Blaine,
I'm actually a "computational" cognitive neuroscientist in so far as I am interested in lies. At the computational core, and why lying is inherent in us, is the computation of predication. This is a pretty deceptive thing because it is probably just an necessary outcome of 'neural network' 'recognition'. 'Recognition' is a good term, but so is 'discrimination' and oddly 'generalization'. Natural Language is just a window on this and reflects the fundamental of how we organize and understand our own knowledge: in terms of predicating this with that. Predication is also 'context'. (The context predicates something and can change its meaning, its truth).
So, in my little computational world, lying is just something we constantly do and compute on to ourselves and investigate as to the truth of what we can imagine.
Numerically, we do predication processing on a massive, increadibly precise, scale in our neocortical brains. In other words, I suspect we have many millions of 'neural networks' (discrimination/generalization/predication) engines going when we just communicate one sentence to each other.
Both in understanding the sentence and creating the new one in response. or not. There are 100,000,000,000 neurons in the neocortex, and 3000+ as many synapses. The simplest sentence will light up 90,000,000 and billons of synapses (these are very rough numbers, we do not know this very precisely.) This is not one neural network, it is many many many neural networks at work on just a few predications we hear or read.
Another fact, provable truth, is that if you can predicate this with that, you can make sense of predicating that with this. The sense will most all the time be very different with rare exception (a cat is a canine and a canine is a cat would be an example where the brain through language sees these as the same meaning, I believe). This is fundamental to how our brains compute.
And it is all incredibly precise and timed down to microseconds ... just like when your brain can correlate the sounds from both your ears to locate the direction much faster and more precisely than the normal 50 millisecond attentional span, similarly for binocular vision, and most important, similar to integrating audo / visual / motor -- catching a ball. To me, this is all predication processing and at its base, you can lie as well as tell the truth. The lies are predicting other outcomes or creating them.
And we can speak them too.
So that is my point of view. I've been writing about this since my first paper on it in 1974.
Thanks for the dialogue. I am very much like Descartes in that I too believe that God does not Lie. My interest is in how the brain computes what it evidently computes, as I can prove with what everybody can observe in their natural language and other measurable, observable, evidence from Cognitive Neuroscience. This is my only interest in lying. I do not 'like' lying except as an object of science, where I find it hugely revealing of how the neocortical (intermodal) brain computes every waking and many sleeping moments of the day on such a massively precise scale and so close to getting the 'truth' right.
The book I wrote on "How to Get Your Lies Back" contains more of the cognitive neuroscience evidence based on recent neuroscience from observations that are much harder to make (e.g., fMRI studies, etc.) and similarly hard computational science (e.g., machine learning and AI). I think that the 'hard' scientists miss the nose in front of their face...the natural language and the fact that is so natural, fast, precise, and correct, and is universally easy for any person can observe directly the natural language he is fluent in understanding and speaking.
The fiat lie category of sentence (any sentence can be a lie) is an cognitive episode where the lie is suspected and you MUST, by the way the brain works, find someone to agree with your understanding before you will 'understand' it as a lie. Someone else will agree with you, or not.
The brain does not have a place where it can ask God what the truth really is. There is no brain organ for that. That is why fiat lies can kill us all.
You might be interested in "Paths of Deceit" which is based on what other science knows about how people deceive themselves through a typical human life and how I would propose, as a machine learning pattern recognition type, to compute such paths based on how the brain computes truth and lies and this real-world flaw in the computation around fiat lies.
Also, I too am a fan of the Hindu Religion, although I am a pretty strong advocate of keeping my agency to myself. Which is only tolerated, but allowed, in Hindu.
NRM: No response necessary. Again, thanks for the conversation. Wish you well.
