ways my brain works

8/22/2024

computerpomorphizing

anthropomorphizing is assigning human qualities to something non-human, what's the name for the opposite of that

I think this happens to most people who learn about computer engineering/science at some point. Terms used for computing become accessible to describe cognitive processes, so I conceptualize a lot of my internal thinking the same way I conceptualize system architecture.

prefacing

Recalling back to geometric/math proofs, you have these logic trees where you start off with some axioms or theorems and build off on them until you reach some sort of conclusion.

A lot of times when I want to communicate something to someone, my brain will immediately construct and traverse a tree of 'premises' as a function of what I think they need to know and what I think they already know in order to fully convey my message.
I usually call this antic of mine 'prefacing'

This tree construction definitely is not perfect and I definitely suffer from going through too many premises when I could have just gotten to the point much sooner. Pretty often when someone asks me something I'll respond with 'uhh hold on let me think of how much detail i want to go in'

literally what's happening in that moment is my brain is making up this whole tree of ideas and I need to perform a whole cognitive function just to decide which node I want to ultimately land on and therefore what sub-tree of ideas I need to traverse through.

I'm trying to work on my purging evaluation function to more quickly stick to what's actually relevant.

Sometimes in long conversations this actually takes some amount of cognitive toll, I can actually feel myself getting exhausted just trying to decide what to say. This also gets combined with trying to foresee a couple levels down in the dialogue tree for any given choice I might make.

platonic epistemology

I took a cognitive science class at gatech where in one lecture the professor mentioned The Platonic doctrine of recollection and something about it always stuck with me or resonated with certain ideas I had.

At the time of writing this I was trying to find the source for the following analogy, as I only vaguely what my professor said about it, but google didn't show me much.

So here's chatgpt:

Grooves in a Material: Imagine a piece of wood or another material that already has grooves or patterns etched into it. These grooves represent innate ideas or knowledge that are already present in the mind (or soul) but not immediately apparent.

Discovering or Tracing the Grooves: Learning, in this analogy, is like running your hand over the material and discovering the grooves. It’s not about creating new knowledge but rather uncovering or revealing what was already there.

There's a few contexts in my life where this concept comes to mind:

1. When I was in school or when I'm learning something new
   this is always what ideas 'clicking' felt/feels like to me. Not sure how much this will make sense but its also combined with a sort of 'yes, this is the way this should be' feeling.
2. When coming up with a solution to a problem
   mostly manifests itself when the converse happens, i.e when a solution feels sub-optimal, the imagery in my brain is as if my hands are running perpendicular to the direction of the grooves, or that I can't exactly make out the direction of the grooves.
3. When making jokes
   I feel like the idea of a low hanging fruit joke can also be expressed as just the most apparent groove. But there's other jokes in any given context that I feel like people don't really make but more so find.

To be clear, I don't mean this all in an actual metaphysical way. This is all mainly just the imagery and feelings my brain has when it comes to certain things.