Original post: http://bearlamp.com.au/new-music-powers/

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I have written before about how I am pretty terrible at canvassing music in my head.  This lends to the appalling ability (to musically oriented people) to be able to do things like listen to the same song on repeat 500 times or more in a row without being bothered by it either way.  I never cared more than the sense of "this is interesting but irrelevant" on the idea.

Being indifferent to music has given me the ability to be completely useless at holding a musical preference, or explore the value of music in terms of going to music events, or participating in musical experiences.

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This week something changed!  Or more accurately last week.  Last week I was listening to a piece for the n'th time, but at the same time was quite badly sleep deprived.  As I was listening the music started falling apart.  Different parts of the music changed volume so that I could isolate different instruments and follow different features of the music.  At the time, being a bit sleep deprived I took it as a warning that maybe it was time to go to bed.  hint hint: your going a little nuts.

Today I noticed I can still do it.  When I am no longer sleep deprived I can pay attention to music in a different way than I used to be able to.  I can single out the drums and only "listen" to that part, or the guitar, or the vocals.  (it's pop music on the radio).  

Of course the reason I bothered to write about it, and the reason that it's interesting is; as half the readers can probably imagine - I told a musical friend of mine that I had developed new powers and he said, 

Wait, people can't normally do that?

So I get to add this to the pile of typical mind, sensory perception assumptions that we make when we interpret our own individual world through our own senses.  What if your's worked a bit differently?  How much would that fundamentally change how you operate as a human?  How much you assume about the world around you and how it works?  And how everyone else works?

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Question:  What are your natural assumptions about how your senses work?  Have you ever noticed anyone else acting on different basic natural assumptions?

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Meta: this took 45mins to write.

This week my friend Anna said to me; "I just discovered my typical mind fallacy around visualisation is wrong". Naturally I was perplexed and confused. She said; 

“When I was in second grade the teacher had the class do an exercise in visualization. The students sat in a circle and the teacher instructed us to picture an ice cream cone with our favorite 0ice cream. I thought about my favorite type of cone and my favorite flavor, but the teacher emphasized "picture this in your head, see the ice cream." I tried this, and nothing happened. I couldn't see anything in my head, let alone an ice cream. I concluded, in my childish vanity, that no one could see things in their head, "visualizing" must just be strong figurative language for "pretending," and the exercise was just boring.”

 

Typical mind fallacy being; "everyone thinks like me" (Or A-typical mind fallacy – "no one thinks like me"). My good friend had discovered (a long time ago) that she had no visualisation function. But only recently made sense of it (approximately 15-20 years later). Anna came to me upset, "I am missing out on a function of the brain; limited in my experiences". Yes; true. She was. And we talked about it and tried to measure and understand that loss in better terms. The next day Anna was back but resolved to feeling better about it. Of course realising the value of individual differences in humans, and accepting that whatever she was missing; she was compensating for it by being an ordinary functional human (give or take a few things here and there), and perhaps there were some advantages.

 

Together we set off down the road of evaluating the concept of the visualisation sense. So bearing in mind; that we started with "visualise an ice cream"... Here is what we covered.

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Close your eyes for a moment, (after reading this paragraph), you can see the "blackness' but you can also see the white sparkles/splotches and some red stuff (maybe beige), as well as the echo-y shadows of what you last looked at, probably your white computer screen. They echo and bounce around your vision. That's pretty easy. Now close your eyes and picture an ice cream cone. So the visualisation-imagination space is not in my visual field, but what I do have is a canvas somewhere on which I draw that ice cream; and anything else I visualise.  It’s definitely in a different place. (We will come back to "where" it is later)

So either you have this "notepad"; “canvas” in your head for the visual perception space or you do not. Well; it’s more like a spectrum of strength of visualisation; where some people will visualise clear and vivid things; and others will have (for lack of better terms) "grey"; "echoes"; Shadows; or foggy visualisation, where drawing that is a really hard thing to do. Anna describes what she can get now in adulthood as a vague kind of bas relief of an image, like an after effect. So it should help you model other people by understanding that variously people can visualise better or worse. (probably not a big deal yet; just wait).

