Tag: The Mind is Flat

  • The Mind is Flat

    Nick Chater

    I think the name of the book is a meta play, because the book convinces you of just that -“the mind is flat”. It is also the most convincing case I have read against AGI (Artificial General Intelligence), even while showing why we have had successes in narrow AI. Before you think it’s an AI book, it’s not, it’s about the human mind. We think of our mind having depths that we cannot fathom at this point, consisting of inner motives, beliefs and desires, many of which are unfathomable to us, and that behaviour is just a superficial aspect of it. This book argues that no such depths exist. The mind is flat.

    But what the mind is, is an excellent and immediate improvisor of actions, and beliefs and desires to explain the actions. My mental (re)action was “no way”, even though a part of this was familiar to me thanks to “How Emotions are made”. The author divides his case into two parts – the first part dismantles the perceptions created by classic psychology about beliefs, desires, hopes, and aims to prove that there is no “inner world”, and the second part provides an alternate theory – memory traces of previous momentary thoughts and experiences. 

    What really works is the accessibility of the narrative and how it is structured. It’s never a “believe me because I told you so”. Instead, we are led through a series of visual and thought exercises that question our understanding of reality. Slowly, a shallow world of improvisations are revealed to us. The mind works on “precedents, not principles”, and our emotions are creative acts made by a superb interpreter – our mind. With multiple examples, he shows our capacity to create “meaning” from nothing. Our inventiveness is brought out by the metaphors we live by, which are not always bound by “cold logic”. And that’s why we are able to create AI in areas where solutions are precisely defined. A general AI would require imaginative interpretations, something humans are very good at, but not really able to explain how!

    This does lead to my favourite “free will vs determinism” debate, and once again, the answer is that at any point, despite the determinism that has happened because nature and nurture, we have the freedom to change our mind. But then again, if it is flat, what’s there to change? Or does it contain a coda of traditions and precedents in the form of genes? While we create meaning from nothing, our quest for the depths of the mind is also perhaps a need to find “meaning”. I’ll leave it at that.

  • In Code we Trust

    Eugene Wei’s TikTok and the Sorting Hat is a splendid read on many counts. It provides some excellent perspectives on tech companies’ crossovers across WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic) and non-WEIRD countries like China and India, made complicated by the culture difference. This serves as the context setting for TikTok’s rise in the US, and some deep chronicling on how this came to be, while juxtaposing it against social networks like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and Twitter. On an aside though, all of these networks have found varying degrees of success in India. Meanwhile, he points out that TikTok is not really a social network, because instead of a social graph, it plays on an interest graph that it builds from the user’s reactions. All of this makes for some excellent reading. But what really caught my attention was this – 

    in some categories a machine learning algorithm significantly responsive and accurate can pierce the veil of cultural ignorance. Today, sometimes culture can be abstracted.

    A meta example of this appears at the end of the post when he visits the Newsdog. At that point it was the top news app in India, and it was built by a Beijing-based startup. Around 40 male Chinese engineers, none of whom could read Hindi!

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