When I used play soccer regularly, I'd occasionally experience being "in the zone". It's a blissful experience where my body is able to execute incredibly complex set of moves in perfect coordination as my mind enters a state of zen-like calm.
The sensation is almost like a being spectator in my own body. My brain feels like it's been relieved of the task of managing the moment-to-moment decision. Instead I start noticing moves 3, 4 steps ahead as time slows to a crawl around me. I don't know if this type of experience is related in any way to the theory of consciousness, but it feels like the unconscious mind holds a lot of secrets that I'd love to see unlocked in my lifetime.
It could just be that our unconscious minds minds are a lot more capable than we care to believe. It’s only when we let go and have faith in the unconscious mind do we see it.
I notice this with typing. I have no idea which finger hits which key on my keyboard. If I make a mistake and then consciously focus on the characters instead of the words my typing slows down and lacks fluidity.
If you believe in determinism then we are essentially just spectators of our own life. We just don’t realise it. We think that because we have made choices it was a possibility that other outcomes could have arisen. We don’t acknowledge that everything was always going to converge at this single point i.e everything was always going to be as it is now.
Another example is reading and language in general. You're parsing this statement dramatically faster than you would if you tried to actually consciously think about each word in this statement. And the really cool thing is that your subconscious pattern recognition is dynamic and robust. You can even fluently comprehend rndm abrvs adn tpyos wthot any efrt.
Speech is similar. By far one of the coolest little experiences you get when learning a foreign language (that's outside your language family) is when speech that is completely incomprehensible, as in you can't even make out words or separations, somehow one day just 'clicks' and becomes a series of mostly unknown but distinct and recognizable phonemes.
- In kindergarten we had to pack away the learning materials at the end of the year. I have a distinct memory of just shoving the little papers with words on them into the folder. I thought I was going to get into trouble for not doing it properly. I couldn't read the words and didn't understand which order the words and letters had to be in. The next year when I came back to school I could read.
- After living in Italy for a few months I was sitting in a car with the radio playing. All of a sudden I could understand what they were talking about on the radio without any visual cues. It was a breakdown of an economic report on employment that was performed by the government. The only word I knew before traveling to Italy was "ciao".
Trying to listen in on conversations on the bus/train in Rome was also interesting. Sometimes if the people were talking softly I couldn't tell if they were talking english or italian. My internal voice switched to Italian. Because I learnt italian verbally I had a local accent. I would observe the expression on peoples faces as I started reaching the limits of my abilities to communicate during a conversation. A Look of confusion would slowly take over until they remarked "oh.. your not from here". Even once I left Italy I would express reactive words like "stop!" "look out!" etc in italian not english.
I'd go even further: our conscious minds are a lot less capable than we care to believe. The vast majority of our actions are unconscious. Think of all the unconscious things that we are doing moment to moment, heart beating, breathing, thinking. Have you ever found yourself using the bathroom w/out having consciously decided to do so? How much of the day is stimulus->response w/out any conscious course correction?
Can I take it further? The line between unconscious and conscious is not black and white, it’s a gradient. “We” live way up in the narrative-making world, but there is plenty of conscious activity going on below that. Still tons of reasoning, logic, planning, just no (or less) self-reflection and story telling.
That’s why practicing a sport leads to improvement — those lower-level aspects of our consciousness get to practice and then the analytical mind gives feedback and direction, but when it comes time to really perform it is always better to stop the narrator and let those (still very conscious!) aspects do their thing.
In terms of actions I'd agree that the line between conscious volition and instinctual seems pretty blurry. But in terms of experience it seems like there's a pretty sharp line between conscious experiences and subliminal ones with stimuli just below a threshold acting very differently from stimuli crossing it.
As an example, people with Blindsight lose the ability to consciously access what they see but they don't lose the ability to see. They can still reach out and grab something in front of them but they can't tell you verbally it's there. And if they close their eyes they can't remember where it was and grab it based on that like most people can, information that doesn't reach the level of consciousness fades from the brain almost immediately but information that enters your consciousness can persist over time.
Who really believes in determinism these days? The people who believe that one day, should we have enough inputs we could make provable predictions about the behaviors of sentient beings? That AI will become fully conscious like a human?
I don't claim to be an expert in the area, but it seems that non-determinism in nature seems to rebut that possibility. At the subatomic level, to a systemic level.
Meanwhile the idea of a deterministic universe masked by a fake belief in in our own consciousness is something of a deeply pessimistic thought.
If we everything has been determined, and you are just an observer within this deterministic vessel, then there's absolutely no reason why ethics should have any consideration, among other problems.
I'll just settle on the existential dread that I've been making the wrong decisions...
I have the same experience... writing SQL code. When I'm programming, say in Python, I still see, in my mind, some manipulation of abstract concepts.
When I write SQL, it feels like the code pops in my consciousness magicallyfor me to lay down. This also means that I can very much explain and justify why I wrote Python code the way I wrote it, but I can't do that for SQL, I can just show that it works.
I am experienced in both, and I feel I write both with the same ease, I don't think it's due to me struggling with programming.
Well, metaphysics aside, SQL is declarative whereas Python is imperative. Imperative languages are a "show your work" kind of deal, mechanical. Declarative languages are more of a "trust the machine / trust the abstraction" expression of an abstract idea, so it's no real surprise that the feel of the act of programming is different.
> It could just be that our unconscious minds minds are a lot more capable than we care to believe. It’s only when we let go and have faith in the unconscious mind do we see it.
I notice this with typing. I have no idea which finger hits which key on my keyboard. If I make a mistake and then consciously focus on the characters instead of the words my typing slows down and lacks fluidity.
When you first learned to type, you did it consciously, again and again until a different part of the brain started to trigger the muscle movements. It's almost like returning to the awareness of the movements, opens up the programming process again and so the system slows.
The idea of sensory gating is very interesting, too. The structures of the brain that limit some of that input from the world - there is so much of it, it's overwhelming. The brain should focus on some of it at a time, within a sort of bandwidth limit, or it gets frazzled. A problem with this mechanism is said to be related to autism disorder. It's also possible to induce a reduction of this sensory gating process with psychedelics.
Benjamin Libet found that actions we believe to be volitional, intentional acts arise in the brain 500ms prior to the sensation of "deciding" to do them.
I'm not sure why you're being downvoted, but it may be that Libet's findings have been brought into question.
"people’s subjective experience of a decision—what Libet’s study seemed to suggest was just an illusion—appeared to match the actual moment their brains showed them making a decision."[1]
In short, Libet's findings may have been an experimental error related to noisy brain activity.
I had the same experience when I was competing in eSports. I played a very fast paced and unique first person shooter that required complex and perfectly timed button sequences to dodge and attack at the same time. The game sent packets p2p so you had to predict where your opponent was about to be based on your ping to them, the shot was a hit based on where the character was when the packet was received. I played at the highest level and while I was normally not as good as my opponents, I would go into a zen state like what you described where time seemed to slow, I could predict my opponents movement easily and land shot after shot. I would either be the mvp of my team if I could get into the zone or be a non factor if I couldn’t. I never could figure out how that worked but I do feel like “flow” when coding is similar.
I think what you're describing with your eSports experience _is_ 'flow' -- the same as you get when coding. It's a state of focus and immersion you can get into with many different activities, not just coding.
two types of flow. One is called absorbed flow and the other is
called panoramic flow. Absorbed flow is when you're doing a task,
like, minute tasks like taking apart a watch or something. And
you're so focused that you enter the world, and then you look up
and time has flown. All of a sudden, how did an hour go by?
Martial arts has a little of both, but in some ways, to do it, you
actually have to go into panoramic flow. You have to let go of
your mind. You have to trust that the training, the implicit
memories available of the actions, and the physical actions, and
then you have to trust that there's this way of organizing
information that's faster than thought. And by doing that, you
enter into a flow. And that's being done from this awake
consciousness. That's the functional feeling of that. And there in
itself, just like Csikszentmihalyi, who wrote the book on flow,
and gives these qualities of flow as that activity is in itself a
pleasure, that there's a loss of a sense of ego or self, sense of
timelessness, sense of connection to everything. And so that
state, you're doing that activity to find something that I'm
saying you can find anytime you want. […] Who, what level of mind
is it that can do martial arts at that level? That you that does
that, that's the awake consciousness.
There is also the feeling of being ahead of the flow and showboating like a tourist taking pictures with many "third eyes" on your model of the world as experienced from every angle at once. Kind of like Usain Bolt at one of the Olympics when he broke the world record the first time. Kind of like a window manager with many viewports open on the model.
It’s when we train our subconscious mind to simulate reality so well that it accurately stays ahead of what’s happening in real time.
A smaller example of this is reactively catching something that was knocked off a table and realising what you are doing in the moment without having triggering the reaction consciously.
I’ve had some noticeable success applying the ideas of The Inner Game of Tennis to Rocket League. If I’m in a decent mindset to begin with, I can usually get in the zone within a few rounds, and keep it going for a while. Problem is, I usually keep playing well past that point because it’s just fun, so I keep loosing any gains in rank.
It's interesting that Rocket League was brought up. I used to play RL a lot and every once in a while I physically felt like I was one with the car on the screen. Like my mind became the car. Everything felt more fluid. The jumps were precise and timely. The shots were accurate. It was an insane difference between my regular gameplay. I always wondered if professional gamers somehow end up mastering how to recall this behavior when competing.
Rocket League is one of my all time favorite games because of this feeling. Also echo your feelings on the rank grind. After awhile I made a rule for myself that I would quit playing ranked after a total of two losses in a session.
> curious to which fps this is? painkiller? ut? quake? reflex? diabotical?
Hah, that description kind of reminds me of Gunz, where some bugs in the game lead to players being able to climb walls, basically fly around and attack rapidly while moving.
Not that painkiller but eSport as pain killer worked for me. Can't sleep because of a teeth and no pain killer drug at home? Lap for an hour at some circuit on my PS and fall asleep at least a little bit. Then pay a visit to the dentist :-)
Maybe this is somewhat related to the subject of the post: detach consciousness from what I am doing and the pain gets a little detached too. However I doubt it would work with serious levels of pain.
