12 ms·

Our brain is a storyteller, not a reporter from an inner world

262 points by dnetesn 8y ago

kilovoltaire 8y ago
I was thinking about this recently—given how difficult it is to explain "why" an artificial neural network behaves a certain way, it's probably similarly difficult for our conscious minds to explain our unconscious behavior, the best they can do is pattern match and tell stories. From the article: "If we could understand the processes by which billions of neurons cooperate to help us recognize a face or interpret a fragment of speech, we would find these as unrelated to the stream of consciousness as the operation of the liver."
- alexpetralia 8y ago
  I speculated that if we make substantial progress in the field of explainability research, we will be able to learn something new about human consciousness.
cryptozeus 8y ago
Great read ...totally opp view of my current thinking about self ...“it’s important to think of the project as going forward, rather than thinking that I and everyone else are in the grip of a mysterious force that’s controlling us and we need to voyage inward to find it. It’s just an unconstructive direction to be looking inward instead of outward. A forward-looking approach to our lives is the positive benefit.”
nerdponx 8y ago
This looks like it amounts to an indirect endorsement of therapeutic modalities like somatic experiencing. I just hope that it doesn't get spun the wrong way. We may not have unconscious "thought", but we certainly do have unconscious "feeling". I haven't read the book (and didn't read the whole interview), but I hope it makes this distinction.
- s-shellfish 8y ago
  I agree with this. I had a heightened degree of anxiety the other day and I wasn't sure why. I'm sure there's a reason, but I couldn't process it. It was completely different than the way I've experienced an awareness of my own emotions my entire life. Always in relation to social environment. Now I seem to just get anxiety over bugs in code. Emotionally connected to my computer. Life is an experience, always new awarenesses to be experienced. I still don't think there's anything permanent about the functioning of the mind. I think the things one decides to be true that one is allowed to believe are true to the individual are the things that are the most important. There can be subconscious thought. I've experienced that. There can also be no unconscious thought. I've experienced that. Theory of mind, always a very tricky subject! Epistomology, cognitive science, theories of intelligence.
patkai 8y ago
Not sure what to think of this yet, but it is refreshing to have an interesting new angle on the brain. This guy reminds me of Marvin Minsky, who once said "I bet the human brain is a kludge."
- bena 8y ago
  That's probably not wrong. How else would you describe a 3 pound lump of fat whose job is to make sure you don't choke on your own saliva?
  - gowld 8y ago
    It only takes the evolutionaroly oldest smallest few grams to avoid choking
aytekin 8y ago
Reminds of Viktor Frank’s Man’s Search for Meaning. Don’t make things unnecessarily complex. Instead of trying find a problems from the past in your unconscious mind and fix, find yourself something to live for. Look forward, not backwards.
wallflower 8y ago
"What happens is not what happens. What happens is the story that we tell ourselves about what happens." A contrived example: Adult is home with parents. One of the parents asks her to clean up her dishes. She reacts quickly with a knee-jerk "I was going to do it! Ugh!". What happened was that the parents wanted to clean up the table. However, since the adult has this shifting narrative in her head about 'my parents don't treat me with respect', she immediately interpreted the simple request as proof or evidence that 'they are not treating me with respect' and emotionally reacted. Kind of like a vicious circle. It's kind of like when we have a bad day, we can interpret it as everything is conspiring against us. The thing is that we are interpreting what happens to us all the time. It doesn't have to be a single origin story/root cause like the author of the book in the article states. The way to look forward is to actually start taking proactive actions towards the story that you want. Since we don't exist without other people, you cannot simply spit affirmations into a mirror or make a vision board. You must put it out there with the people who are entangled in your reality. For the adult in this example, it would be something like being honest with her parents (something like non-violent communication) and telling them how she feels they are treating her without respect and working with them to "co-create" a new reality. Note: This is not my thought. It comes from a personal development organization that starts with 'L' and ends with the letter before 'l'. The extent of my involvement was going to a weekend seminar on invitation from a friend.
- codetrotter 8y ago
  > It comes from a personal development organization that starts with 'L' and ends with the letter before 'l'. Are they a secret organization or something :P or what is up with not wanting to state their name? As a foreigner not living in the US I have no idea what org you are talking about here, so excuse me if it is really obvious to people from the US. PS: With the font on my phone the ‘l’ looked like ‘I’ (uppercase ‘i’) rather than lowercase ‘L’. Regardless I have no idea what the name you are referring to is supposed to be.
  - jupiter90000 8y ago
    Landmark Forum. They don't have the best reputation in general.
jesperlang 8y ago
Another article that refers to the book "The Mind is Flat", there was recently a submission and related discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17625244 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17625244 Highly recommend reading the book, it really is mind blowing and thought provoking!
tranchms 8y ago
