My theory is that this darting is the mechanism of consciousness. We look inward and outward in a loop, which generates the perception of being conscious in a similar way to how sequential frames of film create the illusion of motion. That "persistence of vision" is like the illusion of persistent, continuous consciousness created by the inward-outward regard sequence. Consciousness is a simple algorithm: look at the world, then look at the self to evaluate its reaction to the world. Then repeat.
nomel 3 hours ago [-]
From what...my friend say, this becomes evident with LSD.
They said it clearly amplified the internal part of some visual perception loop, in fairly straightforward ways. For example, intentionally trying to see something as it wasn't (like a shadow as a snake) would make it be seen that way (the shadow would take on a clear snake appearance, and even move a bit).
Some simple examples are all the face optical illusions (Thatcher, reverse mask, etc), that show our perception of a face is in no way direct.
bongodongobob 13 minutes ago [-]
I also have noticed a "ticking" effect at times. Maybe around 5-10Hz or so. Felt like some kind of global clock tick that was updating perception. Everything in between was interpolated. Course it could just be the drugs /shrug
Jeff_Brown 10 hours ago [-]
But why does that feel like anything? I could write a program that concurrently processes its visual input and its internal model. I don't think it would be conscious, unless everything in the universe is conscious (a possibility I can't, admittedly, discount).
delichon 9 hours ago [-]
> But why does that feel like anything?
Consciousness is an attention mechanism. That inward regard, evaluating how the self reacts to the world, is attention being payed to the body's feelings. The outward regard then maps those feelings on to local space. Consciousness is watching your feelings as a kind of HUD on the world. It correlates feels to things.
EMIRELADERO 5 hours ago [-]
Sure, but that still leaves the mystery of how qualia is generated in a mechanistic manner.
savoyard 20 minutes ago [-]
Just wait till you hear Geoffrey Hinton’s “little pink elephants” routine; it will all make sense then (it won’t). The mystery is almost rivaled by that other mystery of why some of us fail to be mystified.
lanfeust6 4 hours ago [-]
Yes. Still perplexing to be thrown into the world. How is it that my individual experience is in this body but not another one? Etc
exolymph 3 hours ago [-]
> But why does that feel like anything?
Anthropic principle: because it does. If it didn't feel like anything, it wouldn't. But it does, so it does.
I have a feeling the response would be “read the latter”
2 hours ago [-]
Traubenfuchs 3 hours ago [-]
> But why does that feel like anything?
Orchestrated objective reduction or just an emerging proeprty of:
Our 86 billion neurons, every single one deafeningly
complex molecular machine with hundred million of hundreds of different receptor types, monoaminoxidae, (reuptake)transporters, connections to other neurons.
dwd 2 hours ago [-]
Anil Seth would have it the other way around that you predictively generate a perception of the world and then use your senses to refine that.
Consciousness could still be the self reaction to this sub-conscious predictive/generative function.
bmikaili 10 hours ago [-]
And funny enough this gets really close to the non-dualistic philosophies of zen buddhism.
bwoah 7 hours ago [-]
You could probably go further upstream and make a loose comparison to the concept of dependent arising (Pratītyasamutpāda):
Interesting idea called transparent self model by Thomas Metzinger, author of The Ego Tunnel where he explains it further.
The gist from my memory of 15+ years ago is that the brain needs to model the world and then itself within the world, creating a model that is transparent to itself, situated in the world.
cantor_S_drug 12 hours ago [-]
Is this also the reason why darting eyes movements can be linked (and is predictive of or can detect) to mental health issues like schizophrenia, etc?
mallowdram 12 hours ago [-]
It's a mechanism of intelligence, not consciousness. Intel is built up from path-integration, short-cuts, vicarious trial and error that begins in very tiny local areas and expands to landmark and non-landmark navigation. This switching between vision and hippocampus has always been theorized about as the fundamental sharp wave ripple threshold of how intelligence is built as most mammals can do this, so it's not the "algorithm of consciousness".
lofaszvanitt 4 hours ago [-]
This whole consciousness debate is just trumped up bs.
ashanoko 7 hours ago [-]
[dead]
AlbertoGP 8 days ago [-]
A particularly interesting part that I did not expect from the title:
> Before the rats encountered the detour, the research team observed that their brains were already firing in patterns that seemed to "imagine" alternate unfamiliar mental routes while they slept. When the researchers compared these sleep patterns to the neural activity during the actual detour, some of them matched.
