
There Is No Such Thing as Conscious Thought - kordlessagain
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/there-is-no-such-thing-as-conscious-thought/
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proc0
Common, this is just semantics.

"I would rather say that consciousness is not what we generally think it is.
It is not direct awareness of our inner world of thoughts and judgments but a
highly inferential process that only gives us the impression of immediacy."

Whatever it is you still can't explain it. End of story.

~~~
teilo
Precisely. Much of what is described as theories of consciousness describe the
mechanics of consciousness, but not the topology of it. It is like describing
how the parts of a machine interact, when we don't know what the parts
actually are made of, or how they are shaped, or how they function or if they
even exist.

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defertoreptar
The article wasn't about this, but the headline reminded me of a conundrum I
first encountered while reading "Permutation City."

The protagonist considers how consciousness can be simulated. Simulated
entities experience subjective time at the same rate, whether their mental
faculties are computed in real-time, or if they are only computed once a day
(which would result in the "outside world" speeding by them, but their
subjective perception of the flow of time never changes).

The protagonist then considers how the same computations could be done on an
abacus by hand, over a long enough time period. The question is then, are the
mechanisms that compute and result in our own consciousness that different
from had someone done it on a computer, or even on an abacus?

~~~
hikarudo
That same question is treated in Herbert Simon's book "The sciences of the
artificial" (1968).

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opless
This seems reasonable at first glance... The brain often makes an observation
that takes too long, and then pretends it knew the results all along. Brain
scans have shown that the decision to do X has happened way before the
awareness of action X has been detected - mostly due to a 'society of mind'.

I don't think the assertions are all correct, in all cases however.

I do think we spend much of our time on a kind of autopilot, where (the bit of
your mind we identify as _you_ ) is essentially a passenger. Our actual
conscious thought is probably much smaller than we'd like to believe.

I'm looking forward to @bencollier49's thoughts/blogpost.

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ArtWomb
Alternatively, ALL matter is conscious. And interstellar motion is guided not
by gravity and dark matter interactions. But by _volition_. With young stars
swerving between trajectories by minded emissions of directional jets ;)

Can Panpsychism Become an Observational Science?

[https://jcer.com/index.php/jcj/article/view/579](https://jcer.com/index.php/jcj/article/view/579)

This comes on the heels of the Free Will debate in neuroscience. Where some
observers decipher the lighting up of a cluster of neurons in an fMRI machine
milliseconds before an action takes place as proof of external determinism. Or
perhaps it is conspiratorial prep for the coming age of state sponsored brain
implants and hive mind mass control.

Regardless debates such as these will become moot once in vivo science of mind
is achieved, perhaps not until century's end. The more interesting questions
in neuroscience tend to be of the form: where do creativity and inspiration
come from? We've all had the experience of focused concentration on a puzzling
problem. Only to have the solution, fully formed, pop into our heads like a
bolt of lighting. Is there some way to fertilize this process? To favor the
probability of discovery.

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swayvil
I always figured that thought occurs by reference.

Like, rather than creating a thought the thought is already there, and then we
refer to it.

A metaphor : You are in a dark room with a flashlight. You direct your
flashlight at a flowerpot. Suddenly you see a flowerpot. But you did not
create the flowerpot it just suddenly became visible.

In my model here the process of thinking consists of a series of changes of
reference. A series of redirections of attention. You observe a thought. You
respond to that thought by directing your attention (much like directing the
beam of a flashlight) at another thought. And so on. An endless chain.

Note that I am a longtime meditation enthusiast so my perspective is abnormal
and weird.

~~~
RichardCA
That's not a metaphor, that's what actually happens.

In order to see a flowerpot your brain has to have a way to connect the image
to something internal. Our brain knows how to do semiotics without our being
conscious of it.

So what we think of as "consciousness" is just our brain processing
information that has a sensory manifestation. Light goes into our eyes, is
processed by our brain, and then we know what's in the room.

But if the lights are turned off in the room, we still now what's in the room.

And we call this capability "consciousness" but that's not what it is.

The difficulty is that any conversation about this topic takes on the
character of a Buddhist riddle. No one knows how to take the next step.

~~~
swayvil
>that's what actually happens.

Oh no, a wild true believer suddenly appears.

JK :)

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Symmetry
I was disappointed to not see any discussion of the thinking that might
plausibly be concious. Yes, most of our "thinking" is instinctive. But we also
have Kannehman's "System 2"[1] which does seem to correspond to what we would
normally consider conscious though. We may "think much less than we think we
think" but that doesn't mean we don't think at all.

