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Alex
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Tutorial 8

...And it has lots of hacks & exercises  :  )
This has been a tough one, largely due to not knowing what to leave out! Research in this area upgrades daily,  so the tutorial may be tweaked a bit over the next week or so but no major changes will be made.

Feedback as always is much appreciated. We've tried to include some issues raised by students in these forums to cut down need for questions, but do feel free to inspire us with more.

A big thanks to all of you who've inspired this, the Editing Ants for the research behind it, and a mega big thanks to Scal, MigZ, R kid and NeuMcCoy for support during its construction  :  )

Now on to tutorial 9...  :  )
Best,
AR


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sirhinojo
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Re: Tutorial 8

Alex,

a quick note to say thanks for this Tutorial.  I don't really have much in the way of feedback, as it is the information is so dense and packed, I need a few reads to feel like I have really grasped the implications made by the scientific research you are here so reader-friendly presenting.

How to say what I want to say next.... ?  I have noticed that you do not have much of a presence on the internet aside from on this forum.  I have noticed that this forum itself is rather quiet.  I see these things as VERY positive.  I attribute this silence (peace) to the fact that you are not 1)selling anything 2)offering yourself up as a guru.

I find myself sometimes getting ahead of myself in the sense that I catch myself acting like NH is "not enough".  And this getting ahead of myself, this greed for more, is actually an anxious self taking over.  Therein lies the simplicity and rather hardcore truth behind NH... don't get ahead of yourself, the soil must always be watered, the plant cannot survive without the roots, blah blah blah choose your own metaphor. 

Anyway, I am so very grateful for your generosity and hard work.

So, one comment about tutorial 8.  Would you like to elaborate on the Hacks, exercises, suggestions that you make to improve congruence in general by taking objects, things, concepts in the world and then doing a sort of association analysis wherein we break this "thing" down to the way it is understood by the different networks?  I have found that I enjoy doing this, oddly enough.  At first I have to get over an inertia against which I feel that it is a useless endeavor, but each time I do it I am pleasantly surprised by the results...

I guess I am asking if you would care to say how this leads to congruence if we are just pulling out associations that we already have out of the brains that we are actually trying to augment.  How is this not just like remembering?  Why is it that Network 3 and Network 6 associations are so hard?  Especially considering that network 3 has so much role in association in the first place!

And one more thing, I have developed a habit lately of not just taking "snapshots" of my environment and training to recollect them whilst looking away, but have also started to often stop my thoughts and retrace backwards through the thoughts I had for a few minutes back.  At first here too the inertia is immense, but then I am so tickled (and sometimes depressed) by how unconsciously the stream of thoughts appears to have been flowing all along.

What do you think of this kind of process?  I wonder if you have experience with this. 

okay, hope I am coherent to you!

liebe grĂ¼sse DANIEL


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Alex
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Re: Tutorial 8

Hi dude, thanks for the FB
It's an important issue that I'm not here to try to free anyone's mind. That's impossible. I'm here to free my own.
That said, I would like it if members would interact more on the forums.
Although I realize one thing about NH people is they are almost always busy; we're creative and sociable and we do a lot of things IRL and don't tend to be mouse-potatoes with buttock blisters  :  )  I'm also aware that interaction, specially among those from varied backgrounds and places, is great for expanding points of view and overall awareness.
And I'd like people to use the forum like a weblog more, just for the fun of it (apart from learning from others' experiences).


You wrote: this getting ahead of myself, this greed for more, is actually an anxious self taking over.

This must have been a tough one to spot. Well done you  :  )  A warning sign I've noticed is when my mind starts talking in words internally. It's an regression from abstraction as frontal lobes lose their energy supply, and if it regresses far enough I verbalize everything out loud, like an infant. I always know when to shift tactics if that gabber gabber starts  :  )

You wrote: Would you like to elaborate on the Hacks, exercises, suggestions that you make to improve congruence in general by taking objects, things, concepts in the world and then doing a sort of association analysis wherein we break this "thing" down to the way it is understood by the different networks?