 

It occurs that there are other canvases; not just for the visual space but for smell and taste as well. So now try to canvas up some smells of lavender or rose, or some soap. You will probably find soap is possible to do; being of memorable and regular significance. The taste of chocolate; kind of appears from all those memories you have; as does cheese; lemon and salt; (but of course someone is screaming at the page about how they don't understand when I say that chocolate "kind of appears”, because it’s very very vivid to them, and someone else can smell soap but it’s quite far away and grey/cloudy).

 

It occurs to me now that as a teenage male I never cared about my odour; and that I regularly took feedback from some people about the fact that I should deal with that, (personal lack of noticing aside), and I would wonder why a few people would care a lot; and others would not ever care. I can make sense of these happenings by theorising that these people have a stronger smell canvas/faculty than other people. Which makes a whole lot of reasonable sense.

Interesting yet? There is more.

This is a big one.

Sound. But more specifically music. Having explored the insight of having a canvas for these senses with several people over the past week; And noting that the person from the story above confidently boasts an over-active music canvas with tunes always going on in their head. For a very long time I decided that I was just not a person who cared about music; and never really knew to ask or try to explain why. Just that it doesn't matter to me. Now I have a model. 

 

I can canvas music as it happens – in real time; and reproduce to a tune; but I have no canvas for visualising auditory sounds without stimulation. (what inspired the entire write-up here was someone saying how it finally made them understand why they didn't make sense of other people's interests in sounds and music) If you ask me to "hear" the C note on my auditory canvas; I literally have no canvas on which to "draw" that note. I can probably hum a C (although I am not sure how), But I can't play that thing in my head.

Interestingly I asked a very talented pianist. And the response was; "of course I have a musical canvas", (to my slight disappointment). Of course she mentioned it being a big space; and a trained thing as well. (As a professional concert pianist) She can play fully imagined practice on a not-real piano and hear a whole piece. Which makes for excellent practice when waiting for other things to happen, (waiting rooms, ques, public transport...)

 

Anna from the beginning is not a musician, and says her head-music is not always pleasant but simply satisfactory to her. Sometimes songs she has heard, but mostly noises her mind produces. And words, always words. She speaks quickly and fluently, because her thoughts occur to her in words fully formed. 

I don't care very much about music because I don't "see" (imagine) it. Songs do get stuck in my head but they are more like echoes of songs I have just heard, not ones I can canvas myself.

 

Now to my favourite sense. My sense of touch. My biggest canvas is my touch canvas. "feel the weight on your shoulders?", I can feel that. "Wind through your hair?", yes. The itch; yes, The scrape on your skin, The rough wall, the sand between your toes. All of that. 

 

It occurs to me that this explains a lot of details of my life that never really came together. When I was little I used to touch a lot of things, my parents were notorious for shouting my name just as I reached to grab things. I was known as a, "bull in a china shop", because I would touch everything and move everything and feel everything and get into all kinds of trouble with my touch. I once found myself walking along next to a building while swiping my hand along the building - I was with a friend who was trying out drugs (weed), She put her hands on the wall and remarked how this would be interesting to touch while high. At the time I probably said something like; "right okay". And now I understand just what everyone else is missing out on.

 

I spend most days wearing as few clothes as possible, (while being normal and modest), I still pick up odd objects around. There is a branch of Autism where the people are super-sensitive to touch and any touch upsets or distracts them; a solution is to wear tight-fitting clothing to dull the senses. I completely understand that and what it means to have a noisy-touch canvas.

All I can say to someone is that you have no idea what you are missing out on; and before this week – neither did I. But from today I can better understand myself and the people around me.

