My pet theory about human consciousness is that is that consciousness is simply recursive theory of mind. Theory of mind [1] is our ability to simulate and reason about the mental states of others. It's how we predict what people are thinking and how they will react to our actions, which is critical for choosing how to act in a social environment.
But when you're thinking about what's in someone's head, one of the things might be them thinking about you. So now you're imagining your own mind from the perspective of another mind. I believe that's entirely what our sense of consciousness is. It's our social reasoning applied to ourselves.
If my pet theory is correct, it implies that the level of consciousness of any species would directly correlate to how social the species is. Solitary animals with little need for theory of mind would have no self awareness in the way that we experience it. They'd live in a zen-like perpetual auto-pilot where they do but couldn't explain why they do what they do... because they will never explain it to anyone anyway.
Theory of mind is interesting but one wouldn't want to hinge consciousness upon it.
That direction would likely contain weird outcomes if the science progressed, something like "Dogs are barely-conscious due to their pack structure, they have a couple levels of recursive theory of mind but they can't sustain it as deep as we can. But cats didn't have that pack structure, they're not conscious at all." Or, "this person has such severe autism that he cannot fundamentally understand others' minds or what others interpret his mind to be, so we've downgraded his classification to unconscious. He'll talk your ear off about the various cars produced in a golden age between 1972 and 1984, but because he doesn't really know what it means for you to be listening we regard it as sleep-talking."
It also just kind of doesn't sound right. "What happens when we go to sleep? Well, we stop thinking about what others think we think, and we simply accept what they think about us." That doesn't sound like any sleep I experience -- it might describe some of my dreams, but of course dreams are anomalous conscious experiences that happen during sleep so that also misses the mark.
"Consciousness" is one of those loaded words that means a few different things in different contexts. When I say consciousness is about recursive theory of mind, I'm not trying to say that when you're asleep you're unable to do social reasoning. That's a different use of the same word.
I mean "conscious" in the sense of self-awareness or sentience.
I'm also not ascribing any moral or cognitive superiority or inferiority to different levels of it. The fact that a cat might be less self-aware of its suffering because it think about how it would explain its pain to other cats does mean imply that I'm saying it should be OK to torture cats.
I'm just interested in what is going in human brains when we "feel self-aware". What are we doing when we're thinking about what we're doing? Where does that sense of perceptual distance come from when we are aware of ourselves? And my pet theory is that the distance comes from imagining how we look through others' eyes and developed from our highly advanced social reasoning.
Sounds about right to me, honestly. In my experience, if the theory is predictive, insulting, and has societal ramifications, it's usually correct.
Let's say the soul is exclusively located in eye-to-eye contact. Theres a lot of information in how that contact is broken, how long its broken for, and what happens in between.
I think people who seldom engage in direct socialization repurpose their social machinery, diverting it toward internal dialogues with themselves, and toward artifacts that were generated by other minds. An indirect, conscious channel into the world, a simulacra theory of mind.
A Possible Evolutionary Reason for Why We Seem to Have Continuity of Consciousness
and Personality.
Thesis : The very thing (a brain module) which allows for outside object continuity, that same brain module maintains inside self / personality / identity continuity.
Reasoning :
Evolution found out modelling the outside world is helpful for survival.
Some eons later, it figured out modelling yourself (self / agent) modelling the outside world is also helpful.
In the outside world, we keep track of continuity of objects through a brain module which hones in on the essence of objects
(e.g. tracking a prey or predator.)
so that EXACT matching algorithms aren't applied but ONLY approximate ones.
As soon as a high enough approximate match (>95%) is found,
we "register" it to be an exact match. i.e. the Brain bumps up the confidence level to 100%.
This is also the reason why we consider our friend Bob to be the same childhood Bob even though he has different hairstyle, clothes,
and other such properties. We don't call Bob who looks different than yesterday as an Imposter.
The damage to this brain module could lead us to call Bob today an imposter.
This same module also tracks continuity of self in a similar manner. Even though our "self" changes from childhood to adult
we "register" "changing self" to be the same thing.
i.e. internally we bump up the confidence to 100% when memories, etc. match and provide a coherent picture of the self.
A multiple personality disorder is just different stable states of neural attractor states.
Continuity is local to a personality but not global and hence transient.
This local continuity of information could link up globally, giving rise to coherent single personality.
My pet theory about human consciousness is that is that consciousness is simply recursive theory of mind. Theory of mind [1] is our ability to simulate and reason about the mental states of others. It's how we predict what people are thinking and how they will react to our actions, which is critical for choosing how to act in a social environment.
But when you're thinking about what's in someone's head, one of the things might be them thinking about you. So now you're imagining your own mind from the perspective of another mind. I believe that's entirely what our sense of consciousness is. It's our social reasoning applied to ourselves.
If my pet theory is correct, it implies that the level of consciousness of any species would directly correlate to how social the species is. Solitary animals with little need for theory of mind would have no self awareness in the way that we experience it. They'd live in a zen-like perpetual auto-pilot where they do but couldn't explain why they do what they do... because they will never explain it to anyone anyway.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind