| Hurley, Dennett, Adams; Inside Jokes; Using Humor to Reverse Engineer the Mind | |||||
| Book | Page | Topic | |||
| Hurley, Dennett, Adams; Inside Jokes | x | Neural mechanism of Humor | |||
| Hurley, Dennett, Adams; Inside Jokes | 23 | Laughter is neither necessary nor sufficient for humor. | |||
| Hurley, Dennett, Adams; Inside Jokes | 24 | Mirth is the response to humor. | 1 | ||
| Hurley, Dennett, Adams; Inside Jokes | 24 | Mirth -- alternatively called amusement or hilarity -- is, like most emotions, is a graduated phenomenon. It ranges from a gentle tinkling of the mind to an intense and overwhelming emotion. | 0 | ||
| Hurley, Dennett, Adams; Inside Jokes | 27 | Our objective is to understand what humor is and how it operates in the brain. We will first strive to discover the universal features that seem to coincide with a feeling of mirth. | 3 | ||
| Hurley, Dennett, Adams; Inside Jokes | 27 | There is a similarity between the joy of humor and the joy of problem-solving. | 0 | ||
| Hurley, Dennett, Adams; Inside Jokes | 27 | When we "get" a joke, we feel a sense of discovery, rather like the sense of triumph when we solve the problem. | 0 | ||
| Hurley, Dennett, Adams; Inside Jokes | 27 | When we are unable to solve a problem, there is a sense of confusion or missing knowledge that is reminiscent of the feeling we get when we are unable to "get" a joke. | 0 | ||
| Hurley, Dennett, Adams; Inside Jokes | 53 | Surprise theories | 26 | ||
| Hurley, Dennett, Adams; Inside Jokes | 53 | Some theories claim that surprise is at least a necessary feature of humor, if not sufficient. | 0 | ||
| Hurley, Dennett, Adams; Inside Jokes | 53 | Surprise is typically defined as the characteristic emotion caused by something unanticipated. | 0 | ||
| Hurley, Dennett, Adams; Inside Jokes | 54 | What surprises us is not unexpected things, but rather things we expected not to happen, because we expected something else to happen instead. | 1 | ||
| Hurley, Dennett, Adams; Inside Jokes | 61 | It is very hard to see what puns, slapstick, classic comedy, and dirty jokes have in common, aside from being (potentially) funny. | 7 | ||
| Hurley, Dennett, Adams; Inside Jokes | 61 | No topic is intrinsically comic. The content requirement must be something to do with how the content is derived, obscured, used, or misused, i.e. it must be a function of the cognitive processing of the content. | 0 | ||
| Hurley, Dennett, Adams; Inside Jokes | 61 | Since the dynamics is so important, there must be conditions of humor that depend (somehow) on the actual physical, "mechanical" properties of operation of this cognitive processing: the variable speed of processing, the variable rate of increasing arousal, the variable intensity and duration of phases in the processing, etc. | 0 | ||
| Hurley, Dennett, Adams; Inside Jokes | 62 | The innate neural system for cognitive processing of humor must have been retained by evolution to perform some substantially important cognitive task. | 1 | ||
| Hurley, Dennett, Adams; Inside Jokes | 62 | The innate neural system for cognitive processing of humor is ubiquitous in human beings, and its activity is powerfully rewarding. | 0 | ||
| Hurley, Dennett, Adams; Inside Jokes | 67 | We are born curious. We are informavores. Our hunger for novelty derives us to fill our heads with facts we might need someday. | 5 | ||
| Hurley, Dennett, Adams; Inside Jokes | 67 | Humans evolved with a hardwired preference for high energy food. | 0 | ||
| Hurley, Dennett, Adams; Inside Jokes | 67 | Humans are suckers for cuteness. Our perceptual-motivational systems have a bias for infant faces that serves those infants well when they depend on our willingness to give their care and protection a higher priority. | 0 | ||
| Hurley, Dennett, Adams; Inside Jokes | 69 | Emotions have valence; they are positive or negative. | 2 | ||
| Hurley, Dennett, Adams; Inside Jokes | 71 | A number of emotions such as anger, giddiness, or guilt often seem to last uninterruptedly for at least hours, if not days. | 2 | ||
