It's Alive

AKA - The Selfish Meme grows legs

Network Address has been slacking on the Fake News front, simply because we tend to avoid anything on the front lines (since you're probably already getting that news from somewhere else) but this stuff is just too good...

As information bursts forth from the noosphere into the anthroposphere, from the inorganic to the organic, from the dematerialized idea to the materialized corpuscule, we see...

Cambridge scientists consider fake news 'vaccine'
Jan 2017, BBC

Researchers suggest "pre-emptively exposing" readers to a small "dose" of the misinformation can help organisations cancel out bogus claims. ...like a virus...contagion...


POST SCRIPT

But let us not forget - Charles Darwin used the taxonomy of Language to explain his theory of evolution.

Natural Selection X Artificial Intelligence
Network Address, 2012

Also check out The Extended Phenotype, Virus of the Mind, Thought Contagion, and memes, meta-, and memetics in general

Magical Thinking

light paintings - Janne Parviainen

Magical thinking still haunts all our thoughts
Andrew Crumey, 2014, Aeon

While scientific theories can become increasingly technical and abstract, the brains that struggle to interpret their meaning haven’t evolved much in the past 50,000 years. If our own brain is a kind of living fossil, it’s hardly surprising that so much of what we do with it is metaphorically fossilised too.

light paintings - Janne Parviainen

All Bodies Are Virtual

Adults become more like children in a virtual world
BBC 16 July 2013

In a virtual world adults in a child-like body start to perceive the world more like a child, a study has shown.

Adults were either placed in a virtual four-year-old body or an adult body scaled down to the same size.

It was found that participants in the child's body overestimated the size of objects and identified better with child-like attributes.

Illusory ownership of a virtual child body causes overestimation of object sizes and implicit attitude changes.

source: pnas

Sexualized avatars affect the real world, researchers find
Oct 10, 2013, phys.org
A Stanford study shows that after women wear sexualized avatars in a virtual reality world, they feel objectified and are more likely to accept rape myths in the real world. The research could have implications for the role of female characters in video games.

Julian Jaynes’s Software Archaeology

Daniel Dennet, speaking on Julian Jaynes, ~1984
julianjaynes.org
[pdf]

main server, geocities.com, [link]
[source], Tree Maps, GDMAP tool

Now, I take Jaynes to be making a similarly exciting and striking move with regard to consciousness. To put it really somewhat paradoxically  you can’t have consciousness until you have the concept of consciousness. In fact he has a more subtle theory than that, but that’s the basic shape of the move.

These aren’t the only two phenomena, morality and consciousness, that work this way. Another one that Jaynes mentions is history, and at first one thinks. “Here’s another use-mention error!” At one point in the book Jaynes suggests that history was invented or discovered just a few years before Herodotus, and one starts to object that of course there was history long before there were historians, but then one realizes that in a sense Jaynes is right. Is there a history of lions and antelopes? Just as many years have passed for them as for us, and things have happened to them, but it is very different. Their passage of time has not been conditioned by their recognition of the transition, it has not been conditioned and tuned and modulated by any reflective consideration of that very process. So history itself, our having histories, is in part a function of our recognizing that very fact. Other phenomena in this category are obvious: you can’t have baseball before you have the concept of baseball, you can t have money before you have the concept of money.

archaeology software

I have used up as much time as I should use, but I am going to say a few more words. If you want to pursue the interesting idea that consciousness postdates the arrival of a certain set of concepts, then of course you have to have in your conceptual armamentarium the idea that concepts themselves can be preconscious, that concepts do not require consciousness. Many have
held that there is no such thing as the unconscious wielding of concepts, but Jaynes’ account of the origins of consciousness depends on the claim that an elaboration of a conceptual scheme under certain social and environmental pressures was the precondition for the emergence of consciousness as we know it. This is, to my mind, the most important claim that Jaynes makes in his book. As he puts it, “The bee has a concept of the flower,” but not a conscious concept. We
have a very salient theoretical role for something which we might as well call concepts, but if you
don’t like it we can call them schmoncepts, concept-like things that you don’t have to be conscious to have.

For instance, computers have them. They are not conscious—yet—but they have lots of concepts,...

[...]

archaeology software

The underlying hardware of the brain is just the same now as it was thousands of years ago (or it may be just the same), but what had to happen was that the environment had to be such as to encourage the development, the emergence, of certain concepts, certain software, which then set in motion some sort of chain reaction. Jaynes is saying that when the right concepts settled into place in the preconscious minds” of our ancestors, there was a sort of explosion. like the explosion in computer science that happens when you invent something like LISP. Suddenly you discover a new logical space. where you get the sorts of different behaviors, the sorts of new powers, the sorts of new problems that we recognize as having the flavor of human consciousness.

