2 thoughts on “Consciousness”

1. My favorite analogy at the moment:

   Imagine you’re watching a basketball game. This is a pretty complicated event. You’ve got a court with various lines on it, a ball, a couple of hoops, a set of rules, 10 players on the court moving themselves & the ball around, and a couple of referees determining where rules are violated. Now suppose you’re listening to the radio broadcast of a basketball game. All the complication of the game is still going on, but instead of watching it directly you’re experiencing a verbal narration of the action.

   The mind is the basketball game. Consciousness is the radio broadcast.

2. I like this analogy because it makes something else clear. If you have some ideas about how the players on the court could improve but the only person you can talk to is the radio announcer, what happens? Well, maybe the players overhear and make some changes. And maybe the radio announcer decides that instead of reporting the game, he’ll start trying to tell the players what to do–when to pass, when to shoot the ball, when to set a screen, and so on. If that happens, the announcer is always going to be a couple of seconds behind the action. We hope the players pay no attention, because it’ll be an awful mess if they do.

   We have to break the analogy a little here, to pretend that the players might hear the radio broadcast during the game. I don’t think we know how much of the mind is listening to our inner monologists, although it’s probably a lot less than we think. There are probably a lot of contexts in which the unbroken analogy is fine. The relevant parts of the mind just aren’t going to hear the announcer, so there’s no real chance of either beneficial or malign influence.