Comment by nemomarx
6 days ago
I've always thought that the mechanisms there create the experience or the illusion of a continuous self or something in that direction. When you've experienced it breaking down (automatic actions happening before you remember deciding to do them is a big contributor to the floaty dream like effect) you start to think maybe there's several systems and the observation and memory parts are just making sense of them. We assemble a self by keeping those memories and experience in a very particular way.
Anil Seth calls the "hard problem" at best a distraction, or hand-waving to avoid answering what he calls the real problem: linking what we experience to the physical brain mechanisms.
In his theory, consciousness is a "controlled hallucination" about what is outside of us. Our senses serve to reinforce or correct the predictions our brains are making. (we have a serious latency issue)
You'll find he's saying a lot of the same things you just wrote.
Sounds also like Daniel Dennett.
Sadly he passed away. I enjoyed listening to him on Michael Shermer and Sean Carroll's podcasts back in the day.
What you may like are the debates on the 2014 Greenland Cruise. Dennett, Chalmers, Goff, Churchland, Prinz and other luminaries debating the "hard problem". The "roast" sessions where they dive into each others work is priceless and highly worth listening to.
Here's Dennett on Chalmers (standing next to him)
https://youtu.be/QX1MxkR3rtk?si=Scp2wrH3epK0figC&t=1674
There is a very good explanation here - not what brains do, but what brains MUST do. Can we walk left and right at the same time? Can we drink coffee before brewing it? No. There is a bottleneck, a serial action bottleneck on the body. So the parallel brain activity must serialize on the output channel. It has to, or face ruin. If action is serialized in time by physical necessity, then information processing must also unify before action in order to support it. We must act as one -> we must cognize as one -> or perish. There is no way to allow each limb to do its own thing, or the brain not to decide what comes next in a unified way.
I doubt your conclusion that unified action needs unified mentation. One may take unified action without achieving unity of the contents of the brain. Acting with instantaneous regret if you will, flying by the seat of your pants, etc. The brain seems to be able to let competing subsystems alternate getting expressed in action.
Not all brain activity is unified, I just claim it must unify on the output side - behavior and language.
But this is not a brain or organism only problem. Even a cell must unify in crucial moments such as division and chemotaxis. A cell either divides or not, no mid point. To persist it must unify at some moments in its activity, yet it is a distributed system of many parts.
The core principle here is - what is the unit of selection? the cell survives or not as a whole, the organism also survives or not as a whole, not organ by organ. Selection chooses the mechanisms that are viable.
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Can you state in plain terms what this actually means?
> There is no way to allow each limb to do its own thing, or the brain not to decide what comes next in a unified way.
This is of course not true. I’ve watched people trip over their own feet because the simultaneously tried to go both left and right. I’ve done it myself.
And this says nothing about consciousness. Most actions are not conscious.
> There is no way to allow each limb to do its own thing
I can pat my head and rub my belly at the same time.
If we're talking about consciousness then yes you can walk left/right at the same time. You can drink coffee before it's brewed.
There is no way to allow each limb to do its own thing
What? Why not?
It's physically possible in terms of limb motion. It's very difficult for most people to actually do, sure; but impossible?
or the brain not to decide what comes next in a unified way
There's the idea that a lot of the brain's "conscious decisions" are actually post-hoc rationalisations of unconscious decisions. If so, there's no reason those decisions have to be unified. Maybe the consciousness of the decision and its outcomes must be unified; maybe that's somehow connected to what consciousness really is. Or maybe not!
I don't think there's enough information to say.