For some people, that's very difficult. They experience speaking as "I let my mouth say something." Even asking them afterwards "what did you just say" can get an "I dunno." This is what happens when you spin off parts of your mind into "semi-autonomous entities" and give them feedback to modify them.
I think it's more like "If I don't know what I'm going to say next, I can laugh at my own jokes." This provides valuable feedback on "bringing the funny."
No. I normally plan out whole sentences before starting to speak, or at least partial sentences and conclusions. I can then repeat the whole sentence verbatim in the short term (10 seconds later). I have a friend who has a completely different way of generating sentences. We discovered the difference because she finishes her sentences and can't reproduce them in the same way afterward.
There is absolutely no way you represent anyone but a tiny, tiny percentage of the most autistic yet high-functioning segment of the population. Either that, or you're just wrong. That's not how people think or speak.
lol as far as I'm aware I'm not autistic. I know a few autistic people and I don't think the same way as they seem to. It's possible I'm some other flavour of neurodivergent though. Don't you think it's possible that this is a situation where people have different internal processes but similar external behaviours? Some people can't imagine images in their heads, and find it very difficult to accept that yes, other people do genuinely experience something visual, not just in a metaphorical way. Brains are weird man.
Which part of what I'm saying seems unbelievable to you? Is it the repeating the sentence afterward? To be fair that might just be a good short-term auditory memory.
Edit - I spent a while trying to observe my conversations today to see how I generated sentences. While I do sometimes parse out whole sentences (often when they're short, or particularly important) You're right, I DO often make them on the fly. However, it feels different from what's described above. I often have a word that appears near the end of the sentence in my mind at the start. (in the last two sentences I noticed "described" and "end/start" concepts in my mind while I was still composing the sentence and hadn't started writing). I know where I'm going and fill in the words to reach that destination. (noticed: "fill-in", "destination"). The experience of starting to speak without an idea of where I'm going seems strange to me, as does not being able to recall what I just said. Perhaps this falls within what you'd call normal?
This was also my assumption, but it's more that I start sentences with a vague idea of where I'm going with them and let my brain fill in the words on the fly until at the end I have a sentence that makes sense. Obviously when I started typing the previous sentence I didn't know what exact words would come at the end.
This is my experience of speaking, I simply open my mouth and then words come out, about half the time they're not even the ones I wanted to say. All too often I think "why did I just say that?" to myself because I've just blurted out something that is wrong or vague when I actually know the specific answer.
I'm also autistic, I suspect it's because talking it someone is too mentally overstimulating so I can't actually be mentally present in the moment. I'm perfectly capable of imagining conversations where I am articulate and speak in coherent sentences or typing them out in "real time" as a stream of consciousness, yet I am never able to say anything like that in "real time" when actually talking. My vocabulary and ability to express concepts plummets through the floor as soon as I open my mouth and it's an immensely frustrating experience.
great suggestion. What is being described above sounds so much like "the editor" complex, which in creative learning processes (e.g. creative writing, poetry and acting classes) is a very predominate problem that many struggle to overcome, which prevents them from freeing up their creativity.
Every jazz musician feels that regularly, I'm "speaking faster than I think" any time I take a solo. Very similar to when I'm making an extemporaneous argument in front of a jury, you're just... doing... the performance, and the active narrator in your head is more like a monitor that notices when a problem's about to come up, "this argument you're speaking right now could lead to a contrary inference you need to address before it takes root", "you're getting too chromatic, find some safe chord tones here".
What was the way in which LLMs helped you realize this, just from witnessing their ability to do that performance without having a consciousness to direct it?
What's your definition of thinking? Just because the observer part of our consciousness doesn't see what's going on behind the scenes doesn't mean we're not thinking.
I've been taking notes over the past year, observing the behavior of my consciousness (as best I can). While I don't *necessarily* have an internal dialog that's running in the background all the time, I've found that when I have to compose an argument, like I'm doing for you now, I have to think about how I'm going to phrase what I want to write, and I "ennunciate" the words I'm going to write in my mind (without vocalizing them). But typing the individual words happens without any conscious awareness. My fingers *seem* to be typing without any control from my mind. But if I were to buy into the claims of reductive physicalism, I would have to assume that there's some part of my mind making decisions about my finger motions. But my consciousness can't observe those sorts of background routines, so to be intellectually honest with myself, I have to remain agnostic about whether physicalism can explain what's happening when I type.
Likewise, yesterday afternoon, dining on oysters and martinis with my girlfriend, I noticed that I was dropping witticisms and word plays without thinking about them ahead of time. My concentration was on making her laugh and listening to (and analyzing) her responses. But the joke-making part of my mind was producing funny statements without my being aware of their generation. Likewise, my girlfriend was responding with witticisms. I don't know if her mind was working the same way my mind was, but I suspect she was in the same mental space, because we were riffing on each other's humor. The manager came over in the middle of our conversation, asked us how we were doing. We were laughing, and I said, "Oops, back into serious mode, "and I said it in a serious voice (deep and enunciated), that everything was perfect. The manager found that "serious mode" remark amusing. And the three of us started discussing the nature of humor when one can just riff on funny things. It turned out that the manager had previously worked in the film industry and had collaborated on a project with Robin Williams. He said that when in serious mode, Williams seemed to be talking in a calm monotone (that the manager said seemed to be purposefully controlled). But when on the set, Williams would go into Robin Williams mode and be totally unpredictable (stressing the method actors on the set). The manager said, that while in his "serious mode" Williams had told him he had little control over what came out in his funny mode. He said it was all improvised below his conscious awareness.
So, I think we're thinking even when we aren't aware that we're thinking.
Jazz musicians have huge repertoires of riffs, transitions, etc. Someone I knew who was very fast with a Rubik’s cube described having something similar. So I’m imagining you mean something of the same kind — that there’s a repertoire of ways to express certain things, and some clusters of ideas that have something in common, expressed a certain way, all bundled together, and strings of ideas along with ways to say them, arranged in a string because each leads to the next. And when you talk
you’re going to the most relevant area of the storehouse and rapidly picking out units that fit well. is that the sort of thing you had in mind?
Sometimes it works like this. Definitely, as I talk about a paper idea multiple times, I develop cached phrases and examples that I use. But even when I'm pushing new ground, somehow some part of me is putting things together at the speed of talking. LLMs are just the first example of a system I've seen that is able to do that kind of thing mechanically, in a way that makes sense, keeping the flow and some of the logical relations between ideas.
I think you transition from the model "I'm doing the driving and thinking consciously about everything" to the "I'm managing the driving but some autopilot part of me is handling most of it" as you move from being a new driver to one with some experience. It's routine for me to start driving to point X, get distracted by a conversation or something, and find myself on the path to point Y (which I most often go to at this time of day)--I can and often do navigate consciously but apparently I don't have to.
However, the part of you that's driving without you paying attention is making rational decisions. The things I trained myself to do, so that I could perform them without consciously monitoring my actions, such as driving, riding a bike, typing, and playing a musical instrument, must have some sort of rational "controller" process working in the background without our supervision. Otherwise we'd screw up more than we do.
Conversations with others are interesting because, unless I'm trying to express something that requires a strict logical progression, like arguing a point or giving instructions, the conversational part of my brain seems to be improvising without me planning what I'm going to say. But I'm also aware that there are boundaries around what I can say and how I'll say it. And I'm consciously monitoring those boundaries as a speak. But everything within those boundaries is fairly spontaneous.
Interesting. It seems obvious to me that I think faster than I can physically speak, and it's really frustrating to not be able to say everything before I lose parts of it, at times!
Is it a constant thing, or do you notice this in specific situations? Other commenters noticed this when doing public speeches, but I sometimes notice myself answering complex questions before the homunculus thinks "hey, that's a good question, let me activate System 2 to answer this", so the homunculus goes "wait, what did I just say? Is it correct? Does it at least sound correct?" instead.
I most specifically feel this way when answering questions after giving an academic philosophy talk. Sometimes also when asking the questions - I’ve spent some time coming up with the idea of the question, but the precise wording and how they all relate to each other comes out sort of automatically.
I give academic talks frequently enough that it's very comfortable and I do them pretty automatically, but I recall a few years ago giving a short talk in a second language (Spanish), and holy crap, that was a lot harder, perhaps partly because the autopilot I built in my brain for English-language technical talks doesn't exist for Spanish-language technical talks.
If you refactor your world-model enough, you can see your "self"/soul as a sort of container of "lifelines", where a lifeline is a connection to the outside world (e.g. a social relationship, an ability that can be applied to places in the world, or an object you own). In this model, one of the main things you can do is balance competing pulls in your soul, which I call the autistic state of mind. But as far as I can tell, many people defer this balancing act to others, which gives up most of their agency; I call this the schizophrenic state of mind.
I should say my model disagrees with Scott's post here in that I regard most people as having pretty severe cases (often more schizophrenic, but in a way that is buffered against clinical pathologies), whereas he regards most people as basically healthy rationalish individuals. And I'm generally unimpressed by biomarkers.
If there’s just a continuum, and you define a different point as the zero point, then the zero of the other scale can look like a really high or really low number.
Psychometrically it'd look like two continua, but psychometric measurements are logarithmically related to real magnitudes, so in practice you're going to have one that is much bigger than the other, and "which is biggest?" gives you a discrete typology.
Psychometric measures of external stimuli are often logarithmically related to intrinsic measures of those external phenomena - but that only makes sense when the external phenomenon actually has a meaningful zero point. Why think that the autism/schizotypy scale is anything like measures of loudness or brightness or whatever?
Yep, it's an intriguing line of inquiry. Scott's not the only one thinking about this, e.g. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/17456916221075252 ("Autistic-Like Traits and Positive Schizotypy as Diametric Specializations of the Predictive Mind")
An important piece of prior work on this "internal model of thoughts & self" perspective is Michael Graziano's theory of consciousness (which Steven Byrnes cites as largely consistent with his view):
This seems a plausible model of multiple personality disorder.
Buddhist texts often point out the evidence that you don’t have a coherent self. Multiple personalities is another model you might appeal to to explain this incoherence that the Buddhists are going on about, especially if your psychiatrist is telling you that MPD is a real thing.
A relatively common situation: a depressed person sort-of wants to get on and tidy up their room, but also sort-of doesn’t. How can it be that we can both want and not want something at the same time?
At this point, vajrayana Buddhism might talk about demons to explain the phenomenon, with the understanding that demons dont really exist.
> A relatively common situation: a depressed person sort-of wants to get on and tidy up their room, but also sort-of doesn’t. How can it be that we can both want and not want something at the same time?
It’s because we have two different decision trees to reconcile within ourselves; one springs from our viscera and the other springs from our conscious modeling.(aka; rationalizing They’re not always on the same page are they? A simple model would be a parent telling a small child to pick up his toys and the child not wanting to. Those two forces combine in us as we become adults and if they aren’t on the same page, well things can go pear shaped .
It's not hard to explain why a person can want X and not-X at the same time.
One common circumstance is that you want to have done X, but you do not want *to be doing* X, where X is homework, cleaning your room, or any other unpleasant task that has good consequences. This is also sufficient to explain procrastination - you don't like doing your homework, so you don't do it until the need to have your homework done becomes stronger than your desire not to be doing it.
A related situation is that X is something with good aspects and bad aspects, and your brain hasn't settled on a clear answer to whether X is *net* good compared to the status quo. For example, do you want to go to bed because it's getting late and you're starting to get tired, or do you want to play "just one more turn" of Civilization?
Memory is very dependent on context (thing X reminds you of related thing Y) so it is not totally out of the question that you might only remember thing Y while inhabiting persona X.
Though, we might suspect something closer to: the memory can’t be integrated into a particular persona’s sense of self, and so is repressed.
I'd actually assert (without much evidence) that "multiple selves" does mean a range of things. And that for most people the "multiple selves" are rather tightly connected, but are still quite different. As for my most common meaning: When I'm programming I don't feel the same as when I'm composing sentences for a note on a blog, and neither of those feel the same as when I'm playing a game. Frequently while I'm playing a game a "meta-self" will comment that "you're really not that interested, so it's probably time to stop", but the game-player will shrug that off several times.
Also for when religious people talk about hearing the voice of the devil telling them to sin etc. they have a model where the devil can be a voice in their head and interpret thoughts within that
What's special about that is the distancing of the "voice of the devil" from their own personalities. I have voices telling me this or that all time time. I rarely bother to trace them back, but I also don't feel compelled by them. In fact whenever I compose a sentence (thoughtfully) I hear a voice telling me what to say or type. Freewheeling conversation may be different, but I'm not sure because in that situation I'm not watching myself.
Buddhists have set up impossible standards for "coherent self". And they reliably fall into self-contradictions. Even to speak of non-coherent selves requires a coherent self.
As William Vallicella put it, for Buddhists out-do atheists in that for an atheist, if they can't be God, there is no God. And for a Buddhist, if they can't be God, there is no "they" themselves,
This is a good point. The question then becomes, I suppose, whether or not "a coherent self" is the *only* thing we are, or whether there is more going on "off stage" as it were.
Is there something special that distinguishes the sorts of beliefs and models that are bistable - that we can suddenly snap out of - from the more common sorts of beliefs and models that seem to gradually change over time?
Things like phobias or habits, for example, that take gradual exposure and consistent effort to change.
The vast majority of optical illusions only exist because they are two dimensional representations of something that we might encounter in three-dimensional space. The primary abstraction of two dimensional perspective and motion is the the first illusion, which we have become rather comfortable with since the birth of perspective drawing. The AB checkerboard illusion works because each square is surrounded by squares that are lighter or darker than it which forces the eye to recognize the pattern and dismiss the truth, which is that those two squares are the same gray.
I think of habits and phobias as having a different mechanism than perception. A habit, for example, seems to be about how strongly some context is tied to a particular set of actions (and maybe a phobia is about how strongly some context is attached to fear/avoidance circuitry).
Perhaps habits and phobias are learned through the adjustment of synaptic weights, while perception is determined by the pattern of neuron activations through fixed weights. For example, a Predictive Coding Network that predicts whether the dancer is spinning clockwise or anticlockwise might already have these predictions "encoded" in its weights (having learned them from past examples), and the propagation of signals through these weights determines which prediction is chosen.
Under this model, beliefs and models that gradually change over time would be about developing new ways of interpreting the environment, while bistable models are about choosing between existing interpretations. Of course, once a new interpretation is stabilised, this might create new associations that lead to new models and habits being built (or existing ones being unlearned) over time.
Also in my experience, the process of letting go of certain trapped priors that lead to anxiety etc. involves lots of little changes in perception that add up over time, that might look like a gradual change from a distance.
I think there is probably some genetic vs. experience spectrum stuff going on. Perhaps we can snap back and forth between two simple images because neurologically the brain has the hard wired capacity and drive to seek both patterns in stimuli? But more complex stuff like phobias, habits, or ideologies are slowly learned over time, and so operate according to different mental dynamics.
How do the rest of you perceive the "upside-down plates" picture? For me, it's very resistant to fully flipping.
If I start at the bottom left, I can easily get the three leftmost plates to flip inside out; I can do something similar from the right-hand side, moving along the top-right corner. I can kind of flip that whole set of 8 along the left-top-right edges, though the circular one at the top is tricky.
The multi-compartment ones take more effort, and not only do they not trigger a cascade, sometimes one compartment will pop out without affecting the other compartments in the same dish.
It seems like my brain is strongly inclined to see them as right-side-up, flipping them requires focus and effort, and at that point I'm not really seeing the image as a whole. I haven't tried viewing it from a long distance, but rolling my chair back a bit didn't make a lot of difference.
To the limited extent that I can flip the divided ones, what seems to work is consciously thinking "okay, if this was the other way around, what would these regions of colour actually represent?" Basically I have to actively reason my way to seeing them differently. Maybe you've already done that, but if not, I'd be curious whether it makes a difference.
Interesting! These things can make me uneasy, too, but I think I would be okay with a single flip followed by stability. I don't think I've ever experienced that with a bistable illusion, though, so I'm not sure how much it would actually bother me; usually the version I see first remains my default, or at least remains accessible.
(In the case of the plates illusion, I can see the inverted version partially and with effort, or completely by rotating the image to change the direction of the implied light source. In the latter case, the dishes look photoshopped and unreal, but it takes effort to mentally flip them right-side-up and I don't seem to be able to do so persistently. Which is a bit weird -- but at least I can temporarily flip them, and also I know I can go back to seeing them correctly by turning the image back the other way, so I'm not getting the full effect of being locked in to seeing them incorrectly. To the extent that it is unsettling, I think that's mainly because I'm seeing them the *wrong* way, and there are some fairly obvious cues that prevent me from fully believing what I'm perceiving.)
I may be misreading but I think you're talking about rotating the phone anticlockwise, so that the light in the image is coming from your direction if the dishes are concave -- at which point your brain decides the light is actually coming from the opposite direction, and the dishes are upside down? If so, that fits with a version I've since looked at, where the image was duplicated and rotated 90 degrees in both directions, and the anticlockwise version makes the dishes look upside down (but also pretty unreal).
Apparently our brains are heavily biased toward perceiving an implied light source 'above' the image (i.e. from top of frame), even when the image appears to have been taken top-down and even when the screen we're using isn't aligned to the up-down axis.
Im not sure its even possible for a real object to correspond to the flipped image here. The bright left rims, and the visible line between the wall and its shaded ground, with the wall brighter, I dont think those are possible inverted. Paying attention to those prevents me from flipping anything.
Ill note that I have never seen a flipping illusion using a real life picture, that wasnt actually resolvable with information from within. The only one I can think of that most people dont get right at a glance is The Dress, and I did get it, so skill issue.
The shaded bottoms-now-tops of the small top right bowls couldnt be parallel to those on the other dishes either, so that might be what kicks you out of flipping fully.
> The shaded bottoms-now-tops of the small top right bowls couldnt be parallel to those on the other dishes either, so that might be what kicks you out of flipping fully.
I think the very bright left rims also make no sense if the bowls are inverted. When I do manage to flip the bowls, they look like they've been badly photoshopped in.
I did a quick google, and it looks like the illusion is often presented in meme form, with the upper text priming you to see them as upside down and the bottom text inviting you to flip them back to normal. I reckon that would be much more effective illusion (and would make sense of the warning that "you might not be able to get them to flip back").
I also found a version where the original image has been duplicated and rotated 90 degrees in each direction.[1] Apparently our brains are much readier to perceive an implied light source 'above' the image than 'below' it (even in this case, where the image seems to have been taken from above looking directly down), and so when the shadows are at the 'bottom' of the objects they appear convex. It works on me -- but when they look upside down, they also look like a bunch of distorted objects photoshopped together. I guess my brain can tell that the inverted version doesn't make physical sense, but it really wants the light to be coming from its preferred direction, so it compromises by telling me the objects are convex but fake-looking.
(I've mainly been using a computer, but the rotated version still works when I'm looking down at a phone screen parallel to the ground, so it seems that my brain thinks the 'top' of the frame is up even when there's no such thing as up on the actual screen.)
Did you miss that I mentioned the rims as well, or are you expressing agreement?
I just googled it, and while the rotations didnt do much for me (the small bowls at the top flip a bit easier, the low res hides the flat bottom and makes the rim thinner/onesided, still dont look like flipped dishes though), the tiny, low-res google previews did look like some weird AI-generated pills for a moment.
Yes, sorry -- I wasn't consciously skimming, but I totally missed most of your second sentence.
Interesting to hear that the rotation doesn't work on everyone! For me it takes a lot of effort to mentally flip the dishes in the counterclockwise-rotated image back to normal (despite how messed up they look), and they go convex again if I look away for a moment.
(Though I've just now switched to a phone and physically rotated the screen while viewing the original image, and the effect is a bit weaker.)
Interesting: I was not able to flip the original image, but when I look at the rotated image, it does initially appear flipped before going back to normal.
When I scrolled the image into frame, they all appeared upside-down (I think the staircase image above primed me toward the inverted perspective).
After reading the description, I looked back at the image and the dishes were all right-side-up. (The dishes are all the same either way. There isn't an odd one that's the other orientation.)
I also cannot see all the plates flipped. I'm usually pretty good at these - I can easily see the dancer spin either way, or even see it as bouncing back and forth rather than rotating. But many of the plates just don't look physically plausible flipped.
This maps well to Michael Levin's model of memory (section 4 of https://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/26/6/481 and https://thoughtforms.life/some-thoughts-on-memory-goals-and-universal-hacking/, also talked about in some podcasts and presentations he has done). In this model, memory isn't some high fidelity thing, but rather a highly compressed/encoded bit of information that, when run through a specific decoder, will result in a particular memory. What is key/critical here is that the decoder plays a very significant role in determining how that compressed information is decoded.
If you encode a memory using decoder/encoder (coder) A, and then decode it using coder A, you'll get out basically the same information that went in. However, if you decode it using coder B you'll get out different information than was put in.
Under normal circumstances, your coder changes very slowly over time as you experience life, and during that time you are constantly remembering things which causes them to be decoded and then re-encoded (so to speak) using the latest version of your coder. However, one can imagine a person having two distinct coders in their head at the same time, and in such a situation encoding something with one coder and then decoding it using a different coder could result in complete failure to decode (no memory), or a different memory than what actually occurred.
This maps well both to the hypnosis situation you have described here, as well as things like split personalities. An individual may remember things differently than they actually occurred because the coder used to encode the event is not the coder used to decode the event, or they may "forget" what happened. It can also explain things like being able to remember correctly if you are put back under hypnosis or if your personality switches back to the one that originally experienced it.
I think it also may have some explanatory power for retrograde amnesia. This could be caused by damage to the coder that needs to be "rebuilt" or "repaired", which is why your memories will sometimes return later. Perhaps older memories are encoded in a more "generic" way, while newer memories are encoded in a way that are are more tightly coupled with the current version of your brain's coder.
That’s interesting. That also explains why, when thinking about things I did in the early 2000s, I sometimes remember myself having looked up directions on my smartphone, because that sort of behavior is part of “find out where I am and where I’m going” in the decoder I’ve used for the past fifteen years, even though it wasn’t part at the time I formed the memory.
That is very interesting! I haven't really thought about whether I have such false memories or not. Thinking about it now, I feel like I have some memories of sneaking peaks at my parents watching R rated films (meaning I was young as I wasn't allowed to watch R until later) on our family flatscreen TV, but I was that age before flatscreen TVs! Even if I think really hard, I can't imagine anything other than either a "placeholder TV" or some sort of large flatscreen-like TV even though I am certain (because I know history) that wasn't the case. At risk of dating myself here, our TV remote had a cable connecting it to the TV, so definitely wasn't flatscreen.
Thinking about it more, I also realize that in my memories, my friends tend to look like they do now, not like they did then, unless there was some specific aspect of how they looked in the past that was relevant to the specific memory.
That is a good one. My parents tend to look like their older selves in my memories as well, though my siblings their younger selves (but somewhat stagnant). All very fascinating stuff!
I've never noticed any obvious anachronisms like that, but I have discovered a lot of false memories when looking through old entries in my diary. It's really eye-opening.
For example, two events I distinctly remembered happening on the same day actually happened two weeks apart. An even more extreme case is when my memory combined events that happened on two different trips to the same place years apart, one in July and one in December.
Another amusing example was when my mother and I both had incompatible memories of when a particular thing happened and argued about it. We eventually figured out when it actually happened and neither of us was right.
There's one memory that really mystifies me, because the details I remember are incompatible with real life history when I tried to look it up. There's no time period in which every detail fits. I have no idea what the truth was there.
I think this same mechanism is behind the "I always knew he was a no-good bastard!" phenomenon, where someone was always fine with your girlfriend/boyfriend while things were going well, but after your nasty breakup with them, they interpret all their current memories in light of what they learned about him since then.
This feels like a really great companion piece to a lot of what Sam Harris writes in his book "Waking Up".
One of the claims in there, made by him and other meditators, is that meditating on your own thoughts enough or in a particular way eventually causes the illusion of the Self to disappear ("You search for it and fail to find it").
In that book, the perspective shift is just given as an empirical claim to tested by the reader, via meditation practice. In this post, it feels like we get a satisfying and plausible mechanistic theory for it.
I practice meditation but I've never understood how you're supposed to distinguish a genuine disappearance of the 'illusion' of self from an illusory disappearance of a real self. It seems to me that the description of any such experience must appeal to extraneous empirical or metaphysical claims that are open to criticism - I don't think you can accept any conclusions about the nature of self purely from introspection. That's another error Descartes made besides dualism
Well, first you see that the sense of self is illusory, then it can disappear. When you get off the zafu, you go back to the illusion, but see it for what it is. The self illusion/model is extremely powerful, but not “real” in a fundamental way. Those reporting that they have experienced enlightenment report getting rid of the illusion altogether and that this is a significant improvement in their experience of living. Daniel Ingram comes to mind.
And I would say that introspection is the only way to grok the true nature of your own self. We have at best a crude understanding of how physical processes translate into consciousness and sense of self, e.g., general anesthesia completely turns both off. The Hard Problem of Consciousness is called that for a reason!
My point is that if I say to a person that the way they report their experience of the disappearance of self is itself an illusory experience, there is no proof to the contrary they can give that is grounded solely in their introspection. It's unfalsifiable conjecture. Any claim about the self is fundamentally a scientific one and its validity cannot be established by appealing to one's private intuitions, or how do we ever find the truth in reports from different people that contradict one another? The hard problem is called the hard problem only because philosophers are amazed whenever they realise they don't understand something.
It would be absurd to claim that alcohol or other drugs don't give you a feeling of euphoria. Preposterous. Anyone who has consumed drugs knows that. But they can't prove it. That absolutely does not mean they're not saying the truth or have good reason to believe the things they do about drug phenomenology.
Generally, this has been the state of the art, until very recently. However, scientists are inching toward methods of physically measuring perceptual phenomena, or qualia (e.g. redness.) If qualia can be mapped, reproduced, or transmitted, they stop being purely metaphysical and become more like states of information instantiated in matter. That’s a profound ontological shift—one that might eventually render the “hard problem” tractable in practice, if not in theory.
I have a different hypothesis: that people who report experiencing "nothingness" aren't really experiencing nothingness, because that's conceptually impossible. It is my impression that without information to process, the conscious mind would stop existing (meaning that you are in a coma--even meditation would be impossible. Dreamless sleep is another example).
What they may be doing instead is relaxing the mental filters that impose structure on our thoughts and feelings--the same sort of semantic associations that give immediate meaning and context to our moment by moment thoughts, and which originate in our long term memory but which are triggered by something happening now--and what is left is an overall experience of "all of me" (which could include a generalized impression of "everything I ever experienced") except without any details at all, what's left can be described as a quale (in the sense of "the smallest, most indivisible unit of an experience").
Most of us will never experience this (normally we want our brain to call up any mental or emotional associations that might help us deal with whatever is happening right now) without formal training. It's probably an epi-phenomenon; not something that evolved on it's own (that has not prevented various creative humans from finding a use for it).
In this context the "self" isn't referring to the body. It's more referring to the "humunculous" talked about in the article. The "illusion of the Self" is just talking about the fact that we have a subjective sense that we are a separate entity "doing the thinking", but that's not true. Thoughts just appear, there is not a separate entity "doing" it.
Haha well good for you. I'm pretty sure this illusion is common to almost everybody.
I don't think it has much to do with philosophy. Illusions generally are gotten rid of by training/exercise/perspective shifts like discussed in this article. Attaining a philosophy alone generally doesn't do it.
You're describing a person, not a "self." People exist, obviously. They have actions and they have agency. What we don't have is a little person behind our eyes in the drivers seat. We don't "have" sight. We don't "have" hunger, despite what Spanish speakers insist on. We are our eyes. We are our hunger. There is no experiencer, there is only experience. Almost everyone sees this illusion, especially the people who insist that they don't.
