But why does that feel like anything? I could write a program that concurrently processes its visual input and its internal model. I don't think it would be conscious, unless everything in the universe is conscious (a possibility I can't, admittedly, discount).

From what...my friend say, this becomes evident with LSD.

They said it clearly amplified the internal part of some visual perception loop, in fairly straightforward ways. For example, intentionally trying to see something as it wasn't (like a shadow as a snake) would make it be seen that way (the shadow would take on a clear snake appearance, and even move a bit).

Some simple examples are all the face optical illusions (Thatcher, reverse mask, etc), that show our perception of a face is in no way direct.

And funny enough this gets really close to the non-dualistic philosophies of zen buddhism.

Interesting idea called transparent self model by Thomas Metzinger, author of The Ego Tunnel where he explains it further.

The gist from my memory of 15+ years ago is that the brain needs to model the world and then itself within the world, creating a model that is transparent to itself, situated in the world.

Anil Seth would have it the other way around that you predictively generate a perception of the world and then use your senses to refine that.

Consciousness could still be the self reaction to this sub-conscious predictive/generative function.

Is this also the reason why darting eyes movements can be linked (and is predictive of or can detect) to mental health issues like schizophrenia, etc?

<<look at the world, then look at the self to evaluate its reaction to the world. Then repeat>>

Who's doing the looking?

This whole consciousness debate is just trumped up bs.

It's a mechanism of intelligence, not consciousness. Intel is built up from path-integration, short-cuts, vicarious trial and error that begins in very tiny local areas and expands to landmark and non-landmark navigation. This switching between vision and hippocampus has always been theorized about as the fundamental sharp wave ripple threshold of how intelligence is built as most mammals can do this, so it's not the "algorithm of consciousness".

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The more you drive the more you notice things. After a few years in the taxi, while going through the tunnel in central Phoenix, I pointed at the cars in the far-left lanes of the freeway and said to my passenger, "you see that car right there? It's going to change into the next lane, and that other guy is going to have to slam on his brakes." My passenger was amazed when exactly this happened seconds later.

Yea but what are you "doing" when you're imagining stuff into the future - you're running some sort of prediction based on the patterns you see in the present. You're planning out moves before you execute them. The biggest difference is accuracy and breadth of simultaneous tracking, and it is relatively difficult to tell when its a good time to slow react or fast react.

Yeah - machines dont have the ability to visualise / imagine out in the future.

Seems to support the idea that dreams are rehearsals for real life.

Suppose we simplify the scenario and think of experiences as draws from a discrete probability distribution, e.g. p=[0.1, 0.1, 0.7, 0.1].

Suppose further that all events are a draw of type 1, 2, 3, or 4, and that our memory kept a count and updated the distribution - it is essentially a frequency distribution.

When we encounter a stimulus, we have to (1) recognize it and (2) assign a reward valence to it. If we only ever observed '3', the distribution would become very peaked. Correspondingly, this suggests that we would recognize '3' events faster and be better at assigning a reward valence to those events.

Then if we ever encounter a non-3 event, we would recognize it more slowly - it is well-established that recognition is tied to encounter frequency - and do a poorer job assigning reward valence to it. Together this means that we would do a bad job selecting the appropriate response.

Perhaps this scenario-based dreaming keeps us (and rats) primed so we're not flat-footed in new scenarios.

The question then becomes - if these scenarios are purely imagined, where are they being sampled from? If we never observe 1, 2, and 4...how do we know that these are the true list of alternative scenarios?

Yeah this part was pretty weird. How do they know that was caused due to the rats' brains firing because they were imagining unfamiliar routes, vs something completely unrelated to the maze routes at all? Just because the hippocampus flash patterns matched doesn't mean that's what the rats were thinking about while sleeping I'd think

>A creative genius envisioning a new world and a person trapped in a state of torment isn't the hardware, but the learned software of regulation, awareness, and perspective.

No, it's hardware. There is no amount of 'wisdom' bootstraps pulling that will make you not schizophrenic.

Wisdom is an arbitrary concept. The drive to avoid suffering is built from sensory and affective affinities and networks funnlled into the cog-mapping motor systems. Calling this wisdom is simply a simplistic narrative.

I think we should be careful about materialistic reductions of awareness. Because some rats dreamed detours that ended up being correct in waking rat life, it does not follow that all instances of deja vu are misfirings. It's a tempting connection to draw, but it does not actually explain how the detours were dreamt to begin with, and this points to a deeper question about awareness in general. If I were pressed for an analogy, I might say something like "just because all books have ink does not mean that all ink lives in books." You know what I mean? There's a superset of experiences that cannot be easily explained away by caching, as tempting as it might be.

Very interesting, will have a read in depth.

Wondering if you have any ideas on this, which can be quite jarring when it happens?

You are thinking about something, and then walk through a doorway into another room and suddenly completely lose track of what you were thinking.

The closest idea I've seen for that is: Jeff Hawkins in his Thousand Brain Theory of Intelligence made a statement that learning is a function of navigation and the world models we construct are set in the context of location we create them.

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Edit: Just read your piece on Faith: "Faith, as it’s traditionally understood, is trivial bullshit compared to the towering, unseen faith we place in the empirical all day everyday."

Absolutely correct, and the traditional understanding of Hebrews 11:1 I don't believe reflects what the author (supposedly Paul) was trying to convey.

Ἔστιν δὲ πίστις ἐλπιζομένων ὑπόστασις, πραγμάτων ἔλεγχος οὐ βλεπομένων

πίστις: Pistis can be translated as confidence, as in: I'm confident this chair won't collapse when I sit on on it. Much stronger than belief or faith.

ὑπόστασις: Hupostasis is also a much stronger word than assurance, it conveys substance, as in your past experience backs up your confidence.

Your work seems pretty good to me, have you seen Steven Byrne's blog theorising about symbol grounding in the brain?

VR cannot be essential to decoding the brain as it deals in topological maps and affinities.

I don't know if it is the paper you are thinking of (likely not) but this idea of checking predictions against outcomes is a very common idea in less mainstream AI research, including the so called "energy-based models" of Yann LeCun and the reference frames of the thousand brains project.

A recent paper posted here also looked at Recurrent Neural Nets and how in simplifying the design to its core amounted to just having a latent prediction and repeatedly adjusting that prediction.