I'm 3 sentences into the interview, and this seems absurd on its face. Does anyone take this seriously?
"When we say we are thinking, what we are actually doing is rearranging causal relations with past events, objects that we have encountered before, to see what happens when we combine them. We don’t need a mental sofa to put next to a mental armchair. We allow the sofas and armchairs encountered in our past to exert an effect in the present, in various combinations."
I had the same reaction, but you have to keep reading. He's building a stack. He's not saying that thoughts and mental images don't actually exist, it's that they don't exist before the game of language is played. And the game of language is turning sensations of physical objects into auditory representations of them. There's no reason to start constructing the abstract objects yet, we're not at that layer of the 'stack'.
It's kind of like saying that when you dive down to the network layer, video doesn't exist. It's up to the application running the network to assemble all the packets to turn it into video.
Thoughts are constructed from the stream of physical experiences that get formed into words, not the other way around. It's perfectly possible for the brain to still operate without thoughts the way we experience them, in fact, deaf people think visually rather than auditorially like most of us do.
That reasoning completely falls on its face though. AFAIK, Stroke patients whose language areas have been destroyed are still able to perform complex tasks.
You can think visually and procedurally (imagining actions) without putting things into words. IIRC Broca's area (which is responsible for grammar) may be related to the temporal planning of non-verbal actions though, so the above may be limited to Wernike's aphasia.
What do they mean by putting things into words? When thinking, it seems that the assumption is that we are silently putting our thoughts into <insert language> words? This is by experience not the case anyway, right?
It depends. Some people (most people?) think their thoughts in words, and find it hard to believe that other people don't. Other people (me, maybe you?) just think "thoughts". Wordlessly, imagelessly. The article supports this, but the GP (it seems to me) finds it worthwhile to point out that people can still think without words, which indicates to me that he thinks with words.
I have had a very hard time explaining to people that I just think thoughts, like flashes of... thinking, without words or actions or images. It's like when speaking or typing, you already know what you're going to say or type or write before you put it into words, but some people have trouble relating to that.
I generally use words only when I need to communicate. I have different forms that I think with depending on what I'm doing. For example, when I'm coding, I think in terms of methods, objects, and data. The process of selecting words to speak or type is very much like finding the right code pattern.
Thanks for your explanation, I did not know that this was the case. I had until now assumed that words are a kind of medium for conveying the underlying thoughts which are abstract and exist separately. Observations like this make me wonder if actually there might be quite substantial differences from person to person when it comes to thinking and perception.
> I have had a very hard time explaining to people that I just think thoughts, like flashes of... thinking, without words or actions or images. It's like when speaking or typing, you already know what you're going to say or type or write before you put it into words, but some people have trouble relating to that.
I'm in the same boat, actually. While I can't read without vocalizing mentally, I have speechless thoughts especially when it comes to math/logic stuff, and I sometimes find it painful to have to wait for my mouth to serialize what I have in mind.
What makes you think other living beings besides humans don't have thoughts? IMHO we're just a slightly souped up version of everything else, exist along a continuity, and are not 'special' except in contrived and technical ways.
'slightly' seems a bit understated to me. There is no other species whose members are anywhere close to sitting around typing messages to each other across hundreds or thousand of miles.
We are steering our evolution as a species outside of biology, in large part, via social and cultural institutions. What other species does that?
He starts from an unfamiliar place, saying "there are no mental objects separate from real objects," and thinking is a process of re-experiencing these objects and rearranging them in our heads. Sounds pretty radical, but when he's done building his stack, it's all much more conventional. He doesn't mean physical objects so much as experiences, and physical experiences aren't replayed exactly in our heads but rather changed, rearranged, organized, and manipulated, and ways of organizing these experiences can be transmitted via language. So when he says, "Simply, there is no need to introduce this new entity, thought, between body and object," it is a little disingenuous because he is using words such as "experience" and "rearrangement" and "reorganization" to describe mental processes. At that point I lose track of what original point he's trying to make. I think when it comes down to it he is just making a big deal out of replacing nouns with verbs (and nouns more obviously made from verbs) to make it sound like he has a unique appreciation for the fact that what goes on in your head is dynamic rather than static.
