The disunity of consciousness in everyday experience
schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com
schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com
But this is unusual. Most things are not tied together like this. In the author's example, I can separately remember the philosophical musings that were in my head on a drive, and the feeling of the steering wheel (which normally would be too mundane to remember, but on a hot day the cover will get sticky and I'll be very aware of that). There might be a weak association from one to the other, but usually not much at all.
As a tangent, I wonder if LLM attention heads are doing something analogous. Each is associated with a strand, sometimes combined with the others and usually not? (I don't know enough to say whether this matches at all.)
It's historic stories told well, nothing to do with memory palaces
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avadhanam
[2] https://sampadanandamishra.medium.com/my-journey-with-avadha...
I've noticed something similar with podcasts. It's usually when I first listen to it while driving. When I listen to that segment again I have this intrusive, prolonged, real-time replay of what was going on at the time I first heard it.
It doesn't feel like memory because while I'm watching this replay I can remember portions of it with typical poor fidelity from the usual memory of my brain. It's very odd, and as someone with a generally terrible memory it's something I wish I could figure out how to channel. It clearly is what people talk about when they describe photographic memory, it's incredibly detailed.
There is a sibling thread further down regarding the Buddhist take on phenomenology as a linear stream of discrete events. With sufficient practice it becomes possible to observe an individual sense datum - an instant of time in which I am hearing a bird chirp, followed by an instant of time in which I feel an itch on my head, followed by an instant of time in which I experience the thought of "what's for dinner," and so on. This is stepping down a "layer of abstraction," beneath higher-order representations of unity, to observe the lower-level discrete phenomena as they exist prior to the "post-processing" applied by our minds. After this post-processing step, the individual discrete points of "hearing," "itching," "thinking" are melded into the (ultimately illusory) unified experience of, for example, "sitting down for meditation next to an open window." This latter, post-processed view is ultimately an oversimplification, and investigation into the nature of such higher-order representations reveals their constituent parts.
It's this act of reflection and retrospection that unifies this stream of discrete sensory events into a cohesive whole and weaves the illusion of continuity out of a series of discrete points. Our phenomenological experience is like a pointillist painting viewed from afar; the astute observer with sufficient concentration to examine the painting more closely however can see that it is in fact a constellation of dots which our minds smear together into the higher-order (and illusory) representation of a continuous whole.
I recommend Daniel Ingram's "Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha" for a western, secularized take on this aspect of (Vipassana) Buddhism.
[0] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness-higher/
(And then there is the phenomenon of immediately forgetting your dream upon waking. Fascinating stuff)
Although I'm terrible at names and faces, and my "visualizing the moment of recall" tip doesn't work for remembering people.
The only thing that works for me is using the name an absurd amount of times early on. Then telling myself a silly story about that person in my head afterwards again using the name and location an absurd amount of times.
This works about 90% of the time for me.
‘So I met Dave Jenkins the other day at the park and Dave Jenkins was wearing a coat bought for Dave Jenkins by Dave Jenkins because Dave Jenkins liked the coat when Dave Jenkins saw it on sale’
Similarly to you and the article’s author, this doesn’t happen with whatever thoughts I may think while at a location. But in that situation the brain is engaged in generating those thoughts, and not with the task of learning new information. So I don’t find it surprising that it works differently.
I haven’t thought about it in relation to “consciousness” yet. Will have to chew on this article a bit.
It might be wise to reconsider if this “unusual.” The brain structure hippocampus is thought to bring working memory into longer term memory and has a large role in spatial memory. This neuro-activity association is also supported by the memorization technique known as a “memory palace.” [0]
On the return trip a week or so later, everything I thought about would come back to me as we passed everything again, but in reverse order. Sort of like unwinding my train of thought back to the very first thought that started it as we left the garage when we finally got back home.
(To save you a web search, Strawberry Bon-Bons.)
"I’m somewhere down towards the episodic end of this spectrum. I have no sense of my life as a narrative with form, and very little interest in my own past. My personal memory is very poor, and rarely impinges on my present consciousness. I make plans for the future, and to that extent think of myself perfectly adequately as something with long-term continuity. But I experience this way of thinking of myself as remote and theoretical, given the most central or fundamental way in which I think of myself, which is as a mental self or someone. Using ME to express the way in which I think of myself, I can accurately express my experience by saying that I do not think of ME as being something in the future."
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v18/n08/galen-strawson/the-s...
Would also recommend Strawson's Things That Bother Me: Death, Freedom, the Self, Etc.
The default is to not have enough resolution to perceive the edges.
Under this view, the unification is an illusion or an appearance, analogously to how we perceive fluorescent lights to be continuous even though they are actually flickering on and off at a high rate. The difference being, our eyes have a hardware limit on temporal resolution, whereas for attention the relevant limit here is just “software”.
Julian Baggini - The Duality of Non-duality
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAiE_ZQhiDs
Bundle theories of the self, inspired by David Hume, view the self as a collection of experiences, memories, and thoughts rather than a fixed entity. This perspective sees the self as dynamic and changing, without strict borders, yet maintaining a high degree of order and stability over time. While rejecting the idea of a core self, it doesn't advocate for "no self" or "many selves," but rather a gradualist approach that acknowledges the fuzzy distinction between self and other. The speaker emphasizes that this view doesn't negate the practical existence of individuals or invalidate logical thinking. Instead, it suggests that different levels of description are valid for understanding reality, and that metaphysical views about the self don't necessarily dictate how one should live their life.