| Hurley, Dennett, Adams; Inside Jokes | 72 | An emotion is an internally induced pleasure or pain -- a valenced perception -- caused by a variety of processes of transduction of information in the world. | 1 | ||
| Hurley, Dennett, Adams; Inside Jokes | 72 | A memory or a thought may awaken a feeling, or a feeling may reference a memory. | 0 | ||
| Hurley, Dennett, Adams; Inside Jokes | 73 | Higher emotions are corporeal feedback systems that provide valenced assessment of contents that do not have direct sensory transducers. | 1 | ||
| Hurley, Dennett, Adams; Inside Jokes | 79 | Boredom has its place in driving us out from cognitive malaise. | 6 | ||
| Hurley, Dennett, Adams; Inside Jokes | 79 | Curiosity inspires our cognitive apparatus into detailed exertions surrounding particular as-of-yet unexplained irregularities. | 0 | ||
| Hurley, Dennett, Adams; Inside Jokes | 84 | Behavior is driven principally by a reward system that, while perhaps neurologically complicated, is phenomenalologically comprised simply of the passions. | 5 | ||
| Hurley, Dennett, Adams; Inside Jokes | 97 | Theorists of cognition have long postulated various mental structures -- frames, scripts, schemas -- designed to render learning and comprehension more efficient. | 13 | ||
| Hurley, Dennett, Adams; Inside Jokes | 97 | A mental space is a region of working memory where activated concepts and percepts are semantically connected into a holistic situational comprehension model. | 0 | ||
| Hurley, Dennett, Adams; Inside Jokes | 97 | Frames, scripts, and schemas or other idealized cognitive models can be thought of as data structures resident in long-term memory and ready to use whenever needed. | 0 | ||
| Hurley, Dennett, Adams; Inside Jokes | 97 | Mental spaces are constructed during comprehension tasks as well as doing abstract and creative thought. | 0 | ||
| Hurley, Dennett, Adams; Inside Jokes | 97 | Conceptual blending in which spaces are combined through mappings to provide creative, comprehensible combinations in thought, maintaining separate referents in multiple spaces. | 0 | ||
| Hurley, Dennett, Adams; Inside Jokes | 98 | In a complex mind, such as a modern non-infantile human mind, mental spaces act as containers that delineate regions of thought. This is what enables us to daydream while watching a movie and keep both separate from each other, as well as separate from our ongoing sense of reality. | 1 | ||
| Hurley, Dennett, Adams; Inside Jokes | 98 | Studies of attention indicate that perhaps only one mental space can be active at a time, but that we may quickly and with little effort slip back-and-forth between them. | 0 | ||
| Hurley, Dennett, Adams; Inside Jokes | 99 | Humans regularly predict the meaning of an ambiguous sentence fragment and then readjust that mental space as disambiguating information arrives. | 1 | ||
| Hurley, Dennett, Adams; Inside Jokes | 99 | As each word in a sentence arrives, the mental space is built incrementally and augmented to model the full set of data then available. | 0 | ||
| Hurley, Dennett, Adams; Inside Jokes | 99 | Not just sentence comprehension but also the situation and event comprehension operate incrementally in a unified continuous system. | 0 | ||
| Hurley, Dennett, Adams; Inside Jokes | 99 | Comprehension is always accomplished by a "holistic" attempt to integrate the information from all sources that has arrived in the brain up until that point. When further information (from any semantic source) arrives that can disambiguate an earlier piece of information, the model is adjusted accordingly. | 0 | ||
| Hurley, Dennett, Adams; Inside Jokes | 99 | During the process of comprehension, the mind does not wait passively until it has "enough" information in a buffer to complete the disambiguation of what it has so far received but rather attempts to disambiguate by assumption until proven otherwise. | 0 | ||
