Not long ago, Richie contended that sticking to presenting true information and letting otters decide what to do, given that information, was “the neatest little summary of the linear model.” This short note should suffice to show that this claim is far from being true and that a whole fleet of Gremlins may have infiltrated communication channels between Richie and AT.
First, let’s point at this:
https://twitter.com/nevaudit/status/892479951479472128
Then let’s point at this:
https://twitter.com/nevaudit/status/892482185948692481
Spot the outlier:
[RG1] I’ll stick to presenting true information and letting otters decide what to do.
[LM1] Doing basic research will turn into applications that will in turn benefit society.
[LM2] Achieving agreement on scientific knowledge is a prerequisite for a political consensus to be reached and then policy action to occur.
[LM3] Specific knowledge or facts compel certain policy responses.
It’d be hard to reconcile RG1 with LM3 or even LM2.
So I see three versions of the misnomered linear model (the label was already taken and sequentiality ain’t linearity), not two. Since our Honest Broker claims there’s a stronger version, let’s assume they belong to a hierarchy of versions, even if the progression is far from being obvious. This assumption doesn’t matter much, as the only version that matters here is LM2, as the word “consensus” indicates.
All version (especially the second one) should imply something that ClimateBall ™ players now know as the deficit model, i.e. the idea that people would make better decisions with better information. This idea is as old as Plato, and as young as how Scott Adams would like to be:
[W]hen my knowledge of proper eating reached a good-enough level I dropped ten pounds without using any extra willpower whatsoever. Now I eat as much as I want, of anything I want, all day long, and I don’t gain a pound. The secret was learning how to manage my cravings. I can eat anything I want because I no longer want unhealthy foods. Knowledge replaced my need for willpower. For example, I now understand that eating simple carbs for lunch kills my energy for the rest of the day. It doesn’t take any willpower to resist doing something I know will make me feel like hell in an hour. But before I knew simple carbs were the culprit, I assumed eating in general was the problem, and I couldn’t avoid eating during the day. Knowledge solved a problem that willpower could not.
That’s crap, of course. Willpower is a bit more complex than that. Every non-hyperrational human being has his own stock of examples as to why we don’t act according to our best judgment, starting with chain smokers. This knowledge is so old there’s even a Greek name for it: Akrasia.
As one can read in that Stanford entry, our ClimateBall quandary already divided platonists and aristotelians. At least insofar as we like staging debates, because it’s easy to find some common ground between the two stances. Both positions still require that we value knowledge, truth, and rationality. Otherwise both positions would become caricatures of themselves.
Truth, truthfulness, and trust should matter to everyone, or at least to the ATs and the Richies of this world.
* * *
How to build truth, truthfulness, and trust looks like a more interesting question than Richie’s Gremlins. To that effect, the discussion sparked by Doug McNeal over the tweeter may be worthwhile to mention, in particular that clarification:
Everyone should at least agree that declarative knowledge is less actionable than procedural knowledge: that egg shells can break is less useful than to know how to make an omelet. The vividness of the second kind of knowledge lies in the storytelling: being told that scientists agree over AGW should be less powerful than to see scientists explaining us how they reached their conclusions.
There are many other ways to cut our knowledge into kinds. You already know that beyond the what and the how, there’s the why, i.e. explanations. But I’d like to finish this note by mentioning the who question: who will be telling people how some scientific knowledge has been reached?
That question matters here because by appealing to an unidentified group of scientists, consensus messaging, whatever that means, may fail to make us see scientists in action. Perhaps this is why the 97 hours of consensus reached millions. To be able to identify with whom’s talking is crucial to build trust.
As a ninja, I ought to know. My play style needs to adapt to the distrust my character brings. As someone who likes to read citations, when I see an Honest Broker talk about unidentified “scholars,” my ninja senses tingle. As a fan of Kurt Vonnegut Jr, I also ought to know that the mirror image to the Pure and Noble Scientist is a disinterested and disembodied freak who builds Ice Nine remorselessly. As a fan of Kate Marvel, I finally ought to know that there are marvelously likable climate scientists.
