Philosphers have wondered for millenia about the meaning and nature of conciousness,
or specifically of concious thought. As a software developer with no practical experience
in congnative science, I thought I'd scratch my own theory together.
The brain seems to be divided into regions that basically each have their own purpose.
These regions are connected to each other through a variety of interesting busses and
interconntects. Science has followed on the heels of philosophy, searching for the home
of consciousness and coming up empty. No particual region of the brain seems to be the
home of consciousness. The brain keeps on working just about no matter which parts you
knock of out of commission.
There is a fundamental assumption, I think, in the approaches taken so far. They
asssume that consciousness is a unit. One that serves the function of thinking, of
reasoning. The bit of the brain that really represents "me". I take a different view.
It aligns more closely with the idea of conciousness as an emergent phenomenom, but I
think is a fair middle road between the two.
I see conscious thought as something we experience. Everything else we experience is
a sense, so my reasoning leads me to see conscious thought not as a whole process of
rational thought. Instead, I see it as a passive sensory input (for as much as sensory
input is passive). I see consciousness as "the sense of what my brain is doing", or
"my perception of what I'm thinking".
The sense has its tendrils everywhere. It seems to be connected to everything.
Perhaps the connections are made directly, or perhaps it is emergent from the
interactions of system busses and interconnects. If I were to guess, I would say that
this sense is centralised in the frontal lobe. That's the part of the brain we
traditionally associate with inhibition, but perhaps another way of thinking about it
is to say that it is the home of the sense that tells our brain it is behaving badly.
When we are drunk, we become disinhibited. We get fuzzy. We become easily confused
because we don't know what's going on in our brain. This can become so advanced that
we end up with no memory of the night. I see this not as a loss of memory, but primarily
as a loss of the sense that would be recorded into memory. We assume we're still conscious
because we're still moving around. We're still carrying on conversation, and perhaps
sophisticated physical activities. My theory is that the brain doesn't need consciousness
to perform those activitites. Consciousness is what closes the loop and lets the brain
understand itself, but it is still a passive process. The real thinking and reasoning
and acting is an entirely unconscious activity.
We have long been aware of some kind of "sub-conscious". It is most obvious in the
reptillian brain that controls our breathing and circulation. We're not aware of the
processes. They aren't part of conscious processes. It is harder to define when it comes
to sub-conscious thought. We see theories that essentially tell us we have two brains.
One does a lot of hard work in the background. The other is the "us". One we train,
the other is what does the training. We are arrogant to think that of the two "us"s that
we are the thinking and reasoning part. In fact, if we are to divide ourselves into two
it is the subconscious that more "us". It is the thinking and active part of our brain.
What we have traditionally thought of as consciousness is the combination of our
consciousness sense, and the parts of the rest of us that we have sensory "wires" into.
I think that we can have some influence over the connections that are made between
the consciousness sense and the reasoning engine of our brain. I think that inhibition
is the classic example. We can stop ourselves reasoning in certain ways, if we understand
the evil of those ways. We can exercise self-restraint, up to self-censorship. I think
that there are some connections we have little control over, though. To examine my own
mental processes, I am completely unaware of most vocal processes until the words pop
out of my mouth. I'm more of a visual thinker. I'm aware of the reasoning processes that
go into the formation of thoughts for speech, but the formation of words I find
disturbingly hard to observe of myself. That is not to say they aren't what I mean.
Those parts of my brain are well trained, and I don't often find myself saying things I
don't mean. I do, however, find myself up in front of a group of people waiting for the
words to come. I can't think ahead about what I'm saying, even to the end of my current
sentance.
Benjamin
