Oakley David A, Halligan Peter W
Division of Psychology and Language Sciences, University College London, London, United Kingdom.
School of Psychology, Cardiff University, Cardiff, United Kingdom.
Front Psychol. 2017 Nov 14;8:1924. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01924. eCollection 2017.
Despite the compelling subjective experience of executive self-control, we argue that "consciousness" contains no top-down control processes and that "consciousness" involves no executive, causal, or controlling relationship with any of the familiar psychological processes conventionally attributed to it. In our view, psychological processing and psychological products are not under the control of consciousness. In particular, we argue that all "contents of consciousness" are generated by and within non-conscious brain systems in the form of a continuous self-referential personal narrative that is not directed or influenced in any way by the "experience of consciousness." This continuously updated personal narrative arises from selective "internal broadcasting" of outputs from non-conscious executive systems that have access to all forms of cognitive processing, sensory information, and motor control. The personal narrative provides information for storage in autobiographical memory and is underpinned by constructs of self and agency, also created in non-conscious systems. The experience of consciousness is a passive accompaniment to the non-conscious processes of internal broadcasting and the creation of the personal narrative. In this sense, personal awareness is analogous to the rainbow which accompanies physical processes in the atmosphere but exerts no influence over them. Though it is an end-product created by non-conscious executive systems, the personal narrative serves the powerful evolutionary function of enabling individuals to communicate (externally broadcast) the contents of internal broadcasting. This in turn allows recipients to generate potentially adaptive strategies, such as predicting the behavior of others and underlies the development of social and cultural structures, that promote species survival. Consequently, it is the capacity to communicate to others the contents of the personal narrative that confers an evolutionary advantage-not the experience of consciousness (personal awareness) itself.
尽管存在令人信服的执行自我控制的主观体验，但我们认为，“意识”并不包含自上而下的控制过程，“意识”与任何传统上归因于它的常见心理过程之间不存在执行、因果或控制关系。我们认为，心理加工和心理产物不受意识控制。具体而言，我们认为所有“意识内容”都是由无意识的大脑系统产生并在其中形成的，其形式是一种持续的自我指涉的个人叙事，这种叙事不以任何方式受到“意识体验”的引导或影响。这种不断更新的个人叙事源于对所有认知加工、感官信息和运动控制形式都有访问权限的无意识执行系统输出的选择性“内部广播”。个人叙事为自传体记忆的存储提供信息，并以自我和能动性的建构为基础，这些建构同样在无意识系统中产生。意识体验是内部广播和个人叙事创建的无意识过程的被动伴随物。从这个意义上说，个人意识类似于大气中物理过程伴随的彩虹，但对它们没有影响。尽管个人叙事是由无意识执行系统产生的最终产物，但它具有强大的进化功能，使个体能够（向外广播）交流内部广播的内容。这反过来又使接收者能够生成潜在的适应性策略，比如预测他人的行为，并构成促进物种生存的社会和文化结构发展的基础。因此，赋予进化优势的是向他人传达个人叙事内容的能力，而不是意识体验（个人意识）本身。
