Pat Hayes:
But they all have access to the individual's memory of itself, ie its egocentric longterm recall of 'what things were like then'.
This would seem to me to be entirely question-begging. Given Bernie's theory requires multiple cortical self-systems, then why are there not multiple memories (this would surely be more logical). What is this "individual" anyway? And, given the multiplicity of creation, why does the number *one* seem to be in a league of its own? (Answer: because there's only one *me* [but then you're back where you started].)
I've waded through the rest of the post several times but, compared to the simple elegance of Schroedinger's position, this sort of explanation strikes me as the ultimate violation of Occam's razor. Why invoke such tortuous complexity to explain something so simple? But I don't want to sound cavalier so here goes:
One important special aspect of the representational language or code used by the narrative memory is a term which plays the role of the "essential indexical"; that is, it stands for th individual itself in the systems's view of its own history. ('Now' is the time of the EI, 'me' is the agent of the EI, 'here' is the location of the EI, etc. The need for such a special term can be demonstrated on purely logical grounds, by the way.)
This is an equally circular argument, as its starting point is the "individual itself".
Many of these accesses have lockouts, so that only one of the various competing self-systems can have control at once.
The model you suggest sounds (as is appropriate with digital architectures) like discrete systems switching in and out. But this is really not our experience of consciousness at all. Bernie mentions the "appetitive self-system". Well, my experience is I get hungry, I get horny, but its the same me! And its not a rapid oscillation between different systems switching in and out. And these systems don't compete in a winner-takes-all fashion, they overlap and modulate each other.
Pat's model may approximate to some wild guess as to how the brain might, perhaps, work, but seems to play fast and loose with the one thing we do know -- our own conscious experience.
Keith Sutherland
keith@imprint.co.uk
jcs-online
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