Forgotten Decisions

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There's no reason to think that people are able to remember everything they think about. We are constantly going through internal ruminations, whether we are paying attention to them or not. I don't think that the internal monologue is something that we turn on and off at will or consciously. I'm not sure if the stream of consciousness that is verbal is always running but when it is running our focus on it fluctuates. Sometimes one can really focus on observing the random thoughts that happen inside the mind. Sometimes one can direct the stream and try to focus where it goes. Sometimes one is completely unable to grasp the internal messages. 

Have you ever felt that when you forget whether or not you locked the door it's because you're not sure if you remember locking it just now or the 50 other times you locked it before? Habitual behaviors become automatic. You don't know you're doing them. This might be the same about thoughts in that some thoughts you have so often that you forget that you had them. For example, when you drive toward your old house because you have gone that way so many times your subconscious, which directs your actions, now just goes there unless consciously directed otherwise. Before you realize it you're already there. This habituation only occurs after one has deliberately directed consciousness repeatedly. One can create these habituations consciously but once it becomes a habit one can forget their role in its creation. 

Maybe one becomes distracted from their internal monologue long enough to forget it exists. It's still somewhere softly analyzing and contemplating in the background. Maybe one is imagining how the next day will develop while watching a TV show. Their mind is only taking in stimulus but every so often their stream of consciousness breaks through and one is interrupted by an already occurring mental conversation. You pick up a few things about going to your favorite restaurant but then you get distracted again and it's such a mundane thought you disregard it. Then, the next day, when internally debating where to eat you decide to go to your favorite restaurant. The decision was actually decided by yourself long before you realize it. Or at least it was primed. Like when someone tells you the wrong lyric and when you hear the song you can't hear anything other than the wrong word that sounds correct now. 

Can one take credit for the forgotten conscious influences one inflicts on one's self? The forgotten fleeting thoughts that are like dreams. Whispy like fog. Like when the right word is on the tip of your tongue. In the back of your mind. Consciousness is like a river in that it is always changing and one day it will not be in the same place. Is it still the same river? Are you responsible for the changes?

Am I a product of only deterministic scientific happenstance? Causes and effects that are completely out of my control? If it is possible to willfully create habituation then it would provide a mechanism for free will to manifest itself in reality and not just in concept. If this mechanism is real then that would mean that it exists within the nervous system and is theoretically identifiable. If free will is a physical reality then determinism has a flaw. This would introduce some amount of unpredictability when it comes to assuming that the future is a series of determined, and predictable causes and effects. 

But what about the thoughts that cause the habituation; how can these thoughts be justified if they just erupt out of nowhere? How can free will be proven if the proposed mechanism relies on thoughts that emerge due to the prior causes that are determined by physics? If thoughts are not purely a reaction to the current environment then maybe thoughts arise as a direct result of a free will mechanism that is not verbal, or has become subconscious prior to being verbal? 

Maybe the first few years of childhood is a period where a system starts to develop that allows for self-observation and mental manipulation. As the system for self-directed behavior matures the person is consciously learning how to learn, how to speak, how to listen to themself, how the world works, how to imagine multiple outcomes, and how to choose different directions. This system of different sectors of the brain networking together to create something new allows for the development of consciousness and the potential for free will. 

As time passes the act of willful self-determination becomes almost entirely habitual and because humans do not develop the concept of consciousness until later in life the subjective perspective that includes both the verbal and nonverbal streams of consciousnesses we collectively call consciousness is almost indescribable. The brain is both emotional and intellectual and yet its functions are elusive to the observer. The system becomes habitual enough at an early enough age that the experience of directing our bodies is forgotten. It goes underground but still provides a mechanism for free will.

As language develops a child begins to incorporate verbal communication into the preexisting paradigm. Self-expression begins to become codified, constrained, and efficiently communicable. As one interacts with reality and develops a language to communicate with others one begins to see the world in a different way.  In a way that is constrained by language. When one is aware of one's own attempts to direct one's own path via the verbal route then consciousness becomes possible to communicate about but is not the sole arbiter of free action. 

In order to understand this concept of a mechanism, rooted in consciousness, that allows for free will one has to overcome the habituation process and redirect the flow of verbal consciousness, knowing that it isn't the only controlling factor. Learning to control one's emotions becomes another skill in strengthening the potential for free will. Another skill that is needed is the ability to examine past failings and plan to correct them with repetitive thoughts and actions. 

If one finds that every time they encounter a certain emotionally distressing situation they act in a way that is dysfunctional then they can make a plan to change how they think about this situation, how they act before, during, and after the situation occurs, and try to understand the underlying emotional states that the situation produces. The more one is self-aware the more they can alter the way they react to situations or attempt to avoid them altogether. This kind of self-awareness is not entirely concerned with internal states but also takes into account the environment that they exist within. The ability to engage in free will is tempered by a person's understanding of everything that can and will affect them. 

