Brain-Loading Mechanisms

How many ways are there to put information into your brain?

The main possibilities that I am aware of are these:

• The control of the growth and development of your brain by information contained in your genes.
• Learning from experience, including both passive observation of the world, and active exploration of how you can interact with the world to achieve your goals.
• "Importing" information from the brain of another person. This method sub-divides into two major sub-categories:
  • Observation of another person, with the aim of imitating their behaviour, and, perhaps somewhat indirectly, imitating their thinking.
  • Accepting information communicated by language (in the prehistoric past this would have been entirely by spoken language, which is most relevant to the topic of this article, but in more modern times this would also include reading).

Reliability and Efficiency

Two basic criteria for judging the relative merits of these different methods of loading information into your brain are reliability and efficiency. Consider each of the methods listed above:

• Genetic control of brain development: The original source of this information is evolution by natural selection. Information acquired this way can be considered quite reliable, as it is based on millions of years of experience, i.e. the experience of your ancestors, judged directly according to success in reproduction. But the amount of information that can be loaded in this way is very limited, and the information cannot be updated very quickly to deal with new circumstances, as the rate of evolution in information terms is probably not more than a few bytes per year.
• Learning from experience: This is reliable in the sense that your experience of the world is very real (although there is the problem of statistical variation, where your own experience may not always be an accurate predictor of what is going to happen in the future).
• Observation of another person: The advantage of deriving information from other people is that other people's brains already contain a lot of information about their own experience, and if you import that information directly rather than go through the same experience yourself, you can save yourself a lot of time and trouble. Unfortunately, imitation is a rather limited method of acquiring information. It can be useful for learning the basics of specific physical skills, but attempting to determine the internal thinking of another person from observation of their actions involves too much hopeful guesswork to be of much use. (Which brings us to the last option ...)
• Learning by listening to what others say: This is both the most efficient and the least reliable method. In as much as language can describe a substantial portion of our knowledge, experience and even how we think, talking and listening can be a very efficient way of transferring information from one person to another. But if a person simply accepts the truth of whatever they are told, they are vulnerable to manipulation by any other person willing to tell that person untrue statements (that only serve the interests of the person telling them).

Bootstrapping

Any system which is designed to acquire information must contain in its design information about how to acquire information. This leads to the bootstrap problem, i.e., how do you import that information into the system in the first place? The term "bootstrap" is used particularly in the computer industry, where it is applied to the question of how to load a program into a computer.

The basic answer to this question is that a program must be loaded into the computer's memory using a program-loading program.

But how did the program-loading program get there? In modern computers the program-loading program is part of the operating system, which is loaded into the computer at startup time from a boot disk. There has to be some program which knows how to load the operating system from the boot disk, and this program is normally found in the BIOS, which is a fixed read-only memory built into the computer. The problem of knowing how to load this program is solved by designing into the CPU an initial instruction pointer value, which tells the CPU to start executing the program found at that point in memory when the power is turned on.

Of course the BIOS program was written, compiled and tested on some other computer, and we could attempt to trace the history of where that program came from and which program on some other earlier computer loaded it, and so on.

Somewhere very early in the history of computers, very simple bootstrap programs were hand-wired into computers, supplemented by data which was entered using simple data-loading switches.

Analysis of program-loading programs reveals dependency relationships between programs and the other programs that load them. We can look for similar dependencies in the four information importing methods given above for the human brain:

