HELP WANTED: I recall that it is highly questionable that consciousness is even continuous. We feel like it is, but (as you know) we have considerable experimental evidence that your “consciousness” thinks things well after you’ve decided to do them. I can’t find it, but I recall a result that says that “consciousness” is a story your brain tells itself after-the-fact, in bursts between gaps of obliviousness. (This also dissolves “quantum immortality”.) Does anyone know about this one?
Don’t remember an exact result like that, but that did remind me of Denntt’s Consciousness Explained, which had stuff about the brain doing all sorts of after-the-fact rewriting of sensory inputs to create a single narrative that presents itself as the conscious experience.
HELP WANTED: I recall that it is highly questionable that consciousness is even continuous. We feel like it is, but (as you know) we have considerable experimental evidence that your “consciousness” thinks things well after you’ve decided to do them. I can’t find it, but I recall a result that says that “consciousness” is a story your brain tells itself after-the-fact, in bursts between gaps of obliviousness. (This also dissolves “quantum immortality”.) Does anyone know about this one?
Don’t remember an exact result like that, but that did remind me of Denntt’s Consciousness Explained, which had stuff about the brain doing all sorts of after-the-fact rewriting of sensory inputs to create a single narrative that presents itself as the conscious experience.
That’s probably what I’m thinking of. Thank you to you and bramflakes!
I think Dennet talks about it a lot, possibly in Consciousness Explained, but I don’t know whether those experiments had been done in 1991.