So I'm going to toss around some thoughts that came up while I was in class trying desperately to find an awful lecture interesting. This will be boring to most, if not all of you, so no worries if you stop reading now :-) ...lol who am I kidding, this presumes there is even a single person reading this at all!
I am taking a class on parallel and distributed computing, which deals with how to "solve problems" over a large number of processing units. So it deals with super computers as well as large networks of computers. Well the teacher made an offhand remark today that resonated: "you see, thinking about parallel algorithms is hard-- we're not used to it". Why?
Our brain does a lot at once: it monitors various biological systems simultaneously, processes all information coming in from our various senses and constructs some 'reality', reminds us when we need to use the restroom, etc. All of this happens because the mechanics of our brains do many many little things all at the same time (massively parallel). And its not just our brains-- even our cells are all little independent machines processing away and interacting with their neighbors. Thus, in nature we see parallel processing all over the place-- especially in our brains. So why is it then that we only experience a single 'focus' of consciousness? Why must we have this 'serialized' (i.e. think about one thing after another) view of the world?
Our brain is doing all of this complicated parallel processing in order to construct a view of 'reality' that we then reason about serially and slowly! Why? Presumably consciousness arose via evolution. Strangely, we evolved this single 'focus' model of consciousness even though few if any other processes in nature have this 'serial' mode of operation.
Is this 'single', slow, serial consciousness the natural result of many smaller massively parallel operations? Is it just the first step in a more complicated evolution of our awareness? Might we one day have multiple 'threads' of consciousness running at the same time (i.e. one part of my brain can think about my homework assignment, while the other figures out what birthdays are coming up). It's difficult to think about because you have a natural inclination to think that 'well its simpler for us to solve problems if there is only one thing to focus on'-- but this answer is completely based off of our only experience with consciousness. Just like we can't imagine what it would be like to have three arms or eyes in the back of our head.
The answers to these questions are important for a lot of reasons. For computer science, people are working on systems that can experience awareness and consciousness like humans do. Creating such a computer would give great insights into our brains... and give way to the 'Terminator' scenario where sentient computers take over the world and kill all humans. Personally, I wouldn't blame the computers. We humans are doing a terrible job of managing ourselves. The child-like shenanigans of modern american politics over something like health care reform is a good case in point.
Now I know that consciousness and cognitive science are big areas of research-- so I'm just naively thinking about this for fun. I'm not trying to say anything profound. Its just neat to think about (in a geeky way)...don't hate :-)
In other news...here's a hot guy:
He's gay too, and in the movie CAMP which you might enjoy if you like Glee. Don't get me wrong its no Glee: it's extremely campy. But some of the music is good, and the boys are hot in it!
Much Love,
Steve
28 comments:
Hi there, Steve
There is at least one person reading this :-)
You've asked an interesting question. My view of it is something like this:
We have a serial view of consciousness because it's just a single "process" running on the massively parallel hardware of the brain. There are plenty of other processes running which consciousness interacts with - senses, motor control, memory and so on - but there's only one consciousness, and it can only handle one thing at a time.
Consciousness can hand over various tasks to subconscious processes - memory is a good one. You start thinking about something you want to bring to mind - a name, a face, a fact - and after a few seconds conclude it's not going to happen. Then, some while later (usually too late to be useful!), the thing you wanted pops into your head. A subconscious memory search process was set running when you had the original thought, and now it has reported back to the conscious.
Another example is more general problem processing: I find, as I think have many others, that the best answers and insights come when you stop thinking consciously about something, and go and do something else instead (preferably not processing-intensive). So many things have come clear to me when I have been out walking around; Douglas Adams (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) famously used to take baths as a way of getting inspiration for the script.
I think this model may also help explain such things as schizophrenia. Most people have only one consciousness process; sometimes it's running, sometimes not. Schizophrenics have more than one consciousness process, though only one can run at a time.
Why exactly this simple, serial consciousness should have arisen from such a mess of parallel processing, I have no idea. But it does seem to be fundamental to the way we think: I'm sure I've heard about recent psychological research that suggests people will serialise their view of what's happened, even if it's not actually the case. One wild shot in the dark from me: might this be related to language processing? Humans seem to have a powerful need to tell stories, to narrate to themselves and others what has happened (look at what we're doing here!). This naturally requires a serialised view of the world.
One final thought: see if you can find a copy of SF author Ted Chiang's short story "Story Of Your Life". I think there's a story collection of the same name containing it. It describes, amongst other things, first contact with aliens who don't have a serialised consciousness, and the story structure is designed to show how this mode of thought might work. It's a bit mind-bending to read, but quite interesting.
More generally: if this is geeky, then I'm all for it. Thinking carefully about interesting ideas is one of the things I most enjoy doing :-)
Take care
Mark
Actually (for me, anyway) I don't always maintain a FIFO queue of thoughts, reasoning, and problem-solving. I know that if I need to go solve a problem, I can read about it, tinker with it, get stuck, move off to something else, and eventually I'll have an "ahah" moment where I make forward progress. Of course, I'm not conscious of it, but I'm decently-certain that this is a relatively-normal process in most people.
And by the way, distributed computing's going to become a big problem in the mobile space eventually. That's what *I'm* fascinated by.
@Mark
Yes- I agree with you on the 'model' of consciousness. And what I find especially intriguing is 'why' this 'single process' is the emergent behavior from all of these parallel subsystems.
I think your thought of 'language' as an evolutionary constraint is interesting. I.e. we have one mouth and are thus constrained to verbally communicate serially-- and this constraint naturally constrains our interactive view of the world. Very good point indeed!
What will be fun to see (if solved in my lifetime at least) is if consciousness requires some 'additional hardware'. We have a nice micro-level model of brain processing: neurons. However, (in my understanding at least), there is an open question as to if this is enough for consciousness to emerge. If the biology of a neuron is 'enough' for consciousness to emerge, then our current model of computation is 'powerful enough' to lead to consciousness. This seems intuitive and reasonable: its not much of a jump to see a brain with a finite number of neurons as just a constrained turing machine.
However, if our brains fundamentally do not fit the turing machine model, then the physical hardware (neuron model) must be different in some exotic way. If this is the case, then we are missing something profound and powerful about the way that our brains work. Also it means that our current model of computation can fundamentally never be powerful enough to run something like 'consciousness'.
Now this sounds like science fiction-- but I remember (and should go lookup this stuff again soon) that there are models of consciousness that incorporate some exotic properties of quantum mechanics to explain consciousness.
I know very little about all of this, and thus really have no opinion about its validity. But the implication is profound: if consciousness requires some additional 'hardware' over the neuron model (perhaps some exotic property of QM), then our model is computation must be augmented if we ever wish to build machines with consciousness.
Thanks for the comment! What type of software development do you do?
@Gauss
Definitely-- I certainly don't follow a strictly FIFO protocol, but my 'experience' of reasoning about things consciously is still 'serial'. I.e. I only have one "mind's eye". And this is true regardless of the order in which I process tasks.
Yes I had been interested in distributed computing before this class, but had never really dug too deep into traditional 'parallel computing'. I didn't really have an appreciation for the complexity of writing algorithms on different interconnect topologies: i.e. implementing parallel prefix sum on a hypercube with 2^d nodes vs on a toroidal NxM mesh. While I find this all interesting, I am much more curious about distributed computing and all of the 'problems' that are typically dealt with in that space such as fault tolerance. My term project is a 'durable' distributed hash table on a small cluster. I completely underestimated the complexity of this project. Almost all DHTs that I researched were optimized for huge numbers of nodes with moderate churn rates. I am constraining the problem by requiring a small cluster and small churn rate, but requiring durability. This durability requirement is a hard constraint to solve, because (I think) that it requires a two-phase commit when nodes join. I've enjoyed the project, just underestimated the time commitment :-)
Steve
As I see it, what we call consciousness is an integrated awareness based on subconscious discrimination. Wasn't it Malcolm Gladwell who observed in his book "Blink" that first hunches about how to react to a situation are frequently right, and "second thoughts" wrong? Isn't that because in some part of our subconscious selves got the answer dead on and screamed out, but had a problem being taken seriously by the over-focused bureaucracy of higher consciousness? I suspect the essence of intelligence may be the ability to discriminate efficiently among the thousands of signals bouncing around in our brains. And before we condemn this single-minded focus, if our evolutionary ancestors hadn't concentrated on the big picture and closed down the democracy of their inner voices, they would have been captured and eaten. The improvement of human intelligence, and consciousness, will come with the improvement of that mental discrimination, and it may well be that in the end we will be able to manage awareness of all these things at once.
Pom's mention of schizophrenia prompts the notion that the disease is characterized by a breakdown in the neurobiological process that regulates conscious discrimination of thought.
@J
Good points. However, consciousness I think is generally defined as something greater than just mediating our 'natural' instincts. I mean pondering about life, the universe, and everything isn't a reaction-- and yet we experience this 'awareness' that we can direct (although using 'we' here is a little circular, no?).
But I whole heartedly agree on your speculation of the 'evolved man' having great accuracy in mediating our natural tendencies with more well-reasoned approaches. I read Blink a while ago, and should re-read it. I don't know that Gladwell was making a case for 'all' decision making, was he? I mean certainly our internal heuristics ("instincts") have been well tuned outside of our consciousness by many years of biological and cultural evolution. So trusting their answers (in some circumstances) can certainly be more accurate than to reason in 'real time'. But I think that our instincts -- like all heuristics -- are inadequate approximations. Where they get fuzzy, we see cracks, which often result in painful, expensive, illogical social phenomena. Our 'instinct' (heuristic) of being distrustful of things that don't "look like us" is certainly a good example of this. This has instinct certainly had advantage in the wild kingdom, but now that we have evolved better reasoning, communication, etc.-- its 'approximation' can lead us to make bad decisions (based solely off of instinct) like discrimination based off of race or sexuality :-)
I think this was your point, and I whole heartedly agree.
