Find one of those stupid old computer games where the player is at one end and some sort of Alien comes down the screen at you. Space Invaders or Galaxian are perfect for the job. The game should be reasonably repetitive and skill based.
Now you can watch your conscious and subconscious interacting. As you can’t consciously control your action at the speed of the game you must wait until an error occurs and then decide not to make the error on the next occasion.
You’ll do this each time you miss or lose a life. Games of this kind allow one to ‘watch’ the process as it actually happens. When you feel that you have just hit the fire button (usually the space bar) the signal sent to the finger to make that pressing action had already been sent some 0.4 seconds before. In other words, at the point when you consciously decide to press the space bar the decision had already been made and the instruction sent.
Now that you’ve played you game for an hour or so your can move up to the next CONSCIOUS level. That is, to stop pretending that you are controlling the finger and just watch. This is possible. The feeling is one of two closely bound friends - one carries out the intention or will of the other. So now there is the conscious you and the you that actually does the pressing.
Note that you can feel the button pressing and even the instruction to press it, but this is after the pressing occurs. You (consciously) are only giving vague or general instructions. You decided to play the game. You decided when to start or quit. You pass on instructions (shoot a bit earlier when the invader is sweeping across the screen). If the game allows, you can step through techniques very slowly - slow enough for the conscious mind to actually directly participate in each step.
If you play this game to the point of boredom or tedium, you will notice that the conscious attention will drift. You no longer pretend to be the shooter, no longer take part in the action (though you are still looking at the screen) and you may start thinking about other things eg "how did that Stonjek fellow talk me into this - I have far to many other important things to do", "what if the kids/my parents catch me doing this" or you might start visualising other things. This is not unusual as the conscious mind is contributing so little to the activity of playing that you will play better if it keeps completely out of it.
This is where the illusion of consciousness comes in. If you were to scrutinise your own mind at any time, even when you were drifting off with the fairies, then you will find that "yes, I am consciously aware of my actions and I am responsible for everything I’m doing". That is the illusion. You are only aware because you just turned the spotlight of consciousness to the task at hand to see if you were conscious of it - which you were. There is also the usual adding to conscious experience of the actions just past (Libet found that this is true of all physical actions (that he tested for and made a reasonable extrapolation)).
I could be equally fooled by an assumption that all thought is accompanied by words because whenever I check my own thoughts they are in words. But that is because my belief is of word thought so I always (unwittingly) page the word thought module (probably the speech centres) which dutifully reports the current state of thought in words.
In both cases we have induced the desired experience. It takes considerably more discipline to page nothing but simply look. In this you check the state of your own mind to see if words, images, spatial extensions or whatever are present. If it is always the same then you can be fairly confident that you are causing the mode of your own perception of self.
Consciousness is responsible for close to all mental processes that take more than a fraction of a second. All processing of inbound information and outbound pre-motor action is subconscious. We only get a report after the event. The memory is almost entirely subconscious though bits of the contents can be paged.
But this is the barrier that consciousness studies faces. Nobody is willing to admit that they have next to no moment to moment control or moment to moment perception. We are responsible for it, but the instructions we send take time to be carried out by the subconscious and are only general (in real time). We can give ourselves specific fine instructions. But getting the subconscious to carry out these instructions, particularly if they are novel, requires training, of the same type that one applies to a pet dog.
All of the power of consciousness is in the perception and manipulation of things that take time and imagination. Thus it takes careful conscious consideration to form societies, to invent and utilise machines, and to form a single, responsible world society. But if we look for consciousness in studies that require responses within a second then we are not only fooling ourselves but each other and the entire study of consciousness.
Kind Regards, Robert Karl Stonjek.
© Robert Karl Stonjek 2003