I'm not sure I quite understand this, so let me waffle a minute...
First of all it may be that you are preempting what I intend to do in T9 & T10,  where hopefully I can explain the associations in more detail, but I thought I had started doing what you describe above in T8, so maybe it isn't working so well  :  )
Can you give me an example of what you are doing? I'd like to work through this with you if you have time, so that I can try to explain it more coherently in the next tutorial, because it's a very challenging concept to get across.


You wrote: say how this leads to congruence if we are just pulling out associations that we already have out of the brains that we are actually trying to augment.

(Bearing in mind I'm not sure I understand you rightly), congruent association is achieved by replacing false associations with real ones so that all the information the brain holds makes sense when compared against each other.
For example your brain has a concept of gravity, and another concept that physical laws cannot be broken. Those two things make sense compared against each other.
Now you meet a new concept -"Things fall downwards". This too makes sense according to your other information.
Now you meet a new, but false concept -"Things can fall upwards if someone does magic."
This doesn't make sense when compared against your other information, and if the mind tales it on board as a fact, an ideological dilemma arises between "Physical laws cannot be broken" and 'magic'. 
So the false association has to be removed and replaced by the truth, which is something like, "We can make it look as though things fall upward by either illusion or technology." Then all associations are coherent. Does this help or am I missing the point?


You wrote: How is this not just like remembering?

Replacing a memory is a matter of remembering and then reconsolidating with congruent associations; for example, you now associate 'magic' with illusion or technology, where it makes sense --or you may now associate 'magic' with 'woo-woo bullshit' if that makes more sense to you.

You wrote: Why is it that Network 3 and Network 6 associations are so hard? Especially considering that network 3 has so much role in association in the first place!

They are hard for westerners to get the hang of because we are trained to think of things in particular ways and there are some concepts that 'most people' are not familiar with. For examples: most oriental people understand "N4 = Rectitude" right away; they are accustomed to the concept of the emotion rectitude, they have felt it, they know what it is. Most westerners don't.
Recently english speakers have become accustomed to the german word 'schadenfreude' for a particular emotion, but english has no equivalent. When we heard the concept explained, we started using the word; previously it had no meaning. This is true of many concepts in N3 & 6 (and to some extent, N5).

It is complicated by (1)the problem that our academic classification of knowledge is not the same as our unconscious classification of information and (2)our language has departed from literal meaning; for example we have to be taught that 'hydro' means 'liquid' in order to understand the real meaning behing hydro-related words, and very few people realize that 'hepatitis' literally means 'liver inflammation' and that's ALL it means.
But I'm waffling... I should let you explain more in case I'm answering the wrong questions!


You wrote: have also started to often stop my thoughts and retrace backwards through the thoughts I had for a few minutes back.

I thought this was included in the hacks & exercises? If not, it is in the list of exercises for T9, so that's ok.
Best,
AR


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sirhinojo
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Re: Tutorial 8

you wrote: Can you give me an example of what you are doing?

Here are two examples.

CHAIR

N1 material object
N2 found around tables, in sitting rooms, at desks, cafes, gardens
N3 often sat in in order to strnghen alliances with those around you, but also the chain that holds you at your desk
N4 built, designed, engineered
N5 recuperate energy
N6 often used in decision making

BILL OF RIGHTS
N1 A material thing, a piece of paper
N2 Found in books, goverment buildings, and legal institutions
N3 makes all men equal, smells of old ink, is a defensive measure, a protective measure
N4 voted on by society
N5 makes declarative statements and describes legal facts
N6 consulted in matters of legal decisions, inspires one to stand up for himself

you wrote:   congruent association is achieved by replacing false associations with real ones so that all the information the brain holds makes sense when compared against each other.

So Alex, let my question be this....are my associations false at any point?  how do I know if they are?

And let my next question be this...  What constitues a concept in your book because in your letter response to me you included things like "things fall downward" and "physical laws cannot be broken" as concepts, but to me these are declarative statements like "John hates cats".

For the sake of doing this associative exercise, I guess it would be nice to know where we draw the line in termns of what a concept is because with declarative sentences like the ones above I would not know even how to begin analyzing them according to the Network Asscociations.

And the question remains, is doing this exercise from Tutorial 8 then really about remembering and reconsolidating?  Because I do not know how we can add any greater congruence in our memory reconsolidation of concepts if we do not know if our concepts are incongruent in the first place.

