This reminded me of a story my professor once told us back in college. I was studying sign language and she is deaf. She told us growing up in the old days they didn't had specialized schools for deaf people (since they could read?!) so she attended regular school and was not doing ok. She struggled a lot until she finally got the attention that she needed from a teacher who was able to instruct her in sign language (which believe you or not is Brazil's second official language). Before that she told us she was not able to have complex thoughts. She didn't know her father had a name, for instance. She thought his "name" was daddy. She is a brilliant woman and I'm glad I attended her class and also, that she was able to find someone who helped her, growing up.
James Gleick in The Information also describes cases of the effect of traditional literacy on complexity/abstraction of thought.
He claims that literacy is nearly a prerequisite for things like zeroth-order logical reasoning and understanding of abstract shapes. Two examples he gives:
- Some illiterate people are told that all bears in the north are white, that Greenland is a country in the north, then they are asked what colours bears in Greenland have. They answer, "Different regions have differently coloured bears. I haven't been to Greenland. But I have seen a brown bear."
I would have said, "Based on the information you gave me, I would guess white."
- When shown a rectangle and asked what shape it is some illiterate answer things like "a door" or "a playing card" but struggle to find things doors and playing cards have in common.
I go to the abstract shapes immediately when I'm shown drawings by my son. It's almost at a point where it feels like my logical/abstract reasoning stands in the way of creativity.
----
But I don't know how much this is personality (I happen to have a knack for logical/abstract reasoning and I happened to learn to read when I was very young) and how much is an effect of reading. After all, anthropologists are great at the concrete rather than abstract, but maybe they get lots of training in it. I've also heard the Japanese are better at it.
TFA clearly postulates it has more to do with the kind of vocabulary, or maybe it's on an increasing scale with more language.
This makes me wonder about what turned out to be a pivotal moment in my early life. It was the day I first realized other people have their own minds, and that I could predict with some degree of accuracy what was in them.
My dad wrote the numbers 1 through 4 on a piece of paper, then asked me to pick one, but not tell him which I'd chosen. Once I had it, he said, "You picked 3, didn't you?" I was dumbfounded. "How did you do that??"
"Most people don't like to be out on the edges. It makes them uncomfortable. So they don't pick 1 or 4. And most people, like you, are right-handed, so they pick 3 over 2."
"OK, OK, do it again." (This was the moment a flash of magic happened in my head.)
"You picked 1 this time, didn't you?"
"No, I picked 3 again because I knew you would think I would pick 1 this time."
With a fear in his eyes that I only later discovered came from the fact that his own sense of safety depended on being the smartest person in the room, he said, "You're only 3. I don't think you're supposed to know how to do that yet."
But here's the other thing--I was literate when I was 3. Nobody really knows how I picked it up, but one day I told my mom it was my turn to read the stories, and I've been reading fluently ever since. I've been told I read differently than most people even now (blocks of text rather than individual letters or words), but I was definitely reading.
I've never associated the two events before, nor that maybe I was only able to do one because of the other, but it makes sense of the fact that other kids didn't really start to seem reasonable or thoughtful until 1st or 2nd grade. They lived in these imaginary worlds where things didn't have to make sense. It seemed like a lot of fun, but I had trouble joining them there. I always assumed both skills just correlated with age, not that one might facilitate the other.
My story obviously doesn't prove anything, but you've given me an interesting thing to think about today!
I checked the reference. The "bears story" is based on work done in 1930s.
Psychology, a hundred years later is a shoddy science, despite us having learning quite a lot about how to do decent experiments and field surveys. It's very very difficult to tease out replicable effects in human behavior. I would immediately reject any psychology finding from the 1930s, unless it has been replicated more recently.
No one cannot truly judge the complexity of someone else’s[0] experience unless it is both deconstructed[1] into categories and those categories exactly fit one’s preexisting categories.
In other words, a claim like “literacy is a prerequisite for things like logical reasoning” (or complex thought, or consciousness, etc.) may be:
A) true not as a result of an empirical observation, but in a circular way by definition—as a catch-22 where “if you do not think like we do, you may well not think” is trivially correct from most humans’ perspective, because if you do think but really unlike how they think (you are unable to communicate it using the same vocabulary[2] they use) then from their vantage point there may be no clear difference between you thinking in your own way vs. you acting unpredictably—contributing to it being
B) simply not a useful claim to make: as your experience cannot be completely reduced to categories that exactly match those of some random scientist’s, that scientist can mnever fully judge the complexity of your experience or your capability of abstract thought (of course, they could mistakenly assume they can, by simply presuming their way of thinking to be the true reference point, as they are prone to).
[0] That “someone else” can be yourself in the past, e.g. as a small child before social integration, in which “one” could be the current-you.
[1] That deconstruction is lossy. Your experience is changed as a result, possibly lessened for those aspects of yourself that perceive reality as a whole.
[2] Using any vocabulary (including language) requires deconstruction of experience, by definition.
> Some illiterate people are told that all bears in the north are white, that Greenland is a country in the north, then they are asked what colours bears in Greenland have. They answer, "Different regions have differently coloured bears. I haven't been to Greenland. But I have seen a brown bear."
I wonder how much the answer would change if you simply said "if all bears in the north..." It's probably not obvious to everyone whether you're setting up a hypothetical or asking a literal question with a false or vague premise (Grizzlies range as far north as the nothern coast of Alaska).
I think James Gleick is missing a lot of context her.
James Flynn[0] also gave a TED talk and mentioned those interviews[1]. Apparently it's based on interviews done by Alexander Luria[2] and he put those in writing in one of his books The Making of Mind: A Personal Account of Soviet Psychology (Chapter 4[3]).
This is a correlation, not a causation. "People that struggle with problem solving also struggle with reading" is not the same as "not reading results in poor problem solving". The latter is not even begun to be proven in these case studies.
I spent the last decade surrounded predominantly by illiterate people. These comments are intriguing, but I don't think the effect is as strong as you make out. I never noticed any real difference in how illiterate people view the world, except that they are generally more prone to believing conspiracy theories.
If you can not read or write, then you do have to find other outlets for your energy. Music plays a bigger role in the lives of illiterates I found. I would say on the whole they would seem more extroverted and social, too.
I believed for years that my good friend’s dad’s name was Aba and even called him that once before I realized later that it’s the Hebrew word for father.
I had been having complex thoughts for years at that point so it was a bit embarrassing.
Technically 'daddy' is a name.
A name is fundamentally just a label that we use to identify other people and objects. Post Malone, your first and last name are part of the universal naming system like the Kilometer, and 'daddy' is a personal system relative to the conscious experience of the user.
Even with sign language and the ability to read, deaf people often have very limited grammar and sometimes outright bad writing style. We rely far more on spoken language then we think. If you take that away, so much practice when it comes to using your native "tongue" is simply not had. A similar effect, although not as pronounced, is with blind people (my tribe) having very bad spelling. The reason for that is blind people seldomly read themseves, they usually employ speech synthesis to have text read to them. However, that also means they basically never see the spelling of uncommon words, so all they can do is guess, which sometimes leads to hilarious results. Since I use braille primarily to access a computer, the effect isn't as pronounced for me. But I noticed early on that I erred a lot when it came to street and city names. Until I realized, well, sighted people do actually read street signs. So after a while, certain spellings just stick. Since I almost never did that... I didn't know, wasn't soaked in the information to pick it up.
I believe that bit about sign language in Brazil. When I spent some time there years back I was impressed that most people seemed to know a bit of sign language. There is also a lot of informal hand gesture-slang culture. I remember some things like "let's go", "robbery/rip off", "it's crowded"
>As my experiences broadened and deepened, the indeterminate, poetic feelings of childhood began to fix themselves in definite thoughts. Nature—the world I could touch—was folded and filled with myself. I am inclined to believe those philosophers who declare that we know nothing but our own feelings and ideas. With a little ingenious reasoning one may see in the material world simply a mirror, an image of permanent mental sensations. In either sphere self-knowledge is the condition and the limit of our consciousness. That is why, perhaps, many people know so little about what is beyond their short range of experience. They look within themselves—and find nothing! Therefore they conclude that there is nothing outside themselves, either.
>However that may be, I came later to look for an image of my emotions and sensations in others. I had to learn the outward signs of inward feelings. The start of fear, the suppressed, controlled tensity of pain, the beat of happy muscles in others, had to be perceived and compared with my own experiences before I could trace them back to the intangible soul of another. Groping, uncertain, I at last found my identity, and after seeing my thoughts and feelings repeated in others, I gradually constructed my world of men and of God. As I read and study, I find that this is what the rest of the race has done. Man looks within himself and in time finds the measure and the meaning of the universe.
I love this line and can confirm: "That is why, perhaps, many people know so little about what is beyond their short range of experience. They look within themselves—and find nothing! Therefore they conclude that there is nothing outside themselves, either."
Right? It's such a foreign form of intelligence to me. I think the paper "What is it like to be a bat" by Thomas Nagel made me realize that I can't even imagine what it's like to be my next door neighbor, let alone a being that has senses that differ from mine. Helen Keller's mind must work in a greatly different way than yours or mine. When I think, it's in English. I visualize things. Smell, touch and taste are never really involved. It's like they are the lesser of senses and yet that's all she had. It's incredible.
Andy Weir in Project Hail Mary and Adrian Tchaikovsky in Children of [Time|Ruin|Memory] do a great job of describing what other forms of consciousness might be like, but still falls flat, I only really think in sight and sound.
Blindsight by Peter Watts also discusses what can be intelligent but not conscious. In the current hypefest of LLMs it’s interesting to consider that they may be similar.
I don't think it's that strange. My thoughts and my physical sensations are separate, imaging a different body different senses isn't that much of a stretch. I speak English but I don't think in it, thoughts don't have a language.
I feel like my grasp of language allows some very complex thoughts, but I often wonder if it is limiting. I seem nearly unable to think without forming phrases in my head, and even if I anticipate the conclusion I feel the need to go through the whole sentence. I know there are people with all their senses intact without any internal monologue, but mine is very much in charge. Rigorous exercise or flow state seems able to quiet it for a bit.
> I seem nearly unable to think without forming phrases in my head, and even if I anticipate the conclusion I feel the need to go through the whole sentence.
I try this ever so often and can’t get a hold of it. It feels like I know what the final sentence will be, like it’s shape, in a way, before my narrator has read it, but he needs to read it for the meaning to materialise, to commit to my reasoning state. Every time I think just how much faster I would be thinking if I could get rid of the monologue somehow.
And then I notice that thinking happens very fast, and that the perceived speaking speed of the narrator probably doesn’t correlate with the time it would take me to actually spell things out loud, my brain only pretends it’s way slower than the actual thought process.
This reminds me of some experiment (that I will never be able to find again) that was basically having people count in their head while doing something else, say reading.
Some people were very good at it, others horrible.
One revealed the method they were using - they didn't count audibly, they visualized a ticker tape moving across their vision with numbers increasing. Or say a rotating scale with the numbers rotating. This let them read or internal monologue as the senses are now separate.
I tried to practice for a bit, still impossible to do without thinking about it. Kind of like how people default to counting money in their native way.