The book “Sapiens” by Noah Harari provides a historical anthropological explanation of the powerful role stories play in forming conciousness. Stories mediate conscious experience and form the basis of reality as we know it. It’s difficult to wrap the mind around what this means exactly, and see it’s far reaching implications. It’s difficult because, our minds are embedded in narratives, embedded within stories that mediate our conscious experience. These stories or narratives operate unconsciously, like programs running on your computer, like an eye trying to examine itself without a mirror. But they impact our ability to perceive, to engage with reality in different ways, even our ability to see and hear phenomena directly acting upon us. The stories we become conditioned to either enhance our ability to perceive and adapt and explain and engage with our world, or limit it. We only hear what we understand. “The limits of my language means the limits of my world.” —Ludwig Wittgenstein “When we change the way we look at the world, the world we look at changes.” —Leo Tolstoy Contemplation and reflection are the mechanisms which allow the mind to examine itself and it’s unconscious assumptions, to detach from ideas— the thoughts and feelings produced by stories— and identify inconsistencies and contradictions and paradoxes (problems) that create dissonance and discomfort and suffering (pain). Reflection is the basis of all enlightenment, and how we reconcile conflicting stories and the beliefs they produce. Every story and narrative mediates our experience with the world. They act as a filter that organizes data and information for our senses and the faculties of our mind that we can then use to make decisions. Every story has contradictions and inconsistencies, because no story completely explains everything about our world, because our world is always changing and evolving. If we believe our story is absolutely “True”, we won’t revise our stories and change our beliefs. As a result, we will want to revise and change the world to conform to our narrative. The latter is incompatible with the highest realization: impermanence is the only permanence; change is the only constant. It is the philosophers and critical thinkers duty to expose those inconsistencies and contradictions, so we can revise our stories, update our webs of belief, and provide a more comprehensive story and understanding of the world. Our ability to choose a story relies on our understanding of the relative nature of our conscious experience. Traveling and exposure to new cultures, reading books, meeting and befriend those with different beliefs, (even taking psychedelics), all enlarge our understanding that Truth is not an absolute construct. The stories that form the basis of our beliefs all mediate our perception of Truth. Those who share the same stories agree to the same truths, and see the same world. Those that don’t have fundamental contradictions about what is. Stories vary in simplicity and complexity, and therefore have a spectrum of explanatory power. The stories of hard sciences may not possess the same utility as religion or Jung’s theories of mind when treating psychological illness. Likewise, the stories of religion may not possess the same utility as hard science when treating physiological illness, or solving environmental crises. Placebo’s (stories that have no basis to the material world) have consistently been shown to be more powerful than many pharmaceutical treatments. The only explanation is the power of stories, and the mind’s power to manifest the experience it believes in. The basis of personal development and self-mastery lies in the understanding and acceptance that we can update and revise personal narratives and beliefs that alter our behavior and lead to desirable results. We are not fixed, static creatures, unless we refuse to let go of limiting stories and beliefs. It is difficult to let go of assumptions that have deep emotional attachment. Many people are unable to accept that their conscious experience is relative, that their experiences are not True, in the capital T sense. Your conscious experience is true according to your story, and anyone who shares your story. Your feelings and thoughts are real. You cannot tell someone they are not. But it’s not the whole story. Those feelings and thoughts are not “necessarily” true. There are other ways to feel and think about the same events and people and ideas. Your conscious experience is limited to the stories you are conditioned to believe about the world. Pain and pleasure and everything in between. And those who share your story affirm your beliefs and reinforce the conditioning of those stories, which in turn operate more pervasively as unconscious assumptions of the world, as cosmic Truth. In this way it becomes increasingly difficult to accept the relative nature of the conscious experience, and examine personal narratives and the beliefs they produce in ways that allow for the adoption of updated stories, which stimulate growth and enlightenment and progress towards harmony and flourishing. Because self-preservation is the highest aim and prerogative of all life, and because life requires constant adaptation to maintain equilibrium, it would seem evident that stories which allow us to revise and update themselves, to accommodate new information about the world, and enhance our explanatory power about the world, would be the best operating narrative. This is precisely the task of science and philosophy. By examining a story’s explanatory power, we can evaluate its utility and merit, and determine if it’s good or bad, if it should be adopted or rejected. Every group of humans possess narratives. Some are global, like religious stories, and some are local, like cultural traditions, or personal historical narratives. Some are specific to domains or subjects of thought, like the mind (psychology) or society (sociology) or the body (medicine), and some the world (geology) and life (biology), and some deal with abstractions (mathematics and physics) and methods (philosophy) for organizing experience in an intelligible way. It’s important to realize that stories provide meaning. They guide our behaviors and provide a moral framework for action and productive social collaboration, and point us toward a worthwhile purpose to struggle and labor after. Because there are endless stories to tell, and endless stories that exist, one may conclude a nihilistic attitude, that all is meaningless. It is accurate to say that no story possesses inherent meaning, other than the meaning that the collective imagination gives it. But that is meaning. Realizing that there is no inherent meaning imposed by transcendental truths establishes a freedom to create stories and meaning relative to your experience, which allows you to be the hero, the protagonist, rather than a spectator caught in stories imposed by others, such as religious orthodoxy, demagogues and charismatic personalities, or brand advertising that reinforce cultural values such as consumerism. You can create your own story, and live it out, with the peace of mind that you have a purpose as fulfilling and meaningful as any story you would have inherited.
