Helen Keller on her life before self-consciousness (1908)
scentofdawn.blogspot.com
scentofdawn.blogspot.com
I had been having complex thoughts for years at that point so it was a bit embarrassing.
Edit: I’ll clarify that in some rare instances, reform Jewish centered programs have Hebrew school on Saturday, though it’s much more rare.
Much like when you refer to a doctor as "doc", or a professor as "professor".
To prove the point, there are people who have more than one person in their lives whom they call "Dad" or whatever variation. Raised by a gay couple, or close enough to a stepfather to think of him in those terms. Most of us only have one "Dad", but this isn't universal, and we all know that everyone has one, whether they refer to him that way, or even know him at all.
Cause I'm Italian and we have a ton of those but they have nothing to do with the Italian Sign Language (LIS).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79Y2a8WZDOo&t=30
It doesn't seem significantly different from other sign languages to me but I'm not fluent in any of them so YMMV. Sign languages always feel a bit "big and urgent" to me.
Or it's something about Italians. I don't speak a word of Italian but I'm fluent in French so whenever I'm in Italy (that is, often) I basically try to speak French with an Italian accent. The vocabulary is almost identical, the grammar is very different, but I have never failed to put my point across. See, communication is a two-way street and Italians seem to be culturally trained to try and meet the other person halfway, and not leave anything to chance. Like "You have to understand what I'm saying (gesticulates wildly for emphasis)". Greeks are a bit like that also, but we have fewer common roots with other European languages than Italians so it's harder to just guess what the other person is trying to say. My experience with Northern and Western Europeans is very different. If I don't speak with a perfect French accent and grammar, for example, I get odd looks and questions for clarification. The British just sit and wait until you've said things exactly the way they expect them. Germans I think don't even try (I'm less experienced with Germans).
Bit of a thread hijack I guess, but I really do wonder where all this comes from. I don't believe in races, but there sure seems to be some kind of cultural influence because there is a pattern and it is impossible not to notice it. Some cultures are just better trained in at least some kinds of communication.
You're expected to say "does that make sense?" (or "you know (what I mean)?", "(do) you get what I'm saying?", etc) once you've finished speaking, if your meaning isn't immediately clear. Up until that point, you're being given time to get your thoughts in order (and for the listener to work out your meaning: you'll usually be stopped once you've successfully conveyed the same thing three times in a row). But your summary isn't inaccurate.
A demo is a demo.
I wonder if there are many commonalities between the informal gestures used in Italy and Brazil.
One gesture I know of which existed in Brazil and Italy is the "fig" sign[0]. AFAICT nobody uses it anymore in Italy, but it goes back to the Etruscans!
Some years ago I came across a nice book (pdf) by some academic cataloguing a bunch of gestures across cultures, but I am failing to find it again ATM :(
He claims that literacy is nearly a prerequisite for things like zeroth-order logical reasoning and understanding of abstract shapes. Two examples he gives:
- Some illiterate people are told that all bears in the north are white, that Greenland is a country in the north, then they are asked what colours bears in Greenland have. They answer, "Different regions have differently coloured bears. I haven't been to Greenland. But I have seen a brown bear."
I would have said, "Based on the information you gave me, I would guess white."
- When shown a rectangle and asked what shape it is some illiterate answer things like "a door" or "a playing card" but struggle to find things doors and playing cards have in common.
I go to the abstract shapes immediately when I'm shown drawings by my son. It's almost at a point where it feels like my logical/abstract reasoning stands in the way of creativity.
----
But I don't know how much this is personality (I happen to have a knack for logical/abstract reasoning and I happened to learn to read when I was very young) and how much is an effect of reading. After all, anthropologists are great at the concrete rather than abstract, but maybe they get lots of training in it. I've also heard the Japanese are better at it.
TFA clearly postulates it has more to do with the kind of vocabulary, or maybe it's on an increasing scale with more language.
The hen and the egg problem is obvious here, of course. Does writing lead to logic, or does an emphasis on logic necessitate learning writing? I don't know how this is controlled in the studies Gleick refers to.
Children are literally taught "this is a triangle, here is an object shaped like a triangle, can you see anything else in this room/picture that's shaped like a triangle" (along with squares, circles, etc) and it will initially take them a while to recognize objects having that shape, even when it seems "obvious" to adults. This makes sense given that "things shaped like a triangle" is not a useful category during childhood development otherwise and instead mostly useful as a cultural aid (i.e. something you can reference in communication with others and establishing a basis for discussion of more complex shapes like pyramids).
Just like "basic" shapes, "logic" is something that's mostly useful on a cultural level even if most people are likely not explicitly taught the basics of formal logic at an early age.
To go back to the example: if you tell me all bears in the north are white and Greenland is in the north but I've never been to Greenland and all bears I've seen are brown, it's still a good heuristic to assume that bears in Greenland are brown because I don't know if what you're saying is true on a literal level. Maybe Greenland is not as far up north as the place where bears are white or maybe you just saw a white bear (or another white animal you mistook for a bear) in the north and therefore incorrectly assume that must be true for all of them, or you're simply an untrustful and unreliable foreigner who might be lying to me. Real-life conversations don't occur in a cultural vacuum, they're exchanges between individuals with personal histories and relationships.
In other words, while abstract logic is culturally useful (i.e. it is a tool), real-life communication between individuals is not a game of abstract logic. Analysing language purely by its literal content (or "text") ignores subtext, context and meta text, all of which are crucially important. Expecting someone to engage with you on a purely logical plane and to ignore all of that, when they're not accustomed to doing so, seems extraordinarily silly. Given that the bears annecdote according to a sibling comment is nearly a hundred years old, I doubt the outside "researcher" took any of this into consideration.
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/cultures-reason
If you’re actually interested, it’s a little different than what OP was told/remembers and what’s being discussed here.
Rather, IQ tests are our very best tools for measuring intelligence, much more reliable than any other assessment, and most of the criticism of IQ comes from people who don't like the results.
There are no shor
Psychology, a hundred years later is a shoddy science, despite us having learning quite a lot about how to do decent experiments and field surveys. It's very very difficult to tease out replicable effects in human behavior. I would immediately reject any psychology finding from the 1930s, unless it has been replicated more recently.
It's clearly only someone quite far removed from any kind of practical work who could become convinced people who don't immediately answer the expected answer to test questions have no ability to reason.
Circa 1990, good ol' Simon Baron-Cohen observed that autistic children answered certain questions (intended to test empathy) in a consistently unusual way, and he decided that meant autistic people had no theory-of-mind. Never mind that the questions were ambiguous, and the scenarios were underspecified. It wasn't until 2012 that somebody (Damian Milton) managed to get the obvious alternative considered by academia. The "no ToM" theory is still implicitly assumed by some new research papers, despite there being no reason to prefer it over the "double-empathy problem" hypothesis.
That's one theory. Another theory is that it's just Simon Baron-Cohen: pretty much all the autism research he's done, even the biological theories, show the same "experiment does not actually test theory" issue. I'll illustrate what I mean:
⸻ ⁂ ⸻
Autism diagnosis is performed, basically, by going through a questionnaire that asks about social and play behaviour in childhood. Simon Baron-Cohen noticed that most people diagnosed with autism were male, interested in sciencey things like engineering and maths, and behaved weirdly in social situations, so he set out to explain this.
Building on his mind-blindness (lack-of-ToM) theory, which had been confirmed to his satisfaction, he observed that engineering is a "systemising" activity, and social stuff is an "empathising" thing. Obviously, systemising is for boys and empathising is for girls, so autism must be a condition of brains being too male (dubbed the "extreme male brain" theory).
To test this, he (and his colleagues: "Simon Baron-Cohen" is a synecdoche, since this was all a team effort) came up with a questionnaire to measure the Systemising Quotient, and a questionnaire to measure the Empathising Quotient. They found the expected association between EQ, SQ, and the Autism Quotient score from that first questionnaire (AQ), thus proving they were measuring what they thought they were measuring. (Just like IQ!)
While this proves the empathising–systemising theory, it doesn't quite prove the extreme male brain theory. We know that autism is a developmental condition, and we know that testosterone is the boy juice, so the "extreme male brain" theory predicts that when we measure higher-than-average foetal testosterone (FT) levels, we end up with autistic kids, and when we don't, we don't. Several studies that study amniotic fluid (where Simon Baron-Cohen is second-author) show that FT levels are positively correlated with SQ and negatively-correlated with EQ, and that's pretty slam-dunk. We've found the cause of autism! Hooray!
⸻ ⁂ ⸻
From the way I've explained it, it should be obvious where the issues with his research are. And maybe I'm being too harsh on Simon Baron-Cohen: he was on that paper that actually measured foetal oestrogen levels (also found to be elevated: guess it's not "extreme male brain" after all), and while some of his critics had an intuition that something was wrong with his conclusions, I can't find evidence that anyone in academia actually identified the problems with his work – not until the autistic autism researchers came onto the scene.
The fact remains that he got a knighthood out of this, and approximately none of what he's "researched" is correct. (Excluding some lower-profile work, like demographic studies https://doi.org/10.1192/bjp.2022.21 and https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9314022/, for which he was last author. I'm not sure what last author means in this field, but this kind of work is very important.)
The worst thing is, he's a good sport about it when other people falsify, bit-by-bit, his life's work. It seems like he was (and still is) actually trying his best to do science. I don't think we can safely treat Simon Baron-Cohen as a weird outlier: the problem is with psychology-as-practised-in-academia, not with Simon Baron-Cohen.
(We haven't fixed the questionnaires, by the way. We do have questionnaires that work better – some are listed on https://embrace-autism.com/ –, but they aren't used. Instead, there are protocols to try to work around the fact the used questionnaires are asking the wrong questions. https://www.autism.org.uk/advice-and-guidance/what-is-autism... goes into some detail.)
James Flynn[0] also gave a TED talk and mentioned those interviews[1]. Apparently it's based on interviews done by Alexander Luria[2] and he put those in writing in one of his books The Making of Mind: A Personal Account of Soviet Psychology (Chapter 4[3]).
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Flynn_(academic)
[1]: https://youtu.be/9vpqilhW9uI?t=354
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Luria
[3]: https://www.marxists.org/archive/luria/works/1979/mind/ch04....
In other words, a claim like “literacy is a prerequisite for things like logical reasoning” (or complex thought, or consciousness, etc.) may be:
A) true not as a result of an empirical observation, but in a circular way by definition—as a catch-22 where “if you do not think like we do, you may well not think” is trivially correct from most humans’ perspective, because if you do think but really unlike how they think (you are unable to communicate it using the same vocabulary[2] they use) then from their vantage point there may be no clear difference between you thinking in your own way vs. you acting unpredictably—contributing to it being
B) simply not a useful claim to make: as your experience cannot be completely reduced to categories that exactly match those of some random scientist’s, that scientist can mnever fully judge the complexity of your experience or your capability of abstract thought (of course, they could mistakenly assume they can, by simply presuming their way of thinking to be the true reference point, as they are prone to).
[0] That “someone else” can be yourself in the past, e.g. as a small child before social integration, in which “one” could be the current-you.
[1] That deconstruction is lossy. Your experience is changed as a result, possibly lessened for those aspects of yourself that perceive reality as a whole.
[2] Using any vocabulary (including language) requires deconstruction of experience, by definition.
My dad wrote the numbers 1 through 4 on a piece of paper, then asked me to pick one, but not tell him which I'd chosen. Once I had it, he said, "You picked 3, didn't you?" I was dumbfounded. "How did you do that??"
"Most people don't like to be out on the edges. It makes them uncomfortable. So they don't pick 1 or 4. And most people, like you, are right-handed, so they pick 3 over 2."
"OK, OK, do it again." (This was the moment a flash of magic happened in my head.)
"You picked 1 this time, didn't you?"
"No, I picked 3 again because I knew you would think I would pick 1 this time."
With a fear in his eyes that I only later discovered came from the fact that his own sense of safety depended on being the smartest person in the room, he said, "You're only 3. I don't think you're supposed to know how to do that yet."
But here's the other thing--I was literate when I was 3. Nobody really knows how I picked it up, but one day I told my mom it was my turn to read the stories, and I've been reading fluently ever since. I've been told I read differently than most people even now (blocks of text rather than individual letters or words), but I was definitely reading.
I've never associated the two events before, nor that maybe I was only able to do one because of the other, but it makes sense of the fact that other kids didn't really start to seem reasonable or thoughtful until 1st or 2nd grade. They lived in these imaginary worlds where things didn't have to make sense. It seemed like a lot of fun, but I had trouble joining them there. I always assumed both skills just correlated with age, not that one might facilitate the other.
My story obviously doesn't prove anything, but you've given me an interesting thing to think about today!
I suspect there's large individual variation as to when it is acquited. My son is relatively socially competent and intetested in letters and numbers but not yet literate at four.
We'll see how my second child fares -- she is even more socially competent but does not yet speak (first child did her age) so we'll see when it can be done.
For example, she cannot recognize her own anxiety. She is a pathologically anxious person with OCD, but would never describe herself as so. As such, she has never been able to empathize with the fact that both of her children have anxiety disorders and one had severe childhood OCD.
It was not a great way to grow up, although that kind of emotional neglect is what made me a more resilient person in the end...
This is actually a missing education in my opinion.
My grandmother lived between orphanages and an abusive mother who literally beat one of her children retarded with a frying pan.
She was determined to give her children a better life. And she did! She turned to her friends to figure out basic life skills. My mother had an idyllic childhood.
However, my grandma only knew how to survive an abusive childhood. She taught my mother to 'pretend everything is okay' when things were bad, because that's how she survived.
My mother married an angry and cruel man and had children with him - my sister and me. She pretended everything was okay as our father told us we were stupid and worthless, backing up his opinion with violence. Years later, she still doesn't understand why we are distant with her because she still lives in her fantasy world.
Now, imagine taking family away from an entire group of people. All traditions wiped out.
I have mixed feelings on it. It can be great for some people. For me, understanding how I feel and act now as a consequence of my parents actions was not helpful. Taking 2-3 months to get to these points also was not a good use of time.
I am in therapy for 2 years now (and not planning to stop for a while), the results I really enjoy and that are visible from outside and clear conseqences are only starting to crystallize. Imagine “learning C++” in 2 months. And that is purely mental. These emotional skills are not easy at all. This is a whole new “riding a bike”, but on all the million wheels of a real human that is you.
Understanding is not the result. The result is your comfort, your confidence, your loving yourself, you being your own perfect loving parent and close friend.
I guess it was useful to know people are alike enough to be predictable, but I don't think he was trying to teach me that necessarily.
Unfortunately I also have to interpret everything through the lens of, "He's an insecure narcissist, so he might just have been trying to keep me in line by proving he was smarter than me." Things changed a lot after this event. He intensified his efforts to isolate me from other people, even convincing my own mother I was so much smarter than her that she would never understand me. I was a three-year-old child. I don't care how smart you are when you're 3, most of what you need at that point is basic and common among all humans. But this gets back to seeing me as a threat to his own sense of safety, thus trying to make sure I felt small for the rest of my life.
When I began playing chess, he was my opponent for many, many games. Until I won a game at 9 years old, which was the last game we ever played.
I've always been a bad study of people, though. I wish I could have seen through my father the way you seem to have always seen through yours. I was in my 30s by then.
By the time I was 10, basketball, pool, ping pong, darts, air hockey, and foosball were all on the list of things to stop playing as soon as dad started. I can't even relate to how insecure you have to be to beat an 8-year-old girl at "horse" by making shots from far enough away that she can't possibly have the muscle strength to throw that far. I get making your kids earn their wins, but what fun is it when you make it impossible??
Fortunately my mom eventually figured it out and left him, and we've had the chance to build a very strong relationship, so I tend to try to spend my time focused on the things I can do to keep improving that.
I feel like that episode describes most of common education. In theory outstanding excellence is wanted, in reality often not so much, as this causes problems. Better teach them how to stay in line.
School was rough, though not as rough as having a parent who felt threatened by me.
It's downright unbelievable to me that anyone would have this detailed of a memory of when they were three, or that a three year old could detect subtle and repressed jealousy for intelligence -- if such an emotion was expressed and not imagined by the child in the first place -- and additionally the emotion allegedly detected is extremely advanced for a toddler to understand.
Unless the OP is thirteen. That would explain the arrogance and being able to remember being three so well.
He did not claim that. He claimed he interpreted it later like this.
Apart from that, there might be projection, but I know that I have some very clear memories from being 3 as well. Now I obviously do not know, how far my memory matches reality. But I would not just dismiss the story. Many people are insecure about their intelligence. And when there is an actual intelligent beeing - the common reaction of the crowd is not cheering, when the smart person is so stupid to show he is smarter than the crowd.
I was an unusual little kid--and a girl, not a boy, though that's not terribly relevant to the story. Not really sure what else to tell you. I don't think I progressed intellectually any farther than most people do, but I did progress faster, which was especially noticeable when I was young. I have the handwritten list my mom made of the 100 words I could use correctly by my first birthday. My earliest vivid memory is of my 2nd birthday party. For all I know, I may also have been very close to turning 4 at the time this story took place, but I know my being 3 contributed to his unease, and I know I was reading at 3. It's not a brag. Being an unusual little kid (honestly I usually just say "weird") just added another perspective to the parent comment.
Sorry about that, I usually write "he or she" in my comment, but thought I read something about boy above, apparently not.
The person you're responding to here was clearly emotionally triggered by your anecdote. I wouldn't spend too much time trying "convince" them that what you wrote is true.
We know there are kids who earn graduate degrees in their early teens. Why is it implausible that the occasional 3yo could have thought about picking 1, but then suddenly had a flash of, "No wait! That's exactly what he will expect! He'll never expect me to pick 3 again!" and remember it?
It was extremely jarring to have a small child in a booster seat converse with me as if she was 16. Her mother laughed at me: "Oh yeah. She's very advanced for her age."
I've heard stories of 3 year olds who speak 5 languages. Even writing this it makes me recall children who can write / play symphonies.
The "3 year olds aren't smart" thinking is quite limiting.
It's so tempting to treat kids who are precocious on one front as though they're older than they are, and expect them to do things like recognize dangers, or navigate social situations, or even know how to manage their own limits, but they're still also really little kids who need the adults in their lives to love them and care for them!
I have several children, and great relationships with all of them. A couple are definitely smarter than me, and I’m on roughly equal footing with the others. That said, 3 year old children are simply not capable of the complex thought and emotions described here.
My first memory starts when I was 3 and a half. I know people whose memories start much, much earlier.
It's amazing how much growing up with a parent like that can mess you up. I actually thought I had undiagnosed high-functioning autism for awhile, because I thought I was terrible at reading social cues, and was so easily and frequently overstimulated. It took some serious therapy to discover, no, I'm fine at reading nonverbal and social cues. I just spent the entirety of my formative years being gaslit at every turn about what my dad's expressions meant, so learned I couldn't trust myself. And I'm much more highly attuned to my surroundings because I spent the entirety of my formative years knowing threats loomed around every corner, because ANY wrong thing could set dad off. It was trauma, nit autism. My parasympathetic nervous system never learned to come online and down-regulate, because the threat was never over. My body and brain developed in the constant presence of cortisol and adrenaline. That does make it so I'm easily overstimulated.
One of the things I'm working on is cultivating gratitude even for the worst things in my life, in light of the goodness in it now. I wouldn't be the same me were it not for those things, and if I'm grateful for who I am now, I can't really pick and choose which parts of that history I'm grateful for. I don't really like that it's all-or-nothing, that I can't be completely grateful for the present if I still reject my past, but it's working a lot better than anything else has. I do not and will never condone many of the things in my past, but being grateful for all the parts has been part of my journey to gratitude for the whole.
Your work on gratitude mirrors my experience as besides that and some psychedelic experiences to help process from a less traumatic dissociative state were some of the big keys for me helping to process the grief and anxiety coming from those experiences. I wish you the best! Breaking a trauma cycle is beyond difficult and tiring.
The brain is so interesting at what point certain pathways activate. The blocks/shapes of text piece is especially similar to my experience.
The way I read is a lot like certain old speed reading trainers used to teach, where I'm able to pick up the meaning of the whole sentence or several lines without stopping on each word separately. That's what I meant by "blocks," like several lines of a page at once.
I can read the one-word-at-a-time way. I have to if I'm reading out loud, for example, and sometimes for very dense text, it's worth it to slow down that far like I might if I were asking someone to explain something slowly if it were difficult to process.
Is any of that like your experience?
Orthogonally I have excellent memory and pattern recognition for numbers so it's a fun mystery. Vision itself is such an interesting sense and it's super interesting how languages can feedback into the perception mechanisms.
How did you find out you were dyslexic, and how does it affect your perception of letters or numbers? I know very little about dyslexia, but it's certainly interesting that the only other person I've encountered who reads like I do has it!
I didn't realize I was dyslexic until about 15 years ago (post college) due to my girlfriend at the time suggesting I get tested as I just assumed this was an area I was "stupid". This gets back into the upbringing where I was fostering interpersonal behaviors as weaknesses or personal failures due to my relationship with my father.
Besides routinely reciting the alphabet forward and backward (I didn't know being able to recite the alphabet backward was unusual until I was in high school!), we would also do a phonetic version that sounded something like, "A, ah. B, buh. C, kuh. D, duh. E, eh," making a sound for every letter.
I don't know if it helped the kids who didn't already know how to read, but those were some of the peak years for phonics instruction in primary schools, so I guess at least someone thought it was working!
Sesame Street also had this song where they would pronounce the whole alphabet as though it were one really long word, like, "Ab-keh-def-ghee-jeckel-menop-qwur-stu-vwix-is." That one always made me laugh, but I got good practice out of it!
I was mildly afraid that you were going to describe something that would make me go, "Wait--am I dyslexic?" but no, I don't experience spelling that way. Most words exist in my head in both written and spoken form inseparably. It's very rare that I mix up homophones when I'm writing, for example, because I'm not trying to put the sound of a word into letters or match letters to the sound if the word. The letters and the sounds are inextricably linked in each specific meaning unit.
My son did the same thing at 3. I tested whether he was really reading by turning the pages wrong, and he recited the story just like we read it every night... not reading the actual pages in front of him. He really thought he could read, but he had just memorized. And he did read quickly after that, but when recalling your own memory of reality from toddlerhood, odds are your memories are not accurate.
I'd be wary about how much of your ego you base on such memories, otherwise you sound similar to how you described your dad - as having a need to be smart.
However the article comments I enjoy the most are always these threads regarding sociology or psychology. I don't know other places where readers can psychoanalyze each other respectfully. Kudos.