• Genetic information is "loaded" by the process of natural selection, which only depends on the existence of a reproducing life form (which ultimately depends on the origin of life from non-life, but this happened a long, long time ago, certainly long before the "invention" of brains). Modern science is finding ways to directly load genetic information from other sources by means of genetic engineering, and we cannot rule out the possibility that one day this will be applied to the construction of human brains, but for the moment this is too hard, and it is also considered by many to be morally unacceptable (although many of the more pragmatic objections to genetic engineering have to do with the risk of failure rather than the risk of success).
• Learning from experience depends at a minimum on the evolution of the mechanisms by which such learning occurs. From what is known about classical and operant conditioning, such mechanisms can only account for learning situations where feedback about the result of a given action follows very soon after its performance. Similarly, perceptual learning must be based directly on perceptions of correlations occurring within a particular moment or within a short time-frame. This is not to say that humans are not capable of learning based on results of actions that do not immediately follow those actions, or based on observation of events separated by long intervals of time. But this type of learning depends on pre-existence of a worldview which provides rules about how to understand causal relationships between events and actions separated by long intervals of time, where this worldview is sufficiently complex that it must be loaded into the brain by the last method in this list.
• Learning by imitation can be instinctive, and therefore only needs to depend on genetically provided information about how to learn.
• Learning by listening is the most problematic. Simple acceptance of the truth of what you hear is something that could be genetically programmed, but it does create vulnerability to manipulation. Reliability can be increased by applying critical consideration to spoken information before it is accepted as true, but there are some major difficulties with this strategy:
  • Firstly, it is likely to substantially reduce the efficiency of listening as a means of loading information into the brain, as the time taken to verify propositions is likely to substantially exceed the amount of time it takes to state them. This reduction in efficiency could be a significant difficulty if there is a possibility of benefitting from the loading of a large quantity of "pre-learnt" culturally provided information about the world.
  • Secondly, the information required to most efficiently and reliably appraise spoken information is information which itself can only easily be provided via spoken communication. Which returns us to the bootstrap problem.
  • And thirdly, the amount of information required to form a worldview which is sophisticated enough to quickly and efficiently appraise any spoken information may be much larger than the amount of information required for a worldview comprehensive enough to deal with most of the contingencies of everyday life. From an evolutionary point of view, only the second problem (i.e. the contingencies of everyday life) needs to be solved.

The Uncritical Listening Hypothesis

The above analysis suggests a hypothesis about human information "bootstrap": that the human brain has a tendency and an ability to accept spoken information uncritically, under at least some circumstances.

This hypothesis seems somewhat counter-intuitive, given our everyday experience that we do not readily accept spoken information which our own critical faculties warn us is unreliable or unconvincing. But there are certain aspects of human experience which are compatible with it:

• People the world over believe in religions as a function of the social environment that they live in (consisting of other people all or mostly believing in the same religion). Many of these religious beliefs seem "irrational" to someone belonging to a different religion (or to no religion at all).
• Hypnotism is an altered mental state where a person uncritically accepts the truth of what they are told by the hypnotist.
• There are various mind-manipulation techniques which are used by salespersons, confidence tricksters and cult leaders to make people believe things and do things which a "rational" person would not do.

Each of these phenomena is traditionally accepted as resulting from a weakness of the mind – an inability to rationally distinguish truth from falsehood. But once we realise the necessity of an efficient "bootstrap" process for loading an informed worldview into the human brain, we should not be surprised to discover that there are situations where a person uncritically accepts the "truth" of whatever they are told, because such uncritical acceptance is a basic part of the brain's growth and development.

In general we would expect uncritical listening to occur mainly in early childhood, where a child can receive information from their parents, who can perhaps be trusted to have their own child's interest at heart.

However, common experience is that even young children do not believe everything that their parents tell them, or do everything that their parents tell them to do (far from it in many cases), which suggests that there may be special triggers which cause children to lower their barriers to acceptance of new information, and uncritical acceptance only occurs in situations where these triggers occur.

For example, one trigger might depend on observation (by the child) that the behaviour and body language of a parent are consistent with that parent not having any hidden agenda behind the content of their current speech. This trigger and other triggers may continue to have some effect even into adulthood, but perhaps only in situations where the benefits of quickly acquiring information about how you are supposed to think – whether that information is true or false – exceed the risks and costs of being manipulated.

Uncritical Listening and Human Evolution

The development of uncritical listening may have played a major role in human evolution, and may, for example, be one of the major factors to distinguish "modern" humans from close relatives such as the Neanderthals.

The rapid spread of new ideas within tribal societies by means of uncritical listening would have enabled the rapid reproduction and mutation of culture, in that a random change in worldview of one person might be rapidly propagated to other members of a tribe. Of course many such mutations would be negative, but in the long run the benefits of positive mutations out-weigh the costs of the negative mutations. The cultures of peoples that changed too conservatively would end up being "left behind", and they would become extinct due to being less competitive, suffering from less access to resources needed for survival, and also suffering extermination by more efficient methods of warfare and tribal genocide.