Hasknewbie 8y ago
Reminds me of Daniel Dennett's Consciousness Explained, where he also tears down the common perception of 'subconscious' thoughts. Not the most easy/didactic book (and certainly not the most humble of titles) but worth a read.
vinceguidry 8y ago
More people should meditate. Especially the people that make these kinds of arguments or study these kinds of things. Most of what he says is pretty good. But this part puts the lie to his whole argument, that the unconscious cannot form thoughts: > But think about the brain processes involved in even realizing that the song is familiar; or recognizing that the singer is David Bowie. We have no introspective access to these brain processes. This isn't true. You can have introspective access to these brain processes. I have investigated recall pretty thoroughly, my conclusions are rather difficult to put into words like many things about consciousness. Your conclusions sound rather banal, unless you have the experience that caused them to arise. But you can't have access if you don't develop it. The other big mistake he makes is in discounting the abilities of stories themselves to have depth. That the brain is constantly telling stories should in no way imply that the brain lacks depth. There is depth in those stories that is worth looking into, depth that the brain put there. The work of psychotherapists is in no way invalidated, in fact, they're much better at thinking about the stories we tell ourselves than we are. It's just, same as with introspective access to your subconscious, you won't find any depth if you don't go looking for it. Through meditation, I was able to create what's called a tulpa, a separate, distinct personality that shares my brain with me. At first I thought it was a non-physical entity, time and introspection and literally asking it what it was, I eventually worked out that it was sharing my brain with me, I didn't even know what a tulpa was back then. If the subconscious can't think, tulpas, which maintain personality distinct from the normal operating consciousness, would have nowhere to 'hide'. It would be easy for the skeptic to then make the argument that it didn't exist, but again, if you don't meditate, you can never really investigate the question. And if you want to keep arguing, say you want to now argue that the tulpa personality was created on the fly by the brain, then eventually your reasoning will turn circular. This is just positivist nihilism in another form.
- ehsanu1 8y ago
  You're saying you have two consciousnesses, one which can inspect the other? Can it inspect itself? Generally, assuming a single consciousness, it's just tautology that unconscious processes can't be inspected. That's why we call them "unconscious", because we are not conscious of them. If you are conscious of them somehow, then they are not exactly unconscious processes any longer.
vladgiverts 8y ago
The saying “all models are wrong, some models are useful” seems appropriate here. The interviewee is arguing against both the correctness and usefulness of “sub-conscious thought” as a model for the human mind. But he seems to conflate the two arguments. It sounded to me like he was saying: “Here are all the ways that the sub-conscious thought is wrong and confusing, so it must not be useful either!” He talks about motor neurons and sensory processing as an unconscious brain process, which is so different from what we consider “thought” that it doesn’t make sense to call them unconscious thought. He then goes on to rail against Jung and Freud and psychology in general. But that’s a straw-man. Based on my limited knowledge, I don’t Freud et al were talking about the mechanical brain processes when they wrote about the unconscious mind. Instead, they were talking about things like the self-images and expectations that we hold at any given moment. Like, if I hold a very low opinion of myself (like I did for most of my life) I might feel awkward and insecure around girls or certain social situations. The unconscious belief in those moments was that there was something inherently wrong with me (I was unloveable, of little value, etc). Ten years ago if you had asked me I would have told you I was amazing. I probably believed it at conscious level. But given my levels of anxiety back then, it certainly wasn’t true. It’s only now after some inner exploration that I am able to see and realize this. Is it fair to call that unconscious or subconscious if these beliefs were there all along I wasn’t aware of them? I personal find that a useful model and I think that’s what psychologists have in mind when they use those words.
- marmaduke 8y ago
  I think the utility of the strict hierarchy conscious over subconscious is what is criticized. In its place, the notion that multiple competing narratives is being argued for. Which narrative is winning is then the content of conscious thought. (cribbed from Daniel Dennett’s work, but fits with modern neuroscience IMO)
- samirillian 8y ago
  If you think the world is flat, then the world is flat. But from the depths our spiritual life stirs.
- mariushn 8y ago
raverbashing 8y ago
