Well now I pretty much have to read the series. Jaynes gave a talk to my graduate class not long after his book came out. Made a lasting impression on me. And I still have the book.
However, in his book I Am a Strange Loop, Douglas Hofstadter describes in a pretty moving way the conversations he has with his dead wife. Humans have "mirror neurons," which allow us to copy individual behaviors of other humans. This is useful in the short term, because it enables us to learn through observation as well as through trial and error.
Hofstadter takes this concept further, to suggest that over the years he knew his wife, his memories of her coalesced into a mental model, a copy of her personality that he carries around in his own brain. At first it was fuzzy and not very useful for predicting her behavior, but as he learned more about her, the model grew in detail and sophistication. After her death, he continued to interact intensively with that internal model, asking its advice on raising their children and generally treating it as though it were a person, keeping those memories alive and vivid.
Sorry I haven’t read your whole series, so maybe you’ve mentioned tulpas or tulpamancy. It if not, you would find it interesting.
I think it was mentioned in one of the earlier essays ;)
Well now I pretty much have to read the series. Jaynes gave a talk to my graduate class not long after his book came out. Made a lasting impression on me. And I still have the book.
https://www.mentalhealth.com/blog/decoding-the-voices-of-schizophrenia#:~:text=Where%20Do%20These%20Voices%20Come,it%20can%20be%20deeply%20disturbing.
However, in his book I Am a Strange Loop, Douglas Hofstadter describes in a pretty moving way the conversations he has with his dead wife. Humans have "mirror neurons," which allow us to copy individual behaviors of other humans. This is useful in the short term, because it enables us to learn through observation as well as through trial and error.
Hofstadter takes this concept further, to suggest that over the years he knew his wife, his memories of her coalesced into a mental model, a copy of her personality that he carries around in his own brain. At first it was fuzzy and not very useful for predicting her behavior, but as he learned more about her, the model grew in detail and sophistication. After her death, he continued to interact intensively with that internal model, asking its advice on raising their children and generally treating it as though it were a person, keeping those memories alive and vivid.
http://www.intergalacticmedicineshow.com/cgi-bin/mag.cgi?do=columns&vol=randall_hayes&article=001