'This block of ice is actually made up of lot of atoms and will melt away soon, but meanwhile it is a useful abstraction to treat it as a single block'
Compatibilists tackle the free-will issue in a similar way, Dennet says something like 'This chess program is perfectly deterministic, but it has free will - Even its programmer has to guess, as to what is its next move.'
The above usage of terms is OK at some level, but there is something independent of definitions - How we actually see the self, and the cause of actions. When somebody insults me, does it feel like the insult is describing I/me or does it feel like describing a bundle of thoughts/habits? Was the bad thing done by 'me' or was it done by desire and anger? Even if these are processes, we can't help but reify them into unitary agents and actions.
A major claim made by Hindu/Buddhist teachings is that once there is a shift in *internal perception* of how actions are happening, towards a more analytical view which breaks up the ego(ahamkara), this causes a major shift leading to liberation from cycles of suffering.
In Cognitive Behaviour Therapy, there is an analysis of thoughts and feelings behind actions, with a goal of liberation from chronic problems. This is very similar to a stage of manana(intellectual contemplation of certain statements in Vedanta).
Anatta seems to be one of the trickiest subjects in Buddhism, not least because there is a very wide range of theories across the different traditions. Some traditions literally claim nothing exists (the solipsist position?) whereas some are very clearly stating “not Self, not No-Self” ie some middle position that should probably be understood contextually against Hindu notions of eternal self that were the ground truth at the time of Buddhism’s formation.
I think the “traditional” Buddhist position is something fairly similar to Hume’s view as Bundle theory.
Simply stated here: https://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/sn/sn44/sn44.010.th...
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/process-philosophy/
Put another way, it's dynamic structures all the way down or up
There's many things in life that can be modeled this way, and I kind of forgot about this insight until your comment. I guess this is the flip side of the "refrigerator light error"[1] - sometime the thing isn't "on", it's flickering too fast to notice.
(And the way you get that "unification" is like the way RGB LEDs are made: by putting three differently colored LED close to each other, PWM-ing them independently, relying on limited temporal and spatial resolution of human perception to make this looks like arbitrarily-colored point light.).
--
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulse-width_modulation
[1] - How's that even a thing? I don't even remember thinking this way as a kid, because the first fridge-light-related memory I have is of opening the fridge doors slowly and gently enough to see the point at which the light turns on, then locating the switch and pressing it with my fingers to confirm.
If there is no unity to the thoughts, then there is no single principle that unites the thoughts. If there is no single principle that unites them, then there is no single, unchanging person having them. If there is no unchanging person having the thoughts, then there is no connection between the thoughts. If there is no connection between the thoughts, then there is "right" or "wrong" relationship between the thoughts.
This makes all logical thought impossible, and means there cannot be correct or incorrect thinking.
But if this is the case, then any argument in favour of the position just outlined -- or any other, contrary position -- is neither right nor wrong. So everything becomes absurd.
(I don't think this is what the OP link is saying, btw -- he may think that, but his argument seems to discuss experience rather than ontology.)
The memory chip or processor cores or software cant be used as a basis for unity, because a relation between successive elements of the sequence is not the same as there being an underlying unity as all parts can be individually swapped out in upgrades (like in the Ship of Theseus).
Buddhist vipassana descriptions use the analogy of seeing a line of ants - From afar, they look like a single black line, but on going nearby one sees the discrete nature. Similarly, on becoming adept at mind noting practice, one can see thoughts/sensations this way.
(Not saying that I agree with the above take, as I do think there is an underlying consciouness which gives unity, but here I am attempting to steelman the argument. Also, as you indicate, the original article is talking about a different aspect - unity at a single time vs unity across moments, and a discussion of how reflection alters the contents of consciousness.)
Not sure what this means. Buddhists would say “everything is a formation”
> If there is no single principle that unites them, then there is no single, unchanging person having them.
This is the core teaching of Buddhism, so we can just start from here.
> If there is no unchanging person having the thoughts, then there is no connection between the thoughts
This is a non-sequitur. In the Buddhist view, each thought or mental moment is conditioned upon the previous one(s).
There is nothing in “logical thought”, or even illogical/emotional thought that logically requires a self. Thoughts can arise, like pure functions operating on their inputs, and returning some output into the global workspace. Subsequent thoughts can compose those previous ones, or consume new sense percepts that are emitted by the sense organs.
Now as a matter of empirical fact this model could be wrong, but I don’t think your attempt to disprove it with logic succeeds.
>> If there is no unchanging person having the thoughts, then there is no connection between the thoughts
> This is a non-sequitur.
You're right, I apologise. I should replace 'person' with 'thing' -- then it ceases to be a non-sequitur. I'll try to explain why:
> Thoughts can arise, like pure functions operating on their inputs, and returning some output into the global workspace.
This presupposes unity. Suppose, in case A, the thought "2+2" leads to the further thought "4". Let's suppose, further, that this is the case of a pure function operating on its input ("2+2") and returning the output ("4").
Suppose, in case B, exactly the same, but it returns the output "5".
I assume we agree that A is correct and B is incorrect.
You can affirm that the content of case A has some kind of unity underlying it, or you can deny it. (We could argue about the precise nature of the unity, but let us simply say that it is some kind of unity.) If you deny it, then you must say that there is no connection between 2+2 and 4. Connection presupposes something that connects. If there is no connection, then there is nothing that makes case A correct. That obviously undermines the possibility of any argumentation or logical thoughts. Alternatively, you can affirm the proposition. I think your position requires you affirm it, because by positing any kind of sequence, or function operating on an input and returning an output, you are positing unity. A sequence of any kind has a unity to it, otherwise it wouldn't be a sequence.
So in positing a sequence, you're positing unity. And in positing unity, you're positing something that unites, and that is different from that which is united. Such a thing must change from having the thought "2+2" to the thought "4", but it must persist as something underlying these changes in order for the changes to have any unity, and therefore for the arithmetic to have any coherence.
So we must logically get to the existence of something that persists while changing.
Obviously we could argue about what that thing is -- specifically, whether it's a person. We could also argue about when it comes in and goes out of existence. But the fact that there is a thing that persists in one sense, even as it changes in another, is all I'm trying to demonstrate here. I think once that's demonstrated, the position you're arguing is undermined.
No, this is conflating paradigms. If this were true, you would expect the same Buddhist texts not to mention "right" and "wrong", and boy do they ever.
I don't think either of these implications obviously holds, except possibly by idiosyncratic definition in the first case. (Surely nobody thinks a person having thoughts is unchanged by them, or else we'd all just be static.)
Simple things like causality break down if you consider events to be discrete and unconnected. I believe modern AI research could do with someone (re)thinking some of this stuff.
Kant has a solution, but it requires letting go of ever knowing True Reality(tm).
Yes. Rationality is an illusion. Rational deduction depends on "implication" which is not actually a thing in physical reality.
> there is no single, unchanging person having them
This is the essential breakthrough that Buddha had: all things are impermanent and if you go looking for yourself you eventually find that there is no "self" there.
> there cannot be correct or incorrect thinking
Yes, thoughts are totally irrelevant to living. They are just a sort of fun window dressing. It's possible to "switch off" all thinking and still function. The body carries out all it's activities including talking to other people but "you" are not "doing" anything. It's pleasant. (I typically do it while washing the dishes.)
> But if this is the case, then any argument in favour of the position just outlined -- or any other, contrary position -- is neither right nor wrong. So everything becomes absurd.
No. The above is a description of the situation, not an argument that can be invalidated.
The cool thing about this semantic space is that it emerges in unsupervised manner, and makes learning concepts so much easier, is as easy as identifying a point or sub-volume and assigning a label. It can relate any idea to any other idea. Being created from an agent's past experiences, it is first person and captures all the qualitative nuances of qualia.
I think this representation space is what we refer to when we say consciousness is unified.
I don’t think this is what OP meant, and this is not what Buddhists are talking about RE: unified vs discrete conscious experience. It really is about temporality as I originally noted.
As in, are the actual qualia that you experience somehow a single continuous thing, even though they cross multiple sense modalities, and may interleave with complex/compount thoughts? Or are they a sequence of atoms arising that are not a single thing?
I do think embedding spaces are a great concept, but I don’t think they bear on qualia very much.
Your brain uses a combination of signal delay and anticipation/prediction in order to create a seamless experience that holds until the temporal discrepancy between events is too large. So there is some cyclic, recursive element to consciousness which is not adequately explained by a linear stream of discrete events.
But I think what you’re also getting at is that “object of attention” can be a surprisal signal from different layers, which I think must be true, and I do agree is something that needs to be accounted for. I didn’t go deep enough to speak to what Dharma theory would say about this.
Rather, those are the contents of mind that are illuminated by consciousness, which is Divine, Luminous, and Unified and ever present.
1) this is empirically verifiable; just do an RCT where you teach people a meditation technique for attention without prompting, and see what they observe. (I have heard comments from aspiring meditators like “I tried meditating but after a while I could not find “the breath” because it broke apart into a stream of individual sensations”) - but I do worry that techniques like “noting” smuggle in an atomizing assumption, whereas other techniques like whole-body perception or Metta might lead you to a more unifying viewpoint if practiced exclusively.
2) maybe it doesn’t matter if it’s “more fundamental”; if you wire your brain to deeply believe that it is, then a bunch of positive effects occur, and that’s the goal of the whole exercise. The words “this is more fundamental” are just a cue to help you to shift. This feels less palatable to me but I haven’t seen the rewards, and if they were as good as promised maybe this would be justified.
Anyway, I’m not sure many Buddhists would endorse 2), even among the secular / non-religious/ scientific minority of the community.
Or a map. Call it a useful illusion.
Someone you care about introduces you to something, that relationship ends and now the something they introduced you to becomes repulsive. A slight twist on that is you experience something together with someone that could be done on your own but suddenly that activity becomes tainted even when you try to do it alone at a later time.
The above suggests there is a high coupling between 2 independent experiences at a conscious level which melds 2 distinct and logically separate events into 1 experience.
