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I posit that the human mind is made up of dozens, or perhaps even hundreds/thousands “smaller agents” that work together to create consciousness as an emergent property of the whole, which makes it impossible to isolate and say “this, THIS right here IS concsciousness”. That does not mean each of those has their own personality, per sé.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Mistook_His_Wife_for_a_Hat is a fantastic exploration of this idea, focusing on people who have lost specific parts of their brains due to tumors or strokes. The human mind is very much like a complex modern website- take Amazon for example, if everything is working, it’s the website where you buy stuff, but if certain specific systems are offline, you lose specific features, like your order history, or your cart, or your recommended products, etc… Missing one or two of of those components diminishes the site somewhat, but it’s still more or less Amazon. Your brain works the same way!
Stupid brain running micro-services.
At least it’s on-prem, I’d hate to see the AWS bill for running a conscious human brain 24-7
And the underlying animal is still there too. It’s fully in control at birth, and gets drowned out as we mature (for some people, less than others).
Small children are little more than animals, which is why they’re so unreasonable.
It’s my belief that the reason the written word or things like clocks are usually unreadable in dreams, is because the animal is both illiterate and innumerate. Dreams are the animals understanding of our waking experience. It knows these patterns are important and how they relate to other things, but it has no fucking idea what any of it actually means.I do find myself reading and writing words in dreams quite a lot. I’ve never seen a clock though, not as far as I can remember.
But sometimes I can even remember signs with street names or banners / short paragraphs.
Dynamic lighting sadly doesn’t work tho. Light switches do nothing. For example if I turn on the lights in my bathroom in a dream, I can even hear the bathroom fan turn on, but the room remains dark. Ive heard thst this is apparently quite common though.
I posit this as well. I’m made up of at least 5 or 6 different versions of me with different biases and personalities. There’s a negative narcissistic version, there’s a happy go lucky version, a pragmatic version, a nihilist with a dark sense of humour, a soppy emotional one, and others and they all fight constantly to have their say. I thought everyone was like this 🤪
I’m all alone. Which is likely why I crave social activities.
Plurality is a thing…
You would like Global Workspace Theory, basically says your consciousness is the result of components of the brain broadcasting their information to the whole.
I also like Integrated Information Theory which measures the conscious experience of a system by how integrated it is, which means that you can’t reduce the system to the sum of it’s parts without losing the emergent properties.
Thanks for the links, very interesting indeed!
Yeah, and come to think of it, I bet you that each one has its own characteristics. Perhaps they may be full blown individuals themeselves from another time and place, and I too will one day join them…
Brb gonna go sailing…
So if I run enough different AI LLM models and let them communicate, I can create consciousness?
No, because LLMs are just a mathematical blender with ONE goal in mind: construct a good sentence. They have no thoughts, they have no corrective motion, they just spit out sentences.
You MIGHT get to passing a Turing test with enough feedback tied in, but then the “conciousness” is specifically coming from the systemic complexity at that point and still very much not the LLMs.
So you’re saying it’s not good enough for a sentient personality, but it might be good enough for an average politician?
Oh, if we’re talking about what it takes to replace politicians, technology has been capable of that for years.
Hell, maybe even above average if the model can update itself in real time.
In my opinion you are giving way too much credit to human beings. We are mainly just machines that spit out sentences.
No, you are giving too much credit to LLMs. Thinking LLMs are capable of sentience is as stupid as thinking individual neurons could learn physics.
If you gave them all access to real world, realtime sensor data… Over an extended period of time…hmm
That can’t be because I clearly exist and cannot differentiate between these “smaller agents”, I am either so perfectly unified that I cannot tell, or this emergentism is bullshit
No there’s no need to posit cutesy sounding things, that’s how misinformation starts :) If you have any sources or can cite stuff you’ve read which may point to it, that’s cool though
No, people are allowed to speculate and throw out ideas they have without needing some “expert” or paper to back up what they are saying. The mistake is treating such as if it’s a fact. Sure, there’s always going to be idiots out there that will take ideas like that and run with them, but I reject the idea that we should censor those speculations and random thoughts because idiots might believe them.
The real problem are the con artists who work those idiots up into a frenzy of fear and distrust by deliberately presenting shit they can’t back up as a fact and threat to drive donations or sell snake oil to “protect” from it.
And I’d say even shit like what you said does more harm than good because it can drive those who enjoy harmless speculation but lack the confidence to push back towards the fringes because they think the mainstream wants to tell them how to think.
I agree that hypotheticals and thought experiments are fun, but I disagree that any random speculation is a good idea. Everything should have a kernel of originating known fact, or some reasonable foundation. You can’t do science without starting with some known facts, or stating your assumptions based on such facts.
Edit to say:
And I’d say even shit like what you said does more harm than good because it can drive those who enjoy harmless speculation but lack the confidence to push back towards the fringes because they think the mainstream wants to tell them how to think
Is this speculation harmless? I am not sure we can qualify that, so it’s wrong to assume that it’s harmless.
Anywho, anyone and everyone should be able to participate in a discussion! I just think it’s nice to ground hypotheticals with some kind of known or observed phenomena. The funny thing is that science validates itself, so maybe this person is accurately describing an unknown cognitive model.
To me, good conversation hygiene in science or related fields is rooted in observations 🤷
I agree that science involves more rigor, but we’re not doing science in here, it’s just an online discussion forum. And OP qualified their comment with “I posit” and didn’t present it like an established fact.
Inside you there are two wolves
Both gay & both loud af, at the same time.
Want some get some
Sorry about that transporter malfunction.
And they were delicious
IIRC the “other consciousness” is the internal monologue or internal visualization you experience when thinking
There’s a potentially related theory too that the origin of religion is internal narrator thinkers having perceived the internal narrator as a second entity who was issuing them commands and beliefs rather than their own internal dialogue.
These people would claim to be “prophets” and basically evangelize whatever presence they ascribed responsibility for the internal narrator to. Leading to more people believing their internal narrators are also these divine forces speaking to them.
Not to dunk on rural americans, but a phenomena like this could also explain the recent evangelical movement in the US considering how much emphasis is placed on the personal relationship and communication with God, these people might actually just not realize their own thoughts and ascribe all thought process as the voice of the big man himself.
Lived in SE USA most of my life…the majority of the most ridiculous fundamentalists don’t have an inner monologue. They speak but there is nothing going on upstairs except life processes.
The way they cling to ideas from others explains why they cling so tightly…they never had one of their own.
Because of this phenomenal outlook they typically adhere to the first idea that comes around and dismiss everything else as false.
Critical thinking is not applicable to everyone.
Absence of an inner monologue does not mean that there is no thought process. I’ve done just fine without one myself. Can’t speak to whatever is plaguing the fundamentalists apart from indoctrination and being steeped in an oppressive culture that’s been fostered over generations.
I have a coworker who I discovered a few weeks ago had no idea internal monologues were a thing. I had to explain that it’s a real documented phenomena and that it’s actually a minority of people that don’t have one. She’s pretty damn smart, too. I also play D&D with a guy who has aphantasia. He’s also pretty damn smart and you would have no idea he was incapable of visualizing things if he didn’t tell you. Him casually mentioning it in conversation surprised people who had known him for years. So, yeah, absolutely no correlation between intelligence and how your thoughts may or may not produce phantom sensory input.
My internal monologue is written. I see letters (they seem typed, but no recognizable font), but I don’t know what it was before I could read.
The only thing I really hear in my head is intrusive- either ear worms or standard intrusive thoughts, otherwise it’s text.
Years ago I had really severe anxiety and intrusive thoughts. I noticed though as my anxiety got better through among other things therapy that the intrusive thoughts took on a new form; Unbidden and often times inappropriate shitposting IRL.
Personally, most of the time I don’t really hear my internal monologue. It’s there but it kinda tends to get drowned out by a constant swirl of other random thoughts unless I externalize it and talk to myself, but I do hear the intrusive thoughts loud and clear. Add those things together and I like to joke that I accidentally manifested a shitpost tulpa.
Then because I found this thought amusing I came up with an entire character to put to it.
The idea of not having a internal monologue is kinda strange to me. I have a constant internal monologue. Like there doesn’t go a moment by without me talking to myself in my head.
I had it a couple of times that my internal monologue was off, usually due to medications or after intense experiences where I just need some space to process. It’s the most strange feeling.
