
A man who can read letters but not numbers exposes roots of consciousness - gumby
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/07/mysterious-case-man-who-can-read-letters-not-numbers-exposes-complex-roots
======
unclesaamm
The last paragraph surprised me even though it shouldn't have. It's shocking
to have a clever scientific story suddenly grounded in the reality that this
person is rapidly dying. In some sense he has donated his body to science even
before he died.

~~~
ketzo
It was pretty jarring. You’re reading along, fascinated if you’re me, then
jarringly reminded of the fact that this was a human being, not a Petri dish.
Empathy’s gotta be one of the most important skills for an experimental social
psychologist.

~~~
chki
>Empathy’s gotta be one of the most important skills for an experimental
social psychologist.

Or maybe the exact opposite? I would find it very hard to do research and
empathize with the subject of my research at the same time.

This has also just made me realized that this problem with empathizing with my
research is actually highly problematic when it comes to the research I am
actually doing at the moment.

~~~
correnos
An EMT friend described her take as, you need empathy in order to help people,
but you need to be able to switch it off because sometimes what you're about
to do is going to hurt them.

It's like any of our instinctual responses. Sometimes it helps, sometimes it's
in the way.

~~~
KozmoNau7
It's not really switching it off as such, it's more that you have to "long-
term empathize" with the person you're helping.

Setting a broken bone or popping a joint back in to place will hurt right now,
but the consequences of _not_ doing it will hurt the person a lot more over
time. So you do inflict pain on them right in the moment, which is certainly
unpleasant to do, but in the hope that the overall pain and discomfort for
them will be significantly lessened.

At least that's how a friend of mine (former firefighter) put it.

------
neom
As someone with really bad dyslexia and dyscalculia I can't say I'm
particularly surprised. I've done a lot of research on what neurologic
differences are present and they're fairly interesting:

[http://www.neuroanatomy.wisc.edu/selflearn/Dyslexia.htm](http://www.neuroanatomy.wisc.edu/selflearn/Dyslexia.htm)

[https://www.brainfacts.org/archives/2011/dyslexia-and-the-
br...](https://www.brainfacts.org/archives/2011/dyslexia-and-the-brain-today)

~~~
joshspankit
Would you be interested in adding what you’ve learned to the discussion here:
[https://www.kialo.com/our-perception-as-humans-is-not-
necess...](https://www.kialo.com/our-perception-as-humans-is-not-necessarily-
the-same-as-any-other-human-30317?path=30317.0~30317.1) ?

------
pulkitsh1234
Somehow this is not surprising for me, I have heard about experiments related
to free-will wherein the brain already made a decision even before the
conscious mind became aware of it. Thus putting doubts on our conscious
experience of free-will.

Also, in terms of problem solving, there are experiments which show that the
brain calculates the answers and "presents" the answers later on to the
consciousness. It's not like the problems were solved within the scope of
consciousness, which is of course contradictory to what we experience. We feel
the contradictions because we experience everything through consciousness,
i.e. we can't experience things which happen outside realm of consciousness.
The brain scans prove in a sense that there is a disconnect (For instance in
this article the brain scans showed signals related to seeing faces in the
numbers, but the conscious experience was not seeing them).

The link between what the brain does, and what we experience (consciousness)
is indeed the hard problem of consciousness.

~~~
akiselev
All of the research you describe can be safely bundled into the same category
as "dead salmon shows brain activity on an fMRI if you squint hard enough."
It's phrenology for the 21st century, except with dyes and MRIs instead of
head shaped calipers.

The second you say the words "conscious mind", you leave the realm of science.
At best, "consciousness" is an abstraction used by psychiatrists and laypeople
over much deeper, more complex, and less understood concepts in neuroscience.
The field has yet to differentiate the roles neural plasticity plays between
newborns, the average college student, and brain trauma victims - let alone
grapple with the implication that our brains are the result of a billion years
of evolution.

The nature of human intelligence is far wilder than you or I can imagine,
Horatio, but publish-or-perish cannon fodder is clearly not the answer.

~~~
hackinthebochs
I'm struggling to come up with something more substantive to say in response,
but this is a bad take and it needs to be said. Studies that demonstrate high
level brain activity without the corresponding conscious experience are
important in that they help to constrain where and how conscious experience is
generated. Platitudes about human intelligence have no utility here.

