HUMANTRUTH - SupraC - Branch 15b. The Silent Oracle. Brain Mind Relationship continued.
It cannot be said that the conscious self may control the conscious mind, or vice versa, and thereby produce a humantrue world. True humanity is a matter of both conscious self and mind submitting to the postconscious mind, because only thus can the conscious person decide truly in order positively and rightly to unite our world.
In the world as it presently exists, when the conscious self is awake and alert it moves around in the mind, figuratively speaking, either deliberately and with some degree of purpose from mild curiosity to frantic urgency, or passively, just drifting idly from one area of quiet local observation to another, without direction. The latter state of self can quickly change to the former when something occurs to demand its attention. In the purposeful state the self submits its question or problem to the mind and awaits answers or solutions. The conscious mind explores its thought and memory banks, also the values and rules of Machine reality and the interests and anxieties of the person, and rapidly offers a sequence of the best answers and solutions it can find, possibly good or bad, but usually founded on the practices and principles of false reality and therefore indifferent to fundamental truth. Choosing from this advice, and influenced by instinct and emotion, the unthinking self makes a decision.
While still examining the conscious mind, consider it from another viewpoint. It is a mass of memories, recorded thoughts and constructions of thought ranging from trivial to dominant. Each memory or thought was laid down either by the conscious mind with the self in close attandance, so each has a thread of connection to self. These threads incorporate signals, using pictures or sounds or colours, and emotions varying from horrified fear to delighted affection. These signals are to attract the attention of the conscious self to thoughts or memories which have been excited by current events to which they are especially relevant. Or they may be responses to a request of the conscious self for memories or thoughts relevant to events with which it is currently dealing.
This exercise in self-examination is tricky because selves are required to ask their minds to assess their own thinking process by means of that very process, which, with or without the self's knowledge or approval, is capable of dissimulation, dishonesty, or point-blank refusal. There are three reasons why the severe shortcomings of the conscious mind make it, on its own, inadequate for the discovery and realisation of truth. Firstly, remember that the conscious mind, and our sense of identity, is restricted to just the first of six potential levels of reason. Secondly, the self it contains, to whose decisions and choices its person is subject, may be a strongly instinctive and wilful one. Finally, because the essential human attribute, the postconscious mind and its further five levels of reasoning, is excluded from the whole conscious sphere except for conscience, the conscious mind/human individual can be falsely convinced because it is quite ignorant of its own limitations and, therefore, quite unable to perceive that there is so much that lies beyond it.
When the conscious mind's thought reaches the top limit of its signal strength, and the scope and power of its maximum neuron groupings is fully stretched, the conscious self alone cannot distinguish which of the group conclusions is true, if any. We know that these groupings cannot reach beyond the first level of reason and therefore that none can be utterly known to be true. But, in this set-up, these are the only conclusions available for the conscious self to choose from, and whatever that self chooses it has little option but to believe is true. By contrast the postconscious has no top limit except truth, at level 6 of reason. The conscious self/mind, being closed off from the postconscious, cannot take part in this high-level reasoning. It can only try, and generally fail, to heed the insistent but non-obligatory inner voice of conscience.
The presently normal focus of attention of the human mind is commonly identified as the self which, ideally, would represent body/mind/reality in harmony. But the self presently stands for its selection from a confusion of individual thought, subject to Machine reality, the identity of its person, the restraints of conscience producing further thought, and so on. The world, which humanity built under instruction from instinct, now controls us and our subsequently cobbled-up conscious mind, and is indifferent to our postconscious potential. In my view, we are engaged in a battle for the truth and liberty of our being, a battle which we are losing but could win were we to become supraconscious, ie were we to open fully to the postconscious and its humanly true potential, submitting to it our conscious mind, our self, our person, and rebuilding our reality accordingly. However, although the postconscious has truth, right, and utter reason on its side, the present fact is that the conscious self is unaware of this utter reason and, consequently falling short of supraconsciousness, lacks the strength of determination to win through to humantruth. The postconscious's chief enemy in this battle is our instituted framework of life - the Machine.
The Machine has the overwhelming advantage that it constitutes our presently actual false reality to which we are firmly attached by necessity and self-interest, real or imagined. The Machine has set up the laws which control us, the motives which propel us, the objectives which attract us. It has provided the weapons with which we fight its battles, and suffocated the reason with which we could fight and win our own genuine battles. As a consequence, the human self, having started off with high emotional expectations, eventually weakens, stops choosing any but the easiest alternatives, subdues the signals of conscience and hints of true reason, submits to the Machine and keeps its nose clean.
