Throwing away main results - the collateral benefits hack

Do motivated people really have their eyes on the prize? Yeah, probably, but you might be surprised about some of their actions. They might just throw away what you thought was the main benefit of their actions, and the goal you thought they were pursuing. And it might not even be that they are behaving irrationally. But that you misunderstood their goal.
I was just thinking about this kind of behavior, from a personal perspective. They are moments when you finally got your lot organized, you know what you have to do the next 50-200 steps to get to your goal, things are finally making sense. You are content: you managed to subdivide a problem that seemed very hard to achieve into manageable subgoals, and all you need to do, in theory, now that you traced a path to your goal, is to keep walking (disclaimer: no encouragement for (a certain brand of) whiskey consumption has been intended here, but c'mon, they do have a cool ads!).
Yet it doesn't happen. You don't get on with it. You don't move to the goal, although it's finally manageable. And its not cause you are lazy - you just discover that now that you finally defined that threatening problem in terms of manageable steps, you can focus on other things, that are far more important to you for some bizarre reason.
 Point taken, the managerial part of your mind is now pissed off with u. And for a good reason: you've been terrified by this problem for so long, and now that finally your brain has provided the solution, instead of defeating the monster you just.... start working on a different task? How uncool is that?
But sometimes you need to trust that your brain knows what it's doing (it got on with keeping your body alive without that much input from you quite well and for quite a while). That you might not be that dedicated to the goal you just mentally solved. That knowing you can achieve it was the main benefit, the thing that helped you move deeper into what it's actually important for you to do.
And sometimes - rarely, but it happens - you might need to just be tolerant with throwing away most of what seems the result of your action. It might be that those results where not what you where there for in the first place, but some collateral benefit, which was a necessary resource for one of your other goals.
I was just thinking about this when I stumbled across a great description of that exact situation in a book chapter by Klahr(1):

"Consider the problem faced recently by an unnamed psychologist in getting from an office at Carnegie Mellon University to a conference room at Colorado resort in order to present a talk about scientific reasoning. The "difference" was one of distance, and among the set of distance-reduction operators were flying, walking, biking, and so forth. Flying was the operator that would most rapidly reduce distance, but it could not be applied to the initial condition: that is, one could not fly directly from one office to the conference site. This presented the subproblem of creating conditions for flying (i.e., getting to an airport). Getting to the airport could best be done via taxi, but there was no taxi at Carnegie Mellon. The sub-subproblem involved making a phone call to the cab company. But all the university phones were out of order for the day during a transition to a new system: only the pay phones worked. An even deeper subproblem: make a call on a pay phone. But a lack of coins made it impossible to apply that operator (no pun intended). However, a Coke machine was handy, and it accepted dollar bills and gave change. So the problem solver bought and discarded a Coke (our emphasis) in order to get on the solution path to transport himself to Colorado."

Well ok, you will say, but I might have thrown away more than a Coke. So what? Solving some problems involves exactly that kind of lateral thinking. The only thing you need to watch for is not to get trapped in too many lateral thinking loops, not to end up throwing away too many portions. Not to end up living in a lateral loop that was supposed to be a life hack and just doesn't take you to your goal anymore.
But to all of you out there that think about yourselves as highly determined people, yet cringe at seeing yourself throwing away main results of what you worked for - relax. Try to understand the bigger goal. And see how smart your brain has been in pursuing it. Don't instill forced discipline just to satisfy your managerial mind - because you came up with too good of a plan to drop it just now. That part of your mind shouldn't be the master. It is just a tool. A costly tool, that takes lots of pride in itself, and likes its own work, but finally just a tool for your deeper goals.
You might be interested to know that some of the most creative minds of the history have done exactly that: hacked into problems, thrown away what to others seemed the main benefit, kept pursuing their task using lateral thinking tools until they got all the little pieces of the puzzle that they needed. And then a solution seemed to emerge out of nowhere (to others).
Just make sure what you are throwing away doesn't have a dangerous impact on your life or others. Other than that, you can keep on playing. It's what problem-solving is all about.
The juggling metaphor of solving tasks is well known: one has too many tasks on one's hands (wonder if one could have to many hands on one's task) and can't possibly cope with everything in the same time. Yet one copes by giving big pushes to the tasks, making them go into a sleeping cycle, when they don't need attention. It's about dealing with emergencies just before they happen. And it is very stressful, although it does imply the somewhat borderline satisfaction of dealing with more than you can.
But this collateral benefits hack is more like what a trapeze artist does. You are not throwing balls in the air, but throwing yourself into goals, being in motion, hoping that the trapeze you just landed will (while still in motion) meet up with another one that will take you a bit closer to your goal, or closer to something that can take you to your goal, or closer to something that is closer to something that can take you to your goal, recursive reasoning for the win!
Part of the path you might have taken might not be intended. It might not be meaningful. It might just be the search for that trapeze which moves you in the range of your dreams, at whatever recursive depth is still exciting for you and still makes you feel near them. And sometimes you might take a path that involved days of tasks just cause you needed the equivalent of a paperclip out of there. But it might be a paperclip without which you can't go any further.
The price that we pay for various parts that we need in our problem-solving might be completely unscaled to what we get from an action. But adapted to the importance getting that thing has for our goals and dreams.
And sometimes taking a path which seems not yours, not meaningful, which seems to take you away rather than towards your goal, is a painful thing (imagine what AI programs must feel when you force them out of their local optima). Yet some paths must be taken, filtered for that paperclip and thrown away. Don't try to keep everything. Drop some balls on the floor. Don't clutch onto them in despair, throw some out there in the world and see what comes back. And find your paperclip!
The creative mind has reasons that the reasonable mind doesn't have...


