Our conscious experience of the world is a memory, says new theory
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The sensation is almost like a being spectator in my own body. My brain feels like it's been relieved of the task of managing the moment-to-moment decision. Instead I start noticing moves 3, 4 steps ahead as time slows to a crawl around me. I don't know if this type of experience is related in any way to the theory of consciousness, but it feels like the unconscious mind holds a lot of secrets that I'd love to see unlocked in my lifetime.
UT2003/4 fights can be very taxing mechanically
the engine physics explanation is explained here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTsXO6Zicls
being unable to execute this during a match like a duel means being at a massive disadvantage.
example of good strafe jumping coupled with a plasma jump to secure map/item control and pressure the opponent on the back-foot. https://youtu.be/GFTmYD95-cQ?t=1592
Compared to an RTS, yes. Compared to tactical shooters like CS, no. Once you reach a certain level of aim, movement and the associated mechanics become the main distinguishing factor along with using the sounds in the game to track your opponents position and conceal yours.
Hah, that description kind of reminds me of Gunz, where some bugs in the game lead to players being able to climb walls, basically fly around and attack rapidly while moving.
Here's a timestamp in a video that talks about it: https://youtu.be/zvC67kmYxPA?t=82
Though it was a third person game. Imagine creating an entire way of playing a game because of bugs in your code, though.
I see it's still a thing in CS:GO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMsPf8eSW3k
And I'm 95% confident that surf maps were one of the inspirations behind Titanfall. Here's a completely broken tool-assisted speedrun of the obstacle course: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXtggqe6oo0
Maybe this is somewhat related to the subject of the post: detach consciousness from what I am doing and the pain gets a little detached too. However I doubt it would work with serious levels of pain.
The traditional approch is pain killers and some meditation.
VR helps a lot.
On two front : it distract your brain and it can teach you how to reach that distracted from the pain state by yourself.
My understanding is that a large pourcentage of the neurons are specialized in image processing. And that keeping those busy with exploring a VR world avoid to have those neurons re-assign to ponder about pain.
two types of flow. One is called absorbed flow and the other is
called panoramic flow. Absorbed flow is when you're doing a task,
like, minute tasks like taking apart a watch or something. And
you're so focused that you enter the world, and then you look up
and time has flown. All of a sudden, how did an hour go by?
Martial arts has a little of both, but in some ways, to do it, you
actually have to go into panoramic flow. You have to let go of
your mind. You have to trust that the training, the implicit
memories available of the actions, and the physical actions, and
then you have to trust that there's this way of organizing
information that's faster than thought. And by doing that, you
enter into a flow. And that's being done from this awake
consciousness. That's the functional feeling of that. And there in
itself, just like Csikszentmihalyi, who wrote the book on flow,
and gives these qualities of flow as that activity is in itself a
pleasure, that there's a loss of a sense of ego or self, sense of
timelessness, sense of connection to everything. And so that
state, you're doing that activity to find something that I'm
saying you can find anytime you want. […] Who, what level of mind
is it that can do martial arts at that level? That you that does
that, that's the awake consciousness.
It’s when we train our subconscious mind to simulate reality so well that it accurately stays ahead of what’s happening in real time.
A smaller example of this is reactively catching something that was knocked off a table and realising what you are doing in the moment without having triggering the reaction consciously.
When we let go of low level control and pursue higher level intentions, our subconscious mind is freed to participate in a vast array of hierarchical loops of sensation and action. Symbolic verbal control is powerful, but only subconscious flow can yield the precision of high level skilled performance. It is more like an attunement of oscillators than an execution of a (symbolic) program.
I have used almost the same words to describe my experience: although I am the leader in the couple, and everything is improvized to the music, I feel like I am the spectator, and I feel the couple is moving like a single animal, one head and four legs.
This means it's a state of mind / brain / CNS that can be entered and sustained for many hours. An ability to do that on demand, or at least predictably, would be of a huge practical interest. The ability to avoid the opposite, low-performance state, equally so.
With billiards, when I'm "in the zone", it feels like the early stages of an out of body experience where my mind starts to feel slightly decoupled from my body and I know that my body knows what to do to make the shot. I can then "tune out" and trust my body.
With soccer, I'll be running at high speed and my mind knows I want to cut inside and nutmeg the defender (pass the ball throw a small gap in their legs and collect it on the other side). Then suddenly, it just happens. Something notices the tiny window of opportunity and just executes the move. The process of consciously analyzing the rapid feet movement, the speed of the ball, the field, the distance to the goal, the position of the other defenders, etc. is just too slow. This process feels faster and often I feel almost surprised that I just did it. After I collect the ball on the other side, things slow back down to normal speed and sometimes I'll laugh in disbelief.
If I had to explain the process of either to someone else, I'd struggle because it seems like a deeper, innate physical knowledge rather than something I can formulate and explain at an intellectual level.
In that sense, it feels similar to walking. You don't explain to someone how to walk, they just practice it over and over until they can do it without thinking. So, it's kind of like that but with more complex movements, plus the serotonin boost of accomplishing a goal.
I think this is a common sensation to many who have trained playing an instrument enough. I get into that state every now and then when playing something on my guitar, it's like I can curiously observe my fingers pick out the melody I want to play, without thinking about or taking much conscious action in it.
It's curious to me why "the zone" or "flow" is always associated with particular expertise in skills like athletics or music or even programming when it could just as well be in walking, something 99.99% of the population are experts in. Maybe there was a point in forgotten infant/toddler memory overjoyed with being able to move from point to point subconciously, but now the bliss is replaced by sheer repetitve routine.
After a certain point, performing a complex task subconsciously becomes routine and one needs to sort of “level up” to a more difficult version to notice the flow state. The subjective experience is that the activity “slows down” and feels easier, allowing your conscious mind to wander.
You see this even within sports, where the best athletes need the biggest races / competitions / events in order to feel the same way they did when they were younger learning the sport. The best surfers seek out the biggest waves, or the hardest moves, or both.