I think that's a very convincing interpretation of self-consciouness/ ego. It's like concurrent interpretations of quantum mechanics : for some like relational quantum mechanics (RQM) vs Everett's many worlds, it's unlikely that you could experimentally prove one over the other but your mind can switch from one to the other to explain what you see. It could be a quasi solution to the so-said "hard problem" of consciousness. If consciousness is itself an interpretative model, a paradigm, it's no surprise you can't really prove it nor infirm it, or reach any kind of definitive answer on that subject. Now the question arises : is the Buddha a philosophical zombie ?
By the by, but Deutsch quite strongly believes that the truth of Everett's MW is experimentally provable. I don't have a strong enough physics background to evaluate the claim but I think it also rests on his disagreements with Bayesian approaches to probability (which itself is reinforced by his MW views). If someone knows more please chime in.
Edit: If I recall correctly his possible proof relies on self-reporting quantum computers- but the point is that he believes it is absolutely provable *in theory*, which I assume many would dispute. Whether that can disprove RQM specifically, I'm unsure.
The first thing to note is that MWI is more than one theory. What splittng is...how complete and irrevocable it is ... varies between particular theories. So does the rate of splitting, so does the mechanism of splitting.
The second thing to note is that many worlders are pointing at something implied the physical formalism and saying "that's a world"....but whether it qualifies as a world is a separate question from whether it's in the formalism , and a separate *kind* of question, from whether it is really there in the formalism. One would expect a world, or universe, to be large, stable, non-interacting, and so on . It's possible to have a theory that has collapse , without having worlds. A successful MWI needs to jump three hurdles: empirical correctness.
mathematical correctness and conceptual correctness -- actually having worlds
---- Coherence versus Decoherence----
There is an approach to MWI based on coherent superpositions, and a version based on decoherence. These are (for all practical purposes) incompatible opposites, but are treated as interchangeable in Yudkowsky's writings. . Decoherent branches are large, stable, non interacting and irreversible...everything that would be intuitively expected of a "world". But there is no empirical evidence for them (in the plural) , nor are they obviously supported by the core mathematics of quantum mechanics, the Schrödinger equation.Coherent superpositions are small scale , down to single particles,possibly observer dependent, reversible, and continue to interact (strictly speaking , interfere) after "splitting". The last point is particularly problematical. because if large scale coherent superposition exist , that would create naked eye macrocsopic scale:, e.g. ghostly traces of a world where the Nazis won.
We have evidence of small scale coherent superposition, since a number of observed quantum.effects depend on it, and we have evidence of decoherence, since complex superposition are difficult to maintain. What we don't have evidence of is decoherence into multiple branches. From the theoretical perspective, decoherence is a complex , entropy like process which occurs when a complex system interacts with its environment. [Decoherence isn't simple)(https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Atu4teGvob5vKvEAF/decoherence-is-simple). But without decoherence, MW doesn't match observation. So there is no theory of MW that is both simple and empirically adequate, contra Yudkowsky and Deutsch
Thanks. I wasn't even aware of the large scale MWI.
FWIW, I prefer a version of the small-scale MWI where each state has both multiple futures and multiple pasts. (And where all the states are give equal "reality", if not equal "probability of being transitioned to". I tend to think of it as an EXTREMELY parallel state-table, where state transitions are as time-reversible as a Feynman diagram.)
OTOH, I don't expect that there is any test that will choose between this model and any of the other models for the same equations.
If it sounded like "equal probabilities", then I said it wrong. All transitions are "certain", but the "wave height" varies substantially. I've never figured out a good way to talk about this. The only difference between this and "quantum field theory" I know of is that I don't accept continuity, so at some level (possibly near the Planck length) it breaks down into a discrete model. In that discrete model ALL of the possible states are "real", though some are quite improbable to reach.
OTOH, I'm definitely no expert in the field. This is just the model I use to think about it. But because I'm no expert, I'm not certain that my ideas are consistent with what's know (i.e. experimental results), I just believe it to be ... the best model I have to think with. And a problem that I see with it involves coordination of things outside the light cone. ISTM that things near the edge of the light cone are likely to be modified by things outside it, and I can't figure out how to think about that.
I normally do not "copy/paste" myself, but even though I already posted the following, it fits even better here:
"This is all very plausible, but there's a meta-physical problem in the middle of it. If the self is perceived as a homonculous, but this is an illusion because we can 'flip' our perceptions and perceive ourselves as controlled by a hypnotist or a divine being--who is doing the perceiving? Which part of the mind is doing the 'flipping?' Because that looks an awful lot like a deliberate decision of the conscious self. "
The flip is definitely helped by deliberate behavior, as seen in the different examples of the article. However, my feeling is that the flip itself hardly qualifies as a deliberate decision. I mean, when I see the first picture of the stairway, I see it by default in the regular orientation. I know it's possible to see it upside down, but it's not like I have a switch to do that. It can resist my will, and suddenly it happens. With a little practice, I admit you can switch almost at will, but there is a hidden second level in that picture. Try to see it as a flat picture with no stairway at all, but just geometric 2D elements. That's probably the more natural way to see the picture—what someone who has never seen a stairway in their life would see—but it's extremely hard for me. The 3D stairs jump to my mind one way or the other. It's not like I could arbitrarily decide at will what I see. There is something strongly automatic and unconscious that imposes its view on me (ego). Like, you know, sometimes words that come out of nowhere. You searched for a word for ten minutes, you pass to something else, and suddenly the word jumps to your mind hours or days later. Or more generally, the feeling of evidence/eureka moments: you know it's like that, you just know, you're certain, it has to be like that, explanation comes afterwards (and not always, but often, the feeling is confirmed by reasoning). In all the examples, deliberate thinking can help a lot, but I wouldn't say that the flip itself or the eureka moment is clearly attributable to the homunculus. Anyway, there is something of the paradox of Theseus' ship. You ask what part of the mind does it? But when you try to decompose a composed entity, you always end up with the idea that identity or reality is nothing but void. That's also the Buddhist reflection mentioned by Scott and Byrnes. So I suppose what part does the flip is a question that can itself be looked at with the prism of the homunculus interpretation, but also with the prism of the void interpretation—two interpretations which you can flip one to the other. But wait—what causes the flip between the interpretations of the flip? Well, that becomes too meta.
I don't disagree--clearly mental behavior of this kind is a complex interaction of deliberate and non-conscious processes. It probably makes no sense to try to tease them apart. I think in the flipping example, the conscious mind is querying a non-conscious process (the one in charge of recognizing shapes) to change it's perception. Because the task is challenging, this doesn't happen right away, and the conscious mind has to keep concentrating on its' query until the non-conscious perceptor fulfills the task, and returns the new perception to the working memory, where it can be consciously perceived. But this new shape is less strongly reinforced compared to interpretations that your mind has been using for your entire life, so it only lasts as long as you consciously deliberate upon it.
I had never heard of Lehar or this site and just checked it out. Thank you for the link! (And I wonder what my eight-year-old will think about it when I share it with him...)
This made me think of how quantum spin in entangled particles can collapse and reverse when observed and then the spin reverses even if the objects are far distances.
I don't know if this has any experimental support I could point to, and it's been a long time since I read it, but Douglas Hofstadter wrote (in either The Mind's I or I Am A Strangle Loop, I don't remember which) that the 'self' concept might be like the "this" pointer in a data structure in C++. Literally just a pointer that points to its own address, but otherwise empty.
In which case, sure, we tie a lot of things to our identity, but they aren't part of the core 'self' concept. And the instant bistable switch of satori is something like noticing this fact?
Great stuff, my qualm is just that even saying perception is indirect is kind of wrong. Suppose there's video evidence in a courtroom, if someone points to the screen and says "that's the killer right there," are they wrong? (And a video isn't much different from any internal model.)
Or to put it another way, the idea that we're "perceiving a model" isn't really correct. We're HAVING a model and at all times directly perceiving a WORLD (and that world as it really, really is, to boot, see bottom of this post).
The trick is, I think, that words like "seeing" and "perceiving" are third person terms - so they're something a third person observer says when (e.g.) they see a tiger perceiving its prey, they're part of that objective, third person STORY.
What the tiger experiences directly (its internal model of the prey) isn't itself yet a perception, it's only granted the grace of being trully callable a "perception" IF AND WHEN a third person can observe both the tiger licking its lips in anticipation, and that there is actually a deer over there.
So neither of the "flips" are a perception until there's been a checking process, and that checking process doesn't change the subjective experience, it just corrects an error in the truth claim about what that subjective experience portended.
We are always and at all times directly perceiving the world, because we are always and at all times perceiving an objective "slice" of the world that's a secret treasure that the world gives of itself to us, and to nobody else, at just that point in time and space.
Yeah direct realism is a related school of though, for sure, though I think there are some differences.
Generally, it's in a similar class of epistemologies where perception is the truth-maker for most existential propositions, and truth-making is not a relation between propositions (though I think because a singular perception can always posssibly be mistaken, then either you try a few different angles yourself, or get someone else to confirm).
Realism is precisely NOT a view on which perception is the truth-maker! (!) That would turn it into some form of subjectivism.
Thinking that (apparent) perception that X (defeasibly) justifies belief that X is very different from thinking a perception that X is what makes X *true*.
I don't think infallibility is required for that logical relation to hold.
(Or to put it another way, the possibility of error doesn't mandate subjectivism.)
I suppose you could qualify it by saying, "WHEN you get a VALID perception, THEN it's the truth maker." When is that? Well, when the thing is actually there in reality and accessible to, checkable by, everyone (via their perceptions).
Maybe the trick is that I'm not thinking of it as something that will automagically make MY sentences true (when I'm in a methodologically solipsistic mood, i.e while staying within my own private experiences), but rather: in a public, intersubjective, objective context, perceptions are what make propositions (things people say or write) true, what anchor them in reality.
(Mind you, if you're thinking of Realism in the sense of classical philosophy, that would be another problem altogether.)
Saying "When you get a VALID perception, THEN it's the truthmaker" doesn't work because it's circular: What's a valid perception? Clearly it's a perception where you're perceiving things TRUEly, rather than falsely. Since the "validity" of perception is determined by whether it's true, you can't then try to define truth by a valid perception, or you'd just be going in a circle.
Also: Intersubjective is not the same as objective; that's why the word "intersubjective" has the word "subjective" in it. If you think that what makes something true is that we all intersubjectively think it, that's a form of subjectivism, and not at all a form of realism.
No, naive realism is the position that we all see the world in objectively the same way. Process Externalism retains the objectivity (and physicalism) but rejects the sameness (the rainbow metaphor is a quick and dirty way of getting at least part of the point across).
>directly perceiving the world, because we are always and at all times perceiving an objective "slice" of the world that's a secret treasure that the world gives of itself to us, and to nobody else, at just that point in time and space.
This strikes me as incoherent. If we are perceiving an objective slice of the world, and it becomes given to me and nobody else, that puts a lot of weight back on subjectivity and how we interpret things as opposed to how they are.
No, because a) the different thing is also objectively what the thing is. Like the rainbow all the appearances are different but nonetheless objectively and physically exist (the interposition of your sensory and cognitive apparatus at just x point in time and space affords the thing the opportunity to exist in a unique way, to have a causal ihnteraction with you that's different from the other fellow's, but equally objective and direct).
But b) that means we can work intersubjectively and correlate our findings - not in the sense that we need to "get at" some full objective thing that will be the same for all of us, but in the sense that we can explain and predict our experience of the thing as it faces us. Our intersubjectivity here isn't comparing loose, separate, un-moored subjective experiences, but rather is a comparison of perfectly objective different forms of existence of a thing appearing to different people.
And after all isn't intersubjectivity just how we work? It seems bootless because some old philosopical ideas mislead us into thinking that it's comparing merely subjective experiences; but because it's comparing objective expeiences that problem doesn't arise.
The philosophical problem is the fixation on the idea that you can't have different, objective physical ways a thing can exist, that things have to exist only in one way that's the same for everyone, in order to be objectively those things. But that's a needless assumption.
What I get from this is that everything is a negotiation and that there is enough commonality in our experience for those negotiations to be successful a lot of the time. I don’t disagree with that. There is a real world. It’s out there somewhere. Enough of us agree on enough things that we know we share some common visions. But you and I both know if you look hard enough you will find some massive divergences in those interpretations.
>the different thing is also objectively what the thing is.
You mean like if I am in the middle of a thunderstorm and you’re 50 miles away, sing a rainbow because it’s already gone by? What thing is what. It’s a negotiation. I am not talking about walking into a forest fire thinking you won’t get burned up there. The physical world does exist, at least as far as I can tell,
>Our intersubjectivity here isn't comparing loose, separate, un-moored subjective experiences.
Doesn’t it kind of depend on what kind of things we’re talking about? Think of two people talking about something that they saw separately reconciling their subjective reporting on the thing. They can’t agree on what really happened.
I think with these replies you're going off into the matter of interpretation, and the matter of tiers of propositions about which there can be disagreement but that ultimately depend on perceptions as anchors to reality.
There can be variations of interpretation of the PURPORT of perceptions, absolutely, but when it comes to sheer perceptions, if there's too much difference (e.g. other than the right and left side of a thing) then we're probably seeing differnt things :)
In this context, it would have to be something like "physical, comprised of matter/energy."
(Amusingly, I'm actually concurrently studying some traditional Advaita Vedanta at the moment, which is completely different: for Advaita, the real is that which persists, that which is unchanging - more or less the Parmenidean idea. But these ideas I'm talking about here are purely for a physicalist context.)
If something exists in the material world, then presumably it's physical nature doesn't change depending upon the point of view or the perceptual filters being used to experience it. There would be a stable reality independent of anyone's perception of it.
Its physical nature doesn't change, but how it looks changes and how it's experienced changes - yet there's no reason to think those different looks and experiences are "merely subjective" because they're different, that's what's being denied.
In fact the whole concept of "Representation," the gap between that and thing, thing-in-itself or whatever, etc., etc., is basically being denied. There is no gap, experience is always and everywhere perfectly objective, just like the naive realist thinks, but not in quite the way the naive realist thinks (the way that's so easily demolished by the critic who points out differences in experience-of-thing for different people).
Again, look at the example of the rainbow, or cf. J J Gibson's idea of "affordances" (albeit that's in a purely psychological context but it gets the point across)., and especially Riccardo Manzotti's "Process Externalism" or "Spread Mind" theory.
This is just redefining "perception" to mean factual belief, instead of the subjective experience of sensory data. Is it not? I mean, if I look at a stereographic image of a tiger, I feel like it's more useful (as a linguistic construct) to say that I perceive a tiger (regardless of the image's relationship to objective reality) than to say that I don't perceive a tiger (because the image might mislead me about my factual beliefs about reality).
And the redefintion doesn't really seem to matter to scott's point. the fact that the brain tries to snap a 2D image into a 3D representation is upstream (not downstream) of my subjective experience, whereas deciding that the image resembles a tiger is way downstream.
If you wanted to be strict you would say, "I seem to see a tiger." But (also) if you want to be strict, that can only be intersubjectively confirmed by triangulation with someone else, or a few someone else's.
I don't think there's much difference between ("first order") factual belief and perception, they're so intimately tied together; in both cases they'd need outside confirmation (again, if you're being strict) to turn them into knowledge or perception (of the real). Of course our senses work so well most of the time that we can be sure (though not certain ofc) that we're actually seeing what seems to be there.
And again, my quibble is with the "my subjective experience" there. There is nothing in the experience itself that makes it EITHER a subjective OR an objective perception, no amount of fiddling or jiggling in the brain. It either is or it isn't, and that depends (not on some kind of backdoor access to an objective reality that's unperceivable, but) a further check (by myself or others). And that's possible because the various different "looks" of things are not (necessarily) merely subjective, but (can be) each of them perfectly objective affordances of the same object - as per the rainbow.
I insist that you're redefining sight/perception in a non-standard way.
> There is nothing in the experience itself that makes it EITHER a subjective OR an objective perception, no amount of fiddling or jiggling in the brain.
And I feel like this claim is even more bizarre, since first-hand experience is the defining example of subjectivity. It sounds like you're confusing the image with the referent. If Alice and Bob both look at an image of a tiger, but Alice is on say... DMT and Bob isn't, their experiences are going to be very different due to "jiggling in the brain", even if their physical reference-frames are otherwise identical. The referent objectively exists, the same image will hit their retinas (assuming the physical reference-frames are identical), but the way the image is perceived (qua interpreted) is dependent on the mental state of the beholder, which makes the first-order interpretation subjective by definition.
Subjective basically means "mind dependent". But it sounds like you think subjective means something like "unverifiable by consensus" (common mistake) or "varies between individuals" (often is the case, but not necessarily).
I think that, in a strictly technical sense, all knowledge is subjective in that it all happens in the brain. The eye is not a camera, and itself perceives nothing. But in introspective terms we see things, and some of those things are coming into consciousness along neural pathways that are tagged as "external", and therefore should appear the same to anyone else who should be able to see the same scene. That's what we mean by "objective." Science presumes that the more separate sources of information which appear to confirm this inference the more likely it is that our perception corresponds to something in the external world, but that's just an inference.
I don't know what this is suppose to add, since I already made a distinction between the signal and the referent. The entire category of optical illusions is proof that just because a quale is influenced by an external stimulus, doesn't mean it's *only* influenced by that external stimulus. So no, I'm not quite ready to call the perception of a rainbow objective, even if the perception accurately corresponds to an objective signal emitted by a noumenal referent.
As far as I can tell, the nature of my disagreement with Gurugeorge is primarily linguistic. In the example above, I would say that Alice IS perceiving an 8 dimensional DMT fractal (because perception is just whatever's in your mental field-of-vision), but Gurugeorge seems to think that Alice ISN'T perceiving anything (because the 8-dimensional DMT fractal doesn't correspond to anything in reality). From his other comments, it sounds like he read a bunch of textbooks that are playing Wittgensteinian wordgames.
edit_1: earlier, when i said "It sounds like you're confusing the image with the referent", i meant "It sounds like you're confusing the *signified* with the referent.
edit_2: look at his original comment.
> The trick is, I think, that words like "seeing" and "perceiving" are third person terms - so they're something a third person observer says when (e.g.) they see a tiger perceiving its prey, they're part of that objective, third person STORY.
does "perception" feel like a *third person term* to you, in standard english vernacular (be it colloquial or jargonistic)?
No, I'm agreeing with you for the most part, I'm just trying to figure out where GG is departing from the standard understanding. I think he's denying that what most people call "objective phenomena" are actually objective at all, but I could be wrong.
also. if you think "objective" means "external in origin", that's not what it means. it means "mind independent". It often coincides with being external in origin, but that's not the central meaning.
and there's already a better word for "external in origin" already: exogenous. Though I usually associate that term with chemistry/physics. In philosophy, probably the best term would be "noumenal" (objects as they truly exist, independent of the senses) as opposed to "phenomenal" (objects as they appear to the senses).
If a thing is mind independent, then per force it must originate out in the external, physical world. Where else would the information come from? Terms like "objective" and "phenomenal" aren't necessarily used in exactly the same way by all scholarly authorities: Kant thought that the phenomenal world was objective because nearly everyone experiences it in the same way (because we all share the same cognitive structures). Other people have used it differently since. So I tend to use the term objective to mean "two or more independent observers should see the same thing" which is consistent with it's use in most scientific contexts.
Every experience is somewhat mind-dependent, or in some way processed by the mind, so I would tie subjectivity to privacy rather than mind-dependence.
Experience is always intrinsically private (always, "it seems TO ME that x"), but sometimes it can also be public (a seems-to-be that actually is, and is therefore necessarily accessible by others).
The subjective is then the MERELY private, a thing that ONLY person A experiences, the objective is what's experienced by everybody (serially as private experiences, as seemings-to-me). I think that's fairly standard, the only difference with this view is that this view claims that what's experienced by everybody doesn't have to be experienced IN EXACTLY THE SAME WAY for it to be objective: that's the shared premise that's misleading both the naive realists and their opponents. The rainbow shows the way out of the trap; everything is somewhat like the rainbow in the sense that it's an objective thing that can nevertheless appear differently to different people while not losing an ounce of its objectivity: each private seeming is a way for the object to exist, so it's never MERELY private.
Again, if every experience is somewhat mind-dependent, mind-independence can't be what makes the difference between a merely subjective experience and an objective experience. What makes the difference is whether what seems to be actually exists or doesn't. If it actually exists that can be confirmed by the same individual with further testing (e.g. shifting position - which, incidentally, speaks to the hallucination example - poking and prodding, taking a sample, etc.), or confirmable by others (with or without their further poking and prodding, etc., it just depends on the standard of rigour)
What the haver of the seeming experience can't do is tell from within their own resources WITHOUT further testing, whether a given experience is merely subjective or also objective. There's nothing on the face of any given experience that tells you whether it's a mere seeming or a seeming that also is. One can't decide subjectivity or objectivity by (as some philosopher put it) merely staring at the experience in isolation.
> Every experience is somewhat mind-dependent, or in some way processed by the mind
yes. literally this. end of story.
> so I would tie subjectivity to privacy rather than mind-dependence.
no. you're redefining terms unnecessarily.
> Again, if every experience is somewhat mind-dependent, mind-independence can't be what makes the difference between a merely subjective experience and an objective experience.
when people say things like "the firetruck is objectively red", they're not applying the adjective "objective" to the subjective experience, they're applying the adjective "objective" to the *referent* of the subjective experience. "the firetruck is objectively red" is a shorthand for "the fire truck as it exists (not as I perceive it) is objectively red". If I wasn't looking at the firetruck, it would still be red, despite nobody subjectively experiencing the redness. That's what object permanence is. The referent, while *informing* the experience, is not part of the experience. It's not like the red metal truck literally gets lodged in your cranium. So no, "subjective" is not a vacuous term.
> What the haver of the seeming experience can't do is tell from within their own resources
uh... yeah, this is the Problem of Solipsism. No amount of testing will ever "prove" a universal. This is precisely why Popper defined science as approximation, rather than discovery.
The firetruck is objectively red FOR THAT OBSERVER.
The firetruck is not red if there's no (human-like or animal with similar vision gubbins) observer.
But it is objectively red as soon as that perceptual apparatus is in causal connection with it.
It can objectively be all sorts of things for different entities because that's just how it shows up for them, when in causal contact with all their different modes of apprehension, perceptual systems, etc.
There is nothing subjective about it, so long as the different experiences can be identified as caused by the same thing. It's only subjective if others with similar perceptual apparatus don't experience it that way, i.e. if the experience is private and nobody else has anything like it. (Obvs there are variations for various types of colour blindness or whatever - but different people with the same colour blindness see it the same way.)
The red is "on" the fire truck, it's not in any sense "in" the brain, the brain is dark, grey, wet and mushy, not red shiny and solid.
IOW it's just as the naive realist thinks, perception is always direct, objective, etc. (when no error). The critic says, "That can't be because everyone would see the same thing." The answer to that is, no, there's no reason why objective experiences should all be the same.
Think of the analogy of how we have social roles. Your kid has no idea of the meticulous curmudgeon that you are at work, that's the face you present to your co-workers, you are objectively that to your co-workers, while the face you present to your kid is that you're a soft touch. Both are objectively what you are, just in those different contexts.
Similarly, the firetruck is red to humans with normal vision, ""£%$% to an alien, etc., those are not subjective experiences just because they're processed, those are just PRECISELY the perturbations the firetruck objectively causes when its causal "radiation," its causal effluences, land on that processing.
I agree it is not either or, it is both. The exact mix of those things can vary considerably for moment to moment in person to person. I would also say that this whole discussion diminishes greatly when we are just talking about our physical interaction directly with the world around us. There is the least room for error there. It’s when we start constructing a narrative around what we have seen or what we have done that things get slippery.
True, but they're more slippery the less assured we are of the anchor points to reality via perceptions (of course they can be slippery for other reaasons too). I think philosophy about the basics is always worthwhile :)
> more slippery the less assured we are of the anchor points to reality
True. That was sort of my point about our immediate interactions with the physical world around us. When other people become involved, it gets a lot more complicated really quickly doesn’t it? How many times in your life have you had to say to someone, “oh! Now I see what you mean.”
There might be an interesting extension of this discussion to a more "sociological" sort of level. Cases where you say "oh! now I see what you mean" aren't exclusively, but do tend to be, cases where your interlocutor is more knowledgeable, more experienced, etc., than you are. Basically, a learning situation.
Yeah, it can play out like that. It can also play out over a misunderstanding where no one’s smarter than anyone else. And it can also be said when someone who you thought was saying something smart explains themselves, and you realize that it wasn’t smart at all. They’re all kind of social in that they all involve some negotiation of meaning with another human being.
As I just said to another guy here, there's nothing in any given experience in and of itself (stared at in isolation as it were) that clinches it, but if you think of the normal case of bias or illusion, usually it's by further investigation oneself, and/or confirmation by others.
Then this seems like a distinction without a difference, since it looks like it makes all the same predictions as the standard approach to perception does.
Because philosophy has an obligation to be useful, in the sense that if the conclusions reached has no impact on how anyone should live their lives, then the question wasn't worth answering.
Oh I agree that there should be an ethical difference, and be useful in that sense, but that's not like a difference in predictions about the shadow puppets in the Cave, better predictions about those - it's not THAT kind of "usefulness."
>We're HAVING a model and at all times directly perceiving a WORLD
Agreed on the grammatical clarification.
>We are always and at all times directly perceiving the world, because we are always and at all times perceiving an objective "slice" of the world that's a secret treasure that the world gives of itself to us, and to nobody else, at just that point in time and space.
Understood as spicy metaphor, agreed. The mention of the potentially technical term "direct" and the links to philosophical papers worries me though, because a lot of the presuppositions normally baked into "stepping outside your perspective" or "getting at the world itself" are nonsense, and to the extent that philosophy propagates these confused discourses rather than dissolving them is bad.
Dlnnae worry aboot the references, they're not that outre, they're to perfectly respectable and credentialed people :)
The Process Externalist view would be that the basic wrong premise is the idea that mind is in the skull, in the brain, whereas mind is at large, spread out in the world.
Our consciousness of the object IS the object. We're misled into thinking of consciousness as something like a little stage in the skull (the Cartesian Theater as Dennett called it), or perhaps it's a property of the thing we vaguely think we are that seems to be a few inches inside the skull, just above the throat, looking out through the eyes, and other senses (cf. Wm James' Psychology). We think "consciousness" refers to those sorts of mysterious things, but really it refers to objects, physical objects in the fully physicalist sense, just objects as they exist in a certain aspect that's relative to our (also physical) bodies and brains.
Poetically, and mystically, you could say that we are the way the world becomes aware of itself (You are the Eyes of the World, as IIRC the Grateful Dead sang). More prosaically, our interposition in time and space, gives the object, via its causal efflux and causal interaction with us, a way to exist that it wouldn't otherwise have.
Nobody else has quite the view on the world that you have, and that view is A WAY THAT THE WORLD EXISTS that it wouldn't otherwise be able to manifest, without you.
The explanation of hypnotism feels completely unsatisfying to me. If you ever get an opportunity to talk with a friend who has been deeply hypnotized, you learn there is something else going on. It is like a bizarre co-opted dream state. The subject isn’t just going along with the hypnotist because they believe they’ve lost control of their body; that’s not how it works at all. The subject completely, irrationally believes the scenarios introduced by the hypnotist, and cannot be convinced otherwise.
Julian Jaynes a good discussion of historical evolution of hypnotism--in somewhat similar term. It requires a social consensus and expectation on part of the subject. That's how manifestations of hypnotic subjects were not stable and evolved along with the ideas of hypnotism itself.