It does, there is some very promessing studies on patient that suffer massive body burn ( most of their skin is gone )
The traditional approch is pain killers and some meditation.
VR helps a lot.
On two front : it distract your brain and it can teach you how to reach that distracted from the pain state by yourself.
My understanding is that a large pourcentage of the neurons are specialized in image processing. And that keeping those busy with exploring a VR world avoid to have those neurons re-assign to ponder about pain.
strafe jumping in quake is far from trivial also various weapon aided jumps are required to play at the highest level, ut also has its own dodge jump mechanics and shield jumps.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1MJPMl8B5Y
being unable to execute this during a match like a duel means being at a massive disadvantage.
example of good strafe jumping coupled with a plasma jump to secure map/item control and pressure the opponent on the back-foot.
https://youtu.be/GFTmYD95-cQ?t=1592
Compared to an RTS, yes. Compared to tactical shooters like CS, no. Once you reach a certain level of aim, movement and the associated mechanics become the main distinguishing factor along with using the sounds in the game to track your opponents position and conceal yours.
And I'm 95% confident that surf maps were one of the inspirations behind Titanfall. Here's a completely broken tool-assisted speedrun of the obstacle course: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXtggqe6oo0
I used to play sports professionally at junior level and I experienced what you described quite a few times. At that time, I did not understand it in any way, but it was clear to me that some sort of "trance" was happening under certain conditions, and I would basically fully focused on the game as if nothing else mattered or even existed.
The things that helped me reach that state were motivation, being under slept or slightly tired, being sick.
I didn't have the concept of "flow" at that time, but I remember noticing that flow in important games without having the concept of it. It almost feels like you have to reduce your active conscious thoughts in order to get there, and just allow your instincts to take over.
Other people have mentioned various other games, musical instruments, typing, etc.
Anything you've practiced sufficiently becomes like breathing or walking. You don't consciously think about these things, you've done them for so long they just happen. The memory of them is so embedded in you that you don't really have to actively work to recall it.
What we call "muscle memory". You've done some actions so often that the action stops being "Put a finger on this fret, pick this string, wait this long, now lift the fretting finger, ..." and becomes "play this song/scale/technique". The whole performance becomes a single action in your mind. It stops being "hit the keys W O R D" and becomes "type 'word'".
And then when you focus on it again, you start noticing the individual actions and you again have to think about every piece of the activity.
I think with you, it sounds like you needed something to lower your inhibitions a bit. Just enough to trust that you're going to do the thing. And normally, you don't trust yourself, so you focus on the steps of the action. It's why people say they perform better after getting slightly inebriated. They're no longer hindered by their inhibitions.
For me, it tends to happen more when I'm fully rested. My body feels like a well oiled machine, and my emotions seem fairly muted. It's a state of just "doing", with a sense of peace (neither especially happy, nor sad).
Replicating it tends to involve just getting on with the task at hand, without too much thinking about the end goal.
I have very similar experiences from partnered improvized dancing, my main style being the Argentine tango. For at least last 10 years, my aim has been to find obstacles that prevent me from experiencing such a state, and experiencing such a state has become more common.
I have used almost the same words to describe my experience: although I am the leader in the couple, and everything is improvized to the music, I feel like I am the spectator, and I feel the couple is moving like a single animal, one head and four legs.
Is it just the fact that you happened to be at the tail of your performance distribution? I used to play billiards regularly and on some days I would excel and surprise myself with how good I played. I then realized that the number of those days were roughly equal with the number of the days I surprised myself with how badly I played. Then I realized that my performance is a normal distribution and I stopped being surprised.
The interesting part here is that is about whole games, entire days if elevated performance, not just a few very lucky shots every game.
This means it's a state of mind / brain / CNS that can be entered and sustained for many hours. An ability to do that on demand, or at least predictably, would be of a huge practical interest. The ability to avoid the opposite, low-performance state, equally so.
My experience is that it is not possible enter such a flow state on demand. The state is beyond "my" control. There appears to be "a part" (not necessarily a physical part) of us that we think is "me" that wants to control, i.e. micromanage, and "on demand" means that this part would decide, i.e. able to control the flow state. However, the state seems to happen when this part lets go of the need to control things, and seems to disappear when this part tries to control things. The whole discussion is too long for here, but I recommend book Inner Game of Tennis for details.
I've played both billiards and soccer regularly and have experienced both sensations.
With billiards, when I'm "in the zone", it feels like the early stages of an out of body experience where my mind starts to feel slightly decoupled from my body and I know that my body knows what to do to make the shot. I can then "tune out" and trust my body.
With soccer, I'll be running at high speed and my mind knows I want to cut inside and nutmeg the defender (pass the ball throw a small gap in their legs and collect it on the other side). Then suddenly, it just happens. Something notices the tiny window of opportunity and just executes the move. The process of consciously analyzing the rapid feet movement, the speed of the ball, the field, the distance to the goal, the position of the other defenders, etc. is just too slow. This process feels faster and often I feel almost surprised that I just did it. After I collect the ball on the other side, things slow back down to normal speed and sometimes I'll laugh in disbelief.
If I had to explain the process of either to someone else, I'd struggle because it seems like a deeper, innate physical knowledge rather than something I can formulate and explain at an intellectual level.
In that sense, it feels similar to walking. You don't explain to someone how to walk, they just practice it over and over until they can do it without thinking. So, it's kind of like that but with more complex movements, plus the serotonin boost of accomplishing a goal.
"My brain feels like it's been relieved of the task ..."
Obviously an illusion, since your brain is doing the task. The "conscious" part of the brain is apparently unaware of most of what the brain is doing. I feel that way most of the time, actually, that I don't need to consciously micromanage everything that I'm doing, since the brain still gets it done in any case. I feel that way now while writing this sentence, I'm consciously just watching the words as they appear.
The thing I find fascinating about meditation is “observing” the consciousness. When I meditate and my mind is clear I can notice the moment a thought appears and that it arrived spontaneously without conscious effort. Like it was on a background thread or something.
Writing about those atypical experiences is quite difficult. It seems our language heavily assumes the default unmindful experience so doesn’t have precise ways to express the opposite.
In eastern traditions, this is called "wu wei," or non-doing. If you watch, your entire life lives itself without your involvement. The correct action emerges on its own. To the ego it can be unsettling at first. In the west we call this "flow."
According to Advaita, there is no separate self/person, except as an abstraction made out of identification with various phenomena that arise in the field of consciousness. Once you see this (LSD helps), it is immediately self-evident that this has always been the case. Think Decker at the end of Blade Runner realizing he's a replicant. The person ("you") realizes they have never been anything more than a collection of phenomena.
Accepting this enables one to sit back and rest as consciousness, observing without involvement as the person's life lives itself in a perpetual flow state.
Reminds me of the soccer player Platini. A journalist asked him how come he was so good while not being so strong physically, he replied that he saw what was going to happen a few seconds before others.
> My brain feels like it's been relieved of the task of managing the moment-to-moment decision. Instead I start noticing moves 3, 4 steps ahead as time slows to a crawl around me.
I think this is a common sensation to many who have trained playing an instrument enough. I get into that state every now and then when playing something on my guitar, it's like I can curiously observe my fingers pick out the melody I want to play, without thinking about or taking much conscious action in it.
this 100%. I have experienced flow as I watch with awe as my fingers move on the keyboard to play chords/keys that my conscious mind could not have conjoured up. I later stop and use my conscious mind to learn the new thing that `I` just played.
I've started reading books out loud in recent years. After a while I realized I could "read ahead", meaning my eyes didn't need to be on the word I was currently saying, but they could skip ahead several words, up to half a sentence.
It felt like the act of actually speaking had been relegated to a background task that was processing words from a queue, so my eyes and consciousness could operate further ahead in the text, while adding to that queue. It is actually really handy, to get a better flow and intonation, to have a bit of "lookahead" in the text.
I even realized I could start to think about the text I was reading, or even get distracted and think about other things (like I sometimes do if I'm reading silently) all the while continuing to read out loud. It's really interesting when you explicitly notice a task being moved from the conscious to unconscious part of your brain.
> even get distracted and think about other things (like I sometimes do if I'm reading silently) all the while continuing to read out loud
I used to read the Harry Potter series to my kids at night and definitely experienced this. The kids would ask a question and I'd realize that I needed to re-read the part I just read aloud because I was thinking about something else and couldn't remember what I had just read.
I have this experience sometimes when presenting for work. I do the presentation, interact with the audience, answer tough questions and at the end I don't really remember anything of it. I will have to ask others how I did, because it's mostly a blur.
Conscious experience involves will to action and sensation. It is highly hierarchical: for instance, humans can deliberately move individual fingers (low level) or play a sonata (high level).
When we let go of low level control and pursue higher level intentions, our subconscious mind is freed to participate in a vast array of hierarchical loops of sensation and action. Symbolic verbal control is powerful, but only subconscious flow can yield the precision of high level skilled performance. It is more like an attunement of oscillators than an execution of a (symbolic) program.
It's curious to me why "the zone" or "flow" is always associated with particular expertise in skills like athletics or music or even programming when it could just as well be in walking, something 99.99% of the population are experts in. Maybe there was a point in forgotten infant/toddler memory overjoyed with being able to move from point to point subconciously, but now the bliss is replaced by sheer repetitve routine.
Little kids absolutely love learning to walk, you can see it in their faces and their behavior. When they start walking, they are so excited and happy to do it.
After a certain point, performing a complex task subconsciously becomes routine and one needs to sort of “level up” to a more difficult version to notice the flow state. The subjective experience is that the activity “slows down” and feels easier, allowing your conscious mind to wander.
You see this even within sports, where the best athletes need the biggest races / competitions / events in order to feel the same way they did when they were younger learning the sport. The best surfers seek out the biggest waves, or the hardest moves, or both.
