Wednesday, April 30, 2003

+   ConsciousThoughts:  Dreams, redux   Thinking about dreams lead me to thinking about interpretations.  Not the Freudian “unfulfilled infantile wishes” crap, either.   There’s a jillion resources which claim that key components in dreams have particular meanings.  Murky waters may mean your life is in flux; an open door suggests an opportunity to be taken.   Can’t a shoe just be a shoe?  Can’t things be what they are, literally?  At what point are they not literally but symbolically something else?   And since we can’t share the entirety of our dream – like not being able to share with exactitude the qualia of the color red or the smell of foods with others – how can we expect anyone else or anyone else’s interpretation to work for us?   Do dream elements change in interpretation from culture to culture?  Or is an open door always an opportunity in every human’s dream?   And if components of dreams can have the same symbolic meaning across a culture or cultures (archetypal symbols), does this not suggest that dreams are memetic, possibly genetic, materials?  Or perhaps they're not local memetic material, but part of a Jungian collective unconscious accessible in dreams?   Is it possible that some of this material isn’t latent or unresolved stuff leftover from the day, but processing which is 1) based on memetic material imbedded in DNA, or 2) remote or entangled with some other processing resource which works using only common archetypal material?   To what extent do we process any materials in our sleep, in our dreams?  How much of it is local or non-local, as suggested by precognitive dreams?   Many questions and few answers yields much food for thought.  You can bet I'll be looking for reading material on this topic as well as your comments.     11:13:47 AM    comment []

	Monday, April 28, 2003

+   ConsciousThoughts: Interpreting Dreams, Interpreting Memes   Last evening I caught the better part of ‘Young Dr. Freud’ on PBS; while I'm still not a fan of Freud's, I'm inclined to think of of him in a somewhat different light after watching this program.   Freud was both on the money and off the mark.  For instance, his work which recognized the globality of sexuality and its role early childhood was a positive achievement, but his assessment of women and their motivations purely stunk.  I’m not certain how much of both his successes and failures to lay at the door of his incredible drive to make a lasting mark; was he more determined to say and produce something than be certain of its essence?   As I listened about his work on Die Traumdeutung (The Interpretation of Dreams), it occurred to me that Freud may have been somewhere in the middle in his theories that dreams are thought-impulses which:   -- Were left unfinished and unresolved during waking hours; -- Represent problems we were unable to solve; -- Are suppressed thoughts; -- May have been stirred up in the unconscious during the day, but not addressed; -- Represent leftover oddments of unresolved detritus accrued during the day.   Are dreams only the residual RAM which hasn’t fully cleared the registers once the human system is powered down to sleep mode?  Are they really a preconscious or unconscious operation that continues while the conscious mind rests and regroups?   Are dreams just stuff left in the remnants of glycogen soup in our brains, like the last noodle in the chicken broth?   I’ve not seen this anywhere else – help me out if someone else has already nailed this concept.  Perhaps the real challenge is not to see dreams as thoughts-impulses, but paused, abruptly terminated, still open, looped, or abended memes?   Does it add value to look at dreams as memetic pieces and parts?   And why is it that so many of the contemporary consciousness studies theorists tippy-toe around dreams and memes?   I’m only pondering on this.  Feel free to add your two-cents.   2:56:59 PM    comment []

	Friday, March 21, 2003

ConsciousThoughts:  Matrix of consciousness development theories   I’m posting a graphic representation of the predominant theories of consciousness development, based on Jenny Wade’s graphic comparison.  (Because of the width of this table, I’ll repost later this evening in a 90 degree rotation.)    The Raven and I have an on-going offline discussion of consciousness theories – feel free to throw in your opinion on this topic.  We’re hoping to find some other interdisciplinary friends to play with in regards to consciousness.   Theory Pre-Birth Re-active Naïve Ego-centric Con-formist Achievement Affilia-tive Authen-tic Tran-scen-dant Unity Death Analytical                       Humanistic                       Maslow                       Kegan                       Loevinger                       Existential                       Gravesians                       Piagetians                       Grof                       Koplowitz                       Cook-Grueter                       Prenatal                       Near-death                       Wilber                       Washburn                       Assagioli                       Wade                       UPDATE -- 8:50 pm EST -- Okay, I twinked this table a little more, let's see if this works rather than move to a 90-degree rotation.  I'm afraid we'd have a similar problem, even if I ran text vertical rather than horizontal.   4:38:09 PM    comment []

