> At 09:45 26/02/97 GMT, Drakir wrote:
>
> >So who decides in the absolute beginning what is logical, and what is not?
>
> I reckon this is like asking a geneticist "Where did the first mammal come
> from?" or "Where did the first DNA molecule come from?" The thing is, once
> you accept that Logic is a set of skills encoded, stored, and transmitted as
> memes, then you can start to think that maybe before the first decision
> about what's logical and what's not, there were precursor systems of
> thought, more patchy-looking heuristics knocking around that worked
> similarly to Logic but which weren't logic and which weren't called logic.
OK. I'm not going to argue with that either, seeing as it makes sense.
> >> I reckon brains are non-logical processors that can be trained to simulate
> >> logical processing to some degree sometimes.
> >
> >I'll take your word on that :)
>
> Thanks for being so... memetically yielding.
You're welcome.
> >I found that when using a shotgun, one does not go for an "overall shooting
> >movement", but rather a judgement. I should imagine that the brain is having
> >a dman good go at judging the angles, and velocities, but simply isn't telling
> >your consciousness. Just think, if your brain told you what it was doing all
> >the time, your conscious side would be overloaded!
>
> Ouch. I just plain disagree with this. Sorry;
I'll forgive you, but just this once ...
> I reckon that if your brain
> judged angles when you were learning to shoot, then you could "port"
> angle-judging skills from one activity to another, and so learning to throw
> a ball into a bucket would help learning to fire a shotgun.
Well why not. All you have to learn is how to copy one skill into another
to make that possible. For example, carrying on your analogy, if throwing balls
into a bucket teaches you the angle judgement required to shoot accurately with
a shotgun, then what you need to do is learn to use a gun, and the accuracy
should come quite rapidly. The only difference is that in one case, you
havn't got a huge metal tube to support.
> But also, the learning curve effects you get with shotgun things
> are the same as the learning curves you get for all sorts of other skills.
> If it was a question of you learning the maths with your unconscious brain,
> wouldn't you expect learning effects and error rates different to those
> which are actually observed?
Not really. The unconscious mind still has to learn things over time.
Surely, though, you've noticed that some people are better at one thing
than someone else, and some people pick up skills faster, because of
experience in other areas.
> > Does ones
> >rationality change, depending on which memes you have recently been
> >infected with, of is rationality permanent once formed?
>
> I'd say that you behave more rationally in some situations than in others,
> because different memetic selection pressures are training your brain in
> some situations than in others.
So rationality is a multi-leveled meme-complex? (Not Brodie levels, just
different patterns of memes) Something must, therefore, operate the
operating system, right? So is that done by memes? If so, is that our
ultimate rationality? If not, is that our true free will?
Drakir