In this article, the concept of working memory accounts for not consciousness but the accessibility, stability and reportability of certain contents.
For example, when I am reading very carefully, I may not be concentrating on the ambient sounds, my bodily position, my peripheral vision, and the environment of the room. These contents may not have to be retained in working memory in any way as relevant information for the current activity. Nevertheless, it does not necessarily follow that these are unconscious in nature. They can be part of the background of consciousness.
Hence, there is the danger that the author assumes "being available for cognitive manipulation or verbal report" to be synonymous with "being conscious." This is quite an assumption and not one arrived at from the working memory model.
oersted 11 minutes ago [-]
Yes I think it’s a linguistic confusion more than anything else.
To me, consciousness is not generally that you can be aware (conscious) of things around you and can react to them, lots of things can do that.
Consciousness is a shorthand for saying that something is conscious of itself, or conscious of its own consciousness. It is the meta-ability to observe its own perceptions and thoughts.
But frankly, it’s a terrible concept and my definition is plenty flawed too. In practice it is more of a moving goalpost to denote the specialness and superiority of humans over all. That thing we can’t quite put a finger on that makes us different. It is a secular euphemism for the soul. It is not very scientific.
And that is quite problematic because the privileges we ascribe to those on the wrong side of the line fall off a cliff. We rely on that line as a foundation for so much of our morals.
I don’t have a solution to propose, it’s hard.
SubiculumCode 2 hours ago [-]
Yeah, binning conscious and unconscious as two categorical classes is probably wrong. There are likely gradations, especially in the context of working memory over time.
cloudie78 50 minutes ago [-]
We can’t define or measure consciousness - because we haven’t discovered how.
So, we can’t define or measure it, but we can create it?
How do you create that which is not definable or measurable?
thansz 40 minutes ago [-]
Not thoroughly understanding consciousness doesn't mean we can't create it. All sorts of phenomena are created without an understanding of the underlying mechanism. The entire animal kingdom, including us humans, have been creating conscious beings (babies) without understanding how consciousness actually works.
Of course, understanding the mechanism is helpful if you want control, reliability, and precision over the phenomena, but creation can definitely happen before we can explain it.
vitally3643 39 minutes ago [-]
> How do you create that which is not definable or measurable?
Through engineering.
This isn't new by any stretch of the imagination. Throughout our entire history as a species, we've been building things long, long before we had the tools to understand them. We built bridges and massive cathedrals before we invented geometry. We built and optimized steam engines for a century before we developed the language of fluid dynamics to understand why those designs were optimal.
Engineering very frequently is far ahead of the science needed to explain it.
As far as consciousness goes, personally I think it's an emergent property that will arise on its own when conditions are right. It will take a lot of experimentation to establish the right conditions, and then generations of study to figure out why those conditions were ideal for consciousness to emerge.
Because realistically we can't learn about consciousness with a sample size of one (us). We need to study other consciousnesses to understand the why and hows.
Tenoke 14 minutes ago [-]
We can create many things without being able to define them. From embryos to fire.
visarga 28 minutes ago [-]
> How do you create that which is not definable or measurable?
animals can have offspring without understanding reproduction
hackingonempty 29 minutes ago [-]
Consciousness is what the brain is doing.
I look forward to more precise definitions.
visarga 27 minutes ago [-]
Consciousness is what the body is doing to be viable.
Without it we can't walk, eat, reproduce, or do anything. I like to think cost viability reasons explain consciousness. I know people prefer metaphysical or quantum magic explanations, I prefer a prosaic one - cost. It's a mechanism to keep our costs offset by gains. Cost can also explain unity - we die as one organism, not each organ on its own.
empath75 8 minutes ago [-]
People made fire for thousands of years before they understood what it was.
qsera 18 minutes ago [-]
Isn't that obvious?
What we perceive as "present" is just our latest memory.
It seems to me that compaction is not unlike sleep
lambdaone 2 hours ago [-]
What makes this most interesting from my point of view is that this is a specific enough theory that it might be amenable to experimental investigation.
