Extension-Ad-2760 t1_iuhj4ur wrote on October 31, 2022 at 11:44 AM

Reply to comment by XxHavanaHoneyxX in Conscious Reality Is Only a Memory of Unconscious Actions, Scientists Propose In Radical New Theory by mossadnik

How do people even go on a diet.

I feel like just that one thing blows this whole hypothesis open. Maybe I've missed something.

LunarGiantNeil t1_iui4ope wrote on October 31, 2022 at 2:44 PM

Here's another example, because the popular bad take on the valid mechanistic view just annoys me: the science on learning things demonstrates that neuroplasticity (the reorganizing of the brain to optimize for cognitive tasks) responds best to "quality inputs" given over your span of attention, which is about 15 minutes for a lot of people, and then requires a good sleep that night to put into practice.

But a quality input requires intent, your conscious role is to filter stimuli, put yourself into a good learning environment, and practice with intention until your focus wanders.

This absolutely suggests the 'awake' part of the brain plays a huge role in teaching things to the unconscious parts of the brain, and then the even other parts play a role in building new brain pathways to make it possible for the conscious and unconscious parts to repeat that thing later.

You 'experience' things through a perception lag, but there really is a role being played by the part of your brain that decides to get off your butt and practice things, with focus. It actually plays a role in physically changing the parts of your brain that run the autopilot parts of your brain that you trigger when you do a complex physio-cognitive thing like playing an instrument or speaking a language.

There's lots of moving parts up there.

LunarGiantNeil t1_iui32e4 wrote on October 31, 2022 at 2:32 PM

Most people here are interpreting the data the way they want it to lead.

The research is showing that the experience of consciousness happens after the brain decides to do things, not that there isn't any active intervention by the higher level abstract thinking, reasoning, problem solving portions.

Nerves and brain matter interpret stuff, make recommendations, and bounce stimuli back and forth more than once. It's not all "multiple choice" made by the 'you' parts of your social and consciousness brain matter, true, but those parts DO get input.

So if you want to do something that you don't enjoy, like a diet, it's a wrestling match between parts of the brain and body. It's not a simple one-way decision chain and then it's over and decided.

People want it to be one way or the other. It's not.

Extension-Ad-2760 t1_iuigxzm wrote on October 31, 2022 at 4:07 PM

I fully agree with you here.

I think some comparison can be made to the way our societies are run. The leader (your consciousness) has final decision on the biggest decisions, but their decision is affected by hundreds of different other people, and their decisions by hundreds of thousands more (your subconscious. You could argue that in some cases the decisions are pretty much pre-determined, but that's only if the decision is just really obvious.

And these other people also do the more mundane jobs of actually keeping everything going (running your body).

And yet some people are convinced that either the leader has complete control, or the people that inform them do. No: they talk to each other, work things out, and neither truly has full control.