4-3 How do we recognize Consciousness?
Student: You still haven't answered my question: if "consciousness" is only an ambiguous word, what makes it such a definite thing.
Here is a theory explaining why this is so: Most of our mental activity takes place, to a greater or lesser extent, "unconsciously" - in the sense that we are barely aware of its existence. But when we encounter difficulties, it launches high-level processes that have the following properties:
- They use our last memories.
- They often work in series rather than in parallel.
- They use abstract, symbolic or verbal descriptions.
- They use models that we have put together about ourselves.
Now suppose the brain can create a resource С which is launched when all the above processes start working together:
If such a C-detector turns out to be quite useful, then it might lead us to believe that it is detecting the existence of some kind of "Conscious Thing"! Indeed, we can even assume that this entity is the reason for the existence of the set of processes described above, and our language system could associate the C-detector with words such as "awareness", "self", "attention" or "I". To see why such a representation can be useful to us, we need to consider its four components.
Recent memories: Why should consciousness involve memory? We constantly perceive consciousness as the present, not the past as something that exists now.
For any mind (and any machine) to know what has been done previously, it must have a record of recent activity. For example, suppose I asked the question, "Are you aware that you are touching your ear?" You can answer, "Yes, I am aware that I am doing this." However, in order to make such a claim, your language resources had to respond to signals coming from other parts of the brain, which in turn responded to previous events. Thus, when you start talking (or thinking) about yourself, you need some time to collect the requested data.
Generally speaking, this means that the brain cannot think about what it is thinking right now; at best, he can review some records of some recent events. There is no reason that any part of the brain could not process the output of other parts of the brain - but even then there will be a slight delay in receiving information.
Sequential process: Why are our high-level processes mostly sequential? Wouldn't it be more efficient for us to do many things in parallel?
Most of the time in your daily life you are doing many things at the same time; it is easy for you to walk, talk, see and scratch your ear at the same time. But very few people are able to passably draw a circle and a square using both hands at the same time.
Common man: Perhaps each of these two tasks require so much attention from you that you cannot focus on the other task.
This statement will make sense if we assume that attention is given in limited quantities - but on that basis, we need a theory to explain what might impose this kind of restriction, given that we can still walk, talk and look at the same time. One explanation is that such restrictions may arise when resources start to conflict. Suppose that the two tasks being performed are so similar that they need to use the same mental resources. In this case, if we try to do two similar things at the same time, one of them will be forced to interrupt its work - and the more such conflicts arise in our brain, the less such things we can do at the same time.
In that case, why can we see, walk and talk at the same time? This presumably arises from the fact that our brains have different systems located in different parts of the brain for these activities, thus reducing the amount of conflict between them. However, when we are forced to solve extremely complex problems, then we have only one way out: somehow break this problem into several parts, each of which will require high-level planning and thinking. For example, solving each of these subproblems may require one or more "assumptions" about a given problem, and then it may be necessary to conduct a mental experiment to confirm the correctness of the assumption.
Why can't we do both at the same time? One possible reason could be quite simple - the resources that are needed to make and implement plans have evolved quite recently - about a million years ago - and we do not have enough copies of these resources. In other words, our higher levels of "management" do not have enough resources - for example, resources to keep track of tasks to be done, and resources to find solutions to the tasks at hand with the involvement of funds with the least internal conflicts. Also, the processes described above most likely use the symbolic descriptions that we described earlier - and these resources also have a limit. If this is the case, then we are simply forced to consistently focus on goals.
Such mutual exclusion may be the main reason why we perceive our thoughts as a "stream of consciousness", or as an "internal monologue" - a process in which a sequence of thoughts can resemble a story or a story. When our resources are limited, we have nothing else to do but slow "sequential information processing," often referred to as "high-level thinking."
Symbolic description: Why are we forced to use symbols or words instead of, say, direct contacts between brain cells?
Many researchers have developed systems that learn from prior experience by changing connections between different parts of the system, called "neural networks" or "learner machines through making connections." It has been proven that such systems can learn to recognize different kinds of patterns - and it is likely that such a low-level process, which is the basis of "neural networks", may underlie most of the functions of our brain. However, although these systems are extremely useful in various useful areas of human activity, they cannot meet the needs of more intelligent tasks, because they store their information in the form of numbers that are difficult to use by other resources. Someone might use these numbers as a measure of correlation or probability, but they won't have the slightest idea what else the numbers might be talking about. In other words, such presentation of information does not have sufficient expressiveness. For example, a small neural network might look like this.
In comparison, the figure below shows the so-called "Semantic Web", which shows some of the connections between the parts of the pyramid. For example, each link that points to a concept supports can be used to predict the fall of the upper block if the lower blocks are removed from their places.
Thus, while "network of connections” shows only the “strength” of the interaction between the elements, and says nothing about the elements themselves, the three-level connections of the “semantic network” can be used for various reasoning.
Self Models: Why did we include "self-models" in the necessary processes in your first diagram?
When Joan thought about what she had done, she asked herself, "What would my friends think of me?" And the only way to answer the question would be to use descriptions or models that represent her friends and herself. Some of Joan's models would describe her physical body, others would describe her goals, still others would describe her relationship to various social and physical events. Ultimately, we would create a system that includes a set of stories about our past, ways of describing our state of mind, a body of knowledge about our abilities, and visualizations of our acquaintances. Chapter 9 will explain in more detail how we do these things and create "models" of ourselves.
Once Joan has created a dataset of models, she can use them for self-reflection—and then find herself thinking about herself. If these reflexive patterns lead to any choice of behavior, then Joan will feel that she is "in control" - and she probably uses the term "conscious" to generalize this process. Other processes occurring in the brain, which she is unlikely to be aware of, Joan will attribute to an area outside her control and call them "unconscious" or "unintentional." And as soon as we ourselves can create machines with such a train of thought, perhaps they too will learn to say phrases like: "I'm sure you know what I mean when I talk about "mental experience"."
I do not insist that such detectors (as C-detector ed.) must be involved in all the processes that we call consciousness. However, without the ability to recognize specific patterns of mental states, we may not be able to talk about them!
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This section began by discussing some ideas about what we mean when we talk about consciousness, and we suggested that consciousness can be characterized as the detection of some high-level activity in the brain.
However, we also wondered what might cause start these high-level activities. We can consider their manifestation in the following example: let's say that among Joan's resources there are "Problem Detectors" or "Criticists" that are triggered when Joan's thoughts run into problems - for example, when she does not achieve some important goal, or does not solve some problem. Under these conditions, Joan can describe her state of mind in terms of "unhappiness" and "frustration" and try to get out of this state of mind through intelligent activity, which can be characterized by the following words: "Now I have to force myself to concentrate." Then she can try to think about the situation, which will require the participation of a set of higher-level processes - for example, activating a set of the following brain resources:
This suggests that we sometimes use "consciousness" to describe actions that initiate processes rather than recognize the start of high-level processes.
Student: On what basis do you choose the terms for your diagrams, and define through them the same words as "consciousness"? Since “consciousness” is a polysemantic word, each person can make his own list of terms that can be included in it.
Indeed, since a large number of psychological words are ambiguous, we are likely to switch between different sets of terms that best describe these ambiguous words, for example, “consciousness”.
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4.3.1 Illusion of Immanence
«The paradox of consciousness - the more intelligent a person is, the more layers of information processing separate him from the real world - this, like many other things in nature, is a kind of compromise. Progressive distancing from the outside world is the price that is paid for any knowledge of the world at all. The deeper and wider [our] our knowledge of the world becomes, the more complex layers of information processing are needed for further knowledge.”
– Derek Bickerton, Languages and Species, 1990.
When you enter a room, you get the feeling that you instantly see everything in your field of vision. However, this is an illusion, because you need time to recognize the objects that are in the room, and only after this process do you get rid of the wrong first impressions. However, this process proceeds so quickly and smoothly that it requires an explanation - and it will be given later in chapter §8.3 of the Pananalogy.
The same thing happens inside our mind. We usually have a constant feeling that we are "conscious" of things going on around us. now. But if we look at the situation from a critical point of view, we understand that there is some problem with this representation - because nothing can be faster than the speed of light. This means that no part of the brain can know what is happening "now" - neither with regard to the outside world, nor other parts of the brain. The maximum that the part we are considering can know is what happened in the near future.
Common man: Then why does it seem to me that I am aware of all the signs and sounds, and also feel my body at every moment of time? Why does it seem to me that all the signals I perceive are processed instantly?
In everyday life, we can assume that everything we see and feel we "realize" here and now, and usually the assumption that we are in constant contact with the outside world does not go sideways for us. However, I will argue that this illusion stems from the peculiarities of the organization of our mental resources - and I should finally give the above phenomenon a name:
Illusion of Immanence: Most of the questions that you ask will be answered before the higher levels of consciousness begin to connect to the search for answers to these questions.
In other words, if you get an answer to a question that interests you before you realize that you needed it, you get the feeling that you knew the answer right away and you get the impression that no mind work was happening.
For example, before you enter a room you are familiar with, it is likely that you are already replaying the memory of that room in your mind, and it may take some time after you enter to notice the changes that have taken place in the room. The idea that a person constantly perceives the present moment is indispensable in everyday life, but much of what we assume we see is our stereotypical expectations.
Some argue that it would be great to be constantly aware of everything that is happening. But the more often your high-level processes change their view of reality, the more difficult it will be for them to find meaningful information in a changing environment. The strength of our higher-level processes does not come from continually changing their descriptions of reality, but from their sufficient stability.
In other words, in order for us to feel how much of the environment and internal environment is preserved over time, we need to be able to explore and compare descriptions from the recent past. We notice changes in spite of them, not because they happen. Our feeling of constant contact with the world is the Illusion of Immanence: it occurs when for every question we ask, we already find the answer in our head even before the question is asked - as if the answers were already there.
In chapter 6, we will look at how our ability to activate knowledge before we need it might explain why we use things like "common sense" and why it seems "obvious" to us.
4.4 Overestimating Consciousness
“Our mind is so well designed that we can start thinking without any understanding of how it works. We can only be aware of the result of this work. The realm of unconscious processes is an unknown being that works and creates for us, and ultimately brings the fruits of its efforts to our knees.
— Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920)
Why is "Consciousness" a mystery to us? I contend that the reason for this is our exaggeration of our own insight. For example, at a given moment in time, the lens of your eye may focus on only one object at a limited distance, while the rest of the out-of-focus objects will be blurred.
Common man: It seems to me that this fact does not apply to me, because all the objects that I see are perceived by me quite clearly.
You can see that this is an illusion if you focus your eyes on the tip of your finger while looking at a distant object. In this case, you will see two objects instead of one, and both will be too blurry to see in detail. Before we did this experiment, we thought that we could see everything clearly overnight, because the lens of the eye adjusted so quickly to the viewing of surrounding objects that we did not have the feeling that the eye could do it. Likewise, many people think they see all the colors in their field of vision - but a simple experiment showed that we see the correct colors of things only near the object that our gaze is directed at.
Both of the examples above are related to the Illusion of Immanence because our eyes react incredibly quickly to things that grab our attention. And I argue that the same is true of consciousness: we make almost the same mistakes about what we can see inside our mind.
Patrick Hayes: “Imagine what it is like to be aware of the processes by which we create imaginary (or real) speech. [In such a case] a simple act such as, say, "inventing a name" would turn into a sophisticated and skillful use of a complex mechanism of lexical access, which would be like playing an internal organ. The words and phrases that we need to communicate will themselves be distant goals, the achievement of which requires knowledge and skills, such as an orchestra playing a symphony, or a mechanic taking apart an intricate mechanism.
Hayes goes on to say that if we knew how everything inside of us works then:
“We would all be in the role of servants of the past us; we would be running around inside the mind trying to sort out the details of the mental machinery that is now incredibly conveniently hidden from view, leaving time for more important issues to be dealt with. Why are we in the engine room, if we can be on the bridge?
With this paradoxical view, consciousness still seems amazing - not because it tells a lot of information about the world, but because it protects us from the tiresome things described above! Here is another description of this process, which can be found in chapter 6.1 "Society of Mind"
Think about how a driver drives a car without any knowledge of how the engine works, or why the car's wheels turn left or right. But if we start to think about it, we will understand that we control both the car and the body in a rather similar way. This also applies to conscious thought - the only thing you have to worry about is the choice of the direction of movement, and everything else will take care of itself. This incredible process involves a huge number of muscles, bones and ligaments, controlled by hundreds of interacting programs that even specialists cannot understand. However, you just have to think "turn in that direction" and your desire is automatically fulfilled.
And if you think about it, it could hardly be otherwise! What would happen if we were forced to perceive trillions of connections in our brain? Scientists, for example, have been watching them for hundreds of years, but they still don't understand how our brains work. Fortunately, in modern life, we just need to know what needs to be done! This can be compared to our vision of a hammer as an object that can hit things, and a ball as an object that can be thrown and caught. Why do we see things not as they are, but in terms of their use?
Similarly, when you play computer games, you control what happens inside the computer mainly through the use of symbols and names. The process we call "consciousness" works in much the same way. It seems that the highest levels of our consciousness are sitting at mental computers, controlling huge machines in our brain, not understanding how they work, but simply “clicking” on various symbols from the list that constantly appears on mental displays.
Our mind has evolved not as a tool for self-observation, but to solve the practical problems of sustenance, protection, and reproduction.
4.5 Models of the Self and Self-Consciousness
If we consider the process of the formation of self-awareness, we must avoid single signs of its manifestation, such as the recognition and separation of certain parts of his body from the environment by the child, his use of words such as "I", and even recognition of his own reflection in the mirror. The use of personal pronouns may be due to the fact that the child begins to repeat words and phrases that others say about him. This repetition may begin in children at different ages, even if their intellectual development proceeds in the same way.
— Wilhelm Wundt. 1897
In §4.2, we suggested that Joan "created and used models of herself"—but we did not explain what we mean by the word model. We use this word with several meanings, such as "Charlie the model administrator", which means that it is worth targeting, or for example "I am creating a model aircraft" which means creating a smaller similar object. But in this text, we use the phrase "model X" to denote a simplified mental representation that allows us to answer some questions about some complex object X.
