(no subject)

The skeptic-of-the-skeptics Society


Susan Blackmore claims there exists no "stream of consciousness"

change blindness has been observed with brief blank flashes between pictures, with image flicker, during cuts in movies or during blinks (Simons 2000).

That the findings are genuinely surprising is confirmed in experiments in which people were asked to predict whether they or others would notice the changes. A large metacognitive error was found - that is, people grossly overestimated their own and others' ability to detect change (Levin, Momen & Drivdahl 2000). James long ago noted something similar; that we fail to notice that we overlook things. “It is true that we may sometimes be tempted to exclaim, when once a lot of hitherto unnoticed details of the object lie before us, “How could we ever have been ignorant of these things and yet have felt the object, or drawn the conclusion, as if it were a continuum, a plenum? There would have been gaps¾but we felt no gaps” (p 488).

Change blindness is not confined to artificial laboratory conditions. Simons and Levin (1998) produced a comparable effect in the real world with some clever choreography. In one study an experimenter approached a pedestrian on the campus of Cornell University to ask for directions. While they talked, two men rudely carried a door between them. The first experimenter grabbed the back of the door and the person who had been carrying it let go and took over the conversation. Only half of the pedestrians noticed the substitution. Again, when people are asked whether they think they would detect such a change they are convinced that they would - but they are wrong.

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Finally, O'Regan (1992) goes even further in demolishing the ordinary view of seeing. He suggests that there is no need for internal representations at all because the world can be used as an external memory, or as its own best model - we can always look again.

This last paragraph agrees with my conception of human consciousness as carrying very little information. Perhaps this idea is relevant to building AIs, though this doesn't seem likely, since computer memory is very cheap.