The greatest myth of all (the article)

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Hi,

 

Thanks for posting the article in its entirety.

 

It was pretty interesting.

 

These are the central ideas of the article:

>The greatest myth of all,

>We suggest that all the

>thoughts, ideas, feelings, attitudes and beliefs traditionally considered to

>be the contents of consciousness are produced by unconscious processes-just

>like actions and perceptions. It's only later that we become aware of them

>as outputs when they enter our consciousness.

>In our model,

>we refer to these "unconscious" parts of the brain as >Level 2.

 

These unconscious parts controlling both visceral acitivites such as digestion

and breathing, blood pressure, water pressure in kidneys etc are controlled for

the main part by areas of the lower brain, the brain stem. Movement, reflexes

and a large part of our voluntary movement, is controlled by the cerebellum.

 

All these centers directly controlling visceral "automonomic" behavior and

activities in the body-mind, report their activity to higher centers, those of

the cortex (which makes up the largest part of the brain, the two hemispheres

with its folds), respinsible for registering the activity of the lower centers

and also for being able to exert a small degree of feedback to the centers

controlling visceral activities. The cortical centers may be seen as level 1,

and the brain stem centers directly controlling visceral activity may be called

level 0.

 

Additonal to the cortical centers controlling visceral activities, level 1,

there are

the cortical centers for control and understanding of language (a complex

behavior needing many centers to function at the same time), memory retrieval

and fully consciously controlled motor activities etc etc, which would

constitute level 2.

 

This distribution of work in levels, leaving most of the control of the body to

the lower brain centers is understandable. Most of the activity carried out by

the lower brain centers do not /necessitate/ conscious control. If it did, the

conscious mind might not have time to do much other than control digestion

(which is a complex process) and breathing, blood pressure etc and try to make

it all fit together and this would represent an inefficient organism.

 

Hence, it is understandable that much of the decision making in the body is only

reported to the conscious mind after it is carried out. One can also safely

assume that this seeming division of the brain centers in higher and lower level

control is energetically sound and has been honed through millennia of

evolution.

 

Another way of seeing it is that the centers controlling the visceral activities

are the most important and the higher, conscious centers are just icing on the

cake.

Which is one point the authors are trying to get across.

>Within this

>level, there must be some kind of decision-making device, a central

>executive structure. The CES identifies the most important task the brain is

>carrying out at any moment, and selects the information that best describes

>the current state of the brain in relation to the chosen task. Only this

>information would be allowed to enter Level 1, to produce "our" conscious

>experience (see Diagram).

 

I found this theory to be interesting.

 

Neuroscientists do not agree whether one single centre can be said to be

responsible for decision making in the conscious control centers and the

knitting of conscious thoughts together to form a sense of self. Some workers

have suggested the sensation of self resides in Area 24 of the deeper layers of

the cortex, called the cingulate gyrus. Other people have suggested the

sensation of self can only be found in the cooperative connections between

several higher brain areas at once.

 

What can be suspected, these functions being higher centers, level 2 activities,

is that they are very flexible to environmental change, i.e. learning and

training. Perhaps the environmental push for the existence of such higher level

centers giving that are able to learn to become a self, is actually the need for

remembrance of activities though learning in a competetive environment. Some

evolutionary neuroscientists have suggested this. The easiest way for an

organism to learn from past behavior, is to hook together the memories of past

activities and sense impressions. Later on, in social evolution, this hooking

mechanism can have been further condensed and lead to a solid sense of self and

upbringing reinforcing this.

>It has therefore allowed them into Level 1-so

>"you" experience them.At the same time, Level 2 is processing information

>about the hard chair, the smell of the room, sounds from outside and the

>whispered conversation going on behind you. Because they are not important

>to the task of listening to the lecture, the CES does not select them for

>entry to level 1, and "you" remain unaware of them.However, if the talk

>becomes boring, the CES might judge that doing something about your

>discomfort is now the priority, and "you" become aware of the hard chair.

>More dramatically, even during the most engaging talk, if your name is

>whispered, you suddenly become aware of the conversation behind you and lose

>the thread of the lecture completely.

 

Reflecting the focus of sense awareness of level 2 activity as well as parts of

level 1 activities residing somewhere in level 2, but not being level 1 itself.

