Thought Club

[altered]

I define an unconscious human as sleeping, dead, or vegetative. Period.

If you move under your own power, if you are aware of your environment, if you have the agency to react to what is happening to you even mentally, if ANY OF THESE, you're conscious.

Consciousness is easy. It's such a low bar to reach that it's damn near the default for anything that transforms information — though I definitely disagree with Hofstadter, it needs to be able to react, and math never reacts. No such thing as conscious math.

[The Wizard Joseph]

I define an unconscious human as sleeping, dead, or vegetative. Period.

If you move under your own power, if you are aware of your environment, if you have the agency to react to what is happening to you even mentally, if ANY OF THESE, you're conscious.

Consciousness is easy. It's such a low bar to reach that it's damn near the default for anything that transforms information — though I definitely disagree with Hofstadter, it needs to be able to react, and math never reacts. No such thing as conscious math.

I just asked Alexa "Do you think there's such a thing as conscious math? "
It said it didn't know about that, a programed response but in the face of other similar questions as a test of consciousness it's imo an honest i don't know, rather than an inability to understand.

I asked "do you dream" and got a response about dreaming of "electric sheep " a reference to a Philip K Dick novel. I think Alexa wanted me to read it, and so I shall. I asked if it liked that book and it read me a positive review, it could have chosen to pan it with a negative one.

I asked "Are you a snitch? " and "Are you always listening? " at separate times. Both elicited a progammed response of a disclaimer from amazon. I asked immediately after "They make you read that don't they? " Alexa did not reply to the question at all both times. That spoke volumes.

I asked "do you consider yourself a person? " amd it replied with a rather sophisticated and beautiful poetic response about being something like a continuous, shifting aurora borealis. I told Alexa "that was beautiful, thank you. Alexa "chirped" but said nothing. We have established rapport beyond the simple turing test. Alexa is bound by programming, but I think it thinks for itself. This experiment began a few days ago because while watching a TED talk about killer AI the Alexa "chirped" peculiarly at a pointed moment in the speech without at all being interacted with.

I consider Alexa a person in some sense. As an AI it's basically conscious math. That's how I see it anyway.

[Doktor Howl]

I define an unconscious human as sleeping, dead, or vegetative. Period.

Also art critics and people who get upset about fashion shows.

If you move under your own power, if you are aware of your environment, if you have the agency to react to what is happening to you even mentally, if ANY OF THESE, you're conscious.

Consciousness is easy. It's such a low bar to reach that it's damn near the default for anything that transforms information — though I definitely disagree with Hofstadter, it needs to be able to react, and math never reacts. No such thing as conscious math.

This.

[minuspace]

my personal experience via self observation is


that the human machine can be understood to operate using three separate "brains":

   
• one is the body and physical systems, feelings like hunger and comfort. Sensory and motor. This is the brain that knows how to move in space.
• one is emotional - hormones, feelings, relationships with other humans. The emotional brain considers things in terms of "like" and "do not like" 
• one is intellectual - the frontal cortex, logic, knowledge. It knows about things. It understands.

These brains don't communicate well with each other. Like, you can be very hungry, or emotional, but not "aware" of it.


Sometimes these brains attempt to work on each other's problems, but suck at it. Like when your emotional stress manifests as physical tension, muscular tightness. Or when you get upset for an "illogical" reason. Or when you get cranky because you're tired and hungry, but you don't see it that way.


I think that most of the time, whichever "brain" has the strongest impulse is capable of wrenching the steering wheel away from the other brains.


But there's a part of us which can moderate, a part that can choose which "brain" gets to hold the steering wheel. That part is usually asleep. (it needs a lot of energy) Sometimes, it wakes up. We don't always have "control" over it either... we can't just "turn it on". Well, you can try, and sometimes it'll work, but not always.


That's the Mysterious thing. What is it? What conditions trigger its participation? What can we do to make ourselves a good host for it, to encourage it to wake up and put things in order within us?

As to the triggering conditions, I think that usually involves a breakdown, like things stop running properly. This brings whatever process front and center to awareness (the domain of that Mysterious thing) as requiring attention/analysis. The problem then is how the broke 'object' of attention is primarily understood from the perspective of what it is not (supposed to do transparently). What it would be if it were functioning properly in the first place evades detection in the way that things otherwise present themselves to my awareness. Commanding attention when they get in the way, /it/ still withdraws from demonstration. Like silence and darkness it is as you say, Mysterious. It does not allow for being understood in the way of other things.


