Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A man who can read letters but not numbers exposes roots of consciousness

sciencemag.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 224 posts

Re: A man who can read letters but not numbers exposes roots of consciousness

#51

Post by ivalm »

mojuba wrote: post #43
apoorvkumar wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

About your analogy - quantum cloning may not be allowed by laws of nature. That would make any consciousness unique at any point in time. Also I feel the experiment suggests split brains would most likely become 2 very different (new?) entities with different behavior after losing integrity.

> quantum cloning may not be allowed by laws of nature It might be that the original should be destroyed, I understand. So be it, destroy the original and create N clones. But the thought experiment is an interesting one regardless.

No, nothing about destroying. It's just you cannot know something sufficiently at infinite precision due to uncertainty principle. It just depends if maximally allowed knowledge of all of person's chemical states is sufficient to reproduce consciousness "sufficiently" closely (I bet it is).

Re: A man who can read letters but not numbers exposes roots of consciousness

#52

Post by sradman »

The original paper Lack of awareness despite complex visual processing: Evidence from event-related potentials in a case of selective metamorphopsia [1] is not as Freudian as the article about “consciousness”:

> How does the neural activity evoked by visual stimuli support visual awareness? In this paper we report on an individual with a rare type of neural degeneration as a window into the neural responses underlying visual awareness. When presented with stimuli containing faces and target words—regardless of whether the patient was aware of their presence—the neuro-physiological responses were indistinguishable. These data support the possibility that extensive visual processing, up to and including activation of identity, can occur without resulting in visual awareness of the stimuli.

[1] https://www.pnas.org/content/117/27/16055

Re: A man who can read letters but not numbers exposes roots of consciousness

#53

Post by henriquemaia »

aaron-santos wrote: post #47

> eventually mastered an entirely new digit system (where ⌊ stood for 2, ⌈ for 8, etc.) Why invent a specialized number system? How difficult would it have been to teach him Chinese numerals for example. Also very curious on his perception of Roman numerals.

Brilliant. Roman numerals are, after all, just letters. The "why haven't they used them?" becomes pretty jarring once you think about it.

Re: A man who can read letters but not numbers exposes roots of consciousness

#54

Post by surround »

This reminds me of two mind-boggling discoveries I’ve had about the human mind.

The first is that the two halves of your brain act somewhat independently. And in rare cases, people’s left and right halves are “split” apart, and they act entirely independently - e.g. their left and their right hands will act separately, or even argue with each other. CGP Grey made a great video about this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfYbgdo8e-8

The other is that most people have a “voice” inside their head - e.g. when they read, they hear their own voice inside their head reading; their thoughts are like sentences they “hear;” they could look in the mirror have a conversation with themselves. Some ~10% of people do not have this internal monologue.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22193451

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11162927

Re: A man who can read letters but not numbers exposes roots of consciousness

#55

Post by isoprophlex »

djhaskin987 wrote: post #46
randcraw wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I too. If a name is unfamiliar to me, even if it's no more than 5-6 letters long, I can't for the life of me recall it. But I can remember random sequences of numerals up to length 12. Why? I wonder if there's some term for this malady, like 'literophasia' or 'numeraphilia'? I wonder too if it occurs equally as often in both genders. I would guess not.

To add some color to this, if it's a common name it's really hard to remember but if it's a foreign name to me or something I've never heard of, it's as if my brain thinks it's a random sequence of sounds and I'll remember it forever. Indian names, native Hawaiian names, no problem, but forget about it if your name is George. It's just the common names I'm used to that I have a hard time with.

Second that, i have that with organic chemicals.

Diazabicycloundecene, sure, used it once, will remember it forever.

Oh nice to meet you George, what was your name again?!

Re: A man who can read letters but not numbers exposes roots of consciousness

#56

Post by guytv »

leonidasv wrote: post #10

This has some implications for artificial general intelligence. If consciousness does not automatically emerge from some sufficient high cognitive processing skills, those sci-fi super-human AI may never arrive. Anyway, I feel sorry for this patient. This must be a tough disease to die with.

Can you think of a disease that's not tough to die with?

Re: A man who can read letters but not numbers exposes roots of consciousness

#57

Post by henriquemaia »

> Somehow, his brain was still processing and identifying a face—a fairly high-level skill—even though his conscious mind was oblivious.

I'm maybe wrong about this, but isn't the ability to recognize faces a fairly low-level skill? Case is point being other social animals having it, like apes, monkeys, or even sheep [1] (who can even recognize human faces [2]).

So maybe they're here referring to the ability of seeing representations of faces (little faces on the letters). Or is this just a blunder of the person who wrote the sciencemag article?

[^1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/1641463.stm [^2] https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-41905652

Re: A man who can read letters but not numbers exposes roots of consciousness

#58

Post by stordoff »

Marsymars wrote: post #42

Reading is weird. I've never had migraines, but a few years ago suddenly, and briefly, lost the ability to read and write. After a number of doctors and tests ruling out a TIA, best guess is one-time transient aphasia from a migraine aura.

Migraines in general are weird. It's rare[1], but I can occasionally tell when a severe migraine is about to occur because rooms feel too big. I walked into my bathroom a few days ago (which is about 2mx2m/6'x6'), and each wall seemed about 2 feet longer than it should, and the far corner looked about 3 feet too far away (it was more a feeling than a visual disturbance - it's hard to describe). I felt _small_, which is a really odd feeling when it comes on suddenly. About an hour later, I had a severe migraine.

I'm assuming it's a subtle form of Alice in Wonderland syndrome[2].

[1] I get regular migraines, but I can only remember this happening a few times, possibly because it's fairly subtle

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_in_Wonderland_syndrome

Re: A man who can read letters but not numbers exposes roots of consciousness

#59

Post by jamiek88 »

Camillo wrote: post #31

If he had simply lost the ability to recognize the glyphs for 2-9, he would have still seen their shapes, and he could have learned them again, just as he learned new glyphs for them. What seems to be happening here is a sort of crosstalk or feedback. His brain is still recognizing the glyphs, but those neurons are sending unwanted signals elsewhere in his visual cortex which scramble the perceived image. My interpre…

Interesting.

The way we can do captchas suggests you may be on to something there.

Re: A man who can read letters but not numbers exposes roots of consciousness

#60

Post by Johnjonjoan »

User23 wrote: post #41
Xenograph wrote: post #16

> In contrast, when shown numbers with embedded faces, the number’s effect apparently swamped that of the face: RFS reported seeing neither; everything looked like spaghetti. Yet an EEG still showed the characteristic N170 spike for registering faces. Somehow, his brain was still processing and identifying a face—a fairly high-level skill—even though his conscious mind was oblivious. This deficit shows high-level cog…

Makes me think of this silliness I saw today: https://mobile.twitter.com/BFriedmanDC/status/12892831187305... I recommend first watching it with you eyes closed and after that seeing how you can manipulate your perception. It was easy to hear “brain needle” with my eyes closed.

Whichever word I repeated in my head as I heard it was what I heard even if looking at another. I could easily and reliably make it change between brainneedle, brainstorm, greenneedle and greenstorm using this method.

Edit: kind of think this is to do with the n at the start of needle being implicit as you already get the n sound at the end of green and brain. I think if you register another n the remaining sound sounds most like eedle and if you don't the remaining sound sounds most like storm... Or I may have listened to this too many times

Post reply on HN