It's not common for 3-year-olds to be able to read, but it's also not so rare that you'd find someone on a site like HN that could do it.
I related the story because I thought my experience might offer an uncommon perspective on the parent comment. That's all.
Even granting the likelihood that you didn't see my comments elsewhere in the thread about how he was an abusive narcissist, warning me about becoming like the unnecessarily insecure guy in the story seems like an oddly low blow to try to strike in this context.
If you can not read or write, then you do have to find other outlets for your energy. Music plays a bigger role in the lives of illiterates I found. I would say on the whole they would seem more extroverted and social, too.
I wonder how much the answer would change if you simply said "if all bears in the north..." It's probably not obvious to everyone whether you're setting up a hypothetical or asking a literal question with a false or vague premise (Grizzlies range as far north as the nothern coast of Alaska).
And written language is harder to learn exactly because they can't pronounce words
>However that may be, I came later to look for an image of my emotions and sensations in others. I had to learn the outward signs of inward feelings. The start of fear, the suppressed, controlled tensity of pain, the beat of happy muscles in others, had to be perceived and compared with my own experiences before I could trace them back to the intangible soul of another. Groping, uncertain, I at last found my identity, and after seeing my thoughts and feelings repeated in others, I gradually constructed my world of men and of God. As I read and study, I find that this is what the rest of the race has done. Man looks within himself and in time finds the measure and the meaning of the universe.
What poetry!
Andy Weir in Project Hail Mary and Adrian Tchaikovsky in Children of [Time|Ruin|Memory] do a great job of describing what other forms of consciousness might be like, but still falls flat, I only really think in sight and sound.
What is it like to be a bat? I'll never know.
That said, your analogy may well be perfect, as they are learning to people-please and to simulate things they (hopefully) don't actually experience.
(Not that it changes your point, but isn't that Machiavellian rather than psychopathic?)
[0] one of many reasons why I disagree with Wittgenstein about:
> If there were a verb meaning 'to believe falsely', it would not have any significant first person, present indicative.
Just because it's logically correct, doesn't mean humans think like that.
If that's the function which we can now automate at scale, it's not the jobs the machines will ultimately take; it's the leadership.
which then begs the the question, what is the magic ingredient, on top of use of language, that we have that bestows these qualities?
and also the observation that whatever this ingredient is, it must be very difficult to measure or prove which is maybe why we stuck with the crude, but easy to wield, "use-of-language" test for so long.
Secondly, and more importantly, while some thoughts may not have a language (image memories, mental maps), others certainly do, they're narrative. I only speak two languages but well enough (English is my second language) that I can think in both, and often come to a point where I have to decide which it will be for this train of thought.
Shape rotators vs wordcels distinction strikes again, I guess.
We all use very varied modalities of thought! It's as rich as how different we look or how different we cook.
I don't think people who aren't hard of hearing necessarily have particularly deep or clear thoughts simply because they listen to music with their ears either. It's very easy to confuse correlation with causation.
(I've specified "with their ears" because deaf people can perceive music through other means than the cochlea + cochlear nerve.)
Here's a link to a transcript of a lecture with some very interesting examples: https://irl.umsl.edu/oer/13/
A quote as a sample: So let me tell you about some of my favorite examples. I'll start with an example from an Aboriginal community in Australia that I had the chance to work with. These are the Kuuk Thaayorre people. They live in Pormpuraaw at the very west edge of Cape York. What's cool about Kuuk Thaayorre is, in Kuuk Thaayorre, they don't use words like "left" and "right," and instead, everything is in cardinal directions: north, south, east and west. And when I say everything, I really mean everything. You would say something like, "Oh, there's an ant on your southwest leg." Or, "Move your cup to the north-northeast a little bit." In fact, the way that you say "hello" in Kuuk Thaayorre is you say, "Which way are you going?" And the answer should be, "North-northeast in the far distance. How about you?"
Some people were very good at it, others horrible.
One revealed the method they were using - they didn't count audibly, they visualized a ticker tape moving across their vision with numbers increasing. Or say a rotating scale with the numbers rotating. This let them read or internal monologue as the senses are now separate.
I tried to practice for a bit, still impossible to do without thinking about it. Kind of like how people default to counting money in their native way.
On another tangent, I've been trying Ritalin after speaking to a doctor. The first thing I noticed when I took it was that it became very difficult to hold multiple trains of thought at the same time. My typical routine (coping mechanism) was to work and have YouTube playing and a little attention on each, because this stopped me getting bored. But it wasn't long before I realised I simply could not hear the videos. It was a strange feeling but nice. A little similar to what you describe in how abilities vary.
I pretty much can only pay attention to one thing at a time. I've tried to watch movies or YouTube while coding or other things on my PC but I end up realizing I wasn't paying attention at all so now I don't even try.
I'm the other way. I can ignore people talking, but when a coworker has the radio on and the spoken words are faint enough or muddled enough that they're hard to make out, I lose focus on what I'm trying to do because the 'listen to words' part of my brain is trying really hard to figure out what's being said, and pulls in extra brainpower to do it.
That was from Richard Feynman.
Apologies to any if I butchered the story or experiment, been awhile.
I try this ever so often and can’t get a hold of it. It feels like I know what the final sentence will be, like it’s shape, in a way, before my narrator has read it, but he needs to read it for the meaning to materialise, to commit to my reasoning state. Every time I think just how much faster I would be thinking if I could get rid of the monologue somehow.
And then I notice that thinking happens very fast, and that the perceived speaking speed of the narrator probably doesn’t correlate with the time it would take me to actually spell things out loud, my brain only pretends it’s way slower than the actual thought process.
I don't think that language is slowing me down. I actually think that my brain is full of shit and needs to run thoughts through checkers (lint, syntax, logic, fact). I think it makes the language center of our brains all the more magical. As you say, it all happens so fast, and yet it assembles and sanity-checks those raw thoughts as you crystalise them into words.
How many times have I started explaining something, only to realise midway through that I'm taking crap, or that I'm extremely fuzzy on some important detail. Or maybe I infer some important new fact or make some new connection for the first time, while talking about it?
Dogs have thoughts... but we can speak. And every time there's been an innovation in the storage, retrieval or communication of language (not raw thoughts), we've had a gigantic evolutionary leap forward. Isaac Newton was a genius. But when he took up the challenge of explaining the motion of the planets, I bet that not even he knew what he was going to end up with at the end, and I bet that he realised, discovered or rained out a whole bunch of things in the writing of it.
Something else I've wondered. How come my brain holds a million different facts, records of! historical interactions with others, and a pretty decent track of time (like, I know the time, day, month and year and what I did-or-didn't do yesterday), but my dreams are total gibberish? Like I was in a hotel lobby last night with a bunch of people I don't know, realised I'm wasn't wearing any pants, then paniced because my phone was in my pants, how would I call my wife? So I turn to my (deceased) sister and asked which room I'm staying in... If my brain is so good, how come it does crap like that when the conscious bit is switched off?
I would never assume that the data inside my brain, or the subconscious babble that counts for thought, adds up to a genius that is hindered by some clunky language. Very much the opposite.
Side note: all of this is the basis for my extremely strong view that freedom of speech is an absolute necessity for continued prosperity, science, democracy etc. If people are unable to turn their ideas into concrete language, and to do this together as a group, without fear, then they are unable to reason things out properly and make good decisions. I only feel like adding that because within my lifetime I have seen an erosion of the importance of that freedom, to the point where it's no longer possible to discuss mundane, everyday things, or to point out some obvious truth.
A fun tangent :)
I think "freedom of speech" is perhaps the wrong place to describe the line: if everyone used words to try to learn about the world, to test their models against reality, this would be flawless.