> “What was surprising was that the rats' brains were already prepared for this novel detour before they ever encountered it,”
glial 2 hours ago [-]
Suppose we simplify the scenario and think of experiences as draws from a discrete probability distribution, e.g. p=[0.1, 0.1, 0.7, 0.1].
Suppose further that all events are a draw of type 1, 2, 3, or 4, and that our memory kept a count and updated the distribution - it is essentially a frequency distribution.
When we encounter a stimulus, we have to (1) recognize it and (2) assign a reward valence to it. If we only ever observed '3', the distribution would become very peaked. Correspondingly, this suggests that we would recognize '3' events faster and be better at assigning a reward valence to those events.
Then if we ever encounter a non-3 event, we would recognize it more slowly - it is well-established that recognition is tied to encounter frequency - and do a poorer job assigning reward valence to it. Together this means that we would do a bad job selecting the appropriate response.
Perhaps this scenario-based dreaming keeps us (and rats) primed so we're not flat-footed in new scenarios.
The question then becomes - if these scenarios are purely imagined, where are they being sampled from? If we never observe 1, 2, and 4...how do we know that these are the true list of alternative scenarios?
e40 12 hours ago [-]
Seems to support the idea that dreams are rehearsals for real life.
usrnm 11 hours ago [-]
I wish some of my dreams really were
mycall 7 days ago [-]
> The same brain networks that normally help us imagine shortcuts or possibilities can, when disrupted, trap us in intrusive memories or hallucinations.
There is a fine line between this an wisdom. The Default Mode Network (DMN) is the brain's "simulation machine". When you're not focused on a specific task, the DMN fires up, allowing you to daydream, remember the past, plan for the future, and contemplate others' perspectives.
Wisdom is not about turning the machine off; it's about becoming the director of the movie it's playing. A creative genius envisioning a new world and a person trapped in a state of torment isn't the hardware, but the learned software of regulation, awareness, and perspective.
Wisdom is the process of learning to aim this incredible, imaginative power toward flourishing instead of suffering. Saying "trap us in intrusive memories or hallucinations" is the negative side where there is also a positive side to it all.
idiotsecant 12 hours ago [-]
>A creative genius envisioning a new world and a person trapped in a state of torment isn't the hardware, but the learned software of regulation, awareness, and perspective.
No, it's hardware. There is no amount of 'wisdom' bootstraps pulling that will make you not schizophrenic.
mallowfram 10 hours ago [-]
The brain isn't hardware, it's biology and oscillation and integrations in optic flow. It can't be dichotomized into hardware or software.
mallowdram 12 hours ago [-]
Wisdom is an arbitrary concept. The drive to avoid suffering is built from sensory and affective affinities and networks funnlled into the cog-mapping motor systems. Calling this wisdom is simply a simplistic narrative.
nzeid 4 hours ago [-]
Yeah. Not sure "flourishing" and "suffering" form a useful dichotomy for "wisdom" to begin with. Life is way more complicated than that.
In effect, my position is that biological systems maintain a synchronized processing pipeline: where the hippocampal prediction system operates slightly “ahead” of sensory processing, like a cache buffer.
If the processing gets “behind” the sensory input then you feel like you’re accessing memory because the electrical signal is reaching memory and sensory distribution simultaneously or slightly lagging.
So it means you’re constantly switching between your world map and the input and comparing them just to stabilize a “linear” experience - something which is a necessity for corporeal prediction and reaction.
dwd 1 hours ago [-]
Very interesting, will have a read in depth.
Wondering if you have any ideas on this, which can be quite jarring when it happens?
You are thinking about something, and then walk through a doorway into another room and suddenly completely lose track of what you were thinking.