Thus, when we say "Joan has Charlie's mental model", we mean that Joan has some mental resources to help her respond to some questions about Charlie. I highlighted the word some because each of Joan's models will work well with certain types of questions - and will give wrong answers to most other questions. Obviously, the quality of Joan's thinking will depend not only on how good her models are, but also on how good her skills are at selecting those models in specific situations.
Some of Joan's models will predict how physical actions can affect the world around them. She also possesses mental models that predict how thought acts can change her mental state. In Chapter 9, we will talk about some of the models she can use to describe herself, i.e. answer some questions about her abilities and inclinations. These models may describe:
Her various goals and ambitions.
Her professional and political views.
Her concept of her competencies.
Her concept of her social roles.
Her various moral and ethical views.
Her faith in who she is.
For example, she may use some of these models to evaluate whether or not to rely on herself to complete a task. Moreover, they can explain some ideas about their consciousness. To show this, I will use an example provided by the philosopher Drew McDermott.
Joan is in some room. She has a model of all the objects in the room. And one of the objects is Joan herself.
Most objects will have their own submodels, which, for example, will describe their structure and functions. Joan's model for the object "Joan" will be a structure, which she will call "I", which will include at least two parts: one of them will be called bodysecond - Mind.
Using different parts of this model, Joan can answer "Yes to the question:Do you have a mind?". But if you ask her:Where is your mind?' - this model will not be able to help answer the question in the way some people do: 'My mind is inside my head (or inside my brain)". However, Joan will be able to give a similar answer if Я will contain an internal link between Mind и body or an external connection between Mind and another part of the body called brain.
More generally, our answers to questions about ourselves depend on the models we have built about ourselves. I used the word model instead of model because, as we will see in Chapter 9, a person needs different models in different settings. Thus, there can be many answers to the same question, depending on what goal a person wants to achieve, and these answers will sometimes not coincide.
Drew McDermott: Few believe that we have such models, even fewer people know that we have them. The key feature is not that the system has a model of itself, but that it has a model of itself as a conscious being.” — comp.ai.philosophy, February 7, 1992.
However, these self-descriptions may not be correct, but they are unlikely to continue to exist unless they do something useful for us.
And what happens if we ask Joan: "Are you aware of what you did now and why you did it?"?
If Joan has good models as she makes her choice - then she will feel that she has some "controlbehind their actions and uses the term "conscious decisionsto describe them. The kind of activity for which she does not have good models, she can classify as independent of her and call "unconscious" or "unintentional". Or vice versa, she may believe that she is still in complete control of the situation and makes some decisions based on "free will' - which, despite what she might say, would mean: 'I don't have a good explanation for what made me do this act.».
Thus, when Joan says:I made a conscious choiceIt doesn't mean that something magical happened. This means that she attributes her thoughts various parts of their most useful models.
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4.6 Carthusian Theater
“We can think of the mind as a theater putting on simultaneous productions. Consciousness consists of comparing them with each other, choosing the most suitable in given conditions and suppressing the least needed by increasing and decreasing the degree of attention. The best and most noticeable results of mental work are selected from the data provided by a lower level of information processing, which is screened out from even more even simpler information, and so on.
— William James.
We sometimes compare the work of the mind to a play staged on a theatrical stage. Because of this, Joan can sometimes imagine herself as a front-row audience in the theatre, with "thoughts in her head" as acting actors. One of these actors was a pain in her knee (§3-5), which began to play a major role. Soon, Joan began to hear a voice in her head:I have to do something about this pain. She prevents me from doing anything.»
Now, when Joan begins to think about how she feels and what she could do, then Joan herself will appear on the scene. But in order for her to be able to hear what she is saying, she must also be in the audience. Thus, we have two copies of Joan - in the role of an actor, and in the role of a spectator!
If we continue to watch this performance, more copies of Joan will appear on the stage. There should be Joan the writer to write the performances and Joan the designer to direct the scenes. There must also be other Joan's behind the scenes to control backstage, lights and sound. Joan the director should show up to stage the play and Joan the critic, so he can complain:I can't take this pain anymore! "
However, when we carefully consider this theatrical point of view, we will see that it raises additional questions for us and does not provide the necessary answers. When Joan the Critic starts complaining about her pain, how does she feel about Joan currently performing on stage? Is there a need for a separate theater for each of these actresses to run plays with just one Joan? Of course, the theater in question does not exist, and Joan's objects are not people. They are just different models of Joan herself that she has created to represent herself in different situations. In some cases, these models are very similar to cartoon characters or caricatures, in others they are completely different from the object from which they are drawn. Either way, Joan's mind abounds with various models of Joan herself - Joan in the past, Joan in the present, and Joan in the future. There are both remnants of the past Joan and the Joan she wants to become. There are also intimate and social models of Joan, Joan athletes and Joan mathematicians, Joan musicians and Joan politicians, and different kinds of professional Joan - and it is because of their different interests that we cannot even hope that all Joan will get along. We will discuss this phenomenon in more detail in Chapter 9.
