It got me at least! ;) (With the 7 that is...)

How very interesting. This article claims to be from Monday, but it is Tuesday here, and I sure didn't see it yesterday.

it was in drafts ;)

razib says:


I think some readers might question the use of the term "robot" to define humans.


No me. During my recent visit to Australia I started thinging very strongly along these lines. Perhaps true liberation occurs when you realize that you are an automaton running a program set up by your genes ...

Here's another review of The Robot's Rebellion.

"'Self, is just an emergent property of subsystems and their synergy.

Just? Isn't that enough?

I guessed 7 the first time. :)

oops, I picked 8, something must be wrong with my processor,. ;)

I guessed 8. I noted that the number pairs were additive inverses so I wasn’t primed to subtract. I was primed to pick 8 as it was the only number between 5 and 12 that had already appeared. (At least that’s my guess.)

Arrgh! I picked 7. Never a blink. What happened to my ''free will''. Am I also preprogrammed to go to Heaven or Hell?

Hmm, I picked 10. All the equations equaled zero, so there was no obvious pick. I picked 10 only because it had a zero in it...

I too picked 7. That's pathetic. How can I be so predictable? Okay..now I'm going to read the rest of the post..

I picked 8 as well.

Arrgh! I picked 7. Never a blink. What happened to my ''free will''. Am I also preprogrammed to go to Heaven or Hell?

I think you can still have your 'free will'. Let's say, you thought about '7' immediately and then before clicking that link to see the answer you pause a moment and change it because you supsect something is tricky. I suppose humans do have the ability question their reflexive responses. Of course, it's nothign to do with Razib's blog and I'm only responding to 'free will'.

I picked 6, I think because the last thing in my mind was 16 (my mind is sometimes sticky like that). Where does the 7 come from? 12 - 5?

In any case, I think that this has nothing to do with free will (except, obviously, in constraining the choices that occur to you). You see a face, and you involuntarily think, "My Wife!" - it is, indeed, your wife. Free will comes in what you do next.

The reformation of the mind that Stanovoich proposes is contingent upon faith in the analytic mind.

Very true. I, for one, do not. Smart people delude themselves into thinking that they are being analytic, when in reality they are no less slaves to TASS.

I picked 6, I think because the last thing in my mind was 16 (my mind is sometimes sticky like that). Where does the 7 come from? 12 - 5?

Well,
modulus of -12+5, to go with
-2+2
-4+4
...
and 'within the limits'

However, taking the modulus because of the word 'limit' is really remarkable.

There is no reason to privilege TASS

The analytic mind is only good for post-facto analysis. TASS enables us to look over the landscape and see the possibilities. The goal of education should be the TASSization of formerly analytic tasks, replacing a spotlight with the light of day. This is our most human endeavor.

I picked 7 as well. The key part is probably "answer the questions as fast as you can". People just do the first equation, which is -2+2 and then scan the rest, realizing the answers are all the same. That way, when it comes time to pick a number between 12 and 5, the number 2 is already implanted in the subconcious and so the majority of people will just simply add 5+2 and get 7. Addition is the simplest math operation to do in your head.

7, like expected. The thought preceding the picking was something fuzzy along the lines "what has the picking to do with the 0 yielding equations before?

[i]Arrgh! I picked 7. Never a blink. What happened to my ''free will''. Am I also preprogrammed to go to Heaven or Hell?[/i]

us computer programmers know that there is no machine capable of coming up with a truly random series of numbers. It wouldn't surprise me to find that the human mind, being in truth nothing more than a biological machine, cannot come up with truly random numbers either.

For some problems that are rigorously solvable using either formal logic or Bayesian analysis, I understand it is possible to show that the human mind is only approximately rational. We seem to have a whole set of heuristics to get us through life passably well. I'd probably go so far as to suggest that even reason is to the human mind merely another heuristic. We use it when it works adequately efficiently and we look for other heuristic shortcuts when we find a problem too difficult to solve through rigorous analysis alone. One of the most eggregious forms of false pride is the rational man's overconfidence in his own capacity for pure reason.

This is one of the reasons why I believe that a sufficiently powerful supercomputer could indeed be superior to human intelligence. If it was fast enough and complex enough that it could solve rigorously through pure reason even those problems that we are forced to fudge, then by golly it could in principal outthink us. The potential is there for a sufficiently powerful processor.

