What is identity? It's a long story.
Ascriptions of identity happen in the mind at the level of conceptualization, and not at the lower level of perception. While perception supports a faculty of categorization which is invariant to many sensory perturbations, such as lighting conditions and partial occlusions in the case of vision, this categorical invariance with respect to sensory perturbation is not the same as object identity.
Even the recognition of objects is not the same as recognizing them as having comparable identities. A mind can know about objects, as parts of a data stream which can be modeled separately, and yet still not know about their physical separation, persistence, or identity. Let me explain.
I was trying to imagine different ways an AI could analyze a video in order to tease out my implicit ideas of how the mental processes of conception differ from and build on perception. Here's the hypothetical: An AI could have an assumption of persistence for some features, like that there will keep being a bird with a bowler hat in each successive frame of the video, and not assume persistence in other features, like the AI could be unable to guess that the bird has a cane behind its body which was seen in a previous frame.
Is this AI seeing samples from the class of "bowler hat birds" and not relating them across times? Or is it successfully forming a very limited concept of identity whose only identity criterion is "be a bird with a hat"?
The answer could be either one, depending on the details of the AI, but pondering that question led me to a description of what it means for an agent to identify a thing as existing in two percepts rather than for it to merely make the same sensory categorization about the contents of the two percepts: Percepts of two instances of a category (two different bird pictures) have similarities which are genetic (arising in the past, after which the things could go their separate ways and never meet each other or their maker again) while two views of one object have similarities because of persistence or conservation (locally, spatially, through intervening times). "This bird" isn't the very narrow category of "birds with all features presently observed to be persisting". "This bird" differs from "a bird just like this" in that the mind assumes an intervening history transforming the features observed in or inferred from one percept into those features observed in or inferred from another percept.
If the AI has no conception of identity, it will just see a sequence of samples from the category of Bowler Hat Birds, and the AI will having nothing to say on whether they're the same or different birds. Despite having learned persistence of features and sensory categorization, it will not have learned Identity, and the question of whether the bird in the second frame has a tiny cane behind its back will be answered at some ignorant base rate (for birds or for canes, about which the AI could well reason separately). If the AI does have a notion of identity, then it could tell us it sees a sequence of different Bowler Hat Birds or one persisting Bowler Hat Bird, depending on its personal categories. But whether it sees them as the same or different, that judgement will be based on whether it suspects there was a causal history in which the objects depicted in the first video frame became the object in the second video frame. If such a transformation is plausible, and would not have entailed the destruction of the tiny cane, then hey presto, we have a plausible inference at the level of conceptualization enabled through through the ascription of identity.
In summary, objecthood at its lowest level might be interpreted as something like learning separation of background and foreground in a sensory stream. Learning that the feature values of an object or the sensory categories of an object are persistent in time is not enough to license other inferences across time which Identity allows, such as supposing that this bird has a tiny unseen cane behind its back. Maybe that's not impressive to you because the AI could have learned object persistence for the cane too, but Identity also lets us do counterfactual cross-temporal density estimation for unobserved features of the bird: like if she has cancer in one frame, she'll probably still have cancer three seconds later. And finally, Identity means supposing a local transformative history (as an explanation for the similarities which allow cross-temporal density estimation) rather than a genetic similarity of the category (in which case observed dissimilarities could be written off as within-category variance).
So that's a good start at what I think Identity is. It might be more complicated. Maybe it can only be the same Bowler Hat Bird in the second video frame if the hat stayed on the whole time between frames. If so, would that specifically be part of the criterion of identity for Bowler Hat Birds, or does continued identity require continuity of identity generally? I don't know. Hard question. Important question. Not for tonight.
Simple Songs For Sarah Sparks
Here are some songs I like, which, if I've sorted through them well enough, can be played on guitar without using any barre chords. Some of the chords do require four fingers, like A/C# and D7/F#, but for these, you can just leave out the bass notes that follows the slash. "Slip Sliding Away" does technically have one barre chord, an F Major, but it doesn't occur during a singing part, so that could also be skipped, I'd say.