...and Then There's Physics 
Oh, well – he wasn’t going to write Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony anyway.
You must admit that Richie dear’s incorrect mansplanation of the linear model points toward a version of the deficit model that would deserve diligence, Rev.
> letting otters decide what to do
🙂
Source: http://discourseontheotter.tumblr.com/post/90552182805/taina-bucher
Since we’re talking otters, here’s a picture of one I took when in the Shetlands a few years ago. I also saw one playing in the surf on Coll last week, but it had gone by the time I’d got my camera.
Willard:
Thanks for the Kate Marvel link. I was already a fan, now I want her to run for POTUS:
This is, so to speak, the Mother of all Tragedies of the Commons: the heritable impulse to leave more copies of your genes than your conspecifics do, unto the Nth generation (whence my nom du clavier, an allusion to my voluntary failure to reproduce ;^o).
Dr. Marvel is as aware of the origins of AGW as anyone in the world, and she feels her share of our collective guilt. She keeps private her reasons for bearing a child, yet she acknowledges that for a chance to have more great-great-grandchildren than other women, she has knowingly socialized her son’s marginal climate-change costs and those of his (i.e. her) descendants in addition to her own.
She’s not fooling herself: even if she raises her son to live as lightly on the Earth as possible, while he lives he will socialize marginal costs. And what about his children, who will be her grandchildren? She’s aware she has doomed everyone in the world, including her own descendants, to a small but finite increment in the common pool of tragedy; she bore her child willingly nevertheless.This is the Tragōidia that Hardin chose for his title.
IMHO, it took a lot of courage for her to post this on the Internet. Unfortunately, with that kind of commitment to honest self-disclosure, she’s well-advised not to enter politics.
Where do otters come from?
Otter-space.
[EDIT. Corrected the link. – Willard]
LM2 applies broadly to knowledge and policy in organizations of any size.
Few executives or senior managers faced with an important decision would be happy taking action if their staff/experts/consultants/etc. had failed to reach any sort of consensus on the issues and recommended solutions involved. They would send it back (outside the academic world, possibly forcefully) until a working consensus was hammered out.
Tarka Dal – one of the ‘otter curries.
[stolen from ISIHAC]
> They would send it back (outside the academic world, possibly forcefully) until a working consensus was hammered out.
Oh, but this isn’t possible in the linear model because, you know, it’s linear.
Any kind of back-and-forth would rather imply a stockholder model, or so our Honest Broker suggests.
To see the absurdity of it all (as if Richie dear’s performance wasn’t enough), let’s introduce the Brokering Window fallacy:
(1) We already know enough about AGW to take action.
(2) Taking action is not about consensus.
Now, ask yourself: how the hell can you say that you know enough about something S without having reached some kind of consensus about that S?
Philosophers studying the embodied mind might have been into something when they held that humans were made to catch freesbees more than to do logic.
>> …humans were made to catch freesbees more than to do logic.
Somewhere in between catching things, and doing logic, is ninpo.
Two ninja were spying on an estate when they were seen. The guard yelled for help and the ninja started to run off. One of the ninja stopped and decided to climb a tree, hoping that the guards would rush off into the darkness looking for them, and when it was safe they would make their escape. His companion felt is was better to run while they could and urged the ninja to come down from the tree. The ninja refused, so the one on the ground yelled out to the guards, “Hey, there’s a ninja in the tree!” The ninja in the tree was forced to come down and the two fled into the night, chuckling about the situation.
Nice one, Rev.
Speaking of ninjas, contrast the “linear model” with this other one:
https://open-mind.net/papers/embodied-prediction
By appealing to the “core flow of information,” are cognitive scientists falling for the linear model? Not at all. Quite the opposite, in fact.
The linear model doesn’t look very model-like to me.
Damn “scholars”!
“starting with chain smokers. This knowledge is so old there’s even a Greek name for it: Akrasia.”
