We don’t make most decisions consciously. Even those that we think we make consciously actually often get made before we become aware of them consciously, and we then rationalize them as having made them consciously afterwards. Here is how Tyler Cowen on Marginal Revolution describes it:
If there is one systematic flaw that humans have, it is an excessive willingness to ascribe conscious intent and to anthropomorphize purely natural and material entities. It seems we are strongly disposed toward this bias.
Yet few of us are willing to examine what is perhaps the biggest and most significant way we make this mistake. When it comes to understanding ourselves, so many of us assume that “we are in charge.” We identify our phenomenological stream of consciousness with our actual selves, and treat that consciousness stream as the true decision maker.
The reality is that you—whatever we take that concept to mean—make most or maybe all of your actual decisions in parts of your brain that precede what you take to be the conscious choice.
As I wrote a few days ago, it’s hard to define what a rational choice is. The above suggests that it’s also hard to define what a choice is, whether rational or not.
The fact that our consciousness is often a mere observer, but likes to imagine itself as the boss, is only one of the strange things about it. Another one is how narrow the beam of consciousness is. I wonder if the two observations are related. If we needed our consciousness for decision-making, it’d make sense for it to be able to process as much information as possible. Since in many cases it’s not involved in decision making, maybe there is no reason for it to have a higher bandwidth.
Nehaveigur 