Consciousness Maps Reality as a Story

I've spent a lot of time trying to figure out what a story is and how stories shape what we point our attention to. Okay, so I understand that relationship between pointing and verbalization, but also pointing and specification of attention.

Okay, so I'm going to bring in some other ideas, and I'll get you to comment on them. I was quite taken by my studies of JJ Gibson. So Gibson wrote a great book called "The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception," and I think there are some brilliant things in it. I've been elaborating on Gibson's ideas in the context of narrative, and I guess narrative is relevant to the idea of sharing, because a lot of what we share are stories. I think stories are pointers to value; that's a way of thinking about it.

So, let me lay out a phenomenological world for you and tell me what you think about this. Imagine you specify a point with your aim. Okay, so now you're determining a destination. This is what bees do when they communicate about where the pollen and the nectar are in flowers—they specify a treasure house of value. Okay, so that's the point; that's the destination.

From Gibson's perspective, once you establish a point, then the world lays itself out as perceptible objects. Some of those are tools; they're all what he called affordances. They're all the phenomena that are now relevant to that goal, and you can break them—he broke them—into roughly two classes: tools and obstacles. A tool is something you can use to move yourself along your pathway, and obstacles are things that can hinder your progress.

I've been thinking about elaborating on that. I think what happens when you specify a point with your, let's say, your perceptual system is that it produces a pathway forward, right? That's your route. Then the route is accompanied by the things that are relevant. You talked about the fact that we are taking in 11 million bits per second but compressing that to 16. Almost all that we perceive is obscured as irrelevant; it's not even part of our conscious experience.

So, what stands out? Well, pathways then, tools and obstacles. Those would be material entities, but then I think there's a parallel in the social domain: friends and foes. Friends share your aim and accompany you along the way; they can be helpful. Foes are human obstacles but can also obscure or interfere with your aim.

So tools and friends, obstacles and foes, and then there's one other element which I think is very cool—I just figured this out. I think the other thing that we perceive are agents of transformation, and those would be like magical creatures in a fairy tale. An agent of transformation changes your aim, and the reason they're magic is that the world of the aim that they specify doesn't play by the same rules as the rule of the aim that you inhabit.

Okay, so now the reason I'm telling you this is relevant to the pointing idea because that's kind of the landscape that emerges as a consequence of pointing. But it also is relevant to the sharing idea. I've been thinking that, you know, when we speak with each other, we're offering the fruits of our imagination; that's a way of thinking about it. Each word is actually a storehouse of value or a pointer to value.

So you could say the reason consciousness evolved—and this seems to be very much in keeping with your thinking—is that we can offer people pointers to a destination or specify a destination. And again, that's not much different than what bees do when they're, you know, doing a dance to specify where the honey is. It's the fruits of our imagination that we can encapsulate in words, and maybe we have that private consciousness, our ability to think on our own, so that we can build up a story house of value so that we actually have something to trade with other people.

Okay, well, that's a take on the things that you just described. I'd like to know what you think about that. I come to think of the paradigm of predictive processing, which has been very influential in the past ten years in understanding how we perceive the world. Carl Friston, a British guy, is one of the leaders of the field, and the basic idea there was a philosopher involved very much in explaining this paradigm of predictive processing.

He was kind enough to say that the deep idea behind it actually was in this book "The User Illusion." Oh, that's cool; that's cool; it's nice of him to say so.

Yeah, yeah. But the point is that what "The User Illusion" tries to say is that first we take in information, and then we create a sort of simulation of what that information is. Only then do we experience; we don't experience the raw intake—we experience our own retelling of what we take in. The predictive processing paradigm is basically saying that all we experience when we go about our stuff in the world is our predictions of what will happen next. What will this guy do? What will this monkey do? Will there be a fault in the rain when I walk there?

So, it's all about predicting. In that sense, it's all about storytelling. Everything we know about the world is storytelling. And then, of course, it turns out very often that our stories are wrong. We are corrected; we understand that there was something wrong, and so we correct our storytelling. We make it more and more qualified.

When we get to know people, we have a better ability to know what to expect from them, and so on. But it's all a question of creating a story that is not inconsistent with the information we take in. There's one thing here that's, I think, very deep, and that is if you take children, they're afraid of the dark. You go into the forest in the evening as a kid, and you are scared because of what could be in the dark. If you go there in the daytime, you're not scared at all.

Why is that? That's because there's nothing to contradict the inner fantasies of the kid. When it's dark, there's no information that runs counter to the idea of many weird trolls and demons out there. But in the daylight, there's so much information that contradicts your ideas. So, in a way, all of our perception of the world is a hallucination we create under the condition that it does not contradict the sensory data we take in.

So we are constantly, constantly telling stories. Telling stories is what perception is all about. Of course, human beings have taken this to a higher level than we expect a mouse to take it to. But it's basically the same phenomenon that we try to create a consistent idea of what the world is like. What we experience is our own dream, if you like, or our own fantasy. Or a better word is our own hallucination.

This will explain all the things we see when the light falls, and you enter into the twilight zone, and then suddenly there's not enough information to contradict all the weird ideas you have in your head.