Why do we care?

[Sandglass]

I realize that there are already threads on consciousness here, but they seem to derail due to it being a finicky word to pin down.

The core question in my mind is "why do I care more about myself than others." Of course the answer is because I am 'conscious' and I am the one with my own subjective experience. The two follow-up questions are:
1. Why am I attached to this body.
2. What exactly is it that "I" do?

Regarding question 1:
I do not know of a way to pursue a full answer to this question, but it may be partially resolved by considering our brain activities that would create a sense of consciousness are stuck to the brains creating them. This seems Pyrrhic to me because while it may explain the phenomenon, it avoids the purpose of the question.

Regarding question 2:
Experiments have shown that our body (and brain) prepares reactions before "we" decide on a path, AKA our consciousness does not drive our decisions. Would this make our consciousness akin to a UI, where we are basically just watching a movie of our lives?

 

[Hadoblado]

People who opt not to pursue their self-interest remove themselves from the gene pool. You are the most recent in a timeless pedigree of winners.

Your brain has different faster circuits for operations involving yourself.

Your behavioral approach system (moving toward/away from stimuli) is tuned to engage you with self-beneficiary experience.

 

[scorpiomover]

The core question in my mind is "why do I care more about myself than others." Of course the answer is because I am 'conscious' and I am the one with my own subjective experience.

If that was true, then all animals without a conscious, and certainly all those species that evolved before species had evolved consciousness, would never seek out food for themselves, and would have died out.

2. What exactly is it that "I" do?

Regarding question 2:
Experiments have shown that our body (and brain) prepares reactions before "we" decide on a path, AKA our consciousness does not drive our decisions. Would this make our consciousness akin to a UI, where we are basically just watching a movie of our lives?

We can observe that most of our actions and behaviours are controlled by your subconscious habits.

However, on the odd occasion, our conscious has the power to override our habits.

Also, our habits can be programmed/re-programmed, by repeated conscious behaviour, such as driving lessons.

It's a bit like having Siri automatically wake you up every morning at 7am. If you want, you can switch the alarm off and sleep in. If you now start getting out of bed every morning at 6am to go for a run before work, and you do that every day for at least 3 weeks, then Siri automatically changes your alarm time to 6am.

So it's more like humans come with a built-in AI that learns from our conscious (mindful) behaviour.

 

[Cognisant]

Regarding question 2:
Experiments have shown that our body (and brain) prepares reactions before "we" decide on a path, AKA our consciousness does not drive our decisions. Would this make our consciousness akin to a UI, where we are basically just watching a movie of our lives?

If your mind were an iceberg the gigantic part below the waterline is all the subconscious information processing that takes place so that the conscious mind has the abstract and contextualized information it needs. The subconscious makes the conscious possible, like how the buoyancy of the ice underwater is what makes the part sticking up out of the water possible.

There's a lot of situations where although you're consciously aware a decision was made (note: past tense) that decision didn't occur on the conscious level, the conscious mind simply isn't fast enough to deal with reality in real time. But then again a lot of decisions aren't that complicated, if something falls off a table you try to catch it and the subconscious is really good at dealing with challenges like "hold this glass of water so that it doesn't tip as I sit down" even though that's actually a very complicated feat.

The conscious mind exists to make executive decisions, you may notice when someone is sleep deprived they become sort of robotic, predictable, inflexible in their behavior. If they have experience tying a certain kind of knot they can do it in this state but if you try to teach them how to do a new kind of knot, even one well within their ability, they'll struggle until they get mad (adrenaline) which wakes up their conscious mind long enough to construct the new behaviour from already known behaviors.

People are robots, really amazing and complicated robots.

The qualia of your consciousness if just you reading your own console logs.

I have no idea if any of this answered your question, I'm really tired and this is just my text generator running on auto.

 

[fluffy]

I try and watch what I do all the time.

This takes much effort.

Only when I need to do a task is this tiresome.

So keeping on it I must not waste energy on distractions.

I do what I can and make sure other things don't get in the way.

 

[threeStepfourStep]

I think the first question could be helped with a bit of Decartes.

I think before we even ask that question, we should ask how the concepts within that question arose in the first place. Asking "Why am I attached to this body?" is already denoting a Cartesian split between mind and body, because we're presupposing a consciousness that may be seperate from our body. If we're presupposing a duality of mind and body, sure, the question makes sense, but if we're not, the statement is non-applicable to our own reality, at least in the reality where Cartesian duality does not prevail.

In fact, the question really doesn't make sense at all, because it seems it's more of a factual statement of "I am myself" that is regurgitated in Cartesian form. Even if the original question is in question form, if we superimpose the inquiry and make it "I am myself?", then yes, you are yourself (if we were to answer the question).

So if we keep on to that framework, and try to answer the question which you brought forth in the beginning, perhaps the answer "because you are" might be the most apt answer there is.

---

On the question of "why do I care more about myself than others", I think most of the time we're on autopilot considering our own wellbeing. If we scrutinize our own wellbeing, it sometimes ruins the whole wellbeing process in itself.

But, if we were to ask why we have an entire biological, psychological process to ensure the bodily, well running function of 1 human being which is us- I mean, because it's nice to have a nicely functioning skin-suit which we can go on about our daily and somehow have a purposeful and energy-and-happiness-filled life? There's that whole taking care of your own self business, but then again if we turn to taking care of others, that in itself is like taking care of yourself too, even if you aren't really mindful of your own wellbeing during that process.

However, if we were to stop and think and realize that if we're at the mental state of asking the question "why do I care more about myself than others", I think that's more of a residue of capitalistic, individualistic process rather than a question of free inquiry. I think the premise, if we were to wipe the sand off the prior conceptions in which the inquiry is asked, perhaps we're operating on certain cultural notions, thus somewhat forumulating the pegged, operating-in-a-box question.