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What if consciousness is not what drives the human mind?

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Re: What if consciousness is not what drives the human mind?

#21
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, one reason to believe otherwise is the simple fact that we are talking about consciousness. If consciousness were just a by-product (like steam in your example) then there would be no physical drive to talk about it.

I don't see how talking about consciousness is necessarily a limitation to it being a by-product of physical processes. It could be that consciousness is simply an emergent property (a by-product) of the communication of billions of neurons that are connected in trillions of ways. Where neurons are emergent of chemical phenomena which are emergent of atomic phenomena and so on. I'm probably greatly simplifying the de…

"Our thoughts have no real impact on the underlying operation of brain" cannot be literally true, if you are able to talk about your thoughts. Because talking about your thoughts means that somehow your thoughts influenced at least the part of your brain that guides your mouth.

Also, how would the ability to think evolve in our species, if our thoughts never had an impact on our behavior? Then they could not provide any evolutionary advantage.

It is possible (and quite likely) that some weaker version of that statement is true; e.g. that there are many things that brain does independently on our thoughts. But claiming that there is "no" impact is just trying to be edgy. Yes, such absolute statement sounds more interesting, but it is wrong.

Re: What if consciousness is not what drives the human mind?

#22

In philosophy of mind this view is broadly construed as 'Epiphenomenalism'. The idea being that consciousness (any mental activity that shows up for us) is like the steam coming off of a locomotive, just a by product of underlying physical events. Our thoughts have no real impact on the underlying operation of the train (brain). Though this view is certainly odd, I've always struggled to see how it isn't true. How co…

I tend to agree. I think of the conscious mind as more like an executive at the top of a huge organization, with like 10 different layers of management and tens of thousands of mostly unseen people beneath it in the org chart.

Every time you go up a level of management, the information that flows upward becomes more high-level and abbreviated, because that information is flowing to people that have to make very high-level decisions about things. The executive that everything ultimately flows up to is still exposed to a tremendous amount of information, but it's an almost comically simplified view of the whole picture. Everyone involved (including the executive) can only hope that every layer of simplification always retains the most important and most accurate information, to maximize the executive's ability to make good decisions.

Likewise our minds have layers upon layers of processing, from raw sensory input that gets collected into perceptions of discrete objects, up through the instincts and memories that decide which of those objects are threats (and if so, which of those threats should trigger the fight-or-flight response, etc.). That's not even getting to the more abstract processes that contribute to feelings of tribalism, thoughts on economics, religion, existentialism, and so on. Most abstract of all (IMO) is how the brain puts everything together to trick us into thinking that we can sense what's going on within other people's minds (empathy, basically, which gives us reasonable educated guesses about how other people are responding to us, while tricking us into thinking that we understand other people far more than we really do).

The conscious mind can only make decisions about high-level data that the endless layers of the subconscious prepares for it, like managers presenting their executives with high-level status reports condensed from mountains of low-level data. The quality of the executive's decisions are capped by both the the executive's own rationality, as well as the quality of the condensed data that gets passed up the chain.

A real life example is someone who feels threatened when they see someone of another race or religion. Such a person might be being rational in their own way, in that they're making decisions based on what they think are facts about the world and their place in it. But such a person doesn't realize that fear or other human flaws are causing garbage data to propagate up to their conscious mind. A racist's problem, for example, is that they're often just rationally responding to the garbage data that is being given to them by their subconscious. They fear people that look different from them because that's what's in the status reports that their subconscious prepares for them every week, but they haven't figured out yet that their own mind is an unreliable narrator for the world around them. We all are unreliable narrators for ourselves, and there's no way to avoid it- the best we can do is try to understand it and make our best effort to maintain a healthy level of skepticism and rationality about everything.

I don't pretend to know anything about any of this stuff on an academic level, this is just a view that I've come around to over the years. I'm just a lifelong armchair philosopher, and this is the best I've been able to come up with so far.

Re: What if consciousness is not what drives the human mind?

#23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But why would the brain be the only factor? What about the rest of your body, and the universe beyond?

Because with very few (important but specific) exceptions, reductionism works, and the explanations for physical behaviors are present locally. The only reasons I've ever heard to look outside the brain to figure out how it functions tend to be motivated by a hopeful dualism.

