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

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

#171

Post by akiselev »

corin_ wrote: post #112
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…

Why does our not fully (or even close to fully) understanding how the brain works mean conscious vs subconscious is unscientific? Is all mental health research unscientific based on the same logic? My understanding is that it's conclusive that some of our brain's processes we feel we are controlling (conscious thinking), while others happen in the background without us realising. The fact that we don't understand eve…

> Is all mental health research unscientific based on the same logic?

Mental health research is focused on clinical outcomes so it's not the same as basic research on consciousness. All of these fMRI studies have been useless for the latter because they're blunt tools - perfect for studying tumor blood flow or correlating which parts of the brain are kinda-sorta active during some extreme scenario (stuck in an fMRI "for science") - but useless for actually probing the nature of the mind.

They tell us that there is "something" there that can be loosely called the "conscious" and "subconscious" mind in academically trained company but it's still trying to shoehorn late 19th century ideas to cutting edge neuroscience - it comes down to selling grant proposals using familiar colloquialisms. We could very well find out tomorrow that there are higher level networks within the brain that make the separation meaningless and you'd still see grant writers overuse them any chance they get.

> My understanding is that it's conclusive that some of our brain's processes we feel we are controlling (conscious thinking), while others happen in the background without us realising. The fact that we don't understand everything that makes that the case doesn't stop that being the case.

These papers are a lot worse than "we don't understand everything." They're often times actively harmful to our understanding.

The brain is so complex that fMRI studies are the scientific research equivalent of a full body CT scan. The older you are, the more likely you are to find something that looks like a tumor. By the time one is in their 50s, full body scans are more likely to result in serious complications from unnecessary biopsies than find a malignant growth. Likewise, the more complex the brain the more room you have to find spurious correlations in fMRIs in just about any scenario where the subject is conscious or even dead if the researcher is really bad at statistics - which most are.

This makes them the perfect tool for scientists under pressure to publish or perish, but not for studying the brain.

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

#172

Post by tomc1985 »

collyw wrote: post #164
hackinthebochs wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> conscious experience is generated Is there any evidence that it is generated?

What else could it be?

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

#173

Post by didibus »

Sharlin wrote: post #96
didibus wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That he could identity people, without being aware of it. Basically, if there were faces inside a number, the EEG showed that his brain recognized the faces, but he did not know there were faces, instead he couldn't understand what he was seeing. So the hypothesis conclusion from this is, recognizing someone's face happens separately from consciousness. Basically, the experiment appears to show that your brain can re…

But that seems fairly obvious, at least to me. Face recognition seems to be an extremely fundamental capability that has probably existed in some form almost as long as brains and image-forming eyes themselves. In RFS’s case, his brain’s ”face module” spotted the faces, his damaged ”number module” couldn’t converge to anything useful, and the jumbled mess for whatever reason overrode the faces in higher-level percept…

> But that seems fairly obvious, at least to me

There's many things that grow from prior knowledge as theories and hypothesis. So maybe from what we already know for the brain, you theorized that the conscious brain plays no role in recognizing faces, yet science needs to validate hypothesis with experimental proof. This is one such experimental data point that seem to validate that theory. I'm not sure we should start to dismiss the scientific process from what we consider obvious or not. Many prior "obvious" things were false, so obviousness isn't good enough in my opinion.

> In any case, it is pretty well understood that our conscious visual perception is almost entirely unlike the raw stream of nerve signals emitted by the retina

For me, the more interesting bit is more with regards to the limits of consciousness. In this case, it seems no amount of conscious effort trying to see and make sense of what you're seeing can actually unscramble what you're seeing. The experiment seem to indicate that the raw stream works as intended, demonstrated by being able to see the shape when rotated 90 degree, but that there is another part in the brain responsible for turning the raw shapes and colors into abstract cognitive information such as it being the number 8 or a face. And that this part is not controlled by consciousness.

Thus it shows that some high level cognitive tasks, like visual pattern recognition are seperate from consciousness. And this isn't something I would have necessarily assumed. Maybe I would have when it comes to really raw low level visual signals, like putting color labels to the wave length information of light, but when it comes to labeling an abstract concept, such as something being a number or a face, I'd have thought that some part of conscious thinking would be involved.

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

#174

Post by danielam »

montjoy wrote: post #161
vinceguidry wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what I meant by "getting into the epistemological weeds" heh. I'll requote your definition with emphasis. > the intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behaviour of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment . All three of the italicized aspects are not how the mind is studied. The mind is not a physical object. It cannot be observed or…

Oh come now. > The mind is not a physical object. It cannot be observed or experimented with in a systematic way. So clearly false if you read the article, or have ever looked at an optical illusion. > ... because buildings and minds are not physical, natural things. They're unnatural things, conjured up by human invention and imagination Then likewise Ecology, Geology, Biology and all other sciences that cover syste…

>> The mind is not a physical object. It cannot be observed or experimented with in a systematic way.

