avturchin's Shortform

avturchin

avturchin's Shortform — LessWrong

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I have interesting experience long time ago. In the near-sleep state my consciousness split in two streams - one was some hypnogogic images, and the other was some hypnogogic music.

They was not related to each other and each had, some how, its own observer.

A moment later something awakened me a bit and the streams seamlessly merged and I was able to observe that a moment before I had two independent streams of consciousness.

Conclusions:

1. A human can have more than one consciousness at the time.

2. It actually happens all the time but we don't care.

3. Merging of consiosnesses is easy. Moreover, binding and merging is actually the same process similar to summation.

There is no center of consciousness - homunculus or electron or whatever.

I may have other conscious processes in the brain which just do not merge with current stream of consciousness.

Qualia remain the same and preserve in each of the streams of consciousness.

7Carl Feynman2y

Why should we accept as evidence something that you perceived while you were dreaming? Last night I dreamed that I was walking barefoot through the snow, but it wasn’t cold because it was summer snow. I assume you don’t take that as evidence that warm snow is an actual summer phenomenon, so why should we take as evidence your memory of having two consciousnesses? It seems to me that a correctly organized consciousness would occur once per body. Consciousness is (at least in part) a system for controlling our actions in the medium and long term. If we had two consciousnesses, and they disagree as to what to do next, it would result in paralysis. And if they agree, then one of them is superfluous, and we’d expend less brain energy if we only had one.

avturchin2y20

I was not dreaming. I was observing my hypnagogic images, which is not the same as dreaming; and when streams merged I become completely awake.

However, after I know what is it, I can observe similar thing again. The receipt is following:
1. do two different unrelated things which require conscious attention but happen in different modalities, audio and video
2. increase the wideness of attention and observe that you just had two streams of more narrow attention.

The closest thing in everyday life is "driver amnesia" - the situation when a car driver is splitting attention between driving and conversation.

1JBlack2y

Conscious experience is direct evidence of itself. It is only very indirectly evidence of anything about external reality. However, I do agree that memory of conscious experience isn't quite so directly evidence of previous states of consciousness. Personally of the numbered claims in the post I expect that (1) is true, (2) is false and this experience was not evidence of it, and I really don't know what (3) and subsequent sentences are supposed to mean.

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avturchin's Shortform

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avturchin's Shortform

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