Two Minds Blog

My  previous blog post explored a new model of how concepts emerge from people's everyday experiences, based on findings from contemporary neuroscience and artificial intelligence (AI) research. Paul Churchland's book  Plato's Camera  argues that the concepts used by the Narrative System are really maps of neural activation patterns, taking sensory data and summarizing them at an abstract level. People's sensory experiences are never exactly the same from one moment to the next, but higher-level neurons in the chain of abstraction come to recognize  new experiences as similar to an existing map. This post will explore how we might be able to use Churchland's new understanding to communicate better with our fellow humans, especially in situations where our narratives are quite different from one another. Let's take an example from politics: I may see a political figure as essentially untrustworthy, not protecting the environment, and putting corporations ah...

We, too, are autonomous vehicles, groping our way forward in a world we only partly understand. - Paul Churchland, Plato's Camera , p. 125 I have written previously about artificial intelligence (AI) as a model for the Intuitive System, which works automatically and based on simple rules. This week's post will argue that the Narrative System uses similar trial-and-error approaches in developing a cognitive representation of the world. This is going to be a two-part blog: The current post will explore how the Narrative System transforms experiences into ideas, to show how a neuroscience-informed perspective helps us make sense of data and experiences of the Narrative System. The following post will examine what this perspective means about how people learn new narratives, and specifically how we can craft better  narratives to more effectively communicate with those who might see the world differently from us. Watch for those  applications in the next post -- just in t...