Br13 UNDERSTANDING CONSCIOUSNESS

Introductory Caution

To begin with, I think we should acknowledge that this matter of consciousness cannot be dealt with under the microscope as a specialised scientific subject. Seriously to question the meaning of CONSCIOUSNESS is to ask our whole mental faculty to discover itself and its processes, also to address the whole matter of humantruth and bring the results to our awareness. When we fully understand consciousness we shall also understand the false nature of our present concept of reality, and we shall then be ready to substitute new, humanly true concepts and practices.

Consciousness is said to be the last important subject still beyond the grasp of our understanding. But this problem should not be left to the psycho-biological specialists to tackle, with a view to separating it into their own preferred scientific explanation-box. Human consciousness is a part of our whole mind, therefore it is part of the human mind's means of self-understanding, not an isolated matter to be contemplated by the self-the self which is endowed with the power of will, the capacity to choose, but not the capacity to reason in its own right; a self which is confined to the limits of the conscious mind within a false concept of reality.

Human selves have not discovered truth because they are not deeply thinking minds. To say 'I think, or believe' this or that is not to be strictly accurate. The self is incapable of any but rudimentary thought and looks to a mind to furnish it with truth. But our reality is confined to the conscious sphere which contains both the wilful self and the mind it relies on - the conscious mind which, because it is subject to the wilful self and geared to a false reality, and of limited range and capacity, is incapable of whole truth. So the conscious mind produces a series of conclusions, relative truths which the self is willing to identify with, some of which it adopts for its guidance by way of beliefs and faiths.

Although consciousness and the conscious mind are part of our whole brain, they are not the major part. The major part, as I shall explain, is the postconscious, and it is to this mind that we must look for the truth about consciousness. It is our usual practice to set our selves to search our conscious mind for its versions of 'truth', but while this practice might be satisfactory in relatively minor practical matters, it is quite inadequate for the solving of major intellectual problems such as the understanding of consciousness.

In addressing the problem of consciousness, it is vital to recognise that the postconscious mind, when it is truly reflected by the wilful conscious self, is us, the essential human being. We have not only failed to acknowledge this fundamental truth but have closed our conscious selves off from the postconscious, excepting for its 'still small voice of conscience'. So this big challenge to our understanding is not at all a question of us using our conscious minds to search for and find answers. It is a question of our focul-point of self looking beyond the lesser conscious and opening to its own upper postconscious mind, 'listening' to it, obliging the conscious mind to submit to postconscious guidance so that postconscious truth shall be superimposed upon the thinking of the conscious mind.

The Foundation of Human Consciousness

In the animals which spearheaded it, the evolution of life on Earth has coincided with an advancing development of intelligence and an increasing degree of consciousness , ie an increase in self awareness and enhancement of the relationship between the self and its whole environment.

At first animals were governed by instinct, supplemented by a small measure of consciousness restricted to inner bolstering of their specious instinct and to the selection from a small range of outer options relevant to that instinct. The degree of consciousness, ie the size of the conscious mind, increased until the time came when the creature with the most highly developed intelligence, the hominid, sensed the survival advantages of dispensing with programming by major behavioural instincts and substituting voluntary choice by intelligence. It is my view that, as the result of this sensed advantage combined with a certain evolutionary pressure, one hominid acquired a dramatic brain-mutation. This involved an expansion of the conscious mind which, though relatively small in dimension, provided an enormous increase in the actual and potential numbers of neurons and their possibile interconnections. That the mutation was adopted must have been because of the vague awareness that such an extension, to be succesful, must be capable of anticipating and reacting to every possible event and of planning effective ways of coping with it. The result was a child born of its hominid mother, our original ancestor, the first of the human species, with an enlarged brain, the neocortex, but an unchanged cranium. Whilst increasing potential intelligence was simply a matter of multiplying neuron numbers, this increase seemingly was not accompanied by an appropriate enlargement of the cranium to accommodate it, and this increased upper brain-volume was accommodated by sqeezing the brain further down into the lower part of the head.

The human mutation did not end here. The early humans must have found the new conscious capacity too much for them. Instead of giving clear alternative strategies to instinct, the new consciousness presented a great confusion of possibilities which, far from being helpful, were a distinct disadvantage to decision-making. What now happened has been consistently suggested and assuredly confirmed by my most deep and persistent reasoning. It was an event that falsely, rather than truly, shaped our character and history. It appears that the early humans rapidly responded to this mutation by dividing the new conscious extension into two parts. One part they brought under the direct and manageable control of the wilful self. In their anxiety to complete the mutation and get on with the business of surviving, rather than laboriously work out those alternative strategies to instinct, and in any case possibly sensing that with only a part of the new conscious extension to work with they no longer had the capacity necessary for that task, they took the easy way and simply applied their new power of intelligence to more effective pursuit of the instinctive drives. They thus became, to themselves and others, the most dangerous species on Earth.

