Here's a simple exercise that my wife Jo and I did in thinking about consciousness:

Step one: Clear your mind, prepare as you would for meditation, allow thoughts to come to mind but don't focus on them and let them go without trying to identify their content. Having released one thought, allow the next one to come, release it in turn and continue with the exercise for about a minute.

Step two: Now attempt to enumerate the thoughts and identify any features or characteristics that might explain why one thought follows another thought. Your explanations might involve emotional, visual, or other sensory modalities. They could follow a sequence of events recalled from some past experience.

Step three: Proceed as in step one but this time try to execute some procedure that you perform routinely but that is relatively open ended and not something for which you have a simple plan or recipe for deciding exactly what to do.

For example, I asked Jo to engage in the process she uses when it's one of the evenings when she is responsible for figuring out what we will eat for dinner. In my case, I attempted to re-create the process that I use when I'm preparing to drive home from work and deciding whether or not to pick up any groceries along the way.

Step four: Try to reconstruct exactly what things you thought about and how you jumped back and forth between thinking about different aspects of what you might do in executing your procedure.

For example, I can think about heading home just about any time after 3 PM and my motivations could be anything from I'm tired and want to get away from the office to I'm not getting any work done and I want to get away so I can have some privacy to work. The process involves thinking about traffic and how that might impact when I leave work and whether it makes sense to stop for groceries.

It can involve sending Jo email or trying to reach her cell phone and asking if there's anything she needs for dinner. Or it can involve some personal interest having to do with what I would like to eat, avoiding another night of leftovers or using it as an excuse to leave work early.

Practically speaking I may have to think about different routes depending upon what I want to purchase and what store it would make the most sense to shop at, e.g., Draeger’s Market, Trader Jo's or DeMartini Orchard’s fruit stand. I might want to get a loaf of Acme bread at Draeger’s and also stop at DeMartini's to pick up tomatoes or fresh salad mix.

In any case, the sequence of steps bears little or no resemblance to what one might expect an automated planning system. Whether I'm hungry or not, whether I'm tired, whether having thought of one set of things, say Acme bread and fresh tomatoes, makes me think of another thing, such as needing a refill on olive oil or wouldn't it be nice to make Italian style bruschetta as an appetizer.

I think we both did a pretty good job of recounting what was going on in our heads as we executed our respective procedures. It would be nice if we could similarly capture any unconscious planning that might go on before or after carrying out the conscious planning but of course there isn't likely to be any simple way of capturing such information short of spending a lot of time in an fMRI scanner.

This morning I drove in to Google early for an meeting and stopped off at the Quad campus for a swim. I arrived at 5 AM which is when the pool officially opens, a time when I am usually the only swimmer and I find it conducive to combine swimming lengths and thinking about technical problems. This morning I asked the question how is my thinking — at least the thinking that is accessible to me — different from how a spider might think.

This may seem like an odd question, but, from what I've read and what I've learned in meditation, I think there is something similar going on with how cognitive threads / processes in our brains play out over time. I imagine the spider having a collection of relatively fixed procedures that are more or less built in and one might characterize them as instinctual. But while the procedures themselves are fixed or stereotyped, their precipitating conditions may induce variability based on the spider's experience. For example, different olfactory stimuli that serve as triggers, or accumulated experience in memory traces relating to the strength of the webs the spider can build and the weather conditions those webs can be expected to stand up to.

I imagined the spiders that live in the nooks and crannies of our kitchen, where they set up their webs to catch bugs that come to feed on the crumbs and spilled liquids that are overlooked in cleaning up after meals. I imagined the spider, having felt some vibration in its web, investigating to see if it has ensnared prey or perhaps some bug that exceeds its appetite and threatens to tear apart its web. I can imagine that in the process of executing this canned routine it notices a breeze that might alternatively explain the vibrations or that might threaten its web and so might require some surgical alterations in the web to batten down the hatches as it were.

In short what I imagined was not much different than say the low-level subroutines in the Linux kernel that perform routine housekeeping and processor scheduling while responding to interrupts that require immediate attention and that may precipitate more complicated responses such as managing I/O and dealing with page faults.

I don't know as much about spiders as I do about flies, but I do know that the so-called jumping spider has about as many neurons as a fruit fly, approximately 100,000. Fly behavior is incredibly complicated and, while much of their behavior is relatively stereotyped, their olfactory system and mating strategies are both plastic and subtly complex.

As I contemplated Jo's and my introspectively reconstructed routine procedures and imagine myself to be a spider in our kitchen I also thought about Stanislas Dehaene’s lecture on consciousness and Daniel Ingram's inability to find words to describe the Buddhist doctrine that "phenomena do not exist in the sense of abiding in a fixed way for any length of time, and thus are utterly transitory, and yet the laws that govern the functioning of this utter transience hold. That phenomena do not exist does not mean that there is not a reality, but that this reality is completely inconstant, except for awareness, which is [a process] not a thing."

Of course, most computer scientists are perfectly comfortable with processes that perform complex computations and many of us believe that consciousness and self-awareness are just such processes and so there really is no mystery to be resolved. When I mentioned this to my friend at work, he replied:

I particularly liked the mental traces and the exercise of imagining yourself as a spider. It made me wonder how much diversity is there among individuals of a species when it comes to thought — and how do different creatures (spiders, octopuses, plants) think?

I found myself fitting better into the shoes of your spider! I feel that I don't engage that much in deliberative thinking unless it is in consciously trying to build a habit. And after that, my actions are generated by some amusing interplay between my (hopefully good) habits and the (stochastic) environment. Or maybe that a lot of my decision-making is subconscious.

I try to test this (when I'm alone and navigating from A to B) by trying to predict what I'll do at an upcoming choice point and seeing whether I actually do it — and I don't seem to be that good at predicting even my own actions. I don't think it's because I'm cognitively lazy or apathetic about the future but because I really can't plan / imagine very accurately.

P.S. As I was contemplating these ideas during my swim, I had an uncomfortable epiphany. I experienced a visceral realization of the Buddhist doctrine of impermanence and the transitory nature of everything, including myself and everything that I cling to in attempting hold back the relentless march of time. Much like my friend, I felt more akin to the spider in my kitchen than to any of the fictions we routinely conjure up to soothe our existential angst. The idea of consciously trying to build up a habit constitutes a form of self-programming, which, together with language and culture, provide us with tools that enable us to achieve a degree of autonomy — think of it the basis for exercising a particular sort of free-will worth having [1] — that would not be possible otherwise.

References

[1]	Daniel Dennett. Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1984.