A simple question - what is the neurological basis for the subconscious or unconscious mind? — EnPassant
How do physical neurons divide the psyche in this way? — EnPassant
(It is questions like this that convince me that neurology is not going to explain what the mind is.) — EnPassant
Do you understand the neurological difference between attentional processes and habitual or automatic ones? — apokrisis
But there seems to be a third category; emotional motivations that are not understood by the conscious mind. — EnPassant
Sometimes people act without understanding their motivations. That seems to be a kind of unconscious mind. — EnPassant
neurology celebrates the efficient brain that learns to get by as inattentively as possible, — apokrisis
The neurological level need is to be efficient and think as little as possible about life. If you know the right kinds of things to do, just do them without stopping to think and debate. Focusing attention on any skilled action - even climbing the stairs - and you can set up the kind of wrestle between two processes with different basic rates (a fifth of a second vs half a second) that causes you to stumble and misfire. When it comes to action or output, one or other level of processing has to be in charge for the moment. — apokrisis
Humans have narrative consciousness, or language-structured self-consciousness. A good way to direct attention is to speak to ourselves in our heads as if we are addressing a person - our self.
So this is another habit(!) we learn. We construct an integrated tale about who we are, what we are about. There is this whole life story about the reasons we would do this or that which is all part of the learnt apparatus of being a self-regulating member of a human society. — apokrisis
I don’t quite follow your meaning when you say that neurology celebrates the efficient brain. Do you essentially mean that this is optimal for health and function? — praxis
When working to improve our skills in some activity, such as stair climbing, we necessarily focus our attention on the activity and often to good effect, so it seems there must be more to the story. — praxis
I understand this learned habit of self is neurologically located in the DMN (default mode network). — praxis
If so, it would seem that neurology celebrates the efficient brain that learns to live as attentively as possible, without the burden of an overactive DMN. — praxis
First they train us to narratise to the point it is an unstoppable habit. Then they tell us off when we let our minds narratise in automatic fashion. — apokrisis
So attention can't be literally shut off. Even if what we are doing can be handled entirely automatically - like driving your car on a familiar journey - your narratising mind is going to want to wander. It will latch on to anything random and ruminate about that.
Even in deepest slow wave sleep your inner voice will be trying to say something meaningful out of blind habit.
So the DMN is rather a neurocognitive artifact. — apokrisis
The question I want to ask is if you believe the DMN, or rather the ingrained habit of self-conscious, can be unlearned to a significant degree, say with the methods I've mentioned and perhaps a sustained mindful attention? — praxis
As you likely know, the inner voice can't actually be shut off. But we can learn to just keep on ignoring it every time it catches our attention. — apokrisis
A simple question - what is the neurological basis for the subconscious or unconscious mind? — EnPassant
(It is questions like this that convince me that neurology is not going to explain what the mind is.) — EnPassant
emotional motivations that are not understood by the conscious mind. Sometimes people act without understanding their motivations. That seems to be a kind of unconscious mind. — EnPassant
It goes without saying that most of our mental processing, assemblage and filtering of sense data is done below the level of conscious awareness. — prothero
Do you understand the neurological difference between attentional processes and habitual or automatic ones? Is there something further to be explained after those? — apokrisis
I think the discussion has always been whether or not the subconscious mind/ habitual/ the autonomic has intentional mental content in competition or subduing with the conscious/attentional mind. — JupiterJess
The best example I have of a sort of competition is that in dreams the subconscious mind (whatever you want to call it) subjects the attentional mind to weird experiences it isn't requesting. — JupiterJess
You mean Freud played on Romanticism to turn it into a "scientific" theory? — apokrisis
And that causes it to generate anticipatory imagery - randomly associative hypnagogic images. — apokrisis
Kevin robs a bank, consciously he is doing it for the money but unbeknownst to him he is institutionalised and subconsciously he wants to return to prison. — JupiterJess
A person needs to know their own intent to be morally responsible in a legal sense after all. — JupiterJess
This is probably why there are tons of Libet threads here and other philosophy forums because the experiment has the implication that the subconscious mind is making the decisions and the conscious mind is being fed lies/illusions. — JupiterJess
But hypnagogia is the process from wakefulness to sleep. — JupiterJess
Freud's dream interpretation was more or less what was written in the Bible where dreams are symbols and have to be decoded by a conscious mind. — JupiterJess
A simple question - what is the neurological basis for the subconscious or unconscious mind? — EnPassant
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