Can We Know our Own Minds?

February 13, 2009

Trying to tie together this week and last week, we asked the question, "Is it rational to play the lottery (for a prospective adrenalin high, maybe)?" and we explored the issue of recognizing reality and not deceiving ourselves. If telling someone that they need to recognize reality is so simple, then why do we have such a difficult time putting it into play even when we practice? We decided that Bernoulli's explanation of not worrying about infrequent things like terror attacks, but actually worrying about poverty is way to start distinguishing between varying realities, but I would argue in order to do so, we must understand how our mind works. Specifically, as it involves consciousness.

This week we will be looking at a TED talk with philosopher Dan Dennett, exploring this issue. "Can we know our own minds?" For those of you who cannot make it, as always here look on ted.com, Can we know our own minds?
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As mentioned previously, we looked at the TED Talk "Can We Know Our Own Minds?" as narrated by philosopher Dan Dennett. From the discussion we gleaned that we are not authorities on our own consciousness. The self is possibly an illusion. It just makes you think you're a you, the you being 100 trillion cellular robots (what we are made of).

Dan uses several demonstrations to show us how the mechanism's in our minds work to manipulate, fill in, or interpret the data before our eyes and where it works very well and when it does not benefit us--which happens because we do not pay attention to things we are not looking for or being attentive to. Because of this, magicians (his most prominent example) can "saw a lady in half" before our very eyes. Dan's point is that the lady is not actually being sawed in half, but the magician merely makes you think she is. Things like magicians make you think your mind is a mysterious entity that cannot be explained or explored, but Dan's point is that this is not true. We just do not know our minds as well as we think we do.

Your consciousness is a bag of tricks (like the magician's act), i.e. it's explicable, but it works like magic because of your overactive brain. Our overactive brains work to fill in details that are missing, or suggested to be present. It is interesting however, that the brain does not seem to have any necessary affinity to filling in color. Color is accidental, but structure is important to neural efficiency. That is why when we see something like the "Nekkar Cube" we fill in geometric endpoints of the cube that aren't really there. Therefore, consciousness is possibly a magic trick that the brain plays on itself. You're both the magician (your mind) and the audience (the self) and your interpretations and manipulations create your world.