What if consciousness is not what drives the human mind?

> We suggest that our personal awareness does not create, cause or choose our beliefs, feelings or perceptions. Instead, the contents of consciousness are generated “behind the scenes” by fast, efficient, non-conscious systems in our brains.

My consciousness prefers to think that it is the one in control, and any suggestion to the contrary makes my consciousness uncomfortable.

In philosophy of mind this view is broadly construed as 'Epiphenomenalism'. The idea being that consciousness (any mental activity that shows up for us) is like the steam coming off of a locomotive, just a by product of underlying physical events. Our thoughts have no real impact on the underlying operation of the train (brain).

Though this view is certainly odd, I've always struggled to see how it isn't true. How could our behavior not be entirely determined by the physical state of our brain? In some ways this strikes me as obviously true, if unintuitive at first.

Interesting! I am not a nueroscientist, but I think about this sort of thing a lot (a very self referencial activity!)

One thing I've come to believe is in line with (what this article presents as) the paper's thesis, and that is the following:

Consciousness is best described as a highest order observation process that is non-continuous. Somewhat like a serverless or virtual instance, it can pop in and out of use as needed, any maybe many times a second.

These brief 'flashes' of highest order observation, when observed by the person, blend to form a continuous experience, but it's really just a smoothing function, and an illusion.

Consider how you can be tricked into believing something was there in a memory that helps explain a story, even when it wasn't. The mind is not as precise as we want to believe!

Consciousness is therefore not the root, and persistent experience! It's weird, but it actually ends up explaining a lot of personal life experiences a little better.

Well, one reason to believe otherwise is the simple fact that we are talking about consciousness.

If consciousness were just a by-product (like steam in your example) then there would be no physical drive to talk about it.

But why would the brain be the only factor? What about the rest of your body, and the universe beyond?