How Consciousness is Made 5: The Consciousness-Making Modules
The parts of your mind that generate your experience of awareness
We, whose duty is wakefulness itself. . .
.Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil.1
In this article, you’re not just going to learn about the parts of your brain that generate conscious experience—you’re going to take them for a test drive and experience them for yourself.
In the previous article, we learned the single most important takeaway about the mystery of consciousness:
Resonance is what’s happening in your brain whenever you experience a conscious experience.
Whenever you gaze at a swollen pumpkin, hear the low gloomy boom of a fog horn, or feel all-consuming terror after making the rash decision to leap off the cliff-diving platform, resonance is vibrating in your brain.
We can be more specific than that. Resonance is vibrating in one or more of your brain modules.
Recall that each brain module is a set of neuron networks that have teamed up to pursue a shared mental goal. More simply, each module has a purpose. A purpose given by the module’s name. For instance, the purpose of your visual What module is to identify what you are seeing. (A polka-dotted pumpkin!)
Minds with modules appear on the third rung of the ladder of purpose. Only minds with resnating modules are capable of consciousness, so that means all the minds on the second rung of the ladder—the invertebrates, including jellyfish, crabs, worms, and bugs—are all unconscious.
The third article in this series (“Resonate, My Lovely!) made the bold claim that all conscious experience is physically embodied in resonant waves of neural activity located inside a brain module. This claim makes two predictions:
Any brain module that generates conscious experience will also produce resonance.
Any brain module that does not produce resonance will not generate conscious experience.
Let’s test these predictions. First we’ll meet some modules that generate resonance. Then we’ll meet modules that do not resonate.
Then you’ll explore for yourself if your own version of these brain modules are generating a conscious experience for you.
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SOME RESONATING MODULES
Inside each of these modules, a mindwhirl brings expectation activity and reality activity together to check if they resonate.
The visual What module
What is this thing? The visual What module recognizes visual objects by comparing the expectation of what the object will look like to the actual perception of the object.
The audio What module
What is this thing? The auditory What module recognizes noises by comparing the expectation of what the noise will sound like to the perception of the noise.
The visual Where module
Where is this thing? The visual Where module locates objects in space by comparing the expectation of where the object is located in space to the perception of the object.
The Why module
Why should I choose this option? The Why module evaluates opportunities to choose a course of action by comparing the expectation of how you’ll feel about the opportunity to the perception of feelings generated by the opportunity.
The synthesizing What module
What is this word? The synthesizing What module recognizes words by comparing the expectation of a sequence of letters to the perception of the letter sequence.
SOME NON-RESONATING MODULES
In these modules, there’s no comparison of expectations with reality. No resonant activity.
The How module
How do I get from here to there? The How module moves the body toward a target.
The When module
When is the “N” sound heard in the word “WHEN”? The When module indexes the position of an item within a sequence of items, such as identifying that N is the fourth letter in the word “WHEN.”
The visual Scene module
Let’s make a scene! The visual Scene module assembles the actual visual scene as perceived right now. It creates a picture of the world.
The auditory Scene module
Let’s make a scene! The auditory Scene module assembles the actual soundscape as perceived right now. It creates an audio recording of the world.
The Freewill module
Make it so! The Freewill module instigates an action, such as reaching for a pumpkin.
Okay, pilgrim—let’s find out whether you experience the glorious sizzle of consciousness when each of these modules is doing its thing inside your cranium. . .
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Let’s fire up your brain modules one by one and see what happens. Each time, your job is to decide: Am I experiencing the mystical charms of awareness—or not?
Look at the dot between the arrows: → • ←
Congratulations! You just activated your visual What module.
Were you conscious of the dot’s presence on the screen?
Snap your fingers and listen to the sound.
Well done! You just activated your audio What module.
Were you conscious of a snapping sound?
Pick up a paperclip, pebble, or coin and toss it from one hand to the other without taking your eyes off it.
Good work, you just activated your visual Where module.
Were you conscious of the coin’s location as it moved through space?
Now take the same paperclip, pebble, or coin and toss it backwards over your shoulder.
If you know where it landed because you heard it hit the floor, bravo! You activated your audio Where module.
Are you conscious of the coin’s likely location behind you?
Consider the romantic adventure movie Titanic. Now consider the superhero action movie The Avengers. Which do you like better?
If you experience a preference—or feel I don’t care for either or I love both—you fired up your Why module.
Are you conscious of your preference? Do you feel a greater interest in one movie over the other?
Open up a music streaming service and play one of your favorite tunes.
If you recognize “Yeah, this is my jam!” you’ve activated your synthesizing What module.
Are you conscious of the song’s melody—Wop Bop a Lu Bop, Ba Lop Bam Boom!
Okay, pilgrim. What did you learn? Each of the above activities charged up one of your resonance-generating modules. And you experienced conscious experience while performing each activity.
All the resonance-making modules you just activated also generate conscious experience.
What about modules that do not resonate?
Read this list carefully:
abacus, wonky, altitude, rascal, entrance, needlepoint, egregious, slippery, scandalous.
Now touch this → X ← with your finger.
You probably experienced no difficulty at all hitting the X. Your How module was in charge of guiding your finger to its target.
But were you aware of manipulating the muscles in your arm, wrist, and hand in order to successfully maneuver the tip of your finger to the X? Or were you merely aware of the target you were reaching for? (Your awareness of the X is manufactured in your visual Where module.)
You can activate your How module without experiencing consciousness.
If you harbor any doubts that you can reach for a target without any conscious awareness of the act of reaching, try this:
Explain to someone how to press an elevator button.
What instructions could you provide other than “Press it” or perhaps “Move your finger here and push”? Seems straightforward enough. But what if the person confirmed they understood your instruction—but pressed their nose instead?
Not out of spite or humor. They insist they tried to press the button; they’re not quite sure what went wrong. What additional guidance could you offer to enable them to adjust their performance?
“Ah, you were extending your flexor carpi ulnaris muscle instead of tensing it, and you were twisting your palmaris longus to the left instead of to the right and you waited a moment too long to flex your extensor digitalus. Try again and this time hold that flexor carpi ulnaris steady!”
We remain unconscious of the activity of the How module. We are unaware of its neural dynamics as it performs its function: controlling our muscles to reach for a target.
Let’s try another one.
Please recall the list of nine words I asked you to read carefully (and no cheating!)
Do you recall if the words “entrance” or “exempt” were on the list? If so, when in the sequence did the word or words appear? In what position, from first to ninth?
Most people have difficulty recollecting the entire list of words, and in particular most people forget whether and when “entrance” appeared on the list. (It is the fifth word.)
Most people tend to recollect the first item on a list and almost as many folks remember the last item. Yet we aren’t conscious of the order of an item. Even if we remembered that “entrance” was on the list, it doesn’t pop out in our mind’s eye tagged with a “fifth position!” label. We don’t experience intuition that, “Oh, I think ‘entrance’ is probably right in the middle of the list, maybe the fourth or fifth item.”
Or think of the first name of American President Lincoln. In what position is the letter “H” in his name? You don’t become conscious that “H” is the fifth letter.
We aren’t conscious of when a word appears in a list or when a letter appears in a word even though our When module does actually calculate the positions of the items in the list. Our When module figures out that “entrance” is the fifth word. But the When module does not resonate. It does not match up an expectation with a perception.
Your When module does not generate conscious experience.
Now let’s activate your Scene modules.
Open your eyes!
Kudos to you, you just activated your visual Scene module.
Open your ears!
Huzzah, your audio Scene module is active.
The activity of your Scene modules is a bit tricky to isolate through introspection. That’s because your Scene modules instantly send their assembled scenes to other modules for further processing, such as the visual What module.
