Mental Model

• A stimulus is received. This can come from:
  • Outside, from the senses
  • Inside, as a bodily or emotional sensation
  • The mind itself, as a thought is held in attention and seeks associations
• The stimulus triggers a massive, apparently instantaneous, parallel search of the cortex to identify the stimulus and prepare an appropriate response:
  • This is the Bayesian predictive engine, which seeks to minimize surprise.
  • It returns - let's call them, after Jung, "symbols", that the brain determines are the most appropriate response, based on habit, on what has worked before
  • We can think of the webs of information stored in the cortex as the unconscious. It is like a sea where we are fishing, our stimulus is the bait, and the symbols emerging are like fish attracted to the bait
  • The surface of the sea is the partition between the unconscious and consciousness - and the specific point where the fish-symbols appear is like a spotlight of attention or awareness.
  • Often one symbol is dominant - a word, a feeling, an image, and provides just the right response needed. Think of a crossword clue where the answer just appears to you. Other times multiple symbols may have similar weights and require deliberation
• The winning symbol triggers a reaction:
  • You may respond in a conversation, put one foot in front of the other, grab a snack, move onto the next word in your novel, move your racquet to meet an incoming tennis ball
  • The system is very efficient. We are reacting dozens/hundreds/thousands (depending at which level of granularity we are looking?) of times every minute, often (mainly?) with very little deliberation.
  • But reflection is presumably a more recent acquisition. My cat reacts to me stroking her either with a purr or with a swipe of her claws and in neither case do I think she is deliberating. But I can react to the approach of a hand...

The difference between the cat and me is an ability to delay reaction, to direct attention onto the symbols returned by the unconscious. Rather than react immediately, I can hold the returned symbols in attention, in consciousness, and through this attention, I can summon other symbols, symbols that are associated with those in my attention. The result of this directed attention may be a more considered reaction. Or no reaction at all, as I reflect on what I am experiencing.

This ability, to pause, to hold stimuli in the mind's eye, allows us to construct much more elaborate theories about what is happening around us, stimulating us, but it is also a kind of curse, taking us out of the immediacy of the moment, separating the stimulus from our reaction and allowing it to pass through any number of labyrinthine symbolic paths.

It is this mechanism, this flickering spotlight, this shallow pool of reflection, that is, to my mind, consciousness, that allows us to reflect, to "know" things, and to have constructed our culture.

Spoken Language

These associations between symbols existed before speech, before language, but spoken language must be involved in the process of slowing down perception, of allowing reflection. Language allows us to assert connections, to compare and contrast symbols, to propose similarity or difference.

Spoken language allows us to speak to ourselves - an inner monologue that is not necessarily as cut and dried as interpersonal language. But it also allows us to speak to others, to share attention and to share concepts. By pointing to direct attention and be making a sound, we can both associate the sound to the object being pointed out and share that association with our interlocutors. Language separates the things of the world out, makes them identifiable. And it shares these separations, these identities with others. Our shared culture originates from this basic form of sharing.

Written Language

While spoken language comes naturally to infants who are exposed to speakers, written language is not a simple acquisition. The child has to learn that the shapes of the letters when arranged in certain patterns, are a visual representation of the sound that evokes the object.

Reading is a fundamentally weird, modern acquisition of humans. It is not essential for an infant to be able to insert themselves into our shared culture.

The Flickering Pool

I've built a [something] empire

Out of some crazy garbage

Called the blood of the exploited working class

Now they've overcome their shyness

Now they're calling me "Your Highness"

And the world screams "Kiss me, son of God"

(They Might Be Giants: "Kiss Me, Son of God")

It's 5am, though I don't know that yet. I've drifted awake and was aware of thinking about a knotty work issue. I don't know if I feel asleep again, but then suddenly, I'm thinking about this song, which I first heard 30+ years ago. I start to begin more conscious. My wife gets out of bed to go to the bathroom and I look at my watch. Now I'm awake and thinking:

• Why did that song suddenly pop into my dozing head? I may have heard it one of twice in the last 20 years, and not in the last few months
• How do I remember all these words? I'm almost certain of most of them, though there's a hole in the first line. I don't have a great memory in general, but somehow this song started playing and I was able (was compelled) to continue on over several lines. And it's not just the words, but also the singing voices and musical accompaniment. This is a rich, robust memory that has been inside me for decades
• What is this weird thinking space - I suppose that it is consciousness or attention, but it seems to flicker in and out of focus, particularly at these moments where I am on the edge of sleep but also during the day.
• As I start to try to examine it, it changes. Now, this flickering space is no longer filled with the work problem or the song lyric, but rather with this question of consciousness.

Then, my wife comes back to bed and I lie still and try not to get too engaged with these thoughts. I want to get back to sleep and, after some period of time, I manage to do so. I'm woken again by my alarm at 7.30am, but when I shut it off I drift off again and wake gradually and finally just before 9am.

I'm back awake and conscious and back to being me in the world of my family and my job. But what does that mean? Isn't this sense of consciousness, of identity, of belonging, dependent on that flickering pool inside my head? And isn't that pool relatively small and doesn't it tend to get filled with, well, songs from 30 years ago? And don't get me started on dreams. Sure, sometimes they're based around things that have happened recently, sometimes things from the middle or distant past, but sometimes they seem to be cut from whole cloth.

But ultimately, I'm less interested in questions of identity, than in knowing how we know things, how we learn, how we reason and make decisions. When at university, studying English and American literature and critical theory, I read a lot of Freud and Heidegger and Derrida and Foucault and Nietzsche. I wrote my master's thesis on Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow and RD Laing's concept of the schizoid. I never finished my PhD and I've been away from academia for a long time now. I went through a decade and a half when my son's were small doing little reading in this area and little reading full stop, but in the last few years, after re-reading Daniel Dennett's Consciousness Explained, I've been back reading and reading and reading.