+ 1 - 0 | § ¶What if...
What if Synaesthasia IS thinking? What if there is no center of thought, some phantom consciousness of our brain that accounts for our sense of self?
It struck me while I was biking today that synaesthasia might be just extra communication among brain components, that these components were already communicating and that synaesthasia was just an extreme of this interlink phenomenon.
Now it's been said that creative people are seven times more likely to be synaesthetic, but what I'd like to know is: are intelligent people likely to be MORE synaesthetic!? One way of measuring intelligence is raw computational ability. Another is memory or recall. Another is lateral thinking, the ability to piece together parts of a puzzle that might not be related at first glance but later prove to be so.
What if this is intelligence? What if the synaesthetic condition is just an extreme form of the interconnects that drive our brains?
We have vision centers, sound centers, shape processors, facial recognition, sound buffers, 'fight, fuck or flee' centers... They're all connected - what if smarter people have more connections, or more efficient connections?
Have there been studies of any correlation between synaesthasia and intelligence? Damn damn damn, this is amazing to think about.
And I was thinking about the nature of consciousness - still not more than 5 pages into these new books I got (was reading the Vernor Vinge novel instead) but I was thinking (heh)...
Perhaps there is no consciousness, per se. The brain is a big lump of specialized interconnected data processors, each gulping down as much input as it can and sharing the symbolic, digested concepts with other centers. The more interconnects (or more effient ones, I don't know which is more likely to prove true but the result is the same) you have the more information can be shared and the smarter you are... But what if these processors, tied together by a shared memory, ARE consciousness?
I imagine one possibility is the temporal lobes, largely believed to be the foundation of actual thought and/or consciousness, are time-sensitive correlators of data. This region of the brain simply (hah) monitors the entire symbolic network and pieces together an entire world view from the echochamber of babbling processors we call a brain. I wish I could find confirmation of that idea presented in a Dilbert cartoon that the brain doesn't show any 'conscious thought' activity until after actions have been decided, 'cause this would lend credence to the idea that the lobes are merely an after-the-fact piecing together of what the brain has already done.
This is how drugs affect the brain, we can't control this because there is no "we", we're a processor trying to make sense of the babbling output of a collection of processors!
This doesn't absolve us of responsibility, or show that we have no 'free will' but instead reinforces the idea that we are what society makes us. Our brains are wired up from the moment we're born, making sense of this onslaught of data and creating a worldview based on things that the brain centers and memory consider consistant. If the brain decides 'good kids' are really a survival priority then we'd create more systems were kids are instructed properly, programming them in effect to have the values and interconnects necessary to function the way they should...
Suppose the brain really does work this way, we don't have a consciousness so much as an animal instinct to preserve and prolong life, and the brain - based on a lifetime of observations and accepted relationships - instinctively picks the proper path! I don't see a huge leap between "fire hurts, must avoid" and "if I teach my kid how to act fairly and honestly it will be easier for me to work with him, and he with the world, and my survival chances are better when others pull for me instead of push against me."
Now assuming this is the case, we've got a massively complicated parallel processing device that's designed to input data and sort it into relationships. These relationships are stored in a communal memory which all centers share, and the entire mess is driven by an instinct to avoid pain, fear and ultimately death. It's true that a few simple rules can create forms of infinite complexity, and from these simple parts we've arrived at a brain that seems conscious, seems aware, and functions as we've come to expect.
Wow.
[oh yeah]
I meant to wonder: Language is passed to us from our parents and our society, it's one more set of input, another tool to forge relationships between concepts. How much does language affect the sense of self, and if there are languages without a word for "I" do people natively speaking this language lack the sense of self we're seeking here?
It struck me while I was biking today that synaesthasia might be just extra communication among brain components, that these components were already communicating and that synaesthasia was just an extreme of this interlink phenomenon.
Now it's been said that creative people are seven times more likely to be synaesthetic, but what I'd like to know is: are intelligent people likely to be MORE synaesthetic!? One way of measuring intelligence is raw computational ability. Another is memory or recall. Another is lateral thinking, the ability to piece together parts of a puzzle that might not be related at first glance but later prove to be so.
What if this is intelligence? What if the synaesthetic condition is just an extreme form of the interconnects that drive our brains?
We have vision centers, sound centers, shape processors, facial recognition, sound buffers, 'fight, fuck or flee' centers... They're all connected - what if smarter people have more connections, or more efficient connections?
Have there been studies of any correlation between synaesthasia and intelligence? Damn damn damn, this is amazing to think about.