(1) Klahr,D. (2000).Exploring Science: The cognition and development of discovery processes - Ch.2 Scientific discovery as Problem Solving. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press

What happened to our cognitivism? (II)

Activity theory, a concept defined by Alexey Leont'ev, presupposes that through engaging with their environment, humans create production tools that are exteriorized forms of mental processes. In my previous blog I was defining cognitivism as a tool which abstracts away information-processings itself (Leont'ev would be proud).
The question is, although cognitivism seems reasonable for allopoietic systems which have as a goal the production and transformation of information, can it still be reasonable in autopoietic systems, where information is not predefined as a valuable product, but its value comes through the valence it has for the system itself? Put in a simpler way, a computer is an allopoietic system, it is created to store, process, retrieve, present information to it's user. But the information is not the computer itself. In a human mind, there is no necessary bonus for acquiring random information, we have to dictate and decide ourselves what information is important enough to be worth attention and resources, and that information changes the structure of our future enquiries. Also the context of various pieces of information might change the meaning of the information itself - and it's meaning that we are interested in, not information-production and manipulation. Information production and manipulation is just a second-order goal to that of understanding and defending and ultimately surviving and accomplishing other goals. Information acquiring can be a purpose in itself for curious natures, but even then the curiosity of the system is biased in certain directions that are specific for it, and the nature of the receiving neural networks, their previous informational content and preoccupation will bias the meaning that is gathered in abstract pursuits.


Still, if we abstracted away the tool of information processing in cognitivism, there is a good chance that that is what we do in our heads, even if it isn't our primary goal. And if information-processing is partially what we do, we must ask ourselves what is the impact that the context and meaning of the information that we process has on the information-processing? It's impact might change a few details in the information-processing activity, but it might also move our cognitive house in a completely different realm of existence. It might mean that we fail to understand the most important things, while we do understand some details that are not as fully relevant for knowledge formation. Until we determine exactly the importance that the meaning and the context of the information presented to us has on the information-processing, we can't say to know much about how cognitive processes work in a human brain.

If we are to talk about partial truths of human cognition, there is also connectionism. What I always enjoyed in connectionism is it's focus on emergence. Connectionism says - yes, there is information processing, but what emerges beyond the activity of small units that do this information processing transcends in some way the processing. If connectionism would study more how the temporality or the succession of information that runs through a system influences the result of the processing, the philosopher of mind in me would be interested to see the results. We have yet to build more complex connectionist architectures that monitor context and are not there just to fulfil a predetermined simple computational task.
In short, if connectionism would become less computational and more oriented on monitoring systems and the encoding and interaction of larger spaces of knowledge, I think we might find results that are more realistic and in tune with human cognition.
That is to say I don't think we need to model human cognition perfectly in our artificial neural networks, but we need to model more complex neural networks and interactions between them, and switch our focus to that level of processing.


Copyright - Ana-Maria Olteteanu 2011

What happened to our cognitivism? (I)

Cognitivism started it's life with a very basic, elegant assumption - that our brain might do exactly what a computer does - process information in the form of representations. As it usually happens with elegant assumptions due to the fact that they are easy to keep in mind, use and apply, the hypothesis picked up. Still the faults started showing soon - the new mind as a processing-information machine metaphor could not explain some very important things: consciousness, phenomenology, meaning.
It seems to me that in the future, postcognitivism might look back at older disciplines like semiotics and hermeneutics, or not-so-old ones, like communication studies, and borrow in some of their metaphors and objects of study to fully mature itself.
What are the crevices and to-be-patched zones of cognitivism?
First of all, argue post-cognitivists, there is context to be taken into account in whatever information-processing matter. We can't speak of information-processing without considering the effect that the information has on the system, as the system might not encode information at all, but meaning. The exact difference between humans and machines, no matter how performant they are at information processing, lays here - information makes a difference to humans, but not to machines. If information is irrelevant for a human being, it fails to excite interest therefore gather attention and other resources needed to be processed.
We should look at information-processing the right way around, which is we created information-processing machines by abstracting a feature that the human mind has away from the human body - rather how we created robotic arms through abstracting away from the mechanics and functionality of the human arm. That doesn't mean that robotic arms can explain all the functions of the human arm.
Still, it's easier to analyse the things and features that we abstracted away, by the simple fact that we can look at them, observe them, talk about them with greater ease - as we are detached from them. And sometimes these objects are a useful source of backwards reflection and analogy, however we should avoid falling in the trap of considering them all explanatory for
all human thinking.
In human thinking, the process of information processing is called upon mostly because the information is relevant in some way. There is lots of previous information in the system, which colors the new processing, or even the questions that are enquired, the direction of the processing itself. And even partial results might invoke massive changes in the brain's state, as a result of the meaning that possible interpretations might have for the system.

