alt.hn

7/4/2026 at 2:02:59 PM

How working memory could give rise to consciousness

 https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-working-memory-could-give-rise-to-consciousness/

by bookofjoe

7/4/2026 at 2:34:17 PM

In this article, the concept of working memory accounts for not consciousness but the accessibility, stability and reportability of certain contents. For example, when I am reading very carefully, I may not be concentrating on the ambient sounds, my bodily position, my peripheral vision, and the environment of the room. These contents may not have to be retained in working memory in any way as relevant information for the current activity. Nevertheless, it does not necessarily follow that these are unconscious in nature. They can be part of the background of consciousness. Hence, there is the danger that the author assumes "being available for cognitive manipulation or verbal report" to be synonymous with "being conscious." This is quite an assumption and not one arrived at from the working memory model.

by albertize

7/4/2026 at 3:18:33 PM

Yeah, binning conscious and unconscious as two categorical classes is probably wrong. There are likely gradations, especially in the context of working memory over time.

by SubiculumCode

7/4/2026 at 5:07:18 PM

If you can't report some stimuli in principle, even to yourself, what would it mean for that stimuli to also be conscious?

by hackinthebochs

7/4/2026 at 4:46:52 PM

Yes I think it’s a linguistic confusion more than anything else.

To me, consciousness is not generally that you can be aware (conscious) of things around you and can react to them, lots of things can do that.

Consciousness is a shorthand for saying that something is conscious of itself, or conscious of its own consciousness. It is the meta-ability to observe its own perceptions and thoughts. And a sense of self, a sense that the observer is the same over time.

But frankly, it’s a terrible concept and my definition is plenty flawed too. In practice it is more of a moving goalpost to denote the specialness and superiority of humans over all. That thing we can’t quite put a finger on that makes us different. It is a secular euphemism for the soul. It is not very scientific.

And that is quite problematic because the privileges we ascribe to those on the wrong side of the line fall off a cliff. We rely on that line as a foundation for so much of our morals. We have seen the catastrophes that happen when a group has a different idea about the line.

I don’t have a solution to propose, it’s hard.

by oersted

7/4/2026 at 7:26:47 PM

I tend to prefer the term subjective experience for what you describe as a meta-ability.

Consciousness is too overloaded by conflicting definitions.

We could at least imagine the possibility of something coming across as conscious in every way without having a subjective experience of self.

Even a fully deterministic view of consciousness can be compatible with a possible split between entities that act-as-if but without a subjective experience, and those with.

The problem is that there is no reasonable way to prove a subjective experience - we're stuck self reporting. We can't even prove other humans have subjective experience.

It is also not clear that it matters of such entities can act identically.

by vidarh

7/4/2026 at 5:11:08 PM

> It is the meta-ability to observe its own perceptions and thoughts. And a sense of self, a sense that the observer is the same over time.

Which is kind of strange because folks who achieve insight examining their own perceptions and thoughts seem to dissolve the barrier between self and not-self.

by kelseyfrog

7/4/2026 at 7:27:47 PM

But even then most such reports still effectively claim a subjective experience.

by vidarh

7/4/2026 at 8:35:35 PM

There's gotta be at least a few stream enterers here who can clarify

by kelseyfrog

7/4/2026 at 6:14:27 PM

The article spends multiple paragraphs on exactly this. Did you read it in its entirety?

"This can be a difficult idea to swallow. Imagine you’re looking out at a countryside scene. You see rolling hills, the vibrant sunshine and a herd of cows. You hear the birds, smell the fresh cut grass and feel the wind on your skin. Surely you are conscious of this whole scene all at once. But we know that working memory has a capacity that is far too tiny to fit all of this information in at one time. If consciousness arises from working memory, then how can I be conscious of all this stuff at once?

Indeed, some philosophers and scientists have argued in just this way, saying that consciousness overflows the capacity of working memory. If this is true, it would be a problem for those who think that consciousness arises from working memory."

by dinfinity

7/4/2026 at 5:41:05 PM

This does not recognize the Hard Problem of Consciousness. Even if we find a mechanistic way to explain what is needed for consciousness, it does not give any clue as to why it feels like something to be conscious.

by henry-p

7/4/2026 at 4:07:45 PM

We can’t define or measure consciousness - because we haven’t discovered how.