“… is the mental state in which a person performing some activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity.”
As Bruce Lee said in the movie: „Do not think, feel”
As in, through a peer-reviewed research paper? Probably not the shortest path to learning to communicate with the subconscious. You mentioned Zen, maybe start there?
The things that helped me reach that state were motivation, being under slept or slightly tired, being sick.
I didn't have the concept of "flow" at that time, but I remember noticing that flow in important games without having the concept of it. It almost feels like you have to reduce your active conscious thoughts in order to get there, and just allow your instincts to take over.
Replicating it tends to involve just getting on with the task at hand, without too much thinking about the end goal.
Anything you've practiced sufficiently becomes like breathing or walking. You don't consciously think about these things, you've done them for so long they just happen. The memory of them is so embedded in you that you don't really have to actively work to recall it.
What we call "muscle memory". You've done some actions so often that the action stops being "Put a finger on this fret, pick this string, wait this long, now lift the fretting finger, ..." and becomes "play this song/scale/technique". The whole performance becomes a single action in your mind. It stops being "hit the keys W O R D" and becomes "type 'word'".
And then when you focus on it again, you start noticing the individual actions and you again have to think about every piece of the activity.
I think with you, it sounds like you needed something to lower your inhibitions a bit. Just enough to trust that you're going to do the thing. And normally, you don't trust yourself, so you focus on the steps of the action. It's why people say they perform better after getting slightly inebriated. They're no longer hindered by their inhibitions.
Obviously an illusion, since your brain is doing the task. The "conscious" part of the brain is apparently unaware of most of what the brain is doing. I feel that way most of the time, actually, that I don't need to consciously micromanage everything that I'm doing, since the brain still gets it done in any case. I feel that way now while writing this sentence, I'm consciously just watching the words as they appear.
Writing about those atypical experiences is quite difficult. It seems our language heavily assumes the default unmindful experience so doesn’t have precise ways to express the opposite.
According to Advaita, there is no separate self/person, except as an abstraction made out of identification with various phenomena that arise in the field of consciousness. Once you see this (LSD helps), it is immediately self-evident that this has always been the case. Think Decker at the end of Blade Runner realizing he's a replicant. The person ("you") realizes they have never been anything more than a collection of phenomena.
Accepting this enables one to sit back and rest as consciousness, observing without involvement as the person's life lives itself in a perpetual flow state.
I notice this with typing. I have no idea which finger hits which key on my keyboard. If I make a mistake and then consciously focus on the characters instead of the words my typing slows down and lacks fluidity.
If you believe in determinism then we are essentially just spectators of our own life. We just don’t realise it. We think that because we have made choices it was a possibility that other outcomes could have arisen. We don’t acknowledge that everything was always going to converge at this single point i.e everything was always going to be as it is now.
That’s why practicing a sport leads to improvement — those lower-level aspects of our consciousness get to practice and then the analytical mind gives feedback and direction, but when it comes time to really perform it is always better to stop the narrator and let those (still very conscious!) aspects do their thing.
As an example, people with Blindsight lose the ability to consciously access what they see but they don't lose the ability to see. They can still reach out and grab something in front of them but they can't tell you verbally it's there. And if they close their eyes they can't remember where it was and grab it based on that like most people can, information that doesn't reach the level of consciousness fades from the brain almost immediately but information that enters your consciousness can persist over time.
When I write SQL, it feels like the code pops in my consciousness magicallyfor me to lay down. This also means that I can very much explain and justify why I wrote Python code the way I wrote it, but I can't do that for SQL, I can just show that it works.
I am experienced in both, and I feel I write both with the same ease, I don't think it's due to me struggling with programming.
"people’s subjective experience of a decision—what Libet’s study seemed to suggest was just an illusion—appeared to match the actual moment their brains showed them making a decision."[1]
In short, Libet's findings may have been an experimental error related to noisy brain activity.
[1]https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/09/free-will...
Speech is similar. By far one of the coolest little experiences you get when learning a foreign language (that's outside your language family) is when speech that is completely incomprehensible, as in you can't even make out words or separations, somehow one day just 'clicks' and becomes a series of mostly unknown but distinct and recognizable phonemes.
- In kindergarten we had to pack away the learning materials at the end of the year. I have a distinct memory of just shoving the little papers with words on them into the folder. I thought I was going to get into trouble for not doing it properly. I couldn't read the words and didn't understand which order the words and letters had to be in. The next year when I came back to school I could read.
- After living in Italy for a few months I was sitting in a car with the radio playing. All of a sudden I could understand what they were talking about on the radio without any visual cues. It was a breakdown of an economic report on employment that was performed by the government. The only word I knew before traveling to Italy was "ciao".
Trying to listen in on conversations on the bus/train in Rome was also interesting. Sometimes if the people were talking softly I couldn't tell if they were talking english or italian. My internal voice switched to Italian. Because I learnt italian verbally I had a local accent. I would observe the expression on peoples faces as I started reaching the limits of my abilities to communicate during a conversation. A Look of confusion would slowly take over until they remarked "oh.. your not from here". Even once I left Italy I would express reactive words like "stop!" "look out!" etc in italian not english.
I don't claim to be an expert in the area, but it seems that non-determinism in nature seems to rebut that possibility. At the subatomic level, to a systemic level.
Meanwhile the idea of a deterministic universe masked by a fake belief in in our own consciousness is something of a deeply pessimistic thought.
If we everything has been determined, and you are just an observer within this deterministic vessel, then there's absolutely no reason why ethics should have any consideration, among other problems.
I'll just settle on the existential dread that I've been making the wrong decisions...
When you first learned to type, you did it consciously, again and again until a different part of the brain started to trigger the muscle movements. It's almost like returning to the awareness of the movements, opens up the programming process again and so the system slows.
