Consciousness creates a sense of continuity
- Consciousness seems to pervade all mentality because it is not conscious of what it isn’t conscious of
- When we are awake, we seem to be conscious all the time. I may shut my eyes and even if I try not to think, and consciousness still streams on, a great river of contents in a succession of different conditions which I have been taught to call thoughts, images, memories, interior dialogues, regrets, wishes, and resolves, all interweaving with the constantly changing pageant of exterior sensations of which I am selectively aware. Always the continuity. Certainly this is the feeling. And whatever we’re doing, we feel that our very self, our deepest of deep identity, is indeed this continuing flow that only ceases in sleep between remembered dreams. This is our experience. And many thinkers have taken this spirit of continuity to be the place to start from in philosophy, the very ground of certainty which no one can doubt. Cogito, ergo sum.
- But what could this continuity mean? If we think of a minute as being sixty thousand milliseconds, are we conscious for every one of those milliseconds? If you still think so, go on dividing the time units, remembering that the firing of neurons is of a finite order—although we have no idea what that has to do with our sense of the continuity of consciousness. Few persons would wish to maintain that consciousness somehow floats like a mist above and about the nervous system completely ununited to any earthly necessities of neural refractory periods.
- It is much more probable that the seeming continuity of consciousness is really an illusion, just as most of the other metaphors about consciousness are. In our flashlight analogy, the flashlight would be conscious of being on only when it is on. Though huge gaps of time occurred, providing things were generally the same, it would seem to the flashlight itself that the light had been continuously on. We are thus conscious less of the time than we think, because we cannot be conscious of when we are not conscious.
- two-millimeter gap on the nasal side of the retina where the optic nerve fibers are gathered together and leave the eye for the brain.1 The interesting thing about this gap is that it is not so much a blind spot as it is usually called; it is a non-spot. A blind man sees his darkness.2 But you cannot see any gap in your vision at all, let alone be conscious of it in any way. Just as the space around the blind spots is joined without any gap at all, so consciousness knits itself over its time gaps and gives the illusion of continuity.
- A better technique of noticing the blind spot is to take two pieces of paper about a half-inch square, and while holding them about a foot and a half in front of you, fixate on one with one eye, and move the other piece of paper out on the same side until it disappears.
- Except when the cause of blindness is in the brain. For example, soldiers wounded in one or the other occipital areas of the cortex, with large parts of the visual field destroyed, are not conscious of any alteration in their vision. Looking straight ahead, they have the illusion of seeing a complete visual world, as you or I do.
References
- Jaynes, Julian. (1976). The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind Chapter 1 The Consciousness of Consciousness (Epub p. 28). New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin Company.
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