11 ms·

The disunity of consciousness in everyday experience

159 points by Hooke 2y ago

potatoman22 2y ago
TL;DR: Our experiences aren't as unified as we might think. Introspection might create a false sense of unity between concurrent experiences. Basically, we might not be as "conscious" as we believe in our day-to-day lives.
- hwhwhwhhwhwh 2y ago
  99.99% of the human population is in sleep mode. Zoning out constantly. Once you became awake, everyday experiences starts to become beautiful and a bit magical. Also you start to ponder more on your awareness and topics like eternity, god, death etc come to your focus than make believe stuff like careers, identity, nationality, opinions shared in tweets, the story you have about your life etc. Also a once atheist you starts to immediately understand the religious teachings. It's hard to understand this statement if you are not awake. I would have down voted this before the shift happened for me :)
  - semitones 2y ago
    How do I wake up and escape the matrix? Please teach us master
    - hwhwhwhhwhwh 2y ago
      It happened to me by chance. But I was seeking it. I think the journey has just started for me. It has its own challenges. But waking up with Sam Harris is probably a good place to start. I don't think it's also for everyone. Life became easy day to day but became more challenging in terms of purpose etc as ego dies.
    - namero999 2y ago
      The work of George Gurdjieff is precisely about this.
      - kukkeliskuu 2y ago
        I second the G.I. Gurdjieff recommendation, but maybe start with any one of the books of "Psychological commentaries" by Nicoll, or "In search of the miraculous" by Ouspensky.
        hwhwhwhhwhwh 2y ago
        I listened to this for a bit. I can agree the ideas are similar. Ramana Maharishi is another person to look into who is a bit more direct.
    - bbor 2y ago
      Heh, relevant XKCD… as always: https://xkcd.com/610/ https://xkcd.com/610/
      - hwhwhwhhwhwh 2y ago
        Lol
  - soulofmischief 2y ago
    > Also a once atheist you starts to immediately understand the religious teachings I ponder the topics you mention and at no point did I feel compelled to radically retool my life around 2000 year old religious documents which themselves have clear lineage to even older, less-informed belief systems.
    - hwhwhwhhwhwh 2y ago
      That's okay. I didn't decide to ponder the religious teachings. After the shift I immediately started to understand the teachings that I once thought was primitive and irrelevant. They all point to the same thing. It's hard to understand what they are pointing to without knowing or experiencing it. Read a bit about perennial philosophy. But it's a bit like telling to blind person what colors are. It will not make sense till you see.
      - soulofmischief 2y ago
        Less abstractly and more concretely: What do they point to? What are you claiming is the unifying deep truth beneath the surface of all religious texts? What heuristic is used to differentiate a text as religious versus the babblings of a schizophrenic? I was raised Catholic, by a deacon, and have a deep understanding of Judeo-Christian religions, and have studied to a lesser extent several world religions. What am I missing?
        hwhwhwhhwhwh 2y ago
        This is a good video which explains this. Love to hear what you understood and if you disagree your reasoning behind it. https://youtu.be/hw47wwOUjuY?si=dXFG_fYOBqJURPcQ https://youtu.be/hw47wwOUjuY?si=dXFG_fYOBqJURPcQ
        kukkeliskuu 2y ago
        I am just a student of these things myself so take everything I say with a grain of salt. But based on your question and my own experience, it seems that you are approaching religion in the same way I was doing -- intellectually. That is natural, but the problem is that our intellect is quite limited. You would like to have a description of "the unifying deep truth". But even very simple experience, like how strawberry tastes like, cannot be transmitted by words and comprehended by the intellect. How could we transmit something vastly more complex even if we knew it -- and I am not claiming I do. So I would say what you are missing is the direct experience of something higher. Seek and you will find.
  - thrance 2y ago
    Your statement is hard to understand because it claims nothing and is extremely pretentious, of course it gets downvoted. What you describe is akin to Camus's Absurd, but you chose to fill in the weirdness of existence with some kind of spirituality. That's your choice. Please don't go around claiming to be morally superior to "99.99%" of all humans on earth.
    - hwhwhwhhwhwh 2y ago
      When did I make the claim I am morally superior? I just said most humans are in sleep mode. Even if I said that it's pointless. It's just a belief and not truth. Also as I said in other comments till you experience a shift none of this makes sense to you. That's okay.
  - buildsjets 2y ago
    Unfortunately, maintaining a career remains necessary to prevent the local authorities who are in charge of money distribution and tax collecting from causing harm to my person and family. And the 99.99% of the other people who surround me, who seem to have a general dissatisfaction with identities, nationalities, and tweets, whether theirs or other peoples, are the ones who keep empowering the various authorities that keep this silly conflict based system running. It's really quite an undesirable situation. "But nobody wants it! Everybody hates it!" OH. WELL, THEN STOP. That's what SHE said! RA Wilson says the only options after visiting Chapel Perilous are to become a paranoid, or an agnostic, and that there is no third way. I'd argue one could also become an atheist. The paranoid thinks there's always a force out there trying to get them. The atheist is convinced there's never a force out there trying to get them. I try to remain agnostic as I am not sure all the evidence is in yet to be able to make an accurate assessment of the situation which we all find ourselves dropped into. I take modified Sturgeon's Law view of various religious teachings. Sturgeon says 90% of everything is crap. I think it's closer to 99%. But the 1% that's left over is pretty interesting. Anyway I gave you a deserved upvote, but I'm sure your karma that matters is not as negative as your HN karma. :)
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
AndrewKemendo 2y ago
Ram Dass fully covered this in much more depth: “ I will work on myself, since the work on myself is going to be the highest thing I can do for it all, since I understand that as man up-levels his own consciousness, he sees more creative solutions to the problems that he's confronting. Therefore, it always feeds back to the same place. But working on myself is just like this. This is social action at the moment.” https://www.ramdass.org/increasing-amount-consciousness/ https://www.ramdass.org/increasing-amount-consciousness/ Here’s a (fairly) long lecture with Q&A demonstrating as such: https://youtu.be/LCiB9oMnIbI?si=yr5ldw8JrkQ7iQtS https://youtu.be/LCiB9oMnIbI?si=yr5ldw8JrkQ7iQtS
theptip 2y ago
The Buddhist take here would be that when you actually hone your attention, introspection reveals not a unified consciousness but a stream of discrete events: thought, visual perception, tactile, tactile, thought,… The default is to not have enough resolution to perceive the edges. Under this view, the unification is an illusion or an appearance, analogously to how we perceive fluorescent lights to be continuous even though they are actually flickering on and off at a high rate. The difference being, our eyes have a hardware limit on temporal resolution, whereas for attention the relevant limit here is just “software”.
- neom 2y ago
  For anyone curious to explore this, I recommend sunyata, and particularly looking in the Madhyamaka philosophy of Nagarjuna.
- wanderingbort 2y ago
  How do you know whether the discrete events are a more fundamental representation vs a higher level representation that your training and discipline produces?
  - laserlight 2y ago
    You don't. Everything is mental fabrication, including calling some mental fabrications illusion. You train your mind to fabricate things that you prefer. Whether they are more fundamental or higher-level representations doesn't matter.
  - theptip 2y ago
    It’s a great question. I have come up with two answers (though I am far from an expert): 1) this is empirically verifiable; just do an RCT where you teach people a meditation technique for attention without prompting, and see what they observe. (I have heard comments from aspiring meditators like “I tried meditating but after a while I could not find “the breath” because it broke apart into a stream of individual sensations”) - but I do worry that techniques like “noting” smuggle in an atomizing assumption, whereas other techniques like whole-body perception or Metta might lead you to a more unifying viewpoint if practiced exclusively. 2) maybe it doesn’t matter if it’s “more fundamental”; if you wire your brain to deeply believe that it is, then a bunch of positive effects occur, and that’s the goal of the whole exercise. The words “this is more fundamental” are just a cue to help you to shift. This feels less palatable to me but I haven’t seen the rewards, and if they were as good as promised maybe this would be justified. Anyway, I’m not sure many Buddhists would endorse 2), even among the secular / non-religious/ scientific minority of the community.
