[FRIAM] Selective cultural processes generate adaptive heuristics

Tue Apr 12 12:09:57 EDT 2022

-- rec --    wrote:
> Science week before last, mixed in with the telomere-to-telomere human 
> genome, https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abo0713 discusses
>
>     Thompson /et al./ (/3/
>     <https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abo0713#core-R3>)
>     describe taking an experimental approach to the question of how
>     opportunities to selectively learn from successful role models can
>     favor the spread of more adaptive, but less intuitive, cognitive
>     heuristics over more intuitive and memorable alternatives.
>
> which is https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abn0915.
>
> Old age is the revenge of the memorable over the adaptive?

Arguments for generational rather than Individual/personal growth and 
transformation...

    /“I don’t think we should try to have people live for a really long
    time,” Musk//recently told Insider
    <https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-interview-axel-springer-tesla-war-in-ukraine-2022-3>//.
    “It would cause asphyxiation of society because the truth is, most
    people don’t change their mind. They just die. So if they don’t die,
    we will be stuck with old ideas and society wouldn’t advance.”/

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/11/elon-musk-on-avoiding-longevity-research-i-am-not-afraid-of-dying.html

And

    A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents
    and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents
    eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with
    it. . . . An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by
    gradually winning over and converting its opponents: it rarely
    happens that Saul becomes Paul. What does happen is that its
    opponents gradually die out, and that the growing generation is
    familiarized with the ideas from the beginning: another instance of
    the fact that the future lies with the youth.

    — Max Planck, Scientific autobiography, 1950, p. 33, 97

I like to challenge young(er) people with the idea that they (and/or 
their children) might *have to* live forever.

In my youth (pre-50) I had a hard time honestly contemplating 
senescence, much less mortality.  It was as-if I thought I would live 
(without diminished capacity) forever.  Every challenge (I thought) made 
me stronger, and every wound was to become a scar that would in some way 
be useful later.  In spite of that, I believe I would have lived my life 
much differently had I honestly believed I would "live forever".

There are all the regrets people have about how they would have treated 
their bodies better had they known they would be stuck struggling with 
various conditions resulting from neglect and abuse in their later 
years.   There are also the regrets people have about not living their 
lives as fully in the period where their appetites and naivetes allowed 
for a sort of hedonism that often fades with age (and experience). 
/Youth being wasted on the young/, as we often note.

The regrets I am now most focused on are those of how one learns and 
builds/manages one's world-view(s), one's ontology(ies).   I think this 
relates to a tangent I won't indulge inline of code-switching vs 
mode-switching.

Following Galen Strawson's thesis 
<http://lchc.ucsd.edu/mca/Paper/against_narrativity.pdf> on the 
/Episodic/ vs the /Diachronic/ (nod to Glen), I suppose I might like to 
have experienced life more /Episodically/ than I have, to have allowed 
myself a less continuous narrative of self to have been experienced.   I 
certainly can recognize the benefit of *breaks* in what I can call a 
piecewise narrative life, punctuated by geographical moves, graduations, 
marriages and divorces, job and career changes. Each of those events 
allowed me to rethink my own narrative, but fundamentally, each new 
persona that emerged from the rubble left from the dismantling of the 
artifacts of the last one was essentially the same.   Since I don't 
identify strongly as an Episodic "Self", I don't know if that sort of 
inside-outism from Diachronic (if that is even a fair description) is 
more free to *discover* itself, rather than (re)*invent* itself?  Or is 
there a hidden diachronic-self obscured to the episodic-selves, by the 
fundamental conceit of not believing in an underlying continuity-self?   
This is likely a mis-reading/understanding of Strawson whose examples 
are taken from his own self-proclaimed Episodic self-experience vs my 
own self-diagnosed Diachronic.

Returning to the ideation of "living forever" (or at least much longer 
than planned for),  I wish for my grandchildren (still in formative 
stages at 4 and 10) that they be prepared much more fundamentally for 
self-re-discovery/invention than I was/am and than my own grand/parents, 
and very likely their own parents who are somewhat (naturally?) shaped a 
bit too much after me and mine.

Following RECs original posting, How to prepare these human-be(com)ings 
to be adaptive at a scale in their own lives, formerly achieved only by 
generational adaptivity?

~~ sas --

>
> -- rec --
>
>
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