Thank you for the long reply. I took some time to digest it. I believe I know what you mean.
I can also say that the consciousness resides in a form of virtual reality in the brain, allowing us to manipulate reality in our minds to predict outcomes of our actions.
We imagine what happens. Physicists use their imagination to understand physical systems. Einstein was famous for his thought experiments, such as imagining riding on a beam of light.
We also use our physical intuition for unrelated things. In math or engineering, everything is a point in some space; a data point. An RGB color is a point in 3D color space. An image can be a single point in some high dimensional space.
All our ancestor’s back to the beginning of life had to navigate an environment. Much of the evolution of our nervous system was occupied with navigating spaces and predicting physics. (This is why I believe language to be much easier than self-driving cars. See Moravec’s paradox.)
One problem is, when I think abstract thoughts and concentrate, I tend to be much less aware of myself. I can’t spare the “CPU cycles”, so to say. I don’t think self-awareness is a necessary component of this “virtual environment”.
There are people who are bad at visualizing; a condition known as aphantasia. There must be, at least, quite some diversity in the nature of this virtual environment.
Some ideas about brain architecture seem to be implied. It should be possible to test some of these ideas by reference to neurological experiments or case studies, such as the work on split-brain patients. Perhaps the phenomenon of blindsight is directly relevant.
That’s all very spot on. 👍 😀
And the fact that our imagination isn’t limited by real physics, but we can imagine alternatives, hence we have fantasy stories. This is I think a very good example of how our minds do not depend entirely on reality.
I can’t spare the “CPU cycles”, so to say.
Absolutely there are limitations, but when you have solved the abstract puzzle and learned it by heart, then you can! But we can only really focus on one thing at a time. I actually tried way back in the 80’s to train myself to focus on 2 things at a time. But pressuring myself too hard was such a disturbing experience I stopped. I think it may be possible, but there is also risk of going insane.
I don’t think self-awareness is a necessary component of this “virtual environment”.
Well that’s a tough one I admit, because trying to understand the limits, I have also observed our cat, to try to determine how it thinks and what the limits are.
It seems to me that cats are not capable of manipulating their environment mentally. For instance if the cat is hunting a mouse that hides behind a small obstacle, the cat cannot figure out to move the obstacle to get at the mouse. This is also an example of different degrees of awareness. It seems like this thing we take for granted, most animals aren’t capable of. So I think this virtual environment is necessary at least for the level of consciousness we have. But I agree that it may not be a necessity for more basic self awareness, because I think our cat is self aware. He can clearly distinguish between me an my wife, this is obvious because his behavior is very different towards us. If he can distinguish between us, it seems logical that he is also able to tell himself as being different from us. AFAIK that’s a pretty big part of what self awareness is.
But I also think that we don’t have to be aware of our consciousness all the time, only when it’s relevant.
at least, quite some diversity in the nature of this virtual environment.
Absolutely yes, HUGE differences. I’m personally a bit of a fan of the multi talent Piet Hein, a multi talent who was a theoretical physicist. He could hold complex geometrical shapes in his head and see if they fit together, in a way no one else at the university could, and he played mental ping-pong" with Niels Bohr, and just like he was very good at it, there are people who are similarly bad at it. I find it hard to understand how their thought process works, because curiously this is also a thing among smart people AFAIK.
I admit I’m not really aware of any results from the study of it, but it is an interesting subject.
I am reminded of the concept of latent representations in AI.
From your link:
we argue that language space may not always be optimal for reasoning.
I absolutely agree. It’s like discerning between the abstract and the concrete, and if you can visualize it as a person, you can probably also understand it. So I wonder if people with aphantasia think in a way that is similar to abstract thinking for everything? Maybe each way has it’s own strength?
We utilize the last hidden state of the LLM as a representation of the reasoning state (termed “continuous thought”)
So it’s not like a virtual reality, but wow that sounds awesome. 😎
It sure is impressive how fast things are developing now.
Thank you for the long reply. I took some time to digest it. I believe I know what you mean.
We imagine what happens. Physicists use their imagination to understand physical systems. Einstein was famous for his thought experiments, such as imagining riding on a beam of light.
We also use our physical intuition for unrelated things. In math or engineering, everything is a point in some space; a data point. An RGB color is a point in 3D color space. An image can be a single point in some high dimensional space.
All our ancestor’s back to the beginning of life had to navigate an environment. Much of the evolution of our nervous system was occupied with navigating spaces and predicting physics. (This is why I believe language to be much easier than self-driving cars. See Moravec’s paradox.)
One problem is, when I think abstract thoughts and concentrate, I tend to be much less aware of myself. I can’t spare the “CPU cycles”, so to say. I don’t think self-awareness is a necessary component of this “virtual environment”.
There are people who are bad at visualizing; a condition known as aphantasia. There must be, at least, quite some diversity in the nature of this virtual environment.
Some ideas about brain architecture seem to be implied. It should be possible to test some of these ideas by reference to neurological experiments or case studies, such as the work on split-brain patients. Perhaps the phenomenon of blindsight is directly relevant.
I am reminded of the concept of latent representations in AI. Lately, as reasoning models have become the rage, there are attempts to let the reasoning happen in latent space.
That’s all very spot on. 👍 😀
And the fact that our imagination isn’t limited by real physics, but we can imagine alternatives, hence we have fantasy stories. This is I think a very good example of how our minds do not depend entirely on reality.
Absolutely there are limitations, but when you have solved the abstract puzzle and learned it by heart, then you can! But we can only really focus on one thing at a time. I actually tried way back in the 80’s to train myself to focus on 2 things at a time. But pressuring myself too hard was such a disturbing experience I stopped. I think it may be possible, but there is also risk of going insane.
Well that’s a tough one I admit, because trying to understand the limits, I have also observed our cat, to try to determine how it thinks and what the limits are.
It seems to me that cats are not capable of manipulating their environment mentally. For instance if the cat is hunting a mouse that hides behind a small obstacle, the cat cannot figure out to move the obstacle to get at the mouse. This is also an example of different degrees of awareness. It seems like this thing we take for granted, most animals aren’t capable of. So I think this virtual environment is necessary at least for the level of consciousness we have. But I agree that it may not be a necessity for more basic self awareness, because I think our cat is self aware. He can clearly distinguish between me an my wife, this is obvious because his behavior is very different towards us. If he can distinguish between us, it seems logical that he is also able to tell himself as being different from us. AFAIK that’s a pretty big part of what self awareness is.
But I also think that we don’t have to be aware of our consciousness all the time, only when it’s relevant.
From your link:
I absolutely agree. It’s like discerning between the abstract and the concrete, and if you can visualize it as a person, you can probably also understand it. So I wonder if people with aphantasia think in a way that is similar to abstract thinking for everything? Maybe each way has it’s own strength?
So it’s not like a virtual reality, but wow that sounds awesome. 😎
It sure is impressive how fast things are developing now.