I live by a couple of (vaguely related) principles:
a) Consciousness is just your brain trying to anticipate the future.
b) Your brain compresses (normalises?) repetition in memories. So even if day to day events happen at normal speed, the years seem to fly by when you reflect on them. If your life seems to be flying-by then maybe you need more novelty.
I always try to see the human brain from an evolutionary perspective.
What the human brain added was a way to simulate other brains, because of growing communication ability for coordination's sake. It's basically a way to recognise smart freeloaders. E.g. men trying to sweet talk a woman for sex (and impregnation). He will make a lot of promises but how surely can you depend on him? It's of vital importance you know so you don't get duped.
So the human brain is an advanced bullshitmeter and bullshitter in an arms race, and this brain simulation machine has all kinds of unexpected side effects. At least, based upon some clues I read from some biologists, I came out on that understanding. If this has some truth, based on the world today, we still can get a lot better at it.
Having a mammalian cortex (or avian cortex equivalent) is what give you the ability the predict. The cortex is the prediction machine - capable of overriding our evolutionary-earlier reactionary behavior with planned behavior based on prediction.
The ability to predict is surely what drove development of the cortex, since the benefits are massive - allows you to know what comes next when you hear the roar of a tiger, or see a poisonous snake, or make a plan, rather than waiting until something bad is actually happening to you.
Parts of our cortex specialized to social behavior would have come later. I doubt bullshit generation/detection would have been a specific driver though! As girls attracted to "bad boys" attest, the urge to merge is far more basic than that.
There's a simpler explanation for time flying by as we get older: the older you are, the smaller a fraction of your total lifespan is represented by a single year. One year is half of a two-year-old's life, but only one eightieth of an eighty-year-old's.
That's not an explanation, because it only makes sense under the unmotivated assumption that the brain measures subjective time as a proportion of lifetime. The brain has no reason to do this.
The brain "searches" through its memory space to find relevant information (dangers, opportunities, rewards).
If we define the perception of time passing through novelty, then there's less novelty the more experiences you have. I think that's an interesting model (if not perfectly accurate).
Likewise, the accumulation of relevant experiences might make time seem to actually pass slower, because you're making more connections at each moment and (arguably, might be false) have a more coherent and active brain -- but if there's less novelty worth remembering, it may appear in retrospect (when you examine your memory) that less (perceptual) time has elapsed for the same wallclock time.
So I think this suggests two kinds of time: instantaneous perceptive time (how much your cognition is active -- for example, it may be near zero during anesthesia) and comparative memory time (how much you judge time intervals from your memory of events).
One interesting example is perhaps when we've had an exciting week and it both seems that a month has elapsed in that week (since so much has happened), and that "time passed so quickly!". The former is explained by comparative memory time; maybe the latter is explained by us simply not thinking about the passage of time at all, and "skipping our clocks" (like forgetting to increment a clock or calendar). This is of course mostly speculation.
Though if I make a stack of boxes the same size the 80th box will be a smaller proportion of the whole stack as is than the 4th box was, yet the individual boxes feel the same size.
Edit: In saying that, if I was looking up at a stack of 80 boxes and someone added another on top it might feel subjectively like the tower was extended by less of an amount than if it was the 3rd box being added.
Our brains typically do judge based on relative change even when it doesn't make a lot of sense - I.e. we'll put more effort trying to save ~$1 on something less than $10 than trying to save $2 or $3 on something that's $100, or $10 on something that's over $1000. The former "feels" like a more significant saving - but a $1 is $1 either way. You can post-rationalise it by saying "but I buy $10 things more often than I do $1000 things", but do you really do 100 times as often?
Also how we perceive time largely depends on how novel and new the experience was. I just got back from an Indian wedding that lasted two days, but felt like a week of time had past since I was experiencing so many new things for the first time.
> a) Consciousness is just your brain trying to anticipate the future.
My personal theory is consciousness is a coalescence of weighted distributions that learn via a closed loop feedback and an injection of true randomness via quantum tunneling. That is, the brain is a mechanism by which true randomness gets turned into a weighted distributions that equate to decisions and actions with a feedback loop. As experiences get encoded as complex neuron paths or "memories" (this includes things like muscle memory, not just what we normally think of as memories), they build stronger paths and more connections, effectively increasing their "weight". This holds true down to how neurons function on an individual level.
Randomness is the basis for all life and seems necessary for there to be any sort of curiosity component to intelligence. At a macro level, it seems to represent breaks in cycles that allow for change. Further, if our own decision making amounts to weighted distributions in neuron paths, how would a brain resolve an equally weighted distribution (no matter how small the chance of that happening is).
Edit: To further explain, I apply the basic principles that govern life to all facets of life, all the way up to the complexities of human society, language, etc.. That is, DNA is a self-replicating system that through randomness was able to build more and more complex organisms over time. It generically represents a way to encode behaviors through time, a necessary subset of which include behaviors for self-replication and resource acquisition (mostly to satisfy the self-replication requirement). On a more complex level, human society is the organism, human language (including speech, writing, visual arts) is the DNA (a means to pass knowledge, behaviors, etc. through time), and humans are the "cells".
Deterministic pseudorandom would also solve these cases, and is not true random.
I'm not saying these cases are pseudorandom (the logistics of having a prng with state apply to biology looks hard), but that it doesn't seem to require true random
Correct! I think that's the question though. Is there true randomness in the system or is it really just playing out based on the laws of physics. I'm more inclined to believe the mechanisms at which randomness gets injected into DNA replication is pseudorandom, but for mental constructs I'm more inclined to believe it's sensitive enough to true randomness.
Hmm, I don't think what I'm saying is the same thing. I'm saying that the behavior of organisms amount to systems with the same function no matter the complexity or timescale. Though to that end, I do consider human society to be an organism of sorts, but beyond that not so much.
