[HN Gopher] The disunity of consciousness in everyday experience
___________________________________________________________________
The disunity of consciousness in everyday experience
Author : Hooke
Score : 135 points
Date : 2024-09-10 21:02 UTC (5 days ago)
(HTM) web link (schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com)
| potatoman22 wrote:
| TL;DR: Our experiences aren't as unified as we might think.
| Introspection might create a false sense of unity between
| concurrent experiences. Basically, we might not be as "conscious"
| as we believe in our day-to-day lives.
| hwhwhwhhwhwh wrote:
| 99.99% of the human population is in sleep mode. Zoning out
| constantly. Once you became awake, everyday experiences starts
| to become beautiful and a bit magical. Also you start to ponder
| more on your awareness and topics like eternity, god, death etc
| come to your focus than make believe stuff like careers,
| identity, nationality, opinions shared in tweets, the story you
| have about your life etc. Also a once atheist you starts to
| immediately understand the religious teachings.
|
| It's hard to understand this statement if you are not awake. I
| would have down voted this before the shift happened for me :)
| semitones wrote:
| How do I wake up and escape the matrix? Please teach us
| master
| hwhwhwhhwhwh wrote:
| It happened to me by chance. But I was seeking it. I think
| the journey has just started for me. It has its own
| challenges. But waking up with Sam Harris is probably a
| good place to start. I don't think it's also for everyone.
| Life became easy day to day but became more challenging in
| terms of purpose etc as ego dies.
| namero999 wrote:
| The work of George Gurdjieff is precisely about this.
| kukkeliskuu wrote:
| I second the G.I. Gurdjieff recommendation, but maybe
| start with any one of the books of "Psychological
| commentaries" by Nicoll, or "In search of the miraculous"
| by Ouspensky.
| bbor wrote:
| Heh, relevant XKCD... as always: https://xkcd.com/610/
| hwhwhwhhwhwh wrote:
| Lol
| soulofmischief wrote:
| > Also a once atheist you starts to immediately understand
| the religious teachings
|
| I ponder the topics you mention and at no point did I feel
| compelled to radically retool my life around 2000 year old
| religious documents which themselves have clear lineage to
| even older, less-informed belief systems.
| hwhwhwhhwhwh wrote:
| That's okay. I didn't decide to ponder the religious
| teachings. After the shift I immediately started to
| understand the teachings that I once thought was primitive
| and irrelevant. They all point to the same thing. It's hard
| to understand what they are pointing to without knowing or
| experiencing it. Read a bit about perennial philosophy. But
| it's a bit like telling to blind person what colors are. It
| will not make sense till you see.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| Less abstractly and more concretely: What do they point
| to? What are you claiming is the unifying deep truth
| beneath the surface of all religious texts? What
| heuristic is used to differentiate a text as religious
| versus the babblings of a schizophrenic?
|
| I was raised Catholic, by a deacon, and have a deep
| understanding of Judeo-Christian religions, and have
| studied to a lesser extent several world religions. What
| am I missing?
| hwhwhwhhwhwh wrote:
| This is a good video which explains this. Love to hear
| what you understood and if you disagree your reasoning
| behind it.
|
| https://youtu.be/hw47wwOUjuY?si=dXFG_fYOBqJURPcQ
| kukkeliskuu wrote:
| I am just a student of these things myself so take
| everything I say with a grain of salt. But based on your
| question and my own experience, it seems that you are
| approaching religion in the same way I was doing --
| intellectually.
|
| That is natural, but the problem is that our intellect is
| quite limited. You would like to have a description of
| "the unifying deep truth". But even very simple
| experience, like how strawberry tastes like, cannot be
| transmitted by words and comprehended by the intellect.
| How could we transmit something vastly more complex even
| if we knew it -- and I am not claiming I do.
|
| So I would say what you are missing is the direct
| experience of something higher. Seek and you will find.
| hwhwhwhhwhwh wrote:
| Also in schizophrenia you see/hear things that are not
| seen by others in material world.
|
| Spirituality does not contradict with what others
| experience in material world.
|
| You just start identifying more with consciousness and
| less with the body. That's the shift.
|
| And if you also think about it scientifically it makes
| sense.
|
| You are consciousness experiencing the world.
|
| Not the body experiencing consciousness.
|
| You are consciousness
|
| Not the body.
|
| The body ages. The cells changes. You remains. The
| consciousness sees the body.
| thrance wrote:
| Your statement is hard to understand because it claims
| nothing and is extremely pretentious, of course it gets
| downvoted.
|
| What you describe is akin to Camus's Absurd, but you chose to
| fill in the weirdness of existence with some kind of
| spirituality. That's your choice. Please don't go around
| claiming to be morally superior to "99.99%" of all humans on
| earth.
| hwhwhwhhwhwh wrote:
| When did I make the claim I am morally superior? I just
| said most humans are in sleep mode. Even if I said that
| it's pointless. It's just a belief and not truth.
|
| Also as I said in other comments till you experience a
| shift none of this makes sense to you. That's okay.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| Ram Dass fully covered this in much more depth:
|
| " I will work on myself, since the work on myself is going to be
| the highest thing I can do for it all, since I understand that as
| man up-levels his own consciousness, he sees more creative
| solutions to the problems that he's confronting. Therefore, it
| always feeds back to the same place. But working on myself is
| just like this. This is social action at the moment."
|
| https://www.ramdass.org/increasing-amount-consciousness/
|
| Here's a (fairly) long lecture with Q&A demonstrating as such:
|
| https://youtu.be/LCiB9oMnIbI?si=yr5ldw8JrkQ7iQtS
| theptip wrote:
| The Buddhist take here would be that when you actually hone your
| attention, introspection reveals not a unified consciousness but
| a stream of discrete events: thought, visual perception, tactile,
| tactile, thought,...
|
| The default is to not have enough resolution to perceive the
| edges.
|
| Under this view, the unification is an illusion or an appearance,
| analogously to how we perceive fluorescent lights to be
| continuous even though they are actually flickering on and off at
| a high rate. The difference being, our eyes have a hardware limit
| on temporal resolution, whereas for attention the relevant limit
| here is just "software".
