Mentally Time Travel (into both the past and future)
Immortalist
Episodic memory shares a core neural network with the simulation of
future episodes, enabling mental time travel into both the past and
the future. The notion that there might be something distinctly human
about mental time travel has provoked ingenious attempts to
demonstrate episodic memory or future simulation in non-human animals,
but we argue that they have not yet established a capacity comparable
to the human faculty.
The evolution of the capacity to simulate possible future events,
based on episodic memory, enhanced fitness by enabling action in
preparation of different possible scenarios that increased present or
future survival and reproduction chances. Human language may have
evolved in the first instance for the sharing of past and planned
future events, and, indeed, fictional ones, further enhancing fitness
in social settings.
Vivid memory and imaginative foresight may be crucial cognitive
devices for human decision making. Our emotional engagement with past
or future events gives them great motivational force, which may
counter a natural tendency towards time discounting and impulsive,
opportunistic behavior. In this view, whereas simple episodic memory
provides us with a store of relevant, case-based information to guide
decisions, mental time travel nudges us towards more restrained
choices, which in the long term are advantageous, especially so given
human dependence on cooperation and coordination.
Many animals seem to have a capacity for some form of episodic recall,
retrieving specific information about the ‘what, where and when’ of
past experiences. Humans (and perhaps other animals) also engage in
what has been called ‘mental time travel’, a form of recall that
allows one to reexperience, albeit in an attenuated form, situations
previously encountered. There is converging evidence that mental time
travel is crucial to human decision making. Here, I offer an
explanation for that connection. mental time travel, in the view
proposed here, provides a motivational ‘brake’ that counters natural
dispositions towards opportunistic, short-termist, ‘myopic’ decision
making.
Under what conditions would natural selection favor the appearance of
a capacity to re-experience the past and experience the future? There
is surprisingly little literature to address these questions, mostly
because few psychologists adopt a functional view of memory systems.
Recently, several independent proposals have been made for a
functional account.** Various aspects of human cognitive functioning
seem to derive increased efficiency from knowledge of past episodes.
In these functional accounts episodic memory and counterfactual
imagination are two aspects of the same capacity to engage in off-line
inferences as an aid to present decision making, for instance, by
maintaining a store of exemplars against which to compare present
situations and select the most beneficial course of action . This
would suggest that mental time travel is a recent adaptation whose
emergence is connected with the sudden increase in behavioral variety
and flexibility that prepared the transitiontoHomoergaster and
sapiens. This is consistent with the computational connections between
mental time travel and other, probably recent, high-level cognitive
functions such as self-knowledge and metarepresentations.
Why add mental time travel to episodic memory or imagination?
Functional models so far explain only why we are able to entertain
information about past or possible situations, not why we also
actually experience these situations. The reason for evolving mental
time travel, as opposed to mere whatwhere- when knowledge, must lie in
mental activity that is present in the former but not in the latter...
**Possible functions of episodic recall;
1. Foresight and flexible planning: Episodes provide a store of
possible scenarios whose combination allows sophisticated foresight
and, therefore, flexible planning.
Case-based inferences and scope syntax: Episodic memory allows
judgment of current situation on the basis of its similarity to
previously encountered ones. Expertise in, for example, social
interaction requires case-based reasoning rather than (or as well as)
rule-governed inferences.
Hindsight: Episodes include information about currently irrelevant
features of a situation that subsequently may become relevant in view
of changed circumstances.
Economic vigilance and accountability: A form of hindsight. Detailed
information about past social interactions allows us to judge who is a
reliable economic partner. Also, that information may become crucial
in making judgments about people’s reliability as coalition partners.
Epistemic vigilance: Humans depend on information conveyed by
conspecifics, so they need evaluation of other agents’ epistemic
reliability. To judge whether people’s utterances are credible, one
must keep a detailed record of communicative events.
http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/364/1521/1317.abstract
http://artsci.wustl.edu/~pboyer/PBoyerHomeSite/articles/Boyer-TiCS-Memory-Preprint.pdf
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Episodic_memory
http://cogprints.org/725/0/MentalTimeTravel.txt
Sir Frederick
>Episodic Memory: conscious recollection of past episodes.
>
clip
>
>http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/364/1521/1317.abstract
>http://artsci.wustl.edu/~pboyer/PBoyerHomeSite/articles/Boyer-TiCS-Memory-Preprint.pdf
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Episodic_memory
>http://cogprints.org/725/0/MentalTimeTravel.txt
Among other things, humans are model driven structures.
Some models include time considerations.
As I age, I find some episodic recalls to be intrusive.
Some strange recalls can occur. For instance,
using a vibrator on my right ear, that might be irritated,
causes me to recall my neighbor's tamarack trees from
fifty years ago! Worthless, but there it is, in my brain.
And repetitive!
zzbu...@netscape.net
> Episodic Memory: conscious recollection of past episodes.
>
> Episodic memory shares a core neural network with the simulation of
> future episodes, enabling mental time travel into both the past and
> the future. The notion that there might be something distinctly human
> about mental time travel has provoked ingenious attempts to
> demonstrate episodic memory or future simulation in non-human animals,
> but we argue that they have not yet established a capacity comparable
> to the human faculty.
>
> The evolution of the capacity to simulate possible future events,
> based on episodic memory, enhanced fitness by enabling action in
> preparation of different possible scenarios that increased present or
> future survival and reproduction chances. Human language may have
> evolved in the first instance for the sharing of past and planned
> future events, and, indeed, fictional ones, further enhancing fitness
> in social settings.
