tar

Ten Oz, I am reposted your OP because certain of our conversational posts addressed your thought, or explored portions or angles, but as a whole did not get back to your question of whether self awareness was simply a mechanism used to make choices, and was not actually the controlling factor in how we feel, or why we make the choices we make. Years ago, while in college, I had a girlfriend who was afraid of heights. I was shingling my dad's garage roof, and thought I could help her overcome her fears by being right there with her and having her climb the ladder and get onto the roof and see that she would not fall, and could look around from on high. It did not work out too well. She was afraid to leave the top of the ladder and step on the roof. No amount of reasoning or coaxing would do the job. We abandoned the effort, because it was not going to work. When my older daughter (the one on the right), was young (and still) she was afraid of fire. We had a woodstove in our large cinderblock garage at the time, and I would use it all the time to heat the garage, when I was out there in the winter, to save on running the oil furnace. I had her one day come out with me and I put a piece of newspaper on the floor in the middle of the garage, away from furniture or anything flammable, and with fire extinguisher in hand, set the piece on fire with a lighter, to show her we were in control of the fire, and need not be afraid. The extinguisher did not work and I stamped out the fire as my terrified child stood wide-eyed watching the "lesson". Needless to say, I did not help her overcome her fear. My wife has heard my dopamine theory, she has watched with pride, me quit smoking...she smokes less than before, and only outside as always, but she still smokes. Rational thought does not really control such situations. Regards, TAR

goldglow, I had a waking dream moment a few minutes ago, where I put together a thought about memories I was having yesterday after I posted, and "something" that I was dreaming about or chewing over in my half awake state. It came clear to me, at least an aspect of this, and I ran to the computer, half asleep, hit some wrong buttons and read your post. I spliced my thought in with yours and have now this. The "choice" we have, that is not an illusion, is what memories to pay attention to, and act on. And in reference to the idea of prefabricated memories, and things being "unknown" at some time in history, I would say, it is difficult to say what someone else "knows" or remembers. Part of our memory as humans has to do with song and legend and stories and written documents, and museums and monuments, memorabilia. memorized bible verses and recorded history of all types. Just because we have no record of sleds being used till a certain time, or someone coming up with a better way to build the log road into the vehicle, does not mean nobody came up with the idea. After all wood and vines and weaved rope and such have a tendency to degrade and be eaten by worms and ants and get dried out and crumble to dust in the sun. The earth remembers things only for a short time, before life and wind and rain and sun forget it happened. So while I will admit that there is no direct evidence that the idea of the wheel is an innate memory, I will offer a time when I was young, playing with a string, putting a loop in a loop and making a long thicker string, my mom saying "huh, you've invented crocheting". So, for this discussion, I am widening the idea of innate to include proclivities. The one foot in front of the other thing. We have our senses, but they are our senses. Just a certain piece of the electromagnetic spectrum, a certain range of vibrations, certain chemicals that "taste" sweet or sour or bitter or savory, and certain sensitivities to changes in roughness, or smoothness, sharpness or dullness, warmth or coolness, a certain range of airborne chemicals that smell a certain way combined with how an object feels and tastes, that tells us (good or bad) how it smells. With these inputs, we build a model of the world. It is likely to be a similar model, as pieced together by another human, as the other human is innately outfitted with the exact same bevy of senses, interpreted by a very similar perceptual system, and recorded in a very similar folded up mass of brain cells and connections. So yes each of us has our own unique set of memories. We have had different experiences, heard different stories, read different books, had to solve different problems, and satisfy different bosses and friends and companies and countries and religions and such, but we are all doing it on the same planet, and we are all doing it as humans. What we remember is the world, and the world fits together flawlessly. Everything fits, every action has an equal and opposite reaction. You move something from over there to here and it does not exist over there anymore. Vibrations of light emanate outward...forever, and come in from everywhere, constantly. Matter is neither created of destroyed, for the most part, just changes form and structure, but when something happens at one spot in the world it eventually "gets" everywhere. You spend a dollar on suntan lotion, and you don't have it to spend on a hamburger, but the clerk at the drugstore gets paid, and the coconut that yielded the oil, does not sprout. Our world operates and fits together with no mercy. No mulligans. You pull your boss's pants down...well you can't take it back. The waking world has a perfect memory, in the sense that a butterfly flapping its wings in Africa could cause a hurricane to emerge and hit Florida. And even that "wheel" and cart a human child 50 thousand years ago constructed out of pebbles and leaves, could be lying broken and scattered, in the sediments at the bottom of a creek. Now, my waking thought was this. Our memories are not perfect. They are limited, and somewhat reconstructed. Fallible twice. Once on the way in, and once upon reconstruction. But the memories are of an infallible thing. Reality, the waking world, does not make mistakes. We have the world to check our memories against. "oh, I thought I left my keys on the desk...no, there they are, on the counter, I must have put them down with the groceries." Well, I didn't think that, about the groceries, I thought that pertaining to this discussion, the free choice we make, is what piece of the world, what particular memories of it, are we paying attention to, now. Perhaps, that is what conscious thought is, an attention to, a noticing of, a seeing of a pattern, a remembering of the world, or portion of it, that accrues to fulfilling a survival need. Where was that water hole? How do I get that honey without getting eaten by the bear, or stung by the bees? Regards, TAR

