Author Archives: Steve Mays
Consciousness and the Social Brain
Amazon: “What is consciousness and how can a brain, a mere collection of neurons, create it? In Consciousness and the Social Brain, Princeton neuroscientist Michael Graziano lays out an audacious new theory to account for the deepest mystery of them all. The human brain has evolved a complex circuitry that allows it to be socially intelligent. This social machinery has only just begun to be studied in detail. One function of this circuitry is to attribute awareness to others: to compute that person Y is aware of thing X. In Graziano’s theory, the machinery that attributes awareness to others also attributes it to oneself. Damage that machinery and you disrupt your own awareness. Graziano discusses the science, the evidence, the philosophy, and the surprising implications of this new theory.”
The (attention schema) theory explains why a brain attributes the property of consciousness to itself, and why we humans are so prone to attribute consciousness to the people and objects around us.
Consciousness is the window through which we understand.
Attention is a data-handling trick for deeply processing some information at the expense of most information. Awareness is the brain’s simplified, schematic model of the complicated, data-handling process of attention.
People have personal, quirky definitions of the term consciousness, whereas everyone more or less agrees on the meaning of the term awareness.
Not all information in the brain has awareness attached to it.
Consciousness refers both to the information about which I am aware and the process of being aware of it. Consciousness encompasses the whole of personal experience at any moment, whereas awareness applies only to one part, the act of experiencing.
Self-knowledge is merely another category of knowledge. How knowledge can be encoded in the brain is not fundamentally mysterious, but how we become aware of the information is. The awareness itself if the mystery.
Whatever awareness is, it musts be able to physically impact neuronal signals. Otherwise we would be unable to say that we have it.
Awareness is a description of attention. […] Attention is not data encoded in the brain; it is a data-handling method. It is an act. It is something the brain does, a procedure, an emergent process. […] In addition to doing attention, the brain also constructs a description of attention and awareness is that description. […] Awareness allows the brain to understand attention, its dynamics, and its consequences.
Awareness is the brain’s cartoon of attention.
The same machinery used to model another person’s attentional state in a social situation is also used to model one’s own attentional state. The benefit is the same: understanding and prediction one’s own behavior.
Attention is an active process, a data-handling style that boosts this or that chunk of information in the brain. In contrast, awareness is a description, a chunk of information, a reflection of the ongoing state of attention.
The unconscious machinery of the brain is so vast that it is like an elephant. Perhaps consciousness is a little boy sitting on the elephant’s head. The boy naively imagines that he is in control of the elephant, but he merely watches what the elephant chooses to do.
Your decision machinery does not have direct access to the real object, only to the information about the object that is encoded in the visual system. A perceptual representation is always inaccurate because it is a simplification.
The brain does attention but knows awareness.
(There is a ) distinction between being aware of something and knowing that you are aware of it.
Awareness is a schematized, descriptive model of attention. […] The purpose of (the) model in the brain is to be useful in interacting with the world, not to be accurate.
My awareness is located inside me. In a sense it is me. It is my mind apprehending something.
Your own private awareness and your ability to attribute awareness to someone else are products of the same machinery in your brain. That machinery computes the property of awareness and can attribute it to others.
Is it necessary to be aware of any specific information in order to be aware? Can you be aware, simply aware, without any target of the awareness? Can I be aware of being?
Consciousness (is) essentially a tale that the brain tells itself to explain what it is doing and why it is doing it. Consciousness is after-the-fact. We know about our mental states using the same tricks and inferences that we use to reconstruct the mental states of other people. We tell ourselves a story about ourselves. As a consequence, we routinely and confidently make up incorrect reasons for our own behavior.
Awareness is a model of the act of attention. […] Attention is not itself information. It is something that happens to information.
The only objective, physically measurable truth we have about consciousness is that we can, at least sometimes, report that we have it.
Consciousness is information that describes the process of attending to something.
Awareness is not knowledge about yourself as a person, or knowledge about your emotions, or knowledge about your thoughts; it is not remembering your past, or introspecting about your mood, or any other part of self-reflection. Awareness is equally present whether you are reflecting on yourself or looking out at the external world. It is present whether you are focused on your innermost feelings or on the grass and sky in the park on a nice day.
