Wanting to Be Understood Explains the Meta-Problem of Consciousness

Summary

Our deep-rooted desire to be understood drives human consciousness and shapes how we communicate. Research reveals that our evolution of external expressions - from primitive gestures to complex language - stems from our need to share our inner experiences. While our conscious awareness can process only a fraction of our rich sensory experiences, we continuously strive to convey these experiences through art, language, and technology. This fundamental drive to be understood may explain why consciousness feels so mysterious - we expect perfect understanding when sharing experiences, yet complete transmission is impossible.

Abstract

Because we are highly motivated to be understood, we created public external representations -- mime, language, art -- to externalise our inner states. We argue that such external representations are a pre-condition for access consciousness, the global availability of information for reasoning. Yet the bandwidth of access consciousness is tiny compared with the richness of `raw experience', so no external representation can reproduce that richness in full. Ordinarily an explanation of experience need only let an audience `grasp' the relevant pattern, not relive the phenomenon. But our drive to be understood, and our low level sensorimotor capacities for `grasping' so rich, that the demand for an explanation of the feel of experience cannot be ``satisfactory''. That inflated epistemic demand (the preeminence of our expectation that we could be perfectly understood by another or ourselves) rather than an irreducible metaphysical gulf -- keeps the hard problem of consciousness alive. But on the plus side, it seems we will simply never give up creating new ways to communicate and think about our experiences. In this view, to be consciously aware is to strive to have one's agency understood by oneself and others.

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