I suppose this thought was the genesis of this subreddit, but this question has really started coming into focus over the last few days for me. We have these extremely top level concepts and assumptions, but for most people understanding how they’ve formed any particular behavior beyond the most top level experience is a complete mystery.
Why is green my favorite color? Did I actively choose green? Why aren’t other colors my favorite color? Why do I even have a favorite color? Is it really my favorite color? Is my favorite color conditional? Why do those conditions change my favorite color? Why aren’t other colors my favorite color in those conditions?
We stumble through our lives only experiencing the already processed output of our brain without the benefit of understanding the underlying mechanics, and it’s fine… until it’s not. Even for people in states where it’s not okay, the ability examine the internal components with any sort of granularity seems impossible. Is it even possible for brains to examine internal processing components without external context? Is this a fixed property of how brains process or can it be modified?
I’m finding it impossible to even comprehend how to contextualize thoughts without some type of experiential construct to bind it to. If this is consistent for most humans (seems like it), it solves a lot of philosophical questions. Consciousness is the passenger to our processing, and as long as we are trapped understanding our processing at the level of consciousness we are also passengers to the processing. I suppose some of us have very cooperative drivers who treat consciousness as a navigator, some that require a lot of yelling and cajoling, and some processing that requires us to grab the steering wheel (usually to terrible effect). Why the differences? Is this something we can change or is it a fixed property of the processing?
I suppose it’s comforting to assume our experience drives our processing, rather than us being beholden to a driver that we have absolutely no insight into.
Edit: I guess this may be obvious to some, but we experience the world in literally the exact opposite order with which the processing occurs, and we only have access to the very top level of that processing. We are trying to control our brains by only understanding the very tip of the tip of the iceberg, and are almost completely ignorant of everything below that. Bananas.
Lol, in the inevitable fall back to computer science analogies, we understand and write our experience in javascript only, what does C or even assembly look like for brains? Can we figure this out by understanding the compiler better?
Edit 2: Thinking along the lines of this analogy more, it seems plausible that we experience consciousness the way we do for exactly the same reason interpreted languages exist, they allow abstraction from a pretty wild level of underlying hardware configurations to create consistent programs across all of them (this enables cooperation). How complex would our training have to be to create bespoke code bases for each individual instead of relying on the interpreter?
Oh shit, this might be something we can actually do.
Edit 3: I’m totally not getting anything done because I’m so distracted by thinking about what kind of processing performance a few generations of this type of education would enable. Like would it just be the gap between great apes and humans or something even more profound? Would this even be a good thing? I’m imagining a species several orders of magnitude more efficient than humans and the thought is a little terrifying considering what we’ve done over the last few centuries with the efficiency gains due to education reforms. I don’t see how making humans “smarter” wouldn’t allow them to make fantastically dumb decisions even faster. Argh.