- cross-posted to:
- humanities@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- humanities@beehaw.org
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Not watching the video, but obviously not.
There is a huge amount of human variation, but one of the big ones is some people don’t have an internal monologue and some people lack the ability to visualize things in their mind.
Either one of those drastically changes what we think of as a consciousness.
Hell, some of the split brain subjects are probably still alive. Some of them had two distinct consciousnesses emerge due to their hemispheres no longer being able to communicate. That’s definitely unique now that we’re not cauterizing corpus callosums anymore.
I think my lack of internal monologue and inability to visualize is why I’ve never been able to get into reading. I’m a little jealous when I hear people describe books as “like watching a movie in your mind”.
I came to the same conclusion about my usual disinterest in books stemming from me having Aphantasia. The only kinds of books I’ve been able to consistently get through are very comedic in their writing style (e.g. Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett, Dennis E. Taylor, etc.). I think the focus on humor instead of visualizing the story and its world is what helps me when it comes to reading books.
Try Carl Hiaasen and Christopher Moore!
I’ll look them up, thanks for the recommendation!
I have both a layered internal monologue, and highly visual thinking. There are some benefits, but on of the draw backs of noticed is feeling less aware of what’s going on in front of me. My visual thinking kinda takes over what my eyes see a little and I loose focus really easy
My partner has a similarly vivid visual thinking and a “crowded” internal monologue. They also have a hard time keeping focus.
I can not visualize pictures in my mind at all, but I was always into reading. Instead of pictures I can build abstract concepts and make connections between that I can touch and move
This is exactly how I do it. I’ve never been able to articulate it like that. Yeah things are connected and I can sort of feel along those connections to understand them.
So I understand how different parts of the story connect with each other while ignoring visual details like descriptions of how things look.
Nice to know there are dozens of us!
Pretty strong case of Aphantasia here, it never even occurred to me that people actually saw things in their minds eye and thought it was more a metaphor or something. I do, however, have a very talkative internal monologue. I have a friend who has no internal monologue paired with Aphantasia, I always enjoy talking with them about their experience and how it differs from my own.
It’s really interesting to me how people’s internal experience can differ and how we can never truly know what these different experiences are like.
Some of them had two distinct consciousnesses emerge due to their hemispheres no longer being able to communicate.
Arguably we all have more than one distinct consciousness due to both hemispheres being able to sustain one on their own, but generally aren’t conscious of it. And in case we are, interpretations tend to be religious as (generally, in currentyear) the right hemisphere consciousness is thought of as an other. As in, nope, that wasn’t your guardian angel, it was your right hemisphere violently pulling you out of your oh so comfortable left hemisphere tunnel vision to finally perceive some traffic instead of how hard your Lambo’s sound makes your dick.
Did you know that, evolutionarily, the interconnection of our hemispheres actually decreased with increased intelligence? Having drastically different takes on the world is very beneficial, likewise having them run concurrently: A wide angle lens for threat perception, a narrow angle lens to focus in on things. Iain McGilchrist has written two great books about the whole topic, but as a broad summary: The right hemisphere is the dominant one, having a holistic model of the world, while the left flourishes on detail and, if not in check, fabulates like a fisher – the right, as said, is supposed to direct its focus. Losing your left hemisphere is like losing your glasses, everything becomes fuzzy but you still know where you are, while losing your right is more like losing your eyes but being proud of how sharp your glasses make everything look. Symptomatically, you then see patients walking say through a door, noticing the hinge, getting drawn into it, really looking at it, and forgetting they were even walking. They’re stuck there, looking at the hinge. (That’s all modulo neuroplasticity, if damage occurs very early in life the brain can compensate). Excessive right-hemisphere dominance would be like dude, that’s all, you know, thoughts.
We need to define consciousness here…
To me everything you describe is related to the mind. Not consciousness.
To me consciousness is the observer of the mind, not the mind.
Like, what is “sensing” your thoughts? What is “behind” the mind’s eyes?
That’s consciousness.