| Hurley, Dennett, Adams; Inside Jokes | 99 | The predictions involved in building sentence comprehension may be "educated" assumptions due to quite explicit noticing of a telling feature, local priming that makes one possibility appear more likely than another, or they may be due to a subliminally learned statistical regularity that suggests the likelihood of one meaning rather than another. | 0 | ||
| Hurley, Dennett, Adams; Inside Jokes | 101 | The term "spreading activation" has been used somewhat loosely among modelers in cognitive science because the notion can be applied to many kinds of models. | 2 | ||
| Hurley, Dennett, Adams; Inside Jokes | 101 | We are going to use a model of just-in-time spreading activation (JITSA) -- a process that can account for intuitions and approximate the structure of frames without requiring their existence as fundamental entities. | 0 | ||
| Hurley, Dennett, Adams; Inside Jokes | 101 | Initial semantic contents are activated by sensation in working memory mental spaces, and the process of perception and any deeper thought ensue from the diffuse triggering of related semantic contents and interference patterns therein. | 0 | ||
| Hurley, Dennett, Adams; Inside Jokes | 101 | Researchers don't yet know how to implement in neural structures a system of JITSA that can detect contradictions or even maintain enough consistency to be a reliable updatable store of world knowledge. | 0 | ||
| Hurley, Dennett, Adams; Inside Jokes | 101 | We are assuming at this time that the brain's functional architecture will prove to bear a useful resemblance to the JITSA system model. | 0 | ||
| Hurley, Dennett, Adams; Inside Jokes | 101 | Taking inspiration from a wide variety of exploratory work in cognitive science, we are supposing that the brain can be modeled as a JITSA system with the information handling capacities we describe, and then looking at how humor could emerge from such a system. | 0 | ||
| Hurley, Dennett, Adams; Inside Jokes | 101 | Borrowing a term from software engineering, "just-in-time (JIT) processing" is an economic model of processing (or thought) in which computation is not performed until the moment it needs to be, i.e. on-demand. | 0 | ||
| Hurley, Dennett, Adams; Inside Jokes | 102 | People generate a bounty of pertinent anticipations about the world. | 1 | ||
| Hurley, Dennett, Adams; Inside Jokes | 102 | Experiences we have at hand are the result of current situation-pertinent thought or recollections of other pertinent-at-the-time thoughts each of which are the result of JITSA. | 0 | ||
| Hurley, Dennett, Adams; Inside Jokes | 102 | We expect future events to fall in line with our experiences and with such inferential anticipations as we have had occasion to create now or during historical comprehension of events. | 0 | ||
| Hurley, Dennett, Adams; Inside Jokes | 102 | Thanks to evolution by natural selection, expectations created by JITSA happen to be, on the whole, the most relevant anticipations, out of an infinite space of logically possible thoughts. | 0 | ||
| Hurley, Dennett, Adams; Inside Jokes | 102 | The relevance of anticipations follows for the simple reason that these anticipations are most applicable to precisely the environment from which they have drawn. | 0 | ||
| Hurley, Dennett, Adams; Inside Jokes | 102 | Just-in-time processing can be performed piecemeal, in keeping with the comprehension of data. | 0 | ||
| Hurley, Dennett, Adams; Inside Jokes | 102 | We think of a functional near-equivalents of frames being grown by JITSA in a large network of meaningful nodes. | 0 | ||
| Hurley, Dennett, Adams; Inside Jokes | 102 | Via probabilities and associations already incorporated into the strengths and proximities in the network, the spreading activation has the capacity to take on the functional structure of a particular instantiation of a frame, with chains of nested conditional probabilities. | 0 | ||
| Hurley, Dennett, Adams; Inside Jokes | 103 | The speed created by the parallel processing of spreading JIT activations in the brain causes an illusion of cognitive completeness in working memory, or frame illusion, as we might call it. | 1 | ||
