7 ms·

Consciousness: Where Are Words?

71 points by Hooke 9y ago

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
empath75 9y ago
I'm 3 sentences into the interview, and this seems absurd on its face. Does anyone take this seriously? "When we say we are thinking, what we are actually doing is rearranging causal relations with past events, objects that we have encountered before, to see what happens when we combine them. We don’t need a mental sofa to put next to a mental armchair. We allow the sofas and armchairs encountered in our past to exert an effect in the present, in various combinations."
- vinceguidry 9y ago
  I had the same reaction, but you have to keep reading. He's building a stack. He's not saying that thoughts and mental images don't actually exist, it's that they don't exist before the game of language is played. And the game of language is turning sensations of physical objects into auditory representations of them. There's no reason to start constructing the abstract objects yet, we're not at that layer of the 'stack'. It's kind of like saying that when you dive down to the network layer, video doesn't exist. It's up to the application running the network to assemble all the packets to turn it into video. Thoughts are constructed from the stream of physical experiences that get formed into words, not the other way around. It's perfectly possible for the brain to still operate without thoughts the way we experience them, in fact, deaf people think visually rather than auditorially like most of us do.
  - pygy_ 9y ago
    That reasoning completely falls on its face though. AFAIK, Stroke patients whose language areas have been destroyed are still able to perform complex tasks. You can think visually and procedurally (imagining actions) without putting things into words. IIRC Broca's area (which is responsible for grammar) may be related to the temporal planning of non-verbal actions though, so the above may be limited to Wernike's aphasia.
    - chesimov 9y ago
      What do they mean by putting things into words? When thinking, it seems that the assumption is that we are silently putting our thoughts into <insert language> words? This is by experience not the case anyway, right?
      - StavrosK 9y ago
        It depends. Some people (most people?) think their thoughts in words, and find it hard to believe that other people don't. Other people (me, maybe you?) just think "thoughts". Wordlessly, imagelessly. The article supports this, but the GP (it seems to me) finds it worthwhile to point out that people can still think without words, which indicates to me that he thinks with words. I have had a very hard time explaining to people that I just think thoughts, like flashes of... thinking, without words or actions or images. It's like when speaking or typing, you already know what you're going to say or type or write before you put it into words, but some people have trouble relating to that.
        vinceguidry 9y ago
        I generally use words only when I need to communicate. I have different forms that I think with depending on what I'm doing. For example, when I'm coding, I think in terms of methods, objects, and data. The process of selecting words to speak or type is very much like finding the right code pattern.
        chesimov 9y ago
        Thanks for your explanation, I did not know that this was the case. I had until now assumed that words are a kind of medium for conveying the underlying thoughts which are abstract and exist separately. Observations like this make me wonder if actually there might be quite substantial differences from person to person when it comes to thinking and perception.
        pygy_ 9y ago
        > I have had a very hard time explaining to people that I just think thoughts, like flashes of... thinking, without words or actions or images. It's like when speaking or typing, you already know what you're going to say or type or write before you put it into words, but some people have trouble relating to that. I'm in the same boat, actually. While I can't read without vocalizing mentally, I have speechless thoughts especially when it comes to math/logic stuff, and I sometimes find it painful to have to wait for my mouth to serialize what I have in mind.
