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.
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.
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.
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"...
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.
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.")
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.
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.