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

sciencemag.org

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

#61

Post by xelxebar »

mojuba wrote: post #35
komali2 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What even is I though?

"I" is something that knows its place in space and time, the here-and-now, but also has a memory of here-and-now moments of the past. As such "I" is an illusion. If a quantum clone of you is created both I's will have the same memory of the past here-and-now moments, so both will be you at the same. So probbaly something similar happens if a brain is split.

By that definition, a GPS module with an SSD is an "I".

In discussions that invoke the words "self" or "consciousness", I find it common to hear pithy or clever definitions. However, rarely do those answers offer any actionable insight.

Are you sure that your words "I" or "consciousness" point at extrinsic things in the world? Have you not just invented a new kind of elan vital? If you claim that "consciousness" is a useful category of phenomena within consensus reality, then great. Demonstrate that.

Dark matter is a mystery, but it is a mystery comprised of concrete phenomena. Terrestrial biogenesis is a mystery, but it too is comprised of concrete phenomena. Heck, even the amorphous term "love" points to a more concrete category of phenomena than the word "consciousness" typically seems to.

FWIW, I think there are concrete approaches to the problem. One method HN might like is to study how we judge subjects as being conscious. Anyone want to build a NN classifier for this?

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

#62

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#64

Post by whalabi »

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.

Whoa. I get the green/brain bit and can kinda tweak my perception to hear both, but needle and storm? When I hear both from the same audio they sound so very different and I can't fathom how they come from the same waves.

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

#65

Post by [deleted] »

Johnjonjoan wrote: post #60
User23 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sou…

[deleted]

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

#66

Post by rocqua »

henriquemaia wrote: post #53
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.

Roman numerals are a lot harder to do arithmetic with.

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

#67

Post by rocqua »

the8472 wrote: post #22
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…

> his brain was still processing and identifying a face—a fairly high-level skill Is it? I thought the brain has specialized parts for identifying faces (hence prosopagnosia) which makes this more of an automatism than higher reasoning.

if you special case a high level skill, does it stop being a high level skill?

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

#68

Post by mojuba »

xelxebar wrote: post #61
mojuba wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I" is something that knows its place in space and time, the here-and-now, but also has a memory of here-and-now moments of the past. As such "I" is an illusion. If a quantum clone of you is created both I's will have the same memory of the past here-and-now moments, so both will be you at the same. So probbaly something similar happens if a brain is split.

By that definition, a GPS module with an SSD is an "I". In discussions that invoke the words "self" or "consciousness", I find it common to hear pithy or clever definitions. However, rarely do those answers offer any actionable insight. Are you sure that your words "I" or "consciousness" point at extrinsic things in the world? Have you not just invented a new kind of elan vital ? If you claim that "consciousness" is…

> By that definition, a GPS module with an SSD is an "I".

No it's not. I didn't explain what I meant by "knowing your place in space and time", sorry about that, but this needs elaboration.

I think we'll agree that consciousness (self-awareness) is not binary: it can be present in varying degrees in computer systems, animals and humans. The degree of self-awareness though I think is a function of how rich the model of the world is in your mind. A GPS module can have its own coordinates and a precise UTC clock, but its model of the world is the most primitive.

Thus knowing your place in space means some model of the world and your relative place within it. Domestic cats and dogs have their own models - of the house and possibly some surroundings, but they are very limited. Humans typically have the most elaborate and the highest level abstract model of the world, therefore our self-awareness is the highest among the creatures.

Time is a trickier one though. Our sense of time seems to be the function of the chain of here-and-now moments. You sense your place now, but you also have a memory of the previous moments as one seemingly uninterrupted flow. This I think is what creates an illusion of being, though obviously "I" doesn't exist in the same sense as a physical object does.

Then there's a whole part of how the model of the world that we build in our minds should also be practical, i.e. help us achieve our goals efficiently, but I'll skip it for now as it gets too far from the original question.

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

#69

Post by rocqua »

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.

I would argue consciousness comes, not from cognitieve processing skills, but from empathetic skills.

I see to possible ways. The first is: one forms a model of 'others' (for interacting better) and then applies that model to themselves. The second is: one wants to communicate thoughts, and thus needs to create a model for thoughts. Which includes conceptualizing 'self'.

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

#70

Post by pulkitsh1234 »

Somehow this is not surprising for me, I have heard about experiments related to free-will wherein the brain already made a decision even before the conscious mind became aware of it. Thus putting doubts on our conscious experience of free-will.

Also, in terms of problem solving, there are experiments which show that the brain calculates the answers and "presents" the answers later on to the consciousness. It's not like the problems were solved within the scope of consciousness, which is of course contradictory to what we experience. We feel the contradictions because we experience everything through consciousness, i.e. we can't experience things which happen outside realm of consciousness. The brain scans prove in a sense that there is a disconnect (For instance in this article the brain scans showed signals related to seeing faces in the numbers, but the conscious experience was not seeing them).

The link between what the brain does, and what we experience (consciousness) is indeed the hard problem of consciousness.

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