Humantruth - SupraC - Branch 13. Understanding Consciousness - continued
I have to admit that pure reasoning, without basic dependence upon scientific fact, is difficult, but it is necessary to the understanding of consciousness or of anything else. To comprehend any matter it is necessary to understand all the essentials of all matters. That is the province of the postconscious mind. We don't yet understand what that must be like because our selves are familiar (fairly familiar) with our limited conscious minds whilst the postconscious is out-of-bounds to our selves. In the conscious sphere, when we seek to understand and master any subject we specialise. We concentrate on that subject absolutely, as far as possible to the exclusion of everything else. The picture of the absent-minded professor, which this conjures up, is thought to be a good thing because this professor produces accurate results. But it is a bad thing in that it does not relate to absolute truth. The truth about much scientific research is that it is unnecessary, money-oriented, or ultimately harmful. The scientist should be aware of this, and put the awareness first. The truth about bio-physicists' research into consciousness is that this is unnecessary research because it shall produce incomplete understanding and because supraconsciousness is a far better route, by way of comprehension of all essential matters, to whatever understanding of this subsidiary process may be found to be really necessary.
The scientific thinker is a member of the science institution, just as the monetary thinker is a member of the financial institution and the journalist a member of the media institution. Each member's thinking is specialised and limited to his or her particular field, but their institutions together form the Machine, and the leaders of the institutions contribute to Machine-thinking in conformity with the Machine-norm. So our thinking in this present reality is not only confined to the conscious mind; it is channelled into specialist streams which form the Machine whose collective thinking then guides its direction and our behaviour. The whole world is dominated by the Machine, and by its principal arm, the competitive money economy. So human thinking everywhere bypasses our chief and most advanced faculty, the postconscious mind, and largely ignores that which is this mind's function - truth. This means that the existing human race is an inadequate expression of, and a bad example of, the phenomenon of consciousness.
Let's have another look at the way in which the human conscious mind works in our existing society. Average persons regard the self as a small apple in a big barrel of mostly competitive other apples. Yet they regard themselves as being as good as any other, and as having equal rights. Even so, they acknowledge that some others are cleverer, better educated or wealthier than they and so more valued. Their views are contradictory, and conscious reality - the Machine - accepts the situation, and that they must make what they can of it. True consciousness - supraconsciousness - would regard the situation as wrong, and would set about putting it right. It would propose a society of give-and-take by which all would be given equal benefit, treatment, value and regard.
It is essential to remember that the human self is little more than a focul-point, and that the person's character is a selection which that self makes from among many possible characteristics in the person's conscious mind, which that mind pushes forward as its preferred selection, persuading the self to accept that selection as legitimate and justified in the light of the person's attributes, lessons of experience, mental strength and agility, degree of confidence, emotional vulnerability, extent of conscience and degree of moral awareness. Having accepted these characteristics the self tries to assert, or if needs be change them, where they arise in the conscious mind in which it has influence. Otherwise, where the characteristics arise from conscience or even directly from the postconscious mind, the self may adopt them even against its own material interests, according to the degree to which it is inspired by moral awareness, or may not adopt them if it is dragged back by self-interest. There is no intrinsic individual character, each of us being the result of differing groups of all these influences, and the lesson to be drawn is the importance of making our reality accord with our true nature and both our reality and our thinking accord with our postconscious intellect.
A study of humanity in its existing reality shall not give a true explanation of consciousness. The reason for this is that throughout our history the conscious mind has held sway in a Machine-world. We have consistently refused to recognise the postconscious mind and so have failed to discover and realise truth. The discovery of truth is the objective of intellect, the basis of agreement which is the vital foundation of a humanly true society. In order to rectify the situation, we need to open to the postconscious mind, the ultimate degree of consciousness. We need to become supraconscious.
