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ciphergoth comments on Rationality Quotes June 2013 - Less Wrong
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...what? Wow!
I'm dying to know whether we're stumbling on a difference in the way we think or the way we describe what we think, here. To me, the first state sounds like rehearsing what I'm going to say in my head before I say it, which I only do when I'm racking my brains on eg how to put something tactfully, where the latter sounds like what I do in conversation all the time, which is simply to let the words fall out of my mouth and find out what I've said.
My experience is that I generally have some kind of fuzzy idea of what I'm going to say before I say it. When I actually speak, sometimes it comes out as a coherent and streamlined sentence whose contents I figure out as a I speak it. At other times - particularly if I'm feeling nervous, or trying to communicate a complicated concept that I haven't expressed in speech before - my fuzzy idea seems to disintegrate at the moment I start talking, and even if I had carefully rehearsed a line many times in my mind, I forget most of it. Out comes either what feels to me like an incoherent jumble, or a lot of "umm, no, wait".
Writing feels a lot easier, possibly because I have the stuff-that-I've-already-written right in front of me and I only need to keep the stuff that I'm about to say in memory, instead of also needing to constantly remind myself about what I've said so far.
ETA: Here's an earlier explanation of how writing sometimes feels like to me.
My internal monologue is a lot faster than the words can get out of my mouth (when I was younger, I tried to speak as fast as I think, with the result that no-one could understand me; of course, to speak that fast, I needed to drop significant parts of most of the words, which didn't help). I don't always plan out every sentence in advance; but thinking about it, I think I do plan out every phrase in advance, relying on the speed of my internal monologue to produce the next phrase before or at worst very shortly after I complete the current phrase. (It often helps to include a brief pause at the end of a phrase in any case). It's very much a just-in-time thing.
If I'm making a special effort to be tactful, then I'll produce and consider a full sentence inside my head before saying it out loud.
Incidentally, I'm also a member of Toastmasters, and one thing that Toastmasters has is impromptu speaking, when a person is asked to give a one-to-two minute speech and is told the topic just before stepping up to give the speech. The topic could be anything (I've had "common sense", "stick", and "nail", among others). Most people seem to be scared of this, apparently seeing it as an opportunity to stand up and be embarrassed; I find that I enjoy it. I often start an impromptu speech with very little idea of how it's going to end; I usually make some sort of pun about the topic (I changed 'common sense' into a very snooty, upper-crust type of person complaining about commoners with money - 'common cents'), and often talk more-or-less total nonsense.
But, through the whole speech, I always know what I am saying. I am not surprised by my own words (no matter how surprised other people may be by the idea of 'common cents'). I don't think I know how to be surprised at what I am saying. (Of course, my words are not always well-considered, in hindsight; and sometimes I will be surprised at someone else's interpretation of my words, and be forced to explain that that's not what I meant)
Something that occurred to me on this topic; reading has a lot to do with the inner monologue. Writing is, in my view, a code of symbols on a piece of paper (or a screen) which tell the reader what their inner monologue should say. Reading, therefore, is the voluntary (and temporary) replacement of the reader's internal monologue with an internal monologue supplied and encoded by the author.
At least, that's what happens when I read. Do other people have the same experience?
Inner monologue test:
I. like. how. when. you. read. this. the. little. voice. in. your. head. takes. pauses..
Does anyone find that the periods don't make the sentence sound different?
Hypothesis: Since I am more used to read sentences without a full stop after each word than sentences like that, of course I will read the former more quickly -- because it takes less effort.
Experiment to test this hypothesis: Ilikehowwhenyoureadthisthelittlevoiceinyourheadspeaksveryquickly.
Result of the experiment: at least for me, my hypothesis is wrong. YMMV.
As far as I can tell, I started reading the test phrase more slowly than normal, then "shifted gears" and sped up, perhaps to faster than normal.
Same here, for both test sentences.
The little voice in my head speaks quickly for that experimental phrase, yes. It should be taking slightly longer to decode - since the information on word borders is missing - which suggests that the voice in my head is doing special effects. I think that that is becausewordslikethis can be used in fiction as the voice of someone who is speaking quickly; so if the voice in my head speeds up when reading it, then that makes the story more immersive.