| neom wrote:
| For anyone curious to explore this, I recommend sunyata, and
| particularly looking in the Madhyamaka philosophy of Nagarjuna.
| wanderingbort wrote:
| How do you know whether the discrete events are a more
| fundamental representation vs a higher level representation
| that your training and discipline produces?
| laserlight wrote:
| You don't. Everything is mental fabrication, including
| calling some mental fabrications illusion. You train your
| mind to fabricate things that you prefer. Whether they are
| more fundamental or higher-level representations doesn't
| matter.
| theptip wrote:
| It's a great question. I have come up with two answers
| (though I am far from an expert):
|
| 1) this is empirically verifiable; just do an RCT where you
| teach people a meditation technique for attention without
| prompting, and see what they observe. (I have heard comments
| from aspiring meditators like "I tried meditating but after a
| while I could not find "the breath" because it broke apart
| into a stream of individual sensations") - but I do worry
| that techniques like "noting" smuggle in an atomizing
| assumption, whereas other techniques like whole-body
| perception or Metta might lead you to a more unifying
| viewpoint if practiced exclusively.
|
| 2) maybe it doesn't matter if it's "more fundamental"; if you
| wire your brain to deeply believe that it is, then a bunch of
| positive effects occur, and that's the goal of the whole
| exercise. The words "this is more fundamental" are just a cue
| to help you to shift. This feels less palatable to me but I
| haven't seen the rewards, and if they were as good as
| promised maybe this would be justified.
|
| Anyway, I'm not sure many Buddhists would endorse 2), even
| among the secular / non-religious/ scientific minority of the
| community.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| Well, that doesn't capture the whole story. If I punch your
| leg, you experience these "discrete" events simultaneously: the
| feeling of being punched, the sound of being punched, the
| visual phenomenon of me punching you.
|
| Your brain uses a combination of signal delay and
| anticipation/prediction in order to create a seamless
| experience that holds until the temporal discrepancy between
| events is too large. So there is some cyclic, recursive element
| to consciousness which is not adequately explained by a linear
| stream of discrete events.
| theptip wrote:
| Indeed, there is some more detail around attention
| (foreground) vs. awareness (background), but the claim really
| is that in your foreground attention there can only be one
| object at a time. In your example the three sense modalities
| would occur sequentially in consciousness, and the rapidity
| would make you think they were simultaneous.
|
| But I think what you're also getting at is that "object of
| attention" can be a surprisal signal from different layers,
| which I think must be true, and I do agree is something that
| needs to be accounted for. I didn't go deep enough to speak
| to what Dharma theory would say about this.
| geye1234 wrote:
| The trouble with this idea is that, if there is no unity to the
| thoughts whatsoever -- as some seem to say -- then any kind of
| rational thought is impossible.
|
| If there is no unity to the thoughts, then there is no single
| principle that unites the thoughts. If there is no single
| principle that unites them, then there is no single, unchanging
| person having them. If there is no unchanging person having the
| thoughts, then there is no connection between the thoughts. If
| there is no connection between the thoughts, then there is
| "right" or "wrong" relationship between the thoughts.
|
| This makes all logical thought impossible, and means there
| cannot be correct or incorrect thinking.
|
| But if this is the case, then any argument in favour of the
| position just outlined -- or any other, contrary position -- is
| neither right nor wrong. So everything becomes absurd.
|
| (I don't think this is what the OP link is saying, btw -- he
| may think that, but his argument seems to discuss experience
| rather than ontology.)
| sctb wrote:
| > This makes all logical thought impossible, and means there
| cannot be correct or incorrect thinking.
|
| No, this is conflating paradigms. If this were true, you
| would expect the same Buddhist texts not to mention "right"
| and "wrong", and boy do they ever.
| skeks6272 wrote:
| That's Hume and it is indeed devastating. Only Kant had an
| answer, but not everyone likes it.
|
| Simple things like causality break down if you consider
| events to be discrete and unconnected. I believe modern AI
| research could do with someone (re)thinking some of this
| stuff.
|
| Kant has a solution, but it requires letting go of ever
| knowing True Reality(tm).
| theptip wrote:
| > If there is no unity to the thoughts, then there is no
| single principle that unites the thoughts.
|
| Not sure what this means. Buddhists would say "everything is
| a formation"
|
| > If there is no single principle that unites them, then
| there is no single, unchanging person having them.
|
| This is the core teaching of Buddhism, so we can just start
| from here.
|
| > If there is no unchanging person having the thoughts, then
| there is no connection between the thoughts
|
| This is a non-sequitur. In the Buddhist view, each thought or
| mental moment is conditioned upon the previous one(s).
|
| There is nothing in "logical thought", or even
| illogical/emotional thought that logically requires a self.
| Thoughts can arise, like pure functions operating on their
| inputs, and returning some output into the global workspace.
| Subsequent thoughts can compose those previous ones, or
| consume new sense percepts that are emitted by the sense
| organs.
|
| Now as a matter of empirical fact this model could be wrong,
| but I don't think your attempt to disprove it with logic
| succeeds.
| geye1234 wrote:
| Thought can't be reduced to a sequence of states, or
| functions acting on each other. I've tried to explain why
| in some other comments on HN. But let's grant that it can
| be so reduced for the sake of argument. I think even then,
| your position is impossible.
|
| >> If there is no unchanging person having the thoughts,
| then there is no connection between the thoughts
|
| > This is a non-sequitur.
|
| You're right, I apologise. I should replace 'person' with
| 'thing' -- then it ceases to be a non-sequitur. I'll try to
| explain why:
|
| > Thoughts can arise, like pure functions operating on
| their inputs, and returning some output into the global
| workspace.
|
| This presupposes unity. Suppose, in case A, the thought
| "2+2" leads to the further thought "4". Let's suppose,
| further, that this is the case of a pure function operating
| on its input ("2+2") and returning the output ("4").
