Ramblings

The Direct Engine is the primary conscious decision-making engine in my brain. It is used for all kinds of immediate decisions. The Direct Engine runs subprocesses, each responsible for individual problems like pathfinding (what is the best way to get to B, considering the physical and social context?), short term strategization (how and where to play the ball in tennis?), long term strategization (career? which chess move is best?) and anything else under my direct, conscious control.

The Direct Engine itself takes orders from the Core. The core delegates certain high-level tasks to regions in the brain supporting consciousness (that's the Direct Engine), which will then solve the task itself or sub-delegate (Comms Engine, Pathfinding, Analyzation) until a returnable value is determined. This is then passed back to the core, which will figure out the logistics of making that happen (which specific muscles to contract, and by how much? which hormones to mobilize? which data to prioritize?).

Things like TRANSCOM, the Comms Engine or even my internal, synaptical chess engine are technically just subprocesses of the Direct Engine, although some of these are so complex in scale that they are better seen as an individual resource in the brain. This includes an Emotions Engine, which determines other people's emotions, which emotion to display myself, and also determining which emotions I actually feel.

It seems to be that the core is able to shut certain Direct Engine tasks away from consciousness. My brain does a lot of background processing (ie. analyzing past experiences and processing them emotionally) - major parts of this are naturally unconscious and part of the core itself, but good chunks should normally be accessible consciously. For me, this background analysis and, especially, the emotional parts about those analyses, are typically not consciously accessible. Until those tasks reach a conclusion, I don't even know those tasks are being carried out.