~~~
collyw
> conscious experience is generated

Is there any evidence that it is generated?

~~~
hackinthebochs
It seems to come and go with life, wakefulness, blows to the head, etc. It can
be modulated through stimulating brain cells or destructive damage. Yes,
there's a lot of evidence that the brain generates consciousness.

------
Xenograph
> In contrast, when shown numbers with embedded faces, the number’s effect
> apparently swamped that of the face: RFS reported seeing neither; everything
> looked like spaghetti. Yet an EEG still showed the characteristic N170 spike
> for registering faces. Somehow, his brain was still processing and
> identifying a face—a fairly high-level skill—even though his conscious mind
> was oblivious. This deficit shows high-level cognitive processing and
> consciousness are distinct, Koch says. “You can get one without the other.”

I think this misses another possibility besides "cognitive processing and
consciousness are distinct".

Namely, "the part of them that is conscious of the cognitive processing is not
well-connected to the part of them that is generating speech and controlling
their motor systems."

~~~
User23
Makes me think of this silliness I saw today:
[https://mobile.twitter.com/BFriedmanDC/status/12892831187305...](https://mobile.twitter.com/BFriedmanDC/status/1289283118730534912)

I recommend first watching it with you eyes closed and after that seeing how
you can manipulate your perception. It was easy to hear “brain needle” with my
eyes closed.

~~~
Johnjonjoan
Whichever word I repeated in my head as I heard it was what I heard even if
looking at another. I could easily and reliably make it change between
brainneedle, brainstorm, greenneedle and greenstorm using this method.

Edit: kind of think this is to do with the n at the start of needle being
implicit as you already get the n sound at the end of green and brain. I think
if you register another n the remaining sound sounds most like eedle and if
you don't the remaining sound sounds most like storm... Or I may have listened
to this too many times

------
Camillo
If he had simply lost the ability to recognize the glyphs for 2-9, he would
have still seen their shapes, and he could have learned them again, just as he
learned new glyphs for them.

What seems to be happening here is a sort of crosstalk or feedback. His brain
is still recognizing the glyphs, but those neurons are sending unwanted
signals elsewhere in his visual cortex which scramble the perceived image.

My interpretation of this case is that the image we perceive consciously is a
combination of the raw visual data and various recognition modules, so that we
don't just perceive "a curved line crossing back on itself in the lower right
of the image" plus "the abstract notion of the number 8", but we see the
number 8 localized where the line forming it is. Same with any other symbols,
objects, faces etc.

Because of this, the neurons that represent the conscious perception of a
certain section of the visual field must receive both "low-level" information
(the curves forming the digit, their color, the color of the background), but
also "mid-level" recognition output ("the digit 8"). So if the neuron(s)
recognizing the 8 act up and send scrambled signals, they can scramble the
whole conscious perception of the corresponding area of the visual field. The
fact that it also disrupts his conscious perception of faces overlying the
digit confirms this.

~~~
jamiek88
Interesting.

The way we can do captchas suggests you may be on to something there.

------
asab
I have also seen this example, where a man blinded by strokes still avoids
obstacles and recognizes emotions, without any conscious awareness[1]. Is this
the same phenomenon?

[1]
[https://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/23/health/23blin.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/23/health/23blin.html)

~~~
namenotrequired
It is the phenomenon called blindsight, mentioned in this article. (Edit: but
not explained, so your question is reasonable)

~~~
au8er
From what I recall in my neuroscience class, this is likely to be caused by
damage to the visual cortex, which is used to consciously process visual
information, but not the superior colliculi, which is used to unconsciously
process peripheral vision. This is caused by damage to one of the visual
processing regions but not others.

From the article, it appears something similar has happened. Corticobasal
syndrome potentially killed off some brain cells but not others, leading to
damage at some areas but not others.

