Chimera of intellect and data

[ZenRaiden]

Humans are of all creatures not just intelligent, but of all creatures on Earth most able to be aware of many objects at once and be able to relate them in meaningful way in complex and nuanced way.

For instance of all creatures we get most training and practice of doing this all the time.
Ants build ant hills.
Birds build nests.
Creatures like migrating birds can travel far and not get lost.
Communication wise all creatures that need to communicate in some way.

But as humans we are the only and of all creatures only ones that can learn and use the skills in one package called brain and develop natural survival skills to pass through our lives being more prolific and adaptive to environments both adapting to and adapting it to our needs.

However our brains are limited by biological limits of neural structures.
Our brains are extremely expensive in calories and nutrition.
Not to mention the bio-electrical energy to get stuff done.
Most of what humans do today even in simple ways requires a lot more brain power than whatever our ancestors ever needed to do before.
Our brains though have one unique quality too and that is reshaping our cognitive landscape to fit our new needs, because apart from being good at harvesting the most energy from any environment, we also became masters and moving on and settling in new environments with new requirements and new conditions.

The Chimera of intellect and data though is problematic as we humans have one major problem and that is the more we want to get out of the environment the more complexity we need to deal with and the more nuance and fines is required in dealing with what we have.

So our mind if we view it in categories, has one category, and each category has sub category, and each sub category has minor categories and minor categories can further be subdivided into fractional categories until we get objectively to the finest data sets.

Millions of connections everyday fire and rewire and reshape our brain, and the more smarter we get the more is rewired in our brains, and the more neural energy gets used.

Humans have an inherent reason not to be so smart, and that is laziness, as laziness protects our brains from burning out.

The trouble is really our brains really burn out only if we use them too fast.

Going steady and slow our brains actually can objectively learn and relearn and unlearn in infinite patterns.

Trouble is in today's world knowing when to sink your mind deeper and when to not is often a judgment call as sinking the mind into the Chimera of data is endlessly easy and being flooded with newer concepts and ideas as well as newer structured ways to deal with data, we can endlessly expand the mind.

What really bothers me often is that there seems to be no known consensus of how much is too much, as often time it seems the more we learn the more we tend to do well regardless of what we learn and how we connect data.

Our brains by learning new things don't just learn more, but they also learn to incorporate data in more detailed and more nuanced way, as well as simply associate data in more flexible way.

There seems to be a critical mass of data where the mind simply stops resisting the influx of new data, and where your mind just gives up on stopping this Chimera and instead feeds it more.

Potentially this could spell doom in a world of limited resources like food, but essentially we are not limited by calories, and frankly we are one way or another smart enough to do more.

There seems to be only one major door stop to human intellect and that is the ultimate gatekeeper and that is social hierarchy and its butch chimps at the top who hate it when people are smarter than they are.

I am saying this as sort of joke to make sure that really minus few smart people who get killed on the odd occasion for being too smart for its society, we really don't have a reason for not being smarter.

There is only one other problem that our brains don't always benefit from the Chimera, and that is the fact that data need a hierarchy in our brains and data also need to be reviewed and edited as well as organized in our brains, and this often does not just happen by it self but is actually part of learning process. Its called also thinking, but also simply digesting information.

In modern society we often learn a lot, but painfully little time is give or importance to digesting data.

I would thus propose the most important evolutionary step in human world where the new human called homo informaticus of information age will be different form our predecessor with patently false name homo sapiens genus.

The new evolutionary step of this new creature is not in how he learns or how he thinks necessarily although that is important, but like our ancestors got better at surviving by cooking food, the new homo informaticus will learn to digest information more efficiently, and chewing on information with better cognitive teeth will benefit by digesting more information and simply getting more mileage out of given information like our ancestors got more calories out of cooked meet than raw meet.

So my question is how do you cook your data, so its more digestible and more tasty,..... and what spices go well with it????

DO we really think enough??? Or too little.

It is said that Neanderthals made tools in 20 minutes or less.
Homo Sapiens made their tools in 2 or more hours.

I would propose the same thing happened in todays evolution where Homo sapiens and homo neanderthals tools is same relationship as homo sapiens and homo informaticus, but instead of tools the new tool is data.

 

[Black Rose]

I would say that those people who have become proficient at "digesting" information already exist. Their brains operate at hyperspeed. So it would be the case that more would appear given technology is creating more information. I think that placed in certain locations they can influence society to manage our resources better.

 

[EndogenousRebel]

I think our physiology is capped out.

Then again evolution is the most creative machine. That being said there simply aren't enough selective pressures to bring about big changes. We've been as "smart" as we are right now for the past 10,000 years. Not that long, but still. Our intelligence comes from the repository of knowledge and tools we've been developing.

There being a almost 1-1 correlation of frontal lobe and possible people in social circles. I believe that you can only have a meaningful relationship with 150 people, and such a thing would indeed entail managing a large amount of complex information.

These relationships back when society wasn't so structured were pivotal to one's survival as people's needs were distributed among many individuals in a personal manner.

It's almost sad really that socialization is a forgotten art, and most people are too cynical to really start relationships like this.

I do think that society is getting stupider, and that this is the cause. We've outsourced one of the major attractors of intelligence to societal assumptions.

We can talk about how looking at static data points, making dynamic models, predicting and iterating based on the outcomes is difficult, but I think that we already have the insight that it's almost impossible for a human to learn from say, economic patterns intuitively without the use of tools.

 

[EndogenousRebel]

To answer your question, I use a KM system known as Logseq. It's basically a Wiki on your own machine. I have been discouraged recently for reasons you bring up Zen. I can stash information in there. I can create flash cards so that I can memorize information, but for what?

A privacy-first, open-source knowledge base

A privacy-first, open-source platform for knowledge management and collaboration.

logseq.com

It's not that useful and I don't personally see uses in it besides being able to spout out trivia. This might be user error though.

I don't agree with your assessment that learning information helps us see the world differently per say. Storing something in our memory about how to do something descriptively doesn't help our kinesthetically. I can learn how to shoot a basketball, but until I practice for hours I'm not going to get better. When it comes to more abstract ideas this becomes even more difficult.

Ultimately unless I'm using this information daily, I have to dedicate time to making sure my brain doesn't prune this information off.

I suppose this is one of those changes that the homo intellectus would excel, in but it would come at a cost of being less adaptable if you ask me.

Edit: I think I want to make games that train this stuff perhaps? I've always wanted to do coding.

 

[ZenRaiden]

I think our physiology is capped out.

In some ways yes, but actually I think we capped it out, by not using our brains the right way. We have to remember that most humans were taught to think in schools.
Schools don't actually teach you to think. So we are kind of dumb actually.
We confuse having data with intellect way too easy.

 

[ZenRaiden]

brain doesn't prune this information off.

Your brain does not prune anything. What it does it overwrites things with faster connections. Realistically we humans have near perfect eidetic memories.
The fact we think we forget is our brain likes to keep space clear as much as possible in order to keep our brain focused on wasting as little energy as possible.
If you want a dormant memory from when you were 5 to come alive you just give your mind the time to do it. It might even take days or weeks, but those memories are safely stored there. Hence why the phenomena of life flashing before your eyes is real.
The right kind of activity your brain can remember gigaquads of data.
Why we lack recall these days is we take very little time to actively recall things.
We rush our brains all the time. The brain wants to be faster if you rush it, so it connects wires and rewrites the old wires with faster wires.

Key is to think slower and you remember more. We live in fast paced world my friend.
It forces us to adapt. Our brains thrive in thinking real slow and steady. Same way we thrive in running slow and steady, instead of sprinting. Chimps are the mental athletes of mental sprints. Humans are slow and long distance runners and slow and long distance thinkers.

 

[EndogenousRebel]

brain doesn't prune this information off.

Your brain does not prune anything. What it does it overwrites things with faster connections. Realistically we humans have near perfect eidetic memories.
The fact we think we forget is our brain likes to keep space clear as much as possible in order to keep our brain focused on wasting as little energy as possible.
If you want a dormant memory from when you were 5 to come alive you just give your mind the time to do it. It might even take days or weeks, but those memories are safely stored there. Hence why the phenomena of life flashing before your eyes is real.
The right kind of activity your brain can remember gigaquads of data.
Why we lack recall these days is we take very little time to actively recall things.
We rush our brains all the time. The brain wants to be faster if you rush it, so it connects wires and rewrites the old wires with faster wires.

Key is to think slower and you remember more. We live in fast paced world my friend.
It forces us to adapt. Our brains thrive in thinking real slow and steady. Same way we thrive in running slow and steady, instead of sprinting. Chimps are the mental athletes of mental sprints. Humans are slow and long distance runners and slow and long distance thinkers.

Theoretically yeah.

But if I don't traverse that highway, it's going to get replaced and at some point the paths to this destination are going to be so few we might as well lose this information. I think you'd only end up remembering things that had a lot of emotional valance unless you were encoding this memory somehow.

