I sometimes ge the most complex logical dreams whilst going to sleep on a programming problem.
The dreams are normal dreams but structured like a programming problem or logic…it’s like my brain is trying to dream normally but it’s also
Fixated on programming logic so it subliminally incorporates it into dreams.
Then I wake up and I feel like I’ve compiled the whole code in my head and did not rest.
anyfoo 1 days ago [-]
I haven't had this in a long time, except for on the (fortunately rare) occasion that I have a fever. Fever dreams are already hell, but if they're non-sensical programming/computer science fever dreams, they were extra hell.
I remember one particular one a few decades ago, where I was feverishly (pun intended) trying to achieve something with XML, only it being a fever dream, nothing of it made sense, so I was wracking my brain for nonsense those entire hours.
chrisweekly 1 days ago [-]
I've had similar experiences, and (having studied neuroscience as an undergrad and in casual / amateur research in the many years since) feel there's a lot of untapped potential to leverage in our hypnopompic and hypnogogic states (at the fuzzy boundaries of sleeping / wakefulness). Fascinating stuff.
(tangent)
Also, please forgive my question which may seem impolite but I really want to know: why did you type "whilst" instead of "when" or "while"? Have you ever said the word "whilst" out loud, in a normal conversation? More letters, an extra (half)syllable, zero meaning or nuance added, I just don't get it. I wonder this every time I see it, mean no disrespect and would be grateful for a straightforward reply. (/tangent)
pbhjpbhj 23 hours ago [-]
Whilst/while is interesting.
Whilst to me is like being in the midst of something, not just that it is happening somewhere. It seems to have more specificity than 'while'.
"Whilst boarding the train..." Is going to be followed by something personal or hypothetical.
However, I think I'm prone to overlaying a gloss on words that isn't necessarily shared.
As I intimated 'whilst' I would use in philosophical contexts, arguments where there are alternative hypotheticals, say. "Whilst it might be said...".
Most likely it's just subconsciously learned, a product of native/mother tongue learning.
Would be interesting to see the word vectors extracted from literature/media moving over time and across contexts in order to make a comparison.
spaghettifythis 1 days ago [-]
Not op, but I often do say 'whilst' out loud. It feels more structured and certain than 'while', which feels floppier as a word.
skinfaxi 1 days ago [-]
It's to be used when the word that follows begins with a vowel sound.
moi2388 1 days ago [-]
Is it? Do you have a source for this? Afaik ‘while’ is often used in US English and ‘whilst’ in British English.
1 days ago [-]
finghin 1 days ago [-]
both are definitely used in modern British English, but whilst is strange to my ears as I grew up in Ireland
slicktux 1 days ago [-]
No offense taken; I do say it out loud during conversations ; at times. I find myself ‘saying’ it more in my head whilst having a stream of consciousness moment.
I find that I have two personalities and my writing/text personality is much more sagacious and better spoken (if that makes sense??)
QuaternionsBhop 1 days ago [-]
This happens to me too. Often my dream plows forwards with unsound assumptions and I wake up believing something confusing.
satvikpendem 1 days ago [-]
Now try lucid dreaming those, it's amazing and brings me closer to Nolan's Inception than ever before. I even think I've had lucid dreams since before that movie came out as apparently he was directly influenced by lucid dreamers.
lukan 1 days ago [-]
Well, maybe you did work on your problems in your sleep and did get less rest because of it, so the new insights you got the next day(s), the groundwork for it might have happened in your sleepwork.
tgv 1 days ago [-]
This sounds odd to me:
> ... neural signals could predict upcoming words in a sentence. ... This kind of predictive coding is something we associate with being awake and attentive, yet it’s happening here in an unconscious state
In psycholinguistics, the assumption is, and always has been, that language processing is unconscious, a background process like visual object recognition. For starters, conscious attention is too slow by two orders of magnitude, and infants can process language, while presumably not yet (fully) conscious.
