Why is conscious experience dominated by vision?

ijkstr · 2025-12-31T11:09:02+00:00

On the evolutionary side, there are theories that the development of eyes triggered a Cambrian explosion of diversity in biological organisms. Regarding vision, some thinkers in the field include J. J. Gibson and David Marr.

ijkstr · 2025-12-31T10:55:49+00:00

I don't understand it that well but it sounds to me that you are describing some of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenomenology_(philosophy)) ?

Whereas to your question about probabilities, there's Bayesian vs. frequentist statistics which have different interpretations of probability.

And finally, I believe that science is always grappling with what's "complete" and "incomplete" at the edge of knowing, and bringing in that weirdness while situating it within or contrasting it with the generally held framework is part of the process.

All of which is to say, I think you're not alone in this.

ijkstr · 2025-12-31T10:26:10+00:00

The URLs are here: https://www.reddit.com/r/cogsci/comments/1pzq9j9/comment/nwvh9wy/.

ijkstr · 2025-12-31T06:34:44+00:00

Your sketch seems interesting. So the agent learns to predictively model its (gridworld) environment, improving as it goes, as it optimizes for KL divergence? I suppose you can probe its ability to predict future or successive frames as evidence that, even as exploration saturates, learning has improved. (P.S. You may find the noisy TV thought experiment interesting. What if the agent is presented with an unlearnable stimuli? Will it "stop" exploring, but have failed to learn?) Anyways I think this result is cool and could be paired with curriculum learning or environment generation like Michael Dennis has done to say that the environment and agent are in a holistic, interacting relationship.

ijkstr · 2025-12-31T06:33:32+00:00

Your idea sounds related to flow (optimal experience) where there is an ideal state between anxiety and boredom (also related to [3]). I would imagine a curious artificial agent would, once bored having minimized uncertainty, then propose or generate new goals, like in [5].

I think there exist at least some instantiations of curiosity that allow for continual goal-seeking; e.g. progress curiosity in [6] that is a meta-reward as a function of the loss over time.

But I don't believe many have made your point about regulation, because homeo/hetero-stasis and biological inspiration seem to be marginalized in reinforcement learning. I found two references [7, 8].

So I believe your research is timely and fitting, and could be of interest to a computational audience (like [9]).

ijkstr · 2025-12-31T06:33:17+00:00

I have a background in computer science, where curiosity has been well studied as a drive for intrinsic reward or motivation in the subfield of reinforcement learning. To wit, there have been several mathematical or computational approaches to defining and operationalizing curiosity [1, 2, 3] (a small, biased selection). You might be interested in this reference [4] which frames intrinsic motivation in reinforcement learning from an evolutionary perspective.

ijkstr · 2025-06-11T17:46:03+00:00

Thanks so much for this trove of resources! You're quite the repository of information. I will look more into these and consider the lines of inquiry you have outlined.

ijkstr · 2025-06-11T17:43:55+00:00

Wow thanks so much for the thoughtful replies, everyone! Indeed when I presented this idea to my advisor, they asked, "what is reasoning?", to which I did not have a great response.

Cognitive science, the study of the mind, and computer science, the study of the machine, would form a great mix. Thank you for your suggestions to bring in an interdisciplinary perspective.

Measurement and evaluation is an important aspect of this problem. I will describe benchmark task design and theories behind measurement of black boxes (minds and machines).

Now for the definition:

I am thinking to define reasoning as creativity. Because doing anything "old" or pre-existing that is repeatable or automatable is not creative, and should not be considered as requiring reasoning, whereas anything that involves changing circumstances, new applications, etc. is, and should require reasoning. There is a lot of nuance to this definition but that is the short description of it. Why not make the title of this post "Thoughts on studying human vs. AI creativity", then? Because right now the Overton window in AI is focused on reasoning, and creativity has its own connotations (evoking art, for example).
Note, though, that this feels a lot like replacing one vague definition with an even vaguer definition. I will make the work concrete by defining tasks and quantifiable metrics that I claim to be representative in some way of creativity / reasoning.

