The neuroscientists on the Vedanta list have had major debates on WHICH ideas (or qualia...) reach consciousness. My conclusion:
it is grossly misleading to imagine that some ideas, sensations or feelings "reach consciousness" and that others do not. Our "consciousness" or "awareness" OF an idea or feeling is not even just a matter of degree; it is a matter of degree and "of geography," of what part of the brain or mind is aware of what other part.
Here is more explanation and detail:
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Today I am supposed to do taxes, not consciousness, and I already posted enough to the sadhu and MOM lists just a few minutes ago. But in Aflredo's post, he refers quickly to a VERY important aspect of consciousness which calls out for comment:
Alfredo: Almost right! It is the ACCESSIBLE correlate of consciousness.
Many, many papers on consciousness, including even solid empirical research, focus on the question:
"WHICH thoughts (or ideas or impulses or feelings) REACH consciousness, or are ACCESSIBLE to consciousness?"
Karl Pribram once held an entire workshop on this KIND of issue, collecting the best researchers in the world relevant... not only to the answer, but to the question itself.
The question itself makes an incorrect assumption; better understanding of consciousness requires overcoming that assumption.
But how to explain? This is subtle stuff.
Karl was deeply impressed by what we can learn from the "blindsight" experiments. Having less memory of those experiments than he had, I always think back to the classic split brain experiments, which are very impressive to watch. (You lucky folks can just go to youtube and search on "split brain experiments". I did just now, and saw many many things... the first being
which I hope is as impressive as what I saw years ago.)
The key point in THOSE experiments: thoughts, feelings, inputs available to the LEFT hemisphere are not always the same as those available/accessible to the RIGHT hemisphere. The blindsight experiments take that further, in more normal brains. (Hey, maybe I should watch
www.youtube.com/watch?v=
it is grossly misleading to imagine that some ideas, sensations or feelings "reach consciousness" and that others do not. Our "consciousness" or "awareness" OF an idea or feeling is not even just a matter of degree; it is a matter of degree and "of geography," of what part of the brain or mind is aware of what other part.
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For those seriously interested in yoga and such, there is a further distinction of importance. Access by one part of the cortex to something else actually has two levels -- current, direct access and POTENTIAL access. The brain (and the soul and the noosphere) all have focus or attention or gating mechanisms, absolutely fundamental to how they work (how we work), which can be shifted by an act of will so as to provide direct access to information which would otherwise NOT be accessible.
(This resonates a lot with Dean Radin's new book, Real Magic!! But it also resonates with a paper by Olshausen on visual cortex, in one of Arbib's earlier Brain Handbooks.)
Best of luck,
Paul
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