And now in reference to memory retracing you wrote:  I thought this was included in the hacks & exercises?

The answer would be YES but only kind of.  It was mentioned along with using pen and paper to jot down the keywords to aid in remembering the flow of thoughts.  I do not use the pen and paper and I imagine this is good, since it indicates that I am capable of remembering the stream of thought without outside aid and also this way I do not hinder the flow so to speak by stopping to note what I am thinking, which I imagine would sort of bring the thinking to a stop.

Anyway, my question still stands, what do you think this exercise is doing for brain augmentation?  I myself feel like I am sort of adding a new habit of tagging my thought process with an expectation that the thoughts themselves will soon be subjected to a sort of meta thought.  I am expressing myself here rather poetically and not scientifically.  I hope that you might have something to say about this strange and curious ecxercise and how it relates to brain augmentation. 

Well, again I hope I have been coherent.  If anything I am giving my frontal networks a serious work out.  I find expressing myself rationally a challenge and this way hope to get much better at it.

looking forward to your response!  all the best, DANIEL


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Re: Tutorial 8

Hey, Daniel,

I hope you don't mind if I chime in with a quick suggestion while we wait for alex's reply.

I want to take one of your statements and give it back to you for analysis.

You said: "(N3) Bill of rights makes all men equal."

Could you tell us (yourself) why you believe that is true?

As you follow your own reasoning, perhaps you'll get the answer to the question about congruence.

My take is that to be well grounded in reality we need to be free from sentimental blocks and fill in the details with formal logic, more often than not intuitively. Anxiety is the main reason we blind ourselves to reality, whose worst and therefore most repressed aspects, usually distorted and augmented by such repression, we're able to see when we stop and relax or, if we never do so to a significant extent, when we're asleep and experience nightmares because we're normally unable to control our thoughts then.

But I digress. If you try the exercise above, I'd love to learn your conclusions.

Edit: Forgot to mention I didn't read Tutorial 8, so disregard this message if it doesn't make sense in its context.


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Alex
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Re: Tutorial 8

Sirhinojo:
Apologies for making a long long post but thanks loads for this! This is really helpful because the examples include false associations, and discourse analysis has enabled me to see the big rule on unconscious processing is "no abstraction".

I think what I need to explain more in the next few tutorials (and hopefully here) is this limitation of the unconscious. It's a basic program and it can't make sense of any abstract concepts that don't relate to concrete physical reality.

A good way to imagine unconscious reasoning is to pretend you're trying to share concepts with an alien, using only email text (I'm trying this approach in tutorials too). "Explain to the alien" is a good mnemonic for remembering how the unconscious works and learning how to communicate in terms it understands. And it's a good game, you see how few core-concept-related bits of data you can use to enablt the alien to fully understand the concept  :  )  If it is a congruent concept, it should need no more than 6.

If I were such an alien reading your examples, I'd start with 'chair', okay, it's a material object, it must be either circular or mobile/mechanical because it is found 'around' tables (other material objects) in a 'sitting room' (is this a room that sits, or a room for sitting down in? Probably the latter) and also at the location of other material objects.

'often sat in' tells me what you earthers do with it often. And this has enough points of similarity already for me to think "Aha! It is like our sitting-mats!"

I would get confused when you introduce the false concept 'chain which holds you at your desk', because this is not true, and it would confuse my concept of chair.

I would be further reassured by 'built, designed, engineered' because we do exactly this with our sitting mats. 'Recuperate energy' would also make sense to me, as we too sit or lie down when we are fatigued.

'often used in decision making' is a bit ambiguous -so is astrology, but if you'd said, 'often sat on while making decisions' that would work. We aliens know about the importance of being calm and relaxed to think clearly.

...In this selection you gave 9 bits of information. 6 of them helped consolidate the concept, and it took only 3 bits of information (material object/often sat in/built, designed, manufactured) for me to understand from your first example a general idea of what a chair IS. You have successfully given the alien a basic concept for 'chair'. I might wonder why you strange earth beings sit on these objects instead of mats, but I'd get the general idea because I also have concepts for variation and cultural diversity.

