/lit/ - Literature

>>22946153
I’d argue posting on 4chan rots your brain fat more than any fiction novel
Yes even the “le high iq” boards like /lit/

>>22946217
Then argue it.

>>22946153
The irony of your post is that while you claim to be aware of the deficiencies of fiction in modelling reality, you're not aware of the insufficiency of your own models of human consciousness, human discovery of truth and interaction with reality. For human consciousness, your interpretation of "Hebb's rule" has much in common with the Lockean association of ideas, but it's a very mechanical interpretation of learning and obviously inaccurate to experience. The ideas in fiction can never be reduced to such simplistic formulas as the concepts in your example. Similarly, your standards of truthfulness are in the very limited models of "statistical accuracy, economic realism", when fiction and literature precisely exists to show that there is more to reality than just statistics and numbers. Your post resembles a caricature of how autistic STEM bugmen view reality but I fear it's sincere. You remind me of Mr Gradgrind in Dickens' Hard Times:
>"Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them."
Dickens' relevant caricature of people like you here evidences just how accurately fiction can model reality -- but importantly Dickens is showing you the truth of how things are rather than telling you.

The further irony of your position is that while you claim to be impervious to the impact of ideology, you are actually in the grips entirely of the paradigm of scientific materialism that tends to dominate the STEM subjects. What you do correctly recognise, however, is that fiction and literature is brilliant at transferring implicit knowledge -- what you fail to realise is that the greatest wealth of knowledge for humans is the implicit, in how one thinks rather than what one thinks, that the explicit side of the rational mind is a mere bureaucrat in comparison to the enormous wealth of the implicit, unconscious side of the human mind. "What can be shown cannot be said", Wittgenstein says, and the most important things in life are shown by literature and art rather than said explicitly. I believe in all likelihood I am wasting my words but in the event that you are actually as open-minded as you claim to be I would recommend you look at the work of Iain McGilchrist to explore the value of fiction and literature and the problems with a purely scientific materialistic worldview.

>>22946408
>human consciousness, your interpretation of "Hebb's rule"
That you bring consciousness into a discussion of memory formation and statistical learning—Hebb's rule—means you don't understand what the rule is about, at all. I'm sure you had at your disposal a number of less pseud ways to opine on this, both with regards to your cocksure phrasings, and with regards to maybe taking your time to work through e.g. Dayan & Abbott's "Computational Neuroscience" to have an actual grasp of the context in which the rule is invoked.

>interpretation of learning and obviously inaccurate to experience.
And right away you've set about putting words in my mouth, who would have thought? No, this isn't an interpretation of "learning," nor is it an "interpretation": it's a description of what literally happens in the brain, and as such it's pretty damn accurate. A concept in the brain is represented by a so-called engram, an ensemble of neurons distributed throughout the brain (https://youtu.be/X5trRLX7PQY).). When an activates simultaneously with or close in time to another engram, the synaptic links between them are strengthened. Physiologically strengthened. You don't consciously regulate it, you can't prevent it any more than you can move an atom in your body through sheer will. There's no way around it. This very literally means that when your brain uses a concept, another concept with a strongly connected engram has a high likelihood of activating. Physiologically, because neurons just work like that. This is not about conscious learning. This is about the physiologically increased likelihood of the brain remembering a co-occurring concept because activating prior engrams is what remembering is.

>there is more to reality than just statistics and numbers
When a physicist or biologist hangs his coat and ventures outside the laboratory, physics and biology don't suddenly stop working. You met 10 green-haired people in your life, 10 pink-haired people in your life, 9 green-haired people turn out to be evil and none of the pink-haired people do; this is statistics. This is a statistic you learned from experience. Fiction destroys the corrupts statistical accuracy of your own experience of real-life by presenting you people who would in reality be massive outliers. Again, you could have chosen to think what this meant before launching off into "le numbers" pseudistry.

>Dickens
Wrote a good story. Reality isn't a good story. Actual real people are mostly boring. The people in any Dickens's story are massive outliers so that Dickens could write a good story, and, typically of fiction, speak in complete statements unlike actual people.

>what you fail to realise is that the greatest wealth of knowledge for humans is the implicit
You've bolted out of pseud territory into lying territory. I wouldn't be bringing up implicit knowledge if it weren't an important (and hard) problem. "But, you need an author whose understanding of the world you already trust."

>>22946571
Your objection to my use of the word "consciousness" is probably accurate and shows where I should've cleared up my phrasing and certain deficiencies of my knowledge. I still very much have a problem with your unexamined beliefs, again very prevalent from the scientific materialist paradigm, that what occurs in the mind is entirely the result of the interactions of certain physical processes in the neurons, and that the world is as it were constituted of atomic facts, that all the truths of the world can be delivered merely through statistics. Wittgenstein attempts in the Tractatus to formulate the structure of this worldview, that the world is as it were composed of atomic facts, but he was also clever enough to realise that there was something else to life. One of those something else's is narrative: you may have met X many people in your life, done X many things, but the formation of a narrative embedding those statistics is out of the purview of statistics.
Moreover, in your application of Hebb's rule, I think you have attempted to apply the simplified model of a mechanic process to a very complex phenomenon, something in the brain that we do not yet fully understand, in a way that is obviously very insufficient to explain it. Considering we do not even currently know how consciousness works, something of even deeper complexity like reading fiction is far, far more complex than you give it credit.
If you want to know just how much of our knowledge is implicit, again, I encourage you to discover the work of Iain McGilchrist.

>>22946840
>but the formation of a narrative embedding those statistics is out of the purview of statistics.
I confess I don't really see the issue. The brain's narrator in building a narrative uses the statistics that the brain as a whole has learned. Speaking of which, statistical inference appears to be a function of brains in general, not just human brains. For example, in crows statistical inference occurs, and we can actually find this because they respond to our experiments: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2023.06.023
>I think you have attempted to apply the simplified model of a mechanic process to a very complex phenomenon, something in the brain that we do not yet fully understand
I must stress again that I don't presume to speak of learning as it is colloquially understood, i.e. goal-directed thought and any such complicated processes. I speak of association by cooccurrence, and of this we are very sure, it's one of the most basic blocks of neuroscience. If you read fiction and meet two concepts one after another, the link between them is necessarily strengthened. This is not speculation.
>we do not even currently know how consciousness works
We have some pretty good ideas and no consensus, but granted. (As an aside, even if you don't care a whit about "consciousness" because it may not even be necessary for agents to function per Metzinger, the work in searching for neural correlates of consciousness is pretty damn interesting and reads like great detective work—the attentional blink &c.)
>something of even deeper complexity like reading fiction
I'd argue reading and learning are less complex.
>If you want to know just how much of our knowledge is implicit
Preaching to the choir. If you want to know, even in mathematics, one of the most formalized and written-down areas of inquiry, most knowledge is implicit. Ironically, can't recommend a source on this, though. Thank you for the recommendation, I checked it out after your first comment, but my reading list is already a couple thousand entries long.

>>22946153

>>22946153
Reading your shitty post has contaminated my brain more than any novel i've read. Fuck off retard.