Tal, a conversation with an alien (15 page)

Some actions I would say are semi-conscious, I don't really think about them, but my conscious mind guides what my subconscious does.

What your conscious mind actually does is make sense of your decisions and actions after they have occurred. The conscious mind analyzes your decisions, observations, actions, and tries to make sense of them in a way that fits into your current emotional and intellectual state. In essence, your conscious mind attempts to recreate a mental universe where, at least at the time, your decisions and actions all had a very good reason. Any emotion or sensation that you have manifests as chemical and electrical signals in your brain, in the physical world. The unique physical composition of your brain and its method of processing information is what guides many of the decisions in your life. The illusion comes from a feeling that your conscious intention, your ghost, comes first, and the physical reaction comes after. 

That may have been what people
felt in the past; that their soul guides their body. I would think that these days, people understand this happens simultaneously. Your mental idea or intention and its physical representation happen at the same time.

That would be
a logical way to look at it. However, the most recent scientific research has shown that the decisions and actions which you feel you have consciously chosen, actually manifest physically in your brain much earlier than your conscious mind is aware of them.

You mean th
ey are processed subconsciously?

Yes.
Even though you feel very strongly that the decision originated in your conscious mind. There have been many experiments done testing this. When asked to make a simple decision or action, for instance choosing when to move a finger, studies have shown that physical reactions in the brain begin happening before the subject is aware of any intention to act. In other words, the scientists, while monitoring signals from the body and brain, could predict when the subjects would choose to do the action, before the subjects even knew it themselves. The physical brain acts, and the mind follows. There have been further experiments, using fMRI, in which scientists found that when subjects were asked to make a choice, such as pressing a button with the left hand or the right hand, it was possible to predict, with some accuracy, up to seven seconds before their conscious decision to act, when and which button the test subject will press.

You are saying that the subconscious somehow makes these decisions well before the conscious mind is even aware there is a decision to make?

Well these are very basic experiments that show certain results. After the experiment is complete, there follows the very long and often contested process of interpreting and understanding these results. The types of experiments with consciousness being done now are similar to the first quantum mechanical experiments, like the double slit experiment one hundred years ago. The results of those experiments seemed impossible at first, and are still befuddling a hundred years later. The meaning of these consciousness experiments is not so clear now and will challenge your scientists and philosophers for many years to come. The one thing you should understand, however, is that the subconscious plays a very significant part in all of your functions, even in decisions and actions that seem to you, purely conscious. You see, here we run into the limitations of teaching in your modern scientific era. Because your brain is already wired to accept the reality of your current paradigm, I do not teach you with knowledge from outside your paradigm, as you will naturally resist this knowledge. I must teach in a way your brain will understand. Thus I must teach based on a logical systematic method, and am forced to use information that you believe is scientifically valid. Luckily in this case, you can check the research yourself, but the research is very limited, so what I can discuss with you is limited. Current scientific research is typically not done for the sake of pure knowledge and the quest for truth. There is not much money in that. The vast majority of your scientists work to make money for corporations. Doing drug testing, or product testing; joining the quest for the ever better tasting toothpaste. The little fundamental research done today is mostly funded by your governments and universities. It will be a while before there is enough pure scientific research to give you a clear idea of what is really going on inside your head.

Honestly, I have to doubt these experiments.
Perhaps for basic simple decisions like choosing left or right, or physical actions like walking or breathing or picking things up this indeed happens. I do not consciously choose, I have already made the decision subconsciously before I am aware of it. But I certainly use my conscious mind to make important thought out decisions about my life.

Because you can sense conscious thought more strongly than unconscious thought, you tend to believe that conscious thought is your decision generator. And since you do not sense the actual physical state of your brain, you do not realize how little act
ual conscious control you have. For instance, when a physical aspect of the brain suffers damage or its chemical makeup is not in balance, it affects all of your decision-making, including thought out decisions. What to an outsider, may seem like erratic behavior, your conscious mind will try to make logical to you. One example is the behavior of humans with too much testosterone. Humans who produce too much testosterone not only tend to get angry easier, but all sorts of decisions change; their likes and dislikes, the activities they do, the people they socialize with, the jobs they enjoy. All the choices they make are affected by the imbalance. Once the balance is restored, the conscious decisions that person makes change dramatically. Similarly, with problems like addiction or depression, the simple conscious understanding that something is wrong rarely changes the behavior. This is often why drugs need to be taken, to physically change the chemical balances in the brain. Sometimes counseling can help to break repetitive patterns and create new ones. In the end, the physical structure of the brain needs to change for conscious action to also change. Let me give you a very amusing example of how a change in the physical brain alters conscious thought. There is a very interesting thing that can happen to humans when they suffer a certain type of brain damage. Have you heard of the Capgras Delusion?

No.

