It always puzzles me, yet at the same time it's a highly addictive process. It happens time and time again:

I'm writing something which I have thought about in my head, then I end up adding something to the scene that I never thought of originally, and when it's something really good, I always think, "Where did that just come from?" because I never could have planned it in a million years.

Where do thoughts come from? How does the brain work to create ficticious moments, sparks of ideas, creativity out of the blue?

I would like to know. Just a little scientific grasp on my brain would be nice. So next time I can say, "Yeah, course, that makes perfect sense."

Is it all down to my own personal subconscious on the balance of my metaphysical self; or is it something completely different?

Ever puzzled, yet highly addicited writer,
Ste

Steve if I could give you the answers to that I would have been up for and most likely have gotten several Nobels.

The topic is absolutely huge. I wouldnt even know where to begin but some starting points you might want to look at if you're really interested are, which you could probably find quite a lot on the web.

A good start might be

http://jamaica.u.arizona.edu/~chalmers/online.html

Over the last couple of years there have been some huge advances into the subject. Thanks to innovations in such areas as Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging. Greater understanding of both neurobiology and neurochemistry as well as a myriad of other fields but we are still a very very long way off answering the questions that you have.

You might want to look into the topic of memes too, these are the so called viruses of the mind and are thought to be the cultural, consciousness propigating equivalent of genes.

Then there's the whole idea that consciousness is simply a trick of memory, then is there really anything like free will. So on and so forth

If you're really interested in the subject let me know and I'll have a rake throug the archives of New Scientist for you.

Geoff

Geoff,

Excellent link. I'll have a good read of that - for the next six months There's bound to be some articles on the site that can help me fathom it out for myself. Just so I'm a little clearer.

I imagine that there are quite a few theories about consciousness being a trick of memory. If you look at the area of human brains - 40/50 % of the brain is still unknown. A goldfish has a tiny brain and has a memory of 5 seconds. We have a huge brain and have a solid memory of 60 odd years before we start 'forgetting' their past for the remainder of their lives. And then theres the whole dream angle and the very strange phenomena of deja vu.

My theory is that we are all dying from the minute we are born. Macabre, yes, but a good example of this is age. If we weren't, we wouldn't get wrinkles, we wouldn't have organs that stop functioning, diseases, illnesses, etc. The trick is to feign off death for as long as possible. But listen to me babbling. I should be putting all this in a short story of something. I do write horror after all.

I do like the theories of metaphysics, yet I've yet to read an article that puts all theories together to create one whole theory on life, the mind, and death.

Something that fascinates me is the perception of reality and how light is the source of all life/energy. If it weren't true we would be able to live without light. We cannot. People who live in areas of the world with little daylight have a huge depression and suicide rate, mental problems, alcohol problems. It is all psyhcological, but I do believe that it is all down to the power of light. I'm not talking mental god-babble light, I'm talking about real hard physical dimension light.

If there was no light our eyes would not be able to see. We would not have a brain full of subconscious memories. Why is it we sleep in the dark and not in the day? - I've got about a thousand questions that I'd love answered but I know will always just be theories.

It's fascinating. The one connection that I just cannot figure is the subconscious mind with the creative conscious mind. Just how does it work? How can I write about something that I haven't experienced? Yet I do. I write about characters using phrases that I've never used. Yet I do. I wrote about the Grand Metropolitan in a short story yesterday. I have not got a single idea what the Grand Metropolitan is, yet I wrote about it! - Very strange. I seemed to think it was a theatre but a friend thought it was a hotel.

If you do find any articles in the New Scientist, I'd really like to read them.

I should really get back to my writing now

Cheers,
Ste

Hi Steve,

I can't honestly say I can answer all your questions but I can answer a fair few of them!

