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Blindsight was a well crafted book but it sort of underplayed the benefits that consciousness gives us. We're bombarded by a huge number of sensory impressions

Blindsight was a well crafted book but it sort of underplayed the benefits that consciousness gives us. We're bombarded by a huge number of sensory impressions at any given time. The unconscious parts of our brain do a huge amount of work in processing it and figuring out which bits are important. But without consciousness to synchronize, serialize, and persist it then all that information will just fade away within a few seconds. To remember something, or talk about it, or engage in multi-step planning regarding it you need to be consciously and not subliminally aware of it.

rini17 6y ago
Perhaps the coherently serialized stream of qualia isn't the only possible way to intelligence?
- Symmetry 6y ago
  Oh clearly not, GPT-3 clearly produces fairly intelligent responses but by the mechanisms that in a human would be pure reflex. And your unconscious reflexes can produce responses that can be relatively intelligent at times. It's just that creates with brains that evolved on Earth need consciousness to remember anything more than a couple of seconds. Also, who knows how qualia fit into this, if they exist they might very well exist for subliminal stimuli too. In the scientific study of consciousness qualia aren't a part of the paradigm really. And in philosophical investigations of consciousness don't have subliminal stimuli as part of their paradigm.
  - rini17 6y ago
    And how do you call the stuff which gets filtered by consciousness so that it can remember more than a couple of seconds? That's what I meant by the qualia. As an example what I mean and it was recently on HN, too: apparently the perception of "now" is a hack supported by delays so that input from various senses is perceived as synchronized even if it does not arrive synchronized to the brain, plus compensating the temporary blindness while doing saccades. Aliens could have different "hack" there, resulting in profoundly different perception of time.

rini17 6y ago

Perhaps the coherently serialized stream of qualia isn't the only possible way to intelligence?

Symmetry 6y ago
Oh clearly not, GPT-3 clearly produces fairly intelligent responses but by the mechanisms that in a human would be pure reflex. And your unconscious reflexes can produce responses that can be relatively intelligent at times. It's just that creates with brains that evolved on Earth need consciousness to remember anything more than a couple of seconds. Also, who knows how qualia fit into this, if they exist they might very well exist for subliminal stimuli too. In the scientific study of consciousness qualia aren't a part of the paradigm really. And in philosophical investigations of consciousness don't have subliminal stimuli as part of their paradigm.
- rini17 6y ago
  And how do you call the stuff which gets filtered by consciousness so that it can remember more than a couple of seconds? That's what I meant by the qualia. As an example what I mean and it was recently on HN, too: apparently the perception of "now" is a hack supported by delays so that input from various senses is perceived as synchronized even if it does not arrive synchronized to the brain, plus compensating the temporary blindness while doing saccades. Aliens could have different "hack" there, resulting in profoundly different perception of time.