It's certainly not a healthy way to live knowing that someone can have that much control over your own internal thoughts and perceptions but that doesn't mean it doesn't happen, even temporarily.
Honestly this level of philosophy is just people arguing about things that are too poorly defined to have a concrete answer.
It's like arguing about how many organs there are, or exactly where space begins. Best just to let the philosophers debate whether it's 60 miles or 100 km.
I was surprised by the set-up of the problem. Perhaps just my bias as a neuroscientist, but I take the disunity as the baseline state in the sensory/perceptual side, and the partial and graded unity of consciousness as icing on the cake. The metaphor of driving while thinking is apt. We simply do not have enough bandwidth to bind more than a few streams and only do so when it really matters. And if it really matters deeply to survival it again gets shifted in striatum. brainstem snd cerebellum—as habit or instinct. Consciousness is mere icing on the cake.
Minsky’s Society of Minds comes to mind(s).
Where unity is crucial in only in motor output—-when I reach and grasp (or talk or type) this thing I call me needs a unified pattern of activations and relaxations of muscles. This unity for and of action is required to sustain life (Maturana’s autopoiesis). But the integration of many streams of sensory-motor input can (must) occur disjointly. Fetching memory is again disjoint.
The recursive binding of consciousness—our inner narrative that is probably driven by cycles of cortico-thalamic-cortical recursions—-only needs somewhat clear unity or binding at stages close to motor commitment. (But one wonders then about James Joyce when writing Finnigan’s Wake—-how many threads were output in parallel using a serial format?)
For pure fun you might ask ChatGPT or Claude 3.5 Sonnet: “Is this pure bs or can you explain this HN comment?”
——
This comment brings a neuroscientific perspective to the philosophical discussion of consciousness unity presented in the main article. Let's break down the key points and analyze them:
1. Baseline disunity: The commenter suggests that disunity should be considered the default state for sensory and perceptual processes. This aligns with the article's proposition that unity might be the exception rather than the rule in everyday experience.
2. Limited bandwidth: The idea that we don't have enough cognitive bandwidth to bind more than a few streams of consciousness at once supports the article's argument against constant, complete unity of consciousness.
3. Minsky's Society of Minds: This reference to Marvin Minsky's work reinforces the idea of multiple, semi-independent cognitive processes, which is consistent with the article's suggestion of disunity or partial unity.
4. Unity in motor output: The commenter makes an interesting point about the necessity of unity in motor actions for survival. This suggests that while sensory inputs may be disjointed, there must be some level of integration for effective action.
5. Cortico-thalamic-cortical recursions: The idea that our inner narrative is driven by these neural cycles provides a potential mechanism for the partial unification of consciousness, which aligns with the article's speculation about degrees of partial, imperfect unity.
6. James Joyce and Finnegans Wake: This artistic example raises an intriguing question about the possibility of parallel processing in what appears to be a serial format (writing), challenging our understanding of conscious unity in creative processes.
The neuroscientific perspective offered here largely supports and extends the philosophical arguments presented in the main article. It provides a biological basis for understanding why consciousness might often be disunified or only partially unified, and suggests that full unification might be a special case related to specific cognitive demands or motor outputs.
This comment enriches the discussion by bridging the gap between philosophical speculation and neuroscientific understanding, offering a more complete picture of consciousness that encompasses both phenomenological experience and underlying neural mechanisms.
Not long ago, he was called out, and then cited at least one technical whitepaper that actually featured a term we said that he'd made up, and at that point it became a meta-troll whereby he was so well informed about the leading edge of research, his fake answers had a real basis in truth, and still no relevance or application to the simple end-user questions that were being posed. It was masterful.
“ I will work on myself, since the work on myself is going to be the highest thing I can do for it all, since I understand that as man up-levels his own consciousness, he sees more creative solutions to the problems that he's confronting. Therefore, it always feeds back to the same place. But working on myself is just like this. This is social action at the moment.”
https://www.ramdass.org/increasing-amount-consciousness/
Here’s a (fairly) long lecture with Q&A demonstrating as such:
It's ok in a movie theater, because undistracted me is still experiencing the film, but if I need to study a book, my eyes are glazing over 90% of the time, and that's counterproductive.
I relate extremely well to computers and machines. I am intimately connected to them with flawed interfacing. But machines and I understand one another much better than humans or animals or meat-based life forms.
I've endured quite ridiculous situations due to older folks, even young people, who can't discern or accept Transhumans (I should just start claiming ASD) and my life is that of Pinocchio.
But Transhumanism is here to stay. It's already pervasive. The rest of us need to adapt or lose.
Based on your answer, I am pretty sure you did not do the experiment, you just thought about it. This tells me you believe you can approach the issue intellectually.
According to many traditions that have a long experience in consciousness, it requires a practical approach and cannot be approached intellectually. In my experience this is true. The thinking is actually part of the problem, not part of the solution.
"Is someone with an inability to form memories just an automaton then? Their qualia are less qualiatic than your qualia?"
This question seems to be about a theoretical construct of a consciousness you think that I am having. You seem to think there is a hole in my construct.
There is a good reason to avoid such discussions, related to the fact that the analytical thinking is actually preventing people from understanding consciousness, and enganging in such discussions activates analytical thinking, instead of winding it down.