As a bonus "thought experiment"-- try considering what happens at the end of that road:
Let's say that the average human mix of instinct vs cognitive reasoning is a function of our cognitive capacity. I think this is fair. Thus, we can hypothesize that as we become more intelligent, we can reason quicker, and thus this mix can change. I.e. if we can reason quicker with greater accuracy, then we can rely less on these inaccurate heuristics (instincts). So let's say that as we evolve we continue to increase our cognitive capability (which may or may not be the course of evolution for humans, but for the sake of the thought experiment). Thus, in 1M years, our future humanoid species now acts much more rationally: each human is more efficient because their local actions and decisions are made with better reasoning, better accuracy.
In this future scenario what happens to our emotions?
I think it's fair to characterize emotions as instincts: they have evolutionary value, they play an integral role in our daily actions, but at the end of the day, the are inaccurate approximations. We may be motivated to succeed because we have pride. And these feelings cause a chain of physiological events that make our consciousness "feel" something pleasurable. So as we grow in intelligence, do we need emotions like greed or pride? If we are more intelligent, then presumably we can recognize the "optimization problem" and economics of life much more completely-- maybe silly instincts will be unnecessary in the 'evolved man'.
This is fine and dandy for certain emotions and instincts that we might naively believe are always bad: greed, vengeance, etc. But happiness, love, etc. -- do these become vestigial as well?
It's interesting to think about. Note that such a future would mean that we (humans) would probably become more homogeneous-- more like machines-- more like our ancestors in evolution. Why would we 'go backwards' in this sense? So thus are instincts a necessary thing for a 'serial consciousness'? And all of this ties back to the question of why and how did we evolve this serial consciousness. I wish I knew a cognitive scientist that could enlighten me :-/
Anyways thanks for the interesting discussion. I love thinking about this stuff-- albeit it a bit naive, I'm sure :-)
Steve
another actual real live reader here - and one who did some undergraduate research on parallel computing way back in the '90s (the stone ages!) It was very interesting back then and we had not even begun to look at massively parallel computing arrays as they have today ... in fact when we had something like 32 or 64 or 128 processors going at once it was a really big deal
I think you've gotten slightly off-track: emotions aren't necessarily instincts. They're an a-rational (not necessarily irrational) reaction to stimuli, but they're no less "trained" in many cases that rational thinking. Sure, we have mirror neurons to help us experience the emotions of others - but we still have our own emotions regardless. Increased rationality doesn't necessarily elimiate emotion; it's not an either/or. The Vulcan concept is pretty simplistic, but even there they didn't eliminate emotion - they buried it.
On the concept of why we only think in a single process: we don't. Most people are only "aware" of thinking in a single process, but they're actually doing far more: ask anyone how often they have a conversation while driving. We tend to highlight one train of thought or process for "active control", but that's mostly a survival technique: while peripheral attention is very important for survival in a jungle so you can notice the twig snap of an approaching tiger, being able to hyperfocus on that snap and concentrate on it is just as important.
The difference is that language itself is single-track, and most people aren't really aware when they're not thinking linguisticly. Everyone has those activities we really enjoy where we "stop thinking and just do", whether it be sports or art or reading or video games or whatever. In reality, we haven't stopped thinking, we've just stopped thinking in words - which is a big deal, since reality and experience are far too complex for mere vocabulary.
However, if you ask someone what they're thinking about, they'll generally only focus on the verbal/linguistic thoughts because those can be easily and instantly related; something more abstract like the observed relation between cloud formations and horizon can't really be expressed in words.
The other issue is that our education systems, especially in early schools, focus almost exclusively on procedural thought rather than holistic/impressionistic thought: "pay attention", "follow the rules", "do a then b then c", etc. This is probably "the" big problem for ADHD-type students, whose natural attention and "thinking" focus more on peripherals and holistics rather than specifics.
There's a guy named Alan Carter who tried to figure out why some people make great programmers and others can't; the "essays" he came up with are grouped together in something called The Programmer's Stone. While he goes a little wild in parts of it, the basic premise seems pretty sound and focuses mainly on the ability to think about "wholes" rather than "parts", which is very much a single task/multitask issue: our minds can either play the role of a single thread, or play the part of managing all the threads and keeping them in sync.
If you can play the piano, ride a bike, or beat most video games, you're multi-threading your thoughts.
Steve i read everything you just wrote but i have no idea what you just said. I guess i have a short circuit in my brain?? XS
Hi all
A miscellany of thoughts in response to various contributions...
@Gauss, Steve: problem solving, reasoning
I think I should make clear that I agree with you - I don't have anything as structured as a FIFO queue interally either. There's a part of me that's conscious of thinking about a problem, as you suggest; it will work on it for a while, and will then get bored of it, or distracted, and move on to something else. Then it gets surprised when some other, unconscious, part of me comes up with an insight or answer.
