Civility as the Ghost in our Myriad Machines

A profound confusion about the conscious self spreads throughout society

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All animals might be conscious to some degree, but people have a special depth of self-awareness that results in an outpouring of measures to customize our habitat, from art to technology to encultured behaviours.

We can learn something about consciousness by considering our audacious preoccupation with terraforming the wilderness.

The brain wears the mind

Self-consciousness is part of the brain’s model of itself, combined with a depth of qualia that reflects extensive background knowledge. The human brain gathers information and employs its cerebral intelligence to spur meta-questions that deepen its understanding of what’s happening. The five outer senses direct the brain to the external world, but the brain is such a prodigious hog for knowledge that it also deploys its meager interior senses, such as introspection and proprioception, to understand its body and neural labyrinth.

The result is what we call the “mind,” as in the folk conception of a haver of thoughts and feelings, a “spirit,” “soul,” or “personal self” that we don’t think of as just the embodied brain. No, the mind is what the brain does, and for centuries…