Ask LessWrong: Human cognitive enhancement now?

taw

Transhumanists have high hopes for enhancing human cognitive abilities in the future. But what realistic steps can we take to enhance them now? On the one hand Flynn effect suggests IQ (which is a major factor in human cognition) can be increased a lot with current technology, on the other hand review of existing drugs seems rather pessimistic - they seem to have minor positive effect on low performers, and very little effect on high performers, what means they're mostly of therapeutic not enhancing use.

So, fellow rationalists, how can we enhance our cognition now? Solid research especially welcome, but consistent anecdotal evidence is also welcome.

Sure, you can model humans as controllers that receive some reference and track it, just as you can model a human as a set of "if-then" loops, but so what?

The difference is that humans are not like control systems, they are control systems, and are not and cannot be modelled as sets of "if-then" loops, whatever those are supposed to be.

How would that model do any good compressing our description of how human minds work?

That presumes we already have such a description. PCT provides one. It provides the possibility to obtain actual understanding of the matter. Nothing else has yet done that.

And if people are control systems -- that is, they vary their actions to obtain their intended perceptions -- then that implies that the traditional methods of experimental psychology are invalid. Correlating experimental stimuli and subjects' responses tells you nothing. Here's a psychologist writing on this, the late Philip Runkel.

The difference is that humans are not like control systems, they are control systems, and are not and cannot be modelled as sets of "if-then" loops, whatever those are supposed to be.

Er, isn't that the "program" level of Powers's model? IOW, his model shows how you can build up from more fundamental control structures to get complex "programs". See chapters 13-18 of Behavior: The Control Of Perception. (At least in the 2nd edition, which is all I've read.)

5SilasBarta17y

What Vladimir_Nesov said. And, [...] We do: it's the set of all observations of human behavior. The goal of science (or rationality) is to find ever-simpler ways of explaining (describing) the data. The worst case scenario is to explain the data by simply restating it. A theory allows you describe past data without simply restating it because it gives you a generative model. (There's probably some LW wiki entry or Eliezer_Yudkowsky post I should reference to give more background about what I'm talking about, but I think you get the idea and it's pretty uncontroversial.) That was the standard I was holding your post to: does this description of human behavior as "tweaking outputs to track a reference" help at all to provide a concise description of human behavior? Once again, I find myself trying to side-step a definitional dispute with you (over whether humans "are control systems") by identifying the more fundamental claim you're making. Here, your claim is that there's some epistemic profit from describing human behavior as a control system. I completely agree that it can be done, just like you can describe human behavior with a long enough computer program. But does this approach actually simplify the problem, or just rename it? I am skeptical that it simplifies because, like I said before, any reference-being-tracked in your model must itself have all the answers that you're trying to use the model for.

4Vladimir_Nesov17y

Humans consist of atoms. The statement was obviously about humans being modelable as physical/[digital computation] processes, forgetting all the stuff about intelligence and control.

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Ask LessWrong: Human cognitive enhancement now?

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Ask LessWrong: Human cognitive enhancement now?

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