And it IS universal. It’s indivisible and eternal (doesn’t change).
Your observer is always neutrally observing. All judgments and shifts happen in the mind. Which the consciousness just observes.
That’s consciousness.
Yeah. But we don’t know how it’s happening.
And it IS universal
No, it’s not.
Your observer is always neutrally observing.
Nope. No one is consciousness forever.
That’s a pretty basic one
Which the consciousness just observes.
Ok.
Now, I know you didn’t mean to, but you may have just said something that’s correct, and I’m almost certain you did so unintentionally.
But over the very very short amount of time we’ve been looking I to this, yes there is a theory that what people think of a consciousness is not actually driving the bus. It’s a bored kid in the backseat daydreaming about why what they see out the back window is what’s outside.
The kid has no control over what they see. They’re not driving the bus or have any influenece over what they see out that window.
But the theory came about because we couldn’t measure the speed of thought back in like the 80s, maybe 70s.
When we could measure faster, it looked like we had been wrong.
Then even later we took that back and said it could be possible that that multiple different things in our environment happen different ways, then an incredibly small amount of time later that quantum wave collapse (happening millions or billions time a second) collapses those different options into a “one true timeline”.
And if that is what’s going (literally uncountable, billions and billions time a second) then maybe we really are just the kid in the back of the bus pretending we’re flying over a landscape with no control over where we’re going.
What’s really calling the shots on what we do isnt just “a Busdriver” either, if it’s not our consciousness running things, it’s a whole bunch of different parts of our bodies that have neurons, some of which are in the brain and some aren’t.
I really really don’t think that’s what you’re trying to say, but you did touch on something that could be possible.
Because again, we do t know and in all likelihood even if humanity figures it out some day, it’ll be generations from now at best
The only observer of the mind would be an outside observer looking at you. You yourself are not an observer of your own mind nor could you ever be. I think it was Feuerbach who originally made the analogy that if your eyeballs evolved to look inwardly at themselves, then they could not look outwardly at the outside world. We cannot observe our own brains as they only exist to build models of reality, if our brains had a model of itself it would have no room left over to model the outside world.
We can only assign an object to be what is “sensing” our thoughts through reflection. Reflection is ultimately still building models of the outside world but the outside world contains a piece of ourselves in a reflection, and this allows us to have some limited sense of what we are. If we lived in a universe where we somehow could never leave an impression upon the world, if we could not see our own hands or see our own faces in the reflection upon a still lake, we would never assign an entity to ourselves at all.
We assign an entity onto ourselves for the specific purpose of distinguishing ourselves as an object from other objects, but this is not an a priori notion (“I think therefore I am” is lazy sophistry). It is an a posteriori notion derived through reflection upon what we observe. We never actually observe ourselves as such a thing is impossible. At best we can over reflections of ourselves and derive some limited model of what “we” are, but there will always be a gap between what we really are and the reflection of what we are.
Precisely what is “sensing your thoughts” is yourself derived through reflection which inherently derives from observation of the natural world. Without reflection, it is meaningless to even ask the question as to what is “behind” it. If we could not reflect, we would have no reason to assign anything there at all. If we do include reflection, then the answer to what is there is trivially obvious: what you see in a mirror.
No. I’m conscious in a super duper way that ya’ll just can’t match.
It’s not even the same day to day for me.
I’m about to go down some rabbit hole about this aren’t I? I had no idea some people don’t have these abilities.
Is Everyone Conscious in the Same Way?
Nope. I am conscious on different days in different ways.
20 seconds in and I already can’t relate, can’t see things when I close my eyes.
A few seconds later, he discusses an interesting situation where a scientist in the 1800’s sent out a questionnaire to some fellow scientists about picturing things in their mind. one of the responding scientists was wildly confused why he was discussing picturing things in the mind’s eye as if people could actually visually see something, and how he could be unaware that it was just a simple turn of phrase, prompting the discovery of Aphantasia! :D
Yeah! Very cool that he got there, my attention was just interrupted by not really connecting with what he was saying, but I’m glad I continued watching. I’m very much locked, relating to his discussion of no inner monologue.