First of all as far as the brain is concerned we do pretty much know the entire layout of the brain now, we are still a long way of the many varied intricacies but we're getting there. FMRI for instance has allowed us to track various parts of the brain that are invloved in certain task, listening to music, or remembering the an event for instance. OFten though when we perform such metal feats we are involving several areas of out brain at once and as you can imagine although we have defined the various bits of the brain i.e. prefrontal cortex, cerebellum etc its not simply a case of saying this and this is turned on therefore this is true. It depends on the sensitivty of the tests and many more factors. Just like that old saying that we only use 10% of our brains which is utter twaddle there are a great number of commonly held beleifs out there that have been covered and often debunked by science. My dad likes to use the une that we still don't know how bees sustain themselves in flight and not matter however hard I try to persuade him that this little mystery of nature has been solved (including showing the paper detailing it!) he won't listen. The goldfish memory thing is one such common myth, studies over the last ten years have shown that many fish have mental abilities and memories that would rival non-human primates.

In one sesne you are indeed correct when you say we are all dying from the moment we're born but the facts are born out that the real degeneration starts to kick in our early forties. When many genes that play their part in our maintenance seem to either switch off or become damaged and therefore less effective. There's the whole thing about the shortening of our telomeres too. Telomeres are strands of repeated bases that lie at the ends of our genes and with each round of cell division they get slightly shorter. Eventually they become depleted and therefore lead to gene damage which is detrimental and will lead to death. That's one theory anyway. We could have course lived a lot longer had our ancestors had the foresight to breed out unwanted traits and had children later. As many of the genes that turn traitor start to kick in after child rearing age and so would not have been selected for deletion in the normal progression of things.

AM I making sense so far? I'm trying to offer reasonable answers which expanding the subject or becoming too techinical, though I run the risk of compromising the facts!

Now to light.

The whole universe runs on energy, everything needs energy to act. Life essentially can be considered as a myriad of chemical processes. Right trying to keep things as simple as possible. Energy from the sun is derived from nuclear fusion, which is basically a result of the huge temperatures created under the gravitational pull of the combined matter of the star. Light is created through this process (skip the details of nuclear fusion) and radiates out in all directions.

Now the way our planet currently works is that light is absorbed by plants and is used effectively to break bonds between atoms so other chemical copmunds can be formed and energy liberated. This energy is then used to drive other chemical processes that in turn drive others creating the dynamic equilibrium that we call life. Ofcourse this system has deveoped over billions of years. The sun initially providing the energy by which water could exist in a liquid state and the energy to excite and break chemical bonds, create atmospheres etc. Now for pedants I know there are other forces at work like geothermal etc but I've igonred these otherwise I'd be here all day and well into the night, at least!

Ofcourse if there was no light then we would not have evolved eyes to be receptive to light! Though in truth we would have even been here to contemplate such things in reality. For a more detailed an interesting explanation of this scenario you really should check out the excellent The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins.

The whole subconcious versus conscious again would take many volumes to discuss in any great detail but one interpretation is that the subconscious is all the task that do not require thought to preform, breathing for instance. Or when you catch a ball you need to calculate the speed, angle, rate of descent etc but you certainly don't run an equation in your head. All these factors will be calculated in your subconscious to produce the result of catching the ball. So the subconscious is basically all the code (id you will) that runs behind the scenes to perform the essential or mundane stuff. The conscious mind on the other hand, there is huge debate about the nature of free will, is the process of reaching decisions, all the things that require more than instinct. And it's this that is beleived to separate us from other animals though this idea is being slowly overturned.

Right I really will stop now

Geoff



<Added>

I really wish I could write like I waffle! I'd be churning out a novel a week, easily :)

<Added>

I really hope I didn't come across as condescending there!

Gosh, this is interesting.

Geoff, I’m not sure I agree with you about the subconscious. Catching a ball is a skill we have to learn (and some of us never do. ) Breathing is a physiological action carried out by the autonomic nervous system – the system that keeps our hearts beating and our digestive systems working, and so on. It’s an unconscious activity rather than subconscious, although it can be overridden when we are awake. We can chose to stop breathing for short periods. When we are asleep the unconscious takes over and keeps us breathing.

Ste, I think that when we’re writing well, when it’s really flowing and we’re wondering where it’s coming from, we’re tapping into the Collective Subconscious.

