Evan Hubbard

Student of mythology and religion.

[Evan Hubbard @Jaffui]

@bnielson01 Sorry to hear that, Bruce. My condolences 🙏

[Evan Hubbard @Jaffui]

@simonsarris Can books be ugly?

[Evan Hubbard @Jaffui]

@robinhanson Playing with words gives us insight into the nature of ultimate reality.

[Evan Hubbard @Jaffui]

@bnielson01 Sequence 1 (you/Deutsch): explanatory universality -> (increased human mimicry?) -> culture

Seq. 2 (Henrich?): purported mimicry ability -> culture -> increased intelligence (presumably including E.U.)

(and then the separate qn of which of these links is causal)

Fair summary?

[Evan Hubbard @Jaffui]

Enjoyed this post from Joseph Heath. There is a section which seems to run counter to @DavidDeutschOxf 's view of human evolution:
https://t.co/ZjuxHsdzHm
"Human infants got really good... at mindlessly copying others – repeating the exact behaviours that they observe.

[Evan Hubbard @Jaffui]

@bnielson01 It sounds like you agree with Deutsch to the extent that the order of events was the other way round. Henrich's view is at least a lens I hadn't considered before.

[Evan Hubbard @Jaffui]

@bnielson01 ...and that this mimicry was essential for human culture, but that it still leaves explanatory universality to be accounted for.

[Evan Hubbard @Jaffui]

@bnielson01 Thanks!
So you/Byrne agree that what animals lack is not understanding/insight in an absolute sense.
This then would be compatible with Henrich's view that humans are distinctive in greatly increasing behavioural mimicry (between your 2nd and 3rd leaps)...

[Evan Hubbard @Jaffui]

@bnielson01 On Heath's/Henrich's view, culture came before specifically human intelligence. Whereas I think Deutsch says that specifically human intell. (ie. explanatory universality) is what allows for human culture.

(I just saw that Brett Hall has posted about this along the same lines)

[Evan Hubbard @Jaffui]

@bnielson01 My read of Heath: humans blindly copy behavior of peers, but mimicry is precisely their strength, bc it lets them absorb the surrounding cultural knowledge, w/out needing to derive it from first principles.
Animals don't have complex culture bc they're not imitative *enough*

[Evan Hubbard @Jaffui]

Would love to hear your opinion @bnielson01 . Is this a convincing alternative to Deutsch's view of distinctively human intelligence?

[Evan Hubbard @Jaffui]

"This created the possibility for more complex culture...by freeing it from the bottleneck [of] by individual intelligence. Chimps...observ[e] others...then use their own intelligence to reproduce the performance...Humans, by contrast...copy others even [without understanding]."

[Evan Hubbard @Jaffui]

@JakeOrthwein Don't you think what he ought to say is that people want entertainment without having to think too hard?

Or maybe that is the implicit criterion of good vs. average movies: thought-provoking vs entertaining.

[Evan Hubbard @Jaffui]

@JakeOrthwein All your tweets are bottomless rabbit-holes in a way that stresses me out. I don't know where to start...

(Not a criticism, BTW)

[Evan Hubbard @Jaffui]

@bnielson01 All good topics! Looking forward to listening.

[Evan Hubbard @Jaffui]

@Plinz Did Aristotle think the soul is "independent of the substrate", ie. it could be instantiated in different matter? My understanding is that for him, the soul just is the structural-functional organisation of a particular configuration of matter (ie. a body). So not independent?

[Evan Hubbard @Jaffui]

But for organisms without a self-model, there is no perspective to take; there is no "thing" experiencing, there is just experience, free-floating as it were. And the apparent absurdity of this notion leads some to conclude that such organisms therefore cannot be conscious.

[Evan Hubbard @Jaffui]

To an organism with a world-model that doesn't include a model of *itself as an agent in that world*, what would conscious experiences be like?
Take aversion, for eg. What is aversion when there is no agent to discriminate between good and bad, between aversive and pleasant?

[Evan Hubbard @Jaffui]

This is why the common definition of consciousness, whereby something is conscious if there is "something it is like" to be that thing, is problematic. It tempts us to ask whether something is conscious by taking on that thing's perspective, and imagining the result.