There’s a basic puzzle in consciousness studies: we all clearly feel the existence of “self”, but all scientific evidence points to it being a constructed product.
I lean towards the constructionist view, but think existing theories miss a key mechanism. They describe the finished building, but don’t explain how the scaffolding was built.
The infant’s initial state is a good reference point. Sensory data is already flowing in, but there’s no centralized “receiver”. It’s more like a monitoring room running automatically—screens are on, but no one’s on duty.
Consciousness might be the real-time data processing of the monitoring system itself. Its core function is to generate a continuous monitoring report, weaving discrete alerts and readings into a narrative of “what’s happening”.
And the “self”? Maybe it’s just the default recipient name on this report.
Who set this recipient address? Evidence points to earliest social interactions. When a caregiver persistently sticks the label “you” onto the child’s internal states—”you’re hungry”/”you’re crying”—she’s actually helping the cognitive system establish its initial pointer associations.
After enough mappings, the system learns to point at itself. It starts automatically categorizing internal states under the address “me”. The recipient is conjured out of void.
Some supporting observations:
Feral children without early dialogue fail to initialize this recipient system
Helen Keller’s well moment was essentially successful symbol-referent binding, activating the entire semantic network
Some schizophrenic symptoms can be understood as the system mistakenly generating multiple recipient addresses
If this model has explanatory power, it implies:
Raw experience precedes the experiencer
Unity is a byproduct of narrative coherence
The problem of other minds is solvable because we use the same consciousness-generating protocol
Open questions:
What are the minimum stability conditions for this narrative system?
Is it competing or complementary with Global Workspace Theory?
How to reframe dissociative identity disorder through this framework?
The self might be a story we tell ourselves afterwards
There’s a basic puzzle in consciousness studies: we all clearly feel the existence of “self”, but all scientific evidence points to it being a constructed product.
I lean towards the constructionist view, but think existing theories miss a key mechanism. They describe the finished building, but don’t explain how the scaffolding was built.
The infant’s initial state is a good reference point. Sensory data is already flowing in, but there’s no centralized “receiver”. It’s more like a monitoring room running automatically—screens are on, but no one’s on duty.
Consciousness might be the real-time data processing of the monitoring system itself. Its core function is to generate a continuous monitoring report, weaving discrete alerts and readings into a narrative of “what’s happening”.
And the “self”? Maybe it’s just the default recipient name on this report.
Who set this recipient address? Evidence points to earliest social interactions. When a caregiver persistently sticks the label “you” onto the child’s internal states—”you’re hungry”/”you’re crying”—she’s actually helping the cognitive system establish its initial pointer associations.
After enough mappings, the system learns to point at itself. It starts automatically categorizing internal states under the address “me”. The recipient is conjured out of void.
Some supporting observations:
Feral children without early dialogue fail to initialize this recipient system
Helen Keller’s well moment was essentially successful symbol-referent binding, activating the entire semantic network
Some schizophrenic symptoms can be understood as the system mistakenly generating multiple recipient addresses
If this model has explanatory power, it implies:
Raw experience precedes the experiencer
Unity is a byproduct of narrative coherence
The problem of other minds is solvable because we use the same consciousness-generating protocol
Open questions:
What are the minimum stability conditions for this narrative system?
Is it competing or complementary with Global Workspace Theory?
How to reframe dissociative identity disorder through this framework?