jacobsimon 2y ago
Was thinking about this recently. The author misses the importance of timing in the unity of perception. It would be rather easy to conduct an experiment and ask people, “did X and Y happen at the same time?” where X and Y are different stimuli. You could test over a variety of different senses and time differences to determine if people are integrating their experiences or not. The other important element is attention and awareness. You can certainly be focused on one thing more than another—this can be a useful kind of disunity
- sctb 2y ago
  Here's an interesting experiment you can do around retrospective perception and timing: clap your hands once, listening for the sound of the clap. Notice what it's like to remember the sound of the clap for a minute or so. Now, clap your hands twice, again listening closely and noticing what it's like to remember the sound for a little while. In the second case, is it possible for you to remember the sound of the first clap only, without an echo of the second?
blueridge 2y ago
Galen Strawson: "I’m somewhere down towards the episodic end of this spectrum. I have no sense of my life as a narrative with form, and very little interest in my own past. My personal memory is very poor, and rarely impinges on my present consciousness. I make plans for the future, and to that extent think of myself perfectly adequately as something with long-term continuity. But I experience this way of thinking of myself as remote and theoretical, given the most central or fundamental way in which I think of myself, which is as a mental self or someone. Using ME to express the way in which I think of myself, I can accurately express my experience by saying that I do not think of ME as being something in the future." https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v18/n08/galen-strawson/the-sense-of-the-self https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v18/n08/galen-strawson/the-s... Would also recommend Strawson's Things That Bother Me: Death, Freedom, the Self, Etc.
jhickok 2y ago
Eric is a fantastic writer and I highly suggest his books including a recent collection of his works in "The Weirdness of the World". Finding "Describing Inner Experience" in grad school had a profound effect on me.
- bbor 2y ago
  Huh okay thanks for commenting, I was very confused about what exactly I was reading until you prompted me to look him up. Interesting guy — he’s a full time professional academic in philosophy, and yet writes like a hacker, even going as far as to skip APA citations in favor of undescribed hyperlinks! The style is a fascinating mix of analytic (such as only giving the time of day to recent theories, and constricting his argument to an explicit outline) and a more casual blog style. He’s also been writing about exactly this — perhaps in slightly less unified (hehe) terms - since at least 2007: https://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/ https://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/ If you find the time, could you share what the big takeaways were that had a profound effect? I’m guessing it was a practical exercise that trained you to more accurately introspect, but that’s just a guess. I’m way too deep into all this philosophy stuff already so I mostly got indignant disagreement out of this essay, and I’d like to see it in a more productive light!
  - jhickok 2y ago
    I'm glad you like his style! I find him incredibly approachable and clear for some of the reasons you outlined above. He also take great pains to be a clear communicator, which you can see in pieces of media like his appearance on Sean Carroll's podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0evRaWV_HU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0evRaWV_HU Anyway, I was not a philosophy undergraduate and so a lot of my exposure was either to popular level works (surveys, etc), or big historical names (Descartes, Hume, Plato), or to very specific areas of research (I was big into metaphysics and philosophy of mind "realists", like Chalmers, Searle, Flanagan etc), and skepticism about intuition, or sense-data, or even skepticism about a priori truths had just never really occurred to me. That's more of a self-own than anything, but we first-years in grad school had a course together where someone in the dept. would take us thru a deep dive in a very specific area by way of a brand new book. For example, the year prior to my arrival they read thru a "Climbing the Mountain", an early draft of the book that would eventually become Parfit's "On What Matters". Anyway, my year all picked "Describing Inner Experience", and this would become my introduction to an ultimately useful view that opened the world of CogSci to me since assumptions I had (which can probably be described at Cartesian) no longer posed powerful arguments against a more empirically-minded look into how the mind works. So, folks that I previously disregarded like Dennett, Wittgenstein, the Churchlands, were now gateways into Smolensky, Prinz, Carruthers, etc.
namero999 2y ago
The usual fallacy of conflating phenomenal experience with cognition, and using the same term "consciousness" to refer to both of the concepts interchangeably. The whole piece is undermined.
- mensetmanusman 2y ago
  Consciousness is required to experience, but it is not required to sense.
  - namero999 2y ago
    I appreciate your reply, however I would partially disagree. Consciousness is always there, and we call sensing what is mediated by our sense organs interacting with the external world, that is, perceiving. It's a class of experience radically different than, say, proprioception or feeling. One is externally mediated, the other is endogenous. Consciousness (in the phenomenal sense) is the superclass of both. Cognition, or meta-consciousness, makes salient specific aspects of our experience/awareness, so that I'm very well aware right now of the pixels of my monitor as I write this, and much less so of the expansion of my rib cage as I breathe, or whatever subtle noises might be going on out of my window. However, I never really stop being conscious of them.
sfink 2y ago
As added support for this view, I can contrast with the relatively uncommon experience of having some experiences unified: when listening to an audio book, my brain often (but not always!) ties the experience of the book with my physical location at the time. When I return to that location, the experience of being there is inextricably tied to the portions of the book I heard in that place. I can't really remember one without the other. But this is unusual. Most things are not tied together like this. In the author's example, I can separately remember the philosophical musings that were in my head on a drive, and the feeling of the steering wheel (which normally would be too mundane to remember, but on a hot day the cover will get sticky and I'll be very aware of that). There might be a weak association from one to the other, but usually not much at all. As a tangent, I wonder if LLM attention heads are doing something analogous. Each is associated with a strand, sometimes combined with the others and usually not? (I don't know enough to say whether this matches at all.)
- temp0826 2y ago
  I think it was the ancient Greeks(?) that walked while learning the epic poems in order to recite them by recalling their journey, using the associations made on the path they took. I think the method of loci[0] is similar except using purely imagined locations/details ("memory palace"). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci
  - jvm___ 2y ago
    Shoutout to the excellent podcast The Memory Palace It's historic stories told well, nothing to do with memory palaces
  - raincom 2y ago
    In India, there is an ancient art called 'avadhAnam'[1][2], where questioners pose various questions to the performer. This performer has to answer questions partially in a verse form, and this can go on for days, if 1000 people are involved. These people have to recite these 1000 verses after everything is over. Performer should not use pen, paper or any recording. These guys memorize many Indian texts that contain verses. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avadhanam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avadhanam [2] https://sampadanandamishra.medium.com/my-journey-with-avadhana-a-remarkable-art-form-376f49b99fd7 https://sampadanandamishra.medium.com/my-journey-with-avadha...
nikolayasdf123 2y ago
yes, afaik global perception moments are normally are generated every 100ms
rramadass 2y ago
Related : A Mind Of Its Own : How Your Brain Distorts and Deceives by Cordelia Fine.
swayvil 2y ago
I've heard that experience is initially a mess. A babble of sensations. Then I tell myself a story about the babble. Map the babble in terms of time, space, things, money, etc. And then that story. That's "reality". (But the real magic show comes when I am guided by the story, in what I pay attention to and what I ignore)
kahirsch 2y ago
