In psychology, there is the concept of the subconscious, or the unconscious, mind. Whatever you call it, you have no real apparent control over it and it’s not subject to your introspection. As such, you have no free will over this apparently automated non-awareness part of your mind (not to be confused with your automated nervous system which holds sway over your body). When you lack free will over the workings of your own mind, well that suggests something or someone else is pulling the strings: translated its evidence for a Simulated Universe.
Continued from yesterday’s blog…
EMOTIONS
Emotions are strange in that you may see a picture of X and burst into tears, or laugh out loud, whereas I’m totally ho-hum, under-whelmed, boring. However, another image may cause me to rant and rave, while you just yawn-the-big-yawn. In either case, you seemingly have no control over your feelings. You don’t seem to have much free will in terms of who you like or dislike or who you fall head-over-heels in love with, so again, I’d conclude that emotions are part of your subconscious.
THE SUBCONSCIOUS IS THE CONSCIOUS?
It seems however unnecessarily messy to have both a subconscious and a conscious mind. Actually, it was Sigmund Freud who divided the mind into the conscious mind and the subconscious (unconscious) mind. The question arises, might the subconscious actually be doing ALL the number crunching and feeding the answers to your (illusionary) consciousness or conscious mind, sometimes unexpectedly – that eureka moment, but more often as not, humming a constant feed along to you in the background, a feeding which as far as you’re concerned is your (illusionary) conscious mind in action but it’s all just the subconscious. You think your conscious mind is composing that letter, but the words and sentences are being fed through to your (illusionary) consciousness via that subconscious interface without you being self-aware of that. So in fact there is no consciousness housed separate and apart as an organic structure, only the illusion of one. Your automated nervous system runs the body; what we now call the subconscious runs the mind – the entire mind.
That’s probably a vastly oversimplification, but regardless of whether or not the subconscious and the conscious are separate and apart or one and the same, the subconscious is top of the pecking order over which we have no control. Only the automated central nervous system rules above all else – if it didn’t you’d be kaput, extinct, stone dead as a doorknob.
MEMORY
I’d be of the opinion that you can’t in fact operate on the conscious level at all at anytime as hinted at above. You read the word “tree” in a book, hear the word spoken, or see a “tree” in the movies or outside your window. You must immediately reach back into that subconscious cubby-hole and draw back out what a tree is in order for the work or image to make sense. You see gibberish in a book or hear it, say someone ‘speaking in tongues’; maybe it’s real gibberish or maybe it’s an unfamiliar foreign language, but it’s gibberish nonetheless. Or say you see something you’ve never seen before (or never heard or learnt about). There’s incomprehension because there’s no subconscious cubby-hole to reach back into that contains that something that will enlighten you. And so you have gibberish or the great unknown to contend with.
One hundred percent of your perception of reality comes into your mind via your five senses and if anything perceived doesn’t match up with your subconscious cubby-hole encyclopaedia then part of your reality makes no sense.
All of these millions of daily inputs, matching with cubby-hole outputs, take place so fast, not quite at the speed of light but getting there, that you have no awareness of it happening. The lag time between reading “tree” and the “ah ha, I know that that means” is so fast it just doesn’t register. If there was a significant time differential you’d know it. Back in our Stone Age cavemen days, our ancient ancestor’s world of fight or flight, survival of the fittest, any lag time would be detrimental to your well being. I see a “sabre-tooth cat” – five second delay – subconscious cubby-hole says “sabre-tooth cat bad news, run”. By then you’re its dinner; it’s too little too late for you.
Take another common scenario. After you wake up in the morning you tend to greet those around you with a “Good morning (person’s name)”. Say it’s “Good morning, John”. Now you have to reach back into your memory to recall what the appropriate phrase is and what the persons name is. You also therefore need to remember the meaning of ‘appropriate’. It would be strange and inappropriate to say “Goodnight Josephine” instead, or “I think I’ll have pizza for dinner tonight”. But how do you reach back into your memory to draw out the correct phrase when you don’t remember what you’re looking for. If you did remember what you were looking for you wouldn’t have to look. It’s the same with any though process. You’ve got to remember what it is you need to remember in order to think the thought, or say the words, or perform the actions. It’s all very circular reasoning. You have to remember what you need to remember in order to remember!
If you remember where you put your keys you don’t need to search your memory to discover where you left your keys, but you initially still had to perform that search of your memory since you remember where you put your keys! But how did you know where to search for the answer (where did I put my keys), an answer that wasn’t an answer to an unasked question like how many keys are on the keychain or what’s the colour of the key I actually need. Your memory bank is a huge place with millions of bits and pieces of data. Only a very tiny fraction is relevant to “where did I put my keys”. It’s like trying to find one sentence in an encyclopaedia or that proverbial needle in a haystack.
