Cognitive Thrift 63 – Compactification
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Cognitive Thrift
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/03/22
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Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Now, that we’ve define thought, somewhat. We can describe a little more about compactification because things seem to be coming to a head here.
Rick Rosner: The brain wants to think about stuff so it doesn’t have to think about it anymore. You brain wants to sort stuff out, make stuff rule bound, and make relationships as concrete as they can possibly be, it is expensive to throw information into consciousness and when information enters consciousness, and it becomes available to your entire conscious brain.
All of the different modules that together constitute your conscious awareness. It is a big heavy-duty arena for dealing with novelty. You hope that your brain can find relationships, produce confusion, sort stuff out so you don’t have to think about stuff anymore, and so you can learn with learning being hardwiring information.
So, it’s associations. It’s relationships and new information, and new information’s relationship to old information is compactified. You figure out what the relationships are and it’s locked in so it’s used, easily retrievable and not confusing.
It’s clean. It takes up less room in your brain. You can think about stuff as it shows up so you don’t have to think about it later, and later you can, if your brain is working right, when the information is relevant you can retrieve it and the landscape of associations pull it back up when it seems to be relevant to new situation and new information.
So, one major function of consciousness is to take big blobs of information, boil them down into small and clear associations, among the things that are already in your memory or consciousness.
And, for instance, I am a joke writer for TV or have been one, and I have been looking at jokes as an example of something that used this process, though probably to no good purpose, but they illustrate how it works.
A joke has a setup, which is often fairly complicated with a lot of moving parts. A priest, a nun, two penguins, and a rabbi walk into an airplane that they are about to jump out of, and then the punch line takes that whole situation and resolves into one or two supposedly amusing truths.
The rabbi, it may be something about how depending on – this is racist or whatever – maybe, it is about how Jews are good with money. The nuns are sexually repressed, and there’s nobody flying the plane. Who knows what?
It takes a complicated situation and resolves it into one simple truth and you’re happy that you’ve got a complicated piece of information resolved into simplicity and you laugh because you’re happy that you learned something cheaply, even though it’s fake learning.
It might not be fake learning. If it is a joke that reminds you that Kim Kardashian owes her entire career started with her making a sex tape, then maybe that is something valuable to know because maybe it reflects something about celebrity at this point in history, but the brain is interested in compact information. And also, we’ll have to figure out how this fits into everything, how information is gained cheaply.
I guess that means pre-digested information in the context of cognitive economics, when I was a kid and wanted to get big and muscly so I could get a girlfriend.
I used to drink this stuff called pre-digested protein and they would take all the junk parts of cows like hooves and render it into amino acids, hence it was pre-digested protein, and supposedly it was already broken down, and your body didn’t have to work as hard to turn it into muscle. It was nasty and it tasted like vomit, but cherry flavored.
I think jokes are an expression of glee for getting a piece of predigested information, where you didn’t have to work it out. It’s been worked out for you, and it is as somebody else’s expense and you got a piece of knowledge and you’re happy, and reflects the brain’s natural tendency to want information and want it cheaply.
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