Graham Glass, etc.

EDU 2.0: Home Page Upgrades

We have a large number of EDU 2.0 upgrades planned for the summer vacation, and we started by adding sections for announcements, notifications, today's events, to-do list and upcoming events to each user's home page. This provides them with a nice dashboard-view of important items.

The tricky part is to add all these additional features without it slowing the system down. Thankfully, due to a bunch of caching techniques, the new version of the home page is actually *faster* than the old, less-useful version.

Next up is a set of Facebook-like news feeds, nicely integrated with the existing blog and forum features.

Here's a picture of a new user home page:

 

Past, Present and Future

Most people intuitively think that a mind treats the past, present and future differently. 

For example, it's usually pretty obvious what "now" is, so wouldn't that information be stored in a special area for things that are happening in the present? Similarly, surely memories of the past are processed differently from things that might occur in the future? And doesn't a mind have a special "planning" area for predicting the future and a different area for remembering the past?

Counter-intuitively, I believe that a mind treats the past, present and future exactly the same, and that there are no special areas for planning versus remembering past events. Indeed, I think that treating them the same makes good architectural sense and results in a much simpler design.

Ultimately, as I've mentioned in previously postings, a mind contains a large number of representations of things. Some involve spatial relationships (such as the representation of a triangle), some involve temporal relationships (such as the flash of lightning followed by the boom of thunder), and some are more complex (such as the concept of "enlightenment"). 

Our mind creates rules that allows it to fill in the details of a representation including those involving time and space. For example, if we imagine two sides of a triangle, we use rules to hypothesize the missing side.

Temporal rules are bidirectional. For example, if we imagine the boom of thunder, that we can hypothesize that lightning came before it. Similarly, it we imagine a flash of lightning, we can hypothesize the boom of thunder that comes after it. So give a representation in space and time, we can hypothesize many possible details accompanying that representation in both time and space. 

Assuming that a mind has general purpose machinery for generating possible details accompanying a representation, it makes sense that this machinery can be applied to any kind of representation whether it is in the past, present or future. 

For example, if I'm daydreaming about being on a beach in the future, I can imagine details of what might happen after I lay on the beach. Similarly, if I recall passing out and then waking up on a beach, I can imagine what might have happened prior to waking up or how I might have reacted to the event had I not gone right back to sleep again.

What this means is that a mind contains representations of lots of things, some of which are in the past, present and future. Many of the representations of things in the "now" are created by our senses and are highly detailed. Mental machinery can flesh out the details of representations while attempting to maintain consistency, and can be applied to any representations, not just those that are "now".

On reflection, I don't think that a mind has special neurons for "memories" versus "future events". I think of a mind as containing representations, some of which involve temporal relations to each other. A representation that comes "before" a representation that is "now" could be thought of as being a memory, but there's no guarantee that it even happened ( you could simply be thinking about something that you wished you had done in the past, or it might be a false memory which is quite common). So what we call a memory is really just a representation of something that happened before "now". 

If I'm right and a mind processes past, present and future in exactly the same way, then how do we tell what is "now"? I think it's a deduction rather than something based on a special area of processing in a mind. Specifically, we tend to call something "now" if it's high resolution and very consistent. That feeling happens all the time during the day, but during the night it's also possible to believe that something is "now", especially during a lucid dream.

My bet is that as brain scanning technologies improve, scientists will discover that temporal and spatial processing is unified and that the same mental machinery is used to experience and process past, present and future.

 

The Profit Red Herring

I've noticed that in many discussions about topics like an education voucher system, people complain that "schools shouldn't be making a profit". I think that profit is a red herring that shuts down conversation and that it would be better if we reframed the debate in terms of "value for money".

Here's why.

Consumers generally have no idea how much profit a company is making on a particular good or service. All the consumer cares about is getting good value for money. If a company is making a profit while providing good value for money, then it's also good for the consumer because that company can reinvest a portion of its profit back into its product line. In addition, a profitable company can expand its distribution channels, hire great talent, and attract private investment if necessary.

Now let's focus on the area of education. Let's say that a government adopts a voucher system that allows a parent to send their children to any school, and allows anyone to start a school (within reasonable constraints) that can compete for the vouchers. Let's also say that the value of a voucher is equal to the amount of money that's currently spent per child so that the total amount spent by the government is the same.

Parents are now free to find schools that provide the best value for money. And like any other service, it's completely irrelevant to the parent how much (if any) profit the school is making. 

They don't care.

If a school is able to provide good value for money and make a profit, then they're a well-run business and will invest some of this profit into expanding their school(s). Which of course is good for parents, the children, and the business.

Similarly, if a school is unable to provide good value for money, it will go out of business and make room for better schools. Likewise, good teachers at that school are freed up to join better schools and poor teachers can find a vocation that suits them.

In one conversation, someone said "yes, but if the school is making a profit then the government is paying them too much and they should be able to pay them less". 

