Aphorism of the Day: Any day that references TJ Hooker is a good day.
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Charlie Rose is rebroadcasting its series on contemporary neuroscience, with Eric Kandel moderating discussions with a number of luminaries from the field. WGHB ran the episode on consciousness last night, which is available on the web here for those of you who missed it. Great fun, and one of the best introductions to the field that I can imagine. Stanislaw Dehaene is the man.
One of my pet peeves with the discussion, even back when it originally aired last year, is the continual use of the ‘tip of the iceberg’ metaphor for consciousness. I’m sympathetic to the idea that consciousness only accesses a fraction of the brains overall information load, certainly, but the metaphor perpetuates what might be called the ‘Pinnacle Conceit,’ the notion that all these non-conscious processes somehow culminate in consciousness. This is the problem I have with Freud’s ‘preconscious,’ or even Dennett’s ‘fame in the brain’ metaphor, the way these characterizations lend themselves to the idea that this… what you are experiencing now, is a kind of crowning achievement, rather than a loose collection of cogs in a far, far vaster machine.
The fact is, consciousness is more like a grave than a summit, something buried in the most complicated machinery known. It evolved to service the greater organism, not vice versa. The superiority of the ‘cog in the machine’ metaphor lies in the fact that the conscious brain is neurofunctionally embedded in the gut brain, something that accesses information from nonconscious neural processors and provides information to other nonconscious neural processors. This allows us to see what I call the ‘Positioning Problem’ in “The Last Magic Show“: the way the neurofunctional context of the information that enters conscious experience in no way exists for conscious experience (not even as an absence), stranding conscious cognition with fragmentary episodes it can only confuse for the whole story–what we call ‘life.’
Imagine an ‘orthogonal’ cable TV channel, one that continually leaps from channel to channel without you knowing, so that you see a continuous show made up of episodic fragments of other shows–say, William Shatner shooting a man who becomes a woman applying lipstick just as the Death Star explodes–without having any knowledge whatsoever of TJ Hooker or Cover Girl or Star Wars. Since this is the show you have always watched, it necessarily forms the very baseline for what counts as a ‘coherent narrative’–which is to say, something meaningful. Then the neuroscientific channel surfers come along and begin talking about narratives that run at right angles to your own, narratives that are far more coherent intellectually, but make utter hash of the ‘baseline narrative’ of your orthogonal viewing.
This illustrates the Positioning Problem in a nutshell. Given that the neurofunctional context of any conscious experience is utterly occluded from conscious experience, we have no way of knowing what role that conscious experience actually plays. For all we know, the channels could be crossed, and things like the ‘feeling of willing,’ for example, may actually follow our actions rather than triggering them. For all we know, the ‘feeling of certainty’ we enjoy may have nothing to do with our reasoning whatsoever, but rather be the result of some unhappy neural birth defect. For us, Bill Shatner shooting a man seems to necessarily cue a woman applying lipstick simply because the possibility of other channels, programs running at right angles to conscious experience, does not belong to our eclectic broadcast.
This is basically what I’m driving at in my brief ‘bestiary’ of possible consciousnesses, and why I’m so pessimistic about what neuroscience will make of the human soul. We presently find ourselves on the rack of knowledge, and we have no reason to think our Inquisitors will be kind. Sure, they seem warm and friendly enough, and even telegenic, as that episode of Charlie Rose reveals. But they are pursuing questions whose answers care nothing for our joints or their range of motion. Nature is their primary authority, and no Pope could be more indifferent to our needs and concerns. This particular Church of Rome, I fear, is about to tear us apart.
BRING IT ON!
Some very thought-provoking stuff. If anyone has any doubt as to the validity of your TJ Hooker – Cover Girl – Star Wars analogy, they need only remember that one dream where they were in High School, realized they forgot an entire class, walked into a room and found themselves in their mother-in-law’s living room with a zebra. And even if we have some small measure of lucidity to question the dream-logic, we can change nothing.
Tononi’s concept of consciousness as the point of maximal information integration also makes the same “iceberg” mistake. The more I think about it, the more it makes more sense to conceive of it as an epiphenomenon of some kinds of informational integration (primarily sense data, it seems). The idea of ‘hidden consciousnesses’ in other parts of my brain that process other kinds of data is bizarre and unappealing, but hey, science never cared about what APPEALS.
“pessimist about what neuroscience will make of the human soul”
Surely you are not suggesting that this question has not been laid to rest.
