Salutations! I've been reading Less Wrong for three or four years now without registering - ever since stumbling across a supremely accessible explanation of Bayes Theorem - and suddenly felt I might have something to add. I feel significantly more cynical than most of the posters here, but endeavor to keep my pessimism grounded.
My parents raised me rationalist (not merely atheist), encouraging an environment where questions were always more important than answers and everyone was willing to admit that "I don't know." I spent the requisite few years in my adolescence imagining I knew everything, but that delusion passed. Then I dropped out of three colleges - on scholarships, making those hard lessons less expensive than they might have been - and today I run the inter-branch delivery department of a medium-sized county library system.
I've got a stubborn fascination with philosophical materialism and behavioral neuroscience, with a recent focus on the linguistic nature of consciousness. I think that language in general - and narrative in particular - is a compression algorithm for transmitting complex ideas like "We ought to go the store." My linguistic memory map of what you already know means I don't assume I have to tell you which store, or why, or how.
Such maps are made of stories, and that means they required a protagonist. I've come to believe that consciousness is systematized experience of being that protagonist, molded by evolution to make communication faster and easier. Which makes consciousness the character the brain plays when it needs to work with other brains, and the set of mental tools with which narrative memories are compressed for later storytelling.
At any rate, I'm here to continue to have all of my perspectives challenged, and with this account I suppose I can also start challenging perspectives.
Salutations! I've been reading Less Wrong for three or four years now without registering - ever since stumbling across a supremely accessible explanation of Bayes Theorem - and suddenly felt I might have something to add. I feel significantly more cynical than most of the posters here, but endeavor to keep my pessimism grounded.
My parents raised me rationalist (not merely atheist), encouraging an environment where questions were always more important than answers and everyone was willing to admit that "I don't know." I spent the requisite few years in my adolescence imagining I knew everything, but that delusion passed. Then I dropped out of three colleges - on scholarships, making those hard lessons less expensive than they might have been - and today I run the inter-branch delivery department of a medium-sized county library system.
I've got a stubborn fascination with philosophical materialism and behavioral neuroscience, with a recent focus on the linguistic nature of consciousness. I think that language in general - and narrative in particular - is a compression algorithm for transmitting complex ideas like "We ought to go the store." My linguistic memory map of what you already know means I don't assume I have to tell you which store, or why, or how.
Such maps are made of stories, and that means they required a protagonist. I've come to believe that consciousness is systematized experience of being that protagonist, molded by evolution to make communication faster and easier. Which makes consciousness the character the brain plays when it needs to work with other brains, and the set of mental tools with which narrative memories are compressed for later storytelling.
At any rate, I'm here to continue to have all of my perspectives challenged, and with this account I suppose I can also start challenging perspectives.