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I live by a couple of (vaguely related) principles: a) Consciousness is just your brain trying to anticipate the future. b) Your brain compresses (normalises?
by hunta2097 7y ago
I live by a couple of (vaguely related) principles:
a) Consciousness is just your brain trying to anticipate the future.
b) Your brain compresses (normalises?) repetition in memories. So even if day to day events happen at normal speed, the years seem to fly by when you reflect on them. If your life seems to be flying-by then maybe you need more novelty.
- zikzak 7y agoThis is true. You also need to take into account how each day is a smaller and smaller percentage of your life which might be why kids think summer vacation lasts forever but it flys by for parents.
- Falling3 7y agoThis explanation comes up frequently in these discussions. It makes a certain amount of sense on its face, but is there any evidence that this actually affects our perception of time?
- akiselev 7y agoWe don't even know if our brain even has a uniform perception of time (outside of the cultural definition), let alone what that might be. It's all guesswork anyway.
- Mediterraneo10 7y agoSee Douwe Draaisma, Why Life Speeds Up as You Get Older, a book that seeks to explain the work done in psychology and neuroscience on this issue to a popular audience.
- frenchy 7y agoThis isn't really evidence at all, but it's well known that as people age, it becomes more difficult to new memories, than it is to keep old ones[1], which is why you regularly get old people mixing up their current loved ones with old, dead people; and why "you can't teach an old dog new tricks". If the passage of time in the human experiences is largely a function of the memories we make. It's not at all surprising that things seem to go faster as we age. [1] There's common-sense explaination for this, but I don't think the exact mechanism is understood. It is widely observed though.
- egjerlow 7y agoWhy would your brain need consciousness to anticipate the future? A computer, which has no consciousness, would be able to do the same.
- TeMPOraL 7y agoConsciousness is how the algorithm feels from inside.
- egjerlow 7y agoWhy would we need to 'feel' anything from the inside? We could operate perfectly well as 'machines' without having this 'feeling'. Also, consciousness isn't a feeling. It is what makes it possible at all to have a subjective experience of feelings in the first place. And that is mind-blowing the more you think of it.
- TeMPOraL 7y agoConsciousness is the algorithm. What you call "consciousness" is how the computational processes that are you see themselves. It could work differently, but for some reasons it doesn't, and we don't understand the reasons.
- egjerlow 7y agoWell, that's a bold claim, and it doesn't really say anything substantial, in my opinion. What does it mean to see yourself? Are the electrical impulses of your brain somehow registering themselves and then reflecting them to yet another part of the brain which.. does what exactly? Believing that consciousness can be explained in terms of material processes is certainly a valid belief, but it is just that: a belief. Believing that a certain configuration of atoms, no matter how involved, can give rise to subjective experience is not far from believing in some kind of magic. And before you retort that a lot of phenomena in nature are 'emergent', I will say:all those phenomena are ultimately explicable in terms of their basic atomic constituents. Consciousness is qualitatively different. You cannot start with the experience of being hungry and then somehow explain the whole process from your stomach being empty to that qualitative experience and how it feels for you.
- dqpb 7y agoI would argue that consciousnes is just the feedback loop of the brain sensing itself
- 7373737373 7y agoBecause consciousness is unitary (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theory), it would be intuitive if all consciously accessible information converged at a single physical location. In this theory, simple feed-forward networks aren't conscious. From what I've read about ego-death, it doesn't seem necessary to consciously sense the self-concept, which would be self-awareness.
- dqpb 7y agoI wouldn't put much weight behind ego death
- 7373737373 7y agoI don't understand. Do you think its necessary to have a self-concept in order to exist intrinsically?
- dqpb 7y agoWhat do you mean by "exist intrinsically"?
- 7373737373 7y agoThere being a subjective perspective, having qualia, sentience: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentience https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentience
- dqpb 7y agoI think the last step to feeling a sensation is knowing that you felt it. To know that you felt a sensation, the act of feeling itself needs to feedback as a sensation. I don't think you need a well developed sense of self or philosophy of mind to be conscious. But I think from a systems point of view, the mind needs to be self sensing.
- EGreg 7y agoWow. This comment may change my life
- jbattle 7y agoThinking of your brain as a story-fitting machine also explains a lot. Everything we perceive our brain tries to fit into a narrative structure
- david-cako 7y agoVery Jungian/Jordan Peterson-esque thought that I think makes a lot of sense in understanding ourselves. Also reminds me of the book The Righteous Mind. We exist to measure ourselves in an ocean of complexity, with infinite recursion in self-awareness.
- ZeroFries 7y agoSorry to be blunt, but that's not a very good response to the Hard Problem of Consciousness. Unfeeling matter becomes feeling when its changes are related to the future? How does that work?
- 7373737373 7y agoFrom the Integrated Information Theory link below: Intrinsic existence: To account for the intrinsic existence of experience, a system constituted of elements in a state must exist intrinsically (be actual): specifically, in order to exist, it must have cause-effect power, as there is no point in assuming that something exists if nothing can make a difference to it, or if it cannot make a difference to anything. Moreover, to exist from its own intrinsic perspective, independent of external observers, a system of elements in a state must have cause-effect power upon itself, independent of extrinsic factors. Cause-effect power can be established by considering a cause-effect space with an axis for every possible state of the system in the past (causes) and future (effects).
- specialist 7y ago"your brain trying to anticipate the future" I got this worldview from Hawkins & Blakeslee's book On Intelligence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Intelligence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Intelligence One side effect is it changed my strategy (coping mechanisms) for reality, truth, beliefs from Popperian to who has the best prediction engines. This has allowed me to disengage from contemporary rhetoric (culture wars) about science (eg creationism), allowing me to better relate to certain friends and family.
- david-cako 7y agoI also often consider that each day I wake up as an observer to a linked list of time, that exists independently of me yet to me "only" in my mind. As our eyes and ears are sensitive to fine vibration around us, so it seems that consciousness is sensitive to time.