> ... neural signals could predict upcoming words in a sentence. ... This kind of predictive coding is something we associate with being awake and attentive, yet it’s happening here in an unconscious state
In psycholinguistics, the assumption is, and always has been, that language processing is unconscious, a background process like visual object recognition. For starters, conscious attention is too slow by two orders of magnitude, and infants can process language, while presumably not yet (fully) conscious.
I sometimes ge the most complex logical dreams whilst going to sleep on a programming problem.
The dreams are normal dreams but structured like a programming problem or logic…it’s like my brain is trying to dream normally but it’s also
Fixated on programming logic so it subliminally incorporates it into dreams.
Then I wake up and I feel like I’ve compiled the whole code in my head and did not rest.
I haven't had this in a long time, except for on the (fortunately rare) occasion that I have a fever. Fever dreams are already hell, but if they're non-sensical programming/computer science fever dreams, they were extra hell.
I remember one particular one a few decades ago, where I was feverishly (pun intended) trying to achieve something with XML, only it being a fever dream, nothing of it made sense, so I was wracking my brain for nonsense those entire hours.
I've had similar experiences, and (having studied neuroscience as an undergrad and in casual / amateur research in the many years since) feel there's a lot of untapped potential to leverage in our hypnopompic and hypnogogic states (at the fuzzy boundaries of sleeping / wakefulness). Fascinating stuff.
(tangent)
Also, please forgive my question which may seem impolite but I really want to know: why did you type "whilst" instead of "when" or "while"? Have you ever said the word "whilst" out loud, in a normal conversation? More letters, an extra (half)syllable, zero meaning or nuance added, I just don't get it. I wonder this every time I see it, mean no disrespect and would be grateful for a straightforward reply. (/tangent)
No offense taken; I do say it out loud during conversations ; at times. I find myself ‘saying’ it more in my head whilst having a stream of consciousness moment.
I find that I have two personalities and my writing/text personality is much more sagacious and better spoken (if that makes sense??)
Now try lucid dreaming those, it's amazing and brings me closer to Nolan's Inception than ever before. I even think I've had lucid dreams since before that movie came out as apparently he was directly influenced by lucid dreamers.
Well, maybe you did work on your problems in your sleep and did get less rest because of it, so the new insights you got the next day(s), the groundwork for it might have happened in your sleepwork.
This is strong evidence against LLMs experiencing qualia. (I know that that topic often gets people laughed out of the room but please don't jump on me for engaging in that debate. When we can collect evidence and be able to show it to people.)
How did you jumped to qualia from consciousness? I can see how this is a strong evidence against LLM being conscious, but to my mind it doesn't imply in any way or form that they do not experience qualia.
Or... well, ok, maybe they can't experience if they are not conscious? I see how this can be argued, but I still do not agree. I'm sure qualia is created not by consciousness (I would notice if it was), and I'm sure it is created not for consciousness specifically, it must have some other uses too.
How can qualia be experienced if not from a conscious observer? It's the same question as asking if a tree falls in the woods with no one to hear or know about it.
People have different notions of what “qualia” means. To me, the experience of qualia is the perception of qualities, or of the texture, of inner processings of the brain. Not consciously experiencing them doesn’t mean that these qualities aren’t there, just like not consciously experiencing sounds wouldn’t mean that the sounds aren’t there, and may be unconsciously processed.
I don’t think that “experience as such” makes any sense. Experience is always of something. And that in turn implies that the something that is being experienced also exists independently of it being experienced.
No disagreements with what you said in your first paragraph.
> I'm sure qualia is created not by consciousness
Whether or not qualia is created by consciousness, I don't see how we necessarily can tell one way or the other. We don't exactly have great introspective tools to do such self analysis, not to mention what we think we feel is often illusory/not reflective of reality.
Yeah, I think you are right. "The content of consciousness" and "consciousness" are different things, and I mixed them up, when writing that sentence. I can watch the content, but not other parts that may be producing it.
Moreover, thinking about it, I come to a conclusion, that if I cannot reflect on qualia creation, then it is a (weak) evidence for qualia created by consciousness. I suppose the consciousness is harder to reflect on than other things, hard to map it into states of the content of consciousness. Like, I can reflect on my vision and see some hints on how I get these wonderful pictures, despite it being definitely not consciousness, I can reflect on how I produce or decode language. And to my mind it is because consciousness was devised to reflect on these things, so I could report on my observations to others. But to reflect on itself is a wholly different matter.