abyssin 23 hours ago [-]
What you call "conscious attention" seems to be a sort of cognitive process. What the article calls unconscious state is a state. The idea is that in some states, some processes (like predictive coding) don't take place.
tgv 20 hours ago [-]
Comatose patients show EEG activity related to sound and language processing. That has been known for at least 30 years (a quick search turns up e.g. https://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/lancet/PIIS0140-6736...). The article also speaks about attention. I even quoted that bit.
healthworker 1 days ago [-]
This is strong evidence against LLMs experiencing qualia. (I know that that topic often gets people laughed out of the room but please don't jump on me for engaging in that debate. When we can collect evidence and be able to show it to people.)
ordu 1 days ago [-]
How did you jumped to qualia from consciousness? I can see how this is a strong evidence against LLM being conscious, but to my mind it doesn't imply in any way or form that they do not experience qualia.
Or... well, ok, maybe they can't experience if they are not conscious? I see how this can be argued, but I still do not agree. I'm sure qualia is created not by consciousness (I would notice if it was), and I'm sure it is created not for consciousness specifically, it must have some other uses too.
satvikpendem 1 days ago [-]
How can qualia be experienced if not from a conscious observer? It's the same question as asking if a tree falls in the woods with no one to hear or know about it.
layer8 1 days ago [-]
People have different notions of what “qualia” means. To me, the experience of qualia is the perception of qualities, or of the texture, of inner processings of the brain. Not consciously experiencing them doesn’t mean that these qualities aren’t there, just like not consciously experiencing sounds wouldn’t mean that the sounds aren’t there, and may be unconsciously processed.
I don’t think that “experience as such” makes any sense. Experience is always of something. And that in turn implies that the something that is being experienced also exists independently of it being experienced.
stevenhuang 1 days ago [-]
No disagreements with what you said in your first paragraph.
> I'm sure qualia is created not by consciousness
Whether or not qualia is created by consciousness, I don't see how we necessarily can tell one way or the other. We don't exactly have great introspective tools to do such self analysis, not to mention what we think we feel is often illusory/not reflective of reality.
ordu 1 days ago [-]
Yeah, I think you are right. "The content of consciousness" and "consciousness" are different things, and I mixed them up, when writing that sentence. I can watch the content, but not other parts that may be producing it.
Moreover, thinking about it, I come to a conclusion, that if I cannot reflect on qualia creation, then it is a (weak) evidence for qualia created by consciousness. I suppose the consciousness is harder to reflect on than other things, hard to map it into states of the content of consciousness. Like, I can reflect on my vision and see some hints on how I get these wonderful pictures, despite it being definitely not consciousness, I can reflect on how I produce or decode language. And to my mind it is because consciousness was devised to reflect on these things, so I could report on my observations to others. But to reflect on itself is a wholly different matter.
LoganDark 1 days ago [-]
We can't even meaningfully prove that human beings have qualia
finghin 1 days ago [-]
We can’t meaningfully deny humans have qualia, there would be too much baby and not enough bathwater.
LoganDark 16 hours ago [-]
I would not deny it. The reason people accept current evidence is, after all, because they can relate to the experience of qualia, even if there's no complete objective understanding of it yet.
vinceguidry 22 hours ago [-]
We can't even meaningfully define the concept.
Geste 1 days ago [-]
Go on, where is the evidence ? I am actually curious and open-minded about it.
jibal 23 hours ago [-]
Since this is about what happens in humans, not LLMs, it couldn't possibly be evidence of any sort regarding LLMs.
(I think there are overwhelming reasons to think that LLMs don't experience qualia, but this has nothing to do with it.)
MarkusQ 21 hours ago [-]
Nuts.
You're saying the discovery that humans can process language without being conscious "couldn't possibly" inform the debate about LLMs? When that debate is literal predicated on the assumption that the ability to process language implies consciousness?
This is a counter example to the fundamental assumption of that argument. Without that, you are left with something like "if we ignore their ability to to process language, do we have any reason to suppose that LLMs (as opposed to, say, a spread sheet or stats package) are conscious?"
jibal 20 hours ago [-]
Sorry to hear that someone rudely thinks that basic logic is "Nuts".
