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

141–150 of 224 posts

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

#141

Post by ses1984 »

corin_ wrote: post #132
vinceguidry wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're making a common mistake, that of equating "scientific" with "good". Science is a particular method for learning about the world, not a marker of moral worth. I don't want to get too far into the epistemological weeds here, but there are plenty of other, perfectly valid ways to understand the world, many of which are used and studied in academia. The easiest examples to point to are philosophy and mathematics.…

I may well be misunderstanding a definition of science, but no I wasn't confusing it with "good". I don't know what the best definition of science is, but here's the first one Google suggests: > "the intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behaviour of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment." Can you explain what excludes the studying of hu…

You can apply science to human behavior and mental health. The problem is trying to integrate that work into theories of consciousness, you start to blur the lines between science and philosophy.

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

#142

Post by hackinthebochs »

akiselev wrote: post #87
pulkitsh1234 wrote: post #70

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 l…

All of the research you describe can be safely bundled into the same category as "dead salmon shows brain activity on an fMRI if you squint hard enough." It's phrenology for the 21st century, except with dyes and MRIs instead of head shaped calipers. The second you say the words "conscious mind", you leave the realm of science. At best, "consciousness" is an abstraction used by psychiatrists and laypeople over much d…

I'm struggling to come up with something more substantive to say in response, but this is a bad take and it needs to be said. Studies that demonstrate high level brain activity without the corresponding conscious experience are important in that they help to constrain where and how conscious experience is generated. Platitudes about human intelligence have no utility here.

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

#143

Post by hnarn »

hrgiger wrote: post #140

Can you relate this with color blindless? Most of time I could swear I could see that green,orange and red different but somehow my brain refuses to identify them.

I might be wrong but my understanding was that the cause of color blindness is an abnormality in the retina, not a neurological condition.

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

#144

Post by hackinthebochs »

fouc wrote: post #126
akiselev wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of the research you describe can be safely bundled into the same category as "dead salmon shows brain activity on an fMRI if you squint hard enough." It's phrenology for the 21st century, except with dyes and MRIs instead of head shaped calipers. The second you say the words "conscious mind", you leave the realm of science. At best, "consciousness" is an abstraction used by psychiatrists and laypeople over much d…

Isn't "conscious mind" just shorthand for "frontal lobes" ? If we can detect the brain solving a variety of things without ever hitting the frontal lobes then that's pretty interesting.

In fact, some such high level decision making processes that involve the prefrontal cortex can occur unconsciously.

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2012.0012...

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

#145

Post by hackinthebochs »

hnarn wrote: post #143
hrgiger wrote: post #140

Can you relate this with color blindless? Most of time I could swear I could see that green,orange and red different but somehow my brain refuses to identify them.

I might be wrong but my understanding was that the cause of color blindness is an abnormality in the retina, not a neurological condition.

There are definitely cases where color-blindness is caused by a neurological issues. Strokes can cause temporary or permanent colorblindness, for example.

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

#146

Post by corin_ »

ses1984 wrote: post #141
corin_ wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I may well be misunderstanding a definition of science, but no I wasn't confusing it with "good". I don't know what the best definition of science is, but here's the first one Google suggests: > "the intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behaviour of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment." Can you explain what excludes the studying of hu…

You can apply science to human behavior and mental health. The problem is trying to integrate that work into theories of consciousness, you start to blur the lines between science and philosophy.

I agree that it can be approached from non-scientific angles (I'd hazard a guess that any subject that can be considered scientific can be approached unscientifically - sometimes for good reasons, sometimes not), but I think(?) you're agreeing with me in my responding to this comment:

> The second you say the words "conscious mind", you leave the realm of science.

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

#147

Post by hackinthebochs »

perl4ever wrote: post #38
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.

It's increasingly looking like there are deep biological reasons for expressions like "gut instinct". There are a lot of neurons in the digestive system. A recent paper[2] appeared to show that the fundamental purpose of sleep is to regulate reactive molecules in the digestive system. Another item I saw in quanta, [or somewhere else][0], described how gut bacteria have a direct link to the vertebrate brain and immune…

>So my modest proposal is that if we want AGI, we need to figure out how to implement a digestive system in silico.

The problem is that whatever function digestion provides to the mind must do so through modulating neural signals. That is, its influence is purely functional in nature. Thus we can replicate its influence without replicating digestion, e.g. simulate the dynamics of the vagus nerve. There is nothing essential about digestion to consciousness.

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

#149

Post by perl4ever »

hackinthebochs wrote: post #147
perl4ever wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's increasingly looking like there are deep biological reasons for expressions like "gut instinct". There are a lot of neurons in the digestive system. A recent paper[2] appeared to show that the fundamental purpose of sleep is to regulate reactive molecules in the digestive system. Another item I saw in quanta, [or somewhere else][0], described how gut bacteria have a direct link to the vertebrate brain and immune…

>So my modest proposal is that if we want AGI, we need to figure out how to implement a digestive system in silico. The problem is that whatever function digestion provides to the mind must do so through modulating neural signals. That is, its influence is purely functional in nature. Thus we can replicate its influence without replicating digestion, e.g. simulate the dynamics of the vagus nerve. There is nothing ess…

The last sentence is a bit facetious.
Post reply on HN