a false memory in the process of construction is experienced. in re-ifying that false memory you experience it over and over. if anything, you are more conscious in the construction of a false memory than in one which was so trivially discarded.
― Philip Nunez, Tuesday, 20 March 2018 01:30 (six years ago) link
I don't regard consciousness as an agent outside-the-box which influences brain activity. I regard experience as the slightly-lagged apperception of the coherently conscious system's activity. As in the conscious brain does stuff, but it takes a moment to feel that. Like the wake thrown off a speedboat. So yeah I think there is behaviour that we need to consciously think about, but that the thought process is sub-experiential, solutions or alternatives arise from neural activity which is part of consciousness but is not explicit. We become aware of its products, not the process. You can't feel or experience the dozens of potential threads spawned by contemplating a possible strategy, you only "experience" whichever one(s) were strong enough to cohere and suppress the others.
― startled macropod (MatthewK), Tuesday, 20 March 2018 01:33 (six years ago) link
Idk man saying memory equals consciousness is to me akin to saying a live broadcast is the same as a recording. Not recording something doesn't mean you didn't see it.
― A True White Kid that can Jump (Granny Dainger), Tuesday, 20 March 2018 01:40 (six years ago) link
And it's theoretically possible to insert false memories into a brain rather than a brain actively creating them itself.
― A True White Kid that can Jump (Granny Dainger), Tuesday, 20 March 2018 01:41 (six years ago) link
only a very small portion of the human visual field is of any reasonable acuity -- the rest is a blur that is filled in by memory, so you literally would not be able to experience an entire picture without memory. Limiting experience to the pure raw sensory information available at any given time means you probably didn't "see" much of anything.
― Philip Nunez, Tuesday, 20 March 2018 01:44 (six years ago) link
If that's "memory" maintaining a seamless sensory world, it's "memory" in the sense of sustained coherent activity or sustained attention (aka "working memory") only, which is not what most people would mean when using the word "memory".I find it helpful to think of our sensory experiences as models which are updated by inputs from receptors as often as they're available.
― startled macropod (MatthewK), Tuesday, 20 March 2018 02:02 (six years ago) link
Begging the question of what a "representation" might be, I think it's intuitive that it is simpler and more efficient to maintain a seamless representation informed by the best available sense data, than to log and deal with every raw input. That's the point of having a brain - to ride the sea of sensory information at a more coherent level. Allows us to strategise rather than simply react.
― startled macropod (MatthewK), Tuesday, 20 March 2018 02:05 (six years ago) link
and to return to the thing I said earlier about planning and threads, there is also quite a lot of evidence that representations / activity patterns compete with each other, often within the same networks of neurons / glia, and dominate when they cohere better than their competition. To experience a unified self one has to wait for the winner to emerge before folding it into the narrative. Which pattern "wins" may depend on both external evidence, and internal states like behavioural goals, so that we reach the interpretation which is the most use to us at that moment. Oops getting pretty handwavey here, I'll stop now.
― startled macropod (MatthewK), Tuesday, 20 March 2018 02:09 (six years ago) link
I like the idea of neuron wars, it’s pretty metal
― Asstral Cheeks (latebloomer), Tuesday, 20 March 2018 02:23 (six years ago) link
I think it might be a bit like the game go where if you outflank the competition they fall into line with you.(which reminds me of a Sunday afternoon once when I was visiting Tokyo and realising they televised go matches, literally static shots of the board and two people thinking intently for minutes at a time, with occasional excited breakaway to commentators playing out possible scenarios on magnet boards)
― startled macropod (MatthewK), Tuesday, 20 March 2018 02:33 (six years ago) link
this is all good stuff, i'm sure i'm too taken by the idea of a unified all-seeing all-powerful consciousness. this though:I regard experience as the slightly-lagged apperception of the coherently conscious system's activity. As in the conscious brain does stuff, but it takes a moment to feel that. Like the wake thrown off a speedboat. reads like pure epiphenomenalism, which to me is a repugnant conclusion. i want to be driver not a passenger! i know that's not an argument against it, just an incentive to find one. what evolutionary purpose does this passive experience serve? is it just a side effect?