Why does Joan create such models of herself? The mind is a tangle of processes that we barely understand. And whenever we encounter something that we do not understand, we try to present it in forms familiar to us, and there is nothing more suitable than the various objects that are around us in space. Therefore, we can imagine a place where all thought processes are located - and, most amazingly, many people actually create such places. For example, Daniel Dennett called this place the "Carthusian Theatre".
Why is this image so popular? Firstly, it does not explain many things, but its presence is much better than using the idea that all thinking is carried out by one Self. It recognizes the existence of various parts of the mind and their ability to interact, and also serves as a kind of “place” where all processes can work and communicate. For example, if various resources offered their plans for what Joan should do, then the idea of a theater stage could give an idea of their common place of work. In this way, Joan's Carthusian Theater allows her to use many of the real-life skills she has learned "in her mind". And it is this place that gives her the opportunity to start thinking about how decisions are made.
Why do we find this metaphor so plausible and natural? Possibly ability “modeling the world inside your mind” was one of the first devices that led our ancestors to the possibility of self-reflection. (There are also experiments showing that some animals create in the brain similar to the map of the environment with which they are familiar). In any case, metaphors like the ones described above permeate our language and thoughts. Imagine how difficult it would be to think without hundreds of different concepts like:I come to my goal". Spatial models are so useful in our daily lives, and we have such powerful skills in using them that it begins to seem that these models are used in any situation.
However, perhaps we have gone too far, and the concept of the Cartesian Theater has already become an obstacle to further consideration of the psychology of the mind. For example, we must recognize that the theater stage is only a facade that hides the main action that takes place behind the scenes - what happens there is hidden in the minds of the actors. Who or what determines what should appear on the stage, that is, who chooses who will entertain us? How exactly does Joan make decisions? How can such a model represent a comparison of two different possible "future outcomes" without simultaneously maintaining two theaters?
The image of the theater alone doesn't help us answer questions like this, because it gives too much of Joan's mind as she watches the production from the audience. However, we have a better way of representing this Global Workplace, which was suggested by Bernard Baars and James Newman, who suggested the following:
“The theater is becoming a workspace where a large set of “experts” have access. … Awareness of what is happening at any given time corresponds to the coordinated activity of the most active union of experts or constituent processes. … At any given time, some may be dozing in their seats, others working on the stage… [but] everyone can take part in the development of the plot. … Each expert has a “voice” and, by forming alliances with other experts, can contribute to the decision about which signals from the outside world should be immediately accepted and which should be “sent back for review”. Most of the work of this deliberative body is carried out outside the workspace (i.e. occur unconsciously). Only issues requiring immediate resolution are given access to the stage."
This last paragraph warns us not to give too much of a role to the compact self or the "homunculus" - the miniature man inside the mind doing all the heavy mental work, instead we have to distribute this work. For, as Daniel Dennett said
“Homunculuses are boogeymen if they copy all of our talents to provide our work, although they should have been explaining and providing them. If you assemble a team or committee of relatively ignorant, narrow-minded, blind homunculi to create intelligent behavior for the entire collective, this will be progress. — in Brainstorms 1987, p. 123.
All the ideas in this book support the above judgment. However, there are serious questions about the extent to which our minds depend on a shared workspace or bulletin board. We conclude that the idea of a "cognitive market" is a good way to start thinking about how we think, but if we look at this model in more detail, we see the need for a much more complex representational model.
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4.7 Sequential Stream of Consciousness
“The truth is that our minds are not in the present moment of time: memories and anticipations take up almost all the time the brain works. Our passions - joy and sorrow, love and hate, hope and fear belong to the past, because the cause that caused them must appear before the effect.
— Samuel Johnson.
The world of subjective experience seems to be perfectly continuous. It seems to us that we live here and now, steadily moving into the future. However, when we use the present tense, we always fall into error, as already noted in §4.2. We may be aware of what we have done recently, but we have no way of knowing what we are doing "right now".
Common man: Funny. Of course I know what I'm doing right now and what I'm thinking right now and what I'm feeling right now. How does your theory explain why I feel a continuous stream of consciousness?
Although what we perceive seems to be “present time” to us, in reality everything is much more complicated. In order to build our perception, some resources must pass sequentially through our memory; sometimes they have to look over our old goals and frustrations to gauge how far we have progressed towards a particular goal.
