A comment on the talk of Kathryn Shultz

First, would like to suggest this TED talk.

http://www.ted.com/talks/kathryn_schulz_on_being_wrong.html

Now, I just share some ideas I have about the subject.

Using the mathematical theory of information it its possible to calc the information provided by the occurrence of an event. It happens to be inversely proportional to the probability of the occurrence of that event. This is, the more likely the event, the less information you receive when it actually occurs.

So, having things clear, planning our actions, executing them, and verifying we were right leave us, at the end, with a net information increase about the out world equal to zero. This is because, since we had things clear from the beginning, in our minds there was a 100% probability that outcome would be as we expected.

As a consequence, there are only two ways of increasing the information we have about the world: either we do things we are not 100% sure about, either we make mistakes. Both cases are exciting.

The problem with current education is that it oppress these situations, leading people to try to avoid them. This is simply a reminder that current educational model is specifically designed to avoid the increase of information about the world, while simply keeping the one we already have.

An equilibrium should exist in which the learning rate is maximized by allowing, and even encouraging, mistakes.

The Invisible Limits

Words. They cannot be used to explain reality beyond the brain; nevertheless, they are also the only way to describe it. This may be a silly paradox, however it tries to make evident the following: we are trapped inside our brains and nothing else exist. Words exist only inside our brains, no matter how obvious we find them to be related with “real things”.

The objective, however, is not to try to understand what is outside our brains, since this is impossible. Suppose someone actually finds it, then it immediately becomes an idea, a sequence of words, therefore, something inside our brain. The objective is rather to better understand how we build these ideas, how they pass from brain to brain and how they affect each one of us. Then we limit the reality to all that can be thought, and understanding how we think means also to understand the reality.

Brains model their inputs. The model is based on internal connections created such that the inputs can be characterized and analyzed in a useful way. Useful in the sense of life, this is, to promote the creation of more brains. Patterns on the input (no matter their origin) can be represented by a sequence of symbols, words. The strength of these patterns, and the fact they can be shared with other persons is what suggests they originate outside, in the “real world”. Symbols sequences representing strong patterns are called, by us, "true".

Now, just notice: the previous paragraphs along with this sentence is just a sequence of symbols.

Vague objective

This blog may have posts about anything. I hope that with time it takes some shape. In fact, my recent thoughts are characterized for being about any subject. However they all tend to have a common basis: Human being as a slave of its own mind.

This simple concept, obvious to a lot of materialists, is very difficult to assimilate (by a human being), because of its own definition. However, since we make better and better models of the “real world” as time passes and science “advances”, it seams feasible that some day, not so far, we will have a model of our brain good enough such that human behavior can stop being considered a mechanism “too complex” to be explained and predicted.

The consequences of such a result are evident. Two important questions occurs to me right know: until which approximation level are we going to be able to arrive? What will happen once we have this knowledge?

More, later.