Truth is counter-intuitive

Ahnimus

This is from Susan Blackmore's Conversations on Consciousness. I don't particularly like Dan Denett's view on this type of stuff, I much prefer that of Paul and Pat Churchland or Bernard Baars. However, the section below I found quite interesting. Let me know what you think.

Conversations on Consciousness by Susan Blackmore wrote:

Sue: Are you equating subjective experience with having a point of view?

Dan: Yes, but having a point of view is not a simple matter. There's an easy sense of having a point of view where lobsters have a point of view, and mosquitoes have a point of view. With a little stretching and pulling you might even say that a pine tree had apoint of view; that is to say a pine tree responds to the world selectively - there's only some features of the environment around the pine tree that it's sensitive to and the rest of the world is indiscernible, as it were, by the pine tree.

But that's indiscernible 'as it were'. In our case there's 'real discerning'; and 'real discerning', in the eyes of many people who have thought about this, has got to be worlds away from the sort of discriminative capacities of that pine tree or that mosquito.

This creates an artefact in the bad sense of that term. To many people there's an imaginative chasm between us with our 'real discerning' and our 'real points of view', and the mere robots, or discrimination-but-not-sentient things. I think that the gap between me and a pine tree, or me and a mosquito, is huge but it's traversable by a series of steps. But I do have to say that some of the steps are quite counter-intuitive, and there's not yet in place the sort of firm 'take it or leave it' science that can force people to abandon their intuitions.

Right now it's a struggle to get people working in consciousness even to think about abandoning their intuitions. They have these powerful, seductive intuitions about how it has to be, or how it can't be, that are just wrong. Nothing new there! We've always had false intuitions about the way the world is, and counter-intuitive science has come along and changed them. But in this case, we don't yet know which intuitions to abandon and why. So the problem is very much a problem of persuasion and self-persuasion and a sort of self-manipulation of one's own imagination, which is scary to many people. So instead they try to have a theory which doesn't require them to tweak their intuitions at all, and then they end up down one cul-de-sac or another, because the theories that are not counter-intuitive are just wrong.

sponger

I've given this subject my occasional attention ever since a friend of mine about 15 years ago said, "Everything is obvious." I think what he meant was that the truth is what we've taught ourselves ignore to the point where we begin missing the obvious as we reinforce what we want to believe in its place.

Between the subconscious and the conscious is a filter that decides what information passes from one end to the other. The filter "prioritizes" our thoughts, so to speak, and "edits" them for the sake of efficiency.

I've scoured the search engines in the past to find a study I heard on the news once, but I haven't been able to find it. Basically, it said that when the human ego has been bruised (ie "offended"), it sends out signals that closely resemble the same signals that are sent out when we feel physical pain.

So, if our mind's filter has the job of filtering thoughts we don't need or want, then my guess is that it probably filters out the ones that cause us discomfort. In which case, I don't deem it entirely unreasonable to guess that it filters out information that can be damaging to our ego, which in turn saves us from the sensation closely resembling that of physical pain.

And that's my guess as to why the truth can so easily become counter-intuitive. We intuitively filter it out from time to time through a process that takes place between the subconciousness and the conciousness.

Ahnimus

Good post Sponger!

I agree with you, although I'm not sure to what degree the filter between consiousness and sub-consciousness matters or if it's a different mechanism all together. I was reading earlier that Francis Crick says there is an exponential number of neurons to each NCC (Neural Correlate of Consciousness). This number is in the area of 1,000 to 10,000 neurons to each NCC. I suppose this would give us the output of thousands of neurons at once, or like you say would the voice of many not be heard? I've heard similar theories before that conscious thoughts are simply the winners of a neurological vote. I don't see any reason why that can't be true. But it could also be true that NCCs only develop for groups of neurons that accumulate a certain mass. Also we do experience moments of conscious dissonance, where we struggle between two opposing thoughts.

Anyway, seems like Crick had some insight into that filter from a neuroscience perspective, you may want to check him out. I agree that our brains reject ideas that cause discomfort.

sponger

Actually, you're on the right track when you say that conscious thoughts are the winners of neurological votes. Consider that our neurological determiners are basically emotions. Emotions are what drive the mechanisms within our brains.

With that in mind, consider that there is a theory out there which says that our thoughts are oragnized by emotional coding. That is, our emotions vary to an extent that they create a hypothetical "card-catalog" of our thoughts.

So, when we choose our thoughts from a choice of an exponential number of variables, exactly which thoughts make it through is dependant on the relationship those thoughts have with our emotions.

But, the question you raise is whether there is any method to this madness when considering that there are more neurons than can be practically put to use.

To answer that, I feel inclined to point out a case in point, which is the case of Einstein's brain. Aside from the computational part of his brain being 15% larger than the average person's, he was also missing most of the depth in the groove that separates the left and right hemispheres of his brain.

It is believe that the lack of definition of that groove allowed the two hemispheres to communicate more easily, and could possibly explain why he described his thoughts as being abstract and relying heavily on symbols. Perhaps our finite and language-based thought patterns are the result of our two hemispheres trying to communicate? Meanwhile, Einstein needed no such crutches.

So, that leads me to believe that we are perfectly capable of organizing our thoughts into meaningful and practical tools for analysis, but that there are certain inhibitors that we have yet to fully identify.

gue_barium

July 21, 1989 - Mike Tyson knocks out "The Truth" in just 93 seconds.