The freedom to speculate wildly is what makes this topic so fun.
My mental model would say, you have a particular pattern recognition module that classifies objects as “chair”, along with a weight of how well the current instance matches the category. An object can be a prototypical perfect Platonic chair, or an almost-chair, or maybe a chair if you flip it over, or not a chair at all.
When you look at a chair, this pattern recognition module immediately classifies it, and then brings online another module, which makes available all the relevant physical affordances, linguistic and logical implications of a chair being present in your environment. Recognizing something as a chair feels identical to recognizing something as a thing-in-which-I-can-sit. Similarly, you don’t have to puzzle out the implications of a tiger walking into the room right now. The fear response will coincide with the recognition of the tiger.
When you try to introspect on chairness, what you’re doing is tossing imagined sense percepts at yourself and observing the responses of the chariness detecting module. This allows you to generate an abstract representation of your own chairness classifier. But this abstract representation is absolutely not the same thing as the chairness classifier, any more than your abstract cogitation about what the “+” operator does is the same thing as the mental operation of adding two numbers together.
I think a lot of confusion about the nature of human thinking stems from the inability to internally distinguish between the abstracted symbol for a mental phenomenon and the mental phenomenon itself. This dovetails with IFS in an interesting way, in that it can be difficult to distinguish between thinking about a particular Part in the abstract, and actually getting into contact with that Part in a way that causes it to shift.
I’m not sure why you say that the unconscious modules communicating with each other would necessarily contradict the idea of us being conscious of exactly the stuff that’s in the workspace, but I tend to agree that considering the contents of our consciousness and the contents of the workspace to be strictly isomorphic seems to be too strong.
I may be simply misunderstanding something. My sense is that when you open the fridge to get a yogurt and your brain shouts “HOW DID CYPHER GET INTO THE MATRIX TO MEET SMITH WITHOUT SOMEONE TO HELP HIM PLUG IN?”, this is a kind of thought that arises from checking meticulously over your epistemic state for logical inconsistencies, rather esoteric and complex logical inconsistencies, and it seems to come from nowhere. Doesn’t this imply that some submodules of your brain are thinking abstractly and logically about The Matrix completely outside of your conscious awareness? If so, then this either implies that the subconscious processing of individual submodules can be very complex and abstract without needing to share information with other submodules, or that information sharing between submodules can occur without you being consciously aware of it.
A third possibility would be that you were actually consciously thinking about The Matrix in a kind of inattentive, distracted way, and it only seems like the thought came out of nowhere. This would be far from the most shocking example of the brain simply lying to you about its operations.
To my reading, all of this seems to pretty well match a (part of) the Buddhist notion of dependent origination, specifically the way senses beget sense contact (experience) begets feeling begets craving (preferences) begets clinging (beliefs/values) begets being (formal ontology). There the focus is a bit different and is oriented around addressing a different question, but I think it’s tackling some of the same issues via different methods.
When you look at a chair, this pattern recognition module immediately classifies it, and then brings online another module, which makes available all the relevant physical affordances, linguistic and logical implications of a chair being present in your environment. Recognizing something as a chair feels identical to recognizing something as a thing-in-which-I-can-sit. Similarly, you don’t have to puzzle out the implications of a tiger walking into the room right now. The fear response will coincide with the recognition of the tiger.
Yeah, this is similar to how I think of it. When I see something, the thoughts which are relevant for the context become available: usually naming the thing isn’t particularly necessary, so I don’t happen to consciously think of its name.
Doesn’t this imply that some submodules of your brain are thinking abstractly and logically about The Matrix completely outside of your conscious awareness? If so, then this either implies that the subconscious processing of individual submodules can be very complex and abstract without needing to share information with other submodules, or that information sharing between submodules can occur without you being consciously aware of it.
Well, we already know from the unconscious priming experiments that information-sharing between submodules can occur without conscious awareness. It could be something like, if you hadn’t been conscious of watching The Matrix, the submodules would never have gotten a strong enough signal about its contents to process it; but once the movie was once consciously processed, there’s enough of a common reference for several related submodules to “know what the other is talking about”.
Or maybe it’s all in one submodule; the fact that that submodule feels a need to make its final conclusion conscious, suggests that it can’t communicate the entirety of its thinking purely unconsciously.
The freedom to speculate wildly is what makes this topic so fun.
My mental model would say, you have a particular pattern recognition module that classifies objects as “chair”, along with a weight of how well the current instance matches the category. An object can be a prototypical perfect Platonic chair, or an almost-chair, or maybe a chair if you flip it over, or not a chair at all.
When you look at a chair, this pattern recognition module immediately classifies it, and then brings online another module, which makes available all the relevant physical affordances, linguistic and logical implications of a chair being present in your environment. Recognizing something as a chair feels identical to recognizing something as a thing-in-which-I-can-sit. Similarly, you don’t have to puzzle out the implications of a tiger walking into the room right now. The fear response will coincide with the recognition of the tiger.
When you try to introspect on chairness, what you’re doing is tossing imagined sense percepts at yourself and observing the responses of the chariness detecting module. This allows you to generate an abstract representation of your own chairness classifier. But this abstract representation is absolutely not the same thing as the chairness classifier, any more than your abstract cogitation about what the “+” operator does is the same thing as the mental operation of adding two numbers together.
I think a lot of confusion about the nature of human thinking stems from the inability to internally distinguish between the abstracted symbol for a mental phenomenon and the mental phenomenon itself. This dovetails with IFS in an interesting way, in that it can be difficult to distinguish between thinking about a particular Part in the abstract, and actually getting into contact with that Part in a way that causes it to shift.
I may be simply misunderstanding something. My sense is that when you open the fridge to get a yogurt and your brain shouts “HOW DID CYPHER GET INTO THE MATRIX TO MEET SMITH WITHOUT SOMEONE TO HELP HIM PLUG IN?”, this is a kind of thought that arises from checking meticulously over your epistemic state for logical inconsistencies, rather esoteric and complex logical inconsistencies, and it seems to come from nowhere. Doesn’t this imply that some submodules of your brain are thinking abstractly and logically about The Matrix completely outside of your conscious awareness? If so, then this either implies that the subconscious processing of individual submodules can be very complex and abstract without needing to share information with other submodules, or that information sharing between submodules can occur without you being consciously aware of it.
A third possibility would be that you were actually consciously thinking about The Matrix in a kind of inattentive, distracted way, and it only seems like the thought came out of nowhere. This would be far from the most shocking example of the brain simply lying to you about its operations.
To my reading, all of this seems to pretty well match a (part of) the Buddhist notion of dependent origination, specifically the way senses beget sense contact (experience) begets feeling begets craving (preferences) begets clinging (beliefs/values) begets being (formal ontology). There the focus is a bit different and is oriented around addressing a different question, but I think it’s tackling some of the same issues via different methods.
Yeah, this is similar to how I think of it. When I see something, the thoughts which are relevant for the context become available: usually naming the thing isn’t particularly necessary, so I don’t happen to consciously think of its name.
Well, we already know from the unconscious priming experiments that information-sharing between submodules can occur without conscious awareness. It could be something like, if you hadn’t been conscious of watching The Matrix, the submodules would never have gotten a strong enough signal about its contents to process it; but once the movie was once consciously processed, there’s enough of a common reference for several related submodules to “know what the other is talking about”.
Or maybe it’s all in one submodule; the fact that that submodule feels a need to make its final conclusion conscious, suggests that it can’t communicate the entirety of its thinking purely unconsciously.