The concept of responsibility is not the same as the concept of free will. People are responsible for their actions, generally speaking, regardless of the perception that they are in control of their actions. A drunk person is responsible for the consequences of their actions just as a psychotic person is responsible for the consequences of their actions. They may not have any insight into the conscious thoughts that existed prior to or during the act but from the perspective of others, they are the ones to blame. They are the ones to set apart and deal with. Attempting to accept all actions as a matter of fate is a recipe for chaos and discounts the ability of people to control themselves, even without a well developed moral system or strengthened free will. 

In conclusion, in regard to thoughts, we are mostly unaware. When we are aware we have an opportunity to self-direct and with enough repetition, we can create new automatic or partially automatic habits. We can consciously control unconscious behaviors through this process. I postulate that before language this ability may have been more open to us and over time our subconscious takes more and more control. Our relationship to consciousness changes as we acquire language. Or maybe it is only after we acquire sophisticated language and maturity that we start to be able to review our thoughts and bring them into some kind of control. It is difficult to halt the momentum of cause and effect that propels us forward but if one can reflect on and redirect their thoughts they just might be able to make lasting change in how they think, how they act, and who they are. 

NOT Conscious

The hardest thing to do is convince someone you're not conscious. People see consciousness everywhere. They apply it to wind and rain. Mountains and rodents. We can personify anything including the universe and god and gods and vegetables. We tell stories of eggs that fall off of castles and bunnies that have tea parties. Everything is a metaphor for ourselves and we are everyone.

This is partly because humans aren't the only things that are conscious. That being said I also do not believe that rocks are conscious. The jury is out on plants and fungi which are mysteriously intelligent. I believe that consciousness exists on a spectrum but only after a few criteria are met. In order to be conscious one must be living. There has to be something more than mere mineral.

Maybe being in nature is soothing because it allows you to change the state of the consciousness that you are in. You can go to the desert to be truly alone. Alone with your thoughts. Alone but not alone in your environment. Out there somewhere there are creatures.

You can go to the forest and surround yourself with ancient trees and listen to the wind. I'd believe trees are conscious before I believed the wind is conscious.

I am not sure where the absolute line is for myself in regards to consciousness. I am not sure there needs to be a clear demarcation when it comes to consciousness. I do not think that people require a clearly formed understanding of consciousness to have empathy for other things, including plants and animals, and even inanimate things such as wind or mountains. Personifying things around us is very natural. When we are born it is very important that a child starts creating mental models of the people around them. By creating models the baby can start to predict what their parents might do and try to understand how to communicate with them. By modeling the environment and generating the concept of agency a baby can start to predict the interactions between agents and objects. A baby immediately starts to differentiate between the significant agents around them and the relatively predictable objects such as tables and binkys.

Agents are party identified by their ability to create change either in their physical location or by changing the physical location of something else. When a person picks up a glass of water they are changing the physical location of the glass and the water and now can be identified as an agent. A mover of things. An actor. Agents act upon other things and cause change to occur.  The day that the glass picks up the person then we might call the glass an agent and suspect that it is conscious.

A trait that should be looked for when determining if an entity is conscious or not is to ask, "is the entity capable of agency?". Can it make alterations to its environment? Nearly all animals are agents in that they act upon the world and cause change. The wind does this so then why wouldn't a gust of wind be considered an agent?

Maybe agency is not enough to call something conscious? Maybe it is and maybe by a very loose definition, the wind could be considered an agent in a non-personified way. Maybe the only concepts we have about agency come from a personal and human perspective. If so then the only model we have of agency is of humans, first by observing parents and then by observing the self. We then apply this concept to other things even if it doesn't apply or is only slightly accurate.

Maybe the wind isn't an agent and it is certainly not conscious because my concept of consciousness is rooted in the belief that consciousness emerges from organized biological material such as neurons, muscles, blood, and hormones. Maybe neurons are the most important element in the formation of consciousness but I'm not sure that that is the case.

Maybe each cell is conscious and with complex networks of communication among cells, consciousness is at the apex of that increase in complexity. As an organism evolves toward more complex forms of assembly and more specialization and diversification of cell types along with the bilingual nature that must occur when cells communicate with necessary bacteria and other microbiomes.

In fact, there are more bacterial cells in your body than human cells. There are roughly 40 trillion bacterial cells in your body and only 30 trillion human cells."
-https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/gut-microbiome-and-health

Maybe the communication network of biological structures is necessary for consciousness. It is the unintended output of trillions of cells and trillions of bacteria trying to communicate with each other. In order to maintain the megastructure that is the human body creates.

Maybe the difference in humans is that the cells and bacteria in humans have a far more efficient way of communicating than other creatures. Encoded in our DNA and in the DNA of the bacteria there exists a unique instruction or schematic that fundamentally alters the megastructure and allows for an ultra-efficient communication system. One that is so efficient that it produces more than required to survive. Maybe the extra energy that is conserved from this efficiency can be utilized to improve the structure. It can be diverted to the brain and to creating systems that lead to successful gene transfer and multiplication.

