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I like the examples from 8.4.2:
- Note the difference between saying (A) “the idea of going to the zoo is positive-valence, a.k.a. motivating”, versus (B) “I want to go to the zoo”. [...]
- Note the difference between saying (A) “the idea of closing the window popped into awareness”, versus (B) “I had the idea to close the window”. Since (B) involves the homunculus as a cause of new thoughts, it’s forbidden in my framework.
I think it could be an interesting mental practice to rephrase inner speech involving "I" in this way. I have been doing this for a while now. It started toward the end of my last meditation retreat when I switched to a non-CISM (or should I say "there was a switch in the thoughts about self-representation"?). Using "I" in mental verbalization felt like a syntax error and other phrasings like you are suggesting here, felt more natural. Interestingly, it still makes sense to use "I" in conversations to refer to me (the speaker). I think that is part of why the CISM is so natural: It uses the same element in internal and external verbalizations[1].
Pondering your examples, I think I would render them differently. Instead of: "I want to go to the zoo," it could be: "there is a desire to go to the zoo." Though I guess if "desire to" stands for "positive-valence thought about") it is very close to your "the idea of going to the zoo is positive-valence."
In practice, the thoughts would be smaller, more like "there is [a sound][2]," "there is a memory of [an animal]," "there is a memory of [an episode from a zoo visit]," "there is a desire to [experience zoo impressions]," "there is a thought of [planning]." The latter gets complicated. The thought of planning could be positive valence (because plans often lead to desirable outcomes) or the planning is instrumentally useful to get the zoo impressions (which themselves may be associated with desirable sights and smells), or the planning can be aversive (because effortful), but still not strong enough to displace the desirable zoo visit.
For an experienced meditator, the fragments that can be noticed can be even smaller - or maybe more pre-cursor-like. This distinction is easier to see with a quiet mind, where, before a thought fully occupies attention, glimmers of thoughts may bubble up[3]. This is related to noticing that attention is shifting. The everyday version of that happens why you notice that you got distracted by something. The subtler form is noticing small shifts during your regular thinking (e.g., I just noticed my attention shifting to some itch, without that really interuping my writing flow). But I'm not sure how much of that is really a sense of attention vs. a retroactive interpretation of the thoughts. Maybe a more competent meditator can comment.
And now I wonder whether the phonological loop, or whatever is responsible for language-like thoughts, maybe subvocalizations, is what makes the CISM the default model.
[brackets indicate concepts that are described by words, not the words themselves]
The question is though, what part notices the noticing. Some thought of [noticing something] must be sufficiently stable and active to do so.
I think your explanation in section 8.5.2 resolves our disagreement nicely. You refer to S(X) thoughts that "spawn up" successive thoughts that eventually lead to X (I'd say X') actions shortly after (or much later). While I was referring to S(X) that cannot give rise to X immediately. I think the difference was that you are more lenient with what X can be, such that S(X) can be about an X that is happening much later, which wouldn't work in my model of thoughts.
Explicit (self-reflective) desire
Statement: “I want to be inside.”
Intuitive model underlying that statement: There’s a frame (§2.2.3) “X wants Y” (§3.3.4). This frame is being invoked, with X as the homunculus, and Y as the concept of “inside” as a location / environment.
How I describe what’s happening using my framework: There’s a systematic pattern (in this particular context), call it P, where self-reflective thoughts concerning the inside, like “myself being inside” or “myself going inside”, tend to trigger positive valence. That positive valence is why such thoughts arise in the first place, and it’s also why those thoughts tend to lead to actual going-inside behavior.
In my framework, that’s really the whole story. There’s this pattern P. And we can talk about the upstream causes of P—something involving innate drives and learned heuristics in the brain. And we can likewise talk about the downstream effects of P—P tends to spawn behaviors like going inside, brainstorming how to get inside, etc. But “what’s really going on” (in the “territory” of my brain algorithm) is a story about the pattern P, not about the homunculus. The homunculus only arises secondarily, as the way that I perceive the pattern P (in the “map” of my intuitive self-model).
As I commented on Are big brains for processing sensory input? I predict that the brain regions of a whale or Orca responsible for spatiotemporal learning and memory are a big part of their encephalization.
I'm not disagreeing with this assessment. The author has an agenda, but I don't think it's hidden in any way. It is mostly word thinking and social association. But that's how the opposition works!
I believe this has been done in Google's Multilingual Neural Machine Translation (GNMT) system that enables zero-shot translations (translating between language pairs without direct training examples). This system leverages shared representations across languages, allowing the model to infer translations for unseen language pairs.
The above link posted is a lengthy and relatively well-sourced, if biased, post about Scott Alexander's writing related to human biodiversity (HBD). The author is very clearly opposed to HBD. I think it is a decent read if you want to understand that position.
Thanks. I already got in touch with Masaharu Mizumoto.
Congrats again for the sequence! It all fits together nicely.
While it makes sense to exclude hallucinogenic drugs and seizures, at least hallucinogenic drugs seem to fit into the pattern if I understand the effect correctly.
Auditory hallucinations, top-down processing and language perception - this paper says that imbalances in top-down cortical regulation is responsible for auditory hallucinations:
Participants who reported AH in the week preceding the test had a higher false alarm rate in their auditory perception compared with those without such (recent) experiences.
And this page Models of psychedelic drug action: modulation of cortical-subcortical circuits says that hallucinogenic drugs lead to such imbalances. So it is plausibly the same mechanism.
I second Patrick McKenzie.
If we were not able to think about potentially bad outcomes well, that would a problem as clearly thinking about them is what avoids them, hopefully. But the question is a good one. My first intuition was that maybe the importance of an outcome - in both directions, good and bad - is relevant.