Think how silly this statement is. Paying them less would:

1. punish them from providing good value for money while being efficient
2. prevent the business from growing and providing good value to more consumers
3. encourage the business owners to leave the field of education and do something else instead

In the free market, businesses have to both provide good value for money and make a profit in order to thrive. Focusing on the profit part of the equation is a red herring. It's the value for money that consumers care about and it's the profit that allows businesses to expand.

A voucher system would move education to a taxpayer-funded, privately-run system that would unleash the awesome power of the free market. Right now, we have a taxpayer-funded monopoly that suppresses innovation and competition.

Which ultimately leads to poor value for money.

 

Reality vs. Imagination

It's very tempting to think that a mind has different mechanisms for functions that seem distinct. For example, "experiencing reality" vs. "imagination" and "memory" vs. "planning". However, I think that in many cases they are just aspects of the same thing.

In this post I discuss reality vs. imagination. I'll discuss the other aspects in some upcoming posts.

Ultimately, our mind only experiences internal representations of things. Outside events are never experienced directly; they're converted by our senses into a stream of data that is used to create detailed internal representations of the outside world. 

A human mind can rarely create highly detailed representations without the help of its senses. However, it can easily generate low-resolution representations under its own steam, and this is what we call "imagination". We can create representations of things that we experienced in the past, things we might experience in the future, and strange & wonderful things that might never exist. Some representations involve time, some involve space, and some involve neither (for example, imagining excitement).

I think that a mind processes reality and imagination in exactly the same way; the only difference is that our senses create highly detailed representations whereas our imagination creates lower-resolution representations. They all occupy the same mental space however, and are processed identically. 

Indeed, I think that the only way that a mind can tell what is "reality" versus "imagination" is that reality tends to be much higher resolution and more consistent. In other words, "reality" is a deduced property of an experience and is not stored or processed differently by our minds. 

One argument for this hypothesis is from lucid dreams, which are as detailed as everyday reality. I've had several lucid dreams and usually the only way I've figured out that I'm in a dream is by logical deduction; some elements of the dream are extraordinary and "give away" the fact that the representations are internally generated instead of via senses.

In my next post I'll describe why I think a mind processes past, present and future in the same way, and that "now" is in fact a deduced property.

Making Minds: Some Notes

Here are some notes related to my "Making minds" series. I use the phrase "a mind" throughout rather than "a brain", because I view a brain as just one kind of mind. For example, I believe that companies such as NASA also have a mind.

1. A mind contains representations of many things, at varying degrees of detail. For example, if you're looking at a cat, your mind will contain a highly detailed representation of the cat because your senses are supplying your mind with a lot of details. If you're imagining a fish, then it will be less detailed than the cat (unless it's parts of a lucid dream).

2. Some of the representations will include a temporal component. For example, you could imagine how your cat looked when it was a kitten, or imagine what your cat will look like when it's old.

3. Your mind can associate a value with some representations. For example, you might find a kitten to be cute and a cat in pain to be very distressful.

4. The emotion associated with a representation increases with its level of detail. If you see an animal in pain in real life, it will usually cause more distress than if you simply imagine what an animal in pain would look like. This is why you'll typically look away from a distressing image - in order to decrease the level of detail of its mental representation, and thus the level of emotion that it causes.

5. A mind prefers positive emotions over negative ones, and the stronger, the better. Since a highly detailed representation creates a more intense emotion than a vague one, a mind will want to contain representations that are detailed and positive.

6. A mind experiences a negative emotion when representations are inconsistent, and therefore prefers them to be consistent. For example, if you try and imagine a fish, you'll probably start by creating a basic representation with primary features such as a body, head and fins. However, a fish does not normally exist in a vacuum, so in order to maintain consistency, you start to fill in related details such as the water that surrounds it. This in turn causes you to imagine its fins moving since fish don't normally hang motionless in water.

7. Details about a representation can also involve time. For example, if you see a fish swimming towards you, then additional details can include where the fish was in the past and where the fish will be in the future.

8. A mind uses rules to fill in details. A mind can generate new hypotheses and will keep more copies of the rules that are accurate and less copies of the rules that are inaccurate. I use the 'copy' metaphor instead of the 'strengthen' metaphor because it's more appropriate for parallel distributed systems.

9. Rules can be of many types, including temporal and spatial. For example, a rule could be of the form "if X happens at time T, then Y usually happens at time T+1". Similarly, a rule could be of the form "if X is on the left, then Y it usually on the right". Note that both of these rules are relative; the temporal rule could apply to events in the past, present or future.

10. Rules can create multiple possibilities, some of which might be mutually inconsistent. For example, if we see a fish swimming towards us, there will be many possible future positions for the fish. But of course the fish can't be in all those positions at the same time.

New "Making Minds" mini-series

Before I get to my major "What is a Mind?" posting, I'm going to write a mini-series that covers the following prerequisite topics:

- mental resources
- consistency
- time and space
- past, present and future
- reality versus imagination
- intensity
- changing the universe

I'm going to try to write one topic a day, starting tomorrow.