The thing we call “self” or “consciousness” is not the agent, is not even a subroutine inside the agent, it is the explanation. This is because any time someone describes eir internal experiences, ey are actually describing this “innate narrative”: after all, this is exactly its original function.
Yes. Rephrasing it slightly, anything that we observe in the global workspace is an output from some subsystem; it is not the subsystem itself. Likewise, the sense of a self is a narrative produced by some subsystem. This narrative is then treated as an ontologically basic entity, the agent which actually does things, because the subsystems that do the self-modeling can only see the things that appear in consciousness. Whatever level is the lowest that you can observe, is the one whose behavior you need to take as an axiom; and if conscious experience is the lowest level that you can observe, then you take the narrative as something whose independent existence has to be assumed.
(Now I wonder about that self-representational blink associated with the experience of the self. Could it be that the same system which produces the narrative of the self also takes that narrative as input—and that the blink obscures it from noticing that it is generating the very same story which it is basing its inferences on? “I see a self taking actions, so therefore the best explanation must be that there is a self which is taking actions?”)
This would also explain Julian Jaynes’s seemingly-crazy theory that ancient people experienced their gods as auditory hallucinations. If society tells you that some of the thoughts that you hear in your head come from gods, then maybe your narrative of the self just comes to assign those thoughts as coming from gods.
This would also explain Julian Jaynes’s seemingly-crazy theory that ancient people experienced their gods as auditory hallucinations. If society tells you that some of the thoughts that you hear in your head come from gods, then maybe your narrative of the self just comes to assign those thoughts as coming from gods.
This makes sense to me; would also be compatible with the model of craving as a specifically socially evolved motivational layer.
Yes. Rephrasing it slightly, anything that we observe in the global workspace is an output from some subsystem; it is not the subsystem itself. Likewise, the sense of a self is a narrative produced by some subsystem. This narrative is then treated as an ontologically basic entity, the agent which actually does things, because the subsystems that do the self-modeling can only see the things that appear in consciousness. Whatever level is the lowest that you can observe, is the one whose behavior you need to take as an axiom; and if conscious experience is the lowest level that you can observe, then you take the narrative as something whose independent existence has to be assumed.
(Now I wonder about that self-representational blink associated with the experience of the self. Could it be that the same system which produces the narrative of the self also takes that narrative as input—and that the blink obscures it from noticing that it is generating the very same story which it is basing its inferences on? “I see a self taking actions, so therefore the best explanation must be that there is a self which is taking actions?”)
This would also explain Julian Jaynes’s seemingly-crazy theory that ancient people experienced their gods as auditory hallucinations. If society tells you that some of the thoughts that you hear in your head come from gods, then maybe your narrative of the self just comes to assign those thoughts as coming from gods.
Speak of the devil.