I have DID and am also curious how it would affect the measurement. I'm just waking up so I've only skimmed the paper so far, but I suspect the results would differ depending on which of us was fronting.
We've noticed that each of us integrates not just sensory information differently, but we also seem to be "wired" differently.
For instance, we are AuDHD, and I, the primary host, lean strongly to the autism behavioral side, my co-host is somewhere between, and a secondary host leans strongly to the ADHD behavioral side. Things that are easy for me can be hard for another.
We also experience senses very differently. There have been many times where one of us can smell something strongly, switch, and the other can't smell it at all.
This affects other senses as well. When I watch a 24 fps movie at a theater, for about the first 10 minutes, all I see is a strobing of still images before I finally adapt and see motion. My co-host sees continuous motion right from the start. This may relate to the temporal binding window discussed in the paper as a motivation for their research.
Our working hypothesis since we were finally diagnosed has been that identity is, at least in part, an integration of both sensory information as well as how strongly various brain regions are activated by whichever identity or identities are most active at a particular time.
Lastly, we have the ability to "take control" over just part of the body. For example, for whatever reason, the motion of stirring a sauce is difficult to me, but it's trivial for another, so sometimes they'll take control of our arms to stir the pot while cooking. To me it feels like my arms have disappeared and someone else's arms are now attached and stirring the pot. This may be temporal binding window related because we do seem to experience sensory information at different speeds and this might cause us to get that alien hand feeling, which is sort of opposite of the rubber hand illusion.
So, I suspect that each of us would react differently to the rubber hand illusion test.
This is why black swan events can be so devastating.
I saw another comment here about a month ago that said many people tend to round a very small risk down to zero risk. The comments were related to driving and the risk of serious injury or death that most people discount, but I think it also applies to other areas of risk in life, too, for many people.
Exceptional events are low probability by definition, and thus people tend to ignore the possibility, assuming instead that the status quo will continue to exist.
I'm also on the spectrum and like using various kinds of parallel construction, including antithesis.
I also tend to use a lot of em dashes. If I posted something I wrote in, say, 2010, I'd likely get a lot of comments about my writing absolutely, 100% being AI-written. I have posted old writing snippets in the past year and gotten this exact reaction.
I originally (two decades ago) started using em dashes, I think, because I also tend to go off on frequent tangents or want to add additional context, and at the beginning of the tangent, I'm not entirely sure how I'll phrase it. So, instead of figuring out the best punctuation at that moment (be that a parenthesis, a comma, or a semicolon for a list), I'll just type an em dash (easy on a Mac).
Then I don't go back and fix it afterward because I have too many thoughts and not enough time to express them. There are popular quotes about exactly this issue.
It's a kind of laziness in the form of my expression to give me more mental capacity to focus on the content. Alt 0151 and Alt 0150 are still burned into my memory from typing em dashes and en dashes so often on Windows.
I suppose I'll have to consider this my own punctuation mode collapse that RLHF is now forcing me to correct.
I've started deliberately using em-dashes and “smart” quotes (made easy by configuring a compose key) — mostly because they look nice, but also out of spite for any software that's somehow not properly Unicode-aware in 20-fucking-25.
That's also a concern. Many day-to-day tasks for employees are repetitive to the point even a less-than-AGI system could potentially disrupt those jobs (and there are people actively working right now to make this happen).
The best case scenario would be the employees taking advantage of their increased productivity to make themselves more valuable to their employer (and if they are lucky, gain increased compensation).
However, it's also possible employers decide they don't need many of their lower level workforce anymore because the remaining ones are more productive. It wouldn't take much of this to drive unemployment levels way up. Perhaps not to the level of the Great Depression, at least not for a while, but it is certainly a potential outcome of the ongoing, long-term process in our economic system of increasingly automating repetitive, low skill tasks.
IOW, it doesn't take AGI to throw a lot of people out of work. It's happened many times with other technologies in the past, and when it happens, things can get pretty bad for a large number of people even if the majority are still doing okay (or even great, for those at the top).
I have met a few people online who told me they were diagnosed with both.
Schizophrenia spectrum disorders (SSDs) and DID can apparently co-occur.
