Comment by zoogeny
3 months ago
I've had an idea since I was a kid which I can share. I was contemplating AI and consciousness generally, probably around the time I read "The Minds I".
I reflected on the pop-psychology idea of consciousness and subconsciousness. I thought of each as an independent stream of tokens, like stream of consciousness poetry. But along the stream there were joining points between these two streams, points where the conscious stream was edited by the subconscious stream. You could think of the subconscious stream as performing CRUD like operations on the conscious stream. The conscious stream would act like a buffer of short-term memory while the subconscious stream would act like a buffer of long-term memory. Like, the subconscious has instructions related to long-term goals and the conscious stream has instructions related to short-term goals.
You can imagine perception as input being fed into the conscious stream and then edited by the subconscious stream before execution.
It seems entirely possible to actually implement this idea in this current day and age. I mean, it was a fever dream as a kid, but now it could be an experiment!
Conscious as subconscious pretending not to be sunconscious, something like that, a thin wrapper. Crud makes sense.
Gels closely to buddhism, hell, all religions.
Have you read Jaynes' "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind"?
I haven't read the original but I am familiar with the broad stroke view. There are similarities (perhaps vague) in the more recent work of someone like McGilchrist and his The Master and His Emissary (another book which I only have a broad stroke view of).
At the time I had this idea I did not know of either of these. I think I was drawing explicitly on the conscious / subconscious vocabulary.