https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=wugFYV7WX44
So I just returned from the consciousness and conscience event in Thunder Bay. It was very nice. Catherine ran it. She did a great job. I talked about it on Paul VanderKlay’s channel. He did a stream from there. And I happened to be in it, which is very nice. Love Paul. Love meeting Jonathan Pigeot and John Brevecky. And so I want to talk about what I think that we should have talked about, but unfortunately didn’t, which is the idea of consciousness, unconsciousness and dead matter. Now, the first question you might ask is why are there three things, Mark, other than, you know, Pythagoras and Plato and all these wonderful triangles? Well, the answer to that is very simple. I think that when you try to frame the world as conscious and unconscious, you run into a problem. And that problem, roughly speaking, is pantheism. Pantheism is stalking you and it will get you. So I think it’s important to differentiate between the conscious, the unconscious, and all the matter in the world that has neither of those features. Otherwise, I would argue you’re being a dualist and dualism bad. So that’s why I list three things. So one of the things we really can get to was a definition of consciousness, which I thought was unfortunate, but it was interesting because Dr. Mondral, who was excellent in the conference, even though he was sort of an outsider, was talking about measuring consciousness. But as I just said, they don’t have a definition. So you’re trying to measure something on a definition, sort of an interesting trick of science, I guess. Not a fan, not sure you can get away with that. And in fact, according to some of the stories he was telling, it doesn’t work. No surprise there for me. But we really didn’t talk about the difference between conscious and unconscious and why that is discernible from, say, dead matter, because you can argue, well, ants are semi-conscious or they’re more conscious as they’re in a colony and less conscious when they’re individual ants. Yeah, maybe. But the sand they move is not conscious. This is actually really important, right? And it has no free will or agency and no possibility of it. In other words, it gets all its agency from creatures that are conscious or unconscious or semi-conscious. I think that’s a really important point. So if you don’t account for that third state, you’re just going to run smack into pantheism eventually because you don’t have a third place to put all the things that aren’t conscious, for example, or unconscious. And you need those constraints in order to define the world correctly. So that was one thing. And I really wanted to sort of highlight what if consciousness is the rational and semi-rational aspect of your brain and it’s wrapped up in propositional knowledge and it’s wrapped up in certain types of procedural knowledge, right? And what if the unconscious actually holds your participatory knowledge? In other words, we participate unconsciously all the time. And this was a point that John Vervecki brought up and Paul Van der Kley actually expanded upon with his sleepwalking metaphor, which I thought was excellent. There is a way in which we drive and we don’t know, we don’t remember paying attention to where we were driving. Sure, that’s because our participation in the world is unconscious, mostly. And our propositional aspect of the world is mostly conscious, not entirely, but mostly. And so there’s a line there and I’m not here today to draw that line for you. I’m here to say it exists and we should engage with it at some point and I’m not smart enough to engage with it and I don’t think I need to. I think it’s sort of unnecessary. So it’s an interesting frame to think that most of our participation is unconscious. Most of our proposition and procedure is conscious. And all of our poetic navigation, see the model, the model is very important. And that sort of helps, maybe use the Pareto 80-20 rule on it, 80% of your participation is poetic, navigation is unconscious, 20% is conscious, and 80% of your propositional and procedural interaction is conscious, and 20% of it is unconscious. I think that’s an interesting model, seems to be everywhere, and we probably can’t really rationalize our participation. Like, why go to a party? What’s the rational? You can come up with rationalizations, but there’s multiple of them. Now we’re in the postmodern critique already. And of course, if you haven’t seen it, the video on postmodernism, it’s very good. You should check it out. Because there’s lots of ways to rationalize the same behavior, and they may have equal validity. Because we can’t rationalize our participation. It happens, or not, based on unknown, illogical, irrational, and unreasonable frameworks. It just sort of emerges, or maybe emanates from above. And we’re drawn to participation. Because I think that’s very true. We’re drawn to participation, it calls out to us something that we engage in as a result of that calling. And I think this is an interesting framing for this problem. And look, I mean, this is early days for this. I may do another video, I may contradict everything I’ve already said or thought about. I don’t know. But I think that this is interesting framing. Dividing it up into consciousness, unconsciousness, and dead matter is important. You’re talking about not only agency, right? Dead matter has no agency. Conscious and unconscious have different degrees of agency. Right? This seems like a very useful way to think about it. It’s non-dualistic, always a plus in my book. And gives us a framework for sort of understanding ourselves better. And that’s really what this is about. How do we understand ourselves better? What are the unconscious things that are drawing us out, or drawing us towards, or pushing us away? And what are we doing when we’re rationalizing? What are we doing when we’re trying to apply logic and reason to our actions? Or to our desired actions or to outcomes that happened maybe that we weren’t aware of in the time? Because we can’t be. The world is much bigger than we are. Distributed cognition is real and really important. And a lot of our mimicry, our participation is probably learned through mimicry and unconsciously. So we learn how to be 30 by watching our parents when they’re 30. And that seems to manifest in the world. There’s big jokes about that. Oh, you don’t want to become your parents. But we do. Or we rebel completely against it. We avoid it. We just, oh, never going to become like that. And there’s merit to both. But that happens. We have a standard by which we’re judging. And that standard roughly seems to be whatever the participation of our parents was at that age. Very mysterious. Doesn’t have to be, it could be other things. But largely, this is where it gets tricky. Like, yeah, it’s not 100%. But it’s like 80%. And that’s close enough. I’m not here to give you 100% certain answer on anything. I think that’s ridiculous. So you can see a way in which our unconscious moves us. And then our conscious tries to validate or justify or rationalize or make logical and reasonable our behaviors after the fact. I think most rationalization is post hoc. I’ve talked about that before in other videos. I still think it’s true. I think it holds true. And I think it’s important. And in our conscious mind wants very much to be, we’ll say, in control of most of our activity. But I don’t think it is. I think consciousness is expensive. And I think rationality is even more expensive. So we don’t do that because it’s too expensive. I mean, if you just look at there are papers on this, you can look them up. I’m not even going to reference them. You can find them. You have the internet. It’s okay. When they look at the energy usage of somebody that they can pretty well assert as being rational, the energy usage off the chart, you couldn’t, you couldn’t use that much energy all day. There’s no way to metabolize that energy quickly enough, not even just get it in your gullet. But even if you got it in your gullet, you still have to turn it into power, all that food. So there’s no way to do it, roughly speaking. You can’t be rational most of the day or much more than a small part of the day. That’s the data that I’ve seen anyway. There might be other data that contradicts that, but I don’t think so. Most people aren’t rational most of the time, and most of the science seems to back that up. So there’s a way in which we’re conscious. We want to be conscious. We want to be not only conscious, but we wrap our idea of consciousness up with rationality. We want to be rational because if we’re rational, then we’re right and we can prove it and we can prove it to everybody else and they’ll have to acknowledge it. Foolishness, foolishness, I say, but that’s very much what we want. That’s the egoic desire, that’s the Rousseauian, if not for society, I’d be perfect. Yeah, no, you wouldn’t. People are people and we keep peopling for whatever reason. And the only way to stop that seems bad. All those options are bad. Don’t do that. They’re all unethical. It seems to me, maybe I’m wrong, maybe not. So there’s a way in which we have to give our unconscious more credit and more clarity. We realized that, yeah, we’re sleepwalking through a lot of our life to steal from Paul Vanderklei there for a bit. And that’s important. We’re going on a script that we didn’t write and maybe didn’t really comprehend, but it’s very much played out because we learned it through mimicry and that’s okay. That’s a good thing. This is distributed cognition through time, I would say. So the distributed cognition through time is largely participatory. It’s not to say there isn’t distributed cognition in propositions, but maybe the most important thing we do is participate with one another, with ourselves, with nature. And that’s what we’re working out. And we’re using our unconscious to do that. And that’s why we tune our unconscious at night with our dreaming. This all makes sense. Am I right? I have no idea. It just seems to make sense. And the purpose of this is to start the conversation around consciousness, unconsciousness, and dead matter. So I want to get that rolling. If you have any thoughts or questions or concerns, put them in the comments. Please. I like comments. Comments are good. Good for my channel. They’re good for you. They’re good for me so I can know, am I making any sense at all? Does anybody understand what I’m saying? And figure out where you’re all at in your thinking so that I can orient my future messages towards that. And I just wanted to mention that I’m very conscious of your involvement and engagement in my channel, because it does show the value. And that comes out in the fact that you’re giving me your time and attention.