Intuition, Logic And The Subconscious Mind
In his concept of transliminality, Thalbourne considers it as having only