Emo Philips once said "I used to think that the human brain was the most fascinating part of the body. Then I realized, whoa, ‘look what’s telling me that’." There seems to be this naïve view among some philosophers that what our verbal stream of consciousness reports is somehow the most important part of our "mind" or our "consciousness", some even saying that verbal thoughts are the only thing that are important enough to be called "thoughts"! I say: look what’s telling you that! I mean that very seriously. I've always assumed that the brain has to have many parallel things going on at the same time and we have some limited awareness of these things and some ability to coordinate and direct the different parts of the brain, but it seems to be rather limited. It can't be complete, just on a Turing/Goedel basis, but anything approaching completeness would mean slowing our thoughts down to the slowest parts. I remember reading about the Libet experiment decades ago and how some people thought that it disproved "free will"— whatever that could possibly mean. The impulse to report a decision to move a finger came after the impulse to move the finger. So? They were apparently assuming that the mind was some synchronized, sequential process and that the verbal report of what "the mind" was intending to do was supposed to come at the same time or before the impulse to move the finger. What??? Even a view of a single stream of "attention" or "executive process" seems dubious. Yes, we have all had the experience where something that's mostly automatic/unconscious suddenly requires our attention. For example, you're driving a car and suddenly a novel situation comes up and you need to turn off the radio or tell the passenger to shut up so you devote all your attention to driving. But just normal driving requires an enormous amount of processing of different concepts and coordinating different parts of the brain. There was an experiment (Maier's two-string puzzle, I just found by google), where a scientist tested people's ability to solve a problem figuring out how to tie two strings together that were hanging from the ceiling, too far apart for anyone to grab both at the same time. Some of the participants were given a non-verbal "hint" of how to solve the problem. But, when asked later how they solved it, most of those given the hint didn't mention it! Were they "consciously aware" of the hint at all? That was an actual experiment relevant to the idea of a unity of consciousness. Anyway, mine is a very limited, amateur, mostly 20th century perspective on the ideas. I'd be interested in what others have to share, especially actual experiments and not so much philosophers examining their verbal thoughts.
- 2y ago
nickjj 2y ago
If this is true, why is this scenario so common for a lot of people: Someone you care about introduces you to something, that relationship ends and now the something they introduced you to becomes repulsive. A slight twist on that is you experience something together with someone that could be done on your own but suddenly that activity becomes tainted even when you try to do it alone at a later time. The above suggests there is a high coupling between 2 independent experiences at a conscious level which melds 2 distinct and logically separate events into 1 experience. It's certainly not a healthy way to live knowing that someone can have that much control over your own internal thoughts and perceptions but that doesn't mean it doesn't happen, even temporarily.
- IshKebab 2y ago
  One thing reminds you of the other. Not rocket science. Honestly this level of philosophy is just people arguing about things that are too poorly defined to have a concrete answer. It's like arguing about how many organs there are, or exactly where space begins. Best just to let the philosophers debate whether it's 60 miles or 100 km.
encoderer 2y ago
these unified experiences are life’s “magical moments” which is like being “in the zone” in a social/physical sense. Everything is keeping you there in the moment and it’s wonderful. Reminds me of the Nimoy quote that ‘in life, like a garden, perfect moments can be had but not preserved’ except in memories.
bbor 2y ago
Great article, thanks for posting! I typed out a long thing that got lost, so I’ll cut to the chase and do what everyone else is doing and give my rebuttal: cognition is absolutely composed of many non-unified (and often almost-entirely-unconscious) systems, much like a computer is composed of many disjointed programs. But consciousness is unity itself, in my view — the fact that most of our animal processes are disjointed doesn’t say much about us as sapient beings, even if those processes take up “most” of us on some given scale (time, energy used, neurons involved, whatever). But I’m just vaguely gesturing — this view was first and best characterized in 1801: For example, this universal identity of the apperception of the manifold given in intuition contains a synthesis of representations and is possible only by means of the consciousness of this synthesis… For the empirical consciousness which accompanies different representations is in itself fragmentary and disunited, and without relation to the identity of the subject. This relation, then, does not exist because I accompany every representation with consciousness, but because I join one representation to another, and am conscious of the synthesis of them… in other words, the analytical unity of apperception is possible only under the presupposition of a synthetical unity.[16] …for the reason alone that I can comprehend the variety of my representations in one consciousness, do I call them my representations, for otherwise I must have as many-coloured and various a self as are the representations of which I am conscious. Synthetical unity of the manifold in intuitions, as given à priori, is therefore the foundation of the identity of apperception itself, which antecedes à priori all determinate thought. But the conjunction of representations into a conception is not to be found in objects themselves… but it is on the contrary an operation of the understanding itself, which is nothing more than the faculty of conjoining à priori and of bringing the variety of given representations under the unity of apperception. This principle is the highest in all human cognition. - Immanuel Kant, A Critique of Pure Reason
kukkeliskuu 2y ago
Just try to maintain unity and remember yourself when doing everyday things, for example when driving the car. If you really do it (and not just think about it) and are honest with yourself, you will soon realize that there are long gaps in your experience. You may remember when you started the drive, and you may remember when you arrived, but there will be long gaps between those moments that you just cannot remember. So you can independently verify yourself that unity is an illusion for most of us. You are able to drive the car without thinking "consciously" about it. So is everybody else. But do not despair. Becoming aware of this illusion of unity is actually a step towards the unity.
- feoren 2y ago
  I feel like it's a common fallacy that if you can't remember something later, then you didn't consciously experience it. It's a very narrow view of consciousness, and leads to silly statements like "There are long gaps in your experience". Is someone with an inability to form memories just an automaton then? Their qualia are less qualiatic than your qualia?
  - kukkeliskuu 2y ago
    Experiences change things, thinking about the experiences does not change things. Based on your answer, I am pretty sure you did not do the experiment, you just thought about it. This tells me you believe you can approach the issue intellectually. According to many traditions that have a long experience in consciousness, it requires a practical approach and cannot be approached intellectually. In my experience this is true. The thinking is actually part of the problem, not part of the solution. "Is someone with an inability to form memories just an automaton then? Their qualia are less qualiatic than your qualia?" This question seems to be about a theoretical construct of a consciousness you think that I am having. You seem to think there is a hole in my construct. There is a good reason to avoid such discussions, related to the fact that the analytical thinking is actually preventing people from understanding consciousness, and enganging in such discussions activates analytical thinking, instead of winding it down. If you want to discuss in good faith, you first need to understand the basics of this traditional view of consciousness. For this, you need practical experiences. Only after understanding basics can we discuss advanced topics, such as the corner cases of definitions. It seems as if you are using the word "automaton" as a diminutive. Having a strong emotional connection to a word may be conspiring with your analytical mind and preventing you from understanding the underlying concepts. Automation is not a bad thing. We humans are trying to automate as much as possible all the time. Our home has lots of automation (dishwasher, oven, blender etc.) that save us work. The nature works similarly, it works as if it had minimized the the energy consumption of living creatures. Brain requires lots of energy to run, so it is efficient to be conscious only when it is necessary. Words do not have one true meaning. It is more practical to use the words in the same way others are using them. If everybody uses the word "conciousness" in a way that person who cannot remember being conscious is not said to be conscious, it is better not to see it as "common fallacy", but just as the definition of the word. If you want to have a different meaning, it will be more helpful for clear communication if you just pick a different word. The word "qualia" is so overloaded with meaning, I will avoid it here altogether. In my experience there are