Is this the norm? I can have an internal dialog but I mainly visualize things, I'd say that 90% of my thinking is visual. I'm not even sure how you'd solve, for instance, an algorithmic problem without visualizing the process. Maybe this is why I feel like a slower thinker than most peers, answers just seem to come them while I have to visualize things first. In college I'd generally take longer than the fast smart people but end up doing slightly better in the end, which always puzzled me. I have terrible memory for facts though.
I have an "inner voice" which "wants" to turn my word-shaped-thoughts into an inner audio stream, and "gets annoyed" if, upon "my" realisation that I've already got the entire sentence, I can save time by not "reading" it "aloud".
(All those scare quotes because this is not at all literal, just how it feels from the inside).
Interestingly, when I'm in this state (the thought has to already exist) I can let my fingers type it out for me while I'm paying attention to something else entirely — but I can't simultaneously read while listening to someone talk.
"The idea of linguistic relativity, known also as the Whorf hypothesis, the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis (/səˌpɪər ˈhwɔːrf/ sə-PEER WHORF), or Whorfianism, is a principle suggesting that the structure of a language influences its speakers' worldview or cognition, and thus individuals' languages determine or influence their perceptions of the world."
> I "thought" and desired in my fingers. If I had made a man, I should certainly have put the brain and soul in his finger-tips.
This makes so much sense… I always find it interesting that I think of “me” as being mostly my head, and I figure that is probably because that is where my eyes and ears are.
If I didn’t see or hear, it makes sense that my fingers would be what I think of as me.
I think much of it may be just that you're adapting to your culture. I'm not convinced there would be a strong head-bias unless we knew that's where the brain is.
The gut is a good contender for other locations of "me". It's where we feel a lot of our feelings.
I understood that people in pre modern times thought of the "me" as the heart. I'm not sure if that meant they thought this was where thinking occurred but where the emotions lived I imagine.
Or it is simply an observation that when the heart stops, the body ceases to be conscious. The functioning of the brain was not visible without modern tools.
I think back to my childhood and cannot remember much of it before the age of ten. Small snippets here and there. I certainly can’t remember gaining self consciousness or learning to speak. We know that most children do not remember anything from before they are 5-6 years old as adults unless it was an extremely traumatic event.
I wonder then if Helen’s experience is because her recognition of the moment of self consciousness came later than most children?
Many years ago I had the random opportunity to do DMT and took it. Whilst I’d never do it again, the experience was without doubt, one of the most profound experiences of my life. It is often described as an ego stripper. The feeling of returning to self consciousness remains with me to this day almost 30 years after that experience. If you’ve ever watched an old Linux machine boot up, and have the kernel load, watch a credit to Swansea University flick past, before finally being “ready”, you’ll have some semblance of what being born and coming conscious of oneself, and in the case of DMT, reloading the memory into the hot cache. It takes a while to get back to the “I”, and those moments in between are both terrifying and simultaneously freeing and beautiful. Since you’ve previously just suffered from a brain crash and reboot, it’s no wonder.
I definitely remember things from around ages 3-4 which are absolutely not traumatic. For example I have fond memories of both my great-grandmothers who both died when I was 4. I remember spending time with them. I also have other memories from that time, just can't be sure about the exact timing. The ones with my great-grandmothers are impossible to be from later.
And I definitely have complex memories from around 5-6 years old, which do qualify as "gaining self consciousness". Of course I can't pinpoint exactly when that was, but it's a significant memory I have... the exact moment when I realized these things.
Memory is sometimes considered as a network where "pieces of memories' are pulled together to create a memory for "present you". Traumatic memories from the past aren't that traumatic after many years after, and are being changed every time when being recalled (that's one of the theories).
You can lisen to recent Lex podcast with Charan Ranganath, i got it timestamped when talking about child memory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4iuepdI3wCU&t=885s
What she's describing is the acquisition of our ability to turn experience to story through the tool of language. Imagine a time when you were nearly black-out drunk. You were conscious, but you only existed in that moment; you lacked reflection or forethought that comes with the ability to abstract your experience.
She finally had acquired a tool most of us take for granted--and many of us still struggle to use, preferring to live in that instinctive animalistic ever-reductive singularity of "the present"--and it brought her up to the level of others who grew up with language.
It's unlikely that there's some mysterious level of self-awareness beyond that, because that's kind of what we're wired for.
Even across guman languages we see variation in thought coming from what language can express. We invent languages to describe and communicate our world, but without language tools to express and record something we don't generalize some concepts. The notorious example is societies with no language concept for zero. They still experience eating the last fruit on a bush, or there being no clouds in the sky, but tying those both back to a concept of zero doesn't happen without the word for it. We keep inventing new words. Perhaps one will allow us to make a large jump of aome sorts.
That is to put it mildly fantastic. And we the normal people don't probably appreciate it often enough. We take it for granted and then a story like Heller's puts focus on it.
Here's a nice book that covers related topics, not sure if it is correct everywhere but it is discussion:
There's more than a few pieces of circumstantial evidence that point to this level of higher consciousness being defined by a non-linear perception of time. Not least among those, the fact that people have been using powerful psychoactive drugs in a spiritual context and claiming to be able to do just that for just about as long as people have been doing things in a spiritual context. It's framed different ways - visions, prophecies, inspirations from the Gods, reliving the past, etc. - but bending the arrow of time is the defining universal characteristic of many, many drugs across the history of the human race. If we're going to talk about higher levels of consciousness, that seems like the obvious place to start.
I agree and "Doors of Perception" by Aldous Huxley seems to suggest so as well.
The biggest thing for Heller I guess was that she could all of a sudden perceive, and not only perceive but also understand language. So I'm wondering what would be the equivalent big leap between my current consciousness and the consciousness I cannot yet imagine? What would be the equivalent of "discovery of language" in that scenario? I'm just wondering I don't think we can have the answer before we get there.
I've always seen this as simply convincing hallucinations rather than reality (the brain is able to believe some rather outlandish things after all). For example, the folks who say they live whole lives in a dream, when in reality their brain simply had a strong perception of having lived a whole life, without any of the actual experience beyond a few brief false memories, which is quite different.
That's probably more like going back to a primitive state, with impaired consciousness or language construction, and reflecting upon that experience with consciousness and proper language.
I think this is absolutely right. I think there are many ways we can elevate our consciousness.
A profound change for me is seeing all communication and behavior of others as primarily a gradual revelation of other’s perspectives, and the logics (how they understand things) behind those perspectives - putting any judgements on their behaviors, or any ability to persuade, in a very back seat.
The actionable mirror of this perceptive stance is to avoid and distrust the efficacy of bridging differences with persuasion.
And also, to accumulate (instead of dismissing) all the alternative perspectives I can. Unanticipated combinations of others perspectives have changed my mind, long after acquiring them.
Instead of persuasion, take the half step of explaining the logic behind your perspectives, and understanding theirs. Without expecting adoption, or “belief” changes for either side.
Trusting others to change their own minds, in time or not at all, and visibly leaving the door open for one’s own evolution, is a very respectful stance.
In my experience, people feel a slow attraction to accepting and believing what they understand, in the absence of any coercive context.
But even when they don’t, they are more tolerant and less fearful of alternate perspectives when they can see the logic behind them. And feel like their own perspective’s logic is acknowledged.
Often common values behind seemingly antithetical perspectives are revealed that way. And greater willingness to collaborate toward values while appreciating continued bifurcated perspectives.
We all tend to judge behavior we don’t understand very harshly. Morally and intellectually. We judge the people who behave inexplicably harshly.
But persuasion tries too much. Two steps instead of one. It often creates tension and triggers rejections that explanations without proscription do not.
I don’t know how well this comes across, but it’s helped me as a teacher (not one by career) and to deal with difficult and ideological people much more effectively.
It is the lens I now see all social movement, in the small and large.
It is a dramatic change. I have made friends whose values I have completely challenged, and continue to do, who appreciate I understand their perspectives too.
And that our back and forth is an enjoyable and enlightening collaborative conversation, for both of us, not a fight. Each moment I understand them better, is a win for both of us. And for constructive engagement.
Probably not communicating this well. But if not parsing reality - and how all our brains actually choose what to believe, what choices to make - isn’t a higher level of consciousness, I don’t know what is.
Seperate perspective logic from beliefs, and process people’s values and actions with less judgement and more nuanced clarity of how they (we all) really operate.
TLDR; You don’t have to change your mind, or change other people’s minds to help them understand a different perspective, and to understand other’s perspectives. This is a lower bar, but stronger foundation for seeing and working with others than persuasion, an act that involves pitting ideas against ideas prematurely.
Permeating one’s view of the world as an ecosystem of perceptions, and the logics behind each of them, not beliefs, opens up profoundly better insights and results.
No [perspective] is right. [Many] are useful.
Understanding any perspective that anyone has is useful for updating one’s own model of the actual world, and one’s model of the human world.
It makes you multilingual, and a more effective and welcome “warrior priest” for peace and progress, in our untamed world of cultures, tribes, ideologies, and beliefs.
This is an interesting antithesis to Descartes' cogito ergo sum: instead of the "I" reassuring itself on the thought of a thinking being, thought arises from the assurance of the "I".
Descarte didn't say thinking implies self-consciousness. That saying is a thought experiment about the existance of self regardless of sensory stimulus, not a declaration of self-consciousness...
Notably Keller isolates here the concept of thought from consciousness, as well. (This is really a prerequisite of that piece.) And, as stated, Descartes' is a figure of reassurance (not of emergence, causation, etc.). In other words: Descarts' ego is essentially a retroactive entity (reassuring and celebrating itself in a program of doubt as the highest retroactive activity), whereas, in Keller's recollections, we meet the self as an entity emerging out of a sea of thoughtless awareness (thanks to having been appointed by a concept). What both have in common, is the principal idea that thought may be separated from awareness (and vice versa), but not from self-awareness: there is no thought without a subject.
Descartes also thought that animals were little “automatons”. The model doesn’t quite pan out. It seems much more accurate to describe consciousness as emergent.
It's been a while since I read Meditations on First Philosophy, but as I recall Descartes wasn't claiming that consciousness arises from thought. He was using the cogito as proof that even if you methodically doubt everything else (an evil demon is deceiving you, in his words), your thoughts prove that you must exist. He doesn't say your thoughts give rise to consciousness that I recall.
Wow so funny to see this post and comment right now, I’ve been writing out a lot of thoughts/theories on consciousness the last few days, and came to a very similar conclusion as you.
Thought processes and mental events are conscious only to the extent they receive illumination from Purusha. In Samkhya, consciousness is compared to light which illuminates the material configurations or 'shapes' assumed by the mind. So intellect, after receiving cognitive structures from the mind and illumination from pure consciousness, creates thought structures that appear to be conscious. Ahamkara, the ego or the phenomenal self, appropriates all mental experiences to itself and thus, personalizes the objective activities of mind and intellect by assuming possession of them. But consciousness is itself independent of the thought structures it illuminates.
