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

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

#51

Post by svachalek »

zdragnar wrote: post #45
nuancebydefault wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Just because humans have additional sources of irrationality doesn't mean they don't also have irrationality based on the same lack of self-awareness that LLMs exhibit.

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

#52

Post by nuancebydefault »

zdragnar wrote: post #45
nuancebydefault wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I could understand that argument as follows: LLMs fill in the gaps in a creative but predictable way. Humans fill in the gaps in creative but unpredictable ways. The creativeness level is affected by the ad hoc state of the brain.

I understand that you relate judgement, ethics and emotions to 'understanding'. I'm not convinced. Emotions might as well be an effect of pattern matching. You hear a (pattern matched) type of song, you feel a certain way.

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

#53

Post by lo_zamoyski »

zdragnar wrote: post #45
nuancebydefault wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Conversely, human beings with varying particular experiences can come to the same conclusions, because human cognition can abstract from particulars, while LLMs are, at best, statistical and imagist. No two of us ever experience the same set of triangles, but abstraction allows us to form concepts like "triangularity", which means we can understand what it means to be a triangle per se (something that is not concrete or particular, and therefore cannot be visualized), while an LLM can only proceed based on the concrete and particular data of input triangles and derivations introduced into the model. It can never go "beyond" the surface features of the training model's images, as it were, and where the appearance of having done so occurs, it is not via abstraction, but by way of product of human abstraction. From the LLM's perspective, there is no triangle, only co-occurrence of features, while abstraction goes beyond features, stripping them away to obtain the bare, unimaginable form.

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

#54

Post by EMM_386 »

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…

I've had numberous LLMs tell me that humans are conscious because we are like radio receivers, picking up a single consciousness field of the universe itself.

So that's very interesting that you mention that.

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

#55

Post by ggm »

codr7 wrote: post #20
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

It certainly looks like what LLMs are doing is one aspect of what a brain is doing.

Key point here is "looks like" I suggest if you want to argue this further to invest the time asking Brain Scientists what they think. Not AI scientists but people who actually work in cognition.

(Not a brain scientist btw)

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

#56

Post by layer8 »

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 would imply that the behavior of elementary particles in the brain (which ultimately cause our observable behavior via nerve signals and muscle movements, including the texts we are typing or dictating here) differs from the one predicted by the known physical laws. That’s difficult to reconcile with the well-confirmed fundamental physical theories, and one has to wonder why nobody tries to experimentally demonstrate such known-physical-laws-contradicting behavior. It would be worth at least one Nobel Prize.

Secondly, it wouldn’t really explain anything. The “consciousness field” would presumably obey some kind of natural laws like the known fields do, but the subjective experience of consciousness would remain as mysterious as before (for those who do find it mysterious).

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

#57

Post by jodrellblank »

card_zero wrote: post #47
selcuka wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 p…

I wonder if the origin of the question is the religious idea of a separate immortal soul which popped into this body and not into some other body - but in some way could have. This concept is in popular discourse like “what if I had been born in Italy in 1420?!” as if that were a thing thats plausible - an “I” separate from this body/place/time/life experiences/memories/language/family/etc but somehow still ‘me’.

Boring materialism view is that a brain with genetics mixed from my parents and raised in the way I was raised, with the experiences I had here and in this time, is what makes “me” and I couldn’t be anywhere or anyone else.

Or another way, we are all everyone else - what it would be like if I was born to your parents and raised like you is … you. What you would be like here is… me.

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

#58

Post by layer8 »

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…

> What would make you (the original) different from your replica?

You’d be in two different locations, have independent experiences, and your world lines would quickly diverge. Both of you would remember a common past.

How do you know when you wake up in the morning that you are the same “I” as you remember from the previous day? Who isn’t to say that the universe didn’t multiply while you were asleep, and now there are two or more of you waking up?

(You don’t actually need to go to sleep to do this: https://cheapuniverses.com/)

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

#59

Post by Barrin92 »

morkalork wrote: post #48
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.

It's not a dualism at all. What the OP is proposing is similar to Spinoza (probably the most hardcore monist to ever exist), where mind is a fundamental property of the universe (in fact, there's only one mind) and each individual person is a 'mode' of it.

It's effectively akin to talking about mass. Despite the fact that mass is observable as a distinct phenomenon in any object, it's obviously not accurate to say that you "produce mass" or that it's "your mass" in some private, ontologically separated way, it just appears that way, by definition if we look at particular manifestations of it.

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

#60

Post by card_zero »

jodrellblank wrote: post #57
card_zero wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

I wonder if the origin of the question is the religious idea of a separate immortal soul which popped into this body and not into some other body - but in some way could have . This concept is in popular discourse like “what if I had been born in Italy in 1420?!” as if that were a thing thats plausible - an “I” separate from this body/place/time/life experiences/memories/language/family/etc but somehow still ‘me’. Bo…

Well, if I were you, I wouldn't worry about it.
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