Probability Instinct - Sufficiently Discrete to Survive in the Jungle
Immortalist
species.
THE PROBABILITY INSTINCT
It looks as if Kant, who thought our minds structure our perceptions, was
right. Probability was built into our minds. Our minds, the electrochemical
symphony that our narrowly evolved neural ganglia play, impose an
infrastructure on our thinking. The mind imposes a background of time and
space and causal connectedness. Scientists have never seen a "causality" in
the wild. They have seen, and they predict, only space-time events that
follow space-time events. Apples on the tree, then apples in the air, then
apples on the ground. Equations and correlations have replaced causes, just
as science has largely replaced philosophy and religion as a theory of
things. No causal germ in one event unfolds into another event. But the
mind, as eighteenth-century philosopher David Hume observed, makes it seem
so and inserts the causal links in the event chain.
Probability seems to be part of the same mental infrastructure. It forms
part of our mental background or viewing screen along with time and space
and causality and similarity and the topological notions of continuity and
connectedness. We see probability everywhere because it lies in our glasses.
I believe that probability or "randomness" is a psychic instinct or Jungian
archetype or mental trend that helps us organize our perceptions and
memories and most of all our expectations. Probability gives structure to
our competing causal predictions about how the future will unfold in the
next instant or day or season or millennium.
Probability ranks or weights the future alternatives. Our expectations then
blend or average these future alternatives into a single
probability-weighted average. The probability weights do not exist outside
our minds. They have no physical reality but have a powerful psychological
reality rooted in our neural mi-crostructure. Hume also thought that we make
up probability as we go and use it to fill in gaps in our mind schemes or
world views: "Though there be no such thing as chance in the world, our
ignorance of the real cause of any event has the same influence on the
understanding and begets a like species of belief."
This probability instinct seems to cut across cultures and may cut across
species. Besides the probability-laden psychology of scientists and most
nonscientists, the widespread gambling and games of chance in primitive and
modern cultures suggest that probability "reasoning" may be a cultural
constant like hero worship or fertility rituals or incest and adultery
taboos. A cultural constant suggests a biological substrate, and that
requires an evolutionary history.
Ranking future alternatives can help pass on genes. Those who could so rank
may have eaten those who could not. It allows us to bet before we act and
improve the outcome of acting. That forward-looking ability has supreme
survival value in biological evolution, the genetic variation and selection
in the last few million years that has finely sculpted our brains and minds,
and in the prior evolution that sculpted the brains and minds of our
mammalian ancestors in the last 220 million years. Natural selection filters
out organisms as they cross the fuzzy line from the present to the future.
Natural selection favors brain mechanisms that help an organism make its
next move in a changing and dangerous world. These forward-looking brain
mechanisms may run deep in the structure of mammalian and even reptilian
brains. Future studies may find that the brains of chimps and apes and
lesser-brained mammals house a forward-looking probability instinct. At the
other extreme we should not be surprised that scientists have exalted
probability ranking into their grand organizing principle of maximum
probability. Scientists follow their probability instincts as their hominid
forefathers followed theirs. Scientists just know more math.
Fuzzy Thinking - The New Science of Fuzzy Logic
Bart Kosko
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/078688021X/
Will Dwinnell
scientists have never directly observed "causality". Are you
asserting that causation does not exist?
I'm also not clear on where your essay on probability is leading. If
the outcome of events are not known beforehand, what difference does
it make whether chance is "real" or percevied? If an observer doesn't
know ahead of time, he doesn't know. Even were one to grant that
there is no "real" randomness in the universe, we are still saddled
with the fact that we possess limited sense faculties, which provide
noisy, incomplete and even self-contradictory information.
Probability gives us tools for dealing with such uncertainties.
-Will Dwinnell
http://will.dwinnell.com
Immortalist
"Will Dwinnell" <pred...@bellatlantic.net> wrote in message
news:2b7b8021.04022...@posting.google.com...
