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0 pointscrdrost2y ago0 comments

Theory of mind is interesting but one wouldn't want to hinge consciousness upon it.

That direction would likely contain weird outcomes if the science progressed, something like "Dogs are barely-conscious due to their pack structure, they have a couple levels of recursive theory of mind but they can't sustain it as deep as we can. But cats didn't have that pack structure, they're not conscious at all." Or, "this person has such severe autism that he cannot fundamentally understand others' minds or what others interpret his mind to be, so we've downgraded his classification to unconscious. He'll talk your ear off about the various cars produced in a golden age between 1972 and 1984, but because he doesn't really know what it means for you to be listening we regard it as sleep-talking."

It also just kind of doesn't sound right. "What happens when we go to sleep? Well, we stop thinking about what others think we think, and we simply accept what they think about us." That doesn't sound like any sleep I experience -- it might describe some of my dreams, but of course dreams are anomalous conscious experiences that happen during sleep so that also misses the mark.

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munificent2y ago

"Consciousness" is one of those loaded words that means a few different things in different contexts. When I say consciousness is about recursive theory of mind, I'm not trying to say that when you're asleep you're unable to do social reasoning. That's a different use of the same word.

I mean "conscious" in the sense of self-awareness or sentience.

I'm also not ascribing any moral or cognitive superiority or inferiority to different levels of it. The fact that a cat might be less self-aware of its suffering because it think about how it would explain its pain to other cats does mean imply that I'm saying it should be OK to torture cats.

I'm just interested in what is going in human brains when we "feel self-aware". What are we doing when we're thinking about what we're doing? Where does that sense of perceptual distance come from when we are aware of ourselves? And my pet theory is that the distance comes from imagining how we look through others' eyes and developed from our highly advanced social reasoning.

sdwr2y ago

Sounds about right to me, honestly. In my experience, if the theory is predictive, insulting, and has societal ramifications, it's usually correct.

Let's say the soul is exclusively located in eye-to-eye contact. Theres a lot of information in how that contact is broken, how long its broken for, and what happens in between.

(Enemy's-gate-is-down-style reorientation)

pshc2y ago

I think people who seldom engage in direct socialization repurpose their social machinery, diverting it toward internal dialogues with themselves, and toward artifacts that were generated by other minds. An indirect, conscious channel into the world, a simulacra theory of mind.

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