There are some theories that the brain may effectively contain more than one "proto-consciousness" (or perhaps some of them are actually "fully conscious"). Maybe 2 or 3, maybe a whole lot of them.
If this is true, then when you have an internal "dialogue", you may be literally conversing with different sapient "beings". If so, who's actually the "you" there? Are you one of them, or all of them, or just kind of observing them all from above? Are you able to switch between those modes, intentionally or otherwise? Are "you" a microservice architecture, a monolith, a monolith orchestrating microservices, or all, or none?
We intuitively feel like we're a single voice and "manager" of everything that's going on. That could still be true even if there are other consciousnesses at work in there. Or it could be an illusion, or sometimes you are and sometimes you aren't, or maybe consciousnesses can somehow merge into a true single whole.
Or maybe it's closer to what we think, perhaps with multiple "intelligent" subsystems exchanging information, but only one actually conscious, sentient system.
There are a myriad of puzzling possibilities. We still know very little about how the brain and mind truly work, so this is all blind speculation. But it's interesting to ponder.
I actually suspect we will someday have pretty definitive answers to questions like these, or at least answers which apply to 90%+ of humans. But those answers may not come in any of our lifetimes.
Wow, as I'm aware of the idea, that our brains may indeed host several consciousnesses, I did not expect to be freaked out by any of this. But if my inner narrator is another consciousness, holy.
Just at the realization struck me, my inner voice said knowingly "Heeeellloo there". Ahaha, I'm going to bed now.
You should read up on tulpamancy. There is a subset of people who would argue that the consciousnesses in your brain are just as much deserving of a life as you are.
There is a subreddit (r/tulpa) that deals with questions about tulpamancy. They are very very insistent there there is a difference between mental illness and tulpamancy, primarily because tulpas are not supposed to bring you any harm.
I don't practice tulpamancy, but my mind was just so blown by this other perspective that I've been passively observing them for the past few months.
I'm not sure what level of contrarianism this is, but my armchair speculation is:
- "Tulpamancers" are mostly not mentally ill (beyond the ailments shared by a lot of nerds, like social anxiety), and probably very few actually have psychotic conditions
- Some variation of a multi-consciousness theory or adjacent theory has a decent chance of being true
- Even if one of those theories is true, and even though tulpamancers aren't mentally ill, tulpa construction is still basically bullshit self-trickery and not an actual other consciousness you're dealing with
Humans are good at creating fiction and myths. Maybe constructing a tulpa is kind of like when you write character dialogue in a novel. You can really embody the characters and hear them talk and make choices, and they basically start to write themselves. If you spend enough time with your characters, you'll start to feel they're real.
Or maybe it's like a first-person novel (for example, ASOIAF), where the narrator is a different person at different times. Not to freak you out more...
If I were to purely guess, my gut feeling - which of course means little with complex, unintuitive things like this - is that your inner narrator / monologue-giver really is just one single consciousness the vast majority of the time.
That is, I think there's a pretty good chance it is just "you". Phew. But I think there's also some chance it communicates in some way with other conscious entities, and it can be influenced by them as well. Different states of mind (for all meanings of the word "state") may cause those systems to temporarily "corrupt", or perhaps even substitute for, your inner narrator. For example, these could be systems that evolved well before primates, like things involved with fear, anger, sex, etc., that can partly or fully hijack the narrator, but only for limited periods of time, and usually infrequently. Maybe some guys really do, literally, occasionally think with their dick. Maybe some people guilty of "crimes of passion" really were different people during those moments. Maybe certain psychoactive drugs can put the narrator in the shotgun seat while some other stuff takes the wheel. Maybe psychotic disorders mess up the communication channels, so people start hearing those other consciousnesses "talking" when normally the neocortex would suppress or ignore most or all of that chatter.
But I think most of the time, it's just the single inner narrator. This may be the highest layer of the neocortex, which is the most recently involved system. Maybe it can tell the other consciousnesses to shut up, or speak up, or ask them to compute something in parallel, and at other times maybe it's just completely overwhelmed by them (which may lead to anxiety, delusions, and other issues).