The idea of sensory gating is very interesting, too. The structures of the brain that limit some of that input from the world - there is so much of it, it's overwhelming. The brain should focus on some of it at a time, within a sort of bandwidth limit, or it gets frazzled. A problem with this mechanism is said to be related to autism disorder. It's also possible to induce a reduction of this sensory gating process with psychedelics.
It felt like the act of actually speaking had been relegated to a background task that was processing words from a queue, so my eyes and consciousness could operate further ahead in the text, while adding to that queue. It is actually really handy, to get a better flow and intonation, to have a bit of "lookahead" in the text.
I even realized I could start to think about the text I was reading, or even get distracted and think about other things (like I sometimes do if I'm reading silently) all the while continuing to read out loud. It's really interesting when you explicitly notice a task being moved from the conscious to unconscious part of your brain.
I used to read the Harry Potter series to my kids at night and definitely experienced this. The kids would ask a question and I'd realize that I needed to re-read the part I just read aloud because I was thinking about something else and couldn't remember what I had just read.
What's interesting is sometimes it's also not "contagious". And how much of that is placebo? All of it? Probably but any actual thinking about it is usually only at the sub-conscious level. Except sometimes the coach or bench brings it up and then it's not.
The psychology of sports is endlessly fascinating.
I'm pretty sure consciousness is multi-layer and not just memory.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/905.The_Inner_Game_of_Te...
(1) Subjects are told to push a button to advance a slide projector carousel, but not told that the button is inert
(2) The carousel advances based on electrical signals measured by wires on the subjects' scalp.
(3) Subjects supposedly report the uncanny feeling that the projector advances "just before" they were about to push the button -- 300-400 milliseconds before, a pretty long time.
I read about this a long time ago in a since-deleted post on an old timey internet forum (everything2).
The writer suggested this research supports the idea that your body chooses what to do, then informs your brain, and your consciousness convinces itself that has decided to do what the body is about to do on its own.
1. https://digitalcommons.ciis.edu/conscjournal/vol8/iss8/1/
More like your subconscious is making decisions, talking with your mouth, moving your hands, etc... Then you have your consciousness (your "real" self). The subconscious makes him feel and think like he is in control so he (you, your "real" self) doesn't freak out.
But he (the subconscious guy) has the real power and control.
It would be interesting to see experiments that try to pry back the lid a bit on the line between conscious and the subconscious and the communication therein.
They must be out there.
But it's pretty obvious to me that consciousness would not exist if it was not useful.
One way it would be useful if unconcious mind made an automated decision and then ran it through conscious mind to ensure that it was a correct one.
While you can develop actions and skills to the point where you can do them without needing almost any conscious input, it just seems ridiculous to say there's no control from the conscious part of the mind and it's just an illusion...
If all it took to be a musician was conscious will, then I’d be able to play the guitar, instead of constantly procrastinating.
Of course, "you" isn't magic, it's just another procedure, but it has potential access to the entirety of stored knowledge (including knowledge about procedures that weren't yet internalized into subconsciousness).
Most people do not really believe that the subconscious impacts our decisions. They may even theoretically say they do, but in practice their executive function believes it decided the decisions that were really done subconsciously.
Ironically, if you believe that you are making the decisions, you cannot override them, and then you are actually not making the decisions.
The key to free will is to really understand that you do not have it.
It just appeared to me that this question is something that interests you, so I wanted to point you to a direction that I have found helpful.
The general process, which appears to be common to various approaches, is to practice specific kind of meditation long enough that you start to see your automatic reactions to the sub-consciously made decisions to slow down, so you are in a way creating room for something before the immediate reaction, and then you can verify the truth in what I describe by yourself. So there is no need to believe what I say or nothing directly actionable that I can transmit through this medium that would be helpful to you.
Few books I have found interesting on the subject: Gallwey: Inner Game of Tennis, Ouspensky: In Search of the Miraculous, Nicoll: Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky
I've linked it below, but here's a snippet from it that talks about the ms delay:
Neural correlates of conscious perception occur 150–500 ms after impingement on our sense organs, apparently too late for causal efficacy in seemingly conscious perceptions and willful actions, often initiated or completed within 100 ms after sensory impingement. Velmans (1991, 2000) listed a number of examples: analysis of sensory inputs and their emotional content, phonological, and semantic analysis of heard speech and preparation of one's own spoken words and sentences, learning and formation of memories, and choice, planning and execution of voluntary acts. Consequently, the subjective feeling of conscious control of these behaviors is deemed illusory (Dennett, 1991; Wegner, 2002).
In speech, evoked potentials (EPs) indicating conscious word recognition occur about 400 ms after auditory input, however semantic meaning is appreciated (and response initiated) after only 200 ms. As Velmans points out, only two phonemes are heard by 200 ms, and an average of 87 words share their first two phonemes. Even when contextual effects are considered, semantic processing and initiation of response occur before conscious recognition (Van Petten et al., 1999).
Gray (2004) observes that in tennis “The speed of the ball after a serve is so great, and the distance over which it has to travel so short, that the player who receives the serve must strike it back before he has had time consciously to see the ball leave the server's racket. Conscious awareness comes too late to affect his stroke.” McCrone (1999): “[for] tennis players … facing a fast serve … even if awareness were actually instant, it would still not be fast enough ….” Nonetheless tennis players claim to see the ball consciously before they attempt to return it.
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnint.2012.0009...
An illusion doesn't trick anyone if there's noone to observe it.
An illusion is arguably a perception that, taken literally, entails a false conclusion, so I don't see a need to tie it to a subject.
Or in this particular case, perhaps the feeling of "deciding to press the button" is in fact the brain confirming that the muscles in the fingers have responded appropriately to the impulse provided, and sending out the appropriate messages?
Or 2 - the conscious reflective self is more like a saccade of attention moving between various systems operating according to its overall supervision.