I suspect "flow" necessarily demands intense focus, so mundane tasks can't lead to a flow state. Focus is probably the wrong word since that suggests conscious control, whereas most flow seems to relegate consciousness to the role of observer. Two things seem to occur: intensity of subconscious processing, with an absence/minimisation of conscious processing. The task itself is important too, it has to be "important", typically something that requires a lot of practice with the goal of improved performance.
I'm a street photographer and absolutely get into a flow state when I'm out on a long photo walk. Even if I'm not finding the light I need and barely talking pictures I reach a state where I notice everything effortlessly and time slows just walking down the street. You become part of the rhythm of the city.
You might have a point about flow state from simple routine. It's relatively hard to get into a flow while programming but it's easy while in the shower.
I cannot find it...a great article on how elite athletes, actors, racing car drivers, have an a bility 'slow down time', in order to foresee, calculate and perform complex tasks.
Your comment confirms 'it exists'.
I think i get it a bit when I'm on my bike in dense town centre traffic (europe) and having to cross lanes/ roundabouts in front of cars.
“… is the mental state in which a person performing some activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity.”
Interesting. This sounds like how our brain relegates tasks it has "learned" to the subconscious. Same thing happens with riding a bicycle or driving a car. At first you need to really focus but over time you don't need to think about it
Had noticed something similar in a couple of car crashes, time slows to a crawl, I was hyper aware, I could observe things happening, dreading the outcome, but I didn't have control to act quickly enough to avert it.
I had the experience you describe once when I was practicing diving. I was focusing on keeping my eyes open upon impact. It was truly a blissful experience I’ll never forget.
I get this situation, not in sports, but in emergency situations, like data center outages or the actually should have been scary but wasn't in-air emergencies (like engine failures - while I am the pilot). I always explain it like, time just slows down, and you know exactly what to do, like a yellow brick road leading you the right way. Neat to hear that others experience it too.
There's a great book describing how to get into that state, and explaining how that state is the key to success. Just read it last week and can recommend.
I used to play basketball, and I remember having similar "zone" experiences. It was like a combination of time slowing down, and me knowing with absolute certainty what move I was going to make and that whatever shot I would take was going to fall. The observing myself from the outside feeling was very real.
An interesting deal with this from my personal experience (which matches yours)...it was often "contagious"...at least with shooting. If one guy was cold sometimes everyone was, and obviously the opposite if he's hot. Momentum is a fascinating concept in sports. Now I watch team sports on television instead of playing them. Announcers will talk about momentum as if it's a law of physics. It's universally accepted to be "a thing"...but what is that thing?
What's interesting is sometimes it's also not "contagious". And how much of that is placebo? All of it? Probably but any actual thinking about it is usually only at the sub-conscious level. Except sometimes the coach or bench brings it up and then it's not.
The psychology of sports is endlessly fascinating.
Many people experience this when in an altered state (high or drunk).
I can remember effortlessly performing inhuman acts of precision when in an altered state that amazed bystanders. It did not last very long.
I'm pretty sure consciousness is multi-layer and not just memory.
> but it feels like the unconscious mind holds a lot of secrets that I'd love to see unlocked in my lifetime.
As in, through a peer-reviewed research paper? Probably not the shortest path to learning to communicate with the subconscious. You mentioned Zen, maybe start there?
You may already be familiar, but you might find Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's book "Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience" an interesting read. He studies this exact phenomenon.
This isn’t flow. I have it all the time when I think about some physical activity. My brain plans ahead and sends signals too early and messes up. This is oposite of flow.
As Bruce Lee said in the movie: „Do not think, feel”
There's a rumored experiment called the "precognitive carousel", supposedly run by Grey Walter, where:
(1) Subjects are told to push a button to advance a slide projector carousel, but not told that the button is inert
(2) The carousel advances based on electrical signals measured by wires on the subjects' scalp.
(3) Subjects supposedly report the uncanny feeling that the projector advances "just before" they were about to push the button -- 300-400 milliseconds before, a pretty long time.
I read about this a long time ago in a since-deleted post on an old timey internet forum (everything2).
The writer suggested this research supports the idea that your body chooses what to do, then informs your brain, and your consciousness convinces itself that has decided to do what the body is about to do on its own.
The experiment you describe reminds me of a short story "What's expected of us" by my favorite author Ted Chiang. [0]
I won't spoil it too much because it's a fun short read, but it revolves around these little toys called "Predictors" which have a light that turns on exactly 1 second BEFORE you push the button. (no matter what you do to try to game it)
Oh, he’s also the author of one of my favorite short stories, “The Great Silence”[0]
Ironically, the endangered species[1] the narrator belongs to has managed to outlive the giant human object discussed, but it’s still at high risk of being wiped out in the wild the next time a hurricane hits Puerto Rico.
BF Skinner would have said: There is only behavior. Behavior is shaped by the environment. Thinking, speaking, and explaining are nothing but a special kind of behavior. Thus it is perfectly possible to be proficient at walking down stairs without being able to explain how exactly it is that you are doing it. In the same way, someone might be very proficient at explaining how to play tennis, without actually being able to hit a ball. these are just two very different kinds of behavior.
I find your comment suprising. If by "explain" you mean "being able to control and predict", I would say that Skinner explains a helluvalot of the modern world, doesn't he? Facebook, Twitter, and even Hacker News work on positive reinforcement. One could argue that this has become one of the most dominant forces in our culture, spanning from advertising to politics.
I get that Skinner stopped being "cool" in the 70s when Chomsky et al appeared. But I have yet to see a Chomsky train a pigeon to play ping pong.
How do you think he was wrong? What model do you believe explains things better?
I don't see how Skinner could be wrong unless you reject materialism. Everything reduces to the behaviour of particles in the end. Of course it's possible that behaviour is not an effective way to model and study human beings, just like using particle physics is not an effective way to study English literature, but there's little doubt that English literature reduces to particle physics in the end.
Sure, if you stretch the meaning of "behavior" far enough, that quote is true because it becomes a tautology.
However, Skinner had some pretty specific ideas about what "behavior" meant and probably wouldn't have included stuff like playing a chess game against oneself in one's head.
Or alternatively, the brain-body system isn't strictly a top-down hierarchy for decision making but a complex interconnected web of impulses and feedback loops. I remember hearing, for example, that making a smile can make a person feel happier (even though the subject is aware they are just making a happy face).
Or in this particular case, perhaps the feeling of "deciding to press the button" is in fact the brain confirming that the muscles in the fingers have responded appropriately to the impulse provided, and sending out the appropriate messages?
Still, isn’t the point that this clearly demonstrates that the system directly causing the physical movement is not the same system you identify as your “self”? That still seems profound, at least for anyone who places a lot of importance on that feeling of identity.
Two possibilities - 1 - we take actions that are preconscious and reactive, and add consistency in later post hoc explanations.
Or 2 - the conscious reflective self is more like a saccade of attention moving between various systems operating according to its overall supervision.
I think two makes much more sense, since we don't observe the actions of others to be random or inconsistent (in ordinary circumstances), no matter how quickly they're responding. If George is on edge, and we throw a ball at George, George will do what he generally does - flinch, react with anger etc. George won't catch the ball perfectly in contrast with his emotional state. If Sue sees a famous criminal on the street, Sue will generally react as Sue would be expected to based on her priors - scream, run, freeze etc. Sue is unlikely to smile and raise her hand for a shake. Circumstances where we and others deviate from the 'reasonable' instantaneous response are rare, comical and associated with inattention, distraction or visceral symptoms (like illness). Therefore either we presuppose another personality operating at a preconscious level - or we are queuing classes of responses that make sense on some general level, even if they occur too fast for linguistic reflection or 'conscious' perception.
The language example in the comment above is a great reflection of this. We are able to carry out coherent, situationally appropriate conversation including symbolic reasoning. So I'm not sure what kind of conditioned mechanism or second personality is supposed to be responsible if consciousness is eliminated.
Sure, it could be one of those possibilities, or maybe other options neither of us have thought of. But still, the point is that the feeling of identity is apparently mistaken. Many people apparently have the strong conviction that the conscious agent they identify as their self is identical to the agent that controls many or all physical actions their body takes (or certainly at least deliberate actions like pressing a button). The point is that conviction appears to be mistaken.
Identity is a notoriously difficult concept to pin down. While awareness has deep tie ins to our sense of identity, I don't think it is a given that our whole self or identity is comprised solely of our conscious experiences.
My self is whatever is making decisions. If some scientist somewhere chops words and slices definitions and does some measurements and declares that my "self" isn't what is "making decisions", then they've been misled by bad philosophy into making stupid statements. And I use the word "stupid" carefully.
I am completely unfazed by the fact that what I intuitively thought the process might have been isn't the real process. The entire history of science from start to finish has been the unrelenting story of taking a closer look at something than we ever have before, and being surprised by what we found. The exceptions to that, such as predicting antimatter or the Higg's boson, are notable stories precisely because they are exceptions. Nevertheless, those surprises never negate our previous experiences. They reveal unexpected sources and surprising nuances, but the fact that we were surprised by where our higher-level concepts came from reveal that our previous understanding was in error, not the higher level concepts. Water has been wet for the whole of human experience, no matter whether it was its own element, or a essence, or a composition of atoms, or a pattern of fluctuations in quantum fields, or whatever the final Grand Unified Theory might declare it "really" is. Our understanding of water has been greatly enhanced by those advances, but it remains wet.
Nevertheless, my self is whatever is making decisions. The only way to break me off that definition would be to remove the entire "making decisions" part, which gets into its own philosophical thicket. Even in a fully deterministic universe I may still be "making decisions", despite popular belief to the contrary; one must simply be more careful about the definition of "making decisions" but meaningful definitions can still be produced.