There is that kind of culture continuing on into bizarre territory where they just continue the same inquiry as if they were investigating something else like sea snails or weather patterns or such. In itself it’s identifyable as some sort of mystical assurance that it’s all for the best. Particularly you can see how when it comes to reviving some person in a coma like state – you can sense how pious a pursuit they kind of feel that is and so utterly important – we must pull all this science shit together for this! Yet – well, some western guy in a hospital somewhere really needs this focus, while you’ve got a starving multitude (which really doesn’t take super science to deal with)…but this is pious stuff, dude? Sure, most of them are monied up already, but there’s a selfish self interest in their own pet projects which rivals how much most people pursue cash. Snatching up what IS public, for their own personal agenda.
I have to wonder, where are the priests on such a panel? Yeah, I know, your instant thought is that just wouldn’t work out. And yeah, it wouldn’t. But the way it’d fuck up would probably be better than these dudes dissapearing into their own self em-piousing agendas without anyone elses nagging words getting in the way of them screwing with what makes words nag. Both neuroscientists and priests.
On this thread, doesn’t the idea warrant some self reference – ie, trying to see programs intermeshing is a way of trying to build some kind of observation platform (that does not collapse or sway terribly much). However, without a self reference it’s probably very prone to collapse – what’s the point of telling people of the multi program kludge, if the understanding of that simply slips in amongst the kludge? How does the idea of the TV kludge sustain itself, without some kind of reference to it that assists in it being maintained? Even worse when it’s ‘that’s how your mind is – you wouldn’t even know the programs are kludged together’, when that very sentence is, atleast taken charitably, an attempt to see they are kludged together. It’s like some kinda attempt to ‘just see’, rather than building prosthetics to detect (or atleast attempt to detect).
Oh, and “You can’t concentrate on several things at once” from the video – sure you can. They just become one thing.
Are you ever not depressing?
To be fair, I’ve seldom found any of Scott’s shit ‘depressing’. Scary sometimes, laden with absolutely terrifying implications, sure. But depressing? Only when the innocent suffer in his stories, I suppose. A lot of people get all morose about the Argument in Neuropath, but really, I’ve never really been upset by the notion that my actions are deterministic. It’s much better exculpation than a Catholic priest could ever give. It’s not sin, it’s just the universe number-crunching. Too bad number-crunching HURTS.
Might I suggest this witty and horrifying short-short story by Ted Chiang? If you’re truly not upset by determinism, you haven’t thought it all the way through.
I’m not sure that story grasps determinism, in the message sent back in time element. That’s more like insentate, in that someone can send a message back in time that your going to walk in front of a bus, you read it, raise your eyebrows and hmmm, then walk in front of a bus. It reminds me of those stories where someone tries to change some future event, then it ends up happening anyway (maybe worse) and a strange sort of sense that time is somehow attempting to adhere to some kinda narrative.
I think things get even weirder when it comes to will and recursive time loops – if conciousness is recursion, and it starts to be the cause of recursive time loops…if you didn’t know about the predictor at second X, would you have pressed the button at second X? I’m wondering if the books will involve this in some Donny Darko Kellhus way that I can’t second guess right now…
“I’m not sure that story grasps determinism, in the message sent back in time element.”
Okay, let’s change out the mechanism. Instead of a message back in time, the Predictor contains a little circuit board running an app called LaPlace’s Daemon. The app has been programmed with the initial conditions of the Big Bang plus the laws of physics, and can thus calculate what will happens anywhere at any time during the entire history of the Universe (it’s a really advanced circuit board). Due to spectacularly poor interface design, all the app can do is give you one second’s warning on a button push.
This is functionally identical to the Predictor in Chiang’s story, and eliminates the problematic time travel aspect. My earlier assertion about the iplications of determinism still stands.
Look, I’m not trying to dodge determinism, but even then what you have is a device that contaminates it’s sample. As soon as it adds anything to the universe, it skews the real world away from it’s play out of the big bang and onward by affecting that world in a way that otherwise wouldn’t have happened absent that mega prediction. The mega prediction in itself fucks up it’s own mega prediction (if it uses it at all to affect that which it watches) – and heck, I’m hitting the hard question of conciousness from a side angle in bringing that up.
If you want a horror story, look at how mega prediction cannot escape determinism – it can only have trailing, unknown streaks of blindness…that could be anywhere! Always! No escape!
