Since I like profound discussions I am now going to have to re-read IFS, it didn’t fully resonate with me the first time.
Huzzah! To speak more broadly, I’m really interested in joining abstract models of the mind with the way that we subjectively experience ourselves. Back in the day when I was exploring psychological modifications, I would subjectively “mainline” my emotions (ie cause them to happen and become aware of them happening) and then “jam the system” (ie deliberately instigating different emotions and shoving them into that experiential flow). IFS and later Unlocking The Emotional Brain (and Scott Alexander’s post on that post, Mental Mountains) helped confirm for me that the thing I thought I was doing was actually the thing I was doing.
I cannot come up with such a cool wolverine story I am afraid.
I found a link in your links to Internal Double Crux. This technique I do recognize.
I recently also tried recursively observing my thoughts, which was interesting. I look at my current thought, than I look at the thought that’s looking at the first thought, etc. Untill it pops, followed by a moment of stillness, then a new thought arises, I start over. Any name for that?
Interesting… When you do this, do you consider the experience of the thought looking at your first thought to be happening simultaneously with the experience of your first thought? If so, this would be contrary to my expectation that one only experiences one thought at a time. To quote Scott Alexander quoting Daniel Ingram:
Then there may be a thought or an image that arises and passes, and then, if the mind is stable, another physical pulse. Each one of these arises and vanishes completely before the other begins, so it is extremely possible to sort out which is which with a stable mind dedicated to consistent precision and not being lost in stories.
When you say ‘one thought at a time’, do you mean one conscious thought? From reading all these multi-agent models I assumed the subconscious is a collection of parallel thoughts, or at least multi-threaded.
I also interpreted the Internal Double Crux as spinning up two threads and let them battle it out.
I recall one dream where I was two individuals at the same time.
I do consider it like two parallel thoughts, though one dominates, or at least I relate my ‘self’ mostly with one of them. However, how do I evaluate my subjective experience? It’s not like I can open the taskmanager and monitor my mind’s processes (though I am still undecided whether I should invest in some of those open source EEG devices).
Edit:
While reading Scott’s review, I am more convinced it’s multi-threading, due the observation that there may be ‘brain wave frequencies’:
This is vipassana (“insight”, “wisdom”) meditation. It’s a deep focus on the tiniest details of your mental experience, details so fleeting and subtle that without a samatha-trained mind you’ll miss them entirely. One such detail is the infamous “vibrations”, so beloved of hippies. Ingram notes that every sensation vibrates in and out of consciousness at a rate of between five and forty vibrations per second, sometimes speeding up or slowing down depending on your mental state. I’m a pathetic meditator and about as far from enlightenment as anybody in this world, but with enough focus even I have been able to confirm this to be true. And this is pretty close to the frequency of brain waves, which seems like a pretty interesting coincidence.
Under this hypothesis, I would now state I have at least observed three states of multi-threading:
Double threading. I picked this up from a mindfulness app. You try to observe your thoughts as they appear. In essence there is one monitoring thread and one free thread.
Triple threads, i.e. Internal Double Crux. You have one moderator thread that monitors and balances two other debating threads.
Recursive threading. One thread starts another thread, which starts another, untill you hit the maximum limit, which is probably related to the brainwave frequency.
When you say ‘one thought at a time’, do you mean one conscious thought? From reading all these multi-agent models I assumed the subconscious is a collection of parallel thoughts, or at least multi-threaded.
Yes. The key factor is that, while I might have many computations going on in my brain at once, I am only ever experiencing a single thing. These things flicker into existence and non-existence extremely quickly and are sampled from a broader range of parallel, unexperienced, thoughts occuring in the subconscious.
Under this hypothesis, I would now state I have at least observed three states of multi-threading:
I think it’s worth hammering out the definition of a thread here. In terms of brain-subagents engaging in computational process, I’d argue that those are always on subconsciously. When I’m watching and listening to TV for instance, I’d describe my self as rapidly flickering between three main computational processes: a visual experience, an auditory experience, and an experience of internal monologue. There are also occasionally threads that I give less attention to—like a muscle being too tense. But I wouldn’t consider myself as experiencing all of these processes simultaneously—instead its more like I’m seeing a single console output that keeps switching between the data produced by each of the processes.
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.
I inspired someone; yay!
Since I like profound discussions I am now going to have to re-read IFS, it didn’t fully resonate with me the first time.
I cannot come up with such a cool wolverine story I am afraid.
Huzzah! To speak more broadly, I’m really interested in joining abstract models of the mind with the way that we subjectively experience ourselves. Back in the day when I was exploring psychological modifications, I would subjectively “mainline” my emotions (ie cause them to happen and become aware of them happening) and then “jam the system” (ie deliberately instigating different emotions and shoving them into that experiential flow). IFS and later Unlocking The Emotional Brain (and Scott Alexander’s post on that post, Mental Mountains) helped confirm for me that the thing I thought I was doing was actually the thing I was doing.
No worries; you’ve still got time!
I found a link in your links to Internal Double Crux. This technique I do recognize.
I recently also tried recursively observing my thoughts, which was interesting. I look at my current thought, than I look at the thought that’s looking at the first thought, etc. Untill it pops, followed by a moment of stillness, then a new thought arises, I start over. Any name for that?
Interesting… When you do this, do you consider the experience of the thought looking at your first thought to be happening simultaneously with the experience of your first thought? If so, this would be contrary to my expectation that one only experiences one thought at a time. To quote Scott Alexander quoting Daniel Ingram:
If you’re interesting in this, you might want to also check out Scott’s review of Daniel’s book.
I’ll examine the link!
When you say ‘one thought at a time’, do you mean one conscious thought? From reading all these multi-agent models I assumed the subconscious is a collection of parallel thoughts, or at least multi-threaded.
I also interpreted the Internal Double Crux as spinning up two threads and let them battle it out.
I recall one dream where I was two individuals at the same time.
I do consider it like two parallel thoughts, though one dominates, or at least I relate my ‘self’ mostly with one of them. However, how do I evaluate my subjective experience? It’s not like I can open the taskmanager and monitor my mind’s processes (though I am still undecided whether I should invest in some of those open source EEG devices).
Edit: While reading Scott’s review, I am more convinced it’s multi-threading, due the observation that there may be ‘brain wave frequencies’:
Under this hypothesis, I would now state I have at least observed three states of multi-threading:
Double threading. I picked this up from a mindfulness app. You try to observe your thoughts as they appear. In essence there is one monitoring thread and one free thread.
Triple threads, i.e. Internal Double Crux. You have one moderator thread that monitors and balances two other debating threads.
Recursive threading. One thread starts another thread, which starts another, untill you hit the maximum limit, which is probably related to the brainwave frequency.
I’ll continue to investigate.
Yes. The key factor is that, while I might have many computations going on in my brain at once, I am only ever experiencing a single thing. These things flicker into existence and non-existence extremely quickly and are sampled from a broader range of parallel, unexperienced, thoughts occuring in the subconscious.
I think it’s worth hammering out the definition of a thread here. In terms of brain-subagents engaging in computational process, I’d argue that those are always on subconsciously. When I’m watching and listening to TV for instance, I’d describe my self as rapidly flickering between three main computational processes: a visual experience, an auditory experience, and an experience of internal monologue. There are also occasionally threads that I give less attention to—like a muscle being too tense. But I wouldn’t consider myself as experiencing all of these processes simultaneously—instead its more like I’m seeing a single console output that keeps switching between the data produced by each of the processes.
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.