> He's not saying that thoughts and mental images don't actually exist, it's that they don't exist before the game of language is played. And the game of language is turning sensations of physical objects into auditory representations of them.
We know this is wrong though. Memory of a chair is distinct from memory of the word "chair". If this wasn't true, then it would be difficult or impossible to speak multiple languages fluently. Also, animals wouldn't be able to understand the world around them, because they don't have language like we have language.
Could you please not rush into an HN thread after 3 sentences to post a quick dismissal of somebody's work? This is just the sort of reaction we're trying to learn—as a community—to suspend, in order to have more substantive conversation. It takes effort, but it's worth it, since internet forums are a shallow wasteland otherwise.
I have found that, if you are careful to state the subject and object of a sentence, then it's really hard to pose any question that doesn't have a trivial and obvious answer.
TRY IT!
So could many of these things just be an artifact of language?
Consciousness is: what it is like to experience something. Note this is different from self consciousness which is: what is it like to be something which experiences and know you are that thing.
Humans are certainly self conscious. Crabs are certainly conscious. Crystals certainly exist.
Where the boundaries are is an interesting question, but the categories certainly exist even if I can't draw a clean boundary around members.
Let's translate your sentences to illustrate what I mean.
What it is like? So you are comparing one entity experiencing something to another. Experiencing is a process that takes place inside the entity and among its component parts.
Know you are that thing - every thing is itself, if it has well defined boundaries. Knowing something is just having access to that information and good reasons to believe it to be correct. Here we have a tautology - that a thing is itself - so it doesn't require much to know that. What you are probably more interested in is a mechanism that can take advantge of that knowledge in various ways. Like self preservation.
Humans are self conscious.
Crabs are self conscious too because they act with a purpose of self preservation, which requires knowledge of what is them and what is not them.
Crystals do not have this knowledge or do not have a mechanism to act on it in a way that manipulates semantic symbols.
> Crabs are self conscious too because they act with a purpose of self preservation, which requires knowledge of what is them and what is not them.
It's a bit more complicated. Self consciousness is the ability to contemplate mental states, some philosophers say. Crabs do not contemplate their own mental states, they simply act and feel.
> Ok well there you go. I was basing it on your earlier definition.
Sorry, but it was my first comment on the thread. You are confusing me with the guy that posted earlier. I apologize for entering in the middle of your conversation.
> So define the word contemplate.
Contemplate: to observe something and to entertain thoughts about it.
Imply that self preservation is an example of self consciousness is not sufficient for me. Plants too react to stimuli and they don't even have a nervous system (edit: neurons are not a sine qua non condition, obviously. I was only pointing to the fact that simpler organisms react to the environment, it is one of the most basic evolutionary strategies). It is necessary something more.
As the poster before me said, there are boundaries. They can be not clear, but they exist.
Guuz's comment does not change the earlier definition (regardless of who stated it.) What it does do is point out a flaw in your argument from that definition to your claim that crabs are self-conscious.
It seems, from the other thread, that there was no change in an original definition, but it would be moot anyway, as the sprinkler example follows the reasoning of your claim that a crab is self-conscious, which in turn follows from the confusion, over the difference between being a thing and knowing that one is that thing, in this paragraph:
"Know you are that thing - every thing is itself, if it has well defined boundaries. Knowing something is just having access to that information and good reasons to believe it to be correct. Here we have a tautology - that a thing is itself - so it doesn't require much to know that. What you are probably more interested in is a mechanism that can take advantge of that knowledge in various ways. Like self preservation."
This line of thought leads to the self-consciousness of buildings in exactly the same way as it leads to the self-consciousness of crabs.
But you did not point out the inadequacy of the definition of the term, tacitly or otherwise; instead, you demonstrated the flaws in your own distortions of that definition. Consequently, it seems unlikely that there is a validation of your original point (whatever that was) somewhere in there.
The clarity of your disagreement has not extended as far as a response to the counter-argument that is implicit in my original post in this thread. The final step in your argument that jjaredsimpson's definition of self-consciousness leads to the conclusion that crabs are self-conscious is this:
'Crabs are self conscious too because they act with a purpose of self preservation, which requires knowledge of what is them and what is not them.'
I pointed out that this works equally well for the claim that buildings with sprinkler systems are self-conscious, a conclusion that you have tacitly agreed is ridiculous. There's no difficulty in seeing what flaw in reasoning led to this conclusion: it is in the claim '[self preservation] requires knowledge of what is them and what is not them', where, in fact, all it needs is a suitable response to a stimulus that may signal an existential threat. This claim is not in jjaredsimpson's definition of self-consciousness; it is an independent axiom that you inserted into the discussion.
If your original point is that any discussion can be stalled by the injection of bogus arguments over the definitions of words, then I would have to agree that you have proven it by example.
If a robot vacuum recognizes a roadblock and stops, its inner representation of the roadblock is not merely an agreement (with whom anyway?).
That representation is internal and (normally) only accessible to the software of that particular robot (it may even could change over time - of course it would be a bad programming practice except for malwares - so no agreement is needed but only some kind of behavioral self consistency). And it have real causal power: it makes the robot stop and turn.
That representation is stored in memory cells wich are (usually in a normal household) not roadblocks.
*(AFAIK this viewpoint is called functionalism. It just somehow feels natural to me as a developer, but maybe it is just taste, and it is just as twisted for a philosopher as the above identity theory for me...)
Meaning and subjectivity come from (machine) learning, or relativity as Riccardo calls it.
I think, consciousness from how our brains learn, namely by having internalized the feedback. Which is another way of saying by modeling the world, and updating those models by constantly monitoring the effectiveness of those models.
We are self-observers, integrating our sensory information into a subjective first-person perspective.
"ALL PROPOUNDERS of theories of knowledge since Kant have been influenced to a greater or lesser degree by the mistaken way he formulated the problem of knowledge. As a result of his “a priorism” he advanced the view that all objects given to us are our representations..."
46 comments
[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 92.0 ms ] thread"When we say we are thinking, what we are actually doing is rearranging causal relations with past events, objects that we have encountered before, to see what happens when we combine them. We don’t need a mental sofa to put next to a mental armchair. We allow the sofas and armchairs encountered in our past to exert an effect in the present, in various combinations."
It's kind of like saying that when you dive down to the network layer, video doesn't exist. It's up to the application running the network to assemble all the packets to turn it into video.
Thoughts are constructed from the stream of physical experiences that get formed into words, not the other way around. It's perfectly possible for the brain to still operate without thoughts the way we experience them, in fact, deaf people think visually rather than auditorially like most of us do.
You can think visually and procedurally (imagining actions) without putting things into words. IIRC Broca's area (which is responsible for grammar) may be related to the temporal planning of non-verbal actions though, so the above may be limited to Wernike's aphasia.
I have had a very hard time explaining to people that I just think thoughts, like flashes of... thinking, without words or actions or images. It's like when speaking or typing, you already know what you're going to say or type or write before you put it into words, but some people have trouble relating to that.
I'm in the same boat, actually. While I can't read without vocalizing mentally, I have speechless thoughts especially when it comes to math/logic stuff, and I sometimes find it painful to have to wait for my mouth to serialize what I have in mind.
We are steering our evolution as a species outside of biology, in large part, via social and cultural institutions. What other species does that?
None. Sometimes I wonder if they know something we don't.
We know this is wrong though. Memory of a chair is distinct from memory of the word "chair". If this wasn't true, then it would be difficult or impossible to speak multiple languages fluently. Also, animals wouldn't be able to understand the world around them, because they don't have language like we have language.
I do take it seriously - it's utterly fascinating. I'm really excited to read Manzotti's new book.
What is consciousness?
What is existence?
They seem to be duals of each other.
I have found that, if you are careful to state the subject and object of a sentence, then it's really hard to pose any question that doesn't have a trivial and obvious answer.
TRY IT!
So could many of these things just be an artifact of language?
Humans are certainly self conscious. Crabs are certainly conscious. Crystals certainly exist.
