MIND, WILL and SELF, IN OUR EXISTING STATE OF CONSCIOUSNESS
This article, and the two diagrams it includes, are a result of my own supraconscious intellation, bringing to consciousness the latest conclusions of my postconscious. That is the sole source of my findings, and they are offered as truth because truth is the ultimate function of every postconscious
When the human mind was divided, it was kept so by means of certain synapses, those that formed the interface between the two halves, being ‘permanently’ closed, held in that position by the irresistable conviction on the part of the conscious mind that to open those synapses and bring down the barrier would spell disaster. These were the ones that the conscious mind closed against the postconscious (on the grounds that it had quite enough to cope with without interference from that quarter), and that the postconscious closed against the conscious (as one would against a pugnacious and noisy neighbour), in order to keep the freedom and independence necessary to the only function of such a mind – truth.
Somehow, a strictly one way information channel was created by which the postconscious was made aware of all thinking and activity going on in the conscious arena. As a result the postconscious, in its anxiety to exert a moral influence, forced its own narrow pathway through to the conscious for the conveyance of its basic moral conclusions – conscience.
Elsewhere I have talked about the self opening to its postconscious. It is necessary to remember that, in very simple terms, the brain works by the transferance of electro-chemical signals. These are controlled by synapses whose opening or closing depends upon the strength of the signals presented to them. It might be that sheer curiosity will persuade the conscious, plagued by problems, to widen the narrow conscience pathway in order to ask questions and, hopefully, to receive answers. This vague project would be reinforced by the fact that its signal – that the two minds ought to combine – would carry enormous signal-strength. Also the prospect of postconscious truth, or humantruth, being introduced into the amoral conscious arena would carry a signal of the greatest power and weight of all, enough to overcome all opposition from established Machine-thinking on the conscious mind’s side and to reign supreme thereafter. The transition must be gradual, to avoid violent conflict, but eventually, when both minds are working as a supraconscious whole, all interface synapses can be kept open to this supraconscious intellation, ie conscious questioning and postconscious answering.
The foundation of will is life’s original determination to live and go on living, almost blindly at first, then by more complex instinct. In higher life forms it has further developed into an instrument for implementing decisions made by conscious intention and contrary to instinct. In the human, the highest form of life on Earth, instinct, as dictator of behaviour, is largely redundant and the will is simply an instrument for converting the reasoned intentions of intellect into actions or expressions.
The question often arises, and continues to be a matter of debate, whether there is such a thing as free will. Rather than take part in this competitive debate, I have relied upon my postconscious mind correctly to describe the nature of will and its function.
A difficulty with the matter of will, free or otherwise, lies in distinguishing between the human situation as it now stands and as it should ideally stand.
In our existing reality, we still retain a powerful range of instincts that should no longer be needed. In certain existing circumstances, violently aggressive instincts can hold sway because the contrary force of peaceful reason is yet too weak to overcome it. An otherwise reasonable individual may nevertheless hold strongly to the right to exercise violent aggression to defend his country, himself, his loved ones, his religious beliefs, his material possessions and his self-interests. This is a common phenomenon which will disappear when aggression, and aggressive response, no longer obtains so that this instinct fades away. The transition is the difficulty.
It is clear that the will cannot be free to make decisions because it can have no adequate means of judgement. If the will were free critically to reason and make its own decisions it would be in constant conflict with the mind proper. Indeed, the will would have itself to carry similar mental capacity, which is ludicrous. It is the mind that reasons and judges. The freedom we have is the freedom to think, not to be wilful. But thought too cannot be free, for it is given by intellect which carries responsibility. We think of wild creatures as being free, but they are rigidly bound by instinct. It is said that if the human will is not free our entire educational, social and moral system must be discarded and revised. This system must be discarded and replaced anyway, not because we lack free will but because we live by the lesser conscious mind which is incapable of truth.
The conscious mind is a mass of neurons, dendrites, synapses etc. that are connected and cross-connected in every possible way, forming large and small constructions that represent thoughts, opinions, proposals, beliefs, convictions, desires etc., all fired with various degrees of instnctive emotion and influences of conscience.These describe the range of knowledge, experience, feeling, moral awareness, opinion and belief of the conscious sector of a person’s mind, the whole of which describes the whole possible person and parts of which construct the present person, the conscious self, but as yet without the vital guidance of the postconscious (excepting, to some degree, conscience).
In the midst of all this grey matter is the actual self, a synaptic focul-point whose job is to recognise the most powerful or persuasive thoughts, opinions, proposals, beliefs, convictions, desires and to select those which the mind prefers, passing them to the decision faculty which in turn either has them activated by the will or added to the conscious mind’s range of knowledge, experience, feeling, moral awareness, opinion and belief to add to the identification of the self as the person. All this involves varying forces of persuasion associated with light decisions such as whether to take sugar in one’s tea, to major decisions such as whether to declare war.
