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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

#91

Post by ghego1 »

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

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

#92

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#93

Post by Sharlin »

henriquemaia wrote: post #53
aaron-santos wrote: post #47

> eventually mastered an entirely new digit system (where ⌊ stood for 2, ⌈ for 8, etc.) Why invent a specialized number system? How difficult would it have been to teach him Chinese numerals for example. Also very curious on his perception of Roman numerals.

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 not a place-value system and you can’t make a computer use Roman numerals just by switching to a custom font.

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

#94

Post by michael-ax »

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 coordinating by way of the cns.. and i have no experiential evidence .. in the amoeba and up .. that a brain is even needed for consciousness.

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

#95

Post by radarsat1 »

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…

> 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.

Seems to conflate consciousness and free will. Just because you're not conscious of it, your brain still made that decision. And your conscious mind can still go back on the decision and "change your mind".

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

#96

Post by Sharlin »

didibus wrote: post #81
kovac wrote: post #25

I don't understand how these experiments lead to the conclusion separates higher cognitive functions from consciousness. I fact I don't see anything that necessarily she'd any light into the roots of consciousness here. Can someone explain how the results of the experiment lead to that conclusion? This looks to me like, if it were a computer program, encoding/decoding of the symbols seems to be messed up for a largel…

That he could identity people, without being aware of it. Basically, if there were faces inside a number, the EEG showed that his brain recognized the faces, but he did not know there were faces, instead he couldn't understand what he was seeing. So the hypothesis conclusion from this is, recognizing someone's face happens separately from consciousness. Basically, the experiment appears to show that your brain can re…

But that seems fairly obvious, at least to me. Face recognition seems to be an extremely fundamental capability that has probably existed in some form almost as long as brains and image-forming eyes themselves. In RFS’s case, his brain’s ”face module” spotted the faces, his damaged ”number module” couldn’t converge to anything useful, and the jumbled mess for whatever reason overrode the faces in higher-level perception fusion processes. Possibly because the faces were so small so were lost in the noise, so to speak. Would be interesting to know how RFS would have perceived a face with small numbers drawn on it.

In any case, it is pretty well understood that our conscious visual perception is almost entirely unlike the raw stream of nerve signals emitted by the retina. We’re completely unaware of the huge amount of filtering, denoising, smoothing, stabilization, spatiotemporal fusion, extrapolation, interpolation, object detection/classification/conceptualization/contextualization/prioritization, and other processing that is done to create what we consciously perceive.

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

#97

Post by xelxebar »

mojuba wrote: post #68
xelxebar wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By that definition, a GPS module with an SSD is an "I". In discussions that invoke the words "self" or "consciousness", I find it common to hear pithy or clever definitions. However, rarely do those answers offer any actionable insight. Are you sure that your words "I" or "consciousness" point at extrinsic things in the world? Have you not just invented a new kind of elan vital ? If you claim that "consciousness" is…

> 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 chosen digits out of an RNG? At best these all fail the intuitive answer test for most people.

Perhaps you have a mental model of Yudkowsian self-optimizers? Or maybe you are thinking more classically along the lines of Kant?

The whole problem I am trying to communicate is that your are playing and refining a model without defining exactly what your are modeling.

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

#98

Post by TeMPOraL »

User23 wrote: post #41
Xenograph wrote: post #16

> In contrast, when shown numbers with embedded faces, the number’s effect apparently swamped that of the face: RFS reported seeing neither; everything looked like spaghetti. Yet an EEG still showed the characteristic N170 spike for registering faces. Somehow, his brain was still processing and identifying a face—a fairly high-level skill—even though his conscious mind was oblivious. This deficit shows high-level cog…

Makes me think of this silliness I saw today: https://mobile.twitter.com/BFriedmanDC/status/12892831187305... I recommend first watching it with you eyes closed and after that seeing how you can manipulate your perception. It was easy to hear “brain needle” with my eyes closed.

Woah. Can confirm it works as described for me - I hear both "green needle" and "brainstorm", depending on which word I read, or which word I think of when I close my eyes.

... or at least that was true until now; I've just retried it again, and I've lost the ability to hear the "-storm" ending. I can hear "green needle" or "brain needle", but no "storm.

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

#99

Post by krisoft »

mojuba wrote: post #68
xelxebar wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By that definition, a GPS module with an SSD is an "I". In discussions that invoke the words "self" or "consciousness", I find it common to hear pithy or clever definitions. However, rarely do those answers offer any actionable insight. Are you sure that your words "I" or "consciousness" point at extrinsic things in the world? Have you not just invented a new kind of elan vital ? If you claim that "consciousness" is…

> 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 where they are, and they know very accurately what is around them. (They even have a sense of where things will be!) Does that make them self-aware?

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

#100

Post by TeMPOraL »

jimmaswell wrote: post #89
stordoff wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Migraines in general are weird. It's rare[1], but I can occasionally tell when a severe migraine is about to occur because rooms feel too big. I walked into my bathroom a few days ago (which is about 2mx2m/6'x6'), and each wall seemed about 2 feet longer than it should, and the far corner looked about 3 feet too far away (it was more a feeling than a visual disturbance - it's hard to describe). I felt _small_, which…

I've never had a migraine but I've definitely had that feeling like the room was too big. I think it only happened once or twice as a kid from a fever or something.

I had that as a kid for a while; when it reached its peak, I ended up in hospital with meningitis. From that period, I distinctively remember feeling small and the room walls and ceiling receding somewhat, and also some weird stuff with colors - I could focus on the visual noise I saw (kind of like the noise you get in a digital camera in low-light condition), and focusing on that would trigger the feeling of the world expanding / me shrinking. All of this only happened at night.
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