Where the user interface Analogy Breaks

Calling consciousness a user interface is useful for about five minutes. The comparison can expose structure that ordinary language hides. The problem begins when the comparison stops behaving like a tool and starts behaving like a claim about what the thing literally is.

Interface language can help distinguish internal processing from information that becomes broadly available to reasoning, report and action.

What the metaphor gets right

Interface language can help distinguish internal processing from information that becomes broadly available to reasoning, report and action.

This is why engineering metaphors are so attractive. They compress a complicated relationship into something we can manipulate mentally. In the best case, the metaphor produces predictions and sharper questions.

What it smuggles in

A software interface is presented to a separate user. Consciousness appears to be part of the organism itself; inventing an inner user simply moves the mystery inward.

Engineering words often carry hidden assumptions: a designer, a specification, modular ownership, explicit goals, a stable machine underneath the program. Those assumptions must be tested rather than inherited.

Return to the physical story

Conscious experience correlates with organized brain activity, but science still debates which mechanisms are necessary and sufficient. Theories emphasize global availability, recurrent processing, integration, prediction and other architectures.

Once the mechanism is back in view, the analogy can be kept on a short leash. We can state which relation is genuinely similar and which difference would make the analogy generate a wrong prediction.

My three tests for a metaphor

1. What mechanism does this comparison help me see?
2. Which engineering assumption does the natural system not share?
3. What would I predict incorrectly if I took the comparison literally?

The third test is the most important. An analogy that cannot fail is decoration, not explanation.

Beyond the borrowed language

The study of consciousness moved through introspection, behaviorism, cognitive science and neuroscience without producing one uncontested mechanistic theory.

Consciousness turns objective description back on the describer: physical systems exist for which something seems to be happening from the inside.

What must a physical system do before there is something it is like to be that system?

A good metaphor should eventually make itself less necessary. It gets us close enough to the real system that we can see where the scaffolding ends.

Reading trail

• Aeon — Life as a restless manner of being
• Aeon — We are not machines

These links are starting points for the scientific and historical ideas. The systems interpretation, analogies and conclusions here are my own.