In this mental disorder, a person feels that all of their friends and relatives are imposters. They also believe that their home is not their real home, their pet, not their pet, etcetera. Though they accurately recognize the face of a loved one, those who suffer from Capgras Delusion do not believe that this is the genuine person. Scientists found that this condition often arises after a person has suffered brain damage caused by an accident or stroke. The area where the brain damage usually occurs is one that controls emotions. A lot of information goes into recognizing someone, and much of it is not visual. Even though they recognize the person visually, they feel no emotion towards them. This emotional recognition you are normally not conscious of is so strong that it overrides the very obvious visual input. Thus they believe that the person they are looking at is an imposter. If their conscious mind was truly powerful, you might think it could override this subconscious information. Yet logical explanations do not fix the problem. No matter how much you try to logically explain to people with this disorder that they are delusional, that their family members are not imposters, the feeling remains. So a dysfunction or imbalance in your physical brain can completely change your conscious actions and observations, though to you, those actions and observations will seem free willed and perfectly logical.

It's hard to believe that I have so little control over how I think and what I choose to do.

I would not say you have little control. I would say you have little conscious control. Think of your mind as a deep ocean; the surface waves are your conscious mind.  Hovering above the ocean, all one can see is the surface ripples. This is what you usually sense when you observe your mind working. Just the surface. Yet the structures under the water affect what patterns manifest on the surface. The subconscious controls 99.999 percent of everything that happens in your life; how you move, how you fight disease, how your billions of cells work together to balance your system. All done without any conscious awareness, millions and millions of actions. Your conscious mind can't keep more than seven numbers in your memory for more than a few seconds. Current scientific research has shown that even when making very important thought out decisions like buying a car, or answering very difficult questions like those on university entrance exams, you are statistically more successful when you make the gut decision and don't ponder for too long about it. Your conscious mind actually gets in the way.

Yes, I have heard of this idea in some popular psychology books and magazines.
When comparing cars or homes, the more people thought about it, the worse their decision. Frankly, much of what you said seems pretty logical to me; aside from the part about the subconscious making decisions before I am aware of it. But why is it that we have made so much progress in manipulating matter, and so little in understanding how we think?

Because the vast majority of your scientists and mathematicians discount
the importance of consciousness, even though all of science and mathematics depends on it. Any measurement, experiment, or theory requires a conscious mind’s involvement.

But we can use tools to measure, like microscopes or electron detectors, we don't need to observe anything.

You still need to create those tools and then collect the information from those tools via conscious interaction. You also need conscious interaction with numbers to manipulate mathematics and create theorems. 

Aren't mathematical laws already there? We didn't invent them.

It takes consciousness to either create them or uncover them, either way consciousness is required. What defines mathematics and what defines mathematical proofs is constantly changing and evolving with the people who practice it. I am not making a judgment about the situation. You can discount consciousness; that isn't a problem in many branches of science. You can still get results. It only becomes a problem when you are seeking insights about consciousness in a paradigm where it is generally ignored. 

Must we step out of the paradigm to unders
tand truths about consciousness?

At this point in your development, you do need to s
tep out a bit, but not too far. If you are interested, I can explain a few controversial ideas about the brain and quantum theory, ideas on the fringe of your scientific understanding. Your scientists don't have a consensus opinion on what I will tell you next, but that is nothing unusual. Science knows so little about the brain. If you told scientists even twenty years ago something obvious, like the fact that the human brain is capable of neurogenesis, the creation of new neurons, most would have laughed at you. Now it is standard knowledge.

Yes, I would like you to continue, especially since you still haven't explained the link between consciousness and seeing many worlds.

Not only is your mind required for perceiving many worlds, it plays a vital role in the creation of many worlds. You now understand that most of your life is controlled by your subconscious mind. And your subconscious mind is influenced by your brain, which is a very complex structure whose constituents operate at the quantum level. Your brain's function is based on the firing of neurons, which send electrical signals throughout your brain. These neurons form neural networks. Your neurons and their many smaller constituents, the parts that make up the neural network, like microtubules and ion channels are all sensitive to the subtle effects of quantum randomness. Your brain is a fluctuating field of neurons, chemicals, and electrical signals. It is not the individual neurons and their synapses or even the microtubules themselves, but the interactions between all of these constituents that is critical. This symbiotic interaction is what creates the amazing abilities of your mind. Look at your chess set. There are only 32 pieces, and 64 squares on the board. Yet your most powerful computers are nowhere near solving chess. They play better than humans, but that's about it. 

I have read that the number of possible interactions or position
s in chess is infinite. But I now realize it can't be, since there is definitely a finite amount of pieces and squares.

Tha
t's right, it is a large number. The number of possible interactions between these 32 pieces, on a 64 square board is greater than 10 to the 100, or one Googol, which is more than the amount of atoms in your observable universe, but definitely finite. Now compare that to your brain, which contains billions of neurons and billions of synapses, with each synapse connected with discrete levels of strength. The brain is extremely complex and extremely delicate. Just as the same action on a particle or group of particles can create many possible reactions; the same stimuli on your body and brain can create many possible reactions in your mind. Humans make decisions in reaction to stimuli, and they believe that if the stimuli were exactly the same, if a situation were exactly the same, they would make exactly the same decisions in reaction to it. This is just not the case. The decisions you have made in your life are more random than you think they are. Just as molecules will not move in the same fashion every time; living things will also not behave in the same fashion every time, even if the situation is exactly identical.

I would think that life forms, using their minds
, might actually remove some of the randomness and act more consistently. I certainly feel as if I make consistent decisions and would repeat them if the situation was exactly the same.