The closest idea I've seen for that is: Jeff Hawkins in his Thousand Brain Theory of Intelligence made a statement that learning is a function of navigation and the world models we construct are set in the context of location we create them.
--------
Edit: Just read your piece on Faith:
"Faith, as it’s traditionally understood, is trivial bullshit compared to the towering, unseen faith we place in the empirical all day everyday."
Absolutely correct, and the traditional understanding of Hebrews 11:1 I don't believe reflects what the author (supposedly Paul) was trying to convey.
πίστις: Pistis can be translated as confidence, as in: I'm confident this chair won't collapse when I sit on on it. Much stronger than belief or faith.
ὑπόστασις: Hupostasis is also a much stronger word than assurance, it conveys substance, as in your past experience backs up your confidence.
shomp 14 hours ago [-]
I think we should be careful about materialistic reductions of awareness. Because some rats dreamed detours that ended up being correct in waking rat life, it does not follow that all instances of deja vu are misfirings. It's a tempting connection to draw, but it does not actually explain how the detours were dreamt to begin with, and this points to a deeper question about awareness in general. If I were pressed for an analogy, I might say something like "just because all books have ink does not mean that all ink lives in books." You know what I mean? There's a superset of experiences that cannot be easily explained away by caching, as tempting as it might be.
Antibabelic 12 hours ago [-]
Materialistic reduction has gotten us quite far in science.
mallowdram 12 hours ago [-]
Not exactly. We don't know where optic-flow reactions that integrate senses, emotions, motor systems in the slightest. Study neural reuse or coordination dynamics. Some relationship between the brain and the world that isn't easily found in the brain alone is responsible.
idiotsecant 11 hours ago [-]
Materialistic interpretations of the world around us are quite literally the only useful ones. If we didn't do that we'd be sleeping in caves and hitting each other with heavy rocks.
dwd 41 minutes ago [-]
Or writing papers on Panpsychism.
While I hold a similar view as Sean Carroll that it is basically hand-waving to say we'll never understand consciousness, I can't discount Donald Hoffman's Interface theory of perception and that evolutionary fitness requires we only perceive four dimensions (but there could be more as hypothesised in string theory).
mallowfram 10 hours ago [-]
Wrong. Materialistic only got us to a level. Now we're looking past materialism in neural reuse, coordination dynamics and ecological psychology and neurobiology. The causes are out there in contradictory correlations.
idiotsecant 7 hours ago [-]
Literally everything is materialist. If it's not it either A) doesn't actually exist or B) you just don't understand it yet.
It's inherent to the meaning of the word.
mallowfram 4 hours ago [-]
A word is a material? You can show me the brain state that corresponds repeatedly and with continuous accuracy a single word? I don't think so.
You can train a computer to correspond to an individual's idiosyncratic brain state for their word voxels, but no one has yet to reduce the material to a single repeatable voxel state.
“We refute (based on empirical evidence) claims that humans use linguistic representations to think.”
Ev Fedorenko Language Lab MIT 2024
The problem with the materialist POV is it doesn't solve the most basic question of brain states. No not everything is a material.
There clearly are processes, like oscillations, that require material to some extent, but are not material themselves. And that's the problem with the materialist camp. If the oscillations, dynamically integrated, are the source of intel/consciousness, then material may not even be a requirement of life. We may just be material sinks.
altruios 3 hours ago [-]
> There clearly are processes, like oscillations, that require material to some extent, but are not material themselves. And that's the problem with the materialist camp. If the oscillations, dynamically integrated, are the source of intel/consciousness, then material may not even be a requirement of life. We may just be material sinks.
I understand.
There is a however a flaw in that thinking.
There is no oscillation that exists outside of some material/medium to oscillate. I agree it is important to distinguish the water from the wave. There is no light wave without the photon.
Thus - I strongly suspect - there is no consciousness without the brain (or similar medium).
mallowfram 2 hours ago [-]
It's not a mind body problem, unfortunately, it's problem of hard indeterminism. We lack free will but the universe is not necessarily deterministic. Chaos has some level of intervention, like quantum darwinism, or gravity probability that is expressed somewhere between physical and process. This may be the interzone both share that is where the gateway exists, how DNA emerges, how neurons are evolved. The material may be inseparable both at origin and inexorably from the process, making the material simply the partner to the process. So materialism may simply be an illusion by itself.