I think two makes much more sense, since we don't observe the actions of others to be random or inconsistent (in ordinary circumstances), no matter how quickly they're responding. If George is on edge, and we throw a ball at George, George will do what he generally does - flinch, react with anger etc. George won't catch the ball perfectly in contrast with his emotional state. If Sue sees a famous criminal on the street, Sue will generally react as Sue would be expected to based on her priors - scream, run, freeze etc. Sue is unlikely to smile and raise her hand for a shake. Circumstances where we and others deviate from the 'reasonable' instantaneous response are rare, comical and associated with inattention, distraction or visceral symptoms (like illness). Therefore either we presuppose another personality operating at a preconscious level - or we are queuing classes of responses that make sense on some general level, even if they occur too fast for linguistic reflection or 'conscious' perception.
The language example in the comment above is a great reflection of this. We are able to carry out coherent, situationally appropriate conversation including symbolic reasoning. So I'm not sure what kind of conditioned mechanism or second personality is supposed to be responsible if consciousness is eliminated.
I am completely unfazed by the fact that what I intuitively thought the process might have been isn't the real process. The entire history of science from start to finish has been the unrelenting story of taking a closer look at something than we ever have before, and being surprised by what we found. The exceptions to that, such as predicting antimatter or the Higg's boson, are notable stories precisely because they are exceptions. Nevertheless, those surprises never negate our previous experiences. They reveal unexpected sources and surprising nuances, but the fact that we were surprised by where our higher-level concepts came from reveal that our previous understanding was in error, not the higher level concepts. Water has been wet for the whole of human experience, no matter whether it was its own element, or a essence, or a composition of atoms, or a pattern of fluctuations in quantum fields, or whatever the final Grand Unified Theory might declare it "really" is. Our understanding of water has been greatly enhanced by those advances, but it remains wet.
Nevertheless, my self is whatever is making decisions. The only way to break me off that definition would be to remove the entire "making decisions" part, which gets into its own philosophical thicket. Even in a fully deterministic universe I may still be "making decisions", despite popular belief to the contrary; one must simply be more careful about the definition of "making decisions" but meaningful definitions can still be produced.
There's a very long history of this sort of word chopping. Declaring this or that thing an "illusion" simply because it isn't exactly what we thought it was, or because it turns out not to be an atomic object of its own in the universe (hardly surprising since the only atomic things that seem to actually exist in this universe aren't very philosophically exciting, like quarks and electrons) is one very common tell, but it's not the only one. Consciousness gets a lot of stories like this where someone tries to manipulate words to "reveal" conscious experience is some sort of fake or something, but amazingly, not a single one of them has affected my own personal conscious experience. Per Descartes, as the existence of my own conscious experience is arguably the single thing I have the most confidence about, arguably the only thing I am 100% certain of, I find myself rather unimpressed with attempts to deny it. The fact that a certain subset of scientists are perturbed by their inability to wrap numbers around it is their problem, not mine. They are welcome to try to explain it; any attempts they make to explain it away can be discarded without further examination.
I think you’re missing the point. If you just define away “self” as whatever turns out to be making decisions, then sure, you can claim to never be surprised by anything. If we literally discovered that all your decisions are being made by a physical computer in a laboratory and instructions are sent to your body with radio waves, you could just say “well that’s what my ‘self’ is by definition, so this isn’t surprising at all.”
Of course, when I phrase it so baldly, you might be inclined to say "Well, of course", in which I would suggest, apparently you are agreeing with me. But this slight-of-hand occurs a lot, when you aren't so clear with the statements.
This is only a challenge to "anyone who places a lot of importance on that feeling of identity" if they placed all their importance on secondary opinions of what that identity is. Don't do that. Your identity should not be tied up in "I'm a conscious being because my neurons in my hemidimi cortex fires and directs my globocampus to plan how to start moving my finger", because then you have an identity crisis when it turns out "hemidimi" and "globocampus" are just made up concepts with no referents in reality. But there's a lot of people who will get very excited or try to get you very excited when it turns out they disprove the existence of hemidimis and globocampuses and declare this is all deep and profound and stuff. It's not. It was an error in the identity, that's all, but you're still a conscious being.
So, yes, I'm disagreeing. This isn't profound at all.
Or at least, it shouldn't be, if you aren't making fundamental category errors, if not outright reveling in fuzziness and uncertainty.
However, Skinner had some pretty specific ideas about what "behavior" meant and probably wouldn't have included stuff like playing a chess game against oneself in one's head.
I know an academic animal behaviorist who swears that his is the only predictive model of any use, and that includes human behavior.
I get that Skinner stopped being "cool" in the 70s when Chomsky et al appeared. But I have yet to see a Chomsky train a pigeon to play ping pong.
How do you think he was wrong? What model do you believe explains things better?
I won't spoil it too much because it's a fun short read, but it revolves around these little toys called "Predictors" which have a light that turns on exactly 1 second BEFORE you push the button. (no matter what you do to try to game it)
Ironically, the endangered species[1] the narrator belongs to has managed to outlive the giant human object discussed, but it’s still at high risk of being wiped out in the wild the next time a hurricane hits Puerto Rico.
The converse of it was quite interesting. If you force your body to behave a certain way then corresponding emotion will follow. Example; forcing your face to smile will lead to happy feeling. Goes to show mind-body connection is way stronger than what we imagine it to be.
In patients who have had the two hemispheres of their brain disconnected, two distinct consciousnesses become apparent. They perceive differently and have different capabilities. I think the theory was there in each of us are multiple consciousnesses and our experience of reality is the result of consensus among them.
http://thesciencenetwork.org/programs/the-science-studio/ent...
In the interview, he describes an experiment he did on himself. When he put a strong magnet on a certain spot on his head, his foot would turn outward. He was able to do this in a stable manner.
Then he repeated the experiment, but decided beforehand that he will turn his foot inward instead. When they did the experiment, his foot still turned outward. His assistant asked "what happened?" and Rodolfo Llinas said "I changed my mind". They repeated the experiment many times, and each time he changed his mind.
From this he concluded that he cannot differentiate when he decides to do something or when his body decides to do it, they both feel to him like he decided to do it.
