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There's an interesting sortof thought-trap when thinking about these things - which this article doesn't fall into - but I'll mention it anyway cos its fun. Den

There's an interesting sortof thought-trap when thinking about these things - which this article doesn't fall into - but I'll mention it anyway cos its fun. Dennett calls it the Cartesian Theatre - and the idea is that when thinking about how the brain works, we may mistakenly imagine that once the brain has (say) processed these timestamped sounds, it then puts them all back together somewhere to 'play them back' to our consciousness. But thats a paradox because then you'd need another consciousness to interpret the reconstructed sound. Dennett likened it to imagining a little homunculus inside your brain that is watching a screen that plays back your conscious exprience. Of course it can't work like that, because it becomes recursive. So when the brain 'time stamps' these sounds (as they put it) it (probably) doesn't then need to ever put them back in the right order again. That bit of processing is done. A corollary to this idea is that consciousness is (most likely) spread throughout the brain so there is no 'one place' where things come back 'together'. That also means there is no one instant in time where we become 'conscious' of things. If its spread throughout the brain is must necessarily be smeared across a (fairly short) internal of time too. I think these days with neural nets being better understood perhaps we dont fall into this thought trap so much.

officialjunk 4y ago
by this logic, with humans having millions of neurons in other parts of the body, such as the gut, we may have consciousness spread out over the body, not just the brain.
- cscheid 4y ago
  Antonio Damasio is a neuroscientist who's done work in the area, and has decent popsci books about this idea. I read the older ones, "Descartes' Error" and "The Feeling of What Happens", and they're fun, good reads. Apparently he's written more on the subject as well.
- coldtea 4y ago
  Not sure about consciousness, but some of its processing is a given, the gut is even called a "second brain" by scientists in related fields.
- ianmcgowan 4y ago
  Perhaps there's a reason for the cliches - "go with your gut", "what is your gut telling you?". It's pretty common to feel like some emotions (anxiety, excitement, shame) are radiating from the gut. Maybe there is actually a physiological link for certain base emotions?
  - practice9 4y ago
    It's common for meditation practitioners to relax their body (relax tense muscles) in order to gain access to calmer states of mind
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
retrac 4y ago
> A corollary to this idea is that consciousness is (most likely) spread throughout the brain so there is no 'one place' where things come back 'together'. That also means there is no one instant in time where we become 'conscious' of things. People can start acting with seemingly-conscious intent before they consciously become aware of the action. This delay can be quite a few seconds. Under ideal conditions with brain imaging, it's possible to guess some time what a person will do before they announce their own awareness of their intent (e.g. press one of two buttons). I've had hints of this experience subjectively, from time to time. Action, then thought, in that order. I'd like a sip of water; with particularly careful awareness of relative sequencing, I'm fairly sure that, sometimes, when this thought percolates to the surface of my mind, my hand is already moving towards the glass. Sometimes I wonder if the conscious self is mostly just a passive observer, constantly coming up with post-hoc rationalizations to explain why the body just acted the way it did. Decidedly unnerving, but that seems to be the nature of our being. Multiple loci of consciousness is, IMO, fairly strongly supported by what happens with brain damage. Very rarely, people with damage to the corpus callosum linking the hemispheres of the brain, develop something like alien hand syndrome, where half of their body adopts complex and seemingly-intentional behaviour, that the person is quite unaware of consciously. This manifestation is sometimes described as having a personality and desires, which are often similar, but not identical, to the conscious part of that person.
- cecilpl2 4y ago
  There is an excellent (very) short story by Ted Chiang called "What's expected of us" that I think you'll like. https://www.nature.com/articles/436150a https://www.nature.com/articles/436150a