- Ben Gibbard - Carolina
- Ben Gibbard - You Remind Me Of Home
- Bon Iver - Skinny Love
- Bruce Springsteen - Dancing In The Dark
- Jimmy Buffet - Margaritaville
- John Denver - Thank God I'm A Country Boy
- Kathleen Edwards - Asking For Flowers
- Kathleen Edwards - I Make The Dough, You Get The Glory
- Paul Simon - Slip Sliding Away
- Sufjan Stevens - Casimir Pulaski Day
- Sufjan Stevens - The Only Thing
- The Band - Atlantic City
- The Magnetic Fields - The Book Of Love
One Syllable Professions
I wanted a list of one syllable jobs. I couldn't find that list, so I made it.
aide, bard, bass (singer), boss, chef, chief, clerk, clown, coach, cook, cop, dean, doc, grip, guard, guide, hand, host, judge, maid, (ship's) mate, mime, monk, nun, nurse, pimp, pope, priest, ref, scout, scribe, serf, shrink, smith, spy, sweep, thief, ump, vet, wonk, wright
I think "whore" could probably go on there too, but I can also see the argument that it's a slur and not a proper title of the profession. "Mayor" is one syllable long for some people and two syllables long for others. I've left out noble titles like "queen, king, prince, lord, duke". I've also omitted some historical names for young male aides, "squire, swain, jack, knave, groom". If I'm including "thief" as a profession, then "crook", "fence", and even "mule" might also merit inclusion. "Head", as a department head, doesn't seem to to be quite a job title to me, though I'm having difficulty articulating why, and though a "head of staff" might disagree. I'd like to give a dishonorable mention to "I" and "eye", which are terms for an investigator, as in the phrase "Private I", and also to "poet" and "dyer", which should be ashamed of themselves for looking so monosyllabic.
If you can name more one-syllable professions, I'd love to include them.
If you can name more one-syllable professions, I'd love to include them.
Edit: For those of you who don't read comments, the enchanting Sarah Sparks adds bum, hack, dom/domme, prof, pol, temp, star. and one more name for a young male aide, page. Great!
Other commenters add: knight, whip, quant, and nose.
Industrial Morality For The Ancestral Ape
It's not enough to do the right thing unless you have an unusually good concept of what's right.
The folk conception of morality doesn't constrain behavior enough. People can see themselves as doing the right thing even while they behave ineffectually. Morality, as popularly conceived, is not a principle which leads people to prioritize efforts with a high return on investment. Morality, as we're used to thinking about it, offers no criticism of the unambitious man who is in all other ways virtuous.
Morality, as it should be conceived, tells us to not sit idly when we don't need to rest. Morality, when taken seriously, tells us to more fully employ ourselves in the pursuit of the good. Morality, when distilled to the conceptual potency of self-consistency, is manic to the degree that mania gets shit done.
....
That last paragraph is what I feel like saying to myself when I'm not getting enough done. And maybe it has some truth. But also, maybe the pressing issue of moral progress is not that we need to squeeze our hearts harder to wring out ever last drop of motivation. Rather, the issue we should consider presently is that we now have opportunities before us which are historically great, and yet our shared, historically-adapted sense of obligation doesn't seem to grok that the cognitive investment of evaluating policies can eclipse the muscular investment of working the earth and wiping the tears from each human eye in a K-mile radius.
The historical man of good character didn't have the economic advantages that we do. As Industry has raised our sense of what is possible, so too it should raise our sense of what achieved outcomes are morally sufficient.
It's still not enough to do the right thing unless you have an unusually good concept of what's right. But maybe good outcomes come more from financial consequentialism than from the emotional disposition characterized by mania and desperation and passion and tireless sacrifice. Or maybe that's my stupid immoral heart asking not to be wrung any tighter.
The folk conception of morality doesn't constrain behavior enough. People can see themselves as doing the right thing even while they behave ineffectually. Morality, as popularly conceived, is not a principle which leads people to prioritize efforts with a high return on investment. Morality, as we're used to thinking about it, offers no criticism of the unambitious man who is in all other ways virtuous.
Morality, as it should be conceived, tells us to not sit idly when we don't need to rest. Morality, when taken seriously, tells us to more fully employ ourselves in the pursuit of the good. Morality, when distilled to the conceptual potency of self-consistency, is manic to the degree that mania gets shit done.
....
That last paragraph is what I feel like saying to myself when I'm not getting enough done. And maybe it has some truth. But also, maybe the pressing issue of moral progress is not that we need to squeeze our hearts harder to wring out ever last drop of motivation. Rather, the issue we should consider presently is that we now have opportunities before us which are historically great, and yet our shared, historically-adapted sense of obligation doesn't seem to grok that the cognitive investment of evaluating policies can eclipse the muscular investment of working the earth and wiping the tears from each human eye in a K-mile radius.
The historical man of good character didn't have the economic advantages that we do. As Industry has raised our sense of what is possible, so too it should raise our sense of what achieved outcomes are morally sufficient.