Not entirely wrong. I think it's entirely possible for "free will" in the sense that it's normally talked about to not really be a thing. After all, we're taught about "nature vs nurture" in psychology, that is, learned vs inherent behaviors passed through genetics. I think what we call "free will" is itself curiosity manifest from random decision making. The overwhelming vast majority of our decisions are based on learned behaviors though, and decision making itself is known to be a cognitively taxing process; so we're predisposed to routine, simplification, and working with proxies.
Edit: to your point about needing validation: the desire for acceptance is simply put, the desire for a positive feedback response on a personal or societal level. Remember, our brains are big reinforced learning machines and crave feedback as quickly and unambiguously as possible. The desire for acceptance is both a thing that keeps behaviors "in-line" with societal expectations while allowing for changes in those behaviors to shape societal behaviors (and expectations) over generations (time), and therefor make progress, or at least change.
This has been my thought process for a while as well - that the brain amplifies quantum effects and uses them to drive larger processes. It's definitely physically possible - for instance, you could construct a double slit splitter that chooses 0 or 1 using the measurement of the direction a photon takes, and decide whether a train goes left or right based on this. You would be making huge macroscopic changes based on minute quantum effects. Perhaps the brain doesn't work this way, but the point is that it is entirely possible, and not ignorant pseudoscience.
In my experience, such emphasis on quantum phenomena tends to be the motivated reasoning of free will compatibilists: they hope to preserve the intuitive idea of free will by looking at what corners of non-determinism still remain in modern physics, emphasising any possible connection to the macro-scale mind, however tenuous. It's analogous to the God of the Gaps argument. [0]
Even assuming quantum phenomena are central to the brain's workings, the arguments still fail: you have no control over the quantum phenomena in your brain, so you still don't have free will in the naïve intuitive sense.
I see even less connection between quantum phenomena and consciousness. Consciousness need not depend on free will.
I agree that some people think this way, but not I. I don't even believe there is a "you" to have free will. Who has control over anything in their brain? They are their brain.
I'm just thinking that perhaps there is a possibility that the brain evolved to take advantage of quantum phenomena to increase capability.
That would assume that randomness is the only quantum property that the brain would use. The possiblity of quantum computation demonstrates that there is more that could he possible.
Your earlier comment certainly appeared to be suggesting the brain uses quantum phenomena as an RNG. Are you instead suggesting the brain is a quantum computer?
The purpose of the example in my first comment was to show that quantum phenomena can influence macroscopic phenomena, not as an example of an RNG. It was probably a bad choice as everyone took it to mean an RNG. Quantum phenomena are not needed for this.
Does it have to be random? There must be some value besides randomness that can be derived from quantum effects, else why would all these tech companies invest billions into quantum computing?
Perhaps your bar for "meaningful" is calibrated too high. Perhaps a dog-level of self-reflection is still quite a big deal, when compared to say a fish or whatnot.
Anyway, can you elaborate on why you think dogs ar "clearly" conscious?
> Perhaps a dog-level of self-reflection is still quite a big deal, when compared to say a fish or whatnot.
Fish are probably conscious.
> Anyway, can you elaborate on why you think dogs ar "clearly" conscious?
Unless you think it's ok to torture dogs, you already agree with me that dogs are conscious.
Or, a more philosophical response:
1. I am conscious
2. My consciousness is, broadly speaking, seated in my brain
3. A dogs has a brain broadly similar to my own
4. Dogs respond to stimuli in a way similar to the way I do. Both of us appear to be able to respond to painful stimuli, for instance.
5. It therefore seems reasonable to conclude that the dog is capable of subjective experience such as suffering, i.e. dogs are conscious.
Of course, dogs appear to be much less intelligent, and it doesn't seem justified to assume that dog consciousness is on the same 'level' as human consciousness, whatever that might mean.
This is broadly similar to an argument like anyone who wishes to argue for solipsism needs to explain why they, one human being among billions, are the only one with consciousness.
It takes more than that, I think; I don't think the adaptive digital filters I used to work with long ago were conscious, yet they work by predicting future values of a signal and continuously adjusting their parameters to minimize the mean square error (or some other error measure).
Most of the prediction that's going on in the brain seems to be at an unconscious level, and our conscious mind only seems to be alerted when something unexpected happens, like when you're walking along and suddenly step into a shallow hole you didn't notice: your brain was unconsciously predicting when your foot would hit the ground and something else happened.
Re b) “.. maybe you need more novelty” - do you have kids? Time flies when you have to focus most of your efforts on someone else than yourself, even if every day is something new.
Yeah, the "repetition is what makes time go faster" thing never made much sense to me. Few parts of my life have involved more day-to-day sameness and as rigid a schedule as high school. Should have felt fast, right? Nope, felt slow as hell. The less-repetitive summers? Felt about the same speed (so, seemed nice and long—now I blink and it's like "oh shit, the leaves are falling? I meant to plant some tomatoes...").
Meanwhile, the very-novel first few years with kids seemed to go by in a flash. A month feels about a week long to me, now, and has for years.
For me the effect seems disconnected from circumstances, but connected to age—years had been feeling subjectively shorter for quite a while before I had kids, even, and they seemed to just be "getting shorter" as I got older, period, no relation to what's going on.
very good point. It's an important distinction to make and a first step in formally defining what is meant by "consciousness". Some people mean consciousness as in "I become unconscious when I sleep or faint" some as in "I exist, I am" others as a prerequisite for free will. As with many things, trying to define the concept helps understand it
a) Consciousness is just your brain trying to anticipate the future.
b) Your brain compresses (normalises?) repetition in memories. So even if day to day events happen at normal speed, the years seem to fly by when you reflect on them. If your life seems to be flying-by then maybe you need more novelty.