Encoding the information, or associating this information with more accessible information is also something we can do. Making bizarre mnemonics or adding that knowledge to something we already knew a lot about would make it easier, but this isn't that practical, not for most people anyway.

It is pretty interesting nonetheless. I remember reading somewhere that people that do this activate their visual cortex when remembering things, which if you think about it is crazy that we have the ability to activate this whole other work horse of the brain to remember things and most people will never use it.

I had used the memory palace technique to remember my this one oath I had to memorize to be let into a club within a day. I never used the technique for anything else in my life, and I couldn't tell you what that oath was to begin with. I did use other techniques to learn German, but that's another skill that evades me these days and I don't remember the techniques I used at all.

You can go to https://forum.artofmemory.com/ and there are a whole bunch of memory nerds talking about their techniques and it's honestly weird because they put so much work into it and probably spent so much time developing these skills, but 90% of people will never use them because it sounds insane and the learning curve is intimidating.

 

[ZenRaiden]

But if I don't traverse that highway, it's going to get replaced and at some point the paths to this destination are going to be so few we might as well lose this information. I think you'd only end up remembering things that had a lot of emotional valance unless you were encoding this memory somehow.

Its complicated, but essentially this is correct, except the fact, that what is unconscious is really unconscious so you cannot "think" about what is unconscious, same way you thought about what you wrote.
So essentially you really don't know what you remember until you remember it.
Its kind of like Catch 22. If you don't remember its there, but if you do remember it, its no longer an issue. Hence our assumptions about our memories are false more often.

Encoding the information, or associating this information with more accessible information is also something we can do. Making bizarre mnemonics or adding that knowledge to something we already knew a lot about would make it easier, but this isn't that practical, not for most people anyway.

Its not practical if you don't have the time to develop this type of thinking. Memory has a language and code of its own. Memory is not language center. Memory is not think patterns. Memory is all and more. Compressing memories is essential for our day to day, but we can compress them in too much compact format.

It is pretty interesting nonetheless. I remember reading somewhere that people that do this activate their visual cortex when remembering things, which if you think about it is crazy that we have the ability to activate this whole other work horse of the brain to remember things and most people will never use it.

Two words... brain waves. Slow brain waves, activate different parts of brain.
I can watch a whole movie on fast forward, but I don't have the audio.
I can think, remember, and problem solve in pictures. The tricky thing is one picture in my mind can have dozens of ideas connected to it.

I had used the memory palace technique to remember my this one oath I had to memorize to be let into a club within a day. I never used the technique for anything else in my life, and I couldn't tell you what that oath was to begin with. I did use other techniques to learn German, but that's another skill that evades me these days and I don't remember the techniques I used at all.

Cool. I know its kind of awkward to use mnemonics.
Its time consuming, and often times when not done right or too hasty can actually back fire and we forget more than rote.

You can go to https://forum.artofmemory.com/ and there are a whole bunch of memory nerds talking about their techniques and it's honestly weird because they put so much work into it and probably spent so much time developing these skills, but 90% of people will never use them because it sounds insane and the learning curve is intimidating.

Thanks for reminding me I have not visited that page for long time.

 

[Black Rose]

I have ADD so it is hard for me to use my working memory to come up with new things in my frontal lobes. That is, to come up with new things you need to place things next to each other in huge amounts and see if they fit together in such a way as to be useful. It is no good just absorbing what others have produced but it is the case that you need to make it yourself to be creative. This can be done in many ways but the front brain is most important as it controls the combination of what comes out. It programs the rest of the brain.

 

[ZenRaiden]

up with new things in my frontal lobes.

Creativity is often misconstrued these days as something your brain does randomly.
I don't think that is the case, although from mere perspective side that is the case.
What most people don't understand creativity is really just a lot of thinking outside the norm. That is it. Any and all new connections in the mind are form of creativity, so any learning, or any type of thinking that does not follow the charted patterns is creativity whether it results in something or just in your mind.
Most people are creative, but don't recognize it as such.

Recognizing your original new ways of thinking and fostering those new ideas, is hard where society often shuts down anything unexpected or outside of the norm.
One does not have to be weird or eccentric to be creative.
Just do and think outside of the norm you set for yourself.

 

[Black Rose]

What most people don't understand creativity is really just a lot of thinking outside the norm.

You still need to put things together, so that is why I mention my ADD.

I cannot think (put things together) internally, I must do so externally.