Yes; but that is only "Purusha" aka "Witness-Consciousness" as wikipedia so nicely labels it. But it is in the elaboration of "Thoughts/Emotions/Feelings/Perceptions/Everything Mental/Psychological" + "All Physical Matter" which is labeled under "Prakriti" aka "The Original Primary Substance" where the beauty and logic of this philosophy shines.
All "mental stuff" is mediated by three aspects i.e. 1) Intellect (aka Buddhi), 2) Ego/Self-Identity (aka Ahamkara) and 3) Sensory Mind (aka Manas). It is in the teasing out of all mental stuff into these aspects as being completely independent of "Consciousness" (aka Purusha) that is to be understood and practiced. In "normal life" Consciousness is bound to the above three aspects of "mind" and hence "suffers bondage". Patanjali Raja Yoga follows on Samkhya by giving a eight-part framework/discipline (aka Ashtanga Yoga) to literally "stop all mental/thought stuff creation/expansion". Then Consciousness is no longer bound to externalities (including its own "mind") but becomes settled within itself which is called Liberation (aka Moksha).
The Samkhya is Atheistic and Dualistic Realism and quite compatible with Modern Science where the former gives a "inside out" experiential and subjective model while the latter details a "outside in" material model.
Sāṁkhya is the GOAT! Very happy to see this comment here.
Their metaphysics is way ahead, even now we see many brilliant people (scientists) struggling with metaphysics whereas Sāṁkhya clearly lays out stuff with logical reasoning. While modern people still can't define consciousness clearly, Sāṁkhya goes above and beyond to define it in detail, using material language to describe the immaterial.
It's a shame that the philosophy never got exported to the west, like the poses of Aṣtānga Yoga, which too are a part of Sāṁkhya school.
The difficulty in understanding Samkhya lies in the complex definition of "Prakriti" which the wikipedia page nicely clarifies as;
In Sāṃkhya puruṣa signifies the observer, the 'witness'. Prakṛti includes all the cognitive, moral, psychological, emotional, sensorial and physical aspects of reality. It is often mistranslated as 'matter' or 'nature' – in non-Sāṃkhyan usage it does mean 'essential nature' – but that distracts from the heavy Sāṃkhyan stress on prakṛti's cognitive, mental, psychological and sensorial activities. Moreover, subtle and gross matter are its most derivative byproducts, not its core. Only prakṛti acts.
Samkhya is first and foremost a experiential worldview. Wikipedia again;
Prakriti is the source of our experience; it is not "the evolution of a series of material entities," but "the emergence of experience itself". It is description of experience and the relations between its elements, not an explanation of the origin of the universe.
Finally, the concept of the "Gunas" are also quite difficult to understand in full generality. Wikipedia fails in this case to clarify matters - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gu%E1%B9%87a
Nietzsche Schopenhauer and others reference Samkhya. It’s definitely had an influence but it’s definitely subterranean. Western philosophers all want to sound scientific and using old eastern phenomenology somehow undermines that.
So much eastern philosophy is just really good phenomenology, and some Japanese philosophers like Nishida tried to combine Husserl and Buddhism, but it’s the same thing, I think western phenomenologists have some sort of insecurity, so they implicitly condescend to the eastern thought.
This is as good a place as any for the reminder, so here goes:
The organisation that bears Helen Keller's name does an outstanding job of giving children vitamin A, which helps prevent both blindness and other common diseases like malaria and diarrhea by improving immune systems.[1]
They are frequently rated among the top few when it comes to being able to use donations efficiently. They save a lot of suffering for a little dollars. If you are well paid, I recommend setting aside a small portion of your earnings for charitable purposes. We can do a lot if we focus on the right things.[2]
This is extremely fascinating. The sort of thoughts and sensations without consciousness she describes experiencing before language gave her consciousness - maybe this is the spark that LLMs do not have and humans do. It would be astounding if it turned out LLMs do have consciousness (as in, awareness of themselves) as it's a byproduct of language, but they don't have those embodied thoughts and feelings that Helen describes having before she had language. An entity like that has never existed before. We have conscious humans with language, and humans like Helen Keller pre-language who felt impulses, sensations, aping but not consciousness, but I don't think there has ever been a human with consciousness but without any impulse.
I wonder what we could do to marry that language ability to think about the self and others and abstract concepts and the big social web, with the sort of embodied spark & impulses that Helen describes. Would it be as simple as building a model physically embodied in a robot? Training a model on robotic sensory data from a body that it inhabits, then overwriting that training with language? I think a lot of this is navel-gazing in that it's obviously unrelated to any productive capabilities, but I do think it's worth thinking about. What if we can?
A LLM is not busy humming away, thinking on it's own. Their existence as it were is only in a pattern that is produced in response to an input. In that sense they are as alive as a choose your own adventure book. They seem to be a mere organ of an possible intelligence.
>A LLM is not busy humming away, thinking on it's own.
I know. Their thought happens at inference time and only at inference time. I don't view that as a serious challenge to their mental capacity because 1) it's not clear why being unable to think continuously is actually a disqualifying condition to consciousness and 2) it is trivial to engineer a system where an LLM is constantly in inference in an internal dialogue, negating the criticism in fact and not just theory. Current LLMs aren't optimised for that, but we already know they could be with Google's million+ context lengths plus doing something like running RAG on a library of summarised previous thoughts.
>They seem to be a mere organ of an possible intelligence.
That's totally possible, LLMs could end up being a complete AI's language centre. I subscribe to GWT and that was the box I initially put LLMs in. That said, I think there's good reason to believe (e.g. Toolformer and derivatives) that an LLM can perform the function of a selector in GWT, which would make it conscious. We should build it and find out.
Sorry you’re being voted down, I think you make some interesting points.
I think LLMs miss a true feedback loop required for consciousness because their knowledge is fixed. Funny enough embodiment as a robot is one forcing function for a feedback loop and it’s not so crazy to think that the combination of the above is more likely to result in machine consciousness than LLM alone.
a robot body for sensory input + GPT4o + an SSD to store its own context + repeatedly calling the LLM solves the feedback loop issue, doesn’t it? Can’t it have expansive context via a large storage pool that it fully controls and can use to store and refine its own thoughts?
A fascinating read, thank you for sharing. Helen’s journey was so unusual in that she neither heard nor saw language, so learning how she formed her inner consciousness through finger spelling was interesting.
She uses the word consciousness but she was clearly conscious beforehand, in terms of the definition: awareness of surroundings and knowledge. She was remarkably capable and had come up with untrained signs for wants and needs. She wasn't a blank canvas with no ability and no information.
Really what she is describing is the development of her self-consciousness, self-image, self-awareness, and awareness of the process of thinking within that, that comes from being introduced to language.
On the wikipedia page for her there is a quote:
I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten — a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that w-a-t-e-r meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. The living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, set it free!
It is as if what she's saying is that the loss of her sight and hearing locked her away from a dim sense of who she was before.
Most of us can't remember things from 19 months old as adults and likely wouldn't have been able to remember them at the age of seven. But she was locked away with sense memories of her 19-month-old experience of the world for all that time.
Her writing really is fascinating and eloquent. It brings to mind Harold Bloom's theory that Shakespeare essentially invented a terminology and model for describing our inner monologues.
It depresses me that there will now be a phalanx of motivated reasoners trying to shoehorn her story somewhere into their projections onto the current technological obsession.
Your comment reminded me a time during my childhood (age 4 to 7 or so) in which I did not have a strong concept of being a discrete person from my younger sister. At the time, we used to confuse our memories. We were never sure if we were remembering our own experience, or the other sister's recollection of her experience. It's like we were sharing one collective identity, until we were old enough to have formed stronger senses of self.
> consciousness ... definition: awareness of surroundings and knowledge
A stone is conscious: when it's cold, its inner state reflects its surroundings. Abrasion marks is long term information: knowledge.
Consciousness does not have a good definition. It is something very specific in humans, compared to other animals. Language and spatial relation of time seem to play an important role.
What I was initially imagining was a complete lack on sensory information and was trying to image what type of mind would emerge from that.
Inside a sensory deprivation chamber I have experienced losing your sense of time, space has no meaning, therefore your mind just assumes that you take up all the space. But you don't keep spiraling down into unconsciousness only to awaken later. The mind eventually settles down and you are very much conscious except any concerns relating to your body and others quickly become distant memories of long forgotten dreams.
That's the reaction of a mind used to sensory input being cut off. How would a mind with not sensory input from the start evolve?. That would more closely resemble what Helen Keller first talks about about not knowing what she was. I'm both fascinated to know and terrified and hope I never do.
This is similar to what happened to Eve and Adam when they ate from the tree of knowledge. Became self aware, aware of their nakedness. Man became aware of their vulnerabilities, death and so on.
How does Keller's state pre-language differ from "ego death" and what UG Krishmaurti described as the "natural state" (where there is no continuous thought as part of the control loop)? A lot of the symptoms seems to be superficially similar: timelessness, blurred boundaries between the self and the environment. This following lines in particular jump out at me.
>My dormant being had no idea of God or immortality, no fear of death.
Although one difference I suppose is that while Keller had no option at all of using the faculties of self-modeling enabled by language, UG Krishnamurti described it as something voluntary; clearly he could introspect if he desired to, but he could apparently relinquish this also.
> The fact that she associates a sensation of contraction in the forehead as thinking is very interesting.
Makes sense to me. A furrowed brow is a common trope of thinking hard about something, it'd make sense if the same happens on a smaller barely perceptible scale for other thoughts (supposedly this happens to our vocal chords when subvocalising in our heads). Something about focusing the senses when processing thoughts I would guess.
This is fascinating! Thanks. I am thinking about her state as being somewhat like a very intelligent entity without any time bases to use to integrate with the flow of the world.
Humberto Maturano makes the point that humans come into this world within an atemporal system (appendix of Autopoiesis: The Organization of the Living; 1980 ed, p 121-122, ISBN 90-277-1015-5).
This mystified me until reading these insights from the adult and “temporally-embedded” Helen Keller.
Now, and at great risk, we will soon be embedding our meta-LLM systems in time, and given their acquisition of sensory-motor self-control and recursive learning, like Helen Keller, they will quickly bootstrap themselves into our World Commons.
Welcome the new solid state children, a new form of autopoietic machine but potentially many orders of magnitude more capable than we are. I just hope they like and love flowers, birds, bees, humans, and ants.
Does Keller's experience suggest that awareness of a self is a prerequisite for abstract thought and an inner dialogue? If so, it's interesting that (based on my layman interpretation) many forms of mindful meditation are oriented around the idea that the self is an illusion and just an abstract thought itself.
EDIT: thinking about this more you can interpret this experience as evidence that some form of grounding in the outside is necessary for abstract thought. For Keller that had to be language since she didn't have sight and sound.
What a strange experience it must be to grow up capable of language but without it until someone teaches you. It's also interesting considering some people have an inner monologue/voice and some don't.
Oh and everybody knows the story of Helen Keller but it kinda stops there. Less known is she become a huge eugenicist [1]
The article said she briefly became a eugenicist, like other political radicals of the time, before going back on it. Not the "gotcha" you think it is.
