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How Julian Jaynes’ consciousness theory is faring in the neuroscience age (2015)

nautil.us

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Re: How Julian Jaynes’ consciousness theory is faring in the neuroscience age (2015)

#61

Post by rusk »

gt_ wrote: post #28
rusk wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have always had trouble understanding why people link verbal thinking and consciousness I came across the same conundrum when I was studying psychology. It all came down to the medium becoming the message. Language is the prime means through which we convey experience. Of course there are other means visual, spacial but when you're "studying consciousness" you're typically reading books. Serious treatise in the a…

So, we use words to abstract our thought, but wouldn’t it seem there to be lower levels of abstraction as well? I believe this is the point Temple Grandin is working toward. I think I agree that words tend to puts thoughts or acknowledgements in a box, but maybe the box is mutable.

Yea but different boxes are mutable for different people in different ways. When communicating by way of the written word language is the common abstraction. To be synthesised as per the receivers own “internal boxes” but in the macro structure imposed by language

Re: How Julian Jaynes’ consciousness theory is faring in the neuroscience age (2015)

#62

Post by rusk »

gscott wrote: post #23
rusk wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Language is really the only differentiator between us and other primates, cognitively I don't agree. Many other types of animals have rudimentary languages, but I wouldn't dispute the sophistication of human language towers above all others, that in itself rests (along with other uniquely sophisticated behavioural endowments) upon what really differentiates us which is the capacity for imagination and abstract though…

I have pets and they try to entertain themselves when they are board. Seems like thet are thinking abstractly with limitations imposed by body and brain.

I don’t think it’s the same. They can’t reason about what they’re doing abstractly. That’s why they’re acting it out.

Re: How Julian Jaynes’ consciousness theory is faring in the neuroscience age (2015)

#63

Post by gizmo686 »

beefield wrote: post #58
psyc wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm right there with you. Always find it weird that people associate language so strongly with intelligence, and consciousness. First, I'm conscious when I'm aware of anything. I don't have to be thinking. Second, my thinking is 99% non-verbal except when I'm communicating to another person or imagining doing so , and even then it's only partly verbal. Almost all of my thinking is in moving or rotating 3D spaces and…

I have had some astonishing discussions where people actually refuse to accept that the verbal part of the thinking (talking in my head) is almost insignificant part of what thinking actually is. Or to be accurate, people claim that language is somehow crucial component of thinking. To me that is really weird idea, and I think that it can even be "proved" to be wrong (obviously my opponents disagreed also there) Name…

>There would need to be significant concepts that people talking different languages think differently.

Not necessarily. If you study linguistics you will find that (human) languages are very similar. So it is possible, that lanugage is a central part of thinking, but the differences between languages are too minor to have significant effects.

I agree with point 2 though.

Re: How Julian Jaynes’ consciousness theory is faring in the neuroscience age (2015)

#64

Post by rusk »

vinceguidry wrote: post #59
rusk wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Language is really the only differentiator between us and other primates, cognitively I don't agree. Many other types of animals have rudimentary languages, but I wouldn't dispute the sophistication of human language towers above all others, that in itself rests (along with other uniquely sophisticated behavioural endowments) upon what really differentiates us which is the capacity for imagination and abstract though…

The book Adam's Tongue: How Humans Made Language, How Language Made Humans makes a cogent argument for my position. It examines carefully the difference between Animal Communication Systems and our own, in all the variety primitive humanity could devise. https://www.amazon.com/Adams-Tongue-Humans-Made-Language-ebo...

I think BF Skinner tried to take behaviourism here. All behaviour being mediated by conditioning, with thought being the sublimated stimulated response of the vocal chords. I think he made a good bit of headway with this but I think Noam Chomsky (language development being his substantive field) put the kaibosh on it. Can’t remember the nuances of the argument off hand.

Re: How Julian Jaynes’ consciousness theory is faring in the neuroscience age (2015)

#65

Post by humanrebar »

ACow_Adonis wrote: post #60
nabla9 wrote: post #12

Wacky and entertaining idea. The theory rests on another idea that many people assume is obviously true without ever thinking twice. It's the notion that verbal thought and verbal thinking is required and fundamental part of consciousness and self awareness. When I started to read about the philosophy of consciousness, it became obvious that most people experience their own consciousness differently than I do. Their…

Completely. I've been surprised by the hostility/resistance to the idea that we don't think in language, especially when I'm trying to convey to people how my own mind works. In trying to convey my experience with language, I have to try to express a layer of...as best as I can get in programmer speak...multithreaded-notthreadsafe-consciousness-impressions. These I then have to translate into single-threaded verbal l…

> as best as I can get in programmer speak...multithreaded-notthreadsafe-consciousness-impressions

The way I explain it, thoughts in my mind are organized in graphs, perhaps like a wiki. As I communicate, I'm constantly deciding which concepts to render inline into text, which to keep handy in case it comes up, and which to ignore. I find that I have decent memory, but it's hard to get to a story from a prompt (like: "tell me something funny from your childhood").

