its been eons since i last posted here.
i was lying on the bed, because i just felt too tired and bleah to sort thru the excess of shirts in our closet. phx and boogie came too, and we all started drifting off to sleep. and then one of our neighbours started pressure-washing the concrete pad in front of his place. and phx said: "that guy doesnt do anything but smoke pot and pressure-wash his sidewalk".
that slowly got some thoughts in me rolling. i wondered how active he would be if he didnt smoke pot. but then i remembered that i tended to get onto doing stuff i normally didnt feel like doing, after having a toke. so maybe it worked like that for this guy too. or maybe i'm just different.
then i started wondering why that would be - why something like that would affect me in that way. sometimes having a slight consistent pain or being sick just got me on working at what had to be done. all these things seem to just take some kind of edge off for me, and i dont terribly mind getting onto doing something i'd normally not want to do. how does that work?
then i started thinking that maybe our brains have a couple different centers that work independently towards their own goals, but what the body ultimately does is either some kind of average of the different agendas that these brain centers are pushing, or these stimuli get all submitted to some kind of editor, which then decides what to do out of all these choices. but maybe something happens during the editor's development that skewes his tendencies one way or another.
or maybe the process is more automated than that, and the brain centers simply submit a request together with some kind of a priority value, and then its not so much a conscious "choice", but rather a kind of an average or a sum total i mentioned earlier. and either because of nurture or nature, or a combination of both, some centers tend to output higher priority values than others.
likely it would be a combination of approaches - for simpler things, the process would be automated, and we'd be only dimly aware of it. for processes with which "conscious" mucking might jeopardize the body - the process would be completely automated and we'd not be aware of it at all. so what processes are we conscious of? is it the ones that deal with the outside world? unless they're boring, then they'd get demoted to the automated department, and awareness would be rerouted from it to more "interesting" things. awareness... attention? conscious attention. what is consciousness? being able to operate with ideas? whats an idea? something which can be described to a degree with language? hmm, phx just told boogie that i'm the next ernest hummingbird :)
but i think awareness, which is probably the same thing as consciousness, is possible without language. language just institutionalizes awareness. you can operate with ideas without language to a limited degree. but to do that you need memory. awareness probably doesnt exist if all ur doing is reacting to stimuli as they come. but if u can compare an experience to a previous experience...
this "comparing" might happen at an even deeper level of automation in the form of the evolutionary process: a mutation that gives an advantage to an organism when dealing with a situation as compared to its peers will give the organism better chances of survival and procreation. over time this type of organism should become the norm. its kind of like learning, but for a species. hardwired biological memory.
but when individual members of the species can learn to deal with situations in a better way, that catapults the learning process for the species hugely. then the members of the species learn to share this knowledge, so that mistakes dont have to be made over and over again, but the learning process can be picked up and continued by the next individual. add parallel processing by sharing information between many individuals at once and testing many new paths of progress from that point, and the species becomes a supercomputer. too bad we often think of ourselves as completely separate individuals and dont feel that connection to everybody else.