Aww, ye! Glad you’re enjoying it ^^
So if said, say, think of a giant tortoise with Pegasus wings; what would happen in your mind?
can’t see things when I close my eyes
I see funny patterns. But definitely no real-life objects. Kinda like on Acid. I guess that my brain naturally produces some hallucinogenous substances.
Nope, just relatively. Though how do you want to define consciousness could change my nope to a yes. It’s all about the definition.
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Bruh. We literally don’t even know what consciousness is.
Probably the smartest living human has spent decades looking into it as a passion project after he and Hawking completed Einsteins physics.
But dude is a realist, he’s 90 years old and long ago accepted he won’t live to hear the answer.
We don’t know how anesthesia works either, so he looked into that and the best he got was it interrupts a quantom wave collapse in our brains, but anesthesia shuts us down when some of those quantom waves have stopped collapsing, but not enough to make the math work out for it to be the cause.
So maybe Roger Penrose just wasted his retirement on this passion project?
In all likelihood we won’t know for decades, and even then it doesn’t really answer the question.
To give you some idea how slowly this shit moves, Penrose just won the 2020 Novel in Physics for shit he theorized in 1964…
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2020/penrose/facts/
He wrote books on it in the 80s/90s, so maybe in another couple decades someone will verify this theory too?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadows_of_the_Mind
And again, this is probably the smartest living human, has spent decades looking into it, and his result was “I dunno, maybe look at this?”
So if anyone ever tries to tell you that anyone knows what consciousness is. You know they’re talking out of their ass.
As long as capitalism drives science, we’ll never know. Because there’s no money in finding it out, and we’re at the point of looking at freaking quantum wave collapse inside of neurons, it’s not exactly something that’s easy or cheap to investigate.
Edit:
And apparently two recent studies are backing it up. Like, just this month recent…
In their new published paper, Shanghai University physicists Zefei Liu and Yong-Cong Chen and biomedical engineer Ping Ao from Sichuan University in China explain how entangled photons emitted by carbon-hydrogen bonds in nerve cell insulation could synchronize activity within the brain.
Their findings come just months after another quantum phenomenon known as superradiance was identified in cellular frameworks, drawing attention to a highly speculative theory on consciousness called the Penrose-Hameroff ‘orchestrated-objective reduction’ model.
Proposed by the highly respected physicist Roger Penrose and the American anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff, the model suggests networks of cytoskeleton tubules that lend structure to cells – in this case, our neurons – act as a kind of quantum computer that somehow shapes our thinking.
https://www.sciencealert.com/quantum-entanglement-in-neurons-may-actually-explain-consciousness
i’d agree that we don’t really understand consciousness. i’d argue it’s more an issue of defining consciousness and what that encompasses than knowing its biological background. if we knew what to look for, we’d find it. also anesthesia isn’t really a problem at all. in fact, we know exactly how general anesthesia works
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2908224/
and Penroses’s Orch OR theory was never meant to explain anesthesia. it’s a more general theory concerning the overall existence of consciousness in the first place. however, anesthesia does relate to the theory, in that it could play a role in proving it (i think? not a primary source but it’s where i found that info)
besides that, Orch OR isn’t exactly a great model in the first place, or at least from a neurological standpoint. even among theories of consciousness, Orch OR is particularly controversial and not widely accepted. i’m no expert and i could be misunderstanding, so please correct me if i’m missing something that would indicate Orch OR is considered even remotely plausible compared to other consciousness theories. this paper certainly had some things to say about it in the context of the validity of theories of consciousness (see V.1 class I).
other theories seem more promising. global workspace theory seems particularly well supported by neurology. its criticisms mainly focus on how GWT fails to truly explain the nature of consciousness. but is that an issue any theory can resolve? again, the problem lies in the definition of consciousness.
then we have integrated information theory. it’s a more mathematical model that aims to quantify the human experience. but you know what? it’s also controversial and highly debated, to the point that it’s been called pseudoscientific because it implies a degree of panpsychism. it’s clearly not a perfect theory.
point is, you’re right. we don’t really get consciousness. we have some wild guesses out there, and penrose’s theory is certainly one of them. genius as penrose is, Orch OR isn’t empirically testable. we don’t know, and maybe can’t know - which is precisely why neuroscience searches elsewhere
i’d agree that we don’t really understand consciousness. i’d argue it’s more an issue of defining consciousness and what that encompasses than knowing its biological background.