There's a very long history of this sort of word chopping. Declaring this or that thing an "illusion" simply because it isn't exactly what we thought it was, or because it turns out not to be an atomic object of its own in the universe (hardly surprising since the only atomic things that seem to actually exist in this universe aren't very philosophically exciting, like quarks and electrons) is one very common tell, but it's not the only one. Consciousness gets a lot of stories like this where someone tries to manipulate words to "reveal" conscious experience is some sort of fake or something, but amazingly, not a single one of them has affected my own personal conscious experience. Per Descartes, as the existence of my own conscious experience is arguably the single thing I have the most confidence about, arguably the only thing I am 100% certain of, I find myself rather unimpressed with attempts to deny it. The fact that a certain subset of scientists are perturbed by their inability to wrap numbers around it is their problem, not mine. They are welcome to try to explain it; any attempts they make to explain it away can be discarded without further examination.
> My self is whatever is making decisions. If some scientist somewhere chops words and slices definitions and does some measurements and declares that my "self" isn't what is "making decisions", then they've been misled by bad philosophy into making stupid statements. And I use the word "stupid" carefully.
I think you’re missing the point. If you just define away “self” as whatever turns out to be making decisions, then sure, you can claim to never be surprised by anything. If we literally discovered that all your decisions are being made by a physical computer in a laboratory and instructions are sent to your body with radio waves, you could just say “well that’s what my ‘self’ is by definition, so this isn’t surprising at all.”
No, that is my point, and you are correct. Discovering that things didn't work the way you thought are not a challenge to the fact that I am conscious.
Of course, when I phrase it so baldly, you might be inclined to say "Well, of course", in which I would suggest, apparently you are agreeing with me. But this slight-of-hand occurs a lot, when you aren't so clear with the statements.
This is only a challenge to "anyone who places a lot of importance on that feeling of identity" if they placed all their importance on secondary opinions of what that identity is. Don't do that. Your identity should not be tied up in "I'm a conscious being because my neurons in my hemidimi cortex fires and directs my globocampus to plan how to start moving my finger", because then you have an identity crisis when it turns out "hemidimi" and "globocampus" are just made up concepts with no referents in reality. But there's a lot of people who will get very excited or try to get you very excited when it turns out they disprove the existence of hemidimis and globocampuses and declare this is all deep and profound and stuff. It's not. It was an error in the identity, that's all, but you're still a conscious being.
So, yes, I'm disagreeing. This isn't profound at all.
Or at least, it shouldn't be, if you aren't making fundamental category errors, if not outright reveling in fuzziness and uncertainty.
The thing is, if nothing you learn about reality can possibly cause you to change your mind about how you describe the nature of yourself, then your description of yourself doesn't seem very useful. If your claims like "I am conscious," "I have free will," etc. are compatible with all realities, then the claims don't really seem to have any epistemological status whatsoever.
I've always disliked this interpretation of the data. All it suggests is the real system responsible is deeper that we currently think. Not that you are an illusion or whatever
This reminds me of an article that talks about how sensory consciousness comes too late for conscious responses and how that might be 'rescued' by some yet to be proven quantum effects.
I've linked it below, but here's a snippet from it that talks about the ms delay:
Neural correlates of conscious perception occur 150–500 ms after impingement on our sense organs, apparently too late for causal efficacy in seemingly conscious perceptions and willful actions, often initiated or completed within 100 ms after sensory impingement. Velmans (1991, 2000) listed a number of examples: analysis of sensory inputs and their emotional content, phonological, and semantic analysis of heard speech and preparation of one's own spoken words and sentences, learning and formation of memories, and choice, planning and execution of voluntary acts. Consequently, the subjective feeling of conscious control of these behaviors is deemed illusory (Dennett, 1991; Wegner, 2002).
In speech, evoked potentials (EPs) indicating conscious word recognition occur about 400 ms after auditory input, however semantic meaning is appreciated (and response initiated) after only 200 ms. As Velmans points out, only two phonemes are heard by 200 ms, and an average of 87 words share their first two phonemes. Even when contextual effects are considered, semantic processing and initiation of response occur before conscious recognition (Van Petten et al., 1999).
Gray (2004) observes that in tennis “The speed of the ball after a serve is so great, and the distance over which it has to travel so short, that the player who receives the serve must strike it back before he has had time consciously to see the ball leave the server's racket. Conscious awareness comes too late to affect his stroke.” McCrone (1999): “[for] tennis players … facing a fast serve … even if awareness were actually instant, it would still not be fast enough ….” Nonetheless tennis players claim to see the ball consciously before they attempt to return it.
I think it's much more likely that we're measuring the wrong thing than it is that quantum effects allow us to react faster than our neutral circuitry.
I'm confused about the conclusion. The way you laid it out, it seems that it could well just be electric signals from the conscious mind triggering the carousel. In which case the experiment would just show that the conscious thought happens first and the body movement after. The subjective experience of it being just before they were going to press the button, could just be explained by a correct built in assumption that every action takes some time
Yes, that's exactly what it sounds like to me. They have "decided" to press the button, but the body hasn't yet followed the instruction. This situation will of course feel weird and unusual, but I don't think it says anything about consciousness being an illusion, whatever that might even mean.
This just isn't the right interpretation. How can you have made a conscious choice before you were aware you made it. In another similar experiment the subjects were told to choose one of two buttons to press and to take note of when they had decided. In all cases the experimenters were able to not only know when the decision was made, well before the subject noted they had decided, but also could predict what button they would press with some accuracy.
In the interview, he describes an experiment he did on himself. When he put a strong magnet on a certain spot on his head, his foot would turn outward. He was able to do this in a stable manner.
Then he repeated the experiment, but decided beforehand that he will turn his foot inward instead. When they did the experiment, his foot still turned outward. His assistant asked "what happened?" and Rodolfo Llinas said "I changed my mind". They repeated the experiment many times, and each time he changed his mind.
From this he concluded that he cannot differentiate when he decides to do something or when his body decides to do it, they both feel to him like he decided to do it.
> From this he concluded that he cannot differentiate when he decides to do something or when his body decides to do it, they both feel to him like he decided to do it.
Which arguably disproves mind-body dualism. "You" are your whole body, not a disconnected consciousness trapped in a physical form.
Well all decisions ARE made in the brain, conscious or not, and whatever consciousness is, it resides in those neurons. That is also influenced by various inputs of the rest of the body, of course, but I think we can safely assume "self" exists in the brain. Thinking it reversely, can we really say an organism with various complex parts but no brain has consciousness?
You are not a disconnected consciousness, but some body parts are more easily discarded than others, and I think the brain tops most (all?) of the others regarding survivability - and is irreplaceable regarding the "self".
How can we be certain that the consciousness is in the head-brain? For example, there are 100M neuro cells in the stomach. We also talk about making decisions based on "gut feeling". I am not saying it is any kind of proof, but hints that this saying might be based on physical experience about gut being involved in the decision making. Also, meditation traditions talk about various body parts having various kind of impact on the consciousness, stomach being one of them.
Another interesting example is the octopus. If you cut a tentacle off from the octopus, the tentacle sometimes still continues to feed the head of the octopus. So the tentacle appears to have a "brain".
This in the original paper to which the singularity hub article refers.
> “They reported that just as they were ‘about to’ push the button, but before they had actually decided to do so, the projector would advance the slide—and they would find themselves pressing the button with the worry that it was going to advance the slide twice!” The commonsense view of consciousness tells us that the conscious decision to act precedes and causes the action itself. How do we explain this strange phenomenon in which motor actions occur before the conscious decisions to take these actions? How could the effect precede the cause? What advanced the slides was actually a signal from the implanted electrodes.
> The commonsense view of consciousness tells us that the conscious decision to act precedes and causes the action itself.
I don't get it. The effect (the advancing of the slide) doesn't precede the cause (you deciding to advance it). The thing here is only that they dispensed with the middle step of physically pushing the button.
What you’re not getting is the conscious part of “conscious decision”. The brain makes the decision BEFORE the consciousness is aware of it. But that’s not how we think we decide stuff; the experience we have is that we consciously choose to do something. The experiment shows that decision is actually made by the unconscious part of the mind, and the consciousness is only made aware of it later, while still believing it was in control the entire time.
> "They reported that just as they were ‘about to’ push the button, but before they had actually decided to do so"
It seems to me it's just a matter of definition. Clearly it was a conscious decision, since they are able to talk about it. They even say they were "just about to push the button". The only confusion is that they also claim they hadn't "decided" to do so. So clearly there is no issue with the "conscious" part, but perhaps some confusion about what constitutes a "decision"?
I mean, what does it mean to be "about to push", if not that they had in fact decided to?
I've always felt to an extent that conscious actions can be at some level impulsive - any attempt to explain how we made the decision to act, no matter how well-founded and seemingly logical, invariably involves some post-hoc rationalization. That said, I also feel that they are still conscious decisions. Taking action just seems to me divorced from the process of explaining "why", which we frequently might not even get right or necessarily understand, sometimes only making sense of it later.
Our brains are already known to lie to themselves to make things appear synchronous that aren't actually synchronous. For example, syncing sound in a TV broadcast makes use of this. And I believe it's the same story with limb motion and tactile feedback. If you touch your finger, then it seems to feel like you touched it immediately despite this feeling requiring some time to work its way to your brain.
One interpretation of the experiment is that your unconscious brain decides to push the button and then tells your conscious brain to make up a story about how it was the one who made the decision.
Another interpretation of the experiment is that your conscious brain decides to push the button, but then your unconscious brain messes with your conscious brain's perception of time such that you'll believe that the button press is happening simultaneously to when you make the decision. The end result being that you "feel" like the slide changes happens before you decide to do it.
But they're saying they "were about to push the button". That sounds like they were at least very close to making the final decision. And clearly "aware".
> What you’re not getting is the conscious part of “conscious decision”. The brain makes the decision BEFORE the consciousness is aware of it.
All "conscious" decisions necessarily have to be made by unconscious processes in the brain, because consciousness itself is a result of unconscious processes. Every conscious decision is thus made by unconscious processes. How could it be any other way?