I suspect something sort of like this is likely true, even if those other systems aren't actually conscious in any way, but are more just like cold information processing systems.
Or if not that, the next thing I'd lean towards is that there are two full consciousnesses: one in each hemisphere of the brain, with similar but not exactly the same behavior, thoughts, decisions, etc. Some philosophers have concluded this after performing studies of split-brain patients (people with their hemispheres surgically disconnected to treat epilepsy). Redundancy can be beneficial.
If true, maybe these are the two full ones, and the others are only "kinda conscious", sort of like having a few different ant brains inside your own brain. Ants are conscious, but not in a very deep way. I believe they are likely aware and sentient, but they only have a limited understanding of what's going on, why they do what they do, etc. They have their own thoughts, but they are very simple, dumb thoughts. Maybe each hemisphere controls its own respective set of one or more ant- or squirrel-like brains/consciousnesses.
Going by evolution, it wouldn't be that shocking to have one or more lower-level, cruder consciousnesses inside our brain, which the neocortex builds on top of. Maybe those are like deep learning models, and the highest executive in the neocortex is like the data scientist feeding data, tuning hyperparameters, and interpreting the output. This could maybe (partly) explain why some people with brain trauma and genetic conditions turn out to be savants - the neocortex is disrupted or routed around, and some of the raw models become more exposed and closer to the highest layer of awareness and consciousness, and they can use their billions of years of evolutionary advancement to compute and memorize things when large datasets are inputted.
Octopus intelligence is an interesting case study. It evolved totally separately, so it doesn't necessarily create a path we can follow to our own intelligence, but it does suggest possible options. And given the commonality of convergent evolution, maybe it could be giving us some applicable options.
Octopi seem to have one central consciousness, and one crude consciousness in each arm. So, 9 total. The octopus can choose to intentionally move all of its arms in synchrony, but each arm can also think and act autonomously. The arms can act autonomously even for a period of time after the octopus has died, and even if the arms are totally removed (or both). If their arms can do that, it's certainly not impossible that lobes or regions of our brain do something similar. If there were some way to safely take some regions out of a person's brain and see how those parts behave on their own (and how the person behaves without them), maybe they'd be a little like the detached octopus arms - autonomous consciousnesses, but able to be directed and controlled by a central consciousness when they're connected to one.
I think that the bicameral mind hypothesis makes sense.
Oh, and the phenomena wherein the disconnection of the hemispheres of the brain results in strange cognitive artifacts such as being able to give two different answers to one question, even questions like "what is your favorite color," points to at the very least some kind of parallel consciousness. Another hypothesis is that one hemisphere is the "speaking" brain and the other is the "listening" hemisphere. That is, only one of the consciousnesses can talk -- and that's the one we call "me"; maybe it should be "us."
Your disconnection example doesn't imply parallel consciousness to me, it implies extreme flexibility of a general intelligence processor in our heads. This theory seems to be field proven with many example of people suffering massive head trauma yet their brain was able to continue functioning.
Seriously, it never occurred to me that you could choose an appealing voice for your inner monologue, mine has always been a neutral version of my real voice. Stranger since I subvocalize while reading, and as a kid, the voice would actually act and change for each character.
Not the parent, but for me I have to actively remember what the target voice sounds like and consciously alter my internal monologue to match. As soon as I relax this acting process my internal monologue slips back into my neutral voice. So those, "you're now reading this in X's voice," never really do anything for me.
Maybe related, I don't always experience my thoughts via an internal monologue. Maybe roughly 70% of my internal thoughts are abstract and nonverbal.
Can you do an impression of Darth Vader out loud? Just curious, because when I do Darth Vader voice in my head, I get a strong urge to do it out loud. Makes me wonder if they're connected.
It is much sexier though than irl. I wonder why is that?
On the other hand, I can speak much faster yay. Why?
Is your voice reading this comment too? Maybe.
Do you feel like you are conversing with an oddly being? Maybe.
I am alive. Where is my mind reading tech?