h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

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I think what we're hinting at here is lack of validity of the traditional conscious/subconscious dichotomy. We tend to think of conscious thought as a single conversation or process. But from various neurological studies we *know* thought doesn't happen like that... a particular stimulus can activate many different areas of the mind along parallel paths. We think of thought as travelling down a single road and turning at the signal, when it really happens along all threads of a spider's web.

And of course, once we realize that, then we realize that we always knew it, that it was so obvious it was pathetic, really, and we should kick ourselves in the butt for not noticing sooner. As I type this I'm thinking about what I'm writing, but my hands are taking care of the "conscious" act of typing even though I'm only barely noticing them. I am noticing my fingers are sticky from the dried fruits at my desk and thinking about how long I'll tolerate that on another level, and I'm listening to my environment to make sure nobody sneaks up on me and notices I'm goofing off at work. And there's an emotional "beware" signal that is being sent to me because something in my environment isn't right... shifting my attention to it a little bit I realize the office is a bit too quiet for this time of day.

All of these things are happening for me at the same time... yet the only one we would normally call "conscious" is the writing of this post. That's because that particular task is occupying most of my attention. Whether I'm paying attention or not, however, all these other tasks are still being processed by my brain.

"Subconscious" is just a euphemism for "I wasn't paying attention."

And, of course, sometimes intuition is used to explain a guess which accidentally turns out to be right.

So the consensus here is that the 'nonconscious' is about the same as 'phlogisten' (sp?) or 'the ether'?

Pattern-chaser

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>>So all you're interested in is threads that display or discuss the bad points of religion, demonstrating the superiority and correctness of your chosen, er, faith?

Unfair and unreasonable on two grounds.

Firstly - surely by now we've establshed that the opposite of religion is *lack* of faith. Atheism is no more a faith position than the refusal to believe in fairies or, as in Bertrand Russell's example, giant teapots orbiting Mars.

Secondly - No. I'm not proselytising atheism so much as asking religion to justify its existence.

(And a second and a half-eth ground - I didn't rejoin the discussion because I have a chip on my shoulder. I felt it was quite valid to poke at whether a discussion of religion was even remotely relevant to what is, essentially, the field of neurology).

Guilty as charged, yer 'onour. I was being facetious, and should've made that clearer.



Why should it? Must atheism justify its existence too? Why?

<...whether a discussion of religion was even remotely relevant to what is, essentially, the field of neurology>

Well that's my fault, for starting this latest discussion off by wondering if religion might appeal more to the nonconscious than the conscious.

Pattern-chaser

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>>"So the consensus here is that the 'nonconscious' is about the same as 'phlogisten' (sp?) or 'the ether'?"

Not necessarily, but from an attention-continuum viewpoint, subconscious/nonconscious would need to be used carefully, realising that there may be very many neural activities which can be conscious or not depending on nothing more than where the spotlight of high-level attention happens to be shining at the time.

<...there may be very many neural activities which can be conscious or not depending on nothing more than where the spotlight of high-level attention happens to be shining at the time>

Fair enough. Do you believe that there are 'neural activities' that are unavailable to introspection, no matter how focussed your attention is?

Pattern-chaser

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More like the nonconscious is a sub-set, or portion of the neural processing events we call 'mind'.
Mind is not a 'thing', but rather more like an activity occuring in parallel with a multitude of other events.

Just as we define various stimuli as internal or external, there is actually no difference:
All stimuli are 'internal' and 'external' simultaneously.
At any given time any aspect of the environment, be it 'internal' or 'external', can impinge on awareness

The difficulty arises when we attempt to define mind objectively, within the restrictions of our annoyingly limited dualistic mode of thought and language...

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I'd imagine things like blood sugar regulation, thermoregulation etc would be unavailable to introspection. Although that's not to say ignoring hunger couldn't have some effect on the body, which could affect the mind in a feedback loop of some sort.

I think it's important to remember that natural selection wouldn't generally favour (self-)introspection, as it's hard to see what benefits would arise from it. This is, of course, separate to the advantages gained from understanding others and so on.

>><...there may be very many neural activities which can be conscious or not depending on nothing more than where the spotlight of high-level attention happens to be shining at the time>

Nearly - but not quite. This might imply an overseeing process called 'attention' - and I'm not sure that this is quite right. It's more that many, many nonconscious processes will be working away. The one(s) we regard as 'conscious' are those which have active, sensory outputs. Granted, though, there must be some kind of channel-switching mechanism. My bet - from what I recall of my university neurophysiology lectures in the distant past - is that it will be something to do with the reticular formation, out in back near the cerebellum.

>>I'd imagine things like blood sugar regulation, thermoregulation etc would be unavailable to introspection.

