
What if consciousness is not what drives the human mind? - wjSgoWPm5bWAhXB
https://theconversation.com/what-if-consciousness-is-not-what-drives-the-human-mind-86785
======
oceanghost
Through 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
Have 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
> "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
I 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.

~~~
escherplex
Fun. With kite-surfing you have to be two people at once, legs and upper body
having co-operating minds of their own. If you get down to Oz you may want to
try cloud-surfing. When you have an occluded weather front the leading edge
clouds have a strong updraft, with a strong downdraft at the trailing end;
effect is like a suspended horizontal wind tube. That was demonstrated to me
during a private-IFR lesson where (under hood) I heard a loud whooshing sound
and the vertical speed indicator shot up. Concerned, the CFI explained what
was happening. Interesting! Wonder if you could cloud surf? Turned out that
was an activity in Queensland, Australia where they have a spring phenomena
called the 'Morning Glory' with long tubular cloud formations and lots of
glider pilots. If you try it make sure you know where you want to land since
the back country there is full of nasty bugs and snakes and the Gulf of
Carpentaria has more than it's fair share of box jellyfish. Nice place to
visit ...

Instead of lizard / monkey / the 'me' try physicalistic / vitalistic /
mentalistic

------
jngreenlee
Interesting! 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.

~~~
EGreg
Listen to what you said... the highest order observation, "when ovserved by
the person" is an illusion.

This implies that there is someone ("the person") observing the highest order
observation -- making it not the highest order.

And to be an illusion there needs to be someone to fool in the first place.

Try to get that language out of your stataments and then see if you can say
ANYTHING AT ALL about consciousness! :-)

~~~
ThomPete
Think about it this way: It's an illusion, but the illusion is real.

Or think about it this way: We simulate a reality (the illusion).

Or how about this. We are pattern recognizing feedback loops (illusion)

Do we really need to know what consciousness is as a thing or have we perhaps
by now realized that question doesn't really make sense because consciousness
is not a thing. It doesn't exist somewhere. It's a concept we use to describe
phenomena but which through language can always only be a reduction of
reality.

~~~
EGreg
Yep, I think our ideas are shaped by our language.

Same thing with the idea of "existence". It actually requires consciousness to
make any sense. The two concepts are actually dual of each other!

Thought experiment: if I told you about a parallel universe which you would
never be able to detect, or deduce from any phenomena in this one ... how is
then saying "it exists" different from saying "it doesn't exist?"

Now imagine this world with no conscious observers. How is its existence any
different from that of the hypothetical parallel universe?

In short - our very concepts of existence and consciousness are really
influenced by the language we use.

Now an interesting question: can you pose ANY question about consciousness or
existence that doesn't have a trivial answer, if you are CAREFUL to avoid all
ambiguity in your language?

I believe that, from an atheist point of view, there IS no root you can get
at. Everything is relative. When you are careful to state the subject and
object of a sentence everything becomes trivially obvious.

The trouble is when you take a ternary relation (eg A should do B if A wants C
to happen) and omit one of the terms. Then you get mystical wondering "How do
we ground the moral imperative that A should do B?" Once you are careful to
include all the input variables, morality and everything else becomes relative
and the statements are merely relations. Then you get something like logical
positivism.

The main question still remains - WHY are things the way they are, so
consistent? And atheists may never know! :)

~~~
ThomPete
Can see you edited so let me add that i am also living without a religion. I
agree that everything is subjective, but that doesent mean we can't build
moral or ethical foundations for how we live together. There are plenty of
shared foundation even if its an illusion to build upon.

------
pmoriarty
_" 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
This is the first time I've seen a quote of a quote. You just squared my
hatred for quotes.

~~~
Xcelerate
Don't blame him. The laws of physics forced him to post that. He had no say in
the matter.

------
mathewsanders
I 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
I've fainted a couple times and I've done hallucinogens. The experiences
aren't anything alike to me.

~~~
stanfordkid
Agreed. 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.

------
strawcomb
> 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.

~~~
sdfin
Another 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
What 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.

------
patja
If 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
Came here to say the same thing! Link:
[http://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm](http://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm)

------
incadenza
In 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
Well, 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
I 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
I 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.

~~~
ffwd
> but the 'events' of consciousness (any thought, feeling, emotion, sensation
> you've ever experienced) has absolutely no impact on behavior. > or slightly
> related 'how could we talk about it?'

All of this is at least intuitively easy to explain with added language and
complexity in the brain. So like the chain would become:

Touch hot flame -> brain processes event (and then does complicated language
processing, and complicated memory and emotion processing) and THEN sends
signals to move hand or not move hand -> You experience all of this but it had
no relevancy to the chain of events.

Where I would ponder the relevancy of consciousness is when it comes to
attention and remembering things. Just from personal experience, I can read a
book, watch a movie or listen to music and I will not remember a thing if I
wasn't aware of it. Is awareness and consciousness the same thing? I don't
know, but at least we are conscious of everything we are aware of, by
definition, and not necessarily vice versa.

------
wbillingsley
A 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.

------
johndoe489
As 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
Does 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
> 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
I 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._

------
danidiaz
Reminds 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
Right, 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.

------
Nomentatus
There'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.

------
miga
What 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/consciousn...](https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/consciousness-
goes-deeper-than-you-think/)

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.

------
linkpoint1
The 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)

------
gdrift
But 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'.

------
codecrusade
Mind is just one of the many sheaths of consciousness. Mind is a very
negligible entity with respect to the vast concept of consciousness.

------
fierro
Anyone interested in this thread should read Godel, Escher, Bach, or at least
it's preface

~~~
arbie
Any tips on how to approach G.E.B.? I have tried a few times now, but it
seemed simultaneously too dense and abstract.

~~~
trevyn
Read 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.

------
jorgec
Also hormones.

------
tzakrajs
Sounds like mimicry of the great Sam Harris.

