You know that everything you think and do is thought and done by you. But what’s a “you”? What kinds of smaller entities cooperate inside your mind to do your work?
It is not enough to explain only what each separate agent does. We must also understand how those parts are interrelated—that is, how groups of agents can accomplish things.
Consider just the seemingly simple problem of not reusing blocks already built into the tower. To a person, this seems simple common sense: “Don’t use an object to satisfy a new goal if that object is already involved in accomplishing a prior goal.” No one knows exactly how human minds do this.
It’s mainly when our other systems start to fail that we engage the special agencies involved with what we call “consciousness.” Accordingly, we’re more aware of simple processes that don’t work well than of complex ones that work flawlessly. This means that we cannot trust our offhand judgments about which of the things we do are simple, and which require complicated machinery. Most times, each portion of the mind can only sense how quietly the other portions do their jobs.
When you’re in pain, it’s hard to keep your interest in other things. You feel that nothing’s more important than finding some way to stop the pain. That’s why pain is so powerful: it makes it hard to think of anything else. Pain simplifies your point of view. When something gives you pleasure, then, too, it’s hard to think of other things. You feel that nothing’s more powerful than finding a way to make that pleasure last. That’s why pleasure is so powerful. It also simplifies your point of view.
If there is no single, central, ruling Self inside the mind, what makes us feel so sure that one exists? What gives that myth its force and strength? A paradox: perhaps it’s because there are no persons in our heads to make us do the things we want—nor even ones to make us want to want—that we construct the myth that we’re inside ourselves.
What do we signify by the words like “me,” “myself,” and “I”? What does a story mean that starts with “In my childhood”? What is that strange possession “you,” which stays the same throughout your life? Are you the same person you were before you learned to read? You scarcely can imagine, now, how words looked then.
So far as conscious thought is concerned, you turn yourself to walk in a certain direction in much the way you steer a car; you are aware only of some general intention, and all the rest takes care of itself. To change your direction of motion is actually quite complicated. If you simply took a larger or smaller step on one side, the way you would turn a rowboat, you would fall toward the outside of the turn. Instead, you start to turn by making yourself fall toward the inside—and then use centrifugal force to right yourself on the next step. This incredible process involves a huge society of muscles, bones, and joints, all controlled by hundreds of interacting programs that even specialists don’t yet understand. Yet all you think is, Turn that way, and your wish is automatically fulfilled.
How do we ever understand anything? Almost always, I think, by using one or another kind of analogy—that is, by representing each new thing as though it resembles something we already know.
Many people seem absolutely certain that no computer could ever be sentient, conscious, self-willed, or in any other way “aware” of itself. But what makes everyone so sure that they themselves possess those admirable qualities?
The secret of what anything means to us depends on how we’ve connected it to all the other things we know. That’s why it’s almost always wrong to seek the “real meaning” of anything. A thing with just one meaning has scarcely any meaning at all.
There is no singularly real world of thought; each mind evolves its own internal universe.
In the physical realm, we keep our books and clothes in self-made shelves and cabinets—thus building artificial boundaries to keep our things from interacting very much. Similarly, in mental realms, we make up countless artificial schemes to force things to seem orderly, by specifying legal codes, grammar rules and traffic laws.
To offer hospitality to paradox is like leaning toward a precipice. You can find out what it is like by falling in, but you may not be able to fall out again. Once contradiction finds a home, few minds can spurn the sense-destroying force of slogans such as “all is one.”
If we could deliberately seize control of our pleasure systems, we could reproduce the pleasure of success without the need for any actual accomplishment. And that would be the end of everything.
Our minds contain processes that enable us to solve problems we consider difficult. “Intelligence” is our name for whichever of those processes we don’t yet understand.