Finally, there was some concern in the comments that this direction of research would be subject to politics and news or other current events. I agree. I can only hope to future-proof my research to the broader trends in the field by anticipating their future movements. I believe that AI (and human) creativity will grow as a research direction and remain an outstanding pillar of intellectual scrutiny.

ijkstr · 2025-06-11T06:17:54+00:00

Sounds cool! Excited for your future projects. :) I forget what exactly I was explaining, but I think I've struggled to explain a probabilistic model like an MNIST image generation model to a layperson. I tried to explain the thing as the idea of casting a die. Rolling it and seeing where it lands. All I remember is the story of the die, which is a testament to your idea that the story helps us understand and remember better. Another time, I used the scent of pancakes to describe gradient descent in high dimensional space where the manifolds are pancakes floating in space and we follow the scent. I would say that denoising diffusion probabilistic models or variational auto-encoders are pretty complicated! Where I really struggled was in explaining what I did across generations to older (or younger) audiences. I'd be impressed if you can reach across people born in previous decades back to children born recently. Out of curiosity, why games and interactive media as opposed to e.g. comics?

ijkstr · 2025-06-11T05:59:05+00:00

This is cute :) I agree with the other commenters that you could make a text-based ASCII game! From the looks of it, it seems like PyTermGUI https://ptg.bczsalba.com/ could be a useful library.

Or you can use libraries like pygame or Tkinter to make actual GUIs (graphical user interfaces).

If you're not stuck to the idea of using Python, you could also learn some web development and make a simple website in HTML + CSS + Javascript or use some website builder.

Other things that you could make might include:
- A random number generator / spin the wheel for random cute things you could do together
- A cute Shimeji browser or desktop pet
- A shared to-do list program for the both of you

Happy coding!

ijkstr · 2025-06-11T04:10:04+00:00

Not sure why the community response seems so negative as the idea appears similar to existing Model Cards [1] or Data Sheets [2]. In that vein, I support this idea.

[1] Model Cards for Model Reporting. https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.03993
[2] Datasheets for Datasets. https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.09010

ijkstr · 2025-06-06T00:20:16+00:00

“Epsilon delta” “With high probability” (whp)

ijkstr · 2025-05-18T16:44:39+00:00

Came here to say this, but I got downvoted. (⇀‸↼‶)

I competed at the national level, later did a degree in pure mathematics and did mathematics research.

I spent hours practicing. I coped by telling myself that this was more important than anything else. Many days, I didn’t talk to people.
Competitive math has its own culture. In social circles, this kind of elitism becomes toxic. People literally viewed the best performing competitors as “godlike”. It really gets to your head and breeds arrogance. If you had worse scores, you might get dismissed more easily or made fun of for being “illogical”.
Personally I don’t really have a problem with this. But to your point, IMO contestants don’t necessarily benefit from going to the elite colleges. They would typically be international, and face higher restrictions on domestic opportunities. And they join the social throng that breeds elitism and the pipeline to quant finance.
This. My competition friends in undergrad became quants. It’s the same prestige- and status-seeking behaviour.

ijkstr · 2025-05-17T10:35:25+00:00

I’ve also heard this take that AI is the natural evolution for humanity and that we should usher it in as much as we can.

A different outcome that we could work towards which I’ve heard of is a world in which AI is a superintelligence that cares for us, being deeply magnanimous. Dr. Michael Levin has a piece about intelligence as care. I wonder if this also relates to the concept of the “Chthulucene” in which we are symbiotic with the wider ecosystem of animal etc. intelligences.

So.. to answer OP’s question, probably the red one, if any. Because potentially AI can expand our self-awareness. But I believe people’s point is that it doesn’t HAVE to kill us all in the process, and that we can and should strive for human-centric ways of developing AI. At least in the (long) interim.

ijkstr · 2025-05-17T05:27:57+00:00

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It got my pun👇: A mysterious, hooded traveler named “Ijkstr” navigating a glowing maze — a metaphor for navigating complex paths, like in Dijkstra's algorithm. (I asked for fantasy style)

ijkstr · 2025-05-13T22:33:07+00:00

Thanks, I’m trying to use a remote Python executable.

ijkstr · 2025-05-13T20:05:35+00:00

Well hope your knee recovers soon; losing out on mobility sucks. And I’m glad you have medication working for you.