As all our explanations are immaterial, they are post hoc observations, to claim any direction to the role of material is to sportscast the existence of material. There is no consciousness without the process, the material may be secondary as its explanation is a process as well.
We haven't found the format that finds the material in its place yet, whether its eliminative materialism, or another state-process pairing that cuts materialism down to a partner role. The jury is still out, but materialism isn't the answer.
idiotsecant 28 minutes ago [-]
Do you thing emergent properties are somehow not materialist? Do you know what the word means? Do you think it means only things that make a noise when you knock on them exist? You seem to be very confused about the conversation we're having.
OgsyedIE 7 days ago [-]
Your work seems pretty good to me, have you seen Steven Byrne's blog theorising about symbol grounding in the brain?
AndrewKemendo 7 days ago [-]
No I havent, I’ll have to look it up, thanks for the recommendation.
mallowdram 12 hours ago [-]
VR cannot be essential to decoding the brain as it deals in topological maps and affinities.
6 hours ago [-]
asdff 3 hours ago [-]
It would be interesting to move beyond rats and into humans binned via navigating their local area through understanding of the street networks independent of any tooling, and those that can't get down the street without mapping software telling them what to do.
Anecdotally it is striking to see the contrast as a member of the former group talking to people of the latter. They have truly no idea where places are or how close they are to other places. It is like these network connections aren't being made by them at all. No sense of scale either of how large a place is or how far away another place might be. I imagine this dependency on turn by turn navigation with no spatial awareness leads to quite different outcomes in terms of modes of thinking.
I mean, when I think about going to a place I am constructing a mental map of the actual city map. I am considering geography, cardinal directions, major corridors and their connectivity along the route, rough estimates of distance, etc. My CPUs are being used no doubt. Others though it is like a blankness in that wake. CPUs idle. Follow the arrows. Who knows where north is? What is a mile?
N_Lens 13 hours ago [-]
Going to new places is really therapeutic (Barring somewhere obviously adverse), since that 'darting to reality' creates a sense of presence.
I often find myself lost in my mental maps in daily life (Living inside my head) unless I'm in a nice novel environment. Meditation helps, however.
forinti 13 hours ago [-]
This takes me to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Your physical experience of something has to be analysed in accordance with your mental model of it in order to attain a diagnosis (in the book it was a motorcycle engine).
My take on this is, especially in regard to debugging IT issues, is that you have to constantly verify and update your mental model (check your premises!) in order to better weed out problems.
aatd86 7 days ago [-]
The way it is phrased, looks like a pre computed model confronted to real data.
So... our current AIs except we have incremental continuous training (accumulated experience)?
And dreams are simulation-based training to make life easier, decision-making more efficient?
What kind of next level machinery is this?! ;D
_spduchamp 7 days ago [-]
I wonder if this also relates to playing music.
pessimizer 11 hours ago [-]
There was a neural net paper like this that generated a lot of discussion on HN, but that I haven't been able to find since (I probably downloaded it, but that teaches me to always remember to use Zotero because academic paper filenames are terrible.)
It was about replacing backprop with a mechanism that checked outcomes against predictions, and just adjusted parameters that deviated from the predictions rather than the entire path. It wasn't suitable for digital machines (because it isn't any more efficient on digital machines) but it worked on analog models. If anybody remembers this, I'd appreciate the link.
I might be garbling the paper because it's from memory and I'm not an expert, but hopefully it's recognizable.
sirwhinesalot 11 hours ago [-]
I don't know if it is the paper you are thinking of (likely not) but this idea of checking predictions against outcomes is a very common idea in less mainstream AI research, including the so called "energy-based models" of Yann LeCun and the reference frames of the thousand brains project.
A recent paper posted here also looked at Recurrent Neural Nets and how in simplifying the design to its core amounted to just having a latent prediction and repeatedly adjusting that prediction.
pessimizer 9 hours ago [-]
If it wasn't a thread on HN, it's probably not. I don't think it was LeCun. It was a long, well-illustrated paper with a web version.
