5 ms·

The Origin of Consciousness (2008)

64 points by skm 2mo ago

deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]
N_Lens 2mo ago
I find the description of consciousness in this article very narrow (Only arising post language). Post language consciousness is a particular type of consciousness, and the same can be said of post DMT consciousness (Which is sometimes without language).
- TheHardProblem 2mo ago
  As somebody who understands the perceived limitations of the materialist take on consciousness in light of recent decades of seeming philosophical traction (Searle, Chalmers), I have to admit how many ways LLMs proved me wrong. Rather, how much of it is just language. We went from completing words to completing sentences, paragraphs, essays, code files, pixel arrangements, music, and more just by aggregating and modeling all that in English. I was amazed that predicting a word can emerge into knowledge, creativity, productivity - the stuff of thoughts. It doesn’t happen to anyone (the thinking) but I think they still qualify as thoughts, just without a thinker.
  - txrx0000 2mo ago
    If by "consciousness" you mean the thing that goes away when we sleep, how are you so sure that there's not a conscious thinker in the machine? That seems like a hypothesis rather than a proven fact as we don't know what process in the brain is responsible for consciousness fading away (assuming a practical materialist stance here) when we sleep. If it's some very basic informational pattern thing, then computers could have it.
    - TheHardProblem 2mo ago
      Burden of Proof mainly. If I cut off my finger I’m still awake. If I cut off my head I’m gone forever. Presumably there is something going on in the head that isn’t happening in the finger (or the LLM). We can be a lot more precise than that even, requiring nerves, chemistry, sense organs, to really get at a specific human definition of “what I mean by consciousness.” But yeah you have the essence of it - I just mean the experience. I don’t think a computer could have it anymore than it could feel pain - thinking and feeling are different classes of problem that don’t complete each other no matter how much you work on just one in isolation. I understand that means I think “thinking” is an unconscious process. And it must be, since LLMs are doing it. What they aren’t doing is experiencing anything alongside that. Who knows what that is. It’s apparently not logical computation in-and-of-itself. > If it's some very basic informational pattern thing, then computers could have it. This is functionalism. The problem I have with it is it pre-supposes a theory of objective information. That “patterns” exist in the first place without the observer. If there is information in the universe that predates us, then I can see how just finding what objective patterns produce it can get us places. But it seems like we conscious observers actually assign the meaning and create information out of chaos. The only reason it isn’t chaos is that we all agree within experience what “1” means, and so-on. There isn’t really “an orange” on “a tree”. But to us there can be. It always works too (to us), so it’s a pretty good stand-in for reality. If you capture the function of a red rubber ball bouncing in a concrete space - ask yourself what you have captured. As you create the simulation software that moves the pixels of the red circle up the screen, ask what exactly you are doing, and what that has to do whatsoever with a ball bouncing in a space. So I don’t believe in functionalism because I don’t believe in pure 1:1 representations. All copies are reductions, any function that describes something is itself a reduction of that thing, and can never include the whole original, for basically the same reason you can’t travel backwards in time.
      - N_Lens 1mo ago
        How do you know that if you cut off your head "you're gone forever"? Death is an event horizon we can't see past, yet the experience of it in the first person is likely one of the most remarkable in this life.
  - ElFitz 1mo ago
    Or words, and language, just provide a sort of sensory input, which provided an environment and a selective pressure can shape an organism or neural network into predicting and producing the kind of reaction or output required for its continued existence. And no, I’m not implying any sort of survival instinct in LLMs. It’s just that we don’t keep around the weights that produce gibberish.
- mjd 2mo ago
  That's exactly Jaynes's theory: consciousness not only arrived after the invention of language, it arrived after the invention of writing, literature, agriculture, metallurgy, and government bureaucracy. And also, that it _could not_ have arisen without language because it is crucially founded in the capability of language to describe the world metaphorically. You don't have to like it, but that's the theory that is being discussed.
  - TheHardProblem 2mo ago
