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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

#101

Post by pas »

michael-ax wrote: post #94
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…

an amoeba has consciousness.. and what you call the hard problem is a problem with the brain doctrine .. as the hands of a concert pianist have no trouble running the show with the rest of his or her parts cooperating to make it possible. .. the mind/brain looking on then .. as in many/most other experiences where a whole person is in flow. its freaky to think my parts, glands, organs were not freely and willingly co…

yes, consciousness is a spectrum, as we already see it during normal human development/lifecycle.

and sure, in that sense maybe even a rock is conscious to some degree, at least compared to hard vacuum.

but conflating the importance of the CNS with the lack of a hard cut-off is a folly.

similarly, just because the concert pianist can't play well after a hand injury doesn't make the hand more important than the brain. because similarly, the pianist can't play well after many types of head/brain injury. naturally, because the pianist learned to play through the hands, fine-tuned and memorized what to do with the hands to get what the brain wants to hear. hence the importance of practice.

amoebas behavior and adaptability is very limited, because its comparatively very simple. an so we might be fairly certain it lacks the hardware/wetware to run what we call consciousness. and it might turn out that a big fancy brain like ours is not needed for consciousness, but likely there's still some cut off, meaning at least a few neurons (or similar networks and [predictive?] feedback loops) are likely needed.

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

#102

Post by agustif »

ghego1 wrote: post #91
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…

> there are experiments which show that the brain calculates the answers and "presents" the answers later on to the consciousness. This made me think of an async process

Promise.all()

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

#103

Post by mojuba »

krisoft wrote: post #99
mojuba wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 o…

"Thus knowing your place in space means some model of the world and your relative place within it." Soooo you are saying a GPS module plus a GIS database? :) If someone puts me in a pitch dark barrel, and then carries the barrel to an unknown to me location will I cease to be conscious by that definition even if I'm kicking and screaming and yelling for help? I'm working on self driving cars. They know very precisely…

The barrel: no, you won't lose your self-awareness because you have a memory and a whole history of your self-aware moments before the barrel. However, staying in the barrel for long enough (say 30 years?) might affect your consciousness though I wouldn't recommend experimenting with it :)

The self-driving cars are interesting in this regard, but in terms of complexity of their model of the world they are still way behind that of the most primitive insects even, I think. This is due to their limited capability of discovering the world and learning about it. A car that can also sense surfaces and hear things might have a chance to build a more complex model. Add the ability to park and connect to a charging socket by itself and you get a very, very basic organism, possibly a bit self-aware, too.

But just because a self-driving car has a model of a macro-world (roads, buildings, other cars) doesn't make it any more self-aware than bacteria.

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

#105

Post by kharak »

djhaskin987 wrote: post #27

> That he could still interpret letters, Schubert says, lends support to the idea that the brain has a specialized module for processing numbers. This makes a lot of sense to me. I have almost no trouble at all remembering long strings of numbers, but I have the opposite problem with names. I cannot remember names to save my life unless I use them on a daily basis. I feel like this is a flip-flop from how most people…

This is one of those things where people say "oh I can't remember names" and what they mean is "I don't put any effort in remembering names".

I know, because I've been the same. Now I repeat names in my mind again and again. The next time I see the person, but don't speak to him or her, I repeat the name in my mind. An couple of minutes after being introduces to a new person, I repeat the name. An hour later, I repeat the name. A day later, I repeat the name. I'll even write some names down inside a notebook.

And guess what, now I'm excellent at remembering names and are one of these people who have seen you once and then approach you with "hey djhaskin, how are you?"

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

#107

Post by henriquemaia »

rocqua wrote: post #66
henriquemaia wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

True. Maybe that's the reason why they chose that new system.

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

#108

Post by Symmetry »

djhaskin987 wrote: post #27

> That he could still interpret letters, Schubert says, lends support to the idea that the brain has a specialized module for processing numbers. This makes a lot of sense to me. I have almost no trouble at all remembering long strings of numbers, but I have the opposite problem with names. I cannot remember names to save my life unless I use them on a daily basis. I feel like this is a flip-flop from how most people…

And as far as I know its not something that's come up in the subliminal priming research, which is how we know most of the structure of how we recognize numbers and letters. I do wonder if it works like this for everybody, though, or if it could something specific to him.

As for names I did a blog post[1] speculating that remembering names might correlate to how you deal with the following:

>So, imagine someone is walking along, down a street. They see the store their going to and they enter through the shop door. So, when you were imagining this, did you see it? Which direction was the person walking, relative to your mind's eye? Did they turn to the left or right to enter the store? What color was everything?

[1]http://hopefullyintersting.blogspot.com/2018/12/ways-of-thin...

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

#109

Post by mojuba »

xelxebar wrote: post #97
mojuba wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 o…

Is your definition actually accurate enough to capture instances of intuitive judgements that "this is a conscious being" without being overly broad to include "obviously non-conscious" things? By calling it a spectrum, the already fuzzy definition becomes so broad as to be almost useless. Your spectrum and "knowing" model admits conscious GPS, albeit "low consciousness." What about spiders or GPT-3 or suitibly chose…

Self-awareness is paradoxical, I am aware of that. What I'm trying to model at least mentally for now, is something that has a chance of becoming self-aware unless we are missing something else.

In other words, let's say these are the necessary but not necessarily sufficient conditions for the emergence of self-awareness: (1) having some model of the world (MOTW), (2) maintaing a relative position of Self in MOTW, (3) maintining a history of positions in time.

The level of self-awareness then becomes a function of the complexity of MOTW and the complexity of the system's interfaces. For example is the model good enough to help it survive or reach whatever goals it's programmed to achieve? Is the system flexible and adaptible enough? Can it discover and learn by itself?

So again, in this regard a GPS system is so primitive that it may be comparable to that of an amoeba or even worse. A coordinate space alone is not a useful or interesting MOTW that would help your GPS box achieve its goals.

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

#110

Post by chiefalchemist »

Just to clarify a bit, it's possible he can't communicate thoughts about numbers. That's a different perspective than can't read them.

I say this because my father had a stroke ~3 years ago. It compromised him significantly. He definitely can communicate the way he used to. But one of the patterns we've seen is he can have a thought, but he can't communicate it. He tries but it doesn't come out. I haven't recognized it's specific like the man in the article. But I wanted to mention that processing and communication are two seperate steps.

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