Relevant to the multiple-personality angle, tulpamancy (qua mental hobby, not supposedly-supernatural woo) is specifically the practice of training yourself to "flip" to an intuition that some of your thoughts come from a second homunculus on purpose, consciously, aware that what you're doing is flipping some switches back and forth. It does indeed feel very much like flipping from duck to rabbit etc.
The latter! Happy to answer questions, though I'm no big aficionado, it's just something I take up now and again to kill time as some people take up meditation or lucid dreaming. It's fun enough, but in practical terms it amounts to having your own ChatGPT in your head that doesn't know anything you don't; and as a trick it's not very rewarding to learn, since you can't show it off to people.
Hm. So do you have a persistent tulpa with a defined personality (ie personality traits distinct from you eg shy/bold/ different interests, different perspectives)? What are they like, and are you able to hold a conversation with them at a normal pace?
Or is it just kind of a self-hypnosis where you notice the thoughts could be seen as not yours?
Do you have a tulpaspace / idr what it was called, but like a dreamworld where you can enter and interact with your tulpa? Do they have a physical form or appearance?
Also, what got you into it? Would you ever learn projection, switching/fronting, etc.?
I've considered learning it since a few years, I guess to deal with loneliness, but I never got around to it, though I did try a lot of visualization for a few days, which was fun but didn't produce anything. I worry that my mind generates scary thoughts or I just generally worry about going crazy, so I worry a tulpa might get constructed badly or torture me. And also, eg they are trapped in my head, would probably be forced to experience species dysphoria, etc..
I've mostly tended to create vocal presences -- where, yes, the whole point is that you can have a conversation with it, or just have it running in the background making "unprompted" comments on your activities and surroundings. I can add visual impressions to it with a bit of focus (nothing like a hallucination/projection, just "imagine an apple"-level of picturing the tulpa's appearance and facial expressions), though I don't tend to bother.
I've toyed with a few different tulpas over the years; the trick is definitely to define a personality that you understand intuitively but which differs from your default demeanour, or else it'll destabilise into a regular internal monologue. (For the same reason, it's better to "cast" a voice distinct from yours, but which you know well enough for you to easily imagine that voice saying novel things.) I've trended towards slightly sarcastic voices-of-reason. Crafting yourself a shoulder angel who'll nag at you can sometimes be useful if you find yourself procrastinating on an important project, or otherwise having difficulty willing yourself to do something.
I definitely don't think a tulpa of the type I've worked on could possibly have qualia separate from mine, so I wouldn't worry about the ethical concern. I suppose it's more of a valid question if you start to get into fronting, but then again, if you don't worry about the moral patienthood of POV characters in your dreams when they aren't 1:1 to your waking self, you probably shouldn't worry too much about that? And anyway, fronting/switching is… well, I would say that's where tulpamancy ends and actual dissociative identity begins. I didn't say "disorder" because I suspect someone with a lot of mental control *can* snap in and out of it in a controlled manner -- but it seems more hazardous if it goes wrong, and for that reason as well as general boredom, I haven't tried too hard.
(Cannot emphasise the "boredom" angle too much. I really wouldn't recommend it as a way to alleviate loneliness -- you are still, ultimately, talking to yourself, even if moment-to-moment the tulpa's statements "feel" surprising in the same way as talking to another person IRL. It'll get stale.)
I definitely wouldn't recommend playing around with this stuff if you already struggle with any kind of intrusive thoughts. Tulpamancy is best practised with a 'clean', controlled mental space as a starting point. Maybe do some meditation, practice shutting down trains of thought at will -- and only then, when you know you can get rid of them at a moment's notice, get into creating self-sustaining pseudo-consciousnesses.
Yeah I talked to two (secular) tulpamancers as part of my research process for that post, one of whom was very intense and analytical about it, and had detailed theories of how it worked that dovetailed with my own thinking. Those discussions were helpful food for thought, but alas I think tulpas only wound up getting mentioned in one paragraph out of the whole series. (Basically, I talk about lucid trances a bunch, and then mention that tulpas are very closely related to lucid trances.) Maybe I could have said more about it, but the series was already very long ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Interesting! I greatly enjoyed Jaynes’s book but always thought he oversold his idea by claiming that people in pre-Classical times were not conscious; it seemed to me more likely that they conceived a new understanding of consciousness, maybe analogous to Adam Smith’s new understanding of commerce.
Oh, ye of little faith. I think he's way more right than wrong. You haven't spent enough time imagining what 75,000 years of communicating and storing information purely by voice would mean for how your mind looked.
I think *that* is a misconception stemming from too much literacy and instruction reliant on it. If someone teaches their kid how to make an adze, voice normally contributes maybe 5% of the communicated information.
However, much information might have been shown, all the rest was spoken so that’s 100%. My point is no matter how much they spoke to each other there was no other way to store and retrieve information.
ChatGPT: There is no firm consensus on precisely how rich spoken language was among ancient humans prior to writing, but the prevailing view among linguists and anthropologists is:
1️⃣ Spoken language was already highly complex and expressive before writing.
Writing is a recent invention (~5,000–5,500 years ago), while modern human language capacity likely emerged at least 50,000–100,000 years ago, if not earlier. Anatomical evidence (e.g., hyoid bone structure, FOXP2 gene) and cognitive capacities suggest ancient humans could produce grammatically structured, symbolically rich speech.
2️⃣ Linguistic diversity and complexity likely matched or exceeded modern spoken languages.
Languages change rapidly and there is no reason to assume they were “simpler” before writing. Even non-literate societies today (e.g., Pirahã, Australian Aboriginal languages) have complex phonologies, grammar, and rich vocabularies. Writing simplifies memory demands, but spoken language had to be sufficient for organizing hunting, toolmaking, kinship structures, myth, and social norms long before writing existed.
I think what F is actually saying is that you are overestimating the importance of verbal information of any kind, thus the invention of modern forms of communication will not have had that much affect on how we think. I am not sure I would go that far, but the cognitive importance of writing is probably overstated.
The Complaint Tablet to Ea-nāṣir is a pretty compelling piece of evidence that theory of mind in general and the concept of deception in particular existed among Mesopotamian c. 1750 BC, at least half a century before Jaynes posits the bicameral mind breaking down (c. 1000-1200 BC, I think).
The Tablet is written by someone named Nanni, who accuses Ea-nāṣir of deceiving him by sending him substandard copper after agreeing to the sale of top-quality ingots and of treating Nanni's messenger rudely. The message expresses shock at Ea-nāṣir's thought process and motivations, saying things like "... you feel free to speak in such a way" and "What do you take me for, that you treat somebody like me with such contempt?" Nanni closes by threatening to be extremely strict about quality standards when accepting future deliveries.
This seems to imply that Nanni is aware that deception is a thing, has a concept that other people have motivations and states of mind, and expects his complaints and warnings to Ea-nāṣir to affect the latter's behavior.
It's been decades since I read Jaynes, but for my part I might salvage the idea by suggesting that this gives evidence of where the invention originated.
It does seem hard to see how real commerce could happen without consciousness, or even without a pretty modern/complete theory of mind.
There's also the fact that even chimps demonstrate theory of mind. It's somewhat limited but they definitely take into account other chimps' knowledge. They can act deceptively depending on social context, for example.
You don't need a really elaborate theory of mind to trade goods. Chimpanzees do it. That copper merchant with the poor reputation stayed in business for a long time and people dealt with him, even while complaining. I find that interesting. See the above quote by Erica. I also find it interesting that it in the entire translation. The man is never accused of dishonesty specifically. He's accused of having second right copper and charging more money for it than he should and putting people to more trouble than he should. Was there a word for liar in existence then? It seems like a good place to use it.
Maybe. I don't know much about their culture. But if you have a theory of mind that admits to dishonesty, I find it mighty strange that the word wouldn't exist and be perfectly OK to use in a business feeling. The copper merchant in question apparently had dealings with a lot of other people who also complained about the quality of his copper, but never complained about his character. They did complain about the way he treated them but they continued to do business with him.
That sounds to me like an oligopoly where the copper merchant was powerful and his customers needed him more than he needed them. They didn't want to risk offending him so they had to be somewhat polite.
Chimps demonstrate theory of mind, btw. It's somewhat limited but they can act deceptively.
I am pretty sure that he proposes the breakdown began before 1200 BC. It accelerated tremendously starting perhaps around 1200 BC. I don't think it's a good idea to put such a fine point on dates in this inquiry because the way our mind compresses the farther back things go is a bit of an obstacle. 10,000 years ago I think there was a lot of diversity in human beings just the way there is today, but we tend to flatten them out when we speak about these things It would've come on quicker in different cultures and it would've been seeded by unusual individuals. In other words, variation. I did not know about this tablet and I just read up on it. It's interesting. My number one point was or should I say is that there was some form of reasonably expressive written language at work here, which, if I understand Jaynes' position correctly is the tool that leads to symbolic thought and then the ability to introspect. It should also be kept in mind that much of this early writing, if not all of it, had to do with commerce.
EDIT: I did some fact checking and you are essentially correct but with this caveat.
chatGPT; Jaynes does acknowledge precursors and cracks in bicamerality earlier than 1200 BCE but sees the large-scale, civilization-wide breakdown as happening in this period. He sometimes references earlier potential seeds of the breakdown around 1500 BCE, particularly with the emergence of writing and increasing social complexity, but maintains that the collapse around 1200 BCE is the key marker.
To me, he's saying that's when it reached a critical mass. Not exactly where it began.
Agreed. There's a ton of evidence that Bronze Age Mesopotamians understood and practised deception. The Hammurabi Codex includes laws like these:
1. If a man accuses another man and makes an allegation of murder against him, but cannot prove it, the accuser will be put to death.
3. If a man comes forward to give false testimony in a case but cannot bring evidence for his accusation, if the case involves a capital offence, that man will be put to death.
11. If the [alleged] owner of lost property cannot produce witnesses who can identify his lost property, he is a liar, he has indeed spread malicious charges, he will be put to death.
The general principle seems to be "the punishment for falsely accusing someone of X is the same as the punishment for X." This is clearly the product of a society that understood the need to disincentivise false accusations.
In the realm of mythology, the Sumerian story 'Bilgames and Huwawa' (a precursor to the tale of Gilgamesh and Humbaba in tablet 5 of the Epic of Gilgamesh) clearly involves deception. The hero Bilgames wants to defeat the giant Huwawa, but Huwawa is protected by seven magical auras that make him invincible. So Bilgames feigns friendship, and offers his sisters' hands in marriage in exchange for the auras. Huwawa accepts the offer, and as soon as he hands over the auras, Bilgames attacks and defeats him.
Yes. False witness is in the code. The penalty was death. It is a written code so my theory is still applies. Obviously, there were things that led up to it. One can also see how seriously they took the notion of one person lying to another. One can also see that it involved very concrete circumstances. False accusation. Shoddy construction Deficient goods passed off. One has to wonder how common these things were given the death penalty involved.
Bilgames and Huwawa: also written down. So we are in the transition from oral to symbolic language. We have a theory of mind of deception here that is totally predicated on animal cunning and not sophistry.
By "authentic" I mean not true in their mind--telling the truth in all cases. That isn't illegal at all--witness 99% of all advertising. You can only sue if someone breaks the mutually agreed upon terms of a contract, and then only if there is some sort of damages.
I haven't checked it personally, but I have read multiple translations both scholarly and amateur and they all seem pretty consistent, and I've seen people on reddit claiming that the translation I quoted is a close translation that takes very few liberties.
Kinda-related tangent: I don’t personally know any ancient languages so as I was reading Jaynes I was kinda struggling a bit to figure out who and what to believe in regards to translations. I did find one source that fact-checked an easily-fact-checkable Jaynes claim about the Iliad and Odyssey, and it was directionally true but exaggerated: https://x.com/steve47285/status/1822741054451298706
For some reason, you made me want to look up the history of trickster stories in human culture. I sense a relationship here.
Certainly. Below is a structured timeline of trickster stories — not the historical periods in which people lived as tricksters, but rather the evolution, transmission, and formalization of the trickster as a narrative figure in human storytelling.
⸻
🌀 TIMELINE OF TRICKSTER STORIES AS NARRATIVE TRADITION
1. Prehistoric Origins (Before 3000 BCE)
• Function: Tricksters likely emerged with the earliest human storytelling — oral, performative, explanatory.
• Setting: Paleolithic bands and early agricultural communities.
It all depends on how you define consciousness, doesn't it? That's the slippery slope with all this.10000 years ago I am willing to bet money that people were much more closely in tune with the visceral somatic sense of living than we are today (or what people were like in 200 A.D. for that matter.) 10,000 years ago, the only information retrieval and storage system was word of mouth and that had been true for quite a while previously; try really hard to imagine that.
The invention of written language had a lot to do with shifting the balance between these things. Ever wonder why the book of John begins with "in the beginning was the word?" Maybe that was the beginning of what I call consciousness. I think Jaynes got a lot more things right than wrong.
>people in pre-Classical times were not conscious" *as we think of it today" is the missing modifier here. He clearly defines what he means by consciousness in the first chapter of the book and if you reject his definition then there's really no point in reading the rest of it.
Thing is, Jaynes never admits to the problem of qualia. To him, consciousness is self-introspection. We can hand-wave and get introspection through Analog I and things but how do we get qualia?
Because generally qualia are considered as a part of consciousness. If a see a color, I am said to be conscious of greenness. Isn't experience of qualia called the Hard Problem of consciousness?
But Jaynes ignores this aspect altogether making very off-hand remarks that perception does not require consciousness with example of amoeba that perceives its surroundings but it certainly isn't conscious. But there is big difference between amoeba, a dog and a man. Higher animals perceive qualia.
> Because generally qualia are considered as a part of consciousness.
Is that so? I see Qualia as a contributing vector to “consciousness.” They are an input. Meaning without a conflict between Qualia and rational thought consciousness would not be necessary
It is not true that he says that. He says that learning does not require it. He doesn’t do a deep dive into qualia because he understands that that is a fundamental aspect of being alive and sees no reason to explain it.
Amoeba almost certainly don't have qualia. And Jaynes responded to the criticism that perception requires consciousness by saying that amoeba perceive their environment (without being conscious). But there is a gulf between amoeba perception and human perception--and this gulf is qualia and Jaynes omits to notice this gulf.
There are billions of people even today who have gotten the majority of their beliefs from things people said to them face to face. I know some of them. They know how to read, but they trust almost none of it.
Sometimes I have a strong feeling that people reject Jayne's theory because it makes them uncomfortable. The specialness of a human being is called into question by his theory. Is it not?
I don't care about that, I just want to know if his factual claims are correct, which means thinking about what evidence might exist to falsify them. If no such evidence could exist, then it might as well be a theory of what songs the elves in Rivendell sang. If such evidence should exist but none exists falsifying the theory, then the theory becomes very plausible.
I became convinced that something like the homunculus account of consciousness must be the case back when I used to rock climb (before I broke my neck two years ago in, erm, a rock climbing accident).
On many occasions, I would observe my body begin to execute physically demanding, precise technical moves in fear inducing situations before I had consciously "told" my body to start moving. Of course my conscious mind would rapidly catch up and experience between conscious awareness and movement would quickly become synchronic. But it happened so often I became quite familiar with the thought, "oh we're going are we?" as I began to execute the required physical moves.
The way I came to think of "myself" is as being like Maggie Simpson in the introduction to The Simpsons. She steers the steering wheel and beeps the horn, and is under the illusion that she is driving the car. But really, Marge is driving the car. Maggie as homunculus.
I'm sure this must be very common, I can perceive it whenever I do a sustainable fast-walk pace for some period of time (say 4mph for 15+ minutes) then get off the treadmill and my legs just seem to move on their own. It sort of feels like you're just "steering" the direction of a Flintstones car from the homunculus seat. Being that it's a compound movement, and not merely a steady contraction/expansion of some muscle fiber, it's makes less sense to be an involuntary motion than the "lean against this wall while you try to raise your arm against it for 30 seconds then step away" thing everyone knows from grade school.
Trying to mess around with one's perception of consciousness on purpose seems just as dangerous as rock climbing in its own way. Seems like an easy way to break your brain. (Sorry to hear about your accident, and hope you were able to make a recovery.)
Well, I'm a quadriplegic now, so not much of a recovery. But given that by any reasonable metric I should have died, some would say I should be grateful.
The question isn't whether or not the conscious mind controls everything. We know it doesn't. The question is whether or not it controls anything; or another way of putting it: what information does the conscious self add to our cognitive/behavioral processes?
The essay feels a bit incomplete to me. Particularly the ending, I actually wasn't even sure it was the ending when I was reading the blog on Gmail.
As for the topic itself, I dunno, while I don't find anything particularly objectionable it doesn't really seem like this model gets us anything. What are the benefits of this over a model like Plato's tripartite soul? I think this is what's missing from this essay is more commentary on the other theories of consciousness and how Byrnes' theory differs.
This model-flipping optical-illusion account fits my experience with Mahamudra (a Vajrayana Buddhist meditation practice). We often meditate with live instructions, which often have the form "take the view that..." (except it's about mental phenomena and the architecture of awareness, rather than twirling dancers).
Thomas Metzinger has a version of this account which he calls the "transparent self-model" (explained in his book "Being No One" or any number of YouTube lectures). He distinguishes between internal models that we see as models, vs. "transparent" models where we relate to the model contents *as if* it were the real world. On this view (as philosophers like to say), a first-person perspective requires we have a *transparent* world-model which includes the self as a specially-indexed object.
This transparency idea highlights how weird some of these "model-flipping" practices can get, especially with the self-model. It's not abstract propositional beliefs that are changing (which we're used to as rationalists), rather our experience of the world.
I think it's well-established that stage hypnosis is basically fake -- people play along because it would be awkward not to, nothing more. So using stage hypnosis (a fake thing) as evidence for this theory is kind of anti-convincing to me.
I imagine it's *often* true that people just play along, but I really doubt that's *always* what's going on--it probably only works on certain personality types.
Richard Feynman tells a story about participating in stage hypnosis, and describing his experience of it. As I recall, he did everything the hypnotist told him to do, but always had some rationalization for why he was doing it. (Like, "Oh, I don't have to do it just because the hypnotist says, but actually I was just about to do that anyways, because of X.") But, after the fact, he could see that he'd been doing very silly things he'd never have had any impulse to do if it weren't for the hypnotist. So it seemed to him like it really worked on him.
I suppose he could be greatly exaggerating to make it a better story, but even if he was exaggerating, (a) Richard Feynman would have been the last person in the world to "play along" with something just because the alternative would be awkward, and (b) lots of other people tell similar stories, and I don't think it's likely that they're all lying.
I was thinking about your review of Jaynes the whole time, I was very glad that it was eventually mentioned. That’s the most interesting part to me: just like in the optical illusions, the initial states are just the most common and most likely to make sense (upside down stairs are rarer than regular ones), but when it comes to our mind, there’s not as many guardrails. If all or most of us end up with roughly the same homunculus model, it’s probably because of the way we hear our parents talk about their own self-perception, but it’s not hard at all to imagine how different cultures could end up with very different models.
I completely understand your point about skipping the free speech part, but it still makes me a bit sad. People really add a whole lot of crazy epicycles to their world models to make space for it. I think it would be very healthy for a lot of people if we finally learned to deal with that idea.
Since I am autistically obsessed with language, I will point out that this
>the predictive processing interpretation is that we perceive our models of the world.
is misleading, insofar as it's Scott's interpretation or whether people working in predictive processing all agree with it. Perceive is an ordinary language world defined by its usages in ordinary contexts. We do perceive the world, because that is the correct way to use the word as it is embedded in everyday life. We do not perceive a model of the world, because "models" aren't imposed between us and the world in our ordinary linguistic behavior.
You might say that perception consists in our brains interpreting various other cognitive models and so we can be wrong about what the world is like - but it's strictly speaking false to say that we perceive those models. Nobody ever speaks of perceiving models irl when they see an illusion or hallucination or regular apple or whatever.
Now, since this is just an autistic objection about language use, it could be immaterial. But it could also mislead people by appropriating a technical term and giving people the misleading impression that there is the world, then their model, and what they perceive is the model, when that's not right. Perception is a complex behavior and can be given deep explanations, but it is not accurate to use the word that what you perceive is sense data or qualia or an inner world or whatever, because nobody irl speaks this way and the technical usage potentially or implicitly adopted here is not congruent with other ordinary usages.
>Now we have the material we need to explain all sorts of weird mental phenomena:
From my understanding, you've just restated what happens to people's beliefs when they're "hypnotized" with an analogy to what happens when people begin perceiving the dancer rotating clockwise vs counterclockwise. I don't really see what the explanation here is supposed to be. The entities involved like "a set of beliefs about yourself" were already part of the existing folk psychology - I expected an explanation of them to invoke theoretical entities in neuroscience, not just more beliefs and desires.
Compare: I also don't know more about why the illusions happen.
>Sometimes, enough neurons representing similar concepts
Concepts are not given a theoretical explanation, nor is representation, nor are we given an explanation of what exactly the neurons do when they fire. Concepts and representations are ordinary terms not successfully explained in theoretical terms, and the only invocation of s theoretical phrase like neurons firing is to make the explanation look sciencey.
>enough concepts to represent a world-state and give positive valence to that world-state.
What is a world state? What is positive valence?
>patterns reach a threshold where they cross over to the motor cortex and activate motor programs elsewhere in the body.
This is a global explanation of all brain activity, like saying "Stuff has momentum and transmits energy when colliding with other stuff" is a physics bases explanation of why I didn't die in a car crash.
> Start with a strong background belief that the new model is plausible.
> Relax.
> Suppress all evidence favoring the old model.
> Gather evidence favoring the new model.
This is also a global explanation for believing things, except it doesn't even attempt to explain what beliefs are or suppressing evidence consists in.
I think I can answer some of these questions you raise--even though I am in agreement with your overall point.
"Models" can refer to any construct which reproduces, in another media, some set of representational relationships. A computer can be said to possess a model of, say, chess. Physics uses mathematical models to predict empirical phenomena. Such models do not have to be conscious--if our preconscious perceptual processes turn out to be using something like a model to represent physical stimuli, then this will be a meaningful sense of that term (so, for example, if our brain does use a processes analogous to backward propagation, then that process could meaningfully be called a "model". We are almost certain that the brain uses a model of some kind to represent stimuli because neural scanning has revealed nothing that resembles a camera picture.
Still, as you say, this is mostly semantics.
I agree that Scott's summary of the original author's explanation of hypnosis doesn't quite make sense. I imagine that if you asked someone under hypnosis questions about themselves, they would give the same answer they would have given when not under hypnosis (except insofar as embarrassment is no longer a barrier). If correct, hypnosis wouldn't change our beliefs about ourselves--therefore our beliefs about ourselves do not define our experience of self-consciousness. I believe that these two things (self-conciousness, and our beliefs about ourselves, which I will term "Self-Concept") are two independent phenomena.
"Concepts", as they function in the mind, however, are pretty clear. They are categories of closely related objects, events or ideas that the brain has tagged as belonging to a common set, usually called "schema" in psychology. These reside in long term memory, and typically represent a kind of averaging across many instances to produce a "prototypical" image of that thing. The idea of "Dog" that you have in your head is a kind of merged conglomeration of every dog you have ever seen or had described to you. For brevity, it is acceptable to call these schema "concepts."
Note, however, that there are other instances of patterns stored in the brain. Perceptual gestalten, such as geometrical figures, are things that the brain automatically searches for in the sensory memory buffer. This process is pre-conscious in that when we recognize a square shape, we don't consciously think about what the shape represents, we are just aware of seeing a square. It's presented as a whole experience (ie, a "gestalt") to the conscious mind.
I think the self-concept is made out of schemas (self-schemas). I think that self-consciousness (or self-awareness if you prefer) is a form of phenomenal awareness in which we are consciously aware is being experienced from our own point of view.
Perceptual illusions are usually mistakes of the pre-conscious perceptual processes. Hypnosis appears to be some sort of interruption of the self-consciousness (or maybe a weakening of it). Categorical bias results from errors residing in the long term memory. None of these things explain the others.
Add all your schemas together and you get your entire world view. All your self-schemas added together create your "Self-Concept". These schemas are not necessarily consistent with each other, nor equally accessible to conscious recall, so we end up with beliefs that are contradictory and triggered by different environmental stimuli.
I agree with you that the way that the author (I don't remember his name) uses "valence" and "threshold" is overly simplistic. It is true in an overall sense that the frontal cortex and the midbrain exchange information in order to send signals to the motor cortex, resulting in behavior, but that description hides a lot of complexity. I also agree that the explanation of seeking evidence of a new "model" (here used as a synonym for structured schemas) also seems simplistic. Are we suggesting that the meaning of our entire life experiences as stored in long term memory can simply be overturned and replaced by something the conscious mind makes up in the moment? Color me skeptical.
I say that perception, or better perceiving -- since this makes it more clear that it's something that happens, a process --, is modelling of parts of the world, and it works very fine most of the time.
But granted, many people aren't aware that perceiving is modeling, because it's something that they don't do voluntarily, like they also do not voluntarily digest.
> If the homunculus-self is a mostly-accurate but not-directly-perceived-and-real model of mental processes, then a person whose mental processes often flip between two or more dramatically different states (for example, borderlines, who are notable for very strong emotional states and “splitting”) may gather evidence for and eventually flip to a model of themselves as multiple different homunculi. This is especially true if they’re primed with the suggestion that this is a likely way for the inside of their mind to be (for example, by a psychotherapist who believes in multiple personalities).
An uninformed take like this makes me wonder if Scott is just clueless about DID specifically or is everything else of his I am reading and nodding along is subject to the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect.
The most unfortunate part is him uncritically repeating the discredited iatrogenic model of DID in the parentheses.
This topic deserves a much more in-depth discussion, suffice it to say for now that not one person with DID (as opposed to the ticktok multiplicity crowd) want to have it. They desperately want to "flip to a model of themselves" where they have a single unfractured self. Most try very hard to do so, repeatedly and in various ways, invariably failing. Most people with clinical DID symptoms have multiple nuanced alters and not the media-beloved one good and one evil, or the Borderline "strong emotional states".
This is interesting to me. I had some pretty serious childhood trauma and the most important one became a repressed memory that I did not recover until my mid 20s. I did not suffer from DID, but I never understood why I was behaving the way I did. It made no sense to me. When I recovered the memory, it started to make sense to me, but it took a long time to work through it. I feel now really that I did have two different selves growing up, except one of them was on silence but pulling the levers.
It would be interesting if Scott read some phenomenology some day, because it is a well-grounded and sophisticated philosophical tradition that shows that those "excruciatingly obvious" philosophical preliminaries he starts with are not obvious at all, and are making a bunch of ontolgical assumptions that go back to Descartes, and it would seem like an important task for a "rationalist" to try to think outside of the dominant ontological assumptions of the age they live in.
Merleau-Ponty would be the most influential and relevant one. But he's very French. More contemporary, and possibly more accessible to someone with a "rationalist" bent, might be Shaun Gallagher and Dan Zahavi, The Phenomenological Mind; or Gallagher's How the Body Shapes the Mind.
I’ve read some Merleau-Ponty but let me check out those other two! Some phenomenology stuff I’ve read can get quite “out there” which has made me rather skeptical!
Boring snowflake touchy-feely comment: I would personally label this essay with some sort of "DANGER: COGNITOHAZARD" trigger warning. This stuff is surprisingly powerful & can go to some very dark places as I discovered for myself a while back. Not gonna say more.
I wonder if this was always true, or if it's a super safe modern world thing--just as your immune system evolved to be constantly suppressing parasites and saving you from the bacteria growing in your food and now it's making you deathly ill because you ate a peanut, your brain evolved to be constantly assessing likely dangers in a world with big nasty predators and no guns + lots of two-legged predators and no laws, and now it's making you terrified of something that's not even a real thing.