    Probably the most fascinating idea there is right now in the field. It might be right. My intuition is that it’s not right - that you can have experience without language, images, and other “sensory objects” but I wonder how useful it is. Just like a plasmic euphoria detached from any identity or process; or an endless, mindless, dread, that drones on for billions of years in the vacuum of space waiting to be liberated by sound, light, anything
  - bonoboTP 2mo ago
    A great majority of humanity remained illiterate just a few generations ago. It's absurd to posit they weren't conscious. Hunter-gatherer and nomadic lifestyles are complex and require deep thought and planning and coordination. You can't do it purely reactively or carrying out simple scripts. Its not so clear to me if it's the chicken or egg. So many things are good candidates for the key ingredient. I personally think that consciousness is social theory of mind applied to the self, or something like simulating and being concerned with how the tribe sees you and interprets your intentions etc, forcing you to analyze yourself similarly to how you analyze others. This would mean that solitary animals are less conscious than social ones.
    - OkayPhysicist 2mo ago
      You're conflating "written language" with "language". While it's still far from impossible to find people who can't read or write, it's exceptionally difficult to find adults with no grasp of any spoken language.
pavel_lishin 2mo ago
I think this was also one of the inspirations for Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash", which also deals with (among other things) the nature of consciousness and religion in the human mind.
- mjd 2mo ago
  It was definitely the inspiration for one of the subplots of _The Big U_. A faction of college students regressed to a bicameral mentality and would hold rituals in which they waited for oracular speech from an electric fan. I remember thinking at the time I read it “I don't know how anyone could understand this book without reading Jaynes first”.
ElFitz 2mo ago
And yet anendophasia is a thing. Some people think without an inner monologue, without words[^0]. And they seem to do so quite well and quite successfully. [0]: https://johnrmiles.com/life-without-an-inner-monologue/ https://johnrmiles.com/life-without-an-inner-monologue/
- kubb 2mo ago
  I’m pretty sure I can do both. Can’t everyone?
  - polytely 2mo ago
    Yeah me too, and it feels like a lot of people who are exclusively 'stuck' in language seem to think the pre-language part is somehow inferior (which imo is very misguided)
    - Jtarii 2mo ago
      Thinking without language makes sense for problems that don't require language like visual art, but how do you solve complex logic problems or write a book without thinking in sentences.
      - bonoboTP 2mo ago
        You can think abstractly about geometry problems, or graph tgeory but even about linear algebra. Feynman describes how he felt while holding and analyzing problems in his mind. I'm less eloquent. Also you can think about the narrative and the valence of a scene for a book, without blabbering to yourself while planning the story. I can narrate it like as if I imagine a friend being there and translating my thought into language but it's an extra step. It also exhausts me more. Which makes coding with LLMs more tiring for me. Before it, I could code without language use exhausting my brain, but talking to LLMs requires putting all of it into English, while before I could just imagine a certain refactor as one coherent thought in my mind without turning it into sentences. Of course above a certain level of difficulty, putting thoughts down helps for problem solving, but a lot of that can be various types of sketch drawings and formulas too. It's likely a verbal and spatial heavy thought difference, the lawyer / engineer type of thinking difference.
GlenTheMachine 2mo ago
Isn't this a testable hypothesis? If consciousness spread virally and isn't a natural outgrowth of the physical structure of the brain, then presumably isolated indigenous tribes would still have pre-consciousness mental processes, and that should be detectable somehow. The being said, I'm reading "Proto" By Laura Spinney, and the thing that strikes me is how recently the world's major languages developed. Everyone assumes we had language fifty thousand years ago, but the actual language families we know about all seem to trace to no more than about 10,000 BCE, and maybe a lot younger than that. The odds of Proto-Indo-European being traceable to a single tribe in the Black Sea region circa 4500 BCE seem really low to me, but that's what seems to have happened.
- carbonguy 2mo ago