Maybe more specific examples would be useful. If my lungs are failing, my brain gets less oxygen, and functions differently. When my childen are hungry, they definitely behave differently, and I attribute the cause of that to their lack of food.

If my wife or friend is in a lousy mood, my mood may sour too. If my team scores, I cheer in excitement -- even when the team is playing hundreds of miles away.

The brain surely plays a role in each of these cases, but I would assign causality outside it.

Re: What if consciousness is not what drives the human mind?

#24

Interesting! I am not a nueroscientist, but I think about this sort of thing a lot (a very self referencial activity!) One thing I've come to believe is in line with (what this article presents as) the paper's thesis, and that is the following: Consciousness is best described as a highest order observation process that is non-continuous. Somewhat like a serverless or virtual instance, it can pop in and out of use as…

What is the empirical reason to believe it's discrete rather than continuous?

For one, quantum physics describes the entire universe as discrete, if I understand it correctly

Re: What if consciousness is not what drives the human mind?

#25

I had an interesting experience once when I regained consciousness after fainting. My first memory of that experience was a cacophony of noises, specific images, and what I can only describe as colored static. Then, over what subjectively felt like 10 seconds, I realized at some stage that I was ‘awake’ and the various sounds and images sort of faded until I had one coherent thought and then started to get awareness…

I've fainted a couple times and I've done hallucinogens. The experiences aren't anything alike to me.

Re: What if consciousness is not what drives the human mind?

#26

I had an interesting experience once when I regained consciousness after fainting. My first memory of that experience was a cacophony of noises, specific images, and what I can only describe as colored static. Then, over what subjectively felt like 10 seconds, I realized at some stage that I was ‘awake’ and the various sounds and images sort of faded until I had one coherent thought and then started to get awareness…

Here are my experiences which seem to match what you describe:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8540946

Re: What if consciousness is not what drives the human mind?

#27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the empirical reason to believe it's discrete rather than continuous?

For one, quantum physics describes the entire universe as discrete, if I understand it correctly

IANAP but as far as I understand, neither time nor space are believed to be discrete in the mainstream physics model.

Re: What if consciousness is not what drives the human mind?

#28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For one, quantum physics describes the entire universe as discrete, if I understand it correctly

IANAP but as far as I understand, neither time nor space are believed to be discrete in the mainstream physics model.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck_length

Re: What if consciousness is not what drives the human mind?

#29

I had an interesting experience once when I regained consciousness after fainting. My first memory of that experience was a cacophony of noises, specific images, and what I can only describe as colored static. Then, over what subjectively felt like 10 seconds, I realized at some stage that I was ‘awake’ and the various sounds and images sort of faded until I had one coherent thought and then started to get awareness…

I've fainted a couple times and I've done hallucinogens. The experiences aren't anything alike to me.

Agreed. Hallucinogens tend to increase synesthesia and sort of "remove the filter" on our brains imagination potential.

Being sedated tends to just "turn your brain off" in my experience. To make an analogy to computer vision: fainting lowers the resolution and increases the noise in the original image, psychedelics change the decision threshold for detection of objects.

Re: What if consciousness is not what drives the human mind?

#30

I had an interesting experience once when I regained consciousness after fainting. My first memory of that experience was a cacophony of noises, specific images, and what I can only describe as colored static. Then, over what subjectively felt like 10 seconds, I realized at some stage that I was ‘awake’ and the various sounds and images sort of faded until I had one coherent thought and then started to get awareness…

Your first experience illustrates neatly my thoughts about the article.

The 'cacophony of noises, specific images' (which you refer to) were generated by the 'fast, efficient, non-conscious systems in [your] brain' (which the article refers to).

But when you woke up fully the cacophony was joined up into the 'coherent whole'. That's what consciousness is, I think: the joining of things or processes together so that they interact and new things (new patterns) can emerge. These things can now be adopted and utilized by 'the narrative' and as a result the narrative itself changes.

So, though it works indirectly, consciousness is really immensely powerful. It's misleading to think of it as 'passive'. The mind may be driven by desires and fears, but without consciousness there'd be no material to work with.

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