> Why can we only think about one thing at a time?
Maybe this is just a perception thing. Sure, you can only really keep up one stream of thought, visualization or inner dialogue (whatever you want to call it) at a time, but perhaps that's because we learn all our lives that direct communication is a one-channel, linear thing--speaking and listening focused on one topic at a time. Our brain does plenty of thinking in the background that leads to "a-ha!" moments even when the direct focus of our thoughts isn't on that topic. What if the mind could maintain multiple threads of thoughts at once, but our language coerces our thought patterns into being linear and non-concurrent?
As someone without an inner monologue, and someone that's spent a LOT of time meditating, it's not the language. It's the attention mechanisms themselves.
Buddhist scholars insist that while we can have multiple threads of attention in our awareness, like strings with pearls of experience/thoughts we can only actually hold one little pearl of information from that stream in our attention at a time, and that we flit between them quite rapidly.
Personally, I sort of agree, but I notice that there seems to be a time-compression thing happening where the pearl delivered to attention can contain a compressed summary of continuous perception. This seems to work for 2 things at once in awareness. When you start monitoring 3+ streams, there are gaps. And even maintaining the 2 streams continuously is exhausting so the mind tends to relax a little and leave gaps on a normal basis, but it seems like it can monitor dual feeds when its particularly important.
My understanding is that neuroscience largely seems to agree with the above.
(Actually, I'll note that the USUAL mode of being doesn't even monitor one stream continuously. A lot of the weird effects (and deeply interesting ones!) they talk about in meditative arts seem to pop up when you progress to being able to hold truly continuous attention.)
What you're describing here is software, not hardware—Cognitive Science is the relevant field, not Neuroscience.
That said, your understanding is largely supported by our current understanding of consciousness, attention, and perception. The attention mechanism doesn't handle parallel processing well—but can operate "multi-threaded", where it juggles several foci at once (with some obvious cost to switching between them). But I think its a mistake to assume that decision making has to be done within this attention context. While we may only be aware of a single thread at any given time, the brain is doing a lot of parallel processing. We can only focus our attention on a single cognitive task, but that doesn't mean we're not actively performing many others.
What you're describing here is dualism and Descartes, in response to a post that references Buddhist scholars, a philosophy famously focused on monism.
"Cognitive science" vs "neuroscience" as a concept is just how we decided to slice the problem up for academia.
we may only be aware of a single thread at any given time
We may be not a single mind, but a bunch of minds. It just happens that the mind that “you” are reads this and has written the above comment, cause it’s of that kind (just like “all biological beings in this thread happen to be humans” type of a filter). Other minds can live completely different lives, just inside the same skull. And share emotions and thoughts with you sometimes from their prison.
This “aware” part is pretty mysterious, because the physical mind could operate without it perfectly. But for some reason, the space containing a mind experiences this awareness thing.
I fully disagree that the mind can operate without "awareness." We understand neither the how nor why of consciousness. But its not just a parlor trick—consciousness helps us mediate our attention.
It's one of the core things missing from our current AI path. Even if the LLMs reach 100% parity on human computational power, we humans are still acting as the ghost-in-the-machine, mediating and directing said computation.
Consciousness (in this sense) doesn't physically exist cause it's unfalsifiable. Philosophy has a whole p-zombie section on that. I believe that you are mixing this metaphysical awareness with the physical process of mind machinery which is obviously required for a mind to work. Unless you have a deeper idea in mind.
If the latter, why do you think it can not? It's a configuration of particles that will evolve by physical means (under materialism ofc). It shouldn't require anything special like any inanimate object doesn't require anything to continue physically existing, the only difference being just how less complex its reactions are. And even that is subjective and anthropecentric, cause laws of nature don't care more about us than e.g. about a rock, they just work.
Because the attention-selection mechanism exists inside the conscious experience. If you can't account for the conscious experience then you're missing the recursive relevancy realization that allows us to select from the salience landscape and direct our behavior accordingly.
LLMs can handle everything downstream from that beautifully. But until we have some way to hand them a conscious experience, they'll need direction from an entity that has one.
Yes, the hardware is optimized over time. But the emergent experience of consciousness isn't described in that hardware. If you're a pure materialist, you believe said experience is still present physically—likely in some combination of brain matter and the ongoing electrical currents flowing through them. But there's no "place" where consciousness sits.
Its the same thing with a game running on a computer. You can point to different systems for specific aspects of it. But you can't show me where, either in software or hardware, the experience of the game lives.
I think this is clearly seen whenever we go for a walk or a drive, the mind drifts but you still somehow get to your destination and in hindsight wonder who was actually driving the car?
Sometimes I'll be deeply thinking about something while driving, and discover I'm at the last road to my house without remembering having driven the previous few blocks. It's quite disturbing. When I say deeply thinking I don't mean anything involving phones or external stimuli - really just thinking about a particular problem I'm working on. I also don't deliberately engage this deep mode of thought, I just sort of slide into it naturally.
