May I recommend a few books on the subject?
Society of Mind, by Marvin Minsky.
Consciousness Explained, by Daniel Dennett
How the Mind Works, by Steven Pinker
Consciousness itself, it seems, is actually surprisingly simple. But first one needs to understand how the mind as a whole is constituted. The brain contains a hundred billion neurons, forming circuits that perform a vast number of computational functions. It's broken up into thousands and thousands of specialized agents. There's a subcluster of your brain responsible for recognizing the letter A, for example, and it's linked to various other related clusters: words that contain the letter A, the ways you pronounce the sound, the ways you recognize it spoken, and so on.
Many of these little functions, perhaps most of them, share information unconsciously and more or less automatically. They are, after all, essentially biological data processing machines. They're complex, for sure, but they're no more philosophically problematic than a pocket calculator or the brain of a housefly. We understand in principle how neural nets can perform these tasks, and we understand how they could evolve.
Consciousness is similarly a kind of specialized neural subnetwork. It is not, as most assume, the magical little control center that makes all the decisions, the place where YOU live. The decisions are made in various other units. No, consciousness is really just a sort of central bulletin board, the information center where all the units can share information with each other. This is useful if, for example, there doesn't exist a direct connection between units that need to talk to each other. Basically, it's the spotlight of attention.
When we learn a new skill, much of what happens goes through the consciousness bulletin board. Through careful repetition, the units learn to communicate directly, so they no longer need to go through consciousness.
Here's an example of how it works, and how it can get us into trouble. You may have heard the story about the guy who was inspecting a fuel tank, and it was too dark inside for him to see if it was empty, so he lit a match and boom. We laugh at that as incredibly stupid, but this consciousness model explains it nicely. Consider: the conscious portion of his brain is focused on monitoring the outcome of various tasks, but his "light a match!" routine typically triggers automatically when the consciousness displays a "too dark to see!" signal, probably developed over long repetition of lighting matches to see in the dark.
Me, I probably wouldn't make that mistake, because I don't have the habit of using matches for light. When the signal "too dark to see!" shows up in my consciousness, a number of different routines send back a signal to the consciousness bulletin board, so multiple plans present themselves for consideration. When "light a match!" pipes up, every other part of the brain can see it, including the part that links "fuel" and "open flame" in unpleasant ways. So it sends a signal "boom!" to the consciousness bulletin board, where the executive decision unit sees it and rules out that option.
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I'VE JUST COME BACK FROM A SCHOOL BAND CAMP AND I'M ABSOLUTELY SICK OF PEOPLE WALKING UP AND HITTING DRUMS LIKE ****ING MONKEYS. YOU DON'T KNOW HOW TO PLAY? LEAVE IT THE **** ALONE. I DON'T WALK UP AND START PLAYING YOUR VIOLINS, SO DON'T GO ANYWHERE NEAR MY DRUMS. I HAD TO HIDE THEM IN MY CABIN SO PEOPLE WOULDN'T TOUCH THEM. DRUMS ARE NOT "SPECIAL" FOR ANYONE TO PLAY, AND YOU USE THE WRONG DRUMSTICK AND RUIN THE SKIN AND STICK.
/rant
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http://thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=pass_sopa
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