Hypothesisconfirmedforme.Perhapstoomanyhourslisteningtoaudiobooksatfivetimesspeed. Normalspeedheadvoicejustseemssoslow.
That sounds in my head like the voice in Italian TV ads for medicines reading the disclaimers required (I guess) by law (ultra-fast words, but pauses between sentences of nearly normal length).
I can parse it both ways. Actually, on further experimentation, it appears to be tied directly to my eye-scanning speed! If I force my eyes to scan over the line quickly from left-to-right, I read it without pause; if I read the way I normally do (by staring at the 'When' to take a "snapshot" of I, like, how, when, you, and read all at once; then staring at the space between "little" and "voice" to take a snapshot of this, the, little, voice, in, and your all at once, then staring at the "pauses" to take a snapshot of head, takes, and pauses), then the pauses get inserted - but not as normal sentence stops; more like... a clipped robot.
Huh. You read in a different way to what I do; I normally scan the line left-to-right. And I insert the pauses when I do so.
It sounds like a clipped robot to me too.
Yeah, something clicked while I was reading an old encyclopedia sometime around age 7; I remember it quite vividly. My brain started being able to process chunks of text at a time instead of single words, so I could sort of focus on the middle of a short sentence or phrase and read the whole thing at once. I went from reading at about one-quarter conversation speed, to about ten times conversation speed, over the course of a few minutes. I still don't quite understand what the process was that enabled the change; I just sort of experienced it happening.
One trade-off is that I don't have full conscious recall of each word when I read things that quickly - but I do tend to be able to pull up a reasonable paraphrasing of the information later if I need to.
I can see both pros and cons to this talent. The pro is obvious; faster reading. The con is that it may cause trouble parsing subtly-worded legal contracts; the sort where one misplaced word may potentially land up with both parties arguing the matter in court. Or anything else where exact wording is important, like preparing a wish for a genie.
Of course, since it seems that you can choose when to use this, um, snapshot reading and when not to, you can gain the full benefit of the pros most of the time while carefully removing the cons in any situation where they become important.
I call that "skimming", but maybe that's something else?
Assuming you're literally talking about subvocalization, it depends on what I'm reading (I do it more with poetry than with academic papers), on how quickly I'm reading (I don't do that as much when skimming), on whether I know what the author's voice sounds like (in which case I subvocalize in their voice -- which slows me down a great deal if I'm reading stuff by someone who speaks slowly and with a strong foreign accent e.g. Benedict XVI), and possibly on something else I'm overlooking at the moment.
I do not notice that I am subvocalising when I read, even when I am looking for it (I tested this on the wiki page that you linked to). I do notice, however, that it mentions that subvocalising is often not detectable by the person doing the subvocalising.
More specifically, if I place my hand lightly on my throat while reading, I feel no movement of the muscles; and I am able to continue reading while swallowing.
So, no, I don't think I'm talking about subvocalising. I'm talking about an imaginary voice in my head that narrates my thought processes.
Hmmm... my inner monologue does not tend to speak in the voice of someone whose voice I know. I can get it to speak in other peoples' voices, or in what I imagine other people's voices to sound like, if I try to, but it defaults to a sort of neutral gear which, now that I think about it, sounds like a voice but not quite like my (external) voice. Similar, but not the same. (And, of course, the way that I hear my voice when I speak differs from how I hear it when recorded on tape - my inner monologue sounds more like the way I hear my voice, but still somewhat different)
...this is strange. I don't know who my inner monologue sounds like, if anyone.
Mine usually sounds more or less like I'm whispering.
My inner monologue definitely doesn't sound like whispering; it's a voice, speaking normally.
I think I can best describe it by saying that it sounds more like I imagine myself sounding than like I actually sound to myself; but I suspect that's recursive, i.e. I imagine myself sounding like that because that's what my inner monologue sounds like.
Does your inner voice sound different depending on your mood or emotional state?
