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Comment by Xenograph | Hacker News Reader

> In contrast, when shown numbers with embedded faces, the number’s effect apparently swamped that of the face: RFS reported seeing neither; everything looked like spaghetti. Yet an EEG still showed the characteristic N170 spike for registering faces. Somehow, his brain was still processing and identifying a face—a fairly high-level skill—even though his conscious mind was oblivious. This deficit shows high-level cognitive processing and consciousness are distinct, Koch says. “You can get one without the other.”

I think this misses another possibility besides "cognitive processing and consciousness are distinct".

Namely, "the part of them that is conscious of the cognitive processing is not well-connected to the part of them that is generating speech and controlling their motor systems."

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Makes me think of this silliness I saw today: https://mobile.twitter.com/BFriedmanDC/status/12892831187305...

I recommend first watching it with you eyes closed and after that seeing how you can manipulate your perception. It was easy to hear “brain needle” with my eyes closed.

This is insane. Does anyone know where I could read about how this works or how the audio is generated?

I don't and that's a good question, but you may be interested to know that it need not be generated. Look up some YouTube videos relating to the "Paul is dead" conspiracy theories and there are several examples. People swear they can hear "I buried Paul", but you can also make yourself hear "Cranberry sauce" (which is what a Beatle said was actually the line).

I heard "brain needle" with my eyes closed also. I could hear "green needle" but couldn't hear "storm" at all.

Whichever word I repeated in my head as I heard it was what I heard even if looking at another. I could easily and reliably make it change between brainneedle, brainstorm, greenneedle and greenstorm using this method.

Edit: kind of think this is to do with the n at the start of needle being implicit as you already get the n sound at the end of green and brain. I think if you register another n the remaining sound sounds most like eedle and if you don't the remaining sound sounds most like storm... Or I may have listened to this too many times

Whoa. I get the green/brain bit and can kinda tweak my perception to hear both, but needle and storm? When I hear both from the same audio they sound so very different and I can't fathom how they come from the same waves.

This looks like one of the early posts: https://www.reddit.com/r/blackmagicfuckery/comments/8jxzee/y...

Deep in the comments, someone posted this:

> If you slow down the audio/video to about 25% speed, you'll notice that the sound for 'needle' begins a fraction earlier than 'storm'. This is because the 's'-sound (in storm) actually begins in the 'ee'-gap of 'needle'. The 't'-sound of 'storm' atches with the 'dl'-sound of 'needle'. The whooshing sound during the 'ee'-gap of the 'needle' sound is heard by our brains as an 's'-sound and - since the brain is already primed for 'storm' - we hear the rest accordingly.

The toy is supposed to be saying Brainstorm: https://ben10.fandom.com/wiki/Brainstorm

That's exactly what I was trying to understand, and how I was trying to understand it. Thank you

I encountered this a while ago, and it's still astonishing that it's possible to hear such different things.

"Brain" and "green" are so similar that mistaking one for the other is not interesting. The really interesting pair is "storm" and "needle" — they seem wildly different.

I think what's going on is that the "ee" vowel sound and the hissing sound of an "s" both have a lot of high frequencies. It might be that an "ee" from a high-pitched speaker sounds similar to an "s" from a lower-pitched speaker, so the interpretation depends on what you infer the speaker's vocal frequency range to be.

And then when you notice that "needle" and "needo" sound almost the same, the "o" in "storm" is not that much of a stretch. "eedle" ~= "eeto" ~= "sto".

I don't get it, all I can hear is some noise followed by 'brain storm'.

The point is that the "brainstorm" bit can also sound like "green needle" if you focus on it.

I started with my eyes closed and heard nothing but noise. With eyes open I caught a glimpse of the brainstorm label and started to hear that and only that. No green needle, as much as I tried to make it flip, it did not.

Before a basic sense-percept arrives at conscious awareness it is transformed by various sub-minds. Insight meditation is about investigating this fabrication process. Here is a free resource on that topic for anyone who wants to take it further: https://www.dharmaoverground.org/web/guest/dharma-wiki/-/wik...

Woah. Can confirm it works as described for me - I hear both "green needle" and "brainstorm", depending on which word I read, or which word I think of when I close my eyes.

... or at least that was true until now; I've just retried it again, and I've lost the ability to hear the "-storm" ending. I can hear "green needle" or "brain needle", but no "storm.

I am not a native english speaker... didn't work for me. With closed eyes I heard something like brain-needle :D and while reading both words shown, I still heard "brain-needle".

Exactly my experience, too. I simply cannot hear either of the words shown.