Re: How Julian Jaynes’ consciousness theory is faring in the neuroscience age (2015)

#66

Post by notduncansmith »

davidgay wrote: post #36
nabla9 wrote: post #12

Wacky and entertaining idea. The theory rests on another idea that many people assume is obviously true without ever thinking twice. It's the notion that verbal thought and verbal thinking is required and fundamental part of consciousness and self awareness. When I started to read about the philosophy of consciousness, it became obvious that most people experience their own consciousness differently than I do. Their…

On this front, and to stray closer to a topic many of us spend too much time on, how do you conceptualise programs and their structure (control, data, etc, etc)? It's clearly formalised in words (except for the occasional visual programming languages/programs), but that's mostly superficial. The actual structure, or thoughts of how to change it seem to me more abstract and often hard to explain other than by combinat…

I usually visualize data structures as pipe systems, and interfaces as 3D shapes around these pipe systems. One thing that took some getting used to was flipping between the interface and flow representations while navigating the abstraction graph, but learning more about nature/physics/math has helped enormously with building and practicing that intuition (and applying it in non-software scenarios by understanding natural phenomena as data structures).

Re: How Julian Jaynes’ consciousness theory is faring in the neuroscience age (2015)

#67

Post by JackFr »

beefield wrote: post #58
psyc wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm right there with you. Always find it weird that people associate language so strongly with intelligence, and consciousness. First, I'm conscious when I'm aware of anything. I don't have to be thinking. Second, my thinking is 99% non-verbal except when I'm communicating to another person or imagining doing so , and even then it's only partly verbal. Almost all of my thinking is in moving or rotating 3D spaces and…

I have had some astonishing discussions where people actually refuse to accept that the verbal part of the thinking (talking in my head) is almost insignificant part of what thinking actually is. Or to be accurate, people claim that language is somehow crucial component of thinking. To me that is really weird idea, and I think that it can even be "proved" to be wrong (obviously my opponents disagreed also there) Name…

> ... there would be no difficulties to convey my thought to you without errors. But obviously that is very difficult for anything but the most trivial thoughts.

The sentence itself is evidence against.

Re: How Julian Jaynes’ consciousness theory is faring in the neuroscience age (2015)

#68

Post by ivansavz »

davidgay wrote: post #36
nabla9 wrote: post #12

Wacky and entertaining idea. The theory rests on another idea that many people assume is obviously true without ever thinking twice. It's the notion that verbal thought and verbal thinking is required and fundamental part of consciousness and self awareness. When I started to read about the philosophy of consciousness, it became obvious that most people experience their own consciousness differently than I do. Their…

On this front, and to stray closer to a topic many of us spend too much time on, how do you conceptualise programs and their structure (control, data, etc, etc)? It's clearly formalised in words (except for the occasional visual programming languages/programs), but that's mostly superficial. The actual structure, or thoughts of how to change it seem to me more abstract and often hard to explain other than by combinat…

I see programs as data (mostly atoms, tuples, and dicts) and a nested list of TODOs.

Each todo is a sequence of tasks, but I don't necessarily assign names to the task parts or think of them verbally. The "local variables" have names in the final code, but not necessarily in the blueprint for the sequence of tasks. The naming of things really comes in only for the dict key names when passing data around.

Re: How Julian Jaynes’ consciousness theory is faring in the neuroscience age (2015)

#69

Post by gt_ »

rusk wrote: post #61
gt_ wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, we use words to abstract our thought, but wouldn’t it seem there to be lower levels of abstraction as well? I believe this is the point Temple Grandin is working toward. I think I agree that words tend to puts thoughts or acknowledgements in a box, but maybe the box is mutable.

Yea but different boxes are mutable for different people in different ways. When communicating by way of the written word language is the common abstraction. To be synthesised as per the receivers own “internal boxes” but in the macro structure imposed by language

This is synthesizing well with me.

Re: How Julian Jaynes’ consciousness theory is faring in the neuroscience age (2015)

#70

Post by mabbo »

majos wrote: post #39
mabbo wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I generally think verbally. Then I started learning American Sign Language. For the 3 years I was actively using it, I thought differently, more with ideas than words. It was fascinating both in the change, and the fact that I've changed back.

I'm looking to learn ASL. Any recommended resources?

This is going to sound like I'm joking, but alcohol is the key to learning.

Find a class on it, one that's at night and one that has half the class go to the bar afterwards, ideally with Deaf people at the bar too.

The social situation, the lack of inhibitions/fears to try stuff, you really pick it up fast.

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