Consciousness
Feb. 10th, 2006 10:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
davywavyMany Years ago, a psychologist carried out an interesting experiment. Under hyponosis, he left a suggestion in a test subject that, when they heard a certain trigger phrase, they would jump in the nearest body of water. Then, whilst out walking later, he used the trigger phrase and the subject promptly jumped into a nearby pond.
"Why on earth", he asked, "did you do that?"
"Oh," replied the patient. "I was hot, and I needed to cool off."
So it was that the idea of cognitive dissonance was born. Further investigated by Leon Festinger, cognitive dissonance is a phrase which covers several behaviours, one of which is the human tendancy to justify post-hoc actions which we didn't really have a reason for when we did them - such as claiming that jumping in a pond was a conscious decision when it actually wasn't.
What's interesting about this is that there's a lot of evidence that we spend a lot of our lives in a perpetual state of cognitive dissonance. Consciousness appears to be a long-term planning mechanism, and short-term decision making seems to be run entirely without conscious control and then justified after the decisions have been made. Evidence suggests that the neurons which control muscle movement start to fire before a conscious decision to move have been made so, for example, when you decided to get out of bed this morning, your muscles had started to move before you had the thought: "Time to get up". As consciousness is only a long-term planning mechanism, it is unwilling to accept that a lot of stuff which happens isn't actually consciously controlled, resulting in us "deciding" to do things after we've already begun to do them.
It's a fantastic cover-up on the part of the brain, designed to help the world make sense.
The point where this starts getting really wierd is when the normal controls of consciousness are removed and the brain starts doing really odd stuff. Split brain patients are a good case in point. The split-brain procedure is carried out in victims of severe and untreatable epilepsy. Epileptic episodes are caused by huge, random firing of the neurons and they start in one part of the brain and spread like a wave accross the whole thing. In order to stop this happening and to give the patient some semblance of a normal life, the Corpus Callosum* - that bundle of nerve fibres which connects the hemispheres of the brain - is severed, cutting all connection between the left and right halves of the brain. This prevents major epilepsy, but has other effects. Interestingly, patients usually have a relatively normal life after this despite there now being effectively two independant consciousnesses operating in the same head.
One half of the brain, usually the left, takes control of communication. Speech and writing (done through the right hand) are controlled by one half of the brain meaning that the other hemisphere is able to see, hear, experience and even control limbs, but is rendered completely incommunicado.
Over time, strange things sometimes start to happen. There are recorded instances of people being hindered and even attacked by their 'other' limb. The left hemisphere, having no knowledge of what is going on in the right, cannot tell what is going on but even then sometimes attempts to justify the actions.
For my money, the freakist bit of all of this is the idea of a single head with two consciousnesses within it, one unable to communicate with the outside world and slowly going mad with frustration and anger to the point where it stages physical attacks upon the body of the 'other' side, whilst all the while the communicative half of the brain is making up justifications for behaviour it doesn't even control.
I dunno about you, but this is an idea which really gives me the creeps. I think I'd rather be epileptic.
The other use of conscious awareness appears to be influencing the universe around us, but when I consider that my brain might not know what I'm going to do next but it can tell an electron which slit to go through, I reach for the Glenmorangie and try not to think about it. Some things just call for booze.
"Why on earth", he asked, "did you do that?"
"Oh," replied the patient. "I was hot, and I needed to cool off."
So it was that the idea of cognitive dissonance was born. Further investigated by Leon Festinger, cognitive dissonance is a phrase which covers several behaviours, one of which is the human tendancy to justify post-hoc actions which we didn't really have a reason for when we did them - such as claiming that jumping in a pond was a conscious decision when it actually wasn't.
What's interesting about this is that there's a lot of evidence that we spend a lot of our lives in a perpetual state of cognitive dissonance. Consciousness appears to be a long-term planning mechanism, and short-term decision making seems to be run entirely without conscious control and then justified after the decisions have been made. Evidence suggests that the neurons which control muscle movement start to fire before a conscious decision to move have been made so, for example, when you decided to get out of bed this morning, your muscles had started to move before you had the thought: "Time to get up". As consciousness is only a long-term planning mechanism, it is unwilling to accept that a lot of stuff which happens isn't actually consciously controlled, resulting in us "deciding" to do things after we've already begun to do them.
It's a fantastic cover-up on the part of the brain, designed to help the world make sense.
The point where this starts getting really wierd is when the normal controls of consciousness are removed and the brain starts doing really odd stuff. Split brain patients are a good case in point. The split-brain procedure is carried out in victims of severe and untreatable epilepsy. Epileptic episodes are caused by huge, random firing of the neurons and they start in one part of the brain and spread like a wave accross the whole thing. In order to stop this happening and to give the patient some semblance of a normal life, the Corpus Callosum* - that bundle of nerve fibres which connects the hemispheres of the brain - is severed, cutting all connection between the left and right halves of the brain. This prevents major epilepsy, but has other effects. Interestingly, patients usually have a relatively normal life after this despite there now being effectively two independant consciousnesses operating in the same head.
One half of the brain, usually the left, takes control of communication. Speech and writing (done through the right hand) are controlled by one half of the brain meaning that the other hemisphere is able to see, hear, experience and even control limbs, but is rendered completely incommunicado.
Over time, strange things sometimes start to happen. There are recorded instances of people being hindered and even attacked by their 'other' limb. The left hemisphere, having no knowledge of what is going on in the right, cannot tell what is going on but even then sometimes attempts to justify the actions.
For my money, the freakist bit of all of this is the idea of a single head with two consciousnesses within it, one unable to communicate with the outside world and slowly going mad with frustration and anger to the point where it stages physical attacks upon the body of the 'other' side, whilst all the while the communicative half of the brain is making up justifications for behaviour it doesn't even control.