Further, you had to remember that you needed to remember where you left your keys. That infinite regression of I need to remember in order to remember in order to remember is almost like that series of Russian dolls, one inside the other inside the other. Ultimately your entire mind becomes 100% clogged with the key problem and you shut down from mental overload. But you don’t, shut down that is, so there’s another solution.
If you cannot consciously recall where you left your keys, and that’s a scenario we can probably all identify with, then you rely on your subconscious. If you’re too impatient for that relax, wait and see approach, there’s always the tried and true treasure hunt approach, but that in itself also involves numerous memory exercises.
YOU’RE ON AUTOPILOT
You don’t need to remember to wake up, or to breathe, or how to take one step in front of the other to walk from A to B, or how to digest your breakfast, or if you’re sick or injured your body by itself usually manages to put things right. You don’t have to remember how to heal a cut or get over the common cold. If nearly all of your body is on autopilot, pre-programmed as it were, perhaps all of your body is pre-programmed, including the mind, regardless how many divisions it has.
OFFICE ASSISTANT
I actually have two separate and apart virtual reality critters on my PC, the standard Office Assistant (cleverly disguised as a cat) and Felix [the cat]. Now the question is, do these simulated critters in any shape, manner and form mirror the (apparently) really real human?
Firstly, I think we can all agree that these two virtual critters are just that – simulations. As such we can all agree that they are just software programmes and that they have no free will. But there are many, many parallels between their behaviour, their mental processes, and that of the (apparently) really real human being.
For starters, the Office Assistant (OA) has memory. If I perform a certain action, I get a prompt to do something in response. The Office Assistant (OA) has searched its memory for an appropriate reply to my action. It has made a decision. It also shows an emotion in trying to attract my attention since it wants further input from me. Because software can and often is upgraded, well that’s learning in another guise. Felix, on the other hand, exhibits some sensory processing by exhibiting a sense of sight, smell and touch when interacting in a creative with other objects it encounters. It exhibits a range of behaviours that you’d identify with a really real cat. About the only things they are not programmed to do is go to the litter box or have sex or vomit, for fairly obvious reasons, though it could be so programmed if one wanted.
They both feed, albeit off of electrical energy. They wake up when I turn on the PC and go to ‘sleep’ when I turn off the PC. The OA actually takes catnaps during long intervals of inactivity where its helpful hints aren’t necessary. There’s also no way of telling if they are programmed to enter a dream state like real cats do. I suspect probably not as it would be unnecessary and a waste of programming.
Of course it’s all just sophisticated programming. I’m not sure exactly how that works, but I’m sure any computer software programmer worthy of the title could spell it out in incredible technical detail.
The upshot is, these clearly simulated cats do indeed mirror many of what we’d identify as real biologically human traits. Of course given the relative sophistications, it’s like comparing the value of a five cent piece against a five dollar bill, but the commonality is that both the five cent piece and the five dollar bill are money. The difference between Office Assistant/Felix and me is just a matter of degree.
MIND OVER MATTER: THE POWER OF POSITIVE THINKING?
Try as you will, your mind cannot influence the behaviour of non-living material, otherwise you’d always win playing the slot or poker machines and 18 holes-in-one at the golf course would be, well, par for the course.
I say non-living because your mind can influence other living minds, though I don’t mean via telepathy or some such or various other technological devices allegedly used for mind-control purposes. The quite ordinary hard stare or the ‘evil eye’ or the barking voice is all that’s required as any raw recruit at the receiving end of the Drill Sergeant’s wrath can attest to. Some minds are putty in the ‘hands’ of other minds. On a gentler note, your thoughts, ideas, words spoken or written can shape the worldviews of other minds.
Two lovers gaze into each others eyes – mental communication of a sort transpires each affecting the physiological state of the other.
Influencing other odd bods and sods apart, your mind can have some minor influence over your own body. Some people have some control over their heart rate to some extent, and the placebo effect, both positive and negative has been proven beyond all doubt in terms of alleviating minor medical ailments by accenting the positive or aggravating the negative. With respect to the later, if you really think someone’s put the whammy on you, and you believe in the power of the whammy, then you can just waste away and curl up and snuff it. It’s not surprising that such things are possible since your mind is really matter (biochemistry) and your body is really matter (biochemistry) and biochemistry can flow from one to the other. Now that only works on a relatively minor scale. You might defy the Earth’s gravity and arm toss a ball up into the air, but you can’t defy it to the extent where you can arm toss the ball all the way to Mars. Likewise, your mind might be able to shorten the duration and severity of a common cold, but it’s probably beyond realism to expect it to overcome a case of pneumonia.
CONCLUSION
Free will means having control over your own mind. It’s mind-over-mind. You’re in command. But you’re not in command over your subconscious. Lack of free will points to another undefined nebulous someone (or something) in control of you, or in other words, a scenario that’s more likely as not makes you a virtual reality in a simulated universe.
And no, I didn’t come up with this topic consciously – it came to me unwanted, unbidden, via my subconscious.
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