> I'm not sure I understand where all of this is going. You assert that
> scientists have never directly observed "causality". Are you
> asserting that causation does not exist?
>
Do you mean do we observe events that stimulate the sights, sounds, tastes,
smeels, or feels of things or do we just experience such properties of
sensory apperatus which we reason are stimulated by such things?
> I'm also not clear on where your essay on probability is leading. If
> the outcome of events are not known beforehand, what difference does
> it make whether chance is "real" or percevied? If an observer doesn't
> know ahead of time, he doesn't know. Even were one to grant that
> there is no "real" randomness in the universe, we are still saddled
> with the fact that we possess limited sense faculties, which provide
> noisy, incomplete and even self-contradictory information.
> Probability gives us tools for dealing with such uncertainties.
>
Very good and I agree. Kosko argues that truth and fact are synonomous with
coherence and correspondance. Like a musical peice played on one instrument
like a guitar while practicing. Although the device is tuned right
[coherence] to play the music it may not be tuned to other instruments in
the band [correspondance] later that day at practice.
The correspondence level of animal sensory perception may have been tuned to
the needs of survival, which may or may not correspond to what we use math
and logic for.
Kosko is arguing for multi-valance in the economy of the brains
transactions.
The cause thing and Hume...
There are no ideas, which occur in metaphysics, more obscure and uncertain,
than those of power, force, energy or necessary connection. ... When we look
about us towards external objects, and consider the operation of causes, we
are never able, in a single instance, to discover any power or necessary
connection; any quality, which binds the effect to the cause, and renders
the one an infallible consequence of the other.... Consequently, there is
not, in any single, particular instance of cause and effect, any thing which
can suggest the idea of power or necessary connection. ...but the power or
force, which actuates the whole machine [the universe], is entirely
concealed from us, and never discovers itself in any of the sensible
qualities of body.... It is impossible, therefore, that the idea of power
can be derived from the contemplation of bodies, in single instances of
their operation; because no bodies ever discover any power, which can be the
original of this idea.
When we entertain, therefore, any suspicion that a philosophical term is
employed without any meaning or idea (as is but too frequent), we need to
enquire, from what impression is that supposed idea derived? And if it be
impossible to assign any, this will serve to confirm our suspicion. Now if
we produce an idea, like power or necessary connection, that we maintain is
not derived from an antecedent impression, it is not incumbent upon Hume to
produce the impression or abandon his empiricism. Instead. ...our idea is
"without any meaning or idea." And as we can have no idea of any thing which
never appeared to our outward sense or inward sentiment, the necessary
conclusion seems to be that we have no idea of connection or power at all,
and that these words are absolutely without any meaning, when employed
either in philosophical reasonings or common life.
This connexion, therefore, which we feel in the mind, this customary
transition of the imagination from one object to its ususal attendant, is
the sentiment or impression from which we form the idea of power or
necessary connection. Nothing farther is in the case.
Causes and effects are discovered, not by reason but through experience,
when we find that particular objects are constantly conjoined with one
another. We tend to overlook this because most ordinary causal judgments are
so familiar; we've made them so many times that our judgment seems
immediate. But when we consider the matter, we realize that "an (absolutely)
unexperienced reasoner could be no reasoner at all" (EHU, 45n). Even in
applied mathematics, where we use abstract reasoning and geometrical methods
to apply principles we regard as laws to particular cases in order to derive
further principles as consequences of these laws, the discovery of the
original law itself was due to experience and observation, not to a priori
reasoning.
The mental imagery and associations may reflect laws of motion and sequence
but to claim they internally cause each other doesn't mean my mental
activites causations reflect the causations of the observed sequences of
changing atomic configurations.
The Copy Principle accounts for the origins of our ideas. But our ideas are
also regularly connected. As Hume put the point in his "Abstract" of the
Treatise, "there is a secret tie or union among particular ideas, which
causes the mind to conjoin them more frequently together, and makes the one,
upon its appearance, introduce the other".
A science of human nature should account for these connections. Otherwise,
we are stuck with an eidetic atomism -- a set of discrete, independent
ideas, unified only in that they are the contents of a particular mind.
Eidetic atomism thus fails to explain how ideas are "bound together," and
its inadequacy in this regard encourages us, as Hume thought it encouraged
Locke, to postulate theoretical notions -- power and substance being the
most notorious -- to account for the connections we find among our ideas.
Eidetic atomism is thus a prime source of the philosophical "hypotheses"
Hume aims to eliminate.
The principles required for connecting our ideas aren't theoretical and
rational; they are natural operations of the mind, associations we
experience in "internal sensation." Hume's introduction of these "principles
of association" is the other distinctive feature of his empiricism, so
distinctive that in the Abstract he advertises it as his most original
contribution: "If any thing can intitle the author to so glorious a name as
that of an inventor, 'tis the use he makes of the principle of the
association of ideas".
Hume locates "three principles of connexion" or association: resemblance,
contiguity, and cause and effect. Of the three, causation is the only
principle that takes us "beyond the evidence of our memory and senses." It
establishes a link or connection between past and present experiences with
events that we predict or explain, so that "all reasonings concerning matter
of fact seem to be founded on the relation of cause and effect." But
causation and the ideas closely related to it also raise serious
metaphysical problems: "there are no ideas, which occur in metaphysics, more
obscure and uncertain, than those of power, force, energy or necessary
connexion"
Hume wants to "fix, if possible, the precise meaning of these terms, and
thereby remove some part of that obscurity, which is so much complained of
in this species of philosophy". This project provides a crucial experiment
for Hume's metaphysical microscope, one designed to prove the worth of his
method, to provide a paradigm for investigating problematic philosophical
and theological notions, and to supply valuable material for these
inquiries.
http://www.friesian.com/hume.htm
http://www.wutsamada.com/alma/modern/humepid.htm
I suppose that at that point in history a milestone had been reached and
nothing was to be the same henceforth and while through Kant and is
appropriators...neurophysiology continues to grow.
> -Will Dwinnell
> http://will.dwinnell.com
mitch
Immortalist wrote:
> Discrete enough to outrun a predator or the slowest member of your own
> species.
>
> THE PROBABILITY INSTINCT
>
> It looks as if Kant, who thought our minds structure our perceptions, was
> right. Probability was built into our minds. Our minds, the electrochemical
> symphony that our narrowly evolved neural ganglia play, impose an
> infrastructure on our thinking. The mind imposes a background of time and
> space and causal connectedness. Scientists have never seen a "causality" in
> the wild. They have seen, and they predict, only space-time events that
> follow space-time events. Apples on the tree, then apples in the air, then
> apples on the ground. Equations and correlations have replaced causes, just
> as science has largely replaced philosophy and religion as a theory of
> things. No causal germ in one event unfolds into another event. But the
> mind, as eighteenth-century philosopher David Hume observed, makes it seem
> so and inserts the causal links in the event chain.
>
> Probability seems to be part of the same mental infrastructure. It forms
> part of our mental background or viewing screen along with time and space
> and causality and similarity and the topological notions of continuity and
> connectedness. We see probability everywhere because it lies in our glasses.
>
I am strongly going to suggest that you look at orthomodular logics and quantum
logics for this in addition to Bayesian decision models and whatever else you
find.
I had been looking a Paul Halmos paper on Hilbert spaces and discovered one of
the inadequacies of quantum logic for quantum mechanics--the Heisenberg
uncertainty principle cannot be represented.
On the other hand, the fact that logic on a Hilbert space is not fixed means
that it is "sufficiently free" for the situation-theoretic analysis that does
not presume predication and object awareness outside of series of perspectives.
Thus, the Hilbert space formalism can be viewed as evolving with a stateful,
defeasible belief system against which secondary "judgeable content" is
oriented.
Just a thought.
:-)
mitch