Yes. If my mood or emotional state is sufficiently severe, then my inner voice will sound different; both in choice of phrasing and in tone of voice.
It's not an audible voice, as such; I think the best way that I can describe it is to say that it's very much like a memory of a voice, except that it's generated on-the-fly instead of being, well, remembered. As such, it has most of the properties of an audible voice (except actual audibility) - including such markers as 'tone of voice'. This tone changes with my emotional state in reasonable ways; that is, if I am sufficiently angry, then my inner voice may take on an angry, menacing tone.
If my emotional state is not sufficiently severe, then I am unable to notice any change in my inner-voice tone. I also note that my spoken voice shows a noticeable change of tone at significantly lower emotional severity than my inner voice does.
I was about to say that it's the same for me, but then I remember that at least for me actual memories of voices can be very vivid (especially in hypnagogic state or when I'm reading stuff written by that person), whereas my inner voice seldom is. (And memories of voices can also be generated on-the-fly -- I can pick a sentence and imagine a bunch of people I know each saying it, even if I can't remember hearing any of them actually ever saying that sentence.)
I'm the same - except occasionally, when I'm 'flowing' in conversation, I'll find that my inner monologue fails to produce what I think it can, and my mouth just halts without input from it
I find that happens to me sometimes when I talk in Afrikaans; my Afrikaans vocabulary is poor enough that I often get halfway through a sentance and find that I can't remember the word for what I want to say.
It occasionally happens to me in any language. I usually manage to rephrase the sentence on the flight or to replace the word with something generic like “thing” and let the listener figure it out from the context, without much trouble.
The parts of your brain that generate speech and the part that generate your internal sense-of-self are less integrated than CCC's. An interesting experiment might be to stop ascribing ownership to your words when you find yourself surprised by them - i.e., instead of framing the phenomenon as "I said that", frame it as "my brain generated those words".
Learn to recognize that the parts of your brain that handle text generation and output are no more "you" than the parts of your brain that handle motor reflex control.
EDIT: Is there a problem with this post?
No! The parts of my brain that handle text generation are the only parts that... *slap*... Ow. Nevermind. It seems we have reached an 'understanding'.
Right!
I mean, I do realize you're being funny, but pretty much exactly this.
I don't recommend aphasia as a way of shock-treating this presumption, but I will admit it's effective. At some point I had the epiphany that my language-generating systems were offline but I was still there; I was still thinking the way I always did, I just wasn't using language to do it.
Which sounds almost reasonable expressed that way, but it was just about as creepy as the experience of moving my arm around normally while the flesh and bone of my arm lay immobile on the bed.
A good way I've found to reach this state is to start to describe a concept in your internal monologue but "cancel" the monologue right at the start - the concept will probably have been already synthesized and will just be hanging around in your mind, undescribed and unspoken but still recognizable.
[edit] Afaict the key step is noticing that you've started a monologue, and sort of interrupting yourself mentally.
So, FWIW, after about 20 minutes spent trying to do this I wasn't in a recognizably different state than I was when I started. I can kind of see what you're getting at, though.
Right, I mean as a way of realizing that there's something noticeable going on in your head that precedes the internal monologue. I wrote that comment wrong. Sorry for wasting your time.
Ah! I get you now. (nods) Yeah, that makes sense.
That's... hm.
I'm not sure I know what you mean.
I'll experiment with behaving as if I did when I'm not in an airport waiting lounge and see what happens.
I've had this happen to me semi-accidentally, the resulting state is extremely unpleasant.
A smash equilibrium.
I'd certainly call them much more significant to my identity than a e.g. my deltoid muscle, or some motor function parts of my brain.
It may be useful to recognize that this is a choice, rather than an innate principle of identity. The parts that speak are just modules, just like the parts that handle motor control. They can (and often do) run autonomously, and then the module that handles generating a coherent narrative stitches together an explanation of why you "decided" to cause whatever they happened to generate.
