[HN Gopher] One Head, Two Brains (2015)
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       One Head, Two Brains (2015)
        
       Author : shry4ns
       Score  : 18 points
       Date   : 2025-02-19 19:22 UTC (3 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.theatlantic.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.theatlantic.com)
        
       | neonate wrote:
       | https://web.archive.org/web/20241228215151/https://www.theat...
       | 
       | https://archive.ph/gJ32A
        
       | zonkerdonker wrote:
       | The confabulation to justify picking out related images that the
       | left brain never observed (chicken and snow shovel in the
       | article) reminds me profoundly of the confident slop produced by
       | LLMs. Make you wonder if llms might be one half of the "brain" of
       | a true AGI
        
         | jjtheblunt wrote:
         | along those lines, maybe dreaming is piecing together new
         | adventures imagined from snippets of reality.
        
         | MathMonkeyMan wrote:
         | That's a theme in the novel "Neuromancer".
        
       | Hacker_Yogi wrote:
       | I disagree with Steven Pinker's claim that consciousness arises
       | from the brain.
       | 
       | This perspective fails to establish that the brain produces
       | consciousness, as it relies on the mistaken assumption that
       | "mind" and "consciousness" are interchangeable. While brain
       | activity may influence the mind, consciousness itself could be a
       | more fundamental aspect of reality. Rather than generating
       | consciousness, the brain might function like a radio, merely
       | receiving and processing information from an all-pervasive field
       | of consciousness.
       | 
       | In this view, a split-brain condition would not create two
       | separate consciousnesses but instead allow access to two distinct
       | streams of an already-existing, universal consciousness.
        
         | actionfromafar wrote:
         | Descartes was pretty much on the same page.
        
         | at_a_remove wrote:
         | I cannot see how one might perform an experiment to determine
         | which concept is correct. As with most things which are
         | unfalsifiable, the idea can be amusing for a bit but is
         | ultimately not useful to the extent that you can do anything
         | about it. You cannot serve tea from Russell's Teapot.
        
         | kerblang wrote:
         | It's not Steven Pinker's claim alone. Gazzaniga agrees, I
         | think, and I know of one other prominent neuroscientist but
         | don't remember his name. Pinker is "just" a psychologist.
         | 
         | Your view is called "pan-psychism". It's interesting, but there
         | isn't anything that makes it necessary. Everything we're
         | finding out is that most or all thinking happens outside of
         | consciousness, and the results bubble up into it as perception.
         | Consciousness does seem to be universal _within_ the brain,
         | though.
         | 
         | I find pan-psychism interesting just because of its popularity
         | - people want something spiritual, knowingly or not. I would
         | advise not to insist that consciousness==soul, however, as
         | neuroscience seems to be rapidly converging on a more mundane
         | view of consciousness. It's best to think of one's "true" self
         | according to the maxim that there is much more to you than
         | meets the mind's eye.
        
         | antonkar wrote:
         | Yep, some unfinished philosophy if you're into it: you can
         | imagine that our universe at a moment of time has is just a
         | giant geometric shape, then at the next moment the universe
         | somehow changes into the this new shape. How does this change
         | happen? Some believe it's a computation according to a rule/s,
         | some that it's not a discrete change but a continuous equation
         | that changed the shape of the universe from one to another.
         | Basically you can imagine the whole universe as a long-exposure
         | photography in 3d and then there is some process that "forgets"
         | almost all of it leaving only slim slices of geometry and
         | changing from one slice into another. This forgetting of the
         | current slice and "recalling" the next, is consciousness, the
         | time-like process. And it looks like the Big Bang was like
         | matter converted to energy (or "space converted to time")
         | process. The final falling into a giant black hole will be the
         | reverse: energy converted to matter (or "time converted to
         | space"). Some say electrons are like small black holes, so we
         | potentially experience the infinitesimal qualia of coming into
         | existence and coming out of existence, because we are
         | sufficiently "time-like" and not too much "space-like". I'll
         | soon write a blog post ;)
        
       | teddyh wrote:
       | Related: _You Are Two_ by GCP Grey:
       | <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfYbgdo8e-8>
        
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