How does the material brain know if I want to move the right or left toe?

reply to post by neoholographic


I don't think God wants us to know.

As close as I can come to understanding what is happening is that all quanta/physical matter is made up of not just the light which forms the images we perceive, but it is also made up of the force which forms said images/quanta/physical matter.

I think modern day academia would agree with that interpretation, but where academia and my interpretation diverge is at the interpretation of force. Academia believes force is a set of tenancies created by static fundamental attributes of our physical plain of existence, and I believe force is manifest interpretation/will.

And this is where God has placed his veil over my eyes. I cannot conceptualize the interface, of awareness and will, which creates the thinker or interpreter. I think free will must be thought to encompass the ability to freely interpret, along with the ability to manifest said interpretation, and that is the thinker, but that is as close as I can come to understanding it...

Maybe something like this:
Our awareness is our brains' awareness of its senses.
Our thoughts are our brains' interpretation of its senses.

or...

Our senses are our other body parts' interpretation of their senses as interpreted by our brains.

To put it another way, all quanta/physical matter is controlled by awareness with will, but that is not to say all awarenesses have free will. I think, only those with free will can freely interpret - which is what our sense of thought is - our awareness' free will to imbue light with the will of its interpretation. And again, how that interfaces and/or manifests between awareness and will, I do not know, nor do I think we are supposed to know, yet.

Where we are screwing up, I think, is by not recognizing that we are interpreting the will/force of the images in order to know the concepts that they represent (which was the very basis for the manifestation of said image/will/interpretation.)

or...

We are interpreting just the will/force of the images, without realizing that the will is manifest in order to image the concept/interpretation of its creator/thinker/interpreter/awareness.


My point to all this is thus:
-Awareness, will, and body/image are working together, so do not try to separate them like you are doing.
-Academia misunderstands force.
-People try to interpret will, but they do not recognize it as such, thereby failing to understand that force/will is the carrier of concepts (concepts which were created by other interpreters); and it is the concepts which we should try to understand -- not the mechanism by which they are created.

I could talk about this for days, but I'll stop here.


edit again: Could you imagine if we figured out how awareness and will work together? What is faith and where does it interface with will and awareness? If we found that out, God would be more than pissed, I think.

neoholographic
Like I said, the material brain stores the memory of when I first went swimming, it needs a user to recall that specific memory. How does the material brain know I wish to recall that specific memory? How does it know the difference between a memory where I first went swimming and a memory where I first went diving.

Your problem is being too simplistic in the decision making process. Your brain determines actions based on a whole lifetime of experiences. Thus any action is dependant on the consolidation of potentially hundreds of billions of small items of information. There will be vast quantities of subconcious connections as well.

It is this subconcious process that cons people into believing a crystal can find lost items !!! DUH!! (FYI you ask the crystal yes/no questions, your subconcious has an answer and micro twitches of the muscles direct the swing of the crystal one way or another). Also note that these micro reactions can be observed by talented observers such has Derren Brown. This is how he apparently "reads your mind".

So to sum up : your whole OP is based on a flawed assumption that there is a simple decision making process.

IMHO : it is this vast array of lifetime experience that makes us concious thinking beings (the religious call it a soul). It is only a matter of time before an artificial intelligence has the same volume of experience. Then it will be as self aware as we are.....

Nature

Your brain makes up its mind up to ten seconds before you realize it, according to researchers. By looking at brain activity while making a decision, the researchers could predict what choice people would make before they themselves were even aware of having made a decision. The work calls into question the ‘consciousness’ of our decisions and may even challenge ideas about how ‘free’ we are to make a choice at a particular point in time. “We think our decisions are conscious, but these data show that consciousness is just the tip of the iceberg,” says John-Dylan Haynes, a neuroscientist at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany, who led the study.

There's something to drum up a few more thoughts in the thread.

My first thought is that just because it isn't explained through material avenues doesn't mean that it must be spiritual.

Moving beyond that, it is a great question that highlights the breadth, or lack thereof, of our collective knowledge. The tantalizing answer would be "the soul". I have heard the term "overself" used before, and think it is a proper term for the concept of what it is. People also often refer to it as "subconcsious", which I find silly. If anything, it would be "superconsciousness", as it would be superior to the clouded veil of illusion we call reality.

In any event, I have no answers. I have millions of comments ont he topic. many of them I likely won't share, LOL.

Good thread....i hope some discussion happens (and the religious fanaticism is kept at bay).

some of this knowledge is genetic. Our mind just learns to use this genetic knowledge over the years from experience. All animals do this, some being better than others. Some animals come out and can stand and walk already, we have to wait to walk so our parents can OOOH and AWWW then tell everyone how soon their kids are walking. After that we learn to get in all sorts of trouble. Good thing we don't come out and walk right away, our parents would be stressed beyond belief as we break all their stuff.

reply to post by butcherguy


I would guess that the mind, as it is referred to in this thread, is likely to be the brain's center for calculating emotional stimuli/responses. And that could mean only the things with emotional stimuli are sent to the subsection of the brains thinking center called "the mind", yet it is done so with a latency because the brain must first determine if said stimuli is emotionally stimulating enough to send to the mind's "eye". Thus giving the appearance that we do not think our thoughts.

The problem, as I see it, is the inference that our minds are separate from all the other thoughts that our bodies produce, or that the rest of our body does not produce thought, or that all combined thoughts are not the mind.

I think all of my bodies thoughts are my mind -- not just the emotional section we all communicate with the most: id, ego, and super ego.

e.g. My toe is thinking here I am, and I can sense its telling of presence. i.e. my toe's mind is apart of my mind because I can sense my toe. We are communicating or sharing concepts - thus we are mind.

And beyond the body we get into hive mind, prophecy, determinism, the ethereal, etc.

But as far as free will not being free, if we place thought/will at the furthermost point in time, then our awareness lagging behind does not dictate that our will was not our own -- it just says that awareness is laggy and that now is truly not now - now as we perceive it, is actually in the past.

Which kind of makes sense if you think about it... you cannot become aware of what you have yet to interpret, right?

And the reason I think now is in the past is because of intuitiveness and pesky things like prophecy and the instantaneousness of quantum entanglement. I mean, if quantum entanglement is real, then determinism cannot be real - determinism requires time to react so we must push "now" into the past.

reply to post by Bleeeeep

now is truly not now - now as we perceive it, is actually in the past.

I believe that this is true.