However, people mistakenly take this experiment to mean that we don't actually have conscious control of our actions. That's incorrect. Think of conscious decision making like a two step algorithm, "conscious" decision making by unconscious processes + store decision in short-term memory = conscious awareness (this is one possible model, not necessarily the model). If the system in the experiment can read the output of the decision making step faster than it gets stored in our memory, then it will produce the results described.
>However, people mistakenly take this experiment to mean that we don't actually have conscious control of our actions.
This is incorrect. Libertarian Free Will, the type you seem to think humans have is an illusion and does not mesh with reality. No serious Neuroscientists or Philosophers of Mind believe it exists.
Note: this has nothing to with the political bent of Libertarianism.
The point isn't to break causality or to make you doubt your own agency.
However, this also isn't just taking out the middle step. If it were, the advance of the slider would feel like it happened instantaneously as soon as we are aware of making the choice consciously. This is showing that our conscious awareness of making a choice lags the choice actually being made at a level we are not conscious of.
> Subjects supposedly report the uncanny feeling that the projector advances "just before" they were about to push the button -- 300-400 milliseconds before, a pretty long time.
There's a delay between your signal to move a muscle, and the movement of the muscle, but that is a discrepancy our brains tend to edit out of the experience. It's more noticeable with the legs where the signal needs to move farther.
But if you tell your foot to curl its toes, there's like a quarter second delay that if you aren't paying very close attention to things feels like you're immediately moving the toes, even though that's clearly not it.
Somewhat related, I read a while ago (there's even a book on this topic, can't recall the title) that our brain/mind is a hypothesis testing machine. i.e., it expects the world to be in a certain way and ask our body to act accordingly and if the hypothesis turns out to be false then it'll act surprised.
The converse of it was quite interesting. If you force your body to behave a certain way then corresponding emotion will follow. Example; forcing your face to smile will lead to happy feeling. Goes to show mind-body connection is way stronger than what we imagine it to be.
I heard something similar and I’ve always wondered if it was true.
In patients who have had the two hemispheres of their brain disconnected, two distinct consciousnesses become apparent. They perceive differently and have different capabilities. I think the theory was there in each of us are multiple consciousnesses and our experience of reality is the result of consensus among them.
The body should take instructions tough. Reacting quickly to somebody's else actions (a ping pong match, a very contested overtake in motorsport) can be totally unconscious but we must have consciously decided at least the general way of performing those activities: the guy on the car ahead suddenly steers left so I'm feinting right than go left again. Or fencing, or riding a horse in a race. Training could prepare the body to handle any action on autopilot but consciousness has a short leash on it.
> that your body chooses what to do, then informs your brain, and your consciousness convinces itself that has decided to do what the body is about to do on its own.
More like your subconscious is making decisions, talking with your mouth, moving your hands, etc... Then you have your consciousness (your "real" self). The subconscious makes him feel and think like he is in control so he (you, your "real" self) doesn't freak out.
But he (the subconscious guy) has the real power and control.
I think the biggest reason I disagree with that is from the experience of extensive music training. I can play instruments almost automatically, and think about other stuff while playing now. But it took years and years of careful, conscious work to train my subconscious and muscles and hands to be able to do that...
While you can develop actions and skills to the point where you can do them without needing almost any conscious input, it just seems ridiculous to say there's no control from the conscious part of the mind and it's just an illusion...
That doesn’t seem to contradict the first explanation. It’s not surprising that your subconscious mind could acquire abilities due to practice initiated by your conscious mind, just like it’s not surprising that your muscles can grow due to exercise initiated by your conscious mind.
You are missing the radical claim being made here. Your conscious mind only discovers you are playing an instrument by observing that you are doing it.
Yeah, that much of the conscious work is while actually sitting down and playing was kinda implied (some is theory though but mostly while physically practicing).
You presume that subconsciousness is something unified and, hm, intelligent. While in reality it seems to be a complex collection of more or less elaborate procedures that were learned partly under supervision of consciousness. Moreover, consciousness (that is you) has veto power (there's research on that). If you predict that your "subconscious guy" will do some dumb thing (like flipping light switch during blackout), you can override it and with enough overrides "the guy" will learn to be a bit less dumb (the procedure will be adjusted to take more context into account).
Of course, "you" isn't magic, it's just another procedure, but it has potential access to the entirety of stored knowledge (including knowledge about procedures that weren't yet internalized into subconsciousness).
Most people do not really believe that the subconscious impacts our decisions. They may even theoretically say they do, but in practice their executive function believes it decided the decisions that were really done subconsciously.
Ironically, if you believe that you are making the decisions, you cannot override them, and then you are actually not making the decisions.
The key to free will is to really understand that you do not have it.
I don't see anything actionable in "you have no free will" statement to care to deeply internalize it. Regardless of a flavor of "free will" interpretation.
It is a good idea anyway not to internalize such a fundamental idea based on comments by a random person on the internet, regardless of whether it is actionable or not.
It just appeared to me that this question is something that interests you, so I wanted to point you to a direction that I have found helpful.
The general process, which appears to be common to various approaches, is to practice specific kind of meditation long enough that you start to see your automatic reactions to the sub-consciously made decisions to slow down, so you are in a way creating room for something before the immediate reaction, and then you can verify the truth in what I describe by yourself. So there is no need to believe what I say or nothing directly actionable that I can transmit through this medium that would be helpful to you.
Few books I have found interesting on the subject:
Gallwey: Inner Game of Tennis, Ouspensky: In Search of the Miraculous, Nicoll: Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky
Presuming that the subconscious isn’t all there is and the “conscious” mind isn’t just an illusion created by all the subconscious processes.
It would be interesting to see experiments that try to pry back the lid a bit on the line between conscious and the subconscious and the communication therein.
That makes me think, if consciousness is an illusion of the subconscious, then what's the difference in terms of outward effect on the world? We're all philosophical zombies then technically since consciousness in this scenario doesn't exist.
I have long suspected that the feeling of struggling with math is the feeling of not closely riding the coattails of the unconscious mind, sort of the opposite of flow. When attempting something challenging for the first time, the intuition isn't developed yet and choices that aren't deliberately reasoned at some higher level are inevitably wrong. It takes a long time to train intuition and math is unforgiving about immediately telling people theyre wrong compared to most areas of thought.
> The writer suggested this research supports the idea that your body chooses what to do, then informs your brain, and your consciousness convinces itself that has decided to do what the body is about to do on its own.
Surely it equally supports the less controversial 'your brain signals [as measured] the body to do something [push the button]'? How does it support adding 'your body signals the brain' to the front of that (roughly)?
for example, your inner voice could simply have some lag from the processing loop where you first need to perceive your inner voice which is a process that takes time, just like perceiving anything else.
another example, your inner voice or however you experience your own consciousness could be a sort of separate process that just 1:1 outputs what your consciousness produces, but as a separate process just takes some time.
I wonder if this is related to the idea of persistent non-symbolic experience[1]. Where the latter is the conscious perception of the "precognitive carousel" and its consequences.
this sounds like you are aware the button isnt doing it and perceive there is some other mechanism, but you cant explain it? the writers conclusion doesnt seem to follow...
Now I'll throw out another completely unprovable thought...
Perhaps consciousness has the ability to affect how wavefunction collapse occurs, perhaps it even has the ability to influence the observed outcome.
I'm not going to try to prove these two ideas but together they can help form an idea that perhaps observations on the past actually influence the past and perhaps despite this 'observation after the fact' there's still free will.
It's not provable but then neither is the "there's no such thing as free will" arguments that this sort of research leads to. The point of the above is to highlight that there's still a way out for free will.
Quantum unconsciousness is attractive under the concept "what if all the things we don't understand are actually one thing", but there's a lot of unknowns out there and they don't all have the same door.
Right. I don't think you need to drop down to the level of quantum physics and neurology for this - I feel that economics invalidates free will just fine on its own.
After all, the supposedly free-willed humans aren't behaving randomly - they're making choices they see as beneficial to themselves (or "good" under their system of values). Meanwhile, economics as a field is all about predicting what choices people make facing specific situations, in order to force people to make specific choices by engineering situations they face. At scale, it works spectacularly well, but even at an individual level, it's just a matter of tailoring manipulation.
One may counter: "I have free will, therefore I can choose not to follow the incentives" - but you are going to follow the incentives anyway, that's literally the definition of what they are. Kryptonite to free will. The thing that allows me to predict what the free-willed you will chose - with perfect accuracy in the theoretical limit. So what's the meaning of free will if people can be made to behave deterministically?
In fact, that's what society is about. That's what civilization is about. Making people behave deterministically to a good approximation. That is, making people predictable to each other. The people who, by their "free will", choose to not follow incentives? We label them as loonies and lock them in mental hospitals, as they're a danger to themselves and everyone around.
To sum up: I increasingly feel the question of free will is meaningless in practice, because having a society is fundamentally opposite to it.
I like to think it's a probability distribution that you have some influence over.
I choose to catch a ball. I've just made it 99% likely that I'll catch it. But there's still room for chaos to ensure it's not a deterministic outcome.
Free will is sometimes failing at things you set out to do? We hardly need quantum theory to explain that humans are clumsy or sometimes mispredict the trajectory of a thrown object.
I like this idea, but it clashes with my experience of almost never getting something "right" the first time, and having to base my future decisions on corrections my past self has envisioned future me taking.
For example, could you imagine someone who has never walked suddenly being able to dance if they were magically healed on some given day?
That said, I do suspect there's some relation between quantum mechanics and how we experience the world, especially given we can't exactly place the relation between space and time.
Heartily recommend it. sci-fi detective story which asks "what if the Copenhagen interpretation of QM was real?" (note: author acknowledges that it's just a plot device: https://www.gregegan.net/QUARANTINE/QM/QM.html - good writeup, but spoilers).
That are interesting possibilities. I just wish some Jean Perrin would design and perform a great experiment to exclude some possibilities from the explanation space.
I'm not a psych expert, but I thought this was long established. I mean we've known about the delays in processing for quite some time and thus the system can't be "real time". I mean everyone has experienced things where they are doing something, walk by, then turn around to check what they just saw because the process delay (not everything is put on the fast track).