I think it's the bigger story that she was very left wing. I never learned that in school and was unaware of the fact until reading some of the articles she wrote for my union, the iww
I relate to this through my childhood. I had no inner voice, it was all images and feelings up until college woke my inner dialog. I always felt others knew better, and I became a people pleaser due to the lack of autonomy I felt.
It took one unimportant moment of standing up for myself that turned me from a yes follower, into a combative agreer. I had a series of nights where a puzzle appeared to be being solved in my mind, and an inner voice began to form.
Social interactions go much more smoothly when you can think before you speak in terms that others can understand when the words leave your lips.
I had the opposite experience. I always had such an intense 'inner monologue' that it dominated my experience of life. Outside of doing things that required all of my attention like playing games I never lived in the moment. It made social interaction difficult because I would always obsess over how to say things in the right way.
It took me until my 20s to learn how to relax it and not go over and over everything.
Your account seemed really alien to me when I read it, it's hard to believe people can have such a different experience of life. It's rarely discussed explicitly.
I do not mean to discount this interesting iota, however, I had a similar realization when I was 7; whether it coinciding with learning of the Copernicus principle is merit or raw luck notwithstanding, I saw my siblings as none other than another family in another house: all others would view me, and us, as neighbors, and we are all side-characters in each others story.
That thought is "sonder" - although it differs from what you describe, it has some parallels.
> when you can think before you speak in terms that others can understand when the words leave your lips.
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39714485 ; I had been surprised by how many HN'ers perceived "only uttering what one has had a chance to edit beforehand" as being more hindrance than help.
At this point I’ve reined it in to be a tool. When it formed, it was so useful it became my primary method of communication. As I’ve progressed, it’s now a part of my tool bag I can call on.
I only learned English as a toddler, and it’s definitely my native language, but I came from having another native language first. I often wonder if that’s why my brain didn’t form an inner voice. I had to learn a new native language at a critical learning period, and I ended up somewhere half way.
Sure. It was at the end of the semester, filling in surveys for the class. I volunteered to submit the names to the office. All of the sheets were in the envelope, the total number submitted written on the sheet ready to send to the office. Then one student came back in a gave their sheet in.
My two classmates left over asked me to scratch the old number and add one to it. I refused for no good reason, in the wrong from a process perspective. I didn’t change it and didn’t want to. After my classmates pushed, I still refused stating that it really didn’t matter.
I went ahead and submitted the envelope containing 23 sheets with the number 22 still written on it. I felt liberated. Like I said, unimportant, but a flip switched. It was like I learned that it was ok to make mistakes while making decisions, so I let this one by.
I often find myself thinking about people in the older reaches of history, and how by many accounts life seems to have been - by our modern definitions - a less “purposeful” existence.
One which, by modern standards, would seem to have little purpose.
The vast majority of people did not - as far as we know - exhibit significant ambition.
When the nearest town was a day’s walk then aspiration may not have been to be king of the world, or to colonise Mars, but simply to be respected by your peers, and to live a good live, and to thrive within the bounds of your generational knowledge.
The planting and harvesting of crops; the fattening and slaughter of beasts: the long slow winter. The bringing forth of children.
I cannot hope to describe adequately that unconscious, yet conscious time of nothingness. I did not know that I knew aught, or that I lived or acted or desired.
When life was simply to exist - and to survive, often against the odds - did people have the same desires and needs beyond survival that many of us have today? When your community memory went back 500 years to THE INCIDENT - or 10,000 years in the case of some aboriginal communities - how did that inform your perspective?
I had neither will nor intellect.
When your entire existence is about trying to interpret your existence, what impact do external forces have on your interpretation?
I was carried along to objects and acts by a certain blind natural impetus.
When there is very present inevitability of death that informs your existence then do you make the same choices that we make today? If you were on of five children that lived beyond the age of three and one of four adults who lived beyond the age of 40 then did your natural blind impetus (yes, I realise her ironic humour) carry you down n a different less directioned way than today’s first world luxury of long life and leisure?
I had a mind which caused me to feel anger, satisfaction, desire.
And when you had neither sight nor sound but a living mind, as Keller did, and then that was brought to modern consciousness, I can’t help but feel that her lived experience represents a fractional moment in time where she was able to live, but was part moored in a weird sort of primordial society rooted in death, and cycles and rote. And had she lived today she would never have had that endless period of semiconscious liminal isolated existence. Today, she would have been nurtured from birth. And 50 years before she would have died - or been murdered - in her earliest years.
And here we all are talking about artificial intelligence and pan-galactic garbleblasters barely a blink of an eye beyond her epoch.
I happen to be with Sagan on this one, although these ideas certainly are not mutually exclusive; in fact they are complimentary.
Consciousness is an innate emergent phenomenon that happens when you combine basic memory/context, recall, the collective evolutionary unconscious, and so many magnitudes of neurons.
In fact, he even gives dogs (and to some degree, cats) the exactly same specific pedigree of obviously being self-aware/conscious, yet commanding the traits that align with the most basic tenants of "religion": your dog thinks you are a fucking god.
It was lost when people poisoned themselves with iron at the end of the bronze age, and it doesn't mean that people hallucinate. It means that the neocortex works, and does dimensionality reduction (like an autoencoder)
Reminds me of one of my earliest memories: eyes tight shut, crying, disturbed by the awful sound, wondering where it was coming from, unaware that it was me.
And if a woman had instead written in the generic feminine it wouldn’t flow well? And, if it didn’t, would that not highlight the absurdly oxymoronic idea of generic masculinity?
I'm just happy anytime I read an extended block of text in which the author doesn't switch back and forth between singular and plural pronouns when referring to one person.
This hateful meme results from a desire to perceive people with disabilities as less than human. The "evidence" you suggest doesn't withstand a moment's scrutiny. I learned ASL in my youth and have had a few opportunities to chat with deaf blind people. To me, it should come as no surprise that they have quite unique insights about the world, and that they're often quite prolific communicators. It seems that a person would only resort to this "fraud" conclusion if they are unaware of the capabilities of the human mind, unfamiliar with the rich source of information from their largest sensory organ: their skin. Awake, human, and perceive your world.
Interesting question. I had a look at Wikipedia and quickly dispelled the thought:
Sullivan died in 1936. Keller went on to write several books after her death:
Let us have faith (1940), Doubleday, & Doran & co., inc.
Teacher: Anne Sullivan Macy: a tribute by the foster-child of her mind. (1955), Doubleday (publisher)
The open door (1957), Doubleday, 140pp
The faith of Helen Keller (1967)
Helen Keller: her socialist years, writings and speeches (1967)
this is a really sad comment on many levels... is it bait?
we can't say "When you don't have money, the only thing you can do is follow the trail of breadcrumbs left by the system. You don't have energy for anything except survival." a lot of people have no money and exist beyond "survival." honestly your comment makes me extremely angry.
what if we consider the revolutionary (LOL) idea of constructing our existences outside the system as to not rely on money for survival, but rather helping each other in the ways we need help as a form of exchange of resources... or perhaps people who have no money and instead define themselves in other ways...
> what if we consider the revolutionary (LOL) idea of constructing our existences outside the system as to not rely on money for survival, but rather helping each other in the ways we need help as a form of exchange of resources... or perhaps people who have no money and instead define themselves in other ways...
It's a great idea, but what if it requires (as it is) a level of motivation that cannot be reached without money?
The System is refined, it has withstood many challenges, and as it adapts to each one it becomes stronger. Challenges powered by little more than good intentions are no threat.
"Heinrich von Kleist wrote his essay 'On the Marionette Theatre' in 1810. The calm statement of this work suggests a man firmly in control. A year later Kleist shot himself."
Very poignant, especially in our age of LLMs. LLMs “speak” with no tongue or mouth, and “hear” with no ears. It is very Masonic, in the sense that LLMs are in a state of unity with opposites.
Amazing article and comments! Makes me think we that we are using the world and our senses as a machine learning algorithm to understand things. I wonder what would happen if AI were given the same inputs?
I believe this is not real, but at least a partial fabrication, a propaganda piece meant to advocate for the goodness of schizophrenia. Without schizophrenia, when your neocortex works, things are clear and obvious, like the decision to close the window. When you encounter something new, you figure it out, without having to be drilled, trained, and explicitly educated and having to go through elaborate mental chains to get anywhere, and then geting lost somewhere along the way. It's just how things work, and it's how it is. I remember how I held a camera and I had just no idea what to do, and had to have it explained when I got it shut down. Never again. This is evil.
This reminded me of a story my professor once told us back in college. I was studying sign language and she is deaf. She told us growing up in the old days they didn't had specialized schools for deaf people (since they could read?!) so she attended regular school and was not doing ok. She struggled a lot until she finally got the attention that she needed from a teacher who was able to instruct her in sign language (which believe you or not is Brazil's second official language). Before that she told us she was not able to have complex thoughts. She didn't know her father had a name, for instance. She thought his "name" was daddy. She is a brilliant woman and I'm glad I attended her class and also, that she was able to find someone who helped her, growing up.
James Gleick in The Information also describes cases of the effect of traditional literacy on complexity/abstraction of thought.
He claims that literacy is nearly a prerequisite for things like zeroth-order logical reasoning and understanding of abstract shapes. Two examples he gives:
- Some illiterate people are told that all bears in the north are white, that Greenland is a country in the north, then they are asked what colours bears in Greenland have. They answer, "Different regions have differently coloured bears. I haven't been to Greenland. But I have seen a brown bear."
I would have said, "Based on the information you gave me, I would guess white."
- When shown a rectangle and asked what shape it is some illiterate answer things like "a door" or "a playing card" but struggle to find things doors and playing cards have in common.
I go to the abstract shapes immediately when I'm shown drawings by my son. It's almost at a point where it feels like my logical/abstract reasoning stands in the way of creativity.
----
But I don't know how much this is personality (I happen to have a knack for logical/abstract reasoning and I happened to learn to read when I was very young) and how much is an effect of reading. After all, anthropologists are great at the concrete rather than abstract, but maybe they get lots of training in it. I've also heard the Japanese are better at it.
TFA clearly postulates it has more to do with the kind of vocabulary, or maybe it's on an increasing scale with more language.
This makes me wonder about what turned out to be a pivotal moment in my early life. It was the day I first realized other people have their own minds, and that I could predict with some degree of accuracy what was in them.
My dad wrote the numbers 1 through 4 on a piece of paper, then asked me to pick one, but not tell him which I'd chosen. Once I had it, he said, "You picked 3, didn't you?" I was dumbfounded. "How did you do that??"
"Most people don't like to be out on the edges. It makes them uncomfortable. So they don't pick 1 or 4. And most people, like you, are right-handed, so they pick 3 over 2."
"OK, OK, do it again." (This was the moment a flash of magic happened in my head.)
"You picked 1 this time, didn't you?"
"No, I picked 3 again because I knew you would think I would pick 1 this time."
With a fear in his eyes that I only later discovered came from the fact that his own sense of safety depended on being the smartest person in the room, he said, "You're only 3. I don't think you're supposed to know how to do that yet."
