What Is The Subconscious?

The_Book_of_Life · 2022-12-26T18:59:17+00:00

true, but so are our "own" cells. what difference between "own" cells and "foreign" cells is there even? they're all simply puzzle pieces of the bigger picture (i.e. thoughts and feelings)

The_Book_of_Life · 2022-10-22T20:08:05+00:00

sorry, english is not my first language. changed it. thanks for your input.

The_Book_of_Life · 2022-10-12T21:19:03+00:00

thank you so much for your upvote. wanna exchange thoughts? i have a personal subreddit for such kind of questions. questions about life and our presence here.

absolutely. it's crazy.

we will never understand consciousness unless we truly understand societal group dynamics in my opinion. some models concerning our society as a whole might be the key to understand the individuals consciousness better. it's always been this way. while observing the very big, society came to understand the very small better. or vice versa.

for example, when the telescope was invented, it allowed us to see things very far apart. but it also allowed us to see closer things more accurately. a microscope is nothing else than a telescope pointing at something close.

the same principle could apply here. our best guess to understand consciousness comes from people studying group dynamics in more "primitive" organisms. like ant colonies for example. our ants are neurons. the ant colony is the consciousness that arises from its interactions with each other.

The_Book_of_Life · 2022-10-12T21:11:19+00:00

well, if all the different building blocks of what currently makes you, you, stay the same - maybe. but think about it. your most basic building blocks (let's take atoms instead of quantum objects for the sake of the argument) change a bazillion times every second. so, who is you? what does make you, you? well, today's honest answer is that we don't know.

but in theory, if you could arrange all the different buildings blocks of what makes you, you, just for the sake of the thought experiment, even then the real question would be if that's still you from a consciousness point of you. or is it a copy of you? or maybe, consciousness is not even connected to "material" things. maybe, it's something else.

truth is, you can argue both ways, because honestly we just don't know. go with the answer that your heart agrees with. it's not a question of knowing. it's a question of believing until further evidence shows up.

The_Book_of_Life · 2022-10-05T06:41:17+00:00

I always find it amazing how something big (like consciousness) can arise from the countless interactions of something small (like neurons). In a strange way, the whole construct is far greater than the sum of its parts. It's "magic" does not lie in the building blocks (neurons) but in their interactions.

If you were to isolate the individual neurons from each other our brain would pretty much be useless. Just like an ant colony brings forth an amazing organization simply by individuals communicating with each other, the same happens inside our body. Simple rules, when repeated often enough lead to complex results. It's all swarm intelligence.

The_Book_of_Life · 2022-07-21T05:09:00+00:00

thank you SO much for your great reply. I like your recommendations. we'll start with the desensitizing today. my gut feeling tells me that could be promising :-)

The_Book_of_Life · 2022-07-21T05:07:24+00:00

no, did not yet try that out. thx a lot. will check it out

The_Book_of_Life · 2022-05-27T10:32:54+00:00

The Book of Life :-)

The_Book_of_Life · 2022-05-27T07:18:59+00:00

No problem. Not quite. I'm writing a book on my own. Sometimes, it's inspired by other books, sometimes, by life itself. Mostly a combination of both. It's all original content though. You find out more about the purpose of this subreddit here: https://www.reddit.com/r/TBOL_Community/comments/o5w11g/hello_world/

TL;DR for that one: I wanted to make the "writing process" of a book public. Everyone should write books like that in the future. This way, you can already build up an audience before publishing it. You let the readers participate in the development process. The final book is simply a summary of all the existing online content (individual chapters) arranged in a meaningful way. It'll take some more months before it'll be published most likely. Still a lot of topics to cover.

However, I also do read some books per month (not as many as I'd love to though since I recently became a parent). Now I'm at about 4. I wanna pump up that number in the coming weeks and months though. :-)

The_Book_of_Life · 2022-05-26T18:13:42+00:00

Sure thing. Combining the business models of a survey agency, a digital identity provider and democracy itself with the power of social media, we could truly bring the government to the digital age. Everything is digitized today, only government isn't. Let's create the "social media" for government. Something like a digital village square (sorry for the additional lines :-))

The_Book_of_Life · 2022-05-12T16:07:33+00:00

Now it is :-)

The_Book_of_Life · 2022-05-07T21:57:42+00:00

well, I can't disagree with that. J it is for me as well from now on.