The comments below are fascinating too. Some claiming that it's two separate recordings even though you can easily see that it's a single six second video, and others even talking about Russian brain washing.

Strange I only hear Brain Storm, eyes closed or open, reading or not reading,

Instead of Green Needle I am hearing a weird backwards sounding sound.

I cannot hear brainstorm, no matter how hard I focus

> his brain was still processing and identifying a face—a fairly high-level skill

Is it? I thought the brain has specialized parts for identifying faces (hence prosopagnosia) which makes this more of an automatism than higher reasoning.

Yeah, I remember learn that in this playlist https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLyGKBDfnk-iAQx4Kw9JeV... very cool

Thank you for this, it's fascinating!

This looks great, do you have any other similar lectures bookmarked?

if you special case a high level skill, does it stop being a high level skill?

You nailed it.

This is a reported piece, so the description could be completely off the mark. But the quote from the neuroscientist is

> “What it tells me,” says Christof Koch, a neuroscientist at the Allen Institute who specializes in consciousness, “is that … you can get dissociation between cognition and consciousness.”

which is a wild overintepreretation.

Gerstmann syndrome is the same kind of deficit where you have preserved consciousness and severe impairments in one very specific cognitive domain. Aphasia is a more common version of a focal neurological deficit which is equally analogous.

This whole article is just pop science nonsense (although it's entirely possible the underlying research has merit; it's not easy to tell based on an article about it).

Sometimes I read about split-brain experiments and wonder, if my brain were to split, which side I'd end up on?

Both.

What even is I though?

"I" is something that knows its place in space and time, the here-and-now, but also has a memory of here-and-now moments of the past. As such "I" is an illusion. If a quantum clone of you is created both I's will have the same memory of the past here-and-now moments, so both will be you at the same. So probbaly something similar happens if a brain is split.

About your analogy - quantum cloning may not be allowed by laws of nature. That would make any consciousness unique at any point in time.

Also I feel the experiment suggests split brains would most likely become 2 very different (new?) entities with different behavior after losing integrity.

> quantum cloning may not be allowed by laws of nature

It might be that the original should be destroyed, I understand. So be it, destroy the original and create N clones. But the thought experiment is an interesting one regardless.

No, nothing about destroying. It's just you cannot know something sufficiently at infinite precision due to uncertainty principle. It just depends if maximally allowed knowledge of all of person's chemical states is sufficient to reproduce consciousness "sufficiently" closely (I bet it is).

"I" isn't a memory or a here and now. It's the universe experiencing itself. It's an observer. What would happen to that experience if it was split? Would it make a new independant observer?

By that definition, a GPS module with an SSD is an "I".

In discussions that invoke the words "self" or "consciousness", I find it common to hear pithy or clever definitions. However, rarely do those answers offer any actionable insight.

Are you sure that your words "I" or "consciousness" point at extrinsic things in the world? Have you not just invented a new kind of elan vital? If you claim that "consciousness" is a useful category of phenomena within consensus reality, then great. Demonstrate that.

Dark matter is a mystery, but it is a mystery comprised of concrete phenomena. Terrestrial biogenesis is a mystery, but it too is comprised of concrete phenomena. Heck, even the amorphous term "love" points to a more concrete category of phenomena than the word "consciousness" typically seems to.

FWIW, I think there are concrete approaches to the problem. One method HN might like is to study how we judge subjects as being conscious. Anyone want to build a NN classifier for this?

> By that definition, a GPS module with an SSD is an "I".

No it's not. I didn't explain what I meant by "knowing your place in space and time", sorry about that, but this needs elaboration.

I think we'll agree that consciousness (self-awareness) is not binary: it can be present in varying degrees in computer systems, animals and humans. The degree of self-awareness though I think is a function of how rich the model of the world is in your mind. A GPS module can have its own coordinates and a precise UTC clock, but its model of the world is the most primitive.

Thus knowing your place in space means some model of the world and your relative place within it. Domestic cats and dogs have their own models - of the house and possibly some surroundings, but they are very limited. Humans typically have the most elaborate and the highest level abstract model of the world, therefore our self-awareness is the highest among the creatures.

Time is a trickier one though. Our sense of time seems to be the function of the chain of here-and-now moments. You sense your place now, but you also have a memory of the previous moments as one seemingly uninterrupted flow. This I think is what creates an illusion of being, though obviously "I" doesn't exist in the same sense as a physical object does.

Then there's a whole part of how the model of the world that we build in our minds should also be practical, i.e. help us achieve our goals efficiently, but I'll skip it for now as it gets too far from the original question.

Is your definition actually accurate enough to capture instances of intuitive judgements that "this is a conscious being" without being overly broad to include "obviously non-conscious" things?

