The article's definition of consciousness is precise, but it's not what people are referring to in most cases where the word "consciousness" is used. Of course, a word can have multiple definitions. But colloquially, when people say consciousness, we usually mean the thing that goes away when we sleep or are anesthetized. I don't think there's a much better way to define that. The contrast between the wakeful and non-wakeful state as oneself experiences from the inside is precisely what defines consciousness in the colloquial sense. It seems to be a self-defining concept because I can't even define what "experiences" means without thinking about the wakeful/non-wakeful contrast phenomena that is consciousness, and "experiences" was supposed to be a part of the definition of "consciousness" one sentence ago.
I am unsure as to what you are trying to say here. It reads to me as “the word the article discusses has a more popular homonym, but they are clearly not talking about that”.
I'm thinking out loud and pointing out the difference to avoid confusion, and also trying to invite discussion around the colloquial def, because I think the colloquial def is the most important/useful one.
When observed by a different conscious being, yes. But from the inside observed by oneself, it feels quite similar, besides the fact that sleep is initiated by oneself, and the wakeful state transition for sleep is more gradual than for anesthesia.
I think that distinction matters because strictly speaking, oneself only has access to one's own consciousness, and that defines one's own understanding of the word "consciousness". It's not possible for me to be you after all, and whatever inferences I make about other people being conscious is based on the fact that I experience my consciousness, and you are similar to me in some specific way (such as being, presumably, a human), therefore you must be conscious. Of course, I'm taking a materialist stance here but that's what's practical to talk about anyway.
> But from the inside observed by oneself, it feels quite similar, besides the fact that sleep is initiated by oneself, and the wakeful state transition for sleep is more gradual than for anesthesia.
Have you been anesthetized before? Different forms are very different, but none of them feel like sleep, at all. General anesthesia feels like a time simply skipped forward. Like a chunk of your memory tape was cut out completely. Twilight sedation feels like you temporarily inhabited someone else's body but the experience was so strange that you blocked out almost all of the memory.
I've been under general anesthesia, but it does not feel too different. I'm dead when sleeping, and basically never dream. I should have said "dreamless sleep" in the earlier comment to be more precise because dreaming is obviously different, but it happens so rarely I forget it exists.
> But from the inside observed by oneself, it feels quite similar
Having been under general anesthesia once the feeling of just completely not existing for the time period I was under felt very different than sleep does to me.
Perhaps it's because I almost never dream. Sleep feels almost just as dead to me.
Case in point, I think we're probably talking about slightly different phenomena even when we talk about the same linguistic definition of consciousness. Kind of like how my idea of an "apple" is based on all of the apples I've seen in the past and instances where I've used the word or saw it being used by others, whereas your idea of "apple" is based on your experiences. They must be mostly similar in information content or we wouldn't be able to communicate at all, but the self-or-other distinction is important.
The more interesting aspect of that is that there's an element of recall implicit in that though: if someone was active, moving around and interacting according to observers then whether they were conscious during that time is heavily informed by whether they remember it later.
Quite where that line exists then is very fuzzy because while for example I feel conscious while I'm typing this, it's also clearly possible I could but then have no memory of it.
Jayme's theory depends on trade emerging post-Bronze Age collapse of a sort that requires a new kind of theory of mind and processing in a low trust environment driven by international trade. The Ea-Nasir letter was written c. 1750 BC shows that the same issues were already around ~ 800 years earlier and there's lots of international trade going on even in the 3,000s BC. The content of the Ea-Nasir letter and the personal reflections and issues presented there really destroy the central thesis of the book. It's also got a few other serious historic flaws (false claims about the existent of omens ignoring previous examples thousands of years earlier) that make it the kind of book that's interesting but without question also completely wrong in its central thesis.
Isn't this a testable hypothesis? If consciousness spread virally and isn't a natural outgrowth of the physical structure of the brain, then presumably isolated indigenous tribes would still have pre-consciousness mental processes, and that should be detectable somehow.
The being said, I'm reading "Proto" By Laura Spinney, and the thing that strikes me is how recently the world's major languages developed. Everyone assumes we had language fifty thousand years ago, but the actual language families we know about all seem to trace to no more than about 10,000 BCE, and maybe a lot younger than that. The odds of Proto-Indo-European being traceable to a single tribe in the Black Sea region circa 4500 BCE seem really low to me, but that's what seems to have happened.
Jaynes relies on some earlier work that's been invalidated, like Bruno Snell's idea of archaic Greeks lacking a concept of an integrated body because they painted what appear to be individual limbs on vases from the geometric period. Snell wrote _The Discovery of the Mind_ in 1946. Since then archaeology has found amazing art like the Pylos Combat Agate from before the geometric period, demonstrating lifelike, realistic bodies rather than assemblages of limbs: the aesthetic of the geometric period was a choice, not evidence of a different kind of consciousness lacking a sense of self.
