By: posthumous
[2006-06-23]
The 8 Steps of Unconsciousness
this is stuff I think about
I was recently watching the evil Willow on Netflix, not the evil vampire Willow but the evil witch Willow, and she said to Dawn something like, "just think loudly. I can hear you." Clearly, Joss Whedon thought that his audience would make sense out of that statement, even though technically thoughts do not make noise. I think this is because we simulate speech when we think, though I’m not sure if we pretend that we’re saying the words or just pretend that we’re hearing the words.
Is that all there is to consciousness? The string of words that is constantly flowing through our brains? It doesn’t seem like enough. After all, we can only handle one stream at a time, and even that cuts off now and then, probably more than we realize. We know that, sometimes, when we are formulating complex ideas, we are holding multiple thoughts simultaneously. We don’t "hear" these thoughts, but they are included in our ultimate conclusions. Are those "held" thoughts in our conscious mind or our unconscious mind? I suppose that’s just a matter of semantics. Also included in consciousness should be the stream of sensation we are constantly experiencing. After all, dreams are not just streams of words, they provide an entire environment of sensation.
Clearly, one measly stream of words is not enough for us to function. Even if you include the stream of sensation, that is not enough. Even if you include the sensation of self, i.e. when you consciously move your arm up and down. This is not done with words. You do not say to yourself "Up, arm!" Instead, you replicate the feeling of your arm moving. But try "thinking loudly" while you are moving your arm back and forth. It is very difficult to think both things at once. And this brings me to the eight steps.
Walking is much more complicated than moving your arm back and forth, yet we walk and think all the time. This is because the mind can record its own thoughts. Application programmers know these as macros (or applescripts). Playing back a recorded thought does not require consciousness (or surface consciousness might be a better term). By observing myself as I walk, I’ve concluded that my macro lasts for eight steps.
I’ve noticed that I can close my eyes for brief periods while I’m walking without feeling any sense of disturbance*. My body is fooled into thinking that I’m still watching out for it, and trundles complacently along… for eight steps. Then I begin to feel disoriented. By ten steps, I am worried. By twelve steps, I have fully realized that I am walking blind. Any additional steps would be irrelevant daredeviltry.
Those eight steps are emblematic of how our mind is so much more complex than consciousness. The mind surveys the ground immediately in front of us and decides that we will be safe for eight steps, so it frees the conscious mind for other thoughts until it takes another glimpse. Even if our eyes are open the entire time, we’re only really "looking" for about every 8 steps. Tripping occurs when something is in our path that could not be seen by this quick glimpse. In other words, if an obstacle can get within our eight-step range, then it will bring us down.
Please, try this at home. Close your eyes while you’re walking and you’ll notice that at first you’re not bothered at all. You’re still supremely confident that you know where you are and where you are going, but the feeling soon fades. Now close your eyes and immediately begin counting your steps. How many steps is it for you before you feel the need to open your eyes again?
*at first, you might not see the connection, but there is no way to force yourself to "not think about walking" while you're walking, so closing my eyes is a way of forcing the issue. I admit, however, that the original intent of my experiments was to devise a way of getting more sleep.
"Why eight?" he asked sotto voce. Is it mear coincidence that the Universal Tao Fusion of the Eight Psychic Channels shares that number? Or that spiders have that many legs? What I want to know is why a six-pack? Why not an eight-pack? Why a dozen? Why is it that when I am speaking sotto voce, my voice has this strange echo?
I forgot who I stole it from, but he was some hack who was incidentally mentioned in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Not anyone important like Kesey, Neal Cassady, Owsley, or anyone like that. He was just sort of there preaching until the pranksters fucked up his shit. Point is, he said if you allow your mind half a chance it will automatically slam into autopilot for you. So what you need to do is force everything into the internal monologue. "Right now I'm feeling...", "Right now I hear...", "Right now I see...", "Right now I'm touching...", "Right now I smell...", "Right now I'm thinking..." It's an amazing pain in the ass, not only because the human brain literally cannot focus on all the senses available to it at once but also because focusing and directing your internal monologue like that will put everything into long term memory. And it is useless, useless shit. All of it.
I really should be working on improving the eight-step drift rather than honing my razor sharp senses for sensing and recording every detail of the coffee mug in my hand.
I think that Baba Rum Raisin was the Be Here Now guy. I am working on honing my eight-bank three-ball combination shot.
So what I'm practicing is a bastardized version of Gestalt therapy reconstructed from only three sentences in a book about filthy hippies. Filthy, filthy hippies. Right now I'm pleased I have the ability to dismiss entire schools of psychotherapy with such swiftness and efficiency.
like father...
like son.......
like hell !......
hey mind where ur goin..those footsteps might lead ya straight to the looney bin..
fingernails are pretty
fingernails are good
seems that all they ever wanted was a marking
I read Fritz Perls' "In&Out of the Garbage Pail" long ago, and the big laugh I got was when he was asked who his therapist was, he said that he had a six-foot tall Swedish masseuse! So, I gather that you can just skip the Gestalt, and get a spiffy masseuse.
The range of comfortable movement possible with your eyes closed depends on your degree of memorization of the area in which the experiment is conducted. I do this experiment every night. I turn off all the lights, then close my eyes and navigate from room to room. I'm doing the nightly routine, shutting off lights and locking doors before going to bed. When the last light goes off, the house gets pitch black and I can't see a thing. Nevertheless, I can go from one side of the house to the other, reach out and put a hand directly onto the newel post, and climb the stairs to bed in perfect confidence that I know exactly where I am in the house. I'm pretty comfortable, too - unless, of course, the kid leaves a toy train engine on the stairs.
We used to do it all the time on the ship, simulating compartments filled with thick, black smoke. Just to keep it interesting we did it with plastic bags over our heads, oxygen supply units that fogged within 60 seconds of putting them on, so that smoke or blindfold became irrelevant. We would navigate from our racks, out of the berthing compartment, up a twenty foot ladder to the main deck, down a corridor and out a door onto the foc'sle. We did it over and over until we could do it at a run, without having to feel our way down the walls.
The brain uses all kinds of cues to develop the multi-dimensional model of the world that we perceive as conciousness. Vision is just one cue. We hold a spatial model of the world we have experienced in our heads. There are varying levels of detail within the model, depending on the degree of interaction we have with objects within the model. We map all sorts of skins onto every object in model, from sounds and colors to moral values and walking directions. The maps are judgement tables that contain the data we need for the nested loops of equations that produce our behavior. People who are born blind still have this map in their head. The brain is actually very adept at knowing where it is, spatially.
Which is to say, if you practice, you can go a hell of a lot farther than eight steps with your eyes closed. Maybe only in very specific conditions, and with a lot of practice, but it's quite possible.
There's an interesting article in last week's New Yorker on stereoscopy, the ability of the brain to perceive the world in 3-D. Apparently, the ability to merge the images from each eye into a single stereo image requires the development of some very specific brain structures in early childhood. If the brain never develops these structures, say, for example, in a child born cross-eyed, then it is unlikely that the brain will ever develop the ability to create that stereo image, even if the vision defect is corrected. Individuals may spend their entire lives only ever to percieve the world visually as a flat plane, yet they still manage to get around and have productive lives for there are other clues that provide information about the world, parallax, perspective, and shadows being among the most useful. The article goes on to describe how one patient attained stereo vision, having never had it in the past, but it's along story with a lot of qualifications and that's not really the point. The point is that conciousness is a meld of inputs from many devices, of which vision is only one. Further, even that one is really a number of discrete operations, so that even if vision is completely disrupted, the brain finds ways to adapt and get along reasonably well without the missing functions.
I guess what I'm really trying to say is that thbe zone of comfortable concious interaction with the surrounding world is relative and dependent on the condition of the brain having the experience.
Some time back, the child development psychologist, Jean Piaget, was big on cognitive maps. And recently, there has been some renewed interest in this kind of cognitive mapping, but now with computers, using the GIS (Geographic Information System) to do some cognitive mapping. Yeah, google for cognitive mapping gis returns nearly a half million hits!
However, the underpinning assumption is that consciousness is directly related to our senses. Now I'm not dismissing it out of hand, however such a hypothesis does fall into the trap of untestability. It's completely impossible to find out whether someone without senses is capable of consciousness. The same evidence can be use to support the "Consciousness is language" hypothesis. Was Helen Keller conscious because she had a period, however brief, where she was able to experience the world with the majority of her senses, or was it because she developed a crude form of communication on her own? How would you prove consciousness in a person deprived of either senses or communication? Along those same lines: how retarded does and individual need to be before it can be said they are no longer cognizant? Cases like Terri Schiavo are fairly cut and dried because we could see important parts of her brain were no longer there. However, there are also individuals who MRIs say should be sensing and interpreting everything. Are they cognizant? Are they conscious? All they do is sit in their stupid little chairs and leech off my tax dollars. Why should I, as a tax payer, be forced to pay for their extravagant vegetative lifestyle? As a tax payer, I say!
Wait, what were we talking about? Oh right...
And another thing, it has been clearly shown time and time again that Wyatt is some form of abominable artificial intelligence. He is an affront to God and incapable of understanding the human condition. As such I have only one question for Wyatt: You're in a desert, walking along in the sand when all of a sudden you look down and see a tortoise, Wyatt. It's crawling toward you. You reach down and you flip the tortoise over on its back, Wyatt. The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over but it can't. Not without your help. But you're not helping. you're not helping, Wyatt. Why is that?
Come now, Hatless, the question of conciousness without sensation has long since been answered - haven't you seen Metallica's "One" video?
Conciousness without having experienced sensation at some point in life must be impossible. It has clearly been demonstrated that sensation is a function of brain structure and connectivity. Absent the structures, no sensation, and no conciousness. The case of structure without demonstrable outward interaction is a bit of a conundrum with regards to a proof, true. As long as we're not talking some mental illness that prevents communication, I'd bet that there's no conciousness there in most cases as well. In those cases, I surmise it has to do with a lack of connectivity between structures. As in epiliptic patients with the lobes of their brains surgically seperated to prevent Gran Mal seizures, the methods of cennectivity are at least as important as the structures themselves.
Further, it's clear that your juvenile turtle test is completely inapplicable in my case - if I am an artificial intelligence, then my ability to present myself physically in a desert is entirely questionable. If I am not artificial, and really exist as a flesh and blood human (as unlikely as that may seem) then there's no way you're getting me into a desert - it's hot there man, and there's no oceans anywhere! Not my kind of place, I'm poorly adapted to environments without water.
I heard that "One" was based on Johnny got his gun, a book I dislike as much as Metallica, though the book is better if you imagine it being read in the heavy metal Cookie Monster voice. And the point I'm making here is about the Cookie Monster voice, not that one should read the book. It sucked.
My other cent is that I like posthumous illustrations that go with articles, but I wish this one was centered.
I think you have to admit that sensation and consciousness are indeed inextricably linked. Without sensation, what do you have to be conscious of? Certainly, we can easily imagine a conscious life without sensation. The brain can simulate reality, as in dreams, but that presupposes that the brain already has some idea of what is real. On the other hand, if a child was born without senses of any kind, how would it ever get started on the project of building a model of the world to become conscious of? Is consciousness heritable?
I guess that really depends on whether you subscribe to Jung's model of the collective unconscious, some form of genetic memory, or some other form of bullshit that doesn't really exist. Those archetypes would take on a much more active role in a person who never had senses. In fact their entire world would consist of those archetypes, although God only knows how those archetypes would express themselves within the sensless mind.
Like air without a balloon! Like peas and carrots! Like Fred and Ginger!
Talking about thinking is like dancing about architecture. Or as the great surrealist Socrates Von Diggety said: "The fish."
Talking about thinking is better than talking without thinking. Or as my eight year old says: "Go fish."
Thinking about talking is linguistics.
I agree with Wyatt, but I'm not sure it's possible to be completely without sensation. There is the sensation of touch, but there is also that spatial sensation that Wyatt was talking about, knowing where your body is, what position it's in, etc. But I will agree that some people are born without the sense of humor, and these should be banished.
and the image is not centered because I want that sense of the steps breaking off--
And actually I could only make it six steps.
you think too much
