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Comment by strawcomb | Hacker News Reader

> We suggest that our personal awareness does not create, cause or choose our beliefs, feelings or perceptions. Instead, the contents of consciousness are generated “behind the scenes” by fast, efficient, non-conscious systems in our brains.

My consciousness prefers to think that it is the one in control, and any suggestion to the contrary makes my consciousness uncomfortable.

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Another section of the article for a TLDR: "we don’t consciously choose our thoughts or our feelings – we become aware of them."

> My consciousness prefers to think that it is the one in control, and any suggestion to the contrary makes my consciousness uncomfortable.

Maybe you should rather say "My awarenes is aware of thoughts about myself being the one in control, and it is also aware of feelings of discomfort that accompany ideas about myself not being the one in control".

What do we achieve by adding all those words? I observe that my body is usually acts as if controlled by a single goal-directed agent. I call this agent I. It doesn't matter if we can single-out some useless subsystem and call it "ride-along consciousness" or "real I" or something.

Honestly, it feels more like we are slaves to our brains. It releases various chemicals(emotions) to push us to do stuff. Everything that can be automated already is - image processing, manual tasks, memory retrieval, face recognition.

Experience/qualia is only involved when brain wants to think. This seems to suggest that free will indeed exists(otherwise why bother with all this machinery), but it is pretty limited.

I wonder why we evolved with that feeling

Maybe separate subsystems in the mind had to evolve to follow the same leader ("I") as obediently as possible because pausing to debate with other subsystems at some critical moment instead of running meant that a predator had time to kill you. The unification of subsystems from this pressure would tighten over time, maybe to the point where a subsystem challenging the primary conscious agent would be perceived as mutiny by the other subsystems and they would try to bully it back into submission by producing anxiety. I wonder if a subsystem successfully powering through the protest and claiming the throne of "I" is what happens when people snap.

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