@Austin: thinking, consciousness
I'm reasonably confident that you're agreeing with us, just in different terms (and, yes, I read your blog post on definitions). I'm happy that some (probably much) of my thinking - processing in the terms I used first - takes place unconsciously. The thing that Steve was getting at is that the "aware" or "conscious" part of the mind insists on treating whatever it is experiencing as a sequential stream of events. I think you may have hit the nail on the head with "most people aren't really aware when they're not thinking linguisticly".
I hadn't heard of "The Programmer's Stone" before, but it sounds like something I really ought to read.
@Steve: language constraint
I wasn't thinking in terms of anything so fundamental as the human body's single mouth constraining communication to a serial mode, but I think you're right. Certainly, linguistic communication requires symbols (words) to be arranged serially for output (speaker, writer) and input (listener, reader).
@Steve: hardware for consciousness
I've seen several more or less popular science approaches to this subject over the years. The impression I've had from them is that neurons alone are not enough for consciousness to arise: there's also a need for a certain level of complexity in the network of connections between them. Exactly what justification there is for this, I don't know.
Something in me would much rather not have to appeal to quantum mechanics to explain consciousness. I have deep misgivings about the philosophical foundations of the subject.
A slight aside - some more suggested reading (SF again): the opening chapter of Greg Egan's novel "Diaspora" is a quite thoughtful and (to me at least) rather appealing description of an AI being created and achieving consciousness in a community of such entities.
@Steve: what I do
I'm afraid my day job is nothing inspiring: developing package and bespoke business systems for a small-ish company. By business system I mean "bread & butter" accounting / inventory / sales / purchasing / manufacturing etc. Nothing remotely related to parallel or distributed processing, let alone AI, alas. AI would be nice, because we could then supply it to our customers to make up for their all too frequent lack of the natural version. It might help with one or two people inside the company as well :-)
I should also point out that I have no formal training in computer science whatsoever.
@Steve: and finally
Having reread the entire original post and sequence of comments several times, I've spotted the question right at the start. I think it's a pick-up line that might well work on me, possibly in slightly different terms. Certainly, I'm a complete infovore - "interesting" is a characteristic that I value highly in people and things.
Also, many thanks for your vote of confidence in following my blog. Maybe one day I will actually post something there, rather than only commenting on everyone else's!
Take care
Mark
Ok... I'll admit, I didn't read most of the post.
Way over my little history major head.
However, I would like to say that I'm so thrilled that someone beside myself has seen Camp. What a... campy movie... haha
Oh and I don't think I've commented here before.... Sorry for such a horrible comment to make up for a ton of lost time?
@Austin
Thanks for the intelligent comments. Regarding emotions: we certainly agree that emotions are trained. I feel confident that on a biological level, we have plenty of feedback mechanisms in our neurophysiology to allow emotions to 'learn'. And on a cultural level we certainly have lots of 'cultural legacy' to provide many constraints within which our emotions adapt.
Can you expand on your statement: "increased rationality doesn't necessarily eliminate emotion". I agree that the crux of this revolves around this issue: does increased rationality (and by that I assume you mean increased cognitive capacity) eliminate emotion? My entire line of reasoning is predicated on the assumption that we can define emotions completely as heuristics which function as 'instincts' in our decision making process. I.e. they are 'fast acting' a-rational (great term btw) forces. Thus, when faced with any arbitrary choice, we choose between a 'fast acting' instinct and a more cognitively intensive 'exploration of the problem space' through reasoning. I think that typically this choice is highly constrained by time. Thus, as time further constrains the decision making process, we are forced to choose potentially inaccurate heuristics vs potentially 'better' rational thinking.
So can we agree on this model of cognitive decision making? If we do, and we agree (with regards to accuracy) that a heuristic (instinct|emotion) <= more time consuming, well reasoned exploration of the problem space-- then I think a natural conclusion is: as we increase time OR cognative capacity (both affect the economics of this decision making model in the same way) we utilize the heuristics less.
Actually, I think the more profound question out of all of this is 'why' would emotions not be instincts? What fundamental properties of emotions precludes such a characterization? I think you have some ideas about this-- at least I gather that from your statement that "they aren't necessarily instincts"? In what way are they not? Or are we just disagreeing over the definition of instinct-- or (more likely) am I just being sloppy with my words :-)
Note also-- I'm not trying to claim one thing or another. This is just naive, ignorant pondering. Don't mistake my tone or sentence structure with some aggressive, self-assured opinion. I'm just "typing out loud".
(cont)
(cont from above)
Regarding consciousness- I think we have a semantics problem (which I will take responsibility for having sloppy word usage again): I'm not saying we think in a single 'thread'-- I certainly appreciate the multitude of things going on in parallel in my brain "without my knowledge" (and even just using these terms is quite sloppy and circular, no?). You hit the nail on the head with "active control". When I write the term "consciousness", I am referring to this "active control"-- this "hyper awareness". And the discussion point that I was trying to lay out was: why in this hyper-parallel environment of our brain does only one single, serial "active control" emerge? Is this a natural consequence of the growing complexity? Of our biology? Are there fundamental constraints about this 'processing environment' that result in a single, serial 'active control'. Can there ever be more than one 'active control'?