I don't see how that follows. The brain could be experiencing all sorts of things while processing, but simply not record it, and so of course the person will have no recollection of experiencing anything.
I broke my leg recently. Shortly after that I've lost my consciousness. It was very painful, the body reacted with a lot of adrenaline, and after a several minutes when adrenaline was drained away my consciousness was drained too.
I experienced something like this several times, though not to the point of fainting. But this time was special in other way too: I had friends near me, they observed me through all the process and we could compare our observations later. It seems, that my memory stopped recording before I fainted. I was still operating to some extent, but I couldn't remember a thing. When asked something I grunted in answer. When one of my friends insisted that I stand up and come to a better place to sit down, I actually stand up and did several steps before stopping and slowly (and carefully) sank to the ground. (An interesting observation, my controls over my body were weakening, but I was still using them for what they worth. It fits with all other similar experiences: the limbs and all the muscles seem to be losing their strength, and it takes a lot of will to make them work.)
On the light of this, I'm very interested what proponents of the idea, that feelings need consciousness to work, would say about my half-unconscious state. Did I feel myself extremely bad at the time? Or maybe I didn't feel anything? My friends are sure that the former statement is true, but they may be mistaken by my outside looks. I personally don't remember. Up to some point I remember that I felt really bad, but the next thing I remember I look at the sky and I'm surprised by what I see (I was not in a place I expected to be). And at that moment I was pretty ok already, no more adrenaline issues, just my leg was aching.
Was I experiencing qualia is another interesting question. I'm pretty sure I was, but I'd like to hear an argument for the opposite.
> I'm very interested what proponents of the idea, that feelings need consciousness to work, would say about my half-unconscious state.
I’m not one of these proponents, but to play the devil’s advocate: The fact that you can’t remember it doesn’t necessarily imply that you didn’t fully consciously experience it at the time.
Maybe it was a different part of your nervous system experiencing them, akin to a BIOS versus the operating system. The brain is a very complex and fractal thing, it is entirely possible that a more basal part of "you" took over for a very traumatic part of your life, very similar, but not exactly, to those with multiple personality disorder act.
I feel like it might be strengthened by a machine that actually does implement the core of the argument (even passes the turing test?) but is also just matrix multiplication. Previously the idea of a device that could respond to input with human-like output was a fantasy, now it's reality which removes one of the arguments against the Chinese Room on the basis of plausibility.
But yes, I would like to see a modern philosophers take on it.
I'm more interested in whether the uninformed intuitions have changed, whether someone who used an LLM before graduating from school and entering university has a more forgiving stance than an "ignorant" college entrant from ten years ago. From my experience of the field, I would really doubt many philosophers of mind have changed their view based on this. The major questions of interest concern qualia, it ha been so for many years.
awesome to see a VS Ramachandran rec on HN. normally it's the rare secondary rec after someone mentions Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat by Oliver Sacks.
It's been understood for quite some time that we only experience a small part of brain activity. Unfortunately that small part is where everything useful happens.
No, definitely not. Our consciousness is honestly an afterthought, as the brain processes mountains of information that does not even get to out conscious level yet is arguably more useful than anything we primitive primates can think of.
Or is the small part the bit where the least useful stuff happens? ;-)
A bit more seriously, the brain actually uses a significant chunk of the body's energy budget (no matter how efficient it is relative to human made equipment). So evolutionarily, it doesn't make sense unless it's doing something exceptionally useful.
It's the part that makes everything useful happen but most of everything useful happens in unconscious parts of the brain and even outside of the brain.
I would think anesthesia, in specific doses, would only attenuate consciousness...if it stopped other processes your organs and nervous system would stop. I guess this confirms that.
General anesthesia disrupts the ability of regions of the brain to network coherently. Individual regions might still be ticking along, but your experience of consciousness is a result of the network.
42 comments:
This sounds odd to me:
> ... neural signals could predict upcoming words in a sentence. ... This kind of predictive coding is something we associate with being awake and attentive, yet it’s happening here in an unconscious state
In psycholinguistics, the assumption is, and always has been, that language processing is unconscious, a background process like visual object recognition. For starters, conscious attention is too slow by two orders of magnitude, and infants can process language, while presumably not yet (fully) conscious.
I sometimes ge the most complex logical dreams whilst going to sleep on a programming problem. The dreams are normal dreams but structured like a programming problem or logic…it’s like my brain is trying to dream normally but it’s also Fixated on programming logic so it subliminally incorporates it into dreams. Then I wake up and I feel like I’ve compiled the whole code in my head and did not rest.
