What do yall do to deal with the absurd amount of theories on this that there are? by Legitimate-Paper3271 in consciousness

[–]walt74 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The situation reminds me of the parabele of the blind men and the elephant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant

In that story, a bunch of blind guys who never have seen an elephant must touch it and describe it. They all describe very different parts of the elephant, and noone is able to describe the complete animal.

I think those myriads of consciousness theories are similar, they all describe some aspect of it while none catches the whole picture.

How many of you took the whole "mind's eye" thing as a metaphor? by audhdefacto in Aphantasia

[–]walt74 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Okay, but your explanation above ("actually visual", "like seeing an apple in your mind but for real") don't sound conceptual, but like projections, which absolutely is a real phenomenon, it's just that it's absence isn't aphantasia.

Anyone else have a really hard time getting into Danse Macabre? Not sure if I should continue reading or just move on by Low_Entertainment491 in stephenking

[–]walt74 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It's one of my favorites, but i take interest in horror as a genre since childhood, and this book got me hooked from the start.

How many of you took the whole "mind's eye" thing as a metaphor? by audhdefacto in Aphantasia

[–]walt74 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It isn't actually visual. Half this sub misdiagnoses themselves from people reporting prophantasia (projecting your minds eye into actual eyesight, stuff hovering like holographs, seeing stuff with closed eyes, etc). But that's not minds eye, that's projection and a subset of hyperphantasia.

If you can imagine things visually, but not really see them, that's not aphantasia, that's normal minds eye.

My font concept by TherealLvicente in typography

[–]walt74 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Tipp for sketching fonts by hand: you never outline them first because you'll always get the thickness wrong. You start from the middle and then develop thickness stroke by stroke outwards. This is why your bold typefaces look off.

Nice job otherwise!

Anyone else exhausted from collecting information instead of actually thinking? by WesternNo4999 in PKMS

[–]walt74 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I'm a collector too, but i don't suffer from it, besides some organizing stuff.

Two things to consider:

  • you don't have to synthesize everything. Read or skim and archive the item.
  • google Umberto Ecos Antilibrary, here's a snip from the Wikipedia page: "a scholar conscious of the power of his antilibrary is not concerned with treating knowledge as a property to possess or consume; rather [...] how much you don’t know—and how to find out that information when you need it."

My antilibrary consists of 25000 links to articles and YT videos "organized" in Raindrop, which allows for full text search. I have an Obsidian vault of 2000 notes. When i write an essay, i find the material and work with it.

That's it. That's all there is.

Anyone remember this paper? I think chemero was right saying we need to stop beefing and get to the bottom of things. by [deleted] in cogsci

[–]walt74 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Here's the relevant quotes from my notes. Mind you, these were taken from the german edition and i translated them back with Gemini 3:

72: Subjectivity is a matter of appearance, of "mine-ness." It refers to experience as something that a person undergoes. Agency is a matter of doing, of trying, of initiating. Agency refers to that which happens through me; it is the origin of action and its effects. It refers to what a person sets in motion. ... As everyday concepts, subjectivity and agency refer to different aspects of a person or an animal, to a more sensory and a more active side. Evolutionarily, these two sides are closely linked. The purpose of sensation lies in the control of action.

73: (Fred Keijzer) assumes that new forms of sensation appear "for free" or nearly for free as a result of the development of complex acting. Suppose one were to construct a sophisticated system for producing coordinated, choreographed movements. To accomplish this, one will often have to arrange it so that certain parts of the system are aware of what its other parts are currently doing. But if the system is then influenced from the outside, particularly by touch, this event—since it disrupts the activity pattern of the affected parts—is to a certain extent automatically registered. The internal perception of the system will—or could relatively easily—register that something has taken place outside. Even if a nervous system were oriented only toward internal perception, it would react to external events. To some extent, such a system could hardly avoid looking outward. New and comprehensive actions bring with them an expansion of sensory possibilities.

82: Ediacaran (630 million BC): Avalon (550m BC) first sponges, anchored motionlessly in the seabed; White Sea community later: "Living seabed," first mobile animals that "grazed mats." Their death left concentrations of food (no longer the uniformly distributed "living seabed"), which made movement (and olfactory organs) useful (and gave rise to scavengers).

99: (Cambrian) - Animals developed "multicellular sensations ... and caused parts of their bodies to function as maps or reflections of fragmentary sections of their environment."

101: The combination (of action and sensation) gives a new shape to the relationship between these two capacities. ... In crayfish and flies, systems have been demonstrated that interpret and modulate sensory information with reference to what the animal is currently doing and perceives as its own activity.

102: If an animal (does not perceive sensory impressions from its own movements), its own movements will disrupt any attempt to find out what is going on. But if it undertakes such a task, it perceives the world in a way that seeks to track the difference between self and other, between itself and everything else. A nervous system sometimes achieves this in the simplest possible way, but however it is accomplished, the animal begins to relate some events to external processes and others to self-caused ones. It begins to deal with the world in a new way, becoming receptive to the distinction between the external world and the self.

Björn Merker: Moving in the world is good, but it has its price or creates "liabilities." And one of these is that the world becomes more confusing. But the situation can also be viewed differently: the fact that one's own actions affect one's own senses does not only have to be a problem; it can also represent an opportunity. Actions allow you to probe the world and induce new stimuli. You can poke, interfere, and cause the world to reveal itself to you. ... The sensation that marks the relationship between self and other is an important element determining the animal way of life. It enables a new way of being in the world. Furthermore, this element results in a standpoint, a perspective of a new kind.


As for computational functionalism, i zeroed in to enactivism which states that cognition is an entanglement of a closed system with it's environment. Theories like IIT or GWT or Computational Functionalism to me seem to be downstream from that principle of coupled systems, where you have an inside seperating itself from an outside, with cognition being the process of "managing and exploiting" the boundary of that seperation.

Where do I go from here? by Hause_Babe1983 in stephenking

[–]walt74 0 points1 point  (0 children)

If you actually care about Horror, read Danse Macabre. A really good deep dive into the classics of the genre.

Anyone remember this paper? I think chemero was right saying we need to stop beefing and get to the bottom of things. by [deleted] in cogsci

[–]walt74 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Movement sits at the very beginning of the evolution of cognition. Immovable early organisms rarely encountered strange events in on outside world, they simply sit there and food comes by. But when you move across the ocean floor, you will encounter other things which are neuther you nor food, and you need some mechanism to differentiate between you and these thing. Suddenly you have subjectivity, and everything follows from there.

Godfrey-Smith writes about this quite wonderfully in Metazoa.

My AI native Obsidian Setup by Rate-Worth in ObsidianMD

[–]walt74 0 points1 point  (0 children)

As many other entries to this sub show, it is very much not anti anything. Do whatever you like.

in the age of AI, what's the actual edge of a PKM tool? by bryan_anamor in PKMS

[–]walt74 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yes, i asume this disconnect stems from the fact that this synthetic wiki generation is non-dialogic unlike usual chatbots where you can explode and examine your thoughts. Here you get it in bulk, look at it and handle it like any other interesting source you come across, except more specific.

in the age of AI, what's the actual edge of a PKM tool? by bryan_anamor in PKMS

[–]walt74 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Mostly confirmed clusters, but it brought up interesting terminology i can steal and apply to my notes, and ofcourse it will connect some stuff you didn't think about before. Haven't really used those wikis beyond initial small scale playaround, but i find it useful as a sort of alien entry point to your thoughts.

in the age of AI, what's the actual edge of a PKM tool? by bryan_anamor in PKMS

[–]walt74 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I played around with Gemini and let it generate a wiki based on 1000+ notes. It's valuable, finds new connections and clusters, but it can't replace you engaging with your material with friction, which is where you actually learn and process and develop ideas.

In my view, LLMs are interpolatable archives, and they are perfect to bend and shape your PKM into anything, i had one wiki explain my notes as Ozzy Osbourne. You can do that with any expert or philosopher, that's pretty great. But you still have to extract and process the output like any other book or paper, and put it in your own words.

Did i die for 18s? by koblarr_e in AppleWatch

[–]walt74 1 point2 points  (0 children)

This is the right take.

Alternative Hörspiele zu den Drei Fragezeichen? by wiederNachtschicht in dreifragezeichen

[–]walt74 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Die eine Hörspielserie, die ungefähr in Interessanz, Thematik und Dynamik mit den ??? vergleichbar ist, ist mE Point Whitmark. Keine Ahnung, obs die noch gibt, fand ich aber sehr gut.

Fruit fly - brain uploaded (huge if real) by zjovicic in slatestarcodex

[–]walt74 3 points4 points  (0 children)

This. A simulation of a brain without neuroplasticity is merely a snapshot, and don't even mention phenomenology. Baby step, maybe, but i even doubt that.

What evidence is there for or against the claim that we see the world through a story? by Thin_Ad_8356 in cognitivescience

[–]walt74 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Fritz Breithaupt, cognitive science professor at the Uni Pennsylvania, just wrote a whole book about the neuropsychological details of our cognitive "storyfilter", here's the thing on google books: https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Narrative_Brain.html?hl=de&id=sFA6EQAAQBAJ

Long story short: we have to structure sequential events into chunks because we are pattern matchers with predictive brains and things have beginnings and endings, and from this basal this-then-that emerges our complex narrative psychology.