Pleeb on control points

9:09 PM - Pleeb: But yes, the control points.   I have my keyboard now, so I can actually talk without having to swipe everything on a touch screen.
9:10 PM - Pleeb: The brain has a lot of automatic processes, all of these things are unconscious. The brain is actually largely automatic- most things are automatic subroutines that are simply initiated.
9:10 PM - Pleeb: Driving is one of them.  If I drive the same route every day, the day that I have to go somewhere else, I might "lose myself" in thought and end up driving that other route, you've mentioned this.
9:12 PM - Pleeb: My professor gave an example, sometimes I would be upstairs, and think of something that I wanted to get downstairs.  I ininate the "go downstairs" routine, and I get up, and start going down.  By the time I get downstairs, I forgot what I was doing there, because my mind was busy thinking about other things, the original reason was forgotten.
9:12 PM - Pleeb: He gave a more extreme example... There was a man who was getting ready for a dinner party that was going to be thrown at his house.  He goes upstairs to take a shower before the party, and next thing he knows he's laying in bed with the lights out, and people from the party are knocking at his door.  Can you tell me what happened?
9:13 PM - Pleeb: (he's got pajamas on and everything)
9:15 PM - Pleeb: (on an unrelated note, I just ate some krispy kreme doughnuts)
9:16 PM - Pleeb: How are things going with Tess? *hugs softly*
9:18 PM - Nobillis: He had initiated the "go to bed" habit
9:18 PM - Nobillis: She gave me a hug
9:19 PM - Nobillis: That's kind of her
9:19 PM - Pleeb: :>
9:19 PM - Pleeb: Yes, she's indeed a hugger.
9:19 PM - Pleeb: And she is one of the kindest people I know...
9:20 PM - Nobillis: I lil hugs
9:20 PM - Pleeb: As far as the go to bed habit, yep.  He would take a shower, get changed and go to bed so often, he ended up doing it without realizing it.
9:20 PM - Nobillis: (like)
9:20 PM - Pleeb: Then when he "snapped out of it" the guests were at the door.
9:20 PM - Pleeb: My mother used to play this light-pattern game, Simon.
9:20 PM - Pleeb: You may have heard of it.
9:20 PM - Nobillis: I know Simon game
9:21 PM - Pleeb: She was going through the motions, playing the game, and then she started to daydream.
9:21 PM - Pleeb: When she "snapped out of it", she was on like, a really, really, fast high level.
9:21 PM - Pleeb: And she look at it, it just flashed a bunch of colors really fast, and then half a second later the buzzer went off and she lost.
9:21 PM - Pleeb: She was like, "...."
9:22 PM - Nobillis: doing it by reflex
9:22 PM - Pleeb: Most of these processes in the brain are automatic and unconscious.  A lot of things don't even need a guiding consciousness.
9:22 PM - Pleeb: Espcially since conscious processing is slower than unconscious.
9:23 PM - Pleeb: Those automatic processes are much faster, and seem to be massively parallel, while the conscious processes seem more procedual (most of the time)
9:23 PM - Pleeb: There seems to be something in the head pulling thestrings though.
9:23 PM - Pleeb: Consider if one is asked to memorize some numbers.
9:23 PM - Pleeb: I would look at the numbers, and then read them to myself in my head.
9:24 PM - Pleeb: Then, for the x-seconds I need to know them (to recall promptly later) I'm saying them in my mind over and over, to keep them there.
9:24 PM - Pleeb: Until x-seconds later when it's time to write them down.
9:24 PM - Pleeb: There's some sort of "guiding intellgence" in the brain that allows us to do this sort of thing.  We don't actually know what that guiding intelligence is, though.
9:25 PM - Pleeb: We call it the problem of the humunculus.
9:25 PM - Pleeb: One could say "there's a tiny human in your brain, pulling levels and hitting switches," but then you need to ask, "Well, who's in that tiny human's brain?"
9:25 PM - Pleeb: In cognitive psychology, we literally have a black box in our cognitive models.
9:26 PM - Pleeb: Because we have no idea what the  executive processes are.
9:26 PM - Pleeb: It's kinda funny... we don't know what consciousness is either, nor how it actually works, or if it's even needed.
9:26 PM - Pleeb: So we label the executive functions as a black box, and work around our cognitive models that way x>
9:27 PM - Nobillis: Um, in Kevin's brain, that "tiny man" is Watchdog 3
9:27 PM - Pleeb: *nods*
9:27 PM - Pleeb: That's actually a model they've used at one point.
9:28 PM - Pleeb: Not a literal tiny man in the head, just "this other intelligence literally pulling the levels and pushing the buttons"
9:28 PM - Pleeb: Here's something interesting.  Crap, I just lost my train of thought that fast.
9:28 PM - Nobillis: THat pulling strings and pushing buttons are the cotrol points I use
9:29 PM - Nobillis: (control)
9:29 PM - Pleeb: OH yeah! anesthesia.
9:29 PM - Pleeb: We don't actually know how anesthesia works, just that it does (most of the time).
9:29 PM - Pleeb: We know that anesthesia stops various parts of the brain from "talking to each other," and we know that when various parts of the brain stop talking to each other, consciousness goes away.
9:31 PM - Pleeb: Consciousness, like memory, seems to be an "overall activity of the brain" phenomenon.
9:31 PM - Nobillis: emergent phenomena
9:31 PM - Pleeb: Yes.
9:31 PM - Nobillis: like in the "melting Asphalt "article
9:32 PM - Pleeb: And I actually have some /really/ interesting ideas for brain-computer interfaces, using this aspect.
9:32 PM - Pleeb: They have managed to 'switch off' conscious awareness by stimulating one part of the brain until it stops working for a few minutes.
9:32 PM - Pleeb: They basically put a large enough electromagnetic field around any given part of the brain, and that part of the brain shuts off for a few minutes.
9:33 PM - Pleeb: You can induce blindness by "shutting off" the primary visual cortex. I almost tried it in the psych lab.
9:33 PM - Pleeb: I wish I did.
9:33 PM - Pleeb: I'll have to tell you about my idea with the computer brain thing later, I have to jump off for a few
9:36 PM - Nobillis: o.k.
9:36 PM - Nobillis: later