From: Adrian Tymes (wingcat@pacbell.net)
Date: Mon Jul 07 2003 - 18:33:40 MDT
--- Robin Hanson <rhanson@gmu.edu> wrote:
> Journeys of self-discovery are familiar themes in
> literature and in the
> stories people tell about themselves.
Because journeys themselves are a standard literary
device. It is easier to describe and relate physical
changes, especially in ways that capture the
audience's attention, than purely mental ones. "Jane
sat around all day, thinking about the difference
between herself and mermaids, and realized that they
were just two different types of people after all," is
not as exciting as, "Jane donned her scuba gear and
set off for the mermaid colony, enraptured by every
quirk of difference she saw, until she noticed that,
despite the fins and gills and aquatic cities,
mermaids were just people too."
> Why couldn't
> evolution have let people better see their own
> preferences? Now it isn't
> crazy to think that our preferences are encoded in
> such complex and kludgey
> mental modules that our conscious mind must struggle
> to infer their
> contents from lots of specific decisions. But even
> so it seems odd that we
> now seem to know more about the (really quite
> strange) nature of the atom
> than we do about what the typical person really
> wants. Why were not our
> ancestors able to slowly learn what they wanted, and
> then use language to
> pass that knowledge on to succeeding generations?
Because the human brain is far more complex than, and
not as easy to objectively observe as, an atom?
Consider: Boolean logic, having few practical uses
before the invention of the computer (a tool with
which to implement its predictions), did not receive
as much study before that time as since. Likewise, we
have been lacking in tools to observe mental states -
beyond notoriously subjective observations of actions
that said states trigger, with often unreliable
connections back to said states - until the past
century or so.
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