Not so for the second example. To the unconscious (and the alien), a piece of paper is, well, a piece of paper. We know paper. Paper is great! You can wrap yourself in it to keep warm, write on it, read off it, wrap things in it, stick it on walls, or clean your noses with it. If the paper has something written on it that's important not to forget, or inspiring artwork, we'll tend to weight it accordingly and read its contents out to each other a lot, but while the unconscious can grasp the basics of poetry, stories and songs, it can make no sense whatsoever of abstract concepts like societal law.

To our alien, your ongoing description sounds suspiciously like woo-woo -this mere piece of paper somehow magically accomplishes amazing supernatural feats of defense and protection!

To the unconscious, in real life, we have no 'rights'*. 'Rights' are a fiction made up by people who would really like them to exist, but they don't. Hurricanes and volcanoes and bacterial diseases will blithely ignore them, as will all things real. Predators (and lunatics) will still attack us, fire will still burn us, water will still drown us, unless we are able to replace this 'rights' theory with real physical equipment/behavior such as flood warnings, antibiotics or weapons.

In real life 'rights' are replaced by abilities -if you have the ability to catch your dinner and keep hold of it, you have the ability to eat. If you have the ability to breathe, you still have no automatic right to do so if there is no oxygen in the room, because real laws can't be broken.

Reading example 2, our alien (whom we have to assume is a healthy intelligent being from a healthy intelligent culture for this thought experiment to work) would think, "okay this thing is a material object that's found inside other material objects or constructs, we get the fact that it smells of some material substance, but we can't see how it is used for defense, equality or protection? (maybe they shove it down predators' throats or block their vision with it?)

People do something on it, called 'voting' (maybe a kind of dance?) and for some reason this paper talks (it makes declarative statements and describes facts about something called 'legal') -we don't yet know what a 'legal' is; maybe it's a part of a human body?"

...These are the kind of limitations the unconscious has. There's no way to change it with logic either, because as soon as we try, the unconscious awareness of reality will come up in opposition. In real life nothing can guarantee freedom, protection or equality except intelligence and the ability to interact. If our path to entelechy is inhibited by things, events or creatures, those things or creatures are not intelligent and we should avoid them, ignore them, build huts out of them, or eat them. It's a totally practical animal.

It can't make any sense of an abstract idea being able to 'make all men equal', because in real life that's impossible. Our abstract ideas are only a preliminary for creativity -an idea can't do anything by itself.

The only thing IRL that could 'make' all men equal is all men being equal (ie, exactly the same), and they're not. We are all equal to different tasks and challenges, but we are most blatantly in nature's eyes not equal (indeed, humanity would come to a rapid end if we were, so our alien is likely to be confused by us even desiring such a thing. Of course we see that he simply doesn't understand -but our task in understanding the unconscious is to see WHY he doesn't undertand.)

From these examples we can hopefully see how a rule of 'no abstraction' limits unconscious cognition. We cannot give the alien a picture of a horse and say 'this is a horse'. We have to say 'this is a picture of a horse'. We have to say the absolute literal truth. If we can grasp that, we've got it.

getting out of the matrix...

In absolute literal truth, 'society' is something that anxious people build when culture goes wrong, and society's 'ideal world' is not only not the real world, it removes our access to the real world and our minds dumb down accordingly.

This is the whole problem -society is based on fantasy and fiction and underlying basic beliefs that are quite simply not true; and it's uncannily similar to many religious cults. This is the biggest most difficult anxiety-raising concept for people to grasp and many never do. So we're boldly going where not many have gone before, in considering it, because fear of letting go of that illusion will stop many in their tracks at exactly this point.

I'm going to stop here, and answer the rest later, before I talk everyone's ass off. Once again thanks loads. We appear to be currently co-authoring future tutorials by accident  :  )
Best,
AR
*For a great cultural psychology lecture on rights which is absolutely true, see George Carlin:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWiBt-pqp0E


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Re: Tutorial 8

Damnit, alex, you've just ruined the exercise! LOL! smile


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Alex
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Re: Tutorial 8

Meta Process Wrote:
Damnit, alex, you've just ruined the exercise! 

