LEN, ‘Steal My Sunshine,’ and Rough Thoughts on Consciousness
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/06/01
I was listening to LEN “Steal My Sunshine” transcribing another colleague’s interview while in a Subway. Something about some of the early parts of the song triggered a thought for me.
There’s a recursion, a deep and unavoidable recursive aspect, to every part of consciousness. I think there’s something there. Like we missed its wider implications.
It’s bit like a ‘carping,’ for our own good but it’s simply in-built, like a faultfinding plural filtration system, of mind to weed out errors. Like the visual illusion of motion in time with rapid transition of images for movies at the theatre, too fast for our consciousness to see it, and so fast we can enjoy entertainment called movies or television. So take three hypothetical levels on it.
Level 1:
Our constant feedback of information from the “multimodal,” as I say, is the one side of it. We need constant information and as dams to get lots of new information.
Level 2:
But those dams have to filter the information. But there’s almost a recursion in it to make those filters so rich to just get out as much error as possible before we get “awareness.” The: we can will what we know, but can’t will what we will bit for Informed Will.
Level 3:
I’m trying to give different images. And it’s the conscious bit too. That’s part of the same recursion system too, so very ‘high level’ or the level where we are aware and there’s an apparency of coherence on every perceivable system alongside the much weaker conceiving system (imagination, visualization). That consciousness is not only those varied feed-forward dams — including from the body’s bottleneck of info too. It’s feed-backward.
Consequences:
A practical example is our predictions or our implicit expectations of that reality alter the perception in consciousness of the reality. Even though, the individual percepts for those qualia are the same coming in. They get warped, as fast as a good theatre movie — almost as if to keep the interest in our conscious experience alert enough.
Possible implications:
Boredom could be a symptom of a system failure immediately before consciousness to keep interest in our conscious awareness. Like a visual illusion or a mental defect, boredom could be classified as a glitch. That’s a new view. Mental illness could more objectively be defined, in this sense, as a failure in different directions: Narcissism — overdrive to the interest in the Self’s conscious experience, anxiety — unbalanced overdrive in interest, depression — unbalanced under-drive in interest, schizophrenic — fragmented conscious experience and a fracture in the system of interest itself. I genuinely think there is something there.
This ubiquitous recursion structured per organism’s mind, of those that have a central processor like a brain, matches much of the structure we see, which is a gross anatomical view. But not only that, we see the fundamental absolute insane amounts of branching the mind does. A coherent self evolves in time, through development. And that self has to be built in time, in an environment, so the selves that we’ve seen in time are localized and specialized. Pick a time, a people, a language, and the language becomes simply a means to catalogue, in a semi-structured way internal experience and this internal experience to others. It’s a way to structure the external world in a manner reflective in individual experience, but yet another recursion into the open world, not simply in the organism.
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