 

There is something to be said for various methods of thinking; some people “think the words”, and some people don’t think in words, they think in pictures or concepts.  I can’t cover that in this post; but keep that in mind as well for “the natural language of my brain”

 

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One more exercise (try to play along – it pays off). Can you imagine 3 lines, connected; an equilateral triangle on a 2D plane. Rotate that around; good (some people will already be unable to do this). Now draw three more of these. Easy for some. Now I want you to line them up so that the three triangles are around the first one. Now fold the shape into a 3D shape.

How many corners?

How many edges?

How many faces?

Okay good. Now I want you to draw a 2D square. Simple; Now add another 4 triangles. Then; like before surround the square with the triangles and fold it into a pyramid. Again;

How many edges?

How many corners?

How many faces?

 

Now I want you to take the previous triangle shape; and attach it to one of the triangles of the square-pyramid shape. Got it?

Now how many corners?

How many edges?

How many faces?

 

That was easy right? Maybe not that last step. So it turns out I am not a super visualiser. I know this because those people who are a super visualisers will find that when they place the triangular pyramid on to the square pyramid; The side faces of the triangle pyramid merge into a rhombus with the square pyramid; effectively making 1 face out of 2 triangle faces; and removing an edge (and doing that twice over for two sides of the shape).  Those who understand will be going “duh” and those who don’t understand will be going “huh?”, what happened?

 

Pretty cool right?

 

Don’t believe me?  Don’t worry - there is a good explanation for those who don’t see it right away - at this link http://wordplay.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/23/pyramid-2/?_r=1 

 

From a super-visualiser: 

“I would say, for me, visualization is less like having a mental playground, and more like having an entire other pair of eyes.  And there's this empty darkness into which I can insert almost anything.  If it gets too detailed, I might have to stop and close my outer eyes, or I might have to stop moving so I don't walk into anything. That makes it sound like a playground, but there's much more to it than that.

 

Imagine that you see someone buying something in a shop.  They pay cash, and the red of the twenty catches your eye.  It's pretty, and it's vivid, and it makes you happy.  And if you imagine a camera zooming out, you see red moving from customers to clerks at all the registers.  Not everyone is paying with twenties, but commerce is red, now.  It's like the air flashes and lights up like fireworks, every time somebody buys something.  

And if you keep zooming out, you can see red blurs all over the town, all over the map.  So if you read about international trade, it's almost like the paper comes to life, and some parts of it are highlighted red.  And if you do that for long enough, it becomes a habit, and something really weird starts to happen.  

When someone tells you about their car, there's a little red flash just out the corner of your eye, and you know they probably didn't pay full price, because there's a movie you can watch, and in the time they got the car, they didn't have a job and they were stressed, so there's not as much red in that part of the movie, so there has to be some way they got the car without losing even more red.  But it's not just colors, and it's definitely not just money.  

 

Happiness might be shimmering motion.  Connection with friends might be almost a blurring together at the center.  And all these amazing visual metaphors that you usually only see in an art gallery are almost literally there in the world, if you look with the other pair of eyes. So sometimes things really do sort of jump out at you, and nobody else noticed them. But it has to start with one thing.  One meaning, one visual metaphor."

Synaesthesia

 

Way up top I mentioned the "where" of the visualisation space. It's not really in the eye, a good name for it might be "the mind's eye". My personal visualisation canvas is located back up left tilted downwards and facing forwards.

 

Synaesthesia is a lot of possible effects. The most well known one is where people associate a colour with a letter, when they think of the letter they have a sense of a colour that goes with the letter. Some letter's don't have colours, sometimes numbers have colours.

 

There are other branches of synaesthesia. Locating things in the physical space. Days of the week can be laid out in a row in front of you; numbers can be located somewhere. Some can be heavier than others. Sounds can have weights; Smells can have colours; Musical notes can have a taste. Words can feel rough or smooth.

