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Comment by tim333 | Hacker News Reader

The new theory summarised (from the paper):

>The theory begins with attention, the process by which signals compete for the brain’s limited computing resources. This internal signal competition is partly under a bottom–up influence and partly under top–down control. We propose that the top–down control of attention is improved when the brain has access to a simplified model of attention itself. The brain therefore constructs a schematic model of the process of attention, the ‘attention schema,’ in much the same way that it constructs a schematic model of the body, the ‘body schema.’ The content of this internal model leads a brain to conclude that it has a subjective experience.

Kind of makes sense to me - that the mechanism that forms a model of your body or a place map or whatever also forms a model of your mental setup of senses, memories and the like.

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The same theory was also mentioned in Dawkins' Selfish Gene. The evolution favored individuals that could simulate its surrounding and consequences of its actions better. At certain point, that simulation had to include the individual itself in order to be complete, and that gave way to consciousness. Dawkins called this "simulation", while the article calls it "internal model".

Consciousness is nothing more than an organism being aware of itself. However, where you say "to include the individual itself" - that's a different matter, as now you are talking about the feeling of being a "self" (which is not a prerequisite to be conscious).

Top down control presupposes consciousness, or something really close to it.

Sleep / dream memory formation seems like a much more reasonable argument. Sleep without activity can simply tone down brain activity. But, if activity happens during REM sleep you need a brain / body abstraction to avoid sleepwalking via sleep paralysis. At that point you have lot's of brain structures for simulating things that can be run while your awake.

Sleep as a means to conserve energy > Sleep as a means to aid learning (replay events for different types of memory formation) > Sleep as a means to simulate options > Simulating options while awake.

I can't help but imagine the brain doing dependency injection to swap in mock walking implementation. :D

The higher "awareness" of the environment and the effects of the body's actions to it can obviously be of evolutionary advantage. And the individuals whose awareness better matches the reality will obviously have advantage too.

Everyone in this thread sounds like a p-zombie.

Says the guy posting the most p-zombie like post on the entire thread.

What exactly makes it "the most p-zombie like post on the entire thread"?

It might be, but we'll never know from mere snark.

Fair point.

It might be, but we'll never know at all, by definition.

a philosophical zombie behaves in every externally observable way the same as a non-zombie, but the philosophical zombie has no inner life. so if you can observe it in other people, for instance, in what they post on the internet, then it isn't pertinent to the philosophical zombie question. everything you can observe then is equally philosophical zombie like.

I wonder if that's completely true, though: that p-zombies behave in every observable way the same as non-zombies. What about in this very discussion of inner life and zombie-ness? Will a p-zombie claim to have subjective experience, or will they be confused by the concept (maybe along the lines of this other comment I replied to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11856232)

Well p-zombies are a hypothetical concept which is usually considered indistinguishable by definition. But yes, it's interesting to consider a degenerate kind of p-zombie which can be detected by its failure to comprehend the concept of qualia.

However, I feel like if such p-zombies did exist, there would be far more significant differences, so I feel like some people just having intellectual difficulty with the idea is more likely.

Yes, I'm interested in the possible real world situation, which does seem plausible to me. I accept the idea that, in almost every way, an actual human p-zombie would behave indistinguishably from a conscious human, but if we let go of the indistinguishable-by-definition requirement, it does seem possible that the discussion of qualia is one of the very few, perhaps only, places where p-zombies would behave differently than conscious beings.

What other significant differences would you expect?

I'm not sure I have a great example, I'll try and think of one. But more generally, I just feel like there are so many things we do that are informed by our experiencing qualia, that the idea of a p-zombie that seemingly mimics all of them except understanding the notion of qualia seems intuitively dubious.

(Also is this some kind of conciousness Calvinism?)

It's not clear to me that there would be a meaningful behavioral difference between an entity that feels pain/pleasure from a given behavior, vs. one that "only" registers negative/positive incentive. But, like pretty much everything in this topic, the water is murky and it's hard to tell what is reliable and what isn't.

What do you mean by the Calvinism question? Whether the real existence of human p-zombies would parallel the Calvinist doctrine of predestination and there being only a subset of humans who are the elect chosen for paradise? If so.. yeah, maybe?

>What do you mean by the Calvinism question?

I was kind of throwing out a vague idea/similarity without really thinking it through there...

More specifically though, the Calvinist idea that the chosen people are the only ones who will ever be able to understand God. (AIUI)

Ah, ok. Yeah, sort of similar: only some "chosen" people might have actual experiences attached to their existence, for better or for worse.