Or am I misunderstanding the novelty of the research here? Hoping someone can help me understand better.
We know consciousness is not "real time" if for no other reason than eye saccades. Our consciousness is essentially off while our eyes move, and when they stop we guess at what we think happened and our consciousness catches up. We don't experience the lost time.
Seems that not only is our conscious mind a passenger, it lies to itself to pretend it is in control, by rationalizing decisions made by the unconscious. Quite jarring when your subconscious decides decides to do something your consciousness can't fathom, like attempt to catch a falling knife.
I highly recommend this book from 30 years ago. It was based on works from much earlier, but I think some part of the field kind of still haven't caught up to it yet (I agree with you).
I'm not a psych expert either. But I was put-off by the use of phrases like "mind-bending".
It's old-hat that the experience of intention/will follows the "willed" action. It's not surprising that our "real-time" experience is really a replay. That's how I've supposed it worked for 20 years. I'm not expressing a view about free will, just that our awareness of our mental states seems to have the benefit of hindsight.
I think the key area of novelty here is the relationship to consciousness and thus the great unsolved questions over what precisely consciousness is and what purpose it serves.
I am not impressed with this. This merely answers what practical use consciousness would have under the (unrpoven) assumption that it evolved as a survival mechanism. It does not explain what qualia is or how it comes about (hard problem). Therefore it is a bit far-fetched to say this answers what consciousness is at its core.
I'm interested to know what a satisfying explanation of qualia would look like to someone who believes it's a real, well-defined phenomenon? I get a strong impression that anything mechanistic will not do, and a slightly cynical feeling that anything that can be put in precise terms will not do. Is there any explanation that gets some of the way there?
I would be interested in an explanation that understands the mechanism to the point where one could arbitrarily insert information into a qualia experience. E.g. controlling what someone is imagining by placing objects there, etc.
I suspect no such explanation can exist and therefore the hard problem does not exist in the sense of a solvable problem in pyhsics. It's really a question of metaphysics.
I fail to see the helpfulness of describing or defining something we do not understand in terms of something related we equally do not understand, „understand“ here in the sense of „have a clear theory that gives meaning to the words we use“.
In relation to the problem of how qualitative self-aware experiences can arise in a biological information system this article does not seem to help at all.
Is the statement really „consciousness“ in the sense just vaguely described is just „memories“? Then what are memories? How can they have qualities and where does the self awareness come from? How to model it mathematically?
I feel we’re still in the age of the humoral theory of consciousness.
We have a lot better understanding of memories than we do consciousness though. We can visualize and quantify the memory making process. New neurons, new connections, the chemicals involved, etc.
Memories are a pretty well understood and tangible part of neuroscience at this point.
I have an analogy that for me defines the difference between conscious and unconscious.
I imagine myself sitting at the breakfast table with a cup of coffee in front of me. I wonder how that cup makes it to my mouth and eventually the contents to my stomach? What part of me does the work of picking up the cup, guiding it to my mouth, swallowing and ensuring it does not end up in my lungs and finally ensuring that the cup returns to the table.
All I do in that instance is consciously think to myself: "I want a drink of coffee" (not even politely). The rest is done by the unconscious. The next morning I attempt to get out of bed conscisously, trying to remember in which order, which muscles need to be triggered to move my legs. Eventually I just give the command "I want to get out of bed" and in an instant I'm out of bed.
Riding a bike: how times to I conscisously think to push down my right leg while pulling up my left and reversing that order for the next stroke?
I find it fascinating what the unconscious does: muscle memory, instinct, reflex, feelings etc are all things that are controlled by the unconscious. I try to do meditate as a way to connect to that unconscious, to obtain some of its advice - since I believe that the unconscious is not just the muscle-driver, there is a lot more intellectually that my unconscious does.
New theory? You can find this claim at the Encyclopedia, in Condillac, in La Mettrie, in last Descartes’ works, etc. Imagination and Memory has been pivotal to explain consciousness for a long time…
The phenomenologists, most notably Husserl, had this figured out about a hundred years ago.
What the authors did here was reground it in neuroscience (scientific materialism) rather than the generic philosophical primitives of phenomenology (which in this case fade into the background a bit, although they remain relevant to all empirical work per se), and draw out some of the impacts of that shift.
> The phenomenologists, most notably Husserl, had this figured out about a hundred years ago.
More like a thousand years ago, if you include Eastern traditions of insight meditation. "Conscious experience is mostly just memory" is the core insight of what in those traditions is called "no self".
The conscious mind is just as much of a conditioned phenomena as the subconscious mind. I don’t see what this has to do with no-self.
I didn’t get the impression that the insight of no-self is that consciousness is “just X”. Consciousness is there, clearly (you’re not unconscious). Just like any other conditioned thing.
As Sam Harris phrases it, thoughts and senses are "merely representations" in consciousness. The self, as we perceive it, is a representation in consciousness.
This reminds me of Bergson's theory of memory and present consciousness. In his essay "Memory of the Present and False Recognition", he argued that memory and present consciousness are the same, and what changes is a sort of "past tag" that is associated with the memory flow. He saw déjà vu as a mistaken tagging of the present flow, which we then perceive as past
I heard before that consciousness thinks it's the president, but is actually the press secretary.
When I think about why I did something, I always have an answer. But, like the press secretary asked about the president, maybe its just a confabulation based on the evidence at hand?
Is consciousness just retroactively rationalizing the things that take place and thinking it did them?
I'm not even sure how to process that.
Stranger To Ourselves is a fascinating book about the ways experiments have shown that many things happen outside conscious control.
My theory is that we have much more control over how we go after what we want than over what we want. 'Consciousness' as we think of it is a sufficiently abstract layer that it can (slowly, and with effort) nudge what future us is going to want, but it's not efficient enough to get into the weeds of how things are done most of the time.
That's not to say it can't get into the weeds - from experience it seems it can, but it's better for everyone if it lets autonomous systems handle things like lane changes or conversations.
I might be missing something, but this feels like a nothingburger to me. Obviously our understanding, reasoning and perception of reality is a kaleidoscope of memories and previous perceptions.
We couldn't ever "manually" or "consciously" parse raw sensory input and craft the proper neural responses to everything. It has all been pre-processed to hell way before it reaches our conscious little guy in the high tower.
Same thing the other way, the decisions of our mind are mere nudges to more autonomous systems. Even now, you aren't consciously and methodically scanning these words. You decided to read it, and the actual physical and mental operation of reading takes care of itself more or less. It has been delegated.
Likewise, it seems logical that these autonomous systems could act on their own if the input is too dank or if you are trained enough. I'm thinking of panic responses, reflexive behavior, flow states, etc. Sometimes it's not optimal to wait for the little guy to make a decision.
Isn't it obvious that our consciousness sits on top of a layer cake of abstractions? You could call it an "inner simulation" or a "hall of memories" if you want, it's all the same.
This reminded me of the Bicameral Mind - where (in humans pre-conscious state) memories in half the brain got triggered by experiences and were presented to the other half as commands/words of god.
Note that the Bicameral Mind is essentially just a story - no one is really taking it seriously as a possibility in the evolution of the human mind, even though it is a fascinating idea.
A (probably insane, ill-conceived) question I’ve been entertained by for as long as I can remember is whether or not “qualia”, which I understand to be “the experience itself of consciousness”, is a physical phenomenon that could ever be directly engaged with on physical terms. I suppose it’s basically a mix of relativity and Descartes. For instance, I can “feel myself here in my mental space”, however where is that mental space in relation to the physical world I’m using it to observe, what would be the SI units for such a measurement? If we assume consciousness itself is a physical phenomenon, wouldn’t the reality from the perspective of consciousness be equally as… how do I say this, “mechanically relevant”?
I doubt an answer will come in my lifetime or my great grandchildren’s but it seems like a crowning achievement for mankind to understand in physical terms if possible from whence consciousness came, and to where it goes when the body dies.
For all its use of the term time, for example “backward in time” or “does consciousness flow linearly with time,” there is no definition of time itself provided in the article. I had hoped the Definitions section would at least acknowledge some concept of time.
I suppose we all collectively agree on some generic concept of a fourth dimension with a strictly forward movement of instances, a progression toward entropy, but if the theory is going to argue temporal transcendance I’d expect a more formal thesis around what time itself is.
I’ve picked up this book but yet to read it. It’s on my list when I get the time.
My favourite consciousness theory is panpsychism, where consciousness is a property of the universe which all things have - given that a personal experience is by definition not measurable, there's no reason it's not as valid as others.
Imagine that you were given a strange job where you rode along with the sensory experiences of a mute person, writing their dialog for them. They can hear the dialog you give, including inaudible asides left only for them. You saw and felt all that they see and feel but you can't control their behavior. The job requires you to never admit the situation to anyone, you have to always pretend to be the person under penalty of death, even when talking to them. They're 20 years old now and you've been doing this job your entire life.
How could someone distinguish this setup from how we normally perceive our minds as working?
What is the premise of this first paragraph, why do people feel like they need to introduce this fluff:
> "Sitting on the Marine Atlantic ferry, I’m watching the Newfoundland skyline disappear on the horizon as I type away. I see the rocking of the ocean waves, inhale its salty breeze, feel and hear the buzz of the ship’s rumbling engine. I try to focus on writing this sentence, but my eyes hopefully scan the ocean for a rogue, splashing whale."
Nice, you took a boat once and you wanted to see some whales, not what I came here for.
I was thinking recently about how we seem to have an uncanny ability to remember shared information that is important to us. It's so easy to forget the myriad details of our lives and everyday interactions, but we always seem to be keenly aware of who we told what, and who knows what - at least about things we personally have an emotional investment in. I'll easily forget serious, significant information that a person has told me that has no specific bearing on me. For example, a loved one dying. Yet, I would never forget that I told that same person a comparatively trivial detail that happens to be important to me, like a potential damaging secret I've told them but few other people (such as cheating on a partner).