(One view of consciousness) Consciousness does not directly cause most of our actions but instead rationalizes them. In (this) view, free will plays a minor role, if any.
All consciousness is a “mere” computed model attributed to an object. One’s brain can attribute it to oneself or to something else. Consciousness is an attribution. (Consciousness) is not something a person has, floating inside. It is an attribution. […] To say that I myself am conscious is to stay, “My own brain has constructed an informational model of awareness and attributed it to my body.”
The most reasonable approach to spirituality is to accept two simultaneous truths. One, literally and objectively, there is no spirit world. Minds do not float independently of bodies and brains. Two, perceptually, there is a spirit world. We live in a perceptual world, a world simulated by the brain, in which consciousness inhabits many things around us, including sometimes empty space.
We will build computers that can construct their own awareness in the same way that the human brain does.
If I spend enough time (with him) and my friend gets to know me well, then he will construct a model in his own brain, an informational model of a mind filled with the quirks and idiosyncrasies that reflect me. His model of my mind will be the same general type of data run in the same general manner on the same general hardware architecture as my own conscious mind. It will be a copy, at low resolution, of my consciousness. In effect, I will have been copied over from one computer to another. […] Fuzzy copies of our conscious minds exist in all the people who knew us.
I consider it a technological inevitability that information will, some day, be scannable directly from the brain and transferrable directly to computers. As embarrassingly sci-fi as that sounds, no theoretical reason stands against it. If the attention schema theory is correct, then human consciousness is information processed in a specific manner. Don’t want to die? Download your consciousness onto a central server and live in a simulated world with all the other downloaded souls. When your body dies, the copy of your mind will persist. You need not know the difference. If the simulation is good, you should feel as though you are in a realistic universe. You can possess what seems to be a human body and can walk and live and eat and sleep on the familiar Earth, all simulated, all in the form of information manipulated on computer hardware. At the rate technology is advancing, give it a few centuries.
It has been said that people invented God. People will invent the afterlife too.
Across all cultures and all religions, universally, people consider God to be a conscious mind. God is aware. God consciously chooses to make things happen. […] The critical question is whether consciousness lies behind the events of the universe. If so, then God exists. If not, then God does not exist. […] The universe is conscious in the same sense that it is beautiful. It is conscious because brains attribute consciousness to it, and that is the only way that anything is ever conscious.
Invisible costs
I find great wisdom and insight in the writing of David Cain. He has quit his “day job” to pursue writing full time and shares what that transition feels like. Looking back to my final days, I recognize some of what he describes. Following ‘graphs are part of a longer post I hope you’ll read.
“A weight that had been resting on my mind for long enough for me to forget that it was possible to remove it. For the first time in a long time I didn’t have to answer to anyone. I knew my company-issue Blackberry wasn’t going to ring, I knew nobody was going to ask anything of me. It was like walking up to a glass barrier that had always been there and realizing it was only air.”
“Our lifestyles come with costs, many of which are invisible, or at least become invisible to us once we’re used to paying them. At all times these enormous invisible forces are acting on your life, shaping what it feels like to be you. They only become visible — and only momentarily — when they change.”
“Because we’re so immersed in our lifestyles, it’s hard to see what individual parts of them are pushing and pulling on our minds. Imagine trying to describe what a building looks like when you’ve only ever been inside it. Moving parts of our lifestyles around gives us the necessary angles to know what it is we’ve actually built with our decisions about career, relationships and living situation. If they never change we never know what they’re doing to us.”
Time for Talk clips (1979)
Coming up with a topic five days a week in our little town was tough, so the host of the local access channel asked me to come on from time to time. I’d forgotten (mercifully) about the first bit but did recall the Arnold Claus segment (about 2:50 in). I should be embarrassed by these but there is a surreal quality about them that appeals to me now. And nothing I said or did was as perfect as the pre-recorded opening to Time for Talk.
Scott Adams: Does God have a personality?
“What’s the difference between a typical religious view of God versus a skeptical view in which there is nothing to the universe but matter and the laws of physics?
Answer: personality
The religious view is that God has a personality of sorts, albeit one that is often unfathomable. And that means God has some sort of intentions, ambitions, goals, or whatever the God version of those impulses might be. If God had none of those impulses, he would just float in space doing nothing.