So, we can’t define or measure it, but we can create it?

How do you create that which is not definable or measurable?

by cloudie78

7/4/2026 at 4:17:41 PM

Not thoroughly understanding consciousness doesn't mean we can't create it. All sorts of phenomena are created without an understanding of the underlying mechanism. The entire animal kingdom, including us humans, have been creating conscious beings (babies) without understanding how consciousness actually works.

Of course, understanding the mechanism is helpful if you want control, reliability, and precision over the phenomena, but creation can definitely happen before we can explain it.

by thansz

7/4/2026 at 5:18:50 PM

Seems like the entire field of alchemy and later chemistry was precluded by a "oh wow" or "that's interesting" or "help, I can't breath", not derivations from first principals. Throwing stuff together just to see what happens and then working backwards from interesting outcomes to recreate and understand those interesting outcomes seems like a perfectly valid if not chaotic approach for happening upon artificial consciousness.

by evilduck

7/4/2026 at 8:10:23 PM

The entire field of modern pharmaceuticals is still not too far from what you're describing. Lots of drugs people use every day (with established clinical effect) we still don't know how they actually work.

by estearum

7/4/2026 at 4:18:22 PM

> How do you create that which is not definable or measurable?

Through engineering.

This isn't new by any stretch of the imagination. Throughout our entire history as a species, we've been building things long, long before we had the tools to understand them. We built bridges and massive cathedrals before we invented geometry. We built and optimized steam engines for a century before we developed the language of fluid dynamics to understand why those designs were optimal.

Engineering very frequently is far ahead of the science needed to explain it.

As far as consciousness goes, personally I think it's an emergent property that will arise on its own when conditions are right. It will take a lot of experimentation to establish the right conditions, and then generations of study to figure out why those conditions were ideal for consciousness to emerge.

Because realistically we can't learn about consciousness with a sample size of one (us). We need to study other consciousnesses to understand the why and hows.

by vitally3643

7/4/2026 at 4:29:40 PM

> How do you create that which is not definable or measurable?

animals can have offspring without understanding reproduction

by visarga

7/4/2026 at 4:43:27 PM

We can create many things without being able to define them. From embryos to fire.

by Tenoke

7/4/2026 at 4:28:49 PM

Consciousness is what the brain is doing.

I look forward to more precise definitions.

by hackingonempty

7/4/2026 at 8:12:45 PM

The definition of consciousness is quite clear IMO: "it is something to be that thing."

What's not clear is what causes it and how to evaluate whether someone/something else "has" it.

by estearum

7/4/2026 at 4:30:37 PM

Consciousness is what the body is doing to be viable.

Without it we can't walk, eat, reproduce, or do anything. I like to think cost viability reasons explain consciousness. I know people prefer metaphysical or quantum magic explanations, I prefer a prosaic one - cost. It's a mechanism to keep our costs offset by gains. Cost can also explain unity - we die as one organism, not each organ on its own.

by visarga

7/4/2026 at 5:14:50 PM

A useful test to see the value of definitions, is to check if there are simple programs which become conscious according to the definition. There are very simple programs (<1000 lines) which do cost optimization, interact with the os and other programs with a coherent self-reference, can reason if they will be able to do some simple tasks etc.

Of course, you can be like Daniel Denett and bite the definition bullet - he was talking about 'free-will', not consciounsess and that a chess program has the necessary properties.

But, it makes more sense to take conscious experience as more fundamental, what we are directly aware of, and try to explain everything else with that as the base.

by enugu

7/4/2026 at 5:17:30 PM

That's very imprecise, and not at all convincing.

Eg.

1. The brain "does cognition".

Cognition <> consciousness.

2. Some philosophical theories have consciousness pre-figuring complex arrangements like the brain.

ie. The brain is not necessarily a pre-requisite for consciousness.

by mellosouls

7/4/2026 at 8:40:03 PM

> ie. The brain is not necessarily a pre-requisite for consciousness.

I'm not saying brains are the only way to produce consciousness, just that the evidence shows that they are the way animals do here on Earth.

