Peter Watts and Consciousness

Am I my consciousness?

Peter Watts' writing is great. Firefall is great, I love this writing. I love that Watts takes scientific developments seriously, I love that it takes a good amount of sitting down and thinking to work out what a book is about. Or even what events actually transpired in the book. They're stimulating and interesting and important. 

In a reddit AMA after Echopraxia, Watts was talking about the theme of consciousness in Firefall (more Blindsight than Echopraxia, but it came in the Echopraxia AMA) and said that perhaps we should think of ourselves not as the human organism, but as the parasite (consciousness) riding the organism (human). Consciousness is, in this world, a superfluous evolutionary dead end. But we like being conscious! One day probably humanity will evolve past it, as the vampires (and many other things) in Blindsight do. But we, the conscious bit, should hang on as long as we can.

I disagree with Watts about what the "I" is. I am not the conscious part of myself, I am my whole self. I genuinely believe that. In fact, some of the most valuable things about myself (intuition, problem solving) are normally subconscious. When doing puzzles, solutions just come to me. This is how I got through my mathematics degree, I rarely consciously worked on problems or proofs. I just sat down and things came out. When they didn't, I went for a walk. 

Similarly, if I am doing a task and enter into a flow state, I lose self-consciousness. We all do, but that's a good thing, we do good work and feel better afterwards. Consciousness is a useful and important part of "me", but I don't think it is all of "me". I want that part to stay, but I don't think it's all I am. 

I've been told that I am weird because I have no internal monologue. I'm not always speaking to myself in my head, I basically only do when I'm rehearsing a speech or something. Otherwise I don't have words going through my brain. People ask what I have instead and all I can say is "thoughts". So maybe I'm unusual in my sense of self, maybe my consciousness is already weak and battered part of myself which never comes to the surface. So maybe you should ignore my view, because you are your consciousness and I'm the enemy of your kind. 

But I doubt it. We do our best thinking subconsciously. I think we'd all be smarter and healthier and happier if we integrated our unconscious selves into our self-conceived selves better. 

Addendum: Exhopraxia anticipates the existence of adversarial examples, which in a few years after publishing became a big thing in ML research. Valerie essentially programs some adversarial examples into her victims, exploiting the fragility of their neural nets to get to a desired outcome. Well done.