The postconscious mind is a mass of neurons, axons, dendrites and synapses capable of inter-connections and cross-connections of the order of ten to the power of several million noughts and dedicated to truth. Truth about a particular topic is arrived at when no positive connection can be found which adds to it, nor any negative connection which can take away from it. The construction of truth is furthered by the cross-connection of many related topics into a main subject, then by the inter-connection of all subjects, and so on. But this whole structure of hierarchical reason must always be open to any new thought arising which may affect it marginally or profoundly, from the remotest past topic to the newest construction, regardless of the upheaval caused where this requires that countless millions of connections be broken and remade. At the apex of this process, when every possible inter-connection and cross-reference has been made, whole truth results. This is truth as far as we can take it, in our place in the universe, or need to take it for the sake of Earth, and all life on Earth, including the human race whose intellect gives it special responsibility - HUMANTRUTH.
As I have said, the postconscious mind is free and independent. It is probably the case that most postconscious minds, even where they have been totally ignored by the self excepting, to some degree, for conscience, have nevertheless proceeded with thinking towards humantruth. Though individuals may know their own, ie conscious minds, they may not have any idea what their postconscious knows unless and until they question it closely, about a weighty ethical problem perhaps. If it has already dealt with this problem the postconscious will produce the true solution, much to the individual's surprise. However, this truth is most unlikely to be immediately accepted in a Machine society which depends on the conscious mind and mistakenly feels the conscious to be reliable on the grounds that its thinking is open to the self's critical examination and correction and therefore accountable to the person, whereas the postconscious is not.
This dichotomy between the conscious and postconscious minds makes the dissemination of humantruth difficult. For example, if Tom is not supraconscious he shall be unwilling or unable to accept Harry's true propositions because, although Tom's postconscious knows them to be true his self (excluded from his own postconscious) is persuaded by his conscious mind (unable to recognise truth) that they are false. To overcome the difficulty, more and more individuals require to be persuaded of the need to open to their postconscious minds - to become supraconscious.
When an intellectual race has fulfilled its mental potential - when it has discovered truth and realised it in the world - supraconsciousness shall be its natural state of mind. Such a race of beings shall have put behind them the struggle that now faces humanity; the struggle of the self to break free from the dominance of its conscious mind and the Machine, and submit to its postconscious.
The key to breaking through to supraconsciousness is the self. I have described the self, at present exclusively confined to the conscious sphere (excepting for conscience), as 'surfing' the conscious mind, just as the browser surfs the internet. Of course, the self does not actually move about within the conscious, any more than the browser moves around the world as it visits various web-sites. The self, I deduce, has a complex system of receptor and transmission tracks which run parallel to the memory banks and thought processes of the conscious mind. At any time, the thought, or the associated group of thoughts, emotions and memories whose strength predominates become the self, in that they become the focus of attention in the conscious mind. This systematic process describes the phenomenon of consciousness, in animals and in humans as they presently stand. The change from human consciousness to supraconsciousness would have profound consequences, yet it involves very little initial change in brain processes. The self would surf the conscious mind in just the same way, but it would lay down a new, major, permanent two-way relay, terminating at the entrance to the postconscious mind with a great receptor and transmitter which afforded the postconscious mind full access to, and prior influence upon, the instinctive wilful self and every cell of the conscious mind, enabling the postconscious to discover truth to humanity so that we determine to realise it in our world.
How do these different parts and functions of the brain communicate? It seems certain that postconscious reason must use some kind of code less cumbersome than human language. Perhaps the conscious mind also uses a code, as well as being affected by all kinds of emotional signals. It is possible that facilities for interpretation into language are inserted here and there. One thing is clear - that human languages are formed chiefly to express thoughts, events and feelings relevant to Machine reality in the conscious sphere, using many words which, because they refer to that false reality, cannot be used to express postconscious truth or to describe an alternative humanly true reality.