Within the conscious mind the self focuses on one thought-construction after another with extreme speed and can make several connections at once or in quick succession, as the individual might need when driving a car and carrying on a conversation at the same time. Some connections are permanently made in order to bring constant heavy influence to bear, such as strong religious faith, concrete political conviction, allegiance to hierarchical position and responsibility.
The self, always seeking to achieve completion, can also make lesser connections, especially the background of emotional ones exerting their influences and one or two in the foreground, trying to reconcile those influences and assist in the decision-making. The self consciously self-identfiies with our actions and expressions, and with the thought constructions that triggered and permitted them, although they may be subject to moral questioning and feelings of guilt. False constructions can become platforms for further thought, confusing and compounding the falsity. Nevertheless, the personality we construct and adopt, together with its opinions and convictions, form the basis on which we make judgements and decisions. The problem for politicians and the like is that being fixed in place in this continuing present reality, their debates and arguments are always voiced from false platforms and therefore are neither true nor go to the building of whole truth.
The will, then, does not choose what connections or decisions shall be made, having no mind of its own. It is like a bunch of synapses, responding to the strongest of the conscious mind’s signals, their related emotions and weight of reason, and passing them on to the motor-functions for action or expression. Chaos results from this process being carried on in countless incomplete conscious minds, with widely different emphases and contradictory selections, at the same time. The ideal shall be achieved when, apart from certain instinctive emotions, supraconsciousness shall be the sole influence on human actions and expressions.
So human individuals are presently represented by conscious minds heavily imprinted and conditioned by the mass of complex, contradictory and conflicting influences engendered and principles practiced by our generally irresponsible, competitive and violent history. Their wills are activated by determinations reached according to the most powerful conclusions following from their conditioning. But instinctive emotions and urges can override such conclusions. The effect of these powerful feelings, such as fear, can change decisions made by the most thorough reason. Otherwise, the will has no choice but to activate decisions, however arrived at. So the will has no freedom, with one exception. Where two or more of the mind’s choices are virtually the same and carry equal weight, the will is empowered to choose one of them at random, but this scarcely constitutes ‘free will’.
Our existing reality consists of the facts accumulated in the 30,000/100,000 years since the human gained a firm foothold on Earth – occurences; practical and intellectual discoveries and their applications (good and bad, right and wrong); achievements, following from various motives (true, false and a mixture of both); institutions and establishments, put in place to support and reinforce processes of civilisation; applications of science and technology (often not sensibly sought or needed but allowed to flourish just the same). All these and all other things, recorded as history, are known by the individual (from memory, from books and newspapers, and now the world wide web,) or not known, (by varying degrees of forgetfulness, indifference, or ignorance). We are not responsible for Machine pressures exerted by the conventions, practices, institutions, obligations of this reality for which we are also not responsible, yet we still feel a certain responsibility for them and allow their public influence to affect our personal behaviour and morality.
Our most irresistible overall influence should be, and would be were our intellects fulfilled, the moral awareness of truth, or humantruth, but truth is the function of another part of our mind which I have already referred to, the postconscious. This postconscious mind has always been practically closed to consciousness, as a result of which it has been free and independent of those complex and false influences that have chiefly shaped our mentality, and able to fulfil the one function open to such a mind – truth, or humantruth. But the conscious mind, being separate, does not share this function; as I have said many times, the conscious is incapable of truth.
However, the postconscious has managed to bring to bear the basic moral tenets and elements of humantruth in the form of conscience, admitted by the back door, so to speak. Conscience does not carry the power to prevail against the false influences of existing reality and to persuade the mind to recognise humantruth, but the postconscious itself does have that power of influence and would prevail were the general human conscious self deliberately to open to it. That way lies the future survival and well-being of humanity on earth.
It is said that we never act contrary to our will, but the will is no more than a tool. It would be more accurate to say that we never act contrary to our convictions, whatever they may be. I think that in the ideal world we would never act contrary to the truth; that truth is the key to living intelligently. But, faced with temptation, it is our reasoned wish to do the honest thing but the emotion of desire may force us to do the opposite. That emotion gets the upper hand because our reality holds and allows both honesty and dishonesty. Were we living by the truth, truth would be the strongest or only influence, and truth abhors dishonesty.
I don’t share a common dislike of the suggestion that the mental processes are mechanical. What else can they be based upon than the extremely rapid activation of neurons and the positive or negative responses of synapses? Nor do I agree with the contention that will and intellect are distinct. When the self intends to activate the will by signalling a strong intellectual proposition, it must also consider all surrounding, closely associated constructions of thought and, if one or more raises a serious challenge to the original proposition, subject all to rethinking. This is not the will’s job. The will has not the ability to make judgements – that is the function of the mind. Again, these processes happen with lightning speed and mistakes might be expected to occur, mistakes which are the mind’s responsibility to correct.
