware of a piece of information, many parts of the mind can act on it. We not only see a ruler in front of us but can describe it, reach for it, deduce that it can prop a window, or count it’s markings.Page 139:
Access-consciousness has four features: First we are aware of a rich field of sensation: color, shapes, sounds, smell, etc. Second, portion of this information can fall under the spotlight of attention, get rotated into and out of short-term memory, and feed our deliberative cognition. Third, sensations and thoughts comes with an emotional flavoring: pleasant of unpleasant, interesting or not, etc. Finally, the executive, the “I”, appears to make choices and pull the leavers of behaviour.