Consciousness: freaky shit or nbd

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holy shit, i can't believe gary came up in this thread. dude is the husband of one of my best friends. i always found his affinity for jaynes quirky at best, but he is dedicated and works hard at his fascinating new theories, gotta give him that.

does this link not work?: http://wustl.academia.edu/GaryWilliams/Papers/156099/What_Is_It_Like_to_Be_Nonconscious_A_Defense_of_Julian_Jaynes

karl...arlk...rlka...lkar..., Monday, 16 July 2012 22:35 (eleven years ago) link

"disagreeing with Ned Block" must be one of the #1 most popular philosophical activities

where can i get a mcdonalds quesadilla tho (silby), Monday, 16 July 2012 22:53 (eleven years ago) link

That link works, and yeah I got some issues. Ok it's a semantic problem but his use of 'consciousness' is highly unorthodox. 'J-Consciousness' might be a useful distinction but to call that and that alone consciousness and say that animals are non-conscious and so are we 90% of the time is highly misleading and unhelpful. And his dismissal of the explanatory gap/hard problem is perfunctory and unconvincing.

ledge, Tuesday, 17 July 2012 08:24 (eleven years ago) link

but to call that and that alone consciousness and say that animals are non-conscious and so are we 90% of the time is highly misleading and unhelpful.

yeah, this was my main problem with it when i first read it, iirc. i think he claims that only consciousness + language/symbolic thinking is actually consciousness, and then uses bicamerality to bypass an actual rigorous history of humanity's development of language and how that would've developed the human mind (i.e. a genealogy of language.)

karl...arlk...rlka...lkar..., Tuesday, 17 July 2012 13:04 (eleven years ago) link

I've never read Jayne directly but I can see why people think the bicameral stuff is wonderful & insane, some of the just-so stories in that paper lean heavily towards the latter though.

By essentially telling ourselves through a linguistically structured neural command to “keep at it” when engaged in a time consuming task (such as sharpening rocks), humans were able to develop cultural skills unparalleled throughout the rest of the animal world.

orly_owl.jpg

ledge, Tuesday, 17 July 2012 13:17 (eleven years ago) link

orly is a god

The Cheerfull Turtle (Latham Green), Tuesday, 17 July 2012 13:20 (eleven years ago) link

yeah, i'm really bothered that he was only mentioned and not actually pictured there. he looks like this:

http://anongallery.org/img/3/5/o-rly-orly-owl.jpg

contenderizer, Tuesday, 17 July 2012 15:17 (eleven years ago) link

that should be the blurb on the back of Jaynes' book.

ryan, Tuesday, 17 July 2012 15:18 (eleven years ago) link

i've always meant to read TOOCITBOTBM (pronounced "toccitibottom") cuz my parents were impressed by it once upon a time. same with godel, escher, bach.

contenderizer, Tuesday, 17 July 2012 15:24 (eleven years ago) link

i think both of those are great and the kind of books i wish were written more often.

I am actually pretty receptive to parts of Jaynes' theory. particularly the idea of consciousness as a product of cultural conditioning. but I love that book most of all because it's this imaginative engagement with the dawn of civilization, a period of history i just find so mysterious and fascinating. i remember being in Hawaii and seeing a display about how they think the first humans arrived there like 6000 years ago and i thought what it must have been like to sail across the ocean back then and their view of just what the world is must have been so different from ours. like, everything must have been so unimaginatively vast. of course there were gods, and magic, and all that.

ryan, Tuesday, 17 July 2012 15:46 (eleven years ago) link

Well I can certainly recommend GEB unequivocally; reading it pretty radically changed my adolescent mind about some stuff. Though some of Hofstadter's stances about cognitivism are less popular in the cognitive science world than they were 30 years ago. It's still a really delightful and informative book.

where can i get a mcdonalds quesadilla tho (silby), Tuesday, 17 July 2012 16:19 (eleven years ago) link

my stepdad told me about the general gist of jaynes' book when i was 13 or so, and because he was very learned, i just accepted the idea as sensible people consensus. i didn't question it until many years later when one of my professors gave me a funny look in response to my mention of how, once upon a time, everyone went around obeying the dictates of voices in their heads.

contenderizer, Tuesday, 17 July 2012 16:50 (eleven years ago) link

"i think he claims that only consciousness + language/symbolic thinking is actually consciousness"
is there anything really wrong with that claim? you'd need to propose a model of ego-consciousness that is devoid of linguistic processing, and i'm not sure if that's possible.

Philip Nunez, Tuesday, 17 July 2012 17:40 (eleven years ago) link

seems reasonable to think that consciousness could exist without language and symbolic thinking, but that gets into how we define consciousness.

contenderizer, Tuesday, 17 July 2012 17:51 (eleven years ago) link

i guess i'm just opposed to the idea that consciousness doesn't exist without language, or that consciousness w/o language is some whole other non-human type of process

karl...arlk...rlka...lkar..., Tuesday, 17 July 2012 17:56 (eleven years ago) link

agree

contenderizer, Tuesday, 17 July 2012 18:02 (eleven years ago) link

it's fine to be politically opposed to it, but you'd need to come up with a reasonable alternative. also why would you think non-humans don't have some kind of language?

