Are you a sentient being that has internal experiences and conscious awareness? If so, you may enjoy this post! (If, instead, you are a philosophical zombie, devoid of any internal experience, you're still welcome to read it anyway... Just be sure you properly pretend you enjoyed reading it). In this post, I'm going to use cartoons to explain what that feeling of "conscious awareness" is that we have in our heads. This sensation of internal awareness is an incredibly weird thing, and appears to be completely distinct from other artifacts of our world. How can it arise from physical matter? Why is it so hard for us to converse about it between ourselves, using language? Does it have an evolutionary purpose? In this post, I am going to try and get to the bottom of these questions. Our exploration of consciousness is going to proceed in two stages: First, we need to think about what it means for something to be "real". Second, we're going to look at the key steps in the evolution of the brain, and why these steps make it difficult for us to appreciate the true nature of our internal subjective experience. Base Reality vs. Story Reality "We don't exist inside the physical world. We exist inside a story that the brain tells itself." –Joscha Bach All of us are familiar with the concept that we don't experience the external world directly, but are instead insulated from that world by the processing of information that takes place in our sense organs. However, if we want to really understand just how distant the operations of our minds are from the external world, we need to go much further than thinking merely about the obvious perceptual separation: there are far more profound barriers between our minds and the physical world than the separation introduced by our sensory system. In fact, our minds are so far removed from the real world that it is best to think of it as residing in an entirely different type of reality. Consider, for instance, this person visiting a grocery store on a typical day:

On the left, we see a picture of some random person's everyday reality: a human being is making decisions as they are walking through a grocery store. Inside that human's brain, different information processing modules are performing the many tasks that are needed for the activity of purchasing groceries. This process involves analyzing visual information, making purchasing decisions, as well as activating modules that weigh the importance of the current activity against other potential activities the human could be doing instead. (I crudely indicated the processing modules that perform such sub-tasks by drawing little colored dots on the brain in the left panel). This left panel shows us the concrete physicality of the grocery store, and shows us that the human brain delegates tasks to different modules of the brain. However, these things are only distantly related to a person's internal experience. If we want to know what it truly feels like to shop for groceries, we need to look at something more akin to the panel on the right, where I have reinterpreted the same scene in terms of how objects in the grocery store, and the goals that the shopper is setting for themselves, exist within that person's mind. A person's internal experience differs greatly from any concrete description of physical reality: inside a person's brain, information generated by disparate brain modules is "stitched together" into a very coherent and integrated story, designed to allow that person to make decisions as effectively as possible. This is what I've attempted to draw in the right panel. A person's mind, as they are shopping for groceries, is filled with distinct and well-delineated impressions of objects in the world (in the picture the person is considering the box of Chex and the shopping cart), which are seamlessly combined with internal mental artifacts (such as the person's annoyance at not finding a large box of Chex, or their anxiety about being late for work), in a way that allows the person to effectively perform many tasks, including shopping for groceries. The critical goal of these panels is to illustrate the way in which our minds do not strictly exist in base reality. Instead, our minds exist primarily inside a story that the brain creates for itself. As a computer programmer might say, our minds are a reality "emulated" by the brain, which makes it fundamentally distinct from ordinary reality: the way time, space and external information are experienced by the mind is greatly warped from how those things exist in the base reality. Also, just as one would find in an emulated computer program, the way our thoughts are assembled and organized in our minds probably bears little resemblance to the way those thoughts were generated by the modules of our brain. At a fundamental level, the way information is organized in base reality vs. story reality differs significantly. The biggest difference is that these differing realities have greatly divergent priorities: in the "story reality" the most important thing in the universe is YOU. The story reality exists exclusively in order to let YOU gather