I think, therefore I think I am: why we aren’t really conscious.

Who can say what it is like to be a conscious being? We certainly have the impression of our first-person experience being ‘true’, but as soon as one tries to define or understand what it might mean, the ‘what it is actually like to be a self-aware perspective-having human’ aspect feels like it’s missing.

It seems on first glance that one’s neurology and psychology are insufficient to account for the first person phenomenological experience of being conscious, but I would like to strongly suggest that this may only seem to be true; and as we well know, things are not always as they seem — even at this most fundamental level.

This triangle is an illusion: it’s actually just coloured pixels

I use language, memories, and ideas to construct my identity — who I am. When it comes to constructing this identity in the abstract sense of being a father, an atheist, a lover of curries and cats (though importantly not together in my bowl), and so on, we can all hopefully agree that there are deterministic, rational reasons for how and why this concept of myself might come to be.

It’s only when we apply the temporal lens of ‘now’ — this present-moment first-person experience — that we feel the need to invoke something new, because then our experience has a subject, the ‘I’ that Descartes thought indivisible because he was the thinker thinking that to be true.

However, what is much more likely to be true than some tenuous and spooky invocation of a new element outside of physical reality to account for this experience, as some would have us consider, is simply that we are just giving ourselves the impression of being conscious. That is to say, we aren’t really conscious in the way that we think we are. I think, therefore I merely think I am.

Self-awareness about self-awareness: confusing and upsetting.

In the same way that you can look at a cloud and see the shape of an animal, or classify an ice-cream as a tasty treat with all its semiotic and sensory cues and associations, or countless other ways our brains process and synthesise information into a sense-making singular impression, so too our experience of a first-person perspective itself. We construct a perspective to be seeing the world from in order to help us understand things better. We quite simply hallucinate this singular impression of being a point of consciousness in time.

And the ‘in time’ part is important too, because when, exactly, does this point of consciousness that we experience exist? There is a temporal gap between when the sense data enters our eyes or ears and when it arrives in our brains, then another more fuzzy gap in the spaces between where and how our brains process those data into something we can understand. Supposedly, then, at the end of that process there’s a ‘me’ that views these synthesised elements in a coherent singular perspective which is where the really real me exists to be doing the seeing.

But the truth is that the ‘me’ that is looking at and interpreting this information is similarly a synthesis of many different things: my language, my memories and their meanings, my millions of mental models and their interrelations, etc. I am, then, a synthesis interpreting a synthesis.

And this is why materialistic arguments seem to fall short to some people, I think, because the relational dynamic isn’t properly exposed. It’s in the interrelationship between two complex and independent mental processes happening inside the same skull that we manifest a subjective experience. There is the emergent property of all of my aspects of identity, from my memories to my mental models to my ideas of who I am in relation to the world, which I construct as an ever-present continuity of myself as a perspective-having agent; and then there’s the similarly singular impression my brain has synthesised of my current sensory and cognitive experience, whether that’s something I’m touching, looking at, listening to, etc, as well as whatever internal reflective thoughts and emotional impressions I’m having as a compound combination of real-time experiences.

So I’m then constructing both a self to be doing the seeing, and a composite thing to be seen, at the same time. And the relational experience of those phenomena makes me feel like I have a first person perspective, because there’s a difference between them. But importantly they’re both merely constructions in my mind. Illusions that serve a purpose, in a simultaneous duality of distinct interactive perceptions.

Side note: when we are in a meditative state, we close this gap and it creates a sense of ‘oneness’ between the thinker and that which the thinker thinks.

The complexity and depth of our lived experience also makes us feel like there’s something other than just a physical deterministic reality constituting who we are. The operative word there is ‘feel’, and there’s a big clue in that too, because our minds have been honed by evolutionary processes to make us experience things, to feel things, which simply aren’t real. Our experience of hunger or sexual desire is, essentially, a trick that our brains play on us to make us do things that confer survival benefits.

Pictured: delicious lies.

As soon as our desire has been satisfied, this seemingly real experiential reality — the experience of being hungry or horny — simply goes away like it never existed, just like our consciousness itself goes away when we sleep or die.

When you think about it, the idea of taking a bit of dead animal, putting it in an orifice in your face, crushing it and masticating it with your mouth bones and spit, and then depositing it into a pit of acid for decomposition via an elongated flesh tube, doesn’t actually sound all that appetising. Similarly sexual rutting is, on its face, absurd — and absurd everywhere else for that matter. And yet our brains can convince us that it’s a very beautiful, poetic, loving thing to do. We can certainly have the experience of it being those things too, but the point is that there is a marked difference and dissonance between what is actually going on, and what our lived perceptual experience is.

Excuse me miss, would you like to get to know each other and then, perhaps, rub our cloacae together in order to procreate?