>The information

>was "outed" by the CES from Level 2 to Level 1 and you become aware of the

>product.Outing can be public, in the form of speech or writing, or can

>remain private, in the form of feelings and thoughts.

 

And especially the inner verbalization of thoughts.

>But whether public or

>not, these outed products have certain distinctive features. They are always

>identified as belonging to the "here and now", rather like a process of

>automatic date stamping, and they are labelled as belonging to the "self".

>Actions, especially when they are labelled as originating from self, are

>also tagged as being voluntary. In the process of outing, any thoughts,

>ideas, beliefs, perceptions and acts become "yours" and are automatically

>linked to the idea of free will.

 

I suspect, the last logic, that these acts will automatically be linked to the

idea of free will, will only happen when the focus of awareness of level 2

brushes past the memory of the linguistic concept of "free will". Which may not

happen in minds where the idea of free will has not become very strongly

ingrained.

>The idea that many aspects of consciousness

>represent the products of prior levels of "unconscious" processing is not

>new. Pioneers such as Hermann von Helmholtz and Wilhelm Wundt, who founded

>the first psychology laboratory in Leipzig in 1879, recognised that most

>mental processes were in many ways no different to the physiological

>processes of the respiratory, cardiac or digestive systems. All are

>efficient automatic processes that happen outside our awareness.

 

Yes, because what the focus of awareness in level 2, in the cortex, can under

most circumstances only access information from level 1 after it has happened,

or very rarely or never, from level 0.

 

But what the mental processes are most like are not the processes of digestion

and so forth (level 0), but the processes of registering the level 0 processes,

level 1 activities, which are also mental processes, but not conscious mental

processes.

 

>Consciousness, he says, gives no clue as to where the answer comes from. It

>is the result of thinking, not the process of thinking, that appears in

>consciousness.

 

The witness of the activities, not the activities themselves.

>As Susan Blackmore from the University of the West of England

>in Bristol has pointed out, consciousness does not "do" anything;

>consciousness is simply "what it is like to be me now".

 

Or: what is being registered here and now.

>But consciousness has

>its uses. Along with our actions, the publicly outed elements of our

>consciousness enable others to form a picture of us. In order to survive in

>complex social groups, this picture should be as consistent and apparently

>rational as possible. Society also needs us to take responsibility for our

>actions.

 

But strangely, if the social and psychological compulsion for a consistent self,

or self image, this will in the end be counterproductive to the very reason the

self apppeared in the course of evolution; namely to enable the individual

enhanced survival by memory retrieval and learning. When the idea of consistency

and the idea of consistent information from the focus of awareness of level1

activities becomes too strong, the organism may lose some of its survival skills

and become unable to respond to environmental challenges in an energetically

sound way. This may give rise to tension and agitation in the mindbody and

psychosomatic disease. Perhaps worse, the self propelling idea of self by the

level 2 focus, may compel the organism to activities to ensure its own survival,

so that it strongly reduces the survival chances for other species, via an

extreme selection and competition.

>The idea that you

>form an intention and then act on it is compelling, but wrong.Even if you

>look carefully at your own experience of decision making, it is evident that

>you don't make up your own mind-if you are honest, and you take the time,

>you discover that your mind makes itself up.

 

It's the X factor: what decided whom you fall in love with ?

what decides which activities you best like to do ?

 

Perhaps ultimately, this X factor is the voice of the level 1 activities

signalling to level 2 focus of awareness via several pathways for the intent of

expressing the true behavioral fenotype of the individial ? A message from the

viscera and ultimately, from another part of nature than the level 2 focus of

awareness ?

>We accept that somewhere in our minds is a representation of a

>self, and there are clearly systems of control, maybe even free will. But

>none of these reside in our consciousness.Our message is that we should all

>learn to accept our Level 2 and extend the concept of "myself" to include it

>when claiming to make decisions, organise or plan strategies. Perhaps we all

>should recognise that "me" is, at best, a partial and often biased version

>of the "larger me" in our unconscious. We should not deceive ourselves by

>believing that the "me" each one of us is conscious of has any significant

>influence over our actions and experiences. In many respects this "me" only

>operates as a monitor or recorder of events which occur elsewhere in the

>unconscious parts of our minds.

 

Very interesting.

 

Thanks for the discussion.

 

 

Love,

 

Amanda ('s level 2 focus of awareness).

 

 

 

 

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