I’m looking out of the window and I’m conscious of the street outside and I’m also conscious of the fact that I’m looking at the street as well as lots of other things going on outside me and inside me.
Here’s what I think is happening.
Inside my head, running on my brain, is a model, or simulation, of everything. It includes what I see on the street, everything else I sense about the outside world or the inside world of my physical body, everything I know, in the form of memories, and crucially, it includes a model of myself, as a subset of the overall model, which interacts with the model I have of the universe.
It seems to me that this theory explains, or is at least consistent with, most of what we know about human psychology; in brief:
Self-consciousness. The idea of self as a “model within a model” is intrinsic to the theory. If consciousness is an expression of the running of the model, then self-consciousness is inevitable. [Note: this is both the easiest and most difficult part of the theory, and I’ll return to it; note for the moment that it ties in with Douglas Hofstadter’s idea of recursiveness or “strange loops”].
Perception. One thing which is very clear from decades of psychological research is that sensory perception is an active rather than a passive process. In other words what I consciously experience when I look out the window is not so much sensory data streaming into my eyes, but rather a much simpler, more abstract, internally generated model, with most of the detail filtered out.
Attention. Central to the idea of active perception, and indeed to consciousness itself, is the concept of attention. As I look out at the street, I’m able to focus successively on a particular tree, or a car, or the street sign. More generally, either consciously or unconsciously, I’m continually shifting attention from one part of the model to another, driven either by external events or internal drives or aims or indeed sequences of thought. What’s mainly going on here, I believe, is a process of testing hypotheses about the outside world – a kind of generalised “corollary discharge” (of which more later).
Drives, feelings, emotions … As a biological animal I am driven by physiological impulses or drives such as the “four Fs” (fight, flight, food and reproduction!) and the model in my head has evolved to satisfy these drives and maximise my chances of survival. Feelings and emotions are simply the conscious expression of these drives. It would be exceedingly odd if the model, and particularly the model within the model corresponding to the self, did not have access in some way to the things which were driving it.
Purposive behaviour. My stomach is rumbling, I feel hungry, and I’m starting to think about lunch. In my head, I run a little simulation in which I get up, go to the kitchen, open the fridge, make myself a bacon sandwich, and so on. Model theory fits very naturally with this sort of purposive behaviour and can be generalised to most other forms of planning and human activity.
Memory and time. The model is a process which runs over time and operates on memories in a similar way that a computer simulation operates on data. There’s a lot more to be said on this subject, but note for the moment that memory and time, which are of course central to consciousness, are also intrinsic to the model theory.
Language and narrative. Language is conceived of as a particular and particularly abstract expression of the model. In a sense, language is a model, and of course, there is a close correlation between language and thought. Similarly, narrative in all its forms – storytelling, books, films – can be regarded as a form of modelling. The fact that we respond so naturally to storytelling, and so easily become absorbed in a good story, fits well with the idea of a corresponding model in our heads.
Dreaming. When we sleep, our model continues to drive itself, influenced by memories, emotions, but largely cut off from the external world. We experience this as narratives which we call dreams – in some ways the purest form of the model. Note that the sub-model we call the self is almost always present within our dreams. A Finnish researcher called Antii Revonsuo has written persuasively on this subject, but he doesn’t seem to have made the leap to consciousness as a whole.
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