If you are unfortunate enough to experience some human body failure modes you can get a glimpse into this process. The cohesive "veil" breaks down and you realize there's more "you" than that voice in your head. The distributed nature of the brain/body peeks through.
Sure, there are deeper reasons for my voice is what it is, but thats something else entirely. I think its more so that as we evolve, we forget our initial motivations for thinking the way we do so that when we do reflect on our past, and are honest with ourselves, they do somewhat remerge.
You were taught well. Teachers and parents and adults don't like it when the child says "I don't know why I did it". They punish that answer. You learned the lesson soon, well, and maybe without even having to be punished.
Oh, and your internal voice is just another one of those simulations.
> A simple example is, I go to the fridge because I am hungry.
Except many millions of people go to the fridge, and they're provably, objectively not hungry. They say "because I'm hungry" too. If you had to make up a fictitious-but-reasonable reason why people go to fridges, that would be at the top of the list. That's why you say it. Few people, if any at all, are even aware of their hunger. In the west, few have even ever experienced hunger, and if they have, almost certainly only a few times in their lives.
None of this is anything that you are really aware of. You can't be. You can't even express how you think your mind works without using the word "voice". I used to think people like you were schizos when I was a child and hadn't figured all of this out yet. It was clear that it wasn't just a failure of vocabulary, I'd met many people even just out in public who didn't seem to know enough words to describe things, this wasn't that. And early on I could tell that it wasn't a joke, eventually that it wasn't even a metaphor. You do not know the reasons you do things, and when forced to explain, you make up stuff and choose to believe that's why. The "I don't know" answer becomes painful to adults. It nags at you. You're supposed to know yourself well enough to have reasons most of the time. It's one of those scary glimpses. There's a ghost inside your skull, moving the furniture around when you're not looking.
Thats assuming I need to make up a justification for why I did something to protect my ego. Most actions I take in my life don't need that reason, that includes going to the fridge because I am in fact, hungry. In fact I'd say 99% of the actions throughout my day are super simple decisions. There are some things where I am conflicted, and unsure about that I don't understand myself sure.
You don't think "I am going to go left" and go right, after all. You don't think "I am going to grab this" and open up your fists. Saying your voice has NO relation to your actions or your true self is just absurd.
For more complex actions that have more emotional depth, again it really depends on how honest you are with yourself. You may not understand everything, but you have some idea or feelings you should be aware of.
Also consider the technical actions we do make. If I am doing my job, I can fully explain my rationale behind why I did the things I did. Why would it be any different for the actions I take in my personal life? I felt insecure about not having a relationship, so I started thinking about how I can improve, so I started thinking about my body, so I started going to the gym. I bought low calorie coke because I am trying to stay fit, because of the previous reasons. You're telling me that's all just complete bs and I did all these things for some completely different, unknown reason?
Or Ive really been hating my job. I started playing piano and I really connected with it and I see its something I am really good at. So I quit my job and enrolled in music school. Complete bs? When I was sitting there at work and had a bunch of negative thoughts about it, I actually didn't feel that way?
>Few people, if any at all, are even aware of their hunger. In the west, few have even ever experienced hunger, and if they have, almost certainly only a few times in their lives.
I think this is a pretty fictitious statement to make. Yeah most people in the west have not experienced "true" hunger, but we all feel hungry every day as we do in fact, need to eat everyday just to sustain. I am not overweight, I am barely holding onto the weight I have. If anything I should be eating more. Yet I feel very hungry several times throughout the day.
I see "I don't know" largely as "I don't want to confront my feelings or publicly tell you". If what you were saying is true, there would be zero point in self reflection or therapy. There would be no point in judging peoples personalities, listening to what they say, or the promises they make.
I don't think you're entirely wrong, in that if you go deep enough asking why, you'll get lost. But thats not because of your unconscious self, thats because you completely forgot/blocked out/retold yourself some other story.
There just isn't a perceivable reason for everything, as we can't fully perceive our internal state. But if youre aware of these things, they can be explained too. For example, you may identify that when you eat greasy foods you become lethargic and that if you don't eat all you become irritable.
Sounds like stochastic gradient descent. Start with random weights and fix them later. That kind of "incompetence" gets you a seven-figure paycheck these days...
Your subjective experience is that incompetent model. Your model doesn't know how to correctly judge human character, so you misread people and always wonder why they say one thing but another is true, and it doesn't click that they're lying the whole time. You can't keep track of time because the internal clock just isn't implemented, so the who day seems to drag on, or maybe fly by too quickly.
It's all just really shitty software. Layers upon layers. And because humans believe this to be some mystical thing, rather than trying to fix it from the inside, they assume that it's awesome, necessary, and why would anyone want to fix it?
No small fraction of it is simply because our memory is faulty. The only time you ever remember anything is the first time you remember it, every memory access of that is really you remembering the last time you remembered it. Each access is lossier than the last, and confabulation is guaranteed. This seems to be true even moments after the event.
If it was anyone other than evolution who wrote your code, you could sue them for criminal negligence.
And that's before we even get to the part where you find out you're not even you. Inside your skull is another being, an intelligent one, with desires and goals. But you can't see, hear, or feel this being. It's invisible. The "you" that I'm talking to, exists because this being once upon a time needed to simulate the other humans around him, so he could anticipate them well enough to not be out-competed. He has a pretty good idea what they'd say if he asked them questions, how they'd respond to threats and challenges, what sets them off (so he can avoid fights). And, by mistake or design, he used this simulator to simulate himself (maybe to bootstrap it? if the simulation's output matches his known answers, it's working correctly?).
You're the simulation. When the judge asks the psycho teenager why he put the cat in the microwave and he says "I dunno" he's telling the truth. He does not know why. When your girlfriend cheats on you, and she's crying hysterically and can't tell you why she did it, she's not just lying (either to hurt you or to spare feelings)... she doesn't know. It was that other being in their skulls doing these things. They're just the simulations.
Now, you've either been poking around in your own head, seeing little glimpses of what I'm talking about, making you wonder if I'm not on to something, or you're incapable of that. I've met both kinds of people. If you're the former, you're wondering just how much of it I understand, because some of the glimpses paint a slightly different picture from what I describe. That's because our minds weren't built the same way. No two are alike, not in a special snowflake way, but instead like no two shacks in shantytown have the same kind of leaky cardboard roofs. And, if you're the latter...