The idea of not having a internal monologue is kinda strange to me. I have a constant internal monologue. Like there doesn’t go a moment by without me talking to myself in my head.
You should try taking Finnegans Wake, especially before going to bed, and see what happens. It rewires your internal monologue syntax in some really strange way that is not far from the experience of sleep.
Grandpa gave me some advice…
“Think before you speak. If you think while you’re speaking, then you’ve already failed.”
Thanks Gpa…wise words.
*origin of prophets as they are understood today
The first religions were generally flavors of animism.
Makes you wonder what happens to a person who now accepts the voices in their head as divine mandate…
Makes sense, in a lot of spiritual practices I’ve been involved in, hearing such a voice is believed to be a higher power.
Unless you mean thoughts themselves, and not something similar but deeper…
I mean that for a lot of these people thought and that higher power are one in the same.
They believe God is a speaker who instructs them via their inner dialogue, or for seers, by “visions” which could be better identified as a similar phenomenon but involving visual thought rather than inner dialogue thought.
Huh, maybe this isn’t the “Higher Self” then… because when I think, I can “hear” a voice in my head, and I can literally make it say what I want…
But when I hear the “Higher Self” it’s just suddenly I know something or I’ll experience a different kind of silent voice where I can’t hear any words… but I suddenly know something I didn’t before and it doesn’t “feel” like me, it feels like it comes from much deeper in than a mere thought does, there’s no “Thought process” in the event of a higher self thing, just realization, and it’s usually shit I couldn’t possible know, but it’s not like I can summon it on command and what it tells me isn’t always useful.
Like, one time it told me I’d drink a regular Mountain Dew, not flavored, for the first time in literal years in a matter of minutes.
I disregard it as unlikely, but decide it may be a good idea to get some food as it had been a long day. So I go to Taco Bell, and get my usual drink, a Baja Blast (which is a flavored mountain dew, but the “higher self” specified that it wouldn’t be flavored, it’d be the OG mountain dew) They tell me they’re out, so absent mindedly I say “Regular mountain dew’s fine.”
Only after I say that do I go “Wait a god damn minute…”
Obviously this can’t be a different form of my thought process that I just don’t understand, because how the fuck was it supposed to know the inventory of that exact Taco Bell? Then again, why would a Higher Self care about what drinks I’m drinking… Weird shit like that happens, and since it’s always right, I always listen to it, and when it actually comes through in a time of need things seem to turn out fine. I can’t explain it, ironically you’d think this would make more really superstitious, but the sad truth is I lost my faith in such things ages ago, it’s just the higher self still functions as it does in spite of that.
If you’ve got an explanation I’d love to hear it
Honestly I’m more impressed by your categorical inventory of the exact kind of Mountain dew you’d been drinking for years.
As for explanation, not everything is owed an explanation. That’s part of my issue with the idea of god in the first place, it’s an act of trying to define what cannot be explained because for an unfortunate number of people having an answer is more important than not giving one unless you can confirm it’s correct or at least approximate or in the direction of a correct answer.
Maybe there is a higher power out there, maybe the supernatural is lurking behind every darkened window and hidden alley, maybe 40k is a prophecy of times to come sent in the form of a table top wargame fortelling the danger of beings worshipped as gods who lust after feasting on our souls, what matters is that all of that is just a story we tell ourselves to pretend those questions aren’t still there because an unanswered question is the true incarnation of madness and terror to most people.
God is the King In Yellow, a cloaked masked figure built to contain all the emptiness we fear in the universe.
It’s not so much I was categorizing the Mountain Dew, it’s that I’d specifically only been drinking flavored mountain dews, so a non-flavored one would have been a clear outliers, just for the record.
I read… Something once and they suggested the past we may have collectively possessed a more direct relationship with rekigi9n like you’re talking about. That for some reason or another we don’t tend to “hear the voice of hod” like we once did. Out relationship with our internal self had changed. Maybe it was bred out by our tendency to kill the religious folks who disagree the most with whatever the dumpster jour religion at the time is.
My speaking consciousness says there isn’t.
My non-verbal consciousness says
I’m aware of my other consciousness. She’s cool. I try to be more like her.
I wish mine would stop giving me intrusive thoughts
Done, they can’t do that anymore. Anything else I can do for you today?
