James Brody
July 8th, 2006, 08:53 PM
This material was "lifted" from Brody, JF, (2002) From Physics and Evolutionary Neuroscience to Psychotherapy: Phase Transitions and Adaptations, Diagnosis and Treatment. In G. Cory & R. Gardner (Eds.) The Evolutionary Neuroethology of Paul MacLean: Convergences & Frontiers, Praeger-Greenwood, pp. 231-259.
It's being modified (put into English!) for inclusion in "Rebels, Deviants, and Individualists"
JB
"Satisfiability Problems, Human Decisions, and 'Maybe'
"'...humans...live in families where mothers simultaneously care for multiple young. Closer birth spacing...exacerbated dilemmas confronted by mothers who must then decide on how to allocate resources among dependent young with competing needs' (Hrdy, 1999, pp. 203-204).
----------
"Phase transitions apply to solving problems of group living. Satisfiability (SAT) problems reveal some of them. Hayes (1997) provides the following example of a SAT problem:
'You are chief of protocol for the embassy ball. The crown prince instructs you either to invite Peru or to exclude Qatar. The queen asks you to invite either Qatar or Romania or both. The king, in a spiteful mood, wants to snub either Romania or Peru or both. Is there a guest list that will satisfy the whims of the entire royal family?'
Such problems vary in the number of actors (king, prince, queen) and the number of conditions imposed by each one. The number of actors is not usually a difficulty, the number of conditions is. Anderson (1999) explains, '...there is a critical value...below which almost all cases are (rapidly) satisfiable and above which they are almost all unsatisfiable (at whatever length investment is made).'
"We solve the former but immediately give up on the latter. The really difficult problems for computational scientists or for mothers of three children lie in the boundary between possible and impossible, the ones that will take both persistence and cleverness to unravel. We can't walk away from them but we won't solve them easily.
"This kind of dilemma may be older and more important than it first appears: (1) every one of us is different and expresses different interests, (2) alliances allow exchanges that reduce conflict between participants but may increase that within each one of them, and (3) the protocol example translates easily into hunter and gatherer variables such as resource availability and giving each member assignments that match his or her skills. (Not everybody gets to carry a spear!) Solutions become more critical when there are not only competing demands within a group but also competing groups in the same territory. These types of computations are plausible selective pressures for human thought.
"People whose executive functions allow them to manage these decisions should gain in social influence and become a parent to more children that survive to adulthood (Barkley 1997). (Chagnon, 1968, gives an excellent example in the contrasts he drew between the conduct of a Yanomamo chief and that of the more combative, more impulsive males in the village.) Satisfiability problems, thus, could be an important clue as to why a bigger neocortex might be a better neocortex."
Copyright, James Brody, 2006
It's being modified (put into English!) for inclusion in "Rebels, Deviants, and Individualists"
JB
"Satisfiability Problems, Human Decisions, and 'Maybe'
"'...humans...live in families where mothers simultaneously care for multiple young. Closer birth spacing...exacerbated dilemmas confronted by mothers who must then decide on how to allocate resources among dependent young with competing needs' (Hrdy, 1999, pp. 203-204).
----------
"Phase transitions apply to solving problems of group living. Satisfiability (SAT) problems reveal some of them. Hayes (1997) provides the following example of a SAT problem:
'You are chief of protocol for the embassy ball. The crown prince instructs you either to invite Peru or to exclude Qatar. The queen asks you to invite either Qatar or Romania or both. The king, in a spiteful mood, wants to snub either Romania or Peru or both. Is there a guest list that will satisfy the whims of the entire royal family?'
Such problems vary in the number of actors (king, prince, queen) and the number of conditions imposed by each one. The number of actors is not usually a difficulty, the number of conditions is. Anderson (1999) explains, '...there is a critical value...below which almost all cases are (rapidly) satisfiable and above which they are almost all unsatisfiable (at whatever length investment is made).'
"We solve the former but immediately give up on the latter. The really difficult problems for computational scientists or for mothers of three children lie in the boundary between possible and impossible, the ones that will take both persistence and cleverness to unravel. We can't walk away from them but we won't solve them easily.
"This kind of dilemma may be older and more important than it first appears: (1) every one of us is different and expresses different interests, (2) alliances allow exchanges that reduce conflict between participants but may increase that within each one of them, and (3) the protocol example translates easily into hunter and gatherer variables such as resource availability and giving each member assignments that match his or her skills. (Not everybody gets to carry a spear!) Solutions become more critical when there are not only competing demands within a group but also competing groups in the same territory. These types of computations are plausible selective pressures for human thought.
"People whose executive functions allow them to manage these decisions should gain in social influence and become a parent to more children that survive to adulthood (Barkley 1997). (Chagnon, 1968, gives an excellent example in the contrasts he drew between the conduct of a Yanomamo chief and that of the more combative, more impulsive males in the village.) Satisfiability problems, thus, could be an important clue as to why a bigger neocortex might be a better neocortex."
Copyright, James Brody, 2006