Myth Maker
By Jessica Lake
I think I finally understand why consciousness feels like the center of thought.
Not that it is. Wink.
For years I followed the herd. Consciousness was the commander-in-chief.
It examined evidence, considered alternatives, and chose among them. Everything else simply supplied information.
I no longer think that is the best explanation.
Why?
Because I learned to rely on my unconscious. I would submit a batch-jobs to it.
Wait.
And bing!
The answers would come.
That suggested to me something very different was happening under the covers.
So what was conscious’ game?
I think consciousness may solve a completely different problem.
Language is serial.
Cognition parallel.
Consciousness is the translation between them.
If my previous insights are correct, much of cognition arises from massively parallel semantic processes. Thousands of semantic rules partially match the current situation. They activate simultaneously. They compete. One reaches threshold first. Competing responses are inhibited.
That leaves me with a problem.
I just laid off the little narrative voice in my head.
Then someone asks,
"Jessica, I just don't get it."
There is no honest way to answer by describing the computation.
I answer,
Easy.
Follow me.
Several thousand semantic rules partially matched the incoming event. Their activation depended upon overlap, intensity, duration, reinforcement history, and inhibitory competition. Eventually one reached threshold first.
Voilà.
That did not go so well.
They're getting hot under the collar.
I need something more persuasive.
Language plods along one word after another.
Consciousness must therefore translate a massively parallel computation into a serial narrative.
Why?
I could not think of any other way the human nervous system could communicate what happened in anything close to real time.
Ergo, cognition is the province of the unconscious.
The narrative is not pure fabrication.
It is a narrative.
It compresses an enormously complex computation into a form another human being can understand.
It maps an inexpressible computation onto an expressible thought.
The remarkable part is that I probably believe the narrative myself.
Not because I am deceiving myself.
Because the narrative is the only representation available to consciousness.
The computation has already happened.
Consciousness receives the result.
Its task is to explain it to a listener.
That also changes how I think about reasoning.
When I am penning a mathematical proof, developing a military strategy, or solving a difficult engineering problem, I often have the strange feeling that I already know the answer.
Perhaps I have gotten it backwards.
Perhaps I am not solving the problem while I am writing.
Perhaps I am persuading myself that it is sound, so that I can persuade others.
The underlying solution had already emerged from a massively parallel semantic computation.
Writing forces me to convert that computation into a linear chain of ideas another human being can follow.
That is why the writing is often difficult even when the solution feels obvious.
I am not discovering the solution.
I am discovering how to explain it.
This may also explain why experts rely so heavily on procedures.
In engineering, medicine, software, business, martial arts, and the military, experience becomes compressed into reusable procedures.
When a familiar pattern appears, the appropriate procedure is activated.
The conscious narrative comes later.
It tells the story.
Perhaps that is what consciousness has been doing all along.
Not making decisions.
Making them communicable.
The decision emerges in parallel.
The explanation emerges in series.
We mistake the explanation for the decision because it is the only part we can hear.
The narrative is not a lie.
It is a myth in the oldest sense of the word.
A coherent story that explains what cannot be communicated directly.
Perhaps consciousness is not the executive.
Perhaps it is the myth maker.