DrmDoc, Well OK, the subconscious is an influence, but I am not clear on what you consider unconscious. Is it no thought. Like you are knocked out or under anesthesia...and is a dream happening when you are unconscious. If a dream is under your unconscious umbrella, does it receive subconscious influences as well? If for instance we have all the sensory information from a lifetime, stored in some fashion in our memories, do both the conscious mind, and the unconscious mind have access to these memories? Regards, TAR Specifically I am after the role of reconstituted memories as afferent input. That is, if I remember something wrong, can I count that as a sensory experience. The example I am using in my own mind at the moment, is a time I saw a man dressed in white at the end of a driveway (we were running scared) as a teenager. We later found out a man that dressed like that had hung himself from a lamppost at the end of the driveway. So did I see a ghost? Does the sensory input required for thought include remembering or reconstructing a sensory experience? Seems there is room in the unconscious to manipulate the pieces of sensory experience and form a workable story, that one cannot easily discern as having happened, or as having been influenced by the subconscious. My brother in law was in the car that day (before he met my sister) and I asked him whether he saw the man 30 years later. He remembers other reasons we were hurrying out of the place, but he did not see a man at the end of the driveway.

DrmDoc, So the basis of thought is the internalization of the world, provided by the analog representation of what was around, through the senses, into a model of the world, which can be navigated, in miniature, requiring less energy to accomplish a trial. The trial, being the thought. Real in that it requires connections and signals between brain cells, but symbolic in nature, as we both were able to visit Times Square, without burning any gas. Regards, TAR the subconscious is, like we said before, working on the problem, running inexpensive, non permanent manipulations of the world (the model of) and when it arrives at a solution that appears to work (put a log on top of two other logs) and imagine the assemblage moving, you can then actually cut the trees down and try it out for real but, as for the wheel and axle, it probably was not "thought" of, without someone seeing a log roll down hill, adding credence to my thought that the world does some thinking for us Which adds weight to Ten Oz's thought that some "choices" that we make, are already made.

