Flooding through our minds is our life, our
conscious
experiences. Yet as we have learned through time, consciousness
not only mysteriously appears out of the unconscious only to disappear
back into it again after a brief animated period, consciousness also
"floats" on a substrate of the unconscious. Much of the brain's
functions never becomes directly conscious, while in other areas the
conscious and the unconscious appear to co-exist and to interact
compatibly and even harmoniously.
One can never explain consciousness without being
able to suggest, and eventually show, how and why both the conscious
and the unconscious exist in the brain. Some do actually claim
that everything is conscious, which presumably is possible in the
barest sense, but clearly some information in the brain is not
consciously connected with the waking consciousness, and much
information is being processed below waking consciousness only to
appear briefly as conscious. At the least, our consciousness, or
our consciousnesses, are indeed separate, and almost certainly special
in comparison with the pre-conscious and the unconscious. Even if
muscles, bones, and floors were conscious in some way, we have little
cause to credit their consciousness as being comparable with our waking
or even our dreaming consciousness, and thus we may as well label them
as "unconscious".
The preceding paragraph is written in part to state
that I am not claiming too much regarding the distinction between the
conscious and the unconscious, but primarily I am noting that the
difference is of a sort that demands explanation. And that
difference is probably coherence, the ability of signals to arise,
harmonize, and sometimes synchronize, enough to produce a meaningful
signal. It must be noted that too much synchronization provides
no scope for producing a register and impact in consciousness, such as
would appear to be the case with brain waves (they may have some dull
impact beyond themselves where they are making their presence
"felt", however they are far too information-poor to produce our
typical high-definition conscious experience). The signal must be
strong and coherent enough to do work and to create a significant
impact in the electric fields, while it is still operating according to
differences in potential that maintain the flow of energy/information
in order to effect a high-level, defined conscious field of electric
interaction.
White noise is not the only, or even the best,
method used by the brain to prevent unhelpful effects of field
interactions. Myelination, for instance, not only speeds impulses
along nerves, but may very well prevent undesirable cross-talk in the
typically myelinated fibers carrying information between sections of
the brain. Myelination, and the avoidance of parallel nerve
fibers in areas where cross-talk would effect meaningless correlations,
would probably be used by the brain to reduce cross-talk, and thus
consciousness. Nevertheless, cross-talk via electric fields is
almost certainly going to happen in dendrites and unmyelinated axons
which exist in close proximity, and it is there that configurations of
the nerves need to produce noise instead of signals unless these
signals are beneficial to humans. Timing , minimized parallelism,
and probably even some randomization, would be needed to make any
cross-talk of virtually no effect on average, thus avoiding useless
correlations and consciousness as a side-effect of this prevention of
extraneous self-organizing signals.
Consciousness is probably an unavoidable consequence
of signal strengthening used by the "conscious areas of the
brain". Unconsciousness is probably the natural state of nerves
which do not react with other nerves, as well as those which interact
randomly with other nerves, or nearly completely synchronously with
nerves in their proximate area. Only the electric nerve fields
that produce a directional unbalanced force, that is to say, those
doing work within the field, are going to be able to strengthen and
correlate nerve impulses through electric fields which are themselves
necessarily "feeling" the biasing effect of fields acting upon other
fields. The register of consciousness is the medium through which
the biasing force works upon the nerves to coordinate them in this
manner (synapses play a huge role, but themselves are lacking in the
connections that could produce connected consciousness).
Unconsciousness occurs (or, "consciousness does not occur") when the
electric fields are not transmitting a biasing force within a complex
electric field of the kind that we find (exclusively?) in the brain.