|
| Suppose, in case B, exactly the same, but it returns the
| output "5".
|
| I assume we agree that A is correct and B is incorrect.
|
| You can affirm that the content of case A has some kind of
| unity underlying it, or you can deny it. (We could argue
| about the precise nature of the unity, but let us simply
| say that it is _some kind_ of unity.) If you deny it, then
| you must say that there is no connection between 2+2 and 4.
| Connection presupposes something that connects. If there is
| no connection, then there is nothing that makes case A
| correct. That obviously undermines the possibility of any
| argumentation or logical thoughts. Alternatively, you can
| affirm the proposition. I think your position requires you
| affirm it, because by positing any kind of sequence, or
| function operating on an input and returning an output, you
| are positing unity. A sequence of any kind has a unity to
| it, otherwise it wouldn 't be a sequence.
|
| So in positing a sequence, you're positing unity. And in
| positing unity, you're positing something that unites, and
| that is different from that which is united. Such a thing
| must _change_ from having the thought "2+2" to the thought
| "4", but it must _persist_ as something underlying these
| changes in order for the changes to have any unity, and
| therefore for the arithmetic to have any coherence.
|
| So we must logically get to the existence of something that
| persists while changing.
|
| Obviously we could argue about _what_ that thing is --
| specifically, whether it 's a person. We could also argue
| about _when_ it comes in and goes out of existence. But the
| fact _that_ there is a thing that persists in one sense,
| even as it changes in another, is all I 'm trying to
| demonstrate here. I think once that's demonstrated, the
| position you're arguing is undermined.
| enugu wrote:
| Discreteness doesn't imply there is no relation in the
| sequence. For instance, consider a processor in a robot
| processing sensations at clock cycle speed.
|
| The memory chip or processor cores or software cant be used
| as a basis for unity, because a relation between successive
| elements of the sequence is not the same as there being an
| underlying unity as all parts can be individually swapped out
| in upgrades (like in the Ship of Theseus).
|
| Buddhist vipassana descriptions use the analogy of seeing a
| line of ants - From afar, they look like a single black line,
| but on going nearby one sees the discrete nature. Similarly,
| on becoming adept at mind noting practice, one can see
| thoughts/sensations this way.
|
| (Not saying that I agree with the above take, as I do think
| there is an underlying consciouness which gives unity, but
| here I am attempting to steelman the argument. Also, as you
| indicate, the original article is talking about a different
| aspect - unity at a single time vs unity across moments, and
| a discussion of how reflection alters the contents of
| consciousness.)
| carapace wrote:
| > then any kind of rational thought is impossible
|
| Yes. Rationality is an illusion. Rational deduction depends
| on "implication" which is not actually a thing in physical
| reality.
|
| > there is no single, unchanging person having them
|
| This is the essential breakthrough that Buddha had: all
| things are impermanent and if you go looking for yourself you
| eventually find that there is no "self" there.
|
| > there cannot be correct or incorrect thinking
|
| Yes, thoughts are totally irrelevant to living. They are just
| a sort of fun window dressing. It's possible to "switch off"
| all thinking and still function. The body carries out all
| it's activities including talking to other people but "you"
| are not "doing" anything. It's pleasant. (I typically do it
| while washing the dishes.)
|
| > But if this is the case, then any argument in favour of the
| position just outlined -- or any other, contrary position --
| is neither right nor wrong. So everything becomes absurd.
|
| No. The above is a description of the situation, not an
| argument that can be invalidated.
| geye1234 wrote:
| If rationality is an illusion, then rationality is both an
| illusion and not an illusion, and all things are
| impermanent and permanent in the same respect, and Buddha
| both did and didn't have the breakthrough you describe, and
| you are both right and wrong in everything you write here,
| and so on.
| kukkeliskuu wrote:
| Even if most of us do not have a real unity in thoughts,
| there may be a potential -- i.e. a possibility to attain
| unity with a long, sustained effort. Because such long,
| sustained effort is rare, the real unity in thoughts is rare.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Of course there is unity to thoughts, but that unity just
| boils down to ordinary cause-and-effect. There's nothing out
| there in the real world that points to a "single, unchanging"
| person or entity having the thoughts, if only because people
| in general are constantly affected by their surrounding
| environment, quite far from being "unchanging".
| JadeNB wrote:
| > If there is no single principle that unites them, then
| there is no single, unchanging person having them. If there
| is no unchanging person having the thoughts, then there is no
| connection between the thoughts.
|
| I don't think either of these implications obviously holds,
| except possibly by idiosyncratic definition in the first
| case. (Surely nobody thinks a person having thoughts is
| unchanged by them, or else we'd all just be static.)
| limit499karma wrote:
| > a unified consciousness but a stream of discrete events
|
| Rather, those are _the contents_ of _mind_ that are illuminated
| by _consciousness_ , which is Divine, Luminous, and Unified and
| ever present.
| passion__desire wrote:
| > the unification is an illusion or an appearance
|
| Julian Baggini - The Duality of Non-duality
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAiE_ZQhiDs
|
| Bundle theories of the self, inspired by David Hume, view the
| self as a collection of experiences, memories, and thoughts
| rather than a fixed entity. This perspective sees the self as
| dynamic and changing, without strict borders, yet maintaining a
| high degree of order and stability over time. While rejecting
| the idea of a core self, it doesn't advocate for "no self" or
| "many selves," but rather a gradualist approach that
| acknowledges the fuzzy distinction between self and other. The
| speaker emphasizes that this view doesn't negate the practical
| existence of individuals or invalidate logical thinking.
| Instead, it suggests that different levels of description are
| valid for understanding reality, and that metaphysical views
| about the self don't necessarily dictate how one should live
| their life.
| theptip wrote:
| Thanks for sharing! I think these are probably the lines of
| reasoning that best bridge from Western philosophical
| traditions to the Buddhist ones.