DrmDoc, One of my dad's associates had done his doctoral thesis on activation theory. I did not read it or ever have more than a wine party conversation about it with him, but what I got, was that us humans like to have something going on that we are paying attention to. In this, not having any input, I am thinking the consciousness would scrape up something to think about. Feedback loop wise I would say that one can be conscious of one's body. "Does my knee feel OK after the replacement?" "Is it getting strong, should I do a few quad contractions?" Or perhaps one reviews the day and checks on what other people might be thinking about them, or if other people need a visit or some help doing something. This greater community, one's property, one's body, are all subjects of conscious attention, conscious thought. But one is subconsciously aware of these things as well. A crash on the street, draws your attention, and may need to be looked into, requiring some motor movement, some output, but some of the input, come from your model of the world, your body and your body's position in the greater world, which is yours, as well. While I agree that conscious thought requires at some points some perceptual input, there is more than just what we hear and see and smell and feel, and taste, that we are conscious of. My dad says that the human mind will construct stuff, when starved of input. Look at a white wall for more that about 30 secs and you will start seeing colors and shapes shifting around. Generated by your mind. The input is not actual, but you are conscious of it, none-the-less. The world indeed is what we are conscious of, but part of that world, that physical world is the humans in it, or on it, including primarily ourselves. That single point of focus consciousness, that is TAR, is actual as well a real physical entity in DrmDoc's model. That is, if we were both to go to Times Square tomorrow at 6pm and stand where the car that ran over the people yesterday wound up stopping against a steel barrier post, we would physically be able to see and hear and hopefully not smell or taste each other. But we can "imagine" the meeting, with no input but my suggestion, required. Things can "happen" physically in my brain, that will cause me to experience the meeting, without it ever having to happen. And did you ever consider, as dimreepr suggests, that we are, just because we are humans, similar. Our brains have THE SAME afferent and efferent neural connections, we have the same structures in our heads at the base of the brain attaching neurons to the top of the spinal cord. Same structures, with the same functions. Not reliant on experience. Built in, developing as we grow in the womb. Same innate mechanisms, same physical stuff, grey matter, and chemicals, and ion discharges and the like. These are all part of what we are conscious of, and how we are conscious at all. We don't need any input from the outside to be conscious of a toothache, or to feel our heart breaking, we are innately outfitted to be conscious humans. Regards, TAR Ten Oz, I really should go out and put a few shakes up, so I will just give an outline. Evolutionarily, as our brains developed, I think it was useful to have a reason to want to do a successful thing again. That is, I think that we feel good when we do a good thing. That way we want to do it right, again, and continually doing it right ensures our survival and the survival of our family, clan, and helps to show others of the species how to do it right and thereby live and pass on one's genes and knowledge. The neurotransmitters involved in the pleasure/reward system include dopamine. When the nicotine receptors in your brain receive nicotine, they release dopamine or the precursors to dopamine. The nicotine gets the dopamine into the synapses and one "feels good". But there are 100 other, real ways to get dopamine. Same dopamine. Look at a pretty girl, or a handsome body, win a game of solitaire, get a joke, defeat an adversary, feed your children, hug your mate... 100 ways, at least, that evolution has prepared for us, to get dopamine. To feel good when we are successful at life. So we want to keep on living, surviving, doing it again. So the theory is, that when we feel good its because dopamine is released, and when dopamine is released we feel good. So one can use the two, good and dopamine, interchangeably in discussions. Pertaining to addiction, one feels they need the addictive substance or behavior to survive, because it provides dopamine, and the dopamine is telling us we are surviving, doing it right, feeling good, feeling victorious, on top of the world...even if we are penniless, friendless, homeless, lying in our own filth in the gutter. Regards, TAR

As an example of innate factors, let's for an instant consider how thought might be affected by having a vagina or a penis. Not being a man or a woman, the provider of seed, or the provider of egg and womb and tit, but just having a thing that is a receptacle, a space within, and having a thing that projects out. Personality is in general somewhat affected by one's size and strength and intelligence and speed and such, but I am, for this example just considering, in terms of innate physical influences to thought, the difference in "thinking" that would result from having a vessel or a tool. Not to really ask what differences in thought would occur, but to point out that any differences in thinking that would naturally flow from having the one or the other, would be innate "ideas" that would not rise in the one, simply because they were not outfitted or infitted like the other. I once noted that women in my family, though equal in status and responsibility in the greater world, tended to take care of the inside of the house, where the man had responsibility for the outside. Not completely, as my wife painted the house and takes care of her flower gardens and such, and I have my duties to the dishes and cooking and such, but in general, there is a difference between men and women, the way we shop, the way we "think" about relationships and situations, what we pay attention to, and the like. Enough of a similarity of roles amongst the men vs the women in my experience to consider that the difference is not totally accounted for by societal roles, but is to at least a small degree, influenced by innate factors.