To illustrate this, consider how the life of a normal human being commonly progresses. The individual child is usually born in a questionable institution, the hospital, its introduction to one of the many and various sections of a reality which controls its parents and which shall control the manner of its upbringing. During upbringing the child might be inspired by imaginative and true ideals, concepts and high universal principles. But, as the real world and its unimaginative and imbalanced education encroaches, it is likely that these ideals shall be put aside and almost forgotten as the apparent need to achieve Machine goals for the sake of its meaningful survival becomes pressing. Maybe 95% of incoming information is concerned with reality and its politics, conditioning us to swallow its precepts, adopt its goals, and obey its instructions, welcome or unwelcome. (All this refers to the big picture of course - to humanity worldwide and overall. Personally, within our immediate locality, most of us try to be loving, moral, reasonable and humane, but there is a world of difference between our personal experience and awareness and the Machine's affairs worldwide).
The adult produced by this process is a mind most of which is filled with a bewildering mixture of such items. The rest of the conscious mind is regimented, conditioned in certain patterns by imposition, self-will or wishful emotion, forming a value, attitude, belief and opinion grid by which all incoming information is sorted and from which practically all verbal expressions and physical actions emanate. But, as explained, most of this is necessarily or probably false, so that society shall be in disagreement, and consequently in chaos.
A definition of the brain/mind relationship that does not admit the existence of the postconscious is bound to accept - as we and our Philosophy presently maintain - that truth is unattainable. This allows parallel acceptance of false reality. The truly unacceptable is quite unexceptional to realists. In the world as it is, it is quite normal and unremarkable that several versions of 'truth' can co-exist.
For example, whilst differences of nationality or age-old culture are superficial in comparison with the fundamental humantruth which gives us to agree, they provide us with continuing cause to hate and kill each other. Where our watchword may be 'all men are born equal' we readily succumb to the Machine's decree that there shall always be rich and poor - that some of us sleep in feather beds while others shiver in cardboard boxes on the street. We allow effects to come before causes. For instance, although smoking is known to cause cancer the producers continue to supply tobacco because the demand from smokers presents a ready and profitable market. Although life is so traumatic that many of us depend upon tobacco-relief, no attempt is made radically to change our wrong reality. For another example, whilst we condemn violence we continually glorify it, neglect seriously to address its causes, and go on manufacturing its required weapons. As a race we also recognise a wide variety of different religions in the full knowledge that, if any, only one could possibly be true.
To anybody who regards the foregoing as irrelevant to a treatise on the brain/mind relationship, I would say think again. The only possible ultimate function of a mind is truth. Our consciences demonstrate that our higher mind is capable of truth. The history of our evolution shows that life developed the brain for the sake of intelligence, so I contend that the brain developed the mind for the sake of truth - not only a matter of the discovery and realisation of truth for its own universal sake but also a matter of the survival of life on Earth, life that is threatened by misapplication of intelligence. Therefore the brain/mind relationship can be seen as a matter of COOPERATION for the discovery of humantruth, a discovery which also reveals a consequent human responsibility - to realise that truth in our world.
Given the world we presently live in, this responsibility would appear impossible of fulfilment, but that is because the mutation which gave us our minds is not yet complete. Our false reality exists because we believe ourselves to be confined to the conscious sphere. Millions of us gallantly battle to bring our moral conscience to bear on our reality but are let down by the inadequacy of our conscious minds, which are in any case commonly underused, as they succumb to the might of the instinct-driven Machine. To win that battle we need a new morality as compelling as instinct - we need to open and submit to the postconscious.
In existing reality, values, standards, opinions and beliefs are implanted in the mind by learning-imposition, a process only possible in the conscious. This competitive process of education is our presently understood method of learning where the self, under instruction from authority and backed up by promises of reward, forces the mind to digest a preprocessed diet, but without the benefit of the postconscious, so that its thinking is unfinished and goes round in circles, constrained by the different thinking of others which has been similarly falsified but demands equal consideration. The winners in this competition are the most apt learners, and they are also taken to be the most fit for authoritative leadership. As a result, people at the top of hierarchies are willingly and habitually limited to the conscious, and can therefore support the Machine without compunction. This also applies to many thinkers, especially those who are studying the mind. Because they too have been trained in the conscious sphere, they do not accept the assertions of the postconscious, regarding its intuitions as unfounded for the reason that they are not proven by evidence and argument, all unaware that these assertions are proven by exhaustive reason, inside the postconscious, anathema to the dominant though lesser conscious because these assertions are beyond the present orientation of its vision, or itself's willingness, to recognise and understand.