|
| Anatta seems to be one of the trickiest subjects in Buddhism,
| not least because there is a very wide range of theories
| across the different traditions. Some traditions literally
| claim nothing exists (the solipsist position?) whereas some
| are very clearly stating "not Self, not No-Self" ie some
| middle position that should probably be understood
| contextually against Hindu notions of eternal self that were
| the ground truth at the time of Buddhism's formation.
|
| I think the "traditional" Buddhist position is something
| fairly similar to Hume's view as Bundle theory.
|
| Simply stated here: https://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/
| sn/sn44/sn44.010.th...
| passion__desire wrote:
| I personally find process philosophy to be the ultimate
| description. i.e. Heraclitus position
|
| https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/process-philosophy/
|
| Put another way, it's dynamic structures all the way down
| or up
|
| https://youtu.be/j96Hls_-Ulc
| enugu wrote:
| There is an important issue with reducing this problem to
| linguistic conventions of how we use words.
|
| 'This block of ice is actually made up of lot of atoms and
| will melt away soon, but meanwhile it is a useful abstraction
| to treat it as a single block'
|
| Compatibilists tackle the free-will issue in a similar way,
| Dennet says something like 'This chess program is perfectly
| deterministic, but it has free will - Even its programmer has
| to guess, as to what is its next move.'
|
| The above usage of terms is OK at some level, but there is
| something independent of definitions - How we actually see
| the self, and the cause of actions. When somebody insults me,
| does it feel like the insult is describing I/me or does it
| feel like describing a bundle of thoughts/habits? Was the bad
| thing done by 'me' or was it done by desire and anger? Even
| if these are processes, we can't help but reify them into
| unitary agents and actions.
|
| A major claim made by Hindu/Buddhist teachings is that once
| there is a shift in *internal perception* of how actions are
| happening, towards a more analytical view which breaks up the
| ego(ahamkara), this causes a major shift leading to
| liberation from cycles of suffering.
|
| In Cognitive Behaviour Therapy, there is an analysis of
| thoughts and feelings behind actions, with a goal of
| liberation from chronic problems. This is very similar to a
| stage of manana(intellectual contemplation of certain
| statements in Vedanta).
| mannykannot wrote:
| With regard to your question about who or what is being
| insulted, Perhaps the first thing to note is that we are to
| others what they have observed of us, modified by what
| their theory of mind intuits from those observations. The
| former, and even more so the latter, are not all that
| reliable, though they are all we have to go on.
| swayvil wrote:
| >the unification is an illusion or an appearance
|
| Or a map. Call it a useful illusion.
| visarga wrote:
| Temporally they are not unified, but spatially they are. I am
| referring to the relational representation space, or the
| "embedding" space. We know that from neural nets, they use high
| dimensional vectors for language, vision and other modalities.
| This representation space is where we go from raw inputs to
| semantics.
|
| The cool thing about this semantic space is that it emerges in
| unsupervised manner, and makes learning concepts so much
| easier, is as easy as identifying a point or sub-volume and
| assigning a label. It can relate any idea to any other idea.
| Being created from an agent's past experiences, it is first
| person and captures all the qualitative nuances of qualia.
|
| I think this representation space is what we refer to when we
| say consciousness is unified.
| theptip wrote:
| > I think this representation space is what we refer to when
| we say consciousness is unified.
|
| I don't think this is what OP meant, and this is not what
| Buddhists are talking about RE: unified vs discrete conscious
| experience. It really is about temporality as I originally
| noted.
|
| As in, are the actual qualia that you experience somehow a
| single continuous thing, even though they cross multiple
| sense modalities, and may interleave with complex/compount
| thoughts? Or are they a sequence of atoms arising that are
| not a single thing?
|
| I do think embedding spaces are a great concept, but I don't
| think they bear on qualia very much.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Or, in a nutshell, Buddhism says consciousness isn't continuous
| - it's pulse-width modulated[0].
|
| There's many things in life that can be modeled this way, and I
| kind of forgot about this insight until your comment. I guess
| this is the flip side of the "refrigerator light error"[1] -
| sometime the thing isn't "on", it's flickering too fast to
| notice.
|
| (And the way you get that "unification" is like the way RGB
| LEDs are made: by putting three differently colored LED close
| to each other, PWM-ing them independently, relying on limited
| temporal _and_ spatial resolution of human perception to make
| this looks like arbitrarily-colored point light.).
|
| --
|
| [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulse-width_modulation
|
| [1] - How's that even a thing? I don't even remember thinking
| this way as a kid, because the first fridge-light-related
| memory I have is of opening the fridge doors slowly and gently
| enough to see the point at which the light turns on, then
| locating the switch and pressing it with my fingers to confirm.
| jacobsimon wrote:
| Was thinking about this recently. The author misses the
| importance of timing in the unity of perception. It would be
| rather easy to conduct an experiment and ask people, "did X and Y
| happen at the same time?" where X and Y are different stimuli.
| You could test over a variety of different senses and time
| differences to determine if people are integrating their
| experiences or not.
|
| The other important element is attention and awareness. You can
| certainly be focused on one thing more than another--this can be
| a useful kind of disunity
| sctb wrote:
| Here's an interesting experiment you can do around
| retrospective perception and timing: clap your hands once,
| listening for the sound of the clap. Notice what it's like to
| remember the sound of the clap for a minute or so. Now, clap
| your hands twice, again listening closely and noticing what
| it's like to remember the sound for a little while. In the
| second case, is it possible for you to remember the sound of
| the first clap only, without an echo of the second?
| blueridge wrote:
| Galen Strawson:
|
| "I'm somewhere down towards the episodic end of this spectrum. I
| have no sense of my life as a narrative with form, and very
| little interest in my own past. My personal memory is very poor,
| and rarely impinges on my present consciousness. I make plans for
| the future, and to that extent think of myself perfectly
| adequately as something with long-term continuity. But I
| experience this way of thinking of myself as remote and
| theoretical, given the most central or fundamental way in which I
| think of myself, which is as a mental self or someone. Using ME
| to express the way in which I think of myself, I can accurately
| express my experience by saying that I do not think of ME as
| being something in the future."
|
| https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v18/n08/galen-strawson/the-s...
