I think it’s worth hammering out the definition of a thread here.
Agreed. I only want to include conscious thought processes. So I am modeling myself as having a single core conscious processor. I assume this aligns with your statement that you are only experiencing a single thing, where experience is equivalent to “a thought during a specified time interval in your consciousness”? The smallest possible time interval that still constitutes a single thought I consider the period of a conscious brainwave. This random site states a conscious brainwave frequency of 12-30Hz, then the shortest possible thought is above 30 milliseconds.
I am assuming it’s temporal multithreading, with each though at least one cycle. Note that I am neither a neuroscientist, nor a computer scientist, so I am probably modeling it all wrong. Nevertheless simple toy models can often be of great help. If there’s a better analogy, I am more than willing to try it out.
People are discussing this across the internet of course, here’s one example on Hacker News
Yes—this fits with my perspective. The definition of the word “thought” is not exactly clear to me but claiming that it’s duration is lower-bounded by brainwave duration seems reasonable to me.
Yeah, it could be that our conscious attention performs temporal multi-threading—only being capable of accessing a single one of the many normally background processes going on in the brain at once. Of course, who knows? Maybe it only feels that way because we are only a single conscious attention thread and there are actually many threads like this in the brain running in parallell. Split brain studies are a potential indicator that this could be true:
After the right and left brain are separated, each hemisphere will have its own separate perception, concepts, and impulses to act. Having two “brains” in one body can create some interesting dilemmas. When one split-brain patient dressed himself, he sometimes pulled his pants up with one hand (that side of his brain wanted to get dressed) and down with the other (this side did not).
People are discussing this across the internet of course, here’s one example on Hacker News
Alternative hypothesis: The way our brain produces thought-words seems like it could in principle be predictive processing a-la GPT-2. Maybe we’re just bad at multi-tasking because switching rapidly between different topics just confuses whatever brain-part is instantiating predictive-processing.
Agreed. I only want to include conscious thought processes. So I am modeling myself as having a single core conscious processor. I assume this aligns with your statement that you are only experiencing a single thing, where experience is equivalent to “a thought during a specified time interval in your consciousness”? The smallest possible time interval that still constitutes a single thought I consider the period of a conscious brainwave. This random site states a conscious brainwave frequency of 12-30Hz, then the shortest possible thought is above 30 milliseconds.
I am assuming it’s temporal multithreading, with each though at least one cycle. Note that I am neither a neuroscientist, nor a computer scientist, so I am probably modeling it all wrong. Nevertheless simple toy models can often be of great help. If there’s a better analogy, I am more than willing to try it out.
People are discussing this across the internet of course, here’s one example on Hacker News
Yes—this fits with my perspective. The definition of the word “thought” is not exactly clear to me but claiming that it’s duration is lower-bounded by brainwave duration seems reasonable to me.
Yeah, it could be that our conscious attention performs temporal multi-threading—only being capable of accessing a single one of the many normally background processes going on in the brain at once. Of course, who knows? Maybe it only feels that way because we are only a single conscious attention thread and there are actually many threads like this in the brain running in parallell. Split brain studies are a potential indicator that this could be true:
--quote from wikipedia
Alternative hypothesis: The way our brain produces thought-words seems like it could in principle be predictive processing a-la GPT-2. Maybe we’re just bad at multi-tasking because switching rapidly between different topics just confuses whatever brain-part is instantiating predictive-processing.