On Jan 23, 2008 9:52 PM, Andrew Lentvorski <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > David Brown wrote: > > I would say that the human brain is more general purpose than any computer > > that we've ever built. > > I might agree. Except that its "general purpose" is actually "pattern > matching for survival". > > > Computers we make have to be laboriously programmed. > > Um, excuse me? Literacy and education don't come for free, you know. > > > The brain learns on its own. It can't be directly programmed, > > and I don't think we're even close to understanding how it works. But, it > > can be indirectly be programmed. Words like "study", and "practice" come > > to mind. > > And it has some absolutely spectacular failure modes: superstition, > schizophrenia, paranoia, depression, etc.
Useful observations. I come from a family where these "failure modes" are manifest. My father and one (of two) brothers were paranoid schizophrenic, clinically diagnosed and often hospitalized for this illness, a mental illness with a large genetic component, i.e. we know as a fact that it runs in families. My family is a good example. As a consequence I have thought a lot about this problem. Why, for instance, would evolution tolerate such an "obviously dysfunctional" disease. I use the term disease on purpose because I would note that schizophrenia is a syndrome (perhaps many diseases) that is in many, if not most cases, a result of a physical disease of the brain. This disease(s) causes serious cognitive differences in brain functioning compared to "normal" people, i.e. schizophrenics see and hear things that the vast majority of people around them are _not_ seeing and hearing. Simply put, they hallucinate. The syndrome has some common consequences. One of them is that ones relationships with other humans almost always deteriorates. Very few people seek out schizophrenics as friends for obvious reasons. Especially when the schizophrenic is, as is often the case, paranoid and potentially (actually rare) violent. So I have a lot of direct experience with good people who suffer from the modes of failure. This experience has caused me to wonder, "Why would such a gene survive the evolutionary process? I would ask Ralph, 'What would this be a part of an intelligent design?" I must note though that I am no believer in ID. I am a believer in classical evolution. I come up with a couple of speculations for why schizophrenia survives, i.e. why it has evolutionary value. However it is late tonight. I am very tired. I will address this tomorrow in another post. Meanwhile I would solicit comments and experience of others. > And it has almost no debugging facilities. Not true. The debugging is done by interaction with other humans. Call it culture if you will. This environmental debugging works externally and is very powerful. Most people fall in line with the external feedback. One of the facts about the mentally ill, schizophrenia being only one of several examples, is that they do _not_ pay nearly as much attention to this external feedback. They do _not_ debug like you and I. In this respect the mentally ill have a lot in common with geniuses and other extremely creative individuals who are driven by internal as opposed to external social realities. BobLQ -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-lpsg
