undefined | Better HN

0 pointsBLKNSLVR8y ago0 comments

Sounds like one of the concepts that inspired the book Blindsight by Peter Watts. The subconscious 'reptile brain' is able to process certain old-school dangers, like an object moving quickly towards us, faster than our conscious brain, and can cause involuntary, potentially life-saving, reactions to the stimulus.

The conscious mind processing these things can often get in the way but, in the case of sports, alter the instinctive behaviour into something advantageous. An augmentation of the conscious and subconscious into better performance.

A converse example, being conflict between conscious and sub-conscious, is if you drop a mug of boiling water, the instinctive reaction is to try and catch 'thing you dropped', but the conscious reaction is 'don't burn yourself' so don't catch it and jump backwards to not get splashed.

Very interesting stuff.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/48484.Blindsight

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight_(Watts_novel)#Consc...

Beware (or since it's the HN crowd, Recommended!): hard sci-fi.

0 comments

2 comments · 1 top-level

dlwdlw8y ago· 1 in thread

One thing that has always bothered me about many AI approaches is that instead of having multiple layers that deal with different levels of urgency everything is delegated to a "rational" mind that thinks vs a combination of thinking predicting and reacting.

The parallel is this obsession with rationality over intuition. Though somewhat ironic because black box AI is just accepted.

BLKNSLVROP8y ago

Building something that mimic how it appears to work, as opposed to how it does work. Like building the symptoms whilst assuming we're building the disease.

Having said that, however, gotta start somewhere. Having said that, however, we might have done a decade of work in the wrong direction by the time we find out what direction it should go...

'tis a conundrum.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse