Today was Kata's morning meeting. She brought us some paper and made us draw. But not the conventional way of drawing!
First it was not watching and knowing...
Secondly, it was not knowing and watching.

It was quite fun. And I find quite interesting, how scientific work needs that awareness, of the senses and of the knowledge in order to grasp the discovery in its more precise explanation...

The name of the chapter caught me from the very beginning.
"Neither science nor the arts can be complete without combining their separate strengths. Science needs the intuition and metaphorical power of the arts, and the arts need the fresh blood of science."
I can't help thinking in how imagination and wonderment is implicit in all scientific or artistic discovery. It isn't like we only have reason in one side to think of science or just emotion when we think on creating music. We're creative, by nature.

Some chapters before, Wilson claimed in how arts and documented work made culture evolve faster. In this chapter, he wrote "gene-culture coevolution is, I believe, the underlying process by which the brain evolved and the arts originated." and there is, culture documented through the years making our artistic works evolve more and more.

Also, the origins of our artistic brain is theorized as a mechanism that started off by putting meaning to things we didn't understand in our surroundings. We have an aesthetic instinct, and I would dare to say that it is also a search for human seal in things. We like to see our genes printed throughout nature. And also, we have idealized beauty characteristics that come from our instinctual search for fertility and powerful genes.

Between instinct and reason, there's tradition. AH, Hayek. I remembered him all throughout this chapter. I'll explain further.

The Social Sciences goes through how complex societies are, and how the researchers in this field haven't acquired a good amount of knowledge, because they separate biology and psychology from human behavior. This is an incredible misunderstanding of human nature. After all, we're part of all this complex system called universe.

But the fact is, that society isn't either a purely deterministic system or a full culture product. It is an interaction of epigenetic rules and an evolving culture. (See Hayek hidden here somewhere?)

And it is amazing, how natural sciences have grown to reach social matters. Biology or psychology for instance, have found characteristics applicable to the society. These are proofs of consilience.

Then, he gets to the prediction topic. For this, he says that math can be made in order to measure certain things in society. Is that something that can be done? I'm of the people that think that society is far too complex... but what if? Would it be helpful?

For this, I'll claim (with help from Wilson) that in order to understand the complexity of society, we have to also understand the environment and our mind. For that, we should claim consilience.

There are some imperatives in our human nature such as categories of choice or rational calculation. Wilson even quoted our friend Daniel Khaneman (Thinking fast and Slow) on how we make irrational choices according to our heuristics and how we tend to make certain decisions according to time and avoiding risk.

This was our last dialogue with Dylan this year, but, I have to admit we had lots of fun. This dialogue was primarily concentrated on the "Patterns" topic.

Humans search for patterns. Everywhere, (music. Yes.) Chaos and uncertainty are uncomfortable, and we like to know that things go on certain way. I think this uneasiness keep us in this process of discovering what is beyond our knowledge.

I wonder how this acquired taste for conceptual art, or experimental music came up. Is this a matter of searching for patterns? I think it is more about knowing the concept, so maybe in this case it's not the quest for patterns, but the quest for understanding what is going on with this is more about understanding meanings. So if we are presented to this cases in the future, we are able to find the pattern. To categorize this as conceptual.

Statistics, may be unreliable. Maybe we have a small number of samples or the incorrect number of samples. This type of information may blind the researcher. In order to make a good research, many different types of samples must be taken, according to the need. For this, we jump to conclusions.

But, we also fall in one of the things that are in our human nature: we're pattern seekers. Patterns make us feel safe, and make us feel that we can predict things. That comfort of finding patterns, where there aren't has fooled lots of people.

We tend to have answers to questions we really don't know the answer to. We tend to make connections, really abstract, with what we think we know.

Kahneman divides the types of existent questions as heuristic questions and target questions. The target questions are those that are complicated and require further and deep thinking. Heuristic questions are those that are answered more simply and that are correlated with our instant memories and responses. That is, System 1.

System 1 tends to make us feel overconfident. For this, I will say that some tend to stop learning. That comfort of being able to answer questions without considering alternatives, nor pushing to a further limit, is one thing that our mind tends to do. We can overcome this habit though.

Also, in this chapter Khaneman quotes to another psychologist, who said that based in our likes and dislikes we form our beliefs of the world. This is a huge mistake, for this is not taking reality as it is.

"Your beliefs, and even your emotional attitude, may change (at least a little) when you learn that the risk of an activity you disliked is smaller than you thought. However, the information about lower risks will also change your view of the benefits (for the better) even if nothing was said about benefits in the information you received."

This is the final chapter of the first part of the book. At the end, Kahneman introduces us to the characteristics of System 1:

Characteristics of System 1

• Generates impressions, feelings, and inclinations; when endorsed by System 2 these become beliefs, attitudes, and intentions operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort, and no sense of voluntary control
  

• Can be programmed by System 2 to mobilize attention when a particular pattern is detected (search)
  

• Executes skilled responses and generates skilled intuitions, after adequate training
  

• Creates a coherent pattern of activated ideas in associative memory

• Links a sense of cognitive ease to illusions of truth, pleasant feelings, and reduced vigilance
  

• Distinguishes the surprising from the normal

• Infers and invents causes and intentions

• Neglects ambiguity and suppresses doubt

• Is biased to believe and confirm

• Exaggerates emotional consistency (halo effect)

• Focuses on existing evidence and ignores absent evidence(WYSIATI)
  

• Generates a limited set of basic assessments

• Represents sets by norms and prototypes, does not integrate

• Matches intensities across scales (e.g., size to loudness)

• Computes more than intended (mental shotgun)

• Sometimes substitutes an easier question for a difficult one (heuristics)
  

• Is more sensitive to changes than to states (prospect theory)

• Overweights low probabilities

• Shows diminishing sensitivity to quantity (psychophysics)

• Responds more strongly to losses than to gains (loss aversion)

• Frames decision problems narrowly, in isolation from one another

It was Majo's morning meeting, and I would say, it was pretty fun! We watched three of her favorite videos of VSauce. The first one was What Color Is A Mirror? and this one explained how the mirror is some kind of a smart kind of white.  It reflects all colors that are put in front of it. But they're a little bit green because they are imperfect.

Something really beautiful about these colors is that, one has to count the fact air when talking about colors, because our atmosphere lets us perceive certain kinds of colors because we of the traveling wavelengths.

Other videos we watched from the same channel. One that talked about how many times we type, and the other one about Dejavu. It is amazing how our brain reacts in certain unconscious forms (Consilience) and still, we are not aware of that happenings.   

On the last chapters we got to explore new terms like WYSIATI. (What You See Is All There Is). This is used to explain that overconfidence that we humans suffer. That illusion of knowledge we tend to have. A lazy System 2 would recall to the known, instead of doubting the known. 

Another term learnt was Mental Shotgun, it means that one is predisposed to compute more than the things we actually want to compute. For this, I might give the credit to the unconscious computations that Wilson speaks about in Consilience.

Since the impact of first impressions are great, one of the habits we want to improve is the habit of being amazed with the ordinary. That is what constitutes an extraordinary man.

Besides, I was really amazed in our matching skills with sounds. For this, I am asking myself the question: why do we react in certain forms toward a kind of musical scale or chord? Is there a language behind this? 

Dylan told us something about how the frequencies are a tool for us to have a perception of this matter, this was really interesting: Primitive men designed their caves in a certain way that the waves perceived by the brain are below the 20Hz our ears perceive. For this, the cavemen just felt weird vibes, these were infrasonic vibes!!

We make questions because of System 2. The questions are biased in unfamiliarity and of course, it requires effort to wonder, to proof our instinctual possibilities. Because first impressions, as I said in the latter chapter, are really influential; we tend to jump into conclusions and we are lazy often to ask questions. It's hard to accept our ignorance.  

So we have a learnt and an instinctual income in our judgements. Also, we put prototypes in our minds according to the situation. Kahneman puts a perfect example: the birds in the oil. There was a fund raising in which different big amounts of birds were about to be saved. When the number of birds is nearly impossible for us to visualize we tend to respond likewise: it doesn't matter if there's 2000 or 200 000 birds, people had a similar response. 

"the awful image of a helpless bird drowning, its feathers soaked in thick oil. The almost complete neglect of quantity in such emotional contexts has been confirmed many times."

We connect different emotions to different types of things. For example loud noises and crimes. 

"If you heard two notes, one for the crime and one for the
punishment, you would feel a sense of injustice if one tone was much louder than the other."

Also, we don't just call one computational workout when we want to find out something. The way I see it, is like a quantum unconscious selection of scenarios and formulas. For this I would also recall the illusion Consilience keeps telling us about. 

We tend to jump into conclusions. This is our System 1 screaming, because our System 2 is lazy. It is fine to make some intuitive movements, but sometimes System 2 acts simultaneously in unfamiliar situations. In this, it jumps into conclusions. 

"System 1 bets on an answer, and the bets are guided by
experience. The rules of the betting are intelligent: recent events and the current context have the most weight in determining an interpretation. When no recent event comes to mind, more distant memories govern."

Doubting and reconsidering is the job of System 2. It makes us "unbelieve" certain things. I think that is one of the reasons why people tend to just say yes when their teacher tells them the "right" answer.

"System 1 is gullible and biased to believe, System 2 is in charge of doubting and unbelieving, but System 2 is sometimes busy, and often lazy."

Also, we tend to jump to conclusions in occasions which are he president’s politics, you probably like his voice and his
appearance as well. Even height! Hello Barack Obama! Well, that's the reason why the new impressions which are the more superficial tend to be the more influential.

On this, I think that System 1 retrieves to all of that unconscious neurons we have. And there the competitions of scenarios happens.

"The combination of a coherence-seeking System 1 with a lazy System 2 implies that System 2 will endorse many intuitive beliefs, which closely reflect the impressions generated by System 1. Of course, System 2 also is capable of a more systematic and careful approach to evidence, and of following a list of boxes that must be checked before making a decision-- think of buying a home, when you deliberately seek information that you don’t have. However, System 1 is expected to influence even the more careful decisions. Its input never ceases."