From [0] (2016):
> One study showed that in a sample of patients diagnosed with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) 74.3% also met diagnostic criteria of a SSD, 49.5% met diagnostic criteria for schizoaffective disorder, and 18.7% met diagnostic criteria for schizophrenia.
The study cited in [0] is dated from 1996, however(!), so it was done not long after the change from changing the name MPD to DID. Not sure how much weight to put on a study that old.
From [1] (2022):
> Numerous studies have shown that up to 50% of patients with schizophrenia meet the diagnostic criteria for dissociative personality disorder.
The two linked studies cited in [1] are dated in 1998 and 2004. So also, still old, but not quite as much.
It seems well-known that the two conditions co-occur. I don't have access to the linked studies, however, and am not willing to pay the subscription or single-paper fees.
I do have DID but SSDs have been thoroughly ruled out for me (I was checked for both, as well as other potential conditions). My assessment seemed quite thorough.
I'd be willing to try institutional academic accounts if you ever have some paywalls article you want to read. Just shoot me an email at partner_privacy@proton.me
Also, my partner likely has DID and is struggling with it somewhat. If you have advice or are willing to answer some questions, I'd appreciate talking about it. But I know it's a big ask, respectfully, so I understand if not.
> ...if you ever have some paywalls article you want to read. Just shoot me an email...
Thanks. I appreciate it. Will do if I come across something.
> Also, my partner likely has DID and is struggling with it somewhat. If you have advice or are willing to answer some questions, I'd appreciate talking about it.
Sure. Not sure if you're wanting advice/help for yourself, your partner, or both, but email me at shippage_hn@proton.me if you'd like to talk. I know more about my own particular kind of DID than others, but am willing to talk about what I know of the generalities, too, as well as a bit about my experiences (including getting a diagnosis) if that helps you or your partner.
Not the poster you replied to. But maybe I should quickly define what I mean by inner monologue: thoughts in word form, utilizing language. I defined it this way because this is what most people seem to mean when they talk about an inner monologue.
In a sense, I do have an inner monologue (or dialogue, or multilogue), it's just not done in words unless I need to crystalize my thoughts into something I can communicate with others. My internal method of thinking is a language; it's just a non-verbal language that's only "spoken" by one person on Earth: me.
I am quite capable of planning long term tasks, solving novel problems, performing abstract thinking, etc., without using words at all. It does, however, mean I need to maintain a huge amount of state in my head. Serializing that state to words is very cumbersome for me, but extremely useful to help reduce the amount of state I need to keep in mind, so it's a tradeoff between spending the annoyingly long amount of time needed to linearize and serialize my thoughts to the outside world, and having more resulting mental bandwidth to deal with the more critical parts of a problem at the moment.
Story time... After I lost my language after the stroke, my mind seemed to have been shattered, like an ancient empire falling, breaking up into numerous squabbling kingdoms. I became aware of the different functions of my brain in a new way. In terms of language, to this day when I communicate with others, it feels like I think in my internal non-verbal language, then sort of toss it over the wall to another part of my brain which converts that to words.
When I was first re-learning how to communicate with others, I managed to "talk" that other part of my brain into round-tripping the translations. So I'd think a thought, the translator part would convert it to words, then the sister part would convert the words back to my own nascent internal language. My own internal language developed alongside my ability to communicate with others via this feedback loop.
I'd never heard of generative adversarial networks at the time, but that's basically what I was doing. Before managing to convince that part of my brain to create the feedback loop, I had barely managed to regain any words at all. Afterward, my vocabulary began recovering rapidly even as it became more feasible to express complex concepts in my new internal way of thinking.
One thing this GAN-style behavior made clear to me, was that language was a highly useful error-correction method. Each time the round trip garbled meaning in various ways, it clarified the sloppiness in my new thought style, shining a light on it that made it easier to see just how much further I needed to go to regain my ability to read, write, and speak.
Maybe if I'd had help regaining my language, I wouldn't have had to develop a unique internal "language" to be able to express thoughts in, and I'd natively think in words again. Hard to say. All I know is I was desperate to be able to think again, and I wasn't willing to wait until I regained my words, especially given how slow the process was initially.
