Unconscious Presence

July 9th, 2006 Fred McVittie

Theatrical presence or charisma is not primarily an attribute we can comprehend through conscious measurement or logical processes of deduction. We usually get a sense of the charisma possessed by a performer on a non-cosnscious level, although we may be able to bring that sense to conscious awareness. This suggests that techniques for the enhancement of presence and the development of charisma would involve the learning of strategies for self-presentation which similarly operate and communicate on a non-conscious level.

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Even Atheists are scared of God

August 4th, 2006 Fred McVittie

Many optical illusions work by encouraging the visual system to make assumptions about what it is looking at which are incorrect. So the Muller-Lyer illusion, even though it consists only of abstract 2-dimensional geometrical shapes, tricks the visual system into behaving as if it is looking at a 3-dimensional scene. The brain then makes assumptions about the relative size of the objects in the scene which assumption includes a correction for distance. So some lines which are the same length appear to be of different lengths. Similarly, the geometry of the Ponzo illusion (above) bears enough similarity to the perspectival shortening of, for example, railway tracks, that our brains make the correction and produce an apparent size difference in shapes which are actually the same.

There are two interesting aspects to this illusion making process:

• Firstly, the construction of a non-existent perspective is entirely unconscious. When we look at an optical illusion we rarely notice the resemblance between the abstract shape and the perspectival convergence of railway lines for example, or the similarity in geometry to the interior or exterior corners of rooms (Muller-Lyer).
• Secondly, these illusions are unusually persistant, and cannot be willed away by the acquisition of conscious rational knowledge. We can measure lines that appear to be of different lengths, confirm to ourselves that they are, in fact, the same, but they still retain their appearance of difference.

This clearly demonstrates that our conscious and non-conscious experience of the world sometimes operate on different registers, and that rational conscious knowledge does not necessarily displace that acquired and through non-conscious means. Also, given that much of our behaviour, emotional response, conceptualisations etc are produced non-consciously it is likely that in situations where conscious knowledge is in conflict with non-conscious knowledge, even when that non-conscious knowledge is known to be the product of an illusion, it is the non-conscious knowledge which will guide the response.

Many of the illusions can be found on Richard Gregory’s home page at http://richardgregory.org/papers/brainmodels/illusions-and-brain-models_p1.htm

Posted in Atheism, Consciousness, Illusion, Seeing, Unconscious | No Comments »

Conscious Difference and Unconscious Universals

August 5th, 2006 Fred McVittie

Conscious processes (deduction, analysis, evaluation, etc) tend to address the needs of situations created through human differences; cultural, linguistic, moral, legal etc. Unconscious processes, or at least some of them, tend to address the needs of situations created by human universals; fight or flight responses, disgust, love, etc.

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Non-conscious ‘Beliefs’ and Behaviour

August 12th, 2006 Fred McVittie

Theories relating to the perception of optical illusions suggest that non-conscious mental processing of visual images has a persistent effect on how those images are consciously perceived. There is clearly a potential for such non-conscious processing to similarly have an effect on physical action, behaviour, attitudes, or feelings. It is conceivable, for example, that an error in perception caused by such processes might lead a person to make a judgment based on this (mis)perception which judgment would be incorrect in conscious rational terms. We know that information directed directly at non-conscious processes, and which bypasses conscious awareness, has a direct effect on attitudes and choice (hence advertising), it is likely that the unconscious knowledge represented by Universal Physics has a similar effect.

Posted in Illusion, Perception, Physics, Seeing, Unconscious, Universals | No Comments »

Clean Language vs. Engines of Enquiry

August 13th, 2006 Fred McVittie

A routine part of all language and conversation is metaphor. Most of the time these metaphors are covert and pass unnoticed in speech and other expressive channels. However, within the flow of speech, and particularly in the back and forth of dialogue, metaphors not only convey the content but also structure the shared edifice that houses the conversation. When a subconsciously agreed upon set of metaphors is used, a mutual conceptual framework is built for the dialogue to inhabit. Quite often though, conversation and discourse proceeds not only be mutually agreed upon consilience of metaphor, but by a process of constantly shifting metaphor usage, one replacing the other as it loses usefulness or when the conversation ’stalls’ through the exhaustion of a particular line of metaphorical enquiry. This procedural mixing of metaphors has been referred to as an ‘engine of enquiry’.

In some, very particular, situations, e.g. therapeutic, exploratory etc. this communal exchange of metaphor, whether shared or mixed, is inappropriate. It is sometimes necessary to allow an individual to explore their own ideosyncratic use of metaphor and build/explore their edifice alone. The techniques of clean language originally conceived by David Grove, and developed by Lawley and Tompkins, lends itself to the facilitation of just such individual conceptual discovery.