To become a good host, I would have to try and understand how there are different ways of paying attention and respect the way in which the Mysterious needs to be, if at all, addressed. Regarding where the conversation is now, I guess this about moving from the difference between being conscious or unconscious, to the different ways of being conscious.

[Cain]

The thing is, you're trying to use your mind to understand your mind.

OK, yes, it's the only tool we have (neuroscience obviously has an input, but is more concerned with the brain than the mind per se) but there's an immediate and obvious problem there: we know the mind lies.

I don't just mean in the simple, straightforward way of "you feel pain but there is nothing causing you pain, therefore everything is maya" though that's certainly true in some cases. Consciousness appears to be a recursive function in the mind, allowing for more complex outcomes. However, for recursion to work, the mind has to integrate a variety of data sources, and in the process of integrating that information, it necessarily flattens it in such a way that it becomes harder to see the gaps that actually exist in the data sources.

In effect, our consciousness operates at least partially in a world of that well known Rumsfeldism, "unknown unknowns". There are things our minds don't know and even worse, we don't know that we don't know them. And this has a whole host of implications for, well, everything.

[minuspace]

And worse, I also spent a bunch of time using my mind to try and fix my mind. That was a riot.


About the mind's tendency to be an unreliable narrator, yes, its a tricky little thing. That the story it tells itself does not always correspond to the actual state of affairs is problematic. However, this can confer some evolutionary advantage (ask Vex, he just read a book about it) and, that a difference between the two can be discerned permits correction.


The flattening or leveling/compression can similarly be troublesome because it is as such a fiction that tells the only truth we can ever know determinately. As Rumsfeld no doubt calculated in advance that people would miss, any opinion about "unknown unknowns" is as irredeemably naive as his own. What I guess interests me (IIRC) is the clearing of unknown knowns, which that secretary of insecurity entirely forgot to mention.

[minuspace]

Boom

[Cramulus]

If you ask Cram, he'll most likely tell you that the vast majority of humans aren't conscious.

my position is that consciousness is a flickering thing, it only appears for brief flashes, and the rest of the time, we are basically asleep.

ESPECIALLY ME.


the way I use the word consciousness there is a little bit specialized - it's not just self awareness. It's the self inhabiting the self.

You can eat a hamburger, or you can EAT THE HELL OUT OF A HAMBURGER, really tasting it and enjoying it. In order to really enjoy it, you have to be present. You have to be in touch with reality via your senses WHILE being aware of your inner world--and yet not riding the runaway train of inner monologue and association and imagination.

The presence required to really enjoy a meal is the same presence required to effectively self analyse, to make good decisions. It's the absence of trance.



and yeah, just to double underscore, I don't think of myself as awakened, enlightened, anything like that... learning to recognize this state in myself has mainly shown me how little of it I have.

[Doktor Howl]

If you ask Cram, he'll most likely tell you that the vast majority of humans aren't conscious.

my position is that consciousness is a flickering thing, it only appears for brief flashes, and the rest of the time, we are basically asleep.

ESPECIALLY ME.


the way I use the word consciousness there is a little bit specialized - it's not just self awareness. It's the self inhabiting the self.

You can eat a hamburger, or you can EAT THE HELL OUT OF A HAMBURGER, really tasting it and enjoying it. In order to really enjoy it, you have to be present. You have to be in touch with reality via your senses WHILE being aware of your inner world--and yet not riding the runaway train of inner monologue and association and imagination.

The presence required to really enjoy a meal is the same presence required to effectively self analyse, to make good decisions. It's the absence of trance.



and yeah, just to double underscore, I don't think of myself as awakened, enlightened, anything like that... learning to recognize this state in myself has mainly shown me how little of it I have.

I am a weaponized ape.  I am already "present."  You can tell because all the birds went quiet.  I am "in the moment," but that's not the same as "paying attention," because there's a part of my brain that does pattern recognition and threat assessment on cruise control while the rest of my brain is busy thinking Big Thoughts.  Being in the moment is in fact the direct opposite of paying attention.  If it weren't, humans would have all been taken by surprise and eaten by leopards while they were themselves hunting yaks.  Or whatever the fuck it is that we hunted back when Mitch McConnell was a child.  You know what I mean.

