Determinism

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See? And from my perspective, it’s inner world all the way down.

Perceptions are just thoughts with rules attached to them. Memories are just the bounds that restrict your otherwise boundless existence.

You are timeless immortal stuff that has temporarily taken on the shape and frailties of a human, but your being is far more real than the make believe that is atoms and stars and the cosmos.

I mean, sure, you are in a space that requires you to puzzle out how the pieces and parts do what they do, and to figure out how to put them together to make some cool toys, but I think it would be a mistake to believe that you yourself are part of the simulation.

There are universes where there is no observer construct. Those are just math that nobody cares about. Then there are universes where an observer construct has come into existence. Any observer worth it’s salt would almost immediately set about turning its home universe into the most boring space possible while crafting inner worlds where all of the “safe excitement” would be going on. The chances of us being in a top layer observer univers are somewhere near nil… once you accept that, all of the rest of the puzzle pieces kinda just snap into place…

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Oh. I see that we are coming at this from radically different points of view.

Unless I am misunderstanding you - you are starting from the point of view that there is some sort of soul thing that rides a human body like a jockey riding a horse.

This is actually an area of deep interest to me and is a very big part of why I am working in this field. There are several important questions that have to be answered for this soul thing to be true - how does this soul thing interact with a body? How does it exist if it can’t be observed? Read my introduction post to see a few more things on this. At the moment - I have never seen a shred of evidence supporting this concept. I have read several unsuccessful attempts to glean any proof that such a thing may exist.

There is a another possibility - that you are promoting some form of panpsychism. I see this crop up from time to time and there are several serious problems with this - not the least being that there is no line that I have seen that shows how this ties in with the vast body of observations on how consciousness works. It is a sexy theory that explains nothing and offers no testable predictions; in other words - from a scientific sense - useless.

I am starting from the point were we are complicated biological machines that grow into existence and cease to function when you die. The workings of this machine are the all there is and there is nothing more. It does not require any special explanation and fits well with observed physics.

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Look out, we’re converging on the other mega-thread!

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I think you are over complicating consciousness.

If consciousness is the net sum observation of interactions in this universe then human consciousness is a pool of observations that is isolated from the whole and led to believe that it is special.

The form of panpsychism that simply states that energy in this universe exhibits a sense of self awareness adds nothing because it stipulates that there is nothing special about awareness. That you are a swirl of water in an ocean wondering why you’re wet and thinking that somehow your swirliness is responsible for your wetness.

Energy in this universe interacts with energy based on some set of foundational rules. To implement those rules, some foundational sink has to be aware of the parameters of those interactions. Whether those observations are sunk into a massive computational device in some higher order universe or they’ happening in the mind of Cthulhu is immaterial. What matters is that for a brief period your DNA has made a construct that captures a pool of observations to fulfill some purpose. You are only one of several running on your neural network because obviously you are completely unaware of your subconscious brethren (who probably also think they are you proper). Wreck the pool or resolve into an emotional prediction or go to sleep and you disappear. Not to worry though… unless disaster happens, in the morning a new you will be spun up believing that continuity has not been broken. Everyone in this thread wants to build another kind of awareness pool in the form of a computational device that simulates the same kinds of thinking that we do.

By my best measure, when you cease, you go to the same place that MS Word goes to when the machine shuts down… your awareness simply becomes part of the greater awareness within this universe.

Let me ask you this question… how many neural connections must exist between two brains before they become one awareness instead of two?

PS - did you ever consider that maybe the reason there are no useful tests around consciousness is because there is nothing useful (beyond the blatantly obvious related to the functioning of this universe) about consciousness?

PPS - perhaps what confounding the conversation is not awareness but awareness of awareness. An observation of yourself observing rather than a simple first order observation.

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If you google panpsychism criticism you will see thousands of well thought out arguments against it.
I see no value in repeating them here.

I am an engineer. I design circuits and write programs. I can see how to make a system that exhibits the essential features of self-awareness and memory. This is the “upper end” of combining HTM elements and is the overarching goal of my research. This approach mimics the observed mechanisms of the brain and is fully in line with the known physical universe. No special metaphysical explanation is required.

I do not see how to rope in some cosmic property that is consciousness and install that into a machine or even how it might emerge in a living being. If you can describe the implementation in a physical manifestation in a useful way “you do this and that and it will happen” I may see some utility in panpsychism but without some practical application it is just some interesting conjecture; long on generalizations and short on specifics.