Personally, no offense, but I think this a contradiction in terms. If we cannot define “consciousness” then you cannot say we don’t understand it. Don’t understand what? If you have not defined it, then saying we don’t understand it is like saying we don’t understand akokasdo. There is nothing to understand about akokasdo because it doesn’t mean anything.
In my opinion, “consciousness” is largely a buzzword, so there is just nothing to understand about it. When we actually talk about meaningful things like intelligence, self-awareness, experience, etc, I can at least have an idea of what is being talked about. But when people talk about “consciousness” it just becomes entirely unclear what the conversation is even about, and in none of these cases is it ever an additional substance that needs some sort of special explanation.
I have never been convinced of panpsychism, IIT, idealism, dualism, or any of these philosophies or models because they seem to be solutions in search of a problem. They have to convince you there really is a problem in the first place, but they only do so by talking about consciousness vaguely so that you can’t pin down what it is, which makes people think we need some sort of special theory of consciousness, but if you can’t pin down what consciousness is then we don’t need a theory of it at all as there is simply nothing of meaning being discussed.
They cannot justify themselves in a vacuum. Take IIT for example. In a vacuum, you can say it gives a quantifiable prediction of consciousness, but “consciousness” would just be defined as whatever IIT is quantifying. The issue here is that IIT has not given me a reason to why I should care about them quantifying what they are quantifying. There is a reason, of course, it is implicit. The implicit reason is that what they are quantifying is the same as the “special” consciousness that supposedly needs some sort of “special” explanation (i.e. the “hard problem”), but this implicit reason requires you to not treat IIT in a vacuum.
Bruh. We literally don’t even know what consciousness is.
You are starting from the premise that there is this thing out there called “consciousness” that needs some sort of unique “explanation.” You have to justify that premise. I do agree there is difficulty in figuring out the precise algorithms and physical mechanics that the brain uses to learn so efficiently, but somehow I don’t think this is what you mean by that.
We don’t know how anesthesia works either, so he looked into that and the best he got was it interrupts a quantom wave collapse in our brains
There is no such thing as “wave function collapse.” The state vector is just a list of probability amplitudes and you reduce those list of probability amplitudes to a definite outcome because you observed what that outcome is. If I flip a coin and it has a 50% chance of being heads and a 50% chance of being tails, and it lands on tails, I reduce the probability distribution to 100% probability for tails. There is no “collapse” going on here. Objectifying the state vector is a popular trend when talking about quantum mechanics but has never made any sense at all.
So maybe Roger Penrose just wasted his retirement on this passion project?
Depends on whether or not he is enjoying himself. If he’s having fun, then it isn’t a waste.
And again, this is probably the smartest living human, has spent decades looking into it, and his result was “I dunno, maybe look at this?” So if anyone ever tries to tell you that anyone knows what consciousness is. You know they’re talking out of their ass.
As long as capitalism drives science, we’ll never know. Because there’s no money in finding it out, and we’re at the point of looking at freaking quantum wave collapse inside of neurons, it’s not exactly something that’s easy or cheap to investigate.
I just want to point out that there has been philosophy before capitalism, and a lot of clever people looked into the question of consciousness without capitalist interests. As such, a lot of modern science doesn’t really focus on it; but nevertheless, there’s a lot of clever thoughts about it. Like in chinese buddhism, there’s views of what consciousness means in sometimes great detail that really make sense to me. Saying we don’t know anything about consciousness because modern science doesn’t is wrong, i think.