Then there is the inherent problem of the basic cell that information processing is performed upon: the representation. Representations, unlike cells in biology, are a theoretical construct, and a slippery one at that. They take the role of more complex symbols upon which actions are to be performed. But unlike computer memory, the human memory is not that keen in making very detailed representations, carrying them around and manipulating them. Rather the human brain is particularly good at carrying around smaller cognitive loads, and using them in a flexible manner, more appropriate for online requests upon a cognitive processing system.
Representationalism and the idea that there is such a thing as representation came to the fore to complete the analogy of information processing - which must happen on something.
The question of imperfect representation calls to the fore the reality of what human representation might be like. If it is based on meaning, experience and continuous reconstruction of perception according to possible or previously encountered species of meaning and experience, then representation becomes a rather very biased tool.

Considering what it has been said before, it striking that cognitivism wants to talk about perfect cognition in a sense that is not necessarily true for humans, but might only be true to machines.
So if we would consider the principles of cognitivism as being part of an attempt to abstract away perfect cognitive principles and perhaps instantiate them in thinking machines, cognitivism would seem to hit the mark more, rather then with explaining to us human cognition.
But it gets better, in a sense that our perfect view of cognition as information-processing might not be that efficient after all.
A detailed description of that on the next post.

Copyright - Ana-Maria Olteteanu 2011

So why exactly is Consciousness more astonishing than the existence of zombies?

Listening and reading about all the consciousness talk lately one can't help but wonder - would some cognitive neurologists and philosophers have preferred us to be all zombies? Do they really find it easier to explain or more likely for us to be zombies rather than entities possessing consciousness?
It's strange that, considering the characteristics of our nervous system.
It's common sense that we are able to classify things and observe them. One of the most fundamental characteristics of human cognition is our ability to abstract away from examples and put together specific features that appear more or less in all those examples.
So why is it so hard to believe that we would abstract ourselves and talk about our own processes as if we would be discussing about an object? There is no endless loop there, just our illusion that it might be so. Of course we can turn the light upon the interpreter of things, and then upon the one that interpreted that. But that is merely repetitive action which loses meaning and content after several levels of abstraction (or perhaps informational resolution).
We are not infinite loops, nor can we analyse or turn the light upon some of the processes that go on in our head, the ones that actually do most of the low-level analysing.
Of course we can pay attention and duplicate an abstraction - even if it was the discourse we were just making regarding some object - and analyse it afterwards as if it would be an object in itself. But that doesn't mean that we are still in that abstraction. We are the analyser, always and what we analyse might be what we've been or what we said a moment ago - a trace of our own activity.
The fact that we have been a second ago that person that we are now analysing might feel a bit as if we are everywhere - but we must remember that our entire self is an abstraction, based on a (hopefully) unitary system with many parts. That various parts can observe other parts is natural. As soon as we observe them we might think we are not them, or they belong to us but we are mainly the observer, not the observed.
This slippery path is what has been tormenting philosophers of mind for ages mainly because they prefer to forget that the I is an abstraction, and fundamentally we can only identify with one I at a time - mainly because that is what we defined "I" to be - an unity that contains the most pertaining characteristics of ourselves.
I for one can't see how it would seem more likely that a system that holds the neural complexity of humans would decide not to have a peak inside its own skull, not to observe its own activities - after all we are always with ourselves, it's rather normal that we notice what we are up to, both in our heads and in the physical world.
I think what philosophers confuse at the time with the problem of consciousness is the problem of creating living systems. We would like our AI conscious, yet for that I think AI would have to first have properties that most living systems have - including need for self-preservation, ability to defend, own goals, a general capacity and desire for survival.
So I think that the main question is what is the difference between living systems and non-living ones, and only after that how much and what type of neural complexity a system needs to acquire to manifest consciousness.


Plus, if zombies are really more likely to exist than consciousness, why haven't we found any so far, and we keep finding humans instead, which stubbornly insist on following their goals? :P