Piperluo

The Mystery of Consciousness

Introduction

The unconscious never sleeps. Even though we have spent decades of years trying to uncover its mysterious mask, it never fails to surprise us and keeps us wondering why we dream, why we have intuition and why our everyday life can be interfered with by strange secrets, beliefs and attitudes of which we may not be totally aware. If our mental world is an iceberg, then the overwater part is our consciousness, while the underwater part, which makes it possible for the iceberg to float on the water, is our unconsciousness where most of the work of mind gets done. This report presents the general idea of unconscious processes and the differences between unconscious processing and conscious thinking based on Bernard J. Baars’s research. Then it presents my interpretation of free will after reading Libet’s study.

The Unconscious

The unconscious is an enigma. In our brain, the unconscious is a vast reservoir of our thoughts, feelings and desires, etc., that hide outside of our awareness and even when we and go to sleep and our consciousness shuts down itself, this perpetual motion machine still keeps working, such as keeping the body warm, slowing breath down, and analyzing images, ideas, emotions, and sensations which all together eventually make dreams occur. Unlike conscious thinking, which is limited and defined as the quality or state of self-awareness, or, of being aware of an external object or something within oneself, featured as immediate memory, the selectivity of attention, the limits of voluntary control, etc., unconscious processing capacity is enormous. In order to have a better knowledge of the unconscious, we need to have a look at the ways in which the unconscious may be different from the conscious.

Biology

Our brain is a massive collection of neurons. It is believed that the cortex has an estimated 55 billion cell.( Baars, P. 238) Each neuron interconnects with one another and functions all together...