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Behavioural economics and human thought systems
“The economy is driven by ’emotions‘” describes behavioural economics, a trend in modern psychology that focuses on irrational thinking and behaviour and attempts to identify common laws of irrationality, as opposed to conventional economics based on rational human activity.
There, for example, the question is asked, “The price of a bat and a ball together is 10 cents on the dollar, and the bat costs a dollar more than the ball. The question “How much is the price of the ball then?” is a problem for which many people intuitively answer that the ball is 10 cents, but in fact, if the price of the ball is x, the bat is x+1, and when added, 2x+1=1.1, so that the correct answer is 0.5 (5 cents) for the ball.
This is a question that Professor Daniel Kahneman of Princeton University, who won the Nobel Prize in Economics, has been giving people for 50 years, and even students at famous universities get more than 50% of the questions wrong, which shows how irrational and thought-stopping the human brain can be.
It is clear from this example that two systems can be envisaged in our minds, one being a quick, automatic, unintentional and unconscious system, such as intuitive judgement, and the other being a deliberate and conscious system, such as logical judgement, which takes time but can be controlled.
Kahneman, mentioned above, refers to these as ‘System 1’ and ‘System 2’, with System 1 being the energy-saving workings of the mind, which leads to quick decisions, but can lead to irrational thinking and behaviour, and System 2 contributing to rational thinking and handing, but requiring time and effort, and sometimes leading to missed decision times It is also assumed to be something that can happen.
AI technology, which is also discussed in this blog, aims to enhance the rational decision-making of System 2 to the utmost limit on behalf of humans, and IA, which is also described in “Overview of Intelligence Augmentation (IA) and its application examples“, is an approach to how to connect the useful parts of System 1 and System 2. System 1 is a system of systems that is used in science and the arts, and is a system of systems that is used in the arts and sciences.
In particular, System 1 is often the source of creative activities conducted by humans in science and art, and combining them with AI-based System 2 is expected to lead to activities that generate original ideas and performances that have never been seen before.
In considering the effective use of such AI, it is important to consider how System 1 is formed, and how the workings of the unconscious mind, which is said to be closely related to System 1, and the effects of unconscious memory on thought and action have been investigated and what has been revealed. The book that describes how the unconscious mind works and what has been revealed about the effects of unconscious memory on thought and behaviour, which are closely related to System 1, is entitled “From the Mystery of the Mind to the Science of the Mind: The Unconscious and Memory” published by Iwanami Shoten.
In this article, I would like to extract the introductory part of this book.
A scientific approach to the mind
“From the Mysteries of the Mind to the Science of the Mind – The Unconscious and Memory” contains Japanese translations of Richard Siemon’s “Mneme: The Principle of Conservation in the Transition of Organic Events”, Francis Gordon’s “Exploring Human Capacities and Their Development” and Daniel L. Schacter’s “In Search of Memory – Brain, Mind and Past”.
The methodology of how things have been investigated and what has been revealed is the scientific approach, which is also described in “Scientific thinking (1) What is science?” Science starts from the idea that there are laws of all things, and these started with the breakthroughs in astronomy and physics by Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo in the 16th century.
The scientific approach to the mind was rejected by Kant, who wrote the Critique of Pure Reason in the 17th century, claiming that mathematics (quantification) and experimentation are necessary for science, and both are impossible in a study of the mind, so a science of the mind cannot be established.
In addition, Kant, famous for “I think, therefore I am”, concluded that in the philosophical thought of doubting everything, only the existence of the doubting self (i.e. the mind) was unquestionably certain, and this method of introspection to explore one’s mind became the standard for studying the mind and the subject of such research was limited to what could be made conscious. Descartes’ consciousness-centred approach also assumed that not a small part of the ideas that are the elements of consciousness are innate, and disregarded the accumulation of experience.
Consciousness and experience
In contrast, the British philosophers, such as Locke, who argued that the mind is a blank slate, and the importance of the association of ideas, which are the elements of consciousness, were the British philosophers mentioned in “On the Road to Ireland (1): A Journey in England“.
Unionists hold that if ideas acquired through experience are similar or temporally and spatially close to each other, then associations can be formed between them in a semi-mechanical way, which leads to the formation of consciousness.
