[colejohnson66]

What astounds me is that the human brain doesn't even know it works (at least consciously). Your brain tells your body what to do, but your consciousness has no idea how.

<rant>

For me, that's what's so amazing about neural networks! If you could ask an individual neuron why their f(x) is the way it is, they probably would only be able to tell you that "that gets the result the brain wants". They're like individual computers, yet they can't work alone; only when put together does what they're doing make sense.

</rant>

[hacker_9]

I have three possible theories for this:

1. Evolution saw no need for it; knowing how our eye's classify light signals into objects and figure out depth etc are not important to survival. What is important is knowing exactly if you are looking at a predator as soon as possible.

2. Too much data for consciousness to handle; There is something like 1 million connections between each eye and the brain alone. Then there is all the parallel processing that must take place to match what we are seeing to the right memory. This process reduces the all the incoming signals to a single variable such as 'car', 'red' etc which can then be passed to our simpler, serial experience of reality.

3. A bit more 'out there': The physical dimension we inhabit is the result of the intersection between two planes, time and space, that seem to stretch to infinity in both directions (no beginning and no end). You could also say this for your own thoughts; do you truly know when a thought begins, or when it ends (no longer part of the brain)? We seem to exist in the middle of these planes, and perhaps that is all that is possible for the conscious experience (meaning, being part of the process of 'seeing' is just not possible).

[hashberry]

4. Consciousness wasn't supposed to happen as living organisms do not need it to survive and reproduce. But since humans are so successful: "It's a feature, not a bug!"

[oldmanjay]

What does "supposed to happen" mean in the context of evolution?

[ghurtado]

I believe what was meant was "not selected for".

However, this could well be argued at length: human consciousness has clearly played a big role in humans becoming the dominant species in the planet.

[mjevans]

My personal belief is that evolution moved from the slowly iterating biological cycle to a much more rapid external augmentation cycle.

We moved to evolving tools that augment our other natural capabilities when it became faster and more effective to focus on making better tools than better humans.

[bordercases]

I wonder why we don't have several conscious thoughts at once.

[yazaddaruvala]

While most of the time, ideas in my head are extremely cohesive, there are times when they are not. For one, while talking to myself, I refer to myself as a we. In other situations, primarily ones of brainstorming, I can definitely feel multiple "quadrants" of my brain initiating different ideas. The reason I feel they are different consciouses is because each idea is driven by different motivations. Some of these are good ideas, some are bad, some are moral, some are immoral. We mostly come to a consensus in fractions of a second, but sometimes its long and drawn out. Like any good team, we ensure everyone is heard and respected, we understand that there will be disagreements and we won't always get our way. Some of us never get our way. But overall we(I) seem to work well with all of the other versions of myself. Lol, at least for now. There are definitely parts of me which are very upset with the consensus to write this post.

I think you just don't hear a lot about it, and people don't acknowledge it much in themselves, because of the stigma/demonization of multiple personality disorders. For me, as long as I(we) can pass the Turing Test of Normality, I don't really mind that my brain works the way it does. If anything, I quite like the way it works.

[Senji]

That's interesting. I, don't "talk" or "think aloud" in my head myself. At all. Ideas just snap into focus at once immediately. Same goes for when I'm trying to figure out a puzzle or when programing.

At the moment I learn something new it just snaps into place at once and the knowledge is integrated on the spot.

Also English is a foreign language for me and the same goes for my native language. Whole concepts emerge as I'm trying to do or say something and then I have to put them into words(in either language).

Sometimes the process of talking is excruciatingly slow and interferes with my thoughts. I find that I can type a lot faster and that helps a little.

[psyc]

This is true for me, but only for domains I know very well. The less I understand the problem, the more I have to think in my head. But there is a mode that I make use of frequently when I want the best answer I can currently produce - I just have to quiet my mind, and the best available answer immediately bubbles to top of mind.

[nnq]

My theory is that we can have several conscious thoughts at once but most of us suppress this most of the time because without a clear "winner thought" that gets the attention and gets to decide what reality is and gets to control the body, you'd end up with what people with schitzophrenia or other psychoses have...

I'd also bet that the first "human-type & human-level" AI will be quire insane by human standards at least if we don't get this inner attention focusing part right from the first time. Considering that this insane AI will also get super-human pretty fast, I'm pretty scared of what it would do before it gets itself to some sort of inner equilibrium or "sanity"...

[mjevans]

I like the term from the Halo series for that kind of AI: 'rampant' / 'rampancy'. It's sort of like having a terrible 2-year-old that happens to be inside of a virtual world, on the internet, thinking at super-human speed.

We should probably make that internet uplink mostly mirror-down libraries only.

[bbctol]

Perhaps we do! How do you know that your autonomic nervous system isn't consciously regulating your breathing, digestion, and heartrate, blissfully unaware of the less important unconscious processes that acquire food and move about. (I wrote a science fiction story along these lines once, that was described by readers as "uh... interesting, I guess.")

[bordercases]

Hell, I'd read it. Still kicking around a copy?

[psyc]

I hypothesize that this is tied to our small working memory. Introspection suggests to me that working memory does not only hold small items of data, but is also where pointers into bigger networks must be anchored. When I'm thinking about a problem or project, my mind's eye saccades around the small features of the problem, but it still feels like those features are being swapped into working memory.

[TeMPOraL]

I sometimes feel I do, but then my sense of introspection goes bonkers.

[Alex3917]

> I wonder why we don't have several conscious thoughts at once.

This is something that can happen via psychedelics or meditation. I don't know of any way to predictably induce it though.

[agumonkey]

And why calming conscious thoughts (meditation) is beneficial too.

[chongli]

To do such would require a subset of the brain to contain more information than the whole, which is clearly impossible.

[not_kurt_godel]

Indeed, Godel's Theorem proves the futility of this.