DrmDoc, To the thread title, we have to determine to everyone's satisfaction, how much of our choices are determined by other factors, like dreams and imagination, social conventions and traditional behavior, to conform to other's desires, and to respond to and adjust the chemical​​s coursing through our brain (the hormones the endorphins, the adrenaline, the pheromones drifting through the air and such,) and how much of our choices are made by the point of focus consciousness that thinks, is in control of the decisions. While it is part of the discussion to consider all those factors, as part of one's mentality, it does not seem proper to me, to make a distinction between that which is physically real, and what is going on that we consider thought. In another thread several years ago I made the analogy of the border of Canada and the U.S. as being a mental construct, a convention, made real by agreement of humans. The border is real, but where there is no physical fence, the trees and birds and streams and worms and air and rocks, do not notice the thing. It exists, like alliances and agreements, and promises and threats and patterns and equations and language and analogies and one thing standing for another, in the synapses of our brains, and written down in documents and now stored on computer hard disks. So I get that there are real things that exist in our imaginations, which in many cases we have brought into reality in the form of buildings and artworks, systems and procedures, rules and regulations and conventional "thought" of all kinds. I get the distinction between real and imagined, and where the line is crossed. But one can not stand on the imagined side of the line, and say the physical has no role, in the play, when it obviously is the MAIN player. Regards, TAR

probably for the same reasons you can't catch lightning in a bottle

DrmDoc, Purely physical? I am not sure where and why you make a distinction between physical reality and mental reality. Perhaps I am guided by an insight I had many years ago on a hilltop in Germany, where I "understood" treeness. Perhaps more an epiphany than an insight, but I "knew" that life grabbed form and structure for a fleeting moment from an immense and extremely long lived universe, headed otherwise toward entropy. Purely physical makes no sense to me, because it insinuates that mental activity is somehow above that purely physical stuff. A ghost in the machine type explanation, that makes little sense to me, since we absolutly are purely physical, both in the equipment we use to experience and record and match and move through and modify the place, and in the fact that the place is the ONLY thing we are internalizing and matching and remembering and moving through and modifying. In general, we are of and in the place, and mental pursuits are not separate from it, but completely bound and contained by it. What magic, other than the waking, purely physical world, are you proposing? Regards, TAR

But wait, DrmDoc, innate is what some of our experience consists of. That is, for instance what having DNA is. Innate. We know how to metabolize fat and starch and sugar, and pump our blood and breathe and such, without any conscious effort. That is the subconscious that is being talked about here. We can not both say that no knowledge is innate, and that we know how to breath. Our conscious efforts, we already determined, sort of, are unconscious efforts, phrased in sharable language. Math, or logic, or reference to a model, or some analogy to the info we obtain through our senses or "something we can say about a thing" in Kant's understanding of understanding. When Ten Oz changed his route to walk in the shade, he imagined the angle of the Sun, compared to his memory of the trees and buildings on the other route. He "knew" it would be a cooler route, before he made his calculations. Since much of our knowledge consists of the external world, internalized through our senses, there is a great deal of knowledge, that exists, that we have yet to internalize through our senses. We know the Sun is there, even at night. The pull of the Sun on our every cell exists, even when we are not thinking about. And we have at least an innate intuition of space and time. My dopamine theory says we also have an innate knowledge of what is good. We feel happy, or good, when we satisfy our hunger, or thirst, or find shade on a hot day, or warmth during a winter storm. Any time we do it right, we get a dopamine reward. How do you know having sex is the right thing to do? You probably did alright the first time, without having prior knowledge of how exactly to handle yourself. Some of what we know is innate. Some expressions of a baby are understood by a parent, no matter what language is normally used to communicate in that part of the world. Last year, the dogs were barking one morning, just before sunrise. I stood out on the front porch trying to make out some reason for their barking in the gloom. A hissing roar that I had never heard before came from above. Instantly adrenaline flowed and I took refuge immediately in the house...looking out the living room window I made out a shadow in the medium size oak in front of my house. It was a bear. I did not expect that the barking of the dogs had treed a bear...but I knew innately that the bear was not happy with me being on the porch, and it was a good idea, to go inside. I remember the sound, now, but at the time I just "understood" it as danger. I think the world does some thinking for us. We just learn from its wisdom. Some knowledge is internally innate, and some knowledge is externally innate. What I mean is that what is true is true, whether we notice it or not, and whether we have a word for it or not. Regards, TAR

