An ant/termite colony is a pretty complex system. But each ant is not complicated at all. Is there a central intelligence that governs the system and that makes it capable of doing complicated things? Look at the magnificent mini-castles that
termites build for instance. Well no – there isn’t any central “intelligence”. But to an outsider there appears to be.

What if this illusion of a “central” pupeeter appears to an insider also? What does this question even mean? It shall become clearer by the end of the post.

I am talking of the human system. It is darn complicated. We have so many complicated sub-systems – circulation, vision, audition and so on.
Is there a “central” system in “control”?
Well – we do have the nervous system, so that’s something. But wait, we assume more: we assume there is a central “consciousness” in control. That conscious-intelligence being our “self”.

Is there really such a central consciousness?

I mean, most of our body functions happen without our “consciousness” anyway. But the “self” does have control over some actions – moving the arm for instance. “Who” “decides” to move the arm basically? We dont know much at all about the body components or how our nervous system controls it. Note even the “we” in the previous sentence. What is that “we”?

All those monks, in temples atop mountains, were meditating all these eons for the same question. Lucky for you guys, I figured it all out without going to all that atop-mountains trouble. And being nice and altruistic and all that, am gonna share the fruits of my timeless wisdom.

Well. You see our brain constantly has an image of the environment. This seems fine. But wait, it also has an image of itself as a part of the environment: this is the “self-symbol”. It is THIS that we call our “consciousness”.

We glibly presume that “our conscious self” has free-choice to do what “we” want. Like say wiggling your little finger.
I don’t think so.
The relevant sub-system of the brain processes a request for wiggling the finger made by another sub-system of the brain, that in turn makes this request on receiving input from some other sub-systems such as an emotion system
and the memory system.

A signal is then sent to the motor cortex for wiggling your finger, which then sends the signals to the body to interact with the environment accordingly. But here is the key – all the brain subsystems also update the self-symbol; the unified “image”.
It is then that “we” perceive it as if “we” have made a decision based on what “we” thought.

The point I’m making is subtle. Our perception of what “we” are is just that – a perception, an image, a painting. The goings-on are BEYOND the control of the “self-image”. All that happens is that “we”, the self-symbol is constantly updated by the brain-subsystem overlords.
“We” are a reflection basically. But why does there have to be such a “self-symbol” if it is not “doing” anything?

Actually, the more complicated the imagery of the self-symbol, the more complex ways in which the system can interact with the environment: this is true even in current AI when you build a robot. You not only need to map the environment properly, but you also need to have a complex self-symbol of – the robot as a part of the environment.

For example, a robot that has to avoid obstacles, should not only have an internal map of its visual scenery, but also where “it” is on the visual scene.

Sometimes due to faulty circuits, multiple self-images are created – this leads to split personalities and the like. There is just one brain, just one central nervous system, I even think the brain has only one environment image, but somehow it ends up having multiple self-symbols at the same time.

Such a complicated system – our human body – is thus just a glorified ant colony really. We could look upon the individual “ants” to be cells, or to be nervous-system components. Each of these do what they are designed to do. And end up with such a complicated system that one of the ants – the self-symbol – thinks it is “intelligent” and “conscious”.