Entertainment, Leisure, Creativity, Free Will and the Nature of Consciousness

The things that draw our minds to love them are worthy of inspection… because our minds themselves are some kind of special.

Tonight, I’d like to try my hand at something a little bit deeper than I usually do for an entertainment website. Okay, so it’s probably much deeper than I normally go. In fact, if I do this correctly, I hope to really push the limits of what I can communicate. Would you like to join me?

When I’m writing for That Park Place, almost always I’m chatting about some sort of creative endeavor. Maybe it’s the beauty of a theme park, perhaps it’s the ingenuity of a script. Whatever I’m discussing, it’s always the product of humanity. Well, unless I’m discussing a national park, but that almost always goes to John Golf. So ninety-nine percent of the time, I’m dealing with the product of people.

That’s not foreign to many of you. If you live in an urban area or even suburbia, your daily commute is filled with scenes of human creation. Traffic lights, stop signs, restaurants, the cup of coffee you and I love so very, very much… it’s all the creation of millions of brains thinking up great new ideas. It’s all the product of planning. It’s all the product of consciousness — of many minds.

Years ago, I sat down and read a book by famed inventor and futurist, Ray Kurzweil. It’s called How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed, and I found the whole thing very informative and ingenious. Breaking down the way that our organic brains organize information was clear-cut and helpful for me figuring out how we perceive the world. Newborns no almost nothing, yet five years later, most children’s brains are adept at recognizing the crossbar on the letter A, then at a higher level recognizing the shape of a letter A, and at a higher set of neurons they’re realizing the letter A is associated with a sound. It’s layer upon layer in a hierarchy of neurological pattern recognition. And every day our world is layered with an almost innumerable set of pattern recognition systems figuring out in nanoseconds what it is we’re looking at, smelling, tasting, hearing and more. It’s all fascinating.

And yet, when I finished Kurzweil’s book, I found myself in disagreement about the thesis so fundamental to the book that it’s featured in the title. As I completed the first chapter, I came away with the profound knowledge that I had not discovered in these pages how to create a mind, but rather I had learned the analog system for creating neurological systems. A mind is very different.

We all know that our minds are special. They’re the conscious stage on which our identity resides. On this stage appear our thoughts, our memories, the things we’re currently seeing, our current experience — that which we focus upon and that which demands our attention. Sometimes we’re in charge of what appears on that conscious stage called the mind (or at least we believe we are) and sometimes we are sent the actors upon the stage without much perceived choice. A horrible memory jolts us with its appearance in our mind, a loud noise forces our attention off a pleasant thought. But we know our mind is tangibly different than anything else in the world. We know that because some, or most, of our brain’s activity is either unconscious or subconscious.

As you’re reading this article, you probably didn’t focus on the feeling of your chair. At least you didn’t if I’ve done a good job of drawing your attention into the writing. But now you’ve paid attention to the feeling of the chair; a feeling that has been there all the time but never drawn onto your conscious mind’s stage. That’s because not everything is deemed worthy by your brain to be on your mind’s stage. Your breathing is done mostly by the unconscious brain. Your body temperature is regulated completely separate from the thinking you associate with being “you”. It’s almost as if there are two huge things going on in your brain: there’s the subconscious majority that goes on in darkness behind a veil, and then there’s the “you” that is your mind. But how does your brain create the “you” that is so different from all the rest of you that is supposedly you?

Chop off your finger and you are still there. Remove all your memories and you’ll likely be unhappy, confused… but your mind will still be there. And what exactly is your mind exactly except for the conscious stage that is a window into the universe beyond and a universe within?

It feels axiomatic. It feels like that mind is something immaterial in a material world. And if you think it’s an illusion or a deterministic manifestation of a gooey organ, it sure doesn’t seem like successful people act that way. I was listening to a professor on a podcast the other day argue that his future self was not his current self because the future him would be totally different cells within just a few years. He said he truly believed this. The problem is I don’t believe him. I don’t because he lives as if that is the antithesis of his convictions. How can someone who believes they cease with every new moment, or at the least after each new sleep cycle, do anything at all which requires planning. If you believe truly that you stop existing every time your stream of consciousness is disrupted, then wouldn’t you do everything your power to stay awake forever? Wouldn’t you immediately cease planning and preparing for the future? Why, you’d certainly not worry about that future you who needs to pay the bills… little alone plan for a PhD you’ll never see! No, the professor on the podcast demonstrated via his life success that he absolutely believed the future had him existing in it.

Famous atheist Sam Harris, who admittedly has had a bad month, has his entire ethic based around something that I think is just a gaping illogical flaw. Take a look at this belief:

Morality must relate, at some level, to the well-being of conscious creatures. If there are more and less effective ways for us to seek happiness and to avoid misery in this world—and there clearly are—then there are right and wrong answers to questions of morality.

