I heard before that consciousness thinks it's the president, but is actually the press secretary.
When I think about why I did something, I always have an answer. But, like the press secretary asked about the president, maybe its just a confabulation based on the evidence at hand?
Is consciousness just retroactively rationalizing the things that take place and thinking it did them?
I'm not even sure how to process that.
Stranger To Ourselves is a fascinating book about the ways experiments have shown that many things happen outside conscious control.
My theory is that we have much more control over how we go after what we want than over what we want. 'Consciousness' as we think of it is a sufficiently abstract layer that it can (slowly, and with effort) nudge what future us is going to want, but it's not efficient enough to get into the weeds of how things are done most of the time.
That's not to say it can't get into the weeds - from experience it seems it can, but it's better for everyone if it lets autonomous systems handle things like lane changes or conversations.
When I think about why I did something, I always have an answer. But, like the press secretary asked about the president, maybe its just a confabulation based on the evidence at hand?
Is consciousness just retroactively rationalizing the things that take place and thinking it did them?
I'm not even sure how to process that.
Stranger To Ourselves is a fascinating book about the ways experiments have shown that many things happen outside conscious control.