Your visual What module compares the actual scene created by your visual Scene module to your expectation of what your visual What module expected to see. If the perception matches expectation, your What module resonates and you experience consciousness of the scene.
But your visual Scene module remains unconscious. It performs a complicated process of identifying the edges and surfaces in a visual scene and erasing visual noise, but all of this specialized scene-making activity never enters your awareness.
A scene only enters awareness after it exits a Scene module and gets processed by a resonance-generating module, such as the visual What module.
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Finally, let’s examine your freewill. What some folks call volition.
Please look over this sentence and choose any one of its words.
Next, will your finger to reach out and touch the selected word. Pay close attention to your willful intention to reach for the target word.
In the “go” moment of initiating your finger reaching, what are you conscious of?
Let’s make it simpler.
Place your finger on a surface in front of you, such as a table, and hold it motionless. Now wait a bit. Wait until you feel the moment is right and then slide your finger to the side. Don’t plan. Don’t count down. Whenever you want, slide your finger.
Were you conscious of your impulse to move? Were you conscious of your private will taking action?
The more intensely you focus on your act of willpower—your intention to move your finger—the more ghostly the decision seems.
You can probably remember the physical feeling of your finger sliding along. You can probably remember the moment your finger started sliding. But try to remember the subjective mental experience during the moment you exerted your willpower to initiate the movement. Recollect your inner impression when you commanded your finger, Slide!
Your will is a mental phantom. An experience without describable features. It is a deliberate conscious act—and yet an act without any conscious content.
The execution of your freewill is unconscious.
You have conscious control over your willpower. You freely choose when to slide your finger. A deliberate, mindful act that’s entirely up to you. But whenever you exert your will, your Freewill module generates no conscious content.
Your Freewill module does not generate resonance, either. There is no matching of expectation and reality within the Freewill module. It generates different sorts of activity than resonance.
You consciously exert your will, but the act of exerting your will generates no conscious experience of the act itself.
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Through your own mental experiments, you’ve established that conscious experience is only associated with activity in modules that resonate. Non-resonant brain activity does not seem to enter experience.
The cosmic question: why?
The first step in resolving this grand conundrum is to ask a more practical and mechanical question:
Why do some modules resonate while others do not?
Here’s a clue. All the consciousness-generating modules you just explored are generous. They all share their knowledge with the rest of your mind. For good reason: if you see something interesting in the world—a yapping Dalmatian pup, perhaps—you might want to listen to it or touch it or talk to it. The modules involved with listening, touching, and talking all require knowledge from your visual What module to get their own job done.
On the other hand, the modules you just explored that did not generate conscious experience do not need to share their knowledge with the rest of your” mind. These “stingy” modules share knowledge with a limited number of other modules—or sometimes no other modules. For example, the How module (a non-conscious module) does not share its private knowledge with any other part of the brain. Instead, the How module directly acts upon the environment (such as moving your hand to touch a pumpkin).
The When module (which computes the order of an item in a sequence) only communicates with a synthesizing What module (which consciously recognizes the entire sequence). No other module needs to know about the order of an item.
The visual Scene module only communicates with the visual What and Where modules (which consciously recognize the scene). Though many other modules need the knowledge inside the What and Where modules, they’re the only modules that need the information from the Visual Scene module.
The “free and open sharing” of knowledge by the consciousness-manufacturing modules is an important clue about how consciousness works and why it exists at all.
Consciousness is made inside highly sociable modules that promiscuously share their knowledge with many other modules in your brain.
Consciousness is not made inside modules that behave like hermits or hoarders, keeping their business to themselves.
This fundamental distinction establishes the First Law of Consciousness. The first great truth relating the subjective to the objective throughout the physical universe:
All Conscious Experience is Resonant Activity.
Previous Consciousness: 4: The Ladder of Purpose
Next Consciousness: 6: The Three Dilemmas of Monkey Mind