In the same way, our brains trick us into thinking that we’re a singular, coherent consciousness seeing the world from a first-person perspective, when the truth is that this experience of consciousness is a cobbled-together perceptual impression comprising the relationship between our abstract construction of a first-person self, and the real-time synthesis of our sense data and cognitive state.

And because it is a state of emergent synthesis, borne of manifold underlying aspects, there are numerous ways through which we can see how our consciousness is not a binary state of either ‘lights on’ or ‘lights off’, but rather a forged construction that appears in different resolutions of coherence on a continuum of first-person self-awareness:

• We drift in and out of consciousness when we wake or go to sleep
• As an infant the fidelity of our experience as having a first-person perspective scales with the development and maturity of our sense of self, the complexity of our language, and the referential depth of our memories. The older we get the more we have a sense of our self as a perspective-having individual.
• When we are delirious from illness or being knocked in the head our consciousness is confused and partial — we don’t have all the pieces we need to render the construction properly
• When we are threatened and in fight-or-flight mode, our construction of a subjective reflective self takes a noticeable back seat to our visceral animalistic instincts and reactions i.e. we ‘become’ more the sense-data perceptual construction while the first-person cognitive subjective reflective construction is more recessed. That is, we feel more directly connected to our environment in real time, rather than an onlooker interacting with it from a removed point of view. The reflective perspective is a relatively recent evolutionary adaptation, and our more primal modes of perception will wrest control when needed.

But why would our brains trick us with an illusion of first-person consciousness in the first place? It’s clear why we evolved the feeling of hunger or horniness to compel us to do things that ensure the replication of our genetic material, but how might first-person consciousness have helped us from an evolutionary perspective?

Well, as with all evolutionary psychology we ought to be deeply skeptical of conveniently neat explanations, because it’s usually far more complex and nuanced than narrative explanations allow for; and we’re far too susceptible to project the prejudices of our current understanding of the world into a distant historical reality. However, while the particulars might be a matter of conjecture, the presumption that there exists a rational evolutionary account for it ought to be taken as a given.

Yeah, and some of them actually think they’re not animals.

So with that caveat out of the way, let’s consider a few ways that constructing the experience of a reflective first-person point of view and continuity of consciousness and identity (in contrast to a more base in-the-moment perceptual animal reactions) might have been useful for our survival:

• Being able to conceive of ourselves as a self, independent of the sensory moment in which we existed, may have been conducive to imagining ourselves in future situations, therefore allowing us to plan with foresight
• As social creatures being able to imagine others’ points of view may have allowed us to foster more empathy and cooperation, and perhaps this process of constructing perspectives was something we became better at and applied unto our own minds
• The very act of deliberative reflection seems to require a meta-perspective from which to see and reflect from. That is to say that for us to consider and judge things, we need to sit above them, which necessitates a cognitive perspective separated from our sensory perspective. The more we developed the ability to remove ourselves cognitively from our immediate perceptions, the better we might have been able to understand, and therefore survive.
• Having a reflective identity may have helped us to promulgate moral standards and aspirations: If I’m a mere animal and I feel angry in this moment I will hit others, but if I’m attempting to be a consistent identity then I must be true to my (constructed) idea of myself as a member of the tribe with all its rules and norms, and not hit even though I’m angry.
• And so on.

Side note: The term ‘first-person consciousness’ or ‘first-person perspective’ can be misleading, because in actuality our more primal perceptions are more first-person, while our reflective self-aware consciousness is closer to a third-person perspective in which we look upon ourselves looking.

It is somewhat unnerving to consider the illusory and constructed nature of our own consciousness, and we are likely motivated to want to see it as something with properties beyond mere deterministic mechanisms, but if we are to be honest and rational then we must stare into the recursive abyss of our constructed selves.

Speaking of which, it is elucidating to consider the recursive perspective of self-awareness as an exposition of the constructed nature of first-person consciousness: think about yourself thinking this thought, then think about yourself thinking about yourself thinking this thought. In the second instance your perspective rose one level above your previous ‘real’ conscious experience. That is to say that you constructed another layer of conscious first-person self-aware consciousness above the first. So where did the first one go? It was never really there in the first place, it was just an idea you created, an impression, a meta-mental-model of a perspective-having entity.

We’re not really conscious in the same way that we don’t really have free will, we just have a very real experience of it; and similarly it doesn’t really change anything. We still ought to proceed as if we have libertarian free will, just as we ought to continue to live our lives as if our consciousness had some kind of magical property outside of deterministic physical reality. It doesn’t, but it doesn’t matter.

Jesse Richardson is the founder of www.schoolofthought.org
— a non profit dedicated to spreading critical thinking.

Projects:
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jesserichardson.com.au : Portfolio, biography and keynote speaking