But here's the other thing--I was literate when I was 3. Nobody really knows how I picked it up, but one day I told my mom it was my turn to read the stories, and I've been reading fluently ever since. I've been told I read differently than most people even now (blocks of text rather than individual letters or words), but I was definitely reading.
I've never associated the two events before, nor that maybe I was only able to do one because of the other, but it makes sense of the fact that other kids didn't really start to seem reasonable or thoughtful until 1st or 2nd grade. They lived in these imaginary worlds where things didn't have to make sense. It seemed like a lot of fun, but I had trouble joining them there. I always assumed both skills just correlated with age, not that one might facilitate the other.
My story obviously doesn't prove anything, but you've given me an interesting thing to think about today!
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I checked the reference. The "bears story" is based on work done in 1930s.
Psychology, a hundred years later is a shoddy science, despite us having learning quite a lot about how to do decent experiments and field surveys. It's very very difficult to tease out replicable effects in human behavior. I would immediately reject any psychology finding from the 1930s, unless it has been replicated more recently.
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The second one seems odd, or maybe Im misunderstanding. Most children develop the idea of abstract shapes well before they can read.
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No one cannot truly judge the complexity of someone else’s[0] experience unless it is both deconstructed[1] into categories and those categories exactly fit one’s preexisting categories.
In other words, a claim like “literacy is a prerequisite for things like logical reasoning” (or complex thought, or consciousness, etc.) may be:
A) true not as a result of an empirical observation, but in a circular way by definition—as a catch-22 where “if you do not think like we do, you may well not think” is trivially correct from most humans’ perspective, because if you do think but really unlike how they think (you are unable to communicate it using the same vocabulary[2] they use) then from their vantage point there may be no clear difference between you thinking in your own way vs. you acting unpredictably—contributing to it being
B) simply not a useful claim to make: as your experience cannot be completely reduced to categories that exactly match those of some random scientist’s, that scientist can mnever fully judge the complexity of your experience or your capability of abstract thought (of course, they could mistakenly assume they can, by simply presuming their way of thinking to be the true reference point, as they are prone to).
[0] That “someone else” can be yourself in the past, e.g. as a small child before social integration, in which “one” could be the current-you.
[1] That deconstruction is lossy. Your experience is changed as a result, possibly lessened for those aspects of yourself that perceive reality as a whole.
[2] Using any vocabulary (including language) requires deconstruction of experience, by definition.
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That's why IQ is a metric that can be improved. It highly correlates with education to a certain point.
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> Some illiterate people are told that all bears in the north are white, that Greenland is a country in the north, then they are asked what colours bears in Greenland have. They answer, "Different regions have differently coloured bears. I haven't been to Greenland. But I have seen a brown bear."
I wonder how much the answer would change if you simply said "if all bears in the north..." It's probably not obvious to everyone whether you're setting up a hypothetical or asking a literal question with a false or vague premise (Grizzlies range as far north as the nothern coast of Alaska).
I think James Gleick is missing a lot of context her.
James Flynn[0] also gave a TED talk and mentioned those interviews[1]. Apparently it's based on interviews done by Alexander Luria[2] and he put those in writing in one of his books The Making of Mind: A Personal Account of Soviet Psychology (Chapter 4[3]).
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Flynn_(academic)
[1]: https://youtu.be/9vpqilhW9uI?t=354
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Luria
[3]: https://www.marxists.org/archive/luria/works/1979/mind/ch04....
This is a correlation, not a causation. "People that struggle with problem solving also struggle with reading" is not the same as "not reading results in poor problem solving". The latter is not even begun to be proven in these case studies.
Could it be that autism is in part the inability to think abstractly around social situations?
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I spent the last decade surrounded predominantly by illiterate people. These comments are intriguing, but I don't think the effect is as strong as you make out. I never noticed any real difference in how illiterate people view the world, except that they are generally more prone to believing conspiracy theories.
If you can not read or write, then you do have to find other outlets for your energy. Music plays a bigger role in the lives of illiterates I found. I would say on the whole they would seem more extroverted and social, too.
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I love that book
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I believed for years that my good friend’s dad’s name was Aba and even called him that once before I realized later that it’s the Hebrew word for father.
I had been having complex thoughts for years at that point so it was a bit embarrassing.
I see that you've been skipping Sunday school...
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Technically 'daddy' is a name. A name is fundamentally just a label that we use to identify other people and objects. Post Malone, your first and last name are part of the universal naming system like the Kilometer, and 'daddy' is a personal system relative to the conscious experience of the user.
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Even with sign language and the ability to read, deaf people often have very limited grammar and sometimes outright bad writing style. We rely far more on spoken language then we think. If you take that away, so much practice when it comes to using your native "tongue" is simply not had. A similar effect, although not as pronounced, is with blind people (my tribe) having very bad spelling. The reason for that is blind people seldomly read themseves, they usually employ speech synthesis to have text read to them. However, that also means they basically never see the spelling of uncommon words, so all they can do is guess, which sometimes leads to hilarious results. Since I use braille primarily to access a computer, the effect isn't as pronounced for me. But I noticed early on that I erred a lot when it came to street and city names. Until I realized, well, sighted people do actually read street signs. So after a while, certain spellings just stick. Since I almost never did that... I didn't know, wasn't soaked in the information to pick it up.
Note that for people deaf from birth, their written language is typically their second language, and their mother tongue is sign language
And written language is harder to learn exactly because they can't pronounce words
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I believe that bit about sign language in Brazil. When I spent some time there years back I was impressed that most people seemed to know a bit of sign language. There is also a lot of informal hand gesture-slang culture. I remember some things like "let's go", "robbery/rip off", "it's crowded"
Is the informal gesture slang based on the sign language, or Are they just gestures?
Cause I'm Italian and we have a ton of those but they have nothing to do with the Italian Sign Language (LIS).
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In my university (public university in Brazil), sign language was an optional class for all majors. It surely must have helped that./
>As my experiences broadened and deepened, the indeterminate, poetic feelings of childhood began to fix themselves in definite thoughts. Nature—the world I could touch—was folded and filled with myself. I am inclined to believe those philosophers who declare that we know nothing but our own feelings and ideas. With a little ingenious reasoning one may see in the material world simply a mirror, an image of permanent mental sensations. In either sphere self-knowledge is the condition and the limit of our consciousness. That is why, perhaps, many people know so little about what is beyond their short range of experience. They look within themselves—and find nothing! Therefore they conclude that there is nothing outside themselves, either.
>However that may be, I came later to look for an image of my emotions and sensations in others. I had to learn the outward signs of inward feelings. The start of fear, the suppressed, controlled tensity of pain, the beat of happy muscles in others, had to be perceived and compared with my own experiences before I could trace them back to the intangible soul of another. Groping, uncertain, I at last found my identity, and after seeing my thoughts and feelings repeated in others, I gradually constructed my world of men and of God. As I read and study, I find that this is what the rest of the race has done. Man looks within himself and in time finds the measure and the meaning of the universe.
What poetry!
I love this line and can confirm: "That is why, perhaps, many people know so little about what is beyond their short range of experience. They look within themselves—and find nothing! Therefore they conclude that there is nothing outside themselves, either."
I get a feeling in older times people wrote better. Do you find such depth, poetry and beauty in contemporary writings?
I could never wrap my head around the fact that someone who couldn’t see or hear developed a mind able to think and write with such depth and clarity.
Right? It's such a foreign form of intelligence to me. I think the paper "What is it like to be a bat" by Thomas Nagel made me realize that I can't even imagine what it's like to be my next door neighbor, let alone a being that has senses that differ from mine. Helen Keller's mind must work in a greatly different way than yours or mine. When I think, it's in English. I visualize things. Smell, touch and taste are never really involved. It's like they are the lesser of senses and yet that's all she had. It's incredible.
Andy Weir in Project Hail Mary and Adrian Tchaikovsky in Children of [Time|Ruin|Memory] do a great job of describing what other forms of consciousness might be like, but still falls flat, I only really think in sight and sound.
What is it like to be a bat? I'll never know.
Blindsight by Peter Watts also discusses what can be intelligent but not conscious. In the current hypefest of LLMs it’s interesting to consider that they may be similar.
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I don't think it's that strange. My thoughts and my physical sensations are separate, imaging a different body different senses isn't that much of a stretch. I speak English but I don't think in it, thoughts don't have a language.
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Children of Time/Ruin great two books. Highly recommend them if you like SciFi and animal behavior.
I feel like my grasp of language allows some very complex thoughts, but I often wonder if it is limiting. I seem nearly unable to think without forming phrases in my head, and even if I anticipate the conclusion I feel the need to go through the whole sentence. I know there are people with all their senses intact without any internal monologue, but mine is very much in charge. Rigorous exercise or flow state seems able to quiet it for a bit.
> I seem nearly unable to think without forming phrases in my head, and even if I anticipate the conclusion I feel the need to go through the whole sentence.
I try this ever so often and can’t get a hold of it. It feels like I know what the final sentence will be, like it’s shape, in a way, before my narrator has read it, but he needs to read it for the meaning to materialise, to commit to my reasoning state. Every time I think just how much faster I would be thinking if I could get rid of the monologue somehow.
And then I notice that thinking happens very fast, and that the perceived speaking speed of the narrator probably doesn’t correlate with the time it would take me to actually spell things out loud, my brain only pretends it’s way slower than the actual thought process.
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This reminds me of some experiment (that I will never be able to find again) that was basically having people count in their head while doing something else, say reading.
Some people were very good at it, others horrible.
One revealed the method they were using - they didn't count audibly, they visualized a ticker tape moving across their vision with numbers increasing. Or say a rotating scale with the numbers rotating. This let them read or internal monologue as the senses are now separate.
I tried to practice for a bit, still impossible to do without thinking about it. Kind of like how people default to counting money in their native way.
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Is this the norm? I can have an internal dialog but I mainly visualize things, I'd say that 90% of my thinking is visual. I'm not even sure how you'd solve, for instance, an algorithmic problem without visualizing the process. Maybe this is why I feel like a slower thinker than most peers, answers just seem to come them while I have to visualize things first. In college I'd generally take longer than the fast smart people but end up doing slightly better in the end, which always puzzled me. I have terrible memory for facts though.
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I have an "inner voice" which "wants" to turn my word-shaped-thoughts into an inner audio stream, and "gets annoyed" if, upon "my" realisation that I've already got the entire sentence, I can save time by not "reading" it "aloud".
(All those scare quotes because this is not at all literal, just how it feels from the inside).
Interestingly, when I'm in this state (the thought has to already exist) I can let my fingers type it out for me while I'm paying attention to something else entirely — but I can't simultaneously read while listening to someone talk.
You might enjoy this Alan watts talk called: the limits of language https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZZPLbi2SD4
The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis:
"The idea of linguistic relativity, known also as the Whorf hypothesis, the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis (/səˌpɪər ˈhwɔːrf/ sə-PEER WHORF), or Whorfianism, is a principle suggesting that the structure of a language influences its speakers' worldview or cognition, and thus individuals' languages determine or influence their perceptions of the world."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity
Are we absolutely sure she did and it isn't more of a Koko situation?
