[ExI] restoration-ready

[William Flynn Wallace]

A very interesting case came up:  a man with brain damage (reported by
Damasio, I think) between his frontal cortex and his amygdala (big
emotional center).  He was of high intelligence but could not hold a job -
got distracted a lot and so on.  But the main thing is that he could not
make the simplest decision.  Keep working or work on something else or
stop.  Coffee offers threw him into a dither which he could just not get
out of.

Bottom line:  some emotional input has to happen to make a decision, even a
simple one.  Hume was right.  Emotions drive behavior more than reason
does.  We seem to always worry about emotions taking over and making us
make irrational decisions.  Of course that can happen.  No system is
perfect.  But without it we are lost.  No, not orthogonal between reason
and emotion.

Have you ever had a situation arise where decision A looked better than B,
but something told you that B was going to work better?  You can call this
intuition or whatever you choose, but what is happening is that your
emotional center likes B better and you may never know the 'reason' for
that emotion.

Also, think of Thinking, Fast and Slow, which I hope you have read.  Much
data seem to point at this:  our unconscious acts and our conscious notices
that and gives it a reason even if the behavior that comes out makes little
sense to us ('Why did I say/do that?") .  The reason appears after the
fact.  That puts our ego in the position of just being a follower of our
unconscious.  Free Will?  Hmmm.

fMRI studies show that the beginning of an action taken by our motor cortex
happens before we are aware of it.  Ergo - we are not in control.

Did you ever listen to the Austin Lounge Lizards? (bunch of lawyers who
played at a bluegrass festival I attended) They have a little tune called
'We are in control'  - maybe that's a bit like whistling through the
graveyard.

bill w

On Thu, May 27, 2021 at 3:47 PM spike jones via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

>
>
>
>
> *From:* extropy-chat <extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org> *On Behalf
> Of *William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat
> *Sent:* Thursday, May 27, 2021 12:15 PM
> *To:* ExI chat list <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>
> *Cc:* William Flynn Wallace <foozler83 at gmail.com>
> *Subject:* Re: [ExI] restoration-ready
>
>
>
> Oh, don't tell me - you are one of 'those' - sunny disposition people,
> making everyone around them sick of you (and with envy as well, I reckon).
> Think of the people in AFrica, in Bangladesh, in downtown San Francisco -
> get your empathy going and try to think like them.  Eat bad food,  TAke up
> smoking cigars, make your wife mad at you.  Probably won't work.   bill w
>
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> Billw, she knew how I am when she married me.  We are Eeyore and Tigger.
>
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> I had a thought on this today after I wrote the Despondex post.  Recently
> I posted about a worry I have had about uploading: what if an upload can
> think but not feel?
>
>
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> Someone here posted that these two cannot be separated: a thinking being
> is a feeling being.  I see those two types of thinking as being more
> orthogonal to each other, but I might be wrong on that.
>
>
>
> An idea occurred to me.  We know that sometimes two separate traits
> co-evolve in such a way as to reinforce each other or drive each other.
> Perhaps human intellect drove emotion, then emotion drove intellect.  It
> could even be fashioned into a mate selection scenario: deeply feeling
> people were more desirable as mates, and the offspring of deeply feeling
> people were capable of higher intellect.
>
>
>
> Another take: what if… we go with the well-known observation that
> comfortable people accomplish nothing.  Uncomfortable people writhe and
> squirm, changing things trying to be comfortable.  If humans were becoming
> the moodiest of beasts, then humans would be the most restless, which might
> drive technology, in order to increase the likelihood that our offspring
> would survive.  Technology enabled humans to expand territory and produce
> more food, then later to preserve food, which enabled more developed
> brains, more intellect, more emotion.  In that view, three human
> characteristics co-evolved: emotion, intellect and mastery of technology.
>
>
>
> spike
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