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Comment by albertize | Hacker News Reader

In this article, the concept of working memory accounts for not consciousness but the accessibility, stability and reportability of certain contents. For example, when I am reading very carefully, I may not be concentrating on the ambient sounds, my bodily position, my peripheral vision, and the environment of the room. These contents may not have to be retained in working memory in any way as relevant information for the current activity. Nevertheless, it does not necessarily follow that these are unconscious in nature. They can be part of the background of consciousness. Hence, there is the danger that the author assumes "being available for cognitive manipulation or verbal report" to be synonymous with "being conscious." This is quite an assumption and not one arrived at from the working memory model.

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Yeah, binning conscious and unconscious as two categorical classes is probably wrong. There are likely gradations, especially in the context of working memory over time.

The subconscious and unconscious are different, and the subconscious has it's own working memory that the conscious can't access.

An interesting read is Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow that explains cognitive systems, 1 is subconscious and fast and the other is conscious and slow

All of this indicates the flaw in the account of “consciousness”. Consciousness is elemental and “conscious”’or “unconscious” are “state forms” both of consciousness.

Consciousness is the envelope. Conscious is a category of awareness.

My brutally downvoted comment implied this, with more conjecture of the envelope. Enable “show dead” if you didn’t catch it!

Yes I think it’s a linguistic confusion more than anything else.

To me, consciousness is not generally that you can be aware (conscious) of things around you and can react to them, lots of things can do that.

Consciousness is a shorthand for saying that something is conscious of itself, or conscious of its own consciousness. It is the meta-ability to observe its own perceptions and thoughts. And a sense of self, a sense that the observer is the same over time.

But frankly, it’s a terrible concept and my definition is plenty flawed too. In practice it is more of a moving goalpost to denote the specialness and superiority of humans over all. That thing we can’t quite put a finger on that makes us different. It is a secular euphemism for the soul. It is not very scientific.

And that is quite problematic because the privileges we ascribe to those on the wrong side of the line fall off a cliff. We rely on that line as a foundation for so much of our morals. We have seen the catastrophes that happen when a group has a different idea about the line.

I don’t have a solution to propose, it’s hard.

> It is the meta-ability to observe its own perceptions and thoughts. And a sense of self, a sense that the observer is the same over time.

Which is kind of strange because folks who achieve insight examining their own perceptions and thoughts seem to dissolve the barrier between self and not-self.

But even then most such reports still effectively claim a subjective experience.

There's gotta be at least a few stream enterers here who can clarify

Not always, ego death states are not needed.

Meta-cognition is a common skill a lot of highly intelligent people possess but of course if you don't have it you can still be highly intelligent, just not as aware.

I tend to prefer the term subjective experience for what you describe as a meta-ability.

Consciousness is too overloaded by conflicting definitions.

We could at least imagine the possibility of something coming across as conscious in every way without having a subjective experience of self.

Even a fully deterministic view of consciousness can be compatible with a possible split between entities that act-as-if but without a subjective experience, and those with.

The problem is that there is no reasonable way to prove a subjective experience - we're stuck self reporting. We can't even prove other humans have subjective experience.

It is also not clear that it matters of such entities can act identically.

You can be aware and react subconsciously too.

The difference between conscious and subconscious is deliberation and speed.

The subconscious relies on shortcuts, the conscious takes more effort, at least when talking about cognition that seems to be the case.

If you can't report some stimuli in principle, even to yourself, what would it mean for that stimuli to also be conscious?

The article spends multiple paragraphs on exactly this. Did you read it in its entirety?

"This can be a difficult idea to swallow. Imagine you’re looking out at a countryside scene. You see rolling hills, the vibrant sunshine and a herd of cows. You hear the birds, smell the fresh cut grass and feel the wind on your skin. Surely you are conscious of this whole scene all at once. But we know that working memory has a capacity that is far too tiny to fit all of this information in at one time. If consciousness arises from working memory, then how can I be conscious of all this stuff at once?

Indeed, some philosophers and scientists have argued in just this way, saying that consciousness overflows the capacity of working memory. If this is true, it would be a problem for those who think that consciousness arises from working memory."

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