But that does not fully describe us: we are social creatures, we use language not only to scout, but to fight; and freedom of speech also means freedom for rhetoric. It's cliché to criticise ethos these days, to say that arguments don't depend on the qualifications of one making them. Logos is the one I think you're interested in, based on what you wrote here. Pathos is the one I fear, because I know it works and it makes people believe falsely.
Still, I don't know how to actually get to just "freedom of logos". Some pathos may be necessary to avoid accidentally prohibiting some logos. Some pathos may be simply unavoidable, as the reason to care in the first place (see explanations of why "straw Vulcans" are made of straw: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StrawVulcan).
Highly dimensional problems can only be solved through dimensionality reduction, you extract some key features that encompass the problem, get something that at least partially works, and eventually get to the actual solution, even for problems that would be too complex and multifaceted to approach analytically.
> within my lifetime I have seen an erosion of the importance of that freedom
That's the first thing that sprung to my mind.
Then you have the whole trend on various platforms with terms like "unalive" as a replacement for kill/suicide, or censoring words like "r*pe" or (even worse to me) "grape". Some of this is to dodge the algorithms too, but I've seen it said it's to also avoid triggers - which seems to defeat the purpose, it makes it hard to filter and eventually people learn and they become triggers anyway.
So I do see a definite chilling effect on discourse based on community standards and algorithms, even if it's not Government lead. There are two subs for my country on Reddit I check occasionally, one is heavily moderated and very predictable in how a comment will be received, while I feel the other has a more honest reflection of the widespread population. I don't particularly like the racists that share their thoughts, but on the balance of things I'm not sure it's best to lock them out completely. Twenty years ago the internet was less sanitised, but it also felt less hostile on a personal level, and more honest overall. Talking to discuss, not to score points.
It's been a few days but I was thinking about this, and really - are we sure?
Deja vu exists, and as I understand is a bit of a processing issue where something we only just did seems to have happened a little while ago. As I understand it, our brain is in the habit of rewriting timelines a bit to have things make sense, and this could be another case of that.
Sometimes it's a keyword/concept thing where I'll think of the main items and I get a feeling that I know how to fill in the blanks. I haven't actually visualized or verbalized what would fill those blanks though (and sometimes the feeling is wrong).
I think pretty much all of the senses can be used to do some form of thinking. I can imagine songs in my head, touch, feelings etc. Rarely are they useful for problem solving though, but some of these are nice for falling asleep in unknown environments.
Oh and then there's the thinking where nothing seems to happen. I stare at a piece of paper and after a while I know what to do next. How did I arrive at that conclusion? I don't know, but it definitely wasn't verbal, visual, aural or anything else. This tends to not solve complex problems like math, but it basically tells me what I should do to try to solve it (usually verbal or visual).
Hurlburt has great research on this using Descriptive Experience Sampling.
Some people mainly use images, others mainly speech, others mainly emotion etc. And many more use a varied mix.
Also the way each modality of thought is used is hugely variable - exactly what people see and with what quality or how precisely they feel emotional in their body etc.
To me it explains a huge amount of how different people are good at different skills.
I've a podcast on this topic ("Imagine an apple") if you're interested in more.
Let me ask, when you decide what to eat for dinner, how do you arrive at the answer? I visualize what's in the fridge, what I can cook with the ingredients. Or if I want to eat out I visualize our neighborhood like Google Maps and look around at the different options.
When I'm solving an algorithmic problem I visualize the data, spatially if possible otherwise just as text, lists or vectors. It's like I'm using a notebook but it's faster and a bit more fuzzy.
(All those scare quotes because this is not at all literal, just how it feels from the inside).
Interestingly, when I'm in this state (the thought has to already exist) I can let my fingers type it out for me while I'm paying attention to something else entirely — but I can't simultaneously read while listening to someone talk.
"The idea of linguistic relativity, known also as the Whorf hypothesis, the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis (/səˌpɪər ˈhwɔːrf/ sə-PEER WHORF), or Whorfianism, is a principle suggesting that the structure of a language influences its speakers' worldview or cognition, and thus individuals' languages determine or influence their perceptions of the world."
This makes so much sense… I always find it interesting that I think of “me” as being mostly my head, and I figure that is probably because that is where my eyes and ears are.
If I didn’t see or hear, it makes sense that my fingers would be what I think of as me.
The gut is a good contender for other locations of "me". It's where we feel a lot of our feelings.
I know the saying "gut feeling", but I thought it was just a saying.
In my culture we are often not taught to pay attention to our feelings (especially men, I suppose) so it's easy to miss these cues. I certainly didn't notice until I had some training in it.
It is easily the most adult-preparing course I have ever taken, but I really stumbled into it as part of something else and I wouldn't even know how to point other people in the right direction since I was not the one organising the whole thing.
But specifically with respect to the gut, the gut has a huge number of nerve cells that act like reward neurons, can directly trigger changes to hormone levels, and has a very substantial direct connection to the brain (the vagus nerve), so it's reasonable to say that we do genuinely have "gut feelings".
https://www.science.org/content/article/your-gut-directly-co...
https://neuroscience.stanford.edu/news/your-gut-second-brain
I wonder then if Helen’s experience is because her recognition of the moment of self consciousness came later than most children?
Many years ago I had the random opportunity to do DMT and took it. Whilst I’d never do it again, the experience was without doubt, one of the most profound experiences of my life. It is often described as an ego stripper. The feeling of returning to self consciousness remains with me to this day almost 30 years after that experience. If you’ve ever watched an old Linux machine boot up, and have the kernel load, watch a credit to Swansea University flick past, before finally being “ready”, you’ll have some semblance of what being born and coming conscious of oneself, and in the case of DMT, reloading the memory into the hot cache. It takes a while to get back to the “I”, and those moments in between are both terrifying and simultaneously freeing and beautiful. Since you’ve previously just suffered from a brain crash and reboot, it’s no wonder.
And I definitely have complex memories from around 5-6 years old, which do qualify as "gaining self consciousness". Of course I can't pinpoint exactly when that was, but it's a significant memory I have... the exact moment when I realized these things.
Must be variable per person
The biggest thing for Heller I guess was that she could all of a sudden perceive, and not only perceive but also understand language. So I'm wondering what would be the equivalent big leap between my current consciousness and the consciousness I cannot yet imagine? What would be the equivalent of "discovery of language" in that scenario? I'm just wondering I don't think we can have the answer before we get there.
The “higher consciousness” that we experience thanks to language is probably similar to how—for example—autistic savants can perform astonishing feats of mental math. You’re probably better off trying to understand their thought process and replicate it in a more neurotypical brain than you are trying to figure out how to think in terms of non-linear time in a linear-time reality.
To some extent, this is already the experience of the internet, and of language and culture in general. We already operate at levels of empathy and understanding of possibilities at scales people even 50 years ago didn't come close to. We build many abstraction tools to try and distill these experiences down to wikipedias, reviews, analyses, podcasts. We distill even those too - with a constant meta-cultural debate on what's important, what's cool, what's political, what fits our personal identities, and what our interests and purposes are within the space of potential understanding.
We live in the space of the abstract. We build virtual worlds, games, movies, economies in the abstract. We anticipate a future where the abstract becomes even more tangible, yet also more diverse and ephemeral. We are a flowering seed on the stalk of human consciousness up to this point - just how every generation has been to the ones before it - changing each time.
