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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Consciousness
| quote: | Originally posted by Subey
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The most important question in this field of inquiry that I can think of is, "What does my conscious mind see when it interacts with the subconscious?"
I've queried my brain many times about this question, and it has come up with the following analogy, which can be summed up as, "Thought Architecture" which I will now explain.
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We start with the following analogy. A Castle = A complex idea/concept and in terms of the example that follows it will represent specifically 'Capitalism'.
And the lens that I perceive this castle with we will call the 'third eye'. This will be explained in a moment.
Now let's say I want to talk to you about the castle. My third eye can view the castle from any angle, and from any level of magnification.
So my conscious mind thinks, 'capitalism is stupid', and I say to you, 'capitalism is stupid'. All my conscious mind contains when I thought that was really is just a word. Simultaneously to this thought my third eye is looking at the castle from a high vantage point so that the entire structure can be seen, and the entire structure has a definite form that conveys specific meaning (i.e. I can see towers, a courtyard, a moat, a portcullis etc.)
If you ask me what is stupid about it. I then respond, 'it results in an unequal distribution of wealth and I think that is evil'. What happened simultaneously was my third eye zoomed in on a tower of the castle, and that tower conveyed the that specific information. My third eye knows that tower, and where it is located relative to all the other parts of the castle. In other words it doesn't get lost exploring the castle.
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To flip this analogy. Let's say I am sharing with you a concept you are unfamiliar with. I speak a sentence to you, and your conscious mind again can only hold a few sentences at a time in its mental context, but it takes each sentence and uses them as bricks to build a castle that your third eye sees. As you ask me questions your third eye is seeing that the castle you are building is missing a tower, so you want clarification to know what kind of tower to build there.
In effect you don't have to consciously 'hold' what I said in the first paragraph of this post in your consciousness, because your 'third eye' is 'holding' it, because it is overseeing the construction of the castle.
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This "Thought Architecture" model seems accurate because it models how through the exchange of only a few words in the conscious mind and in speech that we can manage to manipulate and use complex ideas without much difficulty.
The question for me then what does this model tell us about the nature of conscious thought? And to me the crux of that question is, what's is my conscious mind's relationship with the 'third eye' that sees in this "thought architecture" environment?
It seems to me that the "thought architecture" realm is where the real thought is occurring because that is the only place where 'capitalism' has enough form as a cohesive entity to be thought about. And that my conscious mind is the reflection of the 'third eye' that thinks there.
That's my argument... though I would not be surprised if I didn't communicate it well  |
I think I understand your castle analogy. I use a similar type of model to envision individual intelegence. The difference is that I use cities with buildings instead of a castle with towers. Either works if you can see the connection.
The reason I'd used buildings in a city is as a way of describing how some people are briliant while being dumb. Take the professor who's "Calculus" building is over a hundred stories high but who's "Whatch out for that lamp post in front of you" building is maybe only one or two stories high.
To bring this over to cognition as you've described it might be explained as people having a "Capitalist" castle in thier memory which contains towers such as "Ethics of", "Theory of", "Math Behind", and "Atrocities associated with".
This leads to one of my biggest sticking points with your analysis. It fails to mention memory, or seems to use contiousness in a vaugly interchangable way with memory.
My view of "sub contious" is processing things that you are not actively aware of, picking over long term memory without taking up the resources of short term memory.
Short term memory, by contrast, is almost all contiousness.
It's almost as if the contiousness has acess to most of the short term memory and a little bit of long term memory and sub-contious is the other way around.
On analogy I've come up with to describe sub-contious is the idea of trains steaming along, based on a "train of thought". Every person differes in the number of tracks the have (a one track mind for instance), the number of engines they have, and the amount of power that each engine has.
For example, some people apear to be very good at focusing on a single task, they could be thought of to have a single very powerful train engine. Others can work on processing three or four things with thier sub-contious at the same time. These people would have three or four trains running at the same time.
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They're kind of like fields of sorts, which play like a movie. When I hear doppler effects it's a pretty wild sensation, since it doesn't exactly occupy the same space as the optical visual imagining input.