> When that debate is literal (sic) predicated on the assumption that the ability to process language implies consciousness?
This is an incoherent claim. Debates are between people with differing claims and often differing assumptions; they aren't "predicated" on some assumption or another--that's a category mistake.
Someone can easily argue that LLMs are conscious (or have qualia--that was the disputed claim, and they aren't the same thing) without the strong claim that the ability to process language entails consciousness ... perhaps it is the processing of language together with other features that they think indicates consciousness. For instance, George Lemoine and Richard Dawkins didn't base their judgments on consciousness on such an entailment, but rather on the specifics of what the LLMs said to them.
I won't respond about this again.
MarkusQ 18 hours ago [-]
If LLMs did not process language as well as they do, we would not be having the argument.
The only reason we are having the argument at all is that people see LLMs responding appropriately to language, and _from_that_ conclude that LLMs may be conscious. You even sneak this in yourself when you say "George Lemoine and Richard Dawkins didn't base their judgments on consciousness on such an entailment, but rather on the specifics of what the LLMs said to them" -- in other words, they wouldn't have had judgements in the first place if the LLMs had not "said things to them".
naasking 1 days ago [-]
I don't see how that follows. The brain could be experiencing all sorts of things while processing, but simply not record it, and so of course the person will have no recollection of experiencing anything.
ordu 1 days ago [-]
An anecdote to demonstrate the point.
I broke my leg recently. Shortly after that I've lost my consciousness. It was very painful, the body reacted with a lot of adrenaline, and after a several minutes when adrenaline was drained away my consciousness was drained too.
I experienced something like this several times, though not to the point of fainting. But this time was special in other way too: I had friends near me, they observed me through all the process and we could compare our observations later. It seems, that my memory stopped recording before I fainted. I was still operating to some extent, but I couldn't remember a thing. When asked something I grunted in answer. When one of my friends insisted that I stand up and come to a better place to sit down, I actually stand up and did several steps before stopping and slowly (and carefully) sank to the ground. (An interesting observation, my controls over my body were weakening, but I was still using them for what they worth. It fits with all other similar experiences: the limbs and all the muscles seem to be losing their strength, and it takes a lot of will to make them work.)
On the light of this, I'm very interested what proponents of the idea, that feelings need consciousness to work, would say about my half-unconscious state. Did I feel myself extremely bad at the time? Or maybe I didn't feel anything? My friends are sure that the former statement is true, but they may be mistaken by my outside looks. I personally don't remember. Up to some point I remember that I felt really bad, but the next thing I remember I look at the sky and I'm surprised by what I see (I was not in a place I expected to be). And at that moment I was pretty ok already, no more adrenaline issues, just my leg was aching.
Was I experiencing qualia is another interesting question. I'm pretty sure I was, but I'd like to hear an argument for the opposite.
satvikpendem 1 days ago [-]
Maybe it was a different part of your nervous system experiencing them, akin to a BIOS versus the operating system. The brain is a very complex and fractal thing, it is entirely possible that a more basal part of "you" took over for a very traumatic part of your life, very similar, but not exactly, to those with multiple personality disorder act.
layer8 1 days ago [-]
> I'm very interested what proponents of the idea, that feelings need consciousness to work, would say about my half-unconscious state.
I’m not one of these proponents, but to play the devil’s advocate: The fact that you can’t remember it doesn’t necessarily imply that you didn’t fully consciously experience it at the time.
slopinthebag 1 days ago [-]
The Chinese room argument suggests that it's impossible anyways.
finghin 1 days ago [-]
I don’t disagree with the general point here but the attraction of that argument has surely drifted much in ~5y.
I’d be REALLY curious to see a survey of philosophy 2015 vs 2025 UG entrants on mind-brain connection intuitions
slopinthebag 1 days ago [-]
I feel like it might be strengthened by a machine that actually does implement the core of the argument (even passes the turing test?) but is also just matrix multiplication. Previously the idea of a device that could respond to input with human-like output was a fantasy, now it's reality which removes one of the arguments against the Chinese Room on the basis of plausibility.
But yes, I would like to see a modern philosophers take on it.
finghin 1 days ago [-]
I'm more interested in whether the uninformed intuitions have changed, whether someone who used an LLM before graduating from school and entering university has a more forgiving stance than an "ignorant" college entrant from ten years ago. From my experience of the field, I would really doubt many philosophers of mind have changed their view based on this. The major questions of interest concern qualia, it ha been so for many years.
1 days ago [-]
jibal 23 hours ago [-]
Plausibility was never an argument against Searle's Chinese Room Argument ... that's a very deep confusion, since Searle was arguing against the possibility of Strong AI, whereas advocates of Strong AI of course thought it was plausible and that's why they were working to create it. That you conflate the Chinese Room Argument with "the Chinese Room" is one aspect of the confusion.
finghin 22 hours ago [-]
It’s absolutely about the plausibility of mechanistic intentionality, given the implausibility of intentionality where the person in the experiment doesn’t understand chinese
jibal 20 hours ago [-]
Searle's argument may well be about the plausibility of "mechanistic intentionalty", whatever exactly that means ("mechanistic" just sounds like bigotry to me ... we are all mechanisms and Searle didn't say otherwise, just that we are meat mechanisms and not purely syntactic mechanisms ... and his argument was intended as a logical proof, not just a plausibility argument), but that's not what the previous comments were about. Apparently you mechanistically see the word "plausibility" and think that any and all statements about it refer to the same thing.
I won't respond further.
nothinkjustai 19 hours ago [-]
There are arguments made specifically about the implausibility of such a room making the argument itself invalid. Or I guess I should say “we’re”, because that position is now much less tenable with LLMs.
jibal 23 hours ago [-]
The Chinese Room argument is one of the most fallacious arguments ever offered and is rejected by all experts.
"For [John Searle's] part, he has one argument, the Chinese Room, and he has been trotting it out, basically unchanged, for fifteen years. It has proven to be an amazingly popular number among the non-experts, in spite of the fact that just about everyone who knows anything about the field dismissed it long ago. It is full of well-concealed fallacies. By Searle’s own count, there are over a hundred published attacks on it. He can count them, but I guess he can’t read them, [...]"
nothinkjustai 19 hours ago [-]
Every significant argument has plenty of detractors, that doesn’t mean they’re right. Every argument I’ve heard to the contrary is unconvincing to me, and to the majority:
awesome to see a VS Ramachandran rec on HN. normally it's the rare secondary rec after someone mentions Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat by Oliver Sacks.
satvikpendem 1 days ago [-]
Maybe I just know how it's like to be a bat.
pstuart 1 days ago [-]
I guess this makes sense -- a brain is gonna do brain stuff. The only difference is that we're not present to witness it.
doginasuit 1 days ago [-]
It's been understood for quite some time that we only experience a small part of brain activity. Unfortunately that small part is where everything useful happens.
satvikpendem 1 days ago [-]
No, definitely not. Our consciousness is honestly an afterthought, as the brain processes mountains of information that does not even get to out conscious level yet is arguably more useful than anything we primitive primates can think of.
Kim_Bruning 1 days ago [-]
Or is the small part the bit where the least useful stuff happens? ;-)
A bit more seriously, the brain actually uses a significant chunk of the body's energy budget (no matter how efficient it is relative to human made equipment). So evolutionarily, it doesn't make sense unless it's doing something exceptionally useful.
avadodin 1 days ago [-]
It's the part that makes everything useful happen but most of everything useful happens in unconscious parts of the brain and even outside of the brain.
If that mechanism can be activated, it may significantly compress the time required for education and learning.
mrexcess 1 days ago [-]
Or, worryingly, unsolicited brainwashing, no?
