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What if consciousness is not what drives the human mind?
- strawcomb 9y ago> 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.
- zerostar07 9y agoI wonder why we evolved with that feeling
- stevenh 9y agoMaybe separate subsystems in the mind had to evolve to follow the same leader ("I") as obediently as possible because pausing to debate with other subsystems at some critical moment instead of running meant that a predator had time to kill you. The unification of subsystems from this pressure would tighten over time, maybe to the point where a subsystem challenging the primary conscious agent would be perceived as mutiny by the other subsystems and they would try to bully it back into submission by producing anxiety. I wonder if a subsystem successfully powering through the protest and claiming the throne of "I" is what happens when people snap.
- sdfin 9y agoAnother 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 that accompany ideas about myself not being the one in control".
- red75prime 9y agoWhat 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.
- krzat 9y agoHonestly, 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.
- incadenza 9y agoIn 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 could our behavior not be entirely determined by the physical state of our brain? In some ways this strikes me as obviously true, if unintuitive at first.
- amelius 9y agoWell, 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.
- automoton1 9y agoI 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 dependencies of phenomena, but I think that consciousness is most definitely based upon physical processes. The current evidence makes me believe that consciousness is a by-product of evolution, which is a by-product of the conditions on our planet. So it goes.
- incadenza 9y agoI 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 event and sends signals to move hand -> You experience all of this but it had no relevancy to the chain of events. EDIT: This does beg the question 'why do we have consciousness, then?' or slightly related 'how could we talk about it?'. Which are interesting questions, and probably explained by darwinian processes, but don't really get at the heart of it. My thoughts anyhow.
- jngreenlee 9y agoInteresting! 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 needed, any maybe many times a second. These brief 'flashes' of highest order observation, when observed by the person, blend to form a continuous experience, but it's really just a smoothing function, and an illusion. Consider how you can be tricked into believing something was there in a memory that helps explain a story, even when it wasn't. The mind is not as precise as we want to believe! Consciousness is therefore not the root, and persistent experience! It's weird, but it actually ends up explaining a lot of personal life experiences a little better.
- jessriedel 9y agoWhat is the empirical reason to believe it's discrete rather than continuous?
- Aardwolf 9y agoFor one, quantum physics describes the entire universe as discrete, if I understand it correctly
- danidiaz 9y agoReminds me somewhat of the Sankhya school of Indian philosophy, which was strongly dualist but (unlike Cartesian dualism) considered thought processes as part of material reality, and spirit as some sort of "consciousness capability" which worked mostly as an spectator. https://historyofphilosophy.net/samkhya https://historyofphilosophy.net/samkhya
- escherplex 9y agoRight, with 'consciousness' reported behaving as 'sakshin' or 'witness' and the sense of 'I' (and subsequent not 'I') as a synthetic product of the nervous system called 'ahamkara' ('I' maker) supervening within the 'sakshin'. The Vedantin's goal was 'neti neti', or I'm not-that (empirical) and not-this (human-animal cognitive operating system engineered to interact with the empirical), recognition of which purportedly catalyzed a subsequent 'recollection' of a 'transcendent' cognitive operating system. If interested, see 'Advaita Vedanta - A Philosophical Reconstruction' (Deutsch) for a comprehensive overview of the subject.
- pmoriarty 9y ago"I do not believe in freedom of the will. Schopenhauer's words: "Man can do what he wants, but he cannot will what he wills" accompany me in all situations throughout my life." Albert Einstein
- jasonkostempski 9y agoThis is the first time I've seen a quote of a quote. You just squared my hatred for quotes.
- Xcelerate 9y agoDon't blame him. The laws of physics forced him to post that. He had no say in the matter.
- danjc 9y agoWe're free to choose according to our desire but not free to change what we desire
- cvaidya1986 9y agoWe can though a process of cleaning described in Heartfulness. Desirelessness is but one step in evolution as per 8 steps of Patanjali’s Yoga.
- johndoe489 9y agoAs 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)
- tnzn 9y agoDoes 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" ?
- johndoe489 9y ago> I don't believe in free will, to a large extent, and this doesn't stop me from trying to do good. So, you believe in free will.
- nur0n 9y agoI feel like this issue needs more clarification. Say you have complete disbelief in free will. Without free will, you just carry out a path which is already predetermined. In other words, you just carry out your destiny. It can be the case that you are destined to 'try to do good'. You do not choose to do good, you do good because it is in your nature. More generally: Regardless of belief, people are confronted with choice points where they have to choose A or B. Those who believe in free will believe that the choice is determined by an internal force which they associate with 'themselves'. Those who do not believe in free will believe that the choice is determined by some external force. People make decisions in each scenario, the debate is over the ultimate force which drives the decisions.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- zaarn 9y agoI also subscribe to the belief that there is no free will. This doesn't mean I don't want to do good or don't want to see murderers jailed. It simply means that if the universe was rewound like a VHS tape and played again, nothing would change. That our actions are fully deterministic. If free will existed then rewinding the universe and playing forward again would result in different outcomes.