Philip Nunez, Tuesday, 17 July 2012 18:09 (eleven years ago) link

Oh god let's not have a semantic argument. I think most people are pretty clear that whatever animals have, it ain't language.

ledge, Tuesday, 17 July 2012 18:12 (eleven years ago) link

i'm not "politically" opposed to it, i don't even know what that means. and i doubt that the consciousness that, say, cats experience is mediated by various types of meows running through their mind. xpost

karl...arlk...rlka...lkar..., Tuesday, 17 July 2012 18:13 (eleven years ago) link

or yeah, what ledge said.

karl...arlk...rlka...lkar..., Tuesday, 17 July 2012 18:13 (eleven years ago) link

i don't know how you can avoid a semantic argument when defining what consciousness is seems to be nothing but a semantic argument. (i don't think cats have a secret meow-based language, but they'd need some kind of abstractive mechanism to do anything clever)

Philip Nunez, Tuesday, 17 July 2012 18:18 (eleven years ago) link

I thought we'd been doing pretty well at defining - well discussing - what consciousness is (phenomenal, physical, illusory, magic, etc) not how we apply the term (awareness, introspection).

Do you think language is necessary for a conceptual schema?

ledge, Tuesday, 17 July 2012 18:22 (eleven years ago) link

i'd wager it is, but mostly because I can't fathom how you could devise a mechanism for holding concepts without it looking an awful lot like a language.

Philip Nunez, Tuesday, 17 July 2012 18:31 (eleven years ago) link

can you guys introspectively come up with any examples of what you feel is a conscious experience that isn't affected by a linguistic process in some way?

Philip Nunez, Tuesday, 17 July 2012 18:33 (eleven years ago) link

I find it hard to conceive of consciousness without a language-type structure. Parents to thread, there has been quite a lot of research into the early stages of mind and their relationship to language development, istr.

Were there real cases of "raised by wolves" types? Did any of them have anything they could articulate about their pre-language interiority?

stet, Tuesday, 17 July 2012 18:35 (eleven years ago) link

i don't think cats have a secret meow-based language, but they'd need some kind of abstractive mechanism to do anything clever

i don't know about this. some birds know how to open electric doors by flying in front of the sensor. this is clearly not a dumbly programmed behavior that evolution has "selected for". it's something they've individually learned by observing and doing. but i'm not sure that it requires abstract, conscious thought. the system could work on nothing more than stored memory and desire: desire for food + awareness that food is <there> (in that direction, w/e) + knowledge that doing <this> allows access. the second part of that might not even be necessary.

contenderizer, Tuesday, 17 July 2012 18:40 (eleven years ago) link

I think it's best to consider bare consciousness as the perceptual ground or "environment" to any communicational process---that communication doesn't "represent" conscious experience but in fact excludes it as the very basis for it to be communication.

ryan, Tuesday, 17 July 2012 18:41 (eleven years ago) link

like, the owl might not actually be saying "oh, really?" it could be something that just sounds like that.

contenderizer, Tuesday, 17 July 2012 18:42 (eleven years ago) link

communication doesn't "represent" conscious experience but in fact excludes it as the very basis for it to be communication.

ooh, nice. i like that.

maybe "exclusion" is alone is misleading, though. you mean "exclusion of the thing itself (awareness of conscious experience) in favor of an abstracted representation of it (linguistic communication)", right?

contenderizer, Tuesday, 17 July 2012 18:45 (eleven years ago) link

which is funny because we remain consciously aware during linguistic thought and communication, even of linguistic thought and communication itself

contenderizer, Tuesday, 17 July 2012 18:46 (eleven years ago) link

Sorta--in semiotic or communication theory the first step for something to be communication is the introduction of the possibility of "not"--ie, this is the word "frog" and not a frog.

ryan, Tuesday, 17 July 2012 18:48 (eleven years ago) link

so the reason i wouldnt want to say "exclusion of the thing itself" is because we're then talking about the thing itself. it's more the boundary that's at issue.

ryan, Tuesday, 17 July 2012 18:51 (eleven years ago) link

yeah, that's what i thought you meant. i wonder, though, cuz that (second) formulation makes the negation seem so active. perhaps in the most primitive forms of symbolic communication, there's no awareness of the separation between the symbol and the thing. that's sort of a tangent, though...

contenderizer, Tuesday, 17 July 2012 18:53 (eleven years ago) link

Gregory Bateson has a famous essay on what he calls "meta-communication" in animals. As when dogs play fight it means "this bite is not a bite."

ryan, Tuesday, 17 July 2012 18:55 (eleven years ago) link

if you're talking about bare consciousness to be the summation of perceptual input, i'm not sure in most people that that would count as consciousness at all, since most of it is largely discarded. it'd be interesting to see how people with photographic memory operate, if they operate on entirely different modes of consciousness. a lot of people with really good facility at this seem to have pronounced synaesthesia (which again points to linguistic mechanisms at work)

Philip Nunez, Tuesday, 17 July 2012 18:58 (eleven years ago) link

can you guys introspectively come up with any examples of what you feel is a conscious experience that isn't affected by a linguistic process in some way?

