[austintorn@aol.com]

Nobody,

I’ve always liked to think about how the subconscious mind could create reality and also about how consciousness works. I’ve been reading the “Journal of Consciousness” for years and not getting too far except to appreciate the wonders of it.

I see where it’s proved that the subconscious can produce reality, such as in our night dreams, and I’ve come to realize that the same method for appearances is employed when we are awake, as well, but if I allow that something other than consciousness is real, like the mind or the brain, then I start to figure that other biological things are real, too, so I don’t know where to go from there. What do you think?


Some say that consciousness needs a brain to tune it in or it comes from matter or that it is merely the brain perceiving itself:

Why should the wetness of water result
From the mix of hydrogen, oxygen?
How can cells, blood, heart, and nerves make life?
It is just so. So does matter make mind.

Change the brain and consciousness changes, too.
Take drugs and the emotions change, as well.
Damage the brain and the mind’s damaged, too.
Consciousness emerges only from the brain.

The brain is the mind, and vice-versa,
So there is no need for the mind to turn
The brain’s water into wine, for there’s
No wine that’s separate from the water.

Consciousness is emergent from the brain,
But it is quite a unique phenomenon
Could it be the brain perceiving itself,
Something we might like to call the mind’s ’I’?

Consciousness is a blended force being made
Of mass, space, and time, and, therefore, requires
No explanation—it just arises:
Mind: it matters; matter: ever mind!

Subconscious trains of thought vie for attention,
Dueling choirs competing for first place
In the mind’s ’I’—consciousness—to produce
Future, for this is the task of a thought.

Consciousness mediates thoughts versus outcomes
And is distributed all over the body
From the nerve spindles to the spine to the brain,
A way to actionize without moving.


Some think that consciousness is fundamental or that nature is made of it—all dispositions formerly thought of as physical really being experiential in nature.

Pain’s not the same as the nerves that cause it,
Yet, mind, apart, couldn’t conserve energy.
It seems that info exists in two ways:
Consciously and neurologically.

Consciousness is irreducible in terms
Of basic entities, so, most likely,
The intrinsic properties underlying
Physical dispositions are experiential!

The Midas-magic of our consciousness,
That quantum alchemist of potential,
Creates the Real from the Possible, for
Everything it touches turns to matter!

Nature’s made of occasions of experience
Instantiated into consciousness,
Even for electrons and lower life forms,
’Though worms sense but a smudge of reality.


Some confuse consciousness with the contents:

In identifying consciousness,
We often confuse what is floating in
The stream of consciousness with the water itself;
Such, we note not the sea in which we see.

Can you expand on your theory of the subsonscious?