17/09/2008 by admin.

One of the aspects of new insights into the functioning of the brain that will be most disturbing to most people is the idea that ‘free will’ may not exist, at least in the way we have thought of it for a long time.

If we assume that the science is sound then:

(1) We spend time and effort in making decisions about whether and how to act. In other words, we do actually create an intention to act after a decision process.

(2) That intention results in action. The intention, the initiation of action and the action itself may or may not enter consciousness. There is not that much difference, if any, between a decision process that results in a totally unconscious action and one that is reported as a conscious action. Whether an intention is conscious or not seems to depend on whether or not we conscious focus takes it in.

(3) When the intention, initiation and action are registered consciously there is a time lag which implies that the conscious feeling of intent, initiation or action is not in any sense causal. A cause cannot happen before its effect. There is no even reliably enough time for a veto of action to be actually caused by consciousness.

To many people this seems to mean that they are some sort of automaton with no control over their actions and no responsibility for their behaviour. This idea of loss of control is enough to make people fight the idea that our decisions are not created in some sort of conscious ‘mind’. People can see themselves making decisions in some sort of conscious process and are not willing to lose that self image.

Kock and Mormann in a Scholarpedia article talk about the activity that is required to put an intent into consciousness.

“A particular aspect of the mind-body problem is the question of free will. The spectrum of views ranges from the traditional and deeply embedded belief that we are free, autonomous, and conscious actors to the view that we are biological machines driven by needs and desires beyond conscious access and without willful control. Whether volition is illusory or is free in some libertarian sense does not answer the question of how subjective states relate to brain states. The perception of free will, what psychologists call the feeling of agency or authorship (e.g. “I decided to lift my finger”), is certainly a subjective state with an associated phenomenal content (quale) no different in kind from the quale of a toothache or seeing marine blue. So even if free will is a complete chimera, the subjective feeling of willing an action must have some neuronal correlate.

Direct electrical brain stimulation during neurosurgery (Fried et al. 1991) as well as fMRI experiments implicate medial pre-motor and anterior cingulate cortices in generating the subjective feeling of triggering an action (Lau et al. 2004). In other words, the neural correlate for the feeling of apparent causation involves activity in these cortical regions.”

I have never been able to understand why people have a lack of identification with their unconscious thought. Why is it not their thought? Why are they not responsible for it? Why is it important to believe that their thoughts be made in a fictitious conscious process rather than a real unconscious process? Why distrust your own brain? What gives?

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06/06/2008 by admin.

When I was young, I have no doubt that I believed in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy. I stop believing in them early enough that I do not remember the event – but I do remember the feeling that it was important to continue pretending to believe in them. I have encountered that feeling since when I have given space to some idea that I thought was a harmless little sham, something comforting to say, an old reliable metaphor, a poetic licence.

It came as a real shock to realize that others believed a myth; it was like finding adults who believed in Santa Claus. The conscious mind as opposed to the subconscious mind was one of those ideas. Although it had never seemed to me that I had any more than one mind, it did seem polite to allow others to separate themselves slightly from their actions. They could appear more modest or more blameless if they were allowed to let their subconscious to take the praise or blame. Sometime in my teens, I began to call people on their ‘my subconscious did it’ remarks. To my surprise they believed they had this other mind inside them that was bent on sabotaging their intentions. The only picture that made sense to me was that I had one mind and it was in no way divided – this mind perceived, thought and acted – and I was conscious of some but not all of this activity.

So I had a mind and it was the only mind I had. If I had to choose between it being a conscious or an unconscious mind, I would have to say unconscious, although the choice is somewhat ridiculous. And I also had consciousness – not a conscious mind just plain consciousness. My consciousness seemed part of my mind but not involved with my perceptions, my thoughts, my decisions and so on. All it did was supply an awareness. I have lived the next 50 years with this self image.

The problem is that other people seem to have a very different self image that they are as sincerely about as I am about mine.

I am encouraged that more and more published material uses the term ‘consciousness’ rather than ‘conscious mind’ as time goes on. Here is John R Searle’s definition which does not imply that the thought process is a conscious process.

What we need at this point in our work is a common sense definition of consciousness and such a definition is not hard to give: ‘Consciousness’ refers to those states of sentience or awareness that typically begin when we wake from a dreamless sleep and continue through the day until we fall asleep again, die, go into a coma or otherwise become ‘unconscious’. Dreams are also a form of consciousness, though in many respects they are quite unlike normal waking states.

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