The language thing is just that without writing, reconstructions based on regular sound correspondences only allow us to infer backwards by a few thousand years. It doesn't mean that anything particularly interesting happened exactly at that time to human language. It's just that language changes relatively fast on this timescale so current languages don't offer enough clues.
And the origins of language are famously uncertain. Might have been recent and relatively sudden (<100 thousand years ago) or a gradual slope for many hundreds of thousands of years.
The fact that 100k years ago we could have seen 7 Pleiades with the naked eye but angles shifted since and now only 6, but unconnected traditions speak of 7 entities in tales of their origins may indicate we have had language far sooner than 10,000 BCE.
We have no idea what consciousness is, and cannot reliably detect it in other mammals, or even in other humans. I assume that you, GlenTheMachine, are conscious, but I cannot prove it. I think the most we can state, with a little assurance, is that people under general anesthesia are not conscious.
There’s a fascinating book called Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes by Daniel Everett that covers the Piraha people in the Amazon.
Their language is unusual: no recurrent sentences, almost no discussion of the past. I’m not suggesting they are unconscious but there appears to be something different going on with the Piraha sociolinguistically.
> Isn't this a testable hypothesis? If consciousness spread virally and isn't a natural outgrowth of the physical structure of the brain, then presumably isolated indigenous tribes would still have pre-consciousness mental processes, and that should be detectable somehow.
I'd distinguish verbal inner monologue from consciousness. Many people think on the daily without narrating things to themselves in sentences, without feeling brutish or animalistic. I can plan complex human actions including theory of mind considerations without narrating it as a monologue. It's still very conscious.
Also that reddit post seems like a fake story made up by a teenager as a sort of scifi. It's just too on the nose. Yeah he lived life without understanding that his friends still exist while out of sight... I guess the OP just learned about some developmental stages of toddlers or object permanence etc and wrote a story like this as fanfic.
I think this was also one of the inspirations for Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash", which also deals with (among other things) the nature of consciousness and religion in the human mind.
It was definitely the inspiration for one of the subplots of _The Big U_. A faction of college students regressed to a bicameral mentality and would hold rituals in which they waited for oracular speech from an electric fan.
I remember thinking at the time I read it “I don't know how anyone could understand this book without reading Jaynes first”.
I find this on the crackpottery side. Narrowly defining a certain aspect of consciousness to make a point, and disregarding many (most) other aspects of consciousness. Self-aware much?
(1) The model we learn of the environment, extends to our own bodies status indicators, then our general emotional mood/emotions/reflexes, and finally to some level awareness of our thought behaviors. So our general model includes some visibility and modeling of our own thinking processes.
(2) Our control where we learn to redirect the environment, extends to our bodies as subjects themselves, not just as means to control the environment, then the ability to exert influence on our internal body state (note: control does not mean direct. I can't just turn off stress, but I can go for a walk.) And then to our moods, emotions, and mental reflexes (again, direct isn't necessary, just some means of influencing), and then to some level or our internals thoughts. So our general control map lets us exert some control and influence over our own thinking processes.
(3) Given the tight awareness of some internal through processes, with some control of those thought processes, with similar tight pairing of mood/emotion/mental-reflex awareness and influence, internal body state awareness and influence, external body state awareness and influence, and environment with some level awareness and means of influence ... the most central point of this convergence, thought process awareness and influence, can essentially converge these activities into one inextricable module.
This means that the "watcher" and the "do-er" are not separable (at least on the balance: of course this is not complete. We can be aware of somethings we can't influence, we can influence some things we are not directly aware of).
That this merge of awareness, modeling the subject of awareness, means control, exerting influence, on our own thoughts with our own thoughts in realtime, we have consciousness.
This happens because as we are able to model and strategically influence more sophisticated things, the survival value in being able to do that with our own mind goes up significantly.
So we have a causal path and purpose for consciousness.
It isn't some strange accidentally acquired ability. It is a direct and effective survival strategy.
But that is only one theory. Quantum consciousness fields, Egyptian pyramids, Aliens, a super consciousness that fills the universe, Atlantis, an Apple, a strict "Not a Chinese Room" physics law, or a non-testable, non-identifiable, non-detectable realm (dark cognition?) could be handing out consciousness to people like candy. Or we could all be automatons, who think we are conscious, and wasting a lot of time talking about "it".
Only time will tell if the functional, survival based reason for model-of-self, influence-on-self, integration as one thing is a plausible scenario.