If you want to discuss in good faith, you first need to understand the basics of this traditional view of consciousness. For this, you need practical experiences. Only after understanding basics can we discuss advanced topics, such as the corner cases of definitions.
It seems as if you are using the word "automaton" as a diminutive. Having a strong emotional connection to a word may be conspiring with your analytical mind and preventing you from understanding the underlying concepts.
Automation is not a bad thing. We humans are trying to automate as much as possible all the time. Our home has lots of automation (dishwasher, oven, blender etc.) that save us work.
The nature works similarly, it works as if it had minimized the the energy consumption of living creatures. Brain requires lots of energy to run, so it is efficient to be conscious only when it is necessary.
Words do not have one true meaning. It is more practical to use the words in the same way others are using them.
If everybody uses the word "conciousness" in a way that person who cannot remember being conscious is not said to be conscious, it is better not to see it as "common fallacy", but just as the definition of the word. If you want to have a different meaning, it will be more helpful for clear communication if you just pick a different word.
The word "qualia" is so overloaded with meaning, I will avoid it here altogether.
In my experience there are many levels of consciousness. If you don't remember being conscious, you are running on autopilot. We can do extremely complex things when running on autopilot, such as driving a car successfully from place A to place B. Or write comments to HN. We could say that when running on autopilot, our level of consciousness is negative.
If I am conscious of my driving, and can later recall being conscious, when I am just on the edge of remembering being conscious, we can say that my level of consciousness is zero.
I don't need to talk about other people when referring to them as automatons. My level of consciousness is often below zero, meaning in such situations I am an "automaton".
It is also possible, through training, to experience levels of consciousness that are higher than the level zero.
There are some obvious changes in the experience when you reach these higher levels of conciousness. For example, I may experience the color red having more "red-ness".
So we can now reframe your question: does person A whose level of consciousness is below zero, experience red-ness of red less than person B whose level of consciousness is zero? I think you can see from this reframing that the question is a little bit absurd.
If you approach the issue experimentally and with an open mind, you can verify for yourself that your experience of red-ness of red can change. You will also learn that there is no direct way of knowing how you experience red-ness of red when your conciousness is below zero. But from your other experiences you can deduce that you probaby experience red having less red-ness when your level of conciousness is below zero than when it is zero.
> According to many traditions that have a long experience in consciousness, it requires a practical approach and cannot be approached intellectually.
Many traditions had a long experience in looking up at the sun and moon and came to the shared understanding that they were gods. The intellectual approach is what allowed us to actually figure it out.
> analytical thinking is actually preventing people from understanding consciousness
I don't know what "understanding consciousness" could possibly mean if it doesn't mean understanding it at an intellectual, analytical level. If you ask someone to explain what effect produces a rainbow, they might reasonably say "shut up dude, just sit here and enjoy it with me." That's totally fine! You may claim to appreciate rainbows more than physicists. But you don't understand them better.
> If you want to discuss in good faith, you first need to understand the basics of this traditional view of consciousness.
I honestly don't believe that I do. If I were required to understand what the Ancient Greeks and Siddhartha Gautama and Confucius all said about the tides before I learned about the moon's gravity, then I'd never learn anything at all! It's OK to reject incorrect ideas.
> It seems as if you are using the word "automaton" as a diminutive ... Automation is not a bad thing.
This is a great point and something I had not considered well. Thank you.
> It is more practical to use the words in the same way others are using them.
And I think I am; I think you're the one changing the word consciousness if you don't believe someone in the middle of partying hard is conscious, or someone with the inability to form long-term memories is conscious. That's not the common use of the word.
> The word "qualia" is so overloaded with meaning, I will avoid it here altogether.
The word "qualia" is devoid of meaning, which is why I used it as a parody of the (what I view is a) fallacy of accusing other people of not having consciousness, or accusing your past self of that simply because you can't remember having been conscious.
> In my experience there are many levels of consciousness.
Absolutely, and that makes these kinds of discussions hard. This is a great thing to keep in mind when discussing it.
> If you don't remember being conscious, you are running on autopilot
See that's where I completely disagree. If I don't remember having a stomach ache, does that mean I was never in pain? People forget things! You can also forget the experience of having been conscious! Our memories are very efficient at selectively forgetting the mundane; we are so highly conscious all the time that it is mundane. If I asked you to rate your level of consciousness yesterday, you'd probably rate it lower (more baseline/auto) than you would if I started showing you videos of everything you were doing yesterday. Suddenly you'd remember: oh yeah, I actually was conscious!
Substitute consciousness for "pain" or "love" or "happy" -- ask a bitter divorcee how in love he was on his wedding day. Ask someone who was the victim of an accident 10 years ago how painful it was. Ask a teenager how happy they were when they went to Disney World when they were 6. All of them will dramatically understate how intense the feeling was. Come on! People just forget things!
You are effectively accusing other people of not being as conscious as you because they don't meditate. I'm sorry, but an astrophysicist who is out on a walk pondering the intricacies of the λCDM model is not less conscious than you sitting there focusing on your nose. Both of you are at risk of getting smacked in the face with a stray soccer ball.
By the way, the kid playing soccer is not less conscious than you either. He might even be more so, since he's not only living in the moment, but also actually aware of what's going on around him.