Most "cognitive scientists" seems to conflate the world with their simplified models. For a field with one of the lowest replication rates (and which won't get better) they seem to take their conclusions more seriously than scientists in hard sciences. This interview is painfully self contradictory, "there is no inner truth but there is no easy way of solving this", almost in self denial. "What happens is not what happens. What happens is the story that we tell ourselves about what happens." well, yes And of course the brain tell stories, and "a deep truth" might not be so deep, but past events and how we handle them ourselves do have an effect (though it might not be so obvious). In a fundamental level, is the brain chaotic ("deterministic " but unpredictable due to millions of different variables) or does it have a random component (and how much is that)? And what abstractions emerge from the brain's complexity?
callesgg 8y ago
It was a long time since psychologists believed that unconscious thoughts where actual thoughts. They are more like patterns in the way your brain interprets the world for you. Patterns that where programed in to your brain when you interpreted that part of the world before.
qubax 8y ago
I remember seeing this on hn before. The current thesis is that the brain ( consciousness ) is a predicting machine. A very interesting lecture by a neuroscientist. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRel1JKOEbI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRel1JKOEbI
kashyapc 8y ago
This reminds me of Daniel Kahneman's notion of "experiencing self" vs. "remembering self" (the story-telling self). Here's a story he shares in one of his talks[1] about how the "remembering self" dictates what a person gets to keep as a memory: Now, I'd like to start with an example of somebody who had a question-and-answer session after one of my lectures reported a story, and that was a story -- He said he'd been listening to a symphony, and it was absolutely glorious music and at the very end of the recording, there was a dreadful screeching sound. And then he added, really quite emotionally, it ruined the whole experience. But it hadn't. What it had ruined were the memories of the experience. He had had the experience. He had had 20 minutes of glorious music. They counted for nothing because he was left with a memory; the memory was ruined, and the memory was all that he had gotten to keep. And here's [2] another reference -- "Memory Vs. Experience: Happiness is Relative". [1] https://www.ted.com/talks/daniel_kahneman_the_riddle_of_experience_vs_memory/transcript https://www.ted.com/talks/daniel_kahneman_the_riddle_of_expe... [2] https://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/memory-vs-experience-happiness-is-relative https://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/memory-vs-expe...
cobaltnightmare 8y ago
So, as a professor of clinical psychology... I think there's a lot of sound and fury and misunderstandings and stuff in this area. People try too hard to prove that they've shed Freud without realizing it's basically the same as Kahneman. Also different people are referring to different things when they discuss "consciousness" and "conscious processing" which confuses things. There's some interesting papers emerging in recent years suggesting that two-system models ("subconcious," "fast," "intuitive" versus "slow," "conscious," "deliberate") have a lot of theoretical problems and can generally be explained by other models that don't have this structure. At the same time, there's a lot of evidence that there's different types of processing, or processing of different kinds of content, and that people are not always good at verbalizing their state. The analogy I always like to use is visual versus verbal processing: some visual content you can reason about, but have a hard time putting into words, or vice versa. If you were looking for someone at a huge wedding I was at, and I wanted to know if they were there, it's a lot more efficient to show you pictures of that person than to ask you to verbally describe them. This is different types of processing. I suspect there's something analogous for other types of processing, such as emotional, interoceptive processing, etc. This is different in a lot of ways from some of what the article is referring to, about subconcious problem solving, but then again the article deliberately conflates the two when talking about, e.g., psychotherapy. The flash of insight of a mathematician and a psychotherapy client are not the same flashes necessarily (although they might be). Maybe neither requires "subconcious" processing. But it is possible they involve nonverbal processing, and also possible that verbal processing is differentially associated with other types of processing. It's also a mistake to assume that verbal reports of people should be treated as "inner world reporters." What I mean is that there's a difference between asking someone if they are currently hateful, and expecting an accurate response, and asking them for their views on, say, some member of different sociocultural group, to which they respond with hateful speech. Both are self-sourced verbal behaviors, but we interpret them differently. This is kind of a long-winded way of pointing out there's different things being referred to as "subconcious" (I haven't even gotten into dreams and sleep-arousal states). Saying that one thing can be explained differently doesn't necessarily mean the other thing should be explained the same way. "Consciousness" and "conscious" have become so broadly used that they're close to meaningless because they can mean so many different things.
textor 8y ago
Behaviorists have failed to explain a monkey using a stick to get bananas for the first time. I have little patience for antiquated baloney such as "Emotions are are momentary improvisations to bodily reactions". Do paralyzed people have no emotions now? What about locked-in syndrome? His broader point about flatness may be justified, but his entire school of thought is no less nonsensical than Freud's, which acolytes also try to revive by sprinkling with modern research from time to time; so this "debunking" leaves me unimpressed.
ai_ia 8y ago
He talks about all thoughts arise from bodily sensations. This is exactly what Vipassana teaches. I wonder if he 'borrowed' from there without attributing.
- analog31 8y ago
  Likewise Aristotle, and perhaps others as well.

