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.

Thanks for the detailed reply; I'd like to have the metadiscussion with you, but what exactly would you consider a better place to have it? I've had a reply to you on "why mutual information = model" not yet completed, so I guess I could start another top-level post that addresses these issues.

Anyway:

This other program fits a control model to the human performance in that task, with only a few parameters. ... Just three numbers (or however many it is, it's something like that) closely fits an individual's performance on the task, for as long as they perform it. Is that the sort of thing you are asking for?

Unfortunately, no. It's not enough to show that humans play some game using a simple control algorithm that happens to work for it. You claimed that human behavior can be usefully described as tweaking output to control some observed variable. What you would need to show, then, is this model applied to behavior for which there are alternate, existing explanations.

For example, how does the controller model fit in with mate selection? When I seek a mate, what is the reference that I'm tracking? How does my sensory data get converted into a format that compares with the reference? What is the output?

I choose this example because it's an immensely difficult task just to program object recognition. To say that my behavior is explained by trying to track some reference we don't even know how to define, and by applying an operation to sense data we don't understand yet, does not look like a simplification!

Or in the more general case: what is the default reference that I'm tracking? What am I tracking when I decide to go to work every day, and how do I know I've gotten to work?

Remember, to say you "want" something or that "recognize" something hides an immense amount of complexity, which is why I don't see how it helps to restate these problems as control problems.

Unfortunately, no. It's not enough to show that humans play some game using a simple control algorithm that happens to work for it.

It doesn't "just happen" to work. It works for the same reason that, say, a chemist's description of a chemical reaction works: because the description describes what is actually happening.

Besides, according to the philosophy you expressed, all that matters in compressing the data. A few numbers to compress with high fidelity an arbitrarily large amount of data is pretty good, I would have thought. ETA: Compare how... (read more)

1pjeby17y

Just as an aside, I don't think PCT is the ultimate solution to modeling humans in their entirety. I think Hawkins' HTM model is actually a better description of object and pattern recognition in general, but there aren't any signficant conflicts between HTM and PCT, in that both propose very similar hierarchies of control units. The primary difference is that HTM emphasizes memory-based prediction rather than reference-matching, but I don't see any reason why the same hierarchical units couldn't do both. (PCT's model includes localized per-controller memory much like HTM does, and suggests that memory is used to set reference values, in much the same way that HTM describes memory being used to "predict" that an action should be taken.) The main modeling limitation that I see in PCT is that it doesn't address certain classes of motivated behavior as well as Ainslie's model of conditioned appetites. But if you glue Ainslie, HTM, and PCT together, you get pretty decent overall coverage. And HTM/PCT are a very strong engineering model for "how it's probably implemented", i.e. HTM/PCT models are more or less the simplest things I can imagine building, that do things the way humans appear to do them. Both models look way too simple to be "intelligence", but that's more a reflection of our inbuilt mind-projection tendencies than a flaw in the models! On a more specific note, though: [...] "You" don't track; your brain's control units do. And they do so in parallel -- which is why you can be conflicted. Your reference for going to work every day might be part of the concept "being responsible" or "being on time", or "not getting yelled at for lateness", or whatever... possibly more than one. In order to find out what reference(s) are relevant, you have to do what Powers refers to as "The Test" -- that is, selecting hypothesized control variables and then disturb them to see whether they end up being stabilized by your behavior. In practice, it's easier with a human,

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Ask LessWrong: Human cognitive enhancement now?

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Ask LessWrong: Human cognitive enhancement now?

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