many levels of consciousness. If you don't remember being conscious, you are running on autopilot. We can do extremely complex things when running on autopilot, such as driving a car successfully from place A to place B. Or write comments to HN. We could say that when running on autopilot, our level of consciousness is negative. If I am conscious of my driving, and can later recall being conscious, when I am just on the edge of remembering being conscious, we can say that my level of consciousness is zero. I don't need to talk about other people when referring to them as automatons. My level of consciousness is often below zero, meaning in such situations I am an "automaton". It is also possible, through training, to experience levels of consciousness that are higher than the level zero. There are some obvious changes in the experience when you reach these higher levels of conciousness. For example, I may experience the color red having more "red-ness". So we can now reframe your question: does person A whose level of consciousness is below zero, experience red-ness of red less than person B whose level of consciousness is zero? I think you can see from this reframing that the question is a little bit absurd. If you approach the issue experimentally and with an open mind, you can verify for yourself that your experience of red-ness of red can change. You will also learn that there is no direct way of knowing how you experience red-ness of red when your conciousness is below zero. But from your other experiences you can deduce that you probaby experience red having less red-ness when your level of conciousness is below zero than when it is zero.
robwwilliams 2y ago
Great post and important ideas. I was surprised by the set-up of the problem. Perhaps just my bias as a neuroscientist, but I take the disunity as the baseline state in the sensory/perceptual side, and the partial and graded unity of consciousness as icing on the cake. The metaphor of driving while thinking is apt. We simply do not have enough bandwidth to bind more than a few streams and only do so when it really matters. And if it really matters deeply to survival it again gets shifted in striatum. brainstem snd cerebellum—as habit or instinct. Consciousness is mere icing on the cake. Minsky’s Society of Minds comes to mind(s). Where unity is crucial in only in motor output—-when I reach and grasp (or talk or type) this thing I call me needs a unified pattern of activations and relaxations of muscles. This unity for and of action is required to sustain life (Maturana’s autopoiesis). But the integration of many streams of sensory-motor input can (must) occur disjointly. Fetching memory is again disjoint. The recursive binding of consciousness—our inner narrative that is probably driven by cycles of cortico-thalamic-cortical recursions—-only needs somewhat clear unity or binding at stages close to motor commitment. (But one wonders then about James Joyce when writing Finnigan’s Wake—-how many threads were output in parallel using a serial format?)
- AStonesThrow 2y ago
  When I'm driving along, I simply modulate my cortico-thalamus with a diffusion refractor, in order to maintain motor commitment and properly integrate hyperrealistic streams of sensory-motor inputs, and effect instantaneous responses via activations and relaxations of relevant muscle-groups, to output parallel threads of control-surface movements. It's pretty simple, if you think about it.
  - robwwilliams 2y ago
    There is a long form version that might not seem to be errant goggledeygook to you. But this is the short form. Most neuroscientists would probably get it. Mist cognitive neuroscientist understand the key role of rhythmic feedback activity between thalamus and cortex. For pure fun you might ask ChatGPT or Claude 3.5 Sonnet: “Is this pure bs or can you explain this HN comment?”
mannykannot 2y ago
It seems to me that this is a clear example of an issue to be addressed by the empirical methods of natural philosophy (i.e. science) rather than by introspection of one’s own experience and of other peoples’ reports on their introspection. There is a meme in the philosophy of mind which asserts that we cannot be mistaken about our experiences, but if that has any validity, I think it is only for our most immediate experiences, not what we make of them.
- llamaimperative 2y ago
  How can a question of perception be answered outside of a perceiving system?
  - mannykannot 2y ago
    How can a question of stellar physics be addressed outside of a star? The thing is, one needs (or so I suppose) a perceiving system to address questions of any sort, and why would minds be different? I am merely doubting that introspection is sufficient. I strongly suspect that most of what goes on in our brains is inaccessible to our conscious minds.
dr_dshiv 2y ago
Clearly consciousness isn’t a unity or it would be a one thing. Instead, by unified we mean it is integrated or harmonized— like a song made of many elements but harmonized into a whole. A whole has elements of unity, but necessarily contains parts. Plato’s Parmenides is all about the mystical inability to resolve this paradox of the existence of unity and parts.
alganet 2y ago
But what conclusion this supports? Unity by itself was an argument for something else, wasn't it? So, what does this partial unification implies for that something else? That something else being qualia, in contemporary terms. That doesn't solve _the original question_, or _the hard problem_ in any way. It just breaks it down in a different way. It's ok, the hard problem is hard anyway. When reading it, I get a strong sense that the text softly implies qualia as an emerging phenomenon. A christmas-tree-like composition of smaller qualia units, those coming primarily from senses and building up into more elaborate experiences. However, the argument for qualia was never about individual senses. Thought experiments like "what is like to be a bat?" and "what if I see colors different from everyone else?" were never about individual, specific senses. It was never implied to be literally just about a single sense, but the experience of being as a whole. That idea of "being as a whole" already includes the unconscious-until-conscious experiences. Julian Jaynes puts the "light in the refrigerator" not as a stationary light, but a flashlight that you can swing around in a dark room: wherever you point it to something, that something becomes highlighted in your consciousness. In the same way as the "light in the refrigerator" experiment, when you're not pointing to something, it doesn't mean it's not there. The "flashlight in the dark room" thought experiment also brings up important questions, like: what if there's someone else in the room? How should we deal with things that seemingly move around? It also brings up the idea of object permanence to the context of consciousness. Are we just like small children too naive to perceive what it really is?
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ndarray 2y ago
Yes, you can only spend your attention on one coherent thing at a time. That coherent thing can be a movie (sound and video synced to create coherence), sex in the dark (tactile + sound), or a podcast (only sound - no correlation to other stimuli). All the things you aren't focusing on, kind of run on auto pilot. Why would that mean they're subject to different, separate consciousnesses? I'd just call them separate clusters of attention, running in low power mode, but connected to the same single consciousness nonetheless. The different clusters obviously influence each other, especially when an unexpectedly strong sensation triggers one of them, e.g. a beeping alarm makes you look for the source. According to the author, upon hearing an alarm, the acoustic consciousness must now expand itself to become the main consciousness, which then somehow also integrates with a bunch of previously different consciousnesses (e.g. the one to observe your surroundings) to solve a new problem. We just call that attention.
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AStonesThrow 2y ago
I honestly attempted to read this article, but... psychobabble worse than a ST:TNG ep... Anyway, I was surprised to find nothing with Ctrl+F+"psychosis" because my (perhaps naïve) understanding is that disunity of consciousness is typically pathologized that way: having a wandering or dissociated mind where someone can't cope with everyday experiences. And I believe that disunity, or psychosis, is way more prevalent today than we think. Because with all of us online, absorbed in cyberspaces and AR games, and thinking of FB/IG friends even while we're showering, our minds are guaranteed to be a million miles away, under normal functional circumstances. As a young hobbyist I found a lovely escape into my favorite 6510 processor, but when I joined the workforce, I was extremely dismayed to consider that my work was 100% invisible and 100% intangible to everyone, and I had nothing to talk about with my family or girlfriends about what I did at work, even if I was utterly preoccupied and still working problems out at dinnertime. When distraction and stolen attention is the currency, opiate, or Spice of the Information Age, it's no surprise that we're no longer the masters of our own thoughts, and Eastern Mindfulness is preached from the highest authorities, including a young Obi-Wan Kenobi, because distraction and lack of focus are literally fatal errors for human beings.