The theory of the CS is that every thought or action by every human who has ever lived is recorded in a vast subconscious data bank that we can access when we are in right-brain mode. That’s the slightly altered state of consciousness we’re in when we daydream or meditate. It’s the intuitive, imaginative state that artists, musicians and writers access, whether consciously or unconsciously, when they’re working.

Dee.

Jung refers to the collective self, and Freud refers to repressed desires (parallel to the shadow) as source of creativity.

Funny that I should have been reading this on my holiday, but I did! Two essays in an anthology on aesthetics, one by Freud called "The Poet and Day-Dreaming" and the other by Jung, "Psychology and Literature". (After reading Jung's essay, Freud's seems quite facile.)

Anyway, I feel that not only does Jung address the question of creativity brilliantly, but he also provides a real alternative to "religion" (which has always been a problem for me, as half of my family are religious fanatics, causing me to slam that door shut).

Ani

Hi Geoff, everyone,

But it is really interesting, Geoff, that's one of the amazing things about it.

Yes, with you so far. Made sense.

'The Blind Watchmaker' sounds interesting. I'll track that one down.

Of course you didn't come across as condesceinding. It's fascinating stuff. I can only learn from stuff like this, and that's the important thing.

Well I don't know even where to begin to comment! My mind is buzzing with thoughts.

The subconscious really fascinates me. There's something there that is beyond our reach. We don't live in a world that caters for the subconscious. We live in a world that has been dumbed down. I think the subconscious mind fights a secret war with the conscious mind to be creative. Sometimes it wins and people are consistently creative for the rest of their lives. Sometimes it loses and people are automated zombies doing mundane tasks until they die. Only then do they realise, usually when it's too late, that they've wasted their life. - That was a bit grim for Sunday morning, but that's what I believe anyway

Something that I find kind of creepy is how phrases in language that have been passed through the decades reflect the actual reality of the human mind. 'Seeing is believing', 'Keep your eye on the ball', there's hundreds, I just can't think (lol, re-call them) this early. 'Survival of the fittest' is a good one.

One thing I have given great personal thought about, as I write horror, I've found myself having no choice but to think about it if I was to further my writing. And that is the relation of the dark to the human mind. I really could babble about this until you think me quite certifiable, but I've got some bizarre theories about the dark.

Catching a ball. Now let me indulge my thinking here and this could be quite fun The ball is hurtling towards us at a speed faster than normal. We either know the ball is going to be thrown, or it is thrown and then we see it. Does the conscious mind see it first, or does the subconsicous mind 'see' it first? You can catch any ball, and believe me, it's true, if you keep your eyes on the ball and let your mind focus on it. Why is this? Is it because the subconscious mind can predict or associate how the ball is going to move, because our subconcious mind has already seen it before? Is it down to the subconscious or the conscious that we can catch this ball in a split-second?

But if I look at catching a ball even further, and I've been thinking about the dimension thing over the weekend, is it the light that allows us to catch the ball? The ball is hurtling through the air - I close my eyes, I'm instantly disorientated. There is no light, the ball is light, I cannot catch it, yet I know that if I put my hands up to catch it, I might do it through chance. What part of the brain is thinking when I have my eyes closed? I can maybe hear the ball coming towards me. If it hit me in the face I'd feel it even though I couldn't see it. Could the subconscious gear me to deflect the ball from hitting me in the face?

Now the dimension thing. I can't even begin to say I know the functions of all the dimensions. I've read odd facts here and there and it's all a bit weird. Is there any relation to our subconcious and the dimensions or layers or reality, or light that we live in? What's the connection with the human body and the dimensions? How come, and this really puzzles me, how can our eyes perceive different layers of light, in terms of focus, depth of field of light when there is nothing there? We see three layers of light all around us. We can switch from the background, to middle distance, to foreground without even thinking about it!