Where the boundaries are is an interesting question, but the categories certainly exist even if I can't draw a clean boundary around members.
What it is like? So you are comparing one entity experiencing something to another. Experiencing is a process that takes place inside the entity and among its component parts.
Know you are that thing - every thing is itself, if it has well defined boundaries. Knowing something is just having access to that information and good reasons to believe it to be correct. Here we have a tautology - that a thing is itself - so it doesn't require much to know that. What you are probably more interested in is a mechanism that can take advantge of that knowledge in various ways. Like self preservation.
Humans are self conscious.
Crabs are self conscious too because they act with a purpose of self preservation, which requires knowledge of what is them and what is not them.
Crystals do not have this knowledge or do not have a mechanism to act on it in a way that manipulates semantic symbols.
It's a bit more complicated. Self consciousness is the ability to contemplate mental states, some philosophers say. Crabs do not contemplate their own mental states, they simply act and feel.
So define the word contemplate.
But do you see how defining things and using the subject and object makes it hard to ask any of the major questions?
Sorry, but it was my first comment on the thread. You are confusing me with the guy that posted earlier. I apologize for entering in the middle of your conversation.
> So define the word contemplate.
Contemplate: to observe something and to entertain thoughts about it.
Imply that self preservation is an example of self consciousness is not sufficient for me. Plants too react to stimuli and they don't even have a nervous system (edit: neurons are not a sine qua non condition, obviously. I was only pointing to the fact that simpler organisms react to the environment, it is one of the most basic evolutionary strategies). It is necessary something more.
As the poster before me said, there are boundaries. They can be not clear, but they exist.
According to this definition, crabs are self conscious.
I guess my office building is self conscious then, as it has a sprinkler system.
"Know you are that thing - every thing is itself, if it has well defined boundaries. Knowing something is just having access to that information and good reasons to believe it to be correct. Here we have a tautology - that a thing is itself - so it doesn't require much to know that. What you are probably more interested in is a mechanism that can take advantge of that knowledge in various ways. Like self preservation."
This line of thought leads to the self-consciousness of buildings in exactly the same way as it leads to the self-consciousness of crabs.
Anyway my original point stands :)
'Crabs are self conscious too because they act with a purpose of self preservation, which requires knowledge of what is them and what is not them.'
I pointed out that this works equally well for the claim that buildings with sprinkler systems are self-conscious, a conclusion that you have tacitly agreed is ridiculous. There's no difficulty in seeing what flaw in reasoning led to this conclusion: it is in the claim '[self preservation] requires knowledge of what is them and what is not them', where, in fact, all it needs is a suitable response to a stimulus that may signal an existential threat. This claim is not in jjaredsimpson's definition of self-consciousness; it is an independent axiom that you inserted into the discussion.
If your original point is that any discussion can be stalled by the injection of bogus arguments over the definitions of words, then I would have to agree that you have proven it by example.
http://www.consciousness.it/
This is obviously false to me.*
If a robot vacuum recognizes a roadblock and stops, its inner representation of the roadblock is not merely an agreement (with whom anyway?).
That representation is internal and (normally) only accessible to the software of that particular robot (it may even could change over time - of course it would be a bad programming practice except for malwares - so no agreement is needed but only some kind of behavioral self consistency). And it have real causal power: it makes the robot stop and turn.
That representation is stored in memory cells wich are (usually in a normal household) not roadblocks.
*(AFAIK this viewpoint is called functionalism. It just somehow feels natural to me as a developer, but maybe it is just taste, and it is just as twisted for a philosopher as the above identity theory for me...)
I think, consciousness from how our brains learn, namely by having internalized the feedback. Which is another way of saying by modeling the world, and updating those models by constantly monitoring the effectiveness of those models.
We are self-observers, integrating our sensory information into a subjective first-person perspective.
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Riccardo_Manzotti/publi...
"ALL PROPOUNDERS of theories of knowledge since Kant have been influenced to a greater or lesser degree by the mistaken way he formulated the problem of knowledge. As a result of his “a priorism” he advanced the view that all objects given to us are our representations..."