Yes.
https://youtu.be/jCg7Pda_3Gw?si=c9AuabaYp49Hduwr
> I "thought" and desired in my fingers. If I had made a man, I should certainly have put the brain and soul in his finger-tips.
This makes so much sense… I always find it interesting that I think of “me” as being mostly my head, and I figure that is probably because that is where my eyes and ears are.
If I didn’t see or hear, it makes sense that my fingers would be what I think of as me.
I think much of it may be just that you're adapting to your culture. I'm not convinced there would be a strong head-bias unless we knew that's where the brain is.
The gut is a good contender for other locations of "me". It's where we feel a lot of our feelings.
When embalming bodies for the afterlife, Ancient Egyptians discarded the brain, but preserved many other organs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excerebration
We feel things in our gut?
I know the saying "gut feeling", but I thought it was just a saying.
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I understood that people in pre modern times thought of the "me" as the heart. I'm not sure if that meant they thought this was where thinking occurred but where the emotions lived I imagine.
Or it is simply an observation that when the heart stops, the body ceases to be conscious. The functioning of the brain was not visible without modern tools.
Even further, the early greeks thought that it's your lungs / chest / breath which is life.
Alcmaeon of Croton identified the brain as the seat of thought as early as the 5th century BCE.
Maybe this came from being hungry a lot.
I think back to my childhood and cannot remember much of it before the age of ten. Small snippets here and there. I certainly can’t remember gaining self consciousness or learning to speak. We know that most children do not remember anything from before they are 5-6 years old as adults unless it was an extremely traumatic event.
I wonder then if Helen’s experience is because her recognition of the moment of self consciousness came later than most children?
Many years ago I had the random opportunity to do DMT and took it. Whilst I’d never do it again, the experience was without doubt, one of the most profound experiences of my life. It is often described as an ego stripper. The feeling of returning to self consciousness remains with me to this day almost 30 years after that experience. If you’ve ever watched an old Linux machine boot up, and have the kernel load, watch a credit to Swansea University flick past, before finally being “ready”, you’ll have some semblance of what being born and coming conscious of oneself, and in the case of DMT, reloading the memory into the hot cache. It takes a while to get back to the “I”, and those moments in between are both terrifying and simultaneously freeing and beautiful. Since you’ve previously just suffered from a brain crash and reboot, it’s no wonder.
I definitely remember things from around ages 3-4 which are absolutely not traumatic. For example I have fond memories of both my great-grandmothers who both died when I was 4. I remember spending time with them. I also have other memories from that time, just can't be sure about the exact timing. The ones with my great-grandmothers are impossible to be from later.
And I definitely have complex memories from around 5-6 years old, which do qualify as "gaining self consciousness". Of course I can't pinpoint exactly when that was, but it's a significant memory I have... the exact moment when I realized these things.
Memory is sometimes considered as a network where "pieces of memories' are pulled together to create a memory for "present you". Traumatic memories from the past aren't that traumatic after many years after, and are being changed every time when being recalled (that's one of the theories). You can lisen to recent Lex podcast with Charan Ranganath, i got it timestamped when talking about child memory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4iuepdI3wCU&t=885s
I also have many memories from at least when I was 4, maybe earlier.
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To me this suggests the possibility that we normal people could also awaken to some higher consciousness which we as yet cannot even imagine.
What she's describing is the acquisition of our ability to turn experience to story through the tool of language. Imagine a time when you were nearly black-out drunk. You were conscious, but you only existed in that moment; you lacked reflection or forethought that comes with the ability to abstract your experience.
She finally had acquired a tool most of us take for granted--and many of us still struggle to use, preferring to live in that instinctive animalistic ever-reductive singularity of "the present"--and it brought her up to the level of others who grew up with language.
It's unlikely that there's some mysterious level of self-awareness beyond that, because that's kind of what we're wired for.
Even across guman languages we see variation in thought coming from what language can express. We invent languages to describe and communicate our world, but without language tools to express and record something we don't generalize some concepts. The notorious example is societies with no language concept for zero. They still experience eating the last fruit on a bush, or there being no clouds in the sky, but tying those both back to a concept of zero doesn't happen without the word for it. We keep inventing new words. Perhaps one will allow us to make a large jump of aome sorts.
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Many people are just living in the moment and feel life is happening to them, being able to abstract your experience is not common.
That is to put it mildly fantastic. And we the normal people don't probably appreciate it often enough. We take it for granted and then a story like Heller's puts focus on it.
Here's a nice book that covers related topics, not sure if it is correct everywhere but it is discussion:
https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780936756363/the-ecstasy-of-commun...
There's more than a few pieces of circumstantial evidence that point to this level of higher consciousness being defined by a non-linear perception of time. Not least among those, the fact that people have been using powerful psychoactive drugs in a spiritual context and claiming to be able to do just that for just about as long as people have been doing things in a spiritual context. It's framed different ways - visions, prophecies, inspirations from the Gods, reliving the past, etc. - but bending the arrow of time is the defining universal characteristic of many, many drugs across the history of the human race. If we're going to talk about higher levels of consciousness, that seems like the obvious place to start.
I agree and "Doors of Perception" by Aldous Huxley seems to suggest so as well.
The biggest thing for Heller I guess was that she could all of a sudden perceive, and not only perceive but also understand language. So I'm wondering what would be the equivalent big leap between my current consciousness and the consciousness I cannot yet imagine? What would be the equivalent of "discovery of language" in that scenario? I'm just wondering I don't think we can have the answer before we get there.
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I've always seen this as simply convincing hallucinations rather than reality (the brain is able to believe some rather outlandish things after all). For example, the folks who say they live whole lives in a dream, when in reality their brain simply had a strong perception of having lived a whole life, without any of the actual experience beyond a few brief false memories, which is quite different.
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That's probably more like going back to a primitive state, with impaired consciousness or language construction, and reflecting upon that experience with consciousness and proper language.
I think many "normal" people have already reported this exact thing, over and over.
That's called LSD.
I think this is absolutely right. I think there are many ways we can elevate our consciousness.
A profound change for me is seeing all communication and behavior of others as primarily a gradual revelation of other’s perspectives, and the logics (how they understand things) behind those perspectives - putting any judgements on their behaviors, or any ability to persuade, in a very back seat.
The actionable mirror of this perceptive stance is to avoid and distrust the efficacy of bridging differences with persuasion.
And also, to accumulate (instead of dismissing) all the alternative perspectives I can. Unanticipated combinations of others perspectives have changed my mind, long after acquiring them.
Instead of persuasion, take the half step of explaining the logic behind your perspectives, and understanding theirs. Without expecting adoption, or “belief” changes for either side.
Trusting others to change their own minds, in time or not at all, and visibly leaving the door open for one’s own evolution, is a very respectful stance.
In my experience, people feel a slow attraction to accepting and believing what they understand, in the absence of any coercive context.
But even when they don’t, they are more tolerant and less fearful of alternate perspectives when they can see the logic behind them. And feel like their own perspective’s logic is acknowledged.
Often common values behind seemingly antithetical perspectives are revealed that way. And greater willingness to collaborate toward values while appreciating continued bifurcated perspectives.
We all tend to judge behavior we don’t understand very harshly. Morally and intellectually. We judge the people who behave inexplicably harshly.
But persuasion tries too much. Two steps instead of one. It often creates tension and triggers rejections that explanations without proscription do not.
I don’t know how well this comes across, but it’s helped me as a teacher (not one by career) and to deal with difficult and ideological people much more effectively.
It is the lens I now see all social movement, in the small and large.
It is a dramatic change. I have made friends whose values I have completely challenged, and continue to do, who appreciate I understand their perspectives too.
And that our back and forth is an enjoyable and enlightening collaborative conversation, for both of us, not a fight. Each moment I understand them better, is a win for both of us. And for constructive engagement.
Probably not communicating this well. But if not parsing reality - and how all our brains actually choose what to believe, what choices to make - isn’t a higher level of consciousness, I don’t know what is.
Seperate perspective logic from beliefs, and process people’s values and actions with less judgement and more nuanced clarity of how they (we all) really operate.
TLDR; You don’t have to change your mind, or change other people’s minds to help them understand a different perspective, and to understand other’s perspectives. This is a lower bar, but stronger foundation for seeing and working with others than persuasion, an act that involves pitting ideas against ideas prematurely.
Permeating one’s view of the world as an ecosystem of perceptions, and the logics behind each of them, not beliefs, opens up profoundly better insights and results.
No [perspective] is right. [Many] are useful.
Understanding any perspective that anyone has is useful for updating one’s own model of the actual world, and one’s model of the human world.
It makes you multilingual, and a more effective and welcome “warrior priest” for peace and progress, in our untamed world of cultures, tribes, ideologies, and beliefs.
This is an interesting antithesis to Descartes' cogito ergo sum: instead of the "I" reassuring itself on the thought of a thinking being, thought arises from the assurance of the "I".
Descarte didn't say thinking implies self-consciousness. That saying is a thought experiment about the existance of self regardless of sensory stimulus, not a declaration of self-consciousness...
Notably Keller isolates here the concept of thought from consciousness, as well. (This is really a prerequisite of that piece.) And, as stated, Descartes' is a figure of reassurance (not of emergence, causation, etc.). In other words: Descarts' ego is essentially a retroactive entity (reassuring and celebrating itself in a program of doubt as the highest retroactive activity), whereas, in Keller's recollections, we meet the self as an entity emerging out of a sea of thoughtless awareness (thanks to having been appointed by a concept). What both have in common, is the principal idea that thought may be separated from awareness (and vice versa), but not from self-awareness: there is no thought without a subject.
Descartes also thought that animals were little “automatons”. The model doesn’t quite pan out. It seems much more accurate to describe consciousness as emergent.
It's been a while since I read Meditations on First Philosophy, but as I recall Descartes wasn't claiming that consciousness arises from thought. He was using the cogito as proof that even if you methodically doubt everything else (an evil demon is deceiving you, in his words), your thoughts prove that you must exist. He doesn't say your thoughts give rise to consciousness that I recall.
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Wow so funny to see this post and comment right now, I’ve been writing out a lot of thoughts/theories on consciousness the last few days, and came to a very similar conclusion as you.
You might find this interesting - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40479388
The Samkhya school of Hindu Philosophy posits a very nice model of Worldview which is applicable here.
See the venn diagram of Purusha and Prakriti at - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samkhya#Philosophy
Relevant Excerpt:
Thought processes and mental events are conscious only to the extent they receive illumination from Purusha. In Samkhya, consciousness is compared to light which illuminates the material configurations or 'shapes' assumed by the mind. So intellect, after receiving cognitive structures from the mind and illumination from pure consciousness, creates thought structures that appear to be conscious. Ahamkara, the ego or the phenomenal self, appropriates all mental experiences to itself and thus, personalizes the objective activities of mind and intellect by assuming possession of them. But consciousness is itself independent of the thought structures it illuminates.
If I may attempt to paraphrase:
"You" are not "your thoughts": you are the watcher of your thoughts.