I know, I know! I sent this in and then read your post and thought, ahh...  :  )  My bad -no ants for me tomorrow!
Then I thought...but if Sirhinojo has a good imagination, or manages to drink enough alcohol to forget what I wrote for a while, the exercise can still be done!
Best,
AR


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Sakiro
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Re: Tutorial 8

Tutorial 8:

Wow, this one was a "hard one" for me, basically because of the length, and compared to the others was a little more "theoric" than the others.

I love all the study references you made through all the tutorial, that increase the tutorial/site credibility (especially for new comers).

I think i have a few question about T8 ..

But basically, i have the same sirhinojo question (that you are beginning to answer) .. after we have N1 and N2 balanced .. we need to start build up N3 ..

And besides all the exercises/hacks for N3 in the tutorials, basically we need two things:

- Start building a big database of concepts (wich we can already have it or not ..)
- Be sure that you don't have false associations in them ..

If this is right, at least myself feel a little lost .... how can i even start with that ..?

Maybe with time if you start doing the exercises and the habit to try to associate everything with the core-concepts (matter-space etc) you will overwrite all the false association you can already have with the correct ones ... ?

I really don't think we should start one for one (from the thousand and thousand we could have) ..?

Could take years!

And if you have false associations in N3, the way it can slow down our intelligence is basically from two things

- You will have unconsiouns anxiety (because life will not make sense)
- You will not release the correct neurotransmitter related to the behaviour you need to have about the concept (concret or abstract) you want to learn/do ????

Hope this make sense =)

Another one .. maybe a little off topic, but it prompt me again when reading the last tutorials ..

I know that you said that here we have a Map/Model, and is just that, a pretty good model btw, that can predict what is going on the brain/mind ..

Can our NH map, explain why there are people with strong N5 skills (Very high iq for example) without (apparently) developed strongly first N1-N2-N3 ..?

I mean, if all the frontal skills, are based first in the rear ones, why there are childs or adults wich seems to neglate the rear ones, but still has high performance in the front ones?

I know that most of this people in the future can have a lot of other problems, but the genuine curiosity still stands .. because if i understand well, they couldn't be able to understand all the (abstract) stuff without a dense database of well associated concepts wich seems that people don't develop well in the first place .. (example of childs who stay in house studying all day and don't go to play outside home with other childs etc).


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Re: Tutorial 8

Hey, Sakiro,

They have to do something well, after all the work they put into it, including solving IQ tests a hundred times. You can find a bunch of stories online of parents who manufactured that sort of "genius" by forcing their kids to engage in intellectual activity since their early childhood to the exclusion of pretty much everything else, but pay attention to the aftermath.

Edit: Pointing fingers was classless. =]


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sirhinojo
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Re: Tutorial 8

thanks dudes, and OK!  I will be sirhinojo and not DANIEL! ; )

alex wrote in tutorial 8..."Individual associations may vary, core concepts should not."

And I guess this summarizes my response and confusion.  The exercise is about core concepts, and not individual associations (because individual associations can be very wrong)...

None the less, I believe I am getting closer to understanding the purpose and mechanism of action of the Core Association exercise.

The examples that I provided of my own associations for CHAIR and BILL OF RIGHTS were examples of doing the exercise incorrectly?  I My associations with these things include memories of what OTHERS have said or told me about them.  It seems I thought the point of the exercise was to practice understanding the Network Associations and learning to quickly slot ALL concepts, no matter how unreal, socially fabricated, or sentimental, into the Network.  But now I am to understand that the point of the exercise is about "paring down" or explaining things to aliens so as to prune any confusing, unnecessary, sentimentally fabricated associations.  This could be fun to try.  Let me see...


PHYSICS
N1 describes the composition of matter
N2 describes the behavior of matter
N3 associates matter to energy
N4 uses mathematics and needs coordinated experiments
N5 describes the behavior of energy
N6 predicts the behavior of matter and energy

LOVER
N1 a physical thing, a person
N2 often in bed
N3 how many lovers?  how long a lover?  release oxytocin around lover
N4 a type of ongoing relationship, collaboration (sexual)
N5 can give you energy
N6 ?? deciding to be lovers

This is strange.  I will have to get the hang of this.


