I will always held belief that we are part of the spiritual greater universe and our brains are antennas for the consciousness. At the same time I won’t allow this belief to interfere with my daily logic and scientific pursuits.
It’s way more fun to have some nice private things you are contemplating as you enjoy the various psychedelics.
There is the idea that it’d be easier for the universe to spontaneously create a single consciousness that knows and experiences everything and thinks they are you rather than creating a big bang that naturally leads to beings with consciences such as you.
That is such a weird way of putting it I believe its more the single consciousness wants to like experience because knowing everything is like pointless so it fragmentes into these piece of its conscienceness and we populate the universe experiencing. Maybe different theories but also not my theory lol
It’s the same as the old devil v angel on your shoulder bit. There’s a left hemisphere mode of understanding, a right hemisphere mode of understanding, and there’s what happens when they’re well integrated, which is mostly only achievable through meditation.
Just for the record, the left brain is the denialist, which offers hypotheticals and which takes the behaviour of others and places it firmly outside yourself, edifying the lie you tell yourself that you are separate and different from the other largely identical monkeys. The right brain tends to communicate in gestalts and complete pictures, without negativity and possibly without reference to individuality; YMMV.
I posit that the human mind is made up of dozens, or perhaps even hundreds/thousands “smaller agents” that work together to create consciousness as an emergent property of the whole, which makes it impossible to isolate and say “this, THIS right here IS concsciousness”. That does not mean each of those has their own personality, per sé.
So if I run enough different AI LLM models and let them communicate, I can create consciousness?
No, because LLMs are just a mathematical blender with ONE goal in mind: construct a good sentence. They have no thoughts, they have no corrective motion, they just spit out sentences.
You MIGHT get to passing a Turing test with enough feedback tied in, but then the “conciousness” is specifically coming from the systemic complexity at that point and still very much not the LLMs.
In my opinion you are giving way too much credit to human beings. We are mainly just machines that spit out sentences.
So you’re saying it’s not good enough for a sentient personality, but it might be good enough for an average politician?
No there’s no need to posit cutesy sounding things, that’s how misinformation starts :) If you have any sources or can cite stuff you’ve read which may point to it, that’s cool though
No, people are allowed to speculate and throw out ideas they have without needing some “expert” or paper to back up what they are saying. The mistake is treating such as if it’s a fact. Sure, there’s always going to be idiots out there that will take ideas like that and run with them, but I reject the idea that we should censor those speculations and random thoughts because idiots might believe them.
The real problem are the con artists who work those idiots up into a frenzy of fear and distrust by deliberately presenting shit they can’t back up as a fact and threat to drive donations or sell snake oil to “protect” from it.
And I’d say even shit like what you said does more harm than good because it can drive those who enjoy harmless speculation but lack the confidence to push back towards the fringes because they think the mainstream wants to tell them how to think.
I agree that hypotheticals and thought experiments are fun, but I disagree that any random speculation is a good idea. Everything should have a kernel of originating known fact, or some reasonable foundation. You can’t do science without starting with some known facts, or stating your assumptions based on such facts.
Edit to say:
And I’d say even shit like what you said does more harm than good because it can drive those who enjoy harmless speculation but lack the confidence to push back towards the fringes because they think the mainstream wants to tell them how to think
Is this speculation harmless? I am not sure we can qualify that, so it’s wrong to assume that it’s harmless.
Anywho, anyone and everyone should be able to participate in a discussion! I just think it’s nice to ground hypotheticals with some kind of known or observed phenomena. The funny thing is that science validates itself, so maybe this person is accurately describing an unknown cognitive model.
To me, good conversation hygiene in science or related fields is rooted in observations 🤷
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Mistook_His_Wife_for_a_Hat is a fantastic exploration of this idea, focusing on people who have lost specific parts of their brains due to tumors or strokes. The human mind is very much like a complex modern website- take Amazon for example, if everything is working, it’s the website where you buy stuff, but if certain specific systems are offline, you lose specific features, like your order history, or your cart, or your recommended products, etc… Missing one or two of of those components diminishes the site somewhat, but it’s still more or less Amazon. Your brain works the same way!
I posit this as well. I’m made up of at least 5 or 6 different versions of me with different biases and personalities. There’s a negative narcissistic version, there’s a happy go lucky version, a pragmatic version, a nihilist with a dark sense of humour, a soppy emotional one, and others and they all fight constantly to have their say. I thought everyone was like this 🤪
And the underlying animal is still there too. It’s fully in control at birth, and gets drowned out as we mature (for some people, less than others).
Small children are little more than animals, which is why they’re so unreasonable.
It’s my belief that the reason the written word or things like clocks are usually unreadable in dreams, is because the animal is both illiterate and innumerate. Dreams are the animals understanding of our waking experience. It knows these patterns are important and how they relate to other things, but it has no fucking idea what any of it actually means.
I do find myself reading and writing words in dreams quite a lot. I’ve never seen a clock though, not as far as I can remember.
But sometimes I can even remember signs with street names or banners / short paragraphs.
Dynamic lighting sadly doesn’t work tho. Light switches do nothing. For example if I turn on the lights in my bathroom in a dream, I can even hear the bathroom fan turn on, but the room remains dark. Ive heard thst this is apparently quite common though.
You would like Global Workspace Theory, basically says your consciousness is the result of components of the brain broadcasting their information to the whole.
I also like Integrated Information Theory which measures the conscious experience of a system by how integrated it is, which means that you can’t reduce the system to the sum of it’s parts without losing the emergent properties.
Is this egg_irl?
This is science memes, what about this post do you find similar to egg_irl?
Trigger warning: explaining jokes in way too much detail.
The phrasing is a reference to the “Is this a pigeon?” meme (see: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/is-this-a-pigeon ). This is meant to indicate that this is clearly not egg_irl, but the topic of the original post seemed like something repressed trans people can relate to in hindsight. It reminded me of a common pattern among eggs where there’s a vague but insistent internal voice (not literally a voice, more like an occasional impulse) telling you to do things that you associate with your actual gender, rather than your assigned gender, with varying effects depending on the person. For example, it generally made me feel uncomfortable without understanding why, leading me to assume I simply didn’t like those things, when in fact that was more or less the opposite of the truth.
Anyway, these sorts of things can make the idea of an unknown, voiceless, internal personality separate from your surface-level persona resonate with trans people. Add the fact that when you’re deeply involved in gender issues and transitioning, it’s so much on your mind that there’s a tendency to interpret everything as being somehow related to gender even when it isn’t, and it seemed like a good fit for the pigeon meme.
It certainly feels like that at times. The key being the non verbal part, it’s the part that feels things i can’t explain, like I have to poke and probe some part of my brain by imagining, to try and see how it reacts to certain thoughts and observe the emotions, then try to put it into words to explain it to the conscious part of my mind. Like, the subconscious is not unconscious, it’s perfectly conscious just not verbal.