Not that the theory described above has testable assumptions.
Can the minds model of itself be separated from its ability to influence itself? (We can flail sedated arms, we can feel paralyzed arms. Is that easily possible in the brain.) If they are separable are these separate networks, or are we just suppressing different kinds of cells in an otherwise highly integrated network? Not trying to be exhaustive, or even serious, about any of these proposals. Just pointing out that experiments are possible with regard to the (1) model=actor integration, (2) with evidence of survival benefits, theory of consciousness.
One strong post-prediction of mode/actor convergence as survival adaptation: Consciousness will care very much about itself. Most conscious identities will care very much about the continuity of itself, and second order means of protecting its continuity, like food and acts that sometimes produce babies as side effects. Consciousnesses will be obsessed with themselves, thinking about "themselves", i.e. the consciousness as a being, and process almost everything with some degree of conscious self-interest.
So a theory of survival generated consciousness, is also a theory of emergent personhood.
I find the description of consciousness in this article very narrow (Only arising post language). Post language consciousness is a particular type of consciousness, and the same can be said of post DMT consciousness (Which is sometimes without language).
That's exactly Jaynes's theory: consciousness not only arrived after the invention of language, it arrived after the invention of writing, literature, agriculture, metallurgy, and government bureaucracy. And also, that it _could not_ have arisen without language because it is crucially founded in the capability of language to describe the world metaphorically.
You don't have to like it, but that's the theory that is being discussed.
That is what discredits the idea in my view. Illiterate people are not conscious? People in hunter gatherer or isolated subsistence farming communities?
A great majority of humanity remained illiterate just a few generations ago. It's absurd to posit they weren't conscious.
Hunter-gatherer and nomadic lifestyles are complex and require deep thought and planning and coordination. You can't do it purely reactively or carrying out simple scripts.
Its not so clear to me if it's the chicken or egg. So many things are good candidates for the key ingredient.
I personally think that consciousness is social theory of mind applied to the self, or something like simulating and being concerned with how the tribe sees you and interprets your intentions etc, forcing you to analyze yourself similarly to how you analyze others. This would mean that solitary animals are less conscious than social ones.
You're conflating "written language" with "language". While it's still far from impossible to find people who can't read or write, it's exceptionally difficult to find adults with no grasp of any spoken language.
Probably the most fascinating idea there is right now in the field.
It might be right.
My intuition is that it’s not right - that you can have experience without language, images, and other “sensory objects” but I wonder how useful it is.
Just like a plasmic euphoria detached from any identity or process; or an endless, mindless, dread, that drones on for billions of years in the vacuum of space waiting to be liberated by sound, light, anything
As somebody who understands the perceived limitations of the materialist take on consciousness in light of recent decades of seeming philosophical traction (Searle, Chalmers), I have to admit how many ways LLMs proved me wrong.
Rather, how much of it is just language.
We went from completing words to completing sentences, paragraphs, essays, code files, pixel arrangements, music, and more just by aggregating and modeling all that in English.
I was amazed that predicting a word can emerge into knowledge, creativity, productivity - the stuff of thoughts.
It doesn’t happen to anyone (the thinking) but I think they still qualify as thoughts, just without a thinker.
If by "consciousness" you mean the thing that goes away when we sleep, how are you so sure that there's not a conscious thinker in the machine? That seems like a hypothesis rather than a proven fact as we don't know what process in the brain is responsible for consciousness fading away (assuming a practical materialist stance here) when we sleep. If it's some very basic informational pattern thing, then computers could have it.
If I cut off my finger I’m still awake. If I cut off my head I’m gone forever. Presumably there is something going on in the head that isn’t happening in the finger (or the LLM).
We can be a lot more precise than that even, requiring nerves, chemistry, sense organs, to really get at a specific human definition of “what I mean by consciousness.”
But yeah you have the essence of it - I just mean the experience.
I don’t think a computer could have it anymore than it could feel pain - thinking and feeling are different classes of problem that don’t complete each other no matter how much you work on just one in isolation.
I understand that means I think “thinking” is an unconscious process. And it must be, since LLMs are doing it. What they aren’t doing is experiencing anything alongside that. Who knows what that is. It’s apparently not logical computation in-and-of-itself.
> If it's some very basic informational pattern thing, then computers could have it.
This is functionalism. The problem I have with it is it pre-supposes a theory of objective information. That “patterns” exist in the first place without the observer.
If there is information in the universe that predates us, then I can see how just finding what objective patterns produce it can get us places. But it seems like we conscious observers actually assign the meaning and create information out of chaos. The only reason it isn’t chaos is that we all agree within experience what “1” means, and so-on.
There isn’t really “an orange” on “a tree”. But to us there can be. It always works too (to us), so it’s a pretty good stand-in for reality.
If you capture the function of a red rubber ball bouncing in a concrete space - ask yourself what you have captured. As you create the simulation software that moves the pixels of the red circle up the screen, ask what exactly you are doing, and what that has to do whatsoever with a ball bouncing in a space.
So I don’t believe in functionalism because I don’t believe in pure 1:1 representations. All copies are reductions, any function that describes something is itself a reduction of that thing, and can never include the whole original, for basically the same reason you can’t travel backwards in time.
And yet anendophasia is a thing. Some people think without an inner monologue, without words[^0]. And they seem to do so quite well and quite successfully.
Yeah me too, and it feels like a lot of people who are exclusively 'stuck' in language seem to think the pre-language part is somehow inferior (which imo is very misguided)
Thinking without language makes sense for problems that don't require language like visual art, but how do you solve complex logic problems or write a book without thinking in sentences.
You can think abstractly about geometry problems, or graph tgeory but even about linear algebra. Feynman describes how he felt while holding and analyzing problems in his mind. I'm less eloquent.
Also you can think about the narrative and the valence of a scene for a book, without blabbering to yourself while planning the story. I can narrate it like as if I imagine a friend being there and translating my thought into language but it's an extra step.
It also exhausts me more. Which makes coding with LLMs more tiring for me. Before it, I could code without language use exhausting my brain, but talking to LLMs requires putting all of it into English, while before I could just imagine a certain refactor as one coherent thought in my mind without turning it into sentences.
Of course above a certain level of difficulty, putting thoughts down helps for problem solving, but a lot of that can be various types of sketch drawings and formulas too.
It's likely a verbal and spatial heavy thought difference, the lawyer / engineer type of thinking difference.
If a species were (human level) intelligent, how would they have language first, if there is no need for an unintelligent species to have language (you know, other than bee booty-shaking tier language)?
It becomes chicken and egg. They don't need the language without intelligence, and can't become intelligent without the language (all so they can boot up the internal monologue that is apparently sitting there waiting on a 12,000 word vocabulary).
This is clear to me, because I don't rely on an internal monologue to think about such things. It is unimaginable to you, because you rely on an internal monologue.
Human (and animal minds to a lesser extent) do not think in a spoken language, but in an internal symbolic "language of thought". It is beneath the perception of an "internal monologue", but also tends to atrophy quite severely for people who rely on an internal monologue. Even in your brain though, there are so many different mental processes that you are unaware of for this reason. You can't even reliably sense cause-and-effect in your own mind... the internal monologue just makes up whatever plausible best guesses it can about why you made this decision or that decision, about why you did X or didn't do Y. The internal monologue doesn't have access to that other part of your brain.
No. There are people who cannot exist without the internal monologue, and if unusual circumstances interrupt that internal monologue they experience anxiety, dysfunction, and a rapidly intensifying irritation that they can't even articulate (because there's no monologue to allow them to describe it). They're generally very stupid, but the internal monologue tells them that they should have a high opinion of their own intelligence. It's unclear to me if they can even pretend to understand the concept of metacognition.
There is also a growing group of redditoids who believe that if you don't have an internal monologue you "have no soul".
If you spend your time reading reviews of books about other books that talk about the words of other writers who wrote about what others wrote, you start to believe that anything complex must be language-related.
Try to do a mechanical or electrical engineering degree coasting only on internally narrated words. It won't work. It can work in soft fields where all criteria are about what words other humans like to hear and there is no other complex external arbiter.
The article's definition of consciousness is precise, but it's not what people are referring to in most cases where the word "consciousness" is used. Of course, a word can have multiple definitions. But colloquially, when people say consciousness, we usually mean the thing that goes away when we sleep or are anesthetized. I don't think there's a much better way to define that. The contrast between the wakeful and non-wakeful state as oneself experiences from the inside is precisely what defines consciousness in the colloquial sense. It seems to be a self-defining concept because I can't even define what "experiences" means without thinking about the wakeful/non-wakeful contrast phenomena that is consciousness, and "experiences" was supposed to be a part of the definition of "consciousness" one sentence ago.
I am unsure as to what you are trying to say here. It reads to me as “the word the article discusses has a more popular homonym, but they are clearly not talking about that”.
I'm thinking out loud and pointing out the difference to avoid confusion, and also trying to invite discussion around the colloquial def, because I think the colloquial def is the most important/useful one.
Anesthesia is a rather different state than sleep.