262 points by dnetesn 8y ago

I was thinking about this recently—given how difficult it is to explain "why" an artificial neural network behaves a certain way, it's probably similarly difficult for our conscious minds to explain our unconscious behavior, the best they can do is pattern match and tell stories. From the article: "If we could understand the processes by which billions of neurons cooperate to help us recognize a face or interpret a fragment of speech, we would find these as unrelated to the stream of consciousness as the operation of the liver."

alexpetralia 8y ago
I speculated that if we make substantial progress in the field of explainability research, we will be able to learn something new about human consciousness.

cryptozeus 8y ago

Great read ...totally opp view of my current thinking about self ...“it’s important to think of the project as going forward, rather than thinking that I and everyone else are in the grip of a mysterious force that’s controlling us and we need to voyage inward to find it. It’s just an unconstructive direction to be looking inward instead of outward. A forward-looking approach to our lives is the positive benefit.”

nerdponx 8y ago

This looks like it amounts to an indirect endorsement of therapeutic modalities like somatic experiencing. I just hope that it doesn't get spun the wrong way. We may not have unconscious "thought", but we certainly do have unconscious "feeling". I haven't read the book (and didn't read the whole interview), but I hope it makes this distinction.

s-shellfish 8y ago
I agree with this. I had a heightened degree of anxiety the other day and I wasn't sure why. I'm sure there's a reason, but I couldn't process it. It was completely different than the way I've experienced an awareness of my own emotions my entire life. Always in relation to social environment. Now I seem to just get anxiety over bugs in code. Emotionally connected to my computer. Life is an experience, always new awarenesses to be experienced. I still don't think there's anything permanent about the functioning of the mind. I think the things one decides to be true that one is allowed to believe are true to the individual are the things that are the most important. There can be subconscious thought. I've experienced that. There can also be no unconscious thought. I've experienced that. Theory of mind, always a very tricky subject! Epistomology, cognitive science, theories of intelligence.

patkai 8y ago

Not sure what to think of this yet, but it is refreshing to have an interesting new angle on the brain. This guy reminds me of Marvin Minsky, who once said "I bet the human brain is a kludge."

bena 8y ago
That's probably not wrong. How else would you describe a 3 pound lump of fat whose job is to make sure you don't choke on your own saliva?
- gowld 8y ago
  It only takes the evolutionaroly oldest smallest few grams to avoid choking

aytekin 8y ago

Reminds of Viktor Frank’s Man’s Search for Meaning. Don’t make things unnecessarily complex. Instead of trying find a problems from the past in your unconscious mind and fix, find yourself something to live for. Look forward, not backwards.

wallflower 8y ago

"What happens is not what happens. What happens is the story that we tell ourselves about what happens." A contrived example: Adult is home with parents. One of the parents asks her to clean up her dishes. She reacts quickly with a knee-jerk "I was going to do it! Ugh!". What happened was that the parents wanted to clean up the table. However, since the adult has this shifting narrative in her head about 'my parents don't treat me with respect', she immediately interpreted the simple request as proof or evidence that 'they are not treating me with respect' and emotionally reacted. Kind of like a vicious circle. It's kind of like when we have a bad day, we can interpret it as everything is conspiring against us. The thing is that we are interpreting what happens to us all the time. It doesn't have to be a single origin story/root cause like the author of the book in the article states. The way to look forward is to actually start taking proactive actions towards the story that you want. Since we don't exist without other people, you cannot simply spit affirmations into a mirror or make a vision board. You must put it out there with the people who are entangled in your reality. For the adult in this example, it would be something like being honest with her parents (something like non-violent communication) and telling them how she feels they are treating her without respect and working with them to "co-create" a new reality. Note: This is not my thought. It comes from a personal development organization that starts with 'L' and ends with the letter before 'l'. The extent of my involvement was going to a weekend seminar on invitation from a friend.

codetrotter 8y ago
> It comes from a personal development organization that starts with 'L' and ends with the letter before 'l'. Are they a secret organization or something :P or what is up with not wanting to state their name? As a foreigner not living in the US I have no idea what org you are talking about here, so excuse me if it is really obvious to people from the US. PS: With the font on my phone the ‘l’ looked like ‘I’ (uppercase ‘i’) rather than lowercase ‘L’. Regardless I have no idea what the name you are referring to is supposed to be.
- jupiter90000 8y ago
  Landmark Forum. They don't have the best reputation in general.

jesperlang 8y ago

Another article that refers to the book "The Mind is Flat", there was recently a submission and related discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17625244 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17625244 Highly recommend reading the book, it really is mind blowing and thought provoking!