So, only going from my own personal experiences, I wonder if internal language partially "evolved" as a means of thought error-correction, to review what one was about to say or do before saying or doing it. It's also obviously useful for working with others, and our ability to transfer knowledge even across centuries is remarkably useful, but I also wonder if inner monologue has been maintained in so much of the population even for internal thoughts because that error-correction allows easier self-reflection of our thought process?
Even I sometimes will say aloud the details of the problem I'm currently trying to solve as a means to double-check that I'm not missing anything obvious. I don't do it often, but it can help when I'm stuck. If the translator part of my brain can't figure out a good way to translate my thoughts into words, it's an excellent sign I'm overthinking the problem and need to refocus on less abstruse details.
Sometimes, I wonder if those with an inner monologue focus on that process as being their consciousness, because they often use it to self-reflect on their own thinking process. It's that meta-reflection that people seem to consider their consciousness.
For those of us without an inner monologue, perhaps it's similar, just with a different way of self-reflecting.
I'm in the weird position of having memories of me as a child with a detailed inner monologue, and memories of post-stroke me without an inner monologue. The old memories feel like someone else's memories. I even called them xenomemories for a few years after my stroke because they didn't feel like they belonged to me.
In those old memories, I thought of my inner monologue as "my thoughts" and "my consciousness," but I have no memory of what was going on beneath that level. The words just seemed to flow in a way that made sense to child me. It was like young me needed words to keep thoughts stepping forward in an endless chain of reflection and reasoning via language. Young me didn't value anything except the build artifacts (the words), so all the rest of my thinking process never made it into my memories.
It was the effects of losing those words that made me so hyperaware of everything else going on in my brain, and I had to build up a new understanding of who "I" even was.
All the recent talk about the potential for LLMs to "think" in latent space instead of words feels so very similar to my own experiences, going from words with well-defined meanings to something less sharp, but with more room for nuance. Your mention of thinking in semantic space feels right to me based on the way I think through complex problems today. Thinking in words is exceptionally slow and clumsy for me.
In a sense, it feels like I traded in a binary computer for an analog (or quantum) one, and just like computers, I would imagine each style of thought has its strengths and weaknesses.
It would certainly be nice if my word compiler wasn't so slow and buggy, though. It makes it a lot harder to leave permanent notes for myself or communicate with others.
Your perspective is unique given your circumstances. I can't imagine how it feels to operate in a different mode having traces of the previous one. Very interesting.
This issue is very complex. One of the thorny bits is that what you remember and what is germane are very different things. As humans we operate under the laws of psychology which necessitate interesting but ultimately quite inexplicable things like an "I" to somehow "anchor" our thoughts. I believe investigations into the nature of this "I" are still ongoing (after a few millennia). Perhaps different personalities can use different types of hooks to anchor this "I". Perhaps some are inclined to use language for this and others not.
Sometimes I wonder if it's just lack of introspection: the ones with inner monologue having accepted too soon that that's all there is to their minds and neglected to look underneath this chatter. They can see that this chatter must have a source as well. Surely they'll see this can't be another level of chatter, because I'll ask the question again and again. Ultimately all human cogitation is without source[1] and can't be anything other than purely spontaneous.
Anyway, I'm rambling. Good luck to you!
[1] "without source" meaning: not able to be observed by the subject itself
It certainly feels strange. The two epochs almost feel like past life and current life, with an unexpected and ineffable bridge between the two. I remember thinking in words, but it feels like someone else was doing that, because I certainly wouldn't do it that way today. It definitely makes me constantly question exactly who "I" am.
> Sometimes I wonder if it's just lack of introspection...
Maybe? I know I didn't introspect deeper than my words when I was a child, but that doesn't necessarily mean an adult doesn't introspect about it.
I asked my husband about it because he told me he has a running stream of words most of the day except when he's relaxing. He is aware that he has a layer beneath the words, but still thinks of the words as "his thoughts" and the layer beneath as "just his subconscious," that bubbled up things like emotions or memories in service of his thoughts.
So at least N=1, an inner monologuer did consider that his words weren't all of his thoughts, but he still considered the non-verbal stuff less important than his words. It was as if all he valued was the crystalized thought, not the underlying processes.
