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Comment by heyjamesknight | Hacker News Reader

What you're describing here is software, not hardware—Cognitive Science is the relevant field, not Neuroscience.

That said, your understanding is largely supported by our current understanding of consciousness, attention, and perception. The attention mechanism doesn't handle parallel processing well—but can operate "multi-threaded", where it juggles several foci at once (with some obvious cost to switching between them). But I think its a mistake to assume that decision making has to be done within this attention context. While we may only be aware of a single thread at any given time, the brain is doing a lot of parallel processing. We can only focus our attention on a single cognitive task, but that doesn't mean we're not actively performing many others.

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What you're describing here is dualism and Descartes, in response to a post that references Buddhist scholars, a philosophy famously focused on monism.

"Cognitive science" vs "neuroscience" as a concept is just how we decided to slice the problem up for academia.

Next time, maybe cut the first paragraph ;)

we may only be aware of a single thread at any given time

We may be not a single mind, but a bunch of minds. It just happens that the mind that “you” are reads this and has written the above comment, cause it’s of that kind (just like “all biological beings in this thread happen to be humans” type of a filter). Other minds can live completely different lives, just inside the same skull. And share emotions and thoughts with you sometimes from their prison.

This “aware” part is pretty mysterious, because the physical mind could operate without it perfectly. But for some reason, the space containing a mind experiences this awareness thing.

I fully disagree that the mind can operate without "awareness." We understand neither the how nor why of consciousness. But its not just a parlor trick—consciousness helps us mediate our attention.

It's one of the core things missing from our current AI path. Even if the LLMs reach 100% parity on human computational power, we humans are still acting as the ghost-in-the-machine, mediating and directing said computation.

Consciousness (in this sense) doesn't physically exist cause it's unfalsifiable. Philosophy has a whole p-zombie section on that. I believe that you are mixing this metaphysical awareness with the physical process of mind machinery which is obviously required for a mind to work. Unless you have a deeper idea in mind.

If the latter, why do you think it can not? It's a configuration of particles that will evolve by physical means (under materialism ofc). It shouldn't require anything special like any inanimate object doesn't require anything to continue physically existing, the only difference being just how less complex its reactions are. And even that is subjective and anthropecentric, cause laws of nature don't care more about us than e.g. about a rock, they just work.

Because the attention-selection mechanism exists inside the conscious experience. If you can't account for the conscious experience then you're missing the recursive relevancy realization that allows us to select from the salience landscape and direct our behavior accordingly.

LLMs can handle everything downstream from that beautifully. But until we have some way to hand them a conscious experience, they'll need direction from an entity that has one.

As far as I know, our wetware builds the hardware as the software runs. Like some kind of self-agglomerating and pruning FPGA

"... neurons that fire together wire together" (essentially)

Yes, the hardware is optimized over time. But the emergent experience of consciousness isn't described in that hardware. If you're a pure materialist, you believe said experience is still present physically—likely in some combination of brain matter and the ongoing electrical currents flowing through them. But there's no "place" where consciousness sits.

Its the same thing with a game running on a computer. You can point to different systems for specific aspects of it. But you can't show me where, either in software or hardware, the experience of the game lives.

I think this is clearly seen whenever we go for a walk or a drive, the mind drifts but you still somehow get to your destination and in hindsight wonder who was actually driving the car?

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