Ask A Genius 879: The Active Workshop of Mind
Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/02/01
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: I’m thinking less about the actual structure of consciousness, the actual process of human thinking, the actual process of thought itself; I’m thinking more about the ultimate tool or tools used to discover that process in that structure. What do you think will ultimately lead us not only in the right direction but to more or less an ultimate answer, a comprehensive answer?
Rick Rosner: Well, one thing is when they start doing the multimodal stuff with AI, which is going to take shit tons of servers, and I don’t know what other kind of tech, but if they find out that if you just go multimodal, that AI starts acting like it’s conscious. AI can already talk like it’s conscious, but it’s easy to see through. ChatGPT can sound pretty like a human, but you can poke at it and poke holes in it. I think if they start going multimodal, that might solve most of consciousness, and if so, I think a lot of the evidence for how consciousness works is going to come out of the AI realm. technology is getting better at capturing what’s going on in your brain from instant to instant. I think we already have, as I’ve said a zillion times, a pretty good intuitive understanding of consciousness in this era. We don’t have perfect models of how consciousness works, but the half-assed models that we have via our technology are closer to consciousness than we’ve ever had before.
We have fairly sophisticated levels of big data information processing. I mean AI is still pretty dumb but we’re good at processing information and a lot of the techniques for processing information impinge on the processes in consciousness. So, we’re going to approach it from three different angles; from AI, from PET scans and other super-fast and precise brain Imaging, and from philosophizing about what consciousness might be and they’re all going to come together pretty quick within the next 10 years. Is that reasonable?
Jacobsen: Yes.
Rosner: I hear like a weird adjunct to that. This is a well-known thing; when somebody tells you not to think of an elephant, you can’t do that. You are going to think of an elephant. It’s very hard not to think of an elephant when somebody tells you not to, but you can put off thinking of an elephant picturing an elephant for, I’d say at least a second. Probably with practice, you could put it off for several seconds if you flood the Zone if you have a bunch of other shit to think about, ready to think about or that you’re already thinking about. And if you can deploy that shit and flood your active consciousness with other things to think about, powers to two.
When Hunter Biden was on crack, he got with a lot of women, maybe sex workers. He had a lot of sex; he took a lot of pictures, and these pictures were found on his computer. Marjorie Taylor Greene likes to hold those pictures up with big bars over his junk in Congress; it’s ridiculous. Then liberals who consider themselves funny on Twitter like to taunt the Conservative, saying, “Yeah, you’re just jealous about the size of his junk.” So, think of powers of two, think of Hunter Biden, there’s Elvis on the TV right now, think of… I’ve got farts right now because we had Chinese food. You can flood the Zone with other shit to think about, then you can delay the elephant imagery from entering your consciousness for at least half a second and probably with practice, like two seconds. Is that reasonable? Consciousness is just your active Zone of consideration.
Jacobsen: What if you remove the active workshop for consideration? Get everything else functional, no workshop.
Rosner: When you look at people with Alzheimer’s and other brain disorders, like there have been some famous people who are stuck in time because of an injury or alcoholism, they burnt out the part of their brain that is able to form new memories. These people are constantly surprised every day. They wake up and have to be told where they are in their lives. There was even a Sandler-Drew Barrymore movie called 50 1st Dates about somebody with that. That doesn’t remove the active consideration from the workshop, but it severely impinges on consciousness. Sometimes, to treat severe epilepsy, they’ll sever the Corpus Calossum, which basically means you have two independent consciousnesses working because you have two halves of your brain working together closely enough that you think you have a single consciousness, but each half of your brain can be aware of things that the other half isn’t. So, it’s a really weird version of consciousness. So, consciousness can suffer severe insults, your brain can suffer severe insults, and you can still operate as if you’re conscious. I would assume that when you get put on a heart-lung pump when you’re having heart surgery, in the aftermath of that, you have a bunch of mini-strokes from your blood having been all beaten up, and you lose the quality of your awareness wrecked at least for a while and it’s very much a bummer because you’re aware that you’ve got like degraded consciousness.
So, I’m guessing that I don’t know what you have to do, that you could get in there and you could remove a lot of the active Center, the workshop and whatever was left would still and the person who was left would still think they were conscious even though it was their consciousness is severely degraded. I mean, Alzheimer’s people are known to go to great lengths to hide their confusion from other people and themselves. Also, stroke people where they’ll come up with all sorts of justifications. Carol’s mom, who was descending into Alzheimer’s, would say there’s just a lot going on to explain her confusion. And so, if you’ve been conscious for 70 years but your consciousness becomes impaired, the structures that are left are going to still deliver a result that in a Turing test kind of way seems like that person might still be conscious. Way on a superficial level, ChatGPT seems capable of thinking till you really poke at it, but you could strip out enough that the person wouldn’t really be conscious. I think that is like a fear that is seen in horror movies. You got all these zombies running around who can still do some of the things of humans; they can walk, they can run depending on which type of movie you’re looking at, and they can often figure out how to break into things and get at humans. The fear of consciousness of people who are supposed to be conscious but aren’t, I think that’s one of the fears that we have that can be exploited in horror that you think you’re an autonomous being, but you’re not, and that’s a scary thing.
Also, I mean, we have a ton of zombie stories, we’ve had that over the past ten years, and you could maybe make a case that anxiety over people being driven crazy and turned into lunatics by the Russian fire hose of propaganda model via social media seeing a third of the country of America turned into lunatics, Evangelicals supporting the most Godless mother fucker who’s ever been president; the fear that you’re at the mercy of people whose consciousnesses have been compromised is a horrifying thing. Hence, zombies and other forms of beings who don’t have free will attack you.
[Recording End]
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