Why is the beam of our consciousness so narrow? We can only consciously perceive very little at any given time, even though our senses collect a lot more data. What reaches us is the highly condensed result of many layers of filtering and processing. Eric Nehrlich writes that consciousness is limited to 20 bits per second. I don’t know if that’s accurate, but from observing my own consciousness, I can confirm that its bandwidth is surprisingly narrow.
Why is that? What’s the problem exactly? Is it energetically expensive to have a broader consciousness? If so, why? Or have we simply not gotten around to evolving a broader consciousness since it wouldn’t be that helpful?
Or, and this is a potentially far-out thought, is there something in the nature of consciousness that makes broadness impossible? In other words, does consciousness that is too broad cease to be consciousness? Can the narrowness of consciousness help us understand what consciousness is, and how it appears?
Nehrlich, in the blog post I linked to above, goes in a different direction than my speculation about the nature of consciousness. He argues that since our narrow consciousness is only a small part of our minds, we should pay more attention to the other parts, such as our intuition. This is also what David Bessis argues in Mathematica, which I reviewed a few weeks ago. It’s also diametrically the opposite of the flat mind thesis advanced by Nick Chater, at least on the surface.
Nehaveigur 