Tal, a conversation with an alien

by AnonYMous

  That may have been what people felt in the past; that their soul guides their body. I would think that these days, people understand this happens simultaneously. Your mental idea or intention and its physical representation happen at the same time.

  That would be a logical way to look at it. However, the most recent scientific research has shown that the decisions and actions which you feel you have consciously chosen, actually manifest physically in your brain much earlier than your conscious mind is aware of them.

  You mean they are processed subconsciously?

  Yes. Even though you feel very strongly that the decision originated in your conscious mind. There have been many experiments done testing this. When asked to make a simple decision or action, for instance choosing when to move a finger, studies have shown that physical reactions in the brain begin happening before the subject is aware of any intention to act. In other words, the scientists, while monitoring signals from the body and brain, could predict when the subjects would choose to do the action, before the subjects even knew it themselves. The physical brain acts, and the mind follows. There have been further experiments, using fMRI, in which scientists found that when subjects were asked to make a choice, such as pressing a button with the left hand or the right hand, it was possible to predict, with some accuracy, up to seven seconds before their conscious decision to act, when and which button the test subject will press.

  You are saying that the subconscious somehow makes these decisions well before the conscious mind is even aware there is a decision to make?

  Well these are very basic experiments that show certain results. After the experiment is complete, there follows the very long and often contested process of interpreting and understanding these results. The types of experiments with consciousness being done now are similar to the first quantum mechanical experiments, like the double slit experiment one hundred years ago. The results of those experiments seemed impossible at first, and are still befuddling a hundred years later. The meaning of these consciousness experiments is not so clear now and will challenge your scientists and philosophers for many years to come. The one thing you should understand, however, is that the subconscious plays a very significant part in all of your functions, even in decisions and actions that seem to you, purely conscious. You see, here we run into the limitations of teaching in your modern scientific era. Because your brain is already wired to accept the reality of your current paradigm, I do not teach you with knowledge from outside your paradigm, as you will naturally resist this knowledge. I must teach in a way your brain will understand. Thus I must teach based on a logical systematic method, and am forced to use information that you believe is scientifically valid. Luckily in this case, you can check the research yourself, but the research is very limited, so what I can discuss with you is limited. Current scientific research is typically not done for the sake of pure knowledge and the quest for truth. There is not much money in that. The vast majority of your scientists work to make money for corporations. Doing drug testing, or product testing; joining the quest for the ever better tasting toothpaste. The little fundamental research done today is mostly funded by your governments and universities. It will be a while before there is enough pure scientific research to give you a clear idea of what is really going on inside your head.

  Honestly, I have to doubt these experiments. Perhaps for basic simple decisions like choosing left or right, or physical actions like walking or breathing or picking things up this indeed happens. I do not consciously choose, I have already made the decision subconsciously before I am aware of it. But I certainly use my conscious mind to make important thought out decisions about my life.

  Because you can sense conscious thought more strongly than unconscious thought, you tend to believe that conscious thought is your decision generator. And since you do not sense the actual physical state of your brain, you do not realize how little actual conscious control you have. For instance, when a physical aspect of the brain suffers damage or its chemical makeup is not in balance, it affects all of your decision-making, including thought out decisions. What to an outsider, may seem like erratic behavior, your conscious mind will try to make logical to you. One example is the behavior of humans with too much testosterone. Humans who produce too much testosterone not only tend to get angry easier, but all sorts of decisions change; their likes and dislikes, the activities they do, the people they socialize with, the jobs they enjoy. All the choices they make are affected by the imbalance. Once the balance is restored, the conscious decisions that person makes change dramatically. Similarly, with problems like addiction or depression, the simple conscious understanding that something is wrong rarely changes the behavior. This is often why drugs need to be taken, to physically change the chemical balances in the brain. Sometimes counseling can help to break repetitive patterns and create new ones. In the end, the physical structure of the brain needs to change for conscious action to also change. Let me give you a very amusing example of how a change in the physical brain alters conscious thought. There is a very interesting thing that can happen to humans when they suffer a certain type of brain damage. Have you heard of the Capgras Delusion?

  No.

  In this mental disorder, a person feels that all of their friends and relatives are imposters. They also believe that their home is not their real home, their pet, not their pet, etcetera. Though they accurately recognize the face of a loved one, those who suffer from Capgras Delusion do not believe that this is the genuine person. Scientists found that this condition often arises after a person has suffered brain damage caused by an accident or stroke. The area where the brain damage usually occurs is one that controls emotions. A lot of information goes into recognizing someone, and much of it is not visual. Even though they recognize the person visually, they feel no emotion towards them. This emotional recognition you are normally not conscious of is so strong that it overrides the very obvious visual input. Thus they believe that the person they are looking at is an imposter. If their conscious mind was truly powerful, you might think it could override this subconscious information. Yet logical explanations do not fix the problem. No matter how much you try to logically explain to people with this disorder that they are delusional, that their family members are not imposters, the feeling remains. So a dysfunction or imbalance in your physical brain can completely change your conscious actions and observations, though to you, those actions and observations will seem free willed and perfectly logical.