  - empath75 9y ago
    I think it’s obvious that brains can operate without thoughts because animals and insects do it.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - kleer001 9y ago
      What makes you think other living beings besides humans don't have thoughts? IMHO we're just a slightly souped up version of everything else, exist along a continuity, and are not 'special' except in contrived and technical ways.
      - StavrosK 9y ago
        What makes you think all humans have "thoughts" (I assume you mean "word thoughts")? I, for example, don't think in words or images, I just... think.
      - catawbasam 9y ago
        'slightly' seems a bit understated to me. There is no other species whose members are anywhere close to sitting around typing messages to each other across hundreds or thousand of miles. We are steering our evolution as a species outside of biology, in large part, via social and cultural institutions. What other species does that?
        StavrosK 9y ago
        > What other species does that? None. Sometimes I wonder if they know something we don't.
        deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
  - dkarl 9y ago
    He starts from an unfamiliar place, saying "there are no mental objects separate from real objects," and thinking is a process of re-experiencing these objects and rearranging them in our heads. Sounds pretty radical, but when he's done building his stack, it's all much more conventional. He doesn't mean physical objects so much as experiences, and physical experiences aren't replayed exactly in our heads but rather changed, rearranged, organized, and manipulated, and ways of organizing these experiences can be transmitted via language. So when he says, "Simply, there is no need to introduce this new entity, thought, between body and object," it is a little disingenuous because he is using words such as "experience" and "rearrangement" and "reorganization" to describe mental processes. At that point I lose track of what original point he's trying to make. I think when it comes down to it he is just making a big deal out of replacing nouns with verbs (and nouns more obviously made from verbs) to make it sound like he has a unique appreciation for the fact that what goes on in your head is dynamic rather than static.
  - smaddox 9y ago
    > He's not saying that thoughts and mental images don't actually exist, it's that they don't exist before the game of language is played. And the game of language is turning sensations of physical objects into auditory representations of them. We know this is wrong though. Memory of a chair is distinct from memory of the word "chair". If this wasn't true, then it would be difficult or impossible to speak multiple languages fluently. Also, animals wouldn't be able to understand the world around them, because they don't have language like we have language.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- babygoat 9y ago
  Try starting from the beginning of the conversations. Coming in at the 14th part leaves out a lot of context. I do take it seriously - it's utterly fascinating. I'm really excited to read Manzotti's new book.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- dang 9y ago
  Could you please not rush into an HN thread after 3 sentences to post a quick dismissal of somebody's work? This is just the sort of reaction we're trying to learn—as a community—to suspend, in order to have more substantive conversation. It takes effort, but it's worth it, since internet forums are a shallow wasteland otherwise.
EGreg 9y ago
How about this question: What is consciousness? What is existence? They seem to be duals of each other. I have found that, if you are careful to state the subject and object of a sentence, then it's really hard to pose any question that doesn't have a trivial and obvious answer. TRY IT! So could many of these things just be an artifact of language?
- jjaredsimpson 9y ago
