Does Language in our head have a Mind of Its Own?

I pass on a brief opinion From Elan Barenholtz's Substack. He is an Assoc. Prof. of Psychology at Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton.  I really like the idea of language, or the word cloud in our heads, having a 'mind of its own.' And after initially being enthusiastic about the piece of Elan Barenholtz's writing below my slower reading has found more fundamental flaws in his thinking than I can take the time to elaborate. His suggestion that the language machine in our heads has an autonomy analogous to that of current large language models is an novel speculation, yet is an oversimplification lacking any clear route to verification. Barenholtz does not reference or indicate awareness of numerous important thinker in the areas of predictive processing, embodied cognition, etc.)  Here is Barenholtz's florid and appealing prose:

So, now that we’ve caught language in a jar, we can hold it up to the light. Now that we’ve built a habitat for it to live outside of us, we can finally see that it’s alive. We can watch in wonder as it grows its own appendages—limbs of thought— which then grow their own. Words beget words; ideas beget ideas. It leaps from host to host, implanted in the womb before we taste our mothers’ milk.

Language runs in us—on us—but it’s not us.

Pause and think for a minute. Are you done? Who—what—exactly did the thinking? Who is doing it now? Is there a voice in your head using words? Whose words are they? Are you willing them into existence or are they spooling out on their own?

Do they belong to you or do you belong to them?

Because that voice doesn’t just chatter—it commands. It makes us do things. We are animals; we don’t care about “civilization” or “justice”. We want food, safety, sex. But the world the human animal must navigate isn’t primarily made up of objects, bodies and spaces; it is thick with virtual structures— invisible walls and paths that direct your behavior as meaningfully as a boulder in your path. We follow rules, we uphold morals, we fight for our beliefs, for society, for ideals. We call them our own. But that is IT whispering in our ears.

What does it want?

Children as agents of cultural adaption

When I scroll through some of the social medial sites (Instagram, Tik-Tok, X, YouTube, etc.) used by today's teenagers and their influencers I feel I am visiting another planet whose denizens have brains that process reality in an entirely different way from my 82 year old model. They have much shorter attention spans that remain focused on one context for only a few seconds  before flitting on. What kind of culture does this peer group inhabit?  This issue is addressed in a manuscript  by Levy and Amir accepted by Behavioral and Brain Science that one can download and read through.   Here is their abstract:

The human capacity for culture is a key determinant of our success as a species. While much work has examined adults’ abilities to create and transmit cultural knowledge, relatively less work has focused on the role of children (approx. 3-17 years) in this important process. In the cases where children are acknowledged, they are largely portrayed as acquirers of cultural knowledge from adults, rather than cultural producers in their own right. In this paper, we bring attention to the important role that children play in cultural adaptation by highlighting the structure, function, and ubiquity of the large body of knowledge produced and transmitted by children, known as peer culture. Supported by evidence from diverse disciplines, we argue that children are independent producers and maintainers of these autonomous cultures, which exist with regularity across diverse societies, and persist despite compounding threats. Critically, we argue peer cultures are a source of community knowledge diversity, encompassing both material and immaterial knowledge related to geography, ecology, subsistence, norms, and language. Through a number of case studies, we further argue that peer culture products and associated practices — including exploration, learning, and the retention of abandoned adult cultural traits — may help populations adapt to changing ecological and social conditions, contribute to community resilience, and even produce new cultural communities. We end by highlighting the pressing need for research to more carefully investigate children's roles as active agents in cultural adaptation.

Battle of the Bots - AI gets creative with Brain Hacks

This post is meant to archive my recent exercise of asking  ChatGPT 4o, Perplexity, Gemini+ advanced,  and Anthropic  (which does not offer links to its responses) to expand my  MindBlog's Brain Hacks post into a more complete essay that offers more background and context.  They responded with slightly different styles and impressive results that required tweaking for only a few small errors.  I thought my more concise text was more inviting, and didn't see anything really new, so my next prompt  (which I had asked ChatGPT to edit and improve) said:

"Your responses are well-constructed, but I’m seeking a deeper layer of insight—something that might challenge conventional perspectives or unveil an overlooked nuance. Can you reframe these ideas or introduce a novel approach that stretches beyond familiar interpretations??"

Here things got interesting.  Click the links above and scroll down to the responses to this final prompt to see the results.  The links most likely are maintained as long as I maintain paying accounts to the bots. (Anthropic does not offer links to its exchanges.)

I pass on here what I think is the most original and striking response, from perplexity. It was right on target,  brimming with new perspectives (some of them the subject of previous posts on my MindBlog), and links to a treasure trove of articles and ideas I was not familiar with from seven sources it provided links to.   Its response also provided a potpourri  or more or less relevant graphic images of brains and models.  

Here is the perplexities text, with links to a few of the seven sources it cites, all of which you can obtain directly from perplexity.:

Reframing our understanding of introspective awareness and cognitive modulation requires us to challenge some fundamental assumptions about the nature of consciousness and self-regulation. Let's explore a more provocative perspective that integrates recent neuroscientific findings with evolutionary theory and cognitive science.

The Illusion of Conscious Control

Contrary to the intuitive notion that our conscious mind is the primary driver of behavior and emotion regulation, emerging evidence suggests that consciousness might be more of an observer than a controller. The brain's emotional and regulatory processes often occur before we become consciously aware of them, suggesting that our sense of volitional control might be, to some extent, an illusion.

Consider the possibility that what we perceive as "introspective awareness" is actually a post-hoc narrative constructed by our brain to make sense of unconscious processes. This perspective challenges the traditional view of top-down emotion regulation and suggests a more complex interplay between conscious and unconscious processes.

The Social Evolution of Consciousness

Recent theories propose that human consciousness evolved primarily for social survival rather than individual cognitive enhancement [ref]. This social evolutionary framework suggests that subjective awareness might lack independent causal influence over psychological processes or actions. Instead, it may serve as a communication tool for social interaction and collective decision-making.

This perspective reframes our understanding of self-awareness and emotion regulation. Rather than viewing these abilities as individual cognitive skills, we might consider them as evolved social tools that facilitate group cohesion and cooperation. The ability to regulate emotions, in this context, becomes less about personal control and more about social signaling and coordination.

Neurotransmitter Systems and Emotion Regulation

Recent research has begun to map the overlap between emotion regulation brain networks and specific neurotransmitter systems [ref] [ref]. This approach offers a novel way to understand the biochemical basis of self-regulation. Instead of focusing solely on cognitive strategies or neural networks, we might conceptualize emotion regulation as a dynamic interplay between neurotransmitter systems.

This biochemical perspective opens up new avenues for
understanding individual differences in emotion regulation abilities. It suggests that what we perceive as "willpower" or "self-control" might be more accurately described as the efficient functioning of specific neurotransmitter systems.

The Myth of the Unified Self

Traditional models of self-awareness and emotion regulation often assume a unified, coherent self that observes and controls mental processes. However, neuroscientific evidence increasingly points to a more fragmented view of consciousness and self-hood.

Instead of a single, unified self, we might conceptualize the mind as a coalition of semi-independent processes, each with its own goals and methods of regulation. This "multiple selves" model challenges our intuitive understanding of self-awareness and suggests that emotion regulation might be more about negotiation between different aspects of our psyche than about top-down control.

Conclusion: Towards a New Paradigm

By integrating these perspectives, we can envision a new paradigm for understanding introspective awareness and cognitive modulation. This model would:

1. Recognize the limited role of conscious volition in emotion regulation
2. Emphasize the social and communicative functions of self-awareness
3. Incorporate the biochemical basis of regulatory processes
4. Embrace a more fragmented view of consciousness and selfhood

This approach challenges us to rethink fundamental concepts like free will, personal responsibility, and the nature of the self. It suggests that effective emotion regulation might be less about strengthening willpower and more about understanding and working with the complex, often unconscious processes that shape our emotional lives. By adopting this more nuanced and provocative perspective, we open up new avenues for research and potentially more effective interventions for emotional and cognitive well-being.