| Hurley, Dennett, Adams; Inside Jokes | 103 | The frame illusion is due to the simple fact that comprehension, thought, and recall happened so fast that we seem to have instantaneous access to a number of elements about any situation or thought as if all the details are already actively loaded into working memory. | 0 | ||
| Hurley, Dennett, Adams; Inside Jokes | 103 | In reality, some details will be strongly activated, some will be on the fringe, and some details will not be activated at all. Yet, all of these things are instantly accessible upon the slightest inquiry because of the capacity for JIT activation. | 0 | ||
| Hurley, Dennett, Adams; Inside Jokes | 104 | The JITSA model provides a foundation for the interfaces of cognition that are necessary for humor. | 1 | ||
| Hurley, Dennett, Adams; Inside Jokes | 104 | A belief is a commitment to a fact about the world. | 0 | ||
| Hurley, Dennett, Adams; Inside Jokes | 105 | Working memory beliefs are the most important beliefs -- these are the contents of mental spaces. | 1 | ||
| Hurley, Dennett, Adams; Inside Jokes | 105 | Long-term memory beliefs are better seen as acquired dispositions to have particular active working memory beliefs. | 0 | ||
| Hurley, Dennett, Adams; Inside Jokes | 105 | We have learned things in our lives that dispose us to a likelihood of activating certain beliefs in working memory under certain circumstances of spreading activation. | 0 | ||
| Hurley, Dennett, Adams; Inside Jokes | 105 | Consider long-term memory as a sort of surrogate world; just as the external world is a vast source of information that, thanks to our sensory systems, triggers active beliefs when attended to, so long-term memory is a source of additional information, not currently perceivable in the external world but readily available on-demand. | 0 | ||
| Hurley, Dennett, Adams; Inside Jokes | 106 | To be surprised by something, it must have been unexpected. | 1 | ||
| Hurley, Dennett, Adams; Inside Jokes | 111 | A committed belief in working memory is likely to become a committed belief in long-term memory. | 5 | ||
| Hurley, Dennett, Adams; Inside Jokes | 111 | A committed belief in long-term memory is a disposition to construct future active beliefs and use those contents in acts of reasoning. | 0 | ||
| Hurley, Dennett, Adams; Inside Jokes | 111 | Allowing this ballooning process of committed beliefs between long-term memory and working memory to continue unchecked when one of our committed beliefs just ain't so, can generate a cascade of false beliefs resulting in a substantially faulty world representation. | 0 | ||
| Hurley, Dennett, Adams; Inside Jokes | 111 | The information we ultimately remember from an experience is not a high-resolution copy of the experience, however vivid it may have been, but rather a low-resolution transformation of the experience in which much of the original context has been lost to compression. | 0 | ||
| Hurley, Dennett, Adams; Inside Jokes | 111 | If recall leaves out contextual information, debugging an error later discovered in a descendent belief becomes difficult. | 0 | ||
| Hurley, Dennett, Adams; Inside Jokes | 111 | Try to catch false beliefs before they become compressively encoded, while we still have the context to work on them, and before we end up with a disposition to reactivate that false belief. | 0 | ||
| Hurley, Dennett, Adams; Inside Jokes | 111 | Evolution has provided ways to avoid false beliefs by exploiting our epistemic emotions. | 0 | ||
| Hurley, Dennett, Adams; Inside Jokes | 111 | Confusion helps us to detect conflicts in working memory, thus casting doubt upon the conflicting beliefs and allowing them to be expeditiously reviewed for repair. | 0 | ||
| Hurley, Dennett, Adams; Inside Jokes | 111 | Detecting an improper commitment before it has a chance to create a long-term memory belief can protect us from the whole string of faulty inferences. | 0 | ||
| Hurley, Dennett, Adams; Inside Jokes | 111 | Proposed as the original purpose of humor -- the very important task that pays for its expensive reward system by protecting us from epistemic catastrophe. | 0 | ||