 

Synaesthesia is a class of cross-classification that is done by the brain in interpreting a stimulus, where (we think) it can be caused by crossed wiring in the brain; It's pretty fun. Turns out most people have some kind of Synaesthesia. Usually to do with weights of numbers, or days being in a row. Sometimes Tuesdays are lower than the other days. Who knows. If you pay attention to how sometimes things have an alternative sensory perception, chances are that's a bit of the natural Synaesthete coming out.

So what now?

Synaesthesia is supposed to make you smarter. Crossing brain faculty should help you remember things better; if you can think of numbers in terms of how heavy they are you could probably train your system 1 to do simple arithmetic by "knowing" how heavy the answer is. If it doesn't come naturally to you - these are no longer low-hanging fruit implementations of these ideas.

 

What is a low-hanging fruit; Consider all your "canvases" of thinking; Work out which ones you care more about; and which ones don't matter. (Insert link to superpowers and kryptonites: use your strong senses to your advantage; and make sure you avoid using your weaker senses) (or go on a bender to rebuild your map; influence your territory and train your sensory canvases. Or don't because that wouldn't be a low hanging fruit).

Keep this model around

It can be used for both good and evil. But get the model out there. Talk to people about it. Ask your friends and family if they are able to visualise. Ask about all the senses. Imagine if suddenly you discovered that someone you know; can't "smell" things in their imagination. Or doesn't know what you mean by, "feel this" (seriously you have no idea what you are missing out on the touch spectrum in my little bubble).

You are going to have good senses and bad ones. That's okay! The more you know; the more you can use it to your advantage!

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Meta: Post write up time 1 hour; plus a week of my social life being dominated by the same conversation over and over with different people where I excitedly explain the most exciting thing of this week.  plus 1hr*4, plus 3 people editing and reviewing, plus a rationality dojo where I presented this topic.

 

Meta2: I waited 3 weeks for other people to review this.  There were no substantial changes and I should have not waited so long.  in future I won’t wait that long.

(The below notes are pretty much my attempt to summarise the content in this sample chapter from this book. I am posting this in discussion because I don’t think I will get the time/be bothered enough to improve upon this, so I am posting it now and hope someone finds it interesting or useful. If you do find it interesting check out the full chapter, which goes into more detail)

We don’t experience the world directly, but instead we experience it through a series of “filters” that we call our senses. We know that this is true because of cases of sensory loss. An example is Jonathan I., a 65-year-old New Yorker painter who following an automobile accident suffered from cerebral achromatopsia as well as the loss of the ability to remember and to imagine colours. He would look at a tomato and instead of seeing colours like red or green would instead see only black and shades of grey. The problem was not that Johnathan's eyes no longer worked it was that his brain was unable to process the neural messages for colour.

To understand why Johnathan cannot see colour, we first have to realise that incoming light travels only as far  as the back of the eyes. There the information it contains is converted into neural messages in a process called transduction. We call these neural messages: "sensations". These sensations only involve neural representations of stimuli, not the actual stimuli themselves. Sensations such as “red” or “sweet” or “cold” can be said to have been made by the brain. They also only occur when the neural signal reaches the cerebral cortex. They do not occur when you first interact with the stimuli. To us, the process seems so immediate and direct that we are often fooled into thinking that the sensation of "red" is a characteristic of tomato or that the sensation of “cold” is a characteristic of ice cream. But they are not. What we sense is an electrochemical rendition of the world created by our brain and sensory receptors.

There is another separation between reality as it is and how we sense it to be as well. Organisms can only sense some types of stimulus between certain ranges. This is called the absolute threshold for different types of stimulation and it is the minimum amount of physical energy needed to produce a sensory experience. It should be noted that a faint stimulus does not abruptly become detectable as its intensity increases. There is instead a fuzzy boundary between detection and non-detection, which means that a person’s absolute threshold is in fact not absolute at all. Instead, it varies continually with our mental alertness and physical condition.