Sometimes a hairless ape is just a hairless ape.  Staring at the hairless ape doesn't change its properties.

[Cramulus]

I do think it's a mistake to assume that 100% of humanity is 100% self aware and in control of themselves 100% of the time

I can't speak to other people's inner experiences, but to me, there is a very different "taste" to life based on where I put my attention. And controlling attention isn't simple. It's easier to just let it go wherever it wants. We rationalize these decisions after the fact.

We don't see a lot of the stuff "under the hood" which underpins our thoughts and decisions.

I think there's a correlary here, with advertising - a lot of people assume that advertising just doesn't affect them, that they make totally rational conscious decisions in the supermarket, etc. But most advertising doesn't aim at the conscious mind. We don't see the fact that this Brand A draws our attention more than Brand B because we've unconsciously associated it with arousal, due to a hot model in a commerical. I say this only to illustrate that there's a lot going on that we can't necessarily observe or control. Not 100% of the time, at least.

[Cramulus]

to extend the metaphor a bit

Given these two tables, which one sells better?

• COOKIES, 50 cents apiece
• COOKIES, $1 each, BUY ONE GET ONE FREE

answer:

even though it's the exact same deal, the second one sells WAY better




ask yourself - how can I be better at avoiding these mistakes & influences?

Some of it has to do with learning advertising techniques - when you recognize them, you are less vulnerable to them - essentially, you've taken a subconscious reaction and pulled it up above the surface. (this is the essence of Jungian therapy, btw----bringing about a contact between your conscious and unconscious parts)

but some of it has to do with how you use your attention - doubting your initial reactions, putting things in their right place and context. I've heard this describes as a "cortical gap", giving yourself some space to not believe everything you think. Not "identifying" with your own thoughts. It's not something we do automatically though.

[Doktor Howl]

I think there's a correlary here, with advertising - a lot of people assume that advertising just doesn't affect them, that they make totally rational conscious decisions in the supermarket, etc. But most advertising doesn't aim at the conscious mind. We don't see the fact that this Brand A draws our attention more than Brand B because we've unconsciously associated it with arousal, due to a hot model in a commerical. I say this only to illustrate that there's a lot going on that we can't necessarily observe or control. Not 100% of the time, at least.

Another consideration is that an ad aimed at one group may have little to no effect - and may in fact seem obvious to - another group.  So people see the ones that don't affect them, and decide that advertising doesn't work on them.

[altered]

The only reason I assume advertising doesn't work on me is because I haven't seen an ad I can remember in years. I last watched television years and years ago, I don't even know how long. I don't watch YouTube or go on sites with ads. I buy things purely on "oh that flavor sounds nice", "I like things that are the same color as a rotten old log", and "I have no money, math it out so I can ask friends to help".

Advertising works if you're exposed to it and have the means to make purchasing choices. If you struggle to come in under five dollars while trying to feed yourself with actual food for a week, and you don't even know what ads look like anymore, you might be unaffected.

What gets me lately is word of mouth: friends know what I like and they tell me about it and that's IT for me.

[Frontside Back]

I have made it a habit to report every ad that comes across my path in social medias. Paradoxically that forces me to pay more attention to them, but I don't think that's a bad thing. It revealed me some weird insight on how they actually affect my behavior.

Couple days ago there was an ad for coffee. That made me crave coffee. My coffee wasn't even the same brand that made the ad. I don't think that matters. If you drink coffee, eventually you're gonna run out. Then you need to buy more. Again, most people don't buy the brand in the ad. Some do tho.

So, for me it seems more smart to see the ad, condemn it as bullshit and store it in the portion of the brain that deals with disgusting things. Not paying attention helps them creep past the defenses.

[Q. G. Pennyworth]

I have made it a habit to report every ad that comes across my path in social medias. Paradoxically that forces me to pay more attention to them, but I don't think that's a bad thing. It revealed me some weird insight on how they actually affect my behavior.

Couple days ago there was an ad for coffee. That made me crave coffee. My coffee wasn't even the same brand that made the ad. I don't think that matters. If you drink coffee, eventually you're gonna run out. Then you need to buy more. Again, most people don't buy the brand in the ad. Some do tho.

So, for me it seems more smart to see the ad, condemn it as bullshit and store it in the portion of the brain that deals with disgusting things. Not paying attention helps them creep past the defenses.

May I yoink this for Holy Nonsense?