The problem with the idea that God has a human-like personality is that human personalities are nothing but weaknesses and defects that we romanticize. For example, I might be kind to others because I want them to be nice to me, or perhaps I simply feel guilty when I’m not nice. God wouldn’t have feelings of guilt and he wouldn’t need a strategy just to be loved. He would have everything he needed all the time. Logically, God couldn’t have a personality in the sense that humans do because our personalities are expressions of our defects and our DNA and our neediness.
For example, if you’re ambitious, that’s a romantic way of saying you’re afraid of failure, or you’re greedy, or you want to impress someone. God would not need any of that. Pick any human personality trait and it is either trivial or it is based on some sort of human limitation.
Even your sense of humor is based on a brain limitation. As a professional humorist, I make my living by writing thoughts that the normal human brain can’t process without a hiccup that triggers a laugh response. God wouldn’t have a sense of humor because he always knows how the joke ends, and no idea gives him a hiccup when processing a thought.
You can pick any personality trait and find the human defect that is behind it. Are you a highly social person? It probably means you have a fear of being alone, or you’re so needy that you have to have the approval of others to feel right. Would the creator of universe have social needs? It seems unlikely.
If you agree that God wouldn’t have a human-like personality and human-like needs and ambitions, you end up with a God who is indistinguishable from the sum of the laws of physics.
Language is part of the problem. Did God personally dictate every word in the holy books, or did the laws of physics guarantee that the particles in the universe would bump around until those books were written by someone? If you take away the human personality from God – because it makes no sense that he would have one – then God can still be the “author” of the holy books because he is the sum of all physical laws in the universe. The only difference between a religious and a skeptical interpretation is the choice of words.”
Time for Talk: KBOA830.com
Time for Talk was (is?) a public access program on the local cable system in Kennett, MO. As I recall, it started about the same time I began working at the local radio station, KBOA.
Time for Talk was a labor of love for Dr. Russ Burcham (a local dentist) and his wife, Rosemary. Rosemary did the interviews and Russ worked the camera. Sort of Wayne’s World with Aunt Bea and Sheriff Taylor replacing Wayne and Garth.
Time for Talk was 15 minutes long, as I recall. And it was kind of big deal in our little town because it was about the only way you’d ever see your self on television without getting arrested or dying in bus crash.
Because I was “on the radio,” Russ and Rosemary had me on several times over the years. Before YouTube, the only way you’d see one of these treasures was to go to Kennett.
This one was recorded in 1998, fourteen years after I left Kennett. Rosemary asked me to talk about the website I created for the local station (my first effort at a website). Enjoy.
Jefferson City: Most Beautiful (2013)
Rand McNally Best of the Road
Keloid
“In a not too distant future, societies of all countries come to rely on an intricate network of artificial intelligence devices designed to bring efficacy to man’s life. Yet, man continues to devour himself in useless wars. A strong political hierarchy now divides all powers into three factions, and A. I. devices rapidly gain ground as efficiency becomes a priority.”
“As social revolts grow worse everyday, authorities seek ways to control their citizens. They decide to carry out a series of tests that will determine not only whether some crucial powers can be transferred to non human entities, but also whether man is ready to yield those powers.”
“The world has become a cell for all men and women, who withstand and endure their lives, rather than living them. Machines might have found a solution.”
“From now on, you are set free.”
Your ability to imagine the future
“Your ability to imagine the future is what drives your decisions today. If your imagined future looks like a big foggy nothing, you might as well enjoy today because tomorrow is unknowable. But if you can vividly imagine your future under different scenarios, you’ll make hard choices today that will, you hope, get you to the future you imagine and want.”
— Scott Adams
San Francisco Weekend
This might be the best trip I ever took. Three days in San Francisco. Mostly in the North Beach section where I stayed in a wonderful B&B. My pal Jamie Nelson (a native) showed me around the first day and I just drifted around after that. I had been to SF before but never got far from downtown or the tourist spots. This trip was mostly spent in the neighborhood.
I think I’ve finally learned how to travel (for me): No more than 3 days on the ground; two days for getting there and back; no flight longer than 3 hours.