It turns out the unconscious mind is better at making complex decisions than is the conscious mind114. The conscious mind just can’t handle as many variables, apparently. Quoth one of the researchers: “At some point in our evolution, we started to make decisions consciously, and we’re not very good at it.”

But while many have described the various costs and drawbacks of sentience, few if any have taken the next step and wondered out loud if the whole damn thing isn’t more trouble than it’s worth. Of course it is, people assume; otherwise natural selection would have weeded it out long ago. And they’re probably right. I hope they are. Blindsight is a

Aesthetics might be an exception. Aesthetics seem to require self-awareness—it might even be what got the whole sentience ball rolling in the first place. When music is so beautiful it makes you shiver, that’s your limbic reward circuitry kicking in: the same circuitry that rewards you for fucking an attractive partner or gorging on sucrose.106

Sentience isn’t even necessary to develop a “theory of mind”: you don’t need to be self-reflective in order to track others’ intentions97. Norretranders declared outright that “Consciousness is a fraud.”105

(If the rest of your brain were conscious, it would probably regard you as the pointy-haired boss from Dilbert.)

But beneath the unthreatening, superficial question of what consciousness is floats the more functional question of what it’s good for. It’s telling to note that the nonconscious mind usually works so well on its own that it actually employs a gatekeeper to prevent the conscious self from interfering in daily operations.

Less ambitious, more accessible, Wegner’s The Illusion of Conscious Will20 doesn’t deal with the nature of consciousness so much as with the nature of will, which Wegner thumbnails as “our mind’s way of estimating what it thinks it did.” And of course, Oliver Sacks21 was sending us memos from the edge of consciousness long before consciousness even

Towering above such pussies, Metzinger takes the bull by the balls. His “World-zero” hypothesis not only explains the subjective sense of self, but also why such an illusory first-person narrator would be an emergent property of certain cognitive systems in the first place. I have no idea whether he’s right—the man’s way beyond me—but at least he

SENTIENCE/INTELLIGENCE Here’s the heart of the whole damn exercise. Biggies first: Metzinger’s Being No One19 is the toughest book I’ve ever read (and there are still significant chunks of it I haven’t), but it also contains some of the most mindblowing ideas I’ve encountered in fact or fiction.