this post was submitted on 25 Aug 2024
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Not watching the video, but obviously not.
There is a huge amount of human variation, but one of the big ones is some people don't have an internal monologue and some people lack the ability to visualize things in their mind.
Either one of those drastically changes what we think of as a consciousness.
Hell, some of the split brain subjects are probably still alive. Some of them had two distinct consciousnesses emerge due to their hemispheres no longer being able to communicate. That's definitely unique now that we're not cauterizing corpus callosums anymore.
I think my lack of internal monologue and inability to visualize is why I've never been able to get into reading. I'm a little jealous when I hear people describe books as "like watching a movie in your mind".
I came to the same conclusion about my usual disinterest in books stemming from me having Aphantasia. The only kinds of books I've been able to consistently get through are very comedic in their writing style (e.g. Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett, Dennis E. Taylor, etc.). I think the focus on humor instead of visualizing the story and its world is what helps me when it comes to reading books.
Try Carl Hiaasen and Christopher Moore!
I'll look them up, thanks for the recommendation!
I have both a layered internal monologue, and highly visual thinking. There are some benefits, but on of the draw backs of noticed is feeling less aware of what's going on in front of me. My visual thinking kinda takes over what my eyes see a little and I loose focus really easy
My partner has a similarly vivid visual thinking and a "crowded" internal monologue. They also have a hard time keeping focus.
I can not visualize pictures in my mind at all, but I was always into reading. Instead of pictures I can build abstract concepts and make connections between that I can touch and move
This is exactly how I do it. I’ve never been able to articulate it like that. Yeah things are connected and I can sort of feel along those connections to understand them.
So I understand how different parts of the story connect with each other while ignoring visual details like descriptions of how things look.
Nice to know there are dozens of us!
Pretty strong case of Aphantasia here, it never even occurred to me that people actually saw things in their minds eye and thought it was more a metaphor or something. I do, however, have a very talkative internal monologue. I have a friend who has no internal monologue paired with Aphantasia, I always enjoy talking with them about their experience and how it differs from my own.
It's really interesting to me how people's internal experience can differ and how we can never truly know what these different experiences are like.
Arguably we all have more than one distinct consciousness due to both hemispheres being able to sustain one on their own, but generally aren't conscious of it. And in case we are, interpretations tend to be religious as (generally, in currentyear) the right hemisphere consciousness is thought of as an other. As in, nope, that wasn't your guardian angel, it was your right hemisphere violently pulling you out of your oh so comfortable left hemisphere tunnel vision to finally perceive some traffic instead of how hard your Lambo's sound makes your dick.
Did you know that, evolutionarily, the interconnection of our hemispheres actually decreased with increased intelligence? Having drastically different takes on the world is very beneficial, likewise having them run concurrently: A wide angle lens for threat perception, a narrow angle lens to focus in on things. Iain McGilchrist has written two great books about the whole topic, but as a broad summary: The right hemisphere is the dominant one, having a holistic model of the world, while the left flourishes on detail and, if not in check, fabulates like a fisher -- the right, as said, is supposed to direct its focus. Losing your left hemisphere is like losing your glasses, everything becomes fuzzy but you still know where you are, while losing your right is more like losing your eyes but being proud of how sharp your glasses make everything look. Symptomatically, you then see patients walking say through a door, noticing the hinge, getting drawn into it, really looking at it, and forgetting they were even walking. They're stuck there, looking at the hinge. (That's all modulo neuroplasticity, if damage occurs very early in life the brain can compensate). Excessive right-hemisphere dominance would be like dude, that's all, you know, thoughts.
We need to define consciousness here…
To me everything you describe is related to the mind. Not consciousness.
To me consciousness is the observer of the mind, not the mind.
Like, what is “sensing” your thoughts? What is “behind” the mind’s eyes?
That’s consciousness.
And it IS universal. It’s indivisible and eternal (doesn’t change).
Your observer is always neutrally observing. All judgments and shifts happen in the mind. Which the consciousness just observes.
Yeah. But we don't know how it's happening.
No, it's not.
Nope. No one is consciousness forever.
That's a pretty basic one
Ok.
Now, I know you didn't mean to, but you may have just said something that's correct, and I'm almost certain you did so unintentionally.
But over the very very short amount of time we've been looking I to this, yes there is a theory that what people think of a consciousness is not actually driving the bus. It's a bored kid in the backseat daydreaming about why what they see out the back window is what's outside.
The kid has no control over what they see. They're not driving the bus or have any influenece over what they see out that window.
But the theory came about because we couldn't measure the speed of thought back in like the 80s, maybe 70s.
When we could measure faster, it looked like we had been wrong.
Then even later we took that back and said it could be possible that that multiple different things in our environment happen different ways, then an incredibly small amount of time later that quantum wave collapse (happening millions or billions time a second) collapses those different options into a "one true timeline".
And if that is what's going (literally uncountable, billions and billions time a second) then maybe we really are just the kid in the back of the bus pretending we're flying over a landscape with no control over where we're going.
What's really calling the shots on what we do isnt just "a Busdriver" either, if it's not our consciousness running things, it's a whole bunch of different parts of our bodies that have neurons, some of which are in the brain and some aren't.
I really really don't think that's what you're trying to say, but you did touch on something that could be possible.
Because again, we do t know and in all likelihood even if humanity figures it out some day, it'll be generations from now at best
The only observer of the mind would be an outside observer looking at you. You yourself are not an observer of your own mind nor could you ever be. I think it was Feuerbach who originally made the analogy that if your eyeballs evolved to look inwardly at themselves, then they could not look outwardly at the outside world. We cannot observe our own brains as they only exist to build models of reality, if our brains had a model of itself it would have no room left over to model the outside world.
We can only assign an object to be what is "sensing" our thoughts through reflection. Reflection is ultimately still building models of the outside world but the outside world contains a piece of ourselves in a reflection, and this allows us to have some limited sense of what we are. If we lived in a universe where we somehow could never leave an impression upon the world, if we could not see our own hands or see our own faces in the reflection upon a still lake, we would never assign an entity to ourselves at all.
We assign an entity onto ourselves for the specific purpose of distinguishing ourselves as an object from other objects, but this is not an a priori notion ("I think therefore I am" is lazy sophistry). It is an a posteriori notion derived through reflection upon what we observe. We never actually observe ourselves as such a thing is impossible. At best we can over reflections of ourselves and derive some limited model of what "we" are, but there will always be a gap between what we really are and the reflection of what we are.
Precisely what is "sensing your thoughts" is yourself derived through reflection which inherently derives from observation of the natural world. Without reflection, it is meaningless to even ask the question as to what is "behind" it. If we could not reflect, we would have no reason to assign anything there at all. If we do include reflection, then the answer to what is there is trivially obvious: what you see in a mirror.