It's still not enough to do the right thing unless you have an unusually good concept of what's right. But maybe good outcomes come more from financial consequentialism than from the emotional disposition characterized by mania and desperation and passion and tireless sacrifice. Or maybe that's my stupid immoral heart asking not to be wrung any tighter.
Priorities
I once spent an evening with a demented elderly woman who thought that she was still a hospital administrator. She was very adamant that something needed to be done or someone needed to be called to deal with the clear and present crisis of all the suffering patients. There weren't any patients around her. But she wasn't wrong.
The Religious Cognition Of Atheists
Religions exist across cultures and one explanation for their existence is that humans have cognitive architectures tending to confabulate and preserve the stuff of religions. I think I first heard it from Sapolsky that purifying rituals of religions might have been historically innovated by people with minds tending toward OCD and that the ideas of unseen spirits might have come from people tending toward schizophrenia. Given that some abnormal behaviors and beliefs are historically innovated, to understand the existence of religions we then need to look to more neurotypical incentives for why religious content is widely culturally adopted. Maybe individuals have needs for tribal culture which religious content provides to them, or maybe some religion-stuff is the right amount of weird and emotionally compelling to give people a sense of insightfulness or personal meaning, or maybe some religion stuff is mememtically virulent (which is the mind projected way of saying that that humans copy and repeat some things even without seeing value of doing so), or maybe part of the reason for individual adoption of religion is gullibility or acceptance of social authority, and probably other stuff.
So maybe the genesis of a religion proceeds like this: innovation of compelling nonsense by somewhat abnormal persons followed by pragmatic adoption by neurotypical people who are in need of some emotionally compelling weirdness.
This is a nice narrative, but I think it's too easy on the normies. Watching people talk about their religion (or politics) is almost as terrifying to me as watching people who have been confabulated by dementia or traumatic brain injuries. Neurotypical religious thought might be normal, but it is not sound. The fuel which feeds the fire of religion isn't "pragmatic interest in communal narrative and ritual" or anything nearly so rational, it's the fact that people are cognitively misshapen and dysfunctional, universally, pathetically.
If the scary, sad, gross cognitive failures of neurotypical religious thought are human universals, as religion is a human universal, then we atheists should not be so proud as to think ourselves spared. We have the same disease, even if some of our symptoms have cleared.
This in mind, I wanted to identify some of the failures of human cognition which are associated with religions cross-culturally. Maybe I should have just started with a list of biases from Kahneman and Tversky, but that's not what I did.
One failing of religious thought is compartmentalization, which is mostly to say that people practicing a religion are unable to scrutinize the beliefs of the religion in a way that can successfully produce doubt. Questions of internal consistency can be raised, but somehow these questions don't seem to bear much on whether the person will continue to retain the conceptual edifice as a whole. Further, the edifice can be maintained in the mind with almost no explanatory or predictive connection to reality. For many people, "the suffering observed in the world" doesn't seem to enter the radar of "facts which might challenge a belief in a beneficent god". The philosophical discourses on the question of evil, plentiful as they may be, are not enough to discount this huge daily disconnect between the beliefs and sense data available to neurotypical religious people. I propose that any topic which you think would be controversial to bring up in polite multicultural company, such as cryonics or antinatalism or artificial singletons in my own case, are worth special scrutiny, of the sort that could successfully produce doubt, should the topic merit doubt. If this doesn't sound like an immense epistemic burden, think about the level of reflective scrutiny that it would take for a religious person to abandon their faith in the absence of new social incentives.
So much as the attribution of sacredness to a thing is associated with an unwillingness to quantify the value of the thing or to contemplate trades of the thing against mundane things, all sacredness attribution is a kind of compartmentalization and is deserving of special scrutiny. Maybe you know the dollar value of a human life, but there's probably something out there which you value emotively but still treat in an economically incoherent way. Spooky stuff, right? Someone get Night Vale on the line.
I want to write up the other religion-associated cognitive failings that I identified tonight in long-form, but it's getting late and I have a thing to do tomorrow, so in the interest of posting something at all, which has not been my strength, I'm going to paste the remainder of my twitter tweets on the subject with very little editing.
Another cognitive failing of religious thought is overestimating the causal power of categorization judgments? Or, no, I want to identify something more general than that. What's going on in humans such that they think prayer is a thing worth doing? We overestimate the power of linguistic utterances? That covers more behavior but it's less cognitively abstract. Maybe the core failure is that humans expect reality to condition its behavior socially on our social displays. This is kind of like attributing animacy widely to reality.
For the next failure of religious cognition that I want to talk about, consider divination, numerology, omens, and delusions of reference. Part of what's going on with these is an expectation of a natural cosmic order where the world is self-similar or self-describing, maybe? Divination and numerology are schools of thought for deriving predictions from principles that (the practitioners believe) operate throughout the universe structurally (like a folk notion of physics, but phrased directly in terms of the concepts and objects of daily experience, instead of being phrased in terms of particle-field-shaped math). So that's interesting.
"Reality is self-similar" is, I think, a good guess; it feels close to one of the mistaken inductive principles which is common to lots of religious cognition cross-culturally, but it's also not quite the principle that I want to identify. Maybe the problem with it is that divination isn't just like reading the structure of the heavens in a spilled drop of cola, it's not just seeing the self-similar structure, but it also has a social component of requesting information before possibly receiving it. Like religious people think that the cosmos knows things and may choose to reveal info them if it thinks that they're ready? And the rituals and superstitions of divination are like a cargo cult for getting the attention of that Knowing Natural Order? Does that make sense? When people look for spiritually guiding signs in their daily lives, those signs are like communicative events to them. I think that makes sense. But to the degree that I see personally significant messages in the mundane events of my life, those signs don't really feel communicated to me, so maybe "there is a knowledgeable natural order which has a plan for you" isn't one of the core universal religious mental failings that I need to identify and be vigilant against in myself. I'll keep looking for other magical thinking that might be cognitively upstream of delusions of reference and which plausibly applies to me and other neurotypical people. And the same for prayer, because "expecting reality to respond socially to your social displays" isn't quite as persuasive an account of prayer as I'd like. That was the previous failure that I identified, remember? After compartmentalization and sacredness.
Finally, Zodiacs seem like evidence of another culturally pervasive religion-associated cognitive failure. Maybe the genesis of zodiacs happens like this: people have a general over-reliance on explanations of behavior in terms of stable personality traits, and some people prone to apophenia notice false patterns in who gets stuck with which stable traits (again, which traits the people may not have stably), and then people generally suck at knowing when to abandon named/reified concepts, and so the confabulated patterns of explaining how traits are allocated stay in discussion and eventually become common knowledge.
Nothing in this explanation of zodiacs really rings of magical cognition. Maybe that's because zodiacs aren't all that religion-bound, or maybe it's because I haven't done a good job of finding a supernatural-inductive-bias-like cognitive failing which is upstream of people caring about zodiacs and which is also plausibly at work in my own mind to my detriment. Something something swearing, something something did you know that I hate the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator?
That's the end for tonight, folks. Be good to yourselves.
Edit 1: I just heard about thought-fusion beliefs as studied in abnormal psychology. One example is a person thinking that {an event is more likely to happen because they've been imagining the event happening}. Another class of thought-fusions beliefs is like when a person feels that it's roughly as blameworthy to perform a socially prohibited action as it is to imagine doing so. Are those two examples of religion-like cognition? I think they might be. I think thought fusion might be a kind of widely operating inductive bias which partly explains the cross-cultural genesis and retention of religious content and which also might afflict the minds of atheists. Rad. And maybe the first of those two thought fusion beliefs, where motivated focus on a topic alters the expectation that it will happen, maybe that's also part of the explanation of prayer. Prayer is a way to convince yourself of a desirable fiction through motivated focus. I like that explanation a lot. It's definitely something I can be on the guard against in myself.
Edit 2: I would like to add "believing things because they sound cool or beautiful" as a universal human cognitive failing that manifests equally in religious and non-religious people, and which might support the generation and adoption of religions cross culturally. I think that's an important one and it deserves a short name so that it's easier to call up from the depths of memory. I hesitate to call it a kind of optimism bias, because some things that sound cool are very pessimistic.
Perhaps nearby to "believing things because they sound cool or beautiful", there's a bias of believing things which flatter our self image in ways that we can believe. "I'm the most beautiful man on earth" falls flat as flattery, but "I'm one of a chosen people" is vague enough that everyone can believe it of themselves and not be disturbed that the tribe on the other side of the river also believes it. So that's one more thing to guard against.
I'm wondering now if my purpose in writing this post, deep down, was to find cognitive biases that I could want to be vigilant against. A lot of the Tversky and Kahneman stuff has a ring of either "this won't replicate" or "this is only called a bias when it happens to lead to bad outcomes, and isn't architecturally unsound", and it's hard to care about those. By finding biases that I can associate with religion, maybe I'm just trying to motivate myself to be unlike a negative role model. Is that bad? Is that what one of my negative role models would do? I don't know.
