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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?

#31

Post by ffwd »

incadenza wrote: post #16
automoton1 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I do agree, but to be fair, Epiphenomenalism makes a slightly stronger point. Not only is consciousness entirely a physical process, but the 'events' of consciousness (any thought, feeling, emotion, sensation you've ever experienced) has absolutely no impact on behavior. There is no feedback loop here. So, instead of Touch hot flame -> Feel sensation of pain -> Move hand It's... Touch hot flame -> brain processes eve…

> but the 'events' of consciousness (any thought, feeling, emotion, sensation you've ever experienced) has absolutely no impact on behavior. > or slightly related 'how could we talk about it?'

All of this is at least intuitively easy to explain with added language and complexity in the brain. So like the chain would become:

Touch hot flame -> brain processes event (and then does complicated language processing, and complicated memory and emotion processing) and THEN sends signals to move hand or not move hand -> You experience all of this but it had no relevancy to the chain of events.

Where I would ponder the relevancy of consciousness is when it comes to attention and remembering things. Just from personal experience, I can read a book, watch a movie or listen to music and I will not remember a thing if I wasn't aware of it. Is awareness and consciousness the same thing? I don't know, but at least we are conscious of everything we are aware of, by definition, and not necessarily vice versa.

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

#32

Post by EGreg »

jngreenlee wrote: post #6

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…

Listen to what you said... the highest order observation, "when ovserved by the person" is an illusion.

This implies that there is someone ("the person") observing the highest order observation -- making it not the highest order.

And to be an illusion there needs to be someone to fool in the first place.

Try to get that language out of your stataments and then see if you can say ANYTHING AT ALL about consciousness! :-)

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

#33

Post by linkpoint1 »

The experiments about people with their brain hemispheres separated indicate that conciousness is an effort of many mental areas to create an integrated and coherent mental state. For example, consider subjects whose verbal area is separated from their visual area, when the subject tries to explain what he saw he tell us an imaginary story. This strongly suggests that our brain is working hard to integrate all the information that it receives. At this moment, I can't recall any concrete experiments, but they are something like this: one of your eyes see a message telling that you kid is crying, then you begin to try to phone home, when asked what are you doing, you gives some explanation like my kid was acting a little strange this morning, I need to call to see what is happening at home. More on split-brains and dual conciousness theory at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_consciousness

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

#34

Post by tnzn »

johndoe489 wrote: post #11

As Ramesh Balsekar once said "as long as you believe you have free will, then live your life as if it's true" (otherwise "no freewill" is just a belief and it's doing more harm then good)

Does it really ? I don't believe in free will, to a large extent, and this doesn't stop me from trying to do good. And doesn't the idea of "free will" also do harm ? Such as when people just discard mental health issues as "just matter of will" ?

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

#36

Post by red75prime »

sdfin wrote: post #5
strawcomb wrote: post #2

> We suggest that our personal awareness does not create, cause or choose our beliefs, feelings or perceptions. Instead, the contents of consciousness are generated “behind the scenes” by fast, efficient, non-conscious systems in our brains. My consciousness prefers to think that it is the one in control, and any suggestion to the contrary makes my consciousness uncomfortable.

Another section of the article for a TLDR: "we don’t consciously choose our thoughts or our feelings – we become aware of them." > My consciousness prefers to think that it is the one in control, and any suggestion to the contrary makes my consciousness uncomfortable. Maybe you should rather say "My awarenes is aware of thoughts about myself being the one in control, and it is also aware of feelings of discomfort tha…

What do we achieve by adding all those words? I observe that my body is usually acts as if controlled by a single goal-directed agent. I call this agent I. It doesn't matter if we can single-out some useless subsystem and call it "ride-along consciousness" or "real I" or something.

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

#37

Post by oceanghost »

Through meditative and other techniques, I have learned that-- at least for myself-- that "I" am the result of a conversation of a number of what you might call entities, personalities, archetypal emotions, drives, and other things I am not yet able to classify.

My consciousness-- the surface most of us have access to, tries to make sense of these conversations and form them into a cohesive illusion/narrative in which I am a single "thing" of which I am in control.

A few times I've reached states where I can connect or disconnect these entities for a few minutes, or have a conversation with them directly.

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

#38

Post by unfunco »

oceanghost wrote: post #37

Through meditative and other techniques, I have learned that-- at least for myself-- that "I" am the result of a conversation of a number of what you might call entities, personalities, archetypal emotions, drives, and other things I am not yet able to classify. My consciousness-- the surface most of us have access to, tries to make sense of these conversations and form them into a cohesive illusion/narrative in whic…

Have you experimented with dimethyltryptamine before? I would be interested to know if a commitment to meditation could induce similar effects. What you have described sounds similar to common effects from chemicals such as N,N-DMT and 5-MeO-DMT. Alternatively, could those effects be reached more easily through sensory deprivation?

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

#39

Post by krzat »

strawcomb wrote: post #2

> We suggest that our personal awareness does not create, cause or choose our beliefs, feelings or perceptions. Instead, the contents of consciousness are generated “behind the scenes” by fast, efficient, non-conscious systems in our brains. My consciousness prefers to think that it is the one in control, and any suggestion to the contrary makes my consciousness uncomfortable.

Honestly, it feels more like we are slaves to our brains. It releases various chemicals(emotions) to push us to do stuff. Everything that can be automated already is - image processing, manual tasks, memory retrieval, face recognition.

Experience/qualia is only involved when brain wants to think. This seems to suggest that free will indeed exists(otherwise why bother with all this machinery), but it is pretty limited.

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

#40

Post by incompatible »

jngreenlee wrote: post #6

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…

It's funny how on one hand consciousness may be the only thing you can be sure exists (Cogito ergo sum), but on the other hand, results from neuroscience suggest it's basically an illusion and is not persistent.
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