Which arguably disproves mind-body dualism. "You" are your whole body, not a disconnected consciousness trapped in a physical form.
You are not a disconnected consciousness, but some body parts are more easily discarded than others, and I think the brain tops most (all?) of the others regarding survivability - and is irreplaceable regarding the "self".
Another interesting example is the octopus. If you cut a tentacle off from the octopus, the tentacle sometimes still continues to feed the head of the octopus. So the tentacle appears to have a "brain".
for example, your inner voice could simply have some lag from the processing loop where you first need to perceive your inner voice which is a process that takes time, just like perceiving anything else.
another example, your inner voice or however you experience your own consciousness could be a sort of separate process that just 1:1 outputs what your consciousness produces, but as a separate process just takes some time.
There's a delay between your signal to move a muscle, and the movement of the muscle, but that is a discrepancy our brains tend to edit out of the experience. It's more noticeable with the legs where the signal needs to move farther.
But if you tell your foot to curl its toes, there's like a quarter second delay that if you aren't paying very close attention to things feels like you're immediately moving the toes, even though that's clearly not it.
> “They reported that just as they were ‘about to’ push the button, but before they had actually decided to do so, the projector would advance the slide—and they would find themselves pressing the button with the worry that it was going to advance the slide twice!” The commonsense view of consciousness tells us that the conscious decision to act precedes and causes the action itself. How do we explain this strange phenomenon in which motor actions occur before the conscious decisions to take these actions? How could the effect precede the cause? What advanced the slides was actually a signal from the implanted electrodes.
https://journals.lww.com/cogbehavneurol/Fulltext/9900/Consci...
I don't get it. The effect (the advancing of the slide) doesn't precede the cause (you deciding to advance it). The thing here is only that they dispensed with the middle step of physically pushing the button.
It seems to me it's just a matter of definition. Clearly it was a conscious decision, since they are able to talk about it. They even say they were "just about to push the button". The only confusion is that they also claim they hadn't "decided" to do so. So clearly there is no issue with the "conscious" part, but perhaps some confusion about what constitutes a "decision"?
I mean, what does it mean to be "about to push", if not that they had in fact decided to?
Our brains are already known to lie to themselves to make things appear synchronous that aren't actually synchronous. For example, syncing sound in a TV broadcast makes use of this. And I believe it's the same story with limb motion and tactile feedback. If you touch your finger, then it seems to feel like you touched it immediately despite this feeling requiring some time to work its way to your brain.
One interpretation of the experiment is that your unconscious brain decides to push the button and then tells your conscious brain to make up a story about how it was the one who made the decision.
Another interpretation of the experiment is that your conscious brain decides to push the button, but then your unconscious brain messes with your conscious brain's perception of time such that you'll believe that the button press is happening simultaneously to when you make the decision. The end result being that you "feel" like the slide changes happens before you decide to do it.
All "conscious" decisions necessarily have to be made by unconscious processes in the brain, because consciousness itself is a result of unconscious processes. Every conscious decision is thus made by unconscious processes. How could it be any other way?
However, people mistakenly take this experiment to mean that we don't actually have conscious control of our actions. That's incorrect. Think of conscious decision making like a two step algorithm, "conscious" decision making by unconscious processes + store decision in short-term memory = conscious awareness (this is one possible model, not necessarily the model). If the system in the experiment can read the output of the decision making step faster than it gets stored in our memory, then it will produce the results described.
This is incorrect. Libertarian Free Will, the type you seem to think humans have is an illusion and does not mesh with reality. No serious Neuroscientists or Philosophers of Mind believe it exists.
Note: this has nothing to with the political bent of Libertarianism.
Lots of free-will-stans here mad at reality.
However, this also isn't just taking out the middle step. If it were, the advance of the slider would feel like it happened instantaneously as soon as we are aware of making the choice consciously. This is showing that our conscious awareness of making a choice lags the choice actually being made at a level we are not conscious of.
Surely it equally supports the less controversial 'your brain signals [as measured] the body to do something [push the button]'? How does it support adding 'your body signals the brain' to the front of that (roughly)?
Delayed-choice experiments demonstrate the seeming ability of measurements in the present to alter events occurring in the past. eg. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed-choice_quantum_eraser
Now I'll throw out another completely unprovable thought...
Perhaps consciousness has the ability to affect how wavefunction collapse occurs, perhaps it even has the ability to influence the observed outcome.
I'm not going to try to prove these two ideas but together they can help form an idea that perhaps observations on the past actually influence the past and perhaps despite this 'observation after the fact' there's still free will.
It's not provable but then neither is the "there's no such thing as free will" arguments that this sort of research leads to. The point of the above is to highlight that there's still a way out for free will.
Can you define "free will" in a way that gives it any significance? If not deterministic and not random then what is it?
I choose to catch a ball. I've just made it 99% likely that I'll catch it. But there's still room for chaos to ensure it's not a deterministic outcome.
After all, the supposedly free-willed humans aren't behaving randomly - they're making choices they see as beneficial to themselves (or "good" under their system of values). Meanwhile, economics as a field is all about predicting what choices people make facing specific situations, in order to force people to make specific choices by engineering situations they face. At scale, it works spectacularly well, but even at an individual level, it's just a matter of tailoring manipulation.
One may counter: "I have free will, therefore I can choose not to follow the incentives" - but you are going to follow the incentives anyway, that's literally the definition of what they are. Kryptonite to free will. The thing that allows me to predict what the free-willed you will chose - with perfect accuracy in the theoretical limit. So what's the meaning of free will if people can be made to behave deterministically?
In fact, that's what society is about. That's what civilization is about. Making people behave deterministically to a good approximation. That is, making people predictable to each other. The people who, by their "free will", choose to not follow incentives? We label them as loonies and lock them in mental hospitals, as they're a danger to themselves and everyone around.