|
| Would also recommend Strawson's Things That Bother Me: Death,
| Freedom, the Self, Etc.
| jhickok wrote:
| Eric is a fantastic writer and I highly suggest his books
| including a recent collection of his works in "The Weirdness of
| the World". Finding "Describing Inner Experience" in grad school
| had a profound effect on me.
| bbor wrote:
| Huh okay thanks for commenting, I was very confused about what
| exactly I was reading until you prompted me to look him up.
| Interesting guy -- he's a full time professional academic in
| philosophy, and yet writes like a hacker, even going as far as
| to skip APA citations in favor of undescribed hyperlinks! The
| style is a fascinating mix of analytic (such as only giving the
| time of day to recent theories, and constricting his argument
| to an explicit outline) and a more casual blog style. He's also
| been writing about exactly this -- perhaps in slightly less
| unified (hehe) terms - since at least 2007:
| https://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/
|
| If you find the time, could you share what the big takeaways
| were that had a profound effect? I'm guessing it was a
| practical exercise that trained you to more accurately
| introspect, but that's just a guess. I'm way too deep into all
| this philosophy stuff already so I mostly got indignant
| disagreement out of this essay, and I'd like to see it in a
| more productive light!
| jhickok wrote:
| I'm glad you like his style! I find him incredibly
| approachable and clear for some of the reasons you outlined
| above. He also take great pains to be a clear communicator,
| which you can see in pieces of media like his appearance on
| Sean Carroll's podcast:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0evRaWV_HU
|
| Anyway, I was not a philosophy undergraduate and so a lot of
| my exposure was either to popular level works (surveys, etc),
| or big historical names (Descartes, Hume, Plato), or to very
| specific areas of research (I was big into metaphysics and
| philosophy of mind "realists", like Chalmers, Searle,
| Flanagan etc), and skepticism about intuition, or sense-data,
| or even skepticism about a priori truths had just never
| really occurred to me. That's more of a self-own than
| anything, but we first-years in grad school had a course
| together where someone in the dept. would take us thru a deep
| dive in a very specific area by way of a brand new book. For
| example, the year prior to my arrival they read thru a
| "Climbing the Mountain", an early draft of the book that
| would eventually become Parfit's "On What Matters".
|
| Anyway, my year all picked "Describing Inner Experience", and
| this would become my introduction to an ultimately useful
| view that opened the world of CogSci to me since assumptions
| I had (which can probably be described at Cartesian) no
| longer posed powerful arguments against a more empirically-
| minded look into how the mind works. So, folks that I
| previously disregarded like Dennett, Wittgenstein, the
| Churchlands, were now gateways into Smolensky, Prinz,
| Carruthers, etc.
| namero999 wrote:
| The usual fallacy of conflating phenomenal experience with
| cognition, and using the same term "consciousness" to refer to
| both of the concepts interchangeably. The whole piece is
| undermined.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Consciousness is required to experience, but it is not required
| to sense.
| namero999 wrote:
| I appreciate your reply, however I would partially disagree.
| Consciousness is always there, and we call sensing what is
| mediated by our sense organs interacting with the external
| world, that is, perceiving.
|
| It's a class of experience radically different than, say,
| proprioception or feeling. One is externally mediated, the
| other is endogenous. Consciousness (in the phenomenal sense)
| is the superclass of both.
|
| Cognition, or meta-consciousness, makes salient specific
| aspects of our experience/awareness, so that I'm very well
| aware right now of the pixels of my monitor as I write this,
| and much less so of the expansion of my rib cage as I
| breathe, or whatever subtle noises might be going on out of
| my window. However, I never really stop being conscious of
| them.
| sfink wrote:
| As added support for this view, I can contrast with the
| relatively uncommon experience of having some experiences
| unified: when listening to an audio book, my brain often (but not
| always!) ties the experience of the book with my physical
| location at the time. When I return to that location, the
| experience of being there is inextricably tied to the portions of
| the book I heard in that place. I can't really remember one
| without the other.
|
| But this is unusual. Most things are _not_ tied together like
| this. In the author 's example, I can separately remember the
| philosophical musings that were in my head on a drive, and the
| feeling of the steering wheel (which normally would be too
| mundane to remember, but on a hot day the cover will get sticky
| and I'll be very aware of that). There might be a weak
| association from one to the other, but usually not much at all.
|
| As a tangent, I wonder if LLM attention heads are doing something
| analogous. Each is associated with a strand, sometimes combined
| with the others and usually not? (I don't know enough to say
| whether this matches at all.)
| temp0826 wrote:
| I think it was the ancient Greeks(?) that walked while learning
| the epic poems in order to recite them by recalling their
| journey, using the associations made on the path they took. I
| think the method of loci[0] is similar except using purely
| imagined locations/details ("memory palace").
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci
| jvm___ wrote:
| Shoutout to the excellent podcast The Memory Palace
|
| It's historic stories told well, nothing to do with memory
| palaces
| jcims wrote:
| >As added support for this view, I can contrast with the
| relatively uncommon experience of having some experiences
| unified: when listening to an audio book, my brain often (but
| not always!) ties the experience of the book with my physical
| location at the time. When I return to that location, the
| experience of being there is inextricably tied to the portions
| of the book I heard in that place. I can't really remember one
| without the other.
|
| I've noticed something similar with podcasts. It's usually when
| I first listen to it while driving. When I listen to that
| segment again I have this intrusive, prolonged, real-time
| replay of what was going on at the time I first heard it.
|
| It doesn't feel like memory because while I'm watching this
| replay I can remember portions of it with typical poor fidelity
| from the usual memory of my brain. It's very odd, and as
| someone with a generally terrible memory it's something I wish
| I could figure out how to channel. It clearly is what people
| talk about when they describe photographic memory, it's
| incredibly detailed.