To understand the reasons why the thresholds vary, we can turn to the signal detection theory. According to the signal detection theory, sensation depends on the characteristics of the stimulus, the background stimulation and the detector (the brain). Signal detection theory says that the background stimulation makes it less likely, for example, for you to hear someone calling your name on a busy downtown street than in a quiet park. The signal detection theory also tells us that your ability to hear them would depend on the condition of your brain, i.e. detector, and, perhaps, whether it has been aroused by a strong cup of coffee or dulled by drugs or lack of sleep.

The thresholds also change as similar stimuli are continued. This is called sensory adaption and it refers to the diminishing responsiveness of sensory systems to prolonged stimulation. An example of this would be when you adapt to the feeling of swimming in cold water. Unchanging stimulation generally shifts to the back of people's awareness, whereas, intense or changing stimulation will immediately draw your attention.

So far, we have talked about how the sensory organs filter incoming stimuli and how they can only pick up certain types of stimuli. But, there is also something more. We don’t just sense the world; we perceive it as well. The brain in a process called perception combines sensations with memories, motives and emotions to create a representation of the world that fits our current concerns and interests. In essence, we impose our own meanings on sensory experience. People obviously have different memories, motives and current emotional states and this means that we attach different meanings to our sensations i.e. we have perceptual differences. Two people can look at the same political party or religion and come to starkly different conclusions about them. 

The below picture provides a summary of the whole process discussed so far (stimulation to perception):

From simulation to perception, there are a great number of chances for errors to creep in and for you to either misperceive or even not perceive some types stimuli at all. These errors are often exacerbated by mistakes made by the brain. The brain, while brilliant and complex, is not perfect. Some of the mistakes it can make include perceptual phenomena such as: illusions, constancies, change blindness, and inattentional blindness. Illusions, for example, are when your mind deceives you by interpreting a stimulus pattern incorrectly. There are also instances of ambiguity in which some people see a particular colour and others another. This occurs even with people who are not colour blind. It occurs because the brain strives for colour constancy which is seeing the same object as having the same colour under varying illumination conditions. But, this process of colour constancy is not perfect. It is troubling that despite all we know about sensation and perception many people still uncritically accept the evidence of their senses and perceptions at face value.

Another important aspect of perception is that the different types of sensory stimuli, e.g. hearing and vision, need to be integrated. This process of sensory integration can be another source of perceptual phenomenon. An example of this is the McGurk effect in which  the auditory component of one sound is paired with the visual component of another sound. This leads to an illusion, i.e. the perception of a third sound which is not actually spoken. You have to really see (or hear) this in action to understand it, so take a look at this short video which demonstrates the effect.

That was a quick summary on perception. But, an important question still needs to be asked. Is sensory perception and how its input gets organised in our minds the sole basis of our internal representations of the world or is there something else that might placate any creeping errors from perception? This question was asked by many philosophers. Kant in particular, had a distinction between a priori concepts (things that we know before any experience) and a posteriori concepts (things that we know only from experience). He pointed out that there are some things that we can’t know from experience and instead need to be born with them. The work of Konrad Lorenz, though, pointed out that Kant’s a priori were really evolutionary a posteriori concepts. That is we didn’t learn them, but our ancestors did. We might believe X despite not having seen it with our own eyes, but this is only because our ancestors who believed X survived. If we couldn’t navigate the world because our internal representations of the world were too distant from how the world actually is, then we would have been less likely to survive and reproduce. What this means is that we can have a priori concepts i.e. innate knowledge. But, that this innate knowledge is itself based on sensory perceptions of the world, just not yours. The types of a priori knowledge can be differentiated into the naturalistic a priori and the inference-from-premises a priori.

Following on from a few threads about superpowers and extra sense that humans can try to get; I have always been interested in the idea of putting a magnet in my finger for the benefits of extra-sensory perception.

Stories (occasional news articles) imply that having a magnet implanted in a finger in a place surrounded by nerves imparts a power of electric-sensation.  The ability to feel when there are electric fields around.  So that's pretty neat.  Only I don't really like the idea of cutting into myself (even if its done by a professional piercing artist).  

Only recently did I come across the suggestion that a magnetic ring could impart similar abilities and properties.  I was delighted at the idea of a similar and non-invasive version of the magnetic-implant (people with magnetic implants are commonly known as grinders within the community).  I was so keen on trying it that I went out and purchased a few magnetic rings of different styles and different properties.

Interestingly the direction that a magnetisation can be imparted to a ring-shaped object can be selected from 2 general types.  Magnetised across the diameter, or across the height of the cylinder shape.  (there is a 3rd type which is a ring consisting of 4 outwardly magnetised 1/4 arcs of magnetic metal suspended in a ring-casing. and a few orientations of that system).

I have now been wearing a Neodymium ND50 magnetic ring from supermagnetman.com for around two months.  The following is a description of my experiences with it.

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When I first got the rings, I tried wearing more than one ring on each hand, I very quickly found out what happens when you wear two magnets close to each other. AKA they attract.  Within a day I was wearing one magnet on each hand.  What is interesting is what happens when you move two very strong magnets within each other's magnetic field.  You get the ability to feel a magnetic field, and roll it around in your hands.  I found myself taking typing breaks to play with the magnetic field between my fingers.  It was an interesting experience to be able to do that.  I also found I liked the snap as the two magnets pulled towards each other and regularly would play with them by moving them near each other.  For my experiences here I would encourage others to use magnets as a socially acceptable way to hide an ADHD twitch - or just a way to keep yourself amused if you don't have a phone to pull out and if you ever needed a reason to move.  I have previously used elastic bands around my wrist for a similar purpose.

The next thing that is interesting to note is what is or is not ferrous.  Fridges are made of ferrous metal but not on the inside.  Door handles are not usually ferrous, but the tongue and groove of the latch is.  metal railings are common, as are metal nails in wood.  Elevators and escalators have some metallic parts.  Light switches are often plastic but there is a metal screw holding them into the wall.  Tennis fencing is ferrous, the ends of usb cables are sometimes ferrous and sometimes not.  The cables are not ferrous.  except one I found. (they are probably made of copper)

 

Breaking technology

I had a concern that I would break my technology.  That would be bad.  overall I found zero broken pieces of technology.  In theory if you take a speaker which consists of a magnet and an electric coil and you mess around with its magnetic field it will be unhappy and maybe break.  That has not happened yet.  The same can be said for hard drives, magnetic memory devices, phone technology and other things that rely on electricity.  So far nothing has broken.  What I did notice is that my phone has a magnetic-sleep function on the top left.  i.e. it turns the screen off to hold the ring near that point.  For both benefit and detriment depending on where I am wearing the ring.

Metal shards

I spend some of my time in workshops that have metal shards lying around.  sometimes they are sharp, sometimes they are more like dust.  They end up coating the magnetic ring.  The sharp ones end up jabbing you, and the dust just looks like dirt on your skin.  in a few hours they tend to go away anyways, but it is something I have noticed

magnetic strength

Over the time I have been wearing the magnets their strength has dropped off significantly.  I am considering building a remagnetisation jig, but have not started any work on it.  obviously every time I ding something against it, every time I drop them - the magnetisation decreases a bit as the magnetic dipoles reorganise.

knives

I cook a lot.  Which means I find myself holding sharp knives fairly often.  The most dangerous thing that I noticed about these rings is that when I hold a ferrous knife in the normal way I hold a knife, the magnet has a tendency to shift the knife slightly or at a time when I don't want it to.  That sucks.  Don't wear them while playing with sharp objects like knives.  the last think you want to do is accidentally have your carrot-cutting turn into a finger-cutting event.  What is interesting as well is that some cutlery is made of ferrous metal and some is not.  also sometimes parts of a piece of cutlery are ferrous and some are non-ferrous.  i.e. my normal food-eating knife set has a ferrous blade part and a non-ferrous handle part.  I always figured they were the same, but the magnet says they are different materials.  Which is pretty neat.  I have found the same thing with spoons sometimes.  the scoop is ferrous and the handle is not.  I assume it would be because the scoop/blade parts need extra forming steps so need to be a more work-able metal.  Cheaper cutlery is not like this.

