Your H I Mind: Exploring the Mind

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History

Historically, descriptions, models, and theories of consciousness have, in my humble opinion and despite valiant intellectual efforts, fallen short of actually describing much about consciousness itself.

Our descriptions of consciousness have been based on what we experience as individuals and have been represented as part of our understanding of the human mind.

The brain is recognised to be immensely complex and all work on consciousness suffers a challenge to describe our experience of consciousness.

More recently, neuroscience has developed a variety of models that try to represent the processing that can be measured within the human brain. As an example. One of the best theories, again in my humble opinion, is the Global Workspace Theory proposed by Bernard Baars and Stan Franklin in the late 1980s.

Input to the conscious mind comes from numerous senses. The Nonconscious Mind processes sensory information to provide perceptions, emotions, memories, etc. to the Conscious Mind.

Consciousness is either still represented as in the historical model or it becomes defined as a set of theoretical or measured processes. The end result is that our understanding of consciousness remains vague.

The Problems

There are several problems with historic and existing theories:

It is really difficult to describe consciousness.

Existing theories tend to lump all forms of cognition together as well as sensory processing, perhaps attempting to include what is known about the brain.

There is little allowance for altered states of consciousness.

I shall summarise each of these in turn.

Brain, Mind, and Consciousness

Immediately the very terms that we use to describe our mental experiences and activities can become contentious.

Our brain is a physical thing that can be measured, described, and studied in increasing detail. Our brain ‘hosts’ our consciousness and our mind.

Our mind does not exist, it is a metaphor for something that helps us to understand and define our mental experiences.

Consciousness is a concept that may sit somewhere between brain and mind. Aspects of consciousness may be testable yet these tests tend to relate to whatever model of mind we adopt, and our models of mind remain too lacking in structure to be useful.

Descriptions of Consciousness

Descriptions of consciousness are most likely to start from our own experience of consciousness. These descriptions, my own attempts included, will often end up using words such as ‘attention’, ‘awareness’, ‘thought’, ‘concentration’, and ‘cognition’. But each of these is itself a part of consciousness or a synonym for consciousness. We simply don’t seem to have the words to actually describe our own experience.

Another seeming dead-end is to try and describe the process of consciousness. What is actually going on under the bonnet that results in consciousness happening? The most recent big advance that is exploring this is perhaps the development of Artificial Intelligence. More on this later.

Basic Models of the Mind

Models of the mind, and particularly consciousness itself, have not evolved at the same pace as developments in neuroscience. We basically have been struggling with a two-part model comprising Subconsciousness and Consciousness. Some psychologies, philosophies, and theologies suggest additional parts but the mainstream scientific view seems limited to the two-part approach.

Consciousness is what may be available in all varied situations to our conscious experience. Subconsciousness, or Non-Consciousness, covers all the sensory and other processing that is not directly accessible to our experience of Consciousness. is what may be available to our conscious experience.But, again, there is no adequate definition of what that conscious experience actually is.

Consciousness, like the mind and the brain that hosts both, is very complex and the very simple two-part model is simply not helping us advance our understanding.

Altered States of Consciousness

Consciousness can be a very varied experience. We can be relaxed, excited, in the grip of compulsions and fluid emotions. We can be imaginative and adamant. We can be thoughtful, shocked, dominant, and submissive. We can be conscious whilst dreaming, aware of what is going on whilst in a trance, and we can transcend into experiences that can be life-changing.

These, perhaps infinitely, variable states of mind highlight the complexity of the human brain, and the consciousness that it hosts.

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