tranchms 8y ago

The book “Sapiens” by Noah Harari provides a historical anthropological explanation of the powerful role stories play in forming conciousness. Stories mediate conscious experience and form the basis of reality as we know it. It’s difficult to wrap the mind around what this means exactly, and see it’s far reaching implications. It’s difficult because, our minds are embedded in narratives, embedded within stories that mediate our conscious experience. These stories or narratives operate unconsciously, like programs running on your computer, like an eye trying to examine itself without a mirror. But they impact our ability to perceive, to engage with reality in different ways, even our ability to see and hear phenomena directly acting upon us. The stories we become conditioned to either enhance our ability to perceive and adapt and explain and engage with our world, or limit it. We only hear what we understand. “The limits of my language means the limits of my world.” —Ludwig Wittgenstein “When we change the way we look at the world, the world we look at changes.” —Leo Tolstoy Contemplation and reflection are the mechanisms which allow the mind to examine itself and it’s unconscious assumptions, to detach from ideas— the thoughts and feelings produced by stories— and identify inconsistencies and contradictions and paradoxes (problems) that create dissonance and discomfort and suffering (pain). Reflection is the basis of all enlightenment, and how we reconcile conflicting stories and the beliefs they produce. Every story and narrative mediates our experience with the world. They act as a filter that organizes data and information for our senses and the faculties of our mind that we can then use to make decisions. Every story has contradictions and inconsistencies, because no story completely explains everything about our world, because our world is always changing and evolving. If we believe our story is absolutely “True”, we won’t revise our stories and change our beliefs. As a result, we will want to revise and change the world to conform to our narrative. The latter is incompatible with the highest realization: impermanence is the only permanence; change is the only constant. It is the philosophers and critical thinkers duty to expose those inconsistencies and contradictions, so we can revise our stories, update our webs of belief, and provide a more comprehensive story and understanding of the world. Our ability to choose a story relies on our understanding of the relative nature of our conscious experience. Traveling and exposure to new cultures, reading books, meeting and befriend those with different beliefs, (even taking psychedelics), all enlarge our understanding that Truth is not an absolute construct. The stories that form the basis of our beliefs all mediate our perception of Truth. Those who share the same stories agree to the same truths, and see the same world. Those that don’t have fundamental contradictions about what is. Stories vary in simplicity and complexity, and therefore have a spectrum of explanatory power. The stories of hard sciences may not possess the same utility as religion or Jung’s theories of mind when treating psychological illness. Likewise, the stories of religion may not possess the same utility as hard science when treating physiological illness, or solving environmental crises. Placebo’s (stories that have no basis to the material world) have consistently been shown to be more powerful than many pharmaceutical treatments. The only explanation is the power of stories, and the mind’s power to manifest the experience it believes in. The basis of personal development and self-mastery lies in the understanding and acceptance that we can update and revise personal narratives and beliefs that alter our behavior and lead to desirable results. We are not fixed, static creatures, unless we refuse to let go of limiting stories and beliefs. It is difficult to let go of assumptions that have deep emotional attachment. Many people are unable to accept that their conscious experience is relative, that their experiences are not True, in the capital T sense. Your conscious experience is true according to your story, and anyone who shares your story. Your feelings and thoughts are real. You cannot tell someone they are not. But it’s not the whole story. Those feelings and thoughts are not “necessarily” true. There are other ways to feel and think about the same events and people and ideas. Your conscious experience is limited to the stories you are conditioned to believe about the world. Pain and pleasure and everything in between. And those who share your story affirm your beliefs and reinforce the conditioning of those stories, which in turn operate more pervasively as unconscious assumptions of the world, as cosmic Truth. In this way it becomes increasingly difficult to accept the relative nature of the conscious experience, and examine personal narratives and the beliefs they produce in ways that allow for the adoption of updated stories, which stimulate growth and enlightenment and progress towards harmony and flourishing. Because self-preservation is the highest aim and prerogative of all life, and because life requires constant adaptation to maintain equilibrium, it would seem evident that stories which allow us to revise and update themselves, to accommodate new information about the world, and enhance our explanatory power about the world, would be the best operating narrative. This is precisely the task of science and philosophy. By examining a story’s explanatory power, we can evaluate its utility and merit, and determine if it’s good or bad, if it should be adopted or rejected. Every group of humans possess narratives. Some are global, like religious stories, and some are local, like cultural traditions, or personal historical narratives. Some are specific to domains or subjects of thought, like the mind (psychology) or society (sociology) or the body (medicine), and some the world (geology) and life (biology), and some deal with abstractions (mathematics and physics) and methods (philosophy) for organizing experience in an intelligible way. It’s important to realize that stories provide meaning. They guide our behaviors and provide a moral framework for action and productive social collaboration, and point us toward a worthwhile purpose to struggle and labor after. Because there are endless stories to tell, and endless stories that exist, one may conclude a nihilistic attitude, that all is meaningless. It is accurate to say that no story possesses inherent meaning, other than the meaning that the collective imagination gives it. But that is meaning. Realizing that there is no inherent meaning imposed by transcendental truths establishes a freedom to create stories and meaning relative to your experience, which allows you to be the hero, the protagonist, rather than a spectator caught in stories imposed by others, such as religious orthodoxy, demagogues and charismatic personalities, or brand advertising that reinforce cultural values such as consumerism. You can create your own story, and live it out, with the peace of mind that you have a purpose as fulfilling and meaningful as any story you would have inherited.