------
kovac
I don't understand how these experiments lead to the conclusion separates
higher cognitive functions from consciousness. I fact I don't see anything
that necessarily she'd any light into the roots of consciousness here. Can
someone explain how the results of the experiment lead to that conclusion?
This looks to me like, if it were a computer program, encoding/decoding of the
symbols seems to be messed up for a largely contiguous block of symbols. Like
you get jumbled up weird shapes when you feed the wrong encoding to a program.

~~~
didibus
That he could identity people, without being aware of it.

Basically, if there were faces inside a number, the EEG showed that his brain
recognized the faces, but he did not know there were faces, instead he
couldn't understand what he was seeing.

So the hypothesis conclusion from this is, recognizing someone's face happens
separately from consciousness.

Basically, the experiment appears to show that your brain can recognize faces,
without letting your conscience know about it. So you can't tell the face is
there, but other part of your brain can.

~~~
Sharlin
But that seems fairly obvious, at least to me. Face recognition seems to be an
extremely fundamental capability that has probably existed in some form almost
as long as brains and image-forming eyes themselves. In RFS’s case, his
brain’s ”face module” spotted the faces, his damaged ”number module” couldn’t
converge to anything useful, and the jumbled mess for whatever reason overrode
the faces in higher-level perception fusion processes. Possibly because the
faces were so small so were lost in the noise, so to speak. Would be
interesting to know how RFS would have perceived a face with small numbers
drawn on it.

In any case, it is pretty well understood that our conscious visual perception
is almost entirely unlike the raw stream of nerve signals emitted by the
retina. We’re completely unaware of the huge amount of filtering, denoising,
smoothing, stabilization, spatiotemporal fusion, extrapolation, interpolation,
object
detection/classification/conceptualization/contextualization/prioritization,
and other processing that is done to create what we consciously perceive.

~~~
didibus
> But that seems fairly obvious, at least to me

There's many things that grow from prior knowledge as theories and hypothesis.
So maybe from what we already know for the brain, you theorized that the
conscious brain plays no role in recognizing faces, yet science needs to
validate hypothesis with experimental proof. This is one such experimental
data point that seem to validate that theory. I'm not sure we should start to
dismiss the scientific process from what we consider obvious or not. Many
prior "obvious" things were false, so obviousness isn't good enough in my
opinion.

> In any case, it is pretty well understood that our conscious visual
> perception is almost entirely unlike the raw stream of nerve signals emitted
> by the retina

For me, the more interesting bit is more with regards to the limits of
consciousness. In this case, it seems no amount of conscious effort trying to
see and make sense of what you're seeing can actually unscramble what you're
seeing. The experiment seem to indicate that the raw stream works as intended,
demonstrated by being able to see the shape when rotated 90 degree, but that
there is another part in the brain responsible for turning the raw shapes and
colors into abstract cognitive information such as it being the number 8 or a
face. And that this part is not controlled by consciousness.

Thus it shows that some high level cognitive tasks, like visual pattern
recognition are seperate from consciousness. And this isn't something I would
have necessarily assumed. Maybe I would have when it comes to really raw low
level visual signals, like putting color labels to the wave length information
of light, but when it comes to labeling an abstract concept, such as something
being a number or a face, I'd have thought that some part of conscious
thinking would be involved.

------
leonidasv
This has some implications for artificial general intelligence. If
consciousness does not automatically emerge from some sufficient high
cognitive processing skills, those sci-fi super-human AI may never arrive.

Anyway, I feel sorry for this patient. This must be a tough disease to die
with.

~~~
perl4ever
It's increasingly looking like there are deep biological reasons for
expressions like "gut instinct". There are a lot of neurons in the digestive
system. A recent paper[2] appeared to show that the fundamental purpose of
sleep is to regulate reactive molecules in the digestive system. Another item
I saw in quanta, [or somewhere else][0], described how gut bacteria have a
direct link to the vertebrate brain and immune system.

So my modest proposal is that if we want AGI, we need to figure out how to
implement a digestive system in silico.

[0] [https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/09/your-gut-directly-
co...](https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/09/your-gut-directly-connected-
your-brain-newly-discovered-neuron-circuit)

[1][https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-microbiomes-affect-
fear-2...](https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-microbiomes-affect-
fear-20191204/)

[2][https://www.quantamagazine.org/why-sleep-deprivation-
kills-2...](https://www.quantamagazine.org/why-sleep-deprivation-
kills-20200604/)

~~~
hackinthebochs
>So my modest proposal is that if we want AGI, we need to figure out how to
implement a digestive system in silico.

The problem is that whatever function digestion provides to the mind must do
so through modulating neural signals. That is, its influence is purely
functional in nature. Thus we can replicate its influence without replicating
digestion, e.g. simulate the dynamics of the vagus nerve. There is nothing
_essential_ about digestion to consciousness.