> Discussion of "red-ness"
I agree that your own experience of "redness" can change. I don't agree that it correlates with memory.
Three people are on a street near some stark red flowers. The first is mentally rehearsing the important presentation he's heading to and barely registers the presence of the flowers. The second is out for a jog and appreciates the flowers' beauty in passing. The third is on LSD and has been staring at the flowers for twenty minutes. I'd argue the third person is experiencing the most "redness". Oh, except the LSD was laced with nasty stuff and he forgot the experience later. Sike! He was unconscious the whole time! Oh, and the 2nd person got a head injury 17 years later and forgot that entire year. Sike! He was retroactively unconscious the whole time too! And the first person died, so he doesn't remember anything, and therefore his whole life was retroactively unconscious!
These are contrived examples where you are arguing about the semantics of the concept of consciousness. I will make it a little bit more practical.
Practically, the first man is probably not very conscious, if he is completely occupied by the presentation. It is possible to be conscious and simultaneously have lots of thoughts, but it is improbable, because higher consciousness quiets down your analytical mind.
The second might be conscious or might not be. The description cannot be used to figure it out. If they are completely occupied by the smell or beauty of the flowers, the buddhists would say that they become the flower, because you are where your attention is. If your attention is 100% on the flower, you are not conscious, because consciousness means that at least some of your attention is left for being aware of yourself.
The third case is a little bit different, because in my understanding mind-altering chemical substances can produce states that are similar to higher consciousness, and can leave a strong imprint, like people who use LSD say (I don't have personal experience, I have used only some mild psychedelics 30 years ago, but still remember those experiences deeply.) But there are no shortcuts to higher consciousness. You have to pay the price some way or the other. I don't know enough about the subject to know what the price would be.
If any one of them later forgot about their experiences although they had a higher level of consciousness at the time, that does not take away the consciousness. Memory does not equal consciousness. Memory can inform us about our level of consciousness, but it can also lie.
This is just about semantics of the word. I am not engaging in discussions about semantics. I am interested in the phenomenon.
Also, you are misrepresenting my understanding of the relationship between memory and consciousness.
"Many traditions had a long experience in looking up at the sun and moon and came to the shared understanding that they were gods. The intellectual approach is what allowed us to actually figure it out."
Just this week I read how somebody figured out that "waterfall method" was a straw man, and practically nobody was actually developing software like that. This is how it goes. I used to think like you. But after really learning about it, I realized that there have been people that have been very wise in the history. Sometimes they discuss things allegorically, because it is necessary for effective communication.
"I don't know what "understanding consciousness" could possibly mean if it doesn't mean understanding it at an intellectual, analytical level. If you ask someone to explain what effect produces a rainbow, they might reasonably say "shut up dude, just sit here and enjoy it with me." That's totally fine! You may claim to appreciate rainbows more than physicists. But you don't understand them better."
In software, we have architecture astronauts that have an analytical understanding of the architecture. But then come the developers who actually implement things, and they will come to understand the limitations of the architecture when the architecture meets reality. If the architect has their head in the clouds and refuses to accept the new understanding from this clash with reality, his architecture may be intellectually satisfying, but it will not be succesful. This is one example how analytical mind is quite limited. Understanding requires both knowledge and experience.
"I honestly don't believe that I do. If I were required to understand what the Ancient Greeks and Siddhartha Gautama and Confucius all said about the tides before I learned about the moon's gravity, then I'd never learn anything at all! It's OK to reject incorrect ideas."
What they said is not important. You need to have an experience tasting strawberry if you want to have a meaningful discussion with me about the taste of strawberry.
"See that's where I completely disagree. If I don't remember having a stomach ache, does that mean I was never in pain? People forget things! You can also forget the experience of having been conscious! Our memories are very efficient at selectively forgetting the mundane; we are so highly conscious all the time that it is mundane. If I asked you to rate your level of consciousness yesterday, you'd probably rate it lower (more baseline/auto) than you would if I started showing you videos of everything you were doing yesterday. Suddenly you'd remember: oh yeah, I actually was conscious!"
This argument is mostly about the semantics of the word consciousness. I am not going to argue about that.
I would not reassess my thought whether I was conscious if I was shown videos about myself even if it helped me to remember what I did yesterday.
For me the consciousness means I am aware of myself in the moment. Higher consciousness means the experience is stronger, hence it is more difficult to forget the experience. That does not mean that memory is the same thing as the consciousness.
The memory imprint you are talking about is very different from the memory imprint I am talking about.
People forget things, but if you are blessed with an experience of being more conscious, you will understand how such an experience will be more difficult to forget.
Wedding day or an accident might not leave a stronger than usual imprint although we think it is something great we ought to remember. They also might.
"You are effectively accusing other people of not being as conscious as you because they don't meditate."
I am not more conscious than anybody else. If I thought I was more conscious than anybody else, this would actually be hubris and I would be less conscious than everybody else. I have been blessed with a few experiences of being conscious, but that does not make me a better person in any way and does not help me being more conscious right now. I just happen to have tasted the strawberry so I know what it tastes like.
G.I. Gurdjieff uses the terms "sleep", "sleeping consciousness" and "waking consciousness" respectively to refer to states where you sleep or are otherwise unconscious, where you may think you have been conscious but do not remember being conscious and where you remember being conscious.
