Thought I'd attempt to expand on what I touched on in my last post about the conscious mind and what we think of as ourselves.
Reading an inspiring book at the moment that I believe really nails this. It's called Natural Born Cyborgs by Andy Clark*. Attempting to sum up what is expressed in several chapters won't be easy, but I feel I should try nevertheless.
In my previous post I touched on what I called the subconscious. Turns out, this autonomic system could be more "me" than "I" could ever could have guessed. Our minds may actually be more an amalgum of all our neural and mental capabilities than any particular part of my brain that I can label as "me".
Think about all the concepts, ideas and needs that run through your consciousness every minute/hour/day. The conscious self isn't the part of you which is creating these abstractions for the most part it seems. There is no "central" point in physicality inside your brain which organises and sorts them, they just "pop" into your head. "Thoughts" jossle for attention in this chaotic system. The "background" running of this remarkable software construct is the real powerhouse. Think of the conscious self as the "frontend" of a vast biological database that houses all our knowledge, memories, skills etc.
The brain has remarkable plasticity. Think about, after learning a new 'skill', say tying your shoelaces, it becomes "second nature"; we don't consciously think of what we must do, in a sense the subterran mind learns and stores this knowledge, and applies this when necessary, without our conscious mind having to do anything except set the goal "tie your laces". You can also apply this to many, many other things.
One that keeps occuring to me is the adaptation after buying new shoes. We will often stumble and trip over our feet when our brain has not adapted to the new dimensions or parameters of new footwear. In this case our conscious mind will have to occasionally intervene to prevent us from injuring ourselves. Over time, the subconscious or subterran mind will adapt, and we no longer have to consciously think about how far we raise our legs or feet when walking in said shoes to avoid stumbling or falling - the shoes have become part of our body in some sense, at least to the "unconscious" part of our minds.
Another example is to imagine the "skill" acquired from learning a simple task, say throwing a ball of paper into a bin. Once again, if our subconscious mind has been "trained" sufficiently, we don't consciously judge the trajectory or weight of the object to be thrown, our "automonous" subsystems kick in and do all sorts of complicated maths in the background, that enable our conscious mind to simply set a goal and "do it".
I could go on and on, but the concept is much better explored in the aforementioned book than I could manage in a few paragraphs. Needless to say, what we think of as ourselves does not even seem to scratch the surface. There is so much more to "I", than my consciousness could realise.
This I suspect can be attributed to the haphazard way evolution has "put together" our minds, overlapping, intertwining subsystems, the sum of which allows us to perform some remarkable feats.
Also covered in this book are some truely remarkable concepts on how spoken and to a certain extent writen language can actually structure and rewire parts of the brain, and allow us to accomplish more than would have ever been possible without it. It may be what allows us to analyse and be critical of our own thoughts.
When you think, and please, if you have any experience to the contrary, please prove me wrong, you think in your native language, in my case English. Trying to conceptualise thinking without language doesn't seem perceptually possible to us. But to animals, or certainly mammals at least, this must be the "natural" way of thinking. I speculate for these animals the subconscious, with all its evolutionally programmed responses, may be what "thinks". But it cannot be called "reasoning"; it seems we humans are unique in being the only animals (at least as far as we can know) to be able to "think critically". Language may provide the structure to our brains, a software framework, if you will, that allows this process to occur.
This of course brings forth the question, how did we start using language? But that may warrant a much longer explanation or critique than I would wish to tag on the end of this post.
As you can see, what makes us tick inside our own heads is absolutely fascinating and, once understood, can really help us understand what it is to be human. It can help us "find ourselves" in the truest sense of the term.
N
*Amazon link to book here
