[dlwdlw]

In the book “The Elephant in the Brain”, the author makes the argument that our consciousness is entirely the PR department of the brain, making explanations for the “company” but not truly knowing what’s really going on.

That is, all our thoughts are post-event justifications to make us feel good.

There’s this famous experiment where they show two different things to each eye of a brain divided patient. The patient would then follow instructions from 1 eye, but provide a justification based on what the other eye saw. Like a PR rep having to do the job but with email and communication being down.

The PR rep has to interpret things in a way that is in harmony to the external environment. Making the self seem self-less or hardworking or moral, etc...

Where it gets interesting is that the resulting PR effects affect the environment which then trigger new behaviors resulting in new PR spin. The PR rep has a degree of control over the system yet at the core of it, the PR rep is installed by language/culture/society and is somewhat of an outsider. Like an overly idealistic justice warrior sent to whitewash some corrupt company and being frustrated by the job.

[crazygringo]

This is similar to the thesis of Antonio Damasio's "Descartes' Error", which argues that all our decisions are ultimately taken by an unconscious emotional part of the brain, and that the conscious reasoning part is merely one of many inputs to the unconscious decision-making part.

Which means we literally can never explain the "why" behind any decision we make, because we never know it -- yet that is our true "self", our free will if you choose to interpret it that way.

It's why we can have every rational reason to not eat the cookie, and zero rational reason to eat it (we're not hungry and we rationally know it's in our best interest to lose weight)... and then we eat it anyways. We can't give any rational explanation for why we ate it... it just comes down to, in the end, I wanted to due to emotional factors I can only hypothesize in hindsight.

It's a pretty powerful thesis.

[projektir]

> It's why we can have every rational reason to not eat the cookie, and zero rational reason to eat it (we're not hungry and we rationally know it's in our best interest to lose weight)... and then we eat it anyways. We can't give any rational explanation for why we ate it... it just comes down to, in the end, I wanted to due to emotional factors I can only hypothesize in hindsight.

I don't really think this is as a convincing example as a lot of people think. It has less to do with people having no control and more with people not understanding what "rational" is.

You eat the cookie because you do not, in reality, think eating the cookie is that much of a problem. The issue is that you likely have 5 other layers sitting trying to convince you that you don't want the cookie, because you're trying to fit in with society or whatever.

If you really didn't want to eat the cookie, you wouldn't.

The problem is that the average reason a person has for not eating a cookie is very unconvincing. It's often something along the lines of "well, people, somewhere, think I shouldn't eat too many cookies". "Cookies are unhealthy" also doesn't register, it's too broad. If someone told you the cookie was poisoned with cyanide, trust me, you wouldn't eat it.

It really doesn't have /that/ much to do with raw emotion, except in so far as emotion is composed from values, and your values don't care about eating cookies that much at the end of the day.

[perl4ever]

I think you can and should, make an effort to infer the desires of the non-conscious part of the brain, because it's essential to happiness. It's easy to say people shouldn't deny what they truly want, but I think it's even more important to realize you don't know what you and your subconscious want until you explore possibilities and consequences.

Because brains are jury-rigged by evolution and not a clean integrated design by an intelligent engineer, I think it's natural that there should be a lot of co-dependent modules and redundant cruft that leads to conflicts.

[NihilumExNil]

No, I don't believe this. Rather, as you note inhibition, you rationalize an excuse before hand, here that you have no control over your actions, and as that has so far always worked out, as far as immediate gratification is concerned whereas detriment is harder to grasp, the inhibition is inhibited. The mind is complex and for every prohibitive experience you have an inhibition to find an excuse to justify your actions. Of course, in habitual actions these processes are pretty deeply ingrained, quick, and hence not very conscious compared to much more complex problems that might even compete for attention. Still though, the rationalization of what was done can only come after wards. That is correct.

[jasonkostempski]

"Because it taste good" isn't a rational reason?

[vinceguidry]

I don't buy this argument. I often marvel at just how rapid recognition is. Occasionally you get a slow-dawning realization, but most of the time, things are perceived instantly. It didn't make sense to me until I read somewhere that brain activity denotes 'confusion' while when you finally get a realization, all goes quiet. So recognition happens at speed of light leaving a room.

Sure, if you're purposefully trying to confuse the brain, it's going to be confused. You're actively subverting normal brain function. I bet if they kept performing the same trick, the brain would eventually realize what's going wrong and get quicker at making the realizations.

[somebodynew]

If consciousness is merely an observation of decisions already made in the brain with no actual impact, how do we come to be discussing the concept of consciousness? If the decisions -> consciousness pipeline was only one way, how would the brain come to a state where it's producing a written description of the experience of consciousness?

This is why I've always found the notion of a "philosophical zombie" to be odd - if it accurately reproduces human behavior, then it would be able to have a conversation with you describing its own consciousness, even if it "doesn't have one".