| picometer wrote:
| I'm glad I saw your comment!! I've experienced this exact
| phenomenon when playing Minecraft while listening to an
| audiobook or podcast. Returning to that area will immediately
| remind me of the topic or narrative that I heard. Presumably
| it's related to the "memory palace" technique, but otherwise, I
| can't make heads or tails of it. It's immediate, as if the
| location is a hash key mapping to the information. Or as if
| they're stored in literally the same place, and fetching one
| implies fetching the other.
|
| Similarly to you and the article's author, this doesn't happen
| with whatever thoughts I may think while at a location. But in
| that situation the brain is engaged in generating those
| thoughts, and not with the task of learning new information. So
| I don't find it surprising that it works differently.
|
| I haven't thought about it in relation to "consciousness" yet.
| Will have to chew on this article a bit.
| swayvil wrote:
| You ever enter a room and immediately forget why you came in?
| Memory is tied to environment. Quite intensely.
|
| (And then there is the phenomenon of immediately forgetting
| your dream upon waking. Fascinating stuff)
| bloopernova wrote:
| My way of remembering something later is to mentally picture
| "myself sitting down at my desk and remembering the thing".
| It works reasonably well!
|
| Although I'm terrible at names and faces, and my "visualizing
| the moment of recall" tip doesn't work for remembering
| people.
| jamiek88 wrote:
| I too am terrible at names and faces which is unfortunate
| for my job.
|
| The only thing that works for me is using the name an
| absurd amount of times early on. Then telling myself a
| silly story about that person in my head afterwards again
| using the name and location an absurd amount of times.
|
| This works about 90% of the time for me.
|
| 'So I met Dave Jenkins the other day at the park and Dave
| Jenkins was wearing a coat bought for Dave Jenkins by Dave
| Jenkins because Dave Jenkins liked the coat when Dave
| Jenkins saw it on sale'
| swayvil wrote:
| I've heard of a technique like that called "memory palace".
| Imagining rooms and memories associated with those rooms
| and rooms associated with rooms. By controlling the
| environment (or this mental simulation thereof) you control
| memory access. Or something like that. I haven't actually
| tried it.
| rolisz wrote:
| In highschool I read the Eragon book series while listening
| pretty much only to Jump Around from House of Pain, on repeat,
| for a couple of weeks. Whenever I hear that song again I get
| those dragon and fantasy vibes again
| golergka wrote:
| Same. I use this to remember meetings and lectures; somehow,
| when I just doodle random stuff I remember things better than
| if I wrote them down.
| adolph wrote:
| > But this is unusual. Most things are not tied together like
| this.
|
| It might be wise to reconsider if this "unusual." The brain
| structure hippocampus is thought to bring working memory into
| longer term memory and has a large role in spatial memory. This
| neuro-activity association is also supported by the
| memorization technique known as a "memory palace." [0]
|
| 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci
| ryandv wrote:
| The tying together of physical locations and audio book
| contents, or philosophical musings on a drive, are examples of
| those higher-order representations [0] the author references.
|
| There is a sibling thread further down regarding the Buddhist
| take on phenomenology as a linear stream of discrete events.
| With sufficient practice it becomes possible to observe an
| individual sense datum - an instant of time in which I am
| hearing a bird chirp, followed by an instant of time in which I
| feel an itch on my head, followed by an instant of time in
| which I experience the thought of "what's for dinner," and so
| on. This is stepping down a "layer of abstraction," beneath
| higher-order representations of unity, to observe the lower-
| level discrete phenomena as they exist prior to the "post-
| processing" applied by our minds. After this post-processing
| step, the individual discrete points of "hearing," "itching,"
| "thinking" are melded into the (ultimately illusory) unified
| experience of, for example, "sitting down for meditation next
| to an open window." This latter, post-processed view is
| ultimately an oversimplification, and investigation into the
| nature of such higher-order representations reveals their
| constituent parts.
|
| It's this act of reflection and retrospection that unifies this
| stream of discrete sensory events into a cohesive whole and
| weaves the illusion of continuity out of a series of discrete
| points. Our phenomenological experience is like a pointillist
| painting viewed from afar; the astute observer with sufficient
| concentration to examine the painting more closely however can
| see that it is in fact a constellation of dots which our minds
| smear together into the higher-order (and illusory)
| representation of a continuous whole.
|
| I recommend Daniel Ingram's "Mastering the Core Teachings of
| the Buddha" for a western, secularized take on this aspect of
| (Vipassana) Buddhism.
|
| [0] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness-higher/
| iamacyborg wrote:
| I don't think it's that unusual, I have 3 that immediately
| spring to mind. Whenever I hear Slipknot's Iowa album I think
| of a MUD called Wolfenburg that I played a ton of at the time.
| NIN's The Fragile triggers memories of reading the Diceman and
| smelling L'eau D'Issey reminds me of Berlin.
| iammjm wrote:
| There's this part in Prousts In search of a lost time where he
| recounts eating a certain sweets that kinda teleports him back
| to a moment in his childhood. I too experienced a similar thing
| once while visiting someone who just wiped their floors with a
| certain cleaner that my mom used that I haven't smelled in
| ages. The smell took me back to a place and time I've long
| forgotten, and it was sudden and vivid and intense
| Terr_ wrote:
| As an experiment on readers' childhood memories, I would like
| to inject: "Those semi-solid candies Grandma had that were in
| red wrappers with white polka dots and a green fringe."
|
| (To save you a web search, Strawberry Bon-Bons.)
| nikolayasdf123 wrote:
| yes, afaik global perception moments are normally are generated
| every 100ms
| rramadass wrote:
| Related : _A Mind Of Its Own : How Your Brain Distorts and
| Deceives_ by Cordelia Fine.
| swayvil wrote:
| I've heard that experience is initially a mess. A babble of
| sensations.
|
| Then I tell myself a story about the babble. Map the babble in
| terms of time, space, things, money, etc.
|
| And then that story. That's "reality".
|
| (But the real magic show comes when I am guided by the story, in
| what I pay attention to and what I ignore)
| kahirsch wrote:
| Emo Philips once said "I used to think that the human brain was
| the most fascinating part of the body. Then I realized, whoa,
| 'look what's telling me that'."