It may well be that a single active control is a _fundamental optimum_ given some constraint-- and certainly it seems "obvious". But I'm thinking it seems obvious only because we have no other basis to compare in our experience. If its not an optimum, but only just the current state of its evolution, then might we one day have two 'active controls' in our conscious experience? As an aside: note that I said evolution there-- it seems likely that two consciousness would provide less fitness compared to just increased capacity (neuron density). Thus, it seems unlikely that this would be a natural evolutionary path. But I'm more interesting in understanding if there is a physical or some intrinsic constraint that warrants this single 'active focus'.
Your points on language, "thinking linguistically", and childhood education are great and I certainly agree.
I have heard of the Programmer's Stone, and it sounds like a book that would fit nicely on my bookshelf between "Refactoring your wetware" and the ThoughtWorks Anthology.
Steve
@goleft
Wow ancient times :-) That sounds like fun though. Our university has a hypercube on campus, but I am not sure of the specifics. I know that the bio-computing guys use it for DNA computing simulations.
@Rik
Wow! I'm impressed-- no I think I'm probably the one with the short circuit :-) Thanks for reading though
@Pom
Thanks for the comments- and yes, you should post! I mean you went through all that trouble to get a space set up! :-)
@RhythmChanges
OMG! I found you! Yes 'you'- the OTHER person who has seen CAMP! I agree-- totally campy-- the dialog is just awful in some cases, but I just love it! I actually own the CD and have been known to play "Century Tree" on Piano at times! Thanks for the comment!
Steve
Steve: Regarding instinct. First, we should probably come up with a definition (I love definition; especialyl 6-packs). While Wikipedia is far from an authoritative resource, the definition it gives for instict fits pretty well with what I'm thinking: the inherent inclination of a living organism toward a particular behavior.
Instinct is a byproduct of evolution. For example, animals that live in trees have very few predators to worry about, but snakes are one of the bigs ones. So, animals that live in trees who have an automatic "panic" or "fear" response to snakes tend to live longer and breed more. Thus, humans have an instinctual panic reaction to snakes.
I don't think emotion quite qualifies under the same rubrick. Yes, emotions arose through evolution, but since the whole species doesn't react in the same way to the same stimuli, emotion *itself* isn't instinctual. Sure, certain emotional reactions are instinctual: almost all humans have an innate desire to calm a crying baby, for example; it's beneficial for survival that we do (or, more accurately, those who were more inclined to do so tended to survive more). But by no means does that make all emotional reactions, or emotions themselves, instinctive.
In fact, rationality - or pseudorationality, really - is far more "instinct" than emotion: just look at the thought processes of most children. They're constantly digging for causal chains in events, and while the causes they come up with aren't always accurate, the drive to find them is inherent. They don't learn that behavior - it's inbred (and part of the reason why religion is so pernicious).
Emotional responses are biological to a large degree, yes. There are demonstrable hormonal and biological triggers or mechanisms for most emotions. They generally aren't, however, triggered off the same criteria for everyone.
I suppose, working through this, you could say that some emotions are individually instinctual but not selected for: e.g., every individual has a specific pattern that will induce certain emotions, but those patterns are generally unique to the individual. Many emotions, though, are only triggered on learned experience or behavior (happiness and anxiety being two good examples) and thus can't be defined as "instinct".
However, that biological component is what I was referring to when I said that increased rationality doesn't eliminate emotion. They're two separate, distinct mechanisms. We can, certainly, suppress or exclude emotional response (to a large degree) from rational discourse, but we can't stop ourselves from responding biologically to stimuli without some kind of biochemical inhibitor. The fact that I can give all outward signs of experiencing no emotion does not, in fact, mean that I'm not experience it.
So, no, I don't think that increasing rationality eliminates emotion in general: it may eliminate as many emotional queues or influences from the rationality itself and possibly from other behavior (which is largely controllable), and it can help direct or shape the kinds of emotional responses (such as no longer fearing spiders), but it can't eliminate emotion altogether.
Steve: Regarding the single-thread.
As I stated, I think there are certain evolutionary advantages to at least temporary hyperfocus/specialization. Akin to the way in which muscles can release huge bursts of energy/effort all at once for certain defense or protective sitautions, our minds can hyperfocus to a single thread for short periods of time to, for example, be able to take on that tiger and kill it before it kills us. Outside clues and peripheral attention contribute to the hyperfocus, but the main target/objective overrides all others for a short period for purely survival needs.
I don't think it is necessarily a requirement that people *only* have this "single threaded awareness"; as I think I stated (or at least meant to state), I think that's more a byproduct of our educational environment tied to a factory-type work setting, where being able to multi-task isn't necessarily beneficial (at least from the viewpoint of the floor manager). Thus, I think we train kids specifically to have just the one conscious thread, and then spend lots of money and effort training them later to be able to do other things as well.
