Consciousness

About the blog

[UPDATE: 03/27/2021 2:00 PM - Became aware that suggestions had been used with the possible intent of using me to cause harm to others.  What form that may take is subjective so am making verbiage changes as long as the meaning is not affected.]

   Wouldn't it be a something if consciousness was an incidental byproduct of how our minds work and not quite the awe inspiring, revered topic of intellectuals?

   Getting right to the point you're probably wondering how someone could just change it's label from "unfathomable" (not everyone feels that way but it makes a great research proposal) to "incidental byproduct"?

   I guess it was easier to do than expected.

   And it didn't hurt that René Descartes statement "I think therefore I am" is a chicken-and-egg problem.  The solution to those can be painfully simple but hidden by circular language and doublespeak.

   Most of us aren't the type of thinker to spend hours and hours reasoning through something like:

• How it's possible to be reasoning about consciousness making it possible to reason about itself.

   If you think that statement is profound in some way...  it's not.

   It's confusing at best.  A doctor explaining that ligaments hold bones together because of love couldn't  do better.

   So getting back to consciousness... if you subscribe to the theory that a whole mind is made of 2 sub minds (conscious and unconscious parts) and each contributes a distinct way of looking at the world forming the basis of perspective...

   Let's use a frame-switch to explain it better.  Photography might work.

   Say you have 2 photographs of someone's messy, cluttered desk:

• One photo is before an item was taken from the desk. 
• The other photo is after an item was taken from the desk.

   What's the simplest and fastest way to find out what item was taken?

   If you know that stacking both pictures together to flip back and forth looking for movement is fastest you're probably right.  So setting up the frame-switch with the frame we're most comfortable with first:

• First frame: 2 photographs of the same desk
• We want to identify differences between the photos.
• Flipping between them creates the illusion of movement around differences.

• Second frame: 2 sub minds making up a whole mind
• We want to quantify something unique about the conscious part of the mind.
• Shifting awareness between the conscious and unconscious gives perspective.
• But we don't typically have direct access to unconscious awareness, only conscious awareness.

   You might be wondering now if a real explanation of consciousness was left hanging.

   Nope.  My assertion is the explanation is painfully simple.

   At some point you might start wondering if  "i am" therefore applies even without explicit thought.

   It's backwards.   No surprise there.