Bit for bit

Many people define 'consciousness' as nothing but the state they lose when they go to sleep, overdo substances or get severely injury by accident or violence. Somehow this negative definition suggests that we humans are either conscious or unconscious, which sounds to me like delusional, wishful thinking.

Psychologists would rather claim that we spend quite a limited time 'fully conscious', our sub-consciousness controlling the majority of our activities. Depending what you know or believe about your own subconsciousness, the idea of acting subconscious most of the time might induce quite a lot of fear.

Western societies don't value thinking about thinking and most forms of self-reflective activity very high. Although we all have a mind, only specialists are entitled and encouraged to figure out how these minds work. Yet in everyday business, our minds are mostly driven by our subconscious believes, and rationalise our behaviour after it happens.

The concepts explaining subconsciousness don't appeal too much to regular people, as they seem rather overly complex (Freud) or pretty far out (Jung). After all, all we need to do is to somehow 'soldier on', 'get on with our lives', 'make a living', 'function in the modern world', right?

Yet subconscious drives especially those unaware of it, or touchy to think about it. Education conditions us to 'mind our own business', and leave the business of the mind to dedicated specialists. This opens the door to easy manipulation, and maintains the state of learned helplessness most people suffer from.

So we can embrace the suggestion to be 'in control' of our own lives, only dependent sometimes to those who know ourselves better than we can ever do. If our experience contradicts the promises of 'experts', it can hardly be their fault, something must be wrong with us. And the experts can fix it - if not straight away, then not because they have other interests than our own best at heart, but surely because we're much wronger than we should be.

Any sort of logical system needs a solid foundation to reflect the reality of our own experience, otherwise it creates a life on its own. An idea or concept gone wild might provide us with entertainment, enjoyment, solace, yet it can hide the truth of our existence from us. Whenever we believe something without any personal evidence, we might get deluded into illusion about reality.

Humans are born to be curious, that's one of my personal believes I found plenty of evidence of. I think Truth fails to be described in words, it rather unveils itself in actions and artefacts of existence. When we observe objects falling towards the earth, very consistently, 'gravity' turns into one of those inexplicable truths. Birds and insects defy this principle, but that doesn't need to worry us, as they obviously do something to defy this principle - yet luckily, they land sometimes, and stop doing what they did, so we can investigate how they temporarily manage to counteract the attraction of our spaceship Earth.

The brothers Montgolfiere and the Wright brothers had to sustain through much ridicule for their idea that even humans could manage to defy gravity and float within the atmosphere. Luckily, the combination of astute observation and curiosity advanced technology a bit further, flicking a collective binary switch on - humans can fly, without any magic involved.

The oldest form of flight technology I know of didn't make any inventor famous though. A simple boomerang still manages not only to blow my mind, but those of many others as well. Newton's physics would have trouble describing its flight path, which might explain as well explain why the inventors of the Montgolfiere and the plane had to fight so much resistance.

'Modern' people know that planes exist, and maybe also that boomerangs fly in surprising ways. Most of us hardly know why and how, and wouldn't be able to construct or build either of them. It just doesn't give us a fright when we see them, our subconscious tells us it's possible and we don't need to worry.

We got used to the sun and stars staying in their orbits as well, continuous observation allowed to us to let go of the fear of the sky collapsing on us. Predictability became our friend, and science helped those curious to grasp bits of the why and how, and those less curious could rest in the solace that no magic was involved to make it happen.

The word 'magic' though does already unpredictable things to the minds of english speaking people, activating an essential binary switch in our subconsciousness. We tend to organise our experience around the concept of 'real' and 'illusionary', a imaginary binary concept shown as relatively irrelevant by quantum mechanics and buddhism.

The virus language (thanks Laurie Anderson) often creates binary concepts that defy our experience, while acting as cornerstones to our logic. Yet as social beings, we don't enter the world of our experience as blank slates, but informed by the ideas of our ancestors, transmitted by language and the culture we're born into.

The amount of 'bits' of information in any given sentence is potentially infinite, and neither sender nor receiver usually have any clue about much information is transmitted. If we take a popular way to construct a sentence expressing something meaningful, 'A is B', we already open the door to multiple interpretations.

