Free will, material, chemicals, and imagination...

[Incognito]

It's the unconscious that is controlling your hands. Your conscious mind commands/wills your unconscious to do the movements and then the unconscious executes it.

I recommend the Jack Tanner's book on this subject "Lucid Waking: the Answer to the Problem of Consciousness".

Edited December 25, 2021 by Incognito

[Matthew85]

@Leo Gura Reality being infinite imagination seems to create a challenge in discerning what is truth? Using the example of taking psychedelics to discover truth. If we actually have never taken any psychedelics, we only imagined we did, then our trips and all insights we gained were all imagined as well. If this is the case, what do we use as our barometer for discerning truth? This makes me think of people who say all truths or perspectives are true. As someone who has been a passionate seeker of understanding and truth most of my life, that isn't satisfying.

Edited December 26, 2021 by Matthew85

[RMQualtrough]

23 hours ago, Incognito said:

It's the unconscious that is controlling your hands. Your conscious mind commands/wills your unconscious to do the movements and then the unconscious executes it.

I recommend the Jack Tanner's book on this subject "Lucid Waking: the Answer to the Problem of Consciousness".

The research is that the decision is made by the unconscious before the conscious mind is aware of it... Which btw renders consciousness absolutely useless for evolutionary fitness and tanks any theory that consciousness itself evolved due to evolutionary pressures.

[Incognito]

2 hours ago, RMQualtrough said:

The research is that the decision is made by the unconscious before the conscious mind is aware of it... Which btw renders consciousness absolutely useless for evolutionary fitness and tanks any theory that consciousness itself evolved due to evolutionary pressures.

No, the decision maker is your consciousness and the one that executes is your unconscious. If your consciousness is affected or you're not making any conscious decision, then the unconscious is on autopilot. This can't be useless since thanks to it we are able to make conscious decisions and make plans to shape our future. Humans dominate the animal kingdom because they are conscious and intelligent enough to understand the world via logic and reason and aren't guided entirely by unconscious processes/instincts. This is the key difference between animals and humans. Don't conflate consciousness with sentience which is a totally different thing. I see this category error a lot on this forum. Consciousness has been evolved because of language and education and it is a feature belonging exclusively to humans. Animals are only sentient. They can't make conscious decisions ie think about cleaning their fur or going to sleep at 10pm.

[RMQualtrough]

34 minutes ago, Incognito said:

No, the decision maker is your consciousness and the one that executes is your unconscious. If your consciousness is affected or you're not making any conscious decision, then the unconscious is on autopilot. This can't be useless since thanks to it we are able to make conscious decisions and make plans to shape our future. Humans dominate the animal kingdom because they are conscious and intelligent enough to understand the world via logic and reason and aren't guided entirely by unconscious processes/instincts. This is the key difference between animals and humans. Don't conflate consciousness with sentience which is a totally different thing. I see this category error a lot on this forum. Consciousness has been evolved because of language and education and it is a feature belonging exclusively to humans. Animals are only sentient. They can't make conscious decisions ie think about cleaning their fur or going to sleep at 10pm.

There's nothing special about human awareness compared to animals like horses or w.e., lmao. Are you for real?

[Incognito]

24 minutes ago, RMQualtrough said:

There's nothing special about human awareness compared to animals like horses or w.e., lmao. Are you for real?

I see you're confusing awareness/sentience with consciousness. They aren't the same thing.

[RMQualtrough]

1 hour ago, Incognito said:

I see you're confusing awareness/sentience with consciousness. They aren't the same thing.

Whatever you're trying to claim, is blatantly untrue...

[Tim R]

1 hour ago, Incognito said:

1 hour ago, RMQualtrough said:

There's nothing special about human awareness compared to animals like horses or w.e., lmao. Are you for real?

I see you're confusing awareness/sentience with consciousness. They aren't the same thing.

12 minutes ago, RMQualtrough said:

Whatever you're trying to claim, is blatantly untrue...

@RMQualtrough I think what Incognito meant was that the default state of consciousness of animals is different from that of humans. The range of perceptual capabilities and mental processing power are obviously different, depending on the organism. 

A human being has a much richer awareness of its environment than for example an amoeba. 

[Tim R]

2 hours ago, Incognito said:

They can't make conscious decisions ie think about cleaning their fur or going to sleep at 10pm.

@Incognito Depends on the animal. First of all, humans are also animals. So there's that. Secondly, higher mammals, like feline or canine predators or the higher apes, or some of the cephalopodes, or birds, are incredibly sentient and intelligent They can make consicous decisions. 

2 hours ago, Incognito said:

Consciousness has been evolved because of language and education and it is a feature belonging exclusively to humans.

Consciousness is not what you think it is.