While it is to be hoped that in the future we shall embrace supraconsciousness at an early age, at present the struggle for it has to begin with an act of will. The conscious self continues to surf the conscious mind and to communicate with that mind and relay its thoughts by means of language, but its chief and most frequent contact is with the postconscious. The self submits to the postconscious, and makes the entire thinking of its conscious mind subject to the postconscious. By this means, whereas the self's conduct had previously been directed by instinct, its choices and decisions governed by the thinking of its conscious mind and the conscious mind's opinions and beliefs governed or at least influenced by its experience of dominance by Machine-reality, now the entire human ethos and reality become subject to the ultimate true intelligence of the postconscious mind.
The conscious self now doubts, questions and criticises everything, challenging the normal acceptances of the conscious mind, its own and others. One difficulty in this is that normal acceptance is founded on the world reality which actually exists. Another difficulty is that Machine-reality forms the present foundation of our lives upon which, false though it is, we, in all kinds of contradictory and competitive ways, depend. A third difficulty is that whereas our conscious minds think in separated and differentiated compartments, postconscious thinking, with the aim of setting up a simple, equal, humanly true society, must go through the extremely complex process of truly relating everything with everything else, and unravelling the false tangle amassed by limited and falsely motivated conscious thinking throughout the years of our civilised history.
Now we come to the crux of the meaning of consciousness, and of the postconscious which is central to it. The function of the postconscious is truth, or, in relation to ourselves and our world,HUMANTRUTH, and this may be fully known only through supraconsciousness but it might be briefly described as - ALL THAT IS GOOD AND RIGHT FOR HUMANITY, EARTH, AND ALL OTHER LIFE ON EARTH. It might further be described as follows:
In relation to the right way for us to live, humantruth is a quality of caring and compassionate goodness which is supported by pure supraconscious reason and which, because it is humantrue, shall come to be accompanied by the most powerful of human emotions. Humantruth is supported by pure reason because it is better on all counts than uncaring, aggressive incomplete calculation. Pure reason produces humantruth, which includes the principle of equality by which the actual physical and mental differences between individuals are compensated for by the strong giving and the weak receiving until all are brought to an equal level of welfare and regard. Humantruth includes all other qualities and practical principles which optimum reason supports. The musical quality of perfect pitch or harmony. The quality of beauty in a flower, or bird. The practical principles of fairness, forgiveness and tolerance, also of consideration and forbearance in human relationships. Truth is that structure of reason in which no fault can be found. It suggests that which is level and plumb; straight as an arrow; perfectly honest; also that which is perfect in concept and spirit. Above all I take it to mean utterly complete reasoning of all that is knowable; a state of being that is dissatisfied with anything less than truth, that is devoted to pure reason and accepts responsibility for conducting its physical existence accordingly; the source of right, honest and good morality on which that state of being is founded. And in humanly true society all such qualities and practical principles are upheld by common, supraconscious, agreed awareness.
This is one and the same truth for all postconscious minds, so that a supraconscious society shall be humanly true because all members are truly agreed. Once the self has come firmly under the prior guiding influence of the postconscious that influence shall also govern the thought of the conscious mind and the whole behaviour of each human being.
In order to achieve supraconsciousness we must correct our previous wrong thinking, and that shall be a task for our conscious minds, guided by our postconscious. This is a hard enough task for those who are willing to undertake it, perhaps those with the smallest axe to grind or the least to lose. We have to recognise that the middle and upper rungs of the hierarchical ladders of privilege power and authority tend to be occupied by those with the most conventionally-conditioned minds. We also have to see that all the conditioning influences - of upbringing, education and employment - are contained by the conscious sphere and justified by incomplete conscious thinking.
To deal supraconsciously with current issues is difficult because there are big differences between moral solutions to problems of existing reality and those of a humantrue reality. The main difference is that in most cases those existing problems would not crop up in an ideal society. People whom this present society draws into immorality would not be immoral in a humantrue society. These factors must always be born in mind during the transition from a false to a true society. For a time it shall be difficult to avoid existing society's concepts of crime and punishment, but that punishment should be tempered by the fact that the main guilt for our crimes and evil doings must be born by our past failure to become supraconscious, and by the evil influences and pressures of this false society which we have allowed to develop.