It is extremely unlikely that there is something else involved.

> There is certainly much of physics remaining to be discovered, but in the specific regime covering the particles and forces that make up human beings and their environments, we have good reason to think that all of the ingredients and their dynamics are understood to extremely high precision (Carroll 2021a). Modern physics, in other words, provides evidence for what philosophers call “causal closure of the physical”: physical events have purely physical causes (Loewer 1995, Papineau 1995), at least in the regime relevant to human life. Without dramatically upending our understanding of quantum field theory, there is no room for any new influences that could bear on the problem of consciousness.

https://philpapers.org/archive/CARCAT-33.pdf

(author is now Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins)

by hackingonempty

7/4/2026 at 4:49:27 PM

People made fire for thousands of years before they understood what it was.

by empath75

7/4/2026 at 6:27:23 PM

Working memory is exactly like CPU cache. Data must be first moved to WM from mid and longterm storage in brain (RAM and SSD respectively) before being processed by the brain centres.

Consciousness is a process that runs concurrently with the main process and follows it, hence we know about our thought. In this analogy, WM and consciousness have little relation.

by tsoukase

7/4/2026 at 2:31:00 PM

What makes this most interesting from my point of view is that this is a specific enough theory that it might be amenable to experimental investigation.

by lambdaone

7/4/2026 at 4:39:16 PM

Isn't that obvious?

What we perceive as "present" is just our latest memory.

by qsera

7/4/2026 at 4:30:52 PM

It seems to me that compaction is not unlike sleep

by goalieca

7/4/2026 at 4:31:36 PM

[dead]

by BoardsOfCanada

7/4/2026 at 2:11:41 PM

It does not.

Consciousness is the echo chamber of the quantum domain, temporally propagating through cognitive technology. Memory and temporal propagation (awareness) give consciousness something to do, which makes it topically interesting and addressable.

The quantum domain has a tremendous information density which scales through entanglement (by the tens of thousands or even millions in our neurons) allowing the ultra high definition holographic experience we (many of us) are familiar with.

When quantum holographic memory is understood, consciousness will be better understood. The qubit is a dead end, this will be the indicator of scientific progress.

by d00d0ff000

7/4/2026 at 2:23:13 PM

Does living working memory bifurcate to logical and physical maps as happens to compute memory on kernel bring up after MMU and core coherence? That being the case an owl may know what it is like to be a bat.

by __patchbit__

7/4/2026 at 2:29:11 PM

The physical nervous system is one map, and the consciousness the “moment of continuity” (like a “moment of force” in physical systems). The memory (learned inference) is another map. Consciousness animates and iteratively influences in between.

You can fantasize that you are an owl or a bat, doing so well enough can be quite convincing. Remember, wings are arms and hands (look at a skeletal picture, you will see what I mean.)

by d00d0ff000

7/4/2026 at 2:34:54 PM

I think you'd have great difficulty in doing either, as you are imagining what you think it might be like to be one of these animals are are almost certainly unable to encompass what they might feel it to be like; the case of bats is literally the subject of Thomas Nagel's What Is It Like to Be a Bat?

by lambdaone

7/4/2026 at 3:04:19 PM

Woo!

by PaulDavisThe1st

7/4/2026 at 2:51:55 PM

Do you have any references for these claims?

I’m also curious how you define consciousness.

by AndrewKemendo

7/4/2026 at 4:06:43 PM

> I’m also curious how you define consciousness.

This is what I came here for. Every article or commenter that attempts to deduce the roots of consciousness should first start by defining it. I have yet to see anyone even bother to seriously try.

If I spent all my time trying to figure out the fundamental forces involved in floopityjoop, but refused to ever define exactly what a floopityjoop was, you would ignore me, laugh at me, or feel pity for me.

by mapontosevenths

7/4/2026 at 8:13:43 PM

Well consciousness has the "advantage"/curse of the fact that we all know it exists. We just can't prove it to each other.

by estearum

7/4/2026 at 4:19:56 PM

Hence why I ask

In my experience, “intelligence” and “consciousness” are socially defined categories and can’t be viewed objectively

There’s too much social weight on those to have a firm definition because the social implications are too grave and nobody is willing to give up their philosophy for a precise definition

by AndrewKemendo

7/4/2026 at 4:58:35 PM

Agreed, and just to add to that... It's important.