— Sam Harris

Now perhaps that statement from Harris strikes you as poignant or wise. I think it’s utter rubbish. Why, if there is no greater power akin to God or a Creator or the Truth, why would consciousness or minds matter at all? That’s just a value assignment made by a subjective opinion. Perhaps a computer system would say that consciousness is inefficient and suffering is pointless… so just end all consciousness to solve the problem? Perhaps if the universe is deterministic and materialism explains it all, perhaps the electrical patterns we describe as joy or sorrow are no more important than the electrical patterns one could find in a potato?

And yet there’s Sam Harris, famous atheist, proclaiming that consciousness matters. It’s special. Not subconsciousness, not unconsciousness, not neurological activity… just consciousness.

Now a thermostat could be argued to be conscious, but I don’t think that’s what Harris is describing. I think he’s describing those entities which have a mind. And I’m not sure we understand at all, whatsoever, what a mind is. It’s totally unexplored territory. A thermostat is conscious but almost certainly has no mind. A patient with severe cerebral damage may have neurological consciousness of some stimulus, but we’re very unsure they have a mind. And yet simultaneously, there are people who say they died and maintained a mind that was more vivid than a mind that is in a fully healthy brain state. What an odd thing a mind is.

We can figure out the zeroes and ones of the brain with enough time, I am sure. And if we do, we can surely identify the objective patterns of thought, of experience, of memories and more. But it’s the mind that is so darn odd. Because even if we explain all of the brain, we’re no closer to figuring out the mind, even if I’m not certain the mind is beyond our grasp. It’s sort of like the scientists who proclaim we fully understand how life works, yet we can’t create new life yet… and I’m left to wonder what sort of baker would declare she fully understands pastries yet can’t bake a new one. That’s how I feel about the mind. We must understand almost nothing about it in the present because we have no idea how to make one or what is associated with it. We just know that brains are an ingredient, maybe the only ingredient, maybe not.

Is the brain evolved or designed in such a way as to receive a conscious mind? Is free will entered into an otherwise deterministic reality through such a thing? Who knows? We’re like cavemen trying to understand how satellite television works without even understanding what’s above the clouds. We’re four-hundred years past Isaac Newton and we act sometimes as if we’re a million years advanced into the age of science, already knowing the things that we clearly don’t yet know we don’t yet know.

What I do know is that minds are really special. René Descartes’s theorized once upon a time that “I think, therefore I am.” But maybe that’s not right. Maybe it’s, “I experience, therefore I am.” For there are computers that think, but they will never ask the question and answer it unless programmed to do so. The world is filled with the colors, tastes, experiences… the qualia… that we encounter. But that qualia only reaches what we sometimes call “consciousness” when it reaches our active mind.

The funny thing about minds is that the more value we put into other human minds, the better society goes. That includes the more importantly we treat our own minds. When we buy into the idea that the world is totally material, that cause and effect is absolute, that our consciousness is just an illusion, it seems that everything begins to fall apart. People become depressed, they stop caring about beauty so much, they stop thinking that they’re of great worth. They start to treat others in that lesser way. Yet the more we treat ourselves as if we matter, the more that joy begins to have the chance to rise up. People are not disposable and our choices have real impacts. And yes, we have choices unless we wish to believe in a deterministic hell. Our choices can create real pain — and if you think you believe that your consciousness is an illusion or unreal, just wait until you’re suffering and then see if you think you want to argue suffering isn’t real. That’s when it’s hardest to argue that your mind doesn’t matter.

And from our minds, from our consciousness, springs all sorts of creativity. The beauty of theme parks, the ingenuity of businesses, the choice of what we want to watch, what we want to aim for. There’s incredible awesomeness in the things we talk about on this website, what we write on this website, because our minds are incredibly awesome. They’re so far indescribable. They’re like nothing else we observe in the universe. We should treat ourselves that way and we should look forward to the future because we’ll be there. Our minds will go on and our continuity of self doesn’t disappear with sleep or time. I don’t know exactly what lies beyond the veil, but I know we’re some kind of special. And because of that, it’s worthwhile to write about all the beautiful things all these minds are inventing and developing all over the world.

So I’ll keep doing just that. Once upon a time, my mind was blown away by theme parks and dark rides and movie theaters. My mind is still blown by so many things that strike me as genius.

I hope you don’t mind if I sometimes take a break to write something like this. Sometimes my mind just needs a good stretch.

For all the latest news that should be fun, keep reading That Park Place. As always, drop a comment down below and let me know your thoughts!