― lana del boy (ledge), Tuesday, 20 March 2018 12:39 (six years ago) link
happy to be sat in the back of the limo dozing off
― as the crows around me grows (Noodle Vague), Tuesday, 20 March 2018 12:48 (six years ago) link
Maybe it's just handwaving "I can't believe it's not epiphenomenalism" but to me the conscious-actor and the conscious-experiencer are one and the same entity. I think the consciousness that drives the boat feels the wake as well - the two are not in sync but I think this allows us to "own" our bodily actions regardless of their driver - if I roll my ankle, stumble and recover I still feel like "I" did it when my awareness catches up and processes it all. Even though my body would have performed the same movements if the descending pathways were cut at the midbrain (more or less). So I think the stuff we do ranges from the purely-automatic stretch-reflex type stuff, up to actions and strategies which are the result of consciously setting up conditions and mental states which lead to outcomes we want. I think of awareness as the feedback loop from that process - what are we doing now, what's next. And I think it's possible to be conscious and volitional without being aware in that way, whether you're a goat or just really stoned.
― startled macropod (MatthewK), Tuesday, 20 March 2018 13:52 (six years ago) link
as a super clumsy dude i totally disown the majority of bodily actions.
― Philip Nunez, Tuesday, 20 March 2018 17:10 (six years ago) link
This thread has gotten really good. Some very evocative musings on consciousness here.
― o. nate, Wednesday, 21 March 2018 01:52 (six years ago) link
in all seriousness can you guys recommend some books on this? i find this fascinating.
― wmlynch, Wednesday, 21 March 2018 05:11 (six years ago) link
Probably something by Daniel Dennet
― valorous wokelord (silby), Wednesday, 21 March 2018 05:22 (six years ago) link
know yr enemy
― lana del boy (ledge), Wednesday, 21 March 2018 12:32 (six years ago) link
I should probably read Dennett’s big consciousness book even though he seems to say baffling things in interviews. I suspect materialists and dualists are saying similar things just in a different language. It seems like arguing about that turns into a shouting match and misses the nuanced texture of conscious experience that both sides could agree on.
― o. nate, Wednesday, 21 March 2018 17:19 (six years ago) link
the oliver sacks books aren't explicitly about consciousness but are pretty good in illustrating the aspects of consciousness that maybe shouldn't qualify as consciousness (which lends support to the idea that almost none of it should qualify). It's really odd he never mentions his own face-blindness in them.
― Philip Nunez, Wednesday, 21 March 2018 17:30 (six years ago) link
recommended reading
http://i.imgur.com/SaTCn8x.jpg
― the late great, Wednesday, 21 March 2018 17:41 (six years ago) link
PASCAL LEMAITRE sounds like suitable name for this kind of thing.
― wmlynch, Wednesday, 21 March 2018 19:13 (six years ago) link
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-is-consciousness/
― A True White Kid that can Jump (Granny Dainger), Tuesday, 22 May 2018 21:22 (five years ago) link
A quick search of that article shows it contains neither of the phrases, "freaky shit" or "no big deal".
― A is for (Aimless), Tuesday, 22 May 2018 22:54 (five years ago) link
Scientists are beginning to unravel a mystery
uh-huh, go on...
― lana del boy (ledge), Wednesday, 23 May 2018 08:03 (five years ago) link
I shouldn't be too dismissive, it's easy to be scornful of scientists doing philosophy but there there is actually some interesting and useful science in that article, and in this particular subject I don't think you can say that philosophers are any better informed or their theories less wildly speculative.
― lana del boy (ledge), Wednesday, 23 May 2018 08:17 (five years ago) link
otm
― startled macropod (MatthewK), Wednesday, 23 May 2018 08:34 (five years ago) link
ITT seems intriguing, borderline panpsychist plus this prediction: a sophisticated simulation of a human brain running on a digital computer cannot be conscious - I think they mean at a very high level - even if it can speak in a manner indistinguishable from a human being. And it puts Fela Kuti in my head.
― lana del boy (ledge), Wednesday, 23 May 2018 09:46 (five years ago) link
Peter Watts, sci fi author and Biology PhD:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4uwaw_5Q3I
― They Bunged Him in My Growler (Sanpaku), Sunday, 11 November 2018 15:07 (five years ago) link
Trying again:
Peter Watts, sci fi author and biology PhD:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4uwaw_5Q3I
― They Bunged Him in My Growler (Sanpaku), Sunday, 11 November 2018 15:08 (five years ago) link
starts really well, ending is perhaps slightly disappointing
mind-blowing as the "Deliberation-Without-Attention Effect" study sounds, it seems it's been hard to replicate the findings
anyone read his books?