In the past many attempts to define who (or even what) is and is not conscious led to the exclusion of certain classes of human and animal, and from there to atrocity beyond measure. The p-zombie problem is not only fundamental, it may be the single most important question in all of philosophy and science from a "first do no harm" perspective.

It's not some academic "Umm acshually". The definition MATTERS, and can lead to real world suffering for living beings at massive scale when we get it wrong. So these regularly scheduled "Mechanism For Consciousness Discovered" blog posts that fail to define it first aren't just bad science, they're actively dangerous.

EDIT - To tie it back to this post - If we assume that working memory is involved in consciousness, we exclude people who lack short-term memory. I had a friend in high school who lost most of his due to a traumatic brain injury caused by a car accident. He was, in fact, a conscious being. Just... very, very forgetful and unable to cope well with novel situations.

by mapontosevenths

7/4/2026 at 6:23:21 PM

I define consciousness as “the inflection of the potential of existential being.” As my original comment suggests, I claim consciousness as the echo chamber of the quantum domain.

Before you call it “quantum magic” understand that the “potential of existence” is the foundation of existential reality and we are “just inflecting” upon this through the electrochemical biotechnology of our brains.

I propose all life and living systems are “of consciousness” however primitive, and memory, temporal awareness, even sense of self are holographic renderings within this domain.

by d00d0ff000

7/4/2026 at 2:35:01 PM

Very interesting. Do you have any links to material along these lines?

by therobots927

7/4/2026 at 3:39:27 PM

It conjecture, but in my opinion there's something about our brain based on the evidence.

Three pounds of meat in one human brain can do things an entire datacenter of AI can't. Like fold clothing.

by zulux

7/4/2026 at 2:31:44 PM

> Consciousness is the echo chamber of the quantum domain

[citation needed]

by lambdaone

7/4/2026 at 4:05:03 PM

I've seen this bouncing around since the early 90s, with New Agey people like Danah Zohar, and probably predates even that. There never seemed to be a whole lot to it; not much more than "well, consciousness is weird, and quantum is weird, therefore consciousness is quantum". Or maybe "well, quantum is trendy, and I'd like to make a buck, therefore..."

by mrec

7/4/2026 at 4:37:31 PM

I'm unsure what to make of the post you're replying to, but the idea that there's a connexion between consciousness and quantum phenomena isn't just a New Age idea. Eugene Wigner wasn't New Agey, and he wrote Remarks on the Mind-Body Question, suggesting that wave function collapse only occurs when the consciousness of an an observer becomes aware of the result of a measurement, not the measuring apparatus, which is entangled with whatever is being measured, records it.

by DonaldFisk

7/4/2026 at 4:50:54 PM

For me the most plausible argument for "quantum consciousness" was made by Roger Penrose. I still don't believe it; we can demonstrate wavefunction collapse using experiments like the delayed-choice quantum eraser without anything conscious being involved (unless you believe in retrocausality or the cosmic conspiracy theory, or in panpsychism, which is really no weirder than the quantum consciousness ideas and also quite fun to contemplate).

by lambdaone

7/4/2026 at 6:40:05 PM

It seems like you disqualify everything that doesn’t talk back (LLMs then?). By my account a stone is dormant quantum consciousness and living systems merely animate this. Awareness and sense of self are manifestations of biotechnology.

by d00d0ff000

7/4/2026 at 3:12:04 PM

FWIW the only place I EVER see the phrase "citation needed" is on HN. That's not a good or a bad thing: it's simply an observation.

by bookofjoe

7/4/2026 at 4:02:01 PM

Pretty sure it originated with the Wikipedia annotation. See e.g. https://xkcd.com/285/ from 2007.

by mrec

7/4/2026 at 3:22:29 PM

With apologies to the above post if I'm wrong, I've seen it as a polite way of saying, "bullshit."

by analog31

7/4/2026 at 4:08:09 PM

> I've seen it as a polite way of saying, "bullshit."

Only if they can't provide a reliable citation.

by mapontosevenths