When observed by a different conscious being, yes. But from the inside observed by oneself, it feels quite similar, besides the fact that sleep is initiated by oneself, and the wakeful state transition for sleep is more gradual than for anesthesia.
I think that distinction matters because strictly speaking, oneself only has access to one's own consciousness, and that defines one's own understanding of the word "consciousness". It's not possible for me to be you after all, and whatever inferences I make about other people being conscious is based on the fact that I experience my consciousness, and you are similar to me in some specific way (such as being, presumably, a human), therefore you must be conscious. Of course, I'm taking a materialist stance here but that's what's practical to talk about anyway.
> But from the inside observed by oneself, it feels quite similar, besides the fact that sleep is initiated by oneself, and the wakeful state transition for sleep is more gradual than for anesthesia.
Have you been anesthetized before? Different forms are very different, but none of them feel like sleep, at all. General anesthesia feels like a time simply skipped forward. Like a chunk of your memory tape was cut out completely. Twilight sedation feels like you temporarily inhabited someone else's body but the experience was so strange that you blocked out almost all of the memory.
Sleeping and dreaming is totally different.
I've been under general anesthesia, but it does not feel too different. I'm dead when sleeping, and basically never dream. I should have said "dreamless sleep" in the earlier comment to be more precise because dreaming is obviously different, but it happens so rarely I forget it exists.
> But from the inside observed by oneself, it feels quite similar
Having been under general anesthesia once the feeling of just completely not existing for the time period I was under felt very different than sleep does to me.
Perhaps it's because I almost never dream. Sleep feels almost just as dead to me.
Case in point, I think we're probably talking about slightly different phenomena even when we talk about the same linguistic definition of consciousness. Kind of like how my idea of an "apple" is based on all of the apples I've seen in the past and instances where I've used the word or saw it being used by others, whereas your idea of "apple" is based on your experiences. They must be mostly similar in information content or we wouldn't be able to communicate at all, but the self-or-other distinction is important.
I had some serious surgery a few years ago and paid attention when I went under to see if I could recall anything.
Nope. You don’t exist for that time. Anesthesiologist counts down 10, 9, 8, 7, and then I was teleported to the recovery bed.
I consider it incredibly weird and very unlike sleep. Consciousness is off, instantly, then back.
Well... memory is off at least.
> when people say consciousness, we usually mean the thing that goes away when we sleep or are anesthetized.
How is dreaming during sleep different from consciousness when awake?
Why only as oneself experiences? I can easily tell if a horse is conscious or not. The whole matter is rather simple IMO.
Let's say it's variability (number of distinct if you prefer discrete) of stable responses to external stimuli.
The more interesting aspect of that is that there's an element of recall implicit in that though: if someone was active, moving around and interacting according to observers then whether they were conscious during that time is heavily informed by whether they remember it later.
Quite where that line exists then is very fuzzy because while for example I feel conscious while I'm typing this, it's also clearly possible I could but then have no memory of it.
Apparently you don't need much brain to be conscious. This boy was born with 2% of a brain.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKelkdfi25k
I think of it when someone tries to explain it. Perplexing!
This book is apparently the main source of inspiration for Blindsight by Peter Watts
Jayme's theory depends on trade emerging post-Bronze Age collapse of a sort that requires a new kind of theory of mind and processing in a low trust environment driven by international trade. The Ea-Nasir letter was written c. 1750 BC shows that the same issues were already around ~ 800 years earlier and there's lots of international trade going on even in the 3,000s BC. The content of the Ea-Nasir letter and the personal reflections and issues presented there really destroy the central thesis of the book. It's also got a few other serious historic flaws (false claims about the existent of omens ignoring previous examples thousands of years earlier) that make it the kind of book that's interesting but without question also completely wrong in its central thesis.
Isn't this a testable hypothesis? If consciousness spread virally and isn't a natural outgrowth of the physical structure of the brain, then presumably isolated indigenous tribes would still have pre-consciousness mental processes, and that should be detectable somehow.
The being said, I'm reading "Proto" By Laura Spinney, and the thing that strikes me is how recently the world's major languages developed. Everyone assumes we had language fifty thousand years ago, but the actual language families we know about all seem to trace to no more than about 10,000 BCE, and maybe a lot younger than that. The odds of Proto-Indo-European being traceable to a single tribe in the Black Sea region circa 4500 BCE seem really low to me, but that's what seems to have happened.
Jaynes relies on some earlier work that's been invalidated, like Bruno Snell's idea of archaic Greeks lacking a concept of an integrated body because they painted what appear to be individual limbs on vases from the geometric period. Snell wrote _The Discovery of the Mind_ in 1946. Since then archaeology has found amazing art like the Pylos Combat Agate from before the geometric period, demonstrating lifelike, realistic bodies rather than assemblages of limbs: the aesthetic of the geometric period was a choice, not evidence of a different kind of consciousness lacking a sense of self.