Now I’m never going to be able to read Stanislas again without hearing his damned accent. You’re the leading edge of the philosophy of cognitive neuroscience, Bakker. Academia needs perspectives like yours. Pump them brakes.
Scott, I find this stuff fascinating, but… The Unholy Consult, dude… any news?
Still working on it, every morning seven days a week. This is a different schedule for me – having a kid completely precludes vanishing for weeks in fits of manic creativity. Add to that the fact that I can only work on it part-time… It’s up to 150 000 words, maybe three quarters or so done. I’m VERY happy with it so far. Beyond that, I don’t know what to say. Sorry Mike. This is completely new territory for me!
Wow, thanks for prompt and thorough response, Scott. Just know that there are thousands like me waiting with bated breath. This is the big one!
Just wanted to let you know that you were the one who inspired me to become a fantasy writer. I knew since I was a kid that I would be a writer, and I always liked fantasy, but I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do… Then, one day, I decided I’d go to the bookstore to find a book–a book that I hadn’t heard of and looked interesting to me. I had never done this before. There was something liberating about it, whereas before I would buy book on recommendations or perusing the internet, it felt strange to walk into the store with a completely open mind: that somewhere in there was a fantasy novel that I had never heard of, and would capture my imagination.
The search started badly. I saw rows upon rows of books with cheesy art covers, descriptions of Tolkien ripoff jaunts of Dwarves and Orcs, of Wizards and “halflings.” I considered giving up my search until I came across something strange– a dark book–I remember the Erikson quote most of all: “fantasy with muscle and brains. I read the jacket description and I knew I had found it. “The Darkness That Comes Before” was that book, and it instantly captured my imagination.
That was 2006, and I haven’t forgotten.
Thanks for being an inspiration, Scott. Sorry for the off-topic rants–back to the philosophy!
captured my imagination
Also, Holy God WordPress, let me edit my posts…. -_-
not totally on topic, but I figured commenters here would be interested: A new paper by Davide Rigoni, Simone Kühn, Gennaro Gaudino, Giuseppe Sartori, Marcel Brass.
Abstract:
Believing in free will may arise from a biological need for control. People induced to disbelieve in free will show impulsive and antisocial tendencies, suggesting a reduction of the willingness to exert self-control. We investigated whether undermining free will affects two aspects of self-control: intentional inhibition and perceived self-control. We exposed participants either to anti-free will or to neutral messages. The two groups (no-free will and control) then performed a task that required self-control to inhibit a prepotent response. No-free will participants showed less intentional inhibitions than controls, suggesting a reduction of self-control. We assessed perceived self-control by asking participants whether the response resulted from a deliberate intention or from an impulsive reaction. Perceived self-control was lower in the no-free will group than in control group. Our findings show that undermining free will can degrade self-control and provide insights into how disbelieving in free will leads to antisocial tendencies.
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JDF: I assure you, I have thought long and hard about the consequences of determinism. I went through a version of the “Predictor” game in my head when I was like 12 or 13 (only using an omniscient God as the Predictor). What I don’t understand is how people go from “my choices are deterministic” to “my choices don’t matter”. If you’re predetermined to boil my face in acid, well, that sucks, but I assure you that the fact that you ‘made’ (number-crunched) that choice matters a great deal TO ME.
A computer makes deterministic choices. If it is programmed incorrectly, these deterministic choices can lead to horrendous consequences. To me, human beings are the same way.
Jorge: Fair enough. I don’t understand your position either. It seems to miss the fundamental point of determinism.
“A computer makes deterministic choices. If it is programmed incorrectly, these deterministic choices can lead to horrendous consequences. To me, human beings are the same way.” You miss the point as soon as you type the word “if”. If is contigent. If implies an alternative. There never was an alternative.
If determinism is true, both the computer and the human were programmed at the beginning of time. When the primordial soup started to coalesce, I was going to boil your face in acid. When our solar system formed, I was going to boil your face in acid. When organic molecules happened to come together in a self-replicating pattern, I was…you get the point. To say that A. I had a choice, and B. It somehow matters to you, are both preposterous assertions. This conversation is (if you’re right), a message that was recorded 14 billion years ago.
To me, the implications are clear. Go directly to nihilism. To hell with a semantic apocalypse, determinism is a semantic black hole! No meaning escapes it. Ever.