The two sibling comments have great answers. For me, it feels like a very intuitive process. I've described it to others in the past as feeling like I'm constructing a sort of cognitive atom graph, where memories, emotions, facts, and concepts are the nodes, and the strengths of connection between these are the edges.
To be clear, I'm not actually picturing a graph in my head; it's more that it feels similar in a lot of ways.
This probably sounds incredibly complicated, byzantine, and wasteful to word thinkers, but for me, constructing these "graphs" is so natural and rapid, that I can easily outthink my ability to convert my thoughts to words. It's intuition driven, and operates very quickly, in a sort of semi-conscious scatter/gather way.
I'm guessing other people may also do this subconsciously before they turn what they've gathered into words (maybe?), but for me, retrieving all this is often a more conscious activity.
All of this is as natural to me as breathing. I’m not planning out which things I’m going to scatter-gather, it just sort of happens, just like breathing or beating my heart just sort of happens, and just like those two things I can either be aware of it and control it, or unaware of it and just let it flow.
As an example, where someone else might literally think the words “my favorite flowers are roses”, I would grab concepts of flora, flower, plant reproduction, bees, nectar, pollen, etc. and facts like climbs trellises, susceptible to fungal infections, has thorns, and memories of many of the times I’ve seen roses or listened to someone talk about roses, and finally my emotions like happiness, fear (from the thorns), peacefulness, contentment, enjoyment, personal-ness, etc. Then link all of these together to give a graph that carries a lot of meaning that is extremely specific to me.
All this happens in a tiny fraction of a second. I'm aware of all the parts that go into this thought, even as I understand what the sum of those parts adds up to. There's a great deal of nuance in my new way of thinking that's hard to convert into words in a concise way. "My favorite flowers are roses" is a highly pruned version of what I was actually thinking. It's not a better way or a worse way of thinking. It's just different. Like everything, it has its strengths, and it has its weaknesses.
> "My favorite flowers are roses" is a highly pruned version of what I was actually thinking.
In this scenario, would the phrase "My favorite flowers are roses" have materialized in your mind?
Or if this scenario would be: you have been asked "What are your favorite flowers?", and you would just speak out those words to the other person without rehearsing in your head, would you be capable of recreating that scenario at another time, including the person asking you and you answering, in your head?
> In this scenario, would the phrase "My favorite flowers are roses" have materialized in your mind?
That depends on the situation. I thought I'd mentioned it in this thread, but apparently I'd mentioned it on the post about aphasia a few days ago. I don't think in words anymore except when I'm either conversing with or thinking about conversing with someone else.
If I was just thinking to myself about my favorite things, that phrase would never pop into my head at all. It wouldn't even occur to me to even try putting it into words in that situation.
> Or if this scenario would be: you have been asked "What are your favorite flowers?", and you would just speak out those words to the other person without rehearsing in your head, would you be capable of recreating that scenario at another time, including the person asking you and you answering, in your head?
Yes, I'm autistic (AuDHD), so I often replay social interactions in my head over and over and try to think of better responses than I was able to come up with on the spur of the moment, and this, necessarily, involves thinking in words.
So, while my natural mode of thinking post-stroke is now word-free, I am still capable of thinking in words and do so when I'm thinking about something I may need to communicate to someone else soon.
Immediately post-stroke, of course, I was incapable of thinking in words at all, but I rebuilt that capability over time. It definitely does not feel natural to me, still, to the point I sometimes stutter or pause for awkward seconds to find the right words if I'm suddenly asked to talk about a new topic I haven't rehearsed. I do have a safe subset of English that I try to stay within to avoid any potential stumbling.
I still think in my non-word way the vast, vast majority of the time, then translate to words, unless I'm saying something that's become an automatic response. If someone says to me, "How are you?" I immediately respond, "I'm doing well, thanks. How are you today?" all in words. But if I'm posed a novel question like yours, one that I've never considered before, I have to carefully find a way to translate my thoughts to words before I can answer.
I posted a few days ago about my own experiences with aphasia as a teen. The term author came up with, "The Quiet," resonates with me. My own experience was also quiet, but not as peaceful as hers.