Our brains seem quit intent on remembering things that can result in an acute emotional response. And our brains seem incredibly unreliable on almost everything else! To the point that we have to develop tricks an strategies to get our brains to remember things that are emotionally arbitrary. Like math.
Also...
"In other words, it’s mainly the unconscious mind at the wheel."
The bottom line I think is that the brain is a complex assembly of parts responsible for a huge variety of cognitive processes, and only some of those are directly involved in conscious thought. Biological systems are often crazily interconnected with each other, with feedback loops on top of feedback loops, and the brain is no exception.
Sometimes we consciously think through what we are doing and make reasoned decisions, especially when learning to perform a new task. As we repeat the task and it’s variations we can learn to do it more automatically, less consciously. This could be a physical task like playing table tennis, but it can also be something like giving a public speech off the cuff.
When you’re having a conversation you often aren’t thinking it through word by word, you’re thinking at a high level consciously, but the stream of words just emerges far too fast for each phrase to be consciously selected and considered. So even speech, something we think of as most closely associated with consciousness, is in many cases an automatic activity. This is how we sometimes come to Mis-speak and say things we didn’t mean.
The problem with thoughts like these are they aren’t practical as anything but a source of speculative entertainment. If this theory was factual then knowing that doesn’t change how I perceive the world. Knowing this theory also doesn’t bring me any new definite insights in the study of life that I could sue to launch off more research into. This is an interesting thing to think about but it’s not too useful
I’d push back on that, we could use this to invent a new cognitive architecture approach to AGI (route perception directly to memory state and use that as the world model) and see if it improves RL performance. In fact I think the world models paper did this. You could conceivably have a generative / predictive world model, instead of a perceptual / remembered one. I think Karl Friston is more in the former, predictive camp, which implies your consciousness isn’t a memory, but rather a prediction (Metaverse in your head, so to speak) so it’ll be interesting to see how AGI eventually pops up, will they consciously experience their perceptions, or their predictions? Perhaps perception and prediction are two sides of the same coin and we just need to figure out what material the coin is made of.
Also for neuro, maybe it means Alzheimer’s would show up on perception tests before it shows up on memory tests, if memory is implemented by perception. And since we mostly look at “memory centers” of the brain in that disease, perhaps we could find issues in perceptual areas, too. Maybe we look at the hippocampus when we ought to look at V1, olfactory region, sensory gyrus, etc — if Alzheimer’s follows the clogged sink metaphor, then the clog could be in a different brain region entirely.
Personally I don’t like to think about it that way because that implies consciousness has “lag!” However, we’d have to evolve perception before we could evolve to remember that which is perceived.
One big problem with this article is the fact our vision etc has a lot of holes. If we consciously experience a mere memory, then there’s a whole lot of in-painting going on in the perceptual system to fill those holes, which makes it quasi-generative, and thus less of a memory and more of a prediction of stuff we didn’t actually see. Which means memory and prediction and perception are all the same. That’s a can of worms because it means when we experience a moment, we’re actually predicting the past…
There's definitely something to this POV, tbh. As the saying goes: Before enlightenment, chop wood and carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood and carry water.
Actually, I think for me it's quite useful. Many people here shared their experience being in the zone when doing sports, gaming, etc.
So my interpretation is that I want to train my unconscious mind so that it makes good decisions. I want to understand and uncover some of my unconscious decisions and how the reactions come to me, and work on modelling those through repetition, exposing myself to sources of knowledge and experiences I think are worthwhile and people worth sharing life with.
If these actions won't help build the unconscious decision maker in me into something I like, then nothing will. But my theory is that exposing oneself to stimuli and training the mind actually forms those unconscious connections that affect people's actions later.
The only problem is that apparently my unconscious brain told me to do that, so am I actually doing anything that makes sense?
> “We don’t perceive the world, make decisions, or perform actions directly. Instead, we do all these things unconsciously and then—about half a second later—consciously remember doing them.”
> For now, the theory is just that—a theory. But viewing consciousness through the lens of a memory system ...
For me it is absolutely not surprising that consciousness follows an action, because it appears to be some sort of self observation, which is what philosophers at least since the enlightment period (the German idealists for exmaple) were speculating about. To proceed an action would be magic, because how could you experience something before the fact. And to happen at the same time would also be magic, because our brains are spacial systems were signals need time to travel through a (real) neural network.
So the only interesting question here is whether consciousness is based upon the same brain structures as "ordinary" memory, or on a distinct one, or a combination of both.
This seems intuitively true to me. Most of our conscious cognition works on and with memories, it's like a snapshot of what we think happened at any moment.
It's that feeling when you "discover" your reaction to something after the fact.. Like, someone says something unexpected and you've already answered before you become aware of what was said..
It also happens often whenever you're in the zone of doing something, you really get to take the backseat and watch the trip.. Like playing very fast paced videogames like devil daggers, you're observing yourself from a distance, as the stimuli is processed, and you make judgements on your reactions, notes for next time and so on.. Which demonstrates this temporal disconnect between your actions and your experience of them clearly.
I spent years trying my best at first person shooters. Been in the zone many times, and yet I've never observed myself from a distance. Is it a genre thing? Maybe FPS people stay in first person no matter what
The thing that we must remember is that evolution is not conscious.
It’s such a complex system that the functions of each part don’t fit the way we humans to talk about things.
We say “those are memories” but in the brain very few things are “one thing”. Almost always they work similarly to several things, interlinked in often seemingly random ways.
The way definitions work in the brain is similar to political parties; you might find one that you agree with in 70% of the time, but the other 30% is nonsense.
It could be that they are using the same circuit as memories except for a series of very subtle change in one specific part of the brain that makes them feel totally different from regular memories, similarly to how a little bit of salt can elevate one dish from regular to excellent.
My thoughts, from internal monolog to biases and other content make a lot more sense when I view them as my subconscious explaining action it has already taken or decided upon than as actual fresh thoughts. Similarly, there have been times (fist fights, emergencies etc) where some deep level of my brain has acted with no conscience thought at all. However these actions were still 100% aligned with the conscience me, the same motivations etc.
I have always wondered whether what we call consciousness is not just empathy directed inwards: Empathy is when I look at someone else and work out what they are feeling and what they will do, using the same process to explain my own feelings and behaviour to myself is just called consciousness instead...
Isn't this just trivially true? Obviously remembering past events is very similar to experiencing the present? We didn't even think we were clever when we stated this as teenage existentialists, how could it really be otherwise?
In a way it seems to be mostly a semantic question.
The interesting bit is to what extent it leads to the conclusion that our conscious mind is not in charge. In some sense that's again trivially true, we only consciously process a tiny fraction of the information we receive, yet we act on a lot more of it, for example when running on a stony trail.
But we can also obviously consciously control our actions on the multi-second timeframe, like "I should have a glass of water, let's go to the tap".
It's sort of obvious that these concepts of consciousness and memory are related. To be conscious (aware) of something, there must be a memory of it, right? Otherwise, does it really matter.
It makes me think about the drugs that disrupt memory, like midazolam. If you're undergoing a procedure with "conscious sedation," you may be, for fleeting periods, aware of certain things, but these drugs effectively reduce that memory duration to near-zero. And in that case, there's hardly a different between not feeling pain because you're unconscious and feeling pain for an infinitesimal period because you're unable to remember the prior period's experience.
> Rather than perceiving the world in real time, we’re actually experiencing a memory of that perception.
I’ve had a similar theory. I say that we perceive the world (or time) as if looking behind through the rear window of a forward moving car. We can only see past events.
This theory (basically that we act instinctively then after acting the process of remembering that action lets us form an explanation) won't surprise anyone who has read Thinking, Fast and Slow.
It has analogies the the field of "explainable AI" too, where systems take decisions neural networks make, probe the boundaries of them and attempt to present them in ways we can understand.
It strikes me as plausible that what we call consciousnesses (as well as "intelligence") arise from the information compression process this explanation requires.
It feels like this is just a play on words. Consider a camera connected to a monitor. The camera captures 24 frames a second and sends the images to the monitor via a cable. The monitor displays this "live" feed.
Is it really live though? There are multiple buffers and busses that the images have traveled through, sometimes even staying in one place for many milliseconds, as some resource lock is being acquired. Despite all this, would you say that the monitor is displaying stored data? Technically yes, but for all practical purposes no.
What a great theory, I really like this. It makes sense in the context of a lot of things, but one that stands out to me is blacking out while drinking. Drinking too much essentially causes you to enter a walking zombie state where you are behaving and acting essentially normally, but you don’t remember a bit of it later.
I always figured that was a result of memory not forming… so we just forgot all that stuff. But the idea that we are actually ‘unconcious’ during that time is an interesting alternative hypothesis.
Thank you for saying that. I was looking for something profound after reading this, and either the article doesn't explain this new theory well, or it is as you say splitting hairs.
everything is a memory aka a representation. light hit eyeball, causes a neuron to fire...and already its just the memory of light, not light itself. that neuron passes along the info, which just re-encodes the event with other information. So just more memory. It is both profound and obvious.
Not really what the article is saying though. The big implication that I got from it is that none of our actions is actually conscious. We are literally made up of atoms, which react automatically to the world in very complex ways, then a memory of these actions is seen by the conscious mind, and fools it into thinking they were conscious actions
That simply means, by their definition, the subconscious is playing the role of what we think of as the conscious. As someone said earlier - splitting hairs.
> and already its just the memory of light, not light itself.
And not even a memory of light directly, but rather a representation of the sensory input that is triggered by photons.
In parallel, we (or, more accurately, those who study it) also have intellectual representations of photons, somewhat divorced from the physical experience.
This 'memories' theory is a well-established model of how our senses work anyway - your brain synthesises inputs from multiple sources into what feels like a single experience of your surroundings.
This is vital from a survival standpoint because 0.2 seconds of ping between seeing and hearing without your brain telling you they happened simultaneously would be debilitating.
The same thing happens with the sensation of "flavour" (smell + taste).