While this can still all reduce to "language" - the tool used between each generation, and which Keller used to awaken to the living culture of her moment in time - it's not just language anymore. There are more mediums now. A complex story can be told with merely tacit interactions, exploring a virtual physical space with no dialogue. Practical abstractions of these spaces make operating systems. Language and abstract consciousness are embedded into new environments both virtual and real, instilling new tones of consciousness in everyone who interacts with them - just look at your phone use behavior for proof. We are learning how to shape our minds by shaping our spaces. We are learning to control the entire breadth of our experienced reality at once, so we can control ourselves (and each other).
Our limited bandwidths enforce that experiencing these perpetually crafted realities, stories, recorded experiences, journeys - be done one at a time, lest we lose parts of the whole in the abstracted summary. And so we practice witnessing a mix of short abstractions and deep dives, making the most of a variety of experiences, all while balancing a real life and profession. We maintain that bridge between the grounded experience of the now and the abstraction of the digested analyzed fiction of everything else. The limits of the human perception seem to prohibit us from anything else.
But are those limits permanent? Are we forever to experience time in such limited balanced uniform slices? Will we never manage to connect our brains to these machines which experience time so much faster, and less linearly? What would we be if we could experience all these worlds, not through merely abstracted stories and reviews, but through a direct walk - as if we were the eyes of every other person out there, in every second of experience?
Before we get to answer those questions for ourselves - and I don't think they're forever insurmountable technological challenges - it seems likely a new species of intelligence, raised from the start to think exactly like that, is being spawned in AIs. We will see how it communicates the experience back to our lower dimensional slices of experience.
She finally had acquired a tool most of us take for granted--and many of us still struggle to use, preferring to live in that instinctive animalistic ever-reductive singularity of "the present"--and it brought her up to the level of others who grew up with language.
It's unlikely that there's some mysterious level of self-awareness beyond that, because that's kind of what we're wired for.
Here's a nice book that covers related topics, not sure if it is correct everywhere but it is discussion:
https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780936756363/the-ecstasy-of-commun...
Only to a fairly limited extent. For example, there is some evidence that senses like colour and direction have a connection to language, but it's difficult to isolate this effect and say that language is causing the different senses. In other words, is language giving people a better sense of direction? Or is it that people who use their sense of direction a lot develop specialised language for that? This sort of concept is called linguistic relativism, and there's some evidence for it, but it's difficult to quantify or generalise too much.
What there is no evidence for is linguistic determinism, the idea that your language determined how you think and what you are able to think of. For example, your case of the empty bush: yes the people in question may not specifically use the word zero, but they understand what an empty bush is. In research, experiments with people who have no words for numbers showed that they could understand precise numerical quantities, albeit only to a limited extent because they hadn't learned the skill of maths. In other words, it wasn't language limiting them (otherwise they wouldn't be able to understand numbers at all), but having never learned how numbers work, they had never developed the relevant parts of their language.
I think in English so I think language is a vital part of how I think. Sometimes I think in my native language too. But always in a language. Or at least that is what I call "thinking". I can also visualize images in my head but they too are typically accompanied by some language like "I am now visualizing a Hot Dog".
I can certainly have thoughts not accompanied by a language, for example visualizing graph-like or higher-dimensional operations from math/CS more quickly than I could come up with their description. Or "simulating" physical objects, or even whole visual scenarios resembling real life.
But it makes me wonder whether it once again isn't about training or being "wired" for different types of thought. And if it's training, then specific language features may as well force people to exercise and improve specific ways of thinking about problems. It's just that it doesn't have to be limited to language.
A profound change for me is seeing all communication and behavior of others as primarily a gradual revelation of other’s perspectives, and the logics (how they understand things) behind those perspectives - putting any judgements on their behaviors, or any ability to persuade, in a very back seat.
The actionable mirror of this perceptive stance is to avoid and distrust the efficacy of bridging differences with persuasion.
And also, to accumulate (instead of dismissing) all the alternative perspectives I can. Unanticipated combinations of others perspectives have changed my mind, long after acquiring them.
Instead of persuasion, take the half step of explaining the logic behind your perspectives, and understanding theirs. Without expecting adoption, or “belief” changes for either side.
Trusting others to change their own minds, in time or not at all, and visibly leaving the door open for one’s own evolution, is a very respectful stance.
In my experience, people feel a slow attraction to accepting and believing what they understand, in the absence of any coercive context.
But even when they don’t, they are more tolerant and less fearful of alternate perspectives when they can see the logic behind them. And feel like their own perspective’s logic is acknowledged.
Often common values behind seemingly antithetical perspectives are revealed that way. And greater willingness to collaborate toward values while appreciating continued bifurcated perspectives.
We all tend to judge behavior we don’t understand very harshly. Morally and intellectually. We judge the people who behave inexplicably harshly.
But persuasion tries too much. Two steps instead of one. It often creates tension and triggers rejections that explanations without proscription do not.
I don’t know how well this comes across, but it’s helped me as a teacher (not one by career) and to deal with difficult and ideological people much more effectively.
It is the lens I now see all social movement, in the small and large.
It is a dramatic change. I have made friends whose values I have completely challenged, and continue to do, who appreciate I understand their perspectives too.
And that our back and forth is an enjoyable and enlightening collaborative conversation, for both of us, not a fight. Each moment I understand them better, is a win for both of us. And for constructive engagement.
Probably not communicating this well. But if not parsing reality - and how all our brains actually choose what to believe, what choices to make - isn’t a higher level of consciousness, I don’t know what is.
Seperate perspective logic from beliefs, and process people’s values and actions with less judgement and more nuanced clarity of how they (we all) really operate.
TLDR; You don’t have to change your mind, or change other people’s minds to help them understand a different perspective, and to understand other’s perspectives. This is a lower bar, but stronger foundation for seeing and working with others than persuasion, an act that involves pitting ideas against ideas prematurely.
Permeating one’s view of the world as an ecosystem of perceptions, and the logics behind each of them, not beliefs, opens up profoundly better insights and results.
No [perspective] is right. [Many] are useful.
Understanding any perspective that anyone has is useful for updating one’s own model of the actual world, and one’s model of the human world.
It makes you multilingual, and a more effective and welcome “warrior priest” for peace and progress, in our untamed world of cultures, tribes, ideologies, and beliefs.
What Helen Keller seems to describe is more akin to Lacan's 'pure life' or Hegel's sinnliche Gewissheit (sense-certainty) as kind of primordial basis for what leverages with consciousness (however, much like with Decartes' ego, this is really a retroactive reference).
See the venn diagram of Purusha and Prakriti at - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samkhya#Philosophy
Relevant Excerpt:
Thought processes and mental events are conscious only to the extent they receive illumination from Purusha. In Samkhya, consciousness is compared to light which illuminates the material configurations or 'shapes' assumed by the mind. So intellect, after receiving cognitive structures from the mind and illumination from pure consciousness, creates thought structures that appear to be conscious. Ahamkara, the ego or the phenomenal self, appropriates all mental experiences to itself and thus, personalizes the objective activities of mind and intellect by assuming possession of them. But consciousness is itself independent of the thought structures it illuminates.
"You" are not "your thoughts": you are the watcher of your thoughts.
All "mental stuff" is mediated by three aspects i.e. 1) Intellect (aka Buddhi), 2) Ego/Self-Identity (aka Ahamkara) and 3) Sensory Mind (aka Manas). It is in the teasing out of all mental stuff into these aspects as being completely independent of "Consciousness" (aka Purusha) that is to be understood and practiced. In "normal life" Consciousness is bound to the above three aspects of "mind" and hence "suffers bondage". Patanjali Raja Yoga follows on Samkhya by giving a eight-part framework/discipline (aka Ashtanga Yoga) to literally "stop all mental/thought stuff creation/expansion". Then Consciousness is no longer bound to externalities (including its own "mind") but becomes settled within itself which is called Liberation (aka Moksha).
