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One Head, Two Brains: The origins of split-brain research (2015)

theatlantic.com

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Re: One Head, Two Brains: The origins of split-brain research (2015)

#41

Post by nuancebydefault »

danielmarkbruce wrote: post #16
zonkerdonker wrote: post #3

The confabulation to justify picking out related images that the left brain never observed (chicken and snow shovel in the article) reminds me profoundly of the confident slop produced by LLMs. Make you wonder if llms might be one half of the "brain" of a true AGI

confident slop.

I believe most confident statements people make, are established the same way. There are some anchor points (inputs and vivid memories) and some part of the brain in some stochastic way dreams up connections. Then we convince ourselves that the connections are correct, just because they match some earlier seen pattern or way of reasoning.

Re: One Head, Two Brains: The origins of split-brain research (2015)

#42

Post by yencabulator »

kulahan wrote: post #15
MailleQuiMaille wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"If the music I dance to doesn't arise from the radio, it seems to be suspiciously well correlated with the radio. I think the music I dance arises from the radio."

Note that in this scenario, we’ve never even heard of radio stations or radio waves before.

And despite looking for them intensely, we have never found any evidence of the existence of radio waves, or been able to send a signal to a radio ourselves.

Re: One Head, Two Brains: The origins of split-brain research (2015)

#43

Post by cognaitiv »

cognaitiv wrote: post #33
at_a_remove wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I cannot see how one might perform an experiment to determine which concept is correct. As with most things which are unfalsifiable, the idea can be amusing for a bit but is ultimately not useful to the extent that you can do anything about it. You cannot serve tea from Russell's Teapot.

If the brain is a receiver, information transfer could happen non-locally and the tea might be telepathy, precognition, or remote viewing. In the split brain example, demonstrating an ability to coordinate between hemispheres in ways not predicted by neural separation might challenge the physical origin of consciousness as with the chicken and shovel anecdote. Experiments demonstrating an external source of conscious…

Or communicate telepathically with dogs.

Re: One Head, Two Brains: The origins of split-brain research (2015)

#44

Post by at_a_remove »

cognaitiv wrote: post #33
at_a_remove wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I cannot see how one might perform an experiment to determine which concept is correct. As with most things which are unfalsifiable, the idea can be amusing for a bit but is ultimately not useful to the extent that you can do anything about it. You cannot serve tea from Russell's Teapot.

If the brain is a receiver, information transfer could happen non-locally and the tea might be telepathy, precognition, or remote viewing. In the split brain example, demonstrating an ability to coordinate between hemispheres in ways not predicted by neural separation might challenge the physical origin of consciousness as with the chicken and shovel anecdote. Experiments demonstrating an external source of conscious…

Ah, no.

Suppose you do all kinds of studies and not show any telepathy, precog, or remote viewing. You could still say that the brain was only a receiver. None of that would disprove the "brain-as-consciousness-receiver" concept, you would just say that, I guess it is one way, no telepathy.

It's not disprovable. And so, kind of boring.

Re: One Head, Two Brains: The origins of split-brain research (2015)

#45

Post by zdragnar »

nuancebydefault wrote: post #41
danielmarkbruce wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

confident slop.

I believe most confident statements people make, are established the same way. There are some anchor points (inputs and vivid memories) and some part of the brain in some stochastic way dreams up connections. Then we convince ourselves that the connections are correct, just because they match some earlier seen pattern or way of reasoning.

The basis of human irrationality is not tied to the basis of LLM irrationality.

LLMs don't get to make value judgements, because they don't "understand". They predict the subsequent points of a pattern given a starting point.

Humans do that, but they also jade their perception with emotive ethics, desires, optimism and pessimism.

It is impossible to say that two humans with the exact same experience would always come to the same conclusion, because two humans will never have the exact same experience. Inputs include emotional state triggered by hormones, physical or mental stress, and so forth, which are often not immediately relevant to any particular decision, but carried over from prior states and biological processes.