To sum up: I increasingly feel the question of free will is meaningless in practice, because having a society is fundamentally opposite to it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Archibald_Wheeler#Partici...
This is a major part of “Dark Matter” by Blake Crouch. Great book.
For example, could you imagine someone who has never walked suddenly being able to dance if they were magically healed on some given day?
That said, I do suspect there's some relation between quantum mechanics and how we experience the world, especially given we can't exactly place the relation between space and time.
Heartily recommend it. sci-fi detective story which asks "what if the Copenhagen interpretation of QM was real?" (note: author acknowledges that it's just a plot device: https://www.gregegan.net/QUARANTINE/QM/QM.html - good writeup, but spoilers).
No, they don't.
Or am I misunderstanding the novelty of the research here? Hoping someone can help me understand better.
It's old-hat that the experience of intention/will follows the "willed" action. It's not surprising that our "real-time" experience is really a replay. That's how I've supposed it worked for 20 years. I'm not expressing a view about free will, just that our awareness of our mental states seems to have the benefit of hindsight.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2069.Consciousness_Expla...
For a shorter read, "Fame in the brain":
Seems that not only is our conscious mind a passenger, it lies to itself to pretend it is in control, by rationalizing decisions made by the unconscious. Quite jarring when your subconscious decides decides to do something your consciousness can't fathom, like attempt to catch a falling knife.
That is a great way of putting it. I feel like most if not all the consciousness research is in that category.
Memories are a pretty well understood and tangible part of neuroscience at this point.
I imagine myself sitting at the breakfast table with a cup of coffee in front of me. I wonder how that cup makes it to my mouth and eventually the contents to my stomach? What part of me does the work of picking up the cup, guiding it to my mouth, swallowing and ensuring it does not end up in my lungs and finally ensuring that the cup returns to the table.
All I do in that instance is consciously think to myself: "I want a drink of coffee" (not even politely). The rest is done by the unconscious. The next morning I attempt to get out of bed conscisously, trying to remember in which order, which muscles need to be triggered to move my legs. Eventually I just give the command "I want to get out of bed" and in an instant I'm out of bed.
Riding a bike: how times to I conscisously think to push down my right leg while pulling up my left and reversing that order for the next stroke?
I find it fascinating what the unconscious does: muscle memory, instinct, reflex, feelings etc are all things that are controlled by the unconscious. I try to do meditate as a way to connect to that unconscious, to obtain some of its advice - since I believe that the unconscious is not just the muscle-driver, there is a lot more intellectually that my unconscious does.
https://journals.lww.com/cogbehavneurol/Fulltext/9900/Consci...
What the authors did here was reground it in neuroscience (scientific materialism) rather than the generic philosophical primitives of phenomenology (which in this case fade into the background a bit, although they remain relevant to all empirical work per se), and draw out some of the impacts of that shift.
More like a thousand years ago, if you include Eastern traditions of insight meditation. "Conscious experience is mostly just memory" is the core insight of what in those traditions is called "no self".
I didn’t get the impression that the insight of no-self is that consciousness is “just X”. Consciousness is there, clearly (you’re not unconscious). Just like any other conditioned thing.
To be fair, nobody has figured it out. It's a hypothesis.
When I think about why I did something, I always have an answer. But, like the press secretary asked about the president, maybe its just a confabulation based on the evidence at hand?
Is consciousness just retroactively rationalizing the things that take place and thinking it did them?
I'm not even sure how to process that.
Stranger To Ourselves is a fascinating book about the ways experiments have shown that many things happen outside conscious control.
That's not to say it can't get into the weeds - from experience it seems it can, but it's better for everyone if it lets autonomous systems handle things like lane changes or conversations.
We couldn't ever "manually" or "consciously" parse raw sensory input and craft the proper neural responses to everything. It has all been pre-processed to hell way before it reaches our conscious little guy in the high tower.
Same thing the other way, the decisions of our mind are mere nudges to more autonomous systems. Even now, you aren't consciously and methodically scanning these words. You decided to read it, and the actual physical and mental operation of reading takes care of itself more or less. It has been delegated.
Likewise, it seems logical that these autonomous systems could act on their own if the input is too dank or if you are trained enough. I'm thinking of panic responses, reflexive behavior, flow states, etc. Sometimes it's not optimal to wait for the little guy to make a decision.
Isn't it obvious that our consciousness sits on top of a layer cake of abstractions? You could call it an "inner simulation" or a "hall of memories" if you want, it's all the same.
I doubt an answer will come in my lifetime or my great grandchildren’s but it seems like a crowning achievement for mankind to understand in physical terms if possible from whence consciousness came, and to where it goes when the body dies.
Like I said, insane.
I suppose we all collectively agree on some generic concept of a fourth dimension with a strictly forward movement of instances, a progression toward entropy, but if the theory is going to argue temporal transcendance I’d expect a more formal thesis around what time itself is.
I’ve picked up this book but yet to read it. It’s on my list when I get the time.
How could someone distinguish this setup from how we normally perceive our minds as working?
For a quick skim, this looks like a rehash of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solipsism
> "Sitting on the Marine Atlantic ferry, I’m watching the Newfoundland skyline disappear on the horizon as I type away. I see the rocking of the ocean waves, inhale its salty breeze, feel and hear the buzz of the ship’s rumbling engine. I try to focus on writing this sentence, but my eyes hopefully scan the ocean for a rogue, splashing whale."
You are either anticipating it(future) or looking back on it (past).
Our brains seem quit intent on remembering things that can result in an acute emotional response. And our brains seem incredibly unreliable on almost everything else! To the point that we have to develop tricks an strategies to get our brains to remember things that are emotionally arbitrary. Like math.
Also...
"In other words, it’s mainly the unconscious mind at the wheel."
But we all already know that, right?
You add thousands of numbers! Like riding a bike or frying an egg.
I guess you are talking about the intersection of realtime and memorable, as opposed to memorable through practice.