It probably did develop that way, but it's still the reason that
the people
with actual non-trivial chances of surival work on GPS, Digital
Terrain Mapping,
Atomic Clock Wristwatches, Micocomputers, USB, SGML, XML, C++, All-
in-One Printers,
Holographics, Holograms, Digital Fiber Optics Signalling,
Distributed Processing Software,
Laser Disk Libraries, Blue Ray, Flat Screen Software Debuggers,
Electronic Books, HDTV, Cell Phones,
UAVs, AAVs, Cruise Missiles, Drones, Phalanx, Biodiesel, Post 1905
Pv Cell Energy,
Solar Energy. Self-Replicating Machines, Self-Assembling Robots,
Compact Flourescent Lighting.
Light Sticks, Micowave Ovens, and Thermo-Cooling, rather than the
idiot Tesla-Wannabee science with the
Relativity idiots.
Benj
wrote:
> It probably did develop that way, but it's still the reason that
> the people with nothing better to do work on , Micocomputers,
> UAVs, AAVs, Cruise Missiles, Drones, rather than the
> idiot Tesla-Wannabee science with the
> Relativity idiots.
Which is why real scientists and engineers spend their time working on
perpetual motion machines, free energy, channeled schematic diagrams,
UFO tracking, debunking relativity, time travel, ghost busting, aether
theory, faster than light communications, warp drives, and of course
military applications of "remote viewing" and "time travel".
Posers and idiots like ZZ who couldn't engineer his own ass with both
hands work for Bill Gates or on how to get 300 channels on your TV set
with nothing worth watching on any of them.
ZerkonXXXX
> The evolution of the capacity to simulate possible future events, based
> on episodic memory, enhanced fitness by enabling action in preparation
> of different possible scenarios that increased present or future
> survival and reproduction chances. Human language may have evolved in
> the first instance for the sharing of past and planned future events,
> and, indeed, fictional ones, further enhancing fitness in social
> settings.
All very nice but let's get really real here shall we? 'Evolution of the
capacity' is just too important to lock it up as theory. This is what
many political 'think tanks' do and has become pivotal to military
theorists employed by governments. IOW, why make this seem as if it were
so detached from the present?
No matter how one wants to idealize this as some esoteric capacity,
"Episodic memory" comes down to a common understanding of a history of a
group. Time traveling Neural networks are still vulnerable to SI,SO.
Orewell's "1984" speaks directly to this issue. Namely, it becomes a
political and economical imperative for this same capacity not to evolve
as part of a social mind. People traveled only to a predetermined
politically expedient 'time'.
Uncle Al
>
> Episodic Memory: conscious recollection of past episodes.
>
> Episodic memory shares a core neural network with the simulation of
> future episodes, enabling mental time travel into both the past and
> the future.
Win a Lottery. Is $10-50 million in a single gulp insufficient
motivation or are you an idiot?
idiot
--
Uncle Al
http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/
(Toxic URL! Unsafe for children and most mammals)
http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/lajos.htm#a2
zzbu...@netscape.net
ZZ never claimed to engineer anything for imbeciles like
mathematicians.
Since the only the thing the stoogs even know even know about the
subject is morons, blackboards, strings, and idiots.
Abu Husein
The Creator
Sorry for not sending anything related to this group but it might be
something new to you
The name Allah (God) in Islam is the personal name of God. The most
concise definition of God in Islam is given in four verses of Surah Al-
Ikhlaas in the Holy Qur'an:
{{1. Say (O Muhammad): "He is Allâh, (the) One.
2. "Allâh-us-Samad (The Self-Sufficient Master, Whom all creatures
need, He neither eats nor drinks).
3. "He begetteth not not, nor is He begotten;
4. "And there is none Like unto Him.}} (Holy Qur'an 112: 1-4).
To Muslims, this four-line definition of Almighty God serves as the
touchstone of the study of God. Any candidate to divinity must be
subjected to this ‘acid test' and since the attributes of The Creator
given in this chapter are unique, false gods and pretenders to
divinity can be easily dismissed using these verses.
i) The first criterion is «"Say, He is Allah, one and only". »
Can there be more than one god? This verse tells us that The Creator
is the only one who has total and absolute power, unique in His names
and attributes.
ii) The second criterion is, «'Allah is absolute and eternal’»
The word that is translated as “The Eternal, Absolute” from Arabic is
something that can be attributed only to The Creator as all the other
existent beings temporal or conditional??. It also means that Allah is
not dependant on any person or thing, but all persons and things are
dependant on Him.
iii) The third criterion is «‘He begets not, nor is He begotten’».
This means God was not born, nor does He give birth and share his
divinity with others. Nor does He have a family or relationship with
another being.
(iv) The fourth test, - which is the most stringent - is, «"There is
none like unto Him". »
The moment you can imagine or compare ‘God’ to anything, then he (the
candidate to divinity) is not God. It is not possible to conjure up a
mental picture of the One True God because of the simple fact, as
creation, we only know creation.
The Muslims prefer calling the Supreme Creator, 'Allah', instead of
the English word ‘God’. The Arabic word, ‘Allah’, is pure and unique,
unlike the English word ‘God’, which can be played around with. For
example, If you add ‘s’ to the word God, it becomes ‘Gods’, that is
the plural of God. Allah is one and singular, there is no plural of
Allah. If you add the word ‘father’ to ‘God’ it becomes ‘God-father’.
God-father means someone who is a guardian. There is no word like
‘Allah-father’. If you add the word ‘mother’ to ‘God’, it becomes ‘God-
mother’. There is nothing like ‘Allah-mother’ in Islam. Allah is a
unique word, which does not conjure up any mental picture nor can it
be played around with. Therefore, the Muslims prefer using the Arabic
word ‘Allah’ for the Almighty.
For more information about Islam
www.imanway1.com
http://www.freewebtown.com/trouth/1.html