Do you think that you have an unconscious?

Page 2 of 3 [ 43 posts ]  Go to page Previous  1, 2, 3  Next

kitesandtrainsandcats
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 6 May 2016
Age: 61
Gender: Male
Posts: 3,965
Location: Missouri

29 Sep 2017, 9:42 pm

HughDYork wrote:
What if someone's unconsciousness affected yours

What if it is your basic human right to not be affected by theirs - what law enforcement agency enforces your right?


_________________
"There are a thousand things that can happen when you go light a rocket engine, and only one of them is good."
Tom Mueller of SpaceX, in Air and Space, Jan. 2011


kitesandtrainsandcats
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 6 May 2016
Age: 61
Gender: Male
Posts: 3,965
Location: Missouri

29 Sep 2017, 9:47 pm

Scorpius14 wrote:
i believe that the 10% of our brains that we currently use is ...
.. is a totally bogus belief.
Quote:
The myth's durability, Gordon says, stems from people's conceptions about their own brains: they see their own shortcomings as evidence of the existence of untapped gray matter. This is a false assumption. What is correct, however, is that at certain moments in anyone's life, such as when we are simply at rest and thinking, we may be using only 10 percent of our brains.

"It turns out though, that we use virtually every part of the brain, and that [most of] the brain is active almost all the time," Gordon adds. "Let's put it this way: the brain represents three percent of the body's weight and uses 20 percent of the body's energy."

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/do-people-only-use-10-percent-of-their-brains/

also;

Debunking Neuromyths: Eight Common Brain Myths Set Straight
These myths resemble brain facts but are really fiction.
Posted Aug 10, 2017
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-athletes-way/201708/debunking-neuromyths-eight-common-brain-myths-set-straight


_________________
"There are a thousand things that can happen when you go light a rocket engine, and only one of them is good."
Tom Mueller of SpaceX, in Air and Space, Jan. 2011


HughDYork
Deinonychus
Deinonychus

User avatar

Joined: 27 May 2017
Gender: Male
Posts: 304

30 Sep 2017, 1:07 am

lorknozzel wrote:
HughDYork wrote:
kraftiekortie wrote:
Because of the fact that I dream, I KNOW that I have an "unconscious.'


No no. First you "know" memories of your dreams not dreams by themselves. There is probobility that they were quite different than your memory of them.
Secondly if you are conscious of unconscious phenomenons they can not be unconscious.


So, what would you consider someone's conscious state to be while they were lucid dreaming and participating in the process? If you are in rem sleep while dreaming, you are certainly not awake, yet you need to be conscious or aware at some level to participate in the process and manipulate events.


I don't deny unconscious. We are conscious in certain way of meaning of our actions - in irl or in dreams -but we almost have no knowledge of real force that drives us. We can somehow understand the hidden intention of the force only through an intuition. And those people whose conscious found exlusive acces to unconscious control their fate. BTW As you may know Shopenhauer called the force Will.



lorknozzel
Hummingbird
Hummingbird

User avatar

Joined: 27 Jul 2017
Age: 62
Gender: Male
Posts: 21
Location: Wisconsin

30 Sep 2017, 3:01 pm

HughDYork wrote:

I don't deny unconscious. We are conscious in certain way of meaning of our actions - in irl or in dreams -but we almost have no knowledge of real force that drives us. We can somehow understand the hidden intention of the force only through an intuition. And those people whose conscious found exlusive acces to unconscious control their fate. BTW As you may know Schopenhauer called the force Will.


I didn't think you were denying the unconscious, just wondering how you'd categorize the conscious state of that experience/process.

Schopenhauer uses will as a placeholder for the true nature of a thing, and in a sense, it's potential. In that way of thinking, the unconscious is not the will but some process that has evolved in service of the will to achieve it's ends. It exists somewhere between the will and consciousness, or knowledge as he refers to it. For Schopenhauer rocks have will, and it is responsible for the rock's inner makeup and outward appearance. I would argue that will, in Schopenhauer's usage of the term, does not equal unconscious, as it relates to us humans. I think he would place it even deeper in the our hierarchy, so to speak.