  It's hard to believe that I have so little control over how I think and what I choose to do.

  I would not say you have little control. I would say you have little conscious control. Think of your mind as a deep ocean; the surface waves are your conscious mind. Hovering above the ocean, all one can see is the surface ripples. This is what you usually sense when you observe your mind working. Just the surface. Yet the structures under the water affect what patterns manifest on the surface. The subconscious controls 99.999 percent of everything that happens in your life; how you move, how you fight disease, how your billions of cells work together to balance your system. All done without any conscious awareness, millions and millions of actions. Your conscious mind can't keep more than seven numbers in your memory for more than a few seconds. Current scientific research has shown that even when making very important thought out decisions like buying a car, or answering very difficult questions like those on university entrance exams, you are statistically more successful when you make the gut decision and don't ponder for too long about it. Your conscious mind actually gets in the way.

  Yes, I have heard of this idea in some popular psychology books and magazines. When comparing cars or homes, the more people thought about it, the worse their decision. Frankly, much of what you said seems pretty logical to me; aside from the part about the subconscious making decisions before I am aware of it. But why is it that we have made so much progress in manipulating matter, and so little in understanding how we think?

>   Because the vast majority of your scientists and mathematicians discount the importance of consciousness, even though all of science and mathematics depends on it. Any measurement, experiment, or theory requires a conscious mind’s involvement.

  But we can use tools to measure, like microscopes or electron detectors, we don't need to observe anything.

  You still need to create those tools and then collect the information from those tools via conscious interaction. You also need conscious interaction with numbers to manipulate mathematics and create theorems.

  Aren't mathematical laws already there? We didn't invent them.

  It takes consciousness to either create them or uncover them, either way consciousness is required. What defines mathematics and what defines mathematical proofs is constantly changing and evolving with the people who practice it. I am not making a judgment about the situation. You can discount consciousness; that isn't a problem in many branches of science. You can still get results. It only becomes a problem when you are seeking insights about consciousness in a paradigm where it is generally ignored.

  Must we step out of the paradigm to understand truths about consciousness?

  At this point in your development, you do need to step out a bit, but not too far. If you are interested, I can explain a few controversial ideas about the brain and quantum theory, ideas on the fringe of your scientific understanding. Your scientists don't have a consensus opinion on what I will tell you next, but that is nothing unusual. Science knows so little about the brain. If you told scientists even twenty years ago something obvious, like the fact that the human brain is capable of neurogenesis, the creation of new neurons, most would have laughed at you. Now it is standard knowledge.

  Yes, I would like you to continue, especially since you still haven't explained the link between consciousness and seeing many worlds.

  Not only is your mind required for perceiving many worlds, it plays a vital role in the creation of many worlds. You now understand that most of your life is controlled by your subconscious mind. And your subconscious mind is influenced by your brain, which is a very complex structure whose constituents operate at the quantum level. Your brain's function is based on the firing of neurons, which send electrical signals throughout your brain. These neurons form neural networks. Your neurons and their many smaller constituents, the parts that make up the neural network, like microtubules and ion channels are all sensitive to the subtle effects of quantum randomness. Your brain is a fluctuating field of neurons, chemicals, and electrical signals. It is not the individual neurons and their synapses or even the microtubules themselves, but the interactions between all of these constituents that is critical. This symbiotic interaction is what creates the amazing abilities of your mind. Look at your chess set. There are only 32 pieces, and 64 squares on the board. Yet your most powerful computers are nowhere near solving chess. They play better than humans, but that's about it.

  I have read that the number of possible interactions or positions in chess is infinite. But I now realize it can't be, since there is definitely a finite amount of pieces and squares.

  That's right, it is a large number. The number of possible interactions between these 32 pieces, on a 64 square board is greater than 10 to the 100, or one Googol, which is more than the amount of atoms in your observable universe, but definitely finite. Now compare that to your brain, which contains billions of neurons and billions of synapses, with each synapse connected with discrete levels of strength. The brain is extremely complex and extremely delicate. Just as the same action on a particle or group of particles can create many possible reactions; the same stimuli on your body and brain can create many possible reactions in your mind. Humans make decisions in reaction to stimuli, and they believe that if the stimuli were exactly the same, if a situation were exactly the same, they would make exactly the same decisions in reaction to it. This is just not the case. The decisions you have made in your life are more random than you think they are. Just as molecules will not move in the same fashion every time; living things will also not behave in the same fashion every time, even if the situation is exactly identical.

  I would think that life forms, using their minds, might actually remove some of the randomness and act more consistently. I certainly feel as if I make consistent decisions and would repeat them if the situation was exactly the same.