So these must be metaphysical questions but I always seem to be thinking about them. How can our eyes perceive this light so that it has some sort of cohesive whole? Why do we have shadows and why are they dark when it's light? Do we still have shadows when we are in darkness? Is the subconcious a person's soul? How come we see white light when we die and not darkness? Why do images freeze on a person's retina when they die? How come if I look at a light and close my eyes, I can still see the light in the darkness of my eyes? Where does fear come from when we haven't experienced death - or maybe we have? When we cut ourselves, how come the pain doesn't register fully until we've seen the cut? What's the reason we fall in our dreams and swear that we have fallen in reality when we wake up? What level are we when we die because when we're not sleeping and die, we die with our eyes closed. Is that why everyone sees a white light and not dark light? And somebody please, explain deja vu! - it's really starting to drive me up the wall. Where do instincts come from? How can we automatically preserve ourselves in an unknown situation to survive? - That one really bugs me. And just why the hell are we afraid of the dark so much?

When I get deja vu I always seem to stop dead in my tracks for a solid minute with the most bewildered look of amazement on my face. Like I've just been struck with the best plot idea of my life, then forgotten about it. Is it odd that I usually get deja vu when I'm walking?

- And about a million other questions that I really should be putting in my stories

Ani, religion is a problem for me, which is why I have no problems accepting scientific metaphysics because religion, usually, doesn't even come into it. There's no god in metaphysics, only light - hmnnnn, that sounded vaguely religious there The weird thing is I can never even remember anybody mentioning metaphysics in school, which is pretty appalling as they were quite happy to shove religion down my throat until my brain had melted into a puddle of doom.

So what are Jung's theories and what's his alternative to religion?

In short, my brain hurts right about now

Ste

Hi Dee,

I make no real distinction between subconscious and unconscious. Catching a ball is a skill that although it may seem conscious and there are a few elements that initially require thought it is a background activity. Breathing is exactly the same, it's essentially hardwired into our system, as you say part of the autonomic system. It can be brought to the fore and retrained and then reintegrated into the subsconscious. This is how we learn every skill we have, initially it requires thought but then the process slips below the conscious level and even though we are not aware of it we are often able to improve or skills without conscious thought. Studies have shown that sleeping is particularly useful for this and it's thought that whilst dreaming our brains run scenario agter scenario trying to improve our skills having taken into account all the data on a level we are not aware of. Apologies if I seem to be over simplifying this.

People always tend to talk of Freud and Jung when discussing these things but what we have to remember is that much of what both wrote is just conjecture, philosophy and psychology (and psychology is still subject to fads and whims and so is not actually classified as a science). I'm certainly not dismissing what they wrote outright but we have come a long way since then.

I have to disagree with the theory of a collective consciousness (though you might want to check out the rather excellent anime film Akira that deals with such matters, Japanese with subtitles is best ) Though there is some credibility to a cultural virus called a meme that are thoughtto be the genetic equivalent of genes and so you could argue for a cultural gene pool from which new ideas grow.And to a certain extent everything that you've ever done read or thought has in some way been influenced by something you have experienced. We are the sum total of our experiences, though from these experiences we are able to extrapolate new theories and data and that is in essence how we progress. Buddhism actually has much to say about this and is the only 'religion' I have any respect, though I believe it to be not so much a religion as the oldest form of philosophy.

Ani,

Religion is a very interesting and very worrying subject. There is lots of evidence to suggest that religion springs from a certain kind of brain damage, indeed there is a high conversion rate of reformed alcoholics who have suffered damage to a particular region of the brain. Tough I find this paradoxical to the claim that alcoholism is a factor in roughly 30% of suicides (see the suicides thread). There is also evidence to support the evolution of religious belief and the fact that to a degree it may be hereditary. So not only does the brainwashing of children by devout parents paly it's part but there may be a genetic link too. Studies have shown that religious people tend to be happier than non religious ( I think but I can't be sure that there is a link between the amount of serotonin levels in religious and non religious, which in turn to the fact that lower levels of serotonin mean an enhanced awareness of reality. Perhaps and this is only speculative, religious people have a slightly more rose tinted view of the world because they percieve reality differently) Anyway I think you get the gist.

Right Steve,

Deja vu. I read an article I think it may have been in Sientific American that suggested that deja vu was effectively a temporary loss of cerebral cohesion. Or more particularly that it was induced by one hemisphere of the brain processing what has just been witnessed a fraction of a second before the other half of the brain. This means that you seem to be experiencing the same event twice whne you actually only experienced it once.