  Consciousness is: what it is like to experience something. Note this is different from self consciousness which is: what is it like to be something which experiences and know you are that thing. Humans are certainly self conscious. Crabs are certainly conscious. Crystals certainly exist. Where the boundaries are is an interesting question, but the categories certainly exist even if I can't draw a clean boundary around members.
  - EGreg 9y ago
    Let's translate your sentences to illustrate what I mean. What it is like? So you are comparing one entity experiencing something to another. Experiencing is a process that takes place inside the entity and among its component parts. Know you are that thing - every thing is itself, if it has well defined boundaries. Knowing something is just having access to that information and good reasons to believe it to be correct. Here we have a tautology - that a thing is itself - so it doesn't require much to know that. What you are probably more interested in is a mechanism that can take advantge of that knowledge in various ways. Like self preservation. Humans are self conscious. Crabs are self conscious too because they act with a purpose of self preservation, which requires knowledge of what is them and what is not them. Crystals do not have this knowledge or do not have a mechanism to act on it in a way that manipulates semantic symbols.
    - guuz 9y ago
      > Crabs are self conscious too because they act with a purpose of self preservation, which requires knowledge of what is them and what is not them. It's a bit more complicated. Self consciousness is the ability to contemplate mental states, some philosophers say. Crabs do not contemplate their own mental states, they simply act and feel.
kaffeemitsahne 9y ago
Riccardo Manzotti's website: http://www.consciousness.it/ http://www.consciousness.it/
- szemet 9y ago
  http://www.thespreadmind.com/The_Spread_Mind_S7.php http://www.thespreadmind.com/The_Spread_Mind_S7.php This is obviously false to me.* If a robot vacuum recognizes a roadblock and stops, its inner representation of the roadblock is not merely an agreement (with whom anyway?). That representation is internal and (normally) only accessible to the software of that particular robot (it may even could change over time - of course it would be a bad programming practice except for malwares - so no agreement is needed but only some kind of behavioral self consistency). And it have real causal power: it makes the robot stop and turn. That representation is stored in memory cells wich are (usually in a normal household) not roadblocks. *(AFAIK this viewpoint is called functionalism. It just somehow feels natural to me as a developer, but maybe it is just taste, and it is just as twisted for a philosopher as the above identity theory for me...)
bra-ket 9y ago
the author's Phd thesis "Intentional robots ", 2007: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Riccardo_Manzotti/publication/242281589_Intentional_robots_The_design_of_a_goal-seeking_environment-driven_agent/links/004635341619b9bc1c000000/Intentional-robots-The-design-of-a-goal-seeking-environment-driven-agent.pdf https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Riccardo_Manzotti/publi...
ozy 9y ago
Meaning and subjectivity come from (machine) learning, or relativity as Riccardo calls it. I think, consciousness from how our brains learn, namely by having internalized the feedback. Which is another way of saying by modeling the world, and updating those models by constantly monitoring the effectiveness of those models. We are self-observers, integrating our sensory information into a subjective first-person perspective.
ibigb 9y ago
For a better understanding of consciousness, thinking, knowledge, I would refer you to a short thesis correcting some of the errors of ideas about same: http://wn.rsarchive.org/Books/GA003/English/GC1981/GA003_c03.html http://wn.rsarchive.org/Books/GA003/English/GC1981/GA003_c03... "ALL PROPOUNDERS of theories of knowledge since Kant have been influenced to a greater or lesser degree by the mistaken way he formulated the problem of knowledge. As a result of his “a priorism” he advanced the view that all objects given to us are our representations..."