Again, I'll give the example of playing the piano: while a central single theme is usually linking the action of the two hands and feet, each limb is in fact operating largely independently. It isn't something we generally think of linguisticly, but that's an inherent limit of linguistics rather than the mind itself.
I think if you're trying to tie yourself to the linguistic narrative as the only active conscious thought, you're doing yourself a disservice; it is, however, perfectly reasonable that a thought pattern based on linear, single-threaded concepts can only operate on a single thread.
At the same time, I bet you could train yourself to "think two thoughts" linguistically at once; it'd just take practice, since it's not something we're taught to do. Then again, so does learning to play the piano.
Basically, to summarize: I think the limit on a single linguistic "control" thread are more a limit on linguistics than anything else; we actually have multiple "control thread" capability, but it's generally not linguistic in nature. We can, of course, narrow our awareness down to a single thread for short periods of time, which is a trait that had evolutionary advantages; the big "problem" is that, for socio-political reasons, we're taught from an early age to only use or be aware of the single thread to the detriment of "hyper-threading" our thoughts.
Finally: I love the movie "CAMP" (I have the DVD). Saw it in theatres when it came out briefly. Along the same lines, I like "Were the World Mine", which is a movie of which most people probably haven't heard.
Oh, and again, The Programmer's Stone is interesting - to a point. The whole M0 and Ghost not concepts are about the last rational/reasonable sections, with the later sections starting to go off the deep end. Carter's since backed off from some of the later discussions and has actually spent a lot of time lately on the whole dopamine-addiciton aspect, for which a lot of evidence is coming to light and concurring with the original thought papers.
However, if you only read it for the mapper/packer breakdown, M0, and the Ghost Not, I think it's still pretty relevant.
Hi all
@Austin, Steve:
I'd love to find something in what you've said to disagree with, or at least expand on, if only to keep the discussion going (since I'm enjoying it a lot). About the only thing I can fasten on is the "thinking two thoughts linguistically" point. I have a feeling that I've got to this point a few times in my life, typically after travelling in a foreign country for long enough that I've started thinking in the foreign language rather than starting in English and translating. I'm fairly sure that I've been phrasing something that I wanted to say in the foreign language (typically French), and, simultaneously remarking to myself in English that I was doing this. It was a slightly odd feeling...
Thanks for the warnings about "The Programmer's Stone".
Meanwhile, I intend to revisit your blog; you said some very interesting things, and I hope you won't mind if I start commenting on them.
@Steve:
The blog itself was a by-product. I wanted a blogger account so that I could read and comment on other's blogs more conveniently, and show some sort of profile to give people a bit of context about me. I thought the first post might well be a struggle for me; as it is I've got so involved in the comments that my own blog hasn't seen the light of day yet.
Take care
Mark
Slight adjunct to the discussion:
http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2010/03/childish_creativity.php
"Interestingly, the students who imagined themselves as little kids scored far higher on the creative tasks, coming up with more ideas that were also more original. The effect was especially pronounced among 'introverts,' who exert more mental energy suppressing their 'spontaneous associations'."
This relates to the idea of the censoring or learned inhibition of the hyperthreading activity in favor of a single linguistic thread. Granted, it's tangental, but it supports the same principle: we're taught in school to deliberately shut down most of our capability. So, the ultimate answer to "why do we only think serially?" may be "because that's how we're taught to think."
@Austin
First: I love "Were the World Mine". I was lucky enough to see it in a gay and lesbian film festival here in Memphis (it's probably the only good 'gay event' in this horrible city). It was wonderful on many levels, campy and otherwise :-) Not to mention that I am always excited at the correct use of the 3rd person subjunctive. Here in TN, I am a bit surprised they didn't misspell the adverts to say "WAS the world mine?!?" *sigh*
I play the piano, and certainly recognize that I am not consciously directing my individual finger motions. So I sat down to play, and tried to be a little more cognizant of what was happening. I assume you play? Or play some instrument or have some intimate understanding of what I'm about to explain-- as language will certainly fail me in this description:
When I am improvising, certainly there is no linguistic dialog in my head. But there is still an 'awareness' in my mind of what I _want_ to happen. My mind has some 'representation' of the melody, themes, chord progressions, and as I am playing, I am cognizant of all of those things at once. In this sense, there is a lot of parallelization going on. However, at a higher level of abstraction my awareness is focused on the 'bigger picture' of the structure of the music that my muscles are producing. I anticipate the phrasings, and have thoughts about the progression of the lead melody line that I am improvising over the chord progression, etc. Thus, there is still this singular awareness that is directing the actions of my body-- but at a much "higher level" than if I were performing a more trivial task.
And this is critical: there is obviously a number of things happening from the lowest-level biology (muscles, electrical signals) to the middle-tier of my cognition (music structure, phrasings, melody, harmonies, rhythms, etc) to the highest level where my 'awareness' is orchestrating all of this. To disambiguate the concept, let's call this 'first order awareness'. This is the focus which at the "highest level" is directing our body. This 'first order awareness' can jump around to different levels of abstraction in our thoughts. , different levels of parallelization. To the point: these activities that you describe as canonical examples of parallel thinking (playing the piano, etc.)-- when you sit down, do you literally turn off all cognition, and just by pure randomness express yourself? I would think not-- there is some 'focus', some direction, right (naturally at least)?