This does, in a sense, all boil down to semantics. Poeple can argue for hours
about whether a tree falling in the forest with no one to hear makes a sound
without realizing that they're arguing over the definition of "sound". But the
notion of conscious versus unconscious decisions is a useful one, so given
that we have multiple possible scientific definitions of "consciousness" that
correspond to our traditional conception we might as well pick the one that's
most useful.

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking,_Fast_and_Slow](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking,_Fast_and_Slow)

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joe_the_user
" _The first [theory of the nature of a conscious mind] is what is called the
Global Workspace Theory, which is associated with neuroscientists Stanislas
Dehaene and Bernard Baars. Their theory states that to be considered conscious
a mental state must be among the contents of working memory (the “user
interface” of our minds) and thereby be available to other mental functions,
such as decision-making and verbalization_ "

This seems like an excellent article. Whether you agree with the author or
not, he positions his ideas relative to other thinkers who are positing
broadly verifiable ideas about the nature of consciousness, a subject that can
easily veer off to irrefutable subjective claims.

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_zachs
This makes me want to pick Godel Escher Bach back up, anyone else?

~~~
mehh
It certainly made me think about consciousness being a meta function looking
at the subconscious result. So yeah GEB :)

It may well be the initial decision is subconscious and although we then
(sometimes) inspect it in a meta/conscious way (and recursively if we are
thinking hard), the article is saying we shouldn't confuse the meta process
with the original thought. That original thought is derived in an unknown way.
Its akin to the subsymbolic vs symbolic discussion elsewhere on HN in my
opinion. The unconscious thought being the ANN (subsymbolic part) the meta
function examining that thought and procesing it further being the symbolic
part(consciousness).

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Agebor
This view is quite similar to the theory outlined in "The Mind Is Flat" book:
[https://www.amazon.com/Mind-Flat-Remarkable-Shallowness-
Impr...](https://www.amazon.com/Mind-Flat-Remarkable-Shallowness-
Improvising/dp/030023872X) which I can greatly recommend.

------
carapace
Interesting to cross-pollinate this sort of thing with Michael Levin's work
(that went by a couple of days ago here on HN)
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18700328](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18700328)

"On Having No Head: Cognition throughout Biological Systems"

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eigenspace
Misleading clickbait title. The interviewee is not at all denying the hard
problem of consciousness, he's saying that our conscious experiences are more
disconnected, less informationally dense and that we have less insight into
our experiences than we believe.

This is one of the more annoying things editors do to other people's writing.

~~~
joe_the_user
The interviewee, Peter Carruthers, makes it clear the idea of consciousness
that he is addressing and claiming are false. Not all discussion around
consciousness necessarily references "The Hard Problem". I suspect David
Chalmers and his ideas are more popular in popular discussions than among
other philosophers of the mind.

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Digit-Al
So then, is this a thought provoking article or is there no such thing?

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bencollier49
This is the latest approach to science's complete inability to solve the hard
problem of consciousness. Just declare that it doesn't exist. I think it's
rather pitiful, to be honest.

~~~
eigenspace
I was pretty riled up too when I read the headline, but after reading the
article, I think the interviewee actually has a much more benign view that it
seems. He does not appear to deny the hard problem and indeed the domain of
his claims appear to not even intersect with the hard problem in any real
sense.

It appears to me (correct me if I'm wrong), that he is simply claiming that we
believe we are having much more rich conscious experiences than we actually
are, and that we are often mislead or mistaken about the character of our
experience. As a meditator, I can corroborate these claims.

None of these claims deny the existence of subjective experience itself which
is the basis of the hard problem. He's merely saying that our conscious
experiences are much more disconnected, less informationally dense and less
orderly than we believe.

~~~
whatshisface
> _He 's merely saying that our conscious experiences are much more
> disconnected, less informationally dense and less orderly than we believe._

If there was only one particle in the universe, it wouldn't have a height. I
disagree that the average person has the capacity to be wrong about their
consciousness, because without another one to compare it against they have no
way to form opinions about it.

~~~
eigenspace
A person can't be wrong that they _have_ consciousness, but they can be
mistaken about about the character of their conscious experiences.

We tend to think that we have a very continuous constant stream of attention
and thought but in reality if you learn to pay attention, you'll see that your
mind is pretty erratic and experience is not at all like your memories tend to
represent.

~~~
whatshisface
I don't think most people have a belief about how continuous or erratic their
consciousness is, because the only time words are used to describe things is
when you are distinguishing between more than one thing.

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bflatt72
“So what makes you think that conscious thought isn’t real?”

Haha

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bflatt72
I mean did he come to this conclusion consciously? If conscious thought isn’t
real then why should any of us listen to anything he has to say?

~~~
_Schizotypy
you're misinterpreting the definition of conscious thought given in the
article