The same applies to hot pieces of metal.  Ovens, stoves, kettles, soldering irons...  When they accidentally move towards your fingers, or your fingers are compelled to be attracted to them.  Thats a slightly unsafe experience.

electric-sense

You know how when you run a microwave it buzzes, in a *vibrating* sorta way.  if you put your hand against the outside of a microwave you will feel the motor going.  Yea cool.  So having a magnetic ring means you can feel that without touching the microwave from about 20cm away.  There is a variability to it, better microwaves have more shielding on their motors and are leak less.  I tried to feel the electric field around power tools like a drill press, handheld tools like an orbital sander, computers, cars, appliances, which pretty much covers everything.  I also tried servers and the only thing that really had a buzzing field was a UPS machine (uninterupted power supply).  Which was cool.  Only other people had reported that any transformer - i.e. a computer charger would make that buzz.  I also carry a battery block with me and that had no interesting fields.  Totally not exciting.  As for moving electrical charge.  Cant feel it.  If powerpoints are receiving power - nope.  not dying by electrocution - no change.

boring superpower

There is a reason I call magnetic rings a boring superpower.  The only real super-power I have been imparted is the power to pick up my keys without using my fingers.  and also maybe hold my keys without trying to.  As superpowers go - thats pretty lame.  But kinda nifty.  I don't know. I wouldn't insist people do it for the life-changing purposes.

 

Did I find a human-superpower?  No.  But I am glad I tried it.

 

Any questions?  Any experimenting I should try?

Carol puts her left hand in a bucket of hot water, and lets it acclimate for a few minutes.  Meanwhile her right hand is acclimating to a bucket of ice water.  Then she plunges both hands into a bucket of lukewarm water.  The lukewarm water feels very different to her two hands.  To the left hand, it feels very chilly.  To the right hand, it feels very hot.  When asked to tell the temperature of the lukewarm water without looking at the thermocouple readout, she doesn't know.  Asked to guess, she's off by a considerable margin.

Next Carol flips the thermocouple readout to face her (as shown), and practices.  Using different lukewarm water temperatures of 10-35 C, she gets a feel for how hot-adapted and cold-adapted hands respond to the various middling temperatures.  Now she makes a guess - starting with a random hand, then moving the other one and revising the guess if necessary - each time before looking at the thermocouple.  What will happen?  I haven't done the experiment, but human performance on similar perceptual learning tasks suggests that she will get quite good at it.

We bring Carol a bucket of 20 C water (without telling) and let her adapt her hands first as usual.  "What do you think the temperature is?" we ask.  She moves her cold hand first.  "Feels like about 20," she says.  Hot hand follows.  "Yup, feels like 20."

"Wait," we ask. "You said feels-like-20 for both hands.  Does this mean the bucket no longer feels different to your two different hands, like it did when you started?"

"No!" she replies.  "Are you crazy?  It still feels very different subjectively; I've just learned to see past that to identify the actual temperature."

In addition to reports on the external world, we perceive some internal states that typically (but not invariably) can serve as signals about our environment.  Let's tentatively call these states Subjectively Identified Aspects of Perception (SIAPs).  Even though these states aren't strictly necessary to know what's going on in the environment - Carol's example shows that the sensation felt by one hand isn't necessary to know that the water is 20 C, because the other hand knows this via a different sensation - they still matter to us.  As Eliezer notes:

If I claim to value art for its own sake, then would I value art that no one ever saw?  A screensaver running in a closed room, producing beautiful pictures that no one ever saw?  I'd have to say no.  I can't think of any completely lifeless object that I would value as an end, not just a means.  That would be like valuing ice cream as an end in itself, apart from anyone eating it.  Everything I value, that I can think of, involves people and their experiences somewhere along the line.