  Slate Star Codex reviewed Jaynes' book as well, which is how I first heard about it: https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/01/book-review-origin-of-consciousness-in-the-breakdown-of-the-bicameral-mind/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/01/book-review-origin-of-... To your point: > Isn't this a testable hypothesis? If consciousness spread virally and isn't a natural outgrowth of the physical structure of the brain, then presumably isolated indigenous tribes would still have pre-consciousness mental processes, and that should be detectable somehow. SSC's article points to a Reddit thread that suggests even folks in the mainstream of culture may undergo a "consciousness transition" as adults: https://www.reddit.com/r/self/comments/3yrw2i/i_never_thought_with_language_until_now_this_is/ https://www.reddit.com/r/self/comments/3yrw2i/i_never_though...
  - bonoboTP 2mo ago
    I'd distinguish verbal inner monologue from consciousness. Many people think on the daily without narrating things to themselves in sentences, without feeling brutish or animalistic. I can plan complex human actions including theory of mind considerations without narrating it as a monologue. It's still very conscious. Also that reddit post seems like a fake story made up by a teenager as a sort of scifi. It's just too on the nose. Yeah he lived life without understanding that his friends still exist while out of sight... I guess the OP just learned about some developmental stages of toddlers or object permanence etc and wrote a story like this as fanfic.
txrx0000 2mo ago
The article's definition of consciousness is precise, but it's not what people are referring to in most cases where the word "consciousness" is used. Of course, a word can have multiple definitions. But colloquially, when people say consciousness, we usually mean the thing that goes away when we sleep or are anesthetized. I don't think there's a much better way to define that. The contrast between the wakeful and non-wakeful state as oneself experiences from the inside is precisely what defines consciousness in the colloquial sense. It seems to be a self-defining concept because I can't even define what "experiences" means without thinking about the wakeful/non-wakeful contrast phenomena that is consciousness, and "experiences" was supposed to be a part of the definition of "consciousness" one sentence ago.
- lostmsu 2mo ago
  Why only as oneself experiences? I can easily tell if a horse is conscious or not. The whole matter is rather simple IMO. Let's say it's variability (number of distinct if you prefer discrete) of stable responses to external stimuli.
- JK-Swizzle 2mo ago
  I am unsure as to what you are trying to say here. It reads to me as “the word the article discusses has a more popular homonym, but they are clearly not talking about that”.
  - txrx0000 2mo ago
    I'm thinking out loud and pointing out the difference to avoid confusion, and also trying to invite discussion around the colloquial def, because I think the colloquial def is the most important/useful one.
- sillywabbit 2mo ago
  Anesthesia is a rather different state than sleep.
  - api 2mo ago
colinrand 2mo ago
I find this on the crackpottery side. Narrowly defining a certain aspect of consciousness to make a point, and disregarding many (most) other aspects of consciousness. Self-aware much?
- JK-Swizzle 2mo ago
  How would you define it? Would your definition be that of your experience? Would that definition encompass all of humanity, past and present? Would that definition contain all sapient life? Sentient too? Would that definition allow for less complex forms of life? Reading the comments on this post, I am inclined to agree with the words of his biographer “there were people who disagreed with him [who] had not really read his book or understood it.” If you do get a chance to actually read the book (as you ought to), it covers all the issues and complexities you may have. It is limited only by the information of the era.
nemo 2mo ago
Jayme's theory depends on trade emerging post-Bronze Age collapse of a sort that requires a new kind of theory of mind and processing in a low trust environment driven by international trade. The Ea-Nasir letter was written c. 1750 BC shows that the same issues were already around ~ 800 years earlier and there's lots of international trade going on even in the 3,000s BC. The content of the Ea-Nasir letter and the personal reflections and issues presented there really destroy the central thesis of the book. It's also got a few other serious historic flaws (false claims about the existent of omens ignoring previous examples thousands of years earlier) that make it the kind of book that's interesting but without question also completely wrong in its central thesis.
Nevermark 2mo ago
