Comment by esafak 2 days ago
That's a fair question. I don't know that the theory of mind mentioned here is the same as an internal monologue. I think one could model other people's minds without conducting an internal monologue, by visualizing it, for example. Maybe the anendophasiacs in the audience can enlighten us.
The author also has a Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@michaeltimothybennett
The key to your difficulty is "my brain doesn't talk to me"... the solution is to realize that there is no "me" that's separate from your brain for it to talk to. You are the sum of the processes occurring in your brain and when it simulates others inside your mind, that's nothing but narrative. A simulation is a narrative. You may not perceive this narrative as sequence of words, a monologue, but it certainly is the result of different parts of your brain communicating with each other, passing information back and forth to model a plausible sequence of events.
So yes, you're conscious. So is my dog, but my dog can't post his thoughts about this on Hacker news, so you are more conscious than my dog.
I also lack an internal monologue and have strong aphantasia, so the idea that I might not be conscious made me a bit uneasy—it just felt wrong, somehow. For now, the best I can say is that my worldview, which includes self-consciousness, is abstract. I can put it into words, but most of the time, it doesn’t feel necessary.
Don’t get too worried, the evidence seems to point to our thought mechanisms being superior, at least in some ways. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44283084
> Obviously I'm conscious
I'm not trying to be pedantic - how do you know? What does consciousness mean to you? Do you experience "qualia"? When you notice something, say "the toast is burning", what goes on in your mind?
> but I can 'simulate' others inside my mind.
Do you mean in the sense of working out how they will react to something? What sort of reactions can they exhibit in your mind?
Sorry if these questions are invasive, but you're as close to an alien intelligence as I'll ever meet unless LLMs go full Prime Intellect on us.
>I'm not trying to be pedantic - how do you know?
That was kinda what my point about zombies was about. It's much easier to assert you have consciousness than to actually have it.
More specifically I think in pragmatic terms most things asserting consciousness are asserting what they have whatever consciousness means to them with a subset of things asserting consciousness by dictate of a conscious entity for whatever consciousness means to that entity. For example 10 print "I am conscious" is most probably an instruction that originated from a conscious. This isn't much different from any non candid answer though. It could just be a lie. You can assert anything regardless of its truth.
I'm kind of with Dennett when it comes to qualia, that the distinction between the specialness of qualia and the behaviour that it describes evaporates from any area you look at in detail. I find the thought experiment compelling about what is the difference between having all your memories of red an blue swapped compared to having all your nerve signals for red and blue swapped. In both instances you end up with red and blue being different from how you previously experienced them. Qualia would suggest you would know which would have happened which would mean you could express it and therefore there must be a functional difference in behaviour.
By analogy,
5 + 3 = 8
3 + 5 = 8
This --> 8 <-- here is a copy of one of those two above. Use your Qualia to see which.
>Do you mean in the sense of working out how they will react to something?
Yeah, of the sort of "They want to do this, but they feel like doing that directly will give away too much information, but they also know that playing the move they want to play might be interpreted as an attempt to disguise another action", When thinking about what people will do I am better amongst those who I play games with in knowing which decision they will make. When I play games with my partner we use Scissers, Paper, Stone to pick the starting player, but I always play a subgame of how many draws I can manage, It takes longer but more randomly picks the starting player.
It's all very iocane powder. I guess when I think about it I don't process a simulation to conclusion but just know what their reactions will be given their mental state, which feels very clear to me. I'm not sure how to distinguish the feeling of thinking something will happen and imagining it happening and observing the result. Both are processing information to generate the same answer. Is it the same distinction as the Qualia thing? I'm not sure.
I’ve thought about this a bit as my wife substantially has anendophasia and aphantasia, though not total. Even having a rich inner voice myself, I realise that it’s not absolute.
Many, in fact probably most experiences and thoughts I have are actually not expressed in inner speech. When I look at a scene I see and am aware of the sky, trees, a path, grass, a wall, tennis courts, etc bout none of those words come to mind unless I think to make them, and then only a few I pay attention to.
I think most our interpretation of experience exists at a conceptual, pre-linguistic level. Converting experiences into words before we could act on them would be unbelievably slow and inefficient. I think it’s just that those of us with a rich inner monologue find it’s so easy to do this for things we pay attention to that we imagine we do it for everything, when in fact that is very, very far from the truth.
Considering how I reason about the thought processes, intentions and expected behaviour of others, I don’t think I routinely verbalise that at all. In fact I don’t think the idea that we actually think in words makes any sense. Can people that don’t know how to express a situation linguistically not reason about and respond to that situation? That seems absurd.
> Yeah, of the sort of "They want to do this, but they feel like doing that directly will give away too much information, but they also know that playing the move they want to play might be interpreted as an attempt to disguise another action",
That is the internal monologue.
I can think words in conversations as if I am writing a story (actually thinking about it it's more like reading a script), but as far as I can tell I don't experience what most people describe as an internal monologue, I also have aphantasia which I understand is a frequent co-occurrence with a lack of an internal monologue.
Obviously I'm conscious (but a zombie would say that too). I can certainly consider the mental states of others. Sometimes embarrassingly so, there are a few boardgames where you have to anticipate the actions of others, where the other players are making choices based upon what they think others might do rather than a strictly analytical 'best' move. I'm quite good at those. I am not a poker player but I imagine that professional players have that ability at a much higher level than I do.
So yeah, My brain doesn't talk to me, but I can 'simulate' others inside my mind.
Does it bother anyone else that those simulations of others that you run in your mind might, in themselves, be conscious? If so, do we kill them when we stop thinking about them? If we start thinking about them again do we resurrect them or make a new one?