Binary Brain

This is a topic that I hope gets a beating over time.  Dennett has floated this idea that consciousness is really a massive parallel process by which the loudest contemplative state wins wherein the master puppeteer ceases to exist.  I doubt I am giving his theory justice in that statement.  Right now, though, that’s how I view it.

So, this morning, in the shower, I was thinking, why do some thoughts win out over others? Why does a given string of contemplation take the place of another more logical thread?  In particular, I was daydreaming about a woman I met a year ago and how intrigued I was with her behavior, thought process, ideas, etc.  In brief, I was infatuated with the idea I had of her.  There is no possible way to know if my concept of this person was close to the real thing (even after a third of my life spent in a serious relationship with one person, I hardly know her, so how could I possibly know this person whom has occupied all of a day’s worth of time in dialogue), but for whatever reason, that daydream/thread of thought beat out all the other ideas and thoughts cruising through my head.  I had to finally talk myself out of the daydream and go onto thoughts that I felt would be more responsible and relevant thoughts for the day before me.

I still don’t understand, though, why that daydream took precedence over other ideas that could have occupied my mind.  Was it the connection with emotion?  Was it some suppressed hope for attention from someone similar?  Why do we fantasize?

I consider myself a relatively logical individual with a drive to think and focus my thoughts on things that matter and yet I can become completely preoccupied and engrossed in irrelevant and impossible ideas and it takes the power of persuading some part of my consciousness to go onto other things.  This process is what makes Dennett’s idea of how consciousness works so plausible.  If there truly were a master puppeteer in my head who really controlled the thoughts and was the spirit behind the machine then the idea of streamS of consciousness wouldn’t make sense.  Nor would the fact that I can actually have one conversation in my head that attempts to overtake center stage from another.  I can’t find the particular page in Consciousness Explained, but Dennett relays the statement of another philosopher/psychologist (can’t remember which): when I’m thinking hard about something, the only real language that comes to mind that would describe what is going through my head is “go… you can do it… keep thinking harder…” Isn’t that funny, I thought?  That’s exactly what is going through my head when I’m trying to find the solution to a complex problem.  The actual language content I can come up with to describe the situation is a cheer and not the content of the process that is being used to solve the problem.  Delicious.