Consciousness

How does it work? At the highest level there is a vote. At the lower levels it’s a mess. Some neurons think this, some think that. Different sets of neurons have different narratives for everything that’s going on in our lives and even interpreting your entire life. There is no cohesive whole, no singular truth. It’s not like a book with a set story and fixed narrative. Not at the lower levels. “Down there” it’s a mess. More in some people, less in others. There can be more disagreement in some brains than others among the various groups of neurons. And among certain situations there can be absolute bedlam among the different groups, who have vastly different narratives about what is really going on or as to their explanation for a particular scenario. There can also be bedlam across the board, for the whole shebang. I imagine this causes great mental distress as the higher consciousness tries to take its vote as to what is “reality”. I could see, definitely, the higher consciousness breaking down and not being able to make a vote at all. There’s just too much conflict in what I call the “down there” (this is just the lower levels of consciousness or what many call the subconscious). What unfortunate madness.

This is not just conjecture. We already know that the brain’s neurons disagree as to shapes and edges, etc, in the visual field, and they seem to vote on the “ground truth”. They reach a consensus, and it’s an ad hoc democracy.

Why wouldn’t consciousness operate with the same principles? My own experience biases me strongly to this hypothesis. Without getting too personal, my higher consciousness can’t “make up its mind”. It’s having great trouble taking the vote. I see others and this doesn’t seem to be the case. The lower neurons are in greater agreement. The higher consciousness takes an easy vote.

As a side note, and this is pure conjecture, some of these neurons of the lower order aren’t even on the same side of the brain! Furious communication must take place thru the corpus callosum, for the higher consciousness to take its vote. If there is violent disagreement among the hemispheres perhaps this could even overload the callosum.

Hopefully, mental health workers can take this to heart and understand that not every action has a fixed and definite reasoning. Every action, even “evil” ones can have benign motives in some part of the brain.