I would say Schopenhauer's will is more akin to the morphic fields in Sheldrake's hypothesis of formative causation. Not to pick nits, mind you, I was just sort of struck by the similarity when you brought up Schopenhauer and will.

More to the point, how "aware" a top level process like consciousness can be of it's constituent parts and processes is an interesting question.



Campin_Cat
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 6 May 2014
Age: 63
Gender: Female
Posts: 25,953
Location: Baltimore, Maryland, U.S.A.

30 Sep 2017, 3:33 pm

starkid wrote:
Do you think that you have an unconscious? For those of you who think the unconcious is a real part of human psychology, do you think neurodiverse people have a different sort of unconscious? Or have one at all?

If you are using the word "unconscious" in the way that has become the "normal" misnomer for the word "subconscious", then "yes", I believe I have a subconscious; and yes, I believe all neurodiverse people have a subconscious; and yes, I believe that it is a different subconscious, because we seem to think so differently (so, it stands-to-reason, IMO, that if we have different thoughts in the forefront of our mind [conscious], we will have different thoughts, in the back of our minds [subconscious]).




_________________
White female; age 59; diagnosed Aspie.
I use caps for emphasis----I'm NOT angry or shouting. I use caps like others use italics, underline, or bold.
"What we know is a drop; what we don't know, is an ocean." (Sir Isaac Newton)


ToughDiamond
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 15 Sep 2008
Age: 71
Gender: Male
Posts: 11,856

30 Sep 2017, 6:11 pm

I'm sure I sometimes learn or act unconsciously, but I'm not convinced there's a great big "unconscious mind" that runs as a self-contained entity, if that makes any sense. I'm just not aware of some of my brain's activities, I can increase my awareness of some of them by introspection, but I've never noticed myself making my heart beat. I think the aware part of the brain / mind can only handle so much at a time or there'd be too much to think about. I can't understand Jung's work, Freud seems easier for me, but he seems to be a mixture of useful, clever insights and utter crap. I'd like to see proof of dreams being the unconscious mind at large, I guess it's possible but I don't see why they have to be that.

I suspect my Aspie brain might have less unconscious and more conscious activity than a NT brain, because I always seem to have to ponder consciously a lot of the brain things I do that most people are supposed to do intuitively. But I'm not a brain expert and I have trouble watching my thoughts while I'm thinking them, so it's all rather confusing to me, I can't study it like I can study the insides of a mechanical clock for example.



starkid
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 9 Feb 2012
Gender: Female
Posts: 5,812
Location: California Bay Area

30 Sep 2017, 6:29 pm

ToughDiamond wrote:
I'd like to see proof of dreams being the unconscious mind at large, I guess it's possible but I don't see why they have to be that.

Well I haven't thought about it much before, but it seems like dreams couldn't come from anywhere else but the unconscious. We aren't thinking consciously while we're asleep, and the dreams are created by our own minds, so where else could they come from (rhetorical question)?



ToughDiamond
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 15 Sep 2008
Age: 71
Gender: Male
Posts: 11,856

30 Sep 2017, 10:36 pm

starkid wrote:
ToughDiamond wrote:
I'd like to see proof of dreams being the unconscious mind at large, I guess it's possible but I don't see why they have to be that.

Well I haven't thought about it much before, but it seems like dreams couldn't come from anywhere else but the unconscious. We aren't thinking consciously while we're asleep, and the dreams are created by our own minds, so where else could they come from (rhetorical question)?

