Is there a part of the mind that can become conscious? If so, am I only partly conscious over time or am I only conscious 5% but continuously?
If 95% of the time is spent jerking off in the basement, then what does it mean to be conscious that 5% of the time? Does it mean a random moment of clarity or does it mean I am 95% automatic and 5% connected with something that is beyond myself that makes me self-aware?
I think that we have random moments of clarity. Sometimes you experience a moment when you're able to not just process not just your situation, but also process your thoughts and responses to the situation. (ie thinking about your own thinking)
Most of the time, we are just running these routines we've learned, solving problems using heuristics. When your heuristic doesn't work, or when tragedy happens, you emerge from that fog.
Another way of putting it:
Learning is a conscious process. You can't learn automatically, it takes conscious effort to absorb and integrate information. When you first learned to drive a car, you were really mindful. Every action you took taught you a little bit. Now, years later, you get it. So you don't need the lazy conscious mind to drive. You can just run the mental routine you built.
And if we zoom out, a lot of our life is spent in that routine, in those heuristics. If we don't actively think about it, we don't get a lot of time to reflect on those heuristics, or the process we used to arrive at them.
Am I just one piece of a chain reaction? Am I on autopilot and consciousness is just whatever is other adding itself into my equation?
Marshall McLuhan says we're the sex organs of the machine world.
The Art of Memetics says we're the sex organs of the meme world.
I think the way out of the chain is Agency. And I don't think you really have Agency if you're just making mechanical decisions.
And to expand it again, yes, most decisions are mechanical. Like a character in the Sims, we always take whatever action we perceive will give us best rewards. We continue to exhibit that behavior until a competing one gives us better feels. (behaviorists call that 'melioration') When that calculus is simple, our behavior is predictable.
If you can make decisions
about your automatic processes, you might be in the conscious part of the self.
It's really hard to perform this reflection, this self-consciousness, this
Self-Remembering, while the habitual mind is buzzing. When you're emotional, it's really hard to step outside of it and make an independent decision.
Usually, when we have that 5% moment of self-remembering, it only lasts for that moment, and then it's over.
Part of what I want to discover is how to increase consciousness along a few different dimensions: frequency, length, depth.