Incognito
"This book will shine light on some of the hard-to-reach places in the brain, showing the ways in which we are not the ones driving the boat. Why does the conscious mind know so little? What do visual illusions unmask about the machinery running under the hood? How much of our lives are determined by choices and behaviors that are hard-wired, unconscious, and beyond our control? Do we have any management over who we find gorgeous or repugnant? How is it possible to get angry at yourself: who exactly, is mad at whom? If the drunk Mel Gibson is an anti-Semite and the sober Mel Gibson is authentically apologetic, is there a real Mel Gibson? Why did Supreme Court Justice William Douglas claim that he was able to play football and go hiking, when everyone could see that he was paralyzed after his stroke? Why do people willingly give up their money to banks for Christmas accounts (and why don't monkeys do this)? Why do patients on Parkinson's medications become compulsive gamblers? Why do athletes follow routines, like bouncing the ball three times before taking a free throw? Why did Charles Whitman suddenly kill his family and shoot forty six others from the UT Austin tower, and what did this have to do with his brain? How much of who we are is in the genes, and how much in the environment? Does free will exist or not, and how does that affect our view of blameworthiness and credit?
Stats for nerds
13recommend
15mentions
15people
2011–2024years
87% recommend13% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Psychiatry is useful in the way Statistics is useful for math models we don't fully understand. Statistics let's us get at answers with enough data even though we don't really understand the underlying model at play.
There a whole host of 'sciences' that are kind of 2nd tier like this, Psychiatry being one of them. Once we understand enough Neuroscience, it's likely to me Psychiatry will get consumed by Neuroscience which will splinter into more useful for day to day life categories as it grows (like a psychiatrist)
Super book on the subject and also talks about the rising bar for individual culpability as we understand more about the brain: https://www.amazon.com/Incognito-Secret-Lives-David-Eagleman...
- They are not comparable. There's a prevalent metaphor which imagines the brain as a digital computer. However, this is a metaphor and not actual facts. While we have some good ideas on how the brain works on higher levels (recommended reading Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain by David Eagleman) we do not really have any ideas on the lower levels. As the essay I link below mentions, for example, when attending a concert, our brain changes so that later it can remember it but two brains attending the same concert will not change the same way. This make modelling the brain really damn tricky.
This complete lack of understanding is also why it's completely laughable to think we can do AGI any time soon. Or perhaps ever? The reason for the AI winter cycle is the framing of it, this insane chase of AGI when it's not even defined properly. Instead, we should set out tasks to solve -- we didn't make a better horse when we made cars and locomotives. No one complains these do not provide us with milk to ferment into kumis. The goal was to move faster, not a better horse...
https://aeon.co/essays/your-brain-does-not-process-informati...
- I found David Eagleman's books, especially Incognito, to be really good introduction to how the brain works.
"Proust was a Neuroscientist" is a delightful look at how non-scientists throughout history (artists, dancers, writers) have intuited truths about how parts of the brain work that have since been proven by science.
- Studies of split brain patients play a good part in illustrating how little our consciousness is in control in "Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain" by David Eagleman, a book I highly recommend.
- My own personal theory of mind is heavily inspired by David Eagleman's Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain. There he describes a model of mind in which a multitude of independent "agents" propose "ideas", which bubble up to our consciousness (the top-level agents), which pick some of these ideas according to some (to us) opaque key.
In this model, I imagine that many of these low-level ideas start in a non-language form, and as they bubble up to the higher levels of the mind, they get wrapped in language, as they are processed by consciousness. But since things are not simple, the higher-level agents can modulate the lower-level ones, and that's how the language parts of our minds can influence the non-language (emotional?) parts. I have experienced several instances of purely rational cognition imprinting into my emotional perception of reality.
- For me:
* Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter
* The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins
* Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain by David Eagleman
* Occult America: The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation by Mitch Horowitz
* Little Brother by Cory Doctorow
* Siddhartha by Herman Hesse
* The Culture novels by Ian M. Banks
* Hitchhiker's Guide to The Galaxy by Douglas Adams
* Not a book, but Gene Roddenberry's vision in Star Trek shaped who I want to be and the world in which I prefer to live.
Although, I would say that it's hard to choose because just about everything I read changes me in some way. Here I've tried to stick to the ones that changed me for the better, rather than sending me off on an amusing if useless rabbit trail, e.g. Real Magic by Isaac Bonewitz, Illusions by Richard Bach, The Illuminatus Trilogy by Robert Anton Wilson, H.P. Lovecraft's works.