Not sure what you mean by the different layers of ligh thing. Light is a strange thing though we consider it to be in most cases a wave. Don't even get my started on wave-particle duality! The different colours of light we percieve are simply different frequencies of light. Light doesn't form layers as it always travels in a straight line from source. Though the gravitational effect of a blackhole can bend light! Depth perception is more a matter to do with our eyes and the fact that we have two of them, again you best bet is to have a read of The Blind Watchmaker. You might want to check out a few basic science books too to get your head around the whole light thing you could try Atom by Isaac Asimov (a fairly easy read). Shadows are created when you come between a light source and the object you cast a shodow on, if light is present and there is something obstructing the path of the light then a shadow will be cast. In total darkness no shadow will be present.

Finally the white light we see when we 'die' is actually just neurons firing at random within the visual cortes which we then interpret to be a focused white light. This happens when our brain undergoes stress usually in the form of oxygen starvation. Jet fighter ppilots often experience this sensation when travelling at supersonic speeds.

Right I'm off to have some dinner!

Geoff

Steven
Caught up with your fascinating question too late to follow the whole subsequent debate. Therefore just an observation:

Years ago on an apprentice's first day in the local bus coachworks, one of the many cruel initiations he was subjected to, was being sent to the stores by the old hands to get some "sky hooks"....

Seeking an answer to your question, as posed, from science, is like trying to attach something with sky hooks.

Many scientists have thoughtful, interesting things to say about the brain: far fewer have anything interesting to say about the mind: Richard Dworkins is in neither group. Nor sadly is Lord Winston who, lovely man that he is, managed to write a book about the brain thinking he was writing about the mind - without understanding the difference.

Sorry of that sounds arrogant but most scientists write as if the whole of 20th century philosophy never happended.

Regards

Zettel

Hi there Zettel,

Your sky hooks story reminds me of when I was at school and the CDT teacher sent one of my classmates to ask for a "long stand".

I wasn't sure about which questions you were claiming to be unaswerable but in my humble opinion they will all yield to science sooner or later. Whether people find the answers acceptable or not is something else. I would also say that your claim that few scientists have anything interesting to say about the mind is not something that I have come across whilst studying the subject. I have read countless papers and articles by scientists (neurobiologists, neurochemists, neuropathologists, biochemists etc) that have a great deal of interesting and relevant things to say about the mind and what constitutes it.

Perhaps you were referring to his questions of god and religion. Well i'll be the first to say that it's impossible to disprove a negative but I can in every instance debunk or disprove every single argument that has been given for the existence of a god. Something that I will be attempting as one of the many themes in Smoke.

I also have to disagree that most scientist behave as if 20th century philosophy never happened. We could argue forever and a day over what philosophy is but I general take it to mean the use of logic and rational arguments to discuss the nature of a given subject. It is almost an entirely mental exercise relying soley on the logic of the mind.

Science on the other hand is the rigourous and detailed investigation of phenomena and relies not only on the rational interpretation of data but also solid, repeatable, experiments.

The 20th century philosophers could only draw their arguments from what was known to them and in those days this was very little. In the last few decades though there have been real advances that have pushed not only science but philosophy along. So much of what was taken as granted given the limitations of their knowledge has been either rewritten or overwritten completely. But that's the whole point, that's how we make progress, we learn and continually improve our ideas and theories (by the way, the lay persons definition of theory and the scientific definition differ quite drastically). At best science and philosophy complement each other as you'll find all the greatest philosophers are actually scientists.