Perhaps related is this Slate Star Codex article, which briefly speculates that a god could create a universe where net-negative-utility people are p-zombies:

http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/03/15/answer-to-job/

I've read that :) And it appears like a plausible world to me, although of course I have no idea if it's the world we happen to live in. It does seem to get as close to an answer of how a good [entity] could have [created|simulated] a world with apparent evil in it, as anything I know of.

I'm forced to conclude that some people actually are p-zombies. In 100% of discussions of consciousness, you have a few people pleading for a discussion of subjective experience / awareness, a lot more people acting as if they can't possibly conceive of what you mean by that, and exactly 0 people proposing even a hint in the direction of explaining it.

Scientific reasoning can only apply to something once we can ask counterfactual questions and make counterfactual guesses ("What happens in situation X? How about Y?") about the something. Unfortunately, the kinds of people who talk about a "Hard Problem of Consciousness" do not even respect causal reasoning, and at least half of them are outright mysterians, so almost nobody has bothered to come up with "What happens if...?" questions regarding qualia for scientists to even begin investigating.

As such, most scientifically-trained individuals will simply refuse to treat "qualia" as a real concept. And they've got a point! Something with little to no causal role (remember, epiphenomenalism of the kind necessary for "p-zombies" to be possible requires that consciousness has zero causal role whatsoever), something that can be "observed" in only one way and which is not even fully observable in that way (because no counterfactuals can be had)? Yes, to a well-trained mind that sounds like nonsense.

The idea of subjective experience or qualia can only seem like nonsense if you don't experience it - if you're a p-zombie. If you do experience qualia, if there is "something that it's like" to be you, then the scientific response to that persistent, inexplicable experience, despite not having any sensible or useful way to explain or even question it, is very definitely not to attempt to dismiss it. It is not scientific to deny things that exist merely because they don't fit with the accepted scheme of things, or merely because we don't currently know how to gain further insight into them.

>The idea of subjective experience or qualia can only seem like nonsense if you don't experience it - if you're a p-zombie.

The idea that qualia are some non-physical, non-functional soul-stuff seems like nonsense to basically everyone who isn't a trained philosopher of mind, and half the people who are. P-zombies are worse, because they seem to assume epiphenomenalism, at which point you've turned "consciousness" into something that doesn't even play a causal role.

>If you do experience qualia, if there is "something that it's like" to be you

Yes, I've noted that you can take one word and replace it with its definitions or synonyms. That does nothing to explain what the word points to in specific, of course, so you still have the problem that the things I refer to as experiences, as what it's like to be me, could be sufficiently different in nature from what you personally call qualia as to not even be the same thing. We need common examples or points of comparison in order to have a clear, precise intersubjective definition of the word.

Like, if you keep talking about your "fruit", and I keep talking about my "fruit", and you mean your car but I mean my office chair, we have a severe problem with our discourse -- even if we both supposedly agree that "fruit" plainly exists.

I'm starting to think I am a p-zombie and though I feel like I have conscious experience it's only an illusion caused by my neural circuits.

>in much the same way that it constructs a schematic model of the body, the ‘body schema.’

Sight aside, who said the mind "constructs a schematic model of the body"?

one of those schemes is proprioception. Have you ever noticed how proprioception is hacked when you're driving a car or playing a video game? You become the car. You become Mario.

That always involves my sight though. Seeing the car, Mario etc.

And the only reason it can work without it when it comes to my own arms and legs etc, is because I get touch, air resistance, etc feedback from them.

And even then it comes to my own body, it doesn't work as good as when with vision included -- try shaving with closed eyes for an easy example.

Are you suggesting that the visually impaired somehow have diminished proprioception?

I guess I am. And even worse for those with impaired sense of touch etc.

You say it like it's some kind of preposterous claim.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proprioception — emphasis added.

"In humans, it is provided by proprioceptors in skeletal striated muscles (muscle spindles) and tendons (Golgi tendon organ) and the fibrous capsules in joints."

"A major component of proprioception is joint position sense, which is determined by measuring the accuracy of joint–angle replication. Clinical aspects of joint position sense are measured in joint position matching tests that measure a subject's ability to detect an externally imposed passive movement, or the ability to reposition a joint to a predetermined position. These involve an individual's ability to perceive the position of a joint without the aid of vision."

There's a Wikipedia page on body schemas going on about them at some length. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_schema

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