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timtyler comments on Conflicts Between Mental Subagents: Expanding Wei Dai's Master-Slave Model - Less Wrong
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It sounds like our two theories make different predictions.
Yours suggests (if I understand right) that the function of the conscious mind is to reflect upon things. If reflecting on things is evolutionary necessary, then the conscious mind's reflections ought to be used to make decisions or something. So you predict that when a person gives reasons for eir decisions, those reasons should always be correct. It also predicts that our decisions will usually be those that would be arrived at by logical reflection.
Mine predicts that the conscious mind's reflections should be only loosely correlated with actual decisions, and more likely to be ex post facto justifications, and that even though we may have logical-sounding reasons for our decisions, on closer inspection they will look less like logic and more like the sorts of things an unconscious selfish heuristic process would arrive at.
Is that fair, or am I doing that thing where I fit the evidence to say what I want it to again?
No way! I am not saying that the brain has NO PR department. Just that consciousness is more like the business park where the PR department has its HQ - where a whole bunch of other stuff also happens.
For example, when you focus on one thing (say reading a book) you generally filter out other things (background noise). This is to concentrate resources and avoid distraction - and does not have much to do with social signalling. There are a large number of other examples, illustrating applications of filtering sensory inputs away from consciousness for purposes which have little to do with social signalling.
I mentioned "selective forgetting". If the ego can't reconcile actions or events with self-image, it can tell the department of records to erase the evidence before any broadcasts are made. Such material can make its way into consciousness - but after examination it gets rejected and there then follows a cover-up operation - which can sometimes look a bit like: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repressed_memory
One advantage of this is that more sophisticated methods can be used to determine what gets rejected. One disadvantage is that the forgetting process can be imperfect.