This is a conversation between a friend and me on Facebook.
“There is no ‘later’ that exists anywhere but in the human imagination.”
— initial post
(Josh, friend)
This is so true. The subconsciousness only deals in present absolute terms and is irrational too.
(Jesse)
Not sure what you mean by “irrational”. In my opinion emotions are actually deeply encoded experience, which while they may now be somewhat outdated, are nonetheless extremely useful in many cases.
I also dislike the term “sub”conscious, as it implies it is lesser than consciousness. It is also not used in scientific literature; rather, “unconscious” is the term.
Consciousness itself is a wishy-washy term that I think obfuscates the issue. Truly, all awareness is consciousness to some degree.
A bacterium that is chemically striving to live is aware of a division between itself and the environment, otherwise it would die.
Likewise, a two year old human is conscious to a degree, while a twenty year old is more conscious, yet an eighty year old can perceive even more patterns about itself and optimize for them, so is even more conscious.
Consciousness is a colloquial term and a gradient, and the term is misleading rather than helpful.
(Josh)
Very interesting! Emotions are very important but that is not all the unconscious deals with. It also deals with fragments of language and encodings of memories. So much stuff! I agree that consciousness is a word that can hardly define awareness but it is a good word nonetheless. It can define the difference between asleep and awake.
It is also a good word for psychoanalysis to define the difference between that which I am aware of and that which I am not.
(Jesse)
Being asleep or awake is itself vague. What about lucid dreaming, where you’re conscious that you’re asleep? Or how about how you move your body in bed when you’re not comfortable? Consciousness is illusion. All biological patterns, in order to replicate, are conscious of themselves.
The idea that you’re aware of some things and not others is to create an artificial duality between mind and body. There is only nonduality; body is mind. When a gravitational wave from a star exploding a thousand light-years away hits your brain’s neurons and changes what you think, it shows that all of “you” is made from packets of information that are aware of specific things to lesser and greater extents.
That is, all the memories that make up the experience of your ego are embedded in the fabric of reality. These memories, as neural organizations, are aware of other memories to some extent, though the higher awareness that you experience as “self” may not be able to pinpoint all the details that give rise to the overall painting. That does not mean the lower details are not aware of the other details.
Different pieces of “you” are aware of other pieces to different extents. There is no true division between consciousness and unconsciousness; the division is illusion.
I will agree it can be helpful, just as all division can be helpful when trying to understand underlying patterns. We just have to keep in mind divisions don’t actually exist in the real world.