| > 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. |