Our brain is a storyteller, not a reporter from an inner world
More people should meditate. <i>Especially</i> the people that make these kinds of arguments or study these kinds of things. Most of what he says is pretty good. But this part puts the lie to his whole argument, that the unconscious cannot form thoughts:<p>&gt; But think about the brain processes involved in even realizing that the song is familiar; or recognizing that the singer is David Bowie. We have no introspective access to these brain processes.<p>This isn&#x27;t true. You <i>can</i> have introspective access to these brain processes. I have investigated recall pretty thoroughly, my conclusions are rather difficult to put into words like many things about consciousness. Your conclusions sound rather banal, unless you have the experience that caused them to arise. But you can&#x27;t have access if you don&#x27;t develop it.<p>The other big mistake he makes is in discounting the abilities of stories themselves to have depth. That the brain is constantly telling stories should in no way imply that the brain lacks depth. There is depth in those stories that is worth looking into, depth that the brain put there. The work of psychotherapists is in no way invalidated, in fact, they&#x27;re much better at thinking about the stories we tell ourselves than we are.<p>It&#x27;s just, same as with introspective access to your subconscious, you won&#x27;t find any depth if you don&#x27;t go looking for it.<p>Through meditation, I was able to create what&#x27;s called a <i>tulpa</i>, a separate, distinct personality that shares my brain with me. At first I thought it was a non-physical entity, time and introspection and literally asking it what it was, I eventually worked out that it was sharing my brain with me, I didn&#x27;t even know what a tulpa was back then.<p>If the subconscious can&#x27;t think, tulpas, which maintain personality distinct from the normal operating consciousness, would have nowhere to &#x27;hide&#x27;. It would be easy for the skeptic to then make the argument that it didn&#x27;t exist, but again, if you don&#x27;t meditate, you can never really investigate the question.<p>And if you want to keep arguing, say you want to now argue that the tulpa personality was created on the fly by the brain, then eventually your reasoning will turn circular.<p>This is just positivist nihilism in another form.