Greetings, Friendlies. :)
I hope it’s clear how far the interpreter module would take us from the Classical View of Humanity.
We are working with an emergent property, a consciousness-of. Various modules/functions of the brain are doing their processing and then, as Gazzaniga says in Who’s in Charge?, “[competing] for attention and the winner emerges as the neural system underlying that moment’s conscious experience.”
Yes, it is the case that we have a sense of a continuous self that is somehow “in charge”, but this very sense comes out of a particular module’s functioning. Gazzaniga says, “The psychological unity we experience emerges out of the specialized system called “the interpreter” that generates explanations about our perceptions, memories, and actions and the relationships among them.”
Too, the stories that module constructs are a leeeetle bit behind whatever are the actual goings on of the universe and our own biological systems. The construction/explanation/meaning is necessarily post-hoc. The thing being explained/constructed has already happened by the time we are aware of it.
Rather than some masterful charioteer commanding the reigns of two great steeds, it appears we are more like a self-aggrandizing cattle egret riding on the back of a water buffalo thinking, “Oh yeahhhhh. I am so in charge right now.”
Your thoughts?
Dharma PhD 