In an evo psych book called Why Buddhism is True I was introduced to this concept of brain modules, or networks. There’s some evidence that we do a lot of thinking with various modules in our brains that have competing evolutionary desires. So for example there would be a mating module, which causes us to do stuff to try to get laid, and a status module concerned with social standing and so on and so forth. And that’s all happening subconsciously. Then there’s our consciousness whose purpose is to justify all these decisions we made.
It might explain a couple of things. It would explain why people do self-contradictory things, self-sabotage or even decisions that just don’t make sense. Different parts of the brain deciding at different times. It may be the literal source of our internal conflict.
It also somewhat explains to me observed neurological phenomena like hemi-neglect, where you lose awareness of half of your brain’s perception - for example, someone with hemi-neglect would eat off only one side of a plate, as if the rest of the food isn’t there.
This gets pretty crazy: They’ve done Split-Brain tests where the corpus callosum is severed (left hemisphere can’t talk to right.) Only the left hemisphere, the part that controls speech, can answer questions out loud.
They show the left hemisphere a chicken claw and the right hemisphere a snowy winter scene. Then they lay out a bunch of cards in front of the patient. Their right hand selects the chicken - they know about that. If you ask why they selected the chicken, they’ll use their left hemisphere knowledge to say “because of the chicken claw picture.” But the right hand selects the snow shovel. The patient is unaware they saw a snowy scene and thus has no idea why they selected a shovel. But here’s the thing. When asked why they picked the shovel, they immediately rationalize it by saying, “Oh, that’s simple. You need a shovel to clean out a chicken coop.”
How much other stuff do we do that we have no conscious awareness why we’re doing it? The book suggests we view our own consciousness as a sort of PR agent for the rest of the brain. It posits that we’re not even doing this rationalization to make it make sense to ourselves, we’re doing it to make our behavior make sense to other people.
And I was just thinking, hey, maybe there’s some decision-making capacity in agentic AI that makes it brain-like in some ways, presenting competing goals, for example – but it lacks the PR agent of consciousness.