In my first post, The emergent mind : How Evolution Stumbled Into Consciousness, I described how biological evolution accidentally created consciousness. And in this post I hope to delve in to what I think is the structure of consciousness and how a sense of self emerges from it.
So let’s take a look at the story of Mike;
Mike is a young, likable, outgoing person with an active, social life. If you asked him, he’d tell you life is all sunshine and laughter; he was genuinely happy and stress-free.
One day, he was in a severe vehicle accident. He suffered a devastating spinal cord injury that paralyzed him from the waist down and, crucially, a significant traumatic brain injury from the impact. His life changed overnight. The brain injury, combined with the immense psychological trauma, fundamentally altered his personality. He was now in constant pain, prone to anger and depression, and his social life dwindled away.
If you asked, ‘Is Mike after the accident the same as Mike before?’ the answer feels like no.
He would say he is a different person. Yet, a thread remains: he still remembers being the happy, outgoing person. He has the continuous memory of his own life story, so he knows he is still the Mike who was happy and carefree, even though he has changed since.One day, his carer is careless, and Mike falls, hitting his head again. This second injury causes severe retrograde amnesia, wiping clean most of his autobiographical memory. He doesn’t remember his childhood, his friends, his accident, or the person he used to be.
Now, if you ask him, ‘Are you the same Mike who was happy and outgoing before the accident?’ He would not associate that description with himself. The continuous thread of memory that tied his different selves together has been severed. The continuous narrative of ‘Mike’, for him, has ended.
So, who is Mike? Is he the same person at each stage? What changed?. To an outsider, it will be the same person. But this is only because they possess the continuous narrative that Mike has lost. Their minds hold the story of Mike that his own mind can no longer access.
Without being entangled in the topic of philosophy, let’s take a moment to understand what tied the image of “Self” together for Mike;
- Logical thinking process : The brain is the logical thinking processor of Mike’s body, it analyses outside and inside stimuli and creates a map of what is Mike and what is not Mike, it is also capable of generating complex thoughts and narrations. With the first accident, both inside and outside stimuli Mike received changed significantly, and the capabilities of the brain itself changed, which affected the thought process.
- Temporal continuity : The brain also stores the memory of Mike’s thoughts and experiences including his past stimuli. With the first injury this was not affected, but with the second, the memories which tied the present Mike to the past Mike severed. So Mike is still there, as in still generating thoughts, but his anchor with his past actions/thoughts/experiences is no more.
So if what we call self is tied to a continuous thread of consciousness, where is the soul?
Dear reader, if you’ve followed the story so far, you might have already suspected what’s to come, and that is the conclusion that there is no soul.
Now if you might mentally recoil from that idea, shake your fist and yell “How dare you”, I totally understand. It is an idea that brings about existential dread, the thought there is no higher purpose to our lives and that we’re just a continuation of thoughts and ideas being processed inside a biological body, shakes the very foundation our civilizations have been built on.
So I apologize if I caused distress, but take some time to wrap the idea around your head, as the next post will be a continuation of this discussion within the context of AI.
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