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Alex
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Re: Tutorial 8

Hi dudes,
I'm going to answer one question at a time and see what bits are most helpful in explaining this further, so please be patient as it takes me a while to catch up with yous!

sirhinijo wrote: congruent association is achieved by replacing false associations with real ones so that all the information the brain holds makes sense when compared against each other. So Alex, let my question be this....are my associations false at any point? how do I know if they are?


I've never met anyone yet who didn't have some false associations.

To spot them we have to use the front end of the brain to analyse what the back end is up to, and the most useful way of doing that eventually is discourse analysis. BUT we don't need to go looking for all our false associations in a top-down manner because as we work on a few key concepts with a few simple exercises/games, we will cultivate the habit of noticing and amending them automatically as we are going along.

It's a bit like expanding your vocabulary automatically when learning to talk; you don't have to sit learning lots of new words from a book every day; you don't even have to think about it, you just pick up new words in your native language as you are going along and you learn what they mean by seeing how they are used in context.

Sometimes the hardest thing to explain in NH is that all you have to do is play  :  )
Best,
AR


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Alex
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Re: Tutorial 8

Sirhinojo wrote:
What constitues a concept in your book because in your letter response to me you included things like "things fall downward" and "physical laws cannot be broken" as concepts, but to me these are declarative statements like "John hates cats".

Firstly, it's important to be aware that these terms are not originating 'in my book'. There have been standard meanings for them in psychology since before I was born; I'm just borrowing them. I've tried to include clear definitions wherever possible for this reason.

More alien experiments:
A concept is a bit of meaning. To understand "things fall downwards" our alien would have to understand three bits of information: 'Things' are objects, 'falling' is a type of behavior describing movement from high to low, and 'downwards' is humans' name for low; the direction towards our planet's core.

Since she also lives on a planet that has gravity, objects, and names for directions, she would grasp this concept fairly easily -it has enough points of similarity to her own experience of reality to make sense.

To get her to understand "John hates cats" though presents a dilemma. She would again have to know three bits of meaning (concepts): that 'john' is the name of a human, that 'cats' are a kind of animal, and that 'hates' is a health-damaging sentiment experienced by anxious people when considering or encountering objects or circumstances they feel threatened by.

(Remember, we have to tell the absolute literal truth about every percept -bit of information- we give her. This is why the game is useful -most people are really not aware of what they say- and consequently fail to realize how much and how often they're misunderstood).

The 'hates' percept wouldn't make sense (as we've established the aliens' planet had no anxious people). She would have no concept to compare 'hates' against and would have real trouble understanding why john was doing this apparently health-threatening thing, whatever it was.

If we gave her the extra information that unwell humans experience sentiments, she might 'get' the concept that anxious people are sick people, but she still wouldn't be able to form an image of what john is doing with cats, or how anxious people might behave around cats; she has no real life experience to compare it against because she's never seen or felt sentiment.


A better example here -let's give our alien monochrome vision. Now explain to her what color is -she has no concepts for colors, and percepts associated with them won't make sense. You could tell her what light frequencies are, about refraction and reflection, how the human eyeball worked, and how color is an emergent property of interaction between the two, but you could not in any way enable her to imagine what red or green LOOKS like; to form an image of it. You could not communicate the experience of being in red light; there is no way she could imagine it. She cannot 'see what you mean'.

If her planet had no mammals and she were an amphibian, we would have a similar problem explaining 'cats'. Cats would be very hard for her to imagine, as she has never seen or experienced anything remotely similar, she would have no concept for cats.

Let me now flip the table and get the alien to try to play the same game with us.

Let's say she mails us the message: "Do humans jig humdusking squilloms?"
We would have to explain we don't understand. We know she is asking a question, but she hasn't given us enough bits of information (percepts) to furnish enough points of similarity between our known concepts and her meaning.

Then we get this:
"Jigging is a name for having pleasant body & mind sensations."

Now we have one concept we can relate to and understand, because it is similar enough to our own experience. We think she is probably asking, do we enjoy something or do we feel good about something. In fact we have a similar term -we 'dig' that funky music!

Then we get:
"Humdusking is the name of a game played in the sea with a flat board we try to stay balanced on top of, when there are big sea-waves called Squilloms."