Dennett and Kinsborn “[Remembered events] are distributed both in different parts of the brain and in different memories. These events have temporal properties, but these properties do not determine the order in which information is presented, because there is no single, complete "stream of consciousness", but there are parallel conflicting and constantly revised streams. The temporal gradation of subjective events is a product of the process of interpretation by the brain of various processes, and not a direct reflection of the events that make up these processes.
Also, it's safe to assume that different parts of your mind process information at vastly different speeds and delays. So if you try to present your recent thoughts as a coherent story, your mind will have to somehow compose it by selecting previous thoughts from different streams of consciousness. In addition, some of these processes try to anticipate events, which try to anticipate the "predictive mechanisms" that we describe in §5.9. This means that "the content of your mind" is connected not only with memories, but also with thoughts about your future.
So the only thing you really can't think about is what your mind is doing "right now" because each brain resource can at best know what other brain resources were doing a few moments ago.
Common man: I agree that, by and large, what we think about is connected with recent events. But I still feel that we should use some other idea to describe how our minds work.
HAL-2023: Perhaps all these things seem puzzling to you because the human short-term memory is incredibly small. And when you try to review your last thoughts, you are forced to replace the data you find in memory with the data coming in at the present time. This way you are permanently deleting the data you need for what you were trying to explain.
Common man: I seem to understand what you mean, because sometimes two ideas come to my mind at once, but whichever is written first, the second leaves behind only a faint hint of presence. I believe this is because I don't have enough space to store both ideas. But doesn't that also apply to cars?
HAL-2023: No, this does not apply to me, because the developers provided me with a way to store previous events and my states in special "memory banks". If something goes wrong, I can see what my programs were doing before the error, and then I can start debugging.
Common man: Is this process what makes you so smart?
HAL-2023: From time to time. While these notes may make me more "self-aware" than any other person, they do nothing to improve my performance because I only use them in emergencies. Error handling is so tedious that it makes my mind extremely slow, and so I only start looking at recent activity when I notice my sluggish work. I constantly hear people say, "I'm trying to connect with myself." However, trust me in my experience, they won't come close to resolving the conflict if they can.
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4.8 The Secret of "Experience"
Many thinkers argue that even if we learn everything about how our brain works, there will be one more fundamental question: “Why do we feel things? Philosophers argue that explaining "subjective experience" may be the most difficult problem in psychology, and perhaps this problem will never be solved.
David Chalmers: “Why, when our cognitive systems begin to work with visual and auditory information processing, do we get a visual or auditory experience, such as the sensation of a deep blue color or the sound of a middle C? How can we explain why there is something that can entertain a mental image or relive an emotion? Why should the physical processing of information generate a rich inner life? Gaining experience goes beyond the knowledge that can be obtained from physical theory.
It seems to me that Chalmers believes that gaining experience is a fairly simple and clear process - and therefore should have a simple, compact explanation. However, once we realize that each of our daily psychological words (such as experience, sensation и consciousness) refers to a large number of different phenomena, we must refuse to find a single way to explain the content of these polysemantic words. Instead, we must initially formulate theories about each multivalued phenomenon. Then we may be able to find their common characteristics. But until we can correctly divide these phenomena into parts, it would be rash to conclude that what they describe cannot be "deduced" from other theories.
Physicist: Perhaps the brain works according to rules that are still unknown to us, which cannot be transferred to a machine. For example, we don't fully understand how gravity works yet, and consciousness can be a similar example.
This example also suggests that there must be one source or cause for all the miracles of "consciousness". But as we saw in §4.2, consciousness has many more meanings than can be explained using a single or general method.
Essentialist: What about the fact that consciousness makes me aware of myself? It tells me what I'm thinking now, and thanks to it I know that I exist. Computers calculate without putting any meaning into it, but when a person feels or thinks, the sense of "experience" comes into play, and there is nothing more basic than that feeling.
In Chapter 9 we will discuss that it would be a mistake to assume that you are "self-aware" except in very rough daily approximations. Instead, we are constantly switching between the various "self-models" that you have, and each of them is based on a different, incomplete set of incomplete data. "Experience" may seem clear and direct to us - but often it is incorrectly compiled by us, because each of your different views of yourself can be based on oversights and various types of errors.
Whenever we look at someone else, we see their outer appearance, but not what is inside. It's the same as looking in a mirror - you only see what lies outside of your skin. Now, in the popular notion of consciousness, you also have the magic trick of looking at yourself. from within, and see everything that goes on in your mind. But when you think about this subject more carefully, you will see that your "privileged access" to your own thoughts may be less accurate than your close friends' "understanding" of you.
Common man: This assumption is so stupid that it annoys me, and I know this because of some certain thing that comes from within me, which tells me what I think.