  I think you are confusing what your paradigm would like your actions to be like and what they really are like. In your modern industrialized world, humans strive for perfect repetition and the removal of as much randomness as possible. They have developed artificial life forms, computers and robots; machines to create identical products for mass consumption. They also desire consistency and repeatability in their research and experiments. Living in a paradigm that puts great value on consistency and predictability leads the people of that paradigm to think the same way about themselves, when the reality is the exact opposite. Conscious living things, by nature, are much more chaotic than non-conscious things. Living things actually have a tendency towards randomness; it is built into their very structure. For instance in observing many types of animals, you will see that they perform very many random actions even when there is no reason to do so. Their reaction to stimuli is very chaotic. In the case of a non-living object, laws of motion will tend to send an object in the shortest and most energy conserved manner to its destination. There could be some slight quantum variation, but it is tiny. Yet life doesn't work that way, even though logically it would seem conserving energy is helpful for survival. Even with a clear path to food, you will see that animals don't always take the shortest route. They will take various random paths, often less efficient than a direct path. And when they do decide to move this way or that, living things do not tend to move anywhere in continuous motion like a non-living object. Their motion is interrupted by accelerations, decelerations and pauses. When there is a similar stimulus to many animals, like fruit to a group of fruit flies, they will all act in many different and random ways. Eventually most will go to the fruit, but all in their own time and by their own unique path. The actions of living beings are generally, inherently, random. This randomness is manifested by the design of the brain and the sensitivity of its structure to quantum effects. This is the root physical generator of their chaotic and random behavior.

  Why would there be this extra inherent randomness in living things?

  Well if you think about it, if there is no randomness, there is predictability. Once you are predictable as prey, you are much easier to catch. Once you are predictable as predator you are easy to avoid. If you are predictable in a fight, you will most likely lose. In a constantly changing environment, if you lack variety as a species you are in major trouble. Any calamity or change will wipe you out, as one goes, so do the others. In human groups, even in the most socially controlled environments, the strictest governments or societies, there are always outliers. These outliers are necessary for the survival of the species, and from them come many of the most interesting and novel ideas. Random action in animals increases their chance of survival and their group's chance of survival.

  But as humans, we have some conscious control over these random processes.

  Let me give you an example from recent scientific research that shows how random action is generated in humans. The brain is constantly working. If you are engaged in some activity or thought, certain parts of the brain will be more active than others. However, there is neuronal activity in all parts of the brain. There are many types of neurons in the brain and they fire randomly at different rates. A recent study attempted to observe the random firings of neurons within the brain and their effect on decision-making. While monitored, test subjects were asked to make a simple fifty-fifty choice between performing two tasks, such as performing addition or subtraction. These tasks use two different parts of the brain. The results showed that, depending on where there was more random neuronal firing, one could predict which action would be chosen,
again up to seven seconds in advance. Which part of your brain is more randomly lit up before a decision, will influence the decisions you make, even though to you, it seems to be a completely free willed conscious decision. So the brain chooses and your conscious mind follows with a nice feeling of intention. The state of your brain is the state of your mind.

  Ok, I can understand how actions of animals or our subconscious actions are random. Perhaps even very simple decisions we make, like going left or right, or adding and subtracting have random qualities to them. But what about the conscious, thought out choices that I make? If I actually take some time to make a complicated decision, would I not make the same decision every time?

  Since your brain is a quantum physical system, it will follow mathematical probability rules. You could think of the brain as having its own Schrödinger brain equation. Each time your mind encounters a stimulus, depending on the state of your brain, and how it processes that stimulus, different reactions will have a probability of occurring. Some reactions more likely, and some less likely. You may not feel that long thought out decisions can be influenced by quantum effects, but that decision is going to depend on many subconscious processes and associations you are not aware of. A very popular current research field in psychology is known as priming. Research in this field points to the fact that subconscious symbols and associations have a dramatic effect on your conscious thoughts and actions. Researchers prime their subjects with certain ideas and observe if this affects subsequent unrelated thoughts and actions. In one well-known experiment, students in two groups were told to perform simple manipulations of certain words. One group had to make sentences with words that seemed to refer, though did not mention, old age. Words like Florida, forgetful, bald, and gray. After manipulating these words, those students were then told to walk to another room down the hall for further testing. The researchers then measured the students' rate of movement. The students who manipulated the old words walked down the hall significantly slower than the control group, which did not manipulate words dealing with old age. There have been many such studies. Other interesting studies primed subjects with thoughts or images of money. Later the subjects were asked to perform various tasks measuring generosity, initiative and helpfulness. For instance how many students, after being exposed to symbols or ideas related to money, would help someone who happened to drop their belongings as they were walking by. Those groups who were primed in advance by thinking about money were more selfish, less helpful and more driven in their decision-making.