The other, greater part of that conscious extension was sealed off from consciousness and largely ignored. By this action, whilst it meant that they restricted themselves to the status of super-apes, the early humans actually, and of course unwittingly, laid down the means of their potential future true enlightenment. By closing the second part of that brain extension they gave it the very conditions it requires for its mature fulfilment - freedom and independence. This second extension, which I call the postconscious, was now ready to fulfil its function - the only viable one for a faculty of optimum reason - the discovery and realisation of truth.

To fulfil that function the postconscious required conscious encouragement, and there was not much of that, with at least one exception. The book 'The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind', (Penguin 1993), by Julian Jaynes suggests to me that in early Ancient Greece thinkers strongly felt the presence of a faculty of truth, but they did not identify it as the postconscious. They believed that such wisdom as the postconscious seemed to offer must be beyond human capacity, and therefore had to come from the gods. So they set up the Oracle, notably at Delphi. When they questioned the Oracle, its voice was supposed to answer. No doubt this voice was similar to those heard by schizophrenics, and the phenomenon was somehow a product of the strange relationship that is possible between the left and right frontal lobes of the human brain.

As I shall describe, the human postconscious mind makes itself known to us through intellation, ie exhaustive, submissive cooperation on the part of the conscious mind. In the case of the Ancient Greeks, their conscious minds apparently dominated this relationship with the Oracle. They put questions of a political or strategic kind to which the postconscious would not and could not give the answers they wished, so they substituted their own wishful thinking. Thus the Oracle made little or no change, and fell into disuse. This, the nearest approach that humanity has made to fulfilment of its own mentality, ended in failure and our re-dedication to the conscious arena.

In most human individuals, the closure of the postconscious was thorough, but with a universal exception. The postconscious managed to drive a narrow communication channel through to the conscious, a one way information line by which it conveyed its simple basic conclusions. This is conscience, present in every human, the source of our moral awareness. Whether we hear it, and the degree to which we regularly ignore it, depends upon our circumstances in reality and the way in which those circumstances force us to think.

To understand the nature of human consciousness it may be helpful to look back at life-forms in the purely instinctive state. They had no brain because they did not require a control centre. The simplest life-form was indistinguishable from its life-force, identified as the will automatically to perform its three functions - to absorb food, grow and split into two replicas of itself. The entire entity, and its purpose to express energy, was its self.

Further down the evolution scale these simple life-forms, or single cells, formed groups, which then joined with other groups to make more complex organisms. For these organisms to function required a simple brain which could distinguish between and, as appropriate, activate by means of crude motor-nerves, their different constituent groups. As organisms came to be joined by yet more other groups, and especially when established organisms began eating each other, it was necessary to co-ordinate their activities by means of a simple programme - instinct - incorporated in the brain as its preconscious function. In due course, these organisms acquired senses as aids to survival - the sense of sight, for example. With the acquisition of eyes, a creature was no longer dependent solely upon instinct to direct, and the nervous system to channel, its blind expression of life-force. The eyes gave information of use to the creature's struggle for survival, and this information was analysed, recorded and incorporated in instinct by the brain, resulting in semi-automatic, subconscious activity.

With an increase in complexity of the senses and motor functions, and resultant enlargement of opportunity, there came the necessity to distinguish between and evaluate alternative actions, and this required a faculty of choice. From being indistinguishable from the creature's whole, to being an arbitrary identity dependent on those instinctive influences which proved the strongest, the self became detached, able to focus upon each alternative possibility and, weakly at first but with increasing strength, make decisions. This activity of the self, moving about the conscious mind and focussing on different things, including, of course, pictures and messages coming in from outside, was the beginning of full consciousness.