“Energy in this universe interacts with energy based on some set of foundational rules” is not a workable explanation - I need usable details. What are the rules and how do you implement them to make them work. Does this have any impact on how you arrange the synapses? What special things do you do with the dendrite processing rules? Does this have anything that has to happen with the cell soma when impulses are processed? Is there some special way you structure the cortex layers or interconnections?

Unless and until these details are provided this concept adds nothing to HTM theory. That is the focus of what we are working on here.

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I think I might be seeing some of the disconnect here… my understanding of the universe sees matter as simply a manifestation of energy interacting with itself. So, I am not contending that matter is conscious so much as all energy displays an awareness of other energy. If you were to imagine a universe with only two photons and those photos were to interact with one another, that interaction would require an awareness of the photos either by the photons or the medium within which they exist. Multiply this by some hundreds of orders of magnitude of energetic interactions and you have a universal general awareness the encompasses and is impacted by all things.

I see consciousness as a structured and isolated pool of that same set of interactions. So, to me the question of building a conscious entity is less about how to bring consciousness about as much as how you isolate interactions from the rest of the universe enough that self-same becomes separate from the rest of the universe.

So, if I’m trying to figure out how neurobiology leads to what we think of as human consciousness, I’d be looking for ways in which neurons isolate interactions from the surrounding environment rather than how they are creating an emergent thing.

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I think I can help you wth that: we call it physics. The interaction of matter is neatly encapsulated in these rules and that builds to the various rules of chemistry and biology.

Once you get a handle on these rules you should be able to see how nerves are triggered to fire - the reaction of some matter and energy to other matter and energy.

From these building blocks you can formulate HTM and other higher level structures that organize these elements into functional systems.

I have offered an arrangement of these systems that form self/awareness or consciousness earlier in this thread - all built with these elements.

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What do you mean by this line? I agree with everything else in your post, but I am puzzled by this.

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In post 87 of this thread I offered:

I outline consciousness here.

This is really the same thing as self-awareness.

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@Bitking my model postulates that your consciousness is time sliced on your brain hardware with subconscious projections of yourself that have access to all of the same memories and experiences and that all believe that they are the “real” you. That the only thing that separates you from them is that you are not activated along the same pathways at the same time and that if such an activation were to occur, the two consciousnesses would merge for a moment and believe that they are one and the same.

How does your model treat subconscious processes and your lack of conscious perception of them? If it’s the hardware and not the activation pattern, then one would assume that you might be conscious of any and all things going on in your brain at all times.

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I’ve got a few thoughts about this “problem”. Since we know nothing about the structure of the universe ( many people sure they are but I really doubt), about how exactly human brain works - let’s start from the result of brain’s work. Result is - our culture, society, communication between people and so on. So - our consciousness is smallest part produced by our brain. Human brain is ancient machine for survival and reproduction, thousand of years passes and our society and culture is getting more complicated, our communication getting much more complicated (I’m talking about 3-4k years BC till now).

So now we dive into psychoanalysis: our consciousness is only few things which float to the surface of what we see, the only things which our inner mechanism allow to appear for successful survival (here I mean not only real SURVIVAL but our adequate interaction with people and society). Other things are hidden but also affect our lives, our decisions and our relations. Superficially and roughly speaking human being has huge amount of unrealised aggression, love, despair, fears, illusions and so on at the same time and the only way to function normally is to block part of it (here I mean things inside which constantly happens without external irritants, is our reaction to irritants are normal under certain circumstances - another huge topic). Which parts are blocking most (or completely) is result of our genetics and childhood and society.

I want to mention separately such a thing as an illusion. It is directly related to the topic under discussion. Illusion is when your expectation from your actions or from external events completely not related to the normal reality. As examples: you think money will make you happier, or another person will make you happier, or if you will know more about how human brain works you will be able to make you happier, or if you build real AI it will solve all the problems of humanity and make you happier, or if you marry (or give a birth to a baby) - it will solve all the problems in relations and make you happier, or if you buy bigger house (car, phone, yacht, plane etc) it will make you more happier. As you can see - illusions are everywhere, in any human action.

So from this perspective I see the next statements:

  1. Everything is predetermined - so we do not have options, we are puppets and we do not have any responsibility for our lives. It makes life easier.
  2. Everything is NOT predetermined - it scares. The responsibility for live and death are terrifying and it’s a reason why first statement more popular.

