#cognition is hard

[baconmancr]

You're right that there is very little continuity between the cognition of the caterpillar and the butterfly. However, when we test it, we find they do retain memories to some extent:

In a study published yesterday in Public Library of Science ONE, Georgetown University biologists gave mild shocks to tobacco hornworm caterpillars while exposing the caterpillars to particular odors. After the hornworms built cocoons and emerged as moths -- a process that involves the reorganization of both brain and nervous system -- they still avoided the smells that once brought them shocks.

This appears to be because some sensory associations are stored in "mushroom bodies" that survive metamorphosis:

Led by evolutionary ecologist Martha Weiss, they suspected that larval memories, if maintained at all, would be stored in the so-called mushroom bodies -- areas of the brain that receive information directly from the antennae. Since mushroom body neurons that accumulate early in larval development are lost during metamorphosis, the hypothesis was easy to test: the researchers conditioned the caterpillars at different ages. As they predicted, caterpillars that learned late to associate shock and odor kept the memory into adulthood. Those who made the association early emerged from their cocoons without remembering.

[otaku553]

Procrastination doodles of sabo for the king sabo au :)

[thequeenofsastiel]

Buffy- Hanging out with Spike is not cool, Dawn! Okay? It's dangerous, and icky.

Also Buffy- Dawn could be in danger. Must go to Spike for help.

[baconmancr]

I still toss and turn about this all the time, by the way- it’s probably the most enduring obsession of my childhood, and a nontrivial chunk of what drove me to things like geology, programming, ratspace, and even stuff you wouldn’t expect like a fondness for time travel stories or Li Po poems.

One neuron is just a cell. Many neurons, arranged just so, is a person. Qualia, interiority, volition, values, all spectacularly inexplicable in physical terms. A whole world of imagination, captured in miniature as a net with just the right pattern of string. It’s so fucking goetic. Arrange these symbols in a circle, and a demon appears, using some dread fire to give meaning to form and animate base matter. “The hard problem”, they call it.

My hard problem isn’t that it works, as such. This, I can accept, although not with full equanimity. It’s that it demonstrates something about the cosmos, because everything demonstrates something about the cosmos, and I cannot for the life of me see through that fog. The universe is not billiard balls and it’s not negative-probability waves moving through fields, because when you arrange symbols in a circle you can summon a demon. That was there from the beginning, latent at the big bang that kicked us all off. But all we have is this one thing, this tiny little biosphere on a tiny little world that stumbled blindly in to the right incantations, and everywhere else we look it’s just billiard balls as far as the eye can see. This is not to say that ‘is there extraterrestrial life?’ is the most important question, though of course it’s instrumental, and the Fermi Paradox is maddening in this context as well. But the deeper question is, ‘why in the everliving tiddlywinks does a universe with a demon-summoning ritual in it pretend to be mechanical except in this one narrow thing?’ Where’s the rest of the magic system?

And now we’re closing in on perfecting the ritual ourselves, not understanding a damn thing of course, only marginally less blind than the evolutionary process that first succeeded in us. We zero in on intelligence, the one part of all this that we’ve managed to make tractable in analytical terms, and use that to bootstrap ourselves toward something that hopefully, hopefully shares all the rest. Demons summoning demons (of course it spirals out to infinity almost immediately, how could it not?), and maybe the new ones will be able to tell us what the universe is and how we happened within it. Makes sense as a strategy, I suppose.

[defectivegembrain]

Me: *struggling to interpret visual data*

BBC Ghosts Mary, appearing in my head: Some of them lines be like great mountains, while the others is just little hills

[5tomatoes]

i am a little scared about posting these (i do NOT primarily make fanart) but woe, elijah be upon ye *tosses art and scurries away*

[crippled-peeper]

not being able to put a caption on a post is not a problem. what is a problem is when you pretend like you are being bullied by people who rely on alt text/image descriptions just because they want to be able to follow the same content as you. nobody called you abled they just asked for a fucking image description

[simcardiac-arrested]

how did you let this happen?

[le-trash-bin]

5x14 Dean calling the couple that canabalized each other codependent whose gonna tell him 💀

[baconmancr]

I'm not sure why you would expect every action a body takes to be under conscious control. If you'll forgive me for arguing by analogy, when my serge protector detects a power surge, it doesn't ask my desktop's CPU if its okay to cut power, it just cuts power to protect the computer. There's only one reasonable thing to do, so the decision is made locally and the action is taken automatically.

Something analogous happens when you touch something burning hot. The signal from your hand reaches the brainstem, which reflexively pulls away. Your frontal lobe (usually identified as the seat of consciousness and higher thinking) receives the pain signal that the object is too hot and the proprioceptive signal that the body has moved away from it at the same time.

In both cases, waiting for a decision from a more powerful information processing system would introduce harmful delays and the end decision would be the same. Evolution isn't using conscious decision makers in these cases because the results would be worse.

The heart is similar, in that its rhythm is determined locally. The sinoatrial node is the natural pacemaker of the heart, and a heart will continue to beat even when removed from the body.

If our conscious mind is the final arbitrator, is makes sense it would have the least control into other parts of the system. An empty gut sends a signal that you should be hungry, and lets the powerful long-term planner decide how to resolve that.

However, it may be the case that the brainstem has an "internal consciousness"; that there's something that it's like to be a brainstem, and that that consciousness exists beside the consciousness we're more familiar with. If arbitrary collections of neurons do have experiences, but not all of the consciousnesses of the body are integrated, that could explain the seeming disconnect between conscious and unconscious actions.