There is a good reason why many traditions that investigate consciousness have seperate words for the two latter states.
If you find the time, could you share what the big takeaways were that had a profound effect? I’m guessing it was a practical exercise that trained you to more accurately introspect, but that’s just a guess. I’m way too deep into all this philosophy stuff already so I mostly got indignant disagreement out of this essay, and I’d like to see it in a more productive light!
Anyway, I was not a philosophy undergraduate and so a lot of my exposure was either to popular level works (surveys, etc), or big historical names (Descartes, Hume, Plato), or to very specific areas of research (I was big into metaphysics and philosophy of mind "realists", like Chalmers, Searle, Flanagan etc), and skepticism about intuition, or sense-data, or even skepticism about a priori truths had just never really occurred to me. That's more of a self-own than anything, but we first-years in grad school had a course together where someone in the dept. would take us thru a deep dive in a very specific area by way of a brand new book. For example, the year prior to my arrival they read thru a "Climbing the Mountain", an early draft of the book that would eventually become Parfit's "On What Matters".
Anyway, my year all picked "Describing Inner Experience", and this would become my introduction to an ultimately useful view that opened the world of CogSci to me since assumptions I had (which can probably be described at Cartesian) no longer posed powerful arguments against a more empirically-minded look into how the mind works. So, folks that I previously disregarded like Dennett, Wittgenstein, the Churchlands, were now gateways into Smolensky, Prinz, Carruthers, etc.
It's a class of experience radically different than, say, proprioception or feeling. One is externally mediated, the other is endogenous. Consciousness (in the phenomenal sense) is the superclass of both.
Cognition, or meta-consciousness, makes salient specific aspects of our experience/awareness, so that I'm very well aware right now of the pixels of my monitor as I write this, and much less so of the expansion of my rib cage as I breathe, or whatever subtle noises might be going on out of my window. However, I never really stop being conscious of them.
So, what does this partial unification implies for that something else? That something else being qualia, in contemporary terms.
That doesn't solve _the original question_, or _the hard problem_ in any way. It just breaks it down in a different way. It's ok, the hard problem is hard anyway.
When reading it, I get a strong sense that the text softly implies qualia as an emerging phenomenon. A christmas-tree-like composition of smaller qualia units, those coming primarily from senses and building up into more elaborate experiences.
However, the argument for qualia was never about individual senses. Thought experiments like "what is like to be a bat?" and "what if I see colors different from everyone else?" were never about individual, specific senses. It was never implied to be literally just about a single sense, but the experience of being as a whole.
That idea of "being as a whole" already includes the unconscious-until-conscious experiences. Julian Jaynes puts the "light in the refrigerator" not as a stationary light, but a flashlight that you can swing around in a dark room: wherever you point it to something, that something becomes highlighted in your consciousness. In the same way as the "light in the refrigerator" experiment, when you're not pointing to something, it doesn't mean it's not there.
The "flashlight in the dark room" thought experiment also brings up important questions, like: what if there's someone else in the room? How should we deal with things that seemingly move around? It also brings up the idea of object permanence to the context of consciousness. Are we just like small children too naive to perceive what it really is?
But I’m just vaguely gesturing — this view was first and best characterized in 1801:
For example, this universal identity of the apperception of the manifold given in intuition contains a synthesis of representations and is possible only by means of the consciousness of this synthesis… For the empirical consciousness which accompanies different representations is in itself fragmentary and disunited, and without relation to the identity of the subject. This relation, then, does not exist because I accompany every representation with consciousness, but because I join one representation to another, and am conscious of the synthesis of them… in other words, the analytical unity of apperception is possible only under the presupposition of a synthetical unity.[16]
…for the reason alone that I can comprehend the variety of my representations in one consciousness, do I call them my representations, for otherwise I must have as many-coloured and various a self as are the representations of which I am conscious. Synthetical unity of the manifold in intuitions, as given à priori, is therefore the foundation of the identity of apperception itself, which antecedes à priori all determinate thought. But the conjunction of representations into a conception is not to be found in objects themselves… but it is on the contrary an operation of the understanding itself, which is nothing more than the faculty of conjoining à priori and of bringing the variety of given representations under the unity of apperception.
This principle is the highest in all human cognition.
The other important element is attention and awareness. You can certainly be focused on one thing more than another—this can be a useful kind of disunity
The thing is, one needs (or so I suppose) a perceiving system to address questions of any sort, and why would minds be different? I am merely doubting that introspection is sufficient. I strongly suspect that most of what goes on in our brains is inaccessible to our conscious minds.
Reminds me of the Nimoy quote that ‘in life, like a garden, perfect moments can be had but not preserved’ except in memories.
Then I tell myself a story about the babble. Map the babble in terms of time, space, things, money, etc.
And then that story. That's "reality".
(But the real magic show comes when I am guided by the story, in what I pay attention to and what I ignore)
Anyway, I was surprised to find nothing with Ctrl+F+"psychosis" because my (perhaps naïve) understanding is that disunity of consciousness is typically pathologized that way: having a wandering or dissociated mind where someone can't cope with everyday experiences.