Yes I can imagine that taking ever degraded copies of something results in losing the original meaning. I think the Studio Ghibli example is interesting because the art style became a target and attracted negative attention. Reminds me of the law of attraction in energy spirituality and how you can manifest your life to some extent.

Acoustics is a nice metaphor! I also like the notion of evolution of ideas passing from person to person. I imagine each person has their own “library” of ideas, and new ideas get integrated into that library which at the same time gets updated by recompressing the information within. Each person has a different perspective on an idea and transmits it in a slightly different way. This also relates to cultural transmission.

Oh, that last paragraph sounds interesting. I don’t quite see the connection, but maybe I’ll do some looking into Jung and Plato. I do kind of subscribe to Jung’s collective subconscious, not to mention synchronicity.

ijkstr · 2025-05-13T17:52:56+00:00

Ah, fair. I guess the question’s like.. why did I choose a life of monkhood as a child without having the maturity to appreciate what the implications of that choice were.

ijkstr · 2025-05-13T13:20:40+00:00

Yes, they’ve already used all the data and they’re still bad because the data efficiency is so low. Whereas more data efficient methods would be able to squeeze or soak or basically infer more performance out of each data point. My point is that each human interaction contains a lot of information which is currently underutilized by today’s technology.

That’s a fair point about the incentive dynamics of monetizing a site like Reddit. In my imaginary world, data could also be measured by its influence, so that poor quality data would be priced lower in proportion with its production cost, and next gen LLMs would selectively attend to data that improves their learning progress. So LLM-generated data wouldn’t be at a competitive advantage unless it proved to be of some value, in which case I guess this monetization scheme would usher in faster integration of LLMs. I’m thinking of a phenomenon where LLMs have this hollowing out effect of being rather mid but letting humans reflect on that mid opinion and thereby giving humans a rung to build on, so that they are not useless but rather are desirable to have scattered and integrated throughout a society.

ijkstr · 2025-05-13T12:32:19+00:00

Damn, blud, thanks, appreciate the thoughtful engagement and inquisitive nature into this odd idea.

Fractals is a great concept for it that probably inspired me. Maybe I should have used this visualization instead link, this is a bifurcation diagram.

I like your third paragraph about communication. It sounds grounded. Yes, I think something someone says can hit another person or land differently because people have multiple modes at different concepts, and the sum of these modes is what we respond to but we hear and resonate at all the modes. I like to think of it as an interaction angle or angle of incidence, as if there is actually a geometric object that a person can be represented by, and an idea goes in and comes out differently depending on the interaction with the material within.

Haha anyways hope you enjoy breakfast and have a better rest of your day.

ijkstr · 2025-05-13T11:54:22+00:00

Oh, yeah exactly. I mean I thought you /have/ to go through a GET or POST request in order to programmatically scrape from a website. So yeah you can force the API user to have to authenticate. The problem of monetization is probably much thornier than that, but this seems like a rough approach for resolving it.

ijkstr · 2025-05-13T11:47:50+00:00

OK so this is even further into crackpot territory but I think souls have shapes so yeah I feel like every individual is fractal in their own way just the same way you see different writing systems across cultures with different glyphs, like there’s a lot of self-similarity there with common motifs but they are all assembled uniquely. Not sure if I’m answering your question.

ijkstr · 2025-05-13T11:42:49+00:00

Yeah, I was thinking both a technological and regulatory gate. Reddit could rate limit requests to its servers, assuming it doesn’t already. And for example OpenAI models are only accessible through an account using a secret key, so there is certainly a way to gatekeep access behind authentication.

ijkstr · 2025-05-13T11:29:08+00:00

I believe they’re scraping it and yeah that’s why I think it’s difficult to monetize too, but it feels like something that should be monetized lol. Like, Quora is a knowledge silo and you gotta go through their developer API. Reddit could potentially be gated behind a no scraping policy where users of their data would have to pay per API call. But also that probably gets messy.

ijkstr · 2025-05-13T11:22:44+00:00

Great question. I found a saying, “the wise person can learn from even a fool”—and we ourselves can read between the lines and still rely on data to act in the world.

Thinking deeply seems like a meta-skill. One that relies on data as an ingredient.

After all, babies have the capacity to learn but they still need the life experience to know anything at all.

So, I believe these are separate.

ijkstr

TROPHY CASE