> Then he declared that there is another distinct problem — why the brain’s behavior is accompanied by experience at all — which he christened the “hard” problem of consciousness.
The hard problem isn't about "why", it's about "what it's like".
Try to explain what it's like to hear a major and a chord to a deaf person, or what it's like to see magenta to someone who's blind.
None of the things you say, sign or write will make them experience these sensations.
Ultimately no one but you can know what it's like to be you.
This doesn't mean that subjective experience can't be modeled. but the caveats that apply to models in general are relevant here too: none are correct, some are useful.
Dualism doesn't necessarily means that subjectivity is ineffable. Mind and matter could work like mathematical duals: platonic solids (cube vs octahedron, dodecahedron vs icosahedron, tetrahedron vs itself), Voronoi diagrams and Delaunay triangulations, etc... These are intimately linked, and you can generate one from the other and inversely, yet they have their own distinct properties.
> Try to explain what it's like to hear a major and a chord to a deaf person, or what it's like to see magenta to someone who's blind.
I know this isn't what you wanted, but the dualism struck me:
A major chord is like a blend of two base colors that give rise to a pleasant composite color. Mix the wrong bases and the result is sensibly wrong.
Magenta is like when you play a D and an F# together. When you see it at sunset it's like a major D chord surrounded by the sound of babies laughing. When you see it on the battlefield it's like a minor D chord wrestling against the noise of wind and rain.
These are very good analogies (and possibly experiences for those who are natural synesthetes), but even then, that won't make the who doesn't have the corresponding perceptual modality person experience that exact sensation.
> A major chord is like a blend of two base colors that give rise to a pleasant composite color. Mix the wrong bases and the result is sensibly wrong.
why does a major chord sounds pleasant? and why does a minor chord sounds "sad"? Why does the locrian mode sound so unsettling? is it due to our anatomy or purely cultural?
Well, right, it's contextual. We each have a series of inputs that add up to these contexts. This doesn't mean it can't be explained, it just means there needs to be context.
If you give the blind man a sensor that converts color data to something he can input, and then provide inputs giving the feeling you want to portray associated with that color, you have explained it.
If you feel red is angry, all you need to do is play 400 to 484 THz into his instrument and yell at him angrily enough times for him to associate it. It doesn't seem too subjective to me.
Color perception has nothing to do with light wavelength. Color is a subjective perceptual space.
If you zap your occipital cortex with electromagnetic pulses, you'll experience color flashes (phosphenes).
If a blind person who can read baille does the same, they'll experience tingling sensations in their fingers [1].
People can have visual experiences through somesthesic stimuli (you can give muddy waters divers sonar-based sight by stimulating their skin with an electrode array).
AFAIK, it is not however know whether someone who was blind at birth and whose brain didn't learn to see could have such experiences.
Show me what is subjective about it then. What makes one illusion created out of flesh more real than another?
How are any of these experiences subjective if you can already relate their nature so easily and universally? You are describing biomechanics, not subjective experience.
Are you saying that you are a literal philosophical zombie?
Do you understand the difference between feeling the pain in your toes when you shoot in a door frame and what you experience when you see someone else do the same.
See also colorblindness as a common example, or tetrachromacy, which is posited in some individuals with at least two X chromosomes, and the norm in several species of birds.
Their color space has four dimensions.
People who lose parts of their brains can lose the ability to conceptualize the ability encoded by the region they lost.
No, I am saying the concept of a p-zombie relies on a flawed premise. I am asking you to explain what is fundamentally "subjective" about these experiences.
How are colorblindness and extended color perception any different from full blindness which we already addressed? These are issues of scale of perception, there is nothing subjective about them. You either process the data or not.
Can you experience sympathetic pain without having already experienced pain? I don't see any subjectivity there.
If there are multiple people that experience no pain, how are they subjectively different in their experience of no pain? Really, the more I look at it, arguing subjectivity from the null experience seems a particularly bad hill to die on. If a broken hardware bus generates a subjective experience of its own absence, then an unplugged microphone has a "subjective experience of silence."
Ultimately, I still think you are describing biomechanics, not subjective experience.
Qualia is the term people often use to mean "what it's like". The hard problem is "why is there qualia". This of course assumes that qualia exists as a coherent thing, which some philosophers dispute.
> Some physicians and researchers have argued for years that emotional dysregulation is not peripheral to ADHD but a central, overlooked part of the condition. Yet this symptom does not appear in the formal diagnostic criteria for ADHD in the manual that doctors use to classify mental disorders. That gap has left clinicians without a clear way to categorize what they’re seeing: Are these children best understood as having severe anxiety, as being on the autism spectrum, or as something else entirely? Or does ADHD itself need to be more broadly defined?
Again and again and again. Psychiatry is an epistemic mess.
Psychiatrists are touristic guides of the Paris catacombs that orient themselves with a map of the subway.
"With DSM-V, psychiatry firmly regressed to early 19th-century medical practice. Despite the fact that we know the origins of many of the problems it identifies, its diagnoses describe surface phenomena but completely ignore the underlying causes. Even before DSM-V was released, the American Journal of Psychiatry published the results of validity tests of various new diagnoses which indicated that the DSM largely lacks what, in the world of science is known as, 'reliability', that is, the ability to produce consistent, replicable results. In other words, it lacks scientific validity." ― Bessel Van Der Kolk, M.D.
That "something else entirely" for me was trauma. which has no search hits in this comment thread so far.
