goatherd comments on City of Lights - Less Wrong

30 Post author: Alicorn 31 March 2010 11:30PM

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Comment author: goatherd 13 November 2013 04:40:40AM *  3 points [-]

I have two major entities in by mind, My Brain, and Me. My brain is heavily influenced by chemistry, such as tiredness, and blood sugar levels, and does all the thinking. Me is not affected so much by such things. However, Me has a very limited amount of control over my Brain. If Me forces my Brain to do somthing that it really does not want to do, then it will tire out Me and render it more difficult to force my Brain to do something, until Me's control is replenished, which is a slow process. Me has basically no cognitive faculties, and must make my Brain do the thinking, but talking is a free move, and Me is capable of recognizing and commenting on many cognitive biases as my brain thinks. My brain often will listen to these comments and stop following those faulty lines of thought, because my reword center gives it some dopamine when it makes its thoughts less wrong.

Possible causes for this lack of control:

  1. Me is using its power for unnecessary thing all the time, and so when it is needed it is tiered.
  2. I have a genetic lack of power for Me to control my Brain.

Solutions:

  1. If problem 1, I could try to catch Me controlling my Brain unnecessarily, and stop it.
  2. Training my inner rat. If problems 1 or 2, I could get the reward center to give my brain dopamine when it does what it should do, so that Me would not have to make it to do as much. Then Me to conserve its strength.
  3. Practices. If 1 is true then this has been tried without success, but if not then it may allow Me to increase its strength of control over my Brain.

Additional thoughts:

My Brain, which I have been conspiring to subjugate to the will of Me, is what has been writing all this, with very little control from Me, probable because it gets dopamine for ‘making clover plan to defeat enemy’. My brain doesn't know that the enemy it is making the clever plan against is itself. Me knows that writing this it a good thing, and so encourages my brain to be happy when doing this, so that it will try to do it more.

Comment author: Articulator 13 November 2013 05:48:12AM 1 point [-]

I have slightly more formally defined the existence of a logical and an evolutionary mind. Same general premise, but with more accurate, unambiguous, and intellectual terminology.

I completely agree with the duality and conflict of these two mind-states. I'm pretty sure it's one of the most common break-downs of human cognition.