Posted in Language, Lawley, J. & Tompkins, P., Metaphor, Unconscious | No Comments »

The Physics of the Unconscious

August 27th, 2006 Fred McVittie

Unconscious cognitive processes, including those which produce physical actions, attitudes, and emotional responses, often react or refer to the physical properties of objects, events, or spaces. So, for example, the actions used to catch a ball are unconscious and automatic, and refer to the object and the space through which the ball travels. This unconscious processing of information, and its subsequent translation into effective action, requires the person engaged in that action to possess an internal model or paradigm of the behaviour of objects in spaces. We would not be able to catch a ball if we did not have, in some form, paradigmatic knowledge of the flight of objects and the effects of gravity, wind resistance etc on that flight. There is evidence to suggest that this paradigmatic knowledge is innate and that it closely resembles ‘naive physics’.

McIntyre, J., Zago, M., Berthoz, A. and Lacquaniti, F. 2001. Does the brain model Newton’s laws? Nature Neuroscience, July 2001.

Posted in McIntyre, J., Zago, M., Berthoz, A. and Lacquaniti, F, Naive Physics, Physics, Unconscious | No Comments »

Unconsciousnesses

August 28th, 2006 Fred McVittie

The term unconscious, at least since Freud, has tended to signify a singular part of the mind, almost a second self which is hidden behind the brightly lit facade of conscious thought. This second self is variously represented as benign or malignant, helping us out by providing the Eureka moments of creativity or embarrassing us by slipping obscenities into our dreams and our language. Contemporary brain science, however, tends to model the unconscious differently, regarding the unconscious not as a singular space, agent, or archive, but not as a ‘the’ at all. Rather, it can be said that a wide range of mental processes are simply ‘not conscious’. This might include the various machinations of the Freudian psyche, but would also include numerous other routine processes which are required for the operation and maintenance or the body/person.

Posted in Creativity, Freud, Sigmund, Unconscious | No Comments »

The Development of Unconscious Physics

August 29th, 2006 Fred McVittie

Conscious perceptual processes lead to the formulation of conscious laws of physics, this through the rational, logical, and self-aware processes of observation, pattern recognition, hypothesis formation, and experimentation. It is highly unlikely that any such process is in operation at an unconcious level, where such rigour would be unnecessary and therefore non-adaptive in an evolutionary sense. Having said that, there is evidence to suggest that non-conscious knowledge of physical principles does exist, and whilst some of this knowledge may well be innate it must be true that much non-conscious information about the physics of the world is learned. Since conscious processes are utilised in the derivation of conscious laws of physics it seems inevitable that the body of knowledge we might think of as ‘unconscious physics’ is derived from unconscious perceptions.

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Pauli’s ‘Background Physics’

August 31st, 2006 Fred McVittie

The concept of a non-rational but relatively coherent physics informing unconsious processes, and ultimately influencing actions, attitudes, and emotions, is found in the ‘Background Physics’ proposed by physicist Wolfgang Pauli and developed in his correspondence with the psychologist Jung (Pauli, Jung et al, 2001).

Posted in Jung, Carl G., Physics, Unconscious | No Comments »

Non-conscious Emotional Steering

October 6th, 2006 Fred McVittie

Some unconscious processes can be learnt, and some appear to be innate. Innate unconscious processes include the various tenets of Folk Physics and the intuitive knowledge possessed by babies and infants identified by Spelke, Baillargeon et al. Among those non-conscious processes which are not innate but are acquired through interaction with the world, some can be learnt through ordered rational processes of self-instruction, learning to ride a bike for example, and some are learnt ‘covertly’ through experiences of being in the world which we may not consciously examine but which nevertheless construct our worldview. All of these unconscious processes, learnt and innate, covert and overt, have an affect upon our actions, and on our emotional engagement with those actions. In fact, it might be more accurate to say that such processes (and the beliefs which are formed through them) determine our emotional engagement with action, and this emotional engagement ’steers’ the action into directions which correspond with the dictates of non-conscious processes and beliefs. Going against the steer of the unconscious is experienced as doing something which doesn’t ‘feel right’.

Posted in Baillergeon, Emotion, Intuition, Naive Physics, Spelke, Elizabeth, Unconscious | No Comments »

Performing Magic (Non-consciously)

October 7th, 2006 Fred McVittie

The interactions which take place between performers and audience do not only take place at a conscious rational level. In fact most of the transactions probably takes place non-consciously through body language, gesture, intonation, proximity, etc. Much non-conscious transaction and perception does not utilise the same processes and beliefs that consciousness relies on, the objective axioms of rational physics and deductive logic for example, but rather uses subjective (and sometimes universal) embodied processes and beliefs, Folk Physics and Magic.

