[whatnow37373]

It’s a single narrative that controls the body is what I mean. If one consciousness says “I am Peter” then other consciousnesses would know that and be conflicted about, if they don’t call themselves that.

What I mean is that a single narrative “wins”, not a multitude. This has to be explained somehow.

[mikelevins]

How do you know there aren't several different consciousnesses that all think they are Peter?

How do you know they aren't just constructing whatever narrative they prefer to construct from the common pool of memory, ending up with what looks like a single narrative because the parts of the narrative come from the same pool and get written back to the same pool?

Perhaps each consciousness is just a process, like other bodily processes.

Perhaps a human being is less like a machine with a master control and more like an ecosystem of cooperating processes.

Of course, the consciousnesses like to claim to be in charge, but I don't see why I should take their word for it.

[whatnow37373]

No matter how you twist it at some point two consciousnesses differentiate on some contradictory issue maybe not name, but surely they differ on some issue otherwise they wouldn’t be .. different consciousnesses. Life as a human moves and is narrated as a single story, not the story of a thousand processes.

If that were true I can call my heart a process, my liver, etc. They are in a way part of me but they do not just ex nihilo cohere into a single narrative. That is an active process and whatever does that is the only really interesting one (IMO). So I think there might be a bunch of processes, sub personalities maybe, but there remains the problem of integration. Whatever integrates is the one that really fascinates me.

Anyway, thanks for indulging me. It is hard to go into any depth in this medium. I think you have really interesting ideas. Have a nice weekend.

[mikelevins]

At some moments there has to be a singular decision taken, such as which of two possible options to take. In such a moment some particular consciousness makes the decision, if it’s a decision made by a consciousness (though consciousness takes credit for more decisions than it actually makes, I think).

But granting that point does not grant that there is a single consciousness that is always (or ever) in charge, and it does not grant that any specific consciousness is associated with any specific singular narrative.

We know, scientifically speaking, some things that call the idea of a single consciousness with a single narrative into question. We know, for example from psychology of testimony that the same person’s memory of the same events differs at different times, and that the act of remembering rewrites memories. We have reason to suspect that the brain attributes to conscious choice decisions that are made too quickly for sensory data to reach the brain (and which may therefore be made elsewhere in the nervous system, even though the brain claims to have made the choice after the fact).

And I know from personal experience that some phenomena that normally appear to be singular conscious experiences can devolve into something else under some circumstances. For example, I have experienced blindsight, in which I cannot see something but can nevertheless collect accurate information from it by pointing my eyes at it. I have also experienced being asleep and awake at the same time.

Experiences like these are hard to account for if I assume that my consciousness is singular and continuous and in charge, but not so hard to account for if I assume that it’s a useful illusion cobbled together by a network of cooperating processes that usually (but not always) work well together. For example, many people might claim that it’s nonsense to say that a person can be asleep and awake at the same time, but it’s nonsense only if asleep and awake are mutually exclusive states of a singular consciousness. If, on the other hand, they are two neurological processes that are normally coordinated so that they don’t occur at the same time (because it’s less than useful for them to do so), then it’s not nonsense to observe that under unusual circumstances that coordination might be disrupted. Similarly, if seeing something is one process and consciously experiencing seeing it is a different process—normally, but not necessarily coordinated—then blindsight is not so hard to account for.

Not to mention that it’s trivially easy to find examples of consciousness not being in charge of our behavior, although it likes to think that it is.

I suggest that the supposed singular consciousness, supposedly in charge, may be an illusion constructed by a system of mostly, but not perfectly, coordinated cooperating processes.