MIND, MEANING AND CONSCIOUSNESS

Yes, here’s a few more very clear passages from CONSILIENCE by E. O. Wilson.

(p. 109) “Mind is a stream of conscious and subconscious experience. It is, at root, the coded representation of sensory impressions and the memory and imagination of sensory impressions.”

(p. 109) “Some of the impressions are real, fed by the ongoing stimulation from outside the nervous system, while others are recalled from the memory banks of the cortex. All together, they create scenarios that flow realistically back and forth through time. The scenarios are a virtual reality.”

(p. 110) “Who or what within the brain monitors all this activity? No one. Nothing. The scenarios aren’t seen by some other part of the brain. They just are. Consciousness is the virtual world composed by the scenarios.”

(p. 110) “There is no single stream of consciousness in which all the information is brought together by an executive ego. There are, instead, multiple streams of activity, some of which contribute momentarily to conscious thought and then phase out. Consciousness is the massive coupled aggregated of such participating circuits. The mind is a self organizing republic of scenarios....”

(p. 115) “What we call meaning is the linkage among the neural networks created by the spreading excitation that enlarges imagery and engages emotion. The competitive selection among scenarios is what we call decision making.” [Note how this last line recalls the explanation that Peggy La Cerra came up with in THE ORIGIN OF MINDS. What Wilson calls “scenarios” is what La Cerra names “adaptive representational networks,” ARNs. Both call these scenarios the information which biases our decisions. ]


IT STILL BOILS DOWN TO MODERN PEOPLE VERSUS
RELIGIOUS PEOPLE

I recall that I wrote an entry to this blog months back in which I defined the post-Freudian and the pre-Freudian types who split this world between them. The following two paragraphs by Wilson say the same thing in a kinder way. I’m serious folks—the split between the myth-blindered religious mind and the modern mind is a serious problem for those of us who, I think, are modern people.

(pp. 96-97) “All that has been learned empirically about evolution in general and mental processes in particular suggest that the brain is a machine assembled not to understand itself, but to survive.... It throws a spotlight on those portions of the world it must know in order to live to the next day and surrenders the rest to darkness. To thousands of generations, people lived and reproduced with no need to know how the machinery of the brain works. Myth and self-deception, tribal identity and ritual, more than objective truth, gave them the adaptive edge.

“That is why even today people know more about their automobiles than they do about their own minds.”


MOVIEBEAM UP TO DREAMING SCHEMERY

MovieBeam lies! MovieBeam lies!

As part of its campaign for new customers, the movie rental company which promises to deliver 100s of movies to your home every month, tells the viewer that one of the benefits of receiving movies at home through their system is that the home owner pays no late fees. Yes, you may not pay late fees, but you pay a monthly charge of 8 or 9 bucks that more than meets the average amount of overtime charges a customer picks up in a year. Of course, if you’re a dimwit who can’t keep your records straight, then you might benefit from a low monthly surcharge on your films. I believe I’ve paid no more than 8 or 9 dollars a year in movie late fees in any one year of my life, and in some years, I’ve paid no late fees. I think in making our decision to take the poor waif MovieBeam into our homes, we must consider this extra tax they charge each and every month which, of course, once they get their foot in the door will go up annually, just like Comcast endlessly raises its fees.
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"There's a sucker born every minute." —P.T. Barnum [Think of all those who voted for Bush!]