In fact, in some limited domains where present-day computers and their algorithms are especially well suited to particular problems, computers can far outshine us already. Try running Google using human searchers.

I picked 8 as well. I think Brad Pitt would have too. I take great comfort that Razib is keeping track of Pitt and Aniston. Even if its only at the grocery store check-out line.

Humans are in fact notoriously bad at random number generation. I also picked 7, after explicitly "rejecting" 8 in my mind as the "obvious" power of 2 in range.

I looked at the 5 and and just picked
7 for no apparent reason.

I picked 7.

I saw immediately that the previous numbers cancelled out and when I do math I visualize a lot, so in this case I saw a number strip from left to right, as -infinity to +infinity, so the pattern of bridging the gap between numbers had been set, therefore 5 + 7 = 12, or it takes 7 steps right to get to twelve.
Of course all this happened in a twinkling!

BTW, I suspect that those who think more visually are more apt to pick 7.

RichardSharpe wrote:
Perhaps true liberation occurs when you realize that you are an automaton running a program set up by your genes ...

Well my moment of Zen on this topic came when I was in college years ago and was arguing with a philosophy major over whether artificial intelligence (AI) is possible or not. I was arguing for AI and prompted by him asking me how one could know if a robot could actually think consciously, and not just be following a program. I realized then that the corollary of this is one could know that humans in fact think and are not just following a program.

The short answer is that there is no evidence to refute this assertion. So IMO, we are robots, though intuitively we don't feel like we are!

10. What's this error message doing in my left field of vision?

Reading the piece about Capgras Syndrome above, makes me wonder what I suffer from, as I have a tremendous ability to recognize and remember faces, but have an absolutely terrible time putting a name to a face.

I also very frequently call people by their wrong name - what does this mean?

I picked 7. But I was a little sloppy in adding the numbers. In the first set, I missed the negative sign and got four. The last two sets I saw the negative sign and added correctly to zero.

But I wonder. Has anyone tried just asking people on paper to pick a number between 12 and 5 and see if 7 comes up as often as in this experiment? I kind of felt that I was quickly adding the '5' and the '2' to get 7, being that they were readily available in my field of vision.

I picked 2PI. Of course,I was eating two slices of pie at the time . . .

Even if its only at the grocery store check-out line.

good call ;)

"there is a strong correlation between those with higher general intelligence behaving as if they were instrumental utility maximizers. In other words, those with a high I.Q. are much more likely to allow their analytic mind to overrule their "gut instinct.""

At first, it seems clear that the reason why this is so is because those with a greater cognitive capacity that allows them to predict future events and allows them to plan for things they have not seen will most benefit from a set of emotional and motivational predispositions that facilitate action that is directed toward those unseen objects and events. This correlation between intelligence and "conscientious" behavior was mentioned in the Bell Curve, but I don't think the authors tried to provide an explanation for why it exists. Nevertheless, the capacity to understand more of the world around us may also increase the chances that our minds can go astray and be lead down blind alleys and up the wrong trees. If we were never to entertain thoughts of things unseen and yet to come, we would not be wrong about them so much as we would just ignore them and focus on the immediately relevent four F's. Imagine what would happen if we felt motivated to construct a theory of how heat damages skin tissue every time we touched a hot stove. I don't know if the Robot's Rebellion mentions it, but in a chapter in another book, Stanovich mentions a distinction between rationality and intelligence that may help provide a link between our capacity to understand the world and our capacity to act on it and may help describe a means by which evolution has allowed our capacity for conceptual representation to flourish while reducing the possibility that that conceptual capacity may send us down the wrong path in terms of reproductive fitness.

i think the four equations are meant as distractions. if people had to pick a # between 5 and 12 from the get-go, the answers might vary more wildly. the four equations prime people to think additively, so when they see the 5 and 12, they imagine adding 7 to the 5 to get 12.

I'm wondering if anyone here has read the Sci-Fi short story "The Spade of Reason" by Jim Cowan.

It dealt with one of the topics being discussed here; random numbers and their relationship to reason and the idea of free will/divinity. It's really good, though you have to be a computer geek to get the full affect of it.

Many Marxists were (are;-() very intelligent people. There may be a predisposition in intelligent people to devise grand theories and large egos that fail to admit when their wrong. Often what we call 'rational' is merely a rationalization.

