Conscious Uncoupling
It sure seems like we’re conscious, but the leading experts can’t agree on what consciousness is or how it works. Some argue that if the criteria of human consciousness apply generally, then thermostats are conscious. Others even take the view that consciousness doesn’t exist at all (the only remaining problem, therefore, being the question of why it very much feels like it does).
In 1975, Julian Jaynes (in The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind) promoted the revolutionary idea that consciousness is not a personal interior awareness which we use to make decisions and judgments, as it seems to be. Rather, it’s a modeling system for the behavior and actions of others: an essential part of the brain machinery of a social species.
Jaynes argues that we spent our entire lives on autopilot up to around 2000 BC. It might seem a stretch, but think of your last long drive. It’s a very common experience to drive through a town along the route and have no memory of it, even a few minutes afterwards. This implies that we can conduct very complicated operations and make judgement calls while on autopilot. Jaynes is implying that we never left this mode until very recently in human history.
Although Jaynes admits that we have no access to the information needed to prove this theory, recent research could support his thesis, as summarized by Chris Paley in 2014’s Unthink. Paley argues that to function socially we need a model of ourselves that roughly corresponds to how others are modeling us. The “others” are doing the same thing, of course, creating a massive social feedback loop of consciousness, self-awareness and the illusion of the self.
If all of this sounds insane and far-fetched, that’s a fair observation. I would simply point out that sometimes the truth is insane and far-fetched.
Rather having a coherent “personality”, we are constantly updating what we think of as our inner selves in response to how others react to it.
Or, as Canadian poet Thomas Cooley put it more confusingly in 1992: “I am not who you think I am; I am not who I think I am; I am who I think you think I am.”