~~~
perl4ever
The last sentence is a bit facetious.

~~~
hackinthebochs
With various embodied cognition or extended mind theses floating around, can't
be too sure :)

------
henriquemaia
> Somehow, his brain was still processing and identifying a face—a fairly
> high-level skill—even though his conscious mind was oblivious.

I'm maybe wrong about this, but isn't the ability to recognize faces a fairly
low-level skill? Case is point being other social animals having it, like
apes, monkeys, or even sheep [1] (who can even recognize human faces [2]).

So maybe they're here referring to the ability of seeing representations of
faces (little faces on the letters). Or is this just a blunder of the person
who wrote the sciencemag article?

[^1]
[http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/1641463.stm](http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/1641463.stm)
[^2] [https://www.bbc.com/news/science-
environment-41905652](https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-41905652)

~~~
macleginn
There is a difference between “low level” and “human specific”. Faces are
highly complex geometrically, while numbers, such as 8, are simple. Animals
sure can recognise simple shapes ([https://docsmith.co/2007/01/can-animals-
recognize-shapes/](https://docsmith.co/2007/01/can-animals-recognize-
shapes/)), but they cannot endow them with abstract meanings, such as "number
8". The person in the article lost the basic ability of recognising very
simple shapes while still being able to recognise more complex shapes, like
faces, and to operate with abstract concepts.

~~~
mantap
Babies can recognise faces so I would definitely class it as low-level.
Anything you can do as a baby is low-level.

High-level are things like reading and writing that are learned rather than
evolved.

~~~
henriquemaia
Good point. So whoever wrote that got it wrong, right?

------
djhaskin987
> That he could still interpret letters, Schubert says, lends support to the
> idea that the brain has a specialized module for processing numbers.

This makes a lot of sense to me. I have almost no trouble at all remembering
long strings of numbers, but I have the opposite problem with names. I cannot
remember names to save my life unless I use them on a daily basis. I feel like
this is a flip-flop from how most people process information. It seems to me
that lots of people are very very good at remembering names and have a hard
time remembering numbers. some people look at me offended when I forget their
name as if the only reason I would ever forget their name was because I didn't
like them. It's very embarrassing. When I show I can remember numbers or lines
of code just by looking at them once, people are amazed but then move on.

~~~
randcraw
I too. If a name is unfamiliar to me, even if it's no more than 5-6 letters
long, I can't for the life of me recall it. But I can remember random
sequences of numerals up to length 12. Why?

I wonder if there's some term for this malady, like 'literophasia' or
'numeraphilia'? I wonder too if it occurs equally as often in both genders. I
would guess not.

~~~
djhaskin987
To add some color to this, if it's a common name it's really hard to remember
but if it's a foreign name to me or something I've never heard of, it's as if
my brain thinks it's a random sequence of sounds and I'll remember it forever.
Indian names, native Hawaiian names, no problem, but forget about it if your
name is George. It's just the common names I'm used to that I have a hard time
with.

~~~
isoprophlex
Second that, i have that with organic chemicals.

Diazabicycloundecene, sure, used it once, will remember it forever.

Oh nice to meet you George, what was your name again?!

------
surround
This reminds me of two mind-boggling discoveries I’ve had about the human
mind.

The first is that the two halves of your brain act somewhat independently. And
in rare cases, people’s left and right halves are “split” apart, and they act
_entirely_ independently - e.g. their left and their right hands will act
separately, or even argue with each other. CGP Grey made a great video about
this:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfYbgdo8e-8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfYbgdo8e-8)

The other is that most people have a “voice” inside their head - e.g. when
they read, they hear their own voice inside their head reading; their thoughts
are like sentences they “hear;” they could look in the mirror have a
conversation with themselves. Some ~10% of people do not have this internal
monologue.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22193451](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22193451)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11162927](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11162927)

------
aaron-santos
> eventually mastered an entirely new digit system (where ⌊ stood for 2, ⌈ for
> 8, etc.)

Why invent a specialized number system? How difficult would it have been to
teach him Chinese numerals for example.

Also very curious on his perception of Roman numerals.