How would we know? I mean, maybe Ugh the Caveman sat around in his cave ruminating on his mortality or the meaninglessness of life or something when he should have been sharpening his flint spearheads. How would we tell one way or another?
If all you did in those days was sit around in your cave, you wouldn’t be alive for very long. But essentially you’re correct. It’s all just speculation.
But I think there are thought experiments that you can do and questions you can ask yourself that perhaps makes some hypotheses more compelling than others. I think maybe the best way to explore the idea of the meaninglessness of life is to put yourself in a place where your physical survival depends on you doing something now. If you choose not to, I suppose that means you’re quite happy to die.
Ohhhhh yeah. Had a *very* nasty brush with this myself not long ago when changing my medication schedule. I followed all the rules, consulted with my psych, but it STILL kicked me in the head, hard.
FWIW I did put in a little “Pros and cons” box at the top of the post about meditation / enlightenment / awakening — https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GvJe6WQ3jbynyhjxm/intuitive-self-models-6-awakening-enlightenment-pnse . That doesn’t seem like a ‘trigger warning’ kind of thing, though: IIUC it usually takes hundreds of hours of conscientious effort before anyone can mess themselves up through meditation. Just reading a blog post is safe AFAIK.
Oh, another one is: knowing that multiple personality disorder / dissociative identity disorder (DID) exists is a risk factor for getting it. But in terms of “cost/benefit analysis re writing and reading blog posts about DID”, I think this is a cost that rounds to zero, especially since DID is already commonly portrayed in movies and TV.
If you’re thinking of a different cognitohazard besides those two, then I don’t know what it is.
I actually meant this review, not your original article - I think any blog strongly focused on psychology should be considered a "dangerous space" in terms of this stuff. Although I guess the same is true for ACX, so maybe I shouldn't have said anything.
I've always loved Jaynes' book since I first read it and hated that it was not accepted. I understand the reasons now much better after reading your re-write and analysis. It makes me love the idea even more that there really was a fundamental change in the way most people thought around the late Bronze Age.
I became fascinated long ago by a particular Pharoah who lived around 1450 BCE named Thutmose III, and especially a particular episode in his reign. He was expansionary, and wanted to put down the restless and hostile peoples of the levant. The first phase of his plan was to conquer a fortress called Megiddo (where we get "armageddon"). In order to take the city he had a couple of obvious choices of route to take around a mountain range in his way. He theorized that his enemy would have both of these routes protected, so instead took a middle path no one was expecting, got behind the bulk of his enemy's forces and easily took the city.
It always struck me as odd how the enemy strategist would be fooled by such an obvious choice, but maybe it was that Thutmose had theory of mind and his enemy didn't. His opponent didn't hear from his god what to do and never imagined he could just think for himself.
My apologies. I was logged into my dashboard. The first link only mentions Jane's peripherally in my exploration of consciousness with chatty. The second link digs deeper.
I really enjoyed the second link. You did indeed get very deep into Jaynes and answered a lot of the questions I had about the critical reception of his ideas.
The ideas about memory being conveyed through voice, movement, such as dance, and embodiment in places reminds me of the idea of a "memory palace" that I've always found intriguing. The TV show Sherlock with Benedict Cumberbatch explored this. Sherlock would position ideas in his memory in a manner akin to a physical arrangement in the world and then walk through this space to retrieve information that might otherwise have been lost. Gary Marcus, in his book Kluge, talked about how the biggest limitation on our memory is that we have no decent way of indexing memories and it's kind of like a shoebox full of tiny clippings all scrambled together.
It makes sense that the ancients would have techniques for indexing memories very different from what we're used to with alphabetised sorting in encyclopedias, search engines, and dewey decimal systems.
Despite the "feather for every wind" nature of Claude's content which is so emblematic of LLMs, I found Claude's writing style to be really good. I'm used to ChatGPT and can get similar content with prompts that provide sufficient context, but it's never quite this graceful.
Taking a premodern army through a mountain range is *hard* and even when successful is likely to lose a large fraction of your army on the way. When Hannibal crossed the Alps (long after Jaynes puts the start of self-modelling) it was a shocking success, but he still lost half his army doing it. It seems perfectly explicable that Thutmose's enemy did not expect him to try it.
I can see that, but imagine there is quite a difference in degree of difficulty in crossing the alps - with elephants even - than in crossing over what was referred to by the Egyptian chroniclers as a mountain range but was likely more like a pass over a series of hills. I'd have to get a look at that terrain to really form a better opinion of the difficulty.
What struck me was the tone of the description. A kind of bewilderment by the enemy leader like, "he's not supposed to do that!" Of course, the story was written by the winners and was designed to make Thutmose look amazing, so was more propaganda that anything that could be considered realistic.
Wonderful analogy in this post, between the suddenness of satori and the suddenness of figure-ground reversals.
My favorite sudden satori Zen anecdote:
"A Zen master was instructing a monk who struggled to get what enlightenment was all about. One evening, as darkness fell, the master told the monk: “It’s late; it's getting dark outside. Let's call it a day; you can return to your hut. But first, here, take this lamp to light your way” Just as the monk was reaching for the lamp, the master blew out the flame. The monk was enlightened.."
Sounds like a figure-ground reversal! The light was in the dark....
(Coincidentally, I just posted a blog tangential to this topic of self-models - self-models, active inference and fidgeting:
> The place where the optic nerve meets the eye lacks photoreceptors, leading to a 5-10 degree hole in the middle of the visual field - there’s a medium-sized spot in your vision where you can’t see anything at all. But our lower-level brain centers guess that probably there’s just, you know, normal stuff there. Therefore, they “show” “us” a “picture” of an intact world with normal stuff in the blind spot area - safe enough, unless there’s really an oncoming car.
Does an oncoming car make this less safe? How fast would the car have to be going to (a) fit within your 5-10 degree blind spot, but also (b) hit you before that stops being the case?
I think OP was just making a throwaway joke. Blind spots are very safe viz. driving because (1) Most people have two working eyes and the blind spot of one is within the field-of-view of the other. (2) You saccade (move your eyes to point in a different direction) typically multiple times per second, such that things don’t stay in the blind spot. (3) “hole in the middle of the visual field” is not meant literally, the blind spots are off to the side, away from the central “fovea” where vision is sharpest. Try it yourself at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_spot_(vision)#Blind_spot_test :)
>If you watch mental decision very very carefully for a long time, you notice the same things the Libet experiment noticed, where they seem to often happen before “consciousness” is “aware” of the decision at all.
The "Readiness Potential" activity that occurs in the brain several seconds before a conscious decision is made has been found to be an artifact of sampling methodology, and is actually just background activity that's constantly ebbing and flowing in the brain (https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1210467109). In 2019 a study was performed comparing the brain activity of people making arbitrary decisions with non-arbitrary decisions (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6809608/). Subjects were told that a choice between two different non-profits would appear on a computer screen, and they needed to press a key to pick one of them. The arbitrary group was told that their decision would not have any consequence, they should just pick whichever one they wanted with no criteria. The non-arbitrary group was told that they were choosing which group they would prefer receive a $1,000 donation. Both groups were told they should press the key as soon as they made their decision. They found that you saw the Readiness Potential a few seconds before the arbitrary decisions, but no Readiness Potential at all for the non-arbitrary decisions. The current theory is that RP is just background brain activity, and that when you don't have a reason to make a choice you usually make a choice when background brain activity is high.
This is very interesting, thank you for writing it up. In my uni, I was taught about the original experiments but not the overturning. I took that class in 2019, the first contradictory experiment was in 2012 - I wonder how long it will take until the lecture is changed.
It might take a while. I've been taking psychology courses recently and they still had big sections on the Stanford Prison Experiment, and that was found to be an academic hoax 6 years ago (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31380664/). Curriculum takes a while to catch up, there's a lot of inertia in teaching.
Jung talked about a collective subconscious, but I think it is easier to argue that our modes of consciousness are also collectively constructed and reinforced, and periodically undergo communal phase changes (and that you always have a small number of individuals who fail to join the common attractor state and get diagnosed as "crazy").
Has anyone ever seen a real-life stage or therapy hypnotist use a swinging object? Because I've only ever seen it in TV and movies, and I'd think the cliché nature of the technique might take the subject out of the experience.
No! Square A and square B are not the same color! This is a pet peeve of mine. The squares are clearly different colors. The *pixels in the image* are the same color, but the *squares* are different colors. If you're talking in terms of the image, well, there are no squares at all, those are parallelograms or whatever. To call them "squares" is to accept the premise of the image, in which case they're clearly different colors. To say the squares are the same color is to do a bizarre thing where you accept the spatial premise of the image but not the illumination, which is kind of nonsense.
I think that if you call them parallelograms, the illusion becomes no less compelling (because the illusion is caused by 3D interpretation of the parallelograms and the surrounding image)
If you think about it that way, any interpretation of pixels on the screen is an illusion. Another way to think about it is that we could not interpret the pixels on the screen if our "subsystem" brain did not translate the 2d image to 3d, including lighting and colors etc. So I'm not sure it really makes sense to call this an illusion. The original figures just point out what the brain is subconsciously doing.
Re: sudden changes in your mind. In some trivial and some profound ways this has happened often in my life. Shower thoughts... Where I suddenly get the answer to some problem I've been thinking about. But also doing other mundane things. I can recall the exact stretch of road, where I understood a diode bridge as just a bunch of switches. ( that's more on the trivial side.)
My own interpretation of hypnosis is something of the reverse of the usual: it largely consists of the *conscious* mind telling the brain's perceptual systems to shut up and do what they're told. In terms of predictive coding, when the hypnotist says "there's an apple in your hand, look at how red it is", the subject is making their "top-down prior" strong enough to overrule their actual sense data; when the perceptual system interprets the raw data as a 3-d field of vision, that (imaginary) red apple ends up as part of it because the rest of the brain is insisting that it has to be there.
I once volunteered to be a subject in a hypnosis show, but my brain kept trying to analyze the experience with a running narrative saying things that amounted to "you're imagining really hard, but you haven't quite managed to fool your automatic systems." When the hypnotist told me to imagine that my hands were being squeezed together, and to struggle against the squeezing but fail, what ended up happening is that I "struggled" hard enough that, after a certain point, my hands actually did fly apart...
The checker square illusion never seemed like much of an illusion to me. The light square looks like it's part of a checkerboard that's intrinsically lighter than the dark square, but is in shadow. Neither I nor my eyes are interested in the intensity of light as a function of spherical angle entering my eye - I want to know what the scene is like. I mean, in real life a street in bright sun probably is reflecting more light to your eye than an adjacent sidewalk in deep shade. Is it an illusion that you can tell the sidewalk is actually lighter-colored than the street? This strikes me very differently than something like the cafe wall illusion, where it just looks like non-parallel lines on a page, even though they are parallel.
I think it does qualify as an illusion because, even when I *am* interested in the actual relative frequencies and intensities, I can't accurately perceive them. (More to the point, I can't avoid perceiving them wildly inaccurately.) If I try my hardest to interpret the image as a flat grid of pixels, the A-pixels still look much darker than the B-pixels.
I'm vulnerable to this illusion for a good evolutionary reason, sure -- but I'm still being actively misled by my own brain!
I would disagree with the "actively misled" framing. What Mark is saying (and I agree) is that the brain is a mechanism for taking useless sense data and turning it into functional imaging.
It does this by processing multiple layers of data, none of which look like the nice clean pixel matrix of your screen's display, while simultaneously making intelligent interpretations of how to display the live data feed. (Those distortions are eye floaties, correct them and move on. That's the top surface of a cylinder, track it as the head bobs up and down with the torso breathing.)
Maybe it seems trivial to ask the brain to give you access to the lower layers where, presumably, the individual intensity measurements are made. I'm not convinced that layer exists in the complex network of feedback interactions that is visual processing. It might seem like you're just asking for raw data, but I think what you're really asking for is novel functionality.
Sure, it would be nice to have that functionality, but I'd rather have a brain that correctly interprets shadow distortions. Even really good cameras struggle to produce decent pictures with lots of complex shadow distortion, motion, lens flare, and artifacts. That's partly why my pictures are never as good as actually being there. The visual cortex, partly because of all its distortions, has superior functionality.
> Sometimes, enough neurons representing similar concepts fire at the same time that they form some kind of temporarily stable pattern that takes over the global raworkspace.
This seems unfalsifiable because he hasn't tied the "global workspace" to a specific group of neurons that interact in a reproducibly observable way. Moreover, the claim lacks any predictive value. For instance, satori has yet to be captured by any neuroimaging technology. That's not to say that satori isn't a genuine state that can be experienced, nor that neuroimaging technology may not be able to capture such an event in the future. But even if neuroscientists had the technology to make this theory falsifiable, claiming that a bunch of neurons firing in unison creates the state of satori doesn't explain the subjective experience of satori. GWT sounds like pseudoscience to me.
This was great. Been doing meditation for long time, and every now and then, kind of had the 'non-self' shift happen, fleetingly. Just like briefly experiencing the stairs being upside down . This discussion has given some framework to what I was experiencing, some further understanding around the 'feeling' when switching views.
One thing that has always held me back, is 'what is it good for'?
So lets say you can achieve this alternate shift in perception, where there is no-self, no-ego. How does life get better/or/worse? What happens in day to day life?
I have feeling some people would say once someone flips to the alternate view. Then it creates less stress as in the Sapolsky ideas around why 'Why Zebras don't get Ulcers'
I think the bi-stable model is too simple. I'm thinking of the mind as a set of aperiodic (chaotic) system attractors - some very stable, some not so stable. Yes in some cases there might be just two of them but in the general case there might be many semi-stable attractors. In all dimensions: perception, consciousness, personality etc.
Nice, Brynes' is the clearest, sanest, most thorough piece I've seen written about the sort of thing a rationalist can expect to learn through 1k hours meditating. Super cool that enlightenment does seem to be only one of many possible deliberate changes in self model. Someday we'll have a transition graph showing all of them, and chart the easiest paths to enlightenment (and the other good ones)? Set up coin-and-cups style tricks to convince people they're the 17th Dalai Lama?
I've always wondered if it's possible to "realize" that the true nature of reality is boundless hatred, that all phenomena emerge from the unity of emptiness and malevolence. Not worth running the experiment.
This is all very plausible, but there's a meta-physical problem in the middle of it. If the self is perceived as a homonculous, but this is an illusion because we can 'flip' our perceptions and perceive ourselves as controlled by a hypnotist or a divine being--who is doing the perceiving? Which part of the mind is doing the 'flipping?' Because that looks an awful lot like a deliberate decision of the conscious self.
The conscious self doesn't have to have free will (whatever you think that means) in order to be "real." It just has to be self-conscious. Just because elements of the self perception can be illusory doesn't mean it has to be all illusory. *Something* is experiencing the illusion. That something understands that it possess (perhaps is made out of) a unique point of view.
You can know that your experiences are real because you are experiencing them. They are *subjectively true* because no one else can experience them , but to you they are just a real as any part of objective reality (the part other people can see).
If the self is an illusion, so is everything. If anything is real, so is the self.
I do love the "here's a very obvious philosophical point" disclaimers in front of something that is not at all obvious until you've spent some time thinking about it....
Scott, have you read Hanson's and Simler's "The Elephant in the Brain"? Their main thesis, that the brain engages in strategic self-deception, seems at the same time obvious and obscure, even in the ratsphere, something I continue to be baffled about. It also fits nicely into the "homunculus" model.
Impro is important, albeit maybe for different reasons. Ages ago, when Robin Hanson reviewed it at OB, it was when the idea of social status "really" clicked for a lot of us spectrumy types. We were looking for some objective metric, such as money and academic ranking. The book really helped with understanding that status is in the tiny details of everyday interactions. Example you go to a cafe, and order coffee from the waiter, you are on a slightly taller horse and the waiter is on a slightly smaller horse. Then you ask for a small favour like directions to the nearest pharmacy and then you switch places.
I'm guessing this probably is missing the deeper point being made here, but I think the whole "homunculus model" is deeply confused and based on a straw man of how (most?) people actually experience selfhood.
As far as I can tell, the "homunculus model" was invented by Daniel Dennett as a way of ridiculing (what he thought was) the typical conception of the "self" in the brain. His point was that, if there was a "homunculus" in the brain looking at all the different inputs, this "homunculus" would also need a brain processing inputs, resulting in an infinite regress. But as far as I can tell, no serious thinker has ever actually proposed a model like this, and - at the very least - it doesn't represent how (most) ordinary people actually conceive of or experience themselves.
I think Scott's description of the mind as an "imaginary space" more closely approximates how the average person experiences themselves, but I would insist that the average person does not experience a separate "self" that looks at and/or controls the mind. Instead, the average person experiences themselves as *being* their own mind (or perhaps some combination of their mind and body). And as far as I can tell, there hasn't been any major thinker in western philosophy (more on this next paragraph) that has ever advocated a distinction between the mind and the self in the way that the homunculus model implies.
The reason I know this is because, about 6 and a half years ago, I ran into a post (I think it was actually on the old SSC blog) that quoted someone talking about an eastern (I think Indian) model of consciousness, where the "self" is considered a separate entity from the mind, that observes/controls the mind. The whole point of this theory/model was that it was counterintuitive: most people don't experience a distinction between mind and self like this, and it requires meditation in order to "see the truth" of it. After reading this, I experienced a "flip" in my experience of myself that mirrored this mind-self distinction (I felt like I was "observing my own thoughts" from a distance), which caused me a great deal of distress because it was so far away from how I had experienced myself for the majority of my life. It took about two months to piece back together my default intuitive model, and even then it was unstable for a while. (I had experienced a similar "flip" several years before, but this was before I had heard about this eastern/Indian theory, so I didn't have much of a reference point for it and it went away fairly quickly).
I think the way most people experience themselves is closer to the "imaginary space" model, with the "self" just being that imaginary space itself - or perhaps, the entire experiential field as a whole, including external and bodily perceptions. This is much closer to the "god's eye view" perspective, with the caveat that perhaps the average person does feel themselves having more control over their own mental/experiential processes than they actually do (as mentioned in the "Buddhist enlightenment" section above). I think it's the sense of *control* - rather than the sense of having a homunculus inside you - that's crucial here. (I have less of a sense of what Buddhists mean by "no-self" - to me, the "sense of self" is along the lines of all of my experiences being on the same "channel" or "frequency", and I'm not sure how meditation is supposed to make that go away.)
It is interesting that the bi-stable images are seen as limitations of the human brain, rather than strengths. Being able to see the world from two perspectives more often than not allows you to make better decisions than if you only saw it as it actually was.
It is also interesting that you didn't mention schizophrenia and its inability to detect bi-stable images, which you have mentioned before.
> The train is either going into the tunnel, or coming out of the tunnel. You can make it switch by quickly moving your eyes either left-to-right or vice versa, or by thinking very hard about the train going in or out.
I find it easier to do by just blinking once or twice. This changes the direction almost consistently for me.
Also, is it just me or are some of the optical illusions presented at the start kind of bad (as in: difficult)? I know the stairs one and it usually works for me, but here, I had to actively convince my brain that the green stairs were a live option. 5 seconds of googling gave me a crappy drawing which works better for me: http://www.unterricht.kunstbrowser.de/images/kippfiguer03_460.gif
Also, I couldn't get the cups/plates to flip at all.
Seems like a candidate mechanism for hallucinations based on this is that it is basically a false autocorrection that becomes the model your brain uses. I’m sure someone else has already pointed this out.
I don't find the idea that "thoughts come from nowhere so we're not really in control" a compelling argument. Sam Harris brings that up often, that if you concentrate, you can see that the next thought that pops in your head comes from nowhere. This is supposed to be proof of something, usually that the world is deterministic. I'm not denying that the world is deterministic but if it wasn't and we were in control of our thoughts, how would we expect that experience to change?
Personally, maybe because I'm of this world, but I can't imagine it being different, even if we did have free wiil.
Glad to see the mention of Jaynes at the end. It reminded me of Andrew Cutler's piece (https://substack.com/home/post/p-165631304) on the origins of pronouns. Jaynes might be a little too eager in arguing for a significant difference in consciousness and mental models of the world and self during the Bronze Age, but the linguistic evidence on the origins and spread of the usage of the first person singular "I" around 15k years ago does seem very convincing. Without a linguistic reference to a "self", people only 15k years ago likely really did experience the world completely differently from us. Referring to them as "automata" driven by external forces doesn't seem completely far-fetched.
Back in the 70’s I was intrigued by the work of Milton Erikson. I read into him extensively. My goal was never to use hypnosis, just to understand how the mind works. I’m sure that much of what he did would be considered highly unethical today. I don’t think he really had a full blown theory of mind, but he was certainly on to something. I trust you are
At least a little familiar with him. I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Brilliant piece. It connected a number of important dots for me. None of it was particularly new information, given my proclivities, but somehow the presentation, in your concise, agile hands, brought me to a flip moment. Satori, regarding the predictive brain and self model. I thank you. Or my homunculus thanks you. Or, well, you are being thanked. Thankfulllness is arising? somewhere, aimed somewhere else?... ah hell.
What must it be like to predict the next thing that's going to be said by you versus actively saying it?
For some people, that's very difficult. They experience speaking as "I let my mouth say something." Even asking them afterwards "what did you just say" can get an "I dunno." This is what happens when you spin off parts of your mind into "semi-autonomous entities" and give them feedback to modify them.
What's that line, something like "sometimes I start a sentence without knowing where I'm going and I just hope I end up where I wanted."
I think it's more like "If I don't know what I'm going to say next, I can laugh at my own jokes." This provides valuable feedback on "bringing the funny."
Wait, isn't that how everyone speaks?
No. I normally plan out whole sentences before starting to speak, or at least partial sentences and conclusions. I can then repeat the whole sentence verbatim in the short term (10 seconds later). I have a friend who has a completely different way of generating sentences. We discovered the difference because she finishes her sentences and can't reproduce them in the same way afterward.
There is absolutely no way you represent anyone but a tiny, tiny percentage of the most autistic yet high-functioning segment of the population. Either that, or you're just wrong. That's not how people think or speak.
lol as far as I'm aware I'm not autistic. I know a few autistic people and I don't think the same way as they seem to. It's possible I'm some other flavour of neurodivergent though. Don't you think it's possible that this is a situation where people have different internal processes but similar external behaviours? Some people can't imagine images in their heads, and find it very difficult to accept that yes, other people do genuinely experience something visual, not just in a metaphorical way. Brains are weird man.
Which part of what I'm saying seems unbelievable to you? Is it the repeating the sentence afterward? To be fair that might just be a good short-term auditory memory.
Edit - I spent a while trying to observe my conversations today to see how I generated sentences. While I do sometimes parse out whole sentences (often when they're short, or particularly important) You're right, I DO often make them on the fly. However, it feels different from what's described above. I often have a word that appears near the end of the sentence in my mind at the start. (in the last two sentences I noticed "described" and "end/start" concepts in my mind while I was still composing the sentence and hadn't started writing). I know where I'm going and fill in the words to reach that destination. (noticed: "fill-in", "destination"). The experience of starting to speak without an idea of where I'm going seems strange to me, as does not being able to recall what I just said. Perhaps this falls within what you'd call normal?
This was also my assumption, but it's more that I start sentences with a vague idea of where I'm going with them and let my brain fill in the words on the fly until at the end I have a sentence that makes sense. Obviously when I started typing the previous sentence I didn't know what exact words would come at the end.
This is my experience of speaking, I simply open my mouth and then words come out, about half the time they're not even the ones I wanted to say. All too often I think "why did I just say that?" to myself because I've just blurted out something that is wrong or vague when I actually know the specific answer.
I'm also autistic, I suspect it's because talking it someone is too mentally overstimulating so I can't actually be mentally present in the moment. I'm perfectly capable of imagining conversations where I am articulate and speak in coherent sentences or typing them out in "real time" as a stream of consciousness, yet I am never able to say anything like that in "real time" when actually talking. My vocabulary and ability to express concepts plummets through the floor as soon as I open my mouth and it's an immensely frustrating experience.
You may wish to obtain some training to help you get better at expressing yourself. I might suggest improvisational comedy.
great suggestion. What is being described above sounds so much like "the editor" complex, which in creative learning processes (e.g. creative writing, poetry and acting classes) is a very predominate problem that many struggle to overcome, which prevents them from freeing up their creativity.
It just seems obvious to me that I speak faster than I think, and LLMs helped me make sense of this.
Every jazz musician feels that regularly, I'm "speaking faster than I think" any time I take a solo. Very similar to when I'm making an extemporaneous argument in front of a jury, you're just... doing... the performance, and the active narrator in your head is more like a monitor that notices when a problem's about to come up, "this argument you're speaking right now could lead to a contrary inference you need to address before it takes root", "you're getting too chromatic, find some safe chord tones here".
What was the way in which LLMs helped you realize this, just from witnessing their ability to do that performance without having a consciousness to direct it?
I just finished giving a lecture and it was exactly like that.
Oh, I had realized it long before - but LLMs helped me make some sense of how this type of thing could work.
What's your definition of thinking? Just because the observer part of our consciousness doesn't see what's going on behind the scenes doesn't mean we're not thinking.
Good point. I don’t have such a definition.
I've been taking notes over the past year, observing the behavior of my consciousness (as best I can). While I don't *necessarily* have an internal dialog that's running in the background all the time, I've found that when I have to compose an argument, like I'm doing for you now, I have to think about how I'm going to phrase what I want to write, and I "ennunciate" the words I'm going to write in my mind (without vocalizing them). But typing the individual words happens without any conscious awareness. My fingers *seem* to be typing without any control from my mind. But if I were to buy into the claims of reductive physicalism, I would have to assume that there's some part of my mind making decisions about my finger motions. But my consciousness can't observe those sorts of background routines, so to be intellectually honest with myself, I have to remain agnostic about whether physicalism can explain what's happening when I type.
Likewise, yesterday afternoon, dining on oysters and martinis with my girlfriend, I noticed that I was dropping witticisms and word plays without thinking about them ahead of time. My concentration was on making her laugh and listening to (and analyzing) her responses. But the joke-making part of my mind was producing funny statements without my being aware of their generation. Likewise, my girlfriend was responding with witticisms. I don't know if her mind was working the same way my mind was, but I suspect she was in the same mental space, because we were riffing on each other's humor. The manager came over in the middle of our conversation, asked us how we were doing. We were laughing, and I said, "Oops, back into serious mode, "and I said it in a serious voice (deep and enunciated), that everything was perfect. The manager found that "serious mode" remark amusing. And the three of us started discussing the nature of humor when one can just riff on funny things. It turned out that the manager had previously worked in the film industry and had collaborated on a project with Robin Williams. He said that when in serious mode, Williams seemed to be talking in a calm monotone (that the manager said seemed to be purposefully controlled). But when on the set, Williams would go into Robin Williams mode and be totally unpredictable (stressing the method actors on the set). The manager said, that while in his "serious mode" Williams had told him he had little control over what came out in his funny mode. He said it was all improvised below his conscious awareness.
So, I think we're thinking even when we aren't aware that we're thinking.
Jazz musicians have huge repertoires of riffs, transitions, etc. Someone I knew who was very fast with a Rubik’s cube described having something similar. So I’m imagining you mean something of the same kind — that there’s a repertoire of ways to express certain things, and some clusters of ideas that have something in common, expressed a certain way, all bundled together, and strings of ideas along with ways to say them, arranged in a string because each leads to the next. And when you talk
you’re going to the most relevant area of the storehouse and rapidly picking out units that fit well. is that the sort of thing you had in mind?
Sometimes it works like this. Definitely, as I talk about a paper idea multiple times, I develop cached phrases and examples that I use. But even when I'm pushing new ground, somehow some part of me is putting things together at the speed of talking. LLMs are just the first example of a system I've seen that is able to do that kind of thing mechanically, in a way that makes sense, keeping the flow and some of the logical relations between ideas.