Edit 1: I just heard about thought-fusion beliefs as studied in abnormal psychology. One example is a person thinking that {an event is more likely to happen because they've been imagining the event happening}. Another class of thought-fusions beliefs is like when a person feels that it's roughly as blameworthy to perform a socially prohibited action as it is to imagine doing so. Are those two examples of religion-like cognition? I think they might be. I think thought fusion might be a kind of widely operating inductive bias which partly explains the cross-cultural genesis and retention of religious content and which also might afflict the minds of atheists. Rad. And maybe the first of those two thought fusion beliefs, where motivated focus on a topic alters the expectation that it will happen, maybe that's also part of the explanation of prayer. Prayer is a way to convince yourself of a desirable fiction through motivated focus. I like that explanation a lot. It's definitely something I can be on the guard against in myself.
Edit 2: I would like to add "believing things because they sound cool or beautiful" as a universal human cognitive failing that manifests equally in religious and non-religious people, and which might support the generation and adoption of religions cross culturally. I think that's an important one and it deserves a short name so that it's easier to call up from the depths of memory. I hesitate to call it a kind of optimism bias, because some things that sound cool are very pessimistic.
Perhaps nearby to "believing things because they sound cool or beautiful", there's a bias of believing things which flatter our self image in ways that we can believe. "I'm the most beautiful man on earth" falls flat as flattery, but "I'm one of a chosen people" is vague enough that everyone can believe it of themselves and not be disturbed that the tribe on the other side of the river also believes it. So that's one more thing to guard against.
I'm wondering now if my purpose in writing this post, deep down, was to find cognitive biases that I could want to be vigilant against. A lot of the Tversky and Kahneman stuff has a ring of either "this won't replicate" or "this is only called a bias when it happens to lead to bad outcomes, and isn't architecturally unsound", and it's hard to care about those. By finding biases that I can associate with religion, maybe I'm just trying to motivate myself to be unlike a negative role model. Is that bad? Is that what one of my negative role models would do? I don't know.
news_2016-11
On 2016-11-24 I began an effort to learn to enjoy news reports. I'll be updating this post throughout the remainder of November with whatever stories I judge to be something other than ... gosh, I don't know a word that's hateful enough to describe most news reports. Epistemic poison? I probably won't be linking the original articles, because the original articles are seriously not worth sharing beyond the summaries that I'm providing here. Have I mentioned that I do not yet like news reports?
The Economist: Syrian government bombs rebels.
CNN: Japan and South Korea are now sharing military intelligence.
Bloomberg: The Philippine economy is doing poorly.
Bloomberg: In an effort to account for untaxed black market money, the Indian Government demonitizes its largest bank notes and issues a new series of bank notes which can be exchanged for the old ones.
The Guardian: Hurricanes continue to exist in the tropics.
The Guardian: There's a big fire in Haifa, Israel's third-largest city.
The Guardian: Peace negotiations between the Colombian government and FARC, a revolutionary socialist guerilla force, which have been in progress since 2012 are still in progress.
The Guardian: Thousands of Rohingya Muslim refugees fleeing oppressive social conditions in Myanmar since 2015 continue to exist.
NY Times: People continue to kill and die in the Iraqi civil war.
That's it so far. Maybe I should make a list of all the sites that I looked at in order to show how very many fail to host a single story of greater merit than "A person said that they wouldn't like it if a thing happened that wasn't in their interest".
The Economist: Syrian government bombs rebels.
CNN: Japan and South Korea are now sharing military intelligence.
Bloomberg: The Philippine economy is doing poorly.
Bloomberg: In an effort to account for untaxed black market money, the Indian Government demonitizes its largest bank notes and issues a new series of bank notes which can be exchanged for the old ones.
The Guardian: Hurricanes continue to exist in the tropics.
The Guardian: There's a big fire in Haifa, Israel's third-largest city.
The Guardian: Peace negotiations between the Colombian government and FARC, a revolutionary socialist guerilla force, which have been in progress since 2012 are still in progress.
The Guardian: Thousands of Rohingya Muslim refugees fleeing oppressive social conditions in Myanmar since 2015 continue to exist.
NY Times: People continue to kill and die in the Iraqi civil war.
That's it so far. Maybe I should make a list of all the sites that I looked at in order to show how very many fail to host a single story of greater merit than "A person said that they wouldn't like it if a thing happened that wasn't in their interest".
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