The language thing is just that without writing, reconstructions based on regular sound correspondences only allow us to infer backwards by a few thousand years. It doesn't mean that anything particularly interesting happened exactly at that time to human language. It's just that language changes relatively fast on this timescale so current languages don't offer enough clues.
And the origins of language are famously uncertain. Might have been recent and relatively sudden (<100 thousand years ago) or a gradual slope for many hundreds of thousands of years.
The fact that 100k years ago we could have seen 7 Pleiades with the naked eye but angles shifted since and now only 6, but unconnected traditions speak of 7 entities in tales of their origins may indicate we have had language far sooner than 10,000 BCE.
"Somehow"
We have no idea what consciousness is, and cannot reliably detect it in other mammals, or even in other humans. I assume that you, GlenTheMachine, are conscious, but I cannot prove it. I think the most we can state, with a little assurance, is that people under general anesthesia are not conscious.
There’s a fascinating book called Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes by Daniel Everett that covers the Piraha people in the Amazon.
Their language is unusual: no recurrent sentences, almost no discussion of the past. I’m not suggesting they are unconscious but there appears to be something different going on with the Piraha sociolinguistically.
It is an interesting book, but as far as I know no one has verified Everett's work. I've just noticed this article that talks about it: https://news.mit.edu/2016/data-amazonian-piraha-language-deb...
Slate Star Codex reviewed Jaynes' book as well, which is how I first heard about it: https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/01/book-review-origin-of-...
To your point:
> Isn't this a testable hypothesis? If consciousness spread virally and isn't a natural outgrowth of the physical structure of the brain, then presumably isolated indigenous tribes would still have pre-consciousness mental processes, and that should be detectable somehow.
SSC's article points to a Reddit thread that suggests even folks in the mainstream of culture may undergo a "consciousness transition" as adults: https://www.reddit.com/r/self/comments/3yrw2i/i_never_though...
I'd distinguish verbal inner monologue from consciousness. Many people think on the daily without narrating things to themselves in sentences, without feeling brutish or animalistic. I can plan complex human actions including theory of mind considerations without narrating it as a monologue. It's still very conscious.
Also that reddit post seems like a fake story made up by a teenager as a sort of scifi. It's just too on the nose. Yeah he lived life without understanding that his friends still exist while out of sight... I guess the OP just learned about some developmental stages of toddlers or object permanence etc and wrote a story like this as fanfic.
Our language development and our awareness is currently tied to writing/record keeping. Hard for us to know anything about prehistoric languages.
I think this was also one of the inspirations for Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash", which also deals with (among other things) the nature of consciousness and religion in the human mind.
It was definitely the inspiration for one of the subplots of _The Big U_. A faction of college students regressed to a bicameral mentality and would hold rituals in which they waited for oracular speech from an electric fan.
I remember thinking at the time I read it “I don't know how anyone could understand this book without reading Jaynes first”.
interestingly, this is a book that gemini tends to recommend reading.
I find this on the crackpottery side. Narrowly defining a certain aspect of consciousness to make a point, and disregarding many (most) other aspects of consciousness. Self-aware much?
Consciousness occurs when:
(1) The model we learn of the environment, extends to our own bodies status indicators, then our general emotional mood/emotions/reflexes, and finally to some level awareness of our thought behaviors. So our general model includes some visibility and modeling of our own thinking processes.
(2) Our control where we learn to redirect the environment, extends to our bodies as subjects themselves, not just as means to control the environment, then the ability to exert influence on our internal body state (note: control does not mean direct. I can't just turn off stress, but I can go for a walk.) And then to our moods, emotions, and mental reflexes (again, direct isn't necessary, just some means of influencing), and then to some level or our internals thoughts. So our general control map lets us exert some control and influence over our own thinking processes.
(3) Given the tight awareness of some internal through processes, with some control of those thought processes, with similar tight pairing of mood/emotion/mental-reflex awareness and influence, internal body state awareness and influence, external body state awareness and influence, and environment with some level awareness and means of influence ... the most central point of this convergence, thought process awareness and influence, can essentially converge these activities into one inextricable module.
This means that the "watcher" and the "do-er" are not separable (at least on the balance: of course this is not complete. We can be aware of somethings we can't influence, we can influence some things we are not directly aware of).
That this merge of awareness, modeling the subject of awareness, means control, exerting influence, on our own thoughts with our own thoughts in realtime, we have consciousness.