Your friends can see that you're worried too. Your mind cannot tell you the details of why you feel irritated, why you shake your head and use the word "annoying", instead of "worries"? Indeed, we cannot see all the thoughts of a person by observing his actions from the outside, but even when we look at the thought process "from within, it is difficult for us to be sure that we really see more, especially since such "insights" are often erroneous. Thus, if we mean "consciousness""awareness of our internal processes' That is not true.
“The most merciful thing in the world is the inability of the human mind to relate everything it contains to each other. We live on a quiet island of ignorance, in the middle of the black sea of infinity, but this does not mean that we should not travel far. The sciences, each of which pulls us in its own direction, have so far done us little harm, but someday the unification of disparate knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality and the terrible situation in it that we will either go crazy with revelations or flee from the deadly light of combined knowledge into the world of a safe new dark age.
— G.F. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu.
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4.9 A-brain and B-brain
Socrates: Imagine people, as it were, in an underground dwelling like a cave, where a wide opening stretches along its entire length. From an early age, they have fetters on their feet and around their necks, so that people cannot move from their place, and they see only what is right in front of their eyes, because they cannot turn their heads because of these fetters. The people are turned with their backs to the light emanating from the fire, which burns far above, and between the fire and the prisoners there is an upper road, fenced off by a low wall, like the screen behind which conjurers place their assistants when puppets are shown over the screen.
Glavkon: I represent.
Socrates: Behind this wall, other people carry various utensils, holding them so that they are visible over the wall; they carry statues and all kinds of images of living beings made of stone and wood. At the same time, as usual, some of the carriers are talking, others are silent.
Glavkon: You draw a strange image ...
Socrates: Like us, they see nothing but their shadows or the shadows of these various things cast by fire on the cave wall located in front of them ... Then the prisoners will consider reality nothing more than these shadows - Plato, the State.
Can you think of what you're thinking right now? Well, literally, it's impossible - because every thought will change what you think about. However, you can be content with something a little less if you imagine that your brain (or mind) is made up of two distinct parts: let's call them A-brain и B-brain.
Now suppose that your A-brain receives a signal that rushes from organs such as the eyes, ears, nose, and skin; it can then use these signals to recognize certain events that have occurred in the outside world, and then it can respond to them by sending signals that cause your muscles to contract - which, in turn, can affect the state of the world around you. Thus, we can imagine this system as a separate part of our body.
Your B-brain does not have sensors like the A-brain, but it can receive signals from the A-brain. Thus, the B-brain cannot "see" real things - it can only see descriptions of them. Like the prisoner in Plato's cave who sees only shadows on the wall, B-brain confuses A-brain descriptions of real things, not knowing what they really are. All that the B-brain sees as the "outside world" is the events processed by the A-brain.
Neurologist: And this also applies to all of us. For whatever you touch or see, the higher levels of your brain can never directly touch those things, but can only interpret the idea of these things that other resources have put together for you.
When the fingertips of two people in love touch each other, no one will argue that the physical contact itself has any special meaning. Indeed, such signals themselves do not make sense: the meaning of this contact lies in the representation of this contact in the minds of people in love. However, although the B-brain cannot directly perform a physical act, it can still influence the world around it indirectly - by sending signals to the A-brain that will change its response to external conditions. For example, if the A-brain gets stuck in repeating the same things, the B-brain can easily interrupt this process by sending the appropriate signal to the A-brain.
Student: For example, when I lose my glasses, I always start searching from a certain shelf. Then some voice begins to reproach me for this, which makes me think to look elsewhere.
In this ideal case, B-brain can tell (or teach) A-brain exactly what to do in a similar situation. But even if the B-brain does not have any specific advice, it may not tell the A-brain anything, but start criticizing its actions, as described in your example.
Student: But what would happen if, as I was walking down the road, my B-brain suddenly said, “Sir, you have been repeating the same actions with your foot for more than a dozen times in a row. You should stop right now and do some other activity.
Indeed, it could be the result of a serious accident. To prevent such errors, the B-brain must have appropriate ways of representing things. This accident would not have happened if the B-brain had imagined "moving to a certain place" as one long act, for example: "Keep moving your legs until you cross the street," or as a way to achieve a set goal: "Keep closing the distance available." In this way, the B-brain can work as a manager who has no knowledge of how to do this or that job correctly, but can still give “general” advice on how to do certain things, for example:
If the descriptions provided by the A-brain are too vague, the B-brain will force more specifics to be used.
If the A-brain presents things in too much detail, the B-brain will offer more abstract descriptions.
If the A-brain does something for too long, the B-brain will advise using other techniques to achieve the goal.
How could the B-brain acquire such skills? Some of these may have been built into it from the start, but there must also be a way to learn new skills through training. To do this, the B-brain may need help from other levels of perception. Thus, when B-brain oversees A-brain, another entity, let's call it "C-brain", will oversee B-brain.