Yeah, but it’s one of those paradoxes – if you suddenly knew the future in absolute terms, what, you’d still walk in front of the bus? You can’t say your little synapses would be buzzing over the knowledge of the impending bus – ie, buzzing away with data they otherwise wouldn’t have had, ie, buzzing over with data from an IF that either cannot exist or you break determinism. Thus there is always a pall of ignorance – and within ignorance, a freedom. An If. No, I’m wrong? Okay, call upon your powers of determinism to prove that deterministically I’m wrong and in the process…break determinism.
If anything drives a semantic apocalypse, it seems to be some other psychological pattern of freedom and a need for that. I’m like “Wha? The other kind of freedom? Wha? What is that? Or am I just reading it wrong that it’s some other kind of freedom – what other kind is there?”
Of course the freedom I’m describing is rather like the ignorance at the chess board between players as to each others moves – which makes the idea of Kellhus a real fuck of a problem.
Yes, everything was programmed a bajillion years ago and we’re all just acting out the script. That doesn’t mean that we cannot make moral evaluations as to how we desire things to be. We can even get all meta about it and say that this argument we’re having was also pre-scripted. I am literally bound to argue with you. Why? Because I am predetermined to think that determinism does not imply moral nihilism (or nihilism of any sort). Let’s consider two possibilities:
1. You convince everyone that determinism is true, and they all become moral nihilists. The world decends into a dark age of suffering and despair.
2. I convince everyone that determism is true, but that we are all destined to continually improve our lot through science. The world embraces its glorious destiny and life is good for everyone.
No matter how deterministic you are, you can still have a preference towards one of those two outcomes, and if you have a preference, you are not a moral nihilist. Que sera, sera but let’s hope it’s good.
Put differently: it “matters” to me that you boiled my face in acid because I had to suffer it. Whether you ‘chose’ it, or it was prescribed is immaterial.
Our argument may be due to differences in the way we use the word “matters”.
Abjection to nihilism seems a trumpeting of belief in free will anyway. As in “Oh, determinism – I will now resort to my alternative of nihilism, which I otherwise wouldn’t have. ‘Cause I get that choice”. Better to keep ones sense of free will where you can keep an eye on it, than in such a denial, so ugly for how much it celebrates what it denies. With Mikes example above, did the people show less intentional inhibitions, or more? Cutting off their cutting off?
JDF, Callan and others, have you ever considered an idea that linear presentation of time that is the root of all aforementioned problems(i agree with JDF in that neuroscientific implications are redundant, fully embraced determinism should be enough to derail our train of constructive thought, for some of us at least) is – keeping up with the trend – an illusion itself? That seemingly concrete past can be constantly adjusting to the present in a way that supports what we call causal relationships? And the whole thing actually works in reverse. It may sound too extreme, and yet Ive heard something like thats been contemplated in phisics and found an article on the topic – very recent article btw:
http://arxiv.org/abs/1206.6224
It will likely require multiple readings and some wikipedia inquiries if youre not a specialist, but it could be partially understood, i believe, to get the idea – for (entangled) microscopic particles there is literally no past. Their evolution may seem straightforward, but it isnt. Its formed by later events. The whole talk about cause and effect is therefore irrelevant since each can be both.
Mr. Bakker may be right about us being decieved by Nature. But we in no way can be sure that our corrected picture of the world is not another misunderstanding. He can probably appreciate that – we may be decieved by the very instruments that allowed us to discover previous deception.
Tom Banks talks about this, as do many others. Time and thermodynamics have always been difficult for physicists to digest, perhaps because their mathematics doesn’t seem to give a rat’s ass about time. But all this is rank speculation. The bottomline, I think, comes down to what kinds of claims are the most reliable, and in this respect, causality is the runaway gold standard, at least for the world at our scale. The fact that it’s an unexplained explainer would only be a problem if it were possible to purge unexplained explainers from our discourse, and it is not. The problem with the power of causal explanation is that it makes hash of our psychological categories and so our basic self-understanding. If causality is superceded by some other more powerful unexplained explainer in the future, then the question is one of why we should expect, given that there’s always infinitely more ways for things to go wrong rather than right, that it would be anything other than more antagonistic to our cherished intuitions.