I think you transition from the model "I'm doing the driving and thinking consciously about everything" to the "I'm managing the driving but some autopilot part of me is handling most of it" as you move from being a new driver to one with some experience. It's routine for me to start driving to point X, get distracted by a conversation or something, and find myself on the path to point Y (which I most often go to at this time of day)--I can and often do navigate consciously but apparently I don't have to.
However, the part of you that's driving without you paying attention is making rational decisions. The things I trained myself to do, so that I could perform them without consciously monitoring my actions, such as driving, riding a bike, typing, and playing a musical instrument, must have some sort of rational "controller" process working in the background without our supervision. Otherwise we'd screw up more than we do.
Conversations with others are interesting because, unless I'm trying to express something that requires a strict logical progression, like arguing a point or giving instructions, the conversational part of my brain seems to be improvising without me planning what I'm going to say. But I'm also aware that there are boundaries around what I can say and how I'll say it. And I'm consciously monitoring those boundaries as a speak. But everything within those boundaries is fairly spontaneous.
Interesting. It seems obvious to me that I think faster than I can physically speak, and it's really frustrating to not be able to say everything before I lose parts of it, at times!
Agreed. I wonder if this is related to reading speed?
Is it a constant thing, or do you notice this in specific situations? Other commenters noticed this when doing public speeches, but I sometimes notice myself answering complex questions before the homunculus thinks "hey, that's a good question, let me activate System 2 to answer this", so the homunculus goes "wait, what did I just say? Is it correct? Does it at least sound correct?" instead.
I most specifically feel this way when answering questions after giving an academic philosophy talk. Sometimes also when asking the questions - I’ve spent some time coming up with the idea of the question, but the precise wording and how they all relate to each other comes out sort of automatically.
I give academic talks frequently enough that it's very comfortable and I do them pretty automatically, but I recall a few years ago giving a short talk in a second language (Spanish), and holy crap, that was a lot harder, perhaps partly because the autopilot I built in my brain for English-language technical talks doesn't exist for Spanish-language technical talks.
If you refactor your world-model enough, you can see your "self"/soul as a sort of container of "lifelines", where a lifeline is a connection to the outside world (e.g. a social relationship, an ability that can be applied to places in the world, or an object you own). In this model, one of the main things you can do is balance competing pulls in your soul, which I call the autistic state of mind. But as far as I can tell, many people defer this balancing act to others, which gives up most of their agency; I call this the schizophrenic state of mind.
Interesting choice of terms.
A spectrum of mind from Autistic to Schizophrenic is definitely provocative.
If you're curious, Scott has written about this (theoretical) spectrum before https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/12/11/diametrical-model-of-autism-and-schizophrenia/
I should say my model disagrees with Scott's post here in that I regard most people as having pretty severe cases (often more schizophrenic, but in a way that is buffered against clinical pathologies), whereas he regards most people as basically healthy rationalish individuals. And I'm generally unimpressed by biomarkers.
If there’s just a continuum, and you define a different point as the zero point, then the zero of the other scale can look like a really high or really low number.
Psychometrically it'd look like two continua, but psychometric measurements are logarithmically related to real magnitudes, so in practice you're going to have one that is much bigger than the other, and "which is biggest?" gives you a discrete typology.
Psychometric measures of external stimuli are often logarithmically related to intrinsic measures of those external phenomena - but that only makes sense when the external phenomenon actually has a meaningful zero point. Why think that the autism/schizotypy scale is anything like measures of loudness or brightness or whatever?
Interesting piece I hadn't seen before. I absolutely love the word 'schizotypy' BTW. Had never seen that before either.
Now how am I going to work that into a conversation with my wife today?
"Hey honey you know that new guy who bought the place across the street, you know, the one whose trip we still haven't figured out..." :)
Yep, it's an intriguing line of inquiry. Scott's not the only one thinking about this, e.g. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/17456916221075252 ("Autistic-Like Traits and Positive Schizotypy as Diametric Specializations of the Predictive Mind")
An important piece of prior work on this "internal model of thoughts & self" perspective is Michael Graziano's theory of consciousness (which Steven Byrnes cites as largely consistent with his view):
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/43726566-rethinking-consciousness
This seems a plausible model of multiple personality disorder.
Buddhist texts often point out the evidence that you don’t have a coherent self. Multiple personalities is another model you might appeal to to explain this incoherence that the Buddhists are going on about, especially if your psychiatrist is telling you that MPD is a real thing.
A relatively common situation: a depressed person sort-of wants to get on and tidy up their room, but also sort-of doesn’t. How can it be that we can both want and not want something at the same time?
At this point, vajrayana Buddhism might talk about demons to explain the phenomenon, with the understanding that demons dont really exist.
> A relatively common situation: a depressed person sort-of wants to get on and tidy up their room, but also sort-of doesn’t. How can it be that we can both want and not want something at the same time?
It’s because we have two different decision trees to reconcile within ourselves; one springs from our viscera and the other springs from our conscious modeling.(aka; rationalizing They’re not always on the same page are they? A simple model would be a parent telling a small child to pick up his toys and the child not wanting to. Those two forces combine in us as we become adults and if they aren’t on the same page, well things can go pear shaped .
It's not hard to explain why a person can want X and not-X at the same time.
One common circumstance is that you want to have done X, but you do not want *to be doing* X, where X is homework, cleaning your room, or any other unpleasant task that has good consequences. This is also sufficient to explain procrastination - you don't like doing your homework, so you don't do it until the need to have your homework done becomes stronger than your desire not to be doing it.
A related situation is that X is something with good aspects and bad aspects, and your brain hasn't settled on a clear answer to whether X is *net* good compared to the status quo. For example, do you want to go to bed because it's getting late and you're starting to get tired, or do you want to play "just one more turn" of Civilization?
Have you ever been addicted to something? Nicotine is the best example for me. I gave it up year's ago. But I can still recall the desire.
Addiction is interesting. I remember all the ways I convinced myself it's ok to have a sigarette, after deciding to quit for the n-th time.
Whether or not the selves share memories is pretty crucial to MPD.
Memory is very dependent on context (thing X reminds you of related thing Y) so it is not totally out of the question that you might only remember thing Y while inhabiting persona X.
Though, we might suspect something closer to: the memory can’t be integrated into a particular persona’s sense of self, and so is repressed.
I wasn't claiming that there isn't much even such a thing as MPD. I was pointing out that "multiple selves" could mean a range of things
I'd actually assert (without much evidence) that "multiple selves" does mean a range of things. And that for most people the "multiple selves" are rather tightly connected, but are still quite different. As for my most common meaning: When I'm programming I don't feel the same as when I'm composing sentences for a note on a blog, and neither of those feel the same as when I'm playing a game. Frequently while I'm playing a game a "meta-self" will comment that "you're really not that interested, so it's probably time to stop", but the game-player will shrug that off several times.
Also for when religious people talk about hearing the voice of the devil telling them to sin etc. they have a model where the devil can be a voice in their head and interpret thoughts within that
What's special about that is the distancing of the "voice of the devil" from their own personalities. I have voices telling me this or that all time time. I rarely bother to trace them back, but I also don't feel compelled by them. In fact whenever I compose a sentence (thoughtfully) I hear a voice telling me what to say or type. Freewheeling conversation may be different, but I'm not sure because in that situation I'm not watching myself.
Compare this to the african idea of demonic possession, that has worked its way into the legal system.
Buddhists have set up impossible standards for "coherent self". And they reliably fall into self-contradictions. Even to speak of non-coherent selves requires a coherent self.
As William Vallicella put it, for Buddhists out-do atheists in that for an atheist, if they can't be God, there is no God. And for a Buddhist, if they can't be God, there is no "they" themselves,
This is a good point. The question then becomes, I suppose, whether or not "a coherent self" is the *only* thing we are, or whether there is more going on "off stage" as it were.
Is there something special that distinguishes the sorts of beliefs and models that are bistable - that we can suddenly snap out of - from the more common sorts of beliefs and models that seem to gradually change over time?
Things like phobias or habits, for example, that take gradual exposure and consistent effort to change.
The vast majority of optical illusions only exist because they are two dimensional representations of something that we might encounter in three-dimensional space. The primary abstraction of two dimensional perspective and motion is the the first illusion, which we have become rather comfortable with since the birth of perspective drawing. The AB checkerboard illusion works because each square is surrounded by squares that are lighter or darker than it which forces the eye to recognize the pattern and dismiss the truth, which is that those two squares are the same gray.
I think of habits and phobias as having a different mechanism than perception. A habit, for example, seems to be about how strongly some context is tied to a particular set of actions (and maybe a phobia is about how strongly some context is attached to fear/avoidance circuitry).
Perhaps habits and phobias are learned through the adjustment of synaptic weights, while perception is determined by the pattern of neuron activations through fixed weights. For example, a Predictive Coding Network that predicts whether the dancer is spinning clockwise or anticlockwise might already have these predictions "encoded" in its weights (having learned them from past examples), and the propagation of signals through these weights determines which prediction is chosen.
Under this model, beliefs and models that gradually change over time would be about developing new ways of interpreting the environment, while bistable models are about choosing between existing interpretations. Of course, once a new interpretation is stabilised, this might create new associations that lead to new models and habits being built (or existing ones being unlearned) over time.
Also in my experience, the process of letting go of certain trapped priors that lead to anxiety etc. involves lots of little changes in perception that add up over time, that might look like a gradual change from a distance.
I think there is probably some genetic vs. experience spectrum stuff going on. Perhaps we can snap back and forth between two simple images because neurologically the brain has the hard wired capacity and drive to seek both patterns in stimuli? But more complex stuff like phobias, habits, or ideologies are slowly learned over time, and so operate according to different mental dynamics.
How do the rest of you perceive the "upside-down plates" picture? For me, it's very resistant to fully flipping.
If I start at the bottom left, I can easily get the three leftmost plates to flip inside out; I can do something similar from the right-hand side, moving along the top-right corner. I can kind of flip that whole set of 8 along the left-top-right edges, though the circular one at the top is tricky.
The multi-compartment ones take more effort, and not only do they not trigger a cascade, sometimes one compartment will pop out without affecting the other compartments in the same dish.
It seems like my brain is strongly inclined to see them as right-side-up, flipping them requires focus and effort, and at that point I'm not really seeing the image as a whole. I haven't tried viewing it from a long distance, but rolling my chair back a bit didn't make a lot of difference.
I can’t flip them. The ones with the divided trays just refused to flip for me.
To the limited extent that I can flip the divided ones, what seems to work is consciously thinking "okay, if this was the other way around, what would these regions of colour actually represent?" Basically I have to actively reason my way to seeing them differently. Maybe you've already done that, but if not, I'd be curious whether it makes a difference.
If I work really hard, I can hold that illusion for a few moments, but it never settles for me
I deliberately did not want to try that one. I felt that if I got them to flip, I might not be able to flip them back, which I found very disturbing.
Interesting! These things can make me uneasy, too, but I think I would be okay with a single flip followed by stability. I don't think I've ever experienced that with a bistable illusion, though, so I'm not sure how much it would actually bother me; usually the version I see first remains my default, or at least remains accessible.
(In the case of the plates illusion, I can see the inverted version partially and with effort, or completely by rotating the image to change the direction of the implied light source. In the latter case, the dishes look photoshopped and unreal, but it takes effort to mentally flip them right-side-up and I don't seem to be able to do so persistently. Which is a bit weird -- but at least I can temporarily flip them, and also I know I can go back to seeing them correctly by turning the image back the other way, so I'm not getting the full effect of being locked in to seeing them incorrectly. To the extent that it is unsettling, I think that's mainly because I'm seeing them the *wrong* way, and there are some fairly obvious cues that prevent me from fully believing what I'm perceiving.)
What worked for me was looking at Scott's square and then rolling my phone left so it's as if the light is coming from me instead of from the left.
I may be misreading but I think you're talking about rotating the phone anticlockwise, so that the light in the image is coming from your direction if the dishes are concave -- at which point your brain decides the light is actually coming from the opposite direction, and the dishes are upside down? If so, that fits with a version I've since looked at, where the image was duplicated and rotated 90 degrees in both directions, and the anticlockwise version makes the dishes look upside down (but also pretty unreal).
Apparently our brains are heavily biased toward perceiving an implied light source 'above' the image (i.e. from top of frame), even when the image appears to have been taken top-down and even when the screen we're using isn't aligned to the up-down axis.
Im not sure its even possible for a real object to correspond to the flipped image here. The bright left rims, and the visible line between the wall and its shaded ground, with the wall brighter, I dont think those are possible inverted. Paying attention to those prevents me from flipping anything.
Ill note that I have never seen a flipping illusion using a real life picture, that wasnt actually resolvable with information from within. The only one I can think of that most people dont get right at a glance is The Dress, and I did get it, so skill issue.
The shaded bottoms-now-tops of the small top right bowls couldnt be parallel to those on the other dishes either, so that might be what kicks you out of flipping fully.
> The shaded bottoms-now-tops of the small top right bowls couldnt be parallel to those on the other dishes either, so that might be what kicks you out of flipping fully.
I think the very bright left rims also make no sense if the bowls are inverted. When I do manage to flip the bowls, they look like they've been badly photoshopped in.
I did a quick google, and it looks like the illusion is often presented in meme form, with the upper text priming you to see them as upside down and the bottom text inviting you to flip them back to normal. I reckon that would be much more effective illusion (and would make sense of the warning that "you might not be able to get them to flip back").
I also found a version where the original image has been duplicated and rotated 90 degrees in each direction.[1] Apparently our brains are much readier to perceive an implied light source 'above' the image than 'below' it (even in this case, where the image seems to have been taken from above looking directly down), and so when the shadows are at the 'bottom' of the objects they appear convex. It works on me -- but when they look upside down, they also look like a bunch of distorted objects photoshopped together. I guess my brain can tell that the inverted version doesn't make physical sense, but it really wants the light to be coming from its preferred direction, so it compromises by telling me the objects are convex but fake-looking.
(I've mainly been using a computer, but the rotated version still works when I'm looking down at a phone screen parallel to the ground, so it seems that my brain thinks the 'top' of the frame is up even when there's no such thing as up on the actual screen.)
[1] https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:4800/format:webp/0*5jpOr0ey3WD_rriO , and if the direct link doesn't work, the image appears halfway down this article: https://medium.com/intuitionmachine/anatomy-of-viral-illusion-170b36fb60c0
Did you miss that I mentioned the rims as well, or are you expressing agreement?
I just googled it, and while the rotations didnt do much for me (the small bowls at the top flip a bit easier, the low res hides the flat bottom and makes the rim thinner/onesided, still dont look like flipped dishes though), the tiny, low-res google previews did look like some weird AI-generated pills for a moment.
Yes, sorry -- I wasn't consciously skimming, but I totally missed most of your second sentence.
Interesting to hear that the rotation doesn't work on everyone! For me it takes a lot of effort to mentally flip the dishes in the counterclockwise-rotated image back to normal (despite how messed up they look), and they go convex again if I look away for a moment.
(Though I've just now switched to a phone and physically rotated the screen while viewing the original image, and the effect is a bit weaker.)
Thanks, the split image in the article finally made some of the plates flip for me!
Interesting: I was not able to flip the original image, but when I look at the rotated image, it does initially appear flipped before going back to normal.
When I scrolled the image into frame, they all appeared upside-down (I think the staircase image above primed me toward the inverted perspective).
After reading the description, I looked back at the image and the dishes were all right-side-up. (The dishes are all the same either way. There isn't an odd one that's the other orientation.)
I tried for a few minutes, but I couldn't get any of them to flip.
I was not able to flip any of the plates.
I also cannot see all the plates flipped. I'm usually pretty good at these - I can easily see the dancer spin either way, or even see it as bouncing back and forth rather than rotating. But many of the plates just don't look physically plausible flipped.
This maps well to Michael Levin's model of memory (section 4 of https://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/26/6/481 and https://thoughtforms.life/some-thoughts-on-memory-goals-and-universal-hacking/, also talked about in some podcasts and presentations he has done). In this model, memory isn't some high fidelity thing, but rather a highly compressed/encoded bit of information that, when run through a specific decoder, will result in a particular memory. What is key/critical here is that the decoder plays a very significant role in determining how that compressed information is decoded.
If you encode a memory using decoder/encoder (coder) A, and then decode it using coder A, you'll get out basically the same information that went in. However, if you decode it using coder B you'll get out different information than was put in.
Under normal circumstances, your coder changes very slowly over time as you experience life, and during that time you are constantly remembering things which causes them to be decoded and then re-encoded (so to speak) using the latest version of your coder. However, one can imagine a person having two distinct coders in their head at the same time, and in such a situation encoding something with one coder and then decoding it using a different coder could result in complete failure to decode (no memory), or a different memory than what actually occurred.
This maps well both to the hypnosis situation you have described here, as well as things like split personalities. An individual may remember things differently than they actually occurred because the coder used to encode the event is not the coder used to decode the event, or they may "forget" what happened. It can also explain things like being able to remember correctly if you are put back under hypnosis or if your personality switches back to the one that originally experienced it.
I think it also may have some explanatory power for retrograde amnesia. This could be caused by damage to the coder that needs to be "rebuilt" or "repaired", which is why your memories will sometimes return later. Perhaps older memories are encoded in a more "generic" way, while newer memories are encoded in a way that are are more tightly coupled with the current version of your brain's coder.
That’s interesting. That also explains why, when thinking about things I did in the early 2000s, I sometimes remember myself having looked up directions on my smartphone, because that sort of behavior is part of “find out where I am and where I’m going” in the decoder I’ve used for the past fifteen years, even though it wasn’t part at the time I formed the memory.
That is very interesting! I haven't really thought about whether I have such false memories or not. Thinking about it now, I feel like I have some memories of sneaking peaks at my parents watching R rated films (meaning I was young as I wasn't allowed to watch R until later) on our family flatscreen TV, but I was that age before flatscreen TVs! Even if I think really hard, I can't imagine anything other than either a "placeholder TV" or some sort of large flatscreen-like TV even though I am certain (because I know history) that wasn't the case. At risk of dating myself here, our TV remote had a cable connecting it to the TV, so definitely wasn't flatscreen.
Thinking about it more, I also realize that in my memories, my friends tend to look like they do now, not like they did then, unless there was some specific aspect of how they looked in the past that was relevant to the specific memory.
That is a good one. My parents tend to look like their older selves in my memories as well, though my siblings their younger selves (but somewhat stagnant). All very fascinating stuff!
I've never noticed any obvious anachronisms like that, but I have discovered a lot of false memories when looking through old entries in my diary. It's really eye-opening.
For example, two events I distinctly remembered happening on the same day actually happened two weeks apart. An even more extreme case is when my memory combined events that happened on two different trips to the same place years apart, one in July and one in December.
Another amusing example was when my mother and I both had incompatible memories of when a particular thing happened and argued about it. We eventually figured out when it actually happened and neither of us was right.
There's one memory that really mystifies me, because the details I remember are incompatible with real life history when I tried to look it up. There's no time period in which every detail fits. I have no idea what the truth was there.
I think this same mechanism is behind the "I always knew he was a no-good bastard!" phenomenon, where someone was always fine with your girlfriend/boyfriend while things were going well, but after your nasty breakup with them, they interpret all their current memories in light of what they learned about him since then.
This feels like a really great companion piece to a lot of what Sam Harris writes in his book "Waking Up".
One of the claims in there, made by him and other meditators, is that meditating on your own thoughts enough or in a particular way eventually causes the illusion of the Self to disappear ("You search for it and fail to find it").
In that book, the perspective shift is just given as an empirical claim to tested by the reader, via meditation practice. In this post, it feels like we get a satisfying and plausible mechanistic theory for it.
In Buddhist meditation, you are supposed not to find it. In vedantic mediation , you are supposed to realise it is the entity doing the looking
I practice meditation but I've never understood how you're supposed to distinguish a genuine disappearance of the 'illusion' of self from an illusory disappearance of a real self. It seems to me that the description of any such experience must appeal to extraneous empirical or metaphysical claims that are open to criticism - I don't think you can accept any conclusions about the nature of self purely from introspection. That's another error Descartes made besides dualism
Well, first you see that the sense of self is illusory, then it can disappear. When you get off the zafu, you go back to the illusion, but see it for what it is. The self illusion/model is extremely powerful, but not “real” in a fundamental way. Those reporting that they have experienced enlightenment report getting rid of the illusion altogether and that this is a significant improvement in their experience of living. Daniel Ingram comes to mind.
And I would say that introspection is the only way to grok the true nature of your own self. We have at best a crude understanding of how physical processes translate into consciousness and sense of self, e.g., general anesthesia completely turns both off. The Hard Problem of Consciousness is called that for a reason!
My point is that if I say to a person that the way they report their experience of the disappearance of self is itself an illusory experience, there is no proof to the contrary they can give that is grounded solely in their introspection. It's unfalsifiable conjecture. Any claim about the self is fundamentally a scientific one and its validity cannot be established by appealing to one's private intuitions, or how do we ever find the truth in reports from different people that contradict one another? The hard problem is called the hard problem only because philosophers are amazed whenever they realise they don't understand something.
It would be absurd to claim that alcohol or other drugs don't give you a feeling of euphoria. Preposterous. Anyone who has consumed drugs knows that. But they can't prove it. That absolutely does not mean they're not saying the truth or have good reason to believe the things they do about drug phenomenology.
Generally, this has been the state of the art, until very recently. However, scientists are inching toward methods of physically measuring perceptual phenomena, or qualia (e.g. redness.) If qualia can be mapped, reproduced, or transmitted, they stop being purely metaphysical and become more like states of information instantiated in matter. That’s a profound ontological shift—one that might eventually render the “hard problem” tractable in practice, if not in theory.
I have a different hypothesis: that people who report experiencing "nothingness" aren't really experiencing nothingness, because that's conceptually impossible. It is my impression that without information to process, the conscious mind would stop existing (meaning that you are in a coma--even meditation would be impossible. Dreamless sleep is another example).
What they may be doing instead is relaxing the mental filters that impose structure on our thoughts and feelings--the same sort of semantic associations that give immediate meaning and context to our moment by moment thoughts, and which originate in our long term memory but which are triggered by something happening now--and what is left is an overall experience of "all of me" (which could include a generalized impression of "everything I ever experienced") except without any details at all, what's left can be described as a quale (in the sense of "the smallest, most indivisible unit of an experience").
Most of us will never experience this (normally we want our brain to call up any mental or emotional associations that might help us deal with whatever is happening right now) without formal training. It's probably an epi-phenomenon; not something that evolved on it's own (that has not prevented various creative humans from finding a use for it).
I don't get how someone can claim there is an illusion of self.
If an animal has a correct model of itself (uh, there already is it, the self) then it thinks there is an animal and it is it.
I'm not wrong about thinking I'm the animal whose fingers I right now see typing.
And most people too very correctly identify the part of the universe which they are.
In this context the "self" isn't referring to the body. It's more referring to the "humunculous" talked about in the article. The "illusion of the Self" is just talking about the fact that we have a subjective sense that we are a separate entity "doing the thinking", but that's not true. Thoughts just appear, there is not a separate entity "doing" it.
I don't have this homunculus illusion. I believe only bad philosophers do :)
And yes, in a certain sense everything “just happens”.
Haha well good for you. I'm pretty sure this illusion is common to almost everybody.
I don't think it has much to do with philosophy. Illusions generally are gotten rid of by training/exercise/perspective shifts like discussed in this article. Attaining a philosophy alone generally doesn't do it.
You're describing a person, not a "self." People exist, obviously. They have actions and they have agency. What we don't have is a little person behind our eyes in the drivers seat. We don't "have" sight. We don't "have" hunger, despite what Spanish speakers insist on. We are our eyes. We are our hunger. There is no experiencer, there is only experience. Almost everyone sees this illusion, especially the people who insist that they don't.
I think that's a very convincing interpretation of self-consciouness/ ego. It's like concurrent interpretations of quantum mechanics : for some like relational quantum mechanics (RQM) vs Everett's many worlds, it's unlikely that you could experimentally prove one over the other but your mind can switch from one to the other to explain what you see. It could be a quasi solution to the so-said "hard problem" of consciousness. If consciousness is itself an interpretative model, a paradigm, it's no surprise you can't really prove it nor infirm it, or reach any kind of definitive answer on that subject. Now the question arises : is the Buddha a philosophical zombie ?
By the by, but Deutsch quite strongly believes that the truth of Everett's MW is experimentally provable. I don't have a strong enough physics background to evaluate the claim but I think it also rests on his disagreements with Bayesian approaches to probability (which itself is reinforced by his MW views). If someone knows more please chime in.
Edit: If I recall correctly his possible proof relies on self-reporting quantum computers- but the point is that he believes it is absolutely provable *in theory*, which I assume many would dispute. Whether that can disprove RQM specifically, I'm unsure.
Quantum computation works by coherent superposition, but that doesn't get you all the way to many worlds as usually understood
The first thing to note is that MWI is more than one theory. What splittng is...how complete and irrevocable it is ... varies between particular theories. So does the rate of splitting, so does the mechanism of splitting.
The second thing to note is that many worlders are pointing at something implied the physical formalism and saying "that's a world"....but whether it qualifies as a world is a separate question from whether it's in the formalism , and a separate *kind* of question, from whether it is really there in the formalism. One would expect a world, or universe, to be large, stable, non-interacting, and so on . It's possible to have a theory that has collapse , without having worlds. A successful MWI needs to jump three hurdles: empirical correctness.
mathematical correctness and conceptual correctness -- actually having worlds
---- Coherence versus Decoherence----
There is an approach to MWI based on coherent superpositions, and a version based on decoherence. These are (for all practical purposes) incompatible opposites, but are treated as interchangeable in Yudkowsky's writings. . Decoherent branches are large, stable, non interacting and irreversible...everything that would be intuitively expected of a "world". But there is no empirical evidence for them (in the plural) , nor are they obviously supported by the core mathematics of quantum mechanics, the Schrödinger equation.Coherent superpositions are small scale , down to single particles,possibly observer dependent, reversible, and continue to interact (strictly speaking , interfere) after "splitting". The last point is particularly problematical. because if large scale coherent superposition exist , that would create naked eye macrocsopic scale:, e.g. ghostly traces of a world where the Nazis won.
We have evidence of small scale coherent superposition, since a number of observed quantum.effects depend on it, and we have evidence of decoherence, since complex superposition are difficult to maintain. What we don't have evidence of is decoherence into multiple branches. From the theoretical perspective, decoherence is a complex , entropy like process which occurs when a complex system interacts with its environment. [Decoherence isn't simple)(https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Atu4teGvob5vKvEAF/decoherence-is-simple). But without decoherence, MW doesn't match observation. So there is no theory of MW that is both simple and empirically adequate, contra Yudkowsky and Deutsch
Thanks. I wasn't even aware of the large scale MWI.
FWIW, I prefer a version of the small-scale MWI where each state has both multiple futures and multiple pasts. (And where all the states are give equal "reality", if not equal "probability of being transitioned to". I tend to think of it as an EXTREMELY parallel state-table, where state transitions are as time-reversible as a Feynman diagram.)
OTOH, I don't expect that there is any test that will choose between this model and any of the other models for the same equations.
There is a theory of multiple pasta, Coherent Histories.
I do t see why you would insist on equal .probabilities. measure is genrally unequal , and if you change that it stops working.
If it sounded like "equal probabilities", then I said it wrong. All transitions are "certain", but the "wave height" varies substantially. I've never figured out a good way to talk about this. The only difference between this and "quantum field theory" I know of is that I don't accept continuity, so at some level (possibly near the Planck length) it breaks down into a discrete model. In that discrete model ALL of the possible states are "real", though some are quite improbable to reach.