  - qbit 4y ago
    Great story. But the end bothered me. Particularly this part: “Some of you will succumb and some of you won't, and my sending this warning won't alter those proportions.” Of course sending the warning will have an effect because it becomes part of the conditioning of the people who read it! They don’t get to choose how they will be affected by it, but it will certainly have an effect. To say that a person has no free will is not to say that they are not affected by their environment.
coldtea 4y ago
>So when the brain 'time stamps' these sounds (as they put it) it (probably) doesn't then need to ever put them back in the right order again. That bit of processing is done. I'm not sure I buy it. It wont have a "homunculus", but it could very well have a pipeline of autonomous processing centers, where the second part needs to have them in order. uniq is not a homunculus here either, but still needs its input in order: cut -d, -f1 xxx.csv | sort | uniq | wc -l (yeah, uniq is not needed here, but that's not the point)
- codeulike 4y ago
  it could very well have a pipeline of autonomous processing centers, where the second part needs to have them in order. It might, but it might not. I guess the point is that re-integration is not _necessarily_ required. The thought trap is the idea that things _have_ to be re-integrated for 'consciousness to see them'.
- LocalH 4y ago
  Our brains bounce around in time constantly. Every time your eyes microsaccade, your brain is filling in the gaps after the fact with the best guess at what you were looking at, hence why periodic movements can be "elongated" when you first look at them (look at a clock and the second hand lingers a bit long for the first second). Our brains absolutely do not need to process things in chronological order, but it seems we have evolved for our egos to believe we do, for evolutionary advantage (although, in the last few thousand years we've been doing everything we can to do an end run around that).
  - idiotsecant 4y ago
    Our perceptive unconscious or pre-concious self does not need events to be in order to assemble a meaningful stream of cognition but I'd argue our conscious layer does. The part of us that has the ability to believe or not believe things is by definition a modeling appliance. It takes in information from the outside world through the various interfaces available to it and uses that information to build a causal model. It's often wrong, but it does fundamentally want to see the universe as this happens which has caused that in the past which means that this other event may have a similar outcome. I wonder if this modelling appliance is a major part of the ego and what we consider the 'self'.
TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
Dennett is making a (naive) philosophical point about the nature of consciousness, not a linquistic point about the nature of language perception. You don't need a Cartesian Theatre, or even strict reassembly. I'd expect something more like a hierarchical/nested structure of template recognition for common word sequences and sentence structures. Brains notice certainly when out of order are words. But brains can still make sense of them - with some extra effort - as long as there's still some templated structure left to work with. You need to randomise much longer sequences before the templating breaks down. None of this says anything relevant about what consciousness may or may not be. It's still the same old problem of qualia, only now it's about qualia that are perceived as linguistic and conceptual relationships, not trivial perceptual identifications. ("Dog", "orange", "philosopher", etc.)
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- codeulike 4y ago
  You don't need a Cartesian Theatre Thank goodness. I don't understand how your post sits opposed to mine. They seem to be in agreement?
  - comboy 4y ago
    I think the other poster wants consciousness to stay mysterious and unrelated to pattern recognition. But I'm not sure where does it end up then given agreement about lack of Cartesian Theater.
- taneq 4y ago
  > Brains notice certainly Nice. ;)
hackinthebochs 4y ago
>A corollary to this idea is that consciousness is (most likely) spread throughout the brain so there is no 'one place' where things come back 'together' While it's true that consciousness-aware features are processed in a distributed manner, I don't think it follows to say that consciousness is spread throughout the brain. The core function of consciousness is integrated processing of disparate sensory data into a single decision stream. In other words, various sensory experiences can all influence our decision-making in arbitrary ways, and this "availability for high level decision-making" is what we identify as consciousness. The location of this integration-decision apparatus seems like the best place to "locate" the seat of consciousness. While cortical areas are essential for specific kinds of processing, we shouldn't "locate" consciousness "in" those areas. This is because the output of a cortical area is modulations in signals sent to various downstream target areas. If we were to artificially modulate the downstream targets with an exact duplicate of the pattern of output from the cortical area in question, we would have the same conscious experience. The conscious experience isn't in the signal or its modulation, it is in a very specific kind of integrated processing. That is, there is some kind of representational translation that takes disparate frequency modulated signals and integrates them into a communal representational schema to support the single decision stream. Presumably this communal representation should have a unique computational strategy that stands out as a change in signal dynamics as you follow a stream of sensory processing up the hierarchy. Consciousness would be localizable to within this boundary.
titzer 4y ago
Just a point about recursion. Recursion doesn't immediately imply that something gets smaller and smaller until it bottoms out (or never returns). Things can be self-referential without getting smaller. Code is data and data is code. Quines are a thing. Fixpoints and combinators are things.
- codeulike 4y ago
  The reason the Cartesian theatre is problematic is that it pushes the work of 'understanding' or 'processing' down the chain for the homonculus to sort out. So it's not so much the recursive thing-within-thing size difference, it's more that it's problematic because it dodges the hard bits.
IIAOPSW 4y ago
Why is that a trap. It stands to reason the little man requires only a smaller brain to process the tiny world of the homunculus theater. And the little man in his head is smaller still. At the bottom of the recursive stack is a single neuron. No contradiction.
- dogcomplex 4y ago
  Indeed. Sounds like a fine metaphor for the experience of memory to begin with, which absolutely loses detail as it's compounded. Remembering a memory may well just be adding another layer at the top of that recursive stack
trap_goes_hot 4y ago
>I think these days with neural nets being better understood perhaps we dont fall into this thought trap so much. From what I've read, the designers of AI/ML systems are less and less able to definitively explain how the algorithm works, or how the system is going to respond to a given input. I suppose for 'sentient' AI thats the goal, but I think it is a bit scary if we get a result from a system, and nobody can tell you why or how it was computed.
- comboy 4y ago
  > I think it is a bit scary if we get a result from a system, and nobody can tell you why or how it was computed. You don't need ML for that. That's Wednesday in any corporation.
  - dylan604 4y ago
    But with ML, that's the target as that it's doing it's own thing. Your Wednesday example is just because tribal knowledge is becoming extinct as they lay off the old timers nearing retirement before doing a brain dump. The younger people know they don't know it and rewrite it in a new language, but don't even know what that new language is doing in the background because they've imported so many 3rd party libraries using a newly written class that essentially just reaches out to the original black box but looks new and shiny
  - trap_goes_hot 4y ago
    Heh, true. I was thinking more about things like china's social credit score which uses ai/ml.
- codeulike 4y ago
  That's kind of what I meant. The inner workings of ai/ml are mysterious to us but we are familiar with the idea of a 'black box' that can do something like 'find a face in this photo' and we know inside the black box there's a tangled network of weighted connections. We don't imagine a cartesian theatre inside the black box. But maybe 50 years ago we might have? So perhaps we are getting better at reasoning how the mind might work. People used to use clockwork as a metaphor for the mind, when clockwork was all they knew. Now we have better metaphors.

officialjunk 4y ago

by this logic, with humans having millions of neurons in other parts of the body, such as the gut, we may have consciousness spread out over the body, not just the brain.

cscheid 4y ago
Antonio Damasio is a neuroscientist who's done work in the area, and has decent popsci books about this idea. I read the older ones, "Descartes' Error" and "The Feeling of What Happens", and they're fun, good reads. Apparently he's written more on the subject as well.
coldtea 4y ago
Not sure about consciousness, but some of its processing is a given, the gut is even called a "second brain" by scientists in related fields.
ianmcgowan 4y ago
Perhaps there's a reason for the cliches - "go with your gut", "what is your gut telling you?". It's pretty common to feel like some emotions (anxiety, excitement, shame) are radiating from the gut. Maybe there is actually a physiological link for certain base emotions?
- practice9 4y ago
  It's common for meditation practitioners to relax their body (relax tense muscles) in order to gain access to calmer states of mind
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

retrac 4y ago

> A corollary to this idea is that consciousness is (most likely) spread throughout the brain so there is no 'one place' where things come back 'together'. That also means there is no one instant in time where we become 'conscious' of things. People can start acting with seemingly-conscious intent before they consciously become aware of the action. This delay can be quite a few seconds. Under ideal conditions with brain imaging, it's possible to guess some time what a person will do before they announce their own awareness of their intent (e.g. press one of two buttons). I've had hints of this experience subjectively, from time to time. Action, then thought, in that order. I'd like a sip of water; with particularly careful awareness of relative sequencing, I'm fairly sure that, sometimes, when this thought percolates to the surface of my mind, my hand is already moving towards the glass. Sometimes I wonder if the conscious self is mostly just a passive observer, constantly coming up with post-hoc rationalizations to explain why the body just acted the way it did. Decidedly unnerving, but that seems to be the nature of our being. Multiple loci of consciousness is, IMO, fairly strongly supported by what happens with brain damage. Very rarely, people with damage to the corpus callosum linking the hemispheres of the brain, develop something like alien hand syndrome, where half of their body adopts complex and seemingly-intentional behaviour, that the person is quite unaware of consciously. This manifestation is sometimes described as having a personality and desires, which are often similar, but not identical, to the conscious part of that person.

cecilpl2 4y ago
There is an excellent (very) short story by Ted Chiang called "What's expected of us" that I think you'll like. https://www.nature.com/articles/436150a https://www.nature.com/articles/436150a
- qbit 4y ago
  Great story. But the end bothered me. Particularly this part: “Some of you will succumb and some of you won't, and my sending this warning won't alter those proportions.” Of course sending the warning will have an effect because it becomes part of the conditioning of the people who read it! They don’t get to choose how they will be affected by it, but it will certainly have an effect. To say that a person has no free will is not to say that they are not affected by their environment.

coldtea 4y ago

>So when the brain 'time stamps' these sounds (as they put it) it (probably) doesn't then need to ever put them back in the right order again. That bit of processing is done. I'm not sure I buy it. It wont have a "homunculus", but it could very well have a pipeline of autonomous processing centers, where the second part needs to have them in order. uniq is not a homunculus here either, but still needs its input in order: cut -d, -f1 xxx.csv | sort | uniq | wc -l (yeah, uniq is not needed here, but that's not the point)

codeulike 4y ago
it could very well have a pipeline of autonomous processing centers, where the second part needs to have them in order. It might, but it might not. I guess the point is that re-integration is not _necessarily_ required. The thought trap is the idea that things _have_ to be re-integrated for 'consciousness to see them'.
LocalH 4y ago
Our brains bounce around in time constantly. Every time your eyes microsaccade, your brain is filling in the gaps after the fact with the best guess at what you were looking at, hence why periodic movements can be "elongated" when you first look at them (look at a clock and the second hand lingers a bit long for the first second). Our brains absolutely do not need to process things in chronological order, but it seems we have evolved for our egos to believe we do, for evolutionary advantage (although, in the last few thousand years we've been doing everything we can to do an end run around that).
- idiotsecant 4y ago
  Our perceptive unconscious or pre-concious self does not need events to be in order to assemble a meaningful stream of cognition but I'd argue our conscious layer does. The part of us that has the ability to believe or not believe things is by definition a modeling appliance. It takes in information from the outside world through the various interfaces available to it and uses that information to build a causal model. It's often wrong, but it does fundamentally want to see the universe as this happens which has caused that in the past which means that this other event may have a similar outcome. I wonder if this modelling appliance is a major part of the ego and what we consider the 'self'.

TheOtherHobbes 4y ago

Dennett is making a (naive) philosophical point about the nature of consciousness, not a linquistic point about the nature of language perception. You don't need a Cartesian Theatre, or even strict reassembly. I'd expect something more like a hierarchical/nested structure of template recognition for common word sequences and sentence structures. Brains notice certainly when out of order are words. But brains can still make sense of them - with some extra effort - as long as there's still some templated structure left to work with. You need to randomise much longer sequences before the templating breaks down. None of this says anything relevant about what consciousness may or may not be. It's still the same old problem of qualia, only now it's about qualia that are perceived as linguistic and conceptual relationships, not trivial perceptual identifications. ("Dog", "orange", "philosopher", etc.)

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
codeulike 4y ago
You don't need a Cartesian Theatre Thank goodness. I don't understand how your post sits opposed to mine. They seem to be in agreement?
- comboy 4y ago
  I think the other poster wants consciousness to stay mysterious and unrelated to pattern recognition. But I'm not sure where does it end up then given agreement about lack of Cartesian Theater.
taneq 4y ago
> Brains notice certainly Nice. ;)

hackinthebochs 4y ago

>A corollary to this idea is that consciousness is (most likely) spread throughout the brain so there is no 'one place' where things come back 'together' While it's true that consciousness-aware features are processed in a distributed manner, I don't think it follows to say that consciousness is spread throughout the brain. The core function of consciousness is integrated processing of disparate sensory data into a single decision stream. In other words, various sensory experiences can all influence our decision-making in arbitrary ways, and this "availability for high level decision-making" is what we identify as consciousness. The location of this integration-decision apparatus seems like the best place to "locate" the seat of consciousness. While cortical areas are essential for specific kinds of processing, we shouldn't "locate" consciousness "in" those areas. This is because the output of a cortical area is modulations in signals sent to various downstream target areas. If we were to artificially modulate the downstream targets with an exact duplicate of the pattern of output from the cortical area in question, we would have the same conscious experience. The conscious experience isn't in the signal or its modulation, it is in a very specific kind of integrated processing. That is, there is some kind of representational translation that takes disparate frequency modulated signals and integrates them into a communal representational schema to support the single decision stream. Presumably this communal representation should have a unique computational strategy that stands out as a change in signal dynamics as you follow a stream of sensory processing up the hierarchy. Consciousness would be localizable to within this boundary.

titzer 4y ago

Just a point about recursion. Recursion doesn't immediately imply that something gets smaller and smaller until it bottoms out (or never returns). Things can be self-referential without getting smaller. Code is data and data is code. Quines are a thing. Fixpoints and combinators are things.

codeulike 4y ago
The reason the Cartesian theatre is problematic is that it pushes the work of 'understanding' or 'processing' down the chain for the homonculus to sort out. So it's not so much the recursive thing-within-thing size difference, it's more that it's problematic because it dodges the hard bits.

IIAOPSW 4y ago

Why is that a trap. It stands to reason the little man requires only a smaller brain to process the tiny world of the homunculus theater. And the little man in his head is smaller still. At the bottom of the recursive stack is a single neuron. No contradiction.

dogcomplex 4y ago
Indeed. Sounds like a fine metaphor for the experience of memory to begin with, which absolutely loses detail as it's compounded. Remembering a memory may well just be adding another layer at the top of that recursive stack

trap_goes_hot 4y ago

>I think these days with neural nets being better understood perhaps we dont fall into this thought trap so much. From what I've read, the designers of AI/ML systems are less and less able to definitively explain how the algorithm works, or how the system is going to respond to a given input. I suppose for 'sentient' AI thats the goal, but I think it is a bit scary if we get a result from a system, and nobody can tell you why or how it was computed.

comboy 4y ago
> I think it is a bit scary if we get a result from a system, and nobody can tell you why or how it was computed. You don't need ML for that. That's Wednesday in any corporation.
- dylan604 4y ago
  But with ML, that's the target as that it's doing it's own thing. Your Wednesday example is just because tribal knowledge is becoming extinct as they lay off the old timers nearing retirement before doing a brain dump. The younger people know they don't know it and rewrite it in a new language, but don't even know what that new language is doing in the background because they've imported so many 3rd party libraries using a newly written class that essentially just reaches out to the original black box but looks new and shiny
- trap_goes_hot 4y ago
  Heh, true. I was thinking more about things like china's social credit score which uses ai/ml.
codeulike 4y ago
That's kind of what I meant. The inner workings of ai/ml are mysterious to us but we are familiar with the idea of a 'black box' that can do something like 'find a face in this photo' and we know inside the black box there's a tangled network of weighted connections. We don't imagine a cartesian theatre inside the black box. But maybe 50 years ago we might have? So perhaps we are getting better at reasoning how the mind might work. People used to use clockwork as a metaphor for the mind, when clockwork was all they knew. Now we have better metaphors.