Introspection can be pretty misleading, but it often feels like I can form a complex thought in my head far faster than I can select (not say) the individual words needed to convey it. If you said there was still a linguistic structure underlying it though I couldn't argue against that. How about going in the other direction, simple sensations, sights, sounds, smells? I might think "mmm frying onions!" but the sensation comes first, it seems to me.

ledge, Tuesday, 17 July 2012 19:01 (eleven years ago) link

if you're talking about bare consciousness to be the summation of perceptual input, i'm not sure in most people that that would count as consciousness at all, since most of it is largely discarded.

base consciousness needn't be so entirely base, though. it could be a combination of raw sensory input, a focus on the part of that input that seemed the most interesting/relevant from moment to moment, and a wash of triggered feelings and memories to give sense and texture to the moment (fear, desire, intention, hunger, affection, etc). i'd perfectly willing to describe such a combination as "consciousness", even if it lacked language and abstractive ability.

contenderizer, Tuesday, 17 July 2012 19:06 (eleven years ago) link

perhaps in the most primitive forms of symbolic communication, there's no awareness of the separation between the symbol and the thing.

this is an interesting idea that i've thought about before not so much in terms of total lack of awareness of the separation, but in terms of empathy, like the way a good drawing of something can make you feel something towards what is depicted. i'm thinking of cave paintings as early symbolic communication, and the idea of the paintings having a kind of talismanic power, a symbol as an expression of desire for what is depicted.

karl...arlk...rlka...lkar..., Tuesday, 17 July 2012 19:07 (eleven years ago) link

can you guys introspectively come up with any examples of what you feel is a conscious experience that isn't affected by a linguistic process in some way?

any time you learn to accomplish complex tasks without linguistic structure underlying it, say through muscle memory in a video game, or athleticism, or drawing. i suppose words can act as signposts for learning these things, but when it comes to really doing them, language can actually impede you.

karl...arlk...rlka...lkar..., Tuesday, 17 July 2012 19:10 (eleven years ago) link

stuff like repetitive learned tasks seem designed to pass these conscious experiences into the un/subconscious realm, so it's consonant with language's reduced role in those things.

Philip Nunez, Tuesday, 17 July 2012 19:16 (eleven years ago) link

Is this base level of awareness/sensation parsing (or even relatively complicated interactive motor control) the same "consciousness" Jaynes is describing as coming from the bicameral mind, tho

stet, Tuesday, 17 July 2012 19:21 (eleven years ago) link

I mean, I don't want to beg the question by defining consciousness as something that is at a level that requires language just to show consciousness requires language, but it seems that there are certain mental abilities (deception, for instance) that can't be explained without the kind of structure that could map pretty well to a language.

stet, Tuesday, 17 July 2012 19:24 (eleven years ago) link

Jaynes is writing about the "internal theater" of the mind--so kinda like the voice you use to talk to yourself.

"consciousness" is a notoriously fraught term--kinda laden from the start with what we could call Cartesian biases. I'm sure some would say we'd solve a lot of these problems by simply ceasing to use that word at all.

ryan, Tuesday, 17 July 2012 19:26 (eleven years ago) link

for fun, here's a bit from the first page:

A secret theater of speechless monologue and prevenient counsel, an invisible mansion of all moods, musings, and mysteries, an infinite resort of disappointments and discoveries. A whole kingdom where each of us reigns exclusively alone, questioning what we will, commanding what we can. A hidden hermitage where we may study out the troubled book of what we have done and yet may do. An introcosm that is more myself than anything I can find in a mirror.

ryan, Tuesday, 17 July 2012 19:30 (eleven years ago) link

well there's a board description if ever i

stet, Tuesday, 17 July 2012 19:38 (eleven years ago) link

animals have simple language, just as we have simple echolocation

the late great, Tuesday, 17 July 2012 19:54 (eleven years ago) link

at least when neuroscience types are talking about it they mean something with a grammar of a certain complexity. using that usage, anyway, no animals have language.

note that this is from informal conversations, might not be settled doctrine or anything.

hot slag (lukas), Tuesday, 17 July 2012 20:56 (eleven years ago) link

I voted "freaky shit" - though of course there's nothing "weird" about consciousness itself. What could be more natural to us than the fact of our own consciousness? It only seems "weird" when you consider it from a certain point of view (ie., the "objective" view).

o. nate, Tuesday, 17 July 2012 21:04 (eleven years ago) link

chomsky and o.nate otm

the late great, Tuesday, 17 July 2012 21:22 (eleven years ago) link

wouldn't you think the limits animals have w/r/t language also limits the quality of their consciousness? i wonder if depressed pets bounce back really quickly compared to their depressed owners because of this lack of depth to their depression.

Philip Nunez, Tuesday, 17 July 2012 22:26 (eleven years ago) link


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