To help in understanding our present problems, and in finding solutions which bridge the gap between the present false reality and a true future, consider the following :
A QUESTION OF LAW.
The Chilean ex-dictator General Pinochet faces charges of inhumanity. To his enemies he is a torturer and murderer who must be punished by law. To his supporters he is a man who benefited his country by ruling it well, if ruthlessly in suppressing opposition. In fact he was potentially as kindly a man as most others, but one determined on accomplishing the task of stabilising his country and rebuilding its money-economy, using whatever immoral means he thought necessary, in return for the privileges and rewards which our false society believes to be due to supreme leaders. We can be sure that in his own eyes he is not evil, but a good general who did not shrink from using measures commonly applied by dictators for the benefit of the middle or moneyed classes represented by the elite, by crushing the popular opposition represented by revolutionaries. No doubt it is right that Pinochet should be tried and made an example of, but in laying the blame for his crimes it should be pointed out, above all, that these are crimes of the Machine - the system, as well as of the individuals who serve the system.
A QUESTION OF PHILOSOPHY.
It is not possible to argue with an academic Philosopher excepting on his own terms. He tries to extract truth from the conscious mind and its false reality to which he is confined because he does not recognise the postconscious. So the argument shall be lost in a maze of trails leading to numerous thought-constructions, his own and those laid down by others throughout history. These thought-constructions cannot be ignored by the Philosophical thinker because they obey his rule that to be true they must be proven by evidence and argument. But they are relative truths, each standing alone. They cannot combine to build whole truth. They can only be marshalled by misdirected conscious reason in order to form new ammunition for further fruitless argument.
Academic Philosophers acknowledge that relative truth is incomplete yet, because they do not recognise the existence of the postconscious, they do try but fail to put all these relative truths together and to come up with absolute truth. Consequently they do not believe absolute truth to be possible. But absolute truth is possible to the whole mind. Instead of relative truths coagulating, anchored to their limited subjects, they may be extended by the postconscious and opened up to all its thinking until, when all possible inter-connections are made, absolute truth is discovered.
As far as my encounters with Philosophers go, they understandably resist the idea of a postconscious mind which penetrates to truth independently of the self-conducted research of their own conscious minds, out of sight of their examining eye and free of the old-established rules of their discipline. They must see what their fruitless history indicates, that the conscious mind, directed by the wilful self and subject to the false influence of existing reality, cannot discover truth. That the postconscious is not subject to such interference is the very quality that is essential to a faculty of truth - freedom and independence.
A QUESTION OF MONEY:
Human consciousness, within the Machine, carries an awareness of money, a false awareness because its ramifications are not humanly true. The money-system intervenes beween us and our necessary supportive, co-operative activities. As a result we do things, make things, and provide things not for necessity but for money. And we don't do whatever we do voluntarily unless we already have money. We have to be gainfully employed producing things in order to earn money to buy the things we produce. It is the Machine that employs us, but if it doesn't want us we become unemployed, receiving little or no money and so able to buy little or nothing.
Based on the money system we have become a consumer society, also a meritocracy, devoted to inequality. Beyond need, the Machine produces goods which we are enticed to want, which it can then sell in order to complete the needless and pointless cycle. The money we don't spend we save. That money is lent to persons wishing to buy 'beyond their means', who pay 'interest' on their loan, some of which is passed to us as 'earnings' on our savings. In this way money becomes a commodity exerting its own commercial pressures. This is part of the artificial reality of which academic Philosophy has to take account, and which falsifies the meaning of consciousness.
This false concept of money has produced the notion of progress, as a good and necessary human compulsion. Most of this progress is actually AUTOPROGRESSION. Autoprogression follows from competitive ambition and the need or wish to make more money by increasing profitability. Some of this autoprogression brings a certain degree of human good, such as the development of some genuinely vital medicines, but mostly it is to create ever increasing new demand by the offer of more and more technically advanced, efficiently produced, and therefore more profitable, yet superfluous, goods and services.