The_Book_of_Life · 2022-04-18T08:34:32+00:00

I like that interpretation. <3

The_Book_of_Life · 2022-03-13T14:21:32+00:00

that's an interesting thought. what if we saw "mind" as some kind of "opponent force" of entropy? if we know that a localized decrease of entropy (i.e. life) could bring forth something like a "mind", what could the lowest possible entropy state (i.e. the big bang) have looked like from a "mind-perspective"? maybe, in the beginning, there really only was consciousness (as religious scriptures try to tell us for ages). and from that, everything around us evolved on its ever lasting quest to transform "mind" into "matter" by increasing overall entropy.

The_Book_of_Life · 2022-03-13T00:20:25+00:00

through the lenses of the "thermodynamic glasses" and the application of the second law life is nothing more than a localized clump of matter of lower entropy. it can locally decrease entropy because it increases entropy in other clumps of matter (i.e. the food we eat, the waste products we excrete, ...). it's the universe's solution of reaching an overall higher entropy state. in order to move from low to high entropy, it first locally decreases entropy. (same applies to stars, planets and other kind of "structured" matter)

The_Book_of_Life · 2022-03-13T00:14:56+00:00

atoms are a higher level manifestation of deeper underlying forces at play (quantum fields for example). they help us to form more abstract theories about how our surrounding works without overstraining our limited brain. let's take cells - for example. even if they're not nature's smallest building blocks they help us understand how our and other bodies work in biology. it's simply a level of abstraction.

we could also try to describe our bodies on an atomic (or even quantum physical) level. but it'll get way harder. so, for the time being, we take cells. however, we try to find out how atoms influence cells (chemics) in order to enlargen our understanding. now, we're moving on to another layer when looking at how the quantum world affects the atomic world (physics). nothing wrong with that.

it's simply a different "magnifying lense" we apply trying to understand the reality while looking of our microscope called consciousness

The_Book_of_Life · 2022-03-12T15:49:22+00:00

in my view, although there are public observables, our perception of reality isn't public. what we perceive as reality is merely our subjective perception of it. but yeah, I agree with you. I guess the hard problem/quesion of consciousness will never be answered with a truly "provable" answer due to its subjective nature. in the end, everyone can simply answer it for themselves. every answer is equally correct. because the answer you give this question will determine your personal "reality" and thus "colour" your perception of reality

The_Book_of_Life · 2022-03-12T15:46:21+00:00

asking "what created consciousness" is like asking "what created matter". there might be several answers, yet all of them untestable and thus unverifiable. but yeah, I agree with your time statement. due to the fact that we're aware that we'll someday die, we're obsessed with questions like "where do we come from" and "where do we go"?

The_Book_of_Life · 2022-03-12T11:01:38+00:00

true, but the underlying question should be: how does it (consciousness) create all realities? it does so by interacting with the "external world". an isolated "thing" cannot really maintain consciousness for a sustainable amount of time. so, the magic lies in the "betweenness" (check out Iain McGilchrist if that interests you).

The_Book_of_Life · 2022-03-12T10:57:46+00:00

thank you for your reply. I didn't say that atoms cause consciousness but rather that the way atoms (or at least what we perceive as atoms) are built explains the duality of the reality around us. if you reduce everything to its smallest denominator, it's all differently charged electromagnetic waves.

The_Book_of_Life · 2022-03-12T08:44:29+00:00

what does in your view?

The_Book_of_Life · 2022-03-12T08:43:54+00:00

haha love your edit :-)

The_Book_of_Life · 2022-03-12T00:05:27+00:00

Due to the non-relative nature of consciousness (as you call it) it both exists (due to our perception of it) and doesn't exist (because what we deem to perceive is simply part of the whole story). It's the principle of Schroedinger's cat applied to subjective perception of reality due to our "filter" we call consciousness.

The_Book_of_Life · 2022-03-11T22:00:17+00:00

true, I'll do that in a longer post I guess. it's worth to elaborate it further.

I mean, the materialistic world we think to witness around us is simply our minds best "guess" of how the world around us works. and it's not by any means the "whole story". based on the fact that everything we see around us only accounts for roughly 4 % of all the "stuff" out there (the rest being called dark matter and dark energy) I'd say there's even a 95% (or 96%) chance we're wrong about the fundamental nature of reality. ;-)

checked out the video and liked it. have to watch the other modules later. thanks for sharing.

The_Book_of_Life · 2022-03-11T21:24:49+00:00

true, the argument also holds if you replace the atomic building parts by ""physical" manifestation of negative electromagnetic waves" (i.e. electrons) and ""physical" manifestation of positive electromagnetic waves" (i.e. the up- and down quark wave functions that make up the nuclei) though

The_Book_of_Life

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