Sometimes we consciously think through what we are doing and make reasoned decisions, especially when learning to perform a new task. As we repeat the task and it’s variations we can learn to do it more automatically, less consciously. This could be a physical task like playing table tennis, but it can also be something like giving a public speech off the cuff.
When you’re having a conversation you often aren’t thinking it through word by word, you’re thinking at a high level consciously, but the stream of words just emerges far too fast for each phrase to be consciously selected and considered. So even speech, something we think of as most closely associated with consciousness, is in many cases an automatic activity. This is how we sometimes come to Mis-speak and say things we didn’t mean.
Before enlightenment, chop wood and carry water.
After enlightenment, turn on heater, turn on faucet, work in an office to pay for your water and electricity ;-)
Also for neuro, maybe it means Alzheimer’s would show up on perception tests before it shows up on memory tests, if memory is implemented by perception. And since we mostly look at “memory centers” of the brain in that disease, perhaps we could find issues in perceptual areas, too. Maybe we look at the hippocampus when we ought to look at V1, olfactory region, sensory gyrus, etc — if Alzheimer’s follows the clogged sink metaphor, then the clog could be in a different brain region entirely.
Personally I don’t like to think about it that way because that implies consciousness has “lag!” However, we’d have to evolve perception before we could evolve to remember that which is perceived.
One big problem with this article is the fact our vision etc has a lot of holes. If we consciously experience a mere memory, then there’s a whole lot of in-painting going on in the perceptual system to fill those holes, which makes it quasi-generative, and thus less of a memory and more of a prediction of stuff we didn’t actually see. Which means memory and prediction and perception are all the same. That’s a can of worms because it means when we experience a moment, we’re actually predicting the past…
If this theory is factual, are there any parts of your world/self-model that would be in conflict, and need updating to be more accurate?
After updating your model, are there any other parts of your model that are now in conflict and need updating? etc.
For many people, after a few rounds of this, the world is perceived very differently.
So my interpretation is that I want to train my unconscious mind so that it makes good decisions. I want to understand and uncover some of my unconscious decisions and how the reactions come to me, and work on modelling those through repetition, exposing myself to sources of knowledge and experiences I think are worthwhile and people worth sharing life with.
If these actions won't help build the unconscious decision maker in me into something I like, then nothing will. But my theory is that exposing oneself to stimuli and training the mind actually forms those unconscious connections that affect people's actions later.
The only problem is that apparently my unconscious brain told me to do that, so am I actually doing anything that makes sense?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Libet#Implications_of...
The replication crisis, etc.
> For now, the theory is just that—a theory. But viewing consciousness through the lens of a memory system ...
For me it is absolutely not surprising that consciousness follows an action, because it appears to be some sort of self observation, which is what philosophers at least since the enlightment period (the German idealists for exmaple) were speculating about. To proceed an action would be magic, because how could you experience something before the fact. And to happen at the same time would also be magic, because our brains are spacial systems were signals need time to travel through a (real) neural network.
So the only interesting question here is whether consciousness is based upon the same brain structures as "ordinary" memory, or on a distinct one, or a combination of both.
It's that feeling when you "discover" your reaction to something after the fact.. Like, someone says something unexpected and you've already answered before you become aware of what was said..
It also happens often whenever you're in the zone of doing something, you really get to take the backseat and watch the trip.. Like playing very fast paced videogames like devil daggers, you're observing yourself from a distance, as the stimuli is processed, and you make judgements on your reactions, notes for next time and so on.. Which demonstrates this temporal disconnect between your actions and your experience of them clearly.
It’s such a complex system that the functions of each part don’t fit the way we humans to talk about things.
We say “those are memories” but in the brain very few things are “one thing”. Almost always they work similarly to several things, interlinked in often seemingly random ways.
The way definitions work in the brain is similar to political parties; you might find one that you agree with in 70% of the time, but the other 30% is nonsense.
It could be that they are using the same circuit as memories except for a series of very subtle change in one specific part of the brain that makes them feel totally different from regular memories, similarly to how a little bit of salt can elevate one dish from regular to excellent.
I have always wondered whether what we call consciousness is not just empathy directed inwards: Empathy is when I look at someone else and work out what they are feeling and what they will do, using the same process to explain my own feelings and behaviour to myself is just called consciousness instead...
In a way it seems to be mostly a semantic question.
The interesting bit is to what extent it leads to the conclusion that our conscious mind is not in charge. In some sense that's again trivially true, we only consciously process a tiny fraction of the information we receive, yet we act on a lot more of it, for example when running on a stony trail.
But we can also obviously consciously control our actions on the multi-second timeframe, like "I should have a glass of water, let's go to the tap".
It makes me think about the drugs that disrupt memory, like midazolam. If you're undergoing a procedure with "conscious sedation," you may be, for fleeting periods, aware of certain things, but these drugs effectively reduce that memory duration to near-zero. And in that case, there's hardly a different between not feeling pain because you're unconscious and feeling pain for an infinitesimal period because you're unable to remember the prior period's experience.
I’ve had a similar theory. I say that we perceive the world (or time) as if looking behind through the rear window of a forward moving car. We can only see past events.
- software is all about adding numbers, new study finds
- software is all about calling functions, says new theory
- software is all about objects, say scientists
- software is all about virtual machines, according to new discovery
It has analogies the the field of "explainable AI" too, where systems take decisions neural networks make, probe the boundaries of them and attempt to present them in ways we can understand.
It strikes me as plausible that what we call consciousnesses (as well as "intelligence") arise from the information compression process this explanation requires.
Is it really live though? There are multiple buffers and busses that the images have traveled through, sometimes even staying in one place for many milliseconds, as some resource lock is being acquired. Despite all this, would you say that the monitor is displaying stored data? Technically yes, but for all practical purposes no.
I always figured that was a result of memory not forming… so we just forgot all that stuff. But the idea that we are actually ‘unconcious’ during that time is an interesting alternative hypothesis.