In reality you can’t claim that everything is determined or not. You just don’t know enough to be sure. Our observations are insufficient, our knowledges are changing every day, and human brain not perfect to make right conclusions about the world.

So I’m thinking that reality is determined and not determined at the same time. We think in stereotypes which has time frames (beginning and end of universe, birth of start and it death, sunrise and sunset and so on) and it’s normal, it’s a reason why we survived - we ( as any other intelligent animals ) understand that any process has initial data and result which determined by this data. And I pretty sure that human brain unable to work in other way.

Sorry for my bad english - I would like to say a lot more, but I can’t.

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I am reasonably familiar with brain mechanisms and topology and don’t see how your proposal might work. Perhaps you can elaborate? References to actual neurological mechanisms would be nice.

I have outlined my dumb boss/smart advisor model in part several times on this forum. Perhaps it’s time to work through a detailed exposition. The dumb boss is the subcortical structures that are the neural correlates of the subconscious.

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I’m working with flawed archetypes, but I’ll give it a shot…

Imagine a grid of neurons representing desires along one axis and time on another. The most important desire is a drive towards continuity. We’ll say that is the simulation of you (and your world) in the present moment, some segments of time forward in time and some segments backwards in time since your last sleep. When the near future segment fires, it applies its desired outcomes to your model of the world and watches what the simulator (the rest of your brain) imagines will happen if it takes some set of actions… lets say the hungry you imagines eating the cake that is on the table… it sends back an emotional signal that the cake was yummy… a moment later, a more distant future you on the grid that represents the desire for self fulfillment sees a future where eating the cake has lead to a breakdown of your diet and sends back a signal that causes you to feel guilt… present moment you gets lit up and rather than experiencing the eating of the cake or the failure of the diet, simply experiences the emotional content of following those points on the grid to their conclusions and you decide that the guilt is not worth the yum…

In essence, by lighting up time slices of “you” that are able to pursue specific wants and are able to send back emotional results before being reset for new simulations, “you” (present moment continuity you) are left as a prioritizer and selector of next self future based on emotional signaling. The catch is that you can’t know whether you are you or you are a future cast because if a future cast is aware of its nature, there is no reason for it to stick to realistic scenarios (as opposed to simply ordering up all cakes all the time)… “You” also have to be limited to only receiving emotional feedback because if you actually spent your time living in those futures, you would likely get eaten by a tiger.

One thing I find funny about the whole system is that it seems that we’re low on archetypes, so we culturally tie certain emotional feedback to body parts… so your heart aches for a lover and your stomach wants the food… you are literally in a constant state of being dragged forward by cables cast by your future simulating selves and trying to decide which cables deserve you following them to their actual conclusions.

I suspect that there are enough connections along an axis of such a grid so that continuity you can potentially see the past and future simulations of other continuity you(s), so that you are able to personally imagine futures and pasts rather than only get emotional signaling from them… but I think the majority of the simulations are inaccessible to “you”.

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None of this matches up with any part of the cortex that I am aware of. Not even a little.
First - mixing high level desires and a “time line” grid don’t really match up with any of the structures I am aware of. This tosses out much of your following description.

The closest mechanism to what you are trying to describe is the passive experience of the single you that is collecting all the perceptions (internal and external) and forming the “here and now” in the temporal lobe. This is the experience of you and there is only the single state that is the present. This is digested to a more compact form and stamped in the hippocampus. As each episode is experienced the emotional subcortical structures overlays that memory with the sensation that the episode was “good” or “bad.” Each day the buffer of these experiences are pushed back onto the cortex during sleep.

There is no time slicing. There is no slices of you.

The weighting of selection for action is the overlap of current needs and perceptions. (internal and external). These perception are an active recall process (memory) of both the external perception and internal recall which also calls up the good/bad weighing on the memory/perception that is being weighed for action selection in the forebrain.

There are no multiple simulations - the closest you get to that is the cycles of action unfolding in the forebrain that is projected to the sensory stream to be perceived just the same way as an external perception. This can trigger new internal action selection and so on. We usually call this thinking.

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I feel like you are completely missing subconscious processes…

For example, you are looking at a table that has cheese and cake on it. You can practically taste the cake in your mouth… who chose to imagine the cake rather than the cheese?

You agree to help your mother-in-law hang curtains, but you only help half heartedly… who’s keeping track of your denial about hating her thereby causing you to be passive-aggressive.

Who is driving the car while you’re imagining the fantastical world being described by the book on tape you’re listening to?

