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Comment by AndrewKemendo | Hacker News Reader

This matches my hypothesis on Deja vu

https://kemendo.com/Deja-Vu-Experiment.html

I think it also supports my three loops hypothesis as well:

In effect, my position is that biological systems maintain a synchronized processing pipeline: where the hippocampal prediction system operates slightly “ahead” of sensory processing, like a cache buffer.

If the processing gets “behind” the sensory input then you feel like you’re accessing memory because the electrical signal is reaching memory and sensory distribution simultaneously or slightly lagging.

So it means you’re constantly switching between your world map and the input and comparing them just to stabilize a “linear” experience - something which is a necessity for corporeal prediction and reaction.

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I think we should be careful about materialistic reductions of awareness. Because some rats dreamed detours that ended up being correct in waking rat life, it does not follow that all instances of deja vu are misfirings. It's a tempting connection to draw, but it does not actually explain how the detours were dreamt to begin with, and this points to a deeper question about awareness in general. If I were pressed for an analogy, I might say something like "just because all books have ink does not mean that all ink lives in books." You know what I mean? There's a superset of experiences that cannot be easily explained away by caching, as tempting as it might be.

Materialistic reduction has gotten us quite far in science.

Not exactly. We don't know where optic-flow reactions that integrate senses, emotions, motor systems in the slightest. Study neural reuse or coordination dynamics. Some relationship between the brain and the world that isn't easily found in the brain alone is responsible.

It's also arrested our development. It's like a skill we've got comfortable with and now we arent willing to go further.

Materialistic interpretations of the world around us are quite literally the only useful ones. If we didn't do that we'd be sleeping in caves and hitting each other with heavy rocks.

Wrong. Materialistic only got us to a level. Now we're looking past materialism in neural reuse, coordination dynamics and ecological psychology and neurobiology. The causes are out there in contradictory correlations.

Literally everything is materialist. If it's not it either A) doesn't actually exist or B) you just don't understand it yet.

It's inherent to the meaning of the word.

A word is a material? You can show me the brain state that corresponds repeatedly and with continuous accuracy a single word? I don't think so.

You can train a computer to correspond to an individual's idiosyncratic brain state for their word voxels, but no one has yet to reduce the material to a single repeatable voxel state.

“We refute (based on empirical evidence) claims that humans use linguistic representations to think.” Ev Fedorenko Language Lab MIT 2024

The problem with the materialist POV is it doesn't solve the most basic question of brain states. No not everything is a material.

There clearly are processes, like oscillations, that require material to some extent, but are not material themselves. And that's the problem with the materialist camp. If the oscillations, dynamically integrated, are the source of intel/consciousness, then material may not even be a requirement of life. We may just be material sinks.

> There clearly are processes, like oscillations, that require material to some extent, but are not material themselves. And that's the problem with the materialist camp. If the oscillations, dynamically integrated, are the source of intel/consciousness, then material may not even be a requirement of life. We may just be material sinks.

I understand.

There is a however a flaw in that thinking.

There is no oscillation that exists outside of some material/medium to oscillate. I agree it is important to distinguish the water from the wave. There is no light wave without the photon. Thus - I strongly suspect - there is no consciousness without the brain (or similar medium).

It's not a mind body problem, unfortunately, it's problem of hard indeterminism. We lack free will but the universe is not necessarily deterministic. Chaos has some level of intervention, like quantum darwinism, or gravity probability that is expressed somewhere between physical and process. This may be the interzone both share that is where the gateway exists, how DNA emerges, how neurons are evolved. The material may be inseparable both at origin and inexorably from the process, making the material simply the partner to the process. So materialism may simply be an illusion by itself.

As all our explanations are immaterial, they are post hoc observations, to claim any direction to the role of material is to sportscast the existence of material. There is no consciousness without the process, the material may be secondary as its explanation is a process as well.

We haven't found the format that finds the material in its place yet, whether its eliminative materialism, or another state-process pairing that cuts materialism down to a partner role. The jury is still out, but materialism isn't the answer.

Do you thing emergent properties are somehow not materialist? Do you know what the word means? Do you think it means only things that make a noise when you knock on them exist? You seem to be very confused about the conversation we're having.

If you're bringing up emergence when I've already raised ideas of ecological relations, then it's you who must be very confused about the conversation we're having.

Or writing papers on Panpsychism.

While I hold a similar view as Sean Carroll that it is basically hand-waving to say we'll never understand consciousness, I can't discount Donald Hoffman's Interface theory of perception and that evolutionary fitness requires we only perceive four dimensions (but there could be more as hypothesised in string theory).

Very interesting, will have a read in depth.

Wondering if you have any ideas on this, which can be quite jarring when it happens?

You are thinking about something, and then walk through a doorway into another room and suddenly completely lose track of what you were thinking.

The closest idea I've seen for that is: Jeff Hawkins in his Thousand Brain Theory of Intelligence made a statement that learning is a function of navigation and the world models we construct are set in the context of location we create them.

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Edit: Just read your piece on Faith: "Faith, as it’s traditionally understood, is trivial bullshit compared to the towering, unseen faith we place in the empirical all day everyday."

Absolutely correct, and the traditional understanding of Hebrews 11:1 I don't believe reflects what the author (supposedly Paul) was trying to convey.

Ἔστιν δὲ πίστις ἐλπιζομένων ὑπόστασις, πραγμάτων ἔλεγχος οὐ βλεπομένων

πίστις: Pistis can be translated as confidence, as in: I'm confident this chair won't collapse when I sit on on it. Much stronger than belief or faith.

ὑπόστασις: Hupostasis is also a much stronger word than assurance, it conveys substance, as in your past experience backs up your confidence.

Your work seems pretty good to me, have you seen Steven Byrne's blog theorising about symbol grounding in the brain?

No I havent, I’ll have to look it up, thanks for the recommendation.

VR cannot be essential to decoding the brain as it deals in topological maps and affinities.

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