BoardsOfCanada 26 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
d00d0ff000 3 hours ago [-]
It does not.
Consciousness is the echo chamber of the quantum domain, temporally propagating through cognitive technology. Memory and temporal propagation (awareness) give consciousness something to do, which makes it topically interesting and addressable.
The quantum domain has a tremendous information density which scales through entanglement (by the tens of thousands or even millions in our neurons) allowing the ultra high definition holographic experience we (many of us) are familiar with.
When quantum holographic memory is understood, consciousness will be better understood. The qubit is a dead end, this will be the indicator of scientific progress.
__patchbit__ 3 hours ago [-]
Does living working memory bifurcate to logical and physical maps as happens to compute memory on kernel bring up after MMU and core coherence? That being the case an owl may know what it is like to be a bat.
d00d0ff000 2 hours ago [-]
The physical nervous system is one map, and the consciousness the “moment of continuity” (like a “moment of force” in physical systems). The memory (learned inference) is another map. Consciousness animates and iteratively influences in between.
You can fantasize that you are an owl or a bat, doing so well enough can be quite convincing. Remember, wings are arms and hands (look at a skeletal picture, you will see what I mean.)
lambdaone 2 hours ago [-]
I think you'd have great difficulty in doing either, as you are imagining what you think it might be like to be one of these animals are are almost certainly unable to encompass what they might feel it to be like; the case of bats is literally the subject of Thomas Nagel's What Is It Like to Be a Bat?
2 hours ago [-]
PaulDavisThe1st 2 hours ago [-]
Woo!
AndrewKemendo 2 hours ago [-]
Do you have any references for these claims?
I’m also curious how you define consciousness.
mapontosevenths 51 minutes ago [-]
> I’m also curious how you define consciousness.
This is what I came here for. Every article or commenter that attempts to deduce the roots of consciousness should first start by defining it. I have yet to see anyone even bother to seriously try.
If I spent all my time trying to figure out the fundamental forces involved in floopityjoop, but refused to ever define exactly what a floopityjoop was, you would ignore me, laugh at me, or feel pity for me.
AndrewKemendo 38 minutes ago [-]
Hence why I ask
In my experience, “intelligence” and “consciousness” are socially defined categories and can’t be viewed objectively
There’s too much social weight on those to have a firm definition because the social implications are too grave and nobody is willing to give up their philosophy for a precise definition
therobots927 2 hours ago [-]
Very interesting. Do you have any links to material along these lines?
zulux 1 hours ago [-]
It conjecture, but in my opinion there's something about our brain based on the evidence.
Three pounds of meat in one human brain can do things an entire datacenter of AI can't. Like fold clothing.
lambdaone 2 hours ago [-]
> Consciousness is the echo chamber of the quantum domain
[citation needed]
mrec 53 minutes ago [-]
I've seen this bouncing around since the early 90s, with New Agey people like Danah Zohar, and probably predates even that. There never seemed to be a whole lot to it; not much more than "well, consciousness is weird, and quantum is weird, therefore consciousness is quantum". Or maybe "well, quantum is trendy, and I'd like to make a buck, therefore..."
DonaldFisk 20 minutes ago [-]
I'm unsure what to make of the post you're replying to, but the idea that there's a connexion between consciousness and quantum phenomena isn't just a New Age idea. Eugene Wigner wasn't New Agey, and he wrote Remarks on the Mind-Body Question, suggesting that wave function collapse only occurs when the consciousness of an an observer becomes aware of the result of a measurement, not the measuring apparatus, which is entangled with whatever is being measured, records it.
lambdaone 7 minutes ago [-]
For me the most plausible argument for "quantum consciousness" was made by Roger Penrose. I still don't believe it; we can demonstrate wavefunction collapse using experiments like the delayed-choice quantum eraser without anything conscious being involved (unless you believe in panpsychism, which is really no weirder than the quantum consciousness ideas, and also quite fun to contemplate).
bookofjoe 2 hours ago [-]
FWIW the only place I EVER see the phrase "citation needed" is on HN. That's not a good or a bad thing: it's simply an observation.
mrec 56 minutes ago [-]
Pretty sure it originated with the Wikipedia annotation. See e.g. https://xkcd.com/285/ from 2007.
analog31 2 hours ago [-]
With apologies to the above post if I'm wrong, I've seen it as a polite way of saying, "bullshit."
mapontosevenths 50 minutes ago [-]
> I've seen it as a polite way of saying, "bullshit."
