Unconscious Process

This post will serve as bookend to "Scientific Process", a couple of posts ago. It's the other side of the coin, the same issue really, only the other side of it. At question is how do we know anything, and how do we make decisions? This is an issue that affects health, and pretty much everything else too.

My parents had some interesting books, one of them was the collection of Einstein's letters. He spoke out on the issues of the day, and corresponded with other thinkers and colleagues. I read this so long ago my memory of it is not specific (I want to remember to remember to re-read it:), but as I recall he had an interesting correspondence with Freud. Perhaps their correspondence was not mere happenstance, both of these great scientists had a strong interest in unconscious process. And they both have many wonderful quotes attributed to them, one of my favorites of Einstein's goes something like: many things that can be measured aren't important, and many things that can't be measured are. That's an interesting thing for a scientist to say, since science is basically the art of measurement.

That's a funny way of putting it, that science is the art of... anything. We normally don't think of it that way. But I guess that explains the evolving nature of scientific knowledge - it's a creative process, and process can be precise, but it can be messy too.

There's an old saw about science kicking around, I don't know who said it first, but it is repeated often enough: "if it can't be measured it doesn't exist". Clearly Einstein didn't see it that way. But there is the idea that measurement is the foundation of science, the first step, and repeated throughout the process.

Before that however there must be the inductive leap, the flash of recognition of what might be true, and what to try to measure in the first place. Induction is one of the more interesting things the human mind does, but it's a bit of a mystery because it happens in the unconscious, and we still do not understand the unconscious very well (some things that are important can't be measured). We've certainly made inroads, and we have rough maps that probably are about as accurate as early maps of the globe were. But a precise model of that landscape we do not have.

So the unconscious is basically "dark" to us, it's happening all the time, but we have limited "view" of it. If that weren't true, it wouldn't be unconscious at all! It is thought the unconscious accounts for most of our mind/brain activity - we know part of what it's doing are "background chores" like keeping the blood pumping, and all the rest of it. The body is a complex machine... good thing we don't have to remember where all those switches and knobs are! - can you imagine?

We go completely unconscious when we're asleep, except in dreaming, which seems to happen on the border of conscious and unconscious activity. The autonomic part of the unconscious mind is also directing a lot of "repair work" on the body while sleeping, and perhaps dreams are a part of the "emotion body" house cleaning process, keeping us sane and whole.

We also get ideas in dreams, and when we're awake inductive leaps seem to come out of "nowhere". But they are not really out of nowhere, they are out of our mind/brain's large capacity - most of which is on the unconscious level. We know we remember a lot more stuff than we can think of at any given moment - it can take a day or longer to remember certain things, and "sleeping on it" sometimes helps. In a hypnotic state people can often be brought to recall everyday things from decades past and long since forgotten. And Jung and others have suggested we even have collective memory, the "collective unconscious" of all of mankind. Wow, maybe we potentially remember "everything"! Now that would be worth writing home about:) In any case, a large part of the brain appears to be, in effect, a very large and complex (but gooey) RAM chip.

Creative process is another name for inductive leap. Artists learn to trust this, and value it almost as their "stock in trade". Scientists trust measurement, and since they are measuring "the new" in original research, discovering just how to measure accurately frequently takes place in stages, perhaps even over years and decades. Meanwhile we sometimes see inaccurate conclusion drawn on initial measures, and "interim realities" constructed along the way, which can be problematic when these interim stages are not benign. Ah well, two steps forward and one step back is the order of the day, the path is not a straight line or perfectly linear.

At bottom of every process is unconscious formation, the ongoing collating, sorting, and synthesizing all the disparate bits of memory we all have in there, until finally, fully formed, it manifests as conscious thought. It's one of the more amazing things about being human really.