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The Origin of Consciousness (2008)
91–96 of 96 posts
Re: The Origin of Consciousness (2008)
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
The language thing is just that without writing, reconstructions based on regular sound correspondences only allow us to infer backwards by a few thousand years. It doesn't mean that anything particularly interesting happened exactly at that time to human language. It's just that language changes relatively fast on this timescale so current languages don't offer enough clues. And the origins of language are famously…
The conclusion linguists are coming to is much stronger than that. The data indicate that the last common ancestor of languages as varied as Hittite, German, and Latin was spoken around 4500 BCE in Ukraine. It's a linguistic equivalent of a genetic bottleneck. It isn't merely that we can't know what happened before that. It's that the proto language was in fact relatively recent.
In Ukraine of all places? (I'm from there). It seems rather sensational.
Re: The Origin of Consciousness (2008)
#93Isn't this a testable hypothesis? If consciousness spread virally and isn't a natural outgrowth of the physical structure of the brain, then presumably isolated indigenous tribes would still have pre-consciousness mental processes, and that should be detectable somehow. The being said, I'm reading "Proto" By Laura Spinney, and the thing that strikes me is how recently the world's major languages developed. Everyone a…
There’s a fascinating book called Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes by Daniel Everett that covers the Piraha people in the Amazon. Their language is unusual: no recurrent sentences, almost no discussion of the past. I’m not suggesting they are unconscious but there appears to be something different going on with the Piraha sociolinguistically.
Can you describe a recurrent sentence? I can’t think of what it means.
I did search but only found examples of recurrent in a sentence.
Re: The Origin of Consciousness (2008)
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But from the inside observed by oneself, it feels quite similar, besides the fact that sleep is initiated by oneself, and the wakeful state transition for sleep is more gradual than for anesthesia. Have you been anesthetized before? Different forms are very different, but none of them feel like sleep, at all. General anesthesia feels like a time simply skipped forward. Like a chunk of your memory tape was cut out c…
I've been under general anesthesia, but it does not feel too different. I'm dead when sleeping, and basically never dream. I should have said "dreamless sleep" in the earlier comment to be more precise because dreaming is obviously different, but it happens so rarely I forget it exists.
This is fascinating to me. Your experience is so different from mine.
When I wake from sleeping, I have a distinct sense of time passing and can usually tell you what time it is when I first wake up. But under anesthesia, absolutely no sense of any time passing at all.
Re: The Origin of Consciousness (2008)
#95The article's definition of consciousness is precise, but it's not what people are referring to in most cases where the word "consciousness" is used. Of course, a word can have multiple definitions. But colloquially, when people say consciousness, we usually mean the thing that goes away when we sleep or are anesthetized. I don't think there's a much better way to define that. The contrast between the wakeful and non…
> But colloquially, when people say consciousness, we usually mean the thing that goes away when we sleep or are anesthetized.
Sounds like attention rather than consciousness. You lose your attention.
Re: The Origin of Consciousness (2008)
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
You continue to make the same mistake made above: > I was amazed that predicting a word can emerge into knowledge, creativity, productivity - the stuff of thoughts. Markov Theorem functions can predict a word. They have no knowledge, no creativity, and no more productivity than a hammer or magnifying glass. LLMs are in the "more like Markov Theorems" set of tools, and far more complex, but there is no proof of "knowl…
What mistake did I make? You've correctly pointed out how Markov models and modern LLMs are similar in a way, and how modern LLMs don't have full agency. But this doesn't rule out the possibility that Markov models are very slightly conscious in some human-like way. All information processing happens on matter-based substrates, brains and computers alike. I'll even provide a somewhat specific hypothesis: the pattern…
I should further clarify, this is a materialist stance. But it's the only practical stance to take anyway. And I will offer the explanation for why this is in first person language because it only makes sense that way. Take it and apply it to yourself:
The materialist stance is taken not because I believe in a strict metaphysical sense that something like solipsism/simulation theory is not true (def true: as real as one's own consciousness), but because even if those were true, the materialist stance and its accompanying theories of modern physics would have the same predictive power regarding what I will observe in the future (well, sort of, at least until I wake up from a simulation, or something like that). I could be a solo mind, but this mind is dreaming of a material world that works according to physical laws, so even if I am a solo mind, I am having the same experience as a brain that exists in true material reality, so it doesn't make much of a difference (except when evaluated for the purpose of philosophical rigor and honesty to oneself).
So "information processing is entirely physical" is strictly speaking an assumption, but it is a good assumption, despite it not having the same realness level as one's own consciousness.