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More from my big black book of ai and neuroscience:

I think if trace theory is true to any degree it would go some distance in explaining phenomenal consciousness, assuming I haven't misunderstood anything.

In fuzzy trace theory (FTT) it is posited that people form two types of mental representations about a past event:

*verbatim traces: detailed representations of a past event.

*gist traces: fuzzy representations of a past event.

People can reason with verbatim *and* gist traces but prefer gists.

*vision was suggested to work similarly in 1999. With human vision, two processes could be used: one that aggregates local receptive fields and one that parses the local receptive spatial field. It was suggested that people used prior experience, gists, to decide which dominates a perceptual decision.

Gist processes form representations of events, semantic details, where verbatim reinstates the context found in the surface details of an event.

__notes__

Parallel storage: asserts encoding/storage of verbatim/gist traces operate in *parallel*, not in serial.

I like to think of verbatim traces as databases, and gists as queries constructed by recognition.

Several studies have found that the meaning (gist) of an item is encoded even *before* the surface details (verbatim).

This might be important as a survival mechanism but should not be taken to mean strictly that gists are formed wholly *without* details or important and recognizable features of the item in question. It may well be for high level el processing and classification efficiency this may be an important reprocessing step, in the same way that many functions of the brain are duplicated throughout.

Comments
  • 1
    I don’t understand any of this but I like it.
  • 4
    There’s no such thing as personal conscious.
    It’s more likely some global awareness or we’re just big herd of animals and nothing makes sense.

    If there’s global consciousness the real question is who’s preprocessing stuff we saw during the day when we sleep.

    Brain is just a cpu and storage box that needs sleep to offload most of the things from the day and preprocess stuff for next day.
  • 1
    @vane oh there's definitely an algorithmic component to consciousness. I assume every physical process is computable because the laws of physics can be run backwards or forward, then the conclusion must be that human consciousness can't be a black box (non algorithmic), because you can't run a black box in reverse.

    Therefore there must be some sort of steps, process, statistical process, or otherwise an algorithm that describes our minds.

    If there's a flaw in this reasoning I would very much like to see it.
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    @Wisecrack about describing mind there is connectome research

    https://www.humanconnectome.org
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

    I mentioned global consciousness cause it’s also research project

    https://noosphere.princeton.edu

    I doubt there is personal consciousness cause of how world works. I’d rather say that everything already happened and we are living in simulation.
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    @vane Very fun to read links thanks. You might be interested to read about research into robotics where they treat "the world as its own best model", or model-free learning. Don't know if you're already familiar, but if on the off chance you aren't, definitely go search those phrases.
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