And not even a memory of light directly, but rather a representation of the sensory input that is triggered by photons.
In parallel, we (or, more accurately, those who study it) also have intellectual representations of photons, somewhat divorced from the physical experience.
This is vital from a survival standpoint because 0.2 seconds of ping between seeing and hearing without your brain telling you they happened simultaneously would be debilitating.
The same thing happens with the sensation of "flavour" (smell + taste).
I'm always surprised this is introduced as news.
It seems to me that since the first half of the 20th century, there has been a continuous stream of evidence that the consciousness is, at best, a first class citizen but certainly not the main driver anymore.
- This moment is only a memory, for me and others, try to make it one worth remembering.
- No one can change me except for myself.
- Do whatever you want, as long as you're willing to pay the price and accept the consequences.
It's funny to see the first rule is quite literal.
One thing in particular from the article that I found especially objectionable:
> For now, the theory is just that—a theory.
This is a conjecture. I expect better from science journalism.
What are consequences of this new knowledge?
I'm not really sure from the article what they mean by memory. To take a computer analogy, I doubt all my experience is being constantly written to the hard drive, but it will be in RAM.
So to the extent that my experience temporarily exists and persists in working "memory", then sure... But how could it be otherwise?
Can't one also be conscious of things that have not happened or that may happen in the future, i.e. things that you have not already experienced?
You can have made a forecast based on an experience you already have and have developed a belief you are conscious of something future.
You can fall a victim of perceptual illusion - perceived time delay between 2 events can easily be influenced, even made negative.
But this is my point. In regards to conscienceness; we have no "matter" to point to - unlike something like memory, sensory input, etc.
EDIT: I guess the entire organ you could point to in this case. :)
All this happened before only if you remember it.
But the philosophers don't have a ton to do without more experiments from neuroscience, and neuroscience is doing the best it can with currently available technology.
Studying the brain is really friggin' hard. I don't know where exactly you think the low-hanging fruit is, but trying to measure a brain operating at a neural level without killing it is pretty limited by our current tech.
Consciousness is an emergent property of nervous systems.
There was an interesting article on HN a while ago about memory and its relationship to the aggregate electrical field generated by our neurons - https://picower.mit.edu/news/neurons-are-fickle-electric-fie...
Which I suppose, if people are looking for a singular "entity" to ascribe consciousness to, then something like an emergent electrical field might be a good candidate?
If the brain is just processing things in complete chaos an animal would be completely useless, but with a part/thread dedicated to processing inputs and checking memory I think it is very obvious this function of consciousness would emerge through natural evolution.
Actually another comment points out something interesting, when we get black-out drunk we are basically in this zombie-state. We can talk and hit our head and physically our brain still reacts, but it was like we aren't actually there and our body is just on autopilot mode.
It's a processing loop that helps with executive function, self-reflection etc. which I think lots of animals have some basic version of.
Again we are searching for something more that doesn’t need to be there.
Of course, articulating what the subjective experience being referred to is another problems on its own. All of your comment can exist independent of that perception that's being described. There's no reason for us to have a centralized feeling of it all happening, and the fact that it can be turned off temporarily while the rest mainly still functions is actually mild evidence against the idea that they're one and the same
Itself, it cannot be objectified and understood thus.
There is a way of “knowing” it (Enlightenment) but this does not occur in the subject-object mode and thus this knowledge is not transferrable through language or symbols.
http://www.doiserbia.nb.rs/img/doi/0353-5738/2004/0353-57380...
Whatever the true genealogy of the ideas, I think there is a considerable convergence of thought in trying to solve the same problems.
When I'm reading, my eyes movement scanning the page must be in sync with my perception and reading or the words. I'm not reading words that my eyes scanned half a second ago. Otherwise I'd be "reading" the last word of a line when my eyes are already at the start of the next line?
To take another example, when I'm cooking, my hands movement are certainly in real-time sync with what is happening at that very moment in the real world, otherwise I'd have few remaining fingers after cutting a few vegetables.
I'm no claiming that perception is instantaneous, but clearly we do many activities successfully that implicitly require perceptions to be near real-time.
If the theory is correct but the timing difference is small enough that these objection go away, then I feel the theory is just a change of nomenclature. What they call memory is just the perception delay.
> Rather than perceiving the world in real time, we’re actually experiencing a memory of that perception.
So yeah, the "perception" is a memory, and the processing happens in near real-time.
This also seems to tie well with the research on visual perception that states that much of what we "see" is a projection of the brain based on things we have seen in the past (like how you see a face when you look at a power outlet.)
I am not at all even a hobbyist on this topic though.
Consciousness is the experience of your eyes being in sync with the reading.
> my hands movement are certainly in real-time sync with what is happening at that very moment in the real world, otherwise I'd have few remaining fingers after cutting a few vegetables.
That is what happened. It just happened in the past relative to when you're experiencing it.
How do you talk to people then? I think all those things happened when they did. But the thing inside your brain that plays back the sound and the sensations of making decisions, those emotional things, is delayed.
You won’t get to replay your recollections in time, so depending on what the delay is, you might (from your perspective) just suddenly plop out of existence when crossing a street.
I guess it doesn’t really matter, but it’s interesting to think about.
Have you ever used a password or PIN for so long that you consciously forget it? You can only remember it with your hands?
Likewise, have you ever driven home accidentally, lost in thought, when you intended to travel somewhere else?
It makes sense that what we see is a memory, as how else could we transfer not just the visual, but smells, feelings, etc... into our long term memory. Efficiency
How would you know? If you experience everything half a second after it actually happens that’ll feel like it happening instantly to you.
Coordination would require instant perception, but your memory/recollection of the action/vision could happen any time after.
I guess this theory is a variation of the ‘your life is predetermined’ thing.
Further, the reality you perceive is not True reality, your brain is encoding the information it receives and shows you an evolutionarily successful version of reality.
You can only perceive your surroundings by creating a mental representation of it in your brain. Part of that mechanism involves memory.