"No person is capable of knowing anything without an intake of some perceptual experience associated with that knowledge." Well granted, but not completely granted. Are you saying an "insight" or a pattern or a symbol, is not knowledge? That is, those things are not "out there" in the real world for others to perceive. One can only know those things, if they have a theory of mind, concerning the other person. You have no way of seeing or hearing or smelling or touching or feeling a quale of mine. Yet I know about such things. We know about a lot of things through analogy. Like I can know a little about what dimreepr is going through, quitting smoking by drawing a comparison to what I went through. perhaps everything we know is through analogy, as we have stored, in our brains, the whole universe, in an analogous fashion I know about the Sun for instance, but it can not fit in my brain, I must be holding an analogous Sun in my memory. My dad taught me, that when a newborn first opens his or her eyes, he/she see the world backward and upside down, according to the way the lens focuses the world on the back of the eyeball. Only after moving around in it and seeing people stand and walk and such does the brain put all the senses together to witness a unified model. Let me add "knowledge" of up, and level and down and moving from a stop or to a stop, according to input from the inner ears as afferent knowledge.

I am talking the logic of the subconscious, of evolution, that would make a dangerous thing seem bad, and a helpful thing seem good. I am thinking in terms of my dopamine theory. That equates good with dopamine release. Applied to addiction, one is evolutionarily drawn to dopamine. If you find it in a cancer stick, or a hypodermic the unconscious thinks its good, regardless of what the conscious, rational minds has to say about it. But the conscious, rational mind can tell the unconscious to shut up and sit it out, because what feels good, and releases dopamine is not always actually a good thing. Like I said in the nicotine thread, quitting smoking does not mean you will never feel good again. You just are deciding not to get dopamine THAT way. There are plenty of other, actually good ways, to get dopamine. To feel good, to enjoy life, and make it possible for others to do the same.

sure it is if you have just ingested a larva filled, toxin filled piece of meat, it is a good idea to throw up and get it out of your body or if you smell the flowers its a good idea to feel good about the place and hang around and eat the fruit that comes or find the honey

I used dictate, because we are considering the unconscious being in the driver's seat. To this, logic is what is true. True is what actually is, regardless of what we think. To this, what is going on, behind the scenes, under the layer of conscious thought, is actual matching of the real world, against our model of it, so that we can maneuver through it and manipulate it for our advantage. The thing that works, will be decided on, sometimes, without our being able to put it into words, or consider it, a conscious thought. dimreepr, but why would one smell make you lose your stomach and another move you to poetry? Regards, TAR and more importantly, why do we all make the same choice of which makes us sick and which makes us happy?

