Through a Jaynesian lens, Joseph seems to be missing several if not all the ‘markers’ of consciousness. Granted, you don’t appear to be a Jaynesian, and so it is to me to adjust my usage of the C word. But it is difficult to discuss language as a basis for consciousness without respecting Jaynes, and I do.
“Joseph . . . could not . . . hold abstract ideas in mind, reflect, play, plan. He seemed completely literal — unable to juggle images or hypotheses or possibilities, unable to enter an imaginative or figurative realm… He seemed, like an animal, or an infant, to be stuck in the present, to be confined to literal and immediate perception…”
Bicameral humans might be described so. No temporality. No elsewheres or elsewhens.
Yep…J would say ‘unconscious’. I would add ‘bicameral’, but there is a faction over in the JJ Society that insists that bicameral minds must hear voices. I am not in that camp and in terms of machine consciousness, the point is pretty much irrelevant.
What would these sentences be without the subjective pronoun? I can observe my cat interact with a chipmunk and make similar statements about what “they” do, but it is pure projection to imagine that each organism has an ‘I’ that deliberates, chooses, selects, and is aware.
I know that this Jaynesian ‘I’ requirement for consciousness is lexical choice, but there is a useful beauty in it, because – unless you opt for the ‘medical’, not-knocked-out use of the word – conscious is an apical term for humans. What you are ‘conscious of’ is the most select subsset of what you-organism behaves and reacts to, and the inner monologue threaded ‘other within’ that is YOU is seemingly wholly absent in cat or chipmunk. Cheers!
Isn’t philosophy fun? My view is that conscious is defined by the ability to introspect, by meta-thinking, thinking about thinking.
Of course I might be totally wrong, but thanks to philosophy, no-one can prove it so. Which is a great pity, because I learn best by being wrong. Which is itself thinking about thinking. But I recurse…
Julian Jaynes is interesting. I’ve been thinking about his ideas for the last couple of years and do believe he stumbled onto something very interesting. He sadly was likely correct in his assessment of concept-formation. However, he was also likely very wrong in that assessment. I don’t mean likely in the probabilistic sense. I mean likely in the sense that he understood a small portion of it and it allowed him to see the whole, but also that it is a distorted framework. He gained insight, but his general system while consistent, does not cohere.
Given that he spent the bulk of his life studying the issue, I wouldn’t characterize his theory as having been stumbled onto. His genius is highly underrated simply because it is generally misunderstood. I’ve found that it has to be looked at through the lens of others thought, specifically Nietzsche, Peirce, Wittgenstein, Vygotsky and Dennett. At that point, the notion of a concept becomes superfluous, but I also fail to see the flaw; sometimes called the loose thread, in his concept-formation conclusion. No matter, it really depends on what you are doing with the theory. In my work on Machine Consciousness, it has been foundational.
BTW, welcome back, looks like you have been away quite a long time.
I’m not saying he wasn’t a genius. Some of my own theories rely on his thoughts. I was kind of jokingly using “stumble” instead of for instance “stride”. Using this definition of “stumble”, “an unintentional departure from truth or accuracy”. I believe that the “departure” is to be found within the minutae. Either, way, I’m grateful for his work, it is very interesting and its generalizations are mostly sound. Concepts aren’t superfluous and that may be where our presuppostional approaches to Jaynes’ work differ. Also, just now I reading some things and saw a connection you might find interesting. Look up “Heidegger’s”, Dasein, Das-Man. Through a Jaynesian lens. Heideggerian terminology - Wikipedia
And yeah, I guess I have been gone a while, busy, thinking about things, I’ve lurked a bit and still try to follow trends in AI/ML and especially the work being done at Numenta.
Firstly, what I am about to seriously put to you in a partly mirth-inviting way is a generalisation of mine that can, I believe, be rather justly compared to ‘suggesting to string theorists that Isaac Newton’s theory of gravity is valid and important to be aware of’.
(I’ve substituted Isaac with A. R. Luria — a ‘father’ of neuropsychology.)
‘Reticular activating type’ (RAT) neurons (≈typically tonically firing) constitutes the first type of neural cells to emerge in the phylogeny of fauna.
For example, RAT neurons are the generators of dull throbbing or chronic pain; S-type neurons of pricking, or orienting reflex triggering localised, pains) and of emotional states (moods) and of cognitive vigilance or a keenly preoccupied intellect.
So, more generally, while S-type neurons are generators of what, specifically, we pay “actention” to, RAT neurons are the basic generators of all or any of the 3 gross levels of neurobiologic consciousness; or (as expressed by Janov/Holden in the book Primal Man, The New Consciousness) “1st-line”, “2nd-line” and “3rd-line” consciousness.
Secondly, I suggest that the goal of Numenta (Jeff Hawkins) should not strive to mimmick our brains too thoroughly. This partly because of the fact that our brains evolved (as did the rest of our physioanatomical characteristics — the sumtotal of which stem from that and how our phylogeny resulted in our uniquely adapted “EAVASIVE” characteristics) with the result that we are easily and very commonly deluding ourselves and others.
There are already too many wrong and bad ideas/misunderstandings being promoted around the globe by, and being picked up and adopted by, human neural Actention Selection Serving Systems!
Why running the risk of building so human-like AI machines that what partly will be generated is contagious idiocies‽
This is not so. The meaning of language is a consensus of all the speakers of that language.
You might better have said: the meaning of a word to a particular person is what it does in the brain of that person, but even there I think you’re on shaky ground.
With the risk of getting onto “does a tree falling on an empty forest makes a sound?” Buddhisms, I can’t see what meaning means by discarding what it does to a human brain.