	Thursday, March 06, 2003

ConsciousThoughts: Motivator disclosed   A disclosure: while I’ve always been interested in the concept of consciousness, it’s only been within the last 9 years that I’ve actually done much reading on the subject.   I was motivated to explore the concept of consciousness after undergoing what could be labeled as a transformative moment.  During childbirth, I experienced a state of knowing that changed my entire outlook on the concept of consciousness; I became aware of a unity consciousness, where multiple human beings existed as a single entity for a moment in time.  I didn’t give birth; rather, WE gave birth.   Sure, you might say, it was only a drug-induced hallucination or stress-related traumatic response (or from some of my detractors, more of my crackpottedness).  Point taken.  But for a moment in time I KNEW something else, found myself in a different space and in a different frame of reference.   If reality can be defined as our perception of our life experience, then regardless of the path I took to get there, I was in a different reality.  And if reality can be defined as our experience of consciousness, then I was in a different consciousness for that short window of time.   From that time 9 years ago I’ve been convinced there’s something more than meets the eye, that consciousness is not just a narrow tube through which we are fed information from the world around us.  I KNOW there is more to it, but that for some reason we do not have access to all of the information all of the time about the nature of our world.   Is it perhaps that we’re ill-prepared in our current state of evolution to handle the massive amount of input the universe could provide us?  Perhaps we are only children, toddlers, in terms of the big picture, as yet unable to do more than string simple pieces of information in a well-mannered continuum?   When others complain about the overwhelming amount of data that bombards us every day from many media sources, I take pause.  I wonder if this is the edge of the next phase in our development, being able to assimilate and make sense of a wealth of information simultaneously.   I wonder as well whether your reading this entry (and anything else on the internet) is not also part of the next step in our evolution.  You and I are nerves, across a synapse spanned by a network, firing information back and forth to each other.  We are part of a larger entity, connected., pushing and pulling information between each other in great gobs, much as our own brains are continually moving data around inside our heads.  Is this really what we’re evolving into, a Gaia-brain, a Gaia-consciousness?  Are we now hardwiring that which has existed but been untapped, lying only in our underutilized human software?  Are WE giving birth again, to something much larger than ourselves?   1:43:55 PM    comment []