DrmDoc, While I am not suggesting magical precognition, I am a believer in logic. Like on the court shows I watch, the judges know when somebody is lying, when they make up a story that is just not how a reasonable person would react under the manufactured situation, a person will "decide" on a thing that works, that makes sense. In this sense, I can "guess" what dimreepr might be struggling with (and overcoming), without actually reading his mind. In the context of input and output, you have to allow for millions of years of evolution as input. In the context of input and output, you have to allow for input into others, to become part of your tool box. That is, if the apple hits Galileo on the head, and he tells you about it, it is as if the apple hit you in the head. In any case, making the choice NOT to step off the cliff, is a choice already somewhat made. Even children and dogs have a hard time walking on glass with nothing but a drop beneath it. Regards, TAR so if I "decide" that rotten things smell bad (that might contain bacteria and maggots and toxins that will make me sick or kill me), and flowers smell good (that attract bees, and pollination, and later there is fruit and seeds in the fruit that I can eat to survive,) how much of the decision was actually made by the history of my genes, already or I can choose to read Jampelyang's impermanence as a real thing, that reflects on the history of our genes as an enduring thread that ties us to the past and present and future, even though our own consciousness is fleeting and impermanent, without requiring a magical former life ​We really actually are connected to our ancestors by both physical genes and by the works, and decisions, and discoveries they have made.

goldglow, Consider the phrase "logic would dictate." I perhaps could have known your post and prepared this response. And why do you figure rotten eggs smell BAD to everyone, and honeysuckle blooms smell GOOD. These judgements are predictable. Already built in. Regards, TAR It is possible as well that you heard the national anthem in utero, and that satisfying tunes are constructed of notes that complete harmonizing chords. Listen to a great piece of music, and "predict" the next note. Sure, you probably heard it before, and the theme is most likely copied into other tunes, and hummed and whistled by passers by, but we, as humans have the ability to fill in the blanks, see the form of a deer obscured behind trees...and the ability to satisfyingly complete a musical phrase. Why, I would be willing to bet that you can cho​ose the next thing I am about to Try being married to the same person for 35 years, you can often know what the other person is going to say or do, before they say or do it. Now try existing, as a species on the same planet, for 100s of thousands of generations. Not surprising we feel we know the place a little. And, not surprising that we "fit". an interesting fact about life, in terms of what you may have experienced and what was built in, is the fact that a woman is born with a full complement of eggs That means, that half of you, is as old as your mom. 1/4 of you was around when your grandmother was born. 1/8 when your great grandmother was conceived (or shortly thereafter)... Some of you, was actually on the planet, when Lucy was born.

Ten Oz, Earlier you were speculating that there must be a survival reason why people "feel" they are making a choice. I have two possible avenues to explore. One, the dopamine reward system is structured to reward a person, for doing it right, so they do it again and again. Making the right choice, provides dopamine, making the wrong choice provides hardship and possibly death and an inability to provide for and protect oneself and one's offspring, Therefore making the right choice, or thinking you did, makes you feel good, so the mere act of choosing makes one feel good. "What do you want for dinner?" "I don't know, what do you want?' Or, perhaps, the language thing, should be looked at a little deeper. We have now, and such a thing would have had to develop, a way to share what is going on in our unconscious with another mind. The word, the symbol, the call, the sign, to sneak up around the prey, putting the same "thought" in another mind. As we developed this feature, we could document our correct choices in stone, or song or latter on papyrus. You chose to build a trap, and others can use it. Regards, TAR

Ten Oz, Perhaps the difference between "conscious" thought and unconscious thought, in our this discussion understanding, is similar or analogous to a waking state, and a dream state. That is, there are symbols understood in a dream state, that are not translatable into English. Same way, as your normal switch of routes would have happened, the symbols understood, without you having to pay attention to the situation, enough to put it into words, that would be understandable on the thread. That is our convention of conscious vs. unconscious could be analogous to "phrased in English" vs "experienced in native understanding". Regards, TAR

DrmDoc, I am leaning still in Ten Oz's direction. That there are some "decisions" already coded in the DNA. That is, a female peacock responds to the beauty of the males display. It triggers her dopamine reward system, perhaps. I have absolutely no data on that, a pure speculation, but I am guessing that when I "feel good" when I see a female form, there is something built into my makeup. Perhaps there is a "match" between the female form shape residing in my mental makeup, that is pleasing. Does a squirrel have such a thing for acorns? Maybe. Or there could be a complex of stimuli that together "mean" food. And sure enough, you go over and nibble on the round wood thing and once you eat through the cover you get that sweet meat. So, perhaps Ten Oz is correct to think that there are many things already decided. Squirrels like acorns, people like blueberries. We put everything into our mouths when we are babies, but perhaps we are looking for something. Something about a nipple, tells us we found the right thing, and sucking would be a good "decision". Reflex, but with a purpose, and a certain rational. And although we keep sucking on the pacifier, even though no milk comes, we do indeed get our hunger satisfied when we suck on the bottle, or mother's nipple. We had a cluster of fat squirrels this spring, as they would hang off the gutter and jump onto the bird feeder, a little house hanging under the eave. When I would let the dog out, she would bark at and chase the squirrels over the fence, sending birdseed flying as the squirrels jump would violently swing the feeder. Once spring came, we stopped feeding the birds and the squirrels chewed into the house to get the last seeds. I repaired it, and we thought we would finish the bag and no longer feed them. So, we left it empty for a few days and I looked out one morning and a squirrel (I figure) had chewed the whole thing up. The little shingles off the roof, the corner posts, the place where the birds would stand all around was all in pieces. Oh, that is right, I had moved it unto a chair on the deck, hoping no self respecting squirrel would get that close to the door the dog would come storming out of. Anyway, the point is, the squirrels "thought" if they chewed on this thing, somehow food would be found. The feeder was empty of seeds, but they chewed it up anyway. So I do not think the squirrel would have to have run into an acorn before to eat into one. There where no birdfeeders and deck chairs and such, through evolution. But chewing into hard brown wood, and getting a reward, was something that had happened to squirrels for thousands of generations. There must be something, built into a squirrel, that told them chewing up my feeder was a good decision. So the illusion of choice, that Ten Oz is talking about, is not far fetched. Perhaps we get hooked on drugs that simulate actual victory and completion, and survival goals, because we are wired to seek those neurotransmitters. And some decisions that we make are, like Ten Oz suggests, already decided on, by our pheromones and hormones and by the archetypical memories we have, already encoded in our body/brain/heart complex. After all, the choice to put one foot in front of the other, is somewhat already decided if you have two feet. Regards, TAR a dog or horse can choose to trot or canter or gallop we only can choose to walk or jog or sprint

DrmDoc, But in Ten Oz's defense, on what basis does a squirrel decide to eat her first acorn? There should be some unconscious need or impulse that makes the first nibble happen. Or something about the taste encoded in her chemical reward system , that makes her want to do it again. Regards, TAR Or perhaps she is copying the behavior she sees other squirrels engaged in.

Ten Oz, Shifts responsibility in the sense of for instance you are fighting with your spouse over who left the frig open, when subconsciously you are upset that your spouse does not have a job that pays more. Regards, TAR

Ten Oz, But the subconscious being in control, allows a person to not take responsibility for their actions, as a point of focus player. Like the devil made me do it. So, I do not buy it. , Sure we are driven by subconscious currents, but, they are deep and strong, and inform our decisions, good and bad. Our brains are very complex and millions and billions of synapses and cells are sending messages to each other. There are such mechanisms as predictive motor controlling parts of the brain that set up the order and strength of firing of motor control signals to the muscles, before the actual firing. Like a "plan", that is then actuated. This is not done consciously, but one can test it by putting their thumb and forefinger 1/2 inch apart and holding a dollar bill with about an inch before a release of the bill would have it drop below the thumb and forefinger. You can release the bill with one hand and catch it with the other, all day long. But have someone else release it and the reflexes can not operate fast enough. Your predictive motor simulator can store and send the required signals with the correct motion of the thumb and forefinger at the right moment to catch the bill, only by sending as well the signals to release. So giving our subconscious mind the driver seat, is sort of like saying the engine really made the decision to drive from VA to NJ yesterday. In my case. While it might be, that our DNA is the real decision maker and our bodies are just the hosts of these devious little spirals of chemicals, I tend to look at it, top down. The whole body/brain/heart complex is a real complex that got to be the way it is through evolution, and is intricately related to the environment in which, and from which, it emerged. There is a real reason for life. Any life, is interested in survival, and in reproduction of its particular form and structure, its pattern, in the form of offspring. At least in most cases a life seems to promote its own survival and or the survival of a closely related form of life. Regards, TAR