Primate consciousness, the relationship between the wilful instinctive self and the undeveloped conscious mind, worked well enough, in that instinct was common to members of a species and intelligence hadn't the capacity to venture far enough beyond it to cause serious disruption. Intelligence served instinct to the benefit of species, for example in the ability of chimpanzees to extract termites from termite-mounds with the use of sticks. Instinct continued to govern the way in which primate species marked their territory and respected each others' territories. Instinct was also responsible for ritualising disputes over a kill, or in regard to mating, in order to avoid unnecessary bloodshed. There was some trust between individuals, not due to altruism but to the fact that each could usually anticipate the other's behavior because they knew the patterns of instinct which all generally obeyed. Those instinctive patterns had become established over many generations, by natural selection in the interests of optimum survival.

Humans developed differently, solely because of their greatly increased conscious capacity. They were intelligent enough to enlarge prospects for the instinctive drives, also to reduce the effectiveness of instinctive inhibitions but, because they had deprived themselves of what was to become their chief faculty, the postconscious, they were not intelligent enough to temper those drives for the sake of stability and security, nor to introduce new inhibitions for the sake of gentle cooperation and conservation. Because they did not embrace their brain mutation in full they quickly evolved from the instinctive-conscious to the intellectual-instinctive state. They failed to take, and still hold back from taking, the next and ultimate step for an intellectual species - supraconsciousness. It would seem to be because of this that the word intellect, also the word reason to some extent, rather than representing all that is greatest and best in humanity, has come to be associated with hard calculation devoid of human feeling.

It is reasonable to suppose that the original humans were, except for the head formation, exactly like the hominids who preceded them. Thereafter the physical changes which distinguish us from our ancestors were made much more quickly than previous changes in our line because of our comparatively very rapid development. Such physical changes and development were brought about as a result of our increased mental capacity, adventurous activity, and consequent diversity of environment. But whatever enormous scientific and technological advances have since been achieved, it is important that we recognise the relatively small advances we have made in the field of moral awareness and towards the discovery and realisation of truth.

The Conscious Sphere : Our Existing Reality

Because humans did not take that next evolutionary step open to them, supraconsciousness, they have been in an interim state between instinct and intellect for the past thirty thousand or so years. From five to perhaps ten thousand years ago, living as hunter-gatherers, they found a good balance between instinct and intelligence, a few continuing in this life-style until the present day. This hunter-gatherer existence was made possible because resources were plentiful, there was ample space available, and the dominant humans had little to fear from predators. But the increase in their numbers resulted in scarcity of resources and competition for territory. Under threat and short of wisdom, humans now began forcefully to apply their intelligence to exploiting the instinctive drives. There followed battles, wars, invasions and massacres until, in the nations which prevailed and predominated, some space was given to intellect to dilute the situation by means of certain laws of behaviour backed up by force. In this way a public reality was formed which I call the Machine. The Machine had, and still has, a complete grip on our overall thinking and affairs. At the same time a sub-reality was formed made up of a half-awake and generally ineffective morality which is kept largely private.

All this which makes up our reality is contained within the human conscious sphere, governing, and governed by, the instinctive will-empowered conscious self. The conscious mind contains all the experience and thought that we have memorised, forming it into mostly separated groups and constructions of learning, conditioning, opinion and of prejudice; groups and constructions which, because they are usually separately held, often contradicted, only partially informed, and governed by the often wilful and capricious self, are incapable of discovering truth. We need whole truth - to bring it to bear on our whole situation and produce agreement. What the conscious mind gives us is relative truth, producing eternal disagreement and continual conflict.

This article is addressed to the free and independent human mind and aims to appeal to our private morality, our conscience, our sensed inner truth. But (excepting the recent advent of the internet) if it is to be distributed to a significant number of people it has to be printed and published, and, much as they may want to be, the publishers are not private people, subject to conscience and guided by their true morality. The publishers are Machine-realists, governed by the values and practices of the conscious sphere. This they have to be, in their circumstances, because they must appeal to readers and sell copies if they are to survive. The Machine and its reality is overwhelming, and the general public, in their reading, are attracted to it because its affairs are factual and straight-forward, involving emotion and arousing partisan feeling. A smaller, educated, erudite intellectual public have interests that are more refined but still specialised and also factual, segregated into different and self-justifying disciplines. Human truth, on the other hand, is elusive, and is ridiculed by realists because it goes contrary to the mighty Machine, cannot be confirmed by the conscious mind, and is contradicted by facts of reality which surround us on all sides.