This concept is what I have been (certainly incorrectly) referring to as consciousness, which we will re-label 'first order awareness' (or any arbitrary term). Then maybe we can generally describe consciousness as our comprehensive, subjective, experience of reality. And lastly, we can define reality as our 'model' of our environment that is constantly being refined and decorated by inputs from stimuli. Are these acceptable terms?
I think that you are describing the various factors (socio-political as you nicely put it) that contribute to one's average 'level' of 'first order awareness'. I think you are stating that through perhaps poor education, we are potentially over-constraining our 'first order awareness' at a lower (or slower, less efficient) level than our biology requires. By re-training ourselves (as piano players do, for example), we can gain efficiencies (intelligence?). I totally agree with this, and think your point is very interesting and profound.
However, this point is orthogonal to my original intention (albeit equally if not more interesting). My original thought was to question _why_ we have a singular 'first order awareness'. And at risk of circular logic: Are there some inherent biological constraints (chemical, electrical properties of our neural networks) to require one and only one 'first order awareness'? Are there some inherent costs in the complexity and 'synchronization' problems that would arise from having multiple 'first order awarenesses' orchestrating our actions?
I asked my professor just to get his thoughts. He mentioned that while he was not aware of particular articles or models of consciousness that would predict such a thing, he would guess that time plays a big role in this emergent behavior. There is only a single arrow of time (to steal from physics and thoughts of entropy for a moment)-- this arrow imposes a linear temporal causality that is one direction. Thus, we naturally order events in this linear way, and perhaps this lends itself to a single interpretation of 'now', which leads to a single 'first order awareness'. I thought it was an interesting point.
Wow- this is exhausting :-) But interesting, and I can't thank you enough for providing the counterpoint to encourage me to more thoroughly explore this space... even though this is just naive pondering, intellectual masturbation, if you will-- it's fun none the less. Although masturbation is fun too...so I'm not sure what that says about me or my motivations :-)
Thanks,
Steve
Alwyas glad to engage in mutual masturbation, mental or otherwise :)
Again, I think there is definitely an evolutionary advantage to a singular "first order awareness" - at least in some situations.
To back it down several intellectual levels, we often refer to "paying" attention. I'd argue that, to an extent, that's a pretty accurate concept: we only have so many units of "attention" we can "spend" at any one time. Certain drugs, moods, or stimuli can change this up or down slightly, but at any moment there's a limit.
If you're trying to "focus" or manage multiple tasks, you can't devote as much attention or mental energy to any of them; that's simple scarcity applied. So, when something's important, you pull all resources back from other tasks and devote as much mental energy as you can on one.
This could be really useful when, as I've stated, you're staring a tiger in the face and need to plan your next moves *very* carefully.
Attention is managed by the reticular formation in the brain - which is also responsible for some management of pain sensation, which makes sense since pain is one of the things that can focus our attention very quickly. I'd say there's pretty obvious survival benefits there, so the question of "why" this exists is probably answerable by that.
As a note - and part of the reason this whole conversation interests me, and in partial answer to your question - I'm a bit of an unusual case, neurologically.
Nerves have activation thresholds - points below which they don't "trigger" and above which they do, with varying degrees of intensity. Think of it like a scale of 1 to 10: if the amount of stimulation to a nerve reaches 5, the nerve activates and you're aware of the sensation. If it's only a 4, you might not be aware of it. Interestingly, if it starts at 4 and goes to 5, you "remember" the sensation retroactively through when it was 4, even though you didn't experience it at the time.
For some reason, my threshold is lower: e.g., I experience more sensation than most people. An easy example is that I can pretty much always feel the clothing on my body without focusing my attention on it; I have to "filter" such extraneous sensations out "manually" in my head, but they're always there.
This is largely tied to the reticular formation - my peripheral attention and ability to change focus rapidly from multitasking to single focus is pretty flexible. It makes me very good at certain kinds of troubleshooting/analysis, but means I'm horrible in boring meetings :)
It also means I can do things like type two completely different documents on two different keyboards at the same time, one hand on each. I wouldn't say it's turning off cognition: lack of a single first order awareness isn't a lack of control. I can manage two different linguistic threads at the same time, both approaching that "first order" level, though not at that level for extended periods. In fact, I often find it impossible to concentrate on one thing without having something else to distract me, at least partially.
However, for me, "first order awareness" is often *not* linguistic: the best description I can give is akin to being in a dark room and "feeling" something massive beside you. I sort of "feel" (in the physical sense, though it's not physical) my way through thoughts or concepts, and it's only when I actually go to express them linguistically that they're converted to words.
From my understanding, such "forced multithreading" is actually pretty common in a one class of ADHD individuals (the other class being the opposite: individuals who can't get enough sensation to attract their attention at all). I also know friends who can do the same thing for short periods, though usually only with certain topics or activities.
