Qra SG

 If consciousness is just your brain convincingly editing reality a few milliseconds after it happens, are you ever actually present in your own life, or only ever reviewing the tape?

Consciousness is a feature that all living things with a brain have.

For humans, it takes about 0.5 seconds to become fully conscious of an unforeseen event so that we can take a conscious decision about it. But the process starts much earlier. In fact, most often it starts by a prediction, a simulation of the immediate future before it happens, because most of the immediate future is highly predictable, a feature that all practitioners of sports make use of. For example, most of what hockey players do is taking unconscious decisions based on pretrained movements and predictions. It’s not fully conscious when it happens because it happens faster than 0.5 seconds.

What then becomes the conscious experience is all the data that fits with expectations, memory and sensory input. So you could say that the conscious experience of “now” is smeared out during at least 0.5 seconds, but it feels instantaneous thanks to the magic of the brain.

So most conscious experiences starts with a simulated prediction, then real data comes in, adjusting the prediction before it becomes fully conscious. And there is a loop in there, because you not only become conscious about some event, you also become conscious that you experience the event, the observer observing itself, which in itself is an information loop that takes time.

The simulated prediction is very elaborate. I have experienced it fail only once when I managed to knock a glass from a table. In a reflex, I bent down and very unexpectedly caught the glass just before impact on the floor. My memory of this event is split in two. A very detailed memory where I both saw and heard the glass shatter into a million pieces, where one big shard went in under the stove. And the other, where I caught the glass, bewildered and surprised of what I had just experienced.

This is called representational momentum. The simulated prediction continues a bit if the reality changes unexpectedly. And, it’s almost impossible to fool the prediction engine in the brain to experience a failure.