NonHyloMorph 17 hours ago [-]
shhh! the baby's sleeping!
alexfromapex 1 days ago [-]
I would think anesthesia, in specific doses, would only attenuate consciousness...if it stopped other processes your organs and nervous system would stop. I guess this confirms that.
EA-3167 1 days ago [-]
General anesthesia disrupts the ability of regions of the brain to network coherently. Individual regions might still be ticking along, but your experience of consciousness is a result of the network.
alexfromapex 20 hours ago [-]
You state that like it's a fact. I didn't realize we understood everything about consciousness and the brain. The more you know.
EA-3167 12 hours ago [-]
I’d argue that general anesthesia is the experiment that proves the fact. It’s a blunt and low resolution one admittedly, I wouldn’t use it to make any strong case about consciousness other than that our experience of it clearly requires coordination across many networked brain regions. As far as what’s going on within the individual regions or cells I’m not venturing a guess. Likewise I’m not claiming it to understand why networking of the whole brain is required to be conscious, but take some propofol and you’ll know that it is.
Rendered at 11:56:48 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
I remember one particular one a few decades ago, where I was feverishly (pun intended) trying to achieve something with XML, only it being a fever dream, nothing of it made sense, so I was wracking my brain for nonsense those entire hours.
(tangent) Also, please forgive my question which may seem impolite but I really want to know: why did you type "whilst" instead of "when" or "while"? Have you ever said the word "whilst" out loud, in a normal conversation? More letters, an extra (half)syllable, zero meaning or nuance added, I just don't get it. I wonder this every time I see it, mean no disrespect and would be grateful for a straightforward reply. (/tangent)
Whilst to me is like being in the midst of something, not just that it is happening somewhere. It seems to have more specificity than 'while'.
"Whilst boarding the train..." Is going to be followed by something personal or hypothetical.
However, I think I'm prone to overlaying a gloss on words that isn't necessarily shared.
As I intimated 'whilst' I would use in philosophical contexts, arguments where there are alternative hypotheticals, say. "Whilst it might be said...".
Most likely it's just subconsciously learned, a product of native/mother tongue learning.
Would be interesting to see the word vectors extracted from literature/media moving over time and across contexts in order to make a comparison.
I find that I have two personalities and my writing/text personality is much more sagacious and better spoken (if that makes sense??)
> ... neural signals could predict upcoming words in a sentence. ... This kind of predictive coding is something we associate with being awake and attentive, yet it’s happening here in an unconscious state
In psycholinguistics, the assumption is, and always has been, that language processing is unconscious, a background process like visual object recognition. For starters, conscious attention is too slow by two orders of magnitude, and infants can process language, while presumably not yet (fully) conscious.
Or... well, ok, maybe they can't experience if they are not conscious? I see how this can be argued, but I still do not agree. I'm sure qualia is created not by consciousness (I would notice if it was), and I'm sure it is created not for consciousness specifically, it must have some other uses too.
I don’t think that “experience as such” makes any sense. Experience is always of something. And that in turn implies that the something that is being experienced also exists independently of it being experienced.
> I'm sure qualia is created not by consciousness
Whether or not qualia is created by consciousness, I don't see how we necessarily can tell one way or the other. We don't exactly have great introspective tools to do such self analysis, not to mention what we think we feel is often illusory/not reflective of reality.
Moreover, thinking about it, I come to a conclusion, that if I cannot reflect on qualia creation, then it is a (weak) evidence for qualia created by consciousness. I suppose the consciousness is harder to reflect on than other things, hard to map it into states of the content of consciousness. Like, I can reflect on my vision and see some hints on how I get these wonderful pictures, despite it being definitely not consciousness, I can reflect on how I produce or decode language. And to my mind it is because consciousness was devised to reflect on these things, so I could report on my observations to others. But to reflect on itself is a wholly different matter.
(I think there are overwhelming reasons to think that LLMs don't experience qualia, but this has nothing to do with it.)
You're saying the discovery that humans can process language without being conscious "couldn't possibly" inform the debate about LLMs? When that debate is literal predicated on the assumption that the ability to process language implies consciousness?