Geoff

Geoff
Thanks for the prompt reply. I agree with much more of what you say than you might think given my post. For the point I am trying to make the best expression of it I have recently seen was Brian Appleyard's article in a recent Sunday Times ostensibly about Francis Crick but really about the 'philosophy' of science. 'What is philsophy' is a logically weird question (though not illegitimate)in that it is self-referential in that it is itself philsophical question. (A bit like the word 'ineffable' if you think about it). Philosophy is the only 'subject' there is no 'philosophy of'. That's why PhD's are PhD's.
Many of my intellectual heroes are scientists -Feinberg, Einstein (of course) - latterly Kroto et al - even Susan Greenfield has a better conceptual (i.e. philosophical) understanding of the distinction between brain and mind than many of her colleagues who denigrate her. Science is a reductionist discipline - your remark that "all will yield to science eventually" buys into that belief -and it is a belief - whatever it is, it is not a scientific remark.
My obvious dislike of Dworkins lies in his love of the 'priesthood' conception of science and total lack of humility before the wonder of the world that Einstein and the others above retained. Neither Bertrand Russell nor Einstein would dispplay the hubris of Dworkins in 'denying' other men's Gods etc.
Science is a paradigm of verifiable knowledge. Many of it's practitioners just don't notice when they make extra-scientific statements as if they were within science. They then claim a certainty for them for which only genuinely scientific statements are entitled to.

The mind reducible to brain events? Sure, but then you'd be unable to form hardly any recognisable sentence in language to describe it because our language is irreducibly, intentional in character. We don't even have to go to neuro-science or psychology to point up the problem - just look at the oldest and toughest scientific discipline of all - Physics - in this instance astronomy/cosmology - of all people Germaine set it up in 2 words - "what banged?"
Can't leave you with GG. Best I can do is quote the end of Appleyard's piece above:

Crick was a great scientist who was deluded about the power of science. He was led astray by his justifiable awe and enthusiasm for the simplicity and beauty of the molecule that he and Watson had discovered. They had not found the secret of life because there is no such secret. A far greater mind than either saw this with devastating clarity, not long before the double helix was exposed to the world. "We feel," wrote Wittgenstein, "that even if all the possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all. Of course there is then no question left, and that is the answer. The solution to the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of the problem..."

When Stephen Hawking recently eschewed his search for the 'theory of everything' he finally added some philosophical wisdom to his undoubted scientific brilliance.

Regards

Zettel

Philosophy is the only 'subject' there is no 'philosophy of

What about epistemology? As philosophy is the love of wisdom (knowledge), and epistemology is 'the branch of philosophy that studies the nature of knowledge, in particular its foundations, scope and validity'.

Ani

Hi Ani
I would not equate wisdom with knowledge nor strictly does the history of philosophy. It is for that reason that Epistemology, though a critical element of philosophy (conceived of as a subject of academic study), is merely one branch of Philosophy.
I am careful above in that I certainly do not believe that Philosophy as a subject of academic study exhausts all the posibilities: 20th century philosophy has been much criticised precisely because it appears to concern itself with technical, esoteric issues in logic and language and appears notto have much interest in e.g. Socrates' question "how should we live our lives" - I merely report it - don't necessarily agree with it.
My answer of course begs the important question: If wisdom is not knowledge then what is it? Big question: short inadequate answer - it has much more to do with coming to some understanding of the world and our relation to it and each other than with the simple verifiable facts of either.
Regards
Zettel

I have something to add on the subject of déjà vu, my experiences are changing, quite possibly they’ve started changing since I started writing.

Déjà vu for me has always been a sudden feeling that I’ve experienced an immediate moment before. The feeling is there and then is gone in the blink of an eye.

However, recently things have been changing. Twice I’ve experienced what I can only describe a pre-cognitive déjà vu. The feeling of déjà vu has lasted more than a moment, infact has lasted several seconds. I’ve had time to realise what I’m experiencing and been able to anticipate what happens next. The second time it happened, it really felt like I could reach out and catch the cup before it fell off the table, so to speak. It’s a very odd feeling indeed.

Does everyone experience déjà vu? And do we experience it in the same way?

Grinder

Hi Grinder,

Did you catch the above explanation. The slightly longer term sensation could merely be an episode of incohesion that lasts longer.

Many epiletics tend to suffer from deja vu experiences just before a seizure and many report that the effect can last quite some time.

There is also a condition where the exact opposite happens, Jamais vu which is a disorder of memory characterized by the illusion that the familiar is being encountered for the first time.

Geoff