71 points by Hooke 9y ago

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

I'm 3 sentences into the interview, and this seems absurd on its face. Does anyone take this seriously? "When we say we are thinking, what we are actually doing is rearranging causal relations with past events, objects that we have encountered before, to see what happens when we combine them. We don’t need a mental sofa to put next to a mental armchair. We allow the sofas and armchairs encountered in our past to exert an effect in the present, in various combinations."

vinceguidry 9y ago
I had the same reaction, but you have to keep reading. He's building a stack. He's not saying that thoughts and mental images don't actually exist, it's that they don't exist before the game of language is played. And the game of language is turning sensations of physical objects into auditory representations of them. There's no reason to start constructing the abstract objects yet, we're not at that layer of the 'stack'. It's kind of like saying that when you dive down to the network layer, video doesn't exist. It's up to the application running the network to assemble all the packets to turn it into video. Thoughts are constructed from the stream of physical experiences that get formed into words, not the other way around. It's perfectly possible for the brain to still operate without thoughts the way we experience them, in fact, deaf people think visually rather than auditorially like most of us do.
- pygy_ 9y ago
  That reasoning completely falls on its face though. AFAIK, Stroke patients whose language areas have been destroyed are still able to perform complex tasks. You can think visually and procedurally (imagining actions) without putting things into words. IIRC Broca's area (which is responsible for grammar) may be related to the temporal planning of non-verbal actions though, so the above may be limited to Wernike's aphasia.
  - chesimov 9y ago
    What do they mean by putting things into words? When thinking, it seems that the assumption is that we are silently putting our thoughts into <insert language> words? This is by experience not the case anyway, right?
    - StavrosK 9y ago
      It depends. Some people (most people?) think their thoughts in words, and find it hard to believe that other people don't. Other people (me, maybe you?) just think "thoughts". Wordlessly, imagelessly. The article supports this, but the GP (it seems to me) finds it worthwhile to point out that people can still think without words, which indicates to me that he thinks with words. I have had a very hard time explaining to people that I just think thoughts, like flashes of... thinking, without words or actions or images. It's like when speaking or typing, you already know what you're going to say or type or write before you put it into words, but some people have trouble relating to that.
      - vinceguidry 9y ago
        I generally use words only when I need to communicate. I have different forms that I think with depending on what I'm doing. For example, when I'm coding, I think in terms of methods, objects, and data. The process of selecting words to speak or type is very much like finding the right code pattern.
      - chesimov 9y ago
        Thanks for your explanation, I did not know that this was the case. I had until now assumed that words are a kind of medium for conveying the underlying thoughts which are abstract and exist separately. Observations like this make me wonder if actually there might be quite substantial differences from person to person when it comes to thinking and perception.
      - pygy_ 9y ago
        > I have had a very hard time explaining to people that I just think thoughts, like flashes of... thinking, without words or actions or images. It's like when speaking or typing, you already know what you're going to say or type or write before you put it into words, but some people have trouble relating to that. I'm in the same boat, actually. While I can't read without vocalizing mentally, I have speechless thoughts especially when it comes to math/logic stuff, and I sometimes find it painful to have to wait for my mouth to serialize what I have in mind.
- empath75 9y ago
  I think it’s obvious that brains can operate without thoughts because animals and insects do it.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - kleer001 9y ago
    What makes you think other living beings besides humans don't have thoughts? IMHO we're just a slightly souped up version of everything else, exist along a continuity, and are not 'special' except in contrived and technical ways.
    - StavrosK 9y ago
      What makes you think all humans have "thoughts" (I assume you mean "word thoughts")? I, for example, don't think in words or images, I just... think.
    - catawbasam 9y ago
      'slightly' seems a bit understated to me. There is no other species whose members are anywhere close to sitting around typing messages to each other across hundreds or thousand of miles. We are steering our evolution as a species outside of biology, in large part, via social and cultural institutions. What other species does that?
      - StavrosK 9y ago
        > What other species does that? None. Sometimes I wonder if they know something we don't.
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
- dkarl 9y ago
  He starts from an unfamiliar place, saying "there are no mental objects separate from real objects," and thinking is a process of re-experiencing these objects and rearranging them in our heads. Sounds pretty radical, but when he's done building his stack, it's all much more conventional. He doesn't mean physical objects so much as experiences, and physical experiences aren't replayed exactly in our heads but rather changed, rearranged, organized, and manipulated, and ways of organizing these experiences can be transmitted via language. So when he says, "Simply, there is no need to introduce this new entity, thought, between body and object," it is a little disingenuous because he is using words such as "experience" and "rearrangement" and "reorganization" to describe mental processes. At that point I lose track of what original point he's trying to make. I think when it comes down to it he is just making a big deal out of replacing nouns with verbs (and nouns more obviously made from verbs) to make it sound like he has a unique appreciation for the fact that what goes on in your head is dynamic rather than static.
- smaddox 9y ago
  > He's not saying that thoughts and mental images don't actually exist, it's that they don't exist before the game of language is played. And the game of language is turning sensations of physical objects into auditory representations of them. We know this is wrong though. Memory of a chair is distinct from memory of the word "chair". If this wasn't true, then it would be difficult or impossible to speak multiple languages fluently. Also, animals wouldn't be able to understand the world around them, because they don't have language like we have language.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
babygoat 9y ago
Try starting from the beginning of the conversations. Coming in at the 14th part leaves out a lot of context. I do take it seriously - it's utterly fascinating. I'm really excited to read Manzotti's new book.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
dang 9y ago
Could you please not rush into an HN thread after 3 sentences to post a quick dismissal of somebody's work? This is just the sort of reaction we're trying to learn—as a community—to suspend, in order to have more substantive conversation. It takes effort, but it's worth it, since internet forums are a shallow wasteland otherwise.

