obstacle in the path toward further insights into psychology minds.[69] For example, we have to recognize that a theatrical stage is merely a front, which conceals what’s happening in the wings; the processes behind the scenes are concealed inside the minds of the cast. What dictates what appears in the play—that is, chooses which subjects will interest us? How does Joan actually make her decisions? How could such a model represent comparing two different, possible ‘future worlds’ without maintaining two theaters at once?
The theatrical image, by itself, does not help us answer questions like these because it delegates too much intelligence to that Joan who observes from the audience. However, we see a better way to deal with this in the Global Workspace view proposed by Bernard Baars and James Newman, in which,
“The theater becomes a workspace to which the entire audience of “experts” has potential access … Awareness, at any moment, corresponds to the pattern of activity produced by the then most active coalition of experts, or modular processors. … At any one moment, some may be dozing in their seats, others busy on stage … [but] each can potentially contribute to the direction the play takes. … Each expert has a “vote”, and by forming coalitions with other experts can contribute to deciding which inputs receive immediate attention and which are “sent back to committee”. Most of the work of this deliberative body is done outside the workspace (i.e., non-consciously). Only matters of central import gain access to center stage.”[70]
Those two final sentences warn us to not attribute too much to some compact self or ‘homunculus’—a miniature person inside the mind—who actually does all the hard mental work; instead we have to distribute the work. For as Daniel Dennett has said,
“Homunculi are bogeymen only if they duplicate entire the talents they are rung in to explain. If one can get a team or committee of relatively ignorant, narrow-minded, blind homunculi to produce the intelligent behaviour of the whole, this is progress.”
— in Brainstorms 1978, p. 123. All the ideas in this book agree with this. However, will raise serious questions about the extent to which our minds depend on a centralized workspace or bulletin board. We’ll conclude that the idea of a ‘cognitive marketplace’ is a good way to start to think about thinking, but that when we look more closely we’ll see the need for a great deal more architectural structure.
??????????????????? §4-7. The Serial Stream of Consciousness
The truth is, that no mind is much employed upon the present: recollection and anticipation fill up almost all our moments. Our passions are joy and grief, love and hatred, hope and fear; even love and hatred respect the past, for the cause must have been before the effect...
—Samuel Johnson The world of subjective experience seems perfectly continuous. We feel that we’re living here and now, moving steadily into the future. Yet whenever we use the present tense, we’re under a misconception, as we noted in §4-2: We can know about things that we’ve recently done, but have no way to know what we’re doing ‘right now.’
Citizen: Ridiculous. Of course I know what I’m doing right now—and thinking now, and feeling now. How do your theories explain why I sense a continuous stream of consciousness?
While the stories that we tell ourselves may seem to run in ‘real time,’ what actually happens must be more complex. To construct them, some resources must zigzag through memories; they sometimes look back to old goals and regrets, to assess our progress on previous plans.
Dennett and Kinsbourne: “[Remembered events] are distributed in both space and time in the brain. These events do have temporal properties, but those properties do not determine subjective order, because there is no single, definitive ‘stream of consciousness,’ only a parallel stream of conflicting and continuously revised contents. The temporal order of subjective events is a product of the brain’s interpretational processes, not a direct reflection of events making up those processes.”[71]
Also, it seems safe to assume that different parts of your mind proceed at substantially different speeds, and with varied delays.[72] So if you try to recount your recent thoughts a serial storylike tale about, your narrative machinery will somehow have to pick and choose, in retrospect, from various parts of those multiple streams. Furthermore, some of those processes look ahead in time, to expect or to anticipate events that are depicted by the ‘predicting machines’ that we’ll describe in §5-9. This means that the ‘contents of your consciousness’ are involved not only with ideas about the past but about your possible futures.
So the one thing you cannot be conscious of is what your mind is doing ‘right now’—because each brain- resource can know at best only what some others were doing some moments ago.
Citizen: I agree that much of what we think must be based on records of prior events. But I still feel there’s something more than that, which makes which makes it so hard for use to describe our minds.
HAL-2023: Perhaps such things seem mysterious because your human short-term memories are so small that, when you try to review your recent thoughts, you are forced to replace the data you find by records of what you are doing right now. So you are constantly erasing the data you need for what you were trying to explain.
Citizen: I think I understand what you mean, because I sometimes get two good ideas at once—but, whichever one I write down first, the other leaves only a very faint trace. I presume that this must happen because I just don’t have enough room to store both of them. But wouldn’t that also apply to machines?
HAL: No; that does not apply to apply to me because my designers equipped me with a way to store snapshots of my entire state in special “backtrace” memory banks. Later, if anything goes wrong, then I can see just what my programs have done—so that I can then proceed to debug myself.
Citizen: Is that what makes you so intelligent?
HAL: Only incidentally. Although those records could make me more “self-aware” than any person ever could be, they don’t contribute much to my quality, because I only use them in emergencies. Interpreting them is so tedious that it makes my mind run sluggishly, so I only stop to dwell on them when I sense that I have not been thinking well. I often hear people say things like, “I am trying to get in touch with myself.” However, take my word for it; they would not improve much by doing that.
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