As promised, the latest from exchanges betwixt The Raven and me on consciousness:   Quoth The Raven, in response to my last missive –   Lemme fisk a bit...   there's something going on which does not entirely fit within the definition of consciousness as a result of biological function confined to a local, physical entity.   Here I want to apply Occam's razor because while some Jungian ideas do go in this direction, they require evidence we don't have yet. Let me go back to that Swiss patient a bit. Before we had concrete proof that "out of body" experiences were localized, all sorts of ideas were dangling around the phenomenon, and like phlogistan, are now seen to have been describing something with a purely physical basis.  I'm open minded about things but at this point I'd work on disproving  extra-local phenomena first, and only bring them into the picture as  a last resort if no other conceivable explanation is available. Gaia will be there if and when, no?   Persons diagnosed with multiple personality disorder also twist the concept of consciousness -- for instance, one personality is violently allergic to a food, another personality in the same body is not.  (They may not share the same speech patterns as well!)  How do current theories of consciousness jibe with this manifestation? Is all consciousness local and potentially partitioned, or in part non-local/partitioned, or some other combination/none of the above?   That's the Ravenatrix's field and I'll talk about this with her over dinner this evening.  MPD (or dissociative identity disorder) is exceedingly rare, but we do know for a fact that the mind can trigger antigens, the immune system, and so on as a result of behavioral conditioning - it's the matter of ego that's interesting with MPD, because the literature presents a range of behaviors, in some cases with one ego directing others, and in others with different egos having separate memories, yet the continuum itself points to these being facets of consciousness as we know it.  When I was younger I had lots of imaginary friends (I'm sure you did, too) and perhaps this is simply an extreme case of that.   I tend to view language as a result of consciousness but not necessarily as a co-creative process of consciousness.  Persons without sight or speech do not manifest a lesser degree of consciousness as a result of their physical conditions; other senses or skills assist where facilities are lacking.  Persons required to learn multiple languages in childhood may be slower in acquiring a higher level of proficiency in any one of the languages being learned, but again, no deficit of consciousness exists in proportion to the speed of acquisition.   If we look at, say, the Wild Child of Aveyron, or Genie in LA, the  evidence is that while both were "conscious," neither had developed personalities appropriate to their ages - nor could they ever.  While Genie did acquire rudimentary speech she performed at a severely retarded level and Victor was even worse off - so here we might want to discuss the relationship between personality and consciousness.  When you say "lesser degree of" I'm wondering if someone without language might be less conscious than a fluent language user.   We could imagine that Victor or Genie would feel as much pain as we do, but would they appreciate things as much?  Say a concert, or a fine wine? Operating at a primal, primitive state of satisfying needs on the first two levels of Maslow's hierarchy may not be consciousness in the same sense as working on actualization issues. I wonder if it's reasonable to assume that progress up that scale is tantamount to rising in levels of consciousness.   What may be happening is a dual-processing function, one local, one non-local; time-referential memory is local while some communications and intent/motivations are non-local.  This may explain the observations of certain studies, indicating that processing occurred in the brain AFTER action has taken place.  See work by physiologist Benjamin Libet in this area; one of his studies showed conscious awareness of the intent to perform an action occurred some fraction of a second after the neurophysiological events leading to that action.  Does this suggest that some human action is an automatic or scripted response of which we're conscious after the fact, does this suggest that consciousness is an illusion (being only memory processing), or does it suggest that there is some component that is non-local to the human brain or biology?   I'll have to look at Libet, but I do know that the CNS bypasses the frontal cortex in some behaviors, so that, for example, you yank your hand away from a hot stove and THEN think, "ouch, that's hot!"   Is it possible, too, that the entirety of Earth or the Universe is an aware organism?  Do we operate within these larger structures much as our own organs operate within our bodies?  Blood cells, for example, have a certain purview of operation and freedom to act; do they perceive themselves as conscious, perceive the whole of the body as their own Earth?  Documented cases of acquired allergies post-organ transplant certainly indicate that some physical transferrance of physical programming has occurred; cases of transferred or acquired tastes/preferences for foods post-transplant have also been documented.  Is it possible that some portion of consciousness has been transplanted along with a donor organ?  if so, does this suggest that consciousness is not entirely a brain-based function?   That's exactly what I think.  Which is why I brought up the "gestalt" idea.  It's that consciousness is more than the sum of the parts, but elements of it are localized in the parts, and consciousness is thus the manifestation of a mediating function that balances inputs against outputs, leveling expectation against reward, etc. The biosphere exhibits regulating behaviors, too, balancing systems to achieve stasis, and some effects almost appear intelligent, but we don't need to go there yet (Occam).   This is just the tip of the iceberg from my readings to date.  I've found plenty to chew on within the biological science of consciouness...   I haven't encountered any of the texts you mention but I'll start sharpening my eye toward them and other consciousness-specific works as well. In a sense, you and I know that we're conscious, so we don't need to prove anything in this regard - but I think you're looking to tie in some of your readings on states of consciousness with the scientific underpinnings, yes?  And I'm looking to ferret out what's known about the relationship between thought and language.   Of course, we’re both still deep into generalizations as yet; I’m awaiting my copy of Searle’s The Myth of Consciousness and The Raven’s still working on Searle’s Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language.   More to follow soon, feel free to chime in!   11:15:19 AM    comment []

