The Inner Interlocutor: How the Brain's Question-and-Answer Loop Generates the Sense of Consciousness, the Soul, and the Agents of Myth
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: This paper proposes that the felt sense of consciousness as an inner presence, the concept of the soul, and the gods, spirits and demons of myth all arise from a single cognitive mechanism: the brain's division of labour into a questioning function and an answering function. The questioning function is engaged continuously by ordinary life, from how to lift an object to why lightning strikes. The answering function resolves each problem by the same procedure regardless of scale: it draws first on stored knowledge, and where knowledge runs out it generates a completion, because an unresolved self-relevant problem is experienced as anxiety. Generated completions, shared and stored across a community, become culture's supernatural agents. Because the two functions operate as distinct processes, the person experiences an internal dialogue, and the mere structure of one process witnessing the other produces the feeling that someone is present. That feeling, once noticed, becomes itself a question, and the answering function completes it by giving it a body: the soul. The paper sets out each step as a question, states the theory's answer, and cites the empirical work that corroborates it. The account is shown to be sufficient to explain the phenomena without positing any additional entity.
Author: Khan, Mansoor Ahmad
Language: English
Subfield: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7204924079
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