EGreg 9y ago

How about this question: What is consciousness? What is existence? They seem to be duals of each other. I have found that, if you are careful to state the subject and object of a sentence, then it's really hard to pose any question that doesn't have a trivial and obvious answer. TRY IT! So could many of these things just be an artifact of language?

jjaredsimpson 9y ago
Consciousness is: what it is like to experience something. Note this is different from self consciousness which is: what is it like to be something which experiences and know you are that thing. Humans are certainly self conscious. Crabs are certainly conscious. Crystals certainly exist. Where the boundaries are is an interesting question, but the categories certainly exist even if I can't draw a clean boundary around members.
- EGreg 9y ago
  Let's translate your sentences to illustrate what I mean. What it is like? So you are comparing one entity experiencing something to another. Experiencing is a process that takes place inside the entity and among its component parts. Know you are that thing - every thing is itself, if it has well defined boundaries. Knowing something is just having access to that information and good reasons to believe it to be correct. Here we have a tautology - that a thing is itself - so it doesn't require much to know that. What you are probably more interested in is a mechanism that can take advantge of that knowledge in various ways. Like self preservation. Humans are self conscious. Crabs are self conscious too because they act with a purpose of self preservation, which requires knowledge of what is them and what is not them. Crystals do not have this knowledge or do not have a mechanism to act on it in a way that manipulates semantic symbols.
  - guuz 9y ago
    > Crabs are self conscious too because they act with a purpose of self preservation, which requires knowledge of what is them and what is not them. It's a bit more complicated. Self consciousness is the ability to contemplate mental states, some philosophers say. Crabs do not contemplate their own mental states, they simply act and feel.

kaffeemitsahne 9y ago

Riccardo Manzotti's website: http://www.consciousness.it/ http://www.consciousness.it/

szemet 9y ago
http://www.thespreadmind.com/The_Spread_Mind_S7.php http://www.thespreadmind.com/The_Spread_Mind_S7.php This is obviously false to me.* If a robot vacuum recognizes a roadblock and stops, its inner representation of the roadblock is not merely an agreement (with whom anyway?). That representation is internal and (normally) only accessible to the software of that particular robot (it may even could change over time - of course it would be a bad programming practice except for malwares - so no agreement is needed but only some kind of behavioral self consistency). And it have real causal power: it makes the robot stop and turn. That representation is stored in memory cells wich are (usually in a normal household) not roadblocks. *(AFAIK this viewpoint is called functionalism. It just somehow feels natural to me as a developer, but maybe it is just taste, and it is just as twisted for a philosopher as the above identity theory for me...)

bra-ket 9y ago

the author's Phd thesis "Intentional robots ", 2007: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Riccardo_Manzotti/publication/242281589_Intentional_robots_The_design_of_a_goal-seeking_environment-driven_agent/links/004635341619b9bc1c000000/Intentional-robots-The-design-of-a-goal-seeking-environment-driven-agent.pdf https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Riccardo_Manzotti/publi...

ozy 9y ago

Meaning and subjectivity come from (machine) learning, or relativity as Riccardo calls it. I think, consciousness from how our brains learn, namely by having internalized the feedback. Which is another way of saying by modeling the world, and updating those models by constantly monitoring the effectiveness of those models. We are self-observers, integrating our sensory information into a subjective first-person perspective.

ibigb 9y ago

For a better understanding of consciousness, thinking, knowledge, I would refer you to a short thesis correcting some of the errors of ideas about same: http://wn.rsarchive.org/Books/GA003/English/GC1981/GA003_c03.html http://wn.rsarchive.org/Books/GA003/English/GC1981/GA003_c03... "ALL PROPOUNDERS of theories of knowledge since Kant have been influenced to a greater or lesser degree by the mistaken way he formulated the problem of knowledge. As a result of his “a priorism” he advanced the view that all objects given to us are our representations..."