It so happened that my field of work includes thermodynamics and recently theres a clear demand to go down to micro in order to develop adequate models(or ANY models in some cases – you wont believe how approximate and explanatory limited our theories are sometimes – even in very well-trodden territory) that would allow us to reach our engineering goals, so for me its not a speculation, but an area of actual research. Can we use these hardly imaginable effects to our advantage? Improve stability, reliability, delay some processes, get access to others, previously prohibited, mix, filter, refine beyond classical limits? We want to(and will!) bring this scale to our scale in the form of machines and surround us with them. IT people are digging in the same direction, i believe, and in my opinion, since our success is palpable and close, it would be logical to suggest Nature has already reached that level and used it in its most sophisticated designs.
As for the ways for things to go wrong, I think that SA in its current all-exhausting form already hits the bottom of our imagination and anything different would be better than that.
“IT people are digging in the same direction, i believe, and in my opinion, since our success is palpable and close, it would be logical to suggest Nature has already reached that level and used it in its most sophisticated designs.”
Sounds fascinating Sympathy. This is the reason I refuse to write off quantum accounts of consciousness. Who the hell knows? I just don’t see how this cuts against My Big Fat Pessimistic Induction.
I saw the consciousness-episode and it seemed to me, that the way they described conscious thought as happening, when the whole brain is kicked into activity, whereas unconscious stuff happens locally, pretty much justifies the “tip of the iceberg” metaphore.
Also, they seemed to be a lot more optimistic about the ability of the conscious brain to veto certain actions and judgements.
On the other hand I never really understood, why some people think of “themselves” as only the conscious part of their brain. So the question whether we have a “free will” always kind of passed me by. And I’m really not sure what kind of horrorstories future neuroscience could tell us about our “soul” or why they should be regarded as horrorstories.
The whole brain is active all the time, even when you’re sleeping, so I’m not sure I understand what you mean by your first statement, or how that justifies the ‘tip of the iceberg’ more than the ‘cog in the machine’ metaphor.
There’s lots of optimistic neuroscientists, but in my experience, this is largely because they think some kind of ‘just so’ story will emerge, that a mature neuroscience will somehow come full circle and rescue meaning. Ask them pointed questions about purpose and morality and responsibility and the hand waving starts almost immediately.
Do you think we should ‘hold people responsible’ for their crimes? Do you think we should treat others as ‘genuine agents,’ or simply as ‘as if agents’? Do you think that the Extended Mind Thesis means that we should regard certain forms of theft as violent physical assaults?
And so on, and so on… It isn’t simply ‘free will’ that’s at stake here, it’s everything.
I’m having trouble myself with the “pessimistic” part of your induction. Actually, I agree with most of what you say about the brain and its production of our “selves.” And yes, people shouldn’t be held “responsible” for their actions… But for the life of me, I just can’t seem to figure out why this entails anything objectively disturbing, apocalyptic, etc. Disturbing *for who* ?? What exists that this could disturb?
“And yes, people shouldn’t be held “responsible” for their actions”
I can go on forever about the reasons we should fear our meaningless future, but this sentence captures the dilemma nicely. There’s no such thing as ‘actions,’ so let’s change that to ‘behaviours,’ and there’s no such thing as ‘shouldn’t’ so lets replace that with… ?
It’s a conundrum without parallel, kfreak. The you who doesn’t exist seems to be stranded with cognitive tools that are deceptive through and through.
Well, what do I mean with “active”? I guess whatever neurons do to create those nice colorfull blotches in neuroimaging. I guess, it’s oxygen consumption monitored by MRT or fMRT(, which in turn should indicate some kind of activity, or at least that’s the current paradigm in neuroscience).
Sure, all neurons are consuming oxygen all the time, so we are talking relative activity.
You probably saw the episode when it first aired and haven’t since, but somewhere in the middle, they mention that you can detect whether a visual clue gets pushed into consciousness or not. And the difference, as pictured via neuroimaging, is, that unconscious “perception” is indicated by local activity, whereas conscious perception is indicated by longer, stronger and global activity.
Which looks to me like “important” stuff goes into consciousness. (Importance indicated by the resources the brain uses on it.) This looks very tip-of-the-iceberg-ish to me.
Maybe this finding is restricted to visual clues. I don’t know.
But if our consciousness were some kind of public relation guy for our brain, who thinks he’s in charge, but only get’s some selected information to share with the world, while everything of importance goes on somewhere else, I would expect different results.
Concerning “purpose” or “morality”: What do you think we have, that we could lose?
Do you think morality should somehow be derivable from the structure of the universe or at least from our DNA?