I was given an ADHD diagnosis as a child before it was in vogue. From my (admittedly) biased perspective I was given this as a result of hyperactivity which might have stabilized on its own given enough time, but my caretakers reacting poorly to my early behavior caused long-lasting traumatic symptoms which happen to line up with many symptoms of ADHD. So I just assumed that ADHD was the case the whole time. I started to suspect something was off when stimulants did not help my problems, but unfortunately it was not enough to escape the sphere of trying to solve my issues with ineffective ADHD-centric solutions until long into my adulthood.
Childhood trauma on top of misdiagnosis on top of continuing familial issues was an awful combination for me and I can't say that I've made that much progress from therapy, only that at this point I can survive with full awareness of the reality of how I was treated. It felt like I had been living in an alternate reality for decades and now I can't stop thinking about what I've found out.
I’m sorry you went through all that; it sounds really difficult. I can relate, having come from a similar background and situation. However, I wasn’t actually diagnosed with adhd until well into adulthood. The meds have helped, but I also have been given other emotional deregulation diagnoses, and I’ve been wondering if it’s all one thing. This article and your experiences add to that perception, for me.
Regarding progress in therapy, it’s a lot of work for sure. I would recommend looking into brainspotting (1) - it’s been hugely helpful for processing trauma, for me. YMMV
Not having enough sex is hard to formalize as a diagnostic criterium.
Joke aside (which is on me), I have doubts that it's about psychiatry being an epistemic mess. And when I say "that it's (not) about", I mean that it's not (or is) relevant to the framing of the problem.
a) it's only been almost 200 hundred years, most of which were spend building crowd control rather than exploring minds, so it's not an issue of semantics and 'mental' x 'neural' topologies defined in as unambiguous terms as possible. psychology drew lines for the wrong reasons but men, who build and still run the field, are, ... well ... not very manly, are they? nobody is, these days. Some mafia says jump & people jump, you read it in studies and subtext all the time, and in real life, just look at the the amounts of highly functioning autistic people just rolling with the rules of conformity in 'realms' with 'grander'--meaning, in context, requiring high education (not the half baked kind)--purpose. It's weird.
b) "regulation" implies continuity, which requires literally no more than 2 things:
1. learning a few rules, which is an active thing, much easier for ADHD and other people than the thing they have no control over whatsoever, which is
2. brain circuits that don't (or do) constantly break continuity of ... all the things that return thoughts and emotions even though the "main" function isn't done, or any (or only some) of the concurrent, async functions called by the "main" function are or are not done, (yet), all while all the 'context and reality and "presence" sustaining functions' are just stable enough ... (minus that cool part of the CNS that does it's thing no matter what)
All that said, I have to check the study in detail.
We should never forget that the personalities of parents (and other involved parties) play a 1337% more important role than the subtype of ADHD or whatever symptoms a person "shows".
It is the same thing, just emphasizing that the OS is more than the kernel, and than the userland comes from the GNU project.
The latter had been designed to be a full OS but didn't have a functional kernel when Linux was released, and Torvalds adopted the GNU userland for his project.
- Why did you close your eyes ?
- So that the room will be empty.
Your copy reads as "I'm a radical centrist and will die trying to preserve the status quo".
As it usually goes you'd then tolerate hateful, bigoted folks in the name of openness and Free Speech Absolutism™ (which is totally non-political /s) and chase away women, minorities and folks who care about them.
If this isn't your intention, a CoC is the way to go.
You regrettably can't make hate disappear by pretending it doesn't exist.
I don’t think that’s fair. But i do get how others might read into that too.
Personally i read it more like “this project avoids having any political stance.” Similar to the HN guidelines on politics.
However i do agree that it’s better to remove that message and have no comment on politics, than to comment so visibly that you’re unwilling to comment. Even if you read charitably into the message, it’s still just a distraction on valuable page real estate.
You've put it on a forge with issues and PRs open, which implies you expect external contributions.
I'm trying to warn you about the implicit message your copy sends.
It will chase away the folks I mentioned, and some day you'll discover that one of your non-political core contributors goes by @zyklon1488 on twitter.
>one of your non-political core contributors goes by @zyklon1488 on twitter
I think this is exactly what author meant? This is just a tool, private life or political opinions of contributors are not relevant, as long as they don't try to force them on other project members. The only thing that matters is the quality of submitted code.
Most Bun users don't even know about this (unless they are bitten by this). That doesn't mean absolutely no one cares or would not care even though such complaints might be uncommon.
It demonstrated the capabilities of an AI to a potentially on-the-fence audience while giving the author experience using the new tools/environment. That's solid value. I also just find it really cool to see that an AI did this.
Yeah, it shows the AI is not capable of writing maintainable projects. I'm off the fence. And its cool you find it cool, but reducing the problem space to that of a toy project makes it so much less impressive as to be trivially ignorable.
The new LLM (pattern recognizer/matcher) is not a good tool
> Then he declared that there is another distinct problem — why the brain’s behavior is accompanied by experience at all — which he christened the “hard” problem of consciousness.
The hard problem isn't about "why", it's about "what it's like".
Try to explain what it's like to hear a major and a chord to a deaf person, or what it's like to see magenta to someone who's blind.
None of the things you say, sign or write will make them experience these sensations.
Ultimately no one but you can know what it's like to be you.
This doesn't mean that subjective experience can't be modeled. but the caveats that apply to models in general are relevant here too: none are correct, some are useful.
Dualism doesn't necessarily means that subjectivity is ineffable. Mind and matter could work like mathematical duals: platonic solids (cube vs octahedron, dodecahedron vs icosahedron, tetrahedron vs itself), Voronoi diagrams and Delaunay triangulations, etc... These are intimately linked, and you can generate one from the other and inversely, yet they have their own distinct properties.
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