There is an apparent paradox between our susceptibility to various biases, and the fact that these biases are prevalent precisely because they are part of a cognitive toolkit honed over a long evolutionary period, suggesting that each component of that toolkit must have worked—conferred some advantage. Bayesian inference, claims Jaynes, isn’t just a good move—it is the best move.
What did work is different than what will work or what will work better. I am not really disagreeing with you, I am just pointing out that the tools we used to get to this point are not necessarily the tools we need to get past this point.
The audio clip was very cool, by the way. I was surprised that you gave away the secret and it still worked as intended. I don’t know enough about confirmation bias to continue the discussion past this point, however, so I will leave that to someone else. :)
You have a point: adaptations evolved in past environments may fail in new environments.
However, we’re talking about the apparatus of perception, and the specific example is about speech perception: the “environment”, i.e. the fact that we must make sense of the spoken word—plus the properties of speech as sound—that hasn’t changed much since that faculty evolved.
What has changed, if Carnicelli’s hunch is correct, is the use to which we put this particular module of our perceptual apparatus. That is, we now use it to “reason” with, and the hunch helps explain why our reasoning is often flawed.
But much like the story of the waltzing bear, the wonder isn’t that we reason well or badly, the wonder is that we reason at all.
Thus, if we can understand how apparently low-level things like perceptual modules can be repurposed to cobble together something apparently high-level like consciousness and abstract reasoning, we have some hope of learning enough about the general shape of mind-space to dissolve the question of intelligence; or to use the prevalent metaphor, of learning enough about how birds fly that we’re able to build a plane.
What did work is different than what will work or what will work better. I am not really disagreeing with you, I am just pointing out that the tools we used to get to this point are not necessarily the tools we need to get past this point.
The audio clip was very cool, by the way. I was surprised that you gave away the secret and it still worked as intended. I don’t know enough about confirmation bias to continue the discussion past this point, however, so I will leave that to someone else. :)
You have a point: adaptations evolved in past environments may fail in new environments.
However, we’re talking about the apparatus of perception, and the specific example is about speech perception: the “environment”, i.e. the fact that we must make sense of the spoken word—plus the properties of speech as sound—that hasn’t changed much since that faculty evolved.
What has changed, if Carnicelli’s hunch is correct, is the use to which we put this particular module of our perceptual apparatus. That is, we now use it to “reason” with, and the hunch helps explain why our reasoning is often flawed.
But much like the story of the waltzing bear, the wonder isn’t that we reason well or badly, the wonder is that we reason at all.
Thus, if we can understand how apparently low-level things like perceptual modules can be repurposed to cobble together something apparently high-level like consciousness and abstract reasoning, we have some hope of learning enough about the general shape of mind-space to dissolve the question of intelligence; or to use the prevalent metaphor, of learning enough about how birds fly that we’re able to build a plane.