Addiction isn’t about a weak will.
> Addiction isn’t about a weak will.
“Weakness of the will” is the oldest explanation for addiction:
“Few executives or senior managers faced with an important decision would be happy taking action if their staff/experts/consultants/etc. had failed to reach any sort of consensus on the issues and recommended solutions involved. They would send it back (outside the academic world, possibly forcefully) until a working consensus was hammered out.”
huh.
too funny
=={ In the philosophical study of action, weakwilled actions are defined as those which run contrary to an agent’s better judgement. }==
Thank goodness I never engage in actions that run contrary to my better judgement, and have no addictions.
Willard,
Having been a victim of Akrasia many times,
Mainly while playing bridge, I was pleased to finally find a name for it.
Reading the discussion I found the philosophers stemmed to have an old fashioned notion of a singular rational being acting irrationally (presumably themselves).
Weakness of the will would seem to be evidence of a split personality, that is someone would do a rational thing in one circumstance and frame of mind but another in the same type of circumstance and a different frame of mind.
Even using smokes or alcohol surely changes the rationality of a person, let alone the self subjected stress of a card game.
Bridge, not for money , is a lot less stressful than Texas poker.
Thanks, by the way.
too funny, a philosopher arguing with neuroscientists on the defintition of disease.
Even Coffee rewires your brain.
I smoke. I mean, my body smokes. It carries me to the store to get what makes it happy.
I tell it not to, but it has a will of its own that is very strong.
I will to fly. I really want to. It’s my intention to fly. No matter how hard I try I cannot fly.
It must be a weak will.
Put another way, ‘willpower’ isnt a very useful concept, neither for the treatment or moral question.
Its old philosophy that needs to change it’s addictions
angech, you may find “Thinking, Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahneman interesting (I did), which is in a sense about our “split personality” (cognitive systems).
> ‘willpower’ isnt a very useful concept, neither for the treatment or moral question.
Moral questions are hard to discuss without assuming some kind of agency. Also note that the concept of addiction as we understand it is fairly new:
How we conceive addiction matters to those who’d like to treat it, to the point some say we’re addicted to rehab:
A criminologist I know tells me the success rates for such therapies are around 10%.
***
Also note that addiction is characterized by three quasi-behavioral traits:
http://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/can-you-become-addicted-to-chocolate-201302145903
Not sure how control is better defined than will.
Is ClimateBall ™ addictive?
The discussion above, not unsurprisingly, is dominated by W.E.I.R.D. nation’s perspectives (http://www.vdare.com/posts/weirdwestern-educated-industrialized-rich-and-democratic-societies-think-differently). “The WEIRDer you are, the more you perceive a world full of separate objects, rather than relationships, and the more you use an analytical thinking style, focusing on categories and laws, rather than a holistic style, focusing on patterns and contexts.”
As someone living in a developing nation, the contrasts in the approach to thinking about AGW information application by my colleagues locally and internationally is always an unstated tension. In particular is a largely unexamined question of ethics involved in construction and communication of information (whose, ethics, by what authority, etc) (e.g. http://tinyurl.com/ya9ug5m3 and https://public.wmo.int/en/resources/bulletin/call-ethical-framework-climate-services)
“Weakness of the will would seem to be evidence of a split personality, that is someone would do a rational thing in one circumstance and frame of mind but another in the same type of circumstance and a different frame of mind.”
Not split personality. Simple version
basically you need to understand 3 areas of the brain
dorsalateral pre frontal cortex : planning and higher cognition
striatum : part of the motor system that gets us mamals going, gets us to chase goals
ventral tegmental: Dopamine pump.
So take the internet, or porn, or gambling, or cocaine.. and of those things.
When they are used/consumed you get a reward (dopamine) for persuing that goal.
Repeated enough and the wiring between your pre frontal cortex and the striatum
is altered. In other words ( using marsups terms) your long range planning brain
that would normally tell you to cut that shit out, is “unwired” from your motivational
system. That motivational system ( the system that makes you act) is actually
the will power. So rather than being weak willed, addicts are extremely strong willed.
the pre frontal cortex doesnt get a vote.