The best way I can put it, is that my moral intuition appears to require both the objective and subjective component to grant full value.

Subjectivity matters.  (I am not implying that Eliezer would agree with anything else I say about subjectivity.)

Why would evolution build beings that sense their internal states?  Why not just have the organism know the objective facts of survival and reproduction, and be done with it?  One thought is that it is just easier to build a brain that does both, rather than one that focuses relentlessly on objective facts.  But another is that this separation of sense-data into "subjective" and "objective" might help us learn to overcome certain sorts of perceptual illusion - as Carol does, above.  And yet another is that some internal states might be extremely good indicators and promoters of survival or reproduction - like pain, or feelings of erotic love.  This last hypothesis could explain why we value some subjective aspects so much, too.

Different SIAPs can lead to the same intelligent behavioral performance, such as identifying 20 degree C water.  But that doesn't mean Carol has to value the two routes to successful temperature-telling equally.  And, if someone proposed to give her radically different, previously unknown, subjectively identifiable aspects of experience, as new routes to the kinds of knowledge she gets from perception, she might reasonably balk.  Especially if this were to apply to all the senses.  And if the subjectively identifiable aspects of desire and emotion (SIADs, SIAEs) were also to be replaced, she might reasonably balk much harder.  She might reasonably doubt that the survivor of this process would be her, or even human, in any sense meaningful to her.

Would it be possible to have an intelligent being whose cognition of the world is mediated by no SIAPs?  I suspect not, if that being is well-designed.  See above on "why would evolution build beings that sense internal states."

If you've read all 3 posts, you've probably gotten the point of the Gasoline Gal story by now.  But let me go through some of the mappings from source to target in that analogy.  A car that, when you take it on a tour, accelerates well, handles nicely, makes the right amount of noise, and so on - one that passes the touring test (groan) - is like a being that can identify objective facts in its environment.  An internal combustion engine is like Carol's subjective cold-sensation in her left hand - one way among others to bring about the externally-observable behavior.  (By "externally observable" I mean "without looking under the hood".)  In Carol's case, that behavior is identifying 20 C water.  In the engine's case, it's the acceleration of the car.  Note that in neither case is this internal factor causally inert.  If you take it away and don't replace it with anything, or even if you replace it with something that doesn't fit, the useful external behavior will be severely impaired.  The mere fact that you can, with a lot of other re-working, replace an internal combustion engine with a fuel cell, does not even begin to show that the engine does nothing.

And Gasoline Gal's passion for internal combustion engines is like my - and I dare say most people's - attachment to the subjective internal aspects of perception and emotion that we know and love.  The words and concepts we use for these things - pain, passion, elation, for some easier examples - refer to the actual processes in human beings that drive the related behavior.  (Regarding which, neurology has more to learn.)  As I mentioned in my last post, a desire can form with a particular referent based on early experience, and remain focused on that event-type permanently.  If one constructs radically different processes that achieve similar external results, analogous to the fuel cell driven car, one gets radically different subjectivity - which we can only denote by pointing simultaneously to both the "under the hood" construction of these new beings, and the behavior associated with their SIAPs, together.

Needless to say, this complicates uploading.

One more thing: are SIAPs qualia?  A substantial minority of philosophers, or maybe a plurality, uses "qualia" in a sufficiently similar way that I could probably use that word here.  But another substantial minority loads it with additional baggage.  And that leads to pointless misunderstandings, pigeonholing, and straw men.  Hence, "SIAPs".  But feel free to use "qualia" in the comments if you're more comfortable with that term, bearing my caveats in mind.