Twelfth Post!

[hoisinsauce]

POST NAMER TBC-- work harder, meme!

Welcome back, anyway! Chat fandom, media, creative things, weirdness from around the net, funny stuff, anything! Meme awaits!

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Comments

Re: Books - Consciousness Explained (Daniel C. Dennett)

[(Anonymous)]

We also know ECT works for some problems without having a clue why; this is my current theory-in-progress)

Re: Books - Consciousness Explained (Daniel C. Dennett)

[(Anonymous)]

sd

This is also reminding me how fuzzy I am on how computer memory physically works; time to relearn all that yet again, I guess. ONE DAY I will fucking understand SSDs.

Re: Books - Consciousness Explained (Daniel C. Dennett)

[(Anonymous)]

So, apparently the part about hypothesis generation getting fake yeses and nos was part of the prelude, offering an explanation of hallucinations that didn't require an internal "storyteller" with a coherent readymade narrative. I was waiting for the book to come back to that topic, because I thought his description *of* hallucinations wasn't close enough to the range of human experience for his account to be persuasive.

In the meantime, turns out I had read a bit further in, though I have minimal memory of it; when I put the book down and forgot about it for months (over a year?) he was sketching out the conditions that would need to obtain to scientifically investigate phenomenology. So guess I'll go back to the start of that part, given I don't remember the premises he was painstakingly assembling. =D

So we're on A Method for Phenomenology, pt 3, The Method of Heterophenomenology. I assume (just from the name) this is going to be about branching out from studying one's own experience to the experience of others. But we shall see. What he intends to lay out, at this point, is a "neutral way of describing the data" pertaining to consciousness.

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He argues (in many words) that almost all our current science on people presupposes consciousness, so I think he's implying we'd best keep supposing it; there's nothing special about phenomenology. Dennett's arg: when humans peform different behaviours in response to experiment instructions or events in the experiment, we assume movements or vocalizations aren't random, but that we can get data from them. So we're already assuming they're agents with intentions.

My q: isn't this begging the question?

First sentence of next section, paraphrased: "but isn't this begging the question?"

Ok I'll allow it; make your case.

Terminology note that I may not be consistent with: he distinguishes between "opinions" and "beliefs"; "opinions" are beliefs that you can't have without language.

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In the next section, he says he's gonna get round the question-begging accusation by using the analogy of interpreting fiction. This sounds sus as an approach to that central contention, to me, though might still lead somewhere interesting. But I'm hungry, so I'll come back to my book later.

Re: Books - Consciousness Explained (Daniel C. Dennett)

[(Anonymous)]

Dude has a high words-to-signal ratio. So, he brings up fictional stuff to argue that we can talk about what is true *within* some text, without making a claim about whether that text corresponds to reality. He says we can treat subjects of phenomenological investigations in much the same way; we can approach the results of experiments as if subjects were conscious, without committing ourselves to believing they are or not, and just examine the picture we get as a picture.

That took like 2 pages, including the dubious claim that he could pass a term paper on Madame Bovary without ever having read it, because he knows the plot. sry about ur education system, bro.

There's also an amusing quote where he says he doesn't see any deep philosophical problems about the way we should respond to fiction, because *it's fiction*. Don't we all fucking know it. :''') The repeated declarations that it was barren ground as far as metaphysics goes made me laugh, for obvious reasons.

Re: Books - Consciousness Explained (Daniel C. Dennett)

[(Anonymous)]

He does also gesture at an argument from improbability; ie: if people in experiments just happen to behave like conscious agents, despite being philosophical zombies, that's *pretty remarkable* and should be investigated further, but he doesn't dwell on this. It's fair, though, I think, to ask "if we're saying the behaviour of some humans has no semantic significance, why this behaviour rather than that?" *How* are the zombies alighting on the semblance of consciousness? You'd get some interesting theories down that road, at least.

Re: Books - Consciousness Explained (Daniel C. Dennett)

[(Anonymous)]

Still slowly meandering through this.

We get some descriptions of experiments that suggest that perception of the order of events doesn't always match up with the real order of events, and looking at different ways that might be possible. I feel like this part takes a lot of words to suggest that the nervous system might use a time-stamping mechanism; it spends a lotttt of time explaining that the time in the timestamp might not match up with the time at which it is "read". Well, yeah. But then, maybe it's easier for me to think in terms of timestamps, these days, then it was for him or his audience when he wrote it.

He says that consciousness is a process of constant revision and replacement of information in response to environmental stimuli, arguing that there's no one step where it is all brought together into a cohesive "whole" to be projected for some inner observer. So details can be revised and replaced and assembled asynchronously, if they have the right metadata. (Dennett doesn't use the term "metadata" or "timestamps", but that's what he's describing, imo.)

Something I found funny: he mentions that computers have clocks, but treats this as contingent, an implementation detail. I disagree! I don't think you can compute without clocks of some kind. I think you need some kind of constant against which progress can be measured. I think clocks are a measure of loops, and you can think of time as a loop (eg: orbits). Each completion of the loop increments the counter. (And, for an orbit, 1 completion of the loop means a set amount of distance travelled, so that maps distance to time). I think I want to say that the loop offers a level of abstraction (thinking of graphics), because if it changes in size but you control other processes relative to completions of the loop, the system will have an internal stability. A system with *no* clock is the same as one in which each particle runs on its own time. I don't see how that system can compute, because it's got no way of knowing what order anything happens in, and you need that if you want to do any operations. Maybe I'm just being unimaginative but I think computation without clocks doesn't make *sense*.

