Re: Unconscious Processes


"Curt Welch" <curt@xxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:20051025175029.972$st@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> jbromer@xxxxxxx wrote:
> > While unconscious thoughts might include thought processes that have
> > been suppressed or were never explicit, I do not think that it is
> > reasonable to assume that all unconscious activity that is inaccessible
> > to the conscious mind at one moment is necessarily inaccessible at
> > other times. When we are using our minds, we are usually using our
> > conscious minds for some task at hand. At those moments some processes
> > of mind presumably operate in the background without becoming explicit
> > to conscious thought. Since the mind has to make choices about what
> > knowledge it should work with consciously, the mind has to regulate
> > which ideas are to become conscious. This then suggests that the mind
> > has to suppress some unconscious ideas just as a matter of
> > practicality.
>
> The use of the words "background process" always brings to my mind the
idea
> of a computer program running in the background, doing some huge amounts
of
> computation which we are unware of. I don't think the unconscous is
> anything like that. I think it's far simpler.
>
> I think what you write above is all correct, but its nothing more complex
> than the processes in the brain which determine when neurons fire. That
> is, what we are consciouslly aware of, is neural activity, and nothing
> more. What we are unconscious of, is the physical and chemical actions
> that control when a neuron fires, and when it doesn't fire.
>
> So, the subconscious is all the physiology that goes into defining when
> neurons fire, and the actual activity of the nurons, is the conscious.

This would be great except that I'm pretty certain that neurons still fire
when we have unconscious reactions to things, so your theory is, I think,
disproven before it gets started.



.

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