|
| There seems to be this naive view among some philosophers that
| what our verbal stream of consciousness reports is somehow the
| most important part of our "mind" or our "consciousness", some
| even saying that verbal thoughts are the only thing that are
| important enough to be called "thoughts"!
|
| I say: look what's telling you that! I mean that very seriously.
|
| I've always assumed that the brain has to have many parallel
| things going on at the same time and we have _some_ limited
| awareness of these things and _some_ ability to coordinate and
| direct the different parts of the brain, but it seems to be
| rather limited. It can 't be complete, just on a Turing/Goedel
| basis, but anything approaching completeness would mean slowing
| our thoughts down to the slowest parts.
|
| I remember reading about the Libet experiment decades ago and how
| some people thought that it disproved "free will"-- whatever that
| could possibly mean. The impulse to report a decision to move a
| finger came after the impulse to move the finger. So? They were
| apparently assuming that the mind was some synchronized,
| sequential process and that the verbal report of what "the mind"
| was intending to do was supposed to come at the same time or
| before the impulse to move the finger. What???
|
| Even a view of a single stream of "attention" or "executive
| process" seems dubious. Yes, we have all had the experience where
| something that's mostly automatic/unconscious suddenly requires
| our attention. For example, you're driving a car and suddenly a
| novel situation comes up and you need to turn off the radio or
| tell the passenger to shut up so you devote all your attention to
| driving. But just normal driving requires an _enormous_ amount of
| processing of different concepts and coordinating different parts
| of the brain.
|
| There was an experiment (Maier's two-string puzzle, I just found
| by google), where a scientist tested people's ability to solve a
| problem figuring out how to tie two strings together that were
| hanging from the ceiling, too far apart for anyone to grab both
| at the same time. Some of the participants were given a non-
| verbal "hint" of how to solve the problem. But, when asked later
| how they solved it, most of those given the hint didn't mention
| it! Were they "consciously aware" of the hint at all? That was an
| actual experiment relevant to the idea of a unity of
| consciousness.
|
| Anyway, mine is a very limited, amateur, mostly 20th century
| perspective on the ideas. I'd be interested in what others have
| to share, especially actual experiments and not so much
| philosophers examining their verbal thoughts.
| a_cardboard_box wrote:
| > some even saying that verbal thoughts are the only thing that
| are important enough to be called "thoughts"!
|
| For anyone who thinks this, what happens if you start thinking
| a thought in words, and then stop partway through the sentence?
| When I do this, I understand the meaning of the full sentence
| even if I stop after a single word. Because, how could I say
| something without first knowing what I was going to say?
|
| For me, that meaning is the real thought. The words are just a
| representation of it.
| mannykannot wrote:
| > how could I say something without first knowing what I was
| going to say?
|
| Maybe it's just me, but it is not that uncommon for me to
| start to say something that I thought was clear in my head,
| only to realize that it was not. It happens even more when I
| write, and especially when I write programs.
| nickjj wrote:
| If this is true, why is this scenario so common for a lot of
| people:
|
| Someone you care about introduces you to something, that
| relationship ends and now the something they introduced you to
| becomes repulsive. A slight twist on that is you experience
| something together with someone that could be done on your own
| but suddenly that activity becomes tainted even when you try to
| do it alone at a later time.
|
| The above suggests there is a high coupling between 2 independent
| experiences at a conscious level which melds 2 distinct and
| logically separate events into 1 experience.
|
| It's certainly not a healthy way to live knowing that someone can
| have that much control over your own internal thoughts and
| perceptions but that doesn't mean it doesn't happen, even
| temporarily.
| IshKebab wrote:
| One thing reminds you of the other. Not rocket science.
|
| Honestly this level of philosophy is just people arguing about
| things that are too poorly defined to have a concrete answer.
|
| It's like arguing about how many organs there are, or exactly
| where space begins. Best just to let the philosophers debate
| whether it's 60 miles or 100 km.
| encoderer wrote:
| these unified experiences are life's "magical moments" which is
| like being "in the zone" in a social/physical sense. Everything
| is keeping you there in the moment and it's wonderful.
|
| Reminds me of the Nimoy quote that 'in life, like a garden,
| perfect moments can be had but not preserved' except in memories.
| bbor wrote:
| Great article, thanks for posting! I typed out a long thing that
| got lost, so I'll cut to the chase and do what everyone else is
| doing and give my rebuttal: cognition is absolutely composed of
| many non-unified (and often almost-entirely-unconscious) systems,
| much like a computer is composed of many disjointed programs. But
| _consciousness_ is unity itself, in my view -- the fact that most
| of our animal processes are disjointed doesn't say much about us
| as sapient beings, even if those processes take up "most" of us
| on some given scale (time, energy used, neurons involved,
| whatever).
|
| But I'm just vaguely gesturing -- this view was first and best
| characterized in 1801: For example, this
| universal identity of the apperception of the manifold given in
| intuition contains a synthesis of representations and is possible
| only by means of the consciousness of this synthesis... For the
| empirical consciousness which accompanies different
| representations is in itself fragmentary and disunited, and
| without relation to the identity of the subject. This relation,
| then, does not exist because I accompany every representation
| with consciousness, but because I join one representation to
| another, and am conscious of the synthesis of them... in other
| words, the analytical unity of apperception is possible only
| under the presupposition of a synthetical unity.[16]
| ...for the reason alone that I can comprehend the variety of my
| representations in one consciousness, do I call them my
| representations, for otherwise I must have as many-coloured and
| various a self as are the representations of which I am
| conscious. Synthetical unity of the manifold in intuitions, as
| given a priori, is therefore the foundation of the identity of
| apperception itself, which antecedes a priori all determinate
| thought. But the conjunction of representations into a conception
| is not to be found in objects themselves... but it is on the
| contrary an operation of the understanding itself, which is
| nothing more than the faculty of conjoining a priori and of
| bringing the variety of given representations under the unity of
| apperception. This principle is the highest in all
| human cognition.
