"Self-Control" Is A (Neurological) Type Error

Follow-up to both memory posts.

I natively assume that there's a "me" which does the "controlling" part of executive function. This utterly fails[1] to predict how (initially promising) neurological interventions change cognition.

Let's look at working memory capacity. I thought that, by stimulating brain areas in special patterns, I could have an external system take the role of "controller", leaving me with more "control" headroom; and in this way, I could use my "will" to hold more items in memory.

For example, I could run software which re-activated something I was thinking about a few minutes earlier, and spend "my" control on meta-analyzing my earlier thoughts. Thus I'd get free, extreme metacognition.

On the model I was using, working memory "items" are the coordination of many individual pieces of brain tissue to sit on one carrier frequency; "control" is better thought of as a result of those areas all co-optimizing for sitting on one frequency.

And because of a fundamental harmonic uncertainty, these coordinations are limited to no more than a few tens of WM entries. This feels introspectively like a lack of control-of-stuff-in-working-memory.

From the perspective of any coordination-clique, the stimulation is still cooperative; the same ground-up process occurs, and the "coordination" resource is still consumed.

So the thing which my mind compresses into limited-ability-to-control-memory still happens. I don't get much, if any, extra cache.

(But this sharper map implies that I am able to expand my RAM, by building an index and writing more efficient tooling than what a human brain could reasonably implement. At timescales below ~500ms, my cognition doesn't obviously seem more powerful; but above 10s, and especially for things which take a night's sleep to learn, engineering matters.)

"Control" is the result of lots of local computations done by brain regions; this implies that we can't natively expand working memory. It also helps understand psychosis symptoms in digital telepaths (next post).

^In category theory, this sort of information loss via abstraction is called a generative effect.

In category theory, this sort of information loss via abstraction is called a generative effect.