The 4-F's?: food and fornication, obviously, what else?

fighting and fleeing I assume
I picked 7, then switched to 6 before clicking the button in order to avoid picking the most obvious number. I don't think the "addition" above primes 7, but rather that 7 is always there, at least in US culture, as the default pseudorandom number people generate.

fighting and fleeing. Makes sense. I was sort of leaning to flatulence.

Razib, I think that your attachment to a bright line between "conscious" and "unconscious" thought - itself an unconscious (!) expression of cartesian materialism - is leading you to conflate innate "base" impulses and automated responses under the TASS banner (as both seem to be "unconscious") as against "conscious" analytical thinking. I don't think the line is anything like as clear between TASS and analytical thinking as it is between these and innate impulses/preferences. It's not that hard to divine the rationale behind any automated system - if you found that you have driven to work and don't remember a thing about your journey, you can still understand why you took the route you (automatically) took. If you picked 7, you can hazard a decent guess as to why. If, on the other hand, you leave your wife to have a fling with a 19 year old waitress, you are more likely to confabulate a post-hoc rationale for this - "my wife doesn't understand me" - than put it down to evolutionary programming.

8, no wait. What else? A symbol for infinity as well as a mid-point.

"The 4-F's?"

It sounds cool if you say it this way: "fighting, fleeing, feeding, and fornicating."

Like SteveC, I picked 10, because it was the number between 12 and 5 which has a zero in it.

Razib, I think that your attachment to a bright line between "conscious" and "unconscious" thought - itself an unconscious (!) expression of cartesian materialism - is leading you to conflate innate "base" impulses and automated responses under the TASS banner (as both seem to be "unconscious") as against "conscious" analytical thinking.

well, it must be unconscious, because i thought i made it clear implicitly that there often isn't a "bright line." many aspects of our functioning are over time assimilated into TASS after an initial period of "learning." language and walking are cases where we seem to be very good at learning, but i suspect there are many things that we are not as primed to learn that eventually move from conscious to automatic.

btw, one point in the number sense is that numeracy is basically analog, without our discrete mathematical system a later culture-based overlay. rats and pigeons also have analog numeracy. i am wondering if the numbers 6 and 8 are coming up because they are on either side of 7, and the innate fuzzy analog numeracy is just selecting from a general area.

because i thought i made it clear implicitly that there often isn't a "bright line."

and then

, but i suspect there are many things that we are not as primed to learn that eventually move from conscious to automatic

Obviously not that clear then. This is what I'm getting at - the fact that there isn't a bright line between "conscious" and "unconscious" thought* makes this last point of yours untenable, or at least badly defined. Especially so if it muddies the distinction (under the "unconscious thinking" banner) between learned automated systems and, for want of a better word, "base" impulses.

* - Look, this whole "conscious"/"unconscious" distinction is based on the notion that conscious thought "happens" in the cartesian theater, while "unconscious" thought happens "under the hood". But, a more useful and defensible distinction is that that which we consider to be "conscious" thought is the story we commit to memory and otherwise there's not an awful lot of difference - much of "analytical" thinking is automated but we put a later gloss on it, refining and post-rationalising it in committing it to memory. Let's say I "automatically" drive to work today, but tomorrow I "consciously" drive to work - do you think that my experience of driving in each case is radically different? Or is it just that I bother to "archive" tomorrow's drive.

Another example - you know that our image of what we see is a lot "fuller" than the information we actually receive through our eyes - we only see a tiny cone of the visual field clearly, we have two blind spots and our eyes perform saccades which we don't notice - we "see" this as a full visual field. In the same way, we understand our thnking to be "conscious" but there are huge gaps and automated sections within that "fully conscious" analogue of the visual field.

a more useful and defensible distinction is that that which we consider to be "conscious" thought is the story we commit to memory and otherwise there's not an awful lot of difference

perhaps. i don't remember exactly how it works....

Razib,

Did you use the phrase "bright line" on purpose or was there a hidden (subconscious) connection to the Brights?!

i didn't use the "bright line" term, frank used it to characterize my rendering of the concepts.

..and I can confirm (with reasonable confidence) that, despite the fact that I am a devotee of Dennett and am familiar with the "bright" philosophy, I didn't intend this particular reference.