They said it clearly amplified the internal part of some visual perception loop, in fairly straightforward ways. For example, intentionally trying to see something as it wasn't (like a shadow as a snake) would make it be seen that way (the shadow would take on a clear snake appearance, and even move a bit).
Some simple examples are all the face optical illusions (Thatcher, reverse mask, etc), that show our perception of a face is in no way direct.
Consciousness is an attention mechanism. That inward regard, evaluating how the self reacts to the world, is attention being payed to the body's feelings. The outward regard then maps those feelings on to local space. Consciousness is watching your feelings as a kind of HUD on the world. It correlates feels to things.
Anthropic principle: because it does. If it didn't feel like anything, it wouldn't. But it does, so it does.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle
Explain the first part of this sentence.
Orchestrated objective reduction or just an emerging proeprty of:
Our 86 billion neurons, every single one deafeningly complex molecular machine with hundred million of hundreds of different receptor types, monoaminoxidae, (reuptake)transporters, connections to other neurons.
Consciousness could still be the self reaction to this sub-conscious predictive/generative function.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mind-indian-buddhism/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prat%C4%ABtyasamutp%C4%81da
The gist from my memory of 15+ years ago is that the brain needs to model the world and then itself within the world, creating a model that is transparent to itself, situated in the world.
> Before the rats encountered the detour, the research team observed that their brains were already firing in patterns that seemed to "imagine" alternate unfamiliar mental routes while they slept. When the researchers compared these sleep patterns to the neural activity during the actual detour, some of them matched.
> “What was surprising was that the rats' brains were already prepared for this novel detour before they ever encountered it,”
Suppose further that all events are a draw of type 1, 2, 3, or 4, and that our memory kept a count and updated the distribution - it is essentially a frequency distribution.
When we encounter a stimulus, we have to (1) recognize it and (2) assign a reward valence to it. If we only ever observed '3', the distribution would become very peaked. Correspondingly, this suggests that we would recognize '3' events faster and be better at assigning a reward valence to those events.
Then if we ever encounter a non-3 event, we would recognize it more slowly - it is well-established that recognition is tied to encounter frequency - and do a poorer job assigning reward valence to it. Together this means that we would do a bad job selecting the appropriate response.
Perhaps this scenario-based dreaming keeps us (and rats) primed so we're not flat-footed in new scenarios.
The question then becomes - if these scenarios are purely imagined, where are they being sampled from? If we never observe 1, 2, and 4...how do we know that these are the true list of alternative scenarios?
There is a fine line between this an wisdom. The Default Mode Network (DMN) is the brain's "simulation machine". When you're not focused on a specific task, the DMN fires up, allowing you to daydream, remember the past, plan for the future, and contemplate others' perspectives.
Wisdom is not about turning the machine off; it's about becoming the director of the movie it's playing. A creative genius envisioning a new world and a person trapped in a state of torment isn't the hardware, but the learned software of regulation, awareness, and perspective.
Wisdom is the process of learning to aim this incredible, imaginative power toward flourishing instead of suffering. Saying "trap us in intrusive memories or hallucinations" is the negative side where there is also a positive side to it all.
No, it's hardware. There is no amount of 'wisdom' bootstraps pulling that will make you not schizophrenic.
https://kemendo.com/Deja-Vu-Experiment.html
I think it also supports my three loops hypothesis as well:
https://kemendo.com/ThreeLoops.html
In effect, my position is that biological systems maintain a synchronized processing pipeline: where the hippocampal prediction system operates slightly “ahead” of sensory processing, like a cache buffer.
If the processing gets “behind” the sensory input then you feel like you’re accessing memory because the electrical signal is reaching memory and sensory distribution simultaneously or slightly lagging.
So it means you’re constantly switching between your world map and the input and comparing them just to stabilize a “linear” experience - something which is a necessity for corporeal prediction and reaction.
Wondering if you have any ideas on this, which can be quite jarring when it happens?