information and to let YOU perform actions. Of course, your brain tries to hide this fact from your mind, because a mind that is too self-absorbed would negate the evolutionary advantages that caused the brain to create the mind for itself in the first place. The True Nature of Physical Reality You may have objections to the notion that there are two such distinct realities at play. For instance, you might argue that "it is incorrect that my mind experiences time and distance and objects in a completely different way from how those concepts exist in the real world. For instance, if Event A precedes Event B in the real world, my mind will also unfailingly experience those events in the same order." First of all, some scientific experiments suggest that the order in which our minds experience sequential events can be highly inconsistent (for instance, consider the classical experiments with brain stimulation done by Benjamin Libet). But more importantly, if you believe this you are in fact overlooking an important truth that your brain is concealing from you: our minds were created through adaptive evolution, and in that context the mind's purpose is to act as an efficient decision-making mechanism for tasks within the "real world". To this end, you are right that our minds duplicate some aspects of base reality in an extremely precise way. However, duplicating all the details would be very inefficient and counterproductive. In fact, the facsimile of the world that we see in our minds is rather crude: the truth is that the physical world, as it truly exists, is extremely different from what our minds think it is. This is what the real truth of our world looks like:

In the left panel, I made an attempt to illustrate the physical world as it really is: It is, in many ways, completely different from the way it appears to our minds. For one, physicists tell us that base reality differs greatly from our folk conceptions of reality: i.e., it is composed of quantum fields represented by wave functions, instead of the simpler, 3-dimensional Newtonian world that appears obvious to us. Secondly, base reality does not organize atoms into distinct objects such as "table" or "floor", but treats each atom as a distinct entity. The idea that the floor or a table are distinct objects are merely notions existing in our minds (though certainly very convenient notions, from an evolutionary survival perspective). Thirdly, the information we receive from the outside world, for instance in the form of photons hitting the retina of our eyes, is extremely chaotic and noisy, but we are shielded from this fact. You'll have to excuse my drawing abilities, because these are all things that are impossible to draw, so my cartoon above makes a rather feeble attempt to illustrate it. The point is, if we could experience base reality as it really is we would find it to be very alien, harsh, and mostly incomprehensible. In the right panel, we can see how this reality is instead perceived by our mind: in essence, given a theater performance within the "story reality", where objects in base reality are replaced by crude facsimiles that our mind lazily accepts as real. (Have you ever wondered why dreams are so easily accepted by our minds as real? As Joscha Bach has observed, this is because this same mechanism is at play during our dreams). Our brain orchestrates a bunch of actors, somehow implemented through special modules in our brain (illustrated as purple wizards in the picture above), that act out the real world in front of our mind, and in exchange the mind then makes behavioral decisions that confer survival advantages to the organism within base reality. In short, our mind exists in a sort of "safe space" in which it receives highly-edited information about base reality. Specifically, this information has been edited in a way that strips out as much information as possible, while still allowing the mind to perform its valuable decision-making activities. Through millions of years of evolution, our brains have evolved to heavily edit this information to maximize efficiency, but brains have to be careful not to edit it too much, or the decisions made by the mind based on that information would no longer provide a survival advantage. Note that this concept of the mind I'm presenting differs substantially from that proposed by popular philosophers such as Daniel Dennett, who explicitly deny the existence of a "mind's eye" or internal homunculus. In their view, it is nonsense to think that there's an internal viewer that's experiencing reality as a sort of "theater" that's being performed on its behalf. Here, I claim the opposite: if we had such a theater it would offer an immense survival advantage, and precisely such a theater is taking place every waking hour (and dreaming hour) of our lives. There was a recent movie which did a very good job of encapsulating the difference between "base reality" and "story reality". Can you guess which movie I'm referring to? Anybody? ... It was the 2019 movie "Us" by Jordan Peele. (Skip the next paragraph if you want to avoid some mild spoilers for this excellent movie).