~~~
henriquemaia
Brilliant. Roman numerals are, after all, just letters. The "why haven't they
used them?" becomes pretty jarring once you think about it.

~~~
Sharlin
Roman numerals are not a place-value system and you can’t make a computer use
Roman numerals just by switching to a custom font.

~~~
scatters
OpenType font shaping is shockingly powerful
([e.g.]([https://blog.janestreet.com/commas-in-big-numbers-
everywhere...](https://blog.janestreet.com/commas-in-big-numbers-
everywhere/\))), so I'd be surprised if someone hasn't made a Roman numeral
font already.

~~~
Sharlin
Heh, I knew I should have said something about OpenType shenanigans :)

------
seemslegit
Something that is (crucially) missing from the article but appears in the
paper: his ability to read words describing numbers like "five" remains in
tact, and so is his ability to read Roman numerals.

------
maxkwallace
[https://www.livescience.com/nueroscience-patient-who-can-
not...](https://www.livescience.com/nueroscience-patient-who-can-not-see-
numbers.html)

^ This article (reporting on the same research) seems to be a bit better.

~~~
andai
Maybe so, but the ads were so annoying I couldn't keep reading. It was almost
comical how they kept popping up every few seconds, like some kind of parody.

Fortunately, [https://outline.com/5nJgjL](https://outline.com/5nJgjL)

Curiously this article presents a different hypothesis about why he is able to
read 0 and 1:

> It's also "surprising" that his brain doesn't have problems with "0" and
> "1," McCloskey added. It's not clear why, but those two numbers might look
> similar to letters like "O" or "lowercase l," he said. Or those two numbers
> might be processed differently than other numbers in the brain, as "zero
> wasn't invented for quite a long time after the other digits were," he said.

~~~
Camillo
> Or those two numbers might be processed differently than other numbers in
> the brain, as "zero wasn't invented for quite a long time after the other
> digits were," he said.

Come on, that's just silly. What are they even suggesting here? Zero is
encoded in a different area of RMS's brain because he learned it as an adult,
after its invention under the Nixon administration?

Also from that page: "The group of researchers created new digits for RFS
which they called "surrogate digits" so that he could use them in daily life."

That's just not some sort of new jargon, it's what the word surrogate means!
How does someone end up writing for a living without learning how to use a
dictionary?

------
whoisjuan
> 0 and 1 looked normal—perhaps because those digits resemble letters

Or perhaps this is proof that we live in a simulation that is written in
binary.

------
eivarv
How is "cognition != consciousness" surprising, especially given the (now old)
fMRI studies complicating (our experience of) free will?

Why would one assume awareness and processing abilities to be related, if
there is no evidence for it?

------
dandare
As a software developer I imagine the brain not as some separated layers but
as a huge collection of routines/procedures, for this or that (including
procedure for understanding numbers), interconnected with a spaghetti code of
links. Many of these processes specialise in making decisions and calling
other processes. One specialised procedure is called the consciousness, it is
blind to the rest of the processes and it is tricked into believing that it
does all the calculations while it merely reads the results from other
processes.

Also, I highly recommend the book The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker.

~~~
pessimizer
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epiphenomenalism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epiphenomenalism)

Read Patricia Churchland instead:)

------
Marsymars
Reading is weird.

I've never had migraines, but a few years ago suddenly, and briefly, lost the
ability to read and write. After a number of doctors and tests ruling out a
TIA, best guess is one-time transient aphasia from a migraine aura.

~~~
stordoff
Migraines in general are weird. It's rare[1], but I can occasionally tell when
a severe migraine is about to occur because rooms feel too big. I walked into
my bathroom a few days ago (which is about 2mx2m/6'x6'), and each wall seemed
about 2 feet longer than it should, and the far corner looked about 3 feet too
far away (it was more a feeling than a visual disturbance - it's hard to
describe). I felt _small_, which is a really odd feeling when it comes on
suddenly. About an hour later, I had a severe migraine.

I'm assuming it's a subtle form of Alice in Wonderland syndrome[2].

[1] I get regular migraines, but I can only remember this happening a few
times, possibly because it's fairly subtle

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_in_Wonderland_syndrome](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_in_Wonderland_syndrome)

