Also, it seems safe to assume that different parts of your mind proceed at substantially different speeds, and with varied delays.[72] So if you try to recount your recent thoughts a serial storylike tale about, your narrative machinery will somehow have to pick and choose, in retrospect, from various parts of those multiple streams. Furthermore, some of those processes look ahead in time, to expect or to anticipate events that are depicted by the ‘predicting machines’ that we’ll describe in §5-9. This means that the ‘contents of your consciousness’ are involved not only with ideas about the past but about your possible futures.
So the one thing you cannot be conscious of is what your mind is doing ‘right now’—because each brain-resource can know at best only what some others were doing some moments ago.
Citizen: I agree that much of what we think must be based on records of prior events. But I still feel there’s something more than that, which makes which makes it so hard for use to describe our minds.
HAL-2023: Perhaps such things seem mysterious because your human short-term memories are so small that, when you try to review your recent thoughts, you are forced to replace the data you find by records of what you are doing right now. So you are constantly erasing the data you need for what you were trying to explain.
Citizen: I think I understand what you mean, because I sometimes get two good ideas at once—but, whichever one I write down first, the other leaves only a very faint trace. I presume that this must happen because I just don’t have enough room to store both of them. But wouldn’t that also apply to machines?
HAL: No; that does not apply to apply to me because my designers equipped me with a way to store snapshots of my entire state in special “backtrace” memory banks. Later, if anything goes wrong, then I can see just what my programs have done—so that I can then proceed to debug myself.
Citizen: Is that what makes you so intelligent?
HAL: Only incidentally. Although those records could make me more “self-aware” than any person ever could be, they don’t contribute much to my quality, because I only use them in emergencies. Interpreting them is so tedious that it makes my mind run sluggishly, so I only stop to dwell on them when I sense that I have not been thinking well. I often hear people say things like, “I am trying to get in touch with myself.” However, take my word for it; they would not improve much by doing that.
§4-8. The Mystery of ‘Experience’
Many thinkers have maintained that even after we learn all about how our brain-functions work, one basic question may always remain: “Why do we experience” things?” Here is one philosopher who has argued explaining ‘subjective experience’ could be the hardest problem of psychology—and possibly one that no one will ever solve.
David Chalmers: “Why is it that when our cognitive systems engage in visual and auditory information-processing, we have visual or auditory experience: the quality of deep blue, the sensation of middle C? How can we explain why there is something it is like to entertain a mental image, or to experience an emotion? … Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all? ... The emergence of experience goes beyond what can be derived from physical theory.”[73]
It appears to me that Chalmers assumes that experiencing is quite plain and direct—and therefore deserves some sort of simple, compact explanation. However, once we recognize that each of our everyday psychology words (like experience, feeling, and consciousness) refers to a suitcase of different phenomena, then we should no longer expect to find and single way to explain all the contents of that suitcase-word. Instead, we first will need to make theories about each of those different phenomena. Then we may be able to see that some subsets of them share some useful similarities. But until we have made the right kinds of dissections, it would be rash to conclude that what they describe cannot be ‘derived’ from other ideas. [See §§Emergence.]
Physicist: Perhaps brains exploit some unknown laws that cannot be built into machinery. For example, we don’t really know how gravity works—so consciousness might be an aspect of that.[74]
This too assumes what it’s trying to prove—that there must be a single source or cause for all the marvels of ‘consciousness’. But as we saw in §4-2, consciousness has more meanings than can be explained in any single or uniform way.
Essentialist: What about the basic fact that consciousness makes me aware of myself? It tells me what I am thinking about, and this is how I know I exist. Computers compute without any such sense, but whenever a person feels or thinks, this come with that sense of ‘experience’—and nothing else is more basic than this.
Chapter §9 will argue that it is a mistake to suppose that you are ‘aware of yourself’—except in a very coarse everyday sense. Instead, you are constantly switching among different ‘self-models’ that you have composed—and each of these is based on different, incomplete set of incomplete evidence. “Experience” may seem quite clear and direct—but frequently it’s just plain incorrect, because each of your various views of yourself may be partly based on oversights, or other varieties of mistakes.
Whenever you look at somebody else, you can see their appearance, but not what’s inside it. It’s the same when you look at yourself in a mirror; you only see what lies outside of your skin. Now, in the popular view of consciousness, you also possess some magical trick with which you can look at yourself from inside, and thus see directly into your own mind. But when you reflect on this more carefully you’ll see that your ‘privileged access’ to your own thoughts may sometimes be less accurate than are the ‘insights’ of your intimate friends. (See §9-X.)
Citizen: That claim is so ridiculous that it makes me annoyed with what you said—and I know this in some special way that directly from inside myself, to tell me exactly what I think.
Your friends, too, can see that you are disturbed—and your consciousness fails to tell you details about why those words made you feel annoyed, or to shake your head that particular way, what caused you to use those particular words to say annoyed instead of disturbed? True, we can’t see much of a person’s thoughts by observing their actions from outside—but even when we ‘watch from inside,’ it is hard to be sure that we really see more, in view of how often such ‘insights’ are wrong. So, if we take ‘consciousness’ to mean ‘aware of our internal processes’—it doesn’t live up to its reputation.
“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”