I guess it depends on how one defines consciousness. If it's awareness of our surroundings, you're correct I think. But could we be in a sense conscious when dreaming? A somewhat delusional consciousness to be sure, but does delusion mean not conscious? Meditating people sometimes focus on their inner bodies, ignoring the outside world completely (a condition that would usually induce sleep if not for their upright yogic posture). Are they conscious? And what about a person who hyper-focusses on an idea? I've had dreams in which I've been doing little or nothing else but thinking, sometimes in a surprisingly non-delusional coherent and logical way. It could be argued that I'm not really dreaming, but I experience waking from these things just like I wake up from the usual type of dream. In a normal dream, one is "conscious" of imaginary events but not of real events.



lorknozzel
Hummingbird
Hummingbird

User avatar

Joined: 27 Jul 2017
Age: 62
Gender: Male
Posts: 21
Location: Wisconsin

30 Sep 2017, 11:14 pm

starkid wrote:
For those of you who think the unconcious is a real part of human psychology, do you think neurodiverse people have a different sort of unconscious? Or have one at all?


I believe everyone has an unconscious component in them, defining that with any precision is beyond me. I also believe that each individual's unconscious is just as unique as their personality while still the result of the same underlying biology and processes that we share as humans. I don't think neurodiversity would make a huge difference in that unconscious, probably as much or more in the way it is expressed through our conscious behavior as anything else.

If you haven't seen it before, there is a great pbs series based on David Eagleman's research into the brain.

The Brain - all 6 episodes



Chronos
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 22 Apr 2010
Age: 44
Gender: Female
Posts: 8,698

30 Sep 2017, 11:27 pm

starkid wrote:
For those of you who think the unconcious is a real part of human psychology, do you think neurodiverse people have a different sort of unconscious? Or have one at all?


I think you mean "subconscious" and yes, the brain has one. Unfortunately it has been misrepresented and exploited by field of psychology.

The subconscious is analogous to all of the background processes of a computer, and the conscious is what's presented to the user.

The subconscious has access to memories in deep storage and is responsible for dreams and certain biases, and is responsible for handling much of the brain's auto pilot system.

The brain stores an enormous amount of information. For the most part, humans don't forget many things. The memories remain in deep storage and are inaccessible to the conscious mind because the synapses for the conscious mind to access them have been pruned.

This is a bit like when the boot sector of a hard disk drive becomes corrupted. Your data is still there, you just can't access it using a computer that uses that drive as the primary drive.

This is also why some people see their lives flash before their eyes in near death experiences. The brain enters a hyperactive state in a last ditch effort to revive them and very weak synaptic connections become active and " the signals "amplified", revealing to the person memories in deep storage.

I don't, however, believe that a person's psychological problems can often be attributed to repressed memories which can be revealed through hypnosis. I think most memories that end up in difficult to access areas of deep storage are of rather uneventful things. The more eventful or emotion provoking something is, the more it's likely to form synaptic connections with multiple areas of the brain, and have multiple access points. I do believe though that people can willfully refuse to think much about something that has upset them, edit their recall of something, or have it otherwise distorted. This is proven.

I had an interesting experience once involving deep storage memory.

I once had a dream that I was in a place that I hadn't recalled ever being in, and when I woke up, couldn't recall it as even a real place. I thought little of it, until years later, I decided to take a walk up a road my father and I used to hike up when I was very young, and ended up in the place I had dreamed about.

The memory of the place had been stored in my deep memory storage and could not be access from my conscious memory, as is apparent when I failed to identify the place as a familiar place, both in my dream, and when I awoke. However, my subconscious was able to access it, and had decided to use it to construct part of my dream.

Another interesting manifestation of how the brain works can be found in "split brain" experiments. The two halves of the brain are actually like two different people who are networked together. When the primary connection between them, the corpus callosum, is partially or completely severed, it inhibits the ability of the hemisphere's to communicate with each other. It's upon examination of these individuals that the duel personality nature of the brain can be seen. The two hemispheres will often indicate different answers when presented with questions concerning aspirations, likes and dislikes, and desires. The right hemisphere might want to be a doctor, for example, while the left hemisphere might want to be a secretary or plumber. One hemisphere might want to get dressed while the other hemisphere might want to remain undressed. One hemisphere might hate someone while the other hemisphere might like them. We are two conjoined people constantly in negotiations and collaboration with each other. As an aside, NT females typically have more connections between the two hemispheres of their brain than NT males, which might be why they appear to be better multitaskers and more socially complex. They also use more words per day, possibly because they literally think of more things to say, having more input from both hemispheres, but that's just speculation.

