RE: we are the narrators of our minds

['Chris de Morsella' via Everything List]

 

 

From: everything-list@googlegroups.com 
[mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of meekerdb

On 6/26/2014 9:28 AM, 'Chris de Morsella' via Everything List wrote: 

From: everything-list@googlegroups.com 
[mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of LizR

>>Yes, according to this view we are just "along for the ride".

One way of looking at it. However it seems to me more apt to think of ourselves 
as the loci of the consensus of our brain/minds; to view ourselves as the 
dynamic manifestation of a consensus quorum, which is the wellhead of our 
coming into being.

We are in some sense operators as well in this neural consensus network, 
influencing its vast number of constituent neurons with what we feel, believe, 
conclude and so on. However all this “feeling”, “believing”, “concluding” is 
actually happening in the brain/mind and mediating through what we sense as 
being ourselves back through the quorum network (that I suspect is operating 
beneath our conscious selves) looping back to us as “doubt”, “certainty”, new 
thoughts or focus of attention or whatever beautiful or ugly turn our mind’s 
eye takes.

In my view our common view of ourselves, of our “I” is incomplete. We are more 
than we are conscious of being and the part of ourselves, of which we are 
conscious – IMO -- is the narrating loci of the executive decisional consensus 
network that I am arguing is our actual “self”…. Even though we are unaware of 
the existence of by far most of its constituent activity.


I quite agree.  Conscious thought is only a small part of our "thinking" in the 
more general sense of information processing, problem solving,...  It seems to 
be the part associated with language and visualization.  

 

I agree – and one reason I like the term “narrator”. It seems to me that the 
evolution of sophisticated language processing in our species will be found to 
be linked with the rise of a self-aware aspect of our much larger minds that 
has perhaps gone far beyond its original purpose of being the focus of the 
linguistic stream. Perhaps having a multitude of competing voices in the head 
just drove people mad… schizophrenics suffer from this.

Perhaps – unlike say the considerable amount of processing done on the various 
sensorial streams in order to reify them into our experience of reality, all of 
which is efficiently performed in a highly parallelized fashion  – evolution 
arrived at the understanding that the language center of the mind had to 
represent the (wide area) networked consensus of the whole. 

Or perhaps language hooked into pre-existing decisional areas and for this 
reason is so closely linked to the sensation we experience as being ourselves. 
But it seems evident to me that our minds are engaged in a long running daily 
conversation with themselves… the internal dialog. Hard to write a single 
sentence without the act being accompanied by an internal dialog. I can think 
of non-verbal thoughts much more easily without engaging this inner voice in 
producing the narration of my mind… for example musical or visual thinking 
(even of a technical nature too.. like a blueprint)

As soon as the mode of thought involves language the narration center of my 
mind spins up and the words appear (as if “I” had thought them up out of thin 
air)

 

 

If I were designing a Mars rover and I provided it with memories to use in 
learning I would want to filter out the rovers sensor data and store it only 
succinct chunks that can be easily found by association.  

 

Agreed, and I believe much of what the brain is doing is dumping unimportant 
stuff (or what the mind’s decisional algorithms decide is unimportant) from the 
in-coming sensorial stream in order to render in higher definition that which 
the quorum based decisional algorithms decide is of higher order importance for 
the individual entities survival. Our minds filter out stuff to an outstanding 
degree, especially when we are engaged in some task. Experiments, for example 
with test subjects engaged in complex two order tasks (where they must pay 
attention to say both the shape and the color of randomly appearing objects in 
various locations of their screen of view) that show a surprising number of 
individuals being functionally blind during these tests (where they are highly 
focused on the task) to men dressed in gorilla suits walking clearly through 
their field of view.

 

And I'd only want to store one that indicated something different, something 
the rover didn't already "know".  So I'd have it continually look at new data 
and compare it with what it would have predicted based on old data.  Only new 
data that was not easily predicted would get filed in memory.  

 

Nice compression strategy. Reducing the search space and the noise level is 
especially important when dealing with vast amounts of incoming data in near 
real time mode. 

 

I think this would instantiate consciousness in the rover.  

 

I think consciousness also requires massive parallelism in processing as a 
pre-requisite, and that it relies on parallel algorithms and with considerable 
error correction (at each step… the brain is so incredibly noisy it is a wonder 
it works at all J )

 

 

Of course this could be at different levels depending on how much the rover 
itself was in its predictive models.  It might be only aware of it's position, 
temperature, battery charge,...  Or is might also be aware of its relation to 
JPL, its predictive algorithms, its learning algorithms, ....

 

Given enough parallelism and time (between reboots) to evolve and build a 
memory, I suspect a ghost would eventually emerge within the robot (given 
enough processing depth and breadth), as…  at some fuzzy threshold it began to 
develop some analogue of the brain’s mirror neurons. 

I am quite certain that this is what DARPA is now trying to do…. To build 
intelligent self-aware, self-learning machines.

Cheers,

Chris



Brent 

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