'God is great'. Many people will not only find this sentence meaningful, but also containing Truth. On a semantic level, however, it turns into something with little to no value at all. I don't want to open a can of worms with discussing the terms 'God' and 'great', when I hear any sentence of the 'A is B' type the incompleteness flag of my subconsciousness gets raised.

Aristotle left humanity with some basic ideas about binary logic, we might consider him as one of the first computer scientists in history. Like all abstract concepts, Aristotelian logic simplifies reality in order to obtain 'higher' levels of knowledge. But when we mistake his map for the territory, we become susceptible to be remote controlled by anyone understanding the binary nature of our subconsciousness to create our analogue experience.

When we see an image on a TV or computer screen, we might be aware of the underlying binary construction of it, but depending on the quality of the image, we can happily immerse ourselves in the illusion created by it. Salvatore Dali elegantly demonstrated his understanding of human perception with images that change from a collection of random dots into 'meaningful' shapes in a distance, long before most people got hypnotised by the illusion of moving images composed of a random collection of dots.

Similarly we can stay oblivious to the binary nature of our subconsciousness, and enjoy the speed in which we can react without thinking. The ability the process information subconsciously at high speed definitely contributes to individual survival - faced with a wild animal, philosophical considerations warrant usually fast death.

In our 'civilised' times, life and death situation became luckily rare. In most parts of world, dangerous animals have been extinct, so technology exposes us to the biggest threats to our survival. However, while we live potentially the most sheltered life in known history, the idea of life-threatening situations seem to have increased exponentially.

According to Leary's 8-circuit model of human consciousness, the evaluation into 'save' and 'not save' constitutes an elementary switch in our subconsciousness. This evaluation usually happens neither rational nor objective, yet subconsciously based on our prior experience. If we made 'bad' experiences with approaching a dog, for example, in an early state of our life, we will most likely turn out be a 'cat' person, and when given a choice for a pet unlikely choose a dog.

While dogs can be dangerous in certain cases, most of them are quite harmless. Our subconscious programming, however, doesn't act rational, but automatic. Unless we use efficient methods to change it, it will retain any conditioning ever acquired. While this might sound somewhat overwhelming, it also offers with it the understanding that we might access much more 'information' than we can imagine in our wildest dreams.

Exactly there, in our dreams, we can find a glimpse of the opportunities inherent in our subconscious. A nearly perfect virtual reality happens while our body lays down sleeping, appearing as intensely real like our waking life. Our pineal gland emits DMT and we dance with the dream fairies. While millions of bits of sensual information travel through our nervous system, our attention focuses on a specific set of circumstances, and filters the rest. This 'rest' comprises a large part of the dream scenery.

Not everyone has memories of their dreams, yet we dream every night when we enter a REM (Rapid Eye Movement) phase in our sleep. Obviously, the 'input' to our dream awareness doesn't come from our senses. While the complexity of dreams worlds doesn't look like composed in a binary fashion, it just would need sufficient amount of binary data and high processing speeds. Billions of neuron, each of which might be just a binary switch or even something like a megabyte memory unit, with up to 10000 connections between each other, provide both - large memory area and processing speed.

The locus of individual memory items (engrams) has not been located. If we have a holographic memory, engrams potentially leave traces in a variety of different locations. The orientation of our attention brings memory back to awareness, not necessarily as precise recording of the events that happened, rather as current interpretation of the event itself. As we get mostly educated by permanent repetition, our episodical memory is in average quite prone to error regarding specific details. The same event seen by different people can yield description which tell entirely different stories.

In other words, each of us has a different binary pathway through the filters we acquired in our lifetime. Our reality tunnels, in Robert Anton Wilson's words, distort the space-time event we witness. Unless we understand and detect the patterns we use to generate our 'reality', we cannot de-activate the filters, although drugs might temporarily de-activate them. Opening the doors of perception doesn't provide you with super powers, and learning to shutting them at will is as important as the initial opening.

Yet we can learn to observe our thinking, to get to know the filters through which we create our reality. Don't expect to enter an unfiltered existence, just enjoy the shift of perspective whenever you flicked a binary switch of your subconscious that distorted your perception of reality.