The human problem is that we rely on the lesser conscious mind rather than the postconscious. It seems impertinent to make this claim when the huge bulk of human thought and achievement has been the product of the conscious mind. For instance, who would dare to belittle Aristotle, Christ, Beethoven, Gandhi, Einstein? But Aristotle was one founder of a discipline, Philosophy which, far from discovering truth, has simply confused our thinking. Christ, with an unequalled example of moral and emotional purity, laid the foundations of a religion which, by adapting to the Machine, has refuted its original precepts. Beethoven gave us magnificent feelings of truth but has had little effect in bringing that truth to bear on our everyday lives. Gandhi brought great values to bear on everyday Indian lives but did not bring them to bear on the Machine. Einstein was revered for his mathematical genius but this was allowed to overshadow his concerns for human morality.

From the beginning the normal conscious mind was geared to the service of instinct in the prime cause of self-interest. In nature the secondary instinctive cause of species-interest flows from that, on the principle that what's good for the species is best for the bulk of individuals. This cannot be said of the human race, for we blindly pursue self-interest and leave the destiny of our species, and many others, in the lap of the gods. Although we have increased in numbers, the human race is under many self-created threats on many fronts. This is because the development of mind which made us human, the postconscious, has been denied its natural function - the discovery and realisation of humantruth, which would have cared for us as one species. Instead of maturing into a supraconscious race, we remain stranded in the conscious sphere, denied our true potential. This explains why the concept of absolute truth is not acceptable in the conscious sphere, because the conscious is able only to recognise a much lesser concept - that of relative truth. It is this acceptance of relative truth that enables us also to accept irreconcilable differences of political, religious. philosophical and financial policies, faiths, theories and practices.

The human conscious mind works contrary to true human interests because it is governed by the Machine dynamic. The Machine lays down that in order to become a prominent and influential figure the human individual must first be educated. That education prepares the individual for taking a believing, therefore a supportive place in the Machine hierarchy. Having reached their influential places such individuals are not only surrounded by the facts of reality but are charged with administering a certain separate group of those facts - such is their job. Not only this, but their minds have been deliberately trained to carry out that job - to reason in the interests of that group of facts, according to the wider interests of the Machine. Furthermore, these individuals are, by nature and expectation, concerned to maintain or improve their position in the hierarchy - their career - which means they must remain loyal to their superiors who put them in that position. When they marry it shall be to their advantage to choose a partner who shares the same values and Machine-interests, and children of the marriage will be pressured to follow the same road.

Consider how the conscious minds works. In the example just given, this individual's mind will be full of countless memories, thoughts and constructions of thought. But the main constructions and interests take precedence, and colour all the rest. A banker, for instance, may well have thought at one time of a society without money, relying on barter. That thought might stick in his mind, but with a label attached 'totally discredited'. When the focal point of his awareness, his wilful conscious self, visits this rebellious thought, it immediately also contacts his convinced attachment to the competitive money economy, his vital self-interests, his well-worked-out financial theories, and his awareness of the actual, overwhelming existence of the Machine and all its powerful ramifications. In the face of all this he disowns as ridiculous that rogue notion of a barter-based society (which, in any case, is far removed from the ideal; far removed from the humantrue principle of giving and cooperating.

The conscious mind's cellular construction was originally developed in the service of the various impulsions of instinct. That limited construction is responsible for the conscious mind's inability to gravitate to absolute truth, but the character of the self must also take responsibility. The self embodies will, and the will becomes prejudiced in favour of the individual's preferments, which, in turn, are subject to prejudices of the conscious mind. Had humanity become supraconscious, humantruly guided by a free and independent postconscious mind, the self would have none other than humantrue choices to make. Make no mistake; for simple and sensible practical purposes the conscious mind works well enough. It worked well for the hunter-gatherer for example, as it does, in straightforward matters, for us. It is when the conscious mind is put under pressure in matters of true reason that it lets us down.

The normal conscious mind relates to the predominant interests of its host-creature, and has a strong foundation which is both servant and master of those interests. The mind of intellectual species should relate to what ought to be their fundamental concern - truth, because in truth there are no unintelligent contradictions or conflicts. The conscious mind, being incapable of truth, requires another foundation. In animals this is instinct. In the present human case, here on Earth, that alternative foundation is the Machine.

The Machine is based on instinct with conscious intelligence or intellect applied. It is important to recognise that instinct was never intended to be furthered in this way. Instinct is a self-contained code designed to secure as straightforward as possible a means of survival for a species unable to survive otherwise. The human species is able to survive otherwise, with instinct in all major ways supplanted by intellect. For an example of this we only have to look at the simple and wisely balanced ways of the hunter-gatherers. By contrast, the Machine represents an exceedingly complex way of life, to which our conscious minds are largely geared yet probably not less than 90% of which is not only unnecessary but generally unwise and harmful.

