Pause For Thought Or Pause To Feel?

Self-awareness may give insight to how we think and feel

Idea: people experience self-awareness when they notice the coincidence between self-directed actions and the sensory input caused by those actions. This requires time for activated neural networks to be connected. Due to how information is stored in the brain, these moments of self-awareness may be experienced as negative and be avoided, which could then prevent people from benefitting from the insight self-awareness allows. 

I’ve outlined how I think our intelligence is generated in the post ‘Intelligence, A Simple Mechanism’. However, the idea in that post came to me when I was thinking about self-awareness or consciousness. I had the idea when thinking about the mirror test. 

Almost all animals will instantly react as if they are looking at another animal when seeing their reflection in a mirror. Those that don’t, like our closest cousins the great apes, won’t react so rapidly and will show signs of self-awareness such as touching their face while looking at themselves. This self-awareness will require at least two things: a physical process occurring as part of the biology of the brain, and the feeling that’s associated with this physical event. This blog post will examine the former. 

Neurons are connected up into networks. Some networks will control movement, some the visual system that allows you to see movement, and some will process other senses such as touch that will result from movement. In the example given above, some networks will direct a hand to touch your face, your eyes will see the hand moving, and you will feel the touch on your face. 

All these networks are in their own areas of the brain and are separated from each other. At a basic physical level, it will take time for these networks to connect with each other across the distance between these discrete areas. Something occurred to me when considering this time-lag that’s required for neural networks to be connected: what do we feel when this process is occurring. 

Based on how I assumed neural networks are formed, it seemed to me we would have a core of information we feel certain about that’s bounded by low certainty information (ie, what we’ve learnt vs what we may understand), and any period of focused thought would involve branching of activity within and between these networks of information. In fact, the output for any instance of cognition would be impacted by how well these networks were connected and integrated into a representation of the external world that may be useful. 

But, if an instance of self-awareness takes time to connect the networks controlling acting and sensing, what would it feel like if branching across these networks activated low certainty information? Information that might result in chaotic activity or dead ends? Intuitively, it seemed to me this would be experienced as negative, under the assumption that what we feel is distributed amongst the neurons that are activate at any one time. 

This possible insight was remarkable to me. It immediately suggested how thinking and feeling could be different sides of the same basic process, and it was also immediately apparent that this process could be not just a general feature for how the brain works but the basic underlying mechanism. This blog will explore this idea and its explanatory power, so I won’t expand any further here – see Intelligence, A Simple Mechanism for some more detail. 

For this short post, I’ll just discuss one other aspect. The prediction is self-awareness may necessarily involve being exposed to negative feelings, especially as more time elapses while considering the self. These negative feelings could be inhibitory. But self-awareness may be a rich source of information, which ultimately would be beneficial. So, the pause for thought required for self-awareness may also require courage. 

These emotions – the negative feelings due to the uncertain information, feelings of courage to overcome these negative feels, the feeling of self-awareness itself – are explained at the level of a physical mechanism in the post Intelligence, A Simple Mechanism, but not how the qualitative experience, the feelings themselves, associated with this process emerge. I’ve spent a long time thinking about this problem, sometimes called the Hard Problem of consciousness. I’m not sure it’s been very productive(!), but I’ll write about my thoughts on this topic in other posts.