I have said already that critical awareness of the false concept of money and of many other things, is necessary to our understanding of consciousness, otherwise, if the state of our consciousness remains impure we shall never understand what it really means. As an example, many economists study the money system but on its own terms, so that they never acquire true human understanding of it. The same can be said of the study of consciousness, if it confines itself to the field of false conscious reality.
CONCLUSION
Steven Pinker said 'The big philosophical questions will never be answered by us because our brains are not capable of solving them. And I don't hanker after an explanation because we can understand the human brain without it.' It is a habit of experts to claim that if they haven't found an answer it is impossible to find. Pinker approaches the study of consciousness in the same way - as a purely practical matter in which there is no place for ethical considerations. Physicists have taken a similar approach to questions of creation, evolution and god. Being unable to find satisfactory answers to these questions in terms of science, they have gone to the opposite extreme of toying with the possibility that god the creator might exist after all. It is not that our brains are incapable of answering these questions but that we rely on the lesser conscious mind, jumping to premature conclusions and relying primarily on fact. The conscious mind prefers fact precisely because it can master it. Pure and utter reason is beyond the conscious to comprehend; that is the province of the postconscious.
If it is to achieve complete understanding, any study of consciousness, or of any other subject pertaining to humantruth, must culminate in submitting all questions to the ultimate reasoning faculty of consciousness with which humans are endowed, the postconscious mind, whose function is truth. At that point the studied becomes the studier, because the postconscious mind is infinitely greater than that which represents the conscious mind, the wilful conscious self which presumes to be our master. The conscious self cannot understand the big philosophical questions - Pinker is right to that extent - but our potential is the supraconscious self which should submit to the postconscious, the mind which can understand; which can answer all questions.
Scientists are equipped to reveal the exact physical mechanics of consciousness. Here, for what it's worth, is my own simplified explanation. Eyesight builds up a picture in the mind through a multitude of cells each of which recognises a minute part of the scene observed. The actual electro-chemical components of the picture are transcended by its significance to the intellect. It seems safe to deduce that thoughts are transmitted in a similar way. When one neuron sparks others, the numerous and various interconnections, each conveying one of countless billions of possible tiny fractions of meaning, combine to form a thought, like a picture, which excites the attention of the self which, in turn, introduces it to every other related thought so that eventually its significance takes its place in the person's whole mental register. The key to understanding this, the mechanics of intellect, which can produce profound and complex thought, is appreciation of the staggeringly enormous, almost infinite multiplication of simple signals, each very slightly different from its neighbours.
Consciousness must have arisen from a strong desire for vital information causing the evolution of thought transmitters and by their combining to build an impression of our world, made up of sights, sounds, feelings and thoughts, coming together and attracting the attention of the self. Particularly in humans this impression of the world came to include an impression of the self, both as a separate entity felt inside, and as a person contributing to the reality outside, when groups of transmitters were especially devoted to such self-awareness, recognising it as essential to co-ordinated behaviour, also, hopefully, to intelligently humane and co-operative behaviour.
When not only the majority of human beings but also the experts among them can be hoodwinked by existing reality, it is uncertain whether our race shall ever discover the truth about itself, and then fulfil itself. Some maintain that it is impossible, therefore that it is futile for the individual to be concerned. But this truth is our potential, and even if humanity is destined never to realise that potential, aware individuals are bound unceasingly to pursue it.
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 :
CURRENT : 13. Understanding Consciousness :
REMAINING : 14. Bottom Line : 15. Brain-Mind Relations: 16. Open Letter to Philosophers : 17. The Mind and Philosophy : 18. Self Twixt 2 Minds: 19. The Holographic Dimension:20. Transhumanism Transcended: 21. Mind, Will and Self
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