My stroke was a thief of thought; language fell apart, washed away, leaving me unable to read, write, or even conceive of words. Talking was something beyond me, to the point that I didn't notice when people were moving their mouths while speaking.
For about 3 weeks after my stroke, it seemed everyone was giving me the silent treatment, and I was worried I'd done something terribly wrong to the point nobody would even talk to me, yet I couldn't put any words together to ask them why they were so angry with me. Somehow, I also sensed that something was terribly wrong with me, but I couldn't quite grasp what it was; any time I tried, it slipped through my fingers like fog.
Yet, it was still very quiet, and that left me much more focused on sensations and immediate experiences than before or after. Apparently, I would stare at a tree, or at the snow as it fell. Simply existing. Feeling connected to the world in a new way, part of it, instead of separate from it. Maybe this was ultimate mindfulness, but it didn't feel that way. When I practice mindfulness now, there's still a sense of I-ness that wasn't present back then. All there was existence and connection along with a vague unease, knowing something was wrong.
Much later, they told me I only spoke 5 words after the stroke, all of them so-called "automatic" words like yes, no, and what.
For...reasons...my parents never took me to see a doctor about it, so I had to relearn how to read, write, speak, and listen on my own. Without words, I had to figure out other ways of thinking that didn't involve an internal monologue. Within weeks, I was already building up a new way of thinking to allow myself to understand what was happening in a way that didn't involve language, yet was still expressive enough to describe my experiences internally just as well as language had allowed. To this day, my natural mode of thinking involves no monologue, no words, no images at all.
I do remember what it was like to think in words all the time when I was younger, an unending flow that had carved a deep canyon in my mental landscape. But now that river is little more than a nearly dried up trickle and the canyon lies empty...except when I put words together to communicate with others.
Word-ing is now a very intentional activity for me, laying words like bricks, together with the mortar of understanding to build my own Tower of Babel, translating back and forth between my new way of thinking and the words I need to communicate with others. I've been told I have a very deliberate way of speaking in person, as though I'm carefully choosing each word, and this is why.
I sometimes wonder what my life would be like now if I'd never had the stroke, never lost my language. I suppose I'll never know.
Yes, I have Acquired ELD from a stroke. It does affect my ability to code, especially on the days when I'm more mentally or physically fatigued. And I do also get headaches and fatigue both when expressing my thoughts, as well as when listening to others express theirs.
I tend to last longer when discussing technical subjects with clear logic, goals, and answers than I do in a more free-form conversation that can go in any direction without warning. And I do better in a conversation with only a single person than with multiple people.
I just have to pace myself and take breaks as needed. Fortunately, I have flexible work hours and WFH, so this is possible for me to do.
We've noticed that each of us integrates not just sensory information differently, but we also seem to be "wired" differently.
For instance, we are AuDHD, and I, the primary host, lean strongly to the autism behavioral side, my co-host is somewhere between, and a secondary host leans strongly to the ADHD behavioral side. Things that are easy for me can be hard for another.
We also experience senses very differently. There have been many times where one of us can smell something strongly, switch, and the other can't smell it at all.
This affects other senses as well. When I watch a 24 fps movie at a theater, for about the first 10 minutes, all I see is a strobing of still images before I finally adapt and see motion. My co-host sees continuous motion right from the start. This may relate to the temporal binding window discussed in the paper as a motivation for their research.
Our working hypothesis since we were finally diagnosed has been that identity is, at least in part, an integration of both sensory information as well as how strongly various brain regions are activated by whichever identity or identities are most active at a particular time.
Lastly, we have the ability to "take control" over just part of the body. For example, for whatever reason, the motion of stirring a sauce is difficult to me, but it's trivial for another, so sometimes they'll take control of our arms to stir the pot while cooking. To me it feels like my arms have disappeared and someone else's arms are now attached and stirring the pot. This may be temporal binding window related because we do seem to experience sensory information at different speeds and this might cause us to get that alien hand feeling, which is sort of opposite of the rubber hand illusion.
So, I suspect that each of us would react differently to the rubber hand illusion test.
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