[SPOILERS START]. The horror at the heart of "Us" is of course that we are actually the people in the tunnels, not the people on the surface. The people in the tunnels represent our minds, whereas the people on the surface represent our physical bodies. Do you remember towards the end of the movie, how the underground people were acting out scenes on the surface as if in a stupor? How they were miming out riding on a roller coaster or eating a meal? This is Jordan Peele's vision of what our "story reality" looks like, basically the exact same concept as the right panel in the picture above. The only part the movie got wrong is that the surface is actually the more horrifying place – If the movie had been more realistic, it would have shown the people on the surface fighting to enter the tunnels and enjoy their psychological comfort... not the other way around! [SPOILERS STOP]. Why It's Okay that Conscious Experience Seems Magical Alright, let's suppose my claim is true, that our minds do not reside in base reality, but instead reside in a different "story reality" that is only distantly connected to our notion of "base reality"... does this get us closer to understanding the notion of consciousness? I would argue that it does, because it means we no longer need to consider consciousness as a sort of distinct entity that exists in base reality. In short, we naively tend to view consciousness as a sort of "magical experience" that transcends normal physical reality, an experience for which normal laws of physics lack any explanatory power. But if, instead, our consciousness is a component of "story reality", then this apparent magic is no longer an explanatory barrier: in the emulated story in which our mind resides, there is no inherent limitation that prevents the existence of "hyperphysical" artifacts. (To phrase it in "hacker speak": the x86 instruction set includes MMX vector instructions that do not exist on an ARM processor, but if an ARM processor is emulating an x86 program, it has no difficulty at all in emulating MMX instructions as well, even though MMX instructions do not exist in the "base reality" of an ARM CPU). I will concede that this argument feels a bit like a cop-out: the explanation for consciousness we've developed so far fails to address core questions you likely have, such as, "Why does the color red feel different to me from the color blue? Why would evolution require me to experience feelings, instead of simply existing as a mechanical zombie that is devoid of emotional states?" To address this next level of questions, we need to explore the evolution of our brains in more detail. The Evolution of the Brain Let us divide the evolution of the human brain into three phases. It's possible that the three phases of brain evolution I present in this post deviate from the way our brains actually came about, but that's okay: here, we are merely going to discuss what biologists refer to as a "just-so story". A "just-so story" means we're going to make logical guesses about what happened in prehistory, without meaningful empirical data to support those guesses. For our purposes, such historical speculation will be fine. We aren't concerned about accurately characterizing the brain's history, but are merely building a narrative to characterize the design that the brain manifests in the present. The three phases of brain evolution I'm going to be discussing are the reflex brain, the stateful brain and finally the modeling brain. Each one of these represented a major innovation in the design of animal brains. The Reflex Brain The simplest type of animal brain is the version of the brain that you will read about in any biology textbook. Roughly, this is the version of a brain you might imagine a fish would have. This type of brain operates at the level of reflexes, and uses many hard-wired connections. For example, let's think about how a fish brain might decide if the fish should eat a donut, such as a raspberry jelly donut:

First, its brain needs to decide if the fish is physically capable of eating the donut: it accomplishes this through a circuit that combines sensory information arriving from the eyes (shown in green in the upper panel) as well as basic decision-making circuits in the brain itself that determine if the item to be consumed is not too big or too small. In order for the fish to undergo the motions to eat the donut, this circuit has to say, "Eat it!" Anyone familiar with evolutionary theory can easily imagine how such a circuit would evolve and how the circuit would "know" what the right food size is for the fish: in the past, many fish likely ate potential food items that were too large and choked to death, leading to evolutionary pressure to avoid such objects. Another neural circuit a fish brain is likely to have is a circuit attached to the fish's gut which determines if the fish is still digesting previously-consumed food, essentially a circuit that tells the brain if the fish is hungry. Only if the gut is empty and this circuit yells, "I am hungry!" should the fish consume the donut. Based on this concept of a simple fish brain relying solely on these types of concrete reflexes, we can already think of the fish as having a mind with a "story reality", but for a simple fish it would be an extremely boring reality:

As you can see in this "warped version" of reality, a version of reality that looks at the world from the perspective of the fish's mind, we can see the simple artifacts of "hunger" and "jelly donut", but they are wrapped in a layer of green, which is my attempt to represent the sensory and motor neuron layers that lie between the fish's mind and the external reality. What this green barrier is illustrating is that in order for the fish's mind to interact with the food item, the fish needs to use its neurons connected to its eyes to inspect the donut, or use neurons to activate its muscles to eat the donut. The same is true of its perception of hunger, which requires the fish mind to make use of neurons connected to the gut. The Stateful Brain The "reflex brain" of a fish has a simple design, but also a rather inflexible one: this is because it relies on concrete connections between inputs (from eyes and neurons monitoring the gut, etc.,) and outputs (animal behavior). The next stage in brain sophistication is to add a layer of indirection between inputs and outputs to create a more general, multipurpose neuronal architecture. With this type of design, an animal's eating behavior isn't just directly triggered by neurons monitoring the gut. Instead, the brain can now think "Animal is hungry!" and maintain that as an ongoing fact to guide behavior. As a programmer would say, the brain can process information more efficiently by maintaining "state" to represent properties about itself and of pertinent objects in the outside world. This type of approach is more flexible and efficient for multiple reasons. First of all, it allows the animal to take noisy signals it receives from its internal and external sensors and "smooth them out", instead of relying on continuous sampling of its sensors. In this way, an animal can maintain "object permanence" and not forget that it's hungry as its hunger pangs come and go, or forget that it saw a food source, even if it is temporarily obstructed from view. Secondly, having an internal representation of itself and its environment allows an animal to reuse brain circuits for multiple purposes, without needing to evolve each of them independently. This means the brain can think "Animal is scared!" and flee a predator, no matter how this fear developed- Regardless of whether the animal was bitten or saw a predator with its eyes, the same evasive actions can be taken. In short, if the brain has an internal representation of the identity of the animal and of important objects in the environment, it can evolve higher-level circuitry that benefits from the simplification provided by this representation. This stage of brain development, which I call the stateful brain, is where a "story reality" truly starts to take shape: once the brain has state management to represent the animal's identity and the identity of significant objects in the external world, the "theater of the mind" can really begin to take shape. It is hard to say when animal brains first developed notions of object permanence with internal state management, but I imagine that the stateful brain is what a mouse might experience. Here is how we might illustrate the "story reality" of such a mouse:

Notice that artifacts in this reality are now wrapped by layers of two different colors. As before, we have a green layer representing the barrier of sensory and motor neurons separating the mouse's mind from the donut and perception of hunger. But also, we now have an additional layer of indirection introduced by the brain's state machinery, which maintains its own facsimile of the donut/hunger to improve object permanence. This is the layer that is performing the theater on behalf of the mouse's mind. The state machine of the mouse now also makes it possible for the mouse's brain to maintain more general abstract notions that are NOT directly tied to its senses, i.e., the mouse's story reality can now contain artifacts without a "green layer". This includes notions such as "fear" and "anger", which can persist over time without requiring continuous sensory input. The Modeling Brain The final major leap in brain development is when animals developed the ability to model the world across time. Again, it is hard to say exactly when this ability developed, but certainly monkeys and apes seem to possess an ability to model the outside world. When an animal with a modeling brain sees a donut, it not only thinks of it as an object in the outside world with properties... it also can make inferences about the past and the future of the donut. For instance, it can speculate that a human likely placed the donut there, and can predict what it would feel like to eat the donut, or what the donut might look like if it was left, untouched, for [what humans call] a month. Humans have mastered the art of looking at the world from a modeled perspective, and the ability to model has become integral to how we think. Additionally, our social nature has reinforced this ability to model, since we use language to encode the models of our external world and can discuss them with other humans. The ability to model the world is something that is deeply integral to how our brain works, something that was introduced into the brain (once again) through millions of years of evolutionary pressure. The purpose of modeling the world is to enhance our ability to make decisions by predicting likely future events in the external world. This is what the "story reality" of an ape might look like: