Your Doit Mind: Exploring the Mind

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Tradition

We have had descriptions and models of the human mind for centuries. Our most widely understood models of the mind came out of early psychology and have remained simple for some time.

More recently, neuroscience has advanced numerous theories and observations about what appears to be going on in our brain as we experience consciousness. The knowledge of neuroscience has not bridged the gap to descriptions of the mind, which is perhaps not too surprising as science must build up from observable physical phenomena in the physical brain whilst the whole concept of a mind is a top-down metaphor. The mind is not a physical thing and the relative simplicity of traditional appreciations of the mind remains far apart from the complexity of modern neuroscience.

However, we can deduce that the brain hosts a variety of processes which we associate with consciousness and also with what we assume to be our mind.

Traditionally the mind is simply described as having a non-conscious part (the Nonconscious or Subconscious Mind) and a conscious part (the Conscious Mind). Input to the Conscious Mind comes from numerous senses processed through the Nonconscious Mind. The activity of the Nonconscious Mind converts sensory information to produce perceptions, emotions, memories, etc. to the Conscious Mind.

The Problems.

There are several problems with historic and existing theories:

It is really difficult to describe consciousness.

Existing theories 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.

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: Non-Consciousness and Consciousness. Some psychologies, philosophies, and theologies suggest additional parts but the mainstream scientific view seems limited to the two-part approach.

Non-Consciousness is all the sensory and other processing that is not directly accessible to consciousness and Consciousness is what may be available to our conscious experience.But, again, there is no adequate definition of what that conscious experience 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 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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