This happens because as we are able to model and strategically influence more sophisticated things, the survival value in being able to do that with our own mind goes up significantly.
So we have a causal path and purpose for consciousness.
It isn't some strange accidentally acquired ability. It is a direct and effective survival strategy.
But that is only one theory. Quantum consciousness fields, Egyptian pyramids, Aliens, a super consciousness that fills the universe, Atlantis, an Apple, a strict "Not a Chinese Room" physics law, or a non-testable, non-identifiable, non-detectable realm (dark cognition?) could be handing out consciousness to people like candy. Or we could all be automatons, who think we are conscious, and wasting a lot of time talking about "it".
Only time will tell if the functional, survival based reason for model-of-self, influence-on-self, integration as one thing is a plausible scenario.
Not that the theory described above has testable assumptions.
Can the minds model of itself be separated from its ability to influence itself? (We can flail sedated arms, we can feel paralyzed arms. Is that easily possible in the brain.) If they are separable are these separate networks, or are we just suppressing different kinds of cells in an otherwise highly integrated network? Not trying to be exhaustive, or even serious, about any of these proposals. Just pointing out that experiments are possible with regard to the (1) model=actor integration, (2) with evidence of survival benefits, theory of consciousness.
One strong post-prediction of mode/actor convergence as survival adaptation: Consciousness will care very much about itself. Most conscious identities will care very much about the continuity of itself, and second order means of protecting its continuity, like food and acts that sometimes produce babies as side effects. Consciousnesses will be obsessed with themselves, thinking about "themselves", i.e. the consciousness as a being, and process almost everything with some degree of conscious self-interest.
So a theory of survival generated consciousness, is also a theory of emergent personhood.
How far down the tree of life does this theory consider to be conscious?
I find the description of consciousness in this article very narrow (Only arising post language). Post language consciousness is a particular type of consciousness, and the same can be said of post DMT consciousness (Which is sometimes without language).
That's exactly Jaynes's theory: consciousness not only arrived after the invention of language, it arrived after the invention of writing, literature, agriculture, metallurgy, and government bureaucracy. And also, that it _could not_ have arisen without language because it is crucially founded in the capability of language to describe the world metaphorically.
You don't have to like it, but that's the theory that is being discussed.
That is what discredits the idea in my view. Illiterate people are not conscious? People in hunter gatherer or isolated subsistence farming communities?
A great majority of humanity remained illiterate just a few generations ago. It's absurd to posit they weren't conscious.
Hunter-gatherer and nomadic lifestyles are complex and require deep thought and planning and coordination. You can't do it purely reactively or carrying out simple scripts.
Its not so clear to me if it's the chicken or egg. So many things are good candidates for the key ingredient.
I personally think that consciousness is social theory of mind applied to the self, or something like simulating and being concerned with how the tribe sees you and interprets your intentions etc, forcing you to analyze yourself similarly to how you analyze others. This would mean that solitary animals are less conscious than social ones.
You're conflating "written language" with "language". While it's still far from impossible to find people who can't read or write, it's exceptionally difficult to find adults with no grasp of any spoken language.
Illiterate isn't the same as having no language, just (sic) saying.
Probably the most fascinating idea there is right now in the field.
It might be right.
My intuition is that it’s not right - that you can have experience without language, images, and other “sensory objects” but I wonder how useful it is.
Just like a plasmic euphoria detached from any identity or process; or an endless, mindless, dread, that drones on for billions of years in the vacuum of space waiting to be liberated by sound, light, anything
As somebody who understands the perceived limitations of the materialist take on consciousness in light of recent decades of seeming philosophical traction (Searle, Chalmers), I have to admit how many ways LLMs proved me wrong.
Rather, how much of it is just language.
We went from completing words to completing sentences, paragraphs, essays, code files, pixel arrangements, music, and more just by aggregating and modeling all that in English.
I was amazed that predicting a word can emerge into knowledge, creativity, productivity - the stuff of thoughts.
It doesn’t happen to anyone (the thinking) but I think they still qualify as thoughts, just without a thinker.
If by "consciousness" you mean the thing that goes away when we sleep, how are you so sure that there's not a conscious thinker in the machine? That seems like a hypothesis rather than a proven fact as we don't know what process in the brain is responsible for consciousness fading away (assuming a practical materialist stance here) when we sleep. If it's some very basic informational pattern thing, then computers could have it.
Burden of Proof mainly.
If I cut off my finger I’m still awake. If I cut off my head I’m gone forever. Presumably there is something going on in the head that isn’t happening in the finger (or the LLM).
We can be a lot more precise than that even, requiring nerves, chemistry, sense organs, to really get at a specific human definition of “what I mean by consciousness.”