[Incognito]

2 hours ago, Tim R said:

@Incognito Depends on the animal. First of all, humans are also animals. So there's that. Secondly, higher mammals, like feline or canine predators or the higher apes, or some of the cephalopodes, or birds, are incredibly sentient and intelligent They can make consicous decisions. 

Consciousness is not what you think it is.

Are you conscious when you're dreaming?

[Tim R]

1 hour ago, Incognito said:

Are you conscious when you're dreaming?

Of course.

[Incognito]

28 minutes ago, Tim R said:

Of course.

I doubt so. If you were conscious, you would lucid dream all the time. Being conscious means making conscious, thoughtful decisions which can't be possible without language and education. When you're dreaming, your unconscious controls the dream except when you're becoming conscious/lucid of the dream.

Edited December 26, 2021 by Incognito

[Carl-Richard]

6 hours ago, Incognito said:

Don't conflate consciousness with sentience which is a totally different thing. I see this category error a lot on this forum. Consciousness has been evolved because of language and education and it is a feature belonging exclusively to humans. Animals are only sentient. They can't make conscious decisions ie think about cleaning their fur or going to sleep at 10pm.

Sentience is consciousness (of form). Sapience is self-consciousness (self-awareness).

Sentience is when sensory input is represented within our minds as internal experiences (perceptions). At the most basic level, these experiences are simple, direct and concrete (e.g. sense of touch, smell, hearing etc.). These may be reconstructed independently of live sensory input in the form of mental images (cognition and imagination), and virtually all animals are thought to be capable of this to some extent.

Sapience comes from the ability to abstract out symbolic/iconic representations from a set of concrete experiences. At an even higher level, this ability is expressed through an internal narrative structure, i.e. representing icons linearly across different contextual frames (situations and time frames; story-telling). This is what distinguishes humans from animals: we create narratives that try to explain ourselves and our environment. From here, complex language, culture and an individual identity is born (self-awareness).

[Incognito]

14 hours ago, Carl-Richard said:

Sentience is consciousness (of form). Sapience is self-consciousness (self-awareness).

Sentience is when sensory input is represented within our minds as internal experiences (perceptions). At the most basic level, these experiences are simple, direct and concrete (e.g. sense of touch, smell, hearing etc.). These may be reconstructed independently of live sensory input in the form of mental images (cognition and imagination), and virtually all animals are thought to be capable of this to some extent.

Sapience comes from the ability to abstract out symbolic/iconic representations from a set of concrete experiences. At an even higher level, this ability is expressed through an internal narrative structure, i.e. representing icons linearly across different contextual frames (situations and time frames; story-telling). This is what distinguishes humans from animals: we create narratives that try to explain ourselves and our environment. From here, complex language, culture and an individual identity is born (self-awareness).

Animals do not plan and make decisions consciously. They just go with 'the flow' and do whatever the unconscious (instincts) dictates them. Their world is more like what we experience when we're sleeping and we're not lucid dreaming. Consciousness is about the world of ideas which is independent from the real world and to be conscious you need to be able to THINK about the real world and simulate it inside your mind to solve problems, think about brushing your teeth at 10pm or raise your arm at will. Raising your arm to scratch your neck is different than raising your arm at will. The first action is done unconsciously, while the second is done on purpose. That's the difference between executing unconscious commands vs making conscious decisions.

"Sentience is all about the given, sensory world. Consciousness isn’t. To understand why, let’s imagine the tribe as no longer mute. Imagine that every member of the tribe has language. They all know the word “river”. They can all vocalize that word, and understand when they hear it what it means, what it refers to. When they all go back to their cave, they can go on referring to the river and making plans and decisions regarding the river even though they now have no sentience of the river because they are nowhere near the river and can’t see it.

Consciousness is the ability to go on referring to something when it is no longer present to you in the given world. If you are nowhere near the river, your sentience of it has gone, but not your consciousness of it. You can lie in your bed with your eyes closed and think about the river. That is what consciousness concerns – the ability to think about something even when it is not present to sentience.

All non-human animals are sentient. None is conscious. Not one nonhuman animal can lie down with its eyes closed and reflect on something, whether a river or anything else. Animals are prisoners of the moment. They cannot escape from it.

It has been disastrous for the intellectual development of the human race that, thanks to science in particular (with its psychotic hatred of mind), sentience has been constantly conflated with consciousness even though they have practically nothing in common. Sentience, to be fair, is a necessary condition of consciousness (consciousness is built on top of it), but it is definitely not sufficient for it. Consciousness uses the foundations of sentience, but constructs a radically different type of building, one that relies on intelligent language rather than mere instinct.