	Wednesday, March 05, 2003

One of our esteemed fellow Salon Bloggers, The Raven, starts off our diablog on consciousness with his comments responsive to my recent post:   Coincidence time, Rayne: I spent some time this morning going over John Searle's booklist, focusing on his work in the philosophy of language, which is a little different from linguistic philosophy, and I see he's got at least one text out on the nature of consciousness. I'm really impressed by what I've read of him in the New York Review of Books. Once I finish "Paradigms Regained," by John Casti, I'll order the Searle and let you know if it's worthwhile, or race you through it, depending. Regards, - R. The Raven [sosnoski@comcast.net] • 3/4/03; 2:53:14 PM   I follow-up with an e-mail:   Cool, love synchronicity when it rears its head!  So you're thinking about reading Searle?  Which book were you thinking of, Consciousness and Language?   I note at IONS website that Christian de Quincey's book, Radical Nature: Rediscovering the Soul of Matter won an award recently, also addresses consciousness.  It's on my list to read soon; I may buy it with whatever the Searle book is that you're putting in your queue.   I've launched a new topic, will put posting my thoughts on the subject there.  I've also started a dialogue with Dr. Edgar Mitchell as I indicated in my blog; I'd like to try to compile a library or a "knowledge map" of all studies on/around the concept of consciousness and I think he may be able to help.  It's highly possible the answers we're looking for are right under our noses, but with one group of people looking at this philosophically, another looking at it from quantum physics, yet another looking at it either spiritually or biomedically, there is no broadly accepted unified theory of consciousness.  Were all information on consciousness to be available in one map, and were many intelligent people to be able to collaborate on the topic over this diaspora of data simultaneously, we might be able to develop such a unified theory. Our black-feathered friend’s response:   Pursuant to the foregoing, I'm looking at Searle's "Speech Acts : An Essay in the Philosophy of Language,".   Where I'm at right now is language in a philosophical sense - it's the foundation of structured thought and a serious investigation of mind and consciousness is going to demand a thorough and careful definition of speech and language beyond the layman's grasp.   My studies in psychology have covered a lot of the neurological angles, but Searle has done some work in the purely philosophical realm of language that I'd like to access and one reason I like him so much is that he regularly tangles with Chomsky and always - always - skewers him like a pig at a luau. Whatever people know about this subject, Searle's take is going to be level-headed and authoritative. Maybe not complete, but a good starting position.   As a going-in point, I'm currently thinking of consciousness as a gestalt formed by the interaction of the brain's components and the CNS. Just as a computer OS relies on the motherboard ROM gestalt, I'm figuring that the mind is largely a construct of synaptic delay, which gives us our time-based referential system skewed toward the observation of novelty.   The real kicker was that research that found the "religious" center of the brain, in that Swiss woman who experienced an out-of-the-body sensation every time they fired an electrode in a particular region of her cortex. In that even spiritual awareness appears to be a function of the regulation of the self/not-self mediation center, consciousness is looking like a combination of hardware (neurological/biological) factors and psychological software (Freudian) factors involving some kind of mediation process between self and other.   This makes a lot of sense because of our social evolution and ties in with research showing that environmental adaptability doesn't correlate with our brain size, rather it's our social environment that demands such extreme amounts of processing power.   This could all be wrong, of course, but it's consistent with what I've learned thus far and doesn't contradict anything of merit. You'll see me playing from time to time with language in my blog, and there's something about the way words fit together that's attracting my attention in a big way of late. Thus the philosophy of language is a natural starting position here.   My counter:   I can see we're working different angles on the issue of consciousness.  I've been looking at consciousness as a partially non-local function after reading Jenny Wade's Changes of Mind: A Holonomic Theory of the Evolution of Consciousness (SUNY Series in the Philosophy of Psychology).  Wade studied results of research on all states of consciousness, including pre-birth and post-death; there's something going on which does not entirely fit within the definition of consciousness as a result of biological function confined to a local, physical entity.  