My theory is that this darting is the mechanism of consciousness. We look inward and outward in a loop, which generates the perception of being conscious in a similar way to how sequential frames of film create the illusion of motion. That "persistence of vision" is like the illusion of persistent, continuous consciousness created by the inward-outward regard sequence. Consciousness is a simple algorithm: look at the world, then look at the self to evaluate its reaction to the world. Then repeat.
But why does that feel like anything? I could write a program that concurrently processes its visual input and its internal model. I don't think it would be conscious, unless everything in the universe is conscious (a possibility I can't, admittedly, discount).
More of "because you are a continuous chemical reaction that started 4 billion years ago". A bunch of legacy crap gets left around from the time before higher order thought when the brain - muscle interactivity was just based on feelings.
If we had all those animals, especially those around the time of the cambrian explosion to experiment on as they developed it would probably make more sense in the 'but it does' department. This is also why your math teacher wants you to show your work.
Consciousness is an attention mechanism. That inward regard, evaluating how the self reacts to the world, is attention being payed to the body's feelings. The outward regard then maps those feelings on to local space. Consciousness is watching your feelings as a kind of HUD on the world. It correlates feels to things.
Just wait till you hear Geoffrey Hinton’s “little pink elephants” routine; it will all make sense then (it won’t). The mystery is almost rivaled by that other mystery of why some of us fail to be mystified.
Orchestrated objective reduction or just an emerging proeprty of:
Our 86 billion neurons, every single one deafeningly
complex molecular machine with hundred million of hundreds of different receptor types, monoaminoxidae, (reuptake)transporters, connections to other neurons.
From what...my friend say, this becomes evident with LSD.
They said it clearly amplified the internal part of some visual perception loop, in fairly straightforward ways. For example, intentionally trying to see something as it wasn't (like a shadow as a snake) would make it be seen that way (the shadow would take on a clear snake appearance, and even move a bit).
Some simple examples are all the face optical illusions (Thatcher, reverse mask, etc), that show our perception of a face is in no way direct.
I also have noticed a "ticking" effect at times. Maybe around 5-10Hz or so. Felt like some kind of global clock tick that was updating perception. Everything in between was interpolated. Course it could just be the drugs /shrug
Interesting idea called transparent self model by Thomas Metzinger, author of The Ego Tunnel where he explains it further.
The gist from my memory of 15+ years ago is that the brain needs to model the world and then itself within the world, creating a model that is transparent to itself, situated in the world.
It's a mechanism of intelligence, not consciousness. Intel is built up from path-integration, short-cuts, vicarious trial and error that begins in very tiny local areas and expands to landmark and non-landmark navigation. This switching between vision and hippocampus has always been theorized about as the fundamental sharp wave ripple threshold of how intelligence is built as most mammals can do this, so it's not the "algorithm of consciousness".