That’s why walk a mile for camel made sense to smokers
Even the internet and cell phone use re wires your brain.
So ya all those funny stories about people diving into sewage to get their phones, re wired brains.. and the part of the brain that would say.. dont do that, speaks, but the will in charge isnt going
to listen. It knows exactly what it wants and knows how to get it.
Put another way, the conscious system that thinks its in charge and has all the fancy philosophy, and thinks it represents will and choice, is basically bushwacked by the real will. That conscious system has no words for what is going on and happening to it
too funny,
Willard cites a paper that
A) doesnt look like it was peer reviewed
B) Doesnt cite a single relevant text about his main claims.
Sorry. I’ll stick with the actual science
i admit that seeing the title of this new thread before reading it, I made a foolish assumption.
Missing the implication of the capitalised ‘R’ and the absence of a possessive apostrophe, I was expecting something on how WEALTH, or how rich we are is related to our carbon footprint.
So I had arguments prepared about the carbon intensity of energy production…
But if the object is to examine whether dialog should replace pure scientists imparting truth…
The nature of any dialog depends on the relative status (wealth?) of the participants. In any attempt to change behaviour I think the rich are likely to be a more persuasive in a dialog. And given their carbon footprint, a target where change would have the most effect.
Status may be granted to some by those who value the skill to discover truth more than riches.
(Willpower is a fictive nonsense resulting from the egregious adoption of Platonic dualism. Bicameral mind is most often used as an excuse for falling short of social norms.)
I believe that Tol was quoting [AT]. It’s unclear to me from a quick read whether he was advocating such a “linear model” or quoting it with disdain.
Pondering that and the rest…
> doesnt look like it was peer reviewed
See for yourself:
http://www.jsad.com/
As for the characterization of addiction, it’s straight from the DSM.
***
> I’ll stick with the actual science
Those who help people overcome addiction are not called scientists, but therapists.
***
> I believe that Tol was quoting [AT].
Yes, and when Richie dear pulled AT’s leg, AT went along.
Billions upon billions of strawmen.
Here’s an interesting peer review:
mt,
He was quoting me, but claiming that what I had said was the “neatest summary of the linear model”. I think Willard’s point is that it is not; the linear model has many other aspect and isn’t simply “provide information, walk away”.
> the linear model has many other aspect
Worse, Junior’s strawman doesn’t even include that aspect.
For those who are not used to the tweeter, click on my tweet, then on the image. You’ll see Junior’s two versions in full.
One thing I haven’t mentioned is that honest brokers oftentimes use the third version to discredit the model, even when addressing those who only maintain the first one.
> In particular is a largely unexamined question of ethics involved in construction and communication of information (whose, ethics, by what authority, etc) (e.g. http://tinyurl.com/ya9ug5m3 and https://public.wmo.int/en/resources/bulletin/call-ethical-framework-climate-services)
Indeed, Bruce, hence my who question. Thanks for the references, although I’m usually skeptical of MikeH’s positions. His positioning looks bogus to me.
ClimateBall ™ is a race to credibility.
The Clobal Warming Policy Foundation seeems more interested in convoluting than linearizing its climate narrative
https://vvattsupwiththat.blogspot.com/2017/07/pielkes-gwpf-performance-further.html
> although I’m usually skeptical of MikeH’s positions
Fair enough … although I’d note MikeH wasn’t involved in either of the cited references (other than happening to be the editor-in-chief of the journal in the one case)
🙂
> I’d note MikeH wasn’t involved in either of the cited references (other than happening to be the editor-in-chief of the journal in the one case)
Yes, hence my “positioning.” I like the article and am glad we finally start studying information architectures [of climate websites]. My remark was meant to remind that he’s an author of the commentary that started our current episode.
WarrenP, ReinerG, and MikeH – what can go wrong?
Because, otters may be too impersonal:
https://twitter.com/annabel_lea/status/892865633414766592
even more funny.
this disease model is new.
this climate science is still young.
scientist:policy maker
scientist:therapist.
disease:pollution
imagine a co2 therapist…a policy maker who fixes the problem…told you that this c02 as a pollution model was relatively new.
zero emmissions.abstinence. This could get interesting.
harm reduction.
of course withdrawl from co2 can be deadly…short term risk..continued exposure also dangerous
interesting too to point out that the science is more settled than the therapy. that doesnt make therapists who disagree irrational or anti science.
there might be something interesting here if the ninja took a position.
> this disease model is new
The disease model is actually quite old. Nowadays, addictions are disorders. Also, the science is far from being settled:
Sources tell me that the authors of the DSM VI are thinking about adding ClimateBall.
***
> the science is more settled than the therapy
Treating scurvy is not that hard and the solution to the AGW problem may look as simple as curing scurvy: stop dumping CO2 in the atmosphere like there’s no tomorrow. So perhaps the AGW problem could indeed be seen as a disease. But then I don’t see any real analogue to the climatological state of having scurvy. Moreover, the dumping part of the AGW problem is more akin to a scurvy epidemic, and treating epidemics is seldom as simple as treating a single patient.
The way one ingests vitamin C is not that important – as long as the vitamin deficiency stops, all is well. By the same token, solving the AGW attribution problem is not that important. OTOH, while the cure to AGW is clear, the way we ought to stop dumping CO2 in the atmosphere like there’s no tomorrow is not. So even if the science is clear, we still have to work on our “addiction to oil,” to paraphrase Dubya.
That being said, therapy works on behaviors or cognitions without having access to the neurology of the subject. This constrains both the diagnosis and the treatment. Just like substance abuse centers don’t carry CAT scanners, there doesn’t seem to be any need to solve the AGW attribution problem before risking a CO2 overdose.
And speaking of attribution, there’s a consensus against naive reductionnism (op. cit.):
Which leads us to the third version of our Honest Broker’s strawmen, refuted by the simple observation that there are many ways to derive many oughts from many ises. Just look at Bruce’s two proposals – most of the factual claims work as factual claims *because* they abide to a value system. What he’s asking for seems to be quite minimal, so minimal in fact they remind me of Grice’s maxims. I suspect it’s because I’m weird more than because I’m W.E.I.R.D.
dikranmarsupial says:
angech, you may find “Thinking, Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahneman interesting’ Thanks
This was good, also.
“Put another way, the conscious system that thinks its in charge and has all the fancy philosophy,
and thinks it represents will and choice, is basically bushwacked by the real will. That conscious system has no words for what is going on and happening to it”
One could perhaps argue that the two minds, conscious and unconscious, put in their votes and majority [percentage wise] wins which would partly go back to the idea that the overall good has been voted on even if the conscious part cannot rationalize it being good.
I am sure most of us have had events in our lives where we have done things that we knew were not “right” at the time but had no “ability” to stop our actions at the time and regret them afterwards.
As Steven says the real [unconscious/id] will wins when put into these primal and perhaps not even obviously primal situations.
hard to keep ninja’s honest.
is it knew as one of his cites says,
or old?
“Also note that the concept of addiction as we understand it is fairly new:
Contrary to the prevailing wisdom in the current literature on alcohol (8-10), I am suggesting that post-Prohibition thought (about the progressive character of alcoholism, the experience of the alcoholic, including loss of control over drinking, and the necessity for abstinence) is of a piece with a major strand of 19th-century thought – the ideology of the temperance movement. The most important difference between temperance thought and the “new disease conception” (8) is the location of the source of addiction.”
Haha too funny
yes, the argument over which kind of disease it is contentious.
who knew our ninja played for team contrarian
Let’s see if I can negotiate an understanding with Willard.
When we speak of a coffee addict of having a weak-will, what we really mean is that his conscious
will is disconnected from his behavior will ( striatum) In short, his conscious reasoning and understanding tells him coffee is bad for him, yet his body reaches for it. The motivational circuitry
( the motor system and dopamine pump) will just go on exerting its will to achieve its goal.
And that circuitry is reinforced.
The talking part of his brain is saying no, he will even readily admit he knows it is bad for him
and against his better judgement, his body will just does it anyway.
My phone just went off. I didn’t even think. The hand had a will of its own and picked it up.
Conversation with an old friend H.
SM: So, you know you are killing yourself with this?
H: Yes.
SM: so stop.
H: I can’t I’ll die.
she did. That was a good motivator to study this phenomena.
Actually Willard, I am a compatiablist.
WRT, not having CAT scanners. huh? maybe an MRI or SPECT, or functional MRI or MRS.
those are your 5 basic types. but CAT scan?
As a therapist knowing that your patients brain has been re wired, is critically important.
It’s why you would tell them to not try to quit on their own. deadly.
The scurvy analogy doesnt work for me.
I actually think the Bush analogy works pretty well.
you want to take peoples FF away from them. All they can see is the short term pain
of C02 withdrawl. There’s no talking to these folks. Unfortunately,
everyone else will suffer as well. Even if they saw the long term risk for more pain,
the short term discomfort is all they care about.
And its really aweful for them because they see others, like Al gore, consuming FF with
no consequences, preaching abstinance to them.
A few decades from now they will need a support group.
Steve Mosher: “Put another way, the conscious system that thinks its in charge and has all the fancy philosophy, and thinks it represents will and choice, is basically bushwacked by the real will.”
Aristotle evidently thought something very similar, and so recommended moral training through virtuous moral action in order to make acting virtuously habitual. He recognised that when human beings are faced with a choice they will always take the option that is most personally gratifying. The trick, therefore, is to develop a moral sensibility that delivers a greater reward for acting virtuously than acting basely. Aristotle’s notion of the moral faculty is much closer to the ‘muscular’ than the cerebral, i.e. it becomes strong through the right kind of exercise. Rather like if you want to learn to play tennis you have to get out on the court and actually do it – preferably under the direction of an experienced coach – rather than lock yourself away in a library swotting up on technique. The reward is the feeling of satisfaction that comes every time you zing the ball over the net and place it exactly where it needs to be.
> is it knew as one of his cites says, or old?
The article has been written in 1978. It cites Michel Foucault and refers to “the essentials of the modern or post-Prohibition understanding of alcoholism.” Post-prohibition, get it? New and old are relative.
Reading might help making better gotchas.
***
> hard to keep ninja’s honest.
You’re not trying hard enough.
Try paragraphs.
Let’s try to reach an understanding with our in-house hyperrational.
Say I want to lift my arm. I lift it. Success. Do I care to know how it happened? Most of the times, not at all. Now, suppose I want to lift my arm, but the arm stays there. Do I care to know what’s happening? You bet. So I go see a doctor. The doctor tells me that there’s a problem with the three systems that regulate my arm. All I need is some rewiring.
Good, I say, how can I make my arm work again? The doctor, who is also an honest ninja, will say: no idea, but I know that with some training, your arm may lift again. Yes, he’ll say “may” because he knows that sometimes the training doesn’t work. Why sometimes it works and why sometimes it doesn’t remains a mystery to him. He could tell himself that it’s because of the Will or because of some specific re wiring he doesn’t know about. As a doctor, he knows he mostly plays scientist on TV.
***
The moral of the story is that therapists don’t need to know that their patients’ brain has been re wired. They don’t even need to know their patients have a brain. What they need to know is if the maladaptive behavior stops.
Sure, when the behavior stops, chances are that it’s because the brain has been re wired. That’s merely a way to explain (in a very loose sense) what happened. It’s a model and like all stoopid modulz it gives a rough picture of what is happening for real.
What does really happen in each specific case, and how does the re wiring occur? Nobody knows for sure. Doesn’t matter much, as long as the maladaptive behavior stops and better well-being is being reported.
