Local minima
Consider that the space in which the mechanistic basis (purely psychological, not phenomenological) for the mind resides could be described by an energy landscape. Any particular thought, and more importantly any particular combination of thoughts would have associated with it a particular energy. This energy would be proportional to the amount of "mental work" associated with that particular combination of thoughts.
For example, if one does not know how to play the piano, one can learn how to do so, but in doing so one has to expend mental work to learn that skill, and actually go through the appropriate motions. By learning that skill a person is changing the energy landscape, by lowering the energy of a particular coordinated series of actions. Mental work can actually be quantified by the degree in which it affects the measurable behavior of a system.
This energy landscape dictates the way in which a mind can influence the behavior of the body in which it resides. One of the major problems for a mind trying to have an effect on the way in which the body behaves is that it can get stuck in local minima. This means that the mind can not overcome a previous series of thoughts that lead to a series of actions which the mind does not believe is as important as an alternative series of thoughts that lead to an alternative series of actions. Hence, why it is so hard for people to change once their energy landscapes have conformed to a particular configuration whose central structure is very rigid, with only slight gray areas on the fringe.
There really is no objective goodness inherent in any of these processes...or in other words, associated with any particular thought-action coupling there is no value. We assign value to the couplings based upon the phenomenological experience we have while going through the process of traversing the energy landscape and acting upon the traverse of the energy landscape. What causes this phenomenological experience is a mystery, all we can say is that as an individual traversing an energy landscape we not only think and do things, we also have subjective experiences associated with thinking and doing things. This subjective experience is probably by definition not reductively explainable.
For example, if one does not know how to play the piano, one can learn how to do so, but in doing so one has to expend mental work to learn that skill, and actually go through the appropriate motions. By learning that skill a person is changing the energy landscape, by lowering the energy of a particular coordinated series of actions. Mental work can actually be quantified by the degree in which it affects the measurable behavior of a system.
This energy landscape dictates the way in which a mind can influence the behavior of the body in which it resides. One of the major problems for a mind trying to have an effect on the way in which the body behaves is that it can get stuck in local minima. This means that the mind can not overcome a previous series of thoughts that lead to a series of actions which the mind does not believe is as important as an alternative series of thoughts that lead to an alternative series of actions. Hence, why it is so hard for people to change once their energy landscapes have conformed to a particular configuration whose central structure is very rigid, with only slight gray areas on the fringe.
There really is no objective goodness inherent in any of these processes...or in other words, associated with any particular thought-action coupling there is no value. We assign value to the couplings based upon the phenomenological experience we have while going through the process of traversing the energy landscape and acting upon the traverse of the energy landscape. What causes this phenomenological experience is a mystery, all we can say is that as an individual traversing an energy landscape we not only think and do things, we also have subjective experiences associated with thinking and doing things. This subjective experience is probably by definition not reductively explainable.
posted by meta_darwinist at 2:40 PM
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