The Theater of Reflective, Deliberative Consciousness

In Orwell's Animal Farm, the ruling pigs famously change their slogan "All animals are equal" to "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others."

Panpsychism accounts for the human experience of consciousness in a similar way: "All entities are aware, but some are more aware than others."

Or, just as much to the point: some are differently aware than others.

Every entity in the universe -- every pattern -- has some awareness, but each pattern manifests its awareness differently depending on its nature.

Our reflective, deliberative "theater of consciousness" is the way that primal awareness manifests itself in one part of our mind/brain.

As Bernard Baars has articulated nicely in his cognitive science work, this theater of consciousness integrates all the kinds of memory and processing that our minds do -- it's the "place" where "it all comes together." (I surround "place" with quotes because in the case of the human brain it's not a physical location -- it's an emergent dynamical pattern involving multiple regions, and different ones in different cases.)

According to panpsychism, the "unconscious" parts of your mind/brain are in fact "conscious" in their own ways -- but their own less-intense consciousness is only loosely coupled with that of your theater of reflective, deliberative consciousness.

Various practices such as meditation or psychedelic drug use may increase this coupling, so that the reflective, deliberative consciousness can become more closely coupled with the consciousness of the other parts of the mind/brain that normally appear to it as "unconscious."

None of this however should be taken to deny the specialness of the theater of reflective, deliberative consciousness. It's a wonderful phenomenon -- it's definitively, gloriously different than what takes place in rocks, atoms, molecules, clouds or even lizards. Puzzling out its structure and dynamics is an important task on which cognitive neuroscience is gradually making headway.

But, what makes this aspect of our minds special is not that it's the unique receptacle or source of awareness (it isn't ... nothing is).



The Theater of Reflective, Deliberative Consciousness as a Purposeful Iconoclast

Part of what characterizes the theater of reflective, deliberative consciousness is the special effort it makes to decouple itself from the unconscious. To an extent, it cuts itself off from perceiving the awareness of the other parts of the mind/brain, so it can carry out processing using processes that ignore these other parts.

The reflective/deliberative consciousness wants to gather some information from the unconscious, and then process it in an isolated way, because that way it can carry out special processes that wouldn't work otherwise.

Reflective/deliberative consciousness works in part by making near-exhaustive intercombinations of the small number of things in its focus at any given time. It couldn't do this if it opened up its scope too much, due to the limited amount of resources at its disposal.

So we have a very important theme here: limitation of resources is causing a system (the reflective/deliberative consciousness) to increase its degree of separateness, so as to enable it to achieve some goals better within the resources at its disposal. But these goals themselves have to do with persisting separateness (in this case the separateness of the organism associated with the mind containing the reflective/deliberative consciousness). Separateness spawns more separateness.

Separateness often makes things more interesting ... and often also less joyful ... a general theme to which I will return later.