Hasknewbie 8y ago

Reminds me of Daniel Dennett's Consciousness Explained, where he also tears down the common perception of 'subconscious' thoughts. Not the most easy/didactic book (and certainly not the most humble of titles) but worth a read.

vinceguidry 8y ago

More people should meditate. Especially the people that make these kinds of arguments or study these kinds of things. Most of what he says is pretty good. But this part puts the lie to his whole argument, that the unconscious cannot form thoughts: > But think about the brain processes involved in even realizing that the song is familiar; or recognizing that the singer is David Bowie. We have no introspective access to these brain processes. This isn't true. You can have introspective access to these brain processes. I have investigated recall pretty thoroughly, my conclusions are rather difficult to put into words like many things about consciousness. Your conclusions sound rather banal, unless you have the experience that caused them to arise. But you can't have access if you don't develop it. The other big mistake he makes is in discounting the abilities of stories themselves to have depth. That the brain is constantly telling stories should in no way imply that the brain lacks depth. There is depth in those stories that is worth looking into, depth that the brain put there. The work of psychotherapists is in no way invalidated, in fact, they're much better at thinking about the stories we tell ourselves than we are. It's just, same as with introspective access to your subconscious, you won't find any depth if you don't go looking for it. Through meditation, I was able to create what's called a tulpa, a separate, distinct personality that shares my brain with me. At first I thought it was a non-physical entity, time and introspection and literally asking it what it was, I eventually worked out that it was sharing my brain with me, I didn't even know what a tulpa was back then. If the subconscious can't think, tulpas, which maintain personality distinct from the normal operating consciousness, would have nowhere to 'hide'. It would be easy for the skeptic to then make the argument that it didn't exist, but again, if you don't meditate, you can never really investigate the question. And if you want to keep arguing, say you want to now argue that the tulpa personality was created on the fly by the brain, then eventually your reasoning will turn circular. This is just positivist nihilism in another form.

ehsanu1 8y ago
You're saying you have two consciousnesses, one which can inspect the other? Can it inspect itself? Generally, assuming a single consciousness, it's just tautology that unconscious processes can't be inspected. That's why we call them "unconscious", because we are not conscious of them. If you are conscious of them somehow, then they are not exactly unconscious processes any longer.

vladgiverts 8y ago

The saying “all models are wrong, some models are useful” seems appropriate here. The interviewee is arguing against both the correctness and usefulness of “sub-conscious thought” as a model for the human mind. But he seems to conflate the two arguments. It sounded to me like he was saying: “Here are all the ways that the sub-conscious thought is wrong and confusing, so it must not be useful either!” He talks about motor neurons and sensory processing as an unconscious brain process, which is so different from what we consider “thought” that it doesn’t make sense to call them unconscious thought. He then goes on to rail against Jung and Freud and psychology in general. But that’s a straw-man. Based on my limited knowledge, I don’t Freud et al were talking about the mechanical brain processes when they wrote about the unconscious mind. Instead, they were talking about things like the self-images and expectations that we hold at any given moment. Like, if I hold a very low opinion of myself (like I did for most of my life) I might feel awkward and insecure around girls or certain social situations. The unconscious belief in those moments was that there was something inherently wrong with me (I was unloveable, of little value, etc). Ten years ago if you had asked me I would have told you I was amazing. I probably believed it at conscious level. But given my levels of anxiety back then, it certainly wasn’t true. It’s only now after some inner exploration that I am able to see and realize this. Is it fair to call that unconscious or subconscious if these beliefs were there all along I wasn’t aware of them? I personal find that a useful model and I think that’s what psychologists have in mind when they use those words.

marmaduke 8y ago
I think the utility of the strict hierarchy conscious over subconscious is what is criticized. In its place, the notion that multiple competing narratives is being argued for. Which narrative is winning is then the content of conscious thought. (cribbed from Daniel Dennett’s work, but fits with modern neuroscience IMO)
samirillian 8y ago
If you think the world is flat, then the world is flat. But from the depths our spiritual life stirs.
mariushn 8y ago

raverbashing 8y ago

Most "cognitive scientists" seems to conflate the world with their simplified models. For a field with one of the lowest replication rates (and which won't get better) they seem to take their conclusions more seriously than scientists in hard sciences. This interview is painfully self contradictory, "there is no inner truth but there is no easy way of solving this", almost in self denial. "What happens is not what happens. What happens is the story that we tell ourselves about what happens." well, yes And of course the brain tell stories, and "a deep truth" might not be so deep, but past events and how we handle them ourselves do have an effect (though it might not be so obvious). In a fundamental level, is the brain chaotic ("deterministic " but unpredictable due to millions of different variables) or does it have a random component (and how much is that)? And what abstractions emerge from the brain's complexity?

