How Your Mind Really Works (Blog)

[Savage]

Use this thread to discuss the following entry from Steve Pavlina's blog:

How Your Mind Really Works

[Akashic_Librarian]

Fantastic article Steve. Bravo!

[Old Soul]

I LOVE IT!!

good to go

[Mike DeWitt]

Mark,

I think your characterizations in comment #14 are on the money.

Mike

[Jehosephat]

Good post. This falls in line with some of the other reading I've been doing lately regarding just saying 'yes'. Whenever you are presented with an opportunity or a request and your first instinct is 'no' if you find that that instinct is born out of fear just say 'yes'. This practice not only helps conquer fear but provides the chance to learn in just the manner Steve is describing here.

[jeroenvm]

Wow, for the past ten years I've been telling everyone who will listen that A.I. should investigate exactly this kind of learning!

I got to believe that the solution to this kind of condensed representations that you call 'invariant representations' is modelling probabilities of interaction sequences. This boils down to having the computer record what information comes in (perceptions) and what goes out (actions) and try to find stochastic patterns that describe what comes in, possibly as a result of what goes out.

These patterns can be used to form expectations about the future (as well as interpretations of the past). Many different possible paths into the future can be evaluated in parallel, and the next action of the learning system can be chosen to optimize the likelihood of adding or revising a pattern. That means that the learning algorithm isn't achieving some externally given preprogrammed goal, it is autonomously trying to learn.

Therefore the name of my A.I. project is: Learning Expectations Autonomously (LExAu).

For my view of the possible implications (in the long term) for the evolution of Mind see:

BigHairyAudaciousGoal

For more down-to-earth stuff see the home page of the project

http://lexau.org/

I am looking for resonating minds, so anyone who still has confidence in A.I. and who is prepared to think out of the 'either logic or neural net' box: please contact me using the e-mail form on the LExAu site.

Thanks for all the really interesting and helpful material on your site! I started tuning myself to the LOA only two weeks ago and it already changed my life completely (for the second time in a few weeks, so I must have been ready for something ).

Jeroen

[Mark Lapierre]

Originally Posted by jeroenvm

Wow, for the past ten years I've been telling everyone who will listen that A.I. should investigate exactly this kind of learning!

Have you heard of numenta?

[Niki]

Verry nice. Bravo!

[Dan.Linehan]

I bought a couple cheap torchieres from Walmart, which my intellect tells me is obviously the best answer until you do some future lighting overhauls.

As far as routines, some routines are crucial. This blog wouldn't exist if Steve didn't have a writing routine. There are always necessities: workout routines, personal hygiene routines, bill paying routines, sleep routines, etc., that can and should remain constant when they work well.

Meanwhile, you can open yourself up as many other possibilites as you like in the other aspects of your life.

To illustrate, if I moved to New Zealand tomorrow I could still easily exercise daily, keep the same hygenic habits, pay bills on time, etc.

I tend to believe though that just as there are "best practices" with the smaller things in life, like personal hygiene routines (always brush and floss daily) or fixing a hardware issue with a PC (always check the cables first), there are probably also best practices for the larger things in life too, like what sort of career to have, and where to live. The answers might not be as obvious, but they are there.

Always live somewhere peaceful. Always build a career based on service. And so on. Exploration and open mindedness are the tools we use to figure out what the best practices are, in any context.

[Mark Lapierre]

Heh, when considering the problem of more light, my mind went through all of those common patterns except apathy. Yes, suspicion too, you wily SOB... ;p

Good work Steve. If any of the info for this article came from scientific literature (or the musings of others) I'd love to see it (not because I doubt you, but because I've read similar things and am exceedingly interested in reading more)

I think SunnyBayes will really love this article since it covers what he's been talking about

[sri]

Great article, Steve!
Here is a brief summary for those who have already read it:

This process is called learning:
Reality ---- Rep Of Reality ---- Invariant Rep

This process is called anticipation:
Invariant Rep ---- New Situation


Question: how to change a flawed
Invariant Rep? Since Invariant means
unchanging, does this mean we have to
make a new Invariant Rep and then replace
the old one with it? Which means we have to
face Reality once again, make a better mental model
of it and then derive the Invariant Rep from it...


One of the best teacher I've had told me:

Every time she learns something new,
she links with knowledge she already has.
And the more links you create,
the faster you'll be able to learn.
A good way to do this is to explain
to yourself the new concept in 3-4 different ways.

[Mark Lapierre]

Scott's eBook is a good starting point for the type of learning sri mentioned.

[jkmuller]

Very interesting post, Steve.

It started me thinking about how the effects of habits compare with the mind-numbing effects of routines. Of course, a habit does not have to be routine, one could make a habit of constantly challenging themselves. Still, it would be nearly impossible for someone to be challenging themselves all the time. So maybe the best solution is to find a balance between useful routines, or habits, and challenging experiences.