And I believe that disunity, or psychosis, is way more prevalent today than we think. Because with all of us online, absorbed in cyberspaces and AR games, and thinking of FB/IG friends even while we're showering, our minds are guaranteed to be a million miles away, under normal functional circumstances.
As a young hobbyist I found a lovely escape into my favorite 6510 processor, but when I joined the workforce, I was extremely dismayed to consider that my work was 100% invisible and 100% intangible to everyone, and I had nothing to talk about with my family or girlfriends about what I did at work, even if I was utterly preoccupied and still working problems out at dinnertime.
When distraction and stolen attention is the currency, opiate, or Spice of the Information Age, it's no surprise that we're no longer the masters of our own thoughts, and Eastern Mindfulness is preached from the highest authorities, including a young Obi-Wan Kenobi, because distraction and lack of focus are literally fatal errors for human beings.
There seems to be this naïve view among some philosophers that what our verbal stream of consciousness reports is somehow the most important part of our "mind" or our "consciousness", some even saying that verbal thoughts are the only thing that are important enough to be called "thoughts"!
I say: look what’s telling you that! I mean that very seriously.
I've always assumed that the brain has to have many parallel things going on at the same time and we have some limited awareness of these things and some ability to coordinate and direct the different parts of the brain, but it seems to be rather limited. It can't be complete, just on a Turing/Goedel basis, but anything approaching completeness would mean slowing our thoughts down to the slowest parts.
I remember reading about the Libet experiment decades ago and how some people thought that it disproved "free will"— whatever that could possibly mean. The impulse to report a decision to move a finger came after the impulse to move the finger. So? They were apparently assuming that the mind was some synchronized, sequential process and that the verbal report of what "the mind" was intending to do was supposed to come at the same time or before the impulse to move the finger. What???
Even a view of a single stream of "attention" or "executive process" seems dubious. Yes, we have all had the experience where something that's mostly automatic/unconscious suddenly requires our attention. For example, you're driving a car and suddenly a novel situation comes up and you need to turn off the radio or tell the passenger to shut up so you devote all your attention to driving. But just normal driving requires an enormous amount of processing of different concepts and coordinating different parts of the brain.
There was an experiment (Maier's two-string puzzle, I just found by google), where a scientist tested people's ability to solve a problem figuring out how to tie two strings together that were hanging from the ceiling, too far apart for anyone to grab both at the same time. Some of the participants were given a non-verbal "hint" of how to solve the problem. But, when asked later how they solved it, most of those given the hint didn't mention it! Were they "consciously aware" of the hint at all? That was an actual experiment relevant to the idea of a unity of consciousness.
Anyway, mine is a very limited, amateur, mostly 20th century perspective on the ideas. I'd be interested in what others have to share, especially actual experiments and not so much philosophers examining their verbal thoughts.
For anyone who thinks this, what happens if you start thinking a thought in words, and then stop partway through the sentence? When I do this, I understand the meaning of the full sentence even if I stop after a single word. Because, how could I say something without first knowing what I was going to say?
For me, that meaning is the real thought. The words are just a representation of it.
Maybe it’s just me, but it is not that uncommon for me to start to say something that I thought was clear in my head, only to realize that it was not. It happens even more when I write, and especially when I write programs.
It's hard to understand this statement if you are not awake. I would have down voted this before the shift happened for me :)
"But nobody wants it! Everybody hates it!" OH. WELL, THEN STOP.
That's what SHE said!
RA Wilson says the only options after visiting Chapel Perilous are to become a paranoid, or an agnostic, and that there is no third way. I'd argue one could also become an atheist. The paranoid thinks there's always a force out there trying to get them. The atheist is convinced there's never a force out there trying to get them. I try to remain agnostic as I am not sure all the evidence is in yet to be able to make an accurate assessment of the situation which we all find ourselves dropped into.
I take modified Sturgeon's Law view of various religious teachings. Sturgeon says 90% of everything is crap. I think it's closer to 99%. But the 1% that's left over is pretty interesting.
Anyway I gave you a deserved upvote, but I'm sure your karma that matters is not as negative as your HN karma. :)
I ponder the topics you mention and at no point did I feel compelled to radically retool my life around 2000 year old religious documents which themselves have clear lineage to even older, less-informed belief systems.
I was raised Catholic, by a deacon, and have a deep understanding of Judeo-Christian religions, and have studied to a lesser extent several world religions. What am I missing?
That is natural, but the problem is that our intellect is quite limited. You would like to have a description of "the unifying deep truth". But even very simple experience, like how strawberry tastes like, cannot be transmitted by words and comprehended by the intellect. How could we transmit something vastly more complex even if we knew it -- and I am not claiming I do.
So I would say what you are missing is the direct experience of something higher. Seek and you will find.
Spirituality does not contradict with what others experience in material world.
You just start identifying more with consciousness and less with the body. That's the shift.
And if you also think about it scientifically it makes sense.
You are consciousness experiencing the world.
Not the body experiencing consciousness.
You are consciousness
Not the body.
The body ages. The cells changes. You remains. The consciousness sees the body.
What you describe is akin to Camus's Absurd, but you chose to fill in the weirdness of existence with some kind of spirituality. That's your choice. Please don't go around claiming to be morally superior to "99.99%" of all humans on earth.
Also as I said in other comments till you experience a shift none of this makes sense to you. That's okay.