This sounds like a theory of identity as epiphenomenal homunculus. A module whose job is to sit there weaving a narrative, but which has no effect on anything outside itself (except to make the speech module utter its narrative from time to time). "Mr Volition", as Greg Egan calls it in one of his stories. Is that your view?
More or less, yes. It does have some effect on things outside itself, of course, in that its 'narrative' tends to influence our emotional investment in situations, which in turn influences our reactions.
It seems to me that the Mr. Volition theory suffers from the same logical flaw as p-zombies. How would a non-conscious entity, a p-zombie, come to talk about consciousness? And how does an epiphenomenon come to think it's in charge, how does it even arrive at the very idea of "being in charge", if it was never in charge of anything?
An illusion has to be an illusion of something real. Fake gold can exist only because there is such a thing as real gold. There is no such thing as fake mithril, because there is no such thing as real mithril.
A tape recorder is a non-conscious entity. I can get a tape recorder to talk about consciousness quite easily.
Or are you asking how it would decide to talk about consciousness? It's a bit ambiguous.
I think it's not an epiphenomenon, it's just wired in more circuitously than people believe. It has effects; it just doesn't have some effects that we tend to ascribe to it, like decisionmaking and highlevel thought.
By that analogy, then, fake gods can exist only because there is such a thing as real gods; fake ghosts can only exist because there is such a thing as real ghosts; fake magic can only exist because there is such a thing as real magic.
It's perfectly possible to be ontologically mistaken about the nature of one's world.
Indeed. There is real agency, so people have imagined really big agents that created and rule the world. People's consciousness persists, even after the interruptions of sleep, and they imagine it persists even after death. People's actions appear to happen purely by their intention, and they imagine doing arbitrary things purely by intention. These are the real things that the fakes, pretences, or errors are based on.
But how do the p-zombie and the homunculus even get to the point of having their mistaken ontology?
The p-zombie doesn't, because the p-zombie is not a logically consistent concept. Imagine if there was a word that meant "four-sided triangle" - that's the level of absurdity that the 'p-zombie' idea represents.
On the other hand, the epiphenomenal consciousness (for which I'll accept the appelature 'homunculus' until a more consistent and accurate one occurs to me) is simply mistaken in that it is drawing too large a boundary in some respects, and too small a boundary in others. It's drawing a line around certain phenomena and ascribing a causal relationship between those and its own so-called 'agency', while excluding others. The algorithm that draws those lines doesn't have a particularly strong map-territory correlation; it just happens to be one of those evo-psych things that developed and self-reinforced because it worked in the ancestral environment.
Note that I never claimed that "agency" and "volition" are nonexistent on the whole; merely that the vast majority of what people internally consider "agency" and "volition", aren't.
EDIT: And I see that you've added some to the comment I'm replying to, here. In particular, this stood out:
I don't believe that "my" consciousness persists after sleep. I believe that a new consciousness generates itself upon waking, and pieces itself together using the memories it has access to as a consequence of being generated by "my" brain; but I don't think that the creature that will wake up tomorrow is "me" in the same way that I am. I continue to use words like "me" and "I" for two reasons:
Social convenience - it's damn hard to get along with other hominids without at least pretending to share their cultural assumptions
It is, admittedly, an incredibly persistent illusion. However, it is a logically incoherent illusion, and I have upon occasion pierced it and seen others pierce it, so I'm not entirely inclined to give it ontological reality with p=1.0 anymore.
Mesh mail "mithril" vest, $335.
Setting aside the question of whether this is fake iron man armor, or a real costume of the fake iron man, or a fake costume designed after the fake iron man portrayed by special effects artists in the movies, I think an illusion can be anything that triggers a category recognition by matching some of the features strongly enough to trigger the recognition, while failing to match on a significant amount of the other features that are harder to detect at first.
That's not fake mithril, it's pretend mithril.
To have the recognotion, there must have already been a category to recognise.
Suppose I am standing next to a wall so high that I am left with the subjective impression that it just goes on forever and ever, with no upper bound. Or next to a chasm so deep that I am left with the subjective impression that it's bottomless.
Would you say these subjective impressions are impossible?
If possible, would you say they aren't illusory?