Only if they can't provide a reliable citation.
Rendered at 16:57:40 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
https://theconversation.com/consciousness-how-working-memory...
To me, consciousness is not generally that you can be aware (conscious) of things around you and can react to them, lots of things can do that.
Consciousness is a shorthand for saying that something is conscious of itself, or conscious of its own consciousness. It is the meta-ability to observe its own perceptions and thoughts.
But frankly, it’s a terrible concept and my definition is plenty flawed too. In practice it is more of a moving goalpost to denote the specialness and superiority of humans over all. That thing we can’t quite put a finger on that makes us different. It is a secular euphemism for the soul. It is not very scientific.
And that is quite problematic because the privileges we ascribe to those on the wrong side of the line fall off a cliff. We rely on that line as a foundation for so much of our morals.
I don’t have a solution to propose, it’s hard.
So, we can’t define or measure it, but we can create it?
How do you create that which is not definable or measurable?
Of course, understanding the mechanism is helpful if you want control, reliability, and precision over the phenomena, but creation can definitely happen before we can explain it.
Through engineering.
This isn't new by any stretch of the imagination. Throughout our entire history as a species, we've been building things long, long before we had the tools to understand them. We built bridges and massive cathedrals before we invented geometry. We built and optimized steam engines for a century before we developed the language of fluid dynamics to understand why those designs were optimal.
Engineering very frequently is far ahead of the science needed to explain it.
As far as consciousness goes, personally I think it's an emergent property that will arise on its own when conditions are right. It will take a lot of experimentation to establish the right conditions, and then generations of study to figure out why those conditions were ideal for consciousness to emerge.
Because realistically we can't learn about consciousness with a sample size of one (us). We need to study other consciousnesses to understand the why and hows.
animals can have offspring without understanding reproduction
I look forward to more precise definitions.
Without it we can't walk, eat, reproduce, or do anything. I like to think cost viability reasons explain consciousness. I know people prefer metaphysical or quantum magic explanations, I prefer a prosaic one - cost. It's a mechanism to keep our costs offset by gains. Cost can also explain unity - we die as one organism, not each organ on its own.
What we perceive as "present" is just our latest memory.
Consciousness is the echo chamber of the quantum domain, temporally propagating through cognitive technology. Memory and temporal propagation (awareness) give consciousness something to do, which makes it topically interesting and addressable.
The quantum domain has a tremendous information density which scales through entanglement (by the tens of thousands or even millions in our neurons) allowing the ultra high definition holographic experience we (many of us) are familiar with.
When quantum holographic memory is understood, consciousness will be better understood. The qubit is a dead end, this will be the indicator of scientific progress.
You can fantasize that you are an owl or a bat, doing so well enough can be quite convincing. Remember, wings are arms and hands (look at a skeletal picture, you will see what I mean.)
I’m also curious how you define consciousness.
This is what I came here for. Every article or commenter that attempts to deduce the roots of consciousness should first start by defining it. I have yet to see anyone even bother to seriously try.
If I spent all my time trying to figure out the fundamental forces involved in floopityjoop, but refused to ever define exactly what a floopityjoop was, you would ignore me, laugh at me, or feel pity for me.
In my experience, “intelligence” and “consciousness” are socially defined categories and can’t be viewed objectively
There’s too much social weight on those to have a firm definition because the social implications are too grave and nobody is willing to give up their philosophy for a precise definition
Three pounds of meat in one human brain can do things an entire datacenter of AI can't. Like fold clothing.
[citation needed]
Only if they can't provide a reliable citation.