[AgentME]

I figure that consciousness is one of the inputs into the rest of the brain. It can convince other parts (but it's not the default mode, at least in many contexts). Sometimes companies do follow suggestions from the PR department.

[Drakim]

Are you saying that it's impossible to discuss and reflect upon a falsehood?

[somebodynew]

No, but if consciousness is just a side effect of the decisions made independently by the brain I would like to know why most humans' behavior can reflect the perception of consciousness. It seems like a pretty large coincidence that I'm experiencing consciousness and everyone else can explain the experience of consciousness in a way I can relate to, if consciousness is not perceptible by the brain.

I think that anyone claiming consciousness is just a rationalization of previous decisions needs an explanation of why the brain is apparently aware of and able to make decisions (like writing about consciousness) that depend on the ability of consciousness to change it's behavior.

[beagle3]

I am not in the camp of "consciousness is just a side effect" - I do think it's one of the relatively minor inputs to decision making. But that camp IS consistent.

> I think that anyone claiming consciousness is just a rationalization of previous decisions needs an explanation of why the brain is apparently aware of and able to make decisions (like writing about consciousness) that depend on the ability of consciousness to change it's behavior.

A different analogy might help: The consciosness is a computer screen that usually displays a simplified image of (parts of) what's going on inside the CPU and memory, or lies, or something totally unrelated. It is possible to take a screenshot, dump it to memory, process it with the CPU, etc.

The notion that "conscious thought" would change that screenshot is equivalent to the message "Whatever is written here affects the CPU" appearing on the screen. It just means that the message was displayed, not that it came from a source other than everything else did.

You probably didn't notice, but you are actually arguing for "freedom of choice", which is its own philosophical can of worms, and is not really compatible with our understanding of physics or biology.

[red75prime]

> The patient would then follow instructions from 1 eye, but provide a justification based on what the other eye saw.

Well, you shouldn't expect broken system to work flawlessly. Splitting the brain makes survived parts of self-model inadequate. It's not reasonable to think that the self-model will not break, but automagically begin to reflect new hardware configuration of the brain. It will take time for parts it broke into to adapt.

As for this PR analogy, I find AlphaZero analogy more correct. One part of AlphaZero does all the heavy lifting, finding good looking moves for the current situation. Other part (Monte-Carlo tree search) selects the best moves (I think about it as conscious attention) and plays them to see where the game will go. The first part then uses the result of this to improve its own good moves heuristics.

Both parts are important, the part which generates allowances and the part which analyze, filter and selects what to really do.

Sequential nature of conscious attention make it impossible to control everything, but it doesn't mean that PR department just makes things up. It generates plausible descriptions of what you might be thinking, if you stopped and really though what to do instead of doing it without conscious control.

Those explanations aren't perfect, but PR department is just that, department. You are more than that, you can, if the need arises, reanalyze those descriptions focusing your attention and resources of all the departments on that task. You can change what you are doing and PR department will in time learn your new modus operandi to give better explanations.

I think you give too much credit to the PR department. Not all thoughts are after the fact justifications. I would say thoughts are invaluable tool to focus and coordinate all the brain subsystems, which by themselves lack vision of the whole situation and tend to produce fast and shallow automatic responses.

[hitekker]

The construct your describing is similar to and maybe roughly the same as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narrative_identity, which is supported by a "strong empirical basis", a.k.a., evidence, not ivory tower, wishful thinking.

The most radical summation that I've heard is that human beings are, for large parts of our lives, just animals pretending to be people.

A scary thought.

[Symmetry]

It's a lot more than that. For instance you can't remember things more than a second except to the extent that you become consciously aware of them.

[wahern]

A second is way too short. Sometimes someone will say something and it'll be minutes before I consciously hear what they said. Auditory (and verbal) processing centers have circular buffers that can hold things for quite awhile. Visual not so much--people only imagine they can hold a picture in their mind.

But, yeah, in terms of long-term semantic and episodic memory you can't retain it unless you were conscious of it. People who claim so-called photographic memory in fact only consistently recall details that they consciously noticed. People with hyperthymesia also only remember stuff that they were consciously aware of.

[Symmetry]

You heard that they said something though, right? Yes, you might not resolve the sound into words until after working at it but whether the brain promotes the stimulus to conscious awareness and saves it or if the activations fade should be entirely resolved within a few hundred milliseconds. The stimulus has to go superliminal to get into those circular buffers you're talking about, there aren't any buffers that big in subliminal processing.

[wahern]

You're probably right. I shouldn't draw too many conclusions from my perceived experiences. And consciousness is complex enough that I might not appreciate my awareness of the sounds, not to mention my awareness of the elapsed time.

Plus, it's hard to argue against what the research suggests about echoic memory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echoic_memory. Minutes is at least at least an order of magnitude greater than what's been shown.