― niels, Monday, 12 November 2018 09:19 (five years ago) link
I enjoyed that, especially the ending! He was suitably sceptical about current theories & informative of the current state of the art in actual neural augmentation. Just wish he hadn't repeated the old canard of driving somewhere and arriving with no recollection of how you get there = you were unconscious. Not remembering being conscious doesn't mean you were unconscious.
― Toss another shrimpl air on the bbqbbq (ledge), Monday, 12 November 2018 10:34 (five years ago) link
I have read blindsight, I don't recall anything about it. Does that mean I wasn't conscious when I read it?
― Toss another shrimpl air on the bbqbbq (ledge), Monday, 12 November 2018 10:35 (five years ago) link
Blindsight is really good
― latebloomer, Monday, 12 November 2018 16:48 (five years ago) link
Just wish he hadn't repeated the old canard of driving somewhere and arriving with no recollection of how you get there = you were unconscious.
lol yeah I guess I was unconscious during several lunches last week then
― A True White Kid that can Jump (Granny Dainger), Monday, 12 November 2018 18:43 (five years ago) link
hope it wasn't soup or a big plate of spaghetti
― Evan, Monday, 12 November 2018 19:42 (five years ago) link
Wow- thanks for posting that video. I thought it started well and ended well (the part where Elon Musk made a surprise cameo as the advance guard of the cyber-borg was a real-life lol).
― o. nate, Wednesday, 14 November 2018 03:11 (five years ago) link
Yo consciousness is wild shit
― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Wednesday, 14 November 2018 03:21 (five years ago) link
on the whole it's a great tool, but it's sneaky as hell and tells a lot of lies
― A is for (Aimless), Wednesday, 14 November 2018 04:08 (five years ago) link
O Tru Mind
― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Wednesday, 14 November 2018 06:24 (five years ago) link
enjoyed that Peter Watts talk, however terrifying
― rip van wanko, Wednesday, 14 November 2018 14:14 (five years ago) link
Good, sceptical, pessimistic piece about understanding the brain in general:
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/feb/27/why-your-brain-is-not-a-computer-neuroscience-neural-networks-consciousness
Reverse engineering a computer is often used as a thought experiment to show how, in principle, we might understand the brain. Inevitably, these thought experiments are successful, encouraging us to pursue this way of understanding the squishy organs in our heads. But in 2017, a pair of neuroscientists decided to actually do the experiment on a real computer chip, which had a real logic and real components with clearly designed functions. Things did not go as expected. [...] Eric Jonas and Konrad Paul Kording – employed the very techniques they normally used to analyse the brain and applied them to the MOS 6507 processor found in [the Atari 2600] [...] As Jonas and Kording put it, the techniques fell short of producing "a meaningful understanding"
― Paperbag raita (ledge), Thursday, 27 February 2020 09:34 (four years ago) link
That’s an awesome paper, they do recordings and try to correlate the activity with what’s happening onscreen in Donkey Konghttps://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1005268
― an incoherent crustacean (MatthewK), Thursday, 27 February 2020 10:03 (four years ago) link
The Visual6502 team reverse-engineered the 6507 from physical integrated circuits [11] by chemically removing the epoxy layer and imaging the silicon die with a light microscope. Much like with current connectomics work [12, 13], a combination of algorithmic and human-based approaches were used to label regions, identify circuit structures, and ultimately produce a transistor-accurate netlist (a full connectome) for this processor consisting of 3510 enhancement-mode transistors. Several other support chips, including the Television Interface Adaptor (TIA) were also reverse-engineered and a cycle-accurate simulator was written that can simulate the voltage on every wire and the state of every transistor. The reconstruction has sufficient fidelity to run a variety of classic video games
I find this pretty amazing in itself!
― Paperbag raita (ledge), Thursday, 27 February 2020 10:13 (four years ago) link
They’ve done that with a few CPUs outside of this context - I think there is an online Intel 4004 simulator showing voltage changes on every line as it runs.
― an incoherent crustacean (MatthewK), Thursday, 27 February 2020 22:23 (four years ago) link
Ledge that Guardian book excerpt is so fucking otm, thank you for linking it
― an incoherent crustacean (MatthewK), Tuesday, 3 March 2020 12:31 (four years ago) link