When you’re standing at a high balcony, who’s decision is it to imagine what it would be like to jump?

Who decided to block out that one time when you did something really foolish in high school or some of the truly terrible things you might have said to your parents?

Who’s filtering things that are right in front of your face because you’re focused on some other thought? Why did wearing red appeal to you more than blue today?

When you take a dissociative drug and forget that you’re a human and your own name… who are you? Are you still you? Who’s driving your body?

Why is it that a psychologist can bring about resolution by reminding you of a long buried memory.

These phenomena are all real things and are real aspects of the subjective conscious experience and any theory of brain to mind mapping that is not able to recreate them is going to be lacking an important set of machinery from the human brain.

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And I feel you are unaware of the division of labor between the subcortical structures and the cortex.

The thalamic nuclei and amygdala (subcortical structures that are the bulk of the subconscious) have no idea what a piece of cake or cheese looks like. They have no idea what your mother-in-law looks like; they have no idea what your social obligations are. They have no idea what is work or play to you. Mental projections, social interactions, mental experience - all are perceived and digested and spoon fed to the subcortical structures by the cortex.

What the cortex does learn is how to break these things down to the point where they can be matched up with an ignorant tyrant that can only make the most simple of decisions. These primitive decisions are elaborated into the complex actions that we learn as we transition from a helpless baby to the wonderfully nuanced humans that we are.

To get some idea what the subconscious really is all about - look at any newborn baby. At this point the primitive brain is in the drivers seat.

These old subcortical structures know hunger and thirst and cold and hot and salty and sweet and bitter and pain. They have very simple visual primitives like general faces and expressions. They know happy and sad and anger and curiosity. A few built in instincts and reflexes. Stuff what babies know. And not much else.

The cortex learns to layer behaviors on top of these primitive actions but never forget that the old part of the brain is firmly in the loop - all perceptions are simplified and presented to this old part of the brain and it makes it’s animal decisions. No action ever originates in the cortex - it is a strictly a passive processor. We take these orders from the thalamic nuclei and and make it happen.

This is you - with a fancy veneer of leaned human perceptions and behaviors on top. This partnership is the you that you are asking about. A dumb boss with a really smart advisor. It is a wonderfully close and finely tuned relationship. It took your whole life to learn it. From both the inside and outside the division of labor is hard to discern. Researcher have teased apart some of the dividing line and it is clearly there if you know how to look.

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After sleeping on it, I feel like we might be closer to being on the same page than we realize…

I don’t think your consciousness ever actually visits the cortex. I think maybe the thalamus represents the simulator that I’m talking about, but correct me if I’m completely off the rails…

So, I think that there is A the “real” brain… one that you personally never experience that receives direct inputs and is tied to the outputs and is equivalent in it’s direct interaction with the world to the wiring of a beetle… Then there is B (what I think of as the simulator…) this place is sometimes lit up as a fair representation of A but can also be made to be any simulation of A as projected from C (maybe the cortex?)… finally there is D (maybe the hippocampus? The dumb boss in your lingo) that is watching B at all times and issuing requests to C and A. C being the smart advisor that communicates back to D through projections on B.

So basically, I’m thinking that all of what you think of as your consciousness is residing in D.

When I am saying time slices on the simulator, I think that C uses B to test out theories about the “real” world, but that D doesn’t get to see those simulations unless there is something weird going on chemically…

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The exploration of neuroscience continues …
Nothing enters experience unless it has cortical representation; there must be an activation pattern in the cortical sheet to be registered in the temporal lobe as experience.

Possibly the best way to envision the hipppcampus / entorhinal cortex is as a layer “behind” (next to?) the cortex with the EC part acting as carbon paper to force a temporary copy of the temporal lobe onto the hippocampus during the day, and the contents of the hippocampus going the other way at night. This is more of an artifact of how our memory works than some sort of simulation device. Note that patient HM did not need a HC/EC to function in the way you are describing. He could not form new memories but he was capable of many actions without this.

As far as a “simulation” goes - I have never seen anything that supports this in more than very limited cases where you “think” and explore higher dimensional spaces in your memory.

