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- Hacker News
- It seems to me that compaction is not unlike sleepby goalieca
- Isn't that obvious?
What we perceive as "present" is just our latest memory.
by qsera - What makes this most interesting from my point of view is that this is a specific enough theory that it might be amenable to experimental investigation.by lambdaone
- Working memory is exactly like CPU cache. Data must be first moved to WM from mid and longterm storage in brain (RAM and SSD respectively) before being processed by the brain centres.
Consciousness is a process that runs concurrently with the main process and follows it, hence we know about our thought. In this analogy, WM and consciousness have little relation.
by tsoukase - I agree, but attention is what is missing I think.
Consciousness is merely the awareness of existence, while attention is the process that works with the working memory.
To me, consciousness is a log file that is partially in working memory and has logged the current state of the system.
by hoppp - My way of reasoning on this is unscientific - but it is intuitive. It might be a starting place.
Consider physics as an analogy.
The level of detail dictates the right physics to use. Aerospace engineering can use continuous formulae to predict what’ll happen. But when you deal in a few atoms as in chip design, quantum effects dominate. Sub-atomic particles (quarks et al) are different again.
This makes deriving a universal physics elusive.
So it likely is with consciousness and how the brain achieves what it achieves.
by cadamsdotcom - We can’t define or measure consciousness - because we haven’t discovered how.
So, we can’t define or measure it, but we can create it?
How do you create that which is not definable or measurable?
by cloudie78 - Consciousness is what the brain is doing.
I look forward to more precise definitions.
- People made fire for thousands of years before they understood what it was.by empath75
- We can create many things without being able to define them. From embryos to fire.by Tenoke
- > How do you create that which is not definable or measurable?
animals can have offspring without understanding reproduction
by visarga - > How do you create that which is not definable or measurable?
Through engineering.
This isn't new by any stretch of the imagination. Throughout our entire history as a species, we've been building things long, long before we had the tools to understand them. We built bridges and massive cathedrals before we invented geometry. We built and optimized steam engines for a century before we developed the language of fluid dynamics to understand why those designs were optimal.
Engineering very frequently is far ahead of the science needed to explain it.
As far as consciousness goes, personally I think it's an emergent property that will arise on its own when conditions are right. It will take a lot of experimentation to establish the right conditions, and then generations of study to figure out why those conditions were ideal for consciousness to emerge.
Because realistically we can't learn about consciousness with a sample size of one (us). We need to study other consciousnesses to understand the why and hows.
by vitally3643 - Not thoroughly understanding consciousness doesn't mean we can't create it. All sorts of phenomena are created without an understanding of the underlying mechanism. The entire animal kingdom, including us humans, have been creating conscious beings (babies) without understanding how consciousness actually works.
Of course, understanding the mechanism is helpful if you want control, reliability, and precision over the phenomena, but creation can definitely happen before we can explain it.
by thansz - This does not recognize the Hard Problem of Consciousness. Even if we find a mechanistic way to explain what is needed for consciousness, it does not give any clue as to why it feels like something to be conscious.by henry-p
- by bookofjoe
- Should link to the original article:
https://theconversation.com/consciousness-how-working-memory...
by mellosouls - OT but the first sentence on that page has a typo:
To solve a Rubrik’s cube, you need to engage your working memory. - In this article, the concept of working memory accounts for not consciousness but the accessibility, stability and reportability of certain contents. For example, when I am reading very carefully, I may not be concentrating on the ambient sounds, my bodily position, my peripheral vision, and the environment of the room. These contents may not have to be retained in working memory in any way as relevant information for the current activity. Nevertheless, it does not necessarily follow that these are unconscious in nature. They can be part of the background of consciousness. Hence, there is the danger that the author assumes "being available for cognitive manipulation or verbal report" to be synonymous with "being conscious." This is quite an assumption and not one arrived at from the working memory model.by albertize
- The article spends multiple paragraphs on exactly this. Did you read it in its entirety?
"This can be a difficult idea to swallow. Imagine you’re looking out at a countryside scene. You see rolling hills, the vibrant sunshine and a herd of cows. You hear the birds, smell the fresh cut grass and feel the wind on your skin. Surely you are conscious of this whole scene all at once. But we know that working memory has a capacity that is far too tiny to fit all of this information in at one time. If consciousness arises from working memory, then how can I be conscious of all this stuff at once?
Indeed, some philosophers and scientists have argued in just this way, saying that consciousness overflows the capacity of working memory. If this is true, it would be a problem for those who think that consciousness arises from working memory."
by dinfinity - If you can't report some stimuli in principle, even to yourself, what would it mean for that stimuli to also be conscious?
- Yes I think it’s a linguistic confusion more than anything else.
To me, consciousness is not generally that you can be aware (conscious) of things around you and can react to them, lots of things can do that.
Consciousness is a shorthand for saying that something is conscious of itself, or conscious of its own consciousness. It is the meta-ability to observe its own perceptions and thoughts. And a sense of self, a sense that the observer is the same over time.
But frankly, it’s a terrible concept and my definition is plenty flawed too. In practice it is more of a moving goalpost to denote the specialness and superiority of humans over all. That thing we can’t quite put a finger on that makes us different. It is a secular euphemism for the soul. It is not very scientific.
And that is quite problematic because the privileges we ascribe to those on the wrong side of the line fall off a cliff. We rely on that line as a foundation for so much of our morals. We have seen the catastrophes that happen when a group has a different idea about the line.
I don’t have a solution to propose, it’s hard.
by oersted - Yeah, binning conscious and unconscious as two categorical classes is probably wrong. There are likely gradations, especially in the context of working memory over time.