159 points by Hooke 2y ago

TL;DR: Our experiences aren't as unified as we might think. Introspection might create a false sense of unity between concurrent experiences. Basically, we might not be as "conscious" as we believe in our day-to-day lives.

hwhwhwhhwhwh 2y ago
99.99% of the human population is in sleep mode. Zoning out constantly. Once you became awake, everyday experiences starts to become beautiful and a bit magical. Also you start to ponder more on your awareness and topics like eternity, god, death etc come to your focus than make believe stuff like careers, identity, nationality, opinions shared in tweets, the story you have about your life etc. Also a once atheist you starts to immediately understand the religious teachings. It's hard to understand this statement if you are not awake. I would have down voted this before the shift happened for me :)
- semitones 2y ago
  How do I wake up and escape the matrix? Please teach us master
  - hwhwhwhhwhwh 2y ago
    It happened to me by chance. But I was seeking it. I think the journey has just started for me. It has its own challenges. But waking up with Sam Harris is probably a good place to start. I don't think it's also for everyone. Life became easy day to day but became more challenging in terms of purpose etc as ego dies.
  - namero999 2y ago
    The work of George Gurdjieff is precisely about this.
    - kukkeliskuu 2y ago
      I second the G.I. Gurdjieff recommendation, but maybe start with any one of the books of "Psychological commentaries" by Nicoll, or "In search of the miraculous" by Ouspensky.
      - hwhwhwhhwhwh 2y ago
        I listened to this for a bit. I can agree the ideas are similar. Ramana Maharishi is another person to look into who is a bit more direct.
  - bbor 2y ago
    Heh, relevant XKCD… as always: https://xkcd.com/610/ https://xkcd.com/610/
    - hwhwhwhhwhwh 2y ago
      Lol
- soulofmischief 2y ago
  > Also a once atheist you starts to immediately understand the religious teachings I ponder the topics you mention and at no point did I feel compelled to radically retool my life around 2000 year old religious documents which themselves have clear lineage to even older, less-informed belief systems.
  - hwhwhwhhwhwh 2y ago
    That's okay. I didn't decide to ponder the religious teachings. After the shift I immediately started to understand the teachings that I once thought was primitive and irrelevant. They all point to the same thing. It's hard to understand what they are pointing to without knowing or experiencing it. Read a bit about perennial philosophy. But it's a bit like telling to blind person what colors are. It will not make sense till you see.
    - soulofmischief 2y ago
      Less abstractly and more concretely: What do they point to? What are you claiming is the unifying deep truth beneath the surface of all religious texts? What heuristic is used to differentiate a text as religious versus the babblings of a schizophrenic? I was raised Catholic, by a deacon, and have a deep understanding of Judeo-Christian religions, and have studied to a lesser extent several world religions. What am I missing?
      - hwhwhwhhwhwh 2y ago
        This is a good video which explains this. Love to hear what you understood and if you disagree your reasoning behind it. https://youtu.be/hw47wwOUjuY?si=dXFG_fYOBqJURPcQ https://youtu.be/hw47wwOUjuY?si=dXFG_fYOBqJURPcQ
      - kukkeliskuu 2y ago
        I am just a student of these things myself so take everything I say with a grain of salt. But based on your question and my own experience, it seems that you are approaching religion in the same way I was doing -- intellectually. That is natural, but the problem is that our intellect is quite limited. You would like to have a description of "the unifying deep truth". But even very simple experience, like how strawberry tastes like, cannot be transmitted by words and comprehended by the intellect. How could we transmit something vastly more complex even if we knew it -- and I am not claiming I do. So I would say what you are missing is the direct experience of something higher. Seek and you will find.
- thrance 2y ago
  Your statement is hard to understand because it claims nothing and is extremely pretentious, of course it gets downvoted. What you describe is akin to Camus's Absurd, but you chose to fill in the weirdness of existence with some kind of spirituality. That's your choice. Please don't go around claiming to be morally superior to "99.99%" of all humans on earth.
  - hwhwhwhhwhwh 2y ago
    When did I make the claim I am morally superior? I just said most humans are in sleep mode. Even if I said that it's pointless. It's just a belief and not truth. Also as I said in other comments till you experience a shift none of this makes sense to you. That's okay.
- buildsjets 2y ago
  Unfortunately, maintaining a career remains necessary to prevent the local authorities who are in charge of money distribution and tax collecting from causing harm to my person and family. And the 99.99% of the other people who surround me, who seem to have a general dissatisfaction with identities, nationalities, and tweets, whether theirs or other peoples, are the ones who keep empowering the various authorities that keep this silly conflict based system running. It's really quite an undesirable situation. "But nobody wants it! Everybody hates it!" OH. WELL, THEN STOP. That's what SHE said! RA Wilson says the only options after visiting Chapel Perilous are to become a paranoid, or an agnostic, and that there is no third way. I'd argue one could also become an atheist. The paranoid thinks there's always a force out there trying to get them. The atheist is convinced there's never a force out there trying to get them. I try to remain agnostic as I am not sure all the evidence is in yet to be able to make an accurate assessment of the situation which we all find ourselves dropped into. I take modified Sturgeon's Law view of various religious teachings. Sturgeon says 90% of everything is crap. I think it's closer to 99%. But the 1% that's left over is pretty interesting. Anyway I gave you a deserved upvote, but I'm sure your karma that matters is not as negative as your HN karma. :)
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AndrewKemendo 2y ago

Ram Dass fully covered this in much more depth: “ I will work on myself, since the work on myself is going to be the highest thing I can do for it all, since I understand that as man up-levels his own consciousness, he sees more creative solutions to the problems that he's confronting. Therefore, it always feeds back to the same place. But working on myself is just like this. This is social action at the moment.” https://www.ramdass.org/increasing-amount-consciousness/ https://www.ramdass.org/increasing-amount-consciousness/ Here’s a (fairly) long lecture with Q&A demonstrating as such: https://youtu.be/LCiB9oMnIbI?si=yr5ldw8JrkQ7iQtS https://youtu.be/LCiB9oMnIbI?si=yr5ldw8JrkQ7iQtS

theptip 2y ago

The Buddhist take here would be that when you actually hone your attention, introspection reveals not a unified consciousness but a stream of discrete events: thought, visual perception, tactile, tactile, thought,… The default is to not have enough resolution to perceive the edges. Under this view, the unification is an illusion or an appearance, analogously to how we perceive fluorescent lights to be continuous even though they are actually flickering on and off at a high rate. The difference being, our eyes have a hardware limit on temporal resolution, whereas for attention the relevant limit here is just “software”.

neom 2y ago
For anyone curious to explore this, I recommend sunyata, and particularly looking in the Madhyamaka philosophy of Nagarjuna.
wanderingbort 2y ago
How do you know whether the discrete events are a more fundamental representation vs a higher level representation that your training and discipline produces?
- laserlight 2y ago
  You don't. Everything is mental fabrication, including calling some mental fabrications illusion. You train your mind to fabricate things that you prefer. Whether they are more fundamental or higher-level representations doesn't matter.
- theptip 2y ago
  It’s a great question. I have come up with two answers (though I am far from an expert): 1) this is empirically verifiable; just do an RCT where you teach people a meditation technique for attention without prompting, and see what they observe. (I have heard comments from aspiring meditators like “I tried meditating but after a while I could not find “the breath” because it broke apart into a stream of individual sensations”) - but I do worry that techniques like “noting” smuggle in an atomizing assumption, whereas other techniques like whole-body perception or Metta might lead you to a more unifying viewpoint if practiced exclusively. 2) maybe it doesn’t matter if it’s “more fundamental”; if you wire your brain to deeply believe that it is, then a bunch of positive effects occur, and that’s the goal of the whole exercise. The words “this is more fundamental” are just a cue to help you to shift. This feels less palatable to me but I haven’t seen the rewards, and if they were as good as promised maybe this would be justified. Anyway, I’m not sure many Buddhists would endorse 2), even among the secular / non-religious/ scientific minority of the community.

