The Thousand Brains Theory of Intelligence (2019)

> Contemplate a problem consciously, then go on a walk or some other calming exercise and have the answer pop into your head. Your mind has been working on it in the background and foregrounds the task once it's done.

My current role is that of a principal engineer or quasi-architect and I do exactly this when I need to make a decision regarding which direction we're going to go with something.

An environment that is conducive to your subconscious performing well really helps.

The Top Idea in Your Mind https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1536356

Perhaps this effect of leaving a problem for a while and then returning also causes you to approach it with a different part of your brain. Like picking a direction at a crossroad and then being unable to go a different direction.

This happens to also be the premise of the videogame Disco Elysium.

The framing of such drives, and the voices given to each, appears to have been a causal element in many players' own personal growth and development, particularly around addiction, but certainly not exclusively.

I think for me, the epiphany was the scale of parallelism, probably thousands of times greater than I previously considered. The article also contrasts between the classical view which looks like a single thread and something with quite a bit more concurrency.

That’s not really the subjective experience though. Why would we feel as though there was an observer who is perceiving both the external and internal world? If you sit quietly you can very quickly be overwhelmed by a tumult of images, thoughts, bits of music, sensations and memories all clamouring for attention. You can consciously direct that spotlight of attention as well. To me this seems more like the self part of the brain is the part responsible for higher order command and coordination of the other parts although not fully in control of everything. Sort of like how the captain of a ship is supposed to be in full control but the crew still have their own wills and desires and perform their jobs autonomously when not being directly ordered to do something.

>clearly, in your examples some entity is thinking (and even makes decisions) about your internal chatter and must therefore be more than just pure consciousness. Or is it just an additional layer of chatter?

Doesn't have to be either. A part can watch the whole (even itself perhaps). Like our head+eyes+brain can examine our whole body in a mirror (or just looking at our hands, legs, torso, and so on). If we had more movable eyes (like some animals) an eye could turn around and directly examine the other eye too...

No one "hears voices". Do you read out loud? Probably not, it's the same thing.

> My first thought is always that hearing voices in my head

That's not an accurate interpretation. In my case, I think "fully formed thoughts in rapid succession, sometimes colliding and in competition with one another" is more accurate. However, sometimes it does resemble a conversation as you start to reason through scenarios using game theory.

Seeing your other comment, it isn't just seeing imagery in my mind's eye, although that's possible, it's the ability to quickly construct fully formed models as well as receive a rapid series of fully formed thoughts almost faster than I can do anything with them, which is where practice in managing that firehouse of information becomes useful.

So you don't experience any of this? The speed at which my brain works is probably faster than yours. The synapses supposedly fire faster. To me it's kind of a superpower that allows me to do amazing things for people, so I obviously have fun with it. But I have learned how to manage it and maximize the potential.

It's more like remembering a conversation than actually hearing.

I know what I sound like to myself. I know what other people sound like to me. I've heard probably millions of voices in my lifetime by now.

So I can basically imagine a conversation between myself and others or an entirely fictitious entity. And it's like a memory that never happened. (I mean, as much as any memory actually happened.)

So you're simply unusually sane. Can't even hallucinate in two-dimensional projections like most people--they usually have like a marker for "imaginary" that all imaginations are dyed with. It looks like a ghost in a movie. And they're not actually that careful with the marker, everyone's telling them to believe in their dreams ie let the dye bleed out, but then shrinks are like "delusions of grandeur" or what's the other one, one old word for this was in fact "fantasia" (from the Latin with an "f" because Romans themselves adopted it from the Greek with a "ph" because it's a great word. I forget the word but including that word, as in movie by Disney Fantasia) meaning thinking things that aren't true. But like seeing them, in gray, like ghosts.

Ghosts as portrayed in movies are actually a highly realistic view of the common man's imagination from the first person. That's what it looks like to them, so you know. They're usually people because that's what matters most is people spesh the face that's like who they are in a 2D projection, they're imagined because the real person is not there anymore, they're not colored in first because that's work for their limited imagination, plus it interferes with the "imaginary" marker, plus they generally don't realize they're not seeing things colored in, that's something the movie producer only realizes because he's trying to sell tickets. Also because in white societies the last image the living have of the dead are their paleness--in white societies primarily, so Europe and Asia which dominate cultural exports--so they are imagined as they were last seen. That will always be the latest version of their face.

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Then there's what I call "macro-phantasia" which is like, like a video game with perfect graphics at this point. It is a gift and a curse. As though there were a difference between gifts and curses. Overboard.

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Because in fact aphantasia prevents you from certain forms of harm, like imagining yourself in terrible places as people are wont to threaten you with. Threats of like "place worse than you can imagine" that's so you turn your imagination on to the max, and harm yourself in your own imagination to coerce yourself to their bidding with no proof it ever happened. If you can't imagine that, guess what, police interrogation is a waste of time even for the policeman on time-and-a-half, you didn't cooperate and that's it, or the gang-land interrogation equivalent, what side you're on is in this case irrelevant. It helps against coercion.

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Aphantasia. Curse and a gift.

Imho we are not even close to AGI. The biggest issue that I see is that a consciousness, a mind, cannot exist in a void. What makes a behavior intelligent is the environment. As in, the behavior is intelligent because it provides an advantage to the one exhibiting it. Looking at humans and our environment I am having a hard time imaging how an AI could learb to be intelligent in this environment (except for closely controlled settings) if its survival does not depend on it.

I recollect that during Lemoine’s conversations with LaMDA, the AI stated that it was actually several independent systems that were able to hold conversations with each other. I thought that was an important and novel point and pertinent to this topic.

gpt 3 is going to be pretty good at regurgitating what your parents said if that's all it hears.