I call it my customer service face.
I’m pretty sure mine hates me and makes me so stupid stuff whenever I’m distracted.
Only the Baron Harkonnen speaks in my head, so hah!
Kill the Abomination!
I love the way that’s said in the audiobook. Cheers!
Fear is the mind killer.
I will always held belief that we are part of the spiritual greater universe and our brains are antennas for the consciousness. At the same time I won’t allow this belief to interfere with my daily logic and scientific pursuits.
It’s way more fun to have some nice private things you are contemplating as you enjoy the various psychedelics.
I, too, did a heroic dose of mushrooms once
There is the idea that it’d be easier for the universe to spontaneously create a single consciousness that knows and experiences everything and thinks they are you rather than creating a big bang that naturally leads to beings with consciences such as you.
That’s nonsense. Why would that be easier?
And physics tend to reduce energy state (contrary to biology), not make things easier.
Yeah I read a theory like that, something along the lines of you could not actually have existed until .3s ago but you were created with all of your current memories and experiences
That is such a weird way of putting it I believe its more the single consciousness wants to like experience because knowing everything is like pointless so it fragmentes into these piece of its conscienceness and we populate the universe experiencing. Maybe different theories but also not my theory lol
The vibe when you pay monthly tribute to your landed lord. 👌
deleted by creator
Ah the Soul Antenna theory, yyes I hope that’s valid
So not one but two suffering entities?
Somehow that makes it worse.
What, you guys haven’t killed the other one? You truly aren’t minmaxing your brain usage capacity.
You don’t kill the other one. You work on coordinating them so you can consciously apply yourself to two different things at once.
Multi-threading.
You’re not gonna give us a source?
It is proposed that it is possible that a person may develop two separate conscious entities within their one brain after undergoing a corpus callosotomy.
So unless you’ve had your brain cut in half to treat your epilepsy then you’re probably alright
No conclusive evidence of the proposed phenomenon has been discovered.
The one thing I can think of that approaches support for the idea is “Joe, the split-brain patient”'s case. You can show him stuff on the right side of his visual field, and he’ll tell you what it is. Show him something on the left side of his vision, and he can draw it and react to it, but can’t name it. The speech center of his brain is disconnected from the right hemisphere due to that procedure.
A disconnect doesn’t necessarily imply two separate conscious entities though, right?
This video by CGP Grey goes into it a bit more, but split brain patients have even had their two halves disagree. For example the conscious hand picking out something to wear then the other hand batting it away and picking something else. It’s quite fascinating to read about.
It’s definitely a fascinating subject! I guess the big question is whether we all have two consciousnesses already or that situation only develops after the split. It seems to me that healthy brains have both sides working so well together that they’re essentially one unit, and they only start behaving separately once their forced to.
In those experiments, the speaking portion of Joe has no clue what the other side is experiencing. Like they show it to him on the wrong side and say “can you see this?” “No”. Then they ask him to draw it, and to his amazement he does. It’s not just being unable to vocalize certain thoughts - they’re not even there to vocalize at all to that part of the brain. But the other half is happily chugging away with that info
ooo theres a video where they experiment on a guy that had this procedure, like trying to show different objects to different halves of his brain. its freaky and interesting, wish i could find it.
oh there’s way more than two minds in your brain.
I too have ADHD
So that’s why my constant inner-monologue is verbose and meaningful, but I can’t communicate for shit?
Nah, that’s just anxiety my dude.
As far as I understand, the line gets even blurrier then that. Apparently quiet a lot of the subsections of your brain do things that can be interpreted as conciseness, but we experience it as one unified thing.
No, conciseness is the ability to describe things in few words. You probably meant to say consumption.
No, consumption is the process of taking in food for nourishment. You’re thinking of conscience
No, conscience is the ability to feel remorse for negative actions, you’re probably thinking of conspicuousness.
No, conspicuousness is when something is obvious to the point of standing out, you’re thinking of conscription.
No, conscription is state-mandated enlistment in military service. You’re probably thinking of constipation.
No, constipation is a condition that makes bowel movements hard to pass. You’re probably thinking of conservatorship.
Can vouch for that. Ive always been of two minds on any given subject
Its what I tell people are the voices in my head
Neither of mine can do speech.
