Consciousness
What Is Consciousness
Consciousness arises from a feedback loop between our senses and our memories that generates images, dialog, and feelings in a never-ending internal feed. It can be thought of as our memories stimulating our senses to produce echoes of the original stimuli that imprinted them. We literally hear ourselves think.
Our consciousness uses our memories and training to process new data from our external senses and create output to our motor neurons that determine how we interact with the universe. This can be idle processing like daydreaming, or active processing like weighing pros and cons to make an important decision. In both cases the feedback loop is used to simulate new responses to stimuli and evaluate the expected outcome.
Input (senses) -> Processing (thoughts) -> Output (muscles).
The states of consciousness we experience depends on the interaction of these three steps in the stimulus/response cycle.
Mindfulness
When we are mindful, we are able to turn off the feedback loop and simply experience the new sights, sounds, and sensations that are coming to us externally. It's all input without processing or output.
Flow
Similar to mindfulness, flow states are when we bypass the feedback loop and connect stimulus and response directly through well-worn neural pathways created by repetitive training. It's direct input to output without processing.
Generative AI, Newsfeeds and Modern Consciousness
Generative AI operates very similar to the human stream of consciousness. While AI works by simply consuming huge amounts of data and predicting the most likely word to come next based on a prompt, human language is also a stream of words generated by a probability model trained by every experience that person has ever had.
Due to the similarities our minds have with AI, there are likewise similar shortcomings. Spend too much time on the wrong parts of the Internet and you cannot help but grow more racist, sexist, and hateful, as we saw over and over with early chatbots trained on social media. Therefore it is as essential that we curate the information that we feed our minds with as it is to apply critical thinking to that information.
Since we lack the time and resources to critically evaluate all of the information we take in, and modern media platforms offer an infinite stream of information both questionable and reputable sources, the importance of actively avoiding exposure to misinformation, especially when confirmation bias is involved.
Our stream of consciousness can also be compared to a newsfeed, and the more we use newsfeeds to shape our minds the more similar they become. Just like our newsfeed, our consciousness is a stream of memories, images, thoughts of loved ones, political ideologies, religious dogmas, gossip, music, jokes, work, hobbies and sex. The thoughts we have on these subjects will always be a reflection the information we have given our minds through experience and media.