Of course, if that is what Jaynes’ theory really is, it is no wonder he has to be bold in his interpretation of the tangible evidence, because this isn't just archaeology he is doing: this is software archaeology, and software doesn't leave much of a fossil record. Software, after all, is just concepts. It is abstract and yet, of course, once it is embodied it has very real effects. So if you want to find a record of major “software” changes in archaeological history, what are you going to have to look at? You are going to have to look at the “printouts,” but they are very indirect. You are going to have to look at texts, and you are going to have to look at the pottery shards and figurines as Jaynes does, because that is the only of course, maybe the traces are just gone, maybe the “fossil record” is simply not good enough. Jaynes’ idea is that for us to be the way we are now, there has to have been a revolution— almost certainly not an organic revolution, but a software revolution—in the organization of our information processing system, and that has to have come after language. That, I think, is an absolutely wonderful idea, and if Jaynes is completely wrong in the details, that is a darn shame,
but something like what he proposes has to be right; and we can start looking around for better modules to put in the place of the modules that he has already given us.
www.julianjaynes.org/pdf/dennett_jaynes-software-archeology.pdf

On Time and Humans

Shinichi Maruyama, Nude #1, 2012

http://www.shinichimaruyama.com/

"The light of stars requires time; deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than most distant stars - and yet they have done it themselves." Friedrich "The Madman" Nietzsche

You Love Right Angles

Robert Williams, Persuasion of Right Angles, 2007

You can tell me ‘til you’re blue in the face, but you brain is not designed to see things as they are.

This is an efficiency-of-vision in the way the brain sees; most would call it misperception. I wonder, however, if we can call it so, if we can see that the brain has been designed to see this way. It’s not a mistake. Trying to seeing things as they are in the first place is the mistake.

On Right Angles

Most humans seem to have a natural impulse to create right angles, and will do so despite attempted conscious override. For example, when trying to draw figure 1, most people will draw figure 2 instead. Figures 3 and 4 are more examples. Notice the right angles that are created in the incorrect examples.

Even after a person has been told of this phenomenon, they will continue to perform the same mistake. See figures 5-7: When given instructions to add “cross-contour lines” to figure 5, the typical subject will produce figure 7, not figure 6. Once again, the tendency to make the lines 'increasingly perpendicular' is evident.

Relevant Findings:

The following is taken from a relevant report; subjects were shown various angles and asked what angle they saw:

Compared to a quadrilateral on its own, judgments of the acute and obtuse angles in the cube drawings were biased towards 90 degrees.

Of interest, the judgments are attracted only to 90
degrees, not to 0 degrees or 180 degrees, 45 degrees and 135 degrees,other possible components of good form.

...an angle illusion could be a top-down, Gestalt effect. When physical conditions approach a ‘simpler’ shape, a percept with symmetry, equality, parallels, and orthogonality is favoured, Gestaltists argue.

If the V means 90 degrees, it is seen as 90 degrees, in a strong version of this theory.

Peterson and Gibson (1993) argue perceptual input and cognitive information are processed in parallel. If recognition influences perception, angles close to 90 degrees on the page might indeed be seen as 90 degrees.

Angle illusion on a picture’s surface
SHERIEF HAMMAD, JOHN M. KENNEDY, IGOR JURICEVIC and SHAZMA RAJANI
University of Toronto at Scarborough, 1265 Military Trail, Toronto ON M1C1A4, Canada
Received 28 August 2006; accepted 15 March 2007

Spatial Vision, Vol. 21, No. 3–5, pp. 451– 462 (2008)
Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2008.

Also available online - www.brill.nl/sv
https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/handle/1807/18758

Peterson, M. A. and Gibson, B. S. (1993). Shape recognition contributions to figure-ground organization in three-dimensional displays, Cognit. Psychol. 25, 383–429.

Further Interpretations:

In an effort towards simplification, where all angles exist on a spectrum between 90 and 180 degrees, (either angled or straight) it is 'cognitively efficient' to assume that the angle in question is not somewhere on the angle-spectrum, but only at either end. To see things as either good or bad, right or wrong, up or down, is also much easier and at times more effective than discriminating between shades of difference.

In another override (also, one would assume, to maximize cognitive processing), it is, at times (or, more often than not, as it seems) better to "see" what a thing "is" rather than to see what it really looks like. (This implies that the viewer knows that the correctly-drawn cube is, in fact, a cube, with six rectilinear sides, just by looking at the drawing, thus knowing what it is, or is meant to represent.)

So, is this common misperception a result of simple-over-complex, or one of "what it is" over "what it looks like"

The Nature of Illusion