Folks who are interested in this kind of thing might also be interested to see the Koch Lab’s online demos of CFS, which you can experience for yourself if you happen to have some old-style blue-red 3D glasses kicking around. This is the method where you show an image to the nondominant eye, and a crazy high-contrast flashing stimulus to the dominant eye, and the subject remains totally unaware of the image for (up to) minutes. Pretty fun stuff :)
http://www.klab.caltech.edu/~naotsu/CFS_color_demo.html
You might also be interested in Giulio Tononi’s “Integrated Information” theory of consciousness. The gist is that a brain is “conscious” of features in the world to the extent that it is properly causally entangled with those features, and has represents a large amount of information about the world in a deeply entangled way. Not easy to explain in a few sentences, but it seems to me to be a deeper theory that is perhaps related to this “Global Workspace” idea. I think you can find his most well-known paper at: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/282/5395/1846.short, many more available by poking around google scholar.
Tononi is cool in that he (at least attempted to, I haven’t followed the linear algebra proof) quantified a measure for a system both having distinct functional clusters and integrated states which covary enough with external factors that they provide mutual information with them.
It seems to be in line with the “Intelligence is Compression” idea that I’ve run into a few times ’round these parts. I think that his theory is probably very related to intelligence (at least in human-style architectures), but not particularly related to consciousness.
I do admire his audacity in saying that anything with a high enough measure on his value is conscious.
Anil Seth has some intro/review type stuff on his work, which you can get off of his website: http://www.anilseth.com/
I can see both at the same time, and switch between different modes at will. I also tend to be immune to or see much more clearly all kinds of optical illusions and visual effects like this at various at will, or see them all the different possible ways simultaneously, able to see intuitively why things like this works, separately see “colours” like “movement speed” and “local contrast” in a way that intuitively feels like they were sent from the eyes as separate from maps of those properties that have more a feel of concious deduction and are immune to many common optical illusions, am ascribed a good aesthetic sense and artistic talent, tend to move my eyes and scroll on displays in ways that others find disturbing or even painful but I feel constrained and tunnel visioned if I try not to, I have occupationally experienced something reminiscent of blindishgt for short periods of time (remicent in the same sense as a polar opposite is), and am able to “see” things other’s can’t, and a bunch of other related superpowers.
Hope this is interesting enough as a case study to not come of as bragging. Feel free to run experiments on me since i love this kind of thing.
Nice article!
Folks who are interested in this kind of thing might also be interested to see the Koch Lab’s online demos of CFS, which you can experience for yourself if you happen to have some old-style blue-red 3D glasses kicking around. This is the method where you show an image to the nondominant eye, and a crazy high-contrast flashing stimulus to the dominant eye, and the subject remains totally unaware of the image for (up to) minutes. Pretty fun stuff :) http://www.klab.caltech.edu/~naotsu/CFS_color_demo.html
You might also be interested in Giulio Tononi’s “Integrated Information” theory of consciousness. The gist is that a brain is “conscious” of features in the world to the extent that it is properly causally entangled with those features, and has represents a large amount of information about the world in a deeply entangled way. Not easy to explain in a few sentences, but it seems to me to be a deeper theory that is perhaps related to this “Global Workspace” idea. I think you can find his most well-known paper at: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/282/5395/1846.short, many more available by poking around google scholar.
Thanks for the link!
Tononi is cool in that he (at least attempted to, I haven’t followed the linear algebra proof) quantified a measure for a system both having distinct functional clusters and integrated states which covary enough with external factors that they provide mutual information with them.
It seems to be in line with the “Intelligence is Compression” idea that I’ve run into a few times ’round these parts. I think that his theory is probably very related to intelligence (at least in human-style architectures), but not particularly related to consciousness.
I do admire his audacity in saying that anything with a high enough measure on his value is conscious.
Anil Seth has some intro/review type stuff on his work, which you can get off of his website: http://www.anilseth.com/
I can see both at the same time, and switch between different modes at will. I also tend to be immune to or see much more clearly all kinds of optical illusions and visual effects like this at various at will, or see them all the different possible ways simultaneously, able to see intuitively why things like this works, separately see “colours” like “movement speed” and “local contrast” in a way that intuitively feels like they were sent from the eyes as separate from maps of those properties that have more a feel of concious deduction and are immune to many common optical illusions, am ascribed a good aesthetic sense and artistic talent, tend to move my eyes and scroll on displays in ways that others find disturbing or even painful but I feel constrained and tunnel visioned if I try not to, I have occupationally experienced something reminiscent of blindishgt for short periods of time (remicent in the same sense as a polar opposite is), and am able to “see” things other’s can’t, and a bunch of other related superpowers.
Hope this is interesting enough as a case study to not come of as bragging. Feel free to run experiments on me since i love this kind of thing.