[Max Power]

Invariant reminds me of polarity, something else I don't need to know about, thank godness we have choice.

[liverpool footballer]

Yeah! Great post, mase a lot of sense.

I ought to play a lot more of other sports too instead of just football for the better edge in my game.

[Keith Porterfield]

Hey, this may be off topic. As I read the first part of your post, I did visualize your office. Now, I want to see if I was right. Is there anyway you can post a pic of your office?

Here's what I envisioned...

A large room with windows on two sides. They were large windows, ground to floor. (Although this may be improbable based on the lighting issue) A mahogany desk facing away from the window back towards the door leading into the house. Possibly a tree in the corner that I was looking towards (palm or such).

I don't claim to have any extra senses, but I like to endulge my whimsical self once in a while.

Humor me?

[Savage]

Maybe I'll post a pic when I get it fully set up. The room is 11'x12' (I think) and has three doors: one goes to the hallway, one to a private bathroom, and one to an outdoor courtyard with some trees and plants. There's a short palm tree right outside the door but no trees in the office, although there are a few plants in the room.

The office has a large sliding-door closet with built-in shelving and some drawers. I use a glass, metal, and wood L-shaped desk (from The Sharper Image Stockton collection), and there's a matching bookcase as well. Other than that, I have a 4-drawer Hon filing cabinet but not much else.

I'm setting up this office differently than I did my last one. Since the closet here has such great built-in storage, I'm putting virtually all of my books and supplies in there. I want to keep the room itself more spartan and open. I'm thinking about getting a big wall-mounted LCD TV to use as my primary PC monitor. I tested the idea for a few hours with a 42" LCD TV and really liked it -- I wrote my last blog entry that way. Right now I'm still using a 19" LCD monitor.

Incidentally, the built-in ceiling fan with light can only accept the smaller bulb sizes (3 bulbs x 40W max each), so I'm still working on the lighting issue.

[Sunnybayes]

Steve... hi five!

standing off of each other's shoulders.

[Keith]

A possible solution that you didn't mention is mirrors - they brighten a place up some and make it look larger.

[Bruce Achterberg]

Originally Posted by Steve Pavlina

[...] I'm setting up this office differently than I did my last one. Since the closet here has such great built-in storage, I'm putting virtually all of my books and supplies in there. I want to keep the room itself more spartan and open.

Is that so you can have a bottomless pit put in so when people read your articles and say, "This is madness!", you can say, "This... is... PAVLINA!" while kicking them into the pit, exposing your extremely ripped midsetction as you raise your arms in victory?

[impaul99]

Just a question. What if our minds work nothing like this? What if we're just building a box around our understanding, and by believing in this box we create it using the rules of Subjective Reality.

For example, what if I proposed that our minds work differently. Let's take Steve's lighting issue as an example. Supposedly the "problem" is created, which is that he's moved into a house with bad lighting and he has to use his mind to "solve the problem". However, if we throw SR into the picture, why is there bad lighting in this place in the first place? Why didn't Steve just create a house that already came with good lighting? According to SR, he creates everything so he obviously created bad lighting too.

So, why would he do such a thing? Well, because maybe he needed to write an article for his blog and needed an example for a problem to illustrate, so he "created" bad lighting in his house. But the bad lighting was there when he moved in, which was before he started writing the article. Not necessarily. According to SR, the house could have had good lighting, then Steve needed a "problem" to solve, so now the house has bad lighting and his memories of the past (which doesn't really exist) change to match his new reality so now he think that the house always had bad lighting.

Therefore, the solution to the problem is not about finding a way to get bigger lightbulbs into a 40Watts maximum power rating socket. The solution to the problem is to figure out WHY your mind created the problem in the first place and eliminate the need for you to want to create that problem. Once you do that, and you no longer need the problem to exist, it will "disappear" out of your life.

Anyway, just some crazy thoughts I thought about while reading the article.

[Savage]

I'm pretty sure I created this problem to learn how many Steves it would take to change a light bulb.

Subjectively speaking I wanted to do something a bit more creative with my office this time, so the lighting problem is an opportunity in disguise -- it nudges me to do something more interesting with the lights because the most obvious solution is a dead end.

[Max Power]

Originally Posted by impaul99

Just a question. What if our minds work nothing like this? What if we're just building a box around our understanding, and by believing in this box we create it using the rules of Subjective Reality.

I'm not sure this article is helpful on a SR level. Within the SR model, mind/body is not identity, but output like everything else created. Strictly speaking from the SR POV, there is no mind.

If you believe you have a mind somewhere inside your body, then the article has value, but from SR POV it's unecessary to consider how the mind works, because it's a created thing, it's output, it doesn't do any work.

If you were discussing how consiousness may work, that's different, but the mind is largely redundant. Where and what is you mind? Is it in your brain, is it the thing you use to think? No it's just a label for cognitive thought (another creation) Still Steve is very good at improving the state of consciousness, so it's all good

Max