|
| - Immanuel Kant, _A Critique of Pure Reason_
| kukkeliskuu wrote:
| Just try to maintain unity and remember yourself when doing
| everyday things, for example when driving the car. If you really
| do it (and not just think about it) and are honest with yourself,
| you will soon realize that there are long gaps in your
| experience. You may remember when you started the drive, and you
| may remember when you arrived, but there will be long gaps
| between those moments that you just cannot remember. So you can
| independently verify yourself that unity is an illusion for most
| of us. You are able to drive the car without thinking
| "consciously" about it. So is everybody else. But do not despair.
| Becoming aware of this illusion of unity is actually a step
| towards the unity.
| feoren wrote:
| I feel like it's a common fallacy that if you can't remember
| something later, then you didn't consciously experience it.
| It's a very narrow view of consciousness, and leads to silly
| statements like "There are long gaps in your experience". Is
| someone with an inability to form memories just an automaton
| then? Their qualia are less qualiatic than your qualia?
| mannykannot wrote:
| I suspect that, in these cases, I was conscious to a quite high
| degree as I performed the act, but either did not commit it to
| memory, or can no longer recall those memories. Given that some
| people (though not me) have 'photographic' memories, I lean
| towards the latter.
| robwwilliams wrote:
| Great post and important ideas.
|
| I was surprised by the set-up of the problem. Perhaps just my
| bias as a neuroscientist, but I take the disunity as the baseline
| state in the sensory/perceptual side, and the partial and graded
| unity of consciousness as icing on the cake. The metaphor of
| driving while thinking is apt. We simply do not have enough
| bandwidth to bind more than a few streams and only do so when it
| really matters. And if it really matters deeply to survival it
| again gets shifted in striatum. brainstem snd cerebellum--as
| habit or instinct. Consciousness is mere icing on the cake.
|
| Minsky's Society of Minds comes to mind(s).
|
| Where unity is crucial in only in motor output---when I reach and
| grasp (or talk or type) this thing I call me needs a unified
| pattern of activations and relaxations of muscles. This unity for
| and of action is required to sustain life (Maturana's
| autopoiesis). But the integration of many streams of sensory-
| motor input can (must) occur disjointly. Fetching memory is again
| disjoint.
|
| The recursive binding of consciousness--our inner narrative that
| is probably driven by cycles of cortico-thalamic-cortical
| recursions---only needs somewhat clear unity or binding at stages
| close to motor commitment. (But one wonders then about James
| Joyce when writing Finnigan's Wake---how many threads were output
| in parallel using a serial format?)
| mannykannot wrote:
| It seems to me that this is a clear example of an issue to be
| addressed by the empirical methods of natural philosophy (i.e.
| science) rather than by introspection of one's own experience and
| of other peoples' reports on their introspection. There is a meme
| in the philosophy of mind which asserts that we cannot be
| mistaken about our experiences, but if that has any validity, I
| think it is only for our most immediate experiences, not what we
| make of them.
| llamaimperative wrote:
| How can a question of perception be answered outside of a
| perceiving system?
| mannykannot wrote:
| How can a question of stellar physics be addressed outside of
| a star?
|
| The thing is, one needs (or so I suppose) a perceiving system
| to address questions of any sort, and why would minds be
| different? I am merely doubting that introspection is
| sufficient. I strongly suspect that most of what goes on in
| our brains is inaccessible to our conscious minds.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Clearly consciousness isn't a unity or it would be a one thing.
| Instead, by unified we mean it is integrated or harmonized-- like
| a song made of many elements but harmonized into a whole. A whole
| has elements of unity, but necessarily contains parts. Plato's
| Parmenides is all about the mystical inability to resolve this
| paradox of the existence of unity and parts.
| alganet wrote:
| But what conclusion this supports? Unity by itself was an
| argument for something else, wasn't it?
|
| So, what does this partial unification implies for that something
| else? That something else being qualia, in contemporary terms.
|
| That doesn't solve _the original question_, or _the hard problem_
| in any way. It just breaks it down in a different way. It's ok,
| the hard problem is hard anyway.
|
| When reading it, I get a strong sense that the text softly
| implies qualia as an emerging phenomenon. A christmas-tree-like
| composition of smaller qualia units, those coming primarily from
| senses and building up into more elaborate experiences.
|
| However, the argument for qualia was never about individual
| senses. Thought experiments like "what is like to be a bat?" and
| "what if I see colors different from everyone else?" were never
| about individual, specific senses. It was never implied to be
| literally just about a single sense, but the experience of being
| as a whole.
|
| That idea of "being as a whole" already includes the unconscious-
| until-conscious experiences. Julian Jaynes puts the "light in the
| refrigerator" not as a stationary light, but a flashlight that
| you can swing around in a dark room: wherever you point it to
| something, that something becomes highlighted in your
| consciousness. In the same way as the "light in the refrigerator"
| experiment, when you're not pointing to something, it doesn't
| mean it's not there.
|
| The "flashlight in the dark room" thought experiment also brings
| up important questions, like: what if there's someone else in the
| room? How should we deal with things that seemingly move around?
| It also brings up the idea of object permanence to the context of
| consciousness. Are we just like small children too naive to
| perceive what it really is?
| ndarray wrote:
| Yes, you can only spend your attention on one coherent thing at a
| time. That coherent thing can be a movie (sound and video synced
| to create coherence), sex in the dark (tactile + sound), or a
| podcast (only sound - no correlation to other stimuli). All the
| things you aren't focusing on, kind of run on auto pilot. Why
| would that mean they're subject to different, separate
| consciousnesses? I'd just call them separate clusters of
| attention, running in low power mode, but connected to the same
| single consciousness nonetheless. The different clusters
| obviously influence each other, especially when an unexpectedly
| strong sensation triggers one of them, e.g. a beeping alarm makes
| you look for the source. According to the author, upon hearing an
| alarm, the acoustic consciousness must now expand itself to
| become the main consciousness, which then somehow also integrates
| with a bunch of previously different consciousnesses (e.g. the
| one to observe your surroundings) to solve a new problem. We just
| call that attention.
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