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The Origin of Consciousness (2008)

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Re: The Origin of Consciousness (2008)

#41

Post by bonoboTP »

Jtarii wrote: post #19
polytely wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah me too, and it feels like a lot of people who are exclusively 'stuck' in language seem to think the pre-language part is somehow inferior (which imo is very misguided)

Thinking without language makes sense for problems that don't require language like visual art, but how do you solve complex logic problems or write a book without thinking in sentences.

You can think abstractly about geometry problems, or graph tgeory but even about linear algebra. Feynman describes how he felt while holding and analyzing problems in his mind. I'm less eloquent.

Also you can think about the narrative and the valence of a scene for a book, without blabbering to yourself while planning the story. I can narrate it like as if I imagine a friend being there and translating my thought into language but it's an extra step.

It also exhausts me more. Which makes coding with LLMs more tiring for me. Before it, I could code without language use exhausting my brain, but talking to LLMs requires putting all of it into English, while before I could just imagine a certain refactor as one coherent thought in my mind without turning it into sentences.

Of course above a certain level of difficulty, putting thoughts down helps for problem solving, but a lot of that can be various types of sketch drawings and formulas too.

It's likely a verbal and spatial heavy thought difference, the lawyer / engineer type of thinking difference.

Re: The Origin of Consciousness (2008)

#42

Post by munificent »

txrx0000 wrote: post #27
sillywabbit wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anesthesia is a rather different state than sleep.

When observed by a different conscious being, yes. 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. I think that distinction matters because strictly speaking, oneself only has access to one's own consciousness, and that defines one's own understanding of the word "consc…

> 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 completely. Twilight sedation feels like you temporarily inhabited someone else's body but the experience was so strange that you blocked out almost all of the memory.

Sleeping and dreaming is totally different.

Re: The Origin of Consciousness (2008)

#43

Post by xhevahir »

whtrbt wrote: post #26
GlenTheMachine wrote: post #8

Isn'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.

It is an interesting book, but as far as I know no one has verified Everett's work. I've just noticed this article that talks about it: https://news.mit.edu/2016/data-amazonian-piraha-language-deb...

Re: The Origin of Consciousness (2008)

#44

Post by lostmsu »

txrx0000 wrote: post #9

The 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…

Why only as oneself experiences? I can easily tell if a horse is conscious or not. The whole matter is rather simple IMO.

Let's say it's variability (number of distinct if you prefer discrete) of stable responses to external stimuli.

Re: The Origin of Consciousness (2008)

#45

Post by bonoboTP »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #23
kubb wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m pretty sure I can do both. Can’t everyone?

No. There are people who cannot exist without the internal monologue, and if unusual circumstances interrupt that internal monologue they experience anxiety, dysfunction, and a rapidly intensifying irritation that they can't even articulate (because there's no monologue to allow them to describe it). They're generally very stupid, but the internal monologue tells them that they should have a high opinion of their own…

If you spend your time reading reviews of books about other books that talk about the words of other writers who wrote about what others wrote, you start to believe that anything complex must be language-related.

Try to do a mechanical or electrical engineering degree coasting only on internally narrated words. It won't work. It can work in soft fields where all criteria are about what words other humans like to hear and there is no other complex external arbiter.

Re: The Origin of Consciousness (2008)

#46

Post by adolph »

txrx0000 wrote: post #9

The 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…

> when people say consciousness, we usually mean the thing that goes away when we sleep or are anesthetized.

How is dreaming during sleep different from consciousness when awake?

Re: The Origin of Consciousness (2008)

#49

Post by graemep »

mjd wrote: post #7
N_Lens wrote: post #3

I find the description of consciousness in this article very narrow (Only arising post language). Post language consciousness is a particular type of consciousness, and the same can be said of post DMT consciousness (Which is sometimes without language).

That's exactly Jaynes's theory: consciousness not only arrived after the invention of language, it arrived after the invention of writing, literature, agriculture, metallurgy, and government bureaucracy. And also, that it _could not_ have arisen without language because it is crucially founded in the capability of language to describe the world metaphorically. You don't have to like it, but that's the theory that is…

That is what discredits the idea in my view. Illiterate people are not conscious? People in hunter gatherer or isolated subsistence farming communities?
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