Comment by simonh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by simonh | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

When I am at rest, looking around myself, taking in sensations, observing others runaround me, and aware of myself and my place in the world, I consider myself consciously aware. I don't see what any of that experience has to do with language.

Furthermore, I don't see any reason why that state of conscious awareness would need to have been significantly different in my pre-human ancestors. Would a Homo Erectus have had a significantly different sense of experience? An Australopithecus? Our common ancestor with other apes? If so, why?

It seems to me the parts of the brain active in that state correspond closely to those in other mammals. Yes when I'm solving maths problems, writing a HN post, playing a board game or solving a crossword puzzle I'm using higher brain functions that other mammals don't have. Sure. But what has that got to do with conscious awareness? I have that when I'm doing things very much along the same lines as activities of other mammals. Running a race, climbing a tree, walking through woodland, stalking prey, experiencing love, or loss or panic. I don't see why I would expect their experience of those things to be much different from mine.

There's no 'animal mode' state of awareness that we have when doing 'animal' things that's a vestige of our pre-conscious past. Conscious awareness isn't something that only kicks in when actively engaging higher brain functions. So surely that is evidence it's a foundational part of our mental heritage, not a modern addition?

It seems to me that arguing that a higher mammal's experience must be dramatically different from mine when doing common activities, to the point that it's impossible for us to even imagine what that experience is like, is the extraordinary claim.

Have you ever tried meditating? The first time you do you probably think your mind isn't wandering, it actually takes a bit of practice to even notice quite how much internal dialogue you actually have. It's non stop for most of us.

Yes, but part of the point, at least in the Buddhist tradition, is that those thoughts are just another phenomenon you're experiencing. Do a lot of the right kind of practice, and you can get it to stop, while still maintaining a high level of conscious awareness. E.g. see the book The Mind Illuminated.

> see the book The Mind Illuminated.

I am at around stage 3 just now.... Nowhere near enough to stop my thoughts but they are definitely calmer.

I think using the terms 'dialogue' for that is very loaded. It's pre-supposing that it's linguistic in nature by using a term that is linguistic in nature. If you think of it as simply a stream of representations of experience and cognition, why can't language be a separate layer constructed on top of it that we have and animals don't?

Have you ever had an idea or thought, and found it initially impossible to find the right words and phrases to express it? I certainly have. babies with no language can identify objects and people, develop emotional connections, learn skills and solve problems long before they can speak. Are they not concious?

Yes, this experience of knowing before verbalising confirms it for me. I find it happens most when I'm solving a problem and I know there is a line of thinking I could go down but have not yet gone down, an intuition for some nuance of the problem, a cross contextual connection. If I follow the feeling it materialises into words that reference the problem I am solving but until I do it remains an abstract notion. Sometimes it feels like memories of similar problems and sometimes it feels entirely abstract. Once you look at it though it disappears as it is verbalised so it can only be seen in the corner of your mind's eye.

Is it established that internal dialogue is facilitated by our language faculties, though? That’s certainly not was I would guess from my subjective experience.

This seems like something that should be obvious: most people's internal monologue is delineated in their primary language, or in a pastiche of the languages they know well. Just think about your own thoughts - if they crystallize into something and you serialize it out, it's going to be in language form.

I think the implication here is that it’s a linguistic dialogue.

We have an awareness of our thoughts and a second-order cognition we can simply notice and use to train ourselves to behave differently. It's not immediately clear other animal's second order thinking is as well developed and that can effect every part of your experience.

There's arguments to be made that we have parts of our brain that are created at a very early age that may give us a reaction to unique symbols. There's arguments that the spread of epigenetics down family lines naturally grant a focus on particular traits or behaviours.

Your conscious awareness is heavily trained by your day to day life. You see what is important to you, even in your 'holiday' from high functioning consciousness. When you are running a race and climbing a tree the ability to pace yourself at a rate, see particular handholds and climbing techniques in a tree, are your consciousness. Orangutans use different climbing techniques and live different lives around and inside trees to us. It's not a past-time that speaks of an adventurous or wildlife-like experience, but something that could be as natural to them as walking and with the same connotations as walking on concrete for the rest of us.

This whole exercise of grounding consciousness is a move that will inevitably come after our heightening of awareness in the last four years. This article is a very poor way to attempt to make that happen.

> ... I consider myself consciously aware. I don't see what any of that experience has to do with language.

How do you consider yourself to be anything if your mind does not use tokenised abstractions, ie some level of language?

Cogito ergo sum and all.

I've got to say I'm still pretty happy with the concept of the superego. That consciousness and ability for supervisory control seems to rely on the same handling of complex abstraction as language does.

Why must the abstractions be tokenized? I can notice myself feeling things, and surely that counts as awareness of the self. If you notice that you are full of anger or joy, you notice that _you_ exist.

Surely noticing yourself means you've objectivized yourself i.e. tokenized yourself as an abstraction?

Well you can even fall back to saying that all sensations are abstractions. After all when you feel wet there is no part of your brain that “gets wet”. But the constant mirroring of the external world by your mental abstractions is not something over which you have full control and you couldn’t stop it if you wanted to. Language has nothing to do with it. After all you don’t personally assemble the images you see from your rods and cones, nor did you ever get to choose what cinnamon smells like.

If a dog sees two other dogs, one a potential mate and another a potential rival, doesn't it have to mentally manipulate representations of them? Isn't that a form of tokenisation?

I suspect language is a communications layer built on top of a pre-existing mental framework of sensory experience, identification, memory, recognition, emotional responses, etc.

The alternative is to suggest that humans developed an entirely novel way of representing, interacting with and responding to the world from scratch that just happens to emulate many of the experiences we see expressed by animals - excitement, fear, desire, recognition, problem solving, etc, but shares nothing in common with them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com