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timtyler comments on Conflicts Between Mental Subagents: Expanding Wei Dai's Master-Slave Model - Less Wrong
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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.