This post was entitled 'What to think about everything', and waiting in my drafts. Naturally I got excited, but it turns out that it was not populated. I've no idea what I would have said, but anyway...
The world is a place full of entities and possibilities, because its always developing through time. The brain is nature's way of keeping the world's tendencies to kill your genes from developing into actualities. The mind is the brains way of keeping the brain's tendencies to kill you from developing into actualities.
The brain is solving the problem of Abduction - relating a schema of the super-sensible to a limited observation of a reality in motion is an NP-hard problem (C.S. Pierce first showed that thinking depends on abduction; there are a variety of papers on it but Bylander et al 'The Computational Complexity of Abduction' 1991 is pretty good). NP-hard in a large world means that you can't solve it fully in a reasonable amount of time*, unless you can reduce by orders of magnitude the number of involved entities by:
- lumping up sensations into objects which are cleanly defined by not being other objects, excluding them from their space. Sensations denote limbs and a body which is really just one bear that can be treated as a point, in relation to the question of what to do next.
- expecting repetition of familiar scenarios. Run away.
- importantly, being set up to be pretty darn insensitive to things that don't matter, like 'what if this bear just a regular cuddlepie who are not out to kill us?' meh. No one cares about that. Assume everyone's out to kill us, especially people who look like they don't have our genes.
- Being sensitive to generalisation logic, to reasoning with representations rather than imagining entire entities. I really like Lukacs Kaiser's paper on building a logic detector and solver for tic-tac-toe, connect-four and other simple games. It shows the potential power for symbolic reasoning to play games, and I think games, narrative and dynamic logic are going to get unified pretty thoroughly pretty soon.
- Letting a really simple brain (the emotions) cooperate with you and run the mechanics of the limbic system and what not, and even take over entirely at times, causing you to punch people, cry, or start a blog.
- Making contingent decisions and commitments that will be modified soon.
Over time, the disintegrated solvers get fine-tuned to my environment and it becomes possible for them to be more and more integrated. For me at least, many of those integrations didn't come up with more than a fractious truce. My emotions are kept at arms length a lot of the time, and I don't feel very much, and I don't imagine how something would feel for myself in the future or another person in the present all that well. My reasoning has not been very purposive - I hardly plan, am often unproductive, and get motivated about weirdly small things, and deeply dejected about normal size things, like having a job and a few extra-curricular commitments. (To illustrate agonizing about the very small, I spent a number of hours agonizing about buying a couple of computer components totalling about $30 which I don't need. They were heavily marked down. But I couldn't (or didn't try to) imagine a me in the future who just didn't care that he didn't have them, or a me who did but was disappointed, or a me who suddenly saw what that $30 could have gone toward. I stalled in the emotional desiring and the super-ego's denial.) My reasoning is also unmotivated by anything except deeply personal felt trouble. The mere promise of approval and acceptance, of satisfaction in a job done (whether well, or medium) moves me very little, unless the job is immediately in front of me.
I've been reading 'The mindful way through depression' by Jon Kabat-Zinn. He points to a similar phenomenon in depression, of using the reasoning ('doing') executive brain parts in fruitless wars against desire; in inquisitions against feelings of disappointment or remembered shame; and (I suspect this in my case very much) in abdicating to the emotions when pressed to work hard at something that doesn't seem immediately personally relevant (item 0 -> coaching the emotional brain into useful contribution by putting the right prompting and questions to it).
These two (and other faculties of body and mind) are me.**
*Well, we can't at the moment. Some problems that are NP-hard have no conventional (Turing/von Neumann etc) computing algorithm that completes in polytime, but Shor's algorithm is a famous example that means a quantum computer could complete it in polytime.
** The recent PEL podcast on Lacan suggested that this unification of the divided subject, taking responsibility for all the internality (however it was produced. Mostly made of externality (cultured stuff)) was the goal of psychoanalysis. This is a Pennebaker Essay on how I overcame the major psychic division and became cheerful, emotionally alert and productive.