Now she has given us enough bits of information that match up to our already-understood database of known human concepts. We "see what she means" (we can literally imagine it; we can make an image of it). If she says "holding on with your tail is not allowed in game", we would know she meant 'that is cheating', and we now have a very clear idea of what these aliens do when surf's up.

Which of these examples (if any) explain congruent conceptualisation? I'm aware that I haven't quite got there yet...
Onwards!  :  )
AR


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Re: Tutorial 8

Alex,

I understand pretty well what you are getting at so far, but until I actually practice it a while, I don't really know what else to say. You mentioned taking time to respond to my post, bit by bit, so for this reason I am still sort of waiting for you to post more.

But in the meantime, I will say just a bit more.

My original question was about the exercise where we take concepts and break them down to see how different Networks see or experience the concept.  I found this exercise challenging but fun and also was curious what exactly the mechanism of action was that made it effective. 

Now it seems that the exercise itself is only one of many ways to come to understand congruence.  For example, you brought up Discourse Analysis, and this appears to be another way to analyze what we say and see if what we say is actually sensible at all? Or another example, the visiting Alien thought experiment, whenever the alien is unable to understand our communication, unable to get what we possibly mean, this points to the "unreal" or "incongruent" aspects of our own thinking?

What do you think of the exercise where I broke down PHYSICS and LOVER?

On another note, I am very curious about PG and read through the Resident Quarters and the Rabbit Hole... it seems like a PG never actually got started... or else the Game actually takes place somewhere else that I don't have access to?

greetings, sirhinojo


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Alex
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Re: Tutorial 8

Sirhinojo wrote:
And the question remains, is doing this exercise from Tutorial 8 then really about remembering and reconsolidating? Because I do not know how we can add any greater congruence in our memory reconsolidation of concepts if we do not know if our concepts are incongruent in the first place.


If we start considering input in terms of core concepts, we'll start the habit of forming more congruent associations, and in doing that, anything that doesn't fit will be either automatically brought up for questioning by our unconscious minds, or will be automatically overwritten -and this is where remembering & reconsolidation come in.

Reconsolidation is where we can change false memories. Most of us have done it at least once before; when we were told that there really is no Santa Claus or Tooth Fairy etc. We can maybe even remember the experience of believing in Santa, but we are well aware now that old fat blokes in red suits do not climb down chimneys with gifts. The memory of Santa has been reconsolidated to incorporate more mature concepts such as 'cultural traditions', 'metaphor' 'anthropomorphic representation' etc. Santa still exists, but is now associated with 'mythology' in our database, which is fine and makes sense.

Likewise, some of our students have experienced seeing ghostly apparitions, and in former times may have believed that they were being haunted, because that's what most people will tell you, or that they had some disorder, because that's what others will tell you.

Now however, they are more likely to be aware that research in the real world has shown these experiences are caused by internal source monitoring errors and their appearance 'on the outside' is a perceptual illusion; so these peoples' memory of 'ghosts' will be overwritten accordingly and will make more sense when associated with other things they know -for example we can imagine how a perceptual illusion could confuse us much like an optical illusion, we can imagine how phantom limb pain is also related to source monitoring error, we can imagine how the 'false arm' illusion works by hacking the source monitoring process, why anxious children really can see monsters under the bed, and so on. It all fits together and it all makes sense, unlike previous explanations.

This sort of memory overwriting is automatic, it's how we update our knowledge, and there is no need to go searching around for incongruencies, we just need to consolidate our concepts of reality as we are best able to perceive it right now, and keep questioning new input for validity before accepting it as congruent.

I tend to assess exercises by doing them, and some of them help me understand some things better, like how association works and what congruent association is, so I tend to do them regardless of whether I notice improvement, because just getting more familiar with the ideas in different ways helps.

Questions from me (optional)  :  )

...Can everyone let me know which descriptions so far are most helpful in explaining these ideas and in particular answering your questions?

What questions are still not getting answered?

Are tutorials making it too complicated or too simple, ie, does information seem to be repeated too much, or missing?

Do you think it would be easier for newbies if there were more examples and less waffle, or the other way round?

Best,
AR


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