I recently read
Operators and Things and like many others on this thread -- it was a great read.
I love mentally toying with this idea of the unconscious aspect of ourselves which
Operator and Things brings to center stage. When I first encountered the idea of the unconscious it took years, maybe decades to begin to comprehend it. Although it all appears so obvious to me now, it is such a simple concept, but it was a struggle for me to grasp. “We are conscious beings, what is there that is unconscious about us?”, I use to muse. I resisted the implication that there was an aspect of myself that was even unconscious.
Now, that unconscious aspect of myself appears astonishing. Our unconscious is a mystical aspect of ourselves, it is the bulk of us, all that is beneath the surface. Although unseen, it seems to me to be vast and stupendous. Without my unconscious, my conscious mind would have little meaning. Maybe no meaning.
Barbara O'Brien pointed out the ability to type without thinking about where the letters are, is an aspect of the unconscious. I experience that now as I type. To type with one finger would be torture. I'd have to search for each key.
I'd like to expand on this a little. I believe that our unconscious would include the ability to do all our programmed mechanical motions: eating, breathing, talking, walking, driving, use of our hands, any thing done with the body without the conscious mind guiding it. I also believe that the unconscious includes all our verbal skills, the skill to convert sounds into words and words into coherent thought. It would also include the ability to convert images into letters and to recognize strings of letters as words. It includes our ability to convert our visual input to into knowable objects. Chairs are chairs and tables our tables because of that immediate recognition supported by our unconscious minds.
When I watch myself drive sometimes I can see that the ability to keep my car on the road is totally automatic, totally mechanical. As I watch myself operate the steering wheel, it is almost as though there was someone else there doing the steering. Because of my poor hearing I often notice the gap between the perception of sound and connecting that sound with a meaningful word. Because I am noticing the gap I see the both the mechanical nature of the arising of the word or phrase from the sound. I also see the mystery of it.
I believe that self-observation (a la Gurdjieff or Buddhist mindfulness) makes our unconscious/mechanical aspects more apparent.
Our unconscious also includes the vast store house of memories, our analytic skills, our likes and dislikes, our aversions and our desires. And of course, it is where our dreams and our thoughts stream come from.
Although much of my unconscious seem instantly available (like memory in RAM) such as when typing or casual conversation (where there is no struggle for the words and thoughts to come to the surface.), I'm also aware that much of what is in my unconscious is slow to pull out (like trying to find a lost file). Our memories (with effort) can always be coaxed to always remember more, our minds can always be challenged to produce more associations. Our intuitions can always be expanded. It is as though part of our unconsciousness is very well mapped out and part is undiscovered territory.
And there is the aspect of our unconscious that appears beyond us either logically, spatially or temporally. O'Brien pointed out the example of her winning six times in a row at a casino or the ability to find water with a dowsing rod. This would include mind reading, intuition, channeling. The unconscious seems to be a portal as well.
I'm just trying to lay out a perspective of the unconscious here. I'm kind of making this up as I go along.
As far as “free will” goes, I have to say, the more I notice of my the mechanical aspects of the unconscious, it appears to me that I have less and less free will. (Yeah, I somewhat agree with you Woodsman.) I don't think the idea is to get rid of our mechanicalness, it may not be possible or even desirable, but just to be more and more aware of it.
Schizophrenia, per Barbara O'Brien, is what happens when the unconscious becomes split from the conscious, when the unconscious becomes walled off. I love O”Brien's imagery of “dry beach” as the conscious mind without the waves of the unconscious mind wetting it down. Taken to the extreme, I think is the catatonic schizophrenic, where even our unconscious motor skills are forbidden waves. This is a new understanding for me.
As others on this thread have already posted, the most disturbing notion of
Operator and Things is, of course, the cryptogeograhpic beings that can come through the split mind.
Although hearing an alien voice in my mind would be quite disconcerting, what bothers me more are thoughts that I consider my own but have other origins. It's disturbing to know that I wouldn't know the difference between a thought that came from my mind and the mind of another.
When I was young about 15 (about 50 years ago) I attempted to do a mind reading experiment with a friend of my mothers, someone who I never met before. I thought up three numbers, focused on them and went into the kitchen where my mother and her friend were at. I asked the friend to “think of a number between one and ten.” My mother's friend successfully read my mind all three times while I was professing to be reading his mind. So, transferring thoughts from one entity to another is not an absurd reality for me.
Okay, I know what some of you are thinking – you are skeptical. Maybe my anecdote was rigged, accidental or coincidental. The probability of my little feat was only one in a thousand. People win the lottery with far greater odds. Yeah, even I entertain some doubts about this story of mine, but I'm still sticking to it.
My wife has remarked in the past that she has experienced emotions watching a movie in a theater full of people that she wouldn't have if watching it at home. She attributes it to acquiring the emotions of others.
It occurs to me now, as I write, that maybe nearly all my thoughts are not of my origin. They've all been programmed into me from birth, from all those around me, from the environment, my genetics, the culture, the powers that be.
I just read Timothy Trepanier's SOTT article “The Necessity of Disilllusionment.” He says it much better than I,
... our parents' belief systems become our own, whether it be religion, politics, socio-economic status, or favourite sports team. Our national identity is forged by the place we happened to be born. All our likes and dislikes, passions and prejudices, biases and beliefs, are inculcated into us by our family, peers, education, media and society. We are, effectively, a product of a roll of the geographical dice. The entire landscape of our minds is a product of external forces. There are hardly any thoughts inside us that are truly unique and our own.
Sure is a strange world we live in.
Well, then what is free will? I'd like to propose that, if we have it, that free will is only in the realm of the conscious and not the unconscious. Mostly, I'd like to suggest that it is an awareness of self, a developed sense of being, that which is not influenced or dependent on the unconscious or the external world. In my estimation free will is rare in our world and not acquired easily.
