

A Skeptic’s Guide to the Mind - tokenadult
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/a-skeptics-guide-to-the-mind/

======
spodek
This book sounds like it resonates with one of my main fields of interest.

After getting my PhD in physics at Columbia and starting a company, then going
back to get an MBA (also Columbia), I was fascinated at how effectively the
exercises in leadership class worked. They pointed out how leadership was
based in behavior and said "If you behave this way, people will respond that
way. Doing so will make you a leader."

The exercises worked surprisingly well. I learned behavior that helped me lead
my company better. People began deferring to me as a leader where they didn't
before -- in regular life as well as business. My science background saw
reproducibility and concluded there must be a useful theory beneath. My
physics background wanted not just a theory, but a simple one too. But when I
asked my teachers why it worked they just said "Don't ask. Just do it. It
works." Business school is a vocational school, so that response made sense.

My scientific curiosity kept me going. I studied evolutionary psychology,
positive psychology, cognitive behavioral therapy, and more. I also kept
practicing what I learned in business and life as I continued running my
business and starting others.

As an entrepreneur my goal was not to publish papers, despite my science
background, but to make a _useful_ theory -- useful to entrepreneurs and
businesspeople like myself. Like I gather this book says, I found tons of low-
level detail out there on neuroscience that, while fascinating, was so
detailed and frontier it wasn't clear how to use it, nor how long before newer
results changed our understanding of it, nor could anyone know enough of it to
use it effectively. Not many neuroscientists make great leaders, nor do many
psychologists or psychiatrists, despite knowing so much detail about the
brain. Knowing about something is not the same as knowing how to use it.

Like the author of this book (quoting the review) "has a bone to pick with
neuroscientists. They are discovering fascinating information, but their
interpretations often go beyond what the data can really tell us. They often
draw questionable conclusions from imaging studies that could have other
explanations." I share his skepticism not of the scientific results, but of
its utility to day-to-day life, especially in an entrepreneurial or leadership
environment. My goal was to make the information _useful_ to lead, to run a
company, and in general to win friends and influence people.

Eventually I realized an effective model of the mind had to balance low-level
detail with high-level breadth and ability to be communicated and understood.
I think geeks like us tend to get caught up in fascinating detail, whereas
when we interact with others, especially to start or run our companies or work
in teams, we have to make the information useful in the moment.

My end result was two-fold: a model of the human emotional system and the core
of a book putting it all together that also evolved into a seminar I give at
business schools as well as the New York Academy of Sciences. On a personal
level, I would say I've increased my emotional intelligence and self-awareness
tremendously, two concepts I didn't understand and couldn't figure out how to
increase before creating my model despite knowing their value to my life.

For anyone interested in how the mind works not to publish papers but to _use_
it to lead, to start or run their company, to win friends and influence
people, to live a better life, and to increase their self-awareness and
emotional intelligence, I have a long series of blog posts that are an
effective first draft of the core of that book on the model of our
motivational and emotional system -- <http://joshuaspodek.com/the-model-
summary> \-- and how to use it -- <http://joshuaspodek.com/method-step-by-
step>.

Sorry for the long post leading to a longer series of posts, but if you
clicked this story, I suspect you have the same curiosity about making
neuroscience useful in business and life and may find the material helpful.

EDIT: based on Luc's fair comment, I should note the material is not polished
-- maybe alpha stage or earlier -- and some stuff on models in general very
basic for this community. I've gotten positive feedback and no negative
feedback (no doubt due in part to selection effects) from people who have made
it all through. I'm in the process of making it into a single volume.

~~~
Luc
I hope you can find another approach to explaining your model than what you
have up on the 'The Model: summary' page. Some months ago I read through two
thirds of it and still felt I hadn't got any idea of where you were going with
this. I felt it was all very hand-wavy.

Now, I do appreciate people putting in the effort to publish free content
online, and one doesn't always want to be confronted with smart-asses who find
nits to pick, but since you are writing a book I thought I'd mention it.

~~~
trentlott
_I felt it was all very hand-wavy_

It's as if you expect him to actually understand and explain what his brain is
doing ;)

------
return0
I think they are talking about cognitive neuroscience and not neuroscience in
general. Many in the neuro community consider fMRI studies to be the
equivalent of phrenology. But looking at the top journals in the field (neuron
and nature neuro) you rarely find fMRI studies. The bulk of the work is basic
science that attempts to figure out how the brain works. Basic neuroscience
has its problems too [1] but it is not full of overstatements. Unfortunately,
what gets in the news is mostly catchy subjects that relate to psychology.

1] <http://www.nature.com/nrn/journal/v14/n5/abs/nrn3475.html>

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cristianpascu
We are so certain that people are biased in thinking they are certain of
something.

Also, the other ones, the ones saying things we don't agree with, are saying
that "just because [insert your favorite bias here]". We're the ones really
cool and aware of mind traps.

~~~
doorhammer
When I was still taking social psych courses, one of my favorite events would
be after every lesson when half the class would say something like, "I know
about new cognitive biases! I am now immune."