> So clearly false if you read the article, or have ever looked at an optical illusion.

"Mind" vs. brain. For example, you will never observe the concept "triangularity" or the number 8 or the color "red" in a brain scan. You will see brain activity correlates between what is most likely someone perceiving an instance of triangularity (e.g., a concrete triangle drawn on the blackboard) or, say, the symbol "8" that's been drawn with a red marker, but those are not concepts, which are general. You cannot imagine "triangularity", only particular triangles. But all physical triangles are concrete and particular. You can't draw or construct an abstract triangle because any such drawing or construction will be a particular triangle that excludes all others (an infinite number of them, actually). Properties like the color red can be thought apart from any particular red thing, but you won't find "red" by itself rolling down the sidewalk.

So you have the following syllogism:

Every physical thing is particular. No abstract thing is particular. Therefore, no abstract thing is physical.

So if we can know things abstractly, then it must follow that such things exist in a nonphysical way in our minds. But there is no physical thing in which abstract things can inhere as abstract things because physical things are always concrete and particular.

Things get worse for reductionists. Current reductive views of physical reality exile properties like color as we commonly understand them to the realm of consciousness or mind or whatever. I.e., color as we commonly think of it is reduced to the experience of the reflectance properties of matter, that is, to a property of the mind, because as we have assumed, it is not a property of matter. But if color is not a property of matter, and the mind is material, then color cannot be a property of the mind. Therefore, the mind must be immaterial. This latter view of reality is essentially Cartesian where the universe is divided into impoverished res extensa and the metaphysical rug of res cogitans under which we can sweep all of those unseemly phenomena that reductive accounts of reality cannot cope with. Of course, you might be able to get away with that as long as you're a Cartesian dualist, but materialism, the metaphysical bastard child of Cartesian dualism, takes Cartesian dualism, jettisons res cogitans and attempts to reduce all of those unseemly phenomena attributed to res cogitans to phenomena proper to res extensa. Of course, materialism is utterly incapable of dealing with this problem by definition. Stubborn, dyed-in-the-wool materialists like the Churchlands or Dennett, instead of rethinking their presuppositions, have resorted to the pathetic tactic of denying the very thing they were supposed to explain. Can't explain color or abstract concepts? Then they must not exist!

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

#175

Post by hackinthebochs »

collyw wrote: post #164
hackinthebochs wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> conscious experience is generated Is there any evidence that it is generated?

It seems to come and go with life, wakefulness, blows to the head, etc. It can be modulated through stimulating brain cells or destructive damage. Yes, there's a lot of evidence that the brain generates consciousness.

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

#176

Post by raincom »

hackinthebochs wrote: post #142
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…

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.

The poster you responding to is correct to a large extent. Yes, you can record waves, and you can even classify them like N170. Responses can be 'localized'; however, one has to be a bit careful. Even many researchers say it is new phrenology: for instance, William R. Uttal wrote a book on it, called "The New Phrenology. The limits of localizing cognitive processes in the Brain". This book is not based on philosophical arguments, but based on the research done by cognitive neuroscientists. I am yet to come across a substantial criticism against Uttal's book.

Just because localization is at most one can do, it is not cure to solve all puzzles/problems.

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

#177

Post by hackinthebochs »

raincom wrote: post #176
hackinthebochs wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The poster you responding to is correct to a large extent. Yes, you can record waves, and you can even classify them like N170. Responses can be 'localized'; however, one has to be a bit careful. Even many researchers say it is new phrenology: for instance, William R. Uttal wrote a book on it, called "The New Phrenology. The limits of localizing cognitive processes in the Brain". This book is not based on philosophic…

>Just because localization is at most one can do, it is not cure to solve all puzzles/problems.

But who is saying it does?

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

#178

Post by raindeer3 »

mellosouls wrote: post #116
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…

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. You are thinking of Libet's famous experiments. https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Libet#Implications_o...

There are much more recent studies showing similar results https://www.nature.com/news/2011/110831/full/477023a.html

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

#179

Post by hackinthebochs »

perl4ever wrote: post #149
hackinthebochs wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

With various embodied cognition or extended mind theses floating around, can't be too sure :)

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

#180

Post by adam12 »

nabla9 wrote: post #83
asab wrote: post #6

I have also seen this example, where a man blinded by strokes still avoids obstacles and recognizes emotions, without any conscious awareness[1]. Is this the same phenomenon? [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/23/health/23blin.html

That's called blindsight. In the published article they say that there is no evidence of blindsight. There is whole paragraph named: "No Evidence of Implicit Knowledge Found with Discrimination Tasks." >Furthermore, we showed that he exhibited chance-level accuracy on two-choice discrimination tasks for these distorted stimuli, suggesting that his deficit did not spare the sorts of implicit knowledge sometimes found…

Damn, I read your first sentence as "That's called bullshit".

I wonder how much of the world I am accurately seeing.

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