By calling it a spectrum, the already fuzzy definition becomes so broad as to be almost useless. Your spectrum and "knowing" model admits conscious GPS, albeit "low consciousness." What about spiders or GPT-3 or suitibly chosen digits out of an RNG? At best these all fail the intuitive answer test for most people.

Perhaps you have a mental model of Yudkowsian self-optimizers? Or maybe you are thinking more classically along the lines of Kant?

The whole problem I am trying to communicate is that your are playing and refining a model without defining exactly what your are modeling.

Self-awareness is paradoxical, I am aware of that. What I'm trying to model at least mentally for now, is something that has a chance of becoming self-aware unless we are missing something else.

In other words, let's say these are the necessary but not necessarily sufficient conditions for the emergence of self-awareness: (1) having some model of the world (MOTW), (2) maintaing a relative position of Self in MOTW, (3) maintining a history of positions in time.

The level of self-awareness then becomes a function of the complexity of MOTW and the complexity of the system's interfaces. For example is the model good enough to help it survive or reach whatever goals it's programmed to achieve? Is the system flexible and adaptible enough? Can it discover and learn by itself?

So again, in this regard a GPS system is so primitive that it may be comparable to that of an amoeba or even worse. A coordinate space alone is not a useful or interesting MOTW that would help your GPS box achieve its goals.

I don't think it's paradoxical. I just get the impression you may have jumped to building models without carefully considering the exact phenomenon you claim to deconstruct. "Self-awareness" or "consciousness" are just words. What do they point to in the world?

I experience some sort of an illusion of existence. Then I look at other creatures that look like me and act like me and I generalize, I say: maybe they exist the same way as I do. Then I hear from others that the generalization seems to be called "counsciousness" or sometimes "self-awareness". It's paradoxical because "I" doesn't exist the same way as a rock or any object and yet its continuity creates a resemblance, an illusion of existence.

Try to think of your exact quantum copies - what happens the moment you are cloned? What happens to your "I"? Nothing. The "I" never existed in the first place and therefore nothing happens to it when it's physically copied ;) That's the paradox.

Hi, can you explain what a ' Yudkowsian self-optimizer ' is? I've googled it and the only page that it comes up with is this one! :-)

Looks like I mispelled the name. I was simply referring informally to Eliezer Yudkowsky and the LessWrong-style thoughts on optimization processes. You can read the initial idea here[0].

If you haven't heard of LessWrong before, then you have hit the motherload of all rabbit holes! That site is definitely worth the dive.

[0]:https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HFTn3bAT6uXSNwv4m/optimizati...

Thanks!

I know about lesswrong, and you’re not wrong

"Thus knowing your place in space means some model of the world and your relative place within it." Soooo you are saying a GPS module plus a GIS database? :)

If someone puts me in a pitch dark barrel, and then carries the barrel to an unknown to me location will I cease to be conscious by that definition even if I'm kicking and screaming and yelling for help?

I'm working on self driving cars. They know very precisely where they are, and they know very accurately what is around them. (They even have a sense of where things will be!) Does that make them self-aware?

The barrel: no, you won't lose your self-awareness because you have a memory and a whole history of your self-aware moments before the barrel. However, staying in the barrel for long enough (say 30 years?) might affect your consciousness though I wouldn't recommend experimenting with it :)

The self-driving cars are interesting in this regard, but in terms of complexity of their model of the world they are still way behind that of the most primitive insects even, I think. This is due to their limited capability of discovering the world and learning about it. A car that can also sense surfaces and hear things might have a chance to build a more complex model. Add the ability to park and connect to a charging socket by itself and you get a very, very basic organism, possibly a bit self-aware, too.

But just because a self-driving car has a model of a macro-world (roads, buildings, other cars) doesn't make it any more self-aware than bacteria.

There's very interesting research into this question. This video is easily digestible. https://youtu.be/wfYbgdo8e-8

Since he couldn't process numbers in any useful manner (when communicating, to remember his hotel room, to draw it, etc.) the simplest explanation is that it didn't reach the "central brain processing" area. While this might not be the same thing as "consciousness", it's unlikely that this visual recognition made it very far in the brain. (Maybe the brain damage blocked it from going anywhere at all.)

> Since he couldn't process numbers in any useful manner

I don't think this is true, because the article says:

> Yet he could still do mental arithmetic and perform other mathematical operations. > He eventually mastered an entirely new digit system (where ⌊ stood for 2, ⌈ for 8, etc.); determined to keep working, he had his computer rigged to present the new numerals onscreen.

That suggests to me that he could indeed process numbers, but just couldn't see them

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