OTOH, I'm definitely no expert in the field. This is just the model I use to think about it. But because I'm no expert, I'm not certain that my ideas are consistent with what's know (i.e. experimental results), I just believe it to be ... the best model I have to think with. And a problem that I see with it involves coordination of things outside the light cone. ISTM that things near the edge of the light cone are likely to be modified by things outside it, and I can't figure out how to think about that.
I normally do not "copy/paste" myself, but even though I already posted the following, it fits even better here:
"This is all very plausible, but there's a meta-physical problem in the middle of it. If the self is perceived as a homonculous, but this is an illusion because we can 'flip' our perceptions and perceive ourselves as controlled by a hypnotist or a divine being--who is doing the perceiving? Which part of the mind is doing the 'flipping?' Because that looks an awful lot like a deliberate decision of the conscious self. "
The flip is definitely helped by deliberate behavior, as seen in the different examples of the article. However, my feeling is that the flip itself hardly qualifies as a deliberate decision. I mean, when I see the first picture of the stairway, I see it by default in the regular orientation. I know it's possible to see it upside down, but it's not like I have a switch to do that. It can resist my will, and suddenly it happens. With a little practice, I admit you can switch almost at will, but there is a hidden second level in that picture. Try to see it as a flat picture with no stairway at all, but just geometric 2D elements. That's probably the more natural way to see the picture—what someone who has never seen a stairway in their life would see—but it's extremely hard for me. The 3D stairs jump to my mind one way or the other. It's not like I could arbitrarily decide at will what I see. There is something strongly automatic and unconscious that imposes its view on me (ego). Like, you know, sometimes words that come out of nowhere. You searched for a word for ten minutes, you pass to something else, and suddenly the word jumps to your mind hours or days later. Or more generally, the feeling of evidence/eureka moments: you know it's like that, you just know, you're certain, it has to be like that, explanation comes afterwards (and not always, but often, the feeling is confirmed by reasoning). In all the examples, deliberate thinking can help a lot, but I wouldn't say that the flip itself or the eureka moment is clearly attributable to the homunculus. Anyway, there is something of the paradox of Theseus' ship. You ask what part of the mind does it? But when you try to decompose a composed entity, you always end up with the idea that identity or reality is nothing but void. That's also the Buddhist reflection mentioned by Scott and Byrnes. So I suppose what part does the flip is a question that can itself be looked at with the prism of the homunculus interpretation, but also with the prism of the void interpretation—two interpretations which you can flip one to the other. But wait—what causes the flip between the interpretations of the flip? Well, that becomes too meta.
I don't disagree--clearly mental behavior of this kind is a complex interaction of deliberate and non-conscious processes. It probably makes no sense to try to tease them apart. I think in the flipping example, the conscious mind is querying a non-conscious process (the one in charge of recognizing shapes) to change it's perception. Because the task is challenging, this doesn't happen right away, and the conscious mind has to keep concentrating on its' query until the non-conscious perceptor fulfills the task, and returns the new perception to the working memory, where it can be consciously perceived. But this new shape is less strongly reinforced compared to interpretations that your mind has been using for your entire life, so it only lasts as long as you consciously deliberate upon it.
"If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him"
...because having experienced ego death, he's not a person anymore, and will only *appear* to object.
Reminds me of Steven Lehar's work, especially his cartoon epistemology is a wonderful introduction to our perception and the homunculus: https://qualiacomputing.com/2022/12/28/cartoon-epistemology-by-steven-lehar-2003/
I had never heard of Lehar or this site and just checked it out. Thank you for the link! (And I wonder what my eight-year-old will think about it when I share it with him...)
I also enjoyed his blog on the perceptual origins of mathematics: https://perceptualoriginsofmath.wordpress.com/chapter-1/
and his Harmonic Gestalt YouTube video, and QualiaComputing has lots of interesting further reading material.
Awesome--thank you again!
This made me think of how quantum spin in entangled particles can collapse and reverse when observed and then the spin reverses even if the objects are far distances.
I don't know if this has any experimental support I could point to, and it's been a long time since I read it, but Douglas Hofstadter wrote (in either The Mind's I or I Am A Strangle Loop, I don't remember which) that the 'self' concept might be like the "this" pointer in a data structure in C++. Literally just a pointer that points to its own address, but otherwise empty.
In which case, sure, we tie a lot of things to our identity, but they aren't part of the core 'self' concept. And the instant bistable switch of satori is something like noticing this fact?
Probably I Am A Strange Loop, since The Mind's I significantly predates C++.
Great stuff, my qualm is just that even saying perception is indirect is kind of wrong. Suppose there's video evidence in a courtroom, if someone points to the screen and says "that's the killer right there," are they wrong? (And a video isn't much different from any internal model.)
Or to put it another way, the idea that we're "perceiving a model" isn't really correct. We're HAVING a model and at all times directly perceiving a WORLD (and that world as it really, really is, to boot, see bottom of this post).
The trick is, I think, that words like "seeing" and "perceiving" are third person terms - so they're something a third person observer says when (e.g.) they see a tiger perceiving its prey, they're part of that objective, third person STORY.
What the tiger experiences directly (its internal model of the prey) isn't itself yet a perception, it's only granted the grace of being trully callable a "perception" IF AND WHEN a third person can observe both the tiger licking its lips in anticipation, and that there is actually a deer over there.
So neither of the "flips" are a perception until there's been a checking process, and that checking process doesn't change the subjective experience, it just corrects an error in the truth claim about what that subjective experience portended.
We are always and at all times directly perceiving the world, because we are always and at all times perceiving an objective "slice" of the world that's a secret treasure that the world gives of itself to us, and to nobody else, at just that point in time and space.
(cf. "Process Externalism" (Manzotti), "Affordances" (JJ Gibson), etc.)
No offense, but this point of view is called ‘naive realism’ by the majority of cognitive scientists.
I think "direct realism" would maybe be a better term. Philosopher Michael Huemer makes a pretty good case for direct realism, in my opinion: https://fakenous.substack.com/p/the-virtues-of-direct-realism-12f
Yeah direct realism is a related school of though, for sure, though I think there are some differences.
Generally, it's in a similar class of epistemologies where perception is the truth-maker for most existential propositions, and truth-making is not a relation between propositions (though I think because a singular perception can always posssibly be mistaken, then either you try a few different angles yourself, or get someone else to confirm).
Realism is precisely NOT a view on which perception is the truth-maker! (!) That would turn it into some form of subjectivism.
Thinking that (apparent) perception that X (defeasibly) justifies belief that X is very different from thinking a perception that X is what makes X *true*.
I don't think infallibility is required for that logical relation to hold.
(Or to put it another way, the possibility of error doesn't mandate subjectivism.)
I suppose you could qualify it by saying, "WHEN you get a VALID perception, THEN it's the truth maker." When is that? Well, when the thing is actually there in reality and accessible to, checkable by, everyone (via their perceptions).
Maybe the trick is that I'm not thinking of it as something that will automagically make MY sentences true (when I'm in a methodologically solipsistic mood, i.e while staying within my own private experiences), but rather: in a public, intersubjective, objective context, perceptions are what make propositions (things people say or write) true, what anchor them in reality.
(Mind you, if you're thinking of Realism in the sense of classical philosophy, that would be another problem altogether.)
Saying "When you get a VALID perception, THEN it's the truthmaker" doesn't work because it's circular: What's a valid perception? Clearly it's a perception where you're perceiving things TRUEly, rather than falsely. Since the "validity" of perception is determined by whether it's true, you can't then try to define truth by a valid perception, or you'd just be going in a circle.
Also: Intersubjective is not the same as objective; that's why the word "intersubjective" has the word "subjective" in it. If you think that what makes something true is that we all intersubjectively think it, that's a form of subjectivism, and not at all a form of realism.
No, naive realism is the position that we all see the world in objectively the same way. Process Externalism retains the objectivity (and physicalism) but rejects the sameness (the rainbow metaphor is a quick and dirty way of getting at least part of the point across).
>directly perceiving the world, because we are always and at all times perceiving an objective "slice" of the world that's a secret treasure that the world gives of itself to us, and to nobody else, at just that point in time and space.
This strikes me as incoherent. If we are perceiving an objective slice of the world, and it becomes given to me and nobody else, that puts a lot of weight back on subjectivity and how we interpret things as opposed to how they are.
No, because a) the different thing is also objectively what the thing is. Like the rainbow all the appearances are different but nonetheless objectively and physically exist (the interposition of your sensory and cognitive apparatus at just x point in time and space affords the thing the opportunity to exist in a unique way, to have a causal ihnteraction with you that's different from the other fellow's, but equally objective and direct).
But b) that means we can work intersubjectively and correlate our findings - not in the sense that we need to "get at" some full objective thing that will be the same for all of us, but in the sense that we can explain and predict our experience of the thing as it faces us. Our intersubjectivity here isn't comparing loose, separate, un-moored subjective experiences, but rather is a comparison of perfectly objective different forms of existence of a thing appearing to different people.
And after all isn't intersubjectivity just how we work? It seems bootless because some old philosopical ideas mislead us into thinking that it's comparing merely subjective experiences; but because it's comparing objective expeiences that problem doesn't arise.
The philosophical problem is the fixation on the idea that you can't have different, objective physical ways a thing can exist, that things have to exist only in one way that's the same for everyone, in order to be objectively those things. But that's a needless assumption.
What I get from this is that everything is a negotiation and that there is enough commonality in our experience for those negotiations to be successful a lot of the time. I don’t disagree with that. There is a real world. It’s out there somewhere. Enough of us agree on enough things that we know we share some common visions. But you and I both know if you look hard enough you will find some massive divergences in those interpretations.
There is a real world, but the point is that it doesn't have to present the same aspect to everyone in order to be objectively real.
And that accounts for the problems with naive realism - both its proponents and critics are assuming the previous paragraph.
>the different thing is also objectively what the thing is.
You mean like if I am in the middle of a thunderstorm and you’re 50 miles away, sing a rainbow because it’s already gone by? What thing is what. It’s a negotiation. I am not talking about walking into a forest fire thinking you won’t get burned up there. The physical world does exist, at least as far as I can tell,
>Our intersubjectivity here isn't comparing loose, separate, un-moored subjective experiences.
Doesn’t it kind of depend on what kind of things we’re talking about? Think of two people talking about something that they saw separately reconciling their subjective reporting on the thing. They can’t agree on what really happened.
I think with these replies you're going off into the matter of interpretation, and the matter of tiers of propositions about which there can be disagreement but that ultimately depend on perceptions as anchors to reality.
There can be variations of interpretation of the PURPORT of perceptions, absolutely, but when it comes to sheer perceptions, if there's too much difference (e.g. other than the right and left side of a thing) then we're probably seeing differnt things :)
Can you offer a semi-formal definition of what "exist" and "real" mean in terms of this approach?
In this context, it would have to be something like "physical, comprised of matter/energy."
(Amusingly, I'm actually concurrently studying some traditional Advaita Vedanta at the moment, which is completely different: for Advaita, the real is that which persists, that which is unchanging - more or less the Parmenidean idea. But these ideas I'm talking about here are purely for a physicalist context.)
If something exists in the material world, then presumably it's physical nature doesn't change depending upon the point of view or the perceptual filters being used to experience it. There would be a stable reality independent of anyone's perception of it.
Its physical nature doesn't change, but how it looks changes and how it's experienced changes - yet there's no reason to think those different looks and experiences are "merely subjective" because they're different, that's what's being denied.
In fact the whole concept of "Representation," the gap between that and thing, thing-in-itself or whatever, etc., etc., is basically being denied. There is no gap, experience is always and everywhere perfectly objective, just like the naive realist thinks, but not in quite the way the naive realist thinks (the way that's so easily demolished by the critic who points out differences in experience-of-thing for different people).
Again, look at the example of the rainbow, or cf. J J Gibson's idea of "affordances" (albeit that's in a purely psychological context but it gets the point across)., and especially Riccardo Manzotti's "Process Externalism" or "Spread Mind" theory.
This is just redefining "perception" to mean factual belief, instead of the subjective experience of sensory data. Is it not? I mean, if I look at a stereographic image of a tiger, I feel like it's more useful (as a linguistic construct) to say that I perceive a tiger (regardless of the image's relationship to objective reality) than to say that I don't perceive a tiger (because the image might mislead me about my factual beliefs about reality).
And the redefintion doesn't really seem to matter to scott's point. the fact that the brain tries to snap a 2D image into a 3D representation is upstream (not downstream) of my subjective experience, whereas deciding that the image resembles a tiger is way downstream.
If you wanted to be strict you would say, "I seem to see a tiger." But (also) if you want to be strict, that can only be intersubjectively confirmed by triangulation with someone else, or a few someone else's.
I don't think there's much difference between ("first order") factual belief and perception, they're so intimately tied together; in both cases they'd need outside confirmation (again, if you're being strict) to turn them into knowledge or perception (of the real). Of course our senses work so well most of the time that we can be sure (though not certain ofc) that we're actually seeing what seems to be there.
And again, my quibble is with the "my subjective experience" there. There is nothing in the experience itself that makes it EITHER a subjective OR an objective perception, no amount of fiddling or jiggling in the brain. It either is or it isn't, and that depends (not on some kind of backdoor access to an objective reality that's unperceivable, but) a further check (by myself or others). And that's possible because the various different "looks" of things are not (necessarily) merely subjective, but (can be) each of them perfectly objective affordances of the same object - as per the rainbow.
I insist that you're redefining sight/perception in a non-standard way.
> There is nothing in the experience itself that makes it EITHER a subjective OR an objective perception, no amount of fiddling or jiggling in the brain.
And I feel like this claim is even more bizarre, since first-hand experience is the defining example of subjectivity. It sounds like you're confusing the image with the referent. If Alice and Bob both look at an image of a tiger, but Alice is on say... DMT and Bob isn't, their experiences are going to be very different due to "jiggling in the brain", even if their physical reference-frames are otherwise identical. The referent objectively exists, the same image will hit their retinas (assuming the physical reference-frames are identical), but the way the image is perceived (qua interpreted) is dependent on the mental state of the beholder, which makes the first-order interpretation subjective by definition.
Subjective basically means "mind dependent". But it sounds like you think subjective means something like "unverifiable by consensus" (common mistake) or "varies between individuals" (often is the case, but not necessarily).
I think that, in a strictly technical sense, all knowledge is subjective in that it all happens in the brain. The eye is not a camera, and itself perceives nothing. But in introspective terms we see things, and some of those things are coming into consciousness along neural pathways that are tagged as "external", and therefore should appear the same to anyone else who should be able to see the same scene. That's what we mean by "objective." Science presumes that the more separate sources of information which appear to confirm this inference the more likely it is that our perception corresponds to something in the external world, but that's just an inference.
I don't know what this is suppose to add, since I already made a distinction between the signal and the referent. The entire category of optical illusions is proof that just because a quale is influenced by an external stimulus, doesn't mean it's *only* influenced by that external stimulus. So no, I'm not quite ready to call the perception of a rainbow objective, even if the perception accurately corresponds to an objective signal emitted by a noumenal referent.
As far as I can tell, the nature of my disagreement with Gurugeorge is primarily linguistic. In the example above, I would say that Alice IS perceiving an 8 dimensional DMT fractal (because perception is just whatever's in your mental field-of-vision), but Gurugeorge seems to think that Alice ISN'T perceiving anything (because the 8-dimensional DMT fractal doesn't correspond to anything in reality). From his other comments, it sounds like he read a bunch of textbooks that are playing Wittgensteinian wordgames.
edit_1: earlier, when i said "It sounds like you're confusing the image with the referent", i meant "It sounds like you're confusing the *signified* with the referent.
edit_2: look at his original comment.
> The trick is, I think, that words like "seeing" and "perceiving" are third person terms - so they're something a third person observer says when (e.g.) they see a tiger perceiving its prey, they're part of that objective, third person STORY.
does "perception" feel like a *third person term* to you, in standard english vernacular (be it colloquial or jargonistic)?
No, I'm agreeing with you for the most part, I'm just trying to figure out where GG is departing from the standard understanding. I think he's denying that what most people call "objective phenomena" are actually objective at all, but I could be wrong.
also. if you think "objective" means "external in origin", that's not what it means. it means "mind independent". It often coincides with being external in origin, but that's not the central meaning.
and there's already a better word for "external in origin" already: exogenous. Though I usually associate that term with chemistry/physics. In philosophy, probably the best term would be "noumenal" (objects as they truly exist, independent of the senses) as opposed to "phenomenal" (objects as they appear to the senses).
If a thing is mind independent, then per force it must originate out in the external, physical world. Where else would the information come from? Terms like "objective" and "phenomenal" aren't necessarily used in exactly the same way by all scholarly authorities: Kant thought that the phenomenal world was objective because nearly everyone experiences it in the same way (because we all share the same cognitive structures). Other people have used it differently since. So I tend to use the term objective to mean "two or more independent observers should see the same thing" which is consistent with it's use in most scientific contexts.
Every experience is somewhat mind-dependent, or in some way processed by the mind, so I would tie subjectivity to privacy rather than mind-dependence.
Experience is always intrinsically private (always, "it seems TO ME that x"), but sometimes it can also be public (a seems-to-be that actually is, and is therefore necessarily accessible by others).
The subjective is then the MERELY private, a thing that ONLY person A experiences, the objective is what's experienced by everybody (serially as private experiences, as seemings-to-me). I think that's fairly standard, the only difference with this view is that this view claims that what's experienced by everybody doesn't have to be experienced IN EXACTLY THE SAME WAY for it to be objective: that's the shared premise that's misleading both the naive realists and their opponents. The rainbow shows the way out of the trap; everything is somewhat like the rainbow in the sense that it's an objective thing that can nevertheless appear differently to different people while not losing an ounce of its objectivity: each private seeming is a way for the object to exist, so it's never MERELY private.
Again, if every experience is somewhat mind-dependent, mind-independence can't be what makes the difference between a merely subjective experience and an objective experience. What makes the difference is whether what seems to be actually exists or doesn't. If it actually exists that can be confirmed by the same individual with further testing (e.g. shifting position - which, incidentally, speaks to the hallucination example - poking and prodding, taking a sample, etc.), or confirmable by others (with or without their further poking and prodding, etc., it just depends on the standard of rigour)
What the haver of the seeming experience can't do is tell from within their own resources WITHOUT further testing, whether a given experience is merely subjective or also objective. There's nothing on the face of any given experience that tells you whether it's a mere seeming or a seeming that also is. One can't decide subjectivity or objectivity by (as some philosopher put it) merely staring at the experience in isolation.
> Every experience is somewhat mind-dependent, or in some way processed by the mind
yes. literally this. end of story.
> so I would tie subjectivity to privacy rather than mind-dependence.
no. you're redefining terms unnecessarily.
> Again, if every experience is somewhat mind-dependent, mind-independence can't be what makes the difference between a merely subjective experience and an objective experience.
when people say things like "the firetruck is objectively red", they're not applying the adjective "objective" to the subjective experience, they're applying the adjective "objective" to the *referent* of the subjective experience. "the firetruck is objectively red" is a shorthand for "the fire truck as it exists (not as I perceive it) is objectively red". If I wasn't looking at the firetruck, it would still be red, despite nobody subjectively experiencing the redness. That's what object permanence is. The referent, while *informing* the experience, is not part of the experience. It's not like the red metal truck literally gets lodged in your cranium. So no, "subjective" is not a vacuous term.
> What the haver of the seeming experience can't do is tell from within their own resources
uh... yeah, this is the Problem of Solipsism. No amount of testing will ever "prove" a universal. This is precisely why Popper defined science as approximation, rather than discovery.
The firetruck is objectively red FOR THAT OBSERVER.
The firetruck is not red if there's no (human-like or animal with similar vision gubbins) observer.
But it is objectively red as soon as that perceptual apparatus is in causal connection with it.
It can objectively be all sorts of things for different entities because that's just how it shows up for them, when in causal contact with all their different modes of apprehension, perceptual systems, etc.
There is nothing subjective about it, so long as the different experiences can be identified as caused by the same thing. It's only subjective if others with similar perceptual apparatus don't experience it that way, i.e. if the experience is private and nobody else has anything like it. (Obvs there are variations for various types of colour blindness or whatever - but different people with the same colour blindness see it the same way.)
The red is "on" the fire truck, it's not in any sense "in" the brain, the brain is dark, grey, wet and mushy, not red shiny and solid.
IOW it's just as the naive realist thinks, perception is always direct, objective, etc. (when no error). The critic says, "That can't be because everyone would see the same thing." The answer to that is, no, there's no reason why objective experiences should all be the same.
Think of the analogy of how we have social roles. Your kid has no idea of the meticulous curmudgeon that you are at work, that's the face you present to your co-workers, you are objectively that to your co-workers, while the face you present to your kid is that you're a soft touch. Both are objectively what you are, just in those different contexts.
Similarly, the firetruck is red to humans with normal vision, ""£%$% to an alien, etc., those are not subjective experiences just because they're processed, those are just PRECISELY the perturbations the firetruck objectively causes when its causal "radiation," its causal effluences, land on that processing.
I agree it is not either or, it is both. The exact mix of those things can vary considerably for moment to moment in person to person. I would also say that this whole discussion diminishes greatly when we are just talking about our physical interaction directly with the world around us. There is the least room for error there. It’s when we start constructing a narrative around what we have seen or what we have done that things get slippery.
True, but they're more slippery the less assured we are of the anchor points to reality via perceptions (of course they can be slippery for other reaasons too). I think philosophy about the basics is always worthwhile :)
> more slippery the less assured we are of the anchor points to reality
True. That was sort of my point about our immediate interactions with the physical world around us. When other people become involved, it gets a lot more complicated really quickly doesn’t it? How many times in your life have you had to say to someone, “oh! Now I see what you mean.”
There might be an interesting extension of this discussion to a more "sociological" sort of level. Cases where you say "oh! now I see what you mean" aren't exclusively, but do tend to be, cases where your interlocutor is more knowledgeable, more experienced, etc., than you are. Basically, a learning situation.
Yeah, it can play out like that. It can also play out over a misunderstanding where no one’s smarter than anyone else. And it can also be said when someone who you thought was saying something smart explains themselves, and you realize that it wasn’t smart at all. They’re all kind of social in that they all involve some negotiation of meaning with another human being.
According to this school of thought, if we are perceiving the world as it really is, versus suffering from a bias or an illusion, how would we know?
As I just said to another guy here, there's nothing in any given experience in and of itself (stared at in isolation as it were) that clinches it, but if you think of the normal case of bias or illusion, usually it's by further investigation oneself, and/or confirmation by others.
Then this seems like a distinction without a difference, since it looks like it makes all the same predictions as the standard approach to perception does.
The knowledge Plato's cave-escaper has isn't going to give him any different or better predictions about the shadows on the wall ;)
Why would you expect a different philosophical underpinning to give different predictions for everyday life?
Because philosophy has an obligation to be useful, in the sense that if the conclusions reached has no impact on how anyone should live their lives, then the question wasn't worth answering.
Oh I agree that there should be an ethical difference, and be useful in that sense, but that's not like a difference in predictions about the shadow puppets in the Cave, better predictions about those - it's not THAT kind of "usefulness."
>We're HAVING a model and at all times directly perceiving a WORLD
Agreed on the grammatical clarification.
>We are always and at all times directly perceiving the world, because we are always and at all times perceiving an objective "slice" of the world that's a secret treasure that the world gives of itself to us, and to nobody else, at just that point in time and space.
Understood as spicy metaphor, agreed. The mention of the potentially technical term "direct" and the links to philosophical papers worries me though, because a lot of the presuppositions normally baked into "stepping outside your perspective" or "getting at the world itself" are nonsense, and to the extent that philosophy propagates these confused discourses rather than dissolving them is bad.
Dlnnae worry aboot the references, they're not that outre, they're to perfectly respectable and credentialed people :)
The Process Externalist view would be that the basic wrong premise is the idea that mind is in the skull, in the brain, whereas mind is at large, spread out in the world.
Our consciousness of the object IS the object. We're misled into thinking of consciousness as something like a little stage in the skull (the Cartesian Theater as Dennett called it), or perhaps it's a property of the thing we vaguely think we are that seems to be a few inches inside the skull, just above the throat, looking out through the eyes, and other senses (cf. Wm James' Psychology). We think "consciousness" refers to those sorts of mysterious things, but really it refers to objects, physical objects in the fully physicalist sense, just objects as they exist in a certain aspect that's relative to our (also physical) bodies and brains.
Poetically, and mystically, you could say that we are the way the world becomes aware of itself (You are the Eyes of the World, as IIRC the Grateful Dead sang). More prosaically, our interposition in time and space, gives the object, via its causal efflux and causal interaction with us, a way to exist that it wouldn't otherwise have.
Nobody else has quite the view on the world that you have, and that view is A WAY THAT THE WORLD EXISTS that it wouldn't otherwise be able to manifest, without you.
The explanation of hypnotism feels completely unsatisfying to me. If you ever get an opportunity to talk with a friend who has been deeply hypnotized, you learn there is something else going on. It is like a bizarre co-opted dream state. The subject isn’t just going along with the hypnotist because they believe they’ve lost control of their body; that’s not how it works at all. The subject completely, irrationally believes the scenarios introduced by the hypnotist, and cannot be convinced otherwise.
Julian Jaynes a good discussion of historical evolution of hypnotism--in somewhat similar term. It requires a social consensus and expectation on part of the subject. That's how manifestations of hypnotic subjects were not stable and evolved along with the ideas of hypnotism itself.
Relevant to the multiple-personality angle, tulpamancy (qua mental hobby, not supposedly-supernatural woo) is specifically the practice of training yourself to "flip" to an intuition that some of your thoughts come from a second homunculus on purpose, consciously, aware that what you're doing is flipping some switches back and forth. It does indeed feel very much like flipping from duck to rabbit etc.
by feel, do you mean that the concept is reminiscent of it, or that you have tried tulpamancy to some extent?
The latter! Happy to answer questions, though I'm no big aficionado, it's just something I take up now and again to kill time as some people take up meditation or lucid dreaming. It's fun enough, but in practical terms it amounts to having your own ChatGPT in your head that doesn't know anything you don't; and as a trick it's not very rewarding to learn, since you can't show it off to people.
It's like playing "try to see it from my perspective" except with your own head.
Deciding to stop caring about something can take you from grief to Joy in a moment.
Hm. So do you have a persistent tulpa with a defined personality (ie personality traits distinct from you eg shy/bold/ different interests, different perspectives)? What are they like, and are you able to hold a conversation with them at a normal pace?
Or is it just kind of a self-hypnosis where you notice the thoughts could be seen as not yours?
Do you have a tulpaspace / idr what it was called, but like a dreamworld where you can enter and interact with your tulpa? Do they have a physical form or appearance?
Also, what got you into it? Would you ever learn projection, switching/fronting, etc.?
I've considered learning it since a few years, I guess to deal with loneliness, but I never got around to it, though I did try a lot of visualization for a few days, which was fun but didn't produce anything. I worry that my mind generates scary thoughts or I just generally worry about going crazy, so I worry a tulpa might get constructed badly or torture me. And also, eg they are trapped in my head, would probably be forced to experience species dysphoria, etc..
I've mostly tended to create vocal presences -- where, yes, the whole point is that you can have a conversation with it, or just have it running in the background making "unprompted" comments on your activities and surroundings. I can add visual impressions to it with a bit of focus (nothing like a hallucination/projection, just "imagine an apple"-level of picturing the tulpa's appearance and facial expressions), though I don't tend to bother.