This is a counter example to the fundamental assumption of that argument. Without that, you are left with something like "if we ignore their ability to to process language, do we have any reason to suppose that LLMs (as opposed to, say, a spread sheet or stats package) are conscious?"
> When that debate is literal (sic) predicated on the assumption that the ability to process language implies consciousness?
This is an incoherent claim. Debates are between people with differing claims and often differing assumptions; they aren't "predicated" on some assumption or another--that's a category mistake.
Someone can easily argue that LLMs are conscious (or have qualia--that was the disputed claim, and they aren't the same thing) without the strong claim that the ability to process language entails consciousness ... perhaps it is the processing of language together with other features that they think indicates consciousness. For instance, George Lemoine and Richard Dawkins didn't base their judgments on consciousness on such an entailment, but rather on the specifics of what the LLMs said to them.
I won't respond about this again.
The only reason we are having the argument at all is that people see LLMs responding appropriately to language, and _from_that_ conclude that LLMs may be conscious. You even sneak this in yourself when you say "George Lemoine and Richard Dawkins didn't base their judgments on consciousness on such an entailment, but rather on the specifics of what the LLMs said to them" -- in other words, they wouldn't have had judgements in the first place if the LLMs had not "said things to them".
I broke my leg recently. Shortly after that I've lost my consciousness. It was very painful, the body reacted with a lot of adrenaline, and after a several minutes when adrenaline was drained away my consciousness was drained too.
I experienced something like this several times, though not to the point of fainting. But this time was special in other way too: I had friends near me, they observed me through all the process and we could compare our observations later. It seems, that my memory stopped recording before I fainted. I was still operating to some extent, but I couldn't remember a thing. When asked something I grunted in answer. When one of my friends insisted that I stand up and come to a better place to sit down, I actually stand up and did several steps before stopping and slowly (and carefully) sank to the ground. (An interesting observation, my controls over my body were weakening, but I was still using them for what they worth. It fits with all other similar experiences: the limbs and all the muscles seem to be losing their strength, and it takes a lot of will to make them work.)
On the light of this, I'm very interested what proponents of the idea, that feelings need consciousness to work, would say about my half-unconscious state. Did I feel myself extremely bad at the time? Or maybe I didn't feel anything? My friends are sure that the former statement is true, but they may be mistaken by my outside looks. I personally don't remember. Up to some point I remember that I felt really bad, but the next thing I remember I look at the sky and I'm surprised by what I see (I was not in a place I expected to be). And at that moment I was pretty ok already, no more adrenaline issues, just my leg was aching.
Was I experiencing qualia is another interesting question. I'm pretty sure I was, but I'd like to hear an argument for the opposite.
I’m not one of these proponents, but to play the devil’s advocate: The fact that you can’t remember it doesn’t necessarily imply that you didn’t fully consciously experience it at the time.
I’d be REALLY curious to see a survey of philosophy 2015 vs 2025 UG entrants on mind-brain connection intuitions
But yes, I would like to see a modern philosophers take on it.
I won't respond further.
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1995/12/21/the-mystery-of-c...
"For [John Searle's] part, he has one argument, the Chinese Room, and he has been trotting it out, basically unchanged, for fifteen years. It has proven to be an amazingly popular number among the non-experts, in spite of the fact that just about everyone who knows anything about the field dismissed it long ago. It is full of well-concealed fallacies. By Searle’s own count, there are over a hundred published attacks on it. He can count them, but I guess he can’t read them, [...]"
https://survey2020.philpeople.org/survey/results/5002
Do you have any sources for the first claim? The second claim is of course trivially wrong.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantoms_in_the_Brain
A bit more seriously, the brain actually uses a significant chunk of the body's energy budget (no matter how efficient it is relative to human made equipment). So evolutionarily, it doesn't make sense unless it's doing something exceptionally useful.
Sleep-learning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep-learning
Also, Sleep and learning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_and_learning