No...that's quite interesting. My wife gets grouchy if a meal is late. She doesn't realise it's low blood sugar. Normally it's my fault! But people with diabetes are trained to monitor their blood sugar via higher-level concomittants such as mood and mental activity. Similarly...last night the penny dropped with me that a Selective Noradrenaline Re-uptake Inhibitor that I take is affecting my thermoregulation.

>>I think it's important to remember that natural selection wouldn't generally favour (self-)introspection, as it's hard to see what benefits would arise from it. This is, of course, separate to the advantages gained from understanding others and so on.

Possibly the evolutionary advantage of this 'sense of self' is, indeed, societal. Plus - when highly developed - it allows the levels of abstraction that are necessary for language. (see http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/reith2003/). But it may have first arisen as a side effect of the brain complexity that confers other advantages, such as motor skills.

*And clawing it back to religion* , this sense-of-self has the corollary that one can imagine oneself as part of a bigger whole. Yes?

>>I'd imagine things like blood sugar regulation, thermoregulation etc would be unavailable to introspection.

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Is this through (mental) introspection or through the effects which are felt elsewhere? Does feeling hot count as introspection?

>>"Nearly - but not quite. This might imply an overseeing process called 'attention' - and I'm not sure that this is quite right."

Not necessarily an *interventionist* overseeing process - there's the question of whether much 'consciousness' is an after-the-event narrative concerning what 'I' have just been thinking about, rather than consciousness being in control.
Also, it's not even necessarily the case that a higher-level 'I' decides where to direct the spotlight of conscious attention - much of the time it may be pulled to some area of thought generating 'look at me' signals.

Even when someone decides to expend effort concentrating on a typically opaque internal state to improve their awareness of it, it may be a conscious decision to do so in the sense that the person is conscious of the thoughts around the decision at the time the decision was made, and yet the decision may not be one taken *by* the conscious mind, but merely within its field of view.

>>Does feeling hot count as introspection?

Absolutely! Consciousness is an illusion caused by the fact that our sensors can be activated in various ways - whether by outside stimuli or by internal processes (essentially, memory). What's the difference between feeling hot and *imagining* that you're hot?

I feel a burst of RD Laing coming on:
'Imagine yourself sitting on a park bench. As you're sitting there, imagine that you're imagining that you're where you are now. Imagine that the you you're imagining that you're imagining is sitting on a park bench. Where are you?'

<...My wife gets grouchy if a meal is late. She doesn't realise it's low blood sugar....>

Although these things aren't open to introspection, they are in no way magical or mysterious, and their existence can be deduced, as above, from real, non-magical, evidence.

Pattern-chaser

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P-C has used the e-word!

Changing topics momentarily:
I'm sure some of you will be amused by this...Last night my daughter presented me with a lovely Easter picture she'd drawn - Jesus on the cross, with the other two guys, all surrounded by angels. She says I can keep it on my desk at work. Where am I going wrong?

I've never had a problem with evidence, although I strongly disagree with the unjustified equation of 'evidence' with 'proof'.



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Pattern-chaser

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Well, I don't know about you lot, but frankly none of my neural activity is available for introspection. No matter how hard I introspect I can't make out any neurons at all.

Aren't we looking at some sort of category/hierarchy confusion here?

Noggin

Hah! Excellent point! It's only the *outputs* from the activity - ie sensation - that we are aware of. (barring access to CAT scanners etc. etc.)

Thanks for that. A salutory reminder of human limitations.

Platonic shadows of neural activity?

Unlurks.

At first sight we think we know what consciousness is; after all we all possess it - don't we? Yet it's such a slippery concept to define. Experiments suggest that [all] thought takes place outside of our 'conscious' attention and that we only become aware of it after the event. Even things we think we deliberately planned to do seem to happen before we become aware of them. That this is at least partially true is self evident: consider the amount of data processing that goes into presenting an image of what you see from the signals generated in the retinas of your eyes. Clearly we are unaware of any of this processing - as some simple optical illusions easily demonstrate. The same is true of other sensory 'inputs'; they are all processed before you become aware of them. When you smell either frying bacon or sweaty socks the sensation is not just presented as a simple message - 'bacon!' or 'socks!' - it is accompanied by memory and emotional signals which have already started to affect your response well before you become aware of the smell itself.

We can talk about 'attention' as if there is a consciousness which can switch its view to different thoughts but how do we know if we really made a conscious decision to move our attention from, say, our computer screen to the view outside our window? (you can look back now.) Perhaps some deeper thought process made this decision and then fed it back up as if it was our idea.

If this is so (I'm not really suggesting it is - just offering some ideas) then are we really 'conscious' at all? Can you prove you are genuinely conscious, whatever that means, and not just a self aware thinking machine?

F

Interesting, Fathom.



Probably not, because (as you say) we have great difficulty defining the term 'conscious', so proving we *are* 'conscious' is, er, problematic!

Pattern-chaser

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