I've toyed with a few different tulpas over the years; the trick is definitely to define a personality that you understand intuitively but which differs from your default demeanour, or else it'll destabilise into a regular internal monologue. (For the same reason, it's better to "cast" a voice distinct from yours, but which you know well enough for you to easily imagine that voice saying novel things.) I've trended towards slightly sarcastic voices-of-reason. Crafting yourself a shoulder angel who'll nag at you can sometimes be useful if you find yourself procrastinating on an important project, or otherwise having difficulty willing yourself to do something.
I definitely don't think a tulpa of the type I've worked on could possibly have qualia separate from mine, so I wouldn't worry about the ethical concern. I suppose it's more of a valid question if you start to get into fronting, but then again, if you don't worry about the moral patienthood of POV characters in your dreams when they aren't 1:1 to your waking self, you probably shouldn't worry too much about that? And anyway, fronting/switching is… well, I would say that's where tulpamancy ends and actual dissociative identity begins. I didn't say "disorder" because I suspect someone with a lot of mental control *can* snap in and out of it in a controlled manner -- but it seems more hazardous if it goes wrong, and for that reason as well as general boredom, I haven't tried too hard.
(Cannot emphasise the "boredom" angle too much. I really wouldn't recommend it as a way to alleviate loneliness -- you are still, ultimately, talking to yourself, even if moment-to-moment the tulpa's statements "feel" surprising in the same way as talking to another person IRL. It'll get stale.)
I definitely wouldn't recommend playing around with this stuff if you already struggle with any kind of intrusive thoughts. Tulpamancy is best practised with a 'clean', controlled mental space as a starting point. Maybe do some meditation, practice shutting down trains of thought at will -- and only then, when you know you can get rid of them at a moment's notice, get into creating self-sustaining pseudo-consciousnesses.
I see, that all makes sense.
Good actors do it all the time.
Yeah I talked to two (secular) tulpamancers as part of my research process for that post, one of whom was very intense and analytical about it, and had detailed theories of how it worked that dovetailed with my own thinking. Those discussions were helpful food for thought, but alas I think tulpas only wound up getting mentioned in one paragraph out of the whole series. (Basically, I talk about lucid trances a bunch, and then mention that tulpas are very closely related to lucid trances.) Maybe I could have said more about it, but the series was already very long ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Interesting! I greatly enjoyed Jaynes’s book but always thought he oversold his idea by claiming that people in pre-Classical times were not conscious; it seemed to me more likely that they conceived a new understanding of consciousness, maybe analogous to Adam Smith’s new understanding of commerce.
Jaynes did his best to convince but in the end I put it in the ‘likely malarkey’ file.
Oh, ye of little faith. I think he's way more right than wrong. You haven't spent enough time imagining what 75,000 years of communicating and storing information purely by voice would mean for how your mind looked.
I think *that* is a misconception stemming from too much literacy and instruction reliant on it. If someone teaches their kid how to make an adze, voice normally contributes maybe 5% of the communicated information.
However, much information might have been shown, all the rest was spoken so that’s 100%. My point is no matter how much they spoke to each other there was no other way to store and retrieve information.
ChatGPT: There is no firm consensus on precisely how rich spoken language was among ancient humans prior to writing, but the prevailing view among linguists and anthropologists is:
1️⃣ Spoken language was already highly complex and expressive before writing.
Writing is a recent invention (~5,000–5,500 years ago), while modern human language capacity likely emerged at least 50,000–100,000 years ago, if not earlier. Anatomical evidence (e.g., hyoid bone structure, FOXP2 gene) and cognitive capacities suggest ancient humans could produce grammatically structured, symbolically rich speech.
2️⃣ Linguistic diversity and complexity likely matched or exceeded modern spoken languages.
Languages change rapidly and there is no reason to assume they were “simpler” before writing. Even non-literate societies today (e.g., Pirahã, Australian Aboriginal languages) have complex phonologies, grammar, and rich vocabularies. Writing simplifies memory demands, but spoken language had to be sufficient for organizing hunting, toolmaking, kinship structures, myth, and social norms long before writing existed.
I think what F is actually saying is that you are overestimating the importance of verbal information of any kind, thus the invention of modern forms of communication will not have had that much affect on how we think. I am not sure I would go that far, but the cognitive importance of writing is probably overstated.
I guess I don’t agree
I don’t think I am overestimating it at all.
The Complaint Tablet to Ea-nāṣir is a pretty compelling piece of evidence that theory of mind in general and the concept of deception in particular existed among Mesopotamian c. 1750 BC, at least half a century before Jaynes posits the bicameral mind breaking down (c. 1000-1200 BC, I think).
The Tablet is written by someone named Nanni, who accuses Ea-nāṣir of deceiving him by sending him substandard copper after agreeing to the sale of top-quality ingots and of treating Nanni's messenger rudely. The message expresses shock at Ea-nāṣir's thought process and motivations, saying things like "... you feel free to speak in such a way" and "What do you take me for, that you treat somebody like me with such contempt?" Nanni closes by threatening to be extremely strict about quality standards when accepting future deliveries.
This seems to imply that Nanni is aware that deception is a thing, has a concept that other people have motivations and states of mind, and expects his complaints and warnings to Ea-nāṣir to affect the latter's behavior.
It's been decades since I read Jaynes, but for my part I might salvage the idea by suggesting that this gives evidence of where the invention originated.
It does seem hard to see how real commerce could happen without consciousness, or even without a pretty modern/complete theory of mind.
There's also the fact that even chimps demonstrate theory of mind. It's somewhat limited but they definitely take into account other chimps' knowledge. They can act deceptively depending on social context, for example.
You don't need a really elaborate theory of mind to trade goods. Chimpanzees do it. That copper merchant with the poor reputation stayed in business for a long time and people dealt with him, even while complaining. I find that interesting. See the above quote by Erica. I also find it interesting that it in the entire translation. The man is never accused of dishonesty specifically. He's accused of having second right copper and charging more money for it than he should and putting people to more trouble than he should. Was there a word for liar in existence then? It seems like a good place to use it.
Maybe it was just a social norm. Maybe directly calling someone a liar compelled him to murder you or something.
Maybe. I don't know much about their culture. But if you have a theory of mind that admits to dishonesty, I find it mighty strange that the word wouldn't exist and be perfectly OK to use in a business feeling. The copper merchant in question apparently had dealings with a lot of other people who also complained about the quality of his copper, but never complained about his character. They did complain about the way he treated them but they continued to do business with him.
That sounds to me like an oligopoly where the copper merchant was powerful and his customers needed him more than he needed them. They didn't want to risk offending him so they had to be somewhat polite.
Chimps demonstrate theory of mind, btw. It's somewhat limited but they can act deceptively.
I am pretty sure that he proposes the breakdown began before 1200 BC. It accelerated tremendously starting perhaps around 1200 BC. I don't think it's a good idea to put such a fine point on dates in this inquiry because the way our mind compresses the farther back things go is a bit of an obstacle. 10,000 years ago I think there was a lot of diversity in human beings just the way there is today, but we tend to flatten them out when we speak about these things It would've come on quicker in different cultures and it would've been seeded by unusual individuals. In other words, variation. I did not know about this tablet and I just read up on it. It's interesting. My number one point was or should I say is that there was some form of reasonably expressive written language at work here, which, if I understand Jaynes' position correctly is the tool that leads to symbolic thought and then the ability to introspect. It should also be kept in mind that much of this early writing, if not all of it, had to do with commerce.
EDIT: I did some fact checking and you are essentially correct but with this caveat.
chatGPT; Jaynes does acknowledge precursors and cracks in bicamerality earlier than 1200 BCE but sees the large-scale, civilization-wide breakdown as happening in this period. He sometimes references earlier potential seeds of the breakdown around 1500 BCE, particularly with the emergence of writing and increasing social complexity, but maintains that the collapse around 1200 BCE is the key marker.
To me, he's saying that's when it reached a critical mass. Not exactly where it began.
Agreed. There's a ton of evidence that Bronze Age Mesopotamians understood and practised deception. The Hammurabi Codex includes laws like these:
1. If a man accuses another man and makes an allegation of murder against him, but cannot prove it, the accuser will be put to death.
3. If a man comes forward to give false testimony in a case but cannot bring evidence for his accusation, if the case involves a capital offence, that man will be put to death.
11. If the [alleged] owner of lost property cannot produce witnesses who can identify his lost property, he is a liar, he has indeed spread malicious charges, he will be put to death.
The general principle seems to be "the punishment for falsely accusing someone of X is the same as the punishment for X." This is clearly the product of a society that understood the need to disincentivise false accusations.
In the realm of mythology, the Sumerian story 'Bilgames and Huwawa' (a precursor to the tale of Gilgamesh and Humbaba in tablet 5 of the Epic of Gilgamesh) clearly involves deception. The hero Bilgames wants to defeat the giant Huwawa, but Huwawa is protected by seven magical auras that make him invincible. So Bilgames feigns friendship, and offers his sisters' hands in marriage in exchange for the auras. Huwawa accepts the offer, and as soon as he hands over the auras, Bilgames attacks and defeats him.
Yes. False witness is in the code. The penalty was death. It is a written code so my theory is still applies. Obviously, there were things that led up to it. One can also see how seriously they took the notion of one person lying to another. One can also see that it involved very concrete circumstances. False accusation. Shoddy construction Deficient goods passed off. One has to wonder how common these things were given the death penalty involved.
Bilgames and Huwawa: also written down. So we are in the transition from oral to symbolic language. We have a theory of mind of deception here that is totally predicated on animal cunning and not sophistry.
But that's still true today. You can't sue someone for not acting authentically, only for breaking the terms of a contract.
According to the code, you could put someone to death for not acting authentically
By "authentic" I mean not true in their mind--telling the truth in all cases. That isn't illegal at all--witness 99% of all advertising. You can only sue if someone breaks the mutually agreed upon terms of a contract, and then only if there is some sort of damages.
Is it translated so well? Are the quoted sentences faithful to the originals? Does there exists sufficient fluency to translate into fluent English?
Jaynes made the point that the translators bring to the translation the modern consciousness.
I haven't checked it personally, but I have read multiple translations both scholarly and amateur and they all seem pretty consistent, and I've seen people on reddit claiming that the translation I quoted is a close translation that takes very few liberties.
Kinda-related tangent: I don’t personally know any ancient languages so as I was reading Jaynes I was kinda struggling a bit to figure out who and what to believe in regards to translations. I did find one source that fact-checked an easily-fact-checkable Jaynes claim about the Iliad and Odyssey, and it was directionally true but exaggerated: https://x.com/steve47285/status/1822741054451298706
Interesting. Thx for this.
For some reason, you made me want to look up the history of trickster stories in human culture. I sense a relationship here.
Certainly. Below is a structured timeline of trickster stories — not the historical periods in which people lived as tricksters, but rather the evolution, transmission, and formalization of the trickster as a narrative figure in human storytelling.
⸻
🌀 TIMELINE OF TRICKSTER STORIES AS NARRATIVE TRADITION
1. Prehistoric Origins (Before 3000 BCE)
• Function: Tricksters likely emerged with the earliest human storytelling — oral, performative, explanatory.
• Setting: Paleolithic bands and early agricultural communities.
• Role: Embodied chaos, creativity, boundary-breaking.
• Medium: Mythic storytelling integrated with ritual and shamanic practice.
• Examples (retrospectively reconstructed):
• Proto-Indo-European *Lok-/*Lugh-type figures
• Animal fables (raven, coyote, spider, hare)
• Note: Trickster tales may predate strict moral systems — their amorality served survival, adaptation, and imagination.
⸻
2. Bronze Age Myth Systems (3000–1200 BCE)
• Sumerian & Akkadian:
• Enki (god of mischief, water, wisdom) in Enki and the World Order uses cleverness to reorder cosmic domains.
• Egyptian:
• Set, the unpredictable god of chaos and storms.
• Indian (Vedic):
• Indra, who cheats and tricks both gods and demons.
• Proto-Indo-European echo:
• The trickster is often both culture hero and rule-breaker.
• Function: Tricksters create order through disorder — reshaping cosmology, challenging power.
⸻
3. Iron Age Epics and Classical Formalization (1200–200 BCE)
• Greek:
• Hermes: steals Apollo’s cattle as a baby, god of boundaries, lies, and commerce.
• Odysseus: not a god, but a mortal trickster — in The Odyssey (see above timeline), his cunning (metis) defines him.
• Norse:
• Loki, god of mischief, alternately ally and enemy of the gods.
• Hebrew Bible:
• Jacob deceives Esau and Isaac; the serpent in Eden tempts with knowledge.
• African (Bantu, Akan):
• Anansi the Spider, early attested in oral traditions — eventually becomes central to West African and Caribbean folktales.
• Indian Epics:
• Krishna, in the Mahabharata, plays the role of cosmic trickster, using lies for dharmic ends.
⸻
4. Postclassical / Medieval Transmission (200–1500 CE)
• Christian Europe:
• Trickster transformed into the Devil, the Fool, or Reynard the Fox (satirical beast epics).
• Islamic world:
• Juha/Nasreddin Hodja tales — comic, paradoxical wisdom.
• African oral tradition:
• Trickster motifs continue across griot performance, merged with Islamic and animist influences.
• Indigenous Americas:
• Coyote, Raven, Hare, Nanabozho — boundary-crossers, shape-shifters, world-makers.
• East Asia:
• Sun Wukong (Monkey King) in Journey to the West (16th c. CE) — both sacred and irreverent.
⸻
5. Colonial/Modern Period (1500–1900 CE)
• Slave narratives:
• Tricksters evolve into survival figures: Br’er Rabbit, Esu Elegbara, Anansi adapted into resistance lore.
• Satirical literature:
• Cervantes’ Sancho Panza, Shakespeare’s Fools, Swift’s Gulliver — trickster roles used to expose hypocrisy.
• Folklore collections:
• Brothers Grimm, African American folklore, Native myths recorded by anthropologists.
⸻
6. Modern/Postmodern Tricksters (1900–Present)
• Psychoanalysis & anthropology:
• Jung: the Trickster as archetype (1910s–50s).
• Lévi-Strauss: mythic structure (1950s): trickster mediates opposites.
• Literature & media:
• Bugs Bunny, Bart Simpson, Tom Sawyer, the Joker, Loki (Marvel), V (from V for Vendetta) — playful, subversive, morally ambiguous.
• Postcolonial trickster:
• Reemerges in diasporic fiction (e.g. Salman Rushdie, Zora Neale Hurston, Chinua Achebe) as hybrid, boundary-defying figures.
• Academic theory:
• Trickster becomes lens for studying gender, race, trauma, and transgression in narrative.
⸻
It all depends on how you define consciousness, doesn't it? That's the slippery slope with all this.10000 years ago I am willing to bet money that people were much more closely in tune with the visceral somatic sense of living than we are today (or what people were like in 200 A.D. for that matter.) 10,000 years ago, the only information retrieval and storage system was word of mouth and that had been true for quite a while previously; try really hard to imagine that.
The invention of written language had a lot to do with shifting the balance between these things. Ever wonder why the book of John begins with "in the beginning was the word?" Maybe that was the beginning of what I call consciousness. I think Jaynes got a lot more things right than wrong.
>people in pre-Classical times were not conscious" *as we think of it today" is the missing modifier here. He clearly defines what he means by consciousness in the first chapter of the book and if you reject his definition then there's really no point in reading the rest of it.
Thing is, Jaynes never admits to the problem of qualia. To him, consciousness is self-introspection. We can hand-wave and get introspection through Analog I and things but how do we get qualia?
Where do qualia come in here? I have my own thoughts about it, but I’m not understanding why it’s a problem with defining consciousness.
Because generally qualia are considered as a part of consciousness. If a see a color, I am said to be conscious of greenness. Isn't experience of qualia called the Hard Problem of consciousness?
But Jaynes ignores this aspect altogether making very off-hand remarks that perception does not require consciousness with example of amoeba that perceives its surroundings but it certainly isn't conscious. But there is big difference between amoeba, a dog and a man. Higher animals perceive qualia.
> Because generally qualia are considered as a part of consciousness.
Is that so? I see Qualia as a contributing vector to “consciousness.” They are an input. Meaning without a conflict between Qualia and rational thought consciousness would not be necessary
It is not true that he says that. He says that learning does not require it. He doesn’t do a deep dive into qualia because he understands that that is a fundamental aspect of being alive and sees no reason to explain it.
What is it like to be alive? Compared to what?
Qualia fundamental aspect of being alive??
Amoeba almost certainly don't have qualia. And Jaynes responded to the criticism that perception requires consciousness by saying that amoeba perceive their environment (without being conscious). But there is a gulf between amoeba perception and human perception--and this gulf is qualia and Jaynes omits to notice this gulf.
What can we learn about this from anthropologists dealing with uncontacted/rarely contacted hunter-gatherers?
What can we learn from written records from when literate travelers or invaders or evangelists or whatever encountered illiterate societies?
What can we learn from written records from societies where nearly everyone was illiterate but a tiny fringe?
Most of those emissaries had an agenda that was not about figuring things out
There are billions of people even today who have gotten the majority of their beliefs from things people said to them face to face. I know some of them. They know how to read, but they trust almost none of it.
Ok. I wonder where the people who told them heard it first?
They know how to read…
That’s significant. What if they didn’t, and no one around them did either; and not through ignorance but because it wasn’t an option,
Julian Jaynes was able to put together a unified theory of religion, music, dream, language, hypnotism, oracles etc etc.
And without condescending to the phenomena and the ancient peoples. This was a great achievement in itself as David Stove who reviewed Jaynes wrote.
Sometimes I have a strong feeling that people reject Jayne's theory because it makes them uncomfortable. The specialness of a human being is called into question by his theory. Is it not?
I don't care about that, I just want to know if his factual claims are correct, which means thinking about what evidence might exist to falsify them. If no such evidence could exist, then it might as well be a theory of what songs the elves in Rivendell sang. If such evidence should exist but none exists falsifying the theory, then the theory becomes very plausible.
Well, there is a lively debate out there about all of those things. Have you read the book?
I became convinced that something like the homunculus account of consciousness must be the case back when I used to rock climb (before I broke my neck two years ago in, erm, a rock climbing accident).
On many occasions, I would observe my body begin to execute physically demanding, precise technical moves in fear inducing situations before I had consciously "told" my body to start moving. Of course my conscious mind would rapidly catch up and experience between conscious awareness and movement would quickly become synchronic. But it happened so often I became quite familiar with the thought, "oh we're going are we?" as I began to execute the required physical moves.
The way I came to think of "myself" is as being like Maggie Simpson in the introduction to The Simpsons. She steers the steering wheel and beeps the horn, and is under the illusion that she is driving the car. But really, Marge is driving the car. Maggie as homunculus.
I'm sure this must be very common, I can perceive it whenever I do a sustainable fast-walk pace for some period of time (say 4mph for 15+ minutes) then get off the treadmill and my legs just seem to move on their own. It sort of feels like you're just "steering" the direction of a Flintstones car from the homunculus seat. Being that it's a compound movement, and not merely a steady contraction/expansion of some muscle fiber, it's makes less sense to be an involuntary motion than the "lean against this wall while you try to raise your arm against it for 30 seconds then step away" thing everyone knows from grade school.
Trying to mess around with one's perception of consciousness on purpose seems just as dangerous as rock climbing in its own way. Seems like an easy way to break your brain. (Sorry to hear about your accident, and hope you were able to make a recovery.)
Well, I'm a quadriplegic now, so not much of a recovery. But given that by any reasonable metric I should have died, some would say I should be grateful.
The question isn't whether or not the conscious mind controls everything. We know it doesn't. The question is whether or not it controls anything; or another way of putting it: what information does the conscious self add to our cognitive/behavioral processes?
The essay feels a bit incomplete to me. Particularly the ending, I actually wasn't even sure it was the ending when I was reading the blog on Gmail.
As for the topic itself, I dunno, while I don't find anything particularly objectionable it doesn't really seem like this model gets us anything. What are the benefits of this over a model like Plato's tripartite soul? I think this is what's missing from this essay is more commentary on the other theories of consciousness and how Byrnes' theory differs.
This model-flipping optical-illusion account fits my experience with Mahamudra (a Vajrayana Buddhist meditation practice). We often meditate with live instructions, which often have the form "take the view that..." (except it's about mental phenomena and the architecture of awareness, rather than twirling dancers).
Thomas Metzinger has a version of this account which he calls the "transparent self-model" (explained in his book "Being No One" or any number of YouTube lectures). He distinguishes between internal models that we see as models, vs. "transparent" models where we relate to the model contents *as if* it were the real world. On this view (as philosophers like to say), a first-person perspective requires we have a *transparent* world-model which includes the self as a specially-indexed object.
This transparency idea highlights how weird some of these "model-flipping" practices can get, especially with the self-model. It's not abstract propositional beliefs that are changing (which we're used to as rationalists), rather our experience of the world.
I think it's well-established that stage hypnosis is basically fake -- people play along because it would be awkward not to, nothing more. So using stage hypnosis (a fake thing) as evidence for this theory is kind of anti-convincing to me.
You could also argue that people need to be somewhat suggestible in order to suggest to them that they are suggestible.
I imagine it's *often* true that people just play along, but I really doubt that's *always* what's going on--it probably only works on certain personality types.
Richard Feynman tells a story about participating in stage hypnosis, and describing his experience of it. As I recall, he did everything the hypnotist told him to do, but always had some rationalization for why he was doing it. (Like, "Oh, I don't have to do it just because the hypnotist says, but actually I was just about to do that anyways, because of X.") But, after the fact, he could see that he'd been doing very silly things he'd never have had any impulse to do if it weren't for the hypnotist. So it seemed to him like it really worked on him.
I suppose he could be greatly exaggerating to make it a better story, but even if he was exaggerating, (a) Richard Feynman would have been the last person in the world to "play along" with something just because the alternative would be awkward, and (b) lots of other people tell similar stories, and I don't think it's likely that they're all lying.
Where has it been well established?
I was thinking about your review of Jaynes the whole time, I was very glad that it was eventually mentioned. That’s the most interesting part to me: just like in the optical illusions, the initial states are just the most common and most likely to make sense (upside down stairs are rarer than regular ones), but when it comes to our mind, there’s not as many guardrails. If all or most of us end up with roughly the same homunculus model, it’s probably because of the way we hear our parents talk about their own self-perception, but it’s not hard at all to imagine how different cultures could end up with very different models.
I completely understand your point about skipping the free speech part, but it still makes me a bit sad. People really add a whole lot of crazy epicycles to their world models to make space for it. I think it would be very healthy for a lot of people if we finally learned to deal with that idea.
Since I am autistically obsessed with language, I will point out that this
>the predictive processing interpretation is that we perceive our models of the world.
is misleading, insofar as it's Scott's interpretation or whether people working in predictive processing all agree with it. Perceive is an ordinary language world defined by its usages in ordinary contexts. We do perceive the world, because that is the correct way to use the word as it is embedded in everyday life. We do not perceive a model of the world, because "models" aren't imposed between us and the world in our ordinary linguistic behavior.
You might say that perception consists in our brains interpreting various other cognitive models and so we can be wrong about what the world is like - but it's strictly speaking false to say that we perceive those models. Nobody ever speaks of perceiving models irl when they see an illusion or hallucination or regular apple or whatever.
Now, since this is just an autistic objection about language use, it could be immaterial. But it could also mislead people by appropriating a technical term and giving people the misleading impression that there is the world, then their model, and what they perceive is the model, when that's not right. Perception is a complex behavior and can be given deep explanations, but it is not accurate to use the word that what you perceive is sense data or qualia or an inner world or whatever, because nobody irl speaks this way and the technical usage potentially or implicitly adopted here is not congruent with other ordinary usages.
>Now we have the material we need to explain all sorts of weird mental phenomena:
From my understanding, you've just restated what happens to people's beliefs when they're "hypnotized" with an analogy to what happens when people begin perceiving the dancer rotating clockwise vs counterclockwise. I don't really see what the explanation here is supposed to be. The entities involved like "a set of beliefs about yourself" were already part of the existing folk psychology - I expected an explanation of them to invoke theoretical entities in neuroscience, not just more beliefs and desires.
Compare: I also don't know more about why the illusions happen.
>Sometimes, enough neurons representing similar concepts
Concepts are not given a theoretical explanation, nor is representation, nor are we given an explanation of what exactly the neurons do when they fire. Concepts and representations are ordinary terms not successfully explained in theoretical terms, and the only invocation of s theoretical phrase like neurons firing is to make the explanation look sciencey.
>enough concepts to represent a world-state and give positive valence to that world-state.
What is a world state? What is positive valence?
>patterns reach a threshold where they cross over to the motor cortex and activate motor programs elsewhere in the body.
This is a global explanation of all brain activity, like saying "Stuff has momentum and transmits energy when colliding with other stuff" is a physics bases explanation of why I didn't die in a car crash.
> Start with a strong background belief that the new model is plausible.
> Relax.
> Suppress all evidence favoring the old model.
> Gather evidence favoring the new model.
This is also a global explanation for believing things, except it doesn't even attempt to explain what beliefs are or suppressing evidence consists in.
I think I can answer some of these questions you raise--even though I am in agreement with your overall point.
"Models" can refer to any construct which reproduces, in another media, some set of representational relationships. A computer can be said to possess a model of, say, chess. Physics uses mathematical models to predict empirical phenomena. Such models do not have to be conscious--if our preconscious perceptual processes turn out to be using something like a model to represent physical stimuli, then this will be a meaningful sense of that term (so, for example, if our brain does use a processes analogous to backward propagation, then that process could meaningfully be called a "model". We are almost certain that the brain uses a model of some kind to represent stimuli because neural scanning has revealed nothing that resembles a camera picture.
Still, as you say, this is mostly semantics.
I agree that Scott's summary of the original author's explanation of hypnosis doesn't quite make sense. I imagine that if you asked someone under hypnosis questions about themselves, they would give the same answer they would have given when not under hypnosis (except insofar as embarrassment is no longer a barrier). If correct, hypnosis wouldn't change our beliefs about ourselves--therefore our beliefs about ourselves do not define our experience of self-consciousness. I believe that these two things (self-conciousness, and our beliefs about ourselves, which I will term "Self-Concept") are two independent phenomena.
"Concepts", as they function in the mind, however, are pretty clear. They are categories of closely related objects, events or ideas that the brain has tagged as belonging to a common set, usually called "schema" in psychology. These reside in long term memory, and typically represent a kind of averaging across many instances to produce a "prototypical" image of that thing. The idea of "Dog" that you have in your head is a kind of merged conglomeration of every dog you have ever seen or had described to you. For brevity, it is acceptable to call these schema "concepts."
Note, however, that there are other instances of patterns stored in the brain. Perceptual gestalten, such as geometrical figures, are things that the brain automatically searches for in the sensory memory buffer. This process is pre-conscious in that when we recognize a square shape, we don't consciously think about what the shape represents, we are just aware of seeing a square. It's presented as a whole experience (ie, a "gestalt") to the conscious mind.
I think the self-concept is made out of schemas (self-schemas). I think that self-consciousness (or self-awareness if you prefer) is a form of phenomenal awareness in which we are consciously aware is being experienced from our own point of view.
Perceptual illusions are usually mistakes of the pre-conscious perceptual processes. Hypnosis appears to be some sort of interruption of the self-consciousness (or maybe a weakening of it). Categorical bias results from errors residing in the long term memory. None of these things explain the others.
Add all your schemas together and you get your entire world view. All your self-schemas added together create your "Self-Concept". These schemas are not necessarily consistent with each other, nor equally accessible to conscious recall, so we end up with beliefs that are contradictory and triggered by different environmental stimuli.