My own answer would be that such subjective impressions are both illusory and possible, but that this is not evidence of the existence of such things as real bottomless pits and infinitely tall walls. Rather, they are indications that my imagination is capable of creating synthetic/composite data structures.
I scrawl on a rock "I am conscious." Is the rock talking about consciousness?
No, you are.
I run a program that randomly outputs strings. One day it outputs the string "I am conscious." Is the program talking about consciousness? Am I?
In the same way that a philosophy paper does... yes. Of course, the rock is just a medium for your attempt at communication.
I write a computer program that outputs every possible sequence of 16 characters to a different monitor. Is the monitor which outputs 'I am conscious' talking about consciousness in the same way the rock is? Whose attempt at communication is it a medium for?
.> How would a non-conscious entity, a p-zombie, come to talk about consciousness?
By functional equivalence. A zombie Chalmers is bound to will utter sentences asserting its possession of qualia, a zombie Dennett will utter sentences denying the same.
The only getout is to claim that it is not really talking at all.
The epiphenomenal homunculus theory claims that there's nothing but p-zombies, so there are no conscious beings for them to be functionally equivalent to. After all, as the alien that has just materialised on my monitor has pointed out to me, no humans have zardlequeep (approximate transcription), and they don't go around insisting that they do. They don't even have the concept to talk about.
The theory that there is nothing but zombies runs into the difficulty of explaining why many of them would believe they are non-zombies. The standard p-zombie argument, that you can have qualia-less functional duplicates of non-zombies does not have that problem.
Why would we have these modules that seem quite complex, and likely to negatively effect fitness (thinking's expensive), if they don't do anything? What are the odds of this becoming a prevalent without a favourable selection pressure?
High, if they happen to be foundational.
Sometimes you get spandrels, and sometimes you get systems built on foundations that are no longer what we would call "adaptive", but that can't be removed without crashing systems that are adaptive.
Evo-psych just-so stories are cheap.
Here's one: it turns out that ascribing consistent identity to nominal entities is a side-effect of one of the most easily constructed implementations of "predict the behavior of my environment." Predicting the behavior of my environment is enormously useful, so the first mutant to construct this implementation had a huge advantage. Pretty soon everyone was doing it, and competing for who could do it best, and we had foreclosed the evolutionary paths that allowed environmental prediction without identity-ascribing. So the selection pressure for environmental prediction also produced (as an incidental side-effect) selection pressure for identity-ascribing, despite the identity-ascribing itself being basically useless, and here we are.
I have no idea if that story is true or not; I'm not sure what I'd expect to see differentially were it true or false. My point is more that I'm skeptical of "why would our brains do this if it weren't a useful thing to do?" as a reason for believing that everything my brain does is useful.
It's a bit rude to try to change others' definition of themselves unasked.
Where does that intersect with "that which can be destroyed by the truth, should be"?
"I'm dying to know whether we're stumbling on a difference in the way we think or the way we describe what we think, here." wasn't asking?
I appear to be confused.
Are you implying that subjective self-image is something that we should respect rather than analyze?
I think there's a difference between analysis and authoritive-sounding statements like "X is not actually a part of you, you are wrong about this", especially when it comes to personal attributes like selfness, especially in a thread demonstrating the folly of the typical-mind assumption.
Interesting. It was not my intent to sound any more authoritative than typical. Are there particular signals that indicate abnormally authoritarian-sounding statements that I should watch out for? And are there protocols that I should be aware of here that determine who is allowed to sound more or less authoritarian than whom, and under what circumstances?
FWIW, I understood you in the first place to be saying that this was a choice, and it was good to be aware of it as a choice, rather than making authoritarian statements about what choice to make.
I should have mentioned this earlier, but I did not downvote you so this is somewhat conjectured. In my opinion it's not a question of who but of topic - specifically, and this holds in a more general sense, you might want to be cautious when correcting people about beliefs that are part of their self-image. Couch it in terms like "I don't think", "I believe", "in my opinion", "personally speaking". That'll make it sound less like you think you know their minds better than they do.