CONVERSATIONS
Tuesday, September 06, 2022

Conversation With Ryan on the Natures of Consciousness and Complexity

Cody: I feel like the connection of pre-conscious living... to the post-conscious, abstracted nature of consciousness, the level that that ties into the other things we were just talking about that I've now forgot about...... The plugged-in nature of reality that you experience in a raw ecosystem like that. Damn, I had like, three, four good connections that I just wanted to narrate aloud to remember for future writing, and in the time of opening my phone, it distracted me enough to just make me forget my thoughts......And that right there, that many levels of abstraction, just *pthbtt* steering you away from... a thought train.

Ryan: And that's why that doesn't work with that type of living. Like, it takes longer to process because you're thinking about it. Whereas, if you're operating at just subconscious mind, you just act. Like, it's probably at least 10 times faster if you don't need to think, you know? Your brain, like a neural network, just adapts to pattern recognition in a given ecosystem. If that's all you know, you're going to get really, really, really good at it. It's like, with how everything is nowadays, human-generated, human-generated, chaos-- there's so much stuff that you have to consciously... Like, you can't possibly just autopilot all the time in a good way. Now, it's like auto piloting by being lost in thought... there's no need to thought because you have all the patterns. Like the chess players that can play instinct or whatever, any sport, where you just play on instinct instead of consciously think about.

Cody: It's such a thing to build up. Truly. And how do you get away from it? You know?

Ryan: If you have a... This is why that thing about mastery was cool. The method to mastery... not just hours; hours are good, experience is good. You also need that, like, rigid environment structure such as rules in a game of chess, as well as the structure of the game of chess... You could go in that good autopilot mode. If you created an environment, or, like, a house, whatever, or a backyard ecosystem where nothing really changes... and then figure that out. It's the, like, static nature of things. Not dynamic too fast. Then your pattern recognition picks up.

Cody: It totally makes sense, but! It is interesting that the way our more complex decisions are handled, still through consciousness, rather than that external...

Ryan: What's complex versus not? Aren't all decisions the same?

Cody: Well... more reaction chains in a row. Or like, uh, you know, like, anything... any sort of response to any stimulus given is going to have some level of like, path, like... from happening, like, where the organs that are, like, whatever, manipulated and the source of it. Quote unquote Source, you know, like, some, like, flinching and everything is innately reactive, right? You know, think about flinching and it gradually goes up from there and you know, like... you're in a dangerous situation, and there are two pathways ahead of you, both filled with different types and amounts of danger, and there's a lot to analyze there. It's not something as reactive, so there's going to be, like, I feel like there's a limit to some degree depending on how novel and complex the situations presented to you how neurologically some of model or limit to how much time would have to be spent on it. But! It's all a matter of thinking too, you know, a matter of *how* a more complex situation is kind of intrinsically mapped to be dealt with within the brain and--

Ryan: I see what you're saying in the conscious part of your brain. But, you know, if you think about the subconscious part of your brain, the part that, like, the consciousness is just Like a spotlight of one thing, and if there's a really complex pathway, your subconscious brain is already going to be going crazy with, like, 95% of your invisible thoughts anyway.

Cody: Yeah, yeah. Like, there is going to be some sort of decision-making apparatus at work regardless of whether it is something that is being thought and consciously deliberated on or whether it's, like, things that are not operating in that, like, transitory time-mind-space area, but rather, like, being decided by the subconscious decision factories.

Ryan: Isn't that happening for everything all the time anyway? Whether it's perilous to you or not?

Cody: Yeah, yeah. I think there are just certain orders of complexity depending on the situation given or like, you know, like, there is the mapping of ocular input to perceived output and how humongous our visual cortex is, you know, in our brains. Like, how much area is devoted to parsing through eye information versus, like, you know, the section of your brain that is responsible for parsing the sensory input from, like, *taps on leg* this particular section on my leg would be comparatively much much smaller, you know.

Ryan: Why?

Cody: I mean, it just, like, literally it is, like, in the brain, those areas are much different sizes, you know. So, like, there's some level of complexity going on neurologically, but--

Ryan: I'm thinkin, like, if you see a tiger or if you're staring at a tree, isn't your brain still doing, like, the same number of things? Like, you still have the same number of thoughts, probably, like, subconsciously and consciously combined.

Cody: Hm... there's potentiality, like, there's no... Yeah. Like, there's potential for an equal level of lingering, but I still think... Hm... Well, I, you know, I suppose in, like, the pure bicameral mentality, like, those decisions would come, like, in an instant, via the gods or the kings are the ancestors or whatever else. Potentially. I guess I'll be finding out. (by reading Conversations On Consciousness)

Ryan: Just, complexity inherently seems to be a thing of the conscious mind, where we make it one thing, built off another thing, built off another thing, built off another thing. The subconscious mind is doing that all the time anyway, but we make up even the definition of complexity to, like, almost compliment ourselves. Math can become more complex, I guess. But in terms of just the instinct mode, like, nothing's more complex than anything else... That's why I liked that Homo Deus idea of thought, like, pre-consciousness, *peew!* like an automatic flow chart. Things are maybe even linear, just flows down, but when you put in consciousness, it's just like you get stuck in these little loops. Do I go left? Do I go right? Do I go left? Do I go right? Do I go-- Really really fast and then that, like, builds up, and then you have a whole network of indecisiveness. It's like complexity just seems like there's networks of indecisiveness... end thought.

Cody: And, yeah, and you know, so okay. So my mind would then jump to having a situation of looking at the exact same space and potentially the exact same, like, happenstance in, like, normal daylight versus at twilight, like, the last glimmers of light, so it's almost, like, you can see a teensy bit, but you're... Even, like, right now with this light right here, because everything that you're looking at in this light is so much more uncertain because of, like, the relative lack of density of rods compared to your cones, like, how much more time neurologically in, like, milliseconds or whatever else, is being spent in the subconscious part of the brain, trying to give a definitive enough answer to be satisfactory? Because, like, it would still be delivering results in some fashion. I feel like there'd be a lot of variation even between person to person with like synapse length and everything else, you know, and maybe even, well, I don't know if being in a different part of the brain would, like, lend itself to having greater or worse synapse length, due to, like, folding patterns and stuff like that? You never know, there's a lot that could potentially go into it.

Ryan: That would be cool.

Cody: Nevertheless, I'm really excited that this book has a whole section on the nature of Buddhism.

Ryan: That's cool.

Cody: ...As it relates to the conscious and bicameral modalities. You know, and I... my hypothesis is that they'll say something along the lines of Buddhism being an early way of kind of capturing the essence of what makes our conscious experience superfluous, or like, the void, or like the non-ego or like, not non-ego, but like, you know, non-existence, non-being, the duality of it all and like the inherent nothingness, like--

Ryan: Yeah, that's what I was thinking for a lot of these things, where it's like, we have all this consciousness, but then the point of Buddhism, kinda according to this, is like, you want to just kind of be in that pre... bicameral state. That's what all this meditation seems to be.

Cody: And that's the flow, that's the way, that's being tuned in, and... it's what they've been talking about, for... since it happened. You know, trying to get back to that state, when you think about it, at its essence. And that blows my mind.

Ryan: Return to the monkey.

Cody: *laughs, makes monkey noises*