How conscious is the conscious mind?

[kvnchrist]

How deeply does our awareness extend? Are we apart of a sea of humanity, somehow attached to one another by a psionic link or are we islands of consciousness, alone within our own minds.

 

Is there something to intuition? Can some people feel things happen with those that are close to them, or is it just guilt for not being there?

[marharth]

This is likely going to get locked, but in case it doesn't I will go ahead and post.

 

No one can say for sure what consciousness is, and where it is.

 

Something you mentioned was a "Islands of consciousness" and I have thought about that before. Would be interesting to do research into it, but there is no real proof for such a thing.

[kvnchrist]

This is likely going to get locked, but in case it doesn't I will go ahead and post.

 

No one can say for sure what consciousness is, and where it is.

 

Something you mentioned was a "Islands of consciousness" and I have thought about that before. Would be interesting to do research into it, but there is no real proof for such a thing.

 

 

The conscious mind is not the soul, which is why that other thread got locked. I won't go anywhere near things of the spirit. The conscious mind is mental and has to do with how aware we are of our surroundings and ourselves.

 

I would like a staff member to chime in on the appropriateness of this, if others are weary of the subject skirts any rules.

[draconix]

I have to assume that there is no collective consciousness among humans since it has hasn't yet been proven to exist, and I have to make no new assumptions or changes to my way of thinking in order to believe that it does not exist. Intuition is likely just the things that bubble to the surface from the subconscious mind into the conscious mind. The subconscious mind is to my understanding, always crunching ideas, numbers, facts, and scenarios, and so it would make sense for "intuition" to be right more often than random guessing when it has accurate or pertinent information to factor into it's calculations. However the vast majority of the findings of our subconscious mind would still be inaccurate, so it never really gives us anything to act on, but rather something to reflect upon in hindsight, which your conscious mind may be able to use later on. Just my two cents, it's probably not 100% accurate, but it sounds pretty good to me.

[Nintii]

how this double post happened is a mystery to me Edited September 23, 2011 by Nintii

[Nintii]

THIS IS DIFFICULT TO ANSWER WITHOUT CROSSING THE LINE OF RELIGION OR SPIRITUALITY, BUT I'M GOING TO TRY.

 

Conciousness of being

 

First of all, let's look at thoughts ... by this I mean that you cannot capture a thought in a bottle and inspect it - example, think of the person who means the most to you, capture an image of them in your mind right now.

If I cut you open will I find that image in your brain ? ..... no of course not.

 

(please don't tell me about thoughts being electrical charges or impulses or chemicals because if you had to capture one of them in that form you would have only have an electrical charge or a chemical and not the ACTUAL image

or thought of your loved one).

 

This tells me that within this body - which I call an earthsuit to help me connect to this world just like an astronaut would need a spacesuit to survive in space - ... that within this body is a being that operates on a different plane

of existance that is at once both intangible yet measureable.

This inner person which is Me, expresses and connects itself through the channels of mind, will and emotion to the world around me through my physical body.

 

This ME person if I can call it that is aware or concious of it's existance, it has or rather I should say, I have conciousness of being.

Now, I cannot be the "you" in your body, I can only be the "me" in mine.

Therefore, you are exactly that, an island of self awareness or conciousness that lives in a world full of other people who are also aware of "being" or "self-concious" or have "conciousness".

 

The only way I can "be more than me" is if I "possess" you and live in you and then I will be more than just me, I'd be me and you, and if I was the dominant one then i'd influence you and your actions, but I can't speak of

"possession" on Nexus, as that is going to be classified as religious.

 

Intuition

 

If I know that I am going to provoke a certain reaction from you if I should say certain things then that is not intuition even though I know what is going to happen before the time, because certain actions will produce predictable

reactions.

However, as you are well aware that there are things which have no logical explanation but have been recoreded many times between twins, mother and child and human and animal that are simply off the radar of the scientific.

Being that as it may, that does not disqualify them because you cannot measure them or understand them.

 

I would like to elaborate further but due to the nature of the topic, it aint gonna happen.

Perhaps a new forum should be opened but only to members who pass a certain criteria of responsibility whereby we can "speak our minds", but also where certain rules of responsibility still apply ... just a thought.

[everybodysop]

I'm only going to refer to the first question posed, to prevent disarray.. "How deeply does our awareness extend?"

 

By awareness, you can refer to either sensory, or knowledge.

 

What can we sense, is extremely limited, and derived in the requirements of mostly what we must be able to sense to navigate in this world we grow in. The spongy membranes of our nose altogether contain about 5 million olfactory receptor neurons, while most dogs contain around ~220 million.

 

Human eyes contain about 200,000/mm2 photoreceptors, while the buzzard contains about a million/mm2. Our senses aren't absolutely terrible, via comparison to most creatures, but they are extremely limited. We can only see a portion of electromagnetic spectrum, also.

 

All of this information is translated into our minds for "conscious encoding" and integration. This is the part in which we would call "knowledge". At least, physical knowledge. There is obviously some knowledge that is not sensory related, or sensory-recognition related.

 

Our.. knowledge.. of knowledge itself is what we call epistemology. We have some fairly astouding potential abilities to discern information about a concept, and we aren't quite sure of our limits there yet.

[Jopo1980]

I think therefore I am. - Rene Descartes