Consciousness occurs when: (1) The model we learn of the environment, extends to our own bodies status indicators, then our general emotional mood/emotions/reflexes, and finally to some level awareness of our thought behaviors. So our general model includes some visibility and modeling of our own thinking processes. (2) Our control where we learn to redirect the environment, extends to our bodies as subjects themselves, not just as means to control the environment, then the ability to exert influence on our internal body state (note: control does not mean direct. I can't just turn off stress, but I can go for a walk.) And then to our moods, emotions, and mental reflexes (again, direct isn't necessary, just some means of influencing), and then to some level or our internals thoughts. So our general control map lets us exert some control and influence over our own thinking processes. (3) Given the tight awareness of some internal through processes, with some control of those thought processes, with similar tight pairing of mood/emotion/mental-reflex awareness and influence, internal body state awareness and influence, external body state awareness and influence, and environment with some level awareness and means of influence ... the most central point of this convergence, thought process awareness and influence, can essentially converge these activities into one inextricable module. This means that the "watcher" and the "do-er" are not separable (at least on the balance: of course this is not complete. We can be aware of somethings we can't influence, we can influence some things we are not directly aware of). That this merge of awareness, modeling the subject of awareness, means control, exerting influence, on our own thoughts with our own thoughts in realtime, we have consciousness. This happens because as we are able to model and strategically influence more sophisticated things, the survival value in being able to do that with our own mind goes up significantly. So we have a causal path and purpose for consciousness. It isn't some strange accidentally acquired ability. It is a direct and effective survival strategy. But that is only one theory. Quantum consciousness fields, Egyptian pyramids, Aliens, a super consciousness that fills the universe, Atlantis, an Apple, a strict "Not a Chinese Room" physics law, or a non-testable, non-identifiable, non-detectable realm (dark cognition?) could be handing out consciousness to people like candy. Or we could all be automatons, who think we are conscious, and wasting a lot of time talking about "it". Only time will tell if the functional, survival based reason for model-of-self, influence-on-self, integration as one thing is a plausible scenario. Not that the theory described above has testable assumptions. Can the minds model of itself be separated from its ability to influence itself? (We can flail sedated arms, we can feel paralyzed arms. Is that easily possible in the brain.) If they are separable are these separate networks, or are we just suppressing different kinds of cells in an otherwise highly integrated network? Not trying to be exhaustive, or even serious, about any of these proposals. Just pointing out that experiments are possible with regard to the (1) model=actor integration, (2) with evidence of survival benefits, theory of consciousness. One strong post-prediction of mode/actor convergence as survival adaptation: Consciousness will care very much about itself. Most conscious identities will care very much about the continuity of itself, and second order means of protecting its continuity, like food and acts that sometimes produce babies as side effects. Consciousnesses will be obsessed with themselves, thinking about "themselves", i.e. the consciousness as a being, and process almost everything with some degree of conscious self-interest. So a theory of survival generated consciousness, is also a theory of emergent personhood.
smalltorch 2mo ago
Apparently you don't need much brain to be conscious. This boy was born with 2% of a brain. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKelkdfi25k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKelkdfi25k I think of it when someone tries to explain it. Perplexing!
semiinfinitely 2mo ago
interestingly, this is a book that gemini tends to recommend reading.
ivan4th 2mo ago
This book is apparently the main source of inspiration for Blindsight by Peter Watts
alien_hand 2mo ago
[dead]
abecode 2mo ago
I think that given the developments in AI in the last ~10 years, it would be hard to say that attention is not part of consciousness. I'm not sure if it is "all you need", but I think that any theory that doesn't include it would be very doubtful.
tim333 1mo ago
The origin of consciousness is probably evolution. A mouse that is unconscious and sees the cat coming can run away as opposed to an unconscious one. In that case it goes back more than 3000 years and also will vary in nature - a mouse probably isn't conscious of the rhyming couplets in Shakespeare but good with cats. Even if you redefine consciousness as able to do Shakespeare, I'm skeptical there was an evolutionary change that allowed that 3000 years ago, it's just around when writing became popular, having been invented around 3400 BC.
- tim333 1mo ago
  edit: mouse that is conscious...
grantcas 1mo ago
[dead]