The results of studies like Princeton's Anomalies Engineering Research, Ganzfeld tests performed by a number of researchers, also imply that the actions and effects of consciousness may not be entirely local.  How is it that information can be transferred at a distance without the use of language or physical interaction between humans?  (You'll remember my interest in string theory -- this is one of the areas where answers to non-local consciousness may be found.)   Persons diagnosed with multiple personality disorder also twist the concept of consciousness -- for instance, one personality is violently allergic to a food, another personality in the same body is not.  (They may not share the same speech patterns as well!)  How do current theories of consciousness jibe with this manifestation?  Is all consciousness local and potentially partitioned, or in part non-local/partitioned, or some other combination/none of the above?   I tend to view language as a result of consciousness but not necessarily as a co-creative process of consciousness.  Persons without sight or speech do not manifest a lesser degree of consciousness as a result of their physical conditions; other senses or skills assist where facilities are lacking.  Persons required to learn multiple languages in childhood may be slower in acquiring a higher level of proficiency in any one of the languages being learned, but again, no deficit of consciousness exists in proportion to the speed of acquisition.   What may be happening is a dual-processing function, one local, one non-local; time-referential memory is local while some communications and intent/motivations are non-local.  This may explain the observations of certain studies, indicating that processing occurred in the brain AFTER action has taken place.  See work by physiologist Benjamin Libet in this area; one of his studies showed conscious awareness of the intent to perform an action occurred some fraction of a second after the neurophysiological events leading to that action.  Does this suggest that some human action is an automatic or scripted response of which we're conscious after the fact, does this suggest that consciousness is an illusion (being only memory processing), or does it suggest that there is some component that is non-local to the human brain or biology?   Is it possible, too, that the entirety of Earth or the Universe is an aware organism?  Do we operate within these larger structures much as our own organs operate within our bodies?  Blood cells, for example, have a certain purview of operation and freedom to act; do they perceive themselves as conscious, perceive the whole of the body as their own Earth?  Documented cases of acquired allergies post-organ transplant certainly indicate that some physical transferrance of physical programming has occurred; cases of transferred or acquired tastes/preferences for foods post-transplant have also been documented.  Is it possible that some portion of consciousness has been transplanted along with a donor organ?  if so, does this suggest that consciousness is not entirely a brain-based function?   This is just the tip of the iceberg from my readings to date.  I've found plenty to chew on within the biological science of consciouness -- although I will try to look at Searle's work soon.  Perhaps instead of the book you've mentioned I will tackle his The Mystery of Consciousness, as it offers not only Searle's work but essays from Dennett, Crick and a handful of other notables in the field of consciousness studies.  Your work clearly requires a stronger emphasis on language in relation to psychology, where my interests are most closely related to biology and physics.  We should have enough to compare notes after reading our selections.   Have you read Leonard Shlain's The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image?   Shlain maintains that the written word brought the downfall of the Goddess cultures and the subjugation of women.  He pisses me off, but it's still an amusing treatise.  I may re-read it with my consciousness hat placed firmly on my head.   Tomorrow: a couple more exchanges from Raven and me.  Feel free to jump in!   8:56:13 PM    comment []

ConsciousThoughts: Welcome to a new category on the topic of Consciousness   This category will be dedicated to a diablog on the topic of  consciousness and cognition, including discussion on related theories, studies, research and publications.   You are invited to participate, either by leaving comments under each posting, or by e-mailing me larger entries for posting under this category.   E-mail me at: rayne_today@yahoo.com -- Thank you!   ---   After my post the other day on this topic, The Raven and I traded a few thoughts on consciousness today via e-mail; I’ll post them under the new category to get things rolling.   Raven’s reading John Searle’s work; be sure to watch for Raven’s take on this text at his blog in the near future.   Are you reading anything on the topic of consciousness?  Please do tell!   8:43:24 PM    comment []

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