Memories of the 28th Century

A discussion that touches on the matter of multiple levels of consciousness came up recently on the Philosophy Forums, where I waste a little time on most days. The post was in regard to the power of humans to have “self-agency,” fundamentally the idea that individuals are independent operators. This hinges on what the “self” is. If you think that your waking consciousness is the thing that is yourself and that makes the decisions to act, then you have missed some important matters. What we usually see as out waking consciousness is analogous to the GUI (Graphical User Interface) on a computer OS (operating system). On the computer we interact with the GUI, and through that we tell the computer what to do. Most of the time it appears that the computer works from our commands, but there is a lot more going on below the surface. There are background programs, such as anti-virus, drivers, and system software operating, and we wouldn’t be able to do anything with our applications without the system software that handles sending data to the processor or RAM or storage. Similarly, there are processes running in our bodies that keep us alive, heartbeat, cell metabolism, and so on. In addition, there usually are purely mental processes that often parallel our conscious thought. We have no real control over the processes that out bodies run in the background, and we have only a limited amount of control over what mental activity we do. For those reasons I do not believe that waking consciousness has self-agency, but it is possible that other parts of our brains do have self-agency.

There is also the question of whether dreams are part of that consciousness, and I don’t think that we can tell. I seldom remember my dreams, so I may not be a good one to be making comment about dreams, but from my experience dreams are based in experience, but there is an element of unreality to them There are several theories of dreams, and we don’t know which is correct, but they do show that the waking consciousness certainly does not have self-agency at all times, and they suggest that the underlying processes may consider other possible ways to understand events, and sometimes different understandings appear, sometimes directly in dreams (such as Auguste Kekule’s day dream in which the benzene ring appeared), or the new associations may come up subtly in the course of ordinary thinking. The actual thinking is taking place in the same regions of the brain, but the waking consciousness is not overseeing the activity. The question remains whether the background consciousness is doing something useful in dreams, or if they are random flashes of memory fused with possibilities. I don’t know, but I lean toward the background consciousness doing something, but I don’t know what.

The analogy with a computer is very useful here, because there is a great deal that goes on in the processor that makes up only part of the final result, so we don’t care about it. Just as we don’t care about the management of RAM, as long as things are put into and taken out of RAM correctly.

So who or what is minding the store?

Does it make any difference as long as the store is being minded?

The nature of consciousness is more appropriate to philosophical discussion than to discussion by psychologists although the results of the discussion are important to them, and the results of investigations into the physical basis of consciousness are important to all of us. It is conceivable that consciousness is simply a result of a certain level of interaction among neurons. We know that the other great apes have some consciousness, and they probably have some degree of belief that they have self-agency.

For now, I accept as fact that my waking consciousness is not in overall command. Many systems of my body and mind are controlled by processes that are outside my control, even though those processes are also handled by the brain.

What do you, either your waking consciousness or the underlying intelligence, think?

There are two more steps in this discussion: the Matrix and the old fashioned way.