(July 7, 2016 at 5:51 am)Gemini Wrote:(July 6, 2016 at 8:06 pm)Emjay Wrote: I think you're really onto something there and it just got me thinking - apologies if this is just in effect rephrasing what you've already said, which I think it might be - what if there isn't that much of a difference between what we'd usually term subconscious and conscious? Maybe it's all 'available' to consciousness in theory but in practice the subconscious level stuff is essentially buried under much more prominent conscious level stuff... that the conscious level stuff is what rises to the top in this 'messy, winner-take-all process'. So where meditation both improves concentration and the ability to notice subtle differences in things... as where mindfulness is about noticing things you never usually pay any attention to, it could metaphorically pick through the canopy to the little plants on the forest floor... i.e. notice what is usually subconscious. Because I'm sure I've read somewhere that accomplished meditators can gain control of usually subconscious processes like the heart rate and I was also thinking about the fact that my sister was ill recently with an iron deficiency and in the weeks prior to going to the doctor she made several drastic changes to her diet for no particular reason other than a gut feel - cutting out caffeine and then even decaf tea, and then once she had been to the doctor the recommendations were exactly the same as what she had done - that caffeine inhibits iron absorption and also that the tannin in tea does the same even if it's decaffeinated. I think that was an example of subconscious intuition based on the chemical needs of her body. So I was just thinking that those sorts of subtle chemical needs don't usually make it to consciousness in anything other than a vague, indirect way... such as craving bananas if you need potassium etc... but perhaps if anything is serious enough it will find a way to reach the canopy of consciousness, so that it is a candidate for focus selection by what you suggest is the pre-frontal lobe. In other words perhaps all is equal theoretically for attention and therefore that our usual distinction between conscious and subconscious is only incidental rather than a strict separation between two different types of processes.
I think there's still going to be a true "subconscious" which doesn't involve experience at all and is off limits even to experienced meditators. For instance, an experiment with a monk who'd been meditating for 40+ years showed that he was able to significantly diminish the startle response, but not completely eliminate it.
The view I described is probably best categorized as a cognitive/representational account of consciousness in which first-order mental states constitute a kind of simple consciousness. "Higher order" functions like the prefrontal lobe executive functions don't contribute the experiential character of consciousness to mental states, only the ability to perform complex cognitive operations like forming the thought "I am experiencing this."
This gives you a theory of consciousness in which consciousness is evolutionarily early, beginning with the first cephalized organisms, and which entails that pretty much any animal with a brain is conscious. The difference between animal and human consciousness is an additional layer in the multiply-embedded framework of consciousness.
The fact that first-order mental states aren't always perceived by the executive functions would explain experiments in which subjects don't report neural activity outside of higher brain areas like the prefrontal cortex (Christof Koch's The Quest for Consciousness describes some of these experiments).
Thanks for that link, it was very interesting
And thanks for the book recommendation; I'll get that... you can never have too many books on consciousness 
I'd like to reply to you in more depth but unfortunately I don't feel I have the time or energy at the moment (and that's after tapping out of that mafia game)
So I would have loved to discuss this in depth with you and really get involved in this thread, but I just just don't feel mentally up to anything at the moment But thanks for the food for thought... and I think we have very similar views on some of these issues, so I'd love to be able to talk to you about them some other time down the line when I'm feeling better
