Friday 1 August 2014

Deep thought Friday

Haven't done one of these in a quite a while now.

The background reading includes two posts from today: Trey's review of Guardians of the Galaxy, and the idea certain aspects suggest Farscape, and a post at Realms of Chirak on 'citogenesis', essentially a lack of care in recording knowledge.

What's the connection? Read this article at the IEET site on the idea of intelligence limiting itself.

The question then. Is intelligence an evolutionary dead end and what role does culture play in this?
_

3 comments:

Trey said...

Deep thoughts indeed! I suspect a self-evolving intelligence might be prone to purposely reinforcing its errors. Today, we can limit our media sources so as not to challenge preconceptions, but it would be so much easier if we could just edit our cognition to do it for us.

SinSynn said...

Ack!
Brain hurts naow!
0_o

I hope to see Guardians this week.
Hopefully. I've got some training and a test to take at work this week (blah).

Hiya, Porky!
(That's what I kinda came to say)
*Xenos grin*

Porky said...

@ Trey - I hadn't thought about the echo chamber aspect. Also, if we're talking means of communication, it's an open question how far the ability to form new links, online for example, actually offsets the ability to neglect existing links, by distraction say, or even to break those links, to end up dividing ourselves up more fully into hermetic groups. It sometimes feels like there's a historic stagnation going on.

Choice is a part of it of course. It may well be that the more paths there are, the easier the path of least resistance.

@ SinSynn - Good luck. I don't know when I'll be going, or even if I will - when a film like Guardians comes along there's such a buzz and so many clips and reviews doing the rounds it's almost possible to watch it vicariously. It's not as bad as Prometheus yet - that was only out a few days and I started to feel like I'd already seen it. Give it a few years and maybe I'll forget enough to make it worthwhile...

Good luck with the test as well. The best thing about tests I think is getting a chance to raise the bar. And the feeling when it's all over.