Isn’t morality just a social construct, that evolved because it helped to stabilise societies? Maybe (probably) parts of the construct are encoded in our DNA, but that doesn’t mean there is some kind of “deeper meaning” or absoluteness behind it.
To be responsible just means not to have any practical excuses.
You did, what we did’t want you to do, because there is a tumor in your brain? Ok, we’ll cut it out.
You did it because it’s hardwired in your brain? Tough luck, say goodbye to your friends and family.
Finally I want to thank you, that you actually responded (and quickly, too), although you can probably tell that the philosophical part of my studies quickly got crowded out by mathematics (but hey, Wiener Kreis, Nelson Goodman … I loved those guys) and of course that I’m not a native speaker (which I know from experience can be pretty hard on the ears (or eyes), or even frustrating when subtle points don’t come across).
Why does this look ‘tip of the icebergish’ though? So information gets cortically ‘broadcast’ (as Baars’ model has it) or ‘integrated’ (as Tononi’s model has it) and then… It gets fed forward back into the gut brain. Somewhere in there we ‘experience’ something in utter blindness to its neurofunctional context.
First the tradition was bent on placing the soul before the brain, as the driver, and now it seems bent on placing the soul on top of the brain, as the mountaineer. All I’m pointing out is that its sandwiched in the middle. This is what the results literally show.
We’re clearly hardwired for morality in certain respects (and will be sometime sorting out nature and nurture), but the question, once you realize that our ‘moral intuitions’ are subreptive kluges, is primarily one of ‘buy in.’ If someone lies to you about a broken arm to get you to mow their lawn, would you? Because this is pretty much what nature has done: given us a false framework around which to structure our activity for ends quite apart from those we are conscious of. This is pretty much an empirical fact. So… Do we simply play along? Do we bail? Do we resign ourselves? Simulation. Defection. Resignation.
The point I’m ultimately and continually making is the way the growing divorce between knowledge and experience generates a myriad of apparently irresolvable problems, both in terms of life and thought.
Separate question: Are you familiar with Tom Banks at all Phille? I’m dreadfully curious as to how he’s able to calculate his information totals, both for the universe as a whole, and for the possible amount that could be calculated before his calculator collapses into a black hole? I’m also curious as to whether there’s a mathematics of ‘horizons,’ a kind of liminology. For years it’s seemed to me there might be ways to formalize the informatic straits of consciousness.
Thanks for your response!
“The ‘you’ who doesn’t exist seems to be stranded with cognitive tools that are deceptive through and through.”
Three questions:
1) Alright, I’ll accept that insofar as you accept that for yourself as well. Do you?
2) When those cognitive tools lead to the conclusion, as they seem to do for you as well, that science is the *least* deceptive of the methods I have to work with, is that conclusion also a deception?
3) Yeah, action, behavior, shouldn’t, etc. Sorry, those words probably weren’t the best phrasing of my position. To be more precise, I’d argue that there’s no objective reason for anyone to do anything. I also agree that there’s a huge dilemma, probably inherent in the structure of the brain. I still, though, don’t see how that dilemma necessitates fear/depression/etc any more than it necessitates curiosity/excitement/freedom etc.
No such luck. I had never heard of Tom Banks before and google couldn’t help me much, so I’m not even quite sure what it is he talked about. Linear Time and causality?
There are all kinds of limits in all kinds of mathematics. But to know which fits the blind brain theory best I probably don’t understand it well enough.
Though as a set theorician it kind of reminds me of Skolems Paradox:
There you basically have a bunch of axioms, that tell you, among other things, that there are uncountably big sets, like the set of reals.And you have a model, that satisfies those axioms. Now Skolems Paradox tells us, that there is actually a countable (that means small) model that satisfies the same axioms. Which looks kind of absurd from the outside, because this countable model doesn’t even have enough elements to fill a set like the reals. But from the point of view of the countable model all axioms are satisfied, because you basically can look at the universe only one formula at a time.
But, of course, this is only an analogy, that is based on the same mechanism of the difference of available information, not a description or mathematical model of this aspect of consciousness. (And there are probably a lot less complicated analogies, like the topology of a subset, say.)
Simulation, Defection, Resignation.
I do hear you. But you don’t need the current scientific discoveries to realize that the feeling of love, for example, is a similar subreptive kluge. People (could) have known that for centuries and somehow I don’t remember the emotional apocalypse.