I dunno about you, but this is an idea which really gives me the creeps. I think I'd rather be epileptic.
The other use of conscious awareness appears to be influencing the universe around us, but when I consider that my brain might not know what I'm going to do next but it can tell an electron which slit to go through, I reach for the Glenmorangie and try not to think about it. Some things just call for booze.
Re: Enter the philosopher in diapers.
Date: 2006-02-10 03:19 pm (UTC)I'm sorry, but this way of looking at the universe utterly repels me. What would be the point in going on?
H
Re: Enter the philosopher in diapers.
Date: 2006-02-10 04:42 pm (UTC)However I still remain unable to explain why we experience free will, amongst other things, and it could quite easily be argued that we do not work like the rest of the universe, leaving plenty of space of reasonable doubt and my sanity. I lean towards the idea that there's no free-will; I'm not sure of it by far. So I live my life as if I did have some free-will. That and if I'm wrong and act accordingly I'd be throwing a hell of a lot away. I'd rather hedge my bets.
Re: Enter the philosopher in diapers.
Date: 2006-02-10 04:57 pm (UTC)I have to ask, what would be the reason (I know I'm assuming that logic works in the real as well as the perceived universe here, but just for the purposes of asking), what on earth, I have to ask, would be the reason for us having evolved any kind of self-awareness at all, in that situation? Plenty of machines can react to specific situations faster than us without it; being a deluded spectator in a mechanistic universe just seems to me on an evolutionary scale to be a waste of valuable neurons.
H
Re: Enter the philosopher in diapers.
Date: 2006-02-12 01:06 am (UTC)Re: Enter the philosopher in diapers.
Date: 2006-02-13 09:27 am (UTC)H
Re: Enter the philosopher in diapers.
Date: 2006-02-13 09:43 am (UTC)Re: Enter the philosopher in diapers.
Date: 2006-02-13 09:53 am (UTC)Pimp up your motor
Start blinging it now
Pimp up your motor
And the bitches you will plough
If your leg you are fain to get over
Paint “Old Glory” on top of your Nova
Nick the horse off some geezer’s Ferrari
And she’ll make like the new Mata Hari
For your body the women will hanker
When your wheels tell the world you’re a banker
Pimp up your motor,
And they’ll all kow tow!
H
Re: Enter the philosopher in diapers.
Date: 2006-02-13 10:57 am (UTC)You just let your tongue go loose
Date: 2006-02-14 09:24 am (UTC)Start blinging it now
Pimp up your motor
And the bitches you will plough
If you like your girls cuddly and pliant
Stick some fins on your Robin Reliant
You'll impress 'em from Pittsburgh to Paris
With a small nodding dog in your Yaris
And your manhood you're certain to bolster
If your Lada in fur you upholster
Pimp up your motor
And they'll all kow tow!
H
P.S. By the way, did I mention I've started getting fan mail?
Principle of charity.
Date: 2006-02-13 04:26 pm (UTC)I do not know how the universe works. I don't know how the laws of causality actually work. To know why things are as they are I'd have to know how the laws of causality worked and what the first cause, if any, was. My argument doesn't attempt to show that everything would work out to be the most efficient it possibly could. Only that cause follows effect. This being the case any number of contigencies are theoretically possible, which one actually exists depends on what happened first.
To ask what reason there is for our evolving the way we have implies that things evolve to reach a certain goal instead of simply being the effect of a cause. We just evolved concsiousness because, after the first event, that's how the chain of causality had to happen.
What reason do you have for thinking that things work for a reason rather than because of a cause? Doesn't that imply some sort of rationality and creator at work behind the universe which I don't think is necessary for my view of things?
Re: Principle of charity.
Date: 2006-02-13 09:38 pm (UTC)To ask what reason there is for our evolving the way we have implies that things evolve to reach a certain goal instead of simply being the effect of a cause.
Evolutionary changes can and do happen for a reason without a guided end goal. The reason is random mutations providing greater suitability to environmental conditions. The old idea of evolution striving to it's ultimate endpoint, humanity has long been superceded but that doesn't mean that the changes happened without a logical 'reason'. This is what cause and effect means.
Look up the Red Quuen Theory of evolution, which summerises this far better than I can.
Your earlier comment of 'just because' just doesn't work within evolutionary theory; random mutations do happen but most are deadly so if mutations survive then there must be a reason they are beneficial. Self-awareness survived because it is the single most beneficial evolutionary advantage peretty much any species has ever come out with. Whilat we were formed by our environment, we now create our own environment - the only species really to do this other than, perhaps, termites.
Re: Principle of charity.
Date: 2006-02-14 09:38 am (UTC)As I understand it, then, your arguments are as follows:
1. “Reason” and “cause and effect” are two different things. If you pursued an argument according to “Reason” and then pursued the same argument by appeal to “cause and effect,” and then reduced both of your two separate arguments to formal logic, and put them side by side, they would look completely different from one another.
2. “It simply is” is a perfectly valid and respectable way of bringing a line of scientific enquiry to a period. Indeed, a lot of trouble might have been saved in the past, if only so-called scientists had realised this earlier. Newton: “Why does this apple fall to the ground? It simply does.” Darwin: “Why are there so many different sorts of finches in the Galapagos Islands? There just are, I guess.” Einstein: “What would happen if I rode on a beam of light? Well, I just would, wouldn’t I.”
3. A belief that we are merely the hapless puppets of some predetermined and ineffable Plan, the course of which we are powerless to alter one whit between now and Doomsday, is a completely different kettle of fish from a belief in any kind of metaphysical Deity.
I trust that this accurately summarises your opinions, as outlined in the foregoing discussion, but if you can confirm this for me, then I shall explain to you why I disagree with them.
H