And I was thinking about the nature of consciousness - still not more than 5 pages into these new books I got (was reading the Vernor Vinge novel instead) but I was thinking (heh)...
Perhaps there is no consciousness, per se. The brain is a big lump of specialized interconnected data processors, each gulping down as much input as it can and sharing the symbolic, digested concepts with other centers. The more interconnects (or more effient ones, I don't know which is more likely to prove true but the result is the same) you have the more information can be shared and the smarter you are... But what if these processors, tied together by a shared memory, ARE consciousness?
I imagine one possibility is the temporal lobes, largely believed to be the foundation of actual thought and/or consciousness, are time-sensitive correlators of data. This region of the brain simply (hah) monitors the entire symbolic network and pieces together an entire world view from the echochamber of babbling processors we call a brain. I wish I could find confirmation of that idea presented in a Dilbert cartoon that the brain doesn't show any 'conscious thought' activity until after actions have been decided, 'cause this would lend credence to the idea that the lobes are merely an after-the-fact piecing together of what the brain has already done.
This is how drugs affect the brain, we can't control this because there is no "we", we're a processor trying to make sense of the babbling output of a collection of processors!
This doesn't absolve us of responsibility, or show that we have no 'free will' but instead reinforces the idea that we are what society makes us. Our brains are wired up from the moment we're born, making sense of this onslaught of data and creating a worldview based on things that the brain centers and memory consider consistant. If the brain decides 'good kids' are really a survival priority then we'd create more systems were kids are instructed properly, programming them in effect to have the values and interconnects necessary to function the way they should...
Suppose the brain really does work this way, we don't have a consciousness so much as an animal instinct to preserve and prolong life, and the brain - based on a lifetime of observations and accepted relationships - instinctively picks the proper path! I don't see a huge leap between "fire hurts, must avoid" and "if I teach my kid how to act fairly and honestly it will be easier for me to work with him, and he with the world, and my survival chances are better when others pull for me instead of push against me."
Now assuming this is the case, we've got a massively complicated parallel processing device that's designed to input data and sort it into relationships. These relationships are stored in a communal memory which all centers share, and the entire mess is driven by an instinct to avoid pain, fear and ultimately death. It's true that a few simple rules can create forms of infinite complexity, and from these simple parts we've arrived at a brain that seems conscious, seems aware, and functions as we've come to expect.
Wow.
[oh yeah]
I meant to wonder: Language is passed to us from our parents and our society, it's one more set of input, another tool to forge relationships between concepts. How much does language affect the sense of self, and if there are languages without a word for "I" do people natively speaking this language lack the sense of self we're seeking here?
+ 1 - 0 | § ¶New books came in!
So I got a few new books from Amazon today. Part one of two, the next set should be here in another 10 days or so. I splurged on international shipping after I realized there was really no savings having it shipped to someone else's place first.
The first item on the list is the newest novel from my current favourite author Vernor Vinge. The Peace War seems a short (300p) read but if it's anything like his other works (A Deepness in the Sky and A Fire Upon the Deep) I imagine I'm going to dig it hardcore.
Next up another couple of Brain Books. One's a 1200-page monster from the MIT Press called Essential Sources in the Scientific Study of Consciousness detailing the latest studies into the nature and function of human consciousness. This should be fun, if I can manage to sink my teeth into it. First glance seems to put it beyond the layman. O_o
Lastly is the popular-audience (ie: easily digested) Mind Wide Open which is a much slimmer tome weighing in at a mere 260 pages. I expect to chew through this one in no time, but it was recommended so what the hell.
The first item on the list is the newest novel from my current favourite author Vernor Vinge. The Peace War seems a short (300p) read but if it's anything like his other works (A Deepness in the Sky and A Fire Upon the Deep) I imagine I'm going to dig it hardcore.
Next up another couple of Brain Books. One's a 1200-page monster from the MIT Press called Essential Sources in the Scientific Study of Consciousness detailing the latest studies into the nature and function of human consciousness. This should be fun, if I can manage to sink my teeth into it. First glance seems to put it beyond the layman. O_o
Lastly is the popular-audience (ie: easily digested) Mind Wide Open which is a much slimmer tome weighing in at a mere 260 pages. I expect to chew through this one in no time, but it was recommended so what the hell.
+ 1 - 0 | § ¶More brain stuff
As you probably don't recall I had written about the concept of a modular mind with regards to creating an artificial intelligence. One thing I had thought about (but not written down yet) was the creative process, which a strictly logical computer simulation would have trouble replicating.
