Gang Fang's Blog

This post discusses phenomena in a general manner and terms like “subconscious“, “cognitive biases” are used in a way accepted in popular literature.

I was imagining my conversation with Justin, my skip manager, about what I am studying. I would say to him: “next time when you make a judgement or come up with an idea, notice how you subconsciously construct your thoughts, where materials are retrieved from a source, your memory or some kind of a world model. And the process happens sequentially.”

The consciousness prior is built upon GWT as a truth. But has that been tested? I haven’t seen in any Mila papers about the validity of GWT. I need to find out. https://www.youtube.com/live/qFSv_yxhYsE?si=UJEF17Keijhbc4XA

Once I have confidence in GWT, I can define the easy question of consciousness. I want to use GFN to answer the easy question and simulate consciousness. This would be especially interesting if no one has been doing it.

This is how I see the difference between intuition and instinct. I will illustrate with two examples: “survival instinct” and “intuitive understanding of the atomic structure”. It doesn’t make sense to say neither “survival intuition” nor “instinctive understanding of the atomic structure” but swapping the use of these words reveals “instinct” is biological and evolutionary, while “intuition” is learnt and practiced.

There is also the difference between cognitive bias and heuristic. Daniel Kahneman denounces cognitive biases while Gerd Gigerenzer praises heuristics, but they are in a sense mental shortcuts. However, related to the previous discussion about instinct and intuition, it’s not difficult to see cognitive biases are instinct, while heuristics are intuitive. We don’t choose to be cognitively biased but are born that way, though it can be to some extent corrected. But we deliberately develop heuristics for ourselves to make certain tasks easier.

The goal is to discuss cognitive biases and system 2.

Consciousness

And two following podcasts…

“Consciousness has largely been perceived as a passive state.” – the so-called default mode

“GWT as an operational definition, which may differ from what consciousness actually is” – what does it mean?

“Baars has argued that ‘contrastive evidence’ involves the most relevant set of facts, such as sleep and waking states.”

“Limited Capacity” – the spotlight shining in a theater focuses on a tiny space of the theater

“widespread integration and broadcasting” is the core PREDICTION of GWT

“One of the key points connecting GWT to neuroscientific evidence is that GWT does not require (or suggest) an ‘anatomical hub’ of coordinated activity, but, instead, a momentary, dynamic ‘functional hub’”

“The next paper is by Gaillard et al. (2009). It is an outstanding example of reading work from France by Dehaene and Changeux in Paris. The title is “Converging Intracranial Markers of Conscious Access, ” and it represents probably the most precise evidence so far for cortical integration and broadcasting. The experiment compared conscious and unconscious processing of briefly flashed words. Alea explains how this evidence confirms that conscious perceptual activity is propagated widely throughout the cortex.”

“This ability to transfer and integrate information across multiple systems requires something called “effective connectivity” – or the ability of firing in one group of neurons to affect the firing of another. Massimini and his team suggest that consciousness is dependent on the brain’s ability to integrate information. This paper does seem to offer evidence for the breakdown of long-range connectivity during sleep. This is consistent with the broadcasting hypothesis”

One thing I noticed in these discussions is heavy use of metaphors, due to the fact that it isn’t well understood and is difficult to measure directly.

The significant element System 2 AI borrows from GWT is the “limited capacity”, it translates into GWT framework as sequential construction of thoughts where few symbolic elements are involved. It also focuses on human reasoning capability. The term “stream of consciousness” illustrates this feature and can be observed subjectively. On the other hand, what I heard from Baars’ conversations is almost always about the sensory consciousness and the dynamic nature of the functional hub. They didn’t focus on the bottleneck element. To compare the two, the first is a feature of consciousness, while the second is hypothesizing the neurological basis of consciousness.

The paradox is the serial, integrated and limited stream of consciousness with the massive parallel unconscious distributed system.