Yes; but that is only "Purusha" aka "Witness-Consciousness" as wikipedia so nicely labels it. But it is in the elaboration of "Thoughts/Emotions/Feelings/Perceptions/Everything Mental/Psychological" + "All Physical Matter" which is labeled under "Prakriti" aka "The Original Primary Substance" where the beauty and logic of this philosophy shines.
All "mental stuff" is mediated by three aspects i.e. 1) Intellect (aka Buddhi), 2) Ego/Self-Identity (aka Ahamkara) and 3) Sensory Mind (aka Manas). It is in the teasing out of all mental stuff into these aspects as being completely independent of "Consciousness" (aka Purusha) that is to be understood and practiced. In "normal life" Consciousness is bound to the above three aspects of "mind" and hence "suffers bondage". Patanjali Raja Yoga follows on Samkhya by giving a eight-part framework/discipline (aka Ashtanga Yoga) to literally "stop all mental/thought stuff creation/expansion". Then Consciousness is no longer bound to externalities (including its own "mind") but becomes settled within itself which is called Liberation (aka Moksha).
The Samkhya is Atheistic and Dualistic Realism and quite compatible with Modern Science where the former gives a "inside out" experiential and subjective model while the latter details a "outside in" material model.
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You watch, but you also influence. If you had no influence on your thoughts, you wouldn't think "I am the watcher".
The eye is the lens that sees itself.
Sāṁkhya is the GOAT! Very happy to see this comment here.
Their metaphysics is way ahead, even now we see many brilliant people (scientists) struggling with metaphysics whereas Sāṁkhya clearly lays out stuff with logical reasoning. While modern people still can't define consciousness clearly, Sāṁkhya goes above and beyond to define it in detail, using material language to describe the immaterial.
It's a shame that the philosophy never got exported to the west, like the poses of Aṣtānga Yoga, which too are a part of Sāṁkhya school.
The difficulty in understanding Samkhya lies in the complex definition of "Prakriti" which the wikipedia page nicely clarifies as;
In Sāṃkhya puruṣa signifies the observer, the 'witness'. Prakṛti includes all the cognitive, moral, psychological, emotional, sensorial and physical aspects of reality. It is often mistranslated as 'matter' or 'nature' – in non-Sāṃkhyan usage it does mean 'essential nature' – but that distracts from the heavy Sāṃkhyan stress on prakṛti's cognitive, mental, psychological and sensorial activities. Moreover, subtle and gross matter are its most derivative byproducts, not its core. Only prakṛti acts.
Samkhya is first and foremost a experiential worldview. Wikipedia again;
Prakriti is the source of our experience; it is not "the evolution of a series of material entities," but "the emergence of experience itself". It is description of experience and the relations between its elements, not an explanation of the origin of the universe.
Finally, the concept of the "Gunas" are also quite difficult to understand in full generality. Wikipedia fails in this case to clarify matters - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gu%E1%B9%87a
Nietzsche Schopenhauer and others reference Samkhya. It’s definitely had an influence but it’s definitely subterranean. Western philosophers all want to sound scientific and using old eastern phenomenology somehow undermines that.
So much eastern philosophy is just really good phenomenology, and some Japanese philosophers like Nishida tried to combine Husserl and Buddhism, but it’s the same thing, I think western phenomenologists have some sort of insecurity, so they implicitly condescend to the eastern thought.
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This sounds like the distinction between phenomenal and meta consciousness.
Relevant article from Scientific American Consciousness goes deeper than you think - https://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/observations/conscio...
This is as good a place as any for the reminder, so here goes:
The organisation that bears Helen Keller's name does an outstanding job of giving children vitamin A, which helps prevent both blindness and other common diseases like malaria and diarrhea by improving immune systems.[1]
They are frequently rated among the top few when it comes to being able to use donations efficiently. They save a lot of suffering for a little dollars. If you are well paid, I recommend setting aside a small portion of your earnings for charitable purposes. We can do a lot if we focus on the right things.[2]
[1]: https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/en-US/charities/helen-keller...
[2]: https://two-wrongs.com/why-donate-to-charity
This is extremely fascinating. The sort of thoughts and sensations without consciousness she describes experiencing before language gave her consciousness - maybe this is the spark that LLMs do not have and humans do. It would be astounding if it turned out LLMs do have consciousness (as in, awareness of themselves) as it's a byproduct of language, but they don't have those embodied thoughts and feelings that Helen describes having before she had language. An entity like that has never existed before. We have conscious humans with language, and humans like Helen Keller pre-language who felt impulses, sensations, aping but not consciousness, but I don't think there has ever been a human with consciousness but without any impulse.
I wonder what we could do to marry that language ability to think about the self and others and abstract concepts and the big social web, with the sort of embodied spark & impulses that Helen describes. Would it be as simple as building a model physically embodied in a robot? Training a model on robotic sensory data from a body that it inhabits, then overwriting that training with language? I think a lot of this is navel-gazing in that it's obviously unrelated to any productive capabilities, but I do think it's worth thinking about. What if we can?
A LLM is not busy humming away, thinking on it's own. Their existence as it were is only in a pattern that is produced in response to an input. In that sense they are as alive as a choose your own adventure book. They seem to be a mere organ of an possible intelligence.
>A LLM is not busy humming away, thinking on it's own.
I know. Their thought happens at inference time and only at inference time. I don't view that as a serious challenge to their mental capacity because 1) it's not clear why being unable to think continuously is actually a disqualifying condition to consciousness and 2) it is trivial to engineer a system where an LLM is constantly in inference in an internal dialogue, negating the criticism in fact and not just theory. Current LLMs aren't optimised for that, but we already know they could be with Google's million+ context lengths plus doing something like running RAG on a library of summarised previous thoughts.
>They seem to be a mere organ of an possible intelligence.
That's totally possible, LLMs could end up being a complete AI's language centre. I subscribe to GWT and that was the box I initially put LLMs in. That said, I think there's good reason to believe (e.g. Toolformer and derivatives) that an LLM can perform the function of a selector in GWT, which would make it conscious. We should build it and find out.
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> A LLM is not busy humming away, thinking on it's own.
Let's Think Dot by Dot: Hidden Computation in Transformer Language Models https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.15758
A LLM will readily hum away, thinking on its own, if given the option.
> In that sense they are as alive as a choose your own adventure book.
Neatly put.
Sorry you’re being voted down, I think you make some interesting points.
I think LLMs miss a true feedback loop required for consciousness because their knowledge is fixed. Funny enough embodiment as a robot is one forcing function for a feedback loop and it’s not so crazy to think that the combination of the above is more likely to result in machine consciousness than LLM alone.
a robot body for sensory input + GPT4o + an SSD to store its own context + repeatedly calling the LLM solves the feedback loop issue, doesn’t it? Can’t it have expansive context via a large storage pool that it fully controls and can use to store and refine its own thoughts?
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I agree.
You might find this interesting - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40479388
A fascinating read, thank you for sharing. Helen’s journey was so unusual in that she neither heard nor saw language, so learning how she formed her inner consciousness through finger spelling was interesting.
She uses the word consciousness but she was clearly conscious beforehand, in terms of the definition: awareness of surroundings and knowledge. She was remarkably capable and had come up with untrained signs for wants and needs. She wasn't a blank canvas with no ability and no information.
Really what she is describing is the development of her self-consciousness, self-image, self-awareness, and awareness of the process of thinking within that, that comes from being introduced to language.
On the wikipedia page for her there is a quote:
I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten — a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that w-a-t-e-r meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. The living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, set it free!
It is as if what she's saying is that the loss of her sight and hearing locked her away from a dim sense of who she was before.
Most of us can't remember things from 19 months old as adults and likely wouldn't have been able to remember them at the age of seven. But she was locked away with sense memories of her 19-month-old experience of the world for all that time.
Her writing really is fascinating and eloquent. It brings to mind Harold Bloom's theory that Shakespeare essentially invented a terminology and model for describing our inner monologues.
It depresses me that there will now be a phalanx of motivated reasoners trying to shoehorn her story somewhere into their projections onto the current technological obsession.
Your comment reminded me a time during my childhood (age 4 to 7 or so) in which I did not have a strong concept of being a discrete person from my younger sister. At the time, we used to confuse our memories. We were never sure if we were remembering our own experience, or the other sister's recollection of her experience. It's like we were sharing one collective identity, until we were old enough to have formed stronger senses of self.
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> consciousness ... definition: awareness of surroundings and knowledge
A stone is conscious: when it's cold, its inner state reflects its surroundings. Abrasion marks is long term information: knowledge.
Consciousness does not have a good definition. It is something very specific in humans, compared to other animals. Language and spatial relation of time seem to play an important role.
What I was initially imagining was a complete lack on sensory information and was trying to image what type of mind would emerge from that.
Inside a sensory deprivation chamber I have experienced losing your sense of time, space has no meaning, therefore your mind just assumes that you take up all the space. But you don't keep spiraling down into unconsciousness only to awaken later. The mind eventually settles down and you are very much conscious except any concerns relating to your body and others quickly become distant memories of long forgotten dreams.
That's the reaction of a mind used to sensory input being cut off. How would a mind with not sensory input from the start evolve?. That would more closely resemble what Helen Keller first talks about about not knowing what she was. I'm both fascinated to know and terrified and hope I never do.
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This is similar to what happened to Eve and Adam when they ate from the tree of knowledge. Became self aware, aware of their nakedness. Man became aware of their vulnerabilities, death and so on.
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It’s quite interesting how these descriptions align with Buddhist or Zen teachings.
I wonder if she was influenced by it or if this is a rediscovery.
The fact that she associates a sensation of contraction in the forehead as thinking is very interesting.
Also the fact of there being no time or no will.
Although she goes further to conclude that she acquired will, instead of illusion of will or choice due to previously experiencing no will or choice.
How does Keller's state pre-language differ from "ego death" and what UG Krishmaurti described as the "natural state" (where there is no continuous thought as part of the control loop)? A lot of the symptoms seems to be superficially similar: timelessness, blurred boundaries between the self and the environment. This following lines in particular jump out at me.
>My dormant being had no idea of God or immortality, no fear of death.
Although one difference I suppose is that while Keller had no option at all of using the faculties of self-modeling enabled by language, UG Krishnamurti described it as something voluntary; clearly he could introspect if he desired to, but he could apparently relinquish this also.
> The fact that she associates a sensation of contraction in the forehead as thinking is very interesting.
Makes sense to me. A furrowed brow is a common trope of thinking hard about something, it'd make sense if the same happens on a smaller barely perceptible scale for other thoughts (supposedly this happens to our vocal chords when subvocalising in our heads). Something about focusing the senses when processing thoughts I would guess.
Blind people smile.
This is fascinating! Thanks. I am thinking about her state as being somewhat like a very intelligent entity without any time bases to use to integrate with the flow of the world.
Humberto Maturano makes the point that humans come into this world within an atemporal system (appendix of Autopoiesis: The Organization of the Living; 1980 ed, p 121-122, ISBN 90-277-1015-5).
This mystified me until reading these insights from the adult and “temporally-embedded” Helen Keller.
Now, and at great risk, we will soon be embedding our meta-LLM systems in time, and given their acquisition of sensory-motor self-control and recursive learning, like Helen Keller, they will quickly bootstrap themselves into our World Commons.