I thought about a random 'synaptic misfire' system where parts of the brain, subprocessors if you will, would connect and shoot off random images or concepts to other subprocessors. I thought perhaps this would stimulate a creative process where the individual components would struggle to reconcile hard facts or 'truthful' data with the spurious ones randomly shuttled about the brain, drawing unusual conclusions.1
A couple of days ago I was reading up on V. S. Ramachandran's studies into synaesthasia and the idea that creative people were seven times more likely to be 'afflicted' with the condition and I was struck by an epiphany as if a bell had rung in my head.
The synaesthetic condition seems to have remarkable parallels to the creative process I was trying to replicate, except where I had considered temporary, random connections and images the synaesthete experiences a more 'hardwired' condition. It is this connection, where certain subprocessing nodes are always connected and certain kinds of data are always shared, that the perhaps inappropriate data is processed as creativity2.
I think in my synthetic brain I would start experimenting with these cross-wired conditions on a more temporary basis. I don't see an advantage to a permanent communication between two normally disconnected nodes except in a larger pool where one mind can be completely bent and the rest 'normal' enough to compensate. Perhaps short-term synaesthetic connections between random centers?
The synaesthetic condition fascinates me, and I always wonder how many of our modern phrases or cultural traditions are a result of crosswired brains? "Green with envy," "Cowardly yellow." Was the first person to use these a synaesthetic writer? My mind at least is fascinated by the idea.
1. Naturally this wouldn't be occuring all the time or legitimate thought processes would suffer excessive corruption. Perhaps though this would mimic real life thinking in a tired, drugged or dreaming mind? I've had days like that. =)
2. I've been thinking of the nature of consciousness a lot lately as well, and one thing I come to repeatedly but can't verify as truthful is a statement made in a Dilbert strip. "The region of the brain responsible for conscious thought doesn't show activity until after a decision is reached" or similar. I envision a 'conscious' center that doesn't plan the actions so much as reverse engineer the processes completed by the rest of the brain. 'A decision was made to turn left, deemed correct because the memory center recalled a left at this location at a previous time resulted in a favourable result' or 'A decision was made not to trust this man because men fitting the profiles flagged are reinforced as dangerous. Flagged attributes include dirty, mean looking, holding an ice-cream towards me, and driving a freshly painted van with no license plates. And that's why I'm running, I get it now.'
I thought about a random 'synaptic misfire' system where parts of the brain, subprocessors if you will, would connect and shoot off random images or concepts to other subprocessors. I thought perhaps this would stimulate a creative process where the individual components would struggle to reconcile hard facts or 'truthful' data with the spurious ones randomly shuttled about the brain, drawing unusual conclusions.1
A couple of days ago I was reading up on V. S. Ramachandran's studies into synaesthasia and the idea that creative people were seven times more likely to be 'afflicted' with the condition and I was struck by an epiphany as if a bell had rung in my head.
The synaesthetic condition seems to have remarkable parallels to the creative process I was trying to replicate, except where I had considered temporary, random connections and images the synaesthete experiences a more 'hardwired' condition. It is this connection, where certain subprocessing nodes are always connected and certain kinds of data are always shared, that the perhaps inappropriate data is processed as creativity2.
I think in my synthetic brain I would start experimenting with these cross-wired conditions on a more temporary basis. I don't see an advantage to a permanent communication between two normally disconnected nodes except in a larger pool where one mind can be completely bent and the rest 'normal' enough to compensate. Perhaps short-term synaesthetic connections between random centers?
The synaesthetic condition fascinates me, and I always wonder how many of our modern phrases or cultural traditions are a result of crosswired brains? "Green with envy," "Cowardly yellow." Was the first person to use these a synaesthetic writer? My mind at least is fascinated by the idea.
1. Naturally this wouldn't be occuring all the time or legitimate thought processes would suffer excessive corruption. Perhaps though this would mimic real life thinking in a tired, drugged or dreaming mind? I've had days like that. =)
2. I've been thinking of the nature of consciousness a lot lately as well, and one thing I come to repeatedly but can't verify as truthful is a statement made in a Dilbert strip. "The region of the brain responsible for conscious thought doesn't show activity until after a decision is reached" or similar. I envision a 'conscious' center that doesn't plan the actions so much as reverse engineer the processes completed by the rest of the brain. 'A decision was made to turn left, deemed correct because the memory center recalled a left at this location at a previous time resulted in a favourable result' or 'A decision was made not to trust this man because men fitting the profiles flagged are reinforced as dangerous. Flagged attributes include dirty, mean looking, holding an ice-cream towards me, and driving a freshly painted van with no license plates. And that's why I'm running, I get it now.'