But yeah you have the essence of it - I just mean the experience.
I don’t think a computer could have it anymore than it could feel pain - thinking and feeling are different classes of problem that don’t complete each other no matter how much you work on just one in isolation.
I understand that means I think “thinking” is an unconscious process. And it must be, since LLMs are doing it. What they aren’t doing is experiencing anything alongside that. Who knows what that is. It’s apparently not logical computation in-and-of-itself.
> If it's some very basic informational pattern thing, then computers could have it.
This is functionalism. The problem I have with it is it pre-supposes a theory of objective information. That “patterns” exist in the first place without the observer.
If there is information in the universe that predates us, then I can see how just finding what objective patterns produce it can get us places. But it seems like we conscious observers actually assign the meaning and create information out of chaos. The only reason it isn’t chaos is that we all agree within experience what “1” means, and so-on.
There isn’t really “an orange” on “a tree”. But to us there can be. It always works too (to us), so it’s a pretty good stand-in for reality.
If you capture the function of a red rubber ball bouncing in a concrete space - ask yourself what you have captured. As you create the simulation software that moves the pixels of the red circle up the screen, ask what exactly you are doing, and what that has to do whatsoever with a ball bouncing in a space.
So I don’t believe in functionalism because I don’t believe in pure 1:1 representations. All copies are reductions, any function that describes something is itself a reduction of that thing, and can never include the whole original, for basically the same reason you can’t travel backwards in time.
And yet anendophasia is a thing. Some people think without an inner monologue, without words[^0]. And they seem to do so quite well and quite successfully.
[0]: https://johnrmiles.com/life-without-an-inner-monologue/
I’m pretty sure I can do both. Can’t everyone?
Yeah me too, and it feels like a lot of people who are exclusively 'stuck' in language seem to think the pre-language part is somehow inferior (which imo is very misguided)
Thinking without language makes sense for problems that don't require language like visual art, but how do you solve complex logic problems or write a book without thinking in sentences.
You can think abstractly about geometry problems, or graph tgeory but even about linear algebra. Feynman describes how he felt while holding and analyzing problems in his mind. I'm less eloquent.
Also you can think about the narrative and the valence of a scene for a book, without blabbering to yourself while planning the story. I can narrate it like as if I imagine a friend being there and translating my thought into language but it's an extra step.
It also exhausts me more. Which makes coding with LLMs more tiring for me. Before it, I could code without language use exhausting my brain, but talking to LLMs requires putting all of it into English, while before I could just imagine a certain refactor as one coherent thought in my mind without turning it into sentences.
Of course above a certain level of difficulty, putting thoughts down helps for problem solving, but a lot of that can be various types of sketch drawings and formulas too.
It's likely a verbal and spatial heavy thought difference, the lawyer / engineer type of thinking difference.
>but how do you solve complex logic problems
If a species were (human level) intelligent, how would they have language first, if there is no need for an unintelligent species to have language (you know, other than bee booty-shaking tier language)?
It becomes chicken and egg. They don't need the language without intelligence, and can't become intelligent without the language (all so they can boot up the internal monologue that is apparently sitting there waiting on a 12,000 word vocabulary).
This is clear to me, because I don't rely on an internal monologue to think about such things. It is unimaginable to you, because you rely on an internal monologue.
Human (and animal minds to a lesser extent) do not think in a spoken language, but in an internal symbolic "language of thought". It is beneath the perception of an "internal monologue", but also tends to atrophy quite severely for people who rely on an internal monologue. Even in your brain though, there are so many different mental processes that you are unaware of for this reason. You can't even reliably sense cause-and-effect in your own mind... the internal monologue just makes up whatever plausible best guesses it can about why you made this decision or that decision, about why you did X or didn't do Y. The internal monologue doesn't have access to that other part of your brain.
No. There are people who cannot exist without the internal monologue, and if unusual circumstances interrupt that internal monologue they experience anxiety, dysfunction, and a rapidly intensifying irritation that they can't even articulate (because there's no monologue to allow them to describe it). They're generally very stupid, but the internal monologue tells them that they should have a high opinion of their own intelligence. It's unclear to me if they can even pretend to understand the concept of metacognition.
There is also a growing group of redditoids who believe that if you don't have an internal monologue you "have no soul".
If you spend your time reading reviews of books about other books that talk about the words of other writers who wrote about what others wrote, you start to believe that anything complex must be language-related.
Try to do a mechanical or electrical engineering degree coasting only on internally narrated words. It won't work. It can work in soft fields where all criteria are about what words other humans like to hear and there is no other complex external arbiter.