A soldier who is ordered to serve as warder in a concentration/extermination camp, and sees what is happening there, obeys despite the less strong desire to disobey. The dishonest conscious mind presents two alternatives, one of which it must choose as the stronger and pass to the will for activation. The soldier's desire to disobey is backed by moral principle, more or less strongly held by all minds. His self’s decision to obey is more heavily weighted by personal factors; that he does not want to be shot for disobedience, because he has a wife and children, because many other warders are doing the same, because the inmates are held to be, and undoubtedly appear to be, subhuman.
In a sense the self, like instinct, plays us false by allowing itself, though understandably, to be tipped either way by less weighty, emotional considerations. And the solution to this problem is that we determinedly persuade our race to realise rather than deny its moral principles; to make its whole world humantrue, in which case these fearful dilemmas would never again face us.
Thought constructions may be those which, for the time being, are unconscious (not presently picked out by the focul point of Self). Some are tentative or only partly determined, and being still under consideration are generally long-term. Some, even though false or doubtful, are doggedly asserted and defended. All may be brought to consciousness, both at the forefront where immediately appropriate to the situation or in the background where tangentially relevant and possibly important.
This is done by the Self contacting them in order to obtain reasoning and facts that it requires and they contain, in response to the powerful relevance of those thoughts and facts to ‘discussions’ (unconscious, conscious, or each alternately) starting elsewhere in the mind, probably with references to action-decision.
Examples of constructions asserted and defended – religious faiths inculcated when young, class and caste prejudice, patriotism. Examples of the tentative - fanciful answers to questions such as ‘is there life after death?’ or ‘what exists outside the universe?’
Happiness is universally desired but may be hard to achieve. It is commonly sought by means of alcohol and tobacco, also illegal or prescribed drugs. In a largely unhappy but technologically advanced society such as the present, happiness might be artificially arranged by way of a genetically implanted permanent ‘happy’ thought-construction connected to a constantly pushed ‘will button’ but, I would imagine, only at the expense of free responsibility.
When any thought-construction, large or small, is contacted by the self, it is brought to consciousness, where the conscious mind evaluates it and all related matters under its immediate conscious domain of questioning calculation. If the thought-construction is thus concluded it is placed in settled memory; if it possibly warrants action it is passed forward for decision. Otherwise the thought-construction is returned to unconsciousness for rethink. It is when thought-constructions and related thinking come to consciousness that the self, ie we ourselves, become aware of that construction as representative of us. If that related thinking dislikes the ‘us’ thus presented, it may be returned to consciousness not only for rethink but also reconstruction.
Rethinking and reconstruction of the mind is obviously and simply the thing to do but, as I have already said, in this existing reality politicians and the like think and operate from false platforms, so to them and all the leading Machine-realists it appears neither obvious nor simple.
Under supraconsciousness, a humantrue reality will be made up of many true platforms founded on fundamental truth, so that all constructions of both thought and practice, having begun true, must continue true.
As can be seen from Diagram 2, the principles, practices and values of reality are now humantrue. So instead of our reality going contrary to our basic morality and giving us twisted memories and directions, as was the case with the Machine, it and the new memory now embodies that basic morality.
OUR POTENTIAL STATE OF SUPRACONSCIOUSNESS
The two halves of the human mind have come together, as far as that is possible. The conscious mind still provides an information channel to the postconscious, but is not itself allowed to cross the narrow divide because its job is to apply truth to the management of affairs, whereas the postconscious’ function is to reason the way to truth, or humantruth, a job that requires freedom and independence.
Otherwise the conscious mind, which in combination with the postconscious is now to be called the supraconscious, works in the same way as before excepting for one enormous difference. Instead of making decisions and acting according to instinctive-Machine logic, it now submits to the guidance of postconscious humantruth – the reason for calling it the supraconscious mind of course.
The supraconscious mind intellates, a process of questioning everything, putting those questions to the postconscious, receiving its answers, de-coding them and applying them to all parts of its thinking and activity in the new reality.
Of great significance to the well-being of ourselves and all life on Earth is the fact that every human has a postconscious with the same ultimate function – truth. It follows that when all individual postconscious minds have been stimulated and developed to the point of fulfilment, all humanity will be in moral agreement. We will retain wide differences of personality, character and ability but will hold to the same essential values.
Some individuals suffer malfunctions of the brain which can affect them in many ways, some tragic, but I think there are indications that the postconscious is rarely affected in this way. It is apart from the nervous system and carries no physical responsibility. Its electro-chemical connections are numberless, but they are concerned with one and the same function, truth.
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 : 15. Brain-Mind Relations: 16. Open Letter to Philosophers : 17. The Mind and Philosophy : 18.Self Twixt 2 Minds19. The Holographic Dimension:
CURRENT : 21 : Mind, Will and Self
Comments? Email : johnb-oates@humantruth.org : perhaps for inclusion in End Pages.
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