~~~
jimmaswell
I've never had a migraine but I've definitely had that feeling like the room
was too big. I think it only happened once or twice as a kid from a fever or
something.

~~~
TeMPOraL
I had that as a kid for a while; when it reached its peak, I ended up in
hospital with meningitis. From that period, I distinctively remember feeling
small and the room walls and ceiling receding somewhat, and also some weird
stuff with colors - I could focus on the visual noise I saw (kind of like the
noise you get in a digital camera in low-light condition), and focusing on
that would trigger the feeling of the world expanding / me shrinking. All of
this only happened at night.

------
chiefalchemist
Just to clarify a bit, it's possible he can't communicate thoughts about
numbers. That's a different perspective than can't read them.

I say this because my father had a stroke ~3 years ago. It compromised him
significantly. He definitely can communicate the way he used to. But one of
the patterns we've seen is he can have a thought, but he can't communicate it.
He tries but it doesn't come out. I haven't recognized it's specific like the
man in the article. But I wanted to mention that processing and communication
are two seperate steps.

------
sradman
The original paper _Lack of awareness despite complex visual processing:
Evidence from event-related potentials in a case of selective metamorphopsia_
[1] is not as Freudian as the article about “consciousness”:

> How does the neural activity evoked by visual stimuli support visual
> awareness? In this paper we report on an individual with a rare type of
> neural degeneration as a window into the neural responses underlying visual
> awareness. When presented with stimuli containing faces and target
> words—regardless of whether the patient was aware of their presence—the
> neuro-physiological responses were indistinguishable. These data support the
> possibility that extensive visual processing, up to and including activation
> of identity, can occur without resulting in visual awareness of the stimuli.

[1]
[https://www.pnas.org/content/117/27/16055](https://www.pnas.org/content/117/27/16055)

------
badrabbit
Silly question: how do they know he isn't lying?

~~~
Nextgrid
I read the paper and they address that point by saying that they don’t see any
benefit he would gain from lying.

~~~
badrabbit
Attention or maybe out of some psychological trauma he started lying to
himself about this particular issue.

------
TwoBit
I knew an older woman who had a hard time remembering freeways by their
numbers but could remember them all by their names (e.g. "Santa Ana" freeway
instead of "5"). That seemed odd because to me the number was the name, so why
be any different?

~~~
bitbckt
They weren’t always numbered. Up north, there are still people who refer to
Highway 40 as Lincoln Highway.

I’ve heard a couple of LA natives say that’s an explanation for SoCal’s
affinity for calling them “the 5”: they switched from “the Santa Ana”.

~~~
war1025
> there are still people who refer to Highway 40 as Lincoln Highway

This is interesting to me because here in Iowa, the Lincoln Highway is "old
Highway 30". In the 60s they rerouted Hwy30 about a mile south of the existing
Lincoln Way so they could make it 4 lane and avoid towns.

~~~
war1025
In case it wasn't obvious from my post above, the Lincoln Highway referred to
in both my post and the parent post is the same highway [1].

The part I thought was interesting is I assumed it would have the same number
designation across the entire nation, but that doesn't appear to be the case.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln_Highway](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln_Highway)

------
stormdennis
When they gave him the foam 8 he didn't recognize it and they speculated it
was because the brain prioritised sight over the sense of touch. Surely they
tried the same experiment after asking him to close his eyes first?

~~~
ketzo
Oh man, I wonder what he pictured in his head if he tried to picture an 8
instead of read one? Nothing? Squiggles? Headache?

Honestly, I could ask a billion more questions about this situation. So
fascinating.

