[Michael Chui]

Originally Posted by wolfgang

Do I consider myself (or rather, my self conscious mind) to be a competent programer of my subconscious?

Um, no. I specifically asked about computers, and I've always thought the analogy between brains and computers to be nonsensical.

Originally Posted by wolfgang

So you are thinking, it sounds like, that awareness is something that is programmed too.

Actually, I was asking a question.

However, I'm quite certain that awareness can be manipulated. Programmed is such a strange term to use. Awareness of time can be messed with by taking away natural indicators, such as sunlight, seasonal shifts, calendars, and clocks. Check out what happens in unethical prison environments: the stories don't tell people who scratch lines in the wall to keep count for nothing.

Similarly, at the age of 9 months, children are generally no longer aware of sounds that are ignored in their primary language. I'll look up the study for you if you want. The Principal Investigator would be Patricia Kuhl.

Stage magic is a well-known method of manipulating awareness. "The hand is faster than the eye."

Originally Posted by wolfgang

Our awareness is not programmable because we are built this way. (How's that for getting out of the hot seat on this?)

A cop out. Who, or what, built it that way?

Originally Posted by wolfgang

That part of you that chooses what to pay attention to is flexiable and not part of the conditioned mind.

O RLY?
YouTube - Change blindness

Read the comments after you watch it for the first time. You're looking for a difference between the two shots. I can give you more examples if I find the videos. It's a fairly well-documented phenomenon.

Originally Posted by wolfgang

I'm not sure what the question is. Is it: Does awareness have a historical record of it's actions?

Um, no. It was, taken verbatim from the original post, "Can you show that the thinking mind exists?"

Originally Posted by wolfgang

I'll have to call Bruce Lipton soon if I continue this.

Invite him to the forum. Because he either doesn't know the answer, or he's really bad at communicating it.

I'm not going to even pretend I know how the memory works, even though I have a far less mystical conception as explained by Jeff Hawkins. Perhaps the field you should look into isn't psychoanalysis, as fathered by Jung and Freud, but neuroscience. Or, if you want to stay inside psychology, take a look at The Lucifer Effect, which I'm currently reading.

Originally Posted by wolfgang

What is the main point of relevance to these topics? That things can be analized (without reduction) and future results predicted?

It's worthwhile to look at the art of the biographer. To look at a person's life and reconstruct their motives and influences so that one can understand their future actions in the larger context of who they had been molded into. There is no guarantee that they're right: that's why a lot of biographers differ on the same subjects. But it's very interesting.

Originally Posted by wolfgang

Interesting, but how is this like souls or free will?

The proposition, at the moment, is that free will means that choice cannot be predicted. I'm disagreeing, mostly by first asserting that free will exists, defining it as the existence of choice regardless of prediction, and then by showing that choice can be predicted.

And for the record, I've never minded going off-topic.