Posted in Perception, Performance, Unconscious | No Comments »

The Feeling of What Happens: Details and Patterns

October 22nd, 2006 Fred McVittie

Our unconscious mind has a sensitivity to detail and pattern that our conscious mind does not have and is not capable of having. The complexity of many patterns and the fineness of much detail is beyond the relatively modest and linear computational abilities of conscious processes. The recognition of pattern and detail which is carried out non-consciously usually does not become part of our conscious awareness at all, but rather informs the various behaviours we carry out routinely without any necessity to think consciously about them. So, for example, when in conversation we may fall into a similar rhythmic pattern of speaking as the person we are speaking to without intending to do so or even consciously being aware of the fact. Although these behind-the-scenes computations do not present themselves to conscious awareness as rational facts about such details and patterns (obviously, or by definition they would then not be non-conscious), instead such computations and recognitions appear in consciousness as feelings, biases, hunches, and instincts. We often feel the way we do about a person, situation, event etc because our mind is processing large numbers of observations about that person, situation or event, noting details and discovering patterns which we are totally unaware of consciously. Our feelings are the experienced result of these computations.

Posted in Feeling, Intuition, Pattern, Unconscious | No Comments »

Obviousness and Intuition

December 20th, 2006 Fred McVittie

Many of the actions we carry out are marked with a sense of ‘obviousness’. The placement of a chair in a room; the moment we step off a pavement to cross a road, avoiding oncoming cars. There is no need for much, if any, conscious deliberative thought when carrying out these actions, and often they do not appear in consciousness at all, being carried out on ‘autopilot’. The obviousness of the decisions involved in these actions is, in a sense, a strong form of the ‘intuition’ that we mobilise when making other, less commonplace, decisions. When we get a ‘bad feeling’ about a particular course of action we may be consciously aware of the feeling but reasoning is usually absent from consciousness. The actions steered or shaped by both intuition and obviousness are characterised by this lack of conscious, rational thought. In fact, to bring rational thought to bear on the kind of ‘problems’ usually solved by intuition and obviousness, crossing a road for example, actually makes the task much more difficult and hazardous. In both these forms of decision making, the decision is being made and the action shaped by non-conscious processes, and often the conscious mind is not given access to that process, or is incapable of understanding that process.

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Avatar Fovea Vision

November 29th, 2007 Fred McVittie

In the early days of video gaming, when the very first 3D games were coming onto the market, the processing power of the consoles was often not enough to allow fully real-time rendering of the scene. As one moved the avatar through the virtual environment walls would suddenly pop into existence as their encoded information was realised on the screen. Quick movements particularly were likely to leave one’s avatar in a surreal incomplete landscape of gravity-defying buildings, roofs hovering above non-existent walls, bodies without legs or other visible means of support, and pixelated trees that blossomed before one’s eyes as the resolution increased. Improvements in chip and circuit design has meant that the rendering speed within a modern video game can keep up with the speed of the game easily; dropping of frames and the weirdness of incomplete environments is largely a thing of the past. This is, of course, a good thing. However, this limitation on the construction of a realistic environment on the NES, the Megadrive and the PlayStation 1 offers an interesting metaphor on the sensory construction of reality outside of the world of gaming.

Imagine a video game, a first person shooter perhaps, in which we, the player, are operating the avatar from the traditional position in such games, which is slightly above and behind the in-game character. We can see their body from the back and can control the direction in which they travel, their speed, and also have some control over their gestures and use of objects (typically weapons, but we could extend that to tools of all kinds). Usually in games of this kind we can also see quite a large amount of the environment through which they are moving and, assuming this is a modern console, this environment is seamlessly rendered for us. However, this game is different from others in that the environment is not rendered in its totality. Like games of yore, parts of the scene are rendered in detail, some are partial, and some parts do not appear at all. In this game the extent to which a part of the scene is rendered and therefore visible to the player is equivalent to how it would be visible to the avatar. The resolution of the onscreen environment is mapped according to the resolution that the eyes of the avatar would achieve.

The human visual system, including the eye, does not simply resolve the visual world as a uniform, flat image. There is a large variation between the centre of the gaze, typically occupied by the focus of one’s conscious attention, and the periphery of the visual field, to which one is giving very different attention and may not even be conscious of at all. The centre of vision, or fovea, has a high resolution and good colour determination; the peripheral vision on the other hand has greater sensitivity to motion and to small variations in light and shade, as well as to the discrimination of very faint light sources (which is why astronomers traditionally located stars by looking not directly at them but slightly away from where they were suspected to be, such that their peripheral vision might pick up what their focal vision could not).

Returning to the video game, what the player sees is therefore dependent upon what the character is doing and where they are looking. Parts of the environment, that which corresponds to the focal point of avatar’s point of view, is rendered in high resolution and full colour. Other parts of the scene, which would appear only peripherally within the character’s field of vision, are in monochrome and lack detail. At the extreme edges of avatar vision there may be only a grey mist. Significantly, whilst the action at the centre of the point of focus is well resolved it may be relatively static, whilst the grey mist would be seething with potential. Shadows would form in the mist of the peripheral vision demanding that the avatar pay attention and move them more central by turning in their direction, almost like dreams and phantasms emerging from the subconscious.

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