Pattern-chaser wrote: ↑November 24th, 2021, 10:30 amSteveKlinko wrote: ↑November 21st, 2021, 11:49 am
If a particular Brain activity does not result in some kind of Conscious Experience, then it is irrelevant.
Consider yourself, consciously and deliberately, deciding to move your arm. Before the moment you make your conscious decision, your nonconscious mind has already initiated the action.
I think it's a mistake to consider our minds to be limited to the 'conscious mind' and/or consciousness. There's a lot more going on than that.
Yes, indeed. Conscious processing is the surface level of information processing in the CNS, being just the tip of the iceberg of neural activity.
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Conscious and Unconscious Processes Together Form the Bases of Our Mental Processes
As Bernard Baars has written,
“Consciousness is the water in which we swim. Like fish in the ocean, we can’t jump out to see how it looks from the outside. As soon as we lose consciousness, we can no longer see anything.” We are well aware of our conscious selves. We can report on what is occurring right now as we experience an event or taste a food. Our knowledge of what is occurring moment by moment of our conscious life—the contents of our consciousness—forms the base of our awareness. Fluid, flexible, ever-changing contents of our consciousness seem to be a vast sea in which we swim.
Careful experimentation has time and time again proven this feeling to be false. In fact, the contents of our consciousness are quite limited. At any given time, only so much information, so many senses, feelings, and thoughts, can share the mind-space of our consciousness. More and more evidence is providing support for the notion that it is our
unconscious processing that forms the overwhelming majority of brain functions. Our vast store of memories, language knowledge, automaticities, and procedural learning combine to form the largely
unconscious but accessible if recalled storage of what we have learned and experienced throughout our life. …[T]his information is retrievable, in large part, and forms the bulk of the iceberg of our knowledge store. Conscious contents, at any given moment, form merely the tip of this massive iceberg.
Conscious and unconscious threads together form the thoughts and ideas and actions on any given day. We may be reading a book and thinking consciously about the topic of the book while keeping an eye on the time so we are not late for work. At the same time that these conscious processes enter and recede from the contents of our consciousness, largely unconscious processes are also at work outside our attention or our influence. If we are skilled readers, the process of
reading the book—decoding the shapes of the print to form letters, decoding the strings of letters for form words, parsing the sequence of words to form sentences and so on—is not something we are usually conscious of. Similarly, we may be
walking around the room while reading the book—the act of walking is an overlearned process and so the individual motor movements and balance required are largely automatic. Together the conscious, task-based activities of our lives combine with their unconscious and automatic elements to help us achieve our goals, large and small."
(p. 6)
"Waking cognition is woven of
both conscious and unconscious threads, constantly weaving back and forth. For example, the process of reading
these words is only partly conscious. You are a highly practiced reader, and you have learned over many hours of practice to automatically convert
these tiny marks on paper into your own inner speech and then into unconscious processes like word recognition, grammar, and meaning."
(p. 255)
(Gage, Nicole M., and Bernard J. Baars.
Fundamentals of Cognitive Neuroscience. 2nd ed. London: Academic Press/Elsevier, 2018.)
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