I don’t think consciousness is an illusion, but it is a constraint, a reflection of brain-to-body / cognition-to-action / parallel-to-sequential bottleneck. I don’t understand how GNW explains this singular aspect, that you only have one “stream of consciousness”?
I disagree. Scientific progress happens in a discourse. And in a discourse, many people are wrong until someone is right and convinces everyone else.
The problem is that not everyone is interested in intelligence. And not everyone is equipped to study intelligence. Let everyone do what they like and can.
Besides, it’s fun to muse about consciousness. If you don’t like it, well, there are other threads. ;-).
Sherlock Holmes doesn’t deduce.
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Good grief, it is indeed! We’ve been doing it for millennia. Or at least centuries 
" In being conscious of consciousness, we feel it is the most self-evident thing imaginable. We feel it is the defining attribute of all our waking states, our moods and affections, our memories, our thoughts, attentions, and volitions. We feel comfortably certain that consciousness is the basis of concepts, of learning and reasoning, of thought and judgment, and that it is so because it records and stores our experiences as they happen, allowing us to introspect on them and learn from them at will. We are also quite conscious that all this wonderful set of operations and contents that we call consciousness is located somewhere in the head.
On critical examination, all of these statements are false. They are the costume that consciousness has been masquerading in for centuries. They are the misconceptions that have prevented a solution to the problem of the origin of consciousness."–Jaynes
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The post was intended to be a little argumentative to instigate a consideration for a different perspective. Our straw eye saccading view of the world creates an imaginary space, which may or may not closely resemble external reality. If we only ever “see” changes and not the whole we really are just percieving an elaborate hallucination and our consiousness exist in that frame of reference, an illusion (or in computing terms an operating system).
I’m quite convinced about the validity of Active Resonant Theory but the use of singular words like “conciousness” for abstract complex patterns (attention in particular) in the brain for different purposes can create a lot of ambiguity and open ended debate that is impossible to resolve.
Conciousness is very much a belief, an abstract utterance for something very intangible, the illusion.
“The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes.” - Sherlock Holmes
“There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.” - Sherlock Holmes
“Eliminate all other factors, and the one which remains must be the truth.” - Sherlock Holmes
Actually, from a medical or veterinarian perspective consciousness is very much a concrete observable thing, if difficulty to determine with certainty. A conscious person (or animal) is aware of its surroundings and reacts to a variety of sensory stimuli. A sleeping animal can be wakened, but is mostly unreactive. A comatose or anaesthetised animal is unreactive and cannot be roused.
Conscious state is not the same as what you experience by introspection. It’s all in the definitions (which were not provided).
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Ok, in that interview GNW was the main topic and consciousness was a side topic raised by interviewers asking his opinion on some other researchers saying large language models could be “a little conscious”. At which he recommended more modesty on talking about the matter.
However in another presentation on the topic of consciousness he lists GWT and the same bottleneck question as important topics without delving into … answers.
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As I mentioned elsewhere, the most logical area to implement this bottleneck is TRN in thalamus.
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Sorry the interview was about GFlowNets not GNW. (Global Neuronal Workspace)
Acronym captcha-s will be used as reversed Turing tests in the near future
John 8:11
This could go down a whole route of politically incorrect comedy. Set his alarm clock, having a sleep in ?
The way I understand it, think without words and you can think in parallel (many predictive stream evaluations), first involvement of “words” collapses the thought process to a smaller bound as much of the thought collapses/narrows back in (single slower stream timing implication fades the parallel streams to winner takes all). We can think in terms of objects/concepts that have no utterance but as we think of such close match words the process fades out (attentional attraction/amplification or inhibitory if looking at it in the reverse direction) the other objects, but I guess introspection is not science so will continue to try and create a proof of concept or a good wizard of Oz curtain…
Thinking with words is always some kind of sub-vocalization, and vocalization is done over one kind of brain-to body bottleneck. But the same is true for any conscious thinking, even visual imagination relies on frontal eye fields: you are only looking at one focal point at a time. Try to think without action :).
Yes, there is a plenty of parallel cognitive threads too, but they are subconscious, in conventional sense of that term.
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Do you have any references on this?
Do you mean re FEF? I’ve read it somewhere, it’s not on top of my mind. But it’s almost tautological that FEF is involved in REM. During which activity is very similar to waking, except there is no action, ACh receptors are blocked. Hence it’s a form of imagination. Just googled:
Human brain activity time-locked to rapid eye movements during REM sleep - Experimental Brain Research
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REM means rapid eye movement, so FEF might just be generating those movements (it’s basically the motor cortex for the eyes). That doesn’t mean it’s involved in imagination.
I don’t know of any functional reason for the rapid eye movements during that phase of sleep (not that I’ve looked), so I think it’s just those muscles aren’t paralyzed because there’s no evolutionary reason.
FEF controls visual focus, and we visualize things in imagination and dreams. When we turn to look at something, we have an expectation of what we will see, that’s why we look. So, we must have a reference frame in visual memories, and it seems obvious to me that FEF converts its “coordinates” into eye / head movements. No references, just introspection :).
I think it’s more of a motor thing than an attention thing, if you were talking about attention.
Is what you’re saying basically, thinking relies on bodily (or body-relative) coordinate systems, so it’s singular because action is singular? It makes sense to me for the need for global consensus on action to be mechanistically tied to singular-ness of thoughts.
I don’t think that’s via subcortex, maybe. Kim Peek was able to read two pages simultaneously. I recall he lacked most cortico-cortical connections between the hemispheres, but not cortico-thalamo-cortical. So maybe he was able to have two trains of thoughts at once because he lacked direct CC connections, making cortical motor outputs not directly related.
There’s a type of cell in L5 (slender-tufted) which projects corticocortically and to the striatum but nowhere else. The other cells projecting subcortically don’t project corticocortically long range (except the corticoclaustral L6 cells, I think). In one study, it seems to respond to reward (although it’s unclear so I’d need to find a study about that topic specifically). So those cells are suited for deciding a global agreement on actions.
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I don’t think there is clear distinction, attention is closely related to sub-actualization, like sub-vocalization. Which is basically a motor signal that’s not strong enough to get across neuro-muscular junction.
Yes, the brain evolved to guide the body, hence it “frames” all thinking in terms of action.
Volitional attention (as opposed to e.g. surprise, to keep things more specific) isn’t always convertable into a motor command. I turn my head around, turn back, and focus on what I saw at the expense of what I’m seeing.
So? I did not say attention has to be converted into movement. But attention still relies on the mechanism that could, if not blocked by competing threads, perform the movement. That’s what I meant by sub-actualization.
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I’m saying attention isn’t necessarily motor, not that it’s motor but sometimes can’t be converted into movement. I’m not saying it’s not motor.
I think you should mesh your ideas here with neuroscience. That’d make them much more specific. The devil is in the details, especially when the task is “match something super complicated (the brain) with something super vague (intelligence)”.