I have to think this is all just variations on a spectrum, with most people being "trained out of" the ability to flip into high-level multitasking most of the time and so only being "aware" of the "first order awareness", usually in a linguistic fashion.
... And, yes, I'd have to agree that it's related to our perception of time, though the order of causation is questionable. Physics doesn't *force* a single time arrow; in fact, physics almost demands both directions. By law, every action in physics is exactly reversible, though the level of complexity to do so is often prohibitive: technically, if you can slam the pieces of glass back together with the right forces, you can reform the vase. I wouldn't bet on it, though.
Why we only experience a single time vector is one of the huge questions that physicists haven't been able to even ask correctly, much less answer. It could be that the way our consciousness is formed limits our observation, or it could be that time is limited by some innate factor of the universe, and our conscious observation is a side-effect. Or, there could be some third factor that causes both.
Of course, as Adams wrote, there's always the possibility that "Time is an illusion; lunch time doubly so."
@Austin
Very interesting, indeed. I am familiar with activation thresholds, and your condition is very interesting-- is that a flavor of ADHD?
I can relate to this in some sense-- I feel that I cannot focus properly without music as something to fill part of my brain. Now how much of this is just behavioral conditioning vs a property of my cognitive needs... I don't know.
As a non-physicist-- outside of a the first few courses (classical) and some 'pop-science' books (universe in a nutshell, fabric of the cosmos, etc.)-- I have a 'fuzzy' relationship with Physics. I am 'aware' of some high level concepts, but lack the experience with the mathematics to have a concrete understanding. So via Brian Greene I am aware of the time paradox and 'times arrow'. He discusses some thoughts on it as the result of always increasing entropy (low entropy big bang -> now). Anyways, I'm already embarrassingly close to the edge of my vague, naive understanding of these things... so I think this is nice place to stop :-)
On an unrelated note: what flavor of technology do you work? Where in CA are you (north or south)?
Steve
ha- scratch the CA question... clearly I cannot read (or retain) quick profile views from days prior :-/
Steve - first, never be afraid to wander outside of your area of safety. That's what life guards are for :) Or, to quote something more poetic, "A man's reach should exceed his grasp/else what's a heaven for?"
Second - yeah, it's a "flavor" of ADHD. Suggestions that there might be two (or more) different factors at work in ADHD arose when most people responded certain ways to certain drugs but others were exactly the opposite. Namely, things like dopamine analogs or serotonin uptake inhibitors: in "most" cases, this helps people with ADHD focus better (suggesting a low level of neurotransmitter in the synapse), but in some cases, this just exacerbates the problem and actually leads to violent or other random behavior (which suggests... something different). I definitely fall in the latter case.
ADHD is part of a spectrum of behavior, so all people - even "normal" folks - fall on it to varying degrees. Just like some people can be a Kinsey 4 or 5 and some can be 1 or 2, people vary from one end of the Autism spectrum to the other. Most "normal" people would be a 0 or 1, ADHD folks might range from 2 to 4, and anything above 4 is likely going to impact social interaction severely (things like Aspergers). So, it's perfectly reasonable that you might have some of the traits without being functionally impaired.
My actual title is "application specialist", but that means nothing. Basically, I'm a process analyst/troubleshooter, both of which rely heavily on pattern recognition and wide-range association. If you want to get really specific, I'm functionally a DBA, web admin, systems admin for a half-dozen large-scale applications (time and attendance EDI, that sort of thing), and .NET developer.
And yeah, SoCal, Santa Clarita area. Actually, just came in from getting some sun, since it's gorgeous enough that I took a day off.
... So, a bit late to the party, but...
http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2010/04/attention_and_intelligence.php
The implication that one important aspect in developing intelligence is the ability to selectively focus, implying that the greater ability of an individual in this regard suggests greater intelligence. Perhaps our "first order awareness" is a necessary part of increased intelligence (as the article suggest, limited cognitive resources would require better focus to maximize those resouces).
Quote:
In other words, delayed gratification isn't really about gritting our teeth or exerting willpower: it's about controlling the spotlight of attention. Likewise, intelligence isn't just about remembering abstract facts - it's about controlling what thoughts we're thinking about in the first place. (To put it another way, being smart is not just about having a larger working memory - it's about having more precise control over what's in working memory.) The brain is a bounded machine and the world is a confusing place, full of errata and distractions - intelligence is the ability to parse reality so that it makes just a little bit more sense. (As William James famously wrote, "Everyone knows what attention is...It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others.") Our mind has strict cognitive limitations - selective attention helps us compensate.
Possibly the longest and most interesting thread of replies to a blog post that I have ever read.
So interesting was it, that I have completely forgotten what it was that i was going to write.
I seem to remember that 'awareness' formed a major part of what I was going to write, however.
Now time to go walk the dogs, while thinking about my next college paper, and reflect on the beauty of my BF.
Have a wonderful day. G =]
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