Consciousness and the Illusion of Continuity
It would be absurd to believe that given the brain’s massively parallel construction that there is only a single thread of cognition. Consciousness is that illusion that there is only one thread. It would be absurd to believe that this one thread is the core of cognition instead of the multiple threads that are running in the background.
What runs in the background is what is described as the unconscious. This is known as system 1 processing in dual-process theory. We are essentially intuition machines. What we describe as consciousness is a thread that intermittently executes that is reflectively providing an explanation of a slice of the many thought threads that are running. Consciousness feels continuous but this is just an illusion. It feels like a single thread but is also an illusion.
The key to understanding general intelligence is understanding the massively parallel unconscious brain. It is not the understanding of the single thread illusion that we call consciousness. Understanding the unconscious intuitive brain leads to an understanding of the conscious reflective brain.
Those who practice meditation are more intimately aware of the single-threaded illusion of consciousness. It is actually very difficult to maintain a single train of thought. It takes years of practice to achieve this. It is not a natural state. There are different kinds of meditation. They all have in common the intentional control of the conscious mind. But anyone who has experienced meditation knows that this mind is constantly being interrupted. It is as if it were in fact not continuous at all. I’m not an expert in meditation but I suspect that there are certain kinds that are more beneficial than other kinds. I’ve always been impressed with the clarity of thought of @harari_yuval and @vervaeke_john and suspect it is due to their meditation style.
The mechanism of consciousness employs the mechanism of attention. The mechanism of attention is enabled via the basal ganglia informing the thalamus to inhibit processing in the cortex. Consciousness is an action and not a background process. Attention is not like a spotlight that focuses our cognitive resources on a narrow concern. Rather it is a regulation mechanism that deprioritizes many concurrent threads. The System 2 reflective process is slow because this deprioritization implies that it cannot fully exploit the massive parallelism of the brain.
Intuition can only be leveraged through practice. To be really good at something requires 10,000 hours of participatory experience. Humans do not master a skill by reading an instruction manual. To leverage the massive processing in the brain, the performance of skill must become unconscious. In other words, skills must become ‘second nature’ and thus run ‘in the background’.
But what differentiates human consciousness from animal consciousness if it is all just a mechanism of reflexive cognition and attention? Uexkull has argued that an animal’s cognition is forged by its umwelt. The umwelt is the capabilities of perception and action that are available to a species. Humans are gifted with a high-resolution fovea, high dexterity hands, and vocal cords. No other animal has this triple combination. (is that called a hat trick?) Consciousness as action is a consequence of umwelt. Human consciousness is unique because the human umwelt is unique and the human umwelt is uniquely rich.
In my model of the brain, I find it useful to divide functionality into five regions called self. That is the bodily, volitional, perspectival, narrative, and social selves. Dues to the uniqueness of a species’ umwelt, there is a difference in consciousness:
Humans all have the same umwelt. So we share the same ‘common sense’. However, our consciousness is different because our brains are unique in their inclination towards learning. Our brains are the product of our interaction with the environment.
Julian Jaynes argued that prior to widespread literacy, most humans consciousness was very different from present-day consciousness. The development of civilizations prior to literacy led to what he called the Bicameral mind. Minds that heard voices of instruction in their head. It is as if there was another mind in people’s heads! That is because there are actually several minds. But due to our practice of reading we’ve acquired the habit of introspection of our thoughts.
Literacy is different from the vocalization of language. Language also molds how we think. Although language allows humans to think more abstractly, it is a double-edged sword. Language is effective because it reduces the need for thinking. When we use symbols, we substitute understanding with compressed tokens of the convention. Language is what binds civilizations together because norms work in a way that does not require understanding. Language divorced from understanding is how to create a cult.
The conventional argument language is what separates humans from animals and therefore it is language that underlies human consciousness. This I conjecture to be wrong. A machine can learn a language but it doesn’t need to be conscious.
People who have become masters of a craft frequently find themselves in a cognitive state of flow (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow). Flow has the following experiences:
- Intense and focused concentration on the present moment
- Merging of action and awareness
- A loss of reflective self-consciousness
- A sense of personal control or agency over the situation or activity
- A distortion of temporal experience, one’s subjective experience of time is altered
- Experience of the activity as intrinsically rewarding, also referred to as autotelic experience
When we are in this state, we are maximally productive. But it is clear that the sense of consciousness and time disappears. But what this state reveals that is in contradiction with the common notion of consciousness is that competence and consciousness can be separate capabilities. You can be magnificently competent and immersed in complex performance, yet be not entirely conscious of your own state.
The conscious state arises in regimes outside of flow:
We can be conscious (i.e. aware) of the state consciousness of any of these states. We are conscious of when we are bored or aroused. We are conscious of when we worry and when we are in control. Furthermore, we are also intermittently conscious of our thinking in any of these states. However, the necessity of continuity between conscious thoughts paradoxically occurs in the state of flow. A state where we are least self-conscious.
Therefore I will make the strong hypothesis that conscious thought is not thought. It is just an explanation of our thoughts. Thoughts are always subconsciously intuitive and the thoughts that we describe as being conscious thoughts are subconscious thoughts of explanation. That is a reflective explanation of our thoughts.
But to explain the illusion of continuity, that is, why does it feel like my consciousness is one continuing gestalt process that feels like myself. Our feeling of consciousness is a manifestation of the homeostatic process of our various selves:
Selves of course are homeostatic processes.
A homeostatic process is a conversation of a self with the various non-selves it is in contact with. It is constantly balancing its internal integrity and its need for movement in its environment.
Free will is the agency that is available for each self.
The words ‘free will’ and ‘consciousness’ used in Western Philosophy describe the higher-level narrative and social selves. We are not conscious of how our body regulates itself, we are only partially conscious of what we perceive or how we move. Every homeostatic self process is a dual process (see Kahneman). An intuitive process and a reflective process. Note the redefinition of the second process away from ‘rationality’.
It is of course the reflective process that is consciousness. But it is, as Dennett describes, a user interface into our intuitive cognitive processes.