The Machine, and our response to it, dictates the way we live. It, and to a much lesser extent our conscience, also therefore dictates the way we think. The Machine controls the manner of our birth, influences in varying degrees our upbringing, dominates our education and determines our employment. Under its direction, and mostly by its provision, we then determine our opinions and beliefs, contrive our own sustenance, and choose our spare-time interests, and entertainments.

Our normal present-day consciousness consists of a variety of principles and values (important to the Machine, and to us but in relation to Machine-reality), to which our focul-point of self is drawn and which it arranges in order of importance according to circumstances. For instance, personally we might consider EQUALITY to be a desirable principle, but this principle comes low in the Machine's order of importance because it is a moral principle which, in any case, has proved impossible in practice. This is enough to persuade the conscious mind that inequality is inescapable. It is not enough for the postconscious mind, however, which recognises that it is the Machine which has set up a competitive reality which, by its nature, makes equality impossible. The postconscious mind, on the other hand, would have made the principle of equality one of the essential corner-stones of its supraconscious society.

Individual members of existing society find it hard to accept the proposition that the money economy is harmful and superfluous. The reason for this is that money is so firmly established a feature of present reality. We use the fact that it has so firm a grip on our conscious thinking to prove that it is an essential principle, suggesting that it is a necessary control over forces which would otherwise get out of hand.

The way in which inequality and the money system work together in existing society is relevant to this article because it is an example of preconsciousness, subconsciousness or unconsciousness at work, but not of full consciousness, because that must acknowledge the prior awareness of the postconscious, ie supraconsciousness. A rat is conscious, but would not be cited as the perfect example of consciousness. In the same way, although humans have supraconscious potential they do not exemplify full consciousness either because their behaviour and amoral society fall far short of that potential. Take the case of two persons X and Y. X has a good job and a surplus of money, while Y is unemployed and in debt. X invests his money and gains interest, making him richer. Y borrows money and has to pay interest, making him poorer, and if he fails to keep up the payments he will be gaoled. Full consciousness, ie supraconsciousness of this situation must bring condemnation. Therefore to accept the situation is to fall short of humantruth, for supraconsciousness would be exemplified by the true ideal, an appreciation of which is necessary to full understanding.

The bio-physicists who are concerned to discover how consciousness actually works, as a brain-process, may lose patience with this article for departing from this objective and delving into what seem to be the realms of philosophy. However, even if we do discover exactly how the conscious brain-process actually works, unless we understand its purpose - the significant human truth that can flow from this process and that justifies it - we shall be no further forward. If scientific understanding of the physical process of consciousness is necessary, let it be attempted after either it, or our own supraconscious reason, has revealed the human truth to us. There are two good reasons for this. (1) Knowledge resulting from scientific investigation in the conscious sphere constitutes misunderstanding because, while it shall include relative truths, it cannot embrace absolute truth, and because acceptance of scientific knowledge is likely to turn us away from the true, supraconscious road to human truth. (2) If we first allow supraconsciousness to reveal the truth to us, there shall be no need (unless it be a medical one) for science to investigate consciousness.

Let me try to deal with the actual mechanics of consciousness, the subject presumably of interest to bio-physicists. Suppose a man to be walking along a woodland track. In the background are trees, green leaves, intermittent glimpses of sunny blue sky. His attention is general, flitting from one sight or sound to another and taking no particular note of anything. All the same, each sight is conveyed to his eyes by light and translated into a momentary picture by his brain. This picture might then be immediately discarded, or a detail quickly added to a stored memory of this generalised scene. One can imagine such sequences being conveyed by interconnecting cells and electro chemical impulses. But suppose that some large animal suddenly appears. The instinctive, wilful, conscious focul-point of self, with command of the conscious mind's attention and override connections to all motor-nervous systems, stops and concentrates on this animal to the exclusion of all else excepting for possible weapons to grasp, avenues of escape or means of cover. The animal turns and runs away. As it does so the man recognises from its features that it is a harmless deer. He stands down the emergency systems, allowing his body gradually to relax and recover. It was his mind's close attention to the animal's character and shape that eventually told him it was a harmless deer, and at that point the mind's emergency phase was ended. As the woodland walk returns to its peaceful norm, the self continues giving some of its attention to scouring memory for similar deer-pictures in order to make up a more recognisable head-on picture for the future. To continue, click here