Kiplngram, While Ten Oz has some excellent insights into this, I am leaning in DrmDoc's direction, in terms of not thinking of subconscious or unconscious thought as done by someone other than the point of focus player. That is, just because you don't know exactly the reasoning behind a particular decision, does not mean it was not your decision. Human judgement is important. Very important, and it includes all the subcurrents that Ten Oz is talking about. All the mental calculations, the relationships, the understanding of what your relationship is with the changing world, and where you stand amongst the other players. Was driving back from VT (my daughter is now a PhD in chemistry) and there were endless decisions I was making on the road. When to go out into the fast lane, when to leave a space for a truck to pull over into the slow lane and such. More calculus than I know, gauging speed and acceleration and deceleration distances and the like, all at 60-75 miles an hour. Lots of laws and conventions and such were in play, and trucks would blink their lights to say thank you when I made a place on the road for them to keep their speed up, approaching a hill and such. Real choices, all. No illusion. Wrong choice could easily result in bent metal and blood. Everyone on the road was making choices all the time too. Sometimes a little selfish but for the most part, especially in VA and PA, the other drivers on the road were mindful (conscious) of me, and me of them. Kant, in critique of pure reason, talks about the "understanding" a human has, and how the various thoughts, are synthetized from the a priori (intuitions) understanding of space and the a priori understanding of time. All else, all the things we "can say" about a thing, are built from these undefinable understandings. Nobody knows how to describe what time is, but everybody knows exactly what it is. Same with space. The categories include everything you can in general say about something. So thought, is putting these judgements we make about the world, into a useful format, that we can either remember, or share. (or synthesize into other thoughts) So just because we don't have a clever way to write a thing down, or the words to express a thing, does not mean we have not understood a thing, and made a decision that would be beneficial to our situation. Allow us to enjoy life, and make it possible for others to do the same. But the end result is not an illusion. We really are here, enjoying life, and making it possible for others to do the same. Regards, TAR

"Yes, things like language (spoken, written, math, music, etc) are consciously learned but humans were problem solving and tool making hundreds of thousands of years before languages existed. Launguage is a social interactive tool that allows humans to better combine efforts and pass information." Ten Oz, Not sure one can think, without language. It might be, that what you are talking about as conscious thought is the only thinking that is really going on. Sure we have impulses and reflexes and emotional reaction to hormones and pheromones and such, but thinking is done, usually in a language. Math, logic, English, pictures, symbols, something, that could be considered a language. Earlier someone suggested that an author could have a thought that subsequently takes a year to put into words. My personal theory about dreams is that they are how we talk to ourselves, in our own personal symbolic language. Very often near impossible to translate this language to English, but still a language. A conversation is still going on, between some conversants. That part of the brain, able to converse with unseen others, is also capable of conversing with "oneself". For example, do you guys "hear" me, when you read my words? Have you outfitted TAR, and Ten Oz and DrmDoc, with a voice, as you read? Try thinking a conscious thought, without using language. Regards, TAR or maybe walk it back even further...how can you be conscious of anything unless something is standing for something else...the ability to make an analogy may be the basis of consciousness after all, how can you be conscious of a tree? the tree never got into your brain, some "image" was internalized I don't think even a pre-language human (if there was such a thing), could solve a problem without "imagining" a solution. how do you chip a piece of flint to a point without imagining the stone changing shape as you strike it just so the "meaning" of a word, exists, prior the word, but the word allows the meaning to be held in two minds, at once whether the unconscious is thought of as a separate mind, doing its own thinking or not, there is no communication of the thought, until a word, or symbol is shared between conversants

Thread, I chose to take this picture this morning, of the giant oak just putting out its leaves. Not particularly sunny, but feels pretty good outside this morning. I have been conscious of this tree for quite a few years. Now you are. Regards, TAR