Also a must read: How the Mind Works, Steven Pinker.
Pinker advocates for a model of mind that has multiple streams of consciousness. In Pinker's model of mind, there are multiple agents constructing models of the world in parallel, each trying to predict future states from current state plus current input data. A supervisory process then selects the model that has made the best prediction of current state in the recent past for use when reacting in the current moment. The supervisor process is free to switch between models on the fly as more data comes in.
Pinker grounds his model of mind in curious observations of what people remember, and how our short term memories change over a period of sometimes many seconds as our mind switches between different agent interpretations of what's going on. Witnesses are notoriously unreliable. Pinker concerns himself with why and how witnesses are unreliable, not for legal reasons, but for how those unreliabilities might reveal structure of mind. Pinker's most interesting observation (I think) is that what we seem to remember is output from the models rather than the raw input data; and that what we remember seeing can change dramatically over a period of many seconds as the supervisory process switches between models. Notably, we seem to remember, in short term memory, details of successful models that make "sense", even when those details contradict with what we actually saw. And when those details are moved to longer-term memory, the potentially inaccurate details of model are what are committed.
Pinker advocates for a model of mind that has multiple streams of consciousness. In Pinker's model of mind, there are multiple agents constructing models of the world in parallel, each trying to predict future states from current state plus current input data. A supervisory process then selects the model that has made the best prediction of current state in the recent past for use when reacting in the current moment. The supervisor process is free to switch between models on the fly as more data comes in.
Pinker grounds his model of mind in curious observations of what people remember, and how our short term memories change over a period of sometimes many seconds as our mind switches between different agent interpretations of what's going on. Witnesses are notoriously unreliable. Pinker concerns himself with why and how witnesses are unreliable, not for legal reasons, but for how those unreliabilities might reveal structure of mind. Pinker's most interesting observation (I think) is that what we seem to remember is output from the models rather than the raw input data; and that what we remember seeing can change dramatically over a period of many seconds as the supervisory process switches between models. Notably, we seem to remember, in short term memory, details of successful models that make "sense", even when those details contradict with what we actually saw. And when those details are moved to longer-term memory, the potentially inaccurate details of model are what are committed.