jacobsimon 2y ago

Was thinking about this recently. The author misses the importance of timing in the unity of perception. It would be rather easy to conduct an experiment and ask people, “did X and Y happen at the same time?” where X and Y are different stimuli. You could test over a variety of different senses and time differences to determine if people are integrating their experiences or not. The other important element is attention and awareness. You can certainly be focused on one thing more than another—this can be a useful kind of disunity

sctb 2y ago
Here's an interesting experiment you can do around retrospective perception and timing: clap your hands once, listening for the sound of the clap. Notice what it's like to remember the sound of the clap for a minute or so. Now, clap your hands twice, again listening closely and noticing what it's like to remember the sound for a little while. In the second case, is it possible for you to remember the sound of the first clap only, without an echo of the second?

blueridge 2y ago

Galen Strawson: "I’m somewhere down towards the episodic end of this spectrum. I have no sense of my life as a narrative with form, and very little interest in my own past. My personal memory is very poor, and rarely impinges on my present consciousness. I make plans for the future, and to that extent think of myself perfectly adequately as something with long-term continuity. But I experience this way of thinking of myself as remote and theoretical, given the most central or fundamental way in which I think of myself, which is as a mental self or someone. Using ME to express the way in which I think of myself, I can accurately express my experience by saying that I do not think of ME as being something in the future." https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v18/n08/galen-strawson/the-sense-of-the-self https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v18/n08/galen-strawson/the-s... Would also recommend Strawson's Things That Bother Me: Death, Freedom, the Self, Etc.

jhickok 2y ago

Eric is a fantastic writer and I highly suggest his books including a recent collection of his works in "The Weirdness of the World". Finding "Describing Inner Experience" in grad school had a profound effect on me.

bbor 2y ago
Huh okay thanks for commenting, I was very confused about what exactly I was reading until you prompted me to look him up. Interesting guy — he’s a full time professional academic in philosophy, and yet writes like a hacker, even going as far as to skip APA citations in favor of undescribed hyperlinks! The style is a fascinating mix of analytic (such as only giving the time of day to recent theories, and constricting his argument to an explicit outline) and a more casual blog style. He’s also been writing about exactly this — perhaps in slightly less unified (hehe) terms - since at least 2007: https://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/ https://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/ If you find the time, could you share what the big takeaways were that had a profound effect? I’m guessing it was a practical exercise that trained you to more accurately introspect, but that’s just a guess. I’m way too deep into all this philosophy stuff already so I mostly got indignant disagreement out of this essay, and I’d like to see it in a more productive light!
- jhickok 2y ago
  I'm glad you like his style! I find him incredibly approachable and clear for some of the reasons you outlined above. He also take great pains to be a clear communicator, which you can see in pieces of media like his appearance on Sean Carroll's podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0evRaWV_HU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0evRaWV_HU Anyway, I was not a philosophy undergraduate and so a lot of my exposure was either to popular level works (surveys, etc), or big historical names (Descartes, Hume, Plato), or to very specific areas of research (I was big into metaphysics and philosophy of mind "realists", like Chalmers, Searle, Flanagan etc), and skepticism about intuition, or sense-data, or even skepticism about a priori truths had just never really occurred to me. That's more of a self-own than anything, but we first-years in grad school had a course together where someone in the dept. would take us thru a deep dive in a very specific area by way of a brand new book. For example, the year prior to my arrival they read thru a "Climbing the Mountain", an early draft of the book that would eventually become Parfit's "On What Matters". Anyway, my year all picked "Describing Inner Experience", and this would become my introduction to an ultimately useful view that opened the world of CogSci to me since assumptions I had (which can probably be described at Cartesian) no longer posed powerful arguments against a more empirically-minded look into how the mind works. So, folks that I previously disregarded like Dennett, Wittgenstein, the Churchlands, were now gateways into Smolensky, Prinz, Carruthers, etc.

namero999 2y ago

The usual fallacy of conflating phenomenal experience with cognition, and using the same term "consciousness" to refer to both of the concepts interchangeably. The whole piece is undermined.

mensetmanusman 2y ago
Consciousness is required to experience, but it is not required to sense.
- namero999 2y ago
  I appreciate your reply, however I would partially disagree. Consciousness is always there, and we call sensing what is mediated by our sense organs interacting with the external world, that is, perceiving. It's a class of experience radically different than, say, proprioception or feeling. One is externally mediated, the other is endogenous. Consciousness (in the phenomenal sense) is the superclass of both. Cognition, or meta-consciousness, makes salient specific aspects of our experience/awareness, so that I'm very well aware right now of the pixels of my monitor as I write this, and much less so of the expansion of my rib cage as I breathe, or whatever subtle noises might be going on out of my window. However, I never really stop being conscious of them.

sfink 2y ago

As added support for this view, I can contrast with the relatively uncommon experience of having some experiences unified: when listening to an audio book, my brain often (but not always!) ties the experience of the book with my physical location at the time. When I return to that location, the experience of being there is inextricably tied to the portions of the book I heard in that place. I can't really remember one without the other. But this is unusual. Most things are not tied together like this. In the author's example, I can separately remember the philosophical musings that were in my head on a drive, and the feeling of the steering wheel (which normally would be too mundane to remember, but on a hot day the cover will get sticky and I'll be very aware of that). There might be a weak association from one to the other, but usually not much at all. As a tangent, I wonder if LLM attention heads are doing something analogous. Each is associated with a strand, sometimes combined with the others and usually not? (I don't know enough to say whether this matches at all.)

temp0826 2y ago
I think it was the ancient Greeks(?) that walked while learning the epic poems in order to recite them by recalling their journey, using the associations made on the path they took. I think the method of loci[0] is similar except using purely imagined locations/details ("memory palace"). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci
- jvm___ 2y ago
  Shoutout to the excellent podcast The Memory Palace It's historic stories told well, nothing to do with memory palaces
- raincom 2y ago
  In India, there is an ancient art called 'avadhAnam'[1][2], where questioners pose various questions to the performer. This performer has to answer questions partially in a verse form, and this can go on for days, if 1000 people are involved. These people have to recite these 1000 verses after everything is over. Performer should not use pen, paper or any recording. These guys memorize many Indian texts that contain verses. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avadhanam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avadhanam [2] https://sampadanandamishra.medium.com/my-journey-with-avadhana-a-remarkable-art-form-376f49b99fd7 https://sampadanandamishra.medium.com/my-journey-with-avadha...

nikolayasdf123 2y ago

yes, afaik global perception moments are normally are generated every 100ms

rramadass 2y ago

Related : A Mind Of Its Own : How Your Brain Distorts and Deceives by Cordelia Fine.

swayvil 2y ago

I've heard that experience is initially a mess. A babble of sensations. Then I tell myself a story about the babble. Map the babble in terms of time, space, things, money, etc. And then that story. That's "reality". (But the real magic show comes when I am guided by the story, in what I pay attention to and what I ignore)

kahirsch 2y ago

Emo Philips once said "I used to think that the human brain was the most fascinating part of the body. Then I realized, whoa, ‘look what’s telling me that’." There seems to be this naïve view among some philosophers that what our verbal stream of consciousness reports is somehow the most important part of our "mind" or our "consciousness", some even saying that verbal thoughts are the only thing that are important enough to be called "thoughts"! I say: look what’s telling you that! I mean that very seriously. I've always assumed that the brain has to have many parallel things going on at the same time and we have some limited awareness of these things and some ability to coordinate and direct the different parts of the brain, but it seems to be rather limited. It can't be complete, just on a Turing/Goedel basis, but anything approaching completeness would mean slowing our thoughts down to the slowest parts. I remember reading about the Libet experiment decades ago and how some people thought that it disproved "free will"— whatever that could possibly mean. The impulse to report a decision to move a finger came after the impulse to move the finger. So? They were apparently assuming that the mind was some synchronized, sequential process and that the verbal report of what "the mind" was intending to do was supposed to come at the same time or before the impulse to move the finger. What??? Even a view of a single stream of "attention" or "executive process" seems dubious. Yes, we have all had the experience where something that's mostly automatic/unconscious suddenly requires our attention. For example, you're driving a car and suddenly a novel situation comes up and you need to turn off the radio or tell the passenger to shut up so you devote all your attention to driving. But just normal driving requires an enormous amount of processing of different concepts and coordinating different parts of the brain. There was an experiment (Maier's two-string puzzle, I just found by google), where a scientist tested people's ability to solve a problem figuring out how to tie two strings together that were hanging from the ceiling, too far apart for anyone to grab both at the same time. Some of the participants were given a non-verbal "hint" of how to solve the problem. But, when asked later how they solved it, most of those given the hint didn't mention it! Were they "consciously aware" of the hint at all? That was an actual experiment relevant to the idea of a unity of consciousness. Anyway, mine is a very limited, amateur, mostly 20th century perspective on the ideas. I'd be interested in what others have to share, especially actual experiments and not so much philosophers examining their verbal thoughts.

2y ago

nickjj 2y ago

If this is true, why is this scenario so common for a lot of people: Someone you care about introduces you to something, that relationship ends and now the something they introduced you to becomes repulsive. A slight twist on that is you experience something together with someone that could be done on your own but suddenly that activity becomes tainted even when you try to do it alone at a later time. The above suggests there is a high coupling between 2 independent experiences at a conscious level which melds 2 distinct and logically separate events into 1 experience. It's certainly not a healthy way to live knowing that someone can have that much control over your own internal thoughts and perceptions but that doesn't mean it doesn't happen, even temporarily.

IshKebab 2y ago
One thing reminds you of the other. Not rocket science. Honestly this level of philosophy is just people arguing about things that are too poorly defined to have a concrete answer. It's like arguing about how many organs there are, or exactly where space begins. Best just to let the philosophers debate whether it's 60 miles or 100 km.

encoderer 2y ago

these unified experiences are life’s “magical moments” which is like being “in the zone” in a social/physical sense. Everything is keeping you there in the moment and it’s wonderful. Reminds me of the Nimoy quote that ‘in life, like a garden, perfect moments can be had but not preserved’ except in memories.

bbor 2y ago

Great article, thanks for posting! I typed out a long thing that got lost, so I’ll cut to the chase and do what everyone else is doing and give my rebuttal: cognition is absolutely composed of many non-unified (and often almost-entirely-unconscious) systems, much like a computer is composed of many disjointed programs. But consciousness is unity itself, in my view — the fact that most of our animal processes are disjointed doesn’t say much about us as sapient beings, even if those processes take up “most” of us on some given scale (time, energy used, neurons involved, whatever). But I’m just vaguely gesturing — this view was first and best characterized in 1801: For example, this universal identity of the apperception of the manifold given in intuition contains a synthesis of representations and is possible only by means of the consciousness of this synthesis… For the empirical consciousness which accompanies different representations is in itself fragmentary and disunited, and without relation to the identity of the subject. This relation, then, does not exist because I accompany every representation with consciousness, but because I join one representation to another, and am conscious of the synthesis of them… in other words, the analytical unity of apperception is possible only under the presupposition of a synthetical unity.[16] …for the reason alone that I can comprehend the variety of my representations in one consciousness, do I call them my representations, for otherwise I must have as many-coloured and various a self as are the representations of which I am conscious. Synthetical unity of the manifold in intuitions, as given à priori, is therefore the foundation of the identity of apperception itself, which antecedes à priori all determinate thought. But the conjunction of representations into a conception is not to be found in objects themselves… but it is on the contrary an operation of the understanding itself, which is nothing more than the faculty of conjoining à priori and of bringing the variety of given representations under the unity of apperception. This principle is the highest in all human cognition. - Immanuel Kant, A Critique of Pure Reason

kukkeliskuu 2y ago

Just try to maintain unity and remember yourself when doing everyday things, for example when driving the car. If you really do it (and not just think about it) and are honest with yourself, you will soon realize that there are long gaps in your experience. You may remember when you started the drive, and you may remember when you arrived, but there will be long gaps between those moments that you just cannot remember. So you can independently verify yourself that unity is an illusion for most of us. You are able to drive the car without thinking "consciously" about it. So is everybody else. But do not despair. Becoming aware of this illusion of unity is actually a step towards the unity.

feoren 2y ago
I feel like it's a common fallacy that if you can't remember something later, then you didn't consciously experience it. It's a very narrow view of consciousness, and leads to silly statements like "There are long gaps in your experience". Is someone with an inability to form memories just an automaton then? Their qualia are less qualiatic than your qualia?
- kukkeliskuu 2y ago
  Experiences change things, thinking about the experiences does not change things. Based on your answer, I am pretty sure you did not do the experiment, you just thought about it. This tells me you believe you can approach the issue intellectually. According to many traditions that have a long experience in consciousness, it requires a practical approach and cannot be approached intellectually. In my experience this is true. The thinking is actually part of the problem, not part of the solution. "Is someone with an inability to form memories just an automaton then? Their qualia are less qualiatic than your qualia?" This question seems to be about a theoretical construct of a consciousness you think that I am having. You seem to think there is a hole in my construct. There is a good reason to avoid such discussions, related to the fact that the analytical thinking is actually preventing people from understanding consciousness, and enganging in such discussions activates analytical thinking, instead of winding it down. If you want to discuss in good faith, you first need to understand the basics of this traditional view of consciousness. For this, you need practical experiences. Only after understanding basics can we discuss advanced topics, such as the corner cases of definitions. It seems as if you are using the word "automaton" as a diminutive. Having a strong emotional connection to a word may be conspiring with your analytical mind and preventing you from understanding the underlying concepts. Automation is not a bad thing. We humans are trying to automate as much as possible all the time. Our home has lots of automation (dishwasher, oven, blender etc.) that save us work. The nature works similarly, it works as if it had minimized the the energy consumption of living creatures. Brain requires lots of energy to run, so it is efficient to be conscious only when it is necessary. Words do not have one true meaning. It is more practical to use the words in the same way others are using them. If everybody uses the word "conciousness" in a way that person who cannot remember being conscious is not said to be conscious, it is better not to see it as "common fallacy", but just as the definition of the word. If you want to have a different meaning, it will be more helpful for clear communication if you just pick a different word. The word "qualia" is so overloaded with meaning, I will avoid it here altogether. In my experience there are many levels of consciousness. If you don't remember being conscious, you are running on autopilot. We can do extremely complex things when running on autopilot, such as driving a car successfully from place A to place B. Or write comments to HN. We could say that when running on autopilot, our level of consciousness is negative. If I am conscious of my driving, and can later recall being conscious, when I am just on the edge of remembering being conscious, we can say that my level of consciousness is zero. I don't need to talk about other people when referring to them as automatons. My level of consciousness is often below zero, meaning in such situations I am an "automaton". It is also possible, through training, to experience levels of consciousness that are higher than the level zero. There are some obvious changes in the experience when you reach these higher levels of conciousness. For example, I may experience the color red having more "red-ness". So we can now reframe your question: does person A whose level of consciousness is below zero, experience red-ness of red less than person B whose level of consciousness is zero? I think you can see from this reframing that the question is a little bit absurd. If you approach the issue experimentally and with an open mind, you can verify for yourself that your experience of red-ness of red can change. You will also learn that there is no direct way of knowing how you experience red-ness of red when your conciousness is below zero. But from your other experiences you can deduce that you probaby experience red having less red-ness when your level of conciousness is below zero than when it is zero.