I haven't had this in a long time, except for on the (fortunately rare) occasion that I have a fever. Fever dreams are already hell, but if they're non-sensical programming/computer science fever dreams, they were extra hell.
I remember one particular one a few decades ago, where I was feverishly (pun intended) trying to achieve something with XML, only it being a fever dream, nothing of it made sense, so I was wracking my brain for nonsense those entire hours.
I've had similar experiences, and (having studied neuroscience as an undergrad and in casual / amateur research in the many years since) feel there's a lot of untapped potential to leverage in our hypnopompic and hypnogogic states (at the fuzzy boundaries of sleeping / wakefulness). Fascinating stuff.
(tangent) Also, please forgive my question which may seem impolite but I really want to know: why did you type "whilst" instead of "when" or "while"? Have you ever said the word "whilst" out loud, in a normal conversation? More letters, an extra (half)syllable, zero meaning or nuance added, I just don't get it. I wonder this every time I see it, mean no disrespect and would be grateful for a straightforward reply. (/tangent)
Not op, but I often do say 'whilst' out loud. It feels more structured and certain than 'while', which feels floppier as a word.
It's to be used when the word that follows begins with a vowel sound.
Is it? Do you have a source for this? Afaik ‘while’ is often used in US English and ‘whilst’ in British English.
both are definitely used in modern British English, but whilst is strange to my ears as I grew up in Ireland
No offense taken; I do say it out loud during conversations ; at times. I find myself ‘saying’ it more in my head whilst having a stream of consciousness moment.
I find that I have two personalities and my writing/text personality is much more sagacious and better spoken (if that makes sense??)
Now try lucid dreaming those, it's amazing and brings me closer to Nolan's Inception than ever before. I even think I've had lucid dreams since before that movie came out as apparently he was directly influenced by lucid dreamers.
This happens to me too. Often my dream plows forwards with unsound assumptions and I wake up believing something confusing.
Well, maybe you did work on your problems in your sleep and did get less rest because of it, so the new insights you got the next day(s), the groundwork for it might have happened in your sleepwork.
This is strong evidence against LLMs experiencing qualia. (I know that that topic often gets people laughed out of the room but please don't jump on me for engaging in that debate. When we can collect evidence and be able to show it to people.)
How did you jumped to qualia from consciousness? I can see how this is a strong evidence against LLM being conscious, but to my mind it doesn't imply in any way or form that they do not experience qualia.
Or... well, ok, maybe they can't experience if they are not conscious? I see how this can be argued, but I still do not agree. I'm sure qualia is created not by consciousness (I would notice if it was), and I'm sure it is created not for consciousness specifically, it must have some other uses too.
How can qualia be experienced if not from a conscious observer? It's the same question as asking if a tree falls in the woods with no one to hear or know about it.
People have different notions of what “qualia” means. To me, the experience of qualia is the perception of qualities, or of the texture, of inner processings of the brain. Not consciously experiencing them doesn’t mean that these qualities aren’t there, just like not consciously experiencing sounds wouldn’t mean that the sounds aren’t there, and may be unconsciously processed.
I don’t think that “experience as such” makes any sense. Experience is always of something. And that in turn implies that the something that is being experienced also exists independently of it being experienced.
No disagreements with what you said in your first paragraph.
> I'm sure qualia is created not by consciousness
Whether or not qualia is created by consciousness, I don't see how we necessarily can tell one way or the other. We don't exactly have great introspective tools to do such self analysis, not to mention what we think we feel is often illusory/not reflective of reality.
Yeah, I think you are right. "The content of consciousness" and "consciousness" are different things, and I mixed them up, when writing that sentence. I can watch the content, but not other parts that may be producing it.
Moreover, thinking about it, I come to a conclusion, that if I cannot reflect on qualia creation, then it is a (weak) evidence for qualia created by consciousness. I suppose the consciousness is harder to reflect on than other things, hard to map it into states of the content of consciousness. Like, I can reflect on my vision and see some hints on how I get these wonderful pictures, despite it being definitely not consciousness, I can reflect on how I produce or decode language. And to my mind it is because consciousness was devised to reflect on these things, so I could report on my observations to others. But to reflect on itself is a wholly different matter.
We can't even meaningfully prove that human beings have qualia
We can’t meaningfully deny humans have qualia, there would be too much baby and not enough bathwater.
Go on, where is the evidence ? I am actually curious and open-minded about it.
I don't see how that follows. The brain could be experiencing all sorts of things while processing, but simply not record it, and so of course the person will have no recollection of experiencing anything.