I think it is generally believed impossible that all the amazing and exquisite achievements of the mind could possibly be born of the mechanics, or biology, of the human brain - that there must be something else involved, be it spirit, soul, cosmic consciousness or god. To believe this is to underestimate the brain, and to substitute fantasy for fact. We know that the conscious mind has an almost unimaginable number of potential interconnections. It is a matter of accepting that this and only this lies behind the works of Plato, Leonardo da Vinci and Einstein. It is evident that the myriads of existing neurons, axons, dendrites and synapses are enough to produce all this and much more, as we should know, on the grounds of clear evidence - that all these faculties combine to make a working system which shows under the microscope, whereas there is no overwhelming indication of the existence of, or significant activity of, intelligent spirits and suchlike.
How does the mind work? What is the actual process of thought? This process must be open to understanding because it commonly happens, and it is questionable whether we need any more precise understanding than that. However, at present the process might be explained, if vaguely, in terms of the untold billions of brain connections actually or potentially available to it, ie to the whole mind including the postconscious. These connections carry every tiny element of reason contributing to conclusions that promote every thought. Comparison to the computer is frowned upon, but that is because the most sophisticated of existing computers is crude by comparison with the entire human mind (although superior in the field of matematical calculation). But imagine a super - computer of unlimited ROM and RAM capacity. Then imagine that instead of a simple choice between the alternatives black or white representing positive and negative, you have an enormous range of grey shades between black and white to choose from. Now imagine that instead of the patterned arrangements of these values being fixed by decisions of the computer operator in the form of untold different sequences of 1 and 0, these value-sequences can not only be given infinitely more subtle variety of meaning by expression to several decimal degrees, eg 1.1111 and 0.0000, but can also themselves independently decide to change in value and meaning, in the interests of truth, according to the influence of ever-varying associated inter-connected thoughts carried by countless fellow neurons anywhere else in either the artificial or real mind.
As for the sounds and feelings of truth, consider Beethoven's brain as it accomplished his Fifth Symphony. This tremendous music should not be taken to prove the existence of some kind of spirit transcending the mere mechanics of the brain or biology of the mind. On the contrary, it should be taken as demonstrating the exquisite levels of true beauty of which the human mind is capable. Music like this is a matter of one remarkable conscious mind's neurons engendering a supremely inspiring arrangement of sounds which excite emotional response in countless empathetic minds. At the same time the arrangement appeals exactly and honestly to the intellect, calling forth sympathetic signals from the postconscious mind's neurons. The result is a highly satisfying experience of pure emotion and the 'feel' of true reason in perfect relationship, reflecting the way in which, were we to achieve the supraconscious state, our world affairs would be brought into harmonious relationship.
We are still looking at the conscious mind, which debars itself from the area of pure reason and absolute truth by insisting on remaining separate from the postconscious excepting for conscience. The previous paragraph described another vital aspect of humanity - emotion - which affects the whole brain/mind faculty, including the postconscious in that it accompanies the beauty of pure reason, at one extreme, and the ugliness of blind rage at the other. Our emotions have a wide range of associations - with experience connected to instinct; with subconscious motor reactions to nerve states; with feelings, from simple to complex, arising from human affairs, violent to benign, from nature, and from creations of human imagination, from primitive to cerebral. The beautiful extremes of emotion can find expression in music, which I regard as the sound of truth without its substance. This refers to the heights of music, and the same can be said of sublime art and literature. Its truth raises pure emotional response which is hard to explain until one realises that it must come unconsciously from the postconscious, presumably by way of the conscience track. Such response inspires further creative effort in the conscious mind. This same sublime emotional response which, I repeat, shall result from supraconsciousness, is the common recognition of humantruth by both the conscious and postconscious minds.
Truth cannot be discovered through conscious argument or debate because, yet again, conscious minds are incapable of truth. Inter-postconscious debate is impractical because postconscious minds have no means of communicating with each other excepting via consciousness. Therefore the understanding of truth can only be achieved by supraconsciousness. This is a matter of cooperation between the leading postconscious and the willingly and devotedly following conscious, by individuals consciously communing with their own postconscious minds and independently reaching common agreement. The postconscious is already equipped to play its leading part but the conscious is not yet ready to follow, and does not perceive or acknowledge the part it has to play. The reason is that whilst the conscious mind is confined to the conscious sphere which also contains all human selves and embraces the facts and concepts of their existing reality, the postconscious is presently outside this sphere, only able to communicate with the conscious, against the grain of reality, by way of conscience.