There are many ways to make that behavior stop. While we don’t know which therapy leads to success, or if success is guaranteed, we know that we need to do something. We know enough about brains, behaviors and bloody humans in general to know when we need to try.
That’s how we derive an ought from an is, to our Honest Broker’s dismay.
***
So no, I don’t think contrarians should choose me as their champion, to borrow from MikeH’s symbology we can read about in CG 1. Why did our in-house hyperrational never mention MikeH in his CG book? Must be some bad wiring within the contrarian module.
”
As a doctor, he knows he mostly plays scientist on TV.
”
In a Chinese room full of philosophical zombies, the play’s the thing.
> the play’s the thing
My sentiment too. Abstracting away the play could lead to a view from nowhere where billions upon billions of homunculii replace one that does a perfectly fine job:
Perhaps I should add that I’m not against homunculi per se, as they can become therapeutic tools:
@-SM
“When we speak of a coffee addict of having a weak-will, what we really mean is that his conscious
will is disconnected from his behavior will ( striatum) In short, his conscious reasoning and understanding tells him coffee is bad for him, yet his body reaches for it. The motivational circuitry
( the motor system and dopamine pump) will just go on exerting its will to achieve its goal.”
This is a just-so re-write of the Greek bicameralism between the spirit of Appolo and the Dyonisian base instincts.
Despite the adduction of some credible neuro-science of the mind has been split into a cortex, striatum and dopamine pump, you describe Autonomous Entities battling it out on some metaphorical field.
With Pavlovian re-enforcement thrown in.
Framing addictive behavior as a neurological battle between the angel of the cortex and the devil in the ventral tegmental area has narrative elegance, but that does not ensure it is useful.
Human behavior is very variable and extremely plastic. Repetition works, as anyone who has learnt to play a musical instrument will attest. That does not preclude the possibility that the mind can be a unified system, shaped by historical contingency, and constrained by social/material limits, but like a bicycle, all the parts work together to get you around.
Unless the chain comes off.
Sourcing the causation of ethical error in reified neurological agents that as learning systems produce errors because the examples and internal weighting were biased might look like a man with a hammer thinking they have found a nail.
@-“Perhaps I should add that I’m not against homunculi per se, as they can become therapeutic tools:”
Or a movie.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2096673/
> Framing addictive behavior as a neurological battle between the angel of the cortex and the devil in the ventral tegmental area has narrative elegance, but that does not ensure it is useful.
There is at least one context in which it would be useful:
Too funny.
@-“Levi-Strauss, in his discussion of shamanistic therapies in non-Western cultures, suggests that they work because they provide a way of understanding problems and the world. The patient is given a theory, a set of terms and relationships, that enable him to fit his experience into an intelligible order.”
It is not un-important in Western medical therapies.
In diseases where causation and progression are NOT well understood, or are complex, multi-factored and uncertain, a simple, short comprehensive explanation is a useful and important part of medical management.
Until the recent rise of genetics as the fashionable goto explanation, difficult diseases would be ascribed to ‘Stress’. More recently ‘auto-immune disorder’ has become popular. A story-line in which one of the defending angels of our better Nature is corrupted to become an internal daemon of destruction, warring against the very communality of cells it should guard against attack.
97% CM suffers similar problems. It may have been intended as a neutral description of the level of scientific knowledge when that was called into question. A linear(?) transfer of information about the subject.
However it has long since become a totemic chant. Invoking the quantity and quality of the scientific knowledge of climate as legitimate knowledge.
It acts now as an ideological sieve, an ‘antigen’ that either elicits a positive response, or at least tolerance, or triggers a vigorous negative reaction.
It divides people into those that recognise our understanding of the climate has scientific legitimacy, and those that reject climate science as valid part of that body of human knowledge.
5 homonunculi.
Seems like a rereun of Starking novels by Jack Vance.
Read 3 and had to wait forty years for amazon to get the other two.
Well worth the wait.
Agree with Mosher, the subconscious is king.