Download Networks and consciousness

Networks and consciousness
Donald Steiny
Overall
• Won’t even try to solve AI
• More about problems than solutions
• Introduce the idea of networks and how they
relate to some of the problems in this area
Today
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Review of behaviorism
Review of cognitive psychology
Review of systems and the AI paradigm
Discussion of relational thinking and networks
Examples of how networks lead to new
descriptions
• Some potential applications
Basic behavioral model
The idea
• No such thing as cause and effect – Hume
– Not a property of things.
– Just a consequence of repeated observations
– A matter of faith – the fallacy of induction
• The solution?
– Scientific laws are based on repeated observation
– Psychology could become “scientific.”
But …
• It is not possible to recognize a balanced set of
symbols without memory.
Aaabbbbaaa
It is, however, possible to precisely describe the
memory required by push down store automata,
which lead to computer languages like C and
Pascal.
This lead to “mental processes” and cognitive
psychology
Meanwhile
• Shannon and Weaver
– Formulation of information and redundancy
• Norbert Weiner – Cybernetics
– Feedback
– Control
• Representation of everything as symbols and a
complete science of symbols
And in economics
• Revealed preferences
• Failure of micro explanations
– Coase and Williamson
• Behavioral explanations
– Bounded rationality (Simon)
– Heuristics and biases (Kahneman)
• Still at dyad level
• Macro structures are epiphenomena
Systems
• Systems
– Have inputs and outputs
– They transform their inputs
– They have a boundary
– They have subsystems
– They are part of a larger systems
– Inputs/Outputs can be viewed as symbols
But …
• Symbols are always dependent on context.
What Bateson called a frame was extensively
developed by Erving Goffman.
– He’s a student
– ASCII interpreted as EBCDIC
Over in sociology land
• Harvard Department of Social Relations
– Talcott Parsons
• Functionalist sociology
• The dream of a unified paradigm
– Harrison White
• Network sociology
• Methods that assume heterogeneity
• The middle range of action
Atomic Actors
• Where is action located?
– What is space?
– Cartesian space locates action at a point
• Minds
• Consciousness
• Etc
• Atomic theories
– Rational action
– Systems theory
Relational View – boys and girls
Networks as spaces
• Analogy: each of are members of multiple
networks.
• This is similar to an n-dimensional space, the
difference being that any point can be in an
arbitrary intersection of dimensions.
• Over time the configuration of dimensions
switches so points are generally not in a fixed
set of dimensions.
Identity
• Each network provides a frame of reference
• Different things are salient in each network.
Structural equivalence
Advice leaders
Expressive leader
Is the dot at the front or back?
What is a person?
• When you talk to me who are you talking to?
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My immortal soul?
My lips?
A story you tell yourself?
Folk psychology is key
• Is an action mine or your interpretation of it?
How could we know? How could we remember?
• “a god” existing at the confluence of networks.
Style
• Holds us together across identities
• Helps choose our stories or actions
• Persons are styles
– Napoleon
– Bill Clinton
• War/fashion
• Sets the tone for our actions
What about a company?
• Or a country or “big business” or anything that
causes things.
• Back to the old problem that behaviorism had
• These live in our heads so the same problem
of making repeated observations about
people applies to larger structures
Social roles
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Preexisting (structure)
Fairly fixed
Live in everyone’s heads
Held in place by control.
Stories and accountings
• We account for, explain what we observe
– The swinging rope experiement
– Hume’s cause – Wittgenstein’s intention
• Standard sets of stories are both guides for
action explanations – Durkheim/Heddigger
• We are tied together into networks by these
rhetorics
• Common sense is an underlying accounting
Our location
• Is point of view
• Determines what we can access as
accountings.
• Is affected by control pressures from others
(our interpretations are in the light of others)
Social networking
• New security models use networks:
Granovetter diagrams
• We have multiple identities, seeing it on line
makes it salient
• Facebook security model problem
– Assumes single identity
Culture and meaning
• Culture is the set of available accountings and
the control effort to adopt it.
• Meaning is carried across network domains as
we go from pointing.
A source of - disciplines
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Like situated cognition (Hutchens)
The way we work together
Very hard to see, no ties
Influenced by style
– Chinese making a company
– Finns making a company
– Silicon Valley making a company
• Source of stories and accountings (ties)
The problem of action
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Magical thinking
Fundamental Attribution Error
The great man hypothesis
Creativity and innovation as combinations of
borrowing and salience
• Accountings and stories
• Beliefs and values are explanations, not causes
How does this relate to AI
• The problem is more complex than it is made
out to be
• Reducing reality to symbols won’t work