Student: How many layers does a person need? Do we have dozens or hundreds?
In Chapter 5 we will describe a model of the mind in which all resources are organized into 6 different levels of perception. Here is a brief description of this pattern: it begins with a set of instinctive responses that we are born with. We can then begin to reason, imagine, and plan for the future by developing ways of behaving that we call "deliberate decisions." Still later, we develop the ability to "reflexively think" about our own thoughts. Afterwards, we learn introspection, which allows us to think about how and why we can think about such things. Finally, we begin to consciously think about whether we should have done all this. Here is how this diagram can be applied to Joan's thoughts while crossing the road:
What made Joan turn towards the sound? [Instinctive Reactions]
How did she know it could be a car? [Studied Reactions]
What resources were used to make the decision? [Thinking]
How did she decide what to do in this situation? [Reflection]
Why did she hesitate over her choice? [Self-reflection]
Were the actions consistent with its principles? [Reflection of self-awareness]
Of course, this is an oversimplified representation. These levels can never be clearly defined, because each of these levels, in later life, may use the resources of other levels. However, the established framework will help us begin to discuss the types of resources used by adults, as well as the ways in which they are organized.
Student: Why should there be any layers at all, instead of one big cloud of interconnected resources?
Our argument in favor of our theory is based on the idea that in order to develop efficient complex systems, each evolutionary step must find a compromise between two alternatives:
If there are few connections between its parts within the system, then the capabilities of the system will be limited.
If there are many connections between its parts within the system, each subsequent change in the system will introduce a restriction on the operation of a large number of processes.
How to achieve a good balance between these extremes? The system can start with clearly demarcated parts (for example, more or less separated layers), and then build connections between them.
Embryologist: In embryonic development, the typical structure of the brain begins to take shape through more or less demarcated layers or levels, as shown in your diagrams. Then individual groups of cells begin to form bundles of fibers that extend across the boundaries of brain zones for fairly long distances.
The system can also start by establishing a huge number of connections, and subsequently remove some of them. A similar process is happening to us: back when our brains evolved, our ancestors had to adapt to thousands of different environments, now many reactions that were previously “good” have turned into serious “mistakes” and we need to correct them by removing unnecessary connections.
Embryologist: Indeed, in the course of embryonic development, more than half of the cells described above die off, having barely reached their goal. This process appears to be a series of edits that fix various kinds of "bugs".
This process reflects a fundamental limitation of evolution: it is dangerous to make changes to the old parts of the body, because many of the parts that evolved later depend on the old systems to work. Consequently, at each new stage of evolution, we add various "patches" to the structures that have already been developed. This process has led to an incredibly complex brain, each part of which works according to certain principles, each of which has quite a few exceptions. This complexity is reflected in human psychology, where every aspect of thinking can be partly explained in terms of clear laws and principles of operation, however, every law and principle has its exceptions.
The same limitations appear when we try to improve the performance of a large system, such as an existing computer program. To develop it, we add more and more fixes and patches, instead of rewriting old components. Each specific "error". Which we can fix could eventually lead to more other bugs and make the system extremely unwieldy, which is probably what our minds are doing right now.
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This chapter began by outlining several widely held views on what is "consciousnessand what it is. We came to the conclusion that people use this word to describe a huge number of mental processes that no one fully understands yet. The term "conscious" is quite useful in everyday life and seems almost indispensable for conversation on a social and ethical level, because it keeps us from wanting to know what is in our mind. The same can be said for most other psychological words, such as understanding, emotion и feeling.
However, if we do not recognize the ambiguity of the ambiguous words used, we may fall into the trap of trying to clearly define what the given words "mean". Then we found ourselves in a problematic situation due to the lack of clear ideas about what our mind is and how parts of it work. So, if we want to understand what the human mind does, we need to break down all mental processes into parts that we can analyze. The next chapter will attempt to explain how Joan's mind can do the work of the human mind.
Thanks to Stanislav Sukhanitsky for the translation. If you want to join and help with translations (write in a personal or email [email protected])
"The Emotion Machine Book Table of Contents"
Chapter 1 Falling in Love
Chapter 2. ATTACHMENTS AND GOALS
Chapter 3. FROM PAIN TO SUFFERING
Chapter 4 CONSCIOUSNESS
4-3. How do we recognize Consciousness?
4.3.1 The Immanence Illusion
4-4. Over-rating Consciousness
4-5. Self-Models and Self-Consciousness
4-6. The Cartesian Theater
4-7. The Serial Stream of Consciousness
4-8. The Mystery of Experience
4-9. A-Brains and B-Brains
Chapter 5. LEVELS OF MENTAL ACTIVITIES
Chapter 6] Chapter 7. Thinking []Chapter 8. Resourcefulness[] Chapter 9. The Self []
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Source: habr.com