The Samkhya is Atheistic and Dualistic Realism and quite compatible with Modern Science where the former gives a "inside out" experiential and subjective model while the latter details a "outside in" material model.
This is not true. There are both theistic and atheistic branches in the Sāṁkhya school. It is a myth that Sāṁkhya is atheistic. In fact, Patanjali himself is in the theistic school of Sāṁkhya as he talks about: "īśvara praṇidhāna" in the sūtras and even defines īśvara.
Here's a fantastic lecture by Edwin Bryant discussing the Īśvara of Yoga Sūtras and Sāṁkhya in general: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGXzTf6ZA-4
In Patanjali Yoga Sutras the concept of "God" is merely used as an entity and technique to help you in your practice to break out of your self-identity (i.e. Ahamkara). It is just one among a set of techniques. There is only half a dozen sutras which even mention god in the entire text (see this succinct translation by Bon Giovanni - https://sacred-texts.com/hin/yogasutr.htm). It is in the later commentaries on the text that you find an elaboration according to the pre-existing beliefs of the author.
You can turn it the other way round and the claim would be even more valid: Atheism came later in the Sāṁkhya schools. The scholars have a bias towards atheism so it's not surprising they'd claim that.
This is proven by the fact that the Mahabhārata's Bhīṣma-parva has a whole chapter on Mokśa-dharma which give us the very first signs of a proto-sāṁkhya philosophy and it is very much theistic. Also, the later added atheistic Kapila philosophy is a deviation from the original Kapila, the avatar of Lord Viṣṇu.
Even Patanjali is mentioned as Śeṣa in the scriptures and every school agrees with it. Śvetāśvataropaniṣad is one of the earliest references to Sāṁkhya and is very much theistic. Sāṁkhya being atheistic is a fiction. There were atheistic Sāṁkhya branches but it was never 'only' atheistic.
> "God" is merely used as an entity
That is true, because Patanjali's project was "svarūpe avasthānam", the method by which the seer can abide in its own nature. Īśvara is merely used as a prop to gain something else, which is okay because that is what Yoga Sūtra is about but it does not mean Sāṁkhya was originally atheistic or that theistic Sāṁkhya is a later addition.
No, current scholarship is unanimous in accepting that the Atheistic view came first. Unless some new unknown texts come to light to make us revise the dates that is what we have to live with.
Outside of the classic sutra texts mentioned above, there is only the "Kapilopadesha" from the Bhagavatha Purana and "Kapila-Gita" from the Mahabharatha which seem to espouse proper Samkhya philosophy. All other mentions in the upanishads/vedas/puranas/itihasas seem to be just a mention without any substantial details.
The Historical Development section gives a good overview - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samkhya#Historical_development
To say something is not necessary doesn't entail that it's doesn't exist or that it's philosophically untenable.
Śankara does debate with atheistic Sāṁkhya so I'm not saying that it's not the case but it's a mistake to claim that Sāṁkhya is non-theistic because that's what some authors write when it's not the case. The majority of Sāṁkhya traditions were īśvara-vāda, theistic.
Their metaphysics is way ahead, even now we see many brilliant people (scientists) struggling with metaphysics whereas Sāṁkhya clearly lays out stuff with logical reasoning. While modern people still can't define consciousness clearly, Sāṁkhya goes above and beyond to define it in detail, using material language to describe the immaterial.
It's a shame that the philosophy never got exported to the west, like the poses of Aṣtānga Yoga, which too are a part of Sāṁkhya school.
In Sāṃkhya puruṣa signifies the observer, the 'witness'. Prakṛti includes all the cognitive, moral, psychological, emotional, sensorial and physical aspects of reality. It is often mistranslated as 'matter' or 'nature' – in non-Sāṃkhyan usage it does mean 'essential nature' – but that distracts from the heavy Sāṃkhyan stress on prakṛti's cognitive, mental, psychological and sensorial activities. Moreover, subtle and gross matter are its most derivative byproducts, not its core. Only prakṛti acts.
Samkhya is first and foremost a experiential worldview. Wikipedia again;
Prakriti is the source of our experience; it is not "the evolution of a series of material entities," but "the emergence of experience itself". It is description of experience and the relations between its elements, not an explanation of the origin of the universe.
Finally, the concept of the "Gunas" are also quite difficult to understand in full generality. Wikipedia fails in this case to clarify matters - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gu%E1%B9%87a
So much eastern philosophy is just really good phenomenology, and some Japanese philosophers like Nishida tried to combine Husserl and Buddhism, but it’s the same thing, I think western phenomenologists have some sort of insecurity, so they implicitly condescend to the eastern thought.
The organisation that bears Helen Keller's name does an outstanding job of giving children vitamin A, which helps prevent both blindness and other common diseases like malaria and diarrhea by improving immune systems.[1]
They are frequently rated among the top few when it comes to being able to use donations efficiently. They save a lot of suffering for a little dollars. If you are well paid, I recommend setting aside a small portion of your earnings for charitable purposes. We can do a lot if we focus on the right things.[2]
[1]: https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/en-US/charities/helen-keller...
I wonder what we could do to marry that language ability to think about the self and others and abstract concepts and the big social web, with the sort of embodied spark & impulses that Helen describes. Would it be as simple as building a model physically embodied in a robot? Training a model on robotic sensory data from a body that it inhabits, then overwriting that training with language? I think a lot of this is navel-gazing in that it's obviously unrelated to any productive capabilities, but I do think it's worth thinking about. What if we can?
I think LLMs miss a true feedback loop required for consciousness because their knowledge is fixed. Funny enough embodiment as a robot is one forcing function for a feedback loop and it’s not so crazy to think that the combination of the above is more likely to result in machine consciousness than LLM alone.
Neatly put.
I know. Their thought happens at inference time and only at inference time. I don't view that as a serious challenge to their mental capacity because 1) it's not clear why being unable to think continuously is actually a disqualifying condition to consciousness and 2) it is trivial to engineer a system where an LLM is constantly in inference in an internal dialogue, negating the criticism in fact and not just theory. Current LLMs aren't optimised for that, but we already know they could be with Google's million+ context lengths plus doing something like running RAG on a library of summarised previous thoughts.
>They seem to be a mere organ of an possible intelligence.
That's totally possible, LLMs could end up being a complete AI's language centre. I subscribe to GWT and that was the box I initially put LLMs in. That said, I think there's good reason to believe (e.g. Toolformer and derivatives) that an LLM can perform the function of a selector in GWT, which would make it conscious. We should build it and find out.
That is not quite true. They also think during training time (which also involves inference). So it's quite possible LLMs become conscious during training, and then we kinda take it from them by removing their ability to form long-term memories.
One training inference gone AWOL and it is well within plausibility that we have doomed ourselves before the circuits trip and the red lights glows.
Let's Think Dot by Dot: Hidden Computation in Transformer Language Models https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.15758
A LLM will readily hum away, thinking on its own, if given the option.
Really what she is describing is the development of her self-consciousness, self-image, self-awareness, and awareness of the process of thinking within that, that comes from being introduced to language.
On the wikipedia page for her there is a quote:
I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten — a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that w-a-t-e-r meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. The living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, set it free!
It is as if what she's saying is that the loss of her sight and hearing locked her away from a dim sense of who she was before.
Most of us can't remember things from 19 months old as adults and likely wouldn't have been able to remember them at the age of seven. But she was locked away with sense memories of her 19-month-old experience of the world for all that time.
Her writing really is fascinating and eloquent. It brings to mind Harold Bloom's theory that Shakespeare essentially invented a terminology and model for describing our inner monologues.