You are thinking about something, and then walk through a doorway into another room and suddenly completely lose track of what you were thinking.
The closest idea I've seen for that is: Jeff Hawkins in his Thousand Brain Theory of Intelligence made a statement that learning is a function of navigation and the world models we construct are set in the context of location we create them.
--------
Edit: Just read your piece on Faith: "Faith, as it’s traditionally understood, is trivial bullshit compared to the towering, unseen faith we place in the empirical all day everyday."
Absolutely correct, and the traditional understanding of Hebrews 11:1 I don't believe reflects what the author (supposedly Paul) was trying to convey.
Ἔστιν δὲ πίστις ἐλπιζομένων ὑπόστασις, πραγμάτων ἔλεγχος οὐ βλεπομένων
πίστις: Pistis can be translated as confidence, as in: I'm confident this chair won't collapse when I sit on on it. Much stronger than belief or faith.
ὑπόστασις: Hupostasis is also a much stronger word than assurance, it conveys substance, as in your past experience backs up your confidence.
While I hold a similar view as Sean Carroll that it is basically hand-waving to say we'll never understand consciousness, I can't discount Donald Hoffman's Interface theory of perception and that evolutionary fitness requires we only perceive four dimensions (but there could be more as hypothesised in string theory).
It's inherent to the meaning of the word.
You can train a computer to correspond to an individual's idiosyncratic brain state for their word voxels, but no one has yet to reduce the material to a single repeatable voxel state.
“We refute (based on empirical evidence) claims that humans use linguistic representations to think.” Ev Fedorenko Language Lab MIT 2024
The problem with the materialist POV is it doesn't solve the most basic question of brain states. No not everything is a material.
There clearly are processes, like oscillations, that require material to some extent, but are not material themselves. And that's the problem with the materialist camp. If the oscillations, dynamically integrated, are the source of intel/consciousness, then material may not even be a requirement of life. We may just be material sinks.
I understand.
There is a however a flaw in that thinking.
There is no oscillation that exists outside of some material/medium to oscillate. I agree it is important to distinguish the water from the wave. There is no light wave without the photon. Thus - I strongly suspect - there is no consciousness without the brain (or similar medium).
As all our explanations are immaterial, they are post hoc observations, to claim any direction to the role of material is to sportscast the existence of material. There is no consciousness without the process, the material may be secondary as its explanation is a process as well.
We haven't found the format that finds the material in its place yet, whether its eliminative materialism, or another state-process pairing that cuts materialism down to a partner role. The jury is still out, but materialism isn't the answer.
Anecdotally it is striking to see the contrast as a member of the former group talking to people of the latter. They have truly no idea where places are or how close they are to other places. It is like these network connections aren't being made by them at all. No sense of scale either of how large a place is or how far away another place might be. I imagine this dependency on turn by turn navigation with no spatial awareness leads to quite different outcomes in terms of modes of thinking.
I mean, when I think about going to a place I am constructing a mental map of the actual city map. I am considering geography, cardinal directions, major corridors and their connectivity along the route, rough estimates of distance, etc. My CPUs are being used no doubt. Others though it is like a blankness in that wake. CPUs idle. Follow the arrows. Who knows where north is? What is a mile?
I often find myself lost in my mental maps in daily life (Living inside my head) unless I'm in a nice novel environment. Meditation helps, however.
My take on this is, especially in regard to debugging IT issues, is that you have to constantly verify and update your mental model (check your premises!) in order to better weed out problems.
And dreams are simulation-based training to make life easier, decision-making more efficient?
What kind of next level machinery is this?! ;D
It was about replacing backprop with a mechanism that checked outcomes against predictions, and just adjusted parameters that deviated from the predictions rather than the entire path. It wasn't suitable for digital machines (because it isn't any more efficient on digital machines) but it worked on analog models. If anybody remembers this, I'd appreciate the link.
I might be garbling the paper because it's from memory and I'm not an expert, but hopefully it's recognizable.
A recent paper posted here also looked at Recurrent Neural Nets and how in simplifying the design to its core amounted to just having a latent prediction and repeatedly adjusting that prediction.