64 points by skm 2mo ago

deleted 2mo ago

[deleted]

I find the description of consciousness in this article very narrow (Only arising post language). Post language consciousness is a particular type of consciousness, and the same can be said of post DMT consciousness (Which is sometimes without language).

TheHardProblem 2mo ago
As somebody who understands the perceived limitations of the materialist take on consciousness in light of recent decades of seeming philosophical traction (Searle, Chalmers), I have to admit how many ways LLMs proved me wrong. Rather, how much of it is just language. We went from completing words to completing sentences, paragraphs, essays, code files, pixel arrangements, music, and more just by aggregating and modeling all that in English. I was amazed that predicting a word can emerge into knowledge, creativity, productivity - the stuff of thoughts. It doesn’t happen to anyone (the thinking) but I think they still qualify as thoughts, just without a thinker.
- txrx0000 2mo ago
  If by "consciousness" you mean the thing that goes away when we sleep, how are you so sure that there's not a conscious thinker in the machine? That seems like a hypothesis rather than a proven fact as we don't know what process in the brain is responsible for consciousness fading away (assuming a practical materialist stance here) when we sleep. If it's some very basic informational pattern thing, then computers could have it.
  - TheHardProblem 2mo ago
    Burden of Proof mainly. If I cut off my finger I’m still awake. If I cut off my head I’m gone forever. Presumably there is something going on in the head that isn’t happening in the finger (or the LLM). We can be a lot more precise than that even, requiring nerves, chemistry, sense organs, to really get at a specific human definition of “what I mean by consciousness.” But yeah you have the essence of it - I just mean the experience. I don’t think a computer could have it anymore than it could feel pain - thinking and feeling are different classes of problem that don’t complete each other no matter how much you work on just one in isolation. I understand that means I think “thinking” is an unconscious process. And it must be, since LLMs are doing it. What they aren’t doing is experiencing anything alongside that. Who knows what that is. It’s apparently not logical computation in-and-of-itself. > If it's some very basic informational pattern thing, then computers could have it. This is functionalism. The problem I have with it is it pre-supposes a theory of objective information. That “patterns” exist in the first place without the observer. If there is information in the universe that predates us, then I can see how just finding what objective patterns produce it can get us places. But it seems like we conscious observers actually assign the meaning and create information out of chaos. The only reason it isn’t chaos is that we all agree within experience what “1” means, and so-on. There isn’t really “an orange” on “a tree”. But to us there can be. It always works too (to us), so it’s a pretty good stand-in for reality. If you capture the function of a red rubber ball bouncing in a concrete space - ask yourself what you have captured. As you create the simulation software that moves the pixels of the red circle up the screen, ask what exactly you are doing, and what that has to do whatsoever with a ball bouncing in a space. So I don’t believe in functionalism because I don’t believe in pure 1:1 representations. All copies are reductions, any function that describes something is itself a reduction of that thing, and can never include the whole original, for basically the same reason you can’t travel backwards in time.
    - N_Lens 1mo ago
      How do you know that if you cut off your head "you're gone forever"? Death is an event horizon we can't see past, yet the experience of it in the first person is likely one of the most remarkable in this life.
- ElFitz 1mo ago
  Or words, and language, just provide a sort of sensory input, which provided an environment and a selective pressure can shape an organism or neural network into predicting and producing the kind of reaction or output required for its continued existence. And no, I’m not implying any sort of survival instinct in LLMs. It’s just that we don’t keep around the weights that produce gibberish.
mjd 2mo ago
That's exactly Jaynes's theory: consciousness not only arrived after the invention of language, it arrived after the invention of writing, literature, agriculture, metallurgy, and government bureaucracy. And also, that it _could not_ have arisen without language because it is crucially founded in the capability of language to describe the world metaphorically. You don't have to like it, but that's the theory that is being discussed.
- TheHardProblem 2mo ago
  Probably the most fascinating idea there is right now in the field. It might be right. My intuition is that it’s not right - that you can have experience without language, images, and other “sensory objects” but I wonder how useful it is. Just like a plasmic euphoria detached from any identity or process; or an endless, mindless, dread, that drones on for billions of years in the vacuum of space waiting to be liberated by sound, light, anything
- bonoboTP 2mo ago
  A great majority of humanity remained illiterate just a few generations ago. It's absurd to posit they weren't conscious. Hunter-gatherer and nomadic lifestyles are complex and require deep thought and planning and coordination. You can't do it purely reactively or carrying out simple scripts. Its not so clear to me if it's the chicken or egg. So many things are good candidates for the key ingredient. I personally think that consciousness is social theory of mind applied to the self, or something like simulating and being concerned with how the tribe sees you and interprets your intentions etc, forcing you to analyze yourself similarly to how you analyze others. This would mean that solitary animals are less conscious than social ones.
  - OkayPhysicist 2mo ago
    You're conflating "written language" with "language". While it's still far from impossible to find people who can't read or write, it's exceptionally difficult to find adults with no grasp of any spoken language.