Is it the cell's job to multiply? Is the whole system a mechanism of experimentation? Is resource allocation something that can be applied to the body? Or is it just a metaphor taken from the financial world?

Are bacteria small enough that they perceive cells and other microscopic biological structures in an unrelatable way?

Or is consciousness just an epiphenomenon? Just a ghost in the machine? An inert, neutral, unaffecting, wisp of entropy? The waste product of an overactive mind.

Of course, it is another example of the personification of entities that I relate the biological structures to the architectural and electrical systems I see in my life. The macro-environment that I occupy is a system that I have an elaborate model that is generalizable to other systems. I have a more or less organized set of beliefs about what a social system looks like so I can apply those interactions to the complex interactions occurring inside of the body. The idea that it is social is one of personification. Another act of projecting my own perspective onto something else.

While cells are molecular machines and do use molecules to communicate there is no evidence that they communicate in a similar way to what humans do. Proteins do not have mouths, lungs, or lips to make sounds and they do not have legs or arms to gesticulate their thoughts.

The cause and effects chains are highly complex in biological structures.

But what about plants?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvBlSFVmoaw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RpwW9Lw2Ku4

Plants have very similar cellular structures to humans. The structures of plants are also complex and even if there are no neurons in plants there are definitely communication systems.

Is consciousness a form of communication? If it is then it isn't necessary to have neurons to communicate and therefore it isn't necessary for consciousness. But is it sufficient to have consciousness?

Is all communication a form of consciousness?

What is communication? Communication is the output of information that is then interpreted and comprehended by an input location. Things that communicate are required to be able to take in information and to output information.

If consciousness requires communication then that would mean that the wind is not conscious because any message interpreted by a human would never be falsifiable. There is no way to prove that the output information was comprehended accurately. This is why God does not exist as anyone claiming to be in communication with God can not be falsified. It may be true but by that standard, anything may be true. If the goal is to arrive at the truth then one must be able to rule out impossibilities.

So...

How would a person convince another person they were not conscious? Other than passing out.

Two men enter a room and sit down opposite to each other. The room is well lit but not too bright. There is a table in between the men and there is a small spread of cheese snacks. Each man has their own water bottle and one man's job is to convince the other man that they are not conscious.

The second the other man starts to talk the first man will automatically assume they are conscious. The second the other man reaches for food the first man will assume he is conscious. He will assume that the similarity in physical appearance would necessitate a similarity in mental capacities. As they are both human the first man will project his humanity onto the second man who is not doing a good job of convincing the first man that he is not conscious.

I suppose the second man could never communicate with the first man. Even if the first man yells at him. By never acknowledging them and not moving at all then the person would have little to base their assumptions about the man. At some point, a real human would become fatigued with time and at some point would falter which would give away information to the first man who would start to assume the second man is in fact a person.

This dumb scenario illustrates how agency is connected to consciousness. Out notion that consciousness exists is linked to the ability to act.

If this is true then a brain in a vat can not be conscious. I am not sure this is true. Is a brain in a vat able to make changes to its own brain? Can thoughts cause a change in neural structures? If so then a brain is capable of engaging in the only actions it can. Thought. If it can think about its own existence in an accurate enough way then maybe it can adapt to its surroundings. If a scientist were to measure the brain every day and track its changes and determine that the changes were not random but were in some way positively adaptative then the scientist could say that the brain in the vat is potentially conscious. Because it cannot communicate to the outside world it can not be fully determined whether it was conscious or not.

I think that for there to be certainty regarding the assignment of consciousness to an entity the entity has to be able to communicate with the outside world. This may be false but I'm not sure how else one would ascribe consciousness to something else.

One of the primary ways that consciousness is accepted is by the simple declaration of its existence from an individual. People say they are conscious but is that evidence? I am not sure it is. If just exclaiming things was proof then the justice system would be very easy to administrate.

How would I prove that you were conscious? How would you prove you were conscious?

Do we know of consciousness only by appealing to the similarities in descriptions of subjective experiences? As in it is only through communicating concepts that are comprehended by others does one identify the nature of consciousness. Therefore consciousness only exists with some form of communication. Whether it is internal communication or external communication there has to be some form of information transfer in order to assign consciousness.

This means that the brain in the vat may be conscious as it is possible to be internally communicative and not externally but it isn't possible to communicate your own internal experiences without externally communicating. The brain in the vat needs to come up with a way to project thoughts outward.

What about the role of intention in consciousness? Do we assume we are conscious because we have intentions that we work toward making happen? Maybe we misattribute success to our intentions when it is actually a coincidence and we are not in control of ourselves at all and any success is just a necessary outcome of determined pre-causes.

I would imagine that most people do not go around contemplating the nature of consciousness and this article would be of no value to them. Its value is not important anyway as this article is an exercise in thinking about a topic.