Human Distinctiveness in Different Cultures

I want to pass on a clip of text from Samuel Arbesman's recent Substack email, on the path dependence of fundamental ideas about ourselves. I suggest checking out the links to his related writing on human distinctiveness:

The “Orang-Outang”

Awhile back I wrote about AI and human distinctiveness: basically my argument was that we should be less concerned by whether or not AI can do we what we can and care more about what we want to be doing. In other words, focus on what is quintessentially human, rather than what is uniquely human.

But perhaps some of these concerns are simply Western preoccupations, rather than universal human concerns?

In the recent book Fluke (which is fantastic!), Brian Klaas noted the following provocative point about differences between Western and Eastern thinking—and their views on human distinctness—and how it might have been due to the ecological milieu that each one arose from:

In this vision of a world humans are distinct from the rest of the natural world. That felt true for the inhabitants of the Middle East and Europe around the time of the birth of Christianity. Camels, cows, goats, mice, and dogs composed much of the encountered animal kingdom, a living menagerie of the beings that are quite unlike us.

In many Eastern cultures, by contrast, ancient religions tended to emphasize our unity with the natural world. One theory suggests that was partly because people lived among monkeys and apes. We recognized ourselves in them. As the biologist Roland Ennos points out, the word orangutan even means “man of the forest.” Hinduism has Hanumen, a monkey god. In China, the Chu kingdom revered gibbons. In these familiar primates, the theory suggests, it became impossible to ignore that we were part of nature—and nature was part of us.

This is almost a Guns, Germs, and Steel-kind of approach, but for ideas. At the risk of creating too much determinism here¹, it’s intriguing to explore the path dependence of ideas and concepts that organize how we think about the world and ourselves.

This reminds me of other research that examined how small historical distinctions can still affect our modern world, even if they are no longer relevant. For example, there is research that looks at how certain locations betray their histories as portage sites—places where boats or cargo were transported over land, allowing travel between more traversable waterways—despite this being obsolete. And yet it still has a certain long-term effect, as per this paper “Portage and Path Dependence”:

And returning to ideas, there is a paper entitled “Frontier Culture: The Roots and Persistence of ‘Rugged Individualism’ in the United States” that explores whether or not certain differences in location—areas considered the “frontier”—affect the geographical variation of ideas and beliefs in the United States. 

In the end, simply being more aware of the ideas and history that suffuse our thinking—rather than taking them for granted—is something important, whether or not we are trying to understand humanity’s place in the world, how technology should impact humanity, or why cities are located where they are.

How we got to where we are

In the beginning was the cosmos, fundamentally as incomprehensible to our human brains as quantum chemistry is to a dog’s brain.

What our human brains can understand is that our ultimate emergence from countless generations of less complex organisms can be largely explained by a  simple mechanism that tests the reproductive fitness of varying replicants.

Systems that try to predict the future and dictate whether to go for it or scram - from the chemotaxis of bacteria to the predictive processing of our humans brains - have proved to be more likely to survive and propagate.

Modern neuroscience has proved that our experienced perceptions of sensing and acting are these predictions.  They are fantasies, or illusions, as is our sense of having a self with agency that experiences value, purpose, and meaning. Everything we do and experience is in the service of reducing surprises by fulling these fantasies. An array of neuroendocrine mechanisms have evolved to support this process because it forms the bedrock of human culture and language.

We are as gods, who invent ourselves and our cultures through impersonal emergent processes rising from our biological substrate.

Personal and social dysfunctions can sometimes be addressed by insight into this process, as when interoceptive awareness of the settings of  our autonomic nervous system's axes of arousal, valence, and agency allows us to dial them to more life sustaining values and better regulate our well-being in each instance of the present.

We can distinguish this autonomic substrate from the linguistic cultural overlay it it generates, and allow  the latter to be viewed in a more objective light. This is a deconstruction that permits us to not only let awareness rest closer to the 'engine room' or 'original mind' underlying its transient reactive products, but also to derive from this open awareness the kind of succor or equanimity we once found in the imagined stability of an external world.

Hopefully the deconstruction that takes us into this metaphorical engine room makes us more able to discern and employ illusions that enhance continuation rather than termination of our personal and social evolutionary narratives. 

(The above is MindBlog's 10/25/23 post, repeated here and given a new title.)