pavel_lishin 2mo ago

I think this was also one of the inspirations for Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash", which also deals with (among other things) the nature of consciousness and religion in the human mind.

mjd 2mo ago
It was definitely the inspiration for one of the subplots of _The Big U_. A faction of college students regressed to a bicameral mentality and would hold rituals in which they waited for oracular speech from an electric fan. I remember thinking at the time I read it “I don't know how anyone could understand this book without reading Jaynes first”.

ElFitz 2mo ago

And yet anendophasia is a thing. Some people think without an inner monologue, without words[^0]. And they seem to do so quite well and quite successfully. [0]: https://johnrmiles.com/life-without-an-inner-monologue/ https://johnrmiles.com/life-without-an-inner-monologue/

kubb 2mo ago
I’m pretty sure I can do both. Can’t everyone?
- polytely 2mo ago
  Yeah me too, and it feels like a lot of people who are exclusively 'stuck' in language seem to think the pre-language part is somehow inferior (which imo is very misguided)
  - Jtarii 2mo ago
    Thinking without language makes sense for problems that don't require language like visual art, but how do you solve complex logic problems or write a book without thinking in sentences.
    - bonoboTP 2mo ago
      You can think abstractly about geometry problems, or graph tgeory but even about linear algebra. Feynman describes how he felt while holding and analyzing problems in his mind. I'm less eloquent. Also you can think about the narrative and the valence of a scene for a book, without blabbering to yourself while planning the story. I can narrate it like as if I imagine a friend being there and translating my thought into language but it's an extra step. It also exhausts me more. Which makes coding with LLMs more tiring for me. Before it, I could code without language use exhausting my brain, but talking to LLMs requires putting all of it into English, while before I could just imagine a certain refactor as one coherent thought in my mind without turning it into sentences. Of course above a certain level of difficulty, putting thoughts down helps for problem solving, but a lot of that can be various types of sketch drawings and formulas too. It's likely a verbal and spatial heavy thought difference, the lawyer / engineer type of thinking difference.

GlenTheMachine 2mo ago

Isn't this a testable hypothesis? If consciousness spread virally and isn't a natural outgrowth of the physical structure of the brain, then presumably isolated indigenous tribes would still have pre-consciousness mental processes, and that should be detectable somehow. The being said, I'm reading "Proto" By Laura Spinney, and the thing that strikes me is how recently the world's major languages developed. Everyone assumes we had language fifty thousand years ago, but the actual language families we know about all seem to trace to no more than about 10,000 BCE, and maybe a lot younger than that. The odds of Proto-Indo-European being traceable to a single tribe in the Black Sea region circa 4500 BCE seem really low to me, but that's what seems to have happened.