Welcome the new solid state children, a new form of autopoietic machine but potentially many orders of magnitude more capable than we are. I just hope they like and love flowers, birds, bees, humans, and ants.
There's a fascinating book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Man_Without_Words that goes into some detail about how the world feels before and after language.
It would be amazing to have some science related to this. Probably too hard to follow up on though.
Does Keller's experience suggest that awareness of a self is a prerequisite for abstract thought and an inner dialogue? If so, it's interesting that (based on my layman interpretation) many forms of mindful meditation are oriented around the idea that the self is an illusion and just an abstract thought itself.
EDIT: thinking about this more you can interpret this experience as evidence that some form of grounding in the outside is necessary for abstract thought. For Keller that had to be language since she didn't have sight and sound.
What a strange experience it must be to grow up capable of language but without it until someone teaches you. It's also interesting considering some people have an inner monologue/voice and some don't.
Oh and everybody knows the story of Helen Keller but it kinda stops there. Less known is she become a huge eugenicist [1]
[1]: https://dsq-sds.org/index.php/dsq/article/view/539/716
The article said she briefly became a eugenicist, like other political radicals of the time, before going back on it. Not the "gotcha" you think it is.
I think it's the bigger story that she was very left wing. I never learned that in school and was unaware of the fact until reading some of the articles she wrote for my union, the iww
I relate to this through my childhood. I had no inner voice, it was all images and feelings up until college woke my inner dialog. I always felt others knew better, and I became a people pleaser due to the lack of autonomy I felt.
It took one unimportant moment of standing up for myself that turned me from a yes follower, into a combative agreer. I had a series of nights where a puzzle appeared to be being solved in my mind, and an inner voice began to form.
Social interactions go much more smoothly when you can think before you speak in terms that others can understand when the words leave your lips.
Thanks for sharing.
I had the opposite experience. I always had such an intense 'inner monologue' that it dominated my experience of life. Outside of doing things that required all of my attention like playing games I never lived in the moment. It made social interaction difficult because I would always obsess over how to say things in the right way.
It took me until my 20s to learn how to relax it and not go over and over everything.
Your account seemed really alien to me when I read it, it's hard to believe people can have such a different experience of life. It's rarely discussed explicitly.
I do not mean to discount this interesting iota, however, I had a similar realization when I was 7; whether it coinciding with learning of the Copernicus principle is merit or raw luck notwithstanding, I saw my siblings as none other than another family in another house: all others would view me, and us, as neighbors, and we are all side-characters in each others story.
That thought is "sonder" - although it differs from what you describe, it has some parallels.
> when you can think before you speak in terms that others can understand when the words leave your lips.
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39714485 ; I had been surprised by how many HN'ers perceived "only uttering what one has had a chance to edit beforehand" as being more hindrance than help.
At this point I’ve reined it in to be a tool. When it formed, it was so useful it became my primary method of communication. As I’ve progressed, it’s now a part of my tool bag I can call on. I only learned English as a toddler, and it’s definitely my native language, but I came from having another native language first. I often wonder if that’s why my brain didn’t form an inner voice. I had to learn a new native language at a critical learning period, and I ended up somewhere half way.
What was the moment, if you don’t mind sharing?
Sure. It was at the end of the semester, filling in surveys for the class. I volunteered to submit the names to the office. All of the sheets were in the envelope, the total number submitted written on the sheet ready to send to the office. Then one student came back in a gave their sheet in. My two classmates left over asked me to scratch the old number and add one to it. I refused for no good reason, in the wrong from a process perspective. I didn’t change it and didn’t want to. After my classmates pushed, I still refused stating that it really didn’t matter.
I went ahead and submitted the envelope containing 23 sheets with the number 22 still written on it. I felt liberated. Like I said, unimportant, but a flip switched. It was like I learned that it was ok to make mistakes while making decisions, so I let this one by.
I often find myself thinking about people in the older reaches of history, and how by many accounts life seems to have been - by our modern definitions - a less “purposeful” existence.
One which, by modern standards, would seem to have little purpose.
The vast majority of people did not - as far as we know - exhibit significant ambition.
When the nearest town was a day’s walk then aspiration may not have been to be king of the world, or to colonise Mars, but simply to be respected by your peers, and to live a good live, and to thrive within the bounds of your generational knowledge.
The planting and harvesting of crops; the fattening and slaughter of beasts: the long slow winter. The bringing forth of children.
I cannot hope to describe adequately that unconscious, yet conscious time of nothingness. I did not know that I knew aught, or that I lived or acted or desired.
When life was simply to exist - and to survive, often against the odds - did people have the same desires and needs beyond survival that many of us have today? When your community memory went back 500 years to THE INCIDENT - or 10,000 years in the case of some aboriginal communities - how did that inform your perspective?
I had neither will nor intellect.
When your entire existence is about trying to interpret your existence, what impact do external forces have on your interpretation?
I was carried along to objects and acts by a certain blind natural impetus.
When there is very present inevitability of death that informs your existence then do you make the same choices that we make today? If you were on of five children that lived beyond the age of three and one of four adults who lived beyond the age of 40 then did your natural blind impetus (yes, I realise her ironic humour) carry you down n a different less directioned way than today’s first world luxury of long life and leisure?
I had a mind which caused me to feel anger, satisfaction, desire.
And when you had neither sight nor sound but a living mind, as Keller did, and then that was brought to modern consciousness, I can’t help but feel that her lived experience represents a fractional moment in time where she was able to live, but was part moored in a weird sort of primordial society rooted in death, and cycles and rote. And had she lived today she would never have had that endless period of semiconscious liminal isolated existence. Today, she would have been nurtured from birth. And 50 years before she would have died - or been murdered - in her earliest years.
And here we all are talking about artificial intelligence and pan-galactic garbleblasters barely a blink of an eye beyond her epoch.
It sometimes gives you pause for thought.
You might find this interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origin_of_Consciousness_in....
Very cool.
I happen to be with Sagan on this one, although these ideas certainly are not mutually exclusive; in fact they are complimentary.
Consciousness is an innate emergent phenomenon that happens when you combine basic memory/context, recall, the collective evolutionary unconscious, and so many magnitudes of neurons.
In fact, he even gives dogs (and to some degree, cats) the exactly same specific pedigree of obviously being self-aware/conscious, yet commanding the traits that align with the most basic tenants of "religion": your dog thinks you are a fucking god.
It was lost when people poisoned themselves with iron at the end of the bronze age, and it doesn't mean that people hallucinate. It means that the neocortex works, and does dimensionality reduction (like an autoencoder)
Reminds me of one of my earliest memories: eyes tight shut, crying, disturbed by the awful sound, wondering where it was coming from, unaware that it was me.
Oh yeah? Well I remember grabbing a slippery rope wondering what it was and then realized it was my umbilical cord.
"Don't be snarky."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
For those with whom this resonated, you may also like the writings of Jacques Lusseyran.
Some selections from his works can be heard here[0].
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bn4SHdeVz-o
His autobiography, And There Was Light, and a collection of talks, Against the Pollution of the I, are wonderful
This reminds me of dependent origination from Buddhism.
Very, very much so. And she is literally describing her existence before language as a state of pure craving, aversion, ignorance.
Wikipedia as usual has a nice write up - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prat%C4%ABtyasamutp%C4%81da
I find the Helen Keller story literally unbelievable. Like trying to use a computer without a keyboard or mouse.
Some people even say it is the fakest story they ever heard.
Helen Keller on life before verbal reasoning emerged.
Sounds great
Holy shit. If you are working in AI and haven't read this, what are you even doing with your life? Stop and read this now.
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Let's not go on a generic flamewar tangent please. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40479617.
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And if a woman had instead written in the generic feminine it wouldn’t flow well? And, if it didn’t, would that not highlight the absurdly oxymoronic idea of generic masculinity?
I'm just happy anytime I read an extended block of text in which the author doesn't switch back and forth between singular and plural pronouns when referring to one person.
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This hateful meme results from a desire to perceive people with disabilities as less than human. The "evidence" you suggest doesn't withstand a moment's scrutiny. I learned ASL in my youth and have had a few opportunities to chat with deaf blind people. To me, it should come as no surprise that they have quite unique insights about the world, and that they're often quite prolific communicators. It seems that a person would only resort to this "fraud" conclusion if they are unaware of the capabilities of the human mind, unfamiliar with the rich source of information from their largest sensory organ: their skin. Awake, human, and perceive your world.
Interesting question. I had a look at Wikipedia and quickly dispelled the thought:
Sullivan died in 1936. Keller went on to write several books after her death:
Let us have faith (1940), Doubleday, & Doran & co., inc. Teacher: Anne Sullivan Macy: a tribute by the foster-child of her mind. (1955), Doubleday (publisher) The open door (1957), Doubleday, 140pp The faith of Helen Keller (1967) Helen Keller: her socialist years, writings and speeches (1967)
> There was no output to speak of after Anne Sullivan died.
It looks like she wrote several books after 1936, including one about Anne Sullivan.
I have heard this theory before, as well.
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Hellen Keller was 7 years old when her teacher made a breakthough. I don't think she noticed anything about money.
this is a really sad comment on many levels... is it bait?
we can't say "When you don't have money, the only thing you can do is follow the trail of breadcrumbs left by the system. You don't have energy for anything except survival." a lot of people have no money and exist beyond "survival." honestly your comment makes me extremely angry.
what if we consider the revolutionary (LOL) idea of constructing our existences outside the system as to not rely on money for survival, but rather helping each other in the ways we need help as a form of exchange of resources... or perhaps people who have no money and instead define themselves in other ways...
> what if we consider the revolutionary (LOL) idea of constructing our existences outside the system as to not rely on money for survival, but rather helping each other in the ways we need help as a form of exchange of resources... or perhaps people who have no money and instead define themselves in other ways...
It's a great idea, but what if it requires (as it is) a level of motivation that cannot be reached without money?
The System is refined, it has withstood many challenges, and as it adapts to each one it becomes stronger. Challenges powered by little more than good intentions are no threat.
https://southerncrossreview.org/9/kleist.htm
"Heinrich von Kleist wrote his essay 'On the Marionette Theatre' in 1810. The calm statement of this work suggests a man firmly in control. A year later Kleist shot himself."
Very poignant, especially in our age of LLMs. LLMs “speak” with no tongue or mouth, and “hear” with no ears. It is very Masonic, in the sense that LLMs are in a state of unity with opposites.
Amazing article and comments! Makes me think we that we are using the world and our senses as a machine learning algorithm to understand things. I wonder what would happen if AI were given the same inputs?
I believe this is not real, but at least a partial fabrication, a propaganda piece meant to advocate for the goodness of schizophrenia. Without schizophrenia, when your neocortex works, things are clear and obvious, like the decision to close the window. When you encounter something new, you figure it out, without having to be drilled, trained, and explicitly educated and having to go through elaborate mental chains to get anywhere, and then geting lost somewhere along the way. It's just how things work, and it's how it is. I remember how I held a camera and I had just no idea what to do, and had to have it explained when I got it shut down. Never again. This is evil.