Oddly Influenced

Brian Marick

A podcast about how people have applied ideas from outside software to software.

  1. E52: Emotions as concepts

    JUN 20

    E52: Emotions as concepts

    An elaboration on episode 49's description of the brain as a prediction engine, focusing on a theory of what emotions are, how they're learned, and how emotional experiences are constructed. Emotions like anger and fear turn out to be not that different from concepts like money or bicycle, except that the brain attends more to internal sensations than to external perceptions. If the predictive brain theory is true, the brain is stranger than we imagine; perhaps stranger than we can imagine. Main sources Lisa Feldman Barrett, "The theory of constructed emotion: an active inference account of interoception and categorization," Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 2017.Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain, 2017.Andy Clark, The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality, 2024.Other sources "... Chemero’s approach in his book Radical Embodied Cognitive Science (episode 43)...""... Clark suggests something like this in his 1997 book, Being There, covered in the unnumbered episode just before episode 41...""... Remember how, last episode, I distinctly remember driving seated on the left side of the car while in Ireland..."George A Miller, “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on our Capacity for Processing Information,” 1956. ("... replicating an experiment from 1949...")Credits Picture of the University of Illinois Auditorium is from Vince Smith and is licensed CC BY 2.0. It was cropped.

    33 min
  2. E45: The offloaded brain, part 5: I propose a software design style

    12/31/2023

    E45: The offloaded brain, part 5: I propose a software design style

    In this episode, I ask the question: what would a software design style inspired by ecological and embodied cognition be like? I sketch some tentative ideas. I plan to explore this further at nh.oddly-influenced.dev, a blog that will document an app I'm beginning to write. In my implementation, I plan to use Erlang-style "processes" (actors) as the core building block. Many software design heuristics are (implicitly) intended to avoid turning the app into a Big Ball of Mud. Evolution is not "interested" in the future, but rather in how to add new behaviors while minimizing their metabolic cost. That's similar to, but not the same as, "Big O" efficiency, perhaps because the constant factors dominate. The question I'd like to explore is: what would be a design style that accommodates both my need to have a feeling of intellectual control and looks toward biological plausibility to make design, refactoring, and structuring decisions? Sources Andy Clark, Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again, 1997Ray Naylor, The Mountain in the Sea, 2022Erlang processes (explained using Elixir syntax)Mentioned Brian Foote and Joseph Yoder, "Big Ball of Mud", 1999TetrisIllinoisNew HampshirePrior workWhat I'm wanting to do is something like what the more extreme of the Extreme Programmers did. I'm thinking of Keith Braithwaite’s “test-driven design as if you meant it” (also, also, also) or Corey Haines’s “Global Day of Code Retreat” exercises (also). I mentioned those in early versions of this episode's script. They got cut, but I feel bad that I didn't acknowledge prior work. CreditsThe image is an Ophanim. These entities (note the eyes) were seen by the prophet Ezekiel. They are popularly considered to be angels or something like them, and they're why the phrase "wheels within wheels" is popular. I used the phrase when describing neural activation patterns that are nested within other patterns. The image was retrieved from Wikimedia Commons and was created by user RootOfAllLight, CC BY-SA 4.0.

    38 min
5
out of 5
6 Ratings

About

A podcast about how people have applied ideas from outside software to software.