carbonguy 2mo ago
Slate Star Codex reviewed Jaynes' book as well, which is how I first heard about it: https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/01/book-review-origin-of-consciousness-in-the-breakdown-of-the-bicameral-mind/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/01/book-review-origin-of-... To your point: > Isn't this a testable hypothesis? If consciousness spread virally and isn't a natural outgrowth of the physical structure of the brain, then presumably isolated indigenous tribes would still have pre-consciousness mental processes, and that should be detectable somehow. SSC's article points to a Reddit thread that suggests even folks in the mainstream of culture may undergo a "consciousness transition" as adults: https://www.reddit.com/r/self/comments/3yrw2i/i_never_thought_with_language_until_now_this_is/ https://www.reddit.com/r/self/comments/3yrw2i/i_never_though...
- bonoboTP 2mo ago
  I'd distinguish verbal inner monologue from consciousness. Many people think on the daily without narrating things to themselves in sentences, without feeling brutish or animalistic. I can plan complex human actions including theory of mind considerations without narrating it as a monologue. It's still very conscious. Also that reddit post seems like a fake story made up by a teenager as a sort of scifi. It's just too on the nose. Yeah he lived life without understanding that his friends still exist while out of sight... I guess the OP just learned about some developmental stages of toddlers or object permanence etc and wrote a story like this as fanfic.

txrx0000 2mo ago

The article's definition of consciousness is precise, but it's not what people are referring to in most cases where the word "consciousness" is used. Of course, a word can have multiple definitions. But colloquially, when people say consciousness, we usually mean the thing that goes away when we sleep or are anesthetized. I don't think there's a much better way to define that. The contrast between the wakeful and non-wakeful state as oneself experiences from the inside is precisely what defines consciousness in the colloquial sense. It seems to be a self-defining concept because I can't even define what "experiences" means without thinking about the wakeful/non-wakeful contrast phenomena that is consciousness, and "experiences" was supposed to be a part of the definition of "consciousness" one sentence ago.

lostmsu 2mo ago
Why only as oneself experiences? I can easily tell if a horse is conscious or not. The whole matter is rather simple IMO. Let's say it's variability (number of distinct if you prefer discrete) of stable responses to external stimuli.
JK-Swizzle 2mo ago
I am unsure as to what you are trying to say here. It reads to me as “the word the article discusses has a more popular homonym, but they are clearly not talking about that”.
- txrx0000 2mo ago
  I'm thinking out loud and pointing out the difference to avoid confusion, and also trying to invite discussion around the colloquial def, because I think the colloquial def is the most important/useful one.
sillywabbit 2mo ago
Anesthesia is a rather different state than sleep.
- api 2mo ago

colinrand 2mo ago

I find this on the crackpottery side. Narrowly defining a certain aspect of consciousness to make a point, and disregarding many (most) other aspects of consciousness. Self-aware much?

JK-Swizzle 2mo ago
How would you define it? Would your definition be that of your experience? Would that definition encompass all of humanity, past and present? Would that definition contain all sapient life? Sentient too? Would that definition allow for less complex forms of life? Reading the comments on this post, I am inclined to agree with the words of his biographer “there were people who disagreed with him [who] had not really read his book or understood it.” If you do get a chance to actually read the book (as you ought to), it covers all the issues and complexities you may have. It is limited only by the information of the era.

nemo 2mo ago

Jayme's theory depends on trade emerging post-Bronze Age collapse of a sort that requires a new kind of theory of mind and processing in a low trust environment driven by international trade. The Ea-Nasir letter was written c. 1750 BC shows that the same issues were already around ~ 800 years earlier and there's lots of international trade going on even in the 3,000s BC. The content of the Ea-Nasir letter and the personal reflections and issues presented there really destroy the central thesis of the book. It's also got a few other serious historic flaws (false claims about the existent of omens ignoring previous examples thousands of years earlier) that make it the kind of book that's interesting but without question also completely wrong in its central thesis.

