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Consciousness (pg. 3)
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| venomX |
| quote: | Originally posted by Magnetonium
Think yourself into breathing. Then it will not be the same. Your brain performs so many calculations every second, ranging from thinking, to breathing, to contact with skin, to whatever else. Most of these are not comprehended by your thinking, unless you choose to think or concentrate on a specific process(es). So in a way you can label your entire brain process as subconscious ...
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Seriously Mag, this is exactly what Subey has being arguing for all along. Well more or less in any case. And no, some processes are definitely subconscious. There is no way in hell you can reassign colors to wave frequencies for example. You will never 'see' red when getting the frequency that is currently assigned for green. |
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| Sunsnail |
| quote: | Originally posted by Magnetonium
Remember a famous saying that only about 2% of our brain is used up in our lifetime ;-) imagine what the rest is used for, and how we havent unlocked our brain which holds many more amazing powers and abilities. Ok, you can laugh at me if you want, but its not only my belief. |
http://timekiller.tv/2007/09/12/chewbacca-lives
Sorry to burst your bubble :p |
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| DJ Shibby |
| quote: | Originally posted by venomX
Seriously Mag, this is exactly what Subey has being arguing for all along. Well more or less in any case. And no, some processes are definitely subconscious. There is no way in hell you can reassign colors to wave frequencies for example. You will never 'see' red when getting the frequency that is currently assigned for green. |
Interesting that you say this, because when I was younger I got sick which resulted, as you put, in "reassigning" the way my mind recognized information in the world. To be specific, when I close my eyes I can see sound in colors, which appear to be coded by the frequency of the sound (cymbals - yellow white, bass - black brown, etc) as well as the spatial location of the sound. Maybe this is why I love trance and electronic so much, LOL. :) 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.
The medical term is synaesthesia, which can also be triggered by some drugs (leading me to believe it is latent in our evolutionary past or future), and I'm fairly certain that many different forms of it can potentially be like "upgrades" of sorts to the sensory perceptions we are accustomed to experiencing. Perhaps I even underestimate the role it plays in my conscious and subconscious processing of information. Mind you, I can also see it being a detriment if it took particularly instrusive forms that over-rode the senses we need to survive in this particular world we live in and have created for ourselves.
But... why NOT view the world in 10 ways instead of 5 if we could? Obviously (to me, at least) the "technology" is already in us, in our brain 'hardware'... so the question becomes why (too many centuries of alcohol use?) and when (has it already happened and been supressed? will it happen in the future? is it happening right now?) and how (sight and sound? space and touch? all at once?) it will show itself.
And to the OP: Yes, I'd say the word and idea of "thinking" is just a placeholder for whatever it is this organ we know of as consciousness actually is. Just by being the part of us that "thinks", our consciousness immediately removes itself from the capability of many experimental answers... introspection is our only avenue to better understand ourselves personally, and perhaps one day someone will come along who can link the right instrospections to the collective network within which we exist. |
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| Magnetonium |
Sorry, I dont get it since I've never seen any shows or movies from whatever the character that makes that weird sound. :p Your chance to have some fun out of my post is wasted :toothless
Dont forget, I dont like TV! |
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| Krypton |
| So guys, what's in your id? If you know, then your super-ego is weak. Sigmund Frued was one sick doctor, but hey, psychoanalysis actually works, so I guess all the incest thoughts and pent up sexual desires and unconscioussness are true. THere are some weird weird thing about our psychology...:nervous: |
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| DJ Shibby |
| quote: | Originally posted by Krypton
So guys, what's in your id? If you know, then your super-ego is weak. Sigmund Frued was one sick doctor, but hey, psychoanalysis actually works, so I guess all the incest thoughts and pent up sexual desires and unconscioussness are true. THere are some weird weird thing about our psychology...:nervous: |
Does psychoanalysis "work"?
Or... is it just intuitive people who understand people doing just that, and offering advice thereafter (constructed from their own experiences, etc)? |
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| Krypton |
| quote: | Originally posted by DJ Shibby
Does psychoanalysis "work"?
Or... is it just intuitive people who understand people doing just that, and offering advice thereafter (constructed from their own experiences, etc)? |
Ahhh, I dunno. But the guy was a genious to think of those theories by himself. |
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| Subey |
| quote: | Originally posted by venomX
Seriously Mag, this is exactly what Subey has being arguing for all along. Well more or less in any case. And no, some processes are definitely subconscious. There is no way in hell you can reassign colors to wave frequencies for example. You will never 'see' red when getting the frequency that is currently assigned for green. |
Well for clarification purposes I'm not interested in walking and breathing and what not. I'm specifically focused on all the higher thinking that people naturally give all the credit to their conscious thought.
| quote: | Originally posted by venomX
I agree mostly with your arguments. I think it is a pretty accurate description of how subconscious processes work. Also, for me, the relationship between the conscious mind and that 'third eye' is mostly as you stated. I would tend to agree that most processing is done by that third eye.
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Just to append to the 'third eye' in re-reading it, perhaps the model should be evolved to something like a 'beholder' in the sense that it can invoke multiple instances of the 'third eye' to look at things simultaneously, and process those cohesively.
So using that picture as a reference. The smaller eyes would be instances that might be looking at a tower in the Capitalism Castle, another eye might be looking at the moat of the Communism Castle.
And the largest central eye is the one that has the cohesive view of it all (a vantage point that sees both castles, and the tower and the moat)
| quote: | Originally posted by venomX
Even though you may hold in your conscious the words or structures that that your 'third eye' has fed it, you don't just type it out right away. You take the words and then you consciously evaluate the validity of them in the broader context. |
But aren't you really arguing for the third eye here?
Being able to evaluate things in the 'broader context' sounds like third eye work to me :D |
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| atbell |
| 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 :clown: |
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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| Subey |
I have thought of city models, but I leaned towards a castle because its individual parts and their relationships to each other are more clear as a single entity.
| quote: | Originally posted by atbell
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.
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If the 'third eye' is manipulating a brick that it retrieved from a 10 year old memory or something it received a minute ago in a forum post seemed a dimension that would make my point unnecessarily complicated. And I didn't trust that I would be able to transmit my model at all as it was :D
At the same time I don't think the age of the memory plays that important a role in the sense that the capitalism castle is made up of memories that you've had all your life. If you answer the question, 'What do you think of a free market economy' then your answer will be a cohesive thing whose parts are formed from experiences you've had all throughout your life. It will include the 5 min. old memory you have of buying a chocolate bar to driving through the poor part of town when you were 5. So to me memory isn't a component that I really separate from the castle model, it's integrated into its very structure - and as importantly you don't have to consciously recall either event for them to have an impact in the architecture of your capitalism castle.
[tangetial aside: I know that the reason why an employee named Israel at my local Quickie doesn't work there anymore... he got full time hours at a parking lot where he also worked. I didn't have to consciously add this information to my capitalism castle. It was naturally integrated into the structure because it belongs in that structure. It is also stored in other structures as well, as presumably when I acquired the information it was stored on its own for its own memory sake, and evaluated and placed in other structures where it would have an appropriate contribution - Perhaps though when I am consciously thinking of capitalism is a time when my third eye renovates the castle]
| quote: | Originally posted by atbell
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. |
Using your analogies, I'm arguing that the subconscious layed down a set of track through the capitalism city, and that the conscious mind's stream of thought, is it looking out the window on the train.
It isn't 'thinking', but it appears to be as it describes each location that the subconscious has mapped out on its journey.
The route has been mapped to a logical structure, i.e. you start at introduction square, now on your right you see the body of the argument plaza, and our journey ends at the conclusion airport. |
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| Subey |
Evidence to be evaluated...
Bob is a Creationist. Bob is also a well respected Lawyer.
We pour over one of Bob's cases, and are impressed with it. It's logical/rational and well presented. We understand why he is a respected lawyer.
Now we present Bob with a Fossil. He conscious mind responds with a moronic creationist argument to dismiss the fossil. What light does this shed on the 'Third Eye' vs 'Conscious Mind' relationship?
All the general evidence about Bob's 'Third Eye' suggests that it can process data in a logical way. Therefore his 'Creationism Castle' should be reduced to rubble when the fossil is introduced.
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The crux of the issue is, is it destroyed, and the conscious mind is lied to? Or when the 'third eye' evaluates a conflict between a 'cultural' conclusion and a 'logical' one, that the 'cultural' one has trump?
Even if the second case is true vs the first, does it not suggest that the answer is decided upon by the 'third eye' and then *delivered* to the conscious mind?
In other words, at no point does Bob consciously think, 'the fossil destroys my model of creationism, but I will go with my cultural truth', by the time the thoughts are conscious, he's spewing out his inane defense of creationism. |
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| Capitalizt |
| halfway through this thread my brain exploded. |
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