Our minds did not evolve to serve as instruments for observing themselves, but for solving such practical problems as nutrition, defense, and reproduction.
§4-5. Self-Models and Self-Consciousness
In judging the development of self-consciousness, we must guard against accepting any single symptoms, such as the child’s discrimination of the parts of his body from objects of his environment, his use of the word “I,” or even the recognition of his own image in the mirror. … The use of the personal pronoun is due to the child’s imitation of the examples of those about him. This imitation comes at very different times in the cases of different children, even when their intellectual development in other respects is the same.
In §4-2 we suggested that Joan ‘made and used models of herself’—but we did not explain what we meant by a model. We use that word in quite a few ways, as in “Charles is a model administrator,” which means that he is an example worthy to imitate—or in, “I’m building a model airplane,” which means something built on a scale smaller than that of the original. But here we’re using ‘model of X’ to mean a simplified mental representation that can help us to answer some questions about some other, more complex thing X.
Thus, when we say that ‘Joan has a mental model of Charles’, we mean that Joan possesses some mental resource that helps her answer some questions about Charles.[65] I emphasize the word some because each of Joan’s models will only work well on some kinds of questions—and might give wrong answers to most other questions. Clearly the quality of Joan’s thought will depend both on how good her models are, but on how good are her ways to choose which model to use in each situation.
Some of Joan’s models will have practical uses for predicting how physical actions will make things change in the outer world. She will also have models for predicting how mental acts will make changes in her mental state. In Chapter §9 we’ll talk about some models that she can use to describe herself—that is, to answer some questions about her own abilities and dispositions; these could some descriptions of
Her various goals and ambitions.
Her professional and political views.
Her ideas about her competences,
Her ideas about her social roles.
Her various moral and ethical views.
Her beliefs about of what sort of thing she is.
For example, she could try to use some of these to guess whether she can rely on herself to actually carry out a certain plan. Furthermore, this could explain some of her ideas about consciousness. To illustrate this, I’ll use an example proposed by the philosopher Drew McDermott.[66]
Joan is in a certain room. She has a mental model of some of the contents in that room. One of those objects is Joan herself
Most of those objects will have sub-models themselves, for example to describe their structures and functions. Joan’s model for that object “Joan” will be a structure that she calls “Myself,” and which includes at least two parts—one called Body and one called Mind.
By using the various parts of this model, Joan could say ‘Yes’ if you asked her, “Do you have a mind?” But if you asked her, “Where is your mind?” this model would not help her to say, as some people would, “My mind is inside my head (or my brain).” However, Joan could offer such a reply if Myself included a part-of link from Mind to Head, or a caused-by link from Mind to another part of the body called Brain.
More generally, our answers to questions about ourselves will depend on what is in our models of ourselves. I used models instead of model because, as we’ll see in §9, one may need different models for different purposes. So there may be many answers to the same questions, depending on what one wants to achieve—and those answers need not always agree.
Drew McDermott: Few of us even believe that we have such models, much less know that we have one. The key idea is not that the system has a model of itself, but that it has a model of itself as conscious.”
What if we were to ask of Joan, “Were you conscious of what you just did, and why?”
However, those descriptions don’t have to be correct, but they are not likely to persist if they never do anything useful for us.)
If Joan has good models of how she makes choices, then she may feel that she has some ‘control’ over these—and then perhaps use the name ‘conscious decisions’ for them. As for activities for which she has no good models, she may categorize these as beyond her control and call them ‘unconscious’ or ‘unintentional’. Or alternatively, she may take the view that she’s still in control, and makes some decisions by using ‘free will’ — which translates, despite what she might actually say, into, “I have no good theory of what made me do that.”
So, when Joan says, “I made a conscious decision”, that need not mean that some magical thing has happened; she attributes her thoughts to various parts of her most useful models.
§4-6. The Cartesian Theater
“We can see that the mind is at every stage a theater of simultaneous possibilities. Consciousness consists in the comparison of these with each other, the selection of some, and the suppression of others, of the rest, by the reinforcing and inhibiting agency of attention. The highest and most celebrated mental products are filtered from the data chosen by the faculty below that…in turn sifted from a still larger amount of simpler material, and so on.”
We sometimes think of the work of the mind as like a drama performed on a theater’s stage. Thus Joan may sometimes imagine herself as watching from a front row seat while the ‘things on her mind’ act out the play. One of the characters is that pain in her knee (§3-5), which has just moved to center stage. Soon, Joan hears a voice in her mind that says, “I’ll have to do something about this pain. It keeps me from getting anything done.”
Now, as soon as Joan starts to think that way—about how she feels, and about what she might do—then Joan herself takes a place on that stage. But in order to hear what she says to herself, she must also remain in the audience. So now we have two copies of Joan—the actor, and her audience!
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This idea is explained in more detail at http://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/papers/MatterMindModels.html.