Consciousness and emotion (Introduction)

by dhw, Friday, October 28, 2011, 15:01 (4754 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: What about consciousness. We have discussed it enough times. I still think it is an emergent quantum property of the brain. God hides behind the wall of quantum uncertainty and is joined to our consciousness. I'm sure he planned it this way. God by definition is the consciousness of the universal intelligence.

Here is another view of brain activity, not quite under our wakeful control:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=sparks-in-your-sleep&WT.mc_id=SA_C...

Although this doesn’t deal directly with emotion, let’s keep it under the new heading, so that we leave free will as a separate topic.

Under “Information and free will”, Romansh drew our attention to Susan Blackmore’s article, and I suggested that we had different levels of consciousness. The above article (or the part I could read without registering) tackles the equally mysterious subject of the subconscious mind. When you’re asleep “your brain spins fanciful ideas that your waking mind might have filtered out.” I’m sure we’ve all had experience of this, but creative work takes us at least two levels higher (and maybe this does have some bearing on free will). The subconscious is certainly the source of ideas, and as we write or compose, we consciously record what the subconscious provides us with, while at the same time consciously (= a higher level) monitoring it, editing it or even, as I have occasionally experienced, fighting it. Generally, the subconscious wins – one has to have faith that it knows what it’s doing – but that involves a decision from yet another level (the will?). As regards the visual arts, in which I have zero creative competence, I’ve frequently quoted Michelangelo, who said the statue was already in the marble, and of course Dada, Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism made a virtue of their dependence on the subconscious mind.

All of this ties in with the comment made by the author of the article: “Our brain seems to have a mind of its own”. Not only that, but it seems to provide us with information, judgements, intuitions that are sometimes far more reliable than our deliberate, conscious musings. Go one step further, and you come to psychic experiences, in which again something appears to take over from our conscious control. Well, is it the brain? Are our own material cells actually producing these things independently of the person we think we are? David, you call consciousness an “emergent quantum property of the brain”, which makes the material cells the source. So what role do you think your joined-up God plays in our awareness, our emotions, our ideas? (Once more, this is a genuine question. I do not have any solution to the mystery of the conscious/subconscious.)