I agree with you that the way that the author (I don't remember his name) uses "valence" and "threshold" is overly simplistic. It is true in an overall sense that the frontal cortex and the midbrain exchange information in order to send signals to the motor cortex, resulting in behavior, but that description hides a lot of complexity. I also agree that the explanation of seeking evidence of a new "model" (here used as a synonym for structured schemas) also seems simplistic. Are we suggesting that the meaning of our entire life experiences as stored in long term memory can simply be overturned and replaced by something the conscious mind makes up in the moment? Color me skeptical.
Good point!
I say that perception, or better perceiving -- since this makes it more clear that it's something that happens, a process --, is modelling of parts of the world, and it works very fine most of the time.
But granted, many people aren't aware that perceiving is modeling, because it's something that they don't do voluntarily, like they also do not voluntarily digest.
> If the homunculus-self is a mostly-accurate but not-directly-perceived-and-real model of mental processes, then a person whose mental processes often flip between two or more dramatically different states (for example, borderlines, who are notable for very strong emotional states and “splitting”) may gather evidence for and eventually flip to a model of themselves as multiple different homunculi. This is especially true if they’re primed with the suggestion that this is a likely way for the inside of their mind to be (for example, by a psychotherapist who believes in multiple personalities).
An uninformed take like this makes me wonder if Scott is just clueless about DID specifically or is everything else of his I am reading and nodding along is subject to the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect.
The most unfortunate part is him uncritically repeating the discredited iatrogenic model of DID in the parentheses.
This topic deserves a much more in-depth discussion, suffice it to say for now that not one person with DID (as opposed to the ticktok multiplicity crowd) want to have it. They desperately want to "flip to a model of themselves" where they have a single unfractured self. Most try very hard to do so, repeatedly and in various ways, invariably failing. Most people with clinical DID symptoms have multiple nuanced alters and not the media-beloved one good and one evil, or the Borderline "strong emotional states".
This is interesting to me. I had some pretty serious childhood trauma and the most important one became a repressed memory that I did not recover until my mid 20s. I did not suffer from DID, but I never understood why I was behaving the way I did. It made no sense to me. When I recovered the memory, it started to make sense to me, but it took a long time to work through it. I feel now really that I did have two different selves growing up, except one of them was on silence but pulling the levers.
Here's the long version if you're interested.
https://bcivil.substack.com/p/a-psychonalysis-guided-by-chatgpt
That in no way contradicts Scott's description here. People do not have to want to perceive themselves as fragmented in order to do so.
It would be interesting if Scott read some phenomenology some day, because it is a well-grounded and sophisticated philosophical tradition that shows that those "excruciatingly obvious" philosophical preliminaries he starts with are not obvious at all, and are making a bunch of ontolgical assumptions that go back to Descartes, and it would seem like an important task for a "rationalist" to try to think outside of the dominant ontological assumptions of the age they live in.
Which phenomenologists do you like
Merleau-Ponty would be the most influential and relevant one. But he's very French. More contemporary, and possibly more accessible to someone with a "rationalist" bent, might be Shaun Gallagher and Dan Zahavi, The Phenomenological Mind; or Gallagher's How the Body Shapes the Mind.
I’ve read some Merleau-Ponty but let me check out those other two! Some phenomenology stuff I’ve read can get quite “out there” which has made me rather skeptical!
In the plates example, to me the plates naturally look upside-down. I wasn't able to see them right-side up, in fact!
How do you perceive these rotated versions?
A: https://imgur.com/a/7Eb9lJW
B: https://imgur.com/a/wUr0dd6
C: https://imgur.com/a/4Y0LaMS
A: Started out uptside down then switched to right-side up
B: Right-side up (but possibly influenced by A)
C: Also right-side up (but same note)
Boring snowflake touchy-feely comment: I would personally label this essay with some sort of "DANGER: COGNITOHAZARD" trigger warning. This stuff is surprisingly powerful & can go to some very dark places as I discovered for myself a while back. Not gonna say more.
Isn't it remarkable how our largest fears are almost always inside ourselves?
I wonder if this was always true, or if it's a super safe modern world thing--just as your immune system evolved to be constantly suppressing parasites and saving you from the bacteria growing in your food and now it's making you deathly ill because you ate a peanut, your brain evolved to be constantly assessing likely dangers in a world with big nasty predators and no guns + lots of two-legged predators and no laws, and now it's making you terrified of something that's not even a real thing.
I mean none of it's "real", but as it turns out "not real" things can be extremely dangerous.
It’s pretty real if you’re attacked by a wild animal or someone with a knife. I agree about the danger of not real things in the human equation.
I don’t think it was an issue at all until human beings really started getting good at ruminating about themselves.
How would we know? I mean, maybe Ugh the Caveman sat around in his cave ruminating on his mortality or the meaninglessness of life or something when he should have been sharpening his flint spearheads. How would we tell one way or another?
If all you did in those days was sit around in your cave, you wouldn’t be alive for very long. But essentially you’re correct. It’s all just speculation.
But I think there are thought experiments that you can do and questions you can ask yourself that perhaps makes some hypotheses more compelling than others. I think maybe the best way to explore the idea of the meaninglessness of life is to put yourself in a place where your physical survival depends on you doing something now. If you choose not to, I suppose that means you’re quite happy to die.
Because Ugh the Caveman probably didn't reproduce.
Ohhhhh yeah. Had a *very* nasty brush with this myself not long ago when changing my medication schedule. I followed all the rules, consulted with my psych, but it STILL kicked me in the head, hard.
FWIW I did put in a little “Pros and cons” box at the top of the post about meditation / enlightenment / awakening — https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GvJe6WQ3jbynyhjxm/intuitive-self-models-6-awakening-enlightenment-pnse . That doesn’t seem like a ‘trigger warning’ kind of thing, though: IIUC it usually takes hundreds of hours of conscientious effort before anyone can mess themselves up through meditation. Just reading a blog post is safe AFAIK.
Oh, another one is: knowing that multiple personality disorder / dissociative identity disorder (DID) exists is a risk factor for getting it. But in terms of “cost/benefit analysis re writing and reading blog posts about DID”, I think this is a cost that rounds to zero, especially since DID is already commonly portrayed in movies and TV.
If you’re thinking of a different cognitohazard besides those two, then I don’t know what it is.
I actually meant this review, not your original article - I think any blog strongly focused on psychology should be considered a "dangerous space" in terms of this stuff. Although I guess the same is true for ACX, so maybe I shouldn't have said anything.
I've always loved Jaynes' book since I first read it and hated that it was not accepted. I understand the reasons now much better after reading your re-write and analysis. It makes me love the idea even more that there really was a fundamental change in the way most people thought around the late Bronze Age.
I became fascinated long ago by a particular Pharoah who lived around 1450 BCE named Thutmose III, and especially a particular episode in his reign. He was expansionary, and wanted to put down the restless and hostile peoples of the levant. The first phase of his plan was to conquer a fortress called Megiddo (where we get "armageddon"). In order to take the city he had a couple of obvious choices of route to take around a mountain range in his way. He theorized that his enemy would have both of these routes protected, so instead took a middle path no one was expecting, got behind the bulk of his enemy's forces and easily took the city.
It always struck me as odd how the enemy strategist would be fooled by such an obvious choice, but maybe it was that Thutmose had theory of mind and his enemy didn't. His opponent didn't hear from his god what to do and never imagined he could just think for himself.
I love that book as well. It literally changed the way I thought about the world and myself both. You might be interested in this piece I wrote.
https://bcivil.substack.com/publish/posts/detail/165890966?referrer=%2Fpublish%2Fposts
I can’t sign in. It says it’s a private page.
My apologies. I was logged into my dashboard. The first link only mentions Jane's peripherally in my exploration of consciousness with chatty. The second link digs deeper.
https://bcivil.substack.com/p/jaynes-the-voice-and-llms
https://open.substack.com/pub/bcivil/p/consciousness-twee-and-julian-jaynes?r=257wm&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
I really enjoyed the second link. You did indeed get very deep into Jaynes and answered a lot of the questions I had about the critical reception of his ideas.
The ideas about memory being conveyed through voice, movement, such as dance, and embodiment in places reminds me of the idea of a "memory palace" that I've always found intriguing. The TV show Sherlock with Benedict Cumberbatch explored this. Sherlock would position ideas in his memory in a manner akin to a physical arrangement in the world and then walk through this space to retrieve information that might otherwise have been lost. Gary Marcus, in his book Kluge, talked about how the biggest limitation on our memory is that we have no decent way of indexing memories and it's kind of like a shoebox full of tiny clippings all scrambled together.
It makes sense that the ancients would have techniques for indexing memories very different from what we're used to with alphabetised sorting in encyclopedias, search engines, and dewey decimal systems.
I am glad you got something out of it. thx for reading it.
"You are a feather for every wind that blows Claude."
Outstanding description!
Despite the "feather for every wind" nature of Claude's content which is so emblematic of LLMs, I found Claude's writing style to be really good. I'm used to ChatGPT and can get similar content with prompts that provide sufficient context, but it's never quite this graceful.
Taking a premodern army through a mountain range is *hard* and even when successful is likely to lose a large fraction of your army on the way. When Hannibal crossed the Alps (long after Jaynes puts the start of self-modelling) it was a shocking success, but he still lost half his army doing it. It seems perfectly explicable that Thutmose's enemy did not expect him to try it.
I can see that, but imagine there is quite a difference in degree of difficulty in crossing the alps - with elephants even - than in crossing over what was referred to by the Egyptian chroniclers as a mountain range but was likely more like a pass over a series of hills. I'd have to get a look at that terrain to really form a better opinion of the difficulty.
What struck me was the tone of the description. A kind of bewilderment by the enemy leader like, "he's not supposed to do that!" Of course, the story was written by the winners and was designed to make Thutmose look amazing, so was more propaganda that anything that could be considered realistic.
Wonderful analogy in this post, between the suddenness of satori and the suddenness of figure-ground reversals.
My favorite sudden satori Zen anecdote:
"A Zen master was instructing a monk who struggled to get what enlightenment was all about. One evening, as darkness fell, the master told the monk: “It’s late; it's getting dark outside. Let's call it a day; you can return to your hut. But first, here, take this lamp to light your way” Just as the monk was reaching for the lamp, the master blew out the flame. The monk was enlightened.."
Sounds like a figure-ground reversal! The light was in the dark....
(Coincidentally, I just posted a blog tangential to this topic of self-models - self-models, active inference and fidgeting:
https://open.substack.com/pub/jnicanorozores/p/chewing-on-your-nails-is-care-and?r=lx647&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
>But first, here, take this lamp to light your way” Just as the monk was reaching for the lamp, the master blew out the flame
love it
Here’s a fun analogies item from the FPAT (Flexible Phenomenologist Aptitude Test):
self : thought :: ? : ?
painter : brushstroke?
bee : hive?
surfer : wave?
dreamer upon awakening : dream?
reader : text read?
magnet : iron filings?
iron filings : magnet?
match : fire?
smoke : fire?
fire-builder : fire?
conductor: orchestra?
air guitar player : recorded music?
(jk about the FPAT)
honestly not sure whether that should be bee:hive or hive:bee
> The place where the optic nerve meets the eye lacks photoreceptors, leading to a 5-10 degree hole in the middle of the visual field - there’s a medium-sized spot in your vision where you can’t see anything at all. But our lower-level brain centers guess that probably there’s just, you know, normal stuff there. Therefore, they “show” “us” a “picture” of an intact world with normal stuff in the blind spot area - safe enough, unless there’s really an oncoming car.
Does an oncoming car make this less safe? How fast would the car have to be going to (a) fit within your 5-10 degree blind spot, but also (b) hit you before that stops being the case?
I think OP was just making a throwaway joke. Blind spots are very safe viz. driving because (1) Most people have two working eyes and the blind spot of one is within the field-of-view of the other. (2) You saccade (move your eyes to point in a different direction) typically multiple times per second, such that things don’t stay in the blind spot. (3) “hole in the middle of the visual field” is not meant literally, the blind spots are off to the side, away from the central “fovea” where vision is sharpest. Try it yourself at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_spot_(vision)#Blind_spot_test :)
>If you watch mental decision very very carefully for a long time, you notice the same things the Libet experiment noticed, where they seem to often happen before “consciousness” is “aware” of the decision at all.
The Libet experiment has been pretty convincingly debunked (https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/09/free-will-bereitschaftspotential/597736/).
The "Readiness Potential" activity that occurs in the brain several seconds before a conscious decision is made has been found to be an artifact of sampling methodology, and is actually just background activity that's constantly ebbing and flowing in the brain (https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1210467109). In 2019 a study was performed comparing the brain activity of people making arbitrary decisions with non-arbitrary decisions (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6809608/). Subjects were told that a choice between two different non-profits would appear on a computer screen, and they needed to press a key to pick one of them. The arbitrary group was told that their decision would not have any consequence, they should just pick whichever one they wanted with no criteria. The non-arbitrary group was told that they were choosing which group they would prefer receive a $1,000 donation. Both groups were told they should press the key as soon as they made their decision. They found that you saw the Readiness Potential a few seconds before the arbitrary decisions, but no Readiness Potential at all for the non-arbitrary decisions. The current theory is that RP is just background brain activity, and that when you don't have a reason to make a choice you usually make a choice when background brain activity is high.
This is very interesting, thank you for writing it up. In my uni, I was taught about the original experiments but not the overturning. I took that class in 2019, the first contradictory experiment was in 2012 - I wonder how long it will take until the lecture is changed.
It might take a while. I've been taking psychology courses recently and they still had big sections on the Stanford Prison Experiment, and that was found to be an academic hoax 6 years ago (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31380664/). Curriculum takes a while to catch up, there's a lot of inertia in teaching.
Jung talked about a collective subconscious, but I think it is easier to argue that our modes of consciousness are also collectively constructed and reinforced, and periodically undergo communal phase changes (and that you always have a small number of individuals who fail to join the common attractor state and get diagnosed as "crazy").
Has anyone ever seen a real-life stage or therapy hypnotist use a swinging object? Because I've only ever seen it in TV and movies, and I'd think the cliché nature of the technique might take the subject out of the experience.
I did a few experiments back when young, I tried to hypnotize my friends with some degree of success.
The object I used was a candle flame in a dark room. It really tires the eyes very quickly.
I think the like button may be more bad than good. But I'm pressing it anyway.
Okay, but did you perceive yourself to decide to push it, or....
> decades of experience/inertia behind it”)
Accidental extra quotation mark.
No! Square A and square B are not the same color! This is a pet peeve of mine. The squares are clearly different colors. The *pixels in the image* are the same color, but the *squares* are different colors. If you're talking in terms of the image, well, there are no squares at all, those are parallelograms or whatever. To call them "squares" is to accept the premise of the image, in which case they're clearly different colors. To say the squares are the same color is to do a bizarre thing where you accept the spatial premise of the image but not the illumination, which is kind of nonsense.
I think that if you call them parallelograms, the illusion becomes no less compelling (because the illusion is caused by 3D interpretation of the parallelograms and the surrounding image)
If you think about it that way, any interpretation of pixels on the screen is an illusion. Another way to think about it is that we could not interpret the pixels on the screen if our "subsystem" brain did not translate the 2d image to 3d, including lighting and colors etc. So I'm not sure it really makes sense to call this an illusion. The original figures just point out what the brain is subconsciously doing.
Re: sudden changes in your mind. In some trivial and some profound ways this has happened often in my life. Shower thoughts... Where I suddenly get the answer to some problem I've been thinking about. But also doing other mundane things. I can recall the exact stretch of road, where I understood a diode bridge as just a bunch of switches. ( that's more on the trivial side.)
My own interpretation of hypnosis is something of the reverse of the usual: it largely consists of the *conscious* mind telling the brain's perceptual systems to shut up and do what they're told. In terms of predictive coding, when the hypnotist says "there's an apple in your hand, look at how red it is", the subject is making their "top-down prior" strong enough to overrule their actual sense data; when the perceptual system interprets the raw data as a 3-d field of vision, that (imaginary) red apple ends up as part of it because the rest of the brain is insisting that it has to be there.
I once volunteered to be a subject in a hypnosis show, but my brain kept trying to analyze the experience with a running narrative saying things that amounted to "you're imagining really hard, but you haven't quite managed to fool your automatic systems." When the hypnotist told me to imagine that my hands were being squeezed together, and to struggle against the squeezing but fail, what ended up happening is that I "struggled" hard enough that, after a certain point, my hands actually did fly apart...
The checker square illusion never seemed like much of an illusion to me. The light square looks like it's part of a checkerboard that's intrinsically lighter than the dark square, but is in shadow. Neither I nor my eyes are interested in the intensity of light as a function of spherical angle entering my eye - I want to know what the scene is like. I mean, in real life a street in bright sun probably is reflecting more light to your eye than an adjacent sidewalk in deep shade. Is it an illusion that you can tell the sidewalk is actually lighter-colored than the street? This strikes me very differently than something like the cafe wall illusion, where it just looks like non-parallel lines on a page, even though they are parallel.
I think it does qualify as an illusion because, even when I *am* interested in the actual relative frequencies and intensities, I can't accurately perceive them. (More to the point, I can't avoid perceiving them wildly inaccurately.) If I try my hardest to interpret the image as a flat grid of pixels, the A-pixels still look much darker than the B-pixels.
I'm vulnerable to this illusion for a good evolutionary reason, sure -- but I'm still being actively misled by my own brain!
I would disagree with the "actively misled" framing. What Mark is saying (and I agree) is that the brain is a mechanism for taking useless sense data and turning it into functional imaging.
It does this by processing multiple layers of data, none of which look like the nice clean pixel matrix of your screen's display, while simultaneously making intelligent interpretations of how to display the live data feed. (Those distortions are eye floaties, correct them and move on. That's the top surface of a cylinder, track it as the head bobs up and down with the torso breathing.)
Maybe it seems trivial to ask the brain to give you access to the lower layers where, presumably, the individual intensity measurements are made. I'm not convinced that layer exists in the complex network of feedback interactions that is visual processing. It might seem like you're just asking for raw data, but I think what you're really asking for is novel functionality.
Sure, it would be nice to have that functionality, but I'd rather have a brain that correctly interprets shadow distortions. Even really good cameras struggle to produce decent pictures with lots of complex shadow distortion, motion, lens flare, and artifacts. That's partly why my pictures are never as good as actually being there. The visual cortex, partly because of all its distortions, has superior functionality.
> Sometimes, enough neurons representing similar concepts fire at the same time that they form some kind of temporarily stable pattern that takes over the global raworkspace.
This seems unfalsifiable because he hasn't tied the "global workspace" to a specific group of neurons that interact in a reproducibly observable way. Moreover, the claim lacks any predictive value. For instance, satori has yet to be captured by any neuroimaging technology. That's not to say that satori isn't a genuine state that can be experienced, nor that neuroimaging technology may not be able to capture such an event in the future. But even if neuroscientists had the technology to make this theory falsifiable, claiming that a bunch of neurons firing in unison creates the state of satori doesn't explain the subjective experience of satori. GWT sounds like pseudoscience to me.
"Square A being black and Square B being white, even though these aren’t the real colors."
What does "real color" mean?
Isn't color what an observer perceives? Do objects themselves possess colors?
Light itself possesses frequencies, which are real, measurable, and for which we possess models going down to the level of quantum field theory.
And what does frequencies have to do with color?
If you replace the idea of “me” with an idea of a “we” you get a structure which is great for controlling+coordinating lots of people.
This was great. Been doing meditation for long time, and every now and then, kind of had the 'non-self' shift happen, fleetingly. Just like briefly experiencing the stairs being upside down . This discussion has given some framework to what I was experiencing, some further understanding around the 'feeling' when switching views.
One thing that has always held me back, is 'what is it good for'?
So lets say you can achieve this alternate shift in perception, where there is no-self, no-ego. How does life get better/or/worse? What happens in day to day life?
I have feeling some people would say once someone flips to the alternate view. Then it creates less stress as in the Sapolsky ideas around why 'Why Zebras don't get Ulcers'
I think the bi-stable model is too simple. I'm thinking of the mind as a set of aperiodic (chaotic) system attractors - some very stable, some not so stable. Yes in some cases there might be just two of them but in the general case there might be many semi-stable attractors. In all dimensions: perception, consciousness, personality etc.
Nice, Brynes' is the clearest, sanest, most thorough piece I've seen written about the sort of thing a rationalist can expect to learn through 1k hours meditating. Super cool that enlightenment does seem to be only one of many possible deliberate changes in self model. Someday we'll have a transition graph showing all of them, and chart the easiest paths to enlightenment (and the other good ones)? Set up coin-and-cups style tricks to convince people they're the 17th Dalai Lama?
I've always wondered if it's possible to "realize" that the true nature of reality is boundless hatred, that all phenomena emerge from the unity of emptiness and malevolence. Not worth running the experiment.
This is all very plausible, but there's a meta-physical problem in the middle of it. If the self is perceived as a homonculous, but this is an illusion because we can 'flip' our perceptions and perceive ourselves as controlled by a hypnotist or a divine being--who is doing the perceiving? Which part of the mind is doing the 'flipping?' Because that looks an awful lot like a deliberate decision of the conscious self.
The conscious self doesn't have to have free will (whatever you think that means) in order to be "real." It just has to be self-conscious. Just because elements of the self perception can be illusory doesn't mean it has to be all illusory. *Something* is experiencing the illusion. That something understands that it possess (perhaps is made out of) a unique point of view.
You can know that your experiences are real because you are experiencing them. They are *subjectively true* because no one else can experience them , but to you they are just a real as any part of objective reality (the part other people can see).
If the self is an illusion, so is everything. If anything is real, so is the self.
Flipping the staircase and waiting for my brain to revert in an instant is deliriously fun.
I do love the "here's a very obvious philosophical point" disclaimers in front of something that is not at all obvious until you've spent some time thinking about it....
Scott, have you read Hanson's and Simler's "The Elephant in the Brain"? Their main thesis, that the brain engages in strategic self-deception, seems at the same time obvious and obscure, even in the ratsphere, something I continue to be baffled about. It also fits nicely into the "homunculus" model.
Impro is important, albeit maybe for different reasons. Ages ago, when Robin Hanson reviewed it at OB, it was when the idea of social status "really" clicked for a lot of us spectrumy types. We were looking for some objective metric, such as money and academic ranking. The book really helped with understanding that status is in the tiny details of everyday interactions. Example you go to a cafe, and order coffee from the waiter, you are on a slightly taller horse and the waiter is on a slightly smaller horse. Then you ask for a small favour like directions to the nearest pharmacy and then you switch places.
I'm guessing this probably is missing the deeper point being made here, but I think the whole "homunculus model" is deeply confused and based on a straw man of how (most?) people actually experience selfhood.
As far as I can tell, the "homunculus model" was invented by Daniel Dennett as a way of ridiculing (what he thought was) the typical conception of the "self" in the brain. His point was that, if there was a "homunculus" in the brain looking at all the different inputs, this "homunculus" would also need a brain processing inputs, resulting in an infinite regress. But as far as I can tell, no serious thinker has ever actually proposed a model like this, and - at the very least - it doesn't represent how (most) ordinary people actually conceive of or experience themselves.
I think Scott's description of the mind as an "imaginary space" more closely approximates how the average person experiences themselves, but I would insist that the average person does not experience a separate "self" that looks at and/or controls the mind. Instead, the average person experiences themselves as *being* their own mind (or perhaps some combination of their mind and body). And as far as I can tell, there hasn't been any major thinker in western philosophy (more on this next paragraph) that has ever advocated a distinction between the mind and the self in the way that the homunculus model implies.
The reason I know this is because, about 6 and a half years ago, I ran into a post (I think it was actually on the old SSC blog) that quoted someone talking about an eastern (I think Indian) model of consciousness, where the "self" is considered a separate entity from the mind, that observes/controls the mind. The whole point of this theory/model was that it was counterintuitive: most people don't experience a distinction between mind and self like this, and it requires meditation in order to "see the truth" of it. After reading this, I experienced a "flip" in my experience of myself that mirrored this mind-self distinction (I felt like I was "observing my own thoughts" from a distance), which caused me a great deal of distress because it was so far away from how I had experienced myself for the majority of my life. It took about two months to piece back together my default intuitive model, and even then it was unstable for a while. (I had experienced a similar "flip" several years before, but this was before I had heard about this eastern/Indian theory, so I didn't have much of a reference point for it and it went away fairly quickly).
I think the way most people experience themselves is closer to the "imaginary space" model, with the "self" just being that imaginary space itself - or perhaps, the entire experiential field as a whole, including external and bodily perceptions. This is much closer to the "god's eye view" perspective, with the caveat that perhaps the average person does feel themselves having more control over their own mental/experiential processes than they actually do (as mentioned in the "Buddhist enlightenment" section above). I think it's the sense of *control* - rather than the sense of having a homunculus inside you - that's crucial here. (I have less of a sense of what Buddhists mean by "no-self" - to me, the "sense of self" is along the lines of all of my experiences being on the same "channel" or "frequency", and I'm not sure how meditation is supposed to make that go away.)
It is interesting that the bi-stable images are seen as limitations of the human brain, rather than strengths. Being able to see the world from two perspectives more often than not allows you to make better decisions than if you only saw it as it actually was.
It is also interesting that you didn't mention schizophrenia and its inability to detect bi-stable images, which you have mentioned before.
> The train is either going into the tunnel, or coming out of the tunnel. You can make it switch by quickly moving your eyes either left-to-right or vice versa, or by thinking very hard about the train going in or out.
I find it easier to do by just blinking once or twice. This changes the direction almost consistently for me.
Also, is it just me or are some of the optical illusions presented at the start kind of bad (as in: difficult)? I know the stairs one and it usually works for me, but here, I had to actively convince my brain that the green stairs were a live option. 5 seconds of googling gave me a crappy drawing which works better for me: http://www.unterricht.kunstbrowser.de/images/kippfiguer03_460.gif
Also, I couldn't get the cups/plates to flip at all.
Seems like a candidate mechanism for hallucinations based on this is that it is basically a false autocorrection that becomes the model your brain uses. I’m sure someone else has already pointed this out.
I don't find the idea that "thoughts come from nowhere so we're not really in control" a compelling argument. Sam Harris brings that up often, that if you concentrate, you can see that the next thought that pops in your head comes from nowhere. This is supposed to be proof of something, usually that the world is deterministic. I'm not denying that the world is deterministic but if it wasn't and we were in control of our thoughts, how would we expect that experience to change?
Personally, maybe because I'm of this world, but I can't imagine it being different, even if we did have free wiil.
Glad to see the mention of Jaynes at the end. It reminded me of Andrew Cutler's piece (https://substack.com/home/post/p-165631304) on the origins of pronouns. Jaynes might be a little too eager in arguing for a significant difference in consciousness and mental models of the world and self during the Bronze Age, but the linguistic evidence on the origins and spread of the usage of the first person singular "I" around 15k years ago does seem very convincing. Without a linguistic reference to a "self", people only 15k years ago likely really did experience the world completely differently from us. Referring to them as "automata" driven by external forces doesn't seem completely far-fetched.
so lost
Have you read R. Scott Bakker's paper?
https://www.academia.edu/1502945/The_Last_Magic_Show_A_Blind_Brain_Theory_of_the_Appearance_of_Consciousness
Back in the 70’s I was intrigued by the work of Milton Erikson. I read into him extensively. My goal was never to use hypnosis, just to understand how the mind works. I’m sure that much of what he did would be considered highly unethical today. I don’t think he really had a full blown theory of mind, but he was certainly on to something. I trust you are
At least a little familiar with him. I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Brilliant piece. It connected a number of important dots for me. None of it was particularly new information, given my proclivities, but somehow the presentation, in your concise, agile hands, brought me to a flip moment. Satori, regarding the predictive brain and self model. I thank you. Or my homunculus thanks you. Or, well, you are being thanked. Thankfulllness is arising? somewhere, aimed somewhere else?... ah hell.
Thanks.