The way to achieve supraconscious co-operation, therefore, is for the conscious to make a deliberate move to submit to the postconscious and be guided by it. We should recognise that militating against this revolutionary and far-reaching change of mind is the great weight of existing reality. Most of our institutions, of whatever kind, and consequently most of our minds resist it, because they are closely meshed with this reality which conditions their values, views, expectations, plans, methods and actions. It is said that human conscious habitual reactions, beliefs and opinions, once they are established across synapses by boutons and receptors, become immovably fixed. This may be taken to mean that basic human character and behaviour cannot be changed, which implies that humanly true reform is impossible, but it again overlooks the enormous complexity of the brain. A habit may well be carried by a certain number of immovable positive boutons switching synapses on by closing them, but it can be superseded by the contrary establishment of a larger number of negative boutons, out of the multi-millions that are always available, which switch those same synapses off by keeping them open.
In an attempt to illustrate the conditioning of our thinking I will risk taking the appropriate subject of Philosophy. This is a study which most nearly approaches the objective to pursue truth, but it is very far from discovering truth. Why? Because, just as our reality has been formed by our history and our everyday minds conditioned in the same way, our Philosophy has been formed by its history and by minds which, however brilliantly learned, were also conditioned in that way. In order to learn their chosen subject, (ie a choice made by conscious will, not one made for them by true postconscious reason) Philosophers have to digest or memorise the different bodies of deep reasoning of a number of other respected Philosophers, mostly past but some present. The result is that distinctive volumes of often contradictory conscious reasoning, all more or less claiming to be true, are lodged in the mind under the different name-labels of their originators, in such a way that they can be extracted and quoted when appropriate. To conform to this discipline and at the same time encompass truth is unquestionably a gigantic and impossible undertaking, when the individual's own, would-be true reasoning is diverted, confused, obstructed or stifled in this way.
One mind's unique and elaborate reasoning-processes cannot be transferred in their entirety to another mind, much less several reasoning processes at once. To truly embrace another mind's conclusions we must totally embrace the whole mass of their reasoning, an impossibility unless we have already done so independently so that our own mass of reasoning has brought us to the same conclusions. Taking Philosophy as the pursuit of truth and facing a Philosopher with whose conclusions we disagree, to discover truth we have to subject that Philosopher's conclusions to our own postconscious for assessment, but by-pass the huge volume of his or her reasoning towards their conclusions, rather than undertake the virtually impossible task of following it. Yet if either of us is to reach the same truth as the other, neither of us must hold to our own concluding truths if we harbour the slightest doubt that they may not be utterly true. It is an elemental truth that all postconscious minds are the same in structure and potential, so that those who truly submit to them, and without doubt fulfil them, shall agree on the same truth.
The postconscious biological structure is the same as the conscious in that it depends on a brain faculty consisting of similar neurons, axons, dendrites and synapses, though in larger numbers. But it is subject to nothing other than a compulsion to exercise these neurons etc. in fulfilment of their function - to discover truth and pass it on to the conscious self to be realised. To be able to do this the postconscious must receive from the conscious all information relevant and essential to its purpose. Whenever any such information is missing because it is not part of conscious experience or knowledge, the postconscious has a means, probably through the conscience channel, of creating a drive to obtain it.
The postconscious is purely a reasoning faculty, concerned with facts of course, but facts subject to their place in the realm of reason, not with the separately calculated logic of their relationship with each other, exclusive of overall true reason. Truth is the postconscious's ultimate objective. For such a faculty no other function is possible - for reason to be devoted to untruth makes no sense. Our senseless reality demonstrates that the conscious, not the postconscious, rules the existing human world. Life should sensibly combine a simple but effective means of providing adequate food and shelter, and wide opportunity for all to fulfil both mind and body in healthy and satisfying ways. By contrast, human Machine-society presently sustains a most complex yet ineffective system which obliges humans to struggle for ways of survival ranging in degree from miserably poor to self-satisfied rich, with opportunity, money permitting, to indulge in artificial entertainments which are not equally fulfilling and are often unhealthy.
As to the internal working of the postconscious, it is the same process of interconnection as the conscious but not similarly restricted. The postconscious is free and independent of the racket of reality, the intrusions of instinctive self, and the Machine's demands which invade the conscious sphere. Its neurons contact each other and also go on to form groups, clusters and conglomerates, but with this difference. Being unadulterated with preformed and false values and compulsions, each and every neuron is responsibly free to do what it is designed to do - to respect and pursue only truth. Every thought that any neuron allows to be attached to it must be true as far as is possible to discern. This means that, of all the signals attracted to that neuron, those signals which confirm its truth reinforce it, and those which deny its truth weaken it. If the majority of them have confirmed that neuron's truth it is increased in power and influence. If the majority of signals deny the neuron's truth it decreases in power, and if the denial goes on the neuron eventually dies, but not before a memory of that 'truth' and its denial is recorded in another neuron for the purpose of future judgment.
