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Monday, June 02, 2003

Thinking

I finally got around to watching Robert's talk on Thinking (180 meg). I think he'd be a little more well received if he feigned some humility (heh), but in general I like his approach and wouldn't be surprised if he's more on track than most. The presentation is long (half an hour?), but at a general enough level that you don't need any notable technical background to get the gist of it. And it makes some interesting implications about the nature of human cognition, pretty much agreeing with my own working hypothesis that we (humans) fundamentally do not think logically or rationally but rather intuitively/perceptually, and that we are just so good at doing so that we are able to learn to perform rational thought with it. He labels our fundamental mode of thought "confabulation", which, along with his mathematical model, is slightly more pessimistic than even I had been thinking, but it seems a reasonable hypothesis.

How useful it would be for people to understand how inherently flawed their own thought processes are. Rational thought begins with that--with the acknowledgement that what appears obvious is not necessarily true.

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"You really are very well-documented for a human being." -someone I met online recently.

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