- Nomentatus 9y agoThere's long been good evidence from various experiments that consciousness is merely the publicity office of the mind; as Robert Trivers said using other words decades ago; but it's always good to see more.
- mathewsanders 9y agoI 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 of my surroundings and then finally opened my eyes. It was a very unsettling, but also very interesting experience and sort of made me curious to investigate if this is what people experience with hallucinagens. Another time when I had to make a trip to the ER they gave me nitrous oxide when they tried to reset a broken bone and I had very interesting aural hallucination where sounds became chopped up/echoey. When the gas stopped I asked the nurse how long it had been and she said about 5 minutes but it had felt like 30 mins. Both of experiences left me fascinated how malleable our perceptions are :)
- atom-morgan 9y agoI've fainted a couple times and I've done hallucinogens. The experiences aren't anything alike to me.
- stanfordkid 9y agoAgreed. 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.
- SCHiM 9y agoHere are my experiences which seem to match what you describe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8540946 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8540946
- erasemus 9y agoYour 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.
- linkpoint1 9y agoThe 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_consciousness
- patja 9y agoIf you enjoy this article you might also enjoy the novel "Blindsight" by Peter Watts, which is available for free under Creative Commons and has some interesting ideas about consciousness vs. intelligence.
- jordanlev 9y agoCame here to say the same thing! Link: http://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm http://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm
- oceanghost 9y agoThrough 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.
- unfunco 9y agoHave 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?
- escherplex 9y ago> "I" am the result of a conversation of a number of what you might call entities Prior to attending a week-long ayahuasca retreat in Peru, a psychiatrist friend decided to use ketamine to induce a controlled state of dissociative identity in which one detached aspect of her psyche could observe the machinations of another. Curiously, after returning from Peru following a mentored DMT regimen she reported experiences similar to those reported by oceanghost. Buddhist mystic types contend that one's psychology is a function of 'atmanah' (some sort of co-minds) interacting with a individual's 'prajnatma' (one's self) [Dhammapada text]. Interesting. IF valid (BIG IF) then nobody would be what they seem.
- monk_e_boy 9y agoI kitesurf, there are some tricks that I find very scary, I both want to try them and find them too scary to do. Sometimes its easier to hand off control to my monkey brain, I'm not sure who it is inside me, but they find it easier to ignore the fear that holds human me back. I feel like there is Mr Low-level (maybe lizard brain?) who takes over when I'm super sleepy or driving or walking and listening to podcasts. There is monkey brain who is reckless and doesn't mind what happens to the physical self. Then there is me, I'm usually in charge. The interactions are more complex and nuanced than I can write here.
- tzakrajs 9y agoSounds like mimicry of the great Sam Harris.
- fierro 9y agoAnyone interested in this thread should read Godel, Escher, Bach, or at least it's preface
- arbie 9y agoAny tips on how to approach G.E.B.? I have tried a few times now, but it seemed simultaneously too dense and abstract.
- trevyn 9y agoRead it out loud (to someone else if you like), and don’t try too hard to understand it — if you don’t get a section on first read, just keep going, it’ll make more sense as you process it subconsciously.
- wbillingsley 9y agoA lot of this devolves to discovering that you can't remember more than you can remember, that you do indeed "feel" your mood just as we've talked about since the dawn of time, and other ways in which what we think is limited by the machinery we use to do processing. Shockingly, I neither chose to forget to send my sibling a birthday card, nor chose to have a song from Moana lurking at the back of my head. Both of these have had strong causative influence on my subsequent conscious actions. In other news, when I consciously try to catch a ball, I am limited by the length of my arms. This does not imply that consciousness is an emergent property of my arm bones.
- miga 9y agoWhat would be role of the consciousness if it does not have a manager role? Just justifying our behaviours to the others? By the way - people have already argued that is not conscious, but meta-conscious that makes us different: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/consciousness-goes-deeper-than-you-think/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/consciousn... It is argued that meta-conscious may reflect upon state of the conscious and attempt to readjust works in the other parts of the brain.
- jorgec 9y agoAlso hormones.
- codecrusade 9y agoMind is just one of the many sheaths of consciousness. Mind is a very negligible entity with respect to the vast concept of consciousness.
- gdrift 9y agoBut where is the science? It looks like shooting in the dark and out of frustration coming up with more stories and pretending that what? progress? At least it makes for good sci-fi like Peter Watts'.