Richard_Hollerith comments on Singlethink - Less Wrong

30 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 06 October 2007 07:24PM

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Comment author: Richard_Hollerith 10 October 2007 05:10:05PM 0 points [-]

Are you sure the model that your mind was using to report its own thought process corresponded to what was really going on under the bonnet?

I was very confident that I could reliably retain or reconstruct the last five or so actual thoughts of my conscious deliberation -- and the actual ordering or sequencing of those thoughts. Although recalling or reconstructing a thought sometimes required a few seconds of effort or patience, the reconstruction sure felt like a reliable observation rather than an interpretation or the updating of a model or the use of a learned model. As for extracting generalizations or regularities from those observations, like I said, I can recall making only one (declarative) generalization, but I have no reason to believe that I could not bring the same regularity-noticing, causality-extracting powers to bear on those observations that I could to any observations made by my senses. (When observing a very complex process, the regularity-noticing consists mostly of implicit learning rather than explicit, declarative learning -- or so it seems to me.)