Nevermark 2mo ago

Consciousness occurs when: (1) The model we learn of the environment, extends to our own bodies status indicators, then our general emotional mood/emotions/reflexes, and finally to some level awareness of our thought behaviors. So our general model includes some visibility and modeling of our own thinking processes. (2) Our control where we learn to redirect the environment, extends to our bodies as subjects themselves, not just as means to control the environment, then the ability to exert influence on our internal body state (note: control does not mean direct. I can't just turn off stress, but I can go for a walk.) And then to our moods, emotions, and mental reflexes (again, direct isn't necessary, just some means of influencing), and then to some level or our internals thoughts. So our general control map lets us exert some control and influence over our own thinking processes. (3) Given the tight awareness of some internal through processes, with some control of those thought processes, with similar tight pairing of mood/emotion/mental-reflex awareness and influence, internal body state awareness and influence, external body state awareness and influence, and environment with some level awareness and means of influence ... the most central point of this convergence, thought process awareness and influence, can essentially converge these activities into one inextricable module. This means that the "watcher" and the "do-er" are not separable (at least on the balance: of course this is not complete. We can be aware of somethings we can't influence, we can influence some things we are not directly aware of). That this merge of awareness, modeling the subject of awareness, means control, exerting influence, on our own thoughts with our own thoughts in realtime, we have consciousness. This happens because as we are able to model and strategically influence more sophisticated things, the survival value in being able to do that with our own mind goes up significantly. So we have a causal path and purpose for consciousness. It isn't some strange accidentally acquired ability. It is a direct and effective survival strategy. But that is only one theory. Quantum consciousness fields, Egyptian pyramids, Aliens, a super consciousness that fills the universe, Atlantis, an Apple, a strict "Not a Chinese Room" physics law, or a non-testable, non-identifiable, non-detectable realm (dark cognition?) could be handing out consciousness to people like candy. Or we could all be automatons, who think we are conscious, and wasting a lot of time talking about "it". Only time will tell if the functional, survival based reason for model-of-self, influence-on-self, integration as one thing is a plausible scenario. Not that the theory described above has testable assumptions. Can the minds model of itself be separated from its ability to influence itself? (We can flail sedated arms, we can feel paralyzed arms. Is that easily possible in the brain.) If they are separable are these separate networks, or are we just suppressing different kinds of cells in an otherwise highly integrated network? Not trying to be exhaustive, or even serious, about any of these proposals. Just pointing out that experiments are possible with regard to the (1) model=actor integration, (2) with evidence of survival benefits, theory of consciousness. One strong post-prediction of mode/actor convergence as survival adaptation: Consciousness will care very much about itself. Most conscious identities will care very much about the continuity of itself, and second order means of protecting its continuity, like food and acts that sometimes produce babies as side effects. Consciousnesses will be obsessed with themselves, thinking about "themselves", i.e. the consciousness as a being, and process almost everything with some degree of conscious self-interest. So a theory of survival generated consciousness, is also a theory of emergent personhood.

smalltorch 2mo ago

Apparently you don't need much brain to be conscious. This boy was born with 2% of a brain. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKelkdfi25k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKelkdfi25k I think of it when someone tries to explain it. Perplexing!

semiinfinitely 2mo ago

interestingly, this is a book that gemini tends to recommend reading.

ivan4th 2mo ago

This book is apparently the main source of inspiration for Blindsight by Peter Watts

alien_hand 2mo ago

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abecode 2mo ago

I think that given the developments in AI in the last ~10 years, it would be hard to say that attention is not part of consciousness. I'm not sure if it is "all you need", but I think that any theory that doesn't include it would be very doubtful.

tim333 1mo ago

The origin of consciousness is probably evolution. A mouse that is unconscious and sees the cat coming can run away as opposed to an unconscious one. In that case it goes back more than 3000 years and also will vary in nature - a mouse probably isn't conscious of the rhyming couplets in Shakespeare but good with cats. Even if you redefine consciousness as able to do Shakespeare, I'm skeptical there was an evolutionary change that allowed that 3000 years ago, it's just around when writing became popular, having been invented around 3400 BC.

tim333 1mo ago
edit: mouse that is conscious...

grantcas 1mo ago

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