~~~
StavrosK
My favorite event is recognizing a cognitive bias in me. "Wait, this is rosy
retrospection! Damn you, brain!"

~~~
gertef
I love the smell of roses, but people say I always complain when I smell
them...

~~~
StavrosK
The only way I can tell that I had a bad time in college is because, when I
left, I said to myself "in a few years you're going to remember all the great
times, but the majority wasn't that great".

Lo and behold, five years later, I only remember the good times.

------
drcode
I love reading popular neuroscience books, but boy, they sure are filled with
a lot of hooey... It's refreshing to hear about a book that tries to avoid
this problem.

~~~
new299
Not sure, there appears to be a reasonable amount of hooey here too, but then
it's a subject that we're only really just gaining the tools to handle.

I quite like John Searle take on the philosophy of mind, his book "Mind: A
Brief Introduction" is pretty well written, and I like the Chinese room
thought experiment which I think kind of highlights what a lot of people find
problematic about the mind-body problem.

~~~
RodgerTheGreat
I find Searle's argument hard to take seriously as it is fundamentally rooted
in dualism. If a chinese room were to behave in a manner indistinguishable
(based on input and output) from a person, it would be irrational (not to
mention unscientific) to conclude that it still lacks a "mind" in some vague,
unmeasurable and unfalsifiable sense. His entire argument essentially hinges
upon denial of emergent behavior- that since no part of the chinese room is
"conscious" the sum of these parts similarly cannot exhibit this property.
This is also clearly nonsense- I could similarly state that when I take a
computer apart and examine individual atoms I will find none individually
capable of performing IEEE-754 floating point multiplication and thus conclude
that any machine constructed of such atoms would be similarly incapable.

~~~
new299
I actually think that Searle's Chinese room experiment neatly defines the
divide between the mind from matter and dualism groups. The dualists believe
that the Chinese room can not be squared with their notion of consciousness,
the qualia, which is largely based on their subjective experience of
consciousness. The Mind from Matter people essentially think that the
subjective experience is an illusion, that there is no qualia. That's the
fundamental divide, and the Chinese room experiment is useful in that it
neatly divides those two groups.

I personally don't buy the "if it's indistinguishable from a person it's
conscious" argument. Philosophical Zombies for example are a good example of
system that I think could appear conscious, but I don't think are in any
meaningful way. That is to say, if you had a large lookup table of every
possible response, or just "guessed" reasonable responses by chance, I don't
think that says anything meaningful about consciousness.

The above might be solved by putting somekind of information content limit on
this system, for example if a system responds as a human, and it's
construction requires as little or less information than a human then it can
be said to be conscious, but basing your judgement purely on response is not
enough in my view.

In general I find philosophers rather annoying when they try and deal with
consciousness, Searle is at least easier to pin down and does attempt to
interact with the AI community to some degree.

~~~
RodgerTheGreat
Philosophical Zombies are not falsifiable, as they are necessarily
_completely_ indistinguishable from conscious beings in any way we could test
or measure. Falsifiability is one of the pillars of modern scientific thought
and crucial to drawing useful conclusions about the world.

If there is no amount of interrogation that could possibly convince you that
another being (in silico or otherwise) possessed consciousness, your logic can
be followed through to solipsism.

~~~
new299
"Philosophical Zombies are not falsifiable, as they are necessarily completely
indistinguishable from conscious beings in any way we could test or measure."

You might impose an additional criteria such as complexity limits as I
suggested, which could lead you to a definition of concuousness as a near
minimal encoding of "human like" responses. And would of course be
falsifiable.

But you can take it in the other direction for example someone who is
completely paralysed, they might be conscious but we'd have no way of knowing.
That could bring into play the idea that the ability to interact with the rest
of the universe is an integral part of concuousness.

The problem is that to most people consciousness is defined by its purely
subjective experience. Mind from matter people would possibly say that
subjective experience is an illusion. Searle's thought experiments highlight
that fact, which is what makes them useful, because they make the division
between the two camps clear.

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tokenadult
A submission just made to HN,

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5632321>

a link to a review of Daniel Dennett's newest book, is very much on-point for
this thread. I see I have two interesting books to look forward to reading,
the one reviewed in the review opening this thread, and the one reviewed in
the review opening that thread.

------
jcr
If you enjoy reading about applications of Neuroscience, the following is also
good.

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5624573>

------
cdoxsey
"…our brains possess involuntary mechanisms that make unbiased thought
impossible yet create the illusion that we are rational creatures capable of
fully understanding the mind created by these same mechanisms."

Any theory that posits we are not rational creatures is self refuting. If I
can't trust my mind to reliably deliver rational conclusions, why should I
trust it to have delivered a rational conclusion about the very theory I'm
proposing?

~~~
Evbn
Many biases can be adjusted for. It is hard, though.

