This Will Make You Smarter:New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking

Tristan

Dagobah Resident
FOTCM Member
This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking
edited by John Brockman

http://www.amazon.com/This-Will-Make-You-Smarter/dp/0062109391

This book consist of an anthology of short essays by 151 of our time’s biggest thinkers on subjects as diverse as the power of networks, cognitive humility, the paradoxes of daydreaming, information flow, collective intelligence, and a dizzying, mind-expanding range in between. Together, they construct a powerful toolkit of meta-cognition — a new way to think about thinking itself.

With the participation of many experts such as:

D. Kahneman, D Goleman, Martin Seligman, VS Ramachadrian, R. Sapolsky, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Brian Eno among many others; about possible scientific concepts that can be used to improve cognition and expand the human outlook for change.
Brockman prefaces the essays with an important definition that captures the dimensionality of “science”:

Here, the term ‘scientific’ is to be understood in a broad sense — as the most reliable way of gaining knowledge about anything, whether it be human behavior, corporate behavior, the fate of the planet, or the future of the universe. A ‘scientific concept’ may come from philosophy, logic, economics, jurisprudence, or any other analytic enterprises, as long as it is a rigorous tool that can be summed up succinctly but has broad application to understanding the world.”

The matter behind this book links with what Neuroscientist David Eagleman, author of Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain explores; the concept of “the umwelt” coined by biologist Jakob von Uexküll in 1909 — the idea that different animals in the same ecosystem pick up on different elements of their environment and thus live in different micro-realities based on the subset of the world they’re able to detect. Eagleman stresses the importance of recognizing our own umwelt — our unawareness of the limits of our awareness:

I think it would be useful if the concept of the umwelt were embedded in the public lexicon. It neatly captures the idea of limited knowledge, of unobtainable information, and of unimagined possibilities. Consider the criticisms of policy, the assertions of dogma, the declarations of fact that you hear every day — and just imagine if all of these could be infused with the proper intellectual humility that comes from appreciating the amount unseen.”

But most of the essays in the book are about metacognition. They consist of thinking about how we think. These researchers are giving us tools for thinking. It sounds utilitarian and it is. But tucked in the nooks and crannies of this book there are insights about the intimate world, about the realms of emotion and spirit. There are insights about what sort of creatures we are.
 
I think this book, Incognito, is a great adjunct to the other cognition books. Page 140: Why do we have consciousness at all? Most neuroscientists study animal models of behavior: how a sea slug withdraws from a touch, how a mouse responds to rewards, how an owl localizes sounds in the dark. As these circuits are scientifically brought to light, they all reveal themselves to be nothing but zombie systems: blueprints of circuitry that respond to particular inputs with appropriate outputs. If our brains were composed only of these patterns of circuits, why would it feel like anything to be alive and conscious? Why wouldn't it feel like nothing- like a zombie?

A decade ago, neuroscientist Francis Crick and Christof Koch asked, "Why does not our brain consist simply of a series of specialized zombie systems?" In other words, why are we conscious of anything at all? Why aren't we simply a vast collection of these automated, burned down routines that solve problems?

Crick and Koch answer, like mine is that consciousness exists to control- and to distribute control over- the automated alien systems. A system of automated sub routines that reaches a certain level of complexity (and human brains certainly qualify) requires a high-level mechanism to allow the parts to communicate, dispense resources, and allocate control. As we saw earlier with the tennis player trying to learn how to serve, consciousness is the CEO of the company: he sets the higher level directions and assigns new tasks. We have learned in this chapter that he doesn't need to understand the software that each department in the organization uses; nor does he need to see their detailed log books and sales receipts. He merely needs to know whom to call on when.

As long as the zombie subroutines are running smoothly, the CEO can sleep. Think about when your conscious awareness comes on line: in those situations where events in the world violate your expectations.

Immediately I think of Casteneda's definition of discipline: To face with serenity, odds not within our expectations. I also can't help but think about G. He was constantly learning new tasks, trades, changing routines, etc. as part on his conscious efforts. As soon as something gets learned, it gets largely relegated to automatic routines that operate outside of conscious awareness.

So lets take a look at The Prehistory of the Mind: On page 70 under The Mind as a Cathedral; Phase 3: The minds of the third phase share a new architectural feature: direct access between the chapels. With this feature, knowledge once trapped within different chapels can now be integrated together. It is not quite clear haw this access was achieved. Some of our guides described how they could see knowledge crossing between domain/ intelligences, as if passing through doors and windows which had been inserted in the chapel walls. But one of our guides, Dan Sperber, thought he could see a 'superchapel'- his model of metarepresentation. In this superchapel, knowledge from specialized intelligences is replicated in much the same way that Karmiloff- Smith argued that knowledge becomes replicated in different parts of the mind during development. Clearly we need more evidence before the specific architectural design of Phase 3 minds can be described; all we know at present is that the combining of thoughts and knowledge of the different specialized intelligences is possible and that this has significant consequences for the nature of the mind.

Indeed it does! I think the mind is a tool that is used by 4D as a feeding mechanism if the soul is largely unconscious, or as a tool to make connections and learn the "simple karmic understandings" of 3D by the awakening soul.

I had an interesting experience yesterday considering I was pondering all these things. One of my friends on facebook had made a comment regarding the Germanwings crash: "Seems to me that if we can fly a drone to anywhere in the world from anywhere in the world, then an Air Traffic Controller should be able to take control of an oddly-behaving commercial plane with an unresponsive pilot...once its clear to Air Traffic Control that something is wrong, someone can flip a secure switch that takes control of the plane and safely lands it." So, after reading the comments and seeing that no one was thinking of the reverse possibility, I wrote; " Or.... That IS what happened. Someone took control of the plane remotely and flew it into the mountain to send a message. The rest was cover up." I then refferred anyone interested to SOTT blogtalkradio on the subject. A couple hours later I received this reply from a Chris McCann "Or... we can dispense with promoting right wing teabag radio conspiracy bullshit. Take it to Dittohead country.

Well, as we say, that's not even wrong. But, not surprisingly, it triggered an emotional reaction. My emotional center started running the intellectual center. I started to contemplate what sort of, put the moron back in his place, comments I could make. But having done a little bit of WORK observing myself for a few years now, There's a part of me that said no,no ,no. Wait for the emotional energy to play out before you decide to make any comments or not. So I did and I see now that I lacked external considering in the first place. So, no comments have been made in retaliation.

I made a different choice. And changing realities comes down to the choices we make. The more I see, the more I think the C's have already given us all the clues we need. But it's up to us to make the connections. That's the process we have to go through in order to be ready for the next level where I think there will be another 'dimension' (for lack of a better word) added to cognition. That's why there's no free lunch. Or so I think.

But that's enough for now. Hopefully there's something useful in what I've written.
 
Thank you, Tristan and gender 81, by the comments of this book, I found it in my language, in version kindle, I will add to the reading list.. :flowers:

:lkj:
 
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