(Continued from
part 1)
Bill W Responds:
Your comments are thoughtful and provocative.
It seems to me that knowing at the conscious
level must be 100%. I know what my financial
condition is, I know how many kids I have, I
know what day of the week it is (usually). These
are objective knowings of which I have no doubt.
I do not, however, know whether OJ murdered
his wife, but based upon the evidence, I certainly
think that he did so.
This leads to the question that if I hold a
thought long enough (OJ's guilt) does that thought
become part of my knowing and if so, then what?
It seems to makes no difference whether the
thought is true or false. Some Christians believed
that Jesus was returning on January 1 but even
though their assumption was not correct, they
acted according to their belief system (i.e.
camped out in Israel overnight). Perhaps OJ's
guilt is in fact part my knowing without me
realizing it.
I think that whatever we think, touch, smell,
see, or hear is forever recorded on the subconscious
even though we are not totally aware of everything
that goes on around us. Our conscious mind ignores
those thing we do not consider important. You
are correct with your example of blind people
getting better than average results on their
arrow tests. Likewise psychologists have for
years been testing people for psychic abilities
and many have consistently given better than
average results. This may account for the blind
people giving better than average results as
they may be picking up the thoughts of the one
directing the arrow. This would lead one to
see that the conscious and subconscious interact
yet the subconscious wants to remain at a distance.
Perhaps there is so much there that it would
overwhelm us were we to have it unloaded into
the conscious level all at once.
It seems to me that our conscious mind is our
awareness of being or that which we are aware
of. I am aware of my thoughts, knowings and
feelings so apparently these qualities lie in
the conscious realm of consciousness. After
all, what good is knowing and feeling something
if it is buried in the subconscious and out
of our level of awareness.
This leaves the subconscious. I like your analogy
comparing the subconscious with a computer but
the question I have is, is the hard drive blank
and we are responsible for programming it or
has the hard drive already been programmed with
everything we could possibly want and be and
its just a matter of hitting the print key and
bringing forth into conscious awareness something
that already lies deep within?
The reason I must ask this question is due to
another mental quality - imagination. If I have
a crowbar, it had to come from somewhere, i.e.
the hardware store. If I imagine in my mind
a widget, where did the idea come from, after
all, widgets do not exist in 3 dimensional space.
Even if I had copied 90% of the widget from
similar gadgets, that still leaves 10% that
came from somewhere else. Imagination is the
mental quality of creation. The question is,
does man create something from nothing or does
man bring forth, through his imagination, something
that already exists?
Bill W
March 2001
Jim Replies:
Bill says
< "It seems to me that knowing at the conscious
level must be 100%." >
There is a distinction between conscious and
subconscious knowledge. As mentioned earlier,
blind-sight patients have visual knowledge that
they are not aware of, for example. So knowing
at the conscious level surely cannot be 100%
as you surmise, unless your statement was supposed
to be tautological.
Bill says
< "I think that whatever we think, touch,
smell, see, or hear is forever recorded on the
subconscious even though we are not totally
aware of everything that goes on around us."
>
There is no evidence that everything we sense
is recorded. Indeed is the brain capable of
storing such vast volumes of data? Such recording
would be of little use to us. We could not possibly
hope to recall every waking moment of our lives,
we would not have time! Worse, there would be
little natural advantage to recall
everything
so evolution would surely not bother, especially
as biological memory is expensive in terms of
precious resources. Another disadvantage of
storing everything: it would take longer for
the brain to search such a vast data set for
the information it needs. To be efficient the
brain needs to minimise the amount of data (your
memory) rather than store everything.
That is why we tend to remember only significant
events, such as when we were in danger, or learned
a useful skill: because those events are likely
to be useful to us in the future. If you learn
a hunting skill, you are more likely to survive
and pass on your genes. If you learn to avoid
poisonous snakes you are also more likely to
survive to pass on your genes. Remembering what
you ate for supper every day of your life is
not going to help you survive and hence such
data is probably not stored in long term memory,
and so neither the conscious nor the subconscious
will have access to it.
Irrelevant events are usually not stored in
long term memory, and there is evidence that
those memories that
are stored are likely
to fade if not refreshed by an act of remembrance.
There is even evidence that, for oft remembered
events, we remember memories of our recollection,
rather than the original memories themselves!
Marvin Minsky, the famous AI pioneer and intelligence
expert, estimates that the brain permanently
stores on average about ten bits of information
per second. He points out that this rate of
data storage would imply that our entire memories
would fit onto a single CD ROM.
It is a myth that our brain is like a faithful
video recorder storing every detail and aspect
of our life. Nearly everything is lost forever,
having never qualified for transition from short
term to long term memory.
Bill says
< "Our conscious mind ignores those thing
we do not consider important." >
Pet scan experiments suggest that the
subconscious
mind,
not the conscious mind, decides
what the conscious mind is aware of. The subconscious
controls the conscious mind, and not the other
way around. The idea that the conscious is controlling
what we *think* is important is a myth. If you
hear a loud bang behind you, you become focussed
on that stimulus. It is literally involuntary.
You cannot choose to ignore that bang. Everything
you are conscious of is there because your subconscious
feeds it to you.
To answer your question, do we program ourselves?
I think that we do not. Using the computer analogy
we have software installed, our DNA. Our brains
grow and evolve through predetermined genetic
attributes, our experiences and environment.
But that machine is still deterministic.
Neural networks are computer simulations of
brain circuits. They can learn and recognise
things, just like we can. BUT they have no free
will. What they learn depends on two things:
their structure and the data they are exposed
to, what they "sense" to put it loosely. The
neural nets in our heads, our brains, work like
this too. There is no magic, just incredible
complexity leading to sophisticated behaviours
and even consciousness. Consciousness is the
symptom of our programming, not the cause.
Thanks go to Bill W.
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