Common sense won’t ‘cut the mustard’

More than three hundred years ago Isaac Newton introduced a theory of mechanics that fit beautifully within our common sense intuition and understanding. Newton’s mechanics, the theory of force acting upon objects, uses such common sense parameters as velocity, mass, force, distance, acceleration, and momentum. The student of physics could “feel” the correctness of Isaac’s formulas.

Quantum mechanics was another problem completely. The physicists seeking to intuit and understand the inner world of the atom were faced with trying to understand something that was beyond the world of human intuition. The inner world of the atom was a world incongruent with common sense.

Early in the twentieth century Freud discovered the psychic unconscious; the inner world of human reality that was somewhat like the inner world of the atom in that it was not easily understood by common sense intuition. Freud’s theory of repression represents itself as a means for comprehending this psychic phenomenon.

The Freudian theory of repression was a revolutionary idea originally discovered in the attempt to comprehend human nature as it develops within civilized society. Civilization demands that the individual repress many natural urges. “In the new Freudian perspective, the essence of society is repression of the individual, and the essence of the individual is repression of himself.”

Feud made this breakthrough discovery of human unconsciousness as a result of his attempt to understand and possibly relieve certain “mad” symptoms of the mentally deranged. Freud found meaningfulness within the psychopathology of everyday life, including slips of the tongue, errors, dreams, and random thoughts.

“Meaningfulness means expression of a purpose or an intention.” The expressions contained in dreams were Freud’s principal means for discovering the presence of the unconscious. These dream expressions uncovered an existence that drove Freud “to embrace the paradox that there are in the human being purposes of which he knows nothing, involuntary purposes, or, in more technical Freudian language, “unconscious” ideas.”

The dynamic conflict between the unconscious and the conscious, i.e. neurosis, is not easily recognized as such by the untutored self.

SGCS (Second Generation Cognitive Science) has recently discovered the importance of the cognitive unconsciousness. Utilizing new brain scanning technology and computer modeling, cognitive science has, in the last three to four decades, introduced us to a new concept; “the unconscious cognitive mind”. This new theory of cognition has made us conscious of the fact that most of our conscious life is dictated by our unconscious cognitive processes. Conservatively speaking 95% of cognitive thought is unconscious.

Comprehension of even the most basic human tendencies is no longer available to the common sense intuition. To grasp the essential elements of living successfully within a high tech society we must find ways to supplement our meager formal education that seems to prepare us only for a life of production and consumption; without the necessary understanding needed to be satisfied and successful in that new world where common sense is no longer sufficient for comprehending the vicissitudes of living.

Have you checked on your unconscious life lately? How does one check on their unconscious life?

Quotes from “Life Against Death” by Norman O Brown

it has been suggested that ALL of our decisions and plans and actions are actually unconcious, and that our conciousness is not what we like to think it is. the suggestion is that our conciousness is little more than a final place for our unconcious decisions to be connected, and a way of our unconcious making sense of the decisions it makes.

shoudl this be true, it paints human existence in a poor light, it removes the concept of free will, removes the idea of us being in control of our own lives in any sense.

unfortunately there is evidence that this suggestion might be the case.

fortunately, the evidence is scant and it isnt clear if the interpretation of the evidence is accurate. hope it isnt!

hot dragon

Unconscious thought forms 95% of all thought

In the 1970s a new body of empirical research began to introduce findings that questioned the traditional Anglo-American cognitive paradigm of AI (Artificial Intelligence), i.e. symbol manipulation.

This research indicates that the neurological structures associated with sensorimotor activity are mapped directly to the higher cortical brain structures to form the foundation for subjective conceptualization in the human brain. In other words, our abstract ideas are constructed with copies of sensorimotor neurological structures as a foundation. “It is the rule of thumb among cognitive scientists that unconscious thought is 95 percent of all thought—and that may be a serious underestimate.”

Categorization, the first level of abstraction from “Reality” is our first level of conceptualization and thus of knowing. Seeing is a process that includes categorization, we see something as an interaction between the seer and what is seen. “Seeing typically involves categorization.”

Our categories are what we consider to be real in the world: tree, rock, animal…Our concepts are what we use to structure our reasoning about these categories. Concepts are neural structures that are the fundamental means by which we reason about categories.

Human categories, the stuff of experience, are reasoned about in many different ways. These differing ways of reasoning, these different conceptualizations, are called prototypes and represent the second level of conceptualization

Typical-case prototype conceptualization modes are “used in drawing inferences about category members in the absence of any special contextual information. Ideal-case prototypes allow us to evaluate category members relative to some conceptual standard…Social stereotypes are used to make snap judgments…Salient exemplars (well-known examples) are used for making probability judgments…Reasoning with prototypes is, indeed, so common that it is inconceivable that we could function for long without them.”

When we conceptualize categories in this fashion we often envision them using spatial metaphors. Spatial relation metaphors form the heart of our ability to perceive, conceive, and to move about in space. We unconsciously form spatial relation contexts for entities: ‘in’, ‘on’, ‘about’, ‘across from’ some other entity are common relationships that make it possible for us to function in our normal manner.

When we perceive a black cat and do not wish to cross its path our imagination conceives container shapes such that we do not penetrate the container space occupied by the cat at some time in its journey. We function in space and the container schema is a normal means we have for reasoning about action in space. Such imaginings are not conscious but most of our perception and conception is an automatic unconscious force for functioning in the world.

Our manner of using language to explain experience provides us with an insight into our cognitive structuring process. Perceptual cues are mapped onto cognitive spaces wherein a representation of the experience is structured onto our spatial-relation contour. There is no direct connection between perception and language.

The claim of cognitive science is “that the very properties of concepts are created as a result of the way the brain and the body are structured and the way they function in interpersonal relations and in the physical world.”

Quotes from “Philosophy in the Flesh” by Lakoff and Johnson

i am a psychiatrist and well informed of the various theories and evidence about human thought and understanding. most of it is theoretical, the evidence that does exist is difficult to interpret, and it can reasonably be used to support conflicting theories.

the 95% of all thought is unconcious figure is not the only figure quoted. also, there is disagreement about what the figure means. is it the percentage of all thoughts or all brain activity (which may not be thought as such). do you include sensory data? which part of the brain is "thought" happening in, given that much of the brain we cannot actually measure at all.

and if we are concious of 5%, is it because it is the most important 5%, or the 5% that we have already made unconcious decisions about, or the 5% that the unconcious 95% feels we are able to handle without going mad?

this is a highly philosophical area. the major difficulty is obtaining any reliable data that is actually able to disprove a theory, because the data is notoriously hard to get and can be interpreted in many ways. it is fascinating, but difficult to see it as a science most of the time.

but the philosophy is interesting. i like the idea that all our decisions as human beings are made unconciously, and our conciousness is merely "informed" of decisions that we really had no say in. if true, does the unconcious have a concious existence of its own, and is it aware of us (us being our concious)

hot dragon

The 95% figure comes from SGCS (Second Generation Cognitive Science), which has, in fact, thrown down the gauntlet to philosophy in a challenge that philosophy must justify its apriori metaphysics.