Re: One Head, Two Brains: The origins of split-brain research (2015)

#46

Post by financetechbro »

Hacker_Yogi wrote: post #6

I disagree with Steven Pinker’s claim that consciousness arises from the brain. This perspective fails to establish that the brain produces consciousness, as it relies on the mistaken assumption that "mind" and "consciousness" are interchangeable. While brain activity may influence the mind, consciousness itself could be a more fundamental aspect of reality. Rather than generating consciousness, the brain might funct…

The idea that the brain functions as a sort of radio capturing a consciousness field makes the most sense to me and also feel comforting in some way

Re: One Head, Two Brains: The origins of split-brain research (2015)

#47

Post by card_zero »

selcuka wrote: post #17
jstanley wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If consciousness doesn't arise from the brain, it seems to be suspiciously well correlated with the brain. I think consciousness arises from the brain.

> I think consciousness arises from the brain. I tend to agree, but it doesn't fully explain Benj Hellie's vertiginous question [1]. Everyone seems to have brains, but for some reason only I am me. If we were able to make an atom-by-atom accurate replica of your brain (and optionally your body, too), with all the memories intact, would you suddenly start seeing the world from two different pair of eyes at the same ti…

Yes, the two of you would see through two pairs of eyes, independently.

Both of you would be you, and you two would function separately, occupy separate spaces, and diverge slightly in ways that would only rarely make a difference to your personality.

But that's not the vertiginous question, which is "why am I me". I've wondered that before. However, it is nonsense. Naturally a person is that person, not some other person (and a tree is a tree, not some other tree). There's nothing strange about this. Why would it be otherwise? So the urge to ask the question really reveals some deep-seated misconception, or some other question that actually makes sense, and I wonder what that is.

Re: One Head, Two Brains: The origins of split-brain research (2015)

#48

Post by morkalork »

Hacker_Yogi wrote: post #6

I disagree with Steven Pinker’s claim that consciousness arises from the brain. This perspective fails to establish that the brain produces consciousness, as it relies on the mistaken assumption that "mind" and "consciousness" are interchangeable. While brain activity may influence the mind, consciousness itself could be a more fundamental aspect of reality. Rather than generating consciousness, the brain might funct…

This is dualism, no.

Re: One Head, Two Brains: The origins of split-brain research (2015)

#49

Post by card_zero »

selcuka wrote: post #34
jstanley wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like this is just a totally stupid question. The brain has inputs, internal processing, and outputs. The conscious experience happens within the internal processing. If you make a second copy, then that second copy will also have conscious experience, but it won't share any inputs or outputs or internal state with the first copy. If you were to duplicate your computer, would the second computer share a filesys…

When you replace "I" with "it" (as in your example with computers) the question becomes meaningless and stupid. As an outside observer both computers are the same, as they act exactly the same way, therefore there is no question. That is actually the "egalitarian" view in Benj Hellie's paper [1]: > The ‘god’s eye’ point of view taken in setting up the egalitarian metaphysics does not correspond to my ‘embedded’ point…

Right, yes: Why does physical brain activity produce a first-person perspective?

We might ask "what else do we expect it to do?" A second person perspective makes even less sense. And since the brain's activity entails first-person-perspective-like processing, the next most obvious answer, no perspective at all, isn't plausible either. It's reasonable that the brain would produce a first person perspective as it thinks about its situation. (And you don't have extend this to objects that don't think, by the way, if you were thinking of doing that.)

But I'm still left with the impression that there's an unanswered question which this one was only standing in for. The question is probably "what is thinking, anyway?".

Or, something quite different: "Why don't I have the outside observer point of view?". It's somehow difficult to accept that when there are many points of view scattered across space (and time), you have a specific one, and don't have all of them: "why am I not omniscient?". It's egotistical to expect not to have a specific viewpoint, and yet it seems arbitrary (and thus inexplicable) that you do have one. But again, the real question is not "why is this so?" but "why does this seem like a problem?".

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