Let me give you an example that contrasts this idea with what I think is actually happening.
Setting: You are sitting at your desk at work and your body has been filtering water into the bladder. Your blood is slowly shifting to a more saline condition that you register as thirst. Your bladder is sensing distension that you register as having to pee. Your computer screen is partially filled out and your social expectation is that you are successful in your employment so you keep getting paychecks and support your shelter and mate - conforming with expectations of your tribe with all the positive social affirmations that come with that.
You are processing all these sensation and the body sensors have a fairly direct connection to the thalamus nuclei. As all this is collected and represented in the temporal lobe the lower level body sensors (bladder and thirst) are also projected to the cortex to be registered as sensation.

Your way: You are constructing vast numbers of simulations that include going to lunch, punching your boss for making you work, peeing your pants, going to the water cooler, going to the bathroom, dancing on your desk, quitting your job, jumping from the office window and ending it all, leaving work and laying down in your bed at home, leaving work and watching a movie, leaving work and watching a different movie, going skydiving, (the list of possible actions at this point is really big - you can continue to add these as your imagination dictates)
You weigh all the alternatives in some sort of vast simulation and balance the risk/reward from all these and come up with the highest value for going to the restroom. I am not exactly sure how your system accounts for the intermediate goals of navigation but assume that all the goals are run again as you progress, once the bladder signal is less your run the simulation and the water cooler now is the highest ranked goal so you go with that. And then going back to your disk wins …

My way: the present state is registered in the temporal lobe. The body sensors are being registered and are ranked according to which is signalling the loudest. The thalamic nuclei are weighting the current needs and picking the action selection that most closely matches this need. It signal this selection by pushing out some action activation to the forebrain. At the current time the rewarding action of getting that one last screen filled out is being activated by the ritual parts of the lizard brain that this being projected to the forebrain and elaborated into the script for action. In this case it is the nested habits of being at work and the sub task of what you have learned as your job. The little reward of working on some task and completing it is the current sub-task and as you register the part that you have learned is the reward state (screen completed) the task state restart and is weighed against the pressing need to pee. Your action selection by the thalamus is now weighed higher for starting the peeing task. This script is matched with the sensed surroundings to find the closest matching combination of scripts that can match the need to the perceived environment. You select the script for peeing with the sub tasks of navigating to the bathroom and sub-sub-tasks of getting up, walking, doors, and so on. When you complete the peeing task the thirst sensor now is the highest priority signal (competing with going back to your desk) and it starts to project the needs for drinking. Again you match up your internal knowledge of where water can be found with your sensed environment and select the task of drinking with the sub-tasks of navigating and so on. Once you have satisfied the thirst need the ritual of work resumes as the highest priority task …

As I understand this - the needs sensors, learned scripts (rituals) and values of the scripts, are combined to select actions. The goals and associated weighting of the cost of access are not simulation but simple summing and selection. This summing is done at the cortex level and the subcortical structures make the choice from the alternatives presented by the cortex. There is an evaluation process where the needs are presented to the forebrain and a competitive process matches up the possible choices with the current perception. I have to point out that this is NOT a simulation but an analog weighting and selection. After all - this is being done with nerves that sum inputs and fire if the inputs exceed a certain threshold.

The ability to allow the activation to be projected back to the stored memories and add additional perception (memory) by considering costs of sub-tasks (thinking) is the closest this ever gets to simulation. I see this as a different thing as the search tree is driven by the weighted needs. It ends up doing about the same things but the mechanisms are very different. Projecting your “self” through all of search space and settling on the most appealing is distinctly different from having some need combine with with perception to select the best fitting action (lowest cost) from your learned repertory. I can elaborate on the the selection method in the forebrain but this is getting to be a fairly long Wall-Of-Text at this point.

What was your consciousness doing in all this?

  • “Let me get this one last thing entered, then I will go pee.”
  • “Woo hoo - got another one done!”
  • “Really gotta pee”
  • On the way back, “oh - I could go for some water - better stop by the cooler.”

All the steps in-between are on auto-pilot and not a lot of thinking going on.

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Relevant to to the current focus of this thread:

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I think thinking in terms of chosen fate, chosen deterministic fate, might allow us to somehow square free will in. Like a road where you know the paths leading to good and bad places, the route, and actions, normally deterministic(though sometimes factors exist outside your control), you choose perhaps in a deterministic way to move towards a good end good location good fate, your ability to reevaluate this at any moment prior to reaching your fate, even if it is using deterministic notions to evaluate goodness, is the core of your free will. You are choosing your fate, your deterministic path, and can reevaluate it.

Do not think the decision algorithms have to be fundamentally random or unpredictable for the ability to evaluate and reevaluate the future course of action as being considerable as free will.

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