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posted by LaminatorX on Friday July 03 2015, @01:15AM   Printer-friendly
from the actually-old-theory dept.

Consciousness — the internal dialogue that seems to govern one's thoughts and actions — is far less powerful than people believe, serving as a passive conduit rather than an active force that exerts control, according to a new theory proposed by an SF State researcher. Associate Professor of Psychology Ezequiel Morsella.

Morsella and his coauthors' groundbreaking theory, published online on June 22 by the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences, contradicts intuitive beliefs about human consciousness and the notion of self.

According to Morsella's framework, the "free will" that people typically attribute to their conscious mind — the idea that our consciousness, as a "decider," guides us to a course of action — does not exist. Instead, consciousness only relays information to control "voluntary" action, or goal-oriented movement involving the skeletal muscle system.

http://scienceblog.com/79096/theory-consciousness-free/

Wonder if Edward Bernays would agree with this assessment. Enjoyed watching the very intriguing documentary, The Century of the Self a 2002 British television documentary series by Adam Curtis. It focuses on how the work of Sigmund Freud, Anna Freud, and Edward Bernays influenced the way corporations and governments have analyzed, dealt with, and controlled people.

You can see the documentary: The Century of the Self | Happiness Machines | Episode 1


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  • (Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Friday July 03 2015, @01:58AM

    That was the ultimate result of reading the original short story of which The Matrix is a blatantly derivative work. I dont recall the title or author but I expect my sister can dig it up as she still lives in moscow, Idaho where I found it in the county library.

    I discussed this in Living with Schizoaffective Disorder which made front page at kuro5hin on 2003:

    http://www.warplife.com/mdc/books/schizoaffective-disorder/ [warplife.com]

    Some ither kuron asked for my take on The Matrix. While I knew it was a huge hit and so quite like a really good movie, until then I never had any particular interest in seeing it.

    I discussed this with my wife Bonita. She urged me to watch it, then rented it for me.

    I thought it was quite cool but when Neo was offered his choice of Red or Blue, Bonita paused the tape then asked me to think very carefully over my decision as to whether I should watch the rest of the movie.

    I did.

    I have since come to conclude that while I have learned many fascinating things and have met many fascinating people in all the jails and mental hospitals Ive been detained inbsince then, in many respects I feel I should have chosen the other pill.

    Not long after I first published it that April, I received email from four others who were very releaved to learn that they were not really alone in the universe themselves.

    For you lot to be the product of my delusion is a soul-crushingly lonely experience.

    --
    Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
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  • (Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 03 2015, @02:09AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 03 2015, @02:09AM (#204515)

    Sister knows, wife urged, netizens asked. Do you know how to do things without being prompted by someone? If not, you're just the product of our delusions.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 03 2015, @02:42AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 03 2015, @02:42AM (#204526)

    Sounds like a bad acid trip, but it might have taken you much longer to come down? Once I was convinced (for an hour or so) that everything I'd read about well known LSD experimenters like Leary & Kesey was all invented in my imagination...

    • (Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Friday July 03 2015, @07:44AM

      A UC Santa Cruz Psychobiology undergrad by the name of Timothy Dreszer once pointed out to me that there are no "drug analogs" for mental illness.

      That is, one cannot take a pill to experience Schizophrenia or what have you.

      In my own experience, the very closest drug analog that I am aware of is Nitrous Oxide. In many respects that's much like bipolar mania.

      Mania is the result of excess norepinephrine in the brain, loosely speaking it makes it "too easy to think". Nitrous isn't exactly the same, but the reason nitrous makes us laugh is that Nitrous Oxide is a neurotransmitter as well.

      There are over 130 neurontransmitters, not so much because there is a good reason for us to have so many, but that it's not hard at all to initiate a nerve impulse.

      --
      Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
      • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Friday July 03 2015, @01:28PM

        by kaszz (4211) on Friday July 03 2015, @01:28PM (#204696) Journal

        Any chance to synthesize those other 130 neuron transmitters? And do you have an source that states there are 130 of them?

        Perhaps one could make a cocktail that will give the same neuron transmitter spectra as people with mania has?
        (or even more daring, connect blood streams together with one that has mania?)

        • (Score: 2) by tathra on Friday July 03 2015, @03:32PM

          by tathra (3367) on Friday July 03 2015, @03:32PM (#204752)

          few neurotransmitters, at least none of the major ones, can cross the blood-brain barrier. many or most of them are produced in the brain. some of the important ones are dopamine, norepinephrine, serotonin, gaba, glutamate, anandamide, dmt, nmda, opioid peptides (endorphins, enkephalins, dynorphins, etc), and many others. i'm skeptical of the number 130, but maybe if you counted all the individual peptides and hormones such you might get that high. there are a fuck-ton of different receptors, but not every receptor has a neurotransmitter unique to it.

          oh, and nitrous oxide (N2O), the dissociative known as "laughing gas", is not a neurotransmitter, he's confusing it with nitric oxide (NO).

  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Friday July 03 2015, @04:03AM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday July 03 2015, @04:03AM (#204543) Journal

    That was the ultimate result of reading the original short story of which The Matrix is a blatantly derivative work.

    Sounds like Philip K. Dick. He wrote a number of stories like that (eg, Time Out of Joint [wikipedia.org] and We Can Remember It for You Wholesale [wikipedia.org]).

    • (Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Friday July 03 2015, @07:47AM

      I have read not one but two distinctly different short stories, each of which takes place in an All You Can Eat restaurant in which a space alien bankrupts the proprietor by teleporting the food he eats from his stomach to his home planets, in hopes of saving his people from widespread famine.

      One was called "All You Can Eat". I don't recall the other.

      I don't know whether they were independently written, or whether the magazine editors of the day weren't really on the watch for copyright infringement.

      --
      Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
      • (Score: 3, Informative) by AnonTechie on Friday July 03 2015, @10:21AM

        by AnonTechie (2275) on Friday July 03 2015, @10:21AM (#204645) Journal

        All You Can Eat - Harvey L & Audrey L Bilker.

        Children of Infinity: Original Science Fiction Stories for Young Readers [goodreads.com]

        An anthology of short science fiction stories all about young people. "Wingless on Avalon", "Half Life", and "Wake up to Thunder". Wake up to Thunder is surely the story that inspired the popular movie trilogy "The Matrix".

        --
        Albert Einstein - "Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
        • (Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Friday July 03 2015, @11:01AM

          I used to read science fiction all day and all night.

          One of my sister's elementary school teachers once sent Jeannie home with a note so that my mother could take the admittedly unusual step of convincing Jeannie not to read so much. Wasn't paying attention to her lessons, see.

          I failed three out of four quarters of eighth grade english, as a result of Mrs. Whitworth's very first words to me being "WHAT THE HELL IS THIS BUSINESS ABOUT YOUR GRADES!"

          Civil disobedience, see. I was often, quite sternly informed I would be held back from high school but I didn't want to give Mrs. Whitworth the satisfaction so I passed my time during her classes by reading nonfiction spaceflight history books. (Fairfield, California is the site of Travis Air Force Base, so the county library had quite an impressive collection.)

          I read for pleasure all the way up until September 1982 when I started at Caltech as an Astronomy major. Ironically it was not all the science or math that destroyed my reading, but the literature and history.

          I smiled at first, you made me really happy and I will purchase the book.

          But I am fifty-one years old now. I cannot get those lost years back.

          --
          Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]