DIAGRAM 2A - THE IDEAL FUTURE SUPRACONSCIOUS ARRANGEMENT OF THE HUMAN MIND WITH
THE POSTCONSCIOUS DOMINANT AND SUBMITTED TO BY THE CONSCIOUS
Positively true neurons gather in groups which increase in strength as they grow, and in the process their composite neurons are strengthened. The effect of this is that the brain's most strongly positive neurons and signals shall be its utterly true ones. At present the true neuron signals do not prevail because they are not able to penetrate the barrier which restricts communication from the postconscious to the conscious. I have pointed out that the function of the postconscious faculty can only be truth. I have suggested, at the beginning of this article, various meanings of the word truth, and elsewhere I have described the process of beginning the building of truth in one neuron. It is necessary to boggle the imagination by contemplating the numbers of neurons available to the postconscious mind in its search for overall humantruth, multiplied by the numbers of possible dendrite signals sent from any one neuron to any other (10 to the power of several million noughts). This is the describable process of pure reason which is as yet impossible fully to explain in conscious language but which might dawn on our understanding were we to apply to our postconscious for the answer to a particularly intractable question; were we strongly supraconsciously to persevere with our application, eventually receiving the answer to that question, after determined perseverance when one small inspired insight, added to a mountain of doubt, question and criticism, provides the key which, clicking into place, converts the whole into one clear and incontrovertible truth.
Having seen how humanity misguidedly closed itself to its chief faculty, we should now modify the barrier then erected by fully opening the conscious to the guidance of the postconscious. But we must still totally forbid entry, in the other direction, of interference with the postconscious by the instinctive, emotional, egoistic characteristics adopted by the wilful self, also preventing entry of the influence of the powerfully existing reality associated with that self - preventing all this from disturbing the free and independent processes of the postconscious so that the ideal may be achieved. At the same time we should bring about the further modification of this barrier by allowing the conscious to present its questions and request answers with an encouraging urgency that shall bolster and energise the postconscious reasoning-processes. This I call INTELLATION to distinguish it from normal thinking, and it goes hand-in-hand with increasing supraconsciousness. At present it is normal practice for conscious thinking to be persuaded by Machine reality to follow false parthways which end in untruth.
Intellation is the development of mind by the co-operative combination of conscious and postconscious reason, firmly guided by the latter, towards truth. This is a supraconscious process - the fulfilment of intelligence with the object of achieving its ultimate end - truth - arrived at when all possible information has been absorbed and every neuron in the brain has communicated with every other by every possible channel. We can foresee an ideal time when the human race has achieved this state of full supraconsciousness, as is its nature to do, when humantruth has been discovered and realised (see Diagram 2. above). Humantruth must always be open to question, but however strongly doubted and persistently questioned, it shall always be confirmed. This questioning is intellation in reverse - the stated but doubted truth is taken, and all the pathways to it are traced back through all their multiplied branches and tributaries right up to their myriads of simple single origins from which, tracing forwards again, honestly having to take the same genuine pathways as were originally followed, we ultimately arrive at the same truth. The self has a part to play in intellation, initiating and urging the process. This is the same self that was once confined to the conscious sphere, serving instinct, the Machine, and the resultant automated person. Now it is supraconscious, and in order to keep it that way the postconscious has created a channel of communication by which the self is given the deepest awareness of itself.
Perhaps it is not reasonable to expect very many people to embrace this thinking entirely, but I believe that those who do not will nevertheless find themselves in agreement with the strong, humantrue conclusions which arise from this thinking, There is surely no doubt that our morality should be reflected in our reality. When virtually all minds have discovered humantruth, it seems inevitable that they shall determine to make our world society humantrue.
List of Branch articles. in no particular reading sequence:
PREVIOUS :1. The Nature and State of the Human Race: 2 : Truth - No-Go Area : 3. Facing Yourself: 4. Explaining the Mind : 5. Moral Mind : 6. Great Men: 7. Comment Pinker : 8. The Way We Think : 9. Sanity for Humanity : 10. Evolution of Mind:11. Free Thinker View : 12. Reality : 13. Understanding Consciousness : 14. Bottom Line :
CURRENT :15. Brain Mind Relationship:
REMAINING : 16. Open Letter to Philosophers : 17. The Mind and Philosophy : 18. Self Twixt 2 Minds: 19. The Holographic Dimension:
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