An anecdote to demonstrate the point.
I broke my leg recently. Shortly after that I've lost my consciousness. It was very painful, the body reacted with a lot of adrenaline, and after a several minutes when adrenaline was drained away my consciousness was drained too.
I experienced something like this several times, though not to the point of fainting. But this time was special in other way too: I had friends near me, they observed me through all the process and we could compare our observations later. It seems, that my memory stopped recording before I fainted. I was still operating to some extent, but I couldn't remember a thing. When asked something I grunted in answer. When one of my friends insisted that I stand up and come to a better place to sit down, I actually stand up and did several steps before stopping and slowly (and carefully) sank to the ground. (An interesting observation, my controls over my body were weakening, but I was still using them for what they worth. It fits with all other similar experiences: the limbs and all the muscles seem to be losing their strength, and it takes a lot of will to make them work.)
On the light of this, I'm very interested what proponents of the idea, that feelings need consciousness to work, would say about my half-unconscious state. Did I feel myself extremely bad at the time? Or maybe I didn't feel anything? My friends are sure that the former statement is true, but they may be mistaken by my outside looks. I personally don't remember. Up to some point I remember that I felt really bad, but the next thing I remember I look at the sky and I'm surprised by what I see (I was not in a place I expected to be). And at that moment I was pretty ok already, no more adrenaline issues, just my leg was aching.
Was I experiencing qualia is another interesting question. I'm pretty sure I was, but I'd like to hear an argument for the opposite.
> I'm very interested what proponents of the idea, that feelings need consciousness to work, would say about my half-unconscious state.
I’m not one of these proponents, but to play the devil’s advocate: The fact that you can’t remember it doesn’t necessarily imply that you didn’t fully consciously experience it at the time.
Maybe it was a different part of your nervous system experiencing them, akin to a BIOS versus the operating system. The brain is a very complex and fractal thing, it is entirely possible that a more basal part of "you" took over for a very traumatic part of your life, very similar, but not exactly, to those with multiple personality disorder act.
The Chinese room argument suggests that it's impossible anyways.
I don’t disagree with the general point here but the attraction of that argument has surely drifted much in ~5y.
I’d be REALLY curious to see a survey of philosophy 2015 vs 2025 UG entrants on mind-brain connection intuitions
I feel like it might be strengthened by a machine that actually does implement the core of the argument (even passes the turing test?) but is also just matrix multiplication. Previously the idea of a device that could respond to input with human-like output was a fantasy, now it's reality which removes one of the arguments against the Chinese Room on the basis of plausibility.
But yes, I would like to see a modern philosophers take on it.
I'm more interested in whether the uninformed intuitions have changed, whether someone who used an LLM before graduating from school and entering university has a more forgiving stance than an "ignorant" college entrant from ten years ago. From my experience of the field, I would really doubt many philosophers of mind have changed their view based on this. The major questions of interest concern qualia, it ha been so for many years.
holy no sequitur batman!
This is not new. Read Phantoms in the Brain
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantoms_in_the_Brain
awesome to see a VS Ramachandran rec on HN. normally it's the rare secondary rec after someone mentions Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat by Oliver Sacks.
Maybe I just know how it's like to be a bat.
If that mechanism can be activated, it may significantly compress the time required for education and learning.
I guess this makes sense -- a brain is gonna do brain stuff. The only difference is that we're not present to witness it.
It's been understood for quite some time that we only experience a small part of brain activity. Unfortunately that small part is where everything useful happens.
No, definitely not. Our consciousness is honestly an afterthought, as the brain processes mountains of information that does not even get to out conscious level yet is arguably more useful than anything we primitive primates can think of.
Or is the small part the bit where the least useful stuff happens? ;-)
A bit more seriously, the brain actually uses a significant chunk of the body's energy budget (no matter how efficient it is relative to human made equipment). So evolutionarily, it doesn't make sense unless it's doing something exceptionally useful.
It's the part that makes everything useful happen but most of everything useful happens in unconscious parts of the brain and even outside of the brain.
ScholarlyArticle: "Plasticity and language in the anaesthetized human hippocampus" (2026) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10448-0
Sleep-learning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep-learning
Also, Sleep and learning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_and_learning
I would think anesthesia, in specific doses, would only attenuate consciousness...if it stopped other processes your organs and nervous system would stop. I guess this confirms that.
General anesthesia disrupts the ability of regions of the brain to network coherently. Individual regions might still be ticking along, but your experience of consciousness is a result of the network.