Why the Law of Effect Will Not Go Away

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The lines he pulled

“the Law of Effect is not just a good idea, but the only possible good idea for this job. There is something right in this conviction, I want to maintain, but what is wrong in it has had an ironic result.”

p.172 · underlined where the margin called “Here comes ‘the turn’”

“Mutations equipped with such benign inner environments would have a distinct survival advantage… for trial and error learning is not only tedious; it can be dangerous… it ‘permits our hypotheses to die in our stead’.”

p.175 · Popper recognized on sight — “I know that guy LOL”

“Ultimately of course it is environmental effects that are the measure of adaptivity and the mainspring of learning, but the environment can delegate its selective function to something in the organism (just as death had earlier delegated its selective function to pain).”

p.176 · the passage where Natural Selection 2.0 was coined

“the Latin verb cogito is derived, as St. Augustine tell us, from Latin words meaning to shake together, while the verb intelligo means to select among. The Romans, it seems, knew what they were talking about.”

p.187 · the last underline of the read

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The read, page by page

p.169

A(sort of) Creating an idea/potential hierarchy for what most inspires + addresses the market directly. — Valéry's combinations-and-chooser passage, read as market-fit filtering before the essay even starts arguing.

p.171

BIt is what it is/it works this way — Effect stems from simple maladaptive/neutral genes getting boxed out of mating = the womb level simplicity. — Darwin's mechanistic principle in basketball idiom.

p.172

AClosing all loops is important to the author. — Dennett's care against question-begging read as a craft trait; the margin tracks HOW he argues, not just what.

p.174

AAnd we lowkey see this in America today with social reproduction of class/status based on ethnicity, two parent home, education/college disparity etc. — selection-endowed reinforcement transposed onto sociology.

p.175

BIt goes from energy chain mixed with behaviorialism to internal monologue that plays itself out in that jungle creating the eventual chain. — the whole essay compressed at the Popper line: the inner environment as the jungle where candidate actions fight so the organism doesn't have to.

p.176

ARationale choice to then trial & error through something, learn by demonstration or collaborate to stay alive = evolution/Natural selection 2.0. — the coinage, at the delegation passage.
★JAB CITY. — at Dennett throwing hands at the “classical” peripheralists mid-argument.

p.177

AKinda silly but memory, adaptive problem solving, & critical reflection/teaching generations after are how I take the layers. — the learn-to-learn tongue-twister remapped; the third layer, transmission, is his own addition beyond the text.

p.179

BSort of like log, log, log, bank, SPRINT, evaluate, log, log, SPRINT, never any in between. — generate-and-test recognized as his own operating cadence; the essay's closing Valéry callback lands on the exact passage his first margin annotated.

p.181

BHomunculi/generate & test I am envisioning as trying to cut the cue ball in pool a certain way/approach an off-the-wall with some touch, and if it doesn't work it is one game & you can always clear the table. — heuristics made physical: the rack is the hypothesis, you are never the thing that dies.

p.182

DThe Ultimate ‘V2’ definition. — at learning defined as self-design: putting out V2 of yourself, the product as the proof.

p.183

CSo like the Hiedegger sort of ‘placer’ of, or framer/contextualizer, of reality — idea carried through. — the inner selector recognized as Entry 1's organizers, in a text read two days after publishing.

p.184

BThe tool itself is moving the thinkers/scientists themselves forward along this evolutionary principle. — at the cognitivists expecting AI to pay their debts; the Extension Era thesis, waiting in 1975.
Cie picking between two bits of code/mulling a verdict in a table after the homunculi or scenario prompt is completed. — the intelligent homunculi located in his own daily workflow.

p.185

BI'm envisioning VH1 ‘behind the music’ for bands that don't get along — where the singer is a selector of another persons written lyrics as to what goes in an album v song. — the producer/chooser trade-off cast as band documentary.

p.186

BTo see how your internal store is cleared/working memory is cleared after nibbing on an output — this time you are voyering the gears running autonomously in your mind as opposed to being a rational, controlling actor/agent. — Poincaré's introspective glimpse, rebuilt in the first person.
CCrediting Mother Nature solely for being the driving force behind our actions challenges self actualization/control over art outputs, ultimately ego of creator. — the affront to self-esteem, named precisely.

Structure is scaffold; every quoted line is his, verbatim from the annotated pages across both sittings. A handful of margin words remain garble-flagged in the decode (nibbing/nibbling, ego of/as) and are carried as written rather than guessed at.

The environment can delegate its selective function to something in the organism.D. C. Dennett · Why the Law of Effect Will Not Go Away · 1975

Where the margins reached

The lines he pulled

The read, page by page