I can't find your previous comments on dualism, do you have a link?

hey, remember a couple of months ago when i went around giving arguments for dualism? lets give that another go!

so, let's take it as a given that the human body is just a biological machine, it is deterministic, ultimatly its behavior is out of our control because we ourselves, our own desitions, our preferences, our thoughts, are going to be dictated by the state of the chemicals inside our brain.

now the thing is, we do know how this feels, this is not that hard to imagine at all. my heart beats because my brain is making it beat, i dont put any concious effort into it, i dont choose at every moment to make it beat because i really like how it fees when it does. i cant move the muscles in my heart the same way i can move my finger. same with breathing, i can try to hold my breath for a long time but eventually my brain will override my efforts and make me take a gulp of air. same with my eyes, i cant choose to keep my eyes open if something crashes against my eye suddenly. same with coughing, if something goes down the wrong pipe my body will make me cough wether i want it or not. same with goosebumps, same with sweating, with producing white cells, with moving my intestines to help the waste flow, with sweating and with a bunch of other things.

and the thing about all these processes is that they feel like they would expect from a biological machine, they feel like nothing, it doesnt feel like we "want" to do them and so we do them, they just happen, without us even being aware of it, with no thought, no feeling, no conciousness of it.

so

why is not every process in our body like that? why is it that when it comes to other things like eating or walking or fucking there is an internal process, an awareness, a feeling? all of those things are just bodily functions like the heart beat or the bowel movement or the shiver due to the cold. all of those things are also ultimatly produced by the mechanical processes of the chemicals in our brains, so why those feel different, why do those involve internal feelings at all? we dont do them automatically or on autopilot as it were. we have to internally feel like we "want" to do them and then internally "choose" to do them and then "will" our body to do it. why?

what is going on there? how can there be a "want" codified into ourself through chemicals and why does that want which generate bodily actions feels diferent than other bodily actions?

i understand that making the brain a general problem solving machine and then giving that brain goals and letting it figure out the means to reach those goals is much more effective, versatile and powerful than merely making all of our survival actions hardcoded like heartbeats or breathing is. and i understand that the question can be answered as "because that is the solution evolution came up with" still doesnt really explain how did evolution did it.

how did evolution summon the right combination of chemicals such that certain actions taken by those chemicals are completly unconcious and others generate an internal awareness, if its all chemicals in the brain then it should all be unconcious or it should all be deliberate but we have this weird mix instead

[tanadrin]

intuitively chomskyian linguistics in general reminds me strongly of string theory (cf this Zompist post). research into the fundamentals of language, like research into the fundamentals of physics, is hard. you have to gather tons of data. you have to explore theoretical realms which we only partly understand (it's even worse in linguistics, because cognition is probably much more poorly understood than QCD). it is certainly possible to get locked into an insular and self-referential project of building elaborate and beautiful theories which because of their infinite flexibility need never tangle with the mess and fuss of actual experiment--to say nothing of making useful predictions--but i don't think you should confuse this with actually, like. discovering new facts about the world. although at least chomsky's program is mostly an indulgence that has consumed only him, MIT, and his immediate followers; string theory on the other hand seems to have devoured almost all of theoretical physics.

[vaguely-concerned]

there's a self-help/mental health adjacent post that's going around and it seems to be really helpful for a lot of people which is very good. I also personally hate it with all my fucking heart

[five-thousand-loaves-of-bread]

feel like. more n more because cognitive stuff get worse. becoming “unreliable narrator” of own life. if have heard of that literary term.

can’t tell you what am want even if give choices. can type make noise make gesture that mean yes automatically before even process question but actually answer is no. can borrow other people words say thing that thought is true about self only turn out very wrong. don’t know if want something. don’t know if like something. cannot answer those questions.

can’t tell you whether symptom getting worse or stay same or be better. don’t know if regression slowed or stopped or just past point where regression took even that awareness from me. ask me what symptom experience, if am experiencing this symptom. say yes, think do, but am i? actually understand what symptom is, actually understand n aware of self? for example. say have body weakness. genuinely think that do experience word that say “weakness”. but do actually experience the experience that is weakness? do actually understand definition of word “weakness”? not on purpose lie but, is what say n genuinely believe about self actually reliable.

really is perfect gaslighter, be perpetually gaslit by own cognitive symptoms, cannot escape, because it inside me. but not even know if it gaslighting because what if it not gaslighting what if it actually true. even facts that have nothing do with personal experience. did make it up, did i make reality up. is reality real. “are we live in simulation” except not meme joke. but actually. feel nothing different than made up shows that watch, while can’t shake belief that made up shows real just different world or actually part of this world we just just not aware (similar to how people like us cannot begin imagine what be ultra rich like).

feel as if float in space majority of time. not have self awareness. be in own world all time but not have self awareness of actual things actual self. not have awareness of surrounding.

[please don’t tell me you relate unless am know you / we friends / mutuals & you also have disability that really affect cognitive]

[ribbittrobbit]

when i say i was losing my mind the entire time i was listening to the new wbn i mean i felt like my nose was about to start bleeding from the pressure in my brain

yeah great ep public speaking is terrifying

[lisowa]

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[likeabxrdinflight]

tired of early 20-somethings acting like harry potter was never good or had no value in its day like shut the fuck up half of you weren't even there when it peaked