Sentience requires that which you are sentient of – a specific thing in the given world – to be present to your sensorium. Consciousness has no such requirement. You do not need to be sentient of a river (i.e., be beside a river) to be conscious of a river. You could be anywhere – in the middle of a desert or at the top of a mountain or even on the moon – and have consciousness of a river if that was what you were consciously thinking about."

"Jaynes wrote, “Historically, we inferred and abstracted ideas of sense perception from a realization of our sense organs, and then, because of prior assumptions about mind and matter or soul and body, we believed these processes to be due to consciousness – which they are not.”

How can people solve the problem of consciousness if they don’t know what it is, if they confuse it with something else? People imagine they are conscious of what their sense organs deliver to them. That’s not consciousness. That’s sentience. Every non-human animal engages in sense perception. None is conscious.

Jaynes wrote, “If any of you still think that consciousness is a necessary part of sense perception, then I think you are forced to follow a path to a reductio ad absurdum : you would then have to say that since all animals have sense perception, all are conscious, and so on back through the evolutionary tree even to one-celled protozoa because they react to external stimuli, or one-celled plants like the alga chlamydomonas with its visual system analogous to ours, and thence to even amoeboid white cells of the blood since they sense bacteria and devour them. They too would be conscious. And to say that there are ten thousand conscious beings per cubic millimeter of blood whirling around in the roller-coaster of the vascular system in each of us here this afternoon is a position few would wish to defend.”

"

From the book "Lucid Waking: the Answer to the Problem of Consciousness"

[Nahm]

On 12/26/2021 at 8:27 AM, RMQualtrough said:

There's nothing special about human awareness compared to animals like horses or w.e., lmao. Are you for real?

Special awarenesses, such as higher & lower consciousnesses etc, human awarenesses, and animal awarenesses, are the hallmarks & pillars of materialism. To assume a comparison which is not of direct experience is only to have assumed. 

Similarly, deciding a decision was made. 

[Carl-Richard]

8 hours ago, Incognito said:

Animals do not plan and make decisions consciously. They just go with 'the flow' and do whatever the unconscious (instincts) dictates them.

A decision is a narrative: "Will I do this or will I do this?"

 

8 hours ago, Incognito said:

"Sentience is all about the given, sensory world. Consciousness isn’t. To understand why, let’s imagine the tribe as no longer mute. Imagine that every member of the tribe has language. They all know the word “river”. They can all vocalize that word, and understand when they hear it what it means, what it refers to. When they all go back to their cave, they can go on referring to the river and making plans and decisions regarding the river even though they now have no sentience of the river because they are nowhere near the river and can’t see it"

"(...) an internal narrative structure, i.e. representing icons linearly across different contextual frames (situations and time frames; story-telling)."

"River" is an icon. "I will go to the river and gather water" is a collection of icons represented across a contextual frame.

You can also think about e.g. a specific river (concrete internal image) without connecting it to an abstract icon and still use it to do basic problem solving (e.g. sequential operations). Some animals are thought to do this.

 

[Incognito]

On 12/27/2021 at 7:56 PM, Carl-Richard said:

A decision is a narrative: "Will I do this or will I do this?"

"(...) an internal narrative structure, i.e. representing icons linearly across different contextual frames (situations and time frames; story-telling)."

"River" is an icon. "I will go to the river and gather water" is a collection of icons represented across a contextual frame.

You can also think about e.g. a specific river (concrete internal image) without connecting it to an abstract icon and still use it to do basic problem solving (e.g. sequential operations). Some animals are thought to do this.

Of course, animals have intelligence too but they don't reflect on the world in a conscious way. They can solve complex problems instinctively but cannot connect the given world to an abstract world of thoughts/icons. When you are doing things on autopilot, you can do it without conscious thought, or you can even think about something entirely different than the activity you're engaged in. This is done via active thinking which cannot be done without language. Animals mostly have passive obedient minds following unconscious commands based on instincts. They cannot think rationally a decision before making it.

Edited December 29, 2021 by Incognito

[Mason Riggle]

@Incognito @Carl-Richard

Thought, whether conscious or unconscious, whether you are aware of thought or not, is happening.  Thoughts are arising. Even now, in this moment, as you try to pay attention to these words, other thoughts are competing for your attention.  Where are they coming from?  It's a complete mystery to you. What will you think next? You have no idea until the thought arises. What sounds will you hear next? Again, you have no idea until you hear them. It all works the same way.  Not doing.. just being.  Trees are happening. Clouds are happening. People are happening. Thinking is happening. Decisions are happening. This conversation is happening.  You are happening. But all of these things are happening without anyone who 'does them'. 

You can become aware that this is the case.. you can 'awaken' to it, if you simply pay close attention to your experience.