| Hurley, Dennett, Adams; Inside Jokes | 112 | Conflict and Resolution | 1 | ||
| Hurley, Dennett, Adams; Inside Jokes | 112 | We kill it just is a conflict when there is a contradiction between active belief elements in working memory. | 0 | ||
| Hurley, Dennett, Adams; Inside Jokes | 112 | Conflicts between beliefs in long-term memory can lie dormant side by side, unrecognized. | 0 | ||
| Hurley, Dennett, Adams; Inside Jokes | 112 | It is only went conflicts in long-term memory can be brought into the same working memory space -- awakened, not transported -- that two beliefs can participate and epistemic conflict. | 0 | ||
| Hurley, Dennett, Adams; Inside Jokes | 112 | Three possible outcomes to an epistemic conflict. | 0 | ||
| Hurley, Dennett, Adams; Inside Jokes | 112 | In unresolved conflicts we find ourselves confused and both pieces of information are stored with the conflict between them noted, such that recollecting one of the beliefs will rather easily often bring its uncertainty and the other conflicting beliefs to mind. | 0 | ||
| Hurley, Dennett, Adams; Inside Jokes | 112 | In cooperative resolution we may find a way to accept the truth of both beliefs through a creative insight that dissolves an apparent contradiction into a compatibility. | 0 | ||
| Hurley, Dennett, Adams; Inside Jokes | 112 | In uncooperative resolution, one of the beliefs will survive while the other is destroyed. | 0 | ||
| Hurley, Dennett, Adams; Inside Jokes | 112 | Any two beliefs, no matter how they were originally derived, may participate in a conflict, but getting them to participate in the conflict is often the outcome of hard work -- or luck. | 0 | ||
| Hurley, Dennett, Adams; Inside Jokes | 112 | A whole society can be blissfully ignorant of the contradictions harbored in their "common knowledge" until some reflective and industrious thinker rubs their noses in the quandary -- or some chance event draws everyone's attention to the problem. | 0 | ||
| Hurley, Dennett, Adams; Inside Jokes | 112 | We each have our own scientific agenda: rooting out and fixing the residual conflicts in our personal world knowledge. | 0 | ||
| Hurley, Dennett, Adams; Inside Jokes | 117 | Mirth is the pleasure in unearthing a particular variety of mistake in active belief structures. | 5 | ||
| Hurley, Dennett, Adams; Inside Jokes | 117 | Basic humor is any semantic circumstance in which we make a mistake in active belief structures and succeed in discovering the mistake. | 0 | ||
| Hurley, Dennett, Adams; Inside Jokes | 118 | The incessant generation of mental spaces in the course of our daily lives appears to us to be effortless and automatic and, indeed, involuntary. | 1 | ||
| Hurley, Dennett, Adams; Inside Jokes | 118 | JITSA constructs framed-like structures on the fly, with all their accumulated baggage, and these temporary data structures contribute efficiently to our sense of what is happening, and, more importantly, our sense of what is about to happen. | 0 | ||
| Hurley, Dennett, Adams; Inside Jokes | 118 | It is only the information that gets introduced covertly -- without drawing attention to itself on arrival -- into the mental space whose discovery elicits mirth. | 0 | ||
| Hurley, Dennett, Adams; Inside Jokes | 119 | Accumulation of "world knowledge" is an opportunistic process that includes plenty of unnoticed inclusions -- i.e. items that are not consciously considered and accepted. | 1 | ||
| Hurley, Dennett, Adams; Inside Jokes | 121 | Humor is what happens when an assumption is epistemically committed to in a mental space and then discovered to have been a mistake. | 2 | ||
| Hurley, Dennett, Adams; Inside Jokes | 122 | The epistemic emotions all share a similar ineffable quality of being mental feelings -- but mirth and discovery are particularly similar, in being the two most familiar positively valenced members of this class of emotions. | 1 | ||
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