Here is an interesting example from an article on split brain experiments.

Article wrote:
So, say a "typical" (language in the LEFT hemisphere) split-brain patient is sitting down, looking straight ahead and is focusing on a dot in the middle of a screen. Then a picture of a spoon is flashed to the right of the dot. The visual information about the spoon crosses in the optic chiasm and ends up in the LEFT HEMISPHERE. When the person is asked what the picture was, the person has no problem identifying the spoon and says "Spoon." However, if the spoon had been flashed to the left of the dot (see the picture), then the visual information would have traveled to the RIGHT HEMISPHERE. Now if the person is asked what the picture was, the person will say that nothing was seen!! But, when this same person is asked to pick out an object using only the LEFT hand, this person will correctly pick out the spoon. This is because touch information from the left hand crosses over to the right hemisphere - the side that "saw" the spoon. However, if the person is again asked what the object is, even when it is in the person's hand, the person will NOT be able to say what it is because the right hemisphere cannot "talk." So, the right hemisphere is not stupid, it just has little ability for language - it is "non-verbal."


Here is the link to the entire article.

Split Brain Experiments

There is also a video on youtube on this issue.



HughDYork
Deinonychus
Deinonychus

User avatar

Joined: 27 May 2017
Gender: Male
Posts: 304

01 Oct 2017, 1:26 am

kitesandtrainsandcats wrote:
HughDYork wrote:
what law enforcement agency enforces your right?

Im my own law. f**k the agency.



HughDYork
Deinonychus
Deinonychus

User avatar

Joined: 27 May 2017
Gender: Male
Posts: 304

01 Oct 2017, 1:32 am

lorknozzel wrote:
HughDYork wrote:

I would argue that will, in Schopenhauer's usage of the term, does not equal unconscious, as it relates to us humans.


I made my own research and i came to understanding that Will does equal unconscious.



lorknozzel
Hummingbird
Hummingbird

User avatar

Joined: 27 Jul 2017
Age: 62
Gender: Male
Posts: 21
Location: Wisconsin

01 Oct 2017, 3:08 am

HughDYork wrote:
lorknozzel wrote:
HughDYork wrote:

I would argue that will, in Schopenhauer's usage of the term, does not equal unconscious, as it relates to us humans.


I made my own research and i came to understanding that Will does equal unconscious.


I'll admit it's been several years since I've read any Schopenhauer, the english translations are slow reading. I'm curious as to why you would say that, not that I doubt your take on Schopenhauer and will, I just want to understand it. Or, it could be the term unconscious where we differ. Either way, I'm all ears :)



neurotypicalET
Toucan
Toucan

User avatar

Joined: 23 Oct 2016
Gender: Male
Posts: 270
Location: Out Of My Mind

01 Oct 2017, 6:04 am

kraftiekortie wrote:
According to Carl Jung, there is something called the "Collective Unconscious."

You could be affected by someone else putting input into that "Collective Unconscious."
Would this mean that the ones who are more in touch with their unconscious mind is more likely to be global thinkers as opposed to those who use their conscious mind more, because of this " collective unconscious "?


_________________
Evil men will never see themselves as such, because it is the good in us that see's the evil within ourselves.


kraftiekortie
Veteran
Veteran

Joined: 4 Feb 2014
Gender: Male
Posts: 87,510
Location: Queens, NYC

01 Oct 2017, 6:16 am

They are more likely to understand there is a world and history beyond one's country's (or ethnic group's) borders.



kraftiekortie
Veteran
Veteran

Joined: 4 Feb 2014
Gender: Male
Posts: 87,510
Location: Queens, NYC

01 Oct 2017, 6:21 am

I believe "unconscious" and "subconscious" are synonyms, though there is the implication that the "unconscious" is "deeper" than the "subconscious."