~~~
Nextgrid
I would’ve asked him to _draw_ digits, potentially with his eyes closed, to
see if he still has a representation of the shape of digits in his mind.

~~~
rini17
I believe that's the actual drawing next to the digit 8?

------
kebman
I think it was on this site that someone posted the very interesting
perspectives on consciousness by Roger Penrose.[2] From that I found this
video by Dr. Stuart Hameroff, M.D.: Microtubules & quantum consciousness.[1]
Higly recommended.

[1]:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5DqX9vDcOM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5DqX9vDcOM)

[2]:[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXgqik6HXc0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXgqik6HXc0)

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sangfroid_bio
A real life Flowers for Algernon :(.

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peter303
Letters are phonograms with strong clues about pronunciation. Numerals are
pure ideograms with no clue about pronunciation. Modern English is a mix of
phonograms and ideograms, with more of the former. Its very likely they
trigger different subsystems of the brain. And in this case the ideogram
subsystem was defective.

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luizfzs
The post only mentions recognizing letters and digits, but no mention of the
subject actually writing them. Since the subject was an engineer, maybe
writing numbers would be a sort of mechanical thing, that could bypass that
limitation? That would've been a nice addition to this study.

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dreamcompiler
The SF novel Blindsight by Peter Watts explores the idea of aliens that are
cognizant but not conscious. Fascinating book.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight_(Watts_novel)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight_\(Watts_novel\))

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Symmetry
Blindsight was a well crafted book but it sort of underplayed the benefits
that consciousness gives us. We're bombarded by a huge number of sensory
impressions at any given time. The unconscious parts of our brain do a huge
amount of work in processing it and figuring out which bits are important. But
without consciousness to synchronize, serialize, and persist it then all that
information will just fade away within a few seconds. To remember something,
or talk about it, or engage in multi-step planning regarding it you need to be
consciously and not subliminally aware of it.

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rini17
Perhaps the coherently serialized stream of qualia isn't the only possible way
to intelligence?

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Symmetry
Oh clearly not, GPT-3 clearly produces fairly intelligent responses but by the
mechanisms that in a human would be pure reflex. And your unconscious reflexes
can produce responses that can be relatively intelligent at times. It's just
that creates with brains that evolved on Earth need consciousness to remember
anything more than a couple of seconds.

Also, who knows how qualia fit into this, if they exist they might very well
exist for subliminal stimuli too. In the scientific study of consciousness
qualia aren't a part of the paradigm really. And in philosophical
investigations of consciousness don't have subliminal stimuli as part of
_their_ paradigm.

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rini17
And how do you call the stuff which gets filtered by consciousness so that it
can remember more than a couple of seconds? That's what I meant by the qualia.

As an example what I mean and it was recently on HN, too: apparently the
perception of "now" is a hack supported by delays so that input from various
senses is perceived as synchronized even if it does not arrive synchronized to
the brain, plus compensating the temporary blindness while doing saccades.
Aliens could have different "hack" there, resulting in profoundly different
perception of time.

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Symmetry
If you're interested in learning more about how sensory impressions go on to
become conscious awareness, at least so far as we knew 5 years ago, I'd highly
recommend the book _Consciousness and the Brain_.

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hrgiger
Can you relate this with color blindless? Most of time I could swear I could
see that green,orange and red different but somehow my brain refuses to
identify them.

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hnarn
I might be wrong but my understanding was that the cause of color blindness is
an abnormality in the retina, not a neurological condition.

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hackinthebochs
There are definitely cases where color-blindness is caused by a neurological
issues. Strokes can cause temporary or permanent colorblindness, for example.

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Razengan
“Intelligence” is a 100 different little daemons running in tandem.

I’m surprised at how this analogy almost never comes up in a community of
programmers.

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whearyou
I hate to say this, but could he just be lying?

That’s what I worry about when we try to learn a lot about human minds from a
case.

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lisper
I call shenanigans. There is nothing inherently different about numbers and
letters. They are all just abstract shapes. There is no possible way that
evolution could have produced a mechanism that could distinguish between the
two without training.

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Nasrudith
Couldn't the brain damage have essentially caused the state from the training
process for those specific glyphs to fail with "garbage" associations? Thus he
gets disoroentating confusion and reinforced revulsion when he tries to
understand interfering with any occupational therapy to retrain it such that
arbitrary glyphs lacking such associations didn't have those issues.

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lisper
Yes, that's possible. (I actually missed the bit about the brain damage. I
somehow got the impression that article said that he was born with this. I
guess I skimmed too fast.)

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punnerud
Like the Google Translate app that live translates from camera, there could be
developed googles for him that translate everything that looks like 2..9 into
his new representation of numbers.

