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Consciousness as a Memory System : Cognitive and Behavioral Neurology
journals.lww.come to forgetting and false memories. However, if we believe that episodic memory developed to flexibly and creatively combine and rearrange memories of prior events in order to plan for the future, then it is quite a good system. We argue that consciousness originally developed as part of the episodic memory system—quite likely the part needed to accomplish that flexible recombining of information. We posit further that consciousness was subsequently co-opted to produce other functions that are not directly relevant to memory per se, such as problem-solving, abstract thinking, and language. We suggest that this theory is compatible with many phenomena, such as the slow speed and the after-the-fact order of consciousness, that cannot be explained well by other theories. We believe that our theory may have profound implications for understanding intentional action and consciousness in general. Moreover, we suggest that episodic memory and its associated memory systems of sensory, working, and semantic memory as a whole ought to be considered together as the conscious memory system in that they, together, give rise to the phenomenon of consciousness. Lastly, we suggest that the cerebral cortex is the part of the brain that makes consciousness possible, and that every cortical region contributes to this conscious memory system....
I’m definitely partial to the idea that qualia is an emergent property, but I also think that it’s a continuous gradient as opposed to a binary property. I suspect that some level of self awareness arises in any organism that interacts with its environment in a volitional way. At a fundamental level it’s the organism modelling itself in its environment. Being able to move towards food and away from danger are two basic requirements, and creating an internal model that integrates sensory inputs and reacts to them is a good solution to this problem. And we observe this in pretty much all living organisms. Then it’s just a matter of how complex this model becomes.
Simple organisms have a very rudimentary model, but complex ones exhibit increasing levels of fidelity. There is also a possibility that qualia is just an exhaust fume from this process. It’s entirely possible that the functional survival of the organism does not necessitate consciousness, but it is an emergent property that necessarily falls out from the need of the organism to model itself within the environment. Consciousness can be sort of an echo resulting from that process.
I definitely agree that this is one of the most interesting problems in nature. It’s fascinating that it’s something so core to our experience, yet we’re unable to define what it is exactly.