callesgg 8y ago

It was a long time since psychologists believed that unconscious thoughts where actual thoughts. They are more like patterns in the way your brain interprets the world for you. Patterns that where programed in to your brain when you interpreted that part of the world before.

qubax 8y ago

I remember seeing this on hn before. The current thesis is that the brain ( consciousness ) is a predicting machine. A very interesting lecture by a neuroscientist. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRel1JKOEbI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRel1JKOEbI

kashyapc 8y ago

This reminds me of Daniel Kahneman's notion of "experiencing self" vs. "remembering self" (the story-telling self). Here's a story he shares in one of his talks[1] about how the "remembering self" dictates what a person gets to keep as a memory: Now, I'd like to start with an example of somebody who had a question-and-answer session after one of my lectures reported a story, and that was a story -- He said he'd been listening to a symphony, and it was absolutely glorious music and at the very end of the recording, there was a dreadful screeching sound. And then he added, really quite emotionally, it ruined the whole experience. But it hadn't. What it had ruined were the memories of the experience. He had had the experience. He had had 20 minutes of glorious music. They counted for nothing because he was left with a memory; the memory was ruined, and the memory was all that he had gotten to keep. And here's [2] another reference -- "Memory Vs. Experience: Happiness is Relative". [1] https://www.ted.com/talks/daniel_kahneman_the_riddle_of_experience_vs_memory/transcript https://www.ted.com/talks/daniel_kahneman_the_riddle_of_expe... [2] https://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/memory-vs-experience-happiness-is-relative https://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/memory-vs-expe...

cobaltnightmare 8y ago

So, as a professor of clinical psychology... I think there's a lot of sound and fury and misunderstandings and stuff in this area. People try too hard to prove that they've shed Freud without realizing it's basically the same as Kahneman. Also different people are referring to different things when they discuss "consciousness" and "conscious processing" which confuses things. There's some interesting papers emerging in recent years suggesting that two-system models ("subconcious," "fast," "intuitive" versus "slow," "conscious," "deliberate") have a lot of theoretical problems and can generally be explained by other models that don't have this structure. At the same time, there's a lot of evidence that there's different types of processing, or processing of different kinds of content, and that people are not always good at verbalizing their state. The analogy I always like to use is visual versus verbal processing: some visual content you can reason about, but have a hard time putting into words, or vice versa. If you were looking for someone at a huge wedding I was at, and I wanted to know if they were there, it's a lot more efficient to show you pictures of that person than to ask you to verbally describe them. This is different types of processing. I suspect there's something analogous for other types of processing, such as emotional, interoceptive processing, etc. This is different in a lot of ways from some of what the article is referring to, about subconcious problem solving, but then again the article deliberately conflates the two when talking about, e.g., psychotherapy. The flash of insight of a mathematician and a psychotherapy client are not the same flashes necessarily (although they might be). Maybe neither requires "subconcious" processing. But it is possible they involve nonverbal processing, and also possible that verbal processing is differentially associated with other types of processing. It's also a mistake to assume that verbal reports of people should be treated as "inner world reporters." What I mean is that there's a difference between asking someone if they are currently hateful, and expecting an accurate response, and asking them for their views on, say, some member of different sociocultural group, to which they respond with hateful speech. Both are self-sourced verbal behaviors, but we interpret them differently. This is kind of a long-winded way of pointing out there's different things being referred to as "subconcious" (I haven't even gotten into dreams and sleep-arousal states). Saying that one thing can be explained differently doesn't necessarily mean the other thing should be explained the same way. "Consciousness" and "conscious" have become so broadly used that they're close to meaningless because they can mean so many different things.

textor 8y ago

Behaviorists have failed to explain a monkey using a stick to get bananas for the first time. I have little patience for antiquated baloney such as "Emotions are are momentary improvisations to bodily reactions". Do paralyzed people have no emotions now? What about locked-in syndrome? His broader point about flatness may be justified, but his entire school of thought is no less nonsensical than Freud's, which acolytes also try to revive by sprinkling with modern research from time to time; so this "debunking" leaves me unimpressed.

ai_ia 8y ago

He talks about all thoughts arise from bodily sensations. This is exactly what Vipassana teaches. I wonder if he 'borrowed' from there without attributing.

analog31 8y ago
Likewise Aristotle, and perhaps others as well.