Learning (memory) is the formation of associations between ideas (i.e. associations of ideas), and whether or not these associations can be recalled as memories depends solely on the strength of the associations formed in this way, and learning and recall were not distinguished. Thus, the process of association (association) itself occurs unconsciously and automatically, and appears to be an unconscious mechanism itself. However, the associationist conception remained only in the category of things that can be conscious, and the discussion was in a world apart from the unconscious.
This experience-oriented approach is also linked to pragmatism as described in “Pragmatism and the Knowledge Graph“.
Focus on the unconscious in Germany – Leibniz and Herbart.
Leibniz, the German philosopher and inventor of calculus, as described in “Fundamentals of Continuous Optimisation – Calculus and Linear Algebra“, argued in his late works such as “Monadology” against the aforementioned centralism of consciousness in Descartes and the unionism of Locke in England. Leibniz argued that the surfaces that float in the mind are not only the clear ones that come to consciousness through introspection, but also those that are created by the existence of vague surfaces that do not come to consciousness.
The surface of the unconscious according to Leibniz is the micro-surface called the ‘monad’, an example that Leibniz likes to cite: “We hear the whole sound of the rustling of the waves and recognise it as the sound of waves, but at the same time the individual sounds of the waves (the micro-surface) are also reaching our ears and we cannot be aware of them. (If the micro-surface is nothing, then no matter how much nothingness is added, it remains nothing, and the murmur of the waves cannot be heard.
The concept of the monad advocated by Leibniz is also present in the world of functional programming, as described in “What is a function – its history, programming and machine learning” and “The world of sphere theory” in “Contemporary Thought, July 2020, Special Issue: World of Sphere Theory – Frontiers of Modern Mathematics Reading Notes“. The idea of the monad is also still alive in the world of functional programming, as described in “What is a function – its history, programming and machine learning”.
The idea of the monad is also connected to the panpsychism described in “Modern Thought, June 2020, Special Issue: Panpsychism – Philosophy of Mind in the 21st Century“, which states that the minute elements that make up the mind exist within everything.
Leibniz’s monad theory was further elaborated by Herbart, also of Germany, who, in his Psychology as a Science Newly Grounded in Experience, Metaphysics and Mathematics, proposed the concept of a threshold, the boundary between consciousness and unconsciousness, and tried to establish mathematically, based on the laws of motion in physics, that when the surface layers that can become conscious weaken, they sink into the unconscious below the threshold. He tried to establish mathematically, based on the laws of motion in physics, the theory that when the conscious surface is weakened, they sink into the unconscious below the threshold, but never disappear and continue to exist, waiting for an opportunity to emerge into consciousness again.
Focus on the unconscious in Germany – Romanticism
In Europe at the time when Leibniz proposed his theory of the monad, in Protestant countries such as the Netherlands and the UK, as described in “Realism in the Dutch Golden Age – Rembrandt and Vermeer“, autonomism, rationalism and modern civic spirit were established. The Enlightenment, which posits that all human beings have a common reason and that there are some fundamental laws in the world that can be recognised by reason, flourished and various scientific and technological developments took place.
In contrast, Romanticism, which placed value on the irrational and personal rather than on reason and society, flourished mainly in Germany, and in Japan it greatly influenced the literary works of Mori Ogai, Shimazaki Toson, Higuchi Ichiyo and others in the mid-Meiji period, as described in “Kaido yuku Kanda kaiwa” and “Kaido yuku Hongo kaiwa“.
Romanticism was concerned with phenomena such as dreams, madness, psychosis, genius, revelation, precognition and destiny, which could not be controlled by one’s will (i.e. consciousness), and believed that these phenomena were based on the unconscious, which was thought to lie deep within the mind.
Leibniz and Herbart theorised this interest in the unconscious in Romanticism, and their work provided theoretical support for the idea that human emotions and behaviour are influenced by the unconscious.
These led to Freud’s dream theory, which is also discussed in “Dreams, the brain and machine learning: from dream theory to dream data science“.
From these trends, we move towards the search for methods to quantitatively investigate the unconscious in order to investigate the workings of the mind, which will be discussed in the next article.
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