So, although he's describing it more as a curiousity, because he thinks it's a contingent feature of how we've made computers, I think it's core to consciousness and how we make sense of the world. And, since I doubt the brain is timestamping details with ddmmyyyy, I wonder if it uses loops and then calculates from the offset, and this is why people are governed by various rhythms, circadian, that sort of thing. If it's NOT a loop, the brain can't know when anything happens, so it can't piece together what happened first or second, because it receives the data asynchronously. That's my current suggestion, anyway. Will have to look into it more.

Re: Books - Consciousness Explained (Daniel C. Dennett)

[(Anonymous)]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_oscillation

I think we see repeating patterns because that = loops = clocks.

Re: Books - Consciousness Explained (Daniel C. Dennett)

[(Anonymous)]

Picked up again; finally finished the chapter.

Not much to report. Though I did just realise that the probable reason he keeps using comparisons involving the British Empire is as a pun; he's describing an *Empirical* theory of mind. 😑 (He's using it as an example of a distributed system where you can't say that some property was true of the system at some specific time, because the property became true of different parts at different times and the system was the sum of its parts. In this respect, he's comparing the brain to an empire.)

Re: Books - Consciousness Explained (Daniel C. Dennett)

[(Anonymous)]

That is excellent and I am slightly motivated to pick this up now. Will have to wait until after this (much more mindless) Lockwood & Co reread.

Re: Books - Lockwood and Co. (Jonathan Stroud)

[(Anonymous)]

Lockwood and Co, yay! :D I've read the first 3; have the rest waiting and am looking forward to the right moment to race through them. :))) Am also curious about his series about outlaws...

Re: Books - Lockwood and Co. (Jonathan Stroud)

[(Anonymous)]

I read them years ago and reread them on vacation this month. They held up! I really hadn't remembered much beyond the first two so there were plenty of fun twists.

One thing that I newly appreciated is the depiction especially in book 3 of female adolescent jealousy. I think it captures that awkward mix of admiration and annoyance, and the consequent avoidant and dishonest behaviors, fairly well.

Re: Books - Consciousness Explained (Daniel C. Dennett)

[(Anonymous)]

Onto Chapter 7 - The Evolution of Consciousness.

I'm enjoying this chapter more. Less repetition so far, and more interesting examples. Learned some stuff I didn't know about brains. Due to current context, I keep abstracting everything he's writing about organisms protecting themselves, in order to replicate, to apply it to the arts. He talks about organisms needing a way to distinguish friend from foe, to avoid or embrace; I immediately apply this to literary awards groups, and the tactics they ought to take to survive. :P (namely: not creating environments in which writers wither. Ho-hum) This is a fun chapter to read when viewing humans as nodes in a network, as neurons are, and viewing human behaviors as contributing to (or detracting from) a civilizational immune system. His description of how always-on consciousness formed to provide organisms with better information, to aid their survival, sounds very much like the way feminist groups formed in response to an existential threat. There was no 'HQ' tying strands of info together... until it was needed. Then more organized hubs sprung up. And now this dan uses them as a source of info, even in cases where their initial purpose seems less pressing, because they have been more reliable sources of info about the world than various sources that preceded them. In this way, the collective acquires more complex consciousness (and arguably gets smarter :P).

He describes brains as anticipation-machines, viewing+analyzing their environment and predicting the future, to aid survival. He mentions that you can roughly split brains into two systems; dorsal and ventral; dorsal handles the background processes (he analogizes them to collision-detection) that stop you falling off cliffs and things in real time; ventral handles slower info-gathering and analysis. This makes me picture a continuum, 'open to experience' vs 'treating every new thing as danger', where there's a sweet spot where you learn but don't get eaten. Presumably the more you're willing to investigate and ignore the output of a dorsal system, the more a ventral system gets to do-- unless you fall off a cliff. Made me think about the specific dangers faced by overthinkers who neglect the background processes that keep them alive. :P (and vice versa; being too alert to danger can restrict a system's input and restrict how much it can learn).

He describes complex conscious systems as having evolved from less complex ones, and outlines two strategies for survival: recognize an attack and hide (eg: clam clamping down shell), or predict it in advance and evade it. Claims latter approach evolved in beings that started with the former. Again, much you can enjoy analogizing and drawing conclusions from. With previous chapters, I felt like I was just condensing them when writing notes here; this time, I'm missing a lot of the good stuff, and it's worth reading in full. Haven't finished the chapter, yet.

Also enjoyed this:

"The juvenile sea squirt wanders through the sea searching for a suitable rock or hunk of coral to cling to and make its home for life. For this task, it has a rudimentary nervous system. When it finds its spot and takes root, it doesn't need its brain anymore, so it eats it! (It's rather like getting tenure.)"

Re: Books - Consciousness Explained (Daniel C. Dennett)

[(Anonymous)]

(He also claims that you need to recognize 'self' from 'other' in order to survive. I'm not sure this follows; you need to be able to recognize 'friend' from 'enemy', but I'm not sure you *need* a self/other distinction for that, or if it's just contingent. Hell, I'm not sure if it's even contingent.)

Re: Books - Consciousness Explained (Daniel C. Dennett)

[(Anonymous)]

He claims animals are sensitive to vertical symmetry, because back in the day, most things with vertical symmetry were other animals, and it was useful to know if one was looking at you; it might want to eat you, or you might want to eat it, or you might want to shack up. I need to look into whether this applies to horizontal symmetry; since he mentioned vertical, specifically, I assume not, but then if we were all in the sea at some point, you'd think both would be useful, otherwise a predator could just evade detection by rotating a bit.