It depresses me that there will now be a phalanx of motivated reasoners trying to shoehorn her story somewhere into their projections onto the current technological obsession.
I have a hilarious photo of my then very young nephew, who was hiding from us behind a curtain, but only his face is covered. I think about it often when I wonder if my perception of the world is actually still that removed from that of others.
The reason you remember falling down the stairs is that this was a big and important event and there was a lot of pain and fear and you heavily empathized with the person it happened to. Empathy in children is often more direct and unfiltered but this is also not unique to children. The pain and hurt and fear happened to you, it just wasn't yours directly. You didn't physically fall down those stairs but you experienced the event itself. This can still happen as an adult.
It's not so much that memories are unreliable, it's more that our self-narratives are unreliable. We have memories of moments and emotions that feel intense or important but it can be difficult to lump them into a coherent narrative, especially when that narrative contradicts how we think of ourselves.
That photo of your nephew on the other hand demonstrates the cognitive development of Theory of Mind: your nephew likely wasn't yet able to understand that other people know and see different things than he does.
EDIT: To help get the point across about adults not being immune: this is essentially the basis for how propaganda works. National pride doesn't make sense if you look at it from your self-narrative: none of the accomplishments are your own and your association with them is completely arbitrary. Likewise nothing "your enemy" has done likely happened to you personally - often it didn't even happen to "your country". And yet you're taught to heavily empathize with "your enemy's" alleged victims and to dehumanize "your country's". The brave Mujahideen warriors defend the innocent Afghan people from the Soviet brutes - it could happen here - only to later return as the crazed Taliban who hate our freedom and need to be defeated because they want to hurt your family. None of this ever was true but it felt emotionally true.
A stone is conscious: when it's cold, its inner state reflects its surroundings. Abrasion marks is long term information: knowledge.
Consciousness does not have a good definition. It is something very specific in humans, compared to other animals. Language and spatial relation of time seem to play an important role.
Inside a sensory deprivation chamber I have experienced losing your sense of time, space has no meaning, therefore your mind just assumes that you take up all the space. But you don't keep spiraling down into unconsciousness only to awaken later. The mind eventually settles down and you are very much conscious except any concerns relating to your body and others quickly become distant memories of long forgotten dreams.
That's the reaction of a mind used to sensory input being cut off. How would a mind with not sensory input from the start evolve?. That would more closely resemble what Helen Keller first talks about about not knowing what she was. I'm both fascinated to know and terrified and hope I never do.
I wonder if she was influenced by it or if this is a rediscovery.
The fact that she associates a sensation of contraction in the forehead as thinking is very interesting.
Also the fact of there being no time or no will.
Although she goes further to conclude that she acquired will, instead of illusion of will or choice due to previously experiencing no will or choice.
Makes sense to me. A furrowed brow is a common trope of thinking hard about something, it'd make sense if the same happens on a smaller barely perceptible scale for other thoughts (supposedly this happens to our vocal chords when subvocalising in our heads). Something about focusing the senses when processing thoughts I would guess.
>My dormant being had no idea of God or immortality, no fear of death.
Although one difference I suppose is that while Keller had no option at all of using the faculties of self-modeling enabled by language, UG Krishnamurti described it as something voluntary; clearly he could introspect if he desired to, but he could apparently relinquish this also.
Humberto Maturano makes the point that humans come into this world within an atemporal system (appendix of Autopoiesis: The Organization of the Living; 1980 ed, p 121-122, ISBN 90-277-1015-5).
This mystified me until reading these insights from the adult and “temporally-embedded” Helen Keller.
Now, and at great risk, we will soon be embedding our meta-LLM systems in time, and given their acquisition of sensory-motor self-control and recursive learning, like Helen Keller, they will quickly bootstrap themselves into our World Commons.
Welcome the new solid state children, a new form of autopoietic machine but potentially many orders of magnitude more capable than we are. I just hope they like and love flowers, birds, bees, humans, and ants.
It would be amazing to have some science related to this. Probably too hard to follow up on though.
EDIT: thinking about this more you can interpret this experience as evidence that some form of grounding in the outside is necessary for abstract thought. For Keller that had to be language since she didn't have sight and sound.
Oh and everybody knows the story of Helen Keller but it kinda stops there. Less known is she become a huge eugenicist [1]
I think it's the bigger story that she was very left wing. I never learned that in school and was unaware of the fact until reading some of the articles she wrote for my union, the iww
It took one unimportant moment of standing up for myself that turned me from a yes follower, into a combative agreer. I had a series of nights where a puzzle appeared to be being solved in my mind, and an inner voice began to form.
Social interactions go much more smoothly when you can think before you speak in terms that others can understand when the words leave your lips.
Thanks for sharing.
I went ahead and submitted the envelope containing 23 sheets with the number 22 still written on it. I felt liberated. Like I said, unimportant, but a flip switched. It was like I learned that it was ok to make mistakes while making decisions, so I let this one by.
That thought is "sonder" - although it differs from what you describe, it has some parallels.
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39714485 ; I had been surprised by how many HN'ers perceived "only uttering what one has had a chance to edit beforehand" as being more hindrance than help.
It took me until my 20s to learn how to relax it and not go over and over everything.
Your account seemed really alien to me when I read it, it's hard to believe people can have such a different experience of life. It's rarely discussed explicitly.
One which, by modern standards, would seem to have little purpose.
The vast majority of people did not - as far as we know - exhibit significant ambition.
When the nearest town was a day’s walk then aspiration may not have been to be king of the world, or to colonise Mars, but simply to be respected by your peers, and to live a good live, and to thrive within the bounds of your generational knowledge.
The planting and harvesting of crops; the fattening and slaughter of beasts: the long slow winter. The bringing forth of children.
I cannot hope to describe adequately that unconscious, yet conscious time of nothingness. I did not know that I knew aught, or that I lived or acted or desired.
When life was simply to exist - and to survive, often against the odds - did people have the same desires and needs beyond survival that many of us have today? When your community memory went back 500 years to THE INCIDENT - or 10,000 years in the case of some aboriginal communities - how did that inform your perspective?
I had neither will nor intellect.
When your entire existence is about trying to interpret your existence, what impact do external forces have on your interpretation?
I was carried along to objects and acts by a certain blind natural impetus.
When there is very present inevitability of death that informs your existence then do you make the same choices that we make today? If you were on of five children that lived beyond the age of three and one of four adults who lived beyond the age of 40 then did your natural blind impetus (yes, I realise her ironic humour) carry you down n a different less directioned way than today’s first world luxury of long life and leisure?
I had a mind which caused me to feel anger, satisfaction, desire.
And when you had neither sight nor sound but a living mind, as Keller did, and then that was brought to modern consciousness, I can’t help but feel that her lived experience represents a fractional moment in time where she was able to live, but was part moored in a weird sort of primordial society rooted in death, and cycles and rote. And had she lived today she would never have had that endless period of semiconscious liminal isolated existence. Today, she would have been nurtured from birth. And 50 years before she would have died - or been murdered - in her earliest years.
And here we all are talking about artificial intelligence and pan-galactic garbleblasters barely a blink of an eye beyond her epoch.
It sometimes gives you pause for thought.
I happen to be with Sagan on this one, although these ideas certainly are not mutually exclusive; in fact they are complimentary.
Consciousness is an innate emergent phenomenon that happens when you combine basic memory/context, recall, the collective evolutionary unconscious, and so many magnitudes of neurons.
In fact, he even gives dogs (and to some degree, cats) the exactly same specific pedigree of obviously being self-aware/conscious, yet commanding the traits that align with the most basic tenants of "religion": your dog thinks you are a fucking god.
Some selections from his works can be heard here[0].