phone ringing

You know how you hear the phone you are calling ringing when you call? You're not really hearing the other person's phone ring. Your phone is making a ringing sound, and that sound does not even coincide (in time or in tone) with the ringing phone's ring. Metaphor for consciousness and brain processes.

cast-offs

What if consciousness is just a stream of no-longer-needed mental cast-offs? Tokens used by brain systems to made decisions and orchestrate actions, tokens that are of no further use. Burnt out light bulbs.

bottleneck

What if mind and consciousness are the result of processing bottlenecks in the brain? The honking of a traffic jam.

by-product

If mind and consciousness are mere by-products of massive parallel processing by brain regions, this would account for the disastrous track record of explanations of mind and consciousness.

warm-up comedians

Consciousness and mental images as the brain's way of occupying the body while it processes lots of information. A sort of warm-up comedian for the body while Johnny Carson prepares his material.

discontinuity???

"For the time being it is not unreasonable to conceive of the mind as emerging from the cooperation of many brain regions. This occurs when the sheer accumulation of details regarding the state of the body that is mapped in those regions reaches a 'critical pitch.' The knowledge gap we now recognize my turn out to be little more than a DISCONTINUITY in the complexity of the accumulated detail, and in the complexity of the interactions of the brain regions involved in the mapping" (Looking for Spinoza, p. 209).

Mind emerges when brain regions co-operate and detail reaches a "critical pitch."

But what on earth is a "discontinuity in the complexity"? Is this the idea that when a decision becomes sufficiently complex, the brain must resort to mental images to make processing possible? My idea is that the mental images are either a way of processing more information at higher speed or a kind of delay tactic that allows the brain more time. Are mental images useless by-products or crucial devices? That is a big question. I would suspect they are useless by-products.

timely fashion

"In brief, without mental images, the organism would not be able to perform IN TIMELY FASHION, the large-scale integration of information critical for survival, not to mention well-being. Moreover, without a sense of self and without the feelings that integrate it, such large-scale mental integrations of information would not be ORIENTED to the problems of life, namely, survival and the achievement of well-being" (Looking for Spinoza, p. 208) emphasis mine.

Mental images are needed to speed up processing of information. The sense of self is needed for orientation. Consciousness is a by-product of faster processing.