As human beings, we take for granted our sense of being, our personality, what makes us, well, us! We don't wake up every day asking ourselves, "How did I just wake up?" "What is guiding me?" "What drives me to do the things I do?" But the BBC video with Marcus de Sautoy gave me a new, unique view on our own consciousness. Whenever we do something, our brain is acting in coordinance with our sense of self... our "consciousness." But where exactly does this consciousness come from? And who is in charge of it?
The right button/left button test that Sautoy underwent fascinated me. The fact that scientists could predict which button Sautoy pressed 6 seconds before he actually did it was astounding. It made me wonder though, how could this happen? It is kind of scary to think about this concept of how someone could consciously know what we are going to do without us being aware of it. It brought me to a much larger epistemological question of "How do we know what we think we know?" The entire video tries to answer this question, but in my mind, I don't think we will ever discover the true mysteries of our consciousness. How can we solve our own inner mechanisms, our beliefs, our desires? The very thought of all this burns out my brain and makes me want to just not think about it because it is so unbelievably mystifying.
Furthermore, the red dot test that Sautoy surveyed also led me to an interesting question. If the little girl doesn't pass the consciousness test, who is she as a person? Is she conscious? Is she aimlessly viewing the world as a completely different individual? Is there a "switch" that at some age we turn on and then we are conscious? This video led me to so many abstract questions about our internal "self." We as humans strive to solve so many problems in our external world, but have we even decoded our very own being? Do we even know who we are?
The Secret You: What Drives Our Consciousness?
No TrackBacks
TrackBack URL: http://blog.lib.umn.edu/cgi-bin/mt-tb.cgi/179404
The button test reminds me of playing rock, paper, scissors. I don't find it all too amazing because if somebody trains for long enough to understand how somebody reacts to something, they may have a pretty good guess as to what's going to happen. For instance, there was a show I watched (can't remember what it was called) but these two people decided to play rock, paper, scissors in order to figure out who was going to do something and one of the guys was a tough-guy who, fitting with his tough personality, had absolute faith in the power of rock and so the other person knew to throw down paper in reaction. Also, I'm not sure if you've gotten into the rock, paper, scissors matches where you simply get the same result as the other person again and again with no ending. If this was completely random it is very unfeasible for this to happen, but people definitely have patterns, even to their randomness, for instance, most people won't repeat the same number multiple times in a row if giving a random series to somebody, that's because contrary to randomness, they believe that they just said that number and so it isn't random anymore. The brain definitely works in mysterious ways, but it is hardly random in how everything operates, which I find so much more fascinating.
I agree with you when you say those are some very abstract questions and can burn out your brain when you think about them all at once or in succession. If you remember all the way back to chapter 1, terror management theory really relates to these questions as we don't know the answers and most likely never will, like what happens to us after we die. Religion has been wrestling with this for millenniums! I wouldn't look too much into the right/left button test because there are many plausible reasons why this could happen to be like the book again, "ruling out rival hypotheses". Humans are creatures of habit like many other manacles, maybe we just perceive that we are doing a random pattern when our body is making a habit about which buttons we push. But now I'm raising more questions as which is a common occurrence in discussion. We know know what to look for and the experiences in the video show how we can test once unanswered questions. Science is no absolute, so it may hurt your brain every once in a while but isn't that half the fun?