The stored thoughts: a large part of human cognition - find in the cache Bashny.Net

One of the greatest mysteries about the human brain is how it can work even when the majority of neurons are utilized 10-20 times per second, or 200 Hz in general. In neurology, typically a hundred paces states that any postulated operation should be completed in no more than one hundred consecutive steps - you can be parallel as much as you like, but you can not posit more than 100 (and probably less) neural jumps one after the other.

Can you imagine that you have a program that uses a 100Hz processor, and it does not matter how much you have them? You will also need a hundred billion processors just to get something in real time.




If you need to write the real-time program for the hundreds of billions of 100 Hz processor, you can use this trick as caching. This is where you store the results of previous operations, and next time look at them, rather than to calculate anew each time from scratch. And this is a very exact analogy - recognition, association, perform template

. A good guess is that much of human knowledge - is the search cache

. This idea has the ability to appear in my mind from time to time.

There's a great visual story that should have been in my bookmarks, but I was not able to find there: it is the story of a man whose neighbor-nerdy once remarked that the easiest way to remove the fireplace of the house as follows: dismantle the fireplace, wait until the pipe drops below, remove the visible piece of it, to wait until she falls more and so on until the entire tube will be removed. Years later, when people wanted to get rid of the fireplace of his home, this thought surfaced stored up in his mind ...

As noted by this person only then - you can guess what it went far from smoothly - his neighbor is not particularly well versed in the matter and was not a reliable source. If he was asked about the idea, he probably would have realized that the idea is not very. Some results are stored up, we would be better still to calculate again. But the brain performs template automatically - if you do not consciously realize that the pattern needs to be corrected, and you will continue to operate as before template

. I suspect that if the idea came to the man alone - if he came up with the idea of ​​how to clean a fireplace - he would have treated it more critically. But if someone has already thought about the idea, you can also save computing resources just to cache their output - so

? In modern civilization, one can not think fast enough to think their own thoughts. If I had been thrown into the woods child, brought up by wolves or silent robots, I would not look like a man. One can not think fast enough to summarize the wisdom of the hunter-gatherer tribe in one life, starting from scratch. And it is even more so it is impossible for the wisdom of literate civilization.

But on the other hand, I constantly see people who tend to think critically, while repeating the stored up thoughts that were invented by those who do not use critical thinking.

A good example is the skeptic, who acknowledges: "Well, you can not prove or disprove religion actual evidence." As I have shown elsewhere that this is just a lie according to the theory of probability. And it's also just a lie with respect to this psychology of religion - a few centuries ago, having said this, you would have been at stake. The mother, whose daughter is sick with cancer, praying: "God, please cure my daughter", instead of "Dear Lord, I know that religion does not allow to have any falsifiable consequences, which means that you probably can not cure my daughter, so ... .ladno, in general, I pray to feel better, instead, to do something for this help my daughter. »

But people read "You can not prove or disprove religion factual evidence" and the next time they see a piece of evidence that disproves religion, their brains respond by template. Even some atheists repeat this nonsense without a shadow of a doubt. If they come up with it, and have not heard from someone else, they would have been skeptical about this idea.

Death: complete template: "Death gives meaning to life»

It's frustrating when you talk to the good and decent ordinary people who never in a thousand years, even casually wondered about the extinction of mankind - in the transition to the theme of existential risks hear them say, "Well, perhaps humanity is not worthy of survival." They would never have shot at her child - and he is also a part of humanity - but their brain performs pattern

. Which of the patterns that run your brain, for you are unwelcome?

Rationality: finish Pattern: "Love is irrational»

. If this idea would suddenly come to you on its own, as an entirely new thought, how would you have checked with the critical thinking point of view? I know what I want to say this, but did you know? It can be difficult to look at it with fresh eyes.

Try not to give your brain a complete templates, like he used to. Perhaps there really is not a better option than usual, but you can not know the answer to that question until you fail to stop your brain from manners to give an answer automatically.

Now, when you read this post, the next time you hear someone confidently repeats the meme that you think stupid or false, you will think: "The stored thoughts." My belief is now in your head, waiting for being able to perform as a template. But is it true? Do not allow the brain to complete the template! Think!

Author: Eliezer Yudkowsky