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Comment by adrianratnapala | Hacker News Reader

I am still reading it, but already I see it unnecessarily engages in a postmodernist-like confusion of map and territory.

> Yet you know sure as you were born that there's a broader world outside ... [you know a bunch of other things about reality] ... At this instant, reading by yourself, where do these realities reside? Inside your mind. Memory in a very real sense is reality.

Bloom is absolutely right that memory is central to all this. But it's a category error to say that just because your knowledge of reality is through memory, that memory is the only realitiy.

Ok, it's logically possible there is no external reality, and all that exists is just my (Ratnapala's) memory. But even then the distinction remains. Then, the lying medium (memory) is real, but the content of those memories is not a reality.

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I don't think it's talking about external reality. It's talking about the past. Your memories are the real, even physical residue of your experience of the past. And the past doesn't exist anymore in any other form.

And then the fun part is that every time you remember a memory, you re-encode it and (probably) slightly alter it.

When you vividly remember an event from a decade ago it most likely did not happen like you remember. They've done longitudinal studies on people's memories of things like JFK assassination and 9/11. People swear they remember it clear as day but it never really matches up to what they were actually doing...

Memories are bunk, is my point. Only media can really record history.

>Memories are bunk, is my point. Only media can really record history.

I don't trust media because Berenstein bears is the proper spelling [0]. I died when I was 6 years old after an asthma attack and shifted into another timeline where I survived. It shares most of the same details but likes to throw a few typos in to check if I'm paying attention. I'm not sure the purpose of these tests, but I'm sure I'll figure it out.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confabulation#Mandela_effect

While confabulation is a severe problem with human memory, I don't trust media because history is written by the winners.

And media can be manipulated. Its like 1984 when you think about it.

I don't think its correct to automatically assume naive solipsism of the author.

these two statements are both true (as far as we can verify in this limited human existence, anyway):

1. there is a world beyond an individual's consciousness.

2. an individual can only ever experience the world through their own consciousness, and therefore their own senses and memories.

Bloom's statement contradicts neither of those things. He is simply acknowledging that from an individual's own subjective point of view, their own consciousness is really the only thing they can work with in a direct sense. That isn't a denial or negation of exterior reality. For practical purposes though, if we wish to examine consciousness we are pretty much stuck in examining our own consciousness, since that's the only one we have direct access to.

The human brain can be directly influenced by the outside world. Calling that either 'senses' or 'memories' is abusing the terms rather heavily.

Alternatively, someone can eat LSD without sensing it. But, that LSD is still going to have a profound effect.

I don't understand your point, and it seems to me that you didn't understand mine.

Of course the human mind (which is NOT identical with the brain, not a good idea to conflate those terms) is influenced by the outside world. Sense organs (and the sensations in consciousness that arise due to them) are the means through which external reality causes changes in consciousness.

Why is it wrong to call that "senses"? How is that abusing the term? It's the literal meaning of the word.

Sight and balance is a sense, direct neural stimulation is something else. A stroke for example can do all sorts of nasty things without influencing memory or triggering anything you can detect.

I'm still not sure what your point is and I think you're off topic. What's your point about "direct neural stimulation"?

First off, what does that even mean? Surely your own eyes directly stimulate your optic nerves which directly stimulate your visual cortex. Is there a different kind of stimulation you had in mind?

I'm not sure what you mean by "a stroke can do things without influencing memory or triggering anything you can detect". Do you mean that people sometimes become unconscious during a stroke? Maybe. So what? The effects of a stroke are most certainly detectable afterwards though. I'm really just not sure what you're trying to get at.

Apply a weak electric current to a specific point and people get the sensation they are being watched. It's not a perception it's altering post processing of sensory data. A stroke can remove your ability recognize faces. You could still describe someone, but you would not be able to look at a picture of you wife and know who they where. You would be able to recognize her voice.

These are not in the two category's proposed earlier, thus memory and observation fail fully describe what's going on.

yeah, you're definitely off topic. Prosopagnosia is an interesting phenomenon but it's not related to what Bloom was discussing or what I was elaborating on.

Bloom's discussion was a highlighting of the ways in which cultural transmission of events imbues the sensory perception and recollection of memory in every person in society with a certain kind of filter which he describes by analogy as if it was some sort of group mind.

my point of elaboration was meant to emphasize that when we examine the contents of consciousness, we necessarily are limited to examining our own consciousness qualitatively. Reporting on the consciousness of others is only ever capable of producing yet another stimulus in our own input stream that we would interpet the same way we interpret any other exogenous stimulus. Despite that, this does not imply solipsism. Only an admission of the limitations we are faced with in this examination.

What's off topic about pointing out that this interesting model of the world which you just repeated is wrong? Our brains have plenty of redundancy, but cells die and this really does impact what's going on. Radiation is randomly altering your brain at low levels that very rarely become noticeable, thinking of it in these ideal terms is pointless.

> we necessarily are limited to examining our own consciousness qualitatively

Err no. It's just as much a physical things as a rock or your toenails.

PS: The modern CPU your using to read this is to complex for any one person to understand. It has billions of connections all doing important things some of which don't work. But, it was designed so each connection is intended to do something understandable. Further, it's way to fast to understand what's going on at a second by second basis, but every individual interaction is predictable. So, that CPU is to complex to understand, but that does not mean your limited to looking at it qualitatively.

mind != brain

Brain state = mind. Running program = computer state.

Both are physical things. An abacus does not undergo long term change when you move the beads. But, the arangment of beads can have meaning. Brains and CPU both treat the intermediate state as something meaningful and act on it.

Even if there is no reality outside memory, there still is a simulation. We could not have created such a complex world buy pure imagination. The simulation might be just as complex as the reality itself. So, it would be just a game of words to distinguish between them.

Why would there be a simulation? Do you call all perceptions simulations?

I was wondering the same thing. Perhaps it was meant to say "stimulation" otherwise we're just talking about another layer of separation from reality.

"To see things in a new light is a cognitive challenge; to adjust the language to the new insight is nothing more than a bothersome technicality." - Rudolph Arnheim, Visual Thinking

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