robwwilliams 2y ago

Great post and important ideas. I was surprised by the set-up of the problem. Perhaps just my bias as a neuroscientist, but I take the disunity as the baseline state in the sensory/perceptual side, and the partial and graded unity of consciousness as icing on the cake. The metaphor of driving while thinking is apt. We simply do not have enough bandwidth to bind more than a few streams and only do so when it really matters. And if it really matters deeply to survival it again gets shifted in striatum. brainstem snd cerebellum—as habit or instinct. Consciousness is mere icing on the cake. Minsky’s Society of Minds comes to mind(s). Where unity is crucial in only in motor output—-when I reach and grasp (or talk or type) this thing I call me needs a unified pattern of activations and relaxations of muscles. This unity for and of action is required to sustain life (Maturana’s autopoiesis). But the integration of many streams of sensory-motor input can (must) occur disjointly. Fetching memory is again disjoint. The recursive binding of consciousness—our inner narrative that is probably driven by cycles of cortico-thalamic-cortical recursions—-only needs somewhat clear unity or binding at stages close to motor commitment. (But one wonders then about James Joyce when writing Finnigan’s Wake—-how many threads were output in parallel using a serial format?)

AStonesThrow 2y ago
When I'm driving along, I simply modulate my cortico-thalamus with a diffusion refractor, in order to maintain motor commitment and properly integrate hyperrealistic streams of sensory-motor inputs, and effect instantaneous responses via activations and relaxations of relevant muscle-groups, to output parallel threads of control-surface movements. It's pretty simple, if you think about it.
- robwwilliams 2y ago
  There is a long form version that might not seem to be errant goggledeygook to you. But this is the short form. Most neuroscientists would probably get it. Mist cognitive neuroscientist understand the key role of rhythmic feedback activity between thalamus and cortex. For pure fun you might ask ChatGPT or Claude 3.5 Sonnet: “Is this pure bs or can you explain this HN comment?”

mannykannot 2y ago

It seems to me that this is a clear example of an issue to be addressed by the empirical methods of natural philosophy (i.e. science) rather than by introspection of one’s own experience and of other peoples’ reports on their introspection. There is a meme in the philosophy of mind which asserts that we cannot be mistaken about our experiences, but if that has any validity, I think it is only for our most immediate experiences, not what we make of them.

llamaimperative 2y ago
How can a question of perception be answered outside of a perceiving system?
- mannykannot 2y ago
  How can a question of stellar physics be addressed outside of a star? The thing is, one needs (or so I suppose) a perceiving system to address questions of any sort, and why would minds be different? I am merely doubting that introspection is sufficient. I strongly suspect that most of what goes on in our brains is inaccessible to our conscious minds.

dr_dshiv 2y ago

Clearly consciousness isn’t a unity or it would be a one thing. Instead, by unified we mean it is integrated or harmonized— like a song made of many elements but harmonized into a whole. A whole has elements of unity, but necessarily contains parts. Plato’s Parmenides is all about the mystical inability to resolve this paradox of the existence of unity and parts.

alganet 2y ago

But what conclusion this supports? Unity by itself was an argument for something else, wasn't it? So, what does this partial unification implies for that something else? That something else being qualia, in contemporary terms. That doesn't solve _the original question_, or _the hard problem_ in any way. It just breaks it down in a different way. It's ok, the hard problem is hard anyway. When reading it, I get a strong sense that the text softly implies qualia as an emerging phenomenon. A christmas-tree-like composition of smaller qualia units, those coming primarily from senses and building up into more elaborate experiences. However, the argument for qualia was never about individual senses. Thought experiments like "what is like to be a bat?" and "what if I see colors different from everyone else?" were never about individual, specific senses. It was never implied to be literally just about a single sense, but the experience of being as a whole. That idea of "being as a whole" already includes the unconscious-until-conscious experiences. Julian Jaynes puts the "light in the refrigerator" not as a stationary light, but a flashlight that you can swing around in a dark room: wherever you point it to something, that something becomes highlighted in your consciousness. In the same way as the "light in the refrigerator" experiment, when you're not pointing to something, it doesn't mean it's not there. The "flashlight in the dark room" thought experiment also brings up important questions, like: what if there's someone else in the room? How should we deal with things that seemingly move around? It also brings up the idea of object permanence to the context of consciousness. Are we just like small children too naive to perceive what it really is?

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ndarray 2y ago

Yes, you can only spend your attention on one coherent thing at a time. That coherent thing can be a movie (sound and video synced to create coherence), sex in the dark (tactile + sound), or a podcast (only sound - no correlation to other stimuli). All the things you aren't focusing on, kind of run on auto pilot. Why would that mean they're subject to different, separate consciousnesses? I'd just call them separate clusters of attention, running in low power mode, but connected to the same single consciousness nonetheless. The different clusters obviously influence each other, especially when an unexpectedly strong sensation triggers one of them, e.g. a beeping alarm makes you look for the source. According to the author, upon hearing an alarm, the acoustic consciousness must now expand itself to become the main consciousness, which then somehow also integrates with a bunch of previously different consciousnesses (e.g. the one to observe your surroundings) to solve a new problem. We just call that attention.

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AStonesThrow 2y ago

I honestly attempted to read this article, but... psychobabble worse than a ST:TNG ep... Anyway, I was surprised to find nothing with Ctrl+F+"psychosis" because my (perhaps naïve) understanding is that disunity of consciousness is typically pathologized that way: having a wandering or dissociated mind where someone can't cope with everyday experiences. And I believe that disunity, or psychosis, is way more prevalent today than we think. Because with all of us online, absorbed in cyberspaces and AR games, and thinking of FB/IG friends even while we're showering, our minds are guaranteed to be a million miles away, under normal functional circumstances. As a young hobbyist I found a lovely escape into my favorite 6510 processor, but when I joined the workforce, I was extremely dismayed to consider that my work was 100% invisible and 100% intangible to everyone, and I had nothing to talk about with my family or girlfriends about what I did at work, even if I was utterly preoccupied and still working problems out at dinnertime. When distraction and stolen attention is the currency, opiate, or Spice of the Information Age, it's no surprise that we're no longer the masters of our own thoughts, and Eastern Mindfulness is preached from the highest authorities, including a young Obi-Wan Kenobi, because distraction and lack of focus are literally fatal errors for human beings.