Does anyone else have this happen? I don't think my driving is suffering, but it's hard to really honestly say?
Yes, it's a classic example of the power and skill of your "unconscious" mind - your consciousness is freed up to do novel work because the drive home is so routine that your unconscious mind can do almost all of the work. Should something change - a traffic jam, a detour, a pedestrian crossing the road - your conscious attention will be called back to the more urgent task which is making a decision about how to handle the driving situation.
It seams interesting to me that what we refer to as the conscious mind is unconscious a third of each day and the part we call unconscious is active 24 by 7.
I'm out of my depth here, but a high-level response:
First, I don't think the "unconscious" part is a single process, but myriad processes, and I'd bet they wax and wane.
Second, the "conscious" part is the part that can reason about itself and think abstractly. I think it would be correct to say it's doing higher level computations. The important part is that this is more costly - it's not optimized because it has to be flexible, so it would make sense that it's resting as often as possible.
So, one high-performance, high-power, general-purpose processor to handle the foreground task, and a bunch of low-power processors for background tasks.
Looks like ARM got it right with its big.LITTLE architecture. :)
When I have a deeply engrossing unitary (I.e. not one of five tasks but one task for months) project at work I had better start commuting by train and cut out the driving. I have lost two cars by not doing that. Fortunately no one was hurt. One car I had towed to the work parking lot, and just never thought about it until some time after the project when it turned out the office just had it towed off as unknown junk. The project went well.
Oof, that's kind of scary. Sorry you experienced it, and glad nobody was hurt.
I had a workmate at a gamedev place I worked (so lots of deep technical challenges) who apparently regularly missed the motorway exit for work because he was thinking about what he was working on.
I guess the point is even if the distraction is 100% internal you should still do your best to pull yourself out and get your focus back on the road.
I don't know what ever became of the line of research, but there was a very interesting book I read decades ago called Descartes' Error by Antonio Damasio that examined case studies of patients who had their corpus collosum severed, resulting in a split brain. You could show their left and right eyes different images and ask them what they saw and they would write and speak different answers, because speech and writing are controlled by different brain hemispheres.
This seems to suggest that any bottleneck in conscious attention is not an inherent limitation of an animal brain but rather a consensus mechanism we've developed to keep our chain of experience coherent. If we get rid of the constraint that all of our external communication channels need to present the same narrative, we can seemingly process more information even when it requires being a conscious center of attention.
It's like UIs being single-threaded, because otherwise you would have chaos if several background threads are trying to update the UI at the same time.
Also I do not agree with the premise that we can only think about one thing at a time.
We routinely communicate with multiple people at once and also communicate with the same persons in multiple threads of conversations.
Of cause this means that we switch between those tasks and do not really do them in parallel. At most we listen to one person, answer a second via speech, a third via text while thinking about what to respond to a fourth
This is the part that bothers me. I can definitely think of multiple things at a time. It really just depends on the complexity of the tasks. I can listen to and process and audiobook while driving to work every morning, for instance. I definitely can have multiple thoughts in parallel. I remember when I used to recite prayers, I would be reciting the memorized prayer while thinking about other things. Both things were happening at the same time. The memorized task takes less processing power, but it still requires some thought to execute.
We think about many things at a time. But for those with malfunctioning brains that have the internal monologue going constantly, they mistaken that monologue for their thoughts and so it must be "one thing at a time". The language they experience their monologue in is by its very nature, sequential, you can't speak or even hear/understand two parallel streams of speech.
>Our brain does plenty of thinking in the background that leads to "a-ha!" moments even
That's not "in the background". That's the real you, your real mind. That's the foreground. But, if your brain malfunctions as many do, then the monologue shows up and crowds out everything. Sometimes it is apparently loud enough that it even prevents those "a-ha!" moments.
>but our language coerces our thought patterns into being linear and non-concurrent?
The language should just be discarded. What you want is an internal silence.
I wouldn’t say it’s language so much as unnecessarily added language. Words and sentences can appear and be useful, but there is a lot of mental activity that is not essential but added on responses to things. I wouldn’t say a component that generates comments is a broken brain, it believing the comments or the beliefs embedded inside them can break your contentedness.
Maybe this is just a perception thing. Sure, you can only really keep up one stream of thought, visualization or inner dialogue (whatever you want to call it) at a time, but perhaps that's because we learn all our lives that direct communication is a one-channel, linear thing--speaking and listening focused on one topic at a time. Our brain does plenty of thinking in the background that leads to "a-ha!" moments even when the direct focus of our thoughts isn't on that topic. What if the mind could maintain multiple threads of thoughts at once, but our language coerces our thought patterns into being linear and non-concurrent?