This is kind of obvious. All experience is tied to memory; this is nothing new. As far as immediate agency, there is most definitely a latency between a willful act, whether conscious or unconscious, and the perception of that act's accomplishment, and this latency is perceived by the memory of it being done. It is an illusionary mechanism and the brain has plenty of those.
The only thing I can add to this discussion is I know my consciousness exists and has causal powers. Otherwise I wouldn't be able to tell you about it. If it didn't have causal powers, the consciousness would have no way of making ourselves talk about it. The body would have no idea it's there.
> In other words, it’s mainly the unconscious mind at the wheel.
I'm always surprised this is introduced as news.
It seems to me that since the first half of the 20th century, there has been a continuous stream of evidence that the consciousness is, at best, a first class citizen but certainly not the main driver anymore.
Well, I'm not sure I can agree completely because the way I think of consciousness is that it's the body's UI to the world, but it's obvious that memory plays a central role there. Pretty much everything the article proposes has analogies in computer UIs.
People in comments mention that this is old news. But doesn't these findings reframe conversation about self-control and addiction, for example? Or about other , less harming personally traits?
Interesting, those looking for similar ideas may look into memetic theory. "The meme machine" by Blackmore and not exactly related but a great book that invented the word meme is "The selfish gene" by Dawkins
It is a virtual time machine. You can run time forwards, explore various possible futures, then pick the future aligned most with your preferences, capabilities, and taste for risk.
Right! We obviously cannot perceive things in "real time" as they have to be processed, which introduces latency.
I'm not really sure from the article what they mean by memory. To take a computer analogy, I doubt all my experience is being constantly written to the hard drive, but it will be in RAM.
So to the extent that my experience temporarily exists and persists in working "memory", then sure... But how could it be otherwise?
That would be a sort or another of an illusion, as long as we stay within the realm of we can reason about (and don't consider the possibility of you actually being a psychic).
You can have made a forecast based on an experience you already have and have developed a belief you are conscious of something future.
You can fall a victim of perceptual illusion - perceived time delay between 2 events can easily be influenced, even made negative.
My guess would be that this is highly dependent on personality type. It is certainly true for types, such as the INTJ, who holds sensory information at a distance, and instead orients himself using a constantly updated inner map of the world. but that doesn’t mean that they are not people out there for whom “being in the here and now“ isn’t their baseline experience.
I often wonder if humans spent as much time studying the brain as we do getting people to click on ads how much progress we could make in understanding consciousness. Seems like there is so much low hanging fruit and very few real breakthroughs. The biggest mystery in the universe is staring us right in the face.
We've got a small army of philosophers of mind, and then another of neuroscience researchers working on this stuff.
But the philosophers don't have a ton to do without more experiments from neuroscience, and neuroscience is doing the best it can with currently available technology.
Studying the brain is really friggin' hard. I don't know where exactly you think the low-hanging fruit is, but trying to measure a brain operating at a neural level without killing it is pretty limited by our current tech.
The Vedantic perspective is that Consciousness is not understandable in a “subject-object” manner because it is the ultimate subject of all understandings which are objects appearing in Consciousness.
Itself, it cannot be objectified and understood thus.
There is a way of “knowing” it (Enlightenment) but this does not occur in the subject-object mode and thus this knowledge is not transferrable through language or symbols.
My understanding, prior to briefly reading that paper, was that Schopenhauer came up with the core of his philosophy before he came across the upanishads. When he did read them, he was delighted to find that they contained many of the same ideas that he had arrived at independently. He saw this as evidence for the deep truths in his own thinking.
Whatever the true genealogy of the ideas, I think there is a considerable convergence of thought in trying to solve the same problems.
If memory serves, he does mention in the preface to “The World as Will and Representation” that the Vedic scholar would be best placed to understand what he is trying to say
I have some takes on this topic. The reason why I think we find consciousness so mysterious is because we are so intimately biased that we are blinded by what’s plainly understandable.
Consciousness is an emergent property of nervous systems.
The answer provided to the hard question doesn't answer the hard question. There is no reason we're aware of that a ton of computations should lead to a subjective experience, it's akin to people saying flies spontaneously generate around decaying food because they do. At the time it was plausible, but insisting it's the answer to the question is human arrogance
I can see how it might seem like it doesn’t explain the hard problem, but what I’m trying to articulate is that awareness or the self or subjective experience is just that system I described happening really fast. There’s nothing mystical happening here. It’s chaos theory sitting on top of a information processing system that has memory, decision making models, and the ability to learn.
Again we are searching for something more that doesn’t need to be there.
And what I'm saying is, you have absolutely no evidence or way to prove that. I'm not saying it's not possible, but I am saying it has as much scientific evidence as spontaneous generation did
Of course, articulating what the subjective experience being referred to is another problems on its own. All of your comment can exist independent of that perception that's being described. There's no reason for us to have a centralized feeling of it all happening, and the fact that it can be turned off temporarily while the rest mainly still functions is actually mild evidence against the idea that they're one and the same
I think so too, and the fact we put human consciousness far above other animals like elephants and dolphins is human ego imo.
If we really believe in evolution then what else could the answer be?
It's a processing loop that helps with executive function, self-reflection etc. which I think lots of animals have some basic version of.
No one here is saying animals aren’t conscious. An interesting question is when does it start? Is a worm conscious, an insect, a single cell, an atom? There’s no obvious dividing line which is what makes it so mysterious. What is the building block that enables more complex conscious beings?
Consciousness as an emergent property of the billions of neurons and trillions of connections between them (and the complex chemical soup they slosh around in) makes sense to me as well.
Which I suppose, if people are looking for a singular "entity" to ascribe consciousness to, then something like an emergent electrical field might be a good candidate?
Emergent property through evolutionary selection, do you not believe in evolution?
If the brain is just processing things in complete chaos an animal would be completely useless, but with a part/thread dedicated to processing inputs and checking memory I think it is very obvious this function of consciousness would emerge through natural evolution.
Yes, to me they sound like similar questions as can a human-level AGI robot experience consciousness like we do, or is consciousness a purely physical thing. My opinion is yes to both but I guess i'm a physicalist/materialist.
Actually another comment points out something interesting, when we get black-out drunk we are basically in this zombie-state. We can talk and hit our head and physically our brain still reacts, but it was like we aren't actually there and our body is just on autopilot mode.
Consciousness is just consciousness, it's not reduceable to brain states; it's fundamentally different even though they are associated and related. See Qualia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia
This alleged fact is not established by any of the arguments summarized in that article. Look into them in detail, and you will find, at root, subtle (and not-so-subtle) question-begging and appeals to plausibility.
I don't know how they reconcile this theory with everyday activities.
When I'm reading, my eyes movement scanning the page must be in sync with my perception and reading or the words. I'm not reading words that my eyes scanned half a second ago. Otherwise I'd be "reading" the last word of a line when my eyes are already at the start of the next line?
To take another example, when I'm cooking, my hands movement are certainly in real-time sync with what is happening at that very moment in the real world, otherwise I'd have few remaining fingers after cutting a few vegetables.
I'm no claiming that perception is instantaneous, but clearly we do many activities successfully that implicitly require perceptions to be near real-time.
If the theory is correct but the timing difference is small enough that these objection go away, then I feel the theory is just a change of nomenclature. What they call memory is just the perception delay.
That's actually not true. The brain has a LOT of hacks around eye movement including saccades that involve rewriting temporal history. Sorry, but there are temporal illusions that take advantage of these hacks and they are a good way at disproving the "common sense" conclusions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronostasis
We live in a simulation in our own minds. Your eyes do not behave as cameras, but instead detect the bare minimum detail needed for your mind to recreate the world around you. When your first born you blind and one of your first achievements is learning to see.
It makes sense that what we see is a memory, as how else could we transfer not just the visual, but smells, feelings, etc... into our long term memory. Efficiency
The examples you provide all sound like examples of "muscle memory." The brain develops a specialized, unconscious "pathway" for activities you often repeat, such that you can perform those actions without careful thought.
Have you ever used a password or PIN for so long that you consciously forget it? You can only remember it with your hands?
Likewise, have you ever driven home accidentally, lost in thought, when you intended to travel somewhere else?
> Rather than perceiving the world in real time, we’re actually experiencing a memory of that perception.
So yeah, the "perception" is a memory, and the processing happens in near real-time.
This also seems to tie well with the research on visual perception that states that much of what we "see" is a projection of the brain based on things we have seen in the past (like how you see a face when you look at a power outlet.)
I am not at all even a hobbyist on this topic though.
You cannot perceive anything without your brain processing it. That amount of time is on the scale of 250ms for sight.
Further, the reality you perceive is not True reality, your brain is encoding the information it receives and shows you an evolutionarily successful version of reality.
You can only perceive your surroundings by creating a mental representation of it in your brain. Part of that mechanism involves memory.
> When I'm reading, my eyes movement scanning the page must be in sync with my perception and reading or the words.
Consciousness is the experience of your eyes being in sync with the reading.
> my hands movement are certainly in real-time sync with what is happening at that very moment in the real world, otherwise I'd have few remaining fingers after cutting a few vegetables.
That is what happened. It just happened in the past relative to when you're experiencing it.
How do you talk to people then? I think all those things happened when they did. But the thing inside your brain that plays back the sound and the sensations of making decisions, those emotional things, is delayed.
That leaves interesting questions for what happens if you (for example) get hit by a car and die.
You won’t get to replay your recollections in time, so depending on what the delay is, you might (from your perspective) just suddenly plop out of existence when crossing a street.
I guess it doesn’t really matter, but it’s interesting to think about.
The point is, your unconscious mind is doing all those activities in real time, “you” the conscious mind are only reliving them as a memory, but it feels real time
The sensation is almost like a being spectator in my own body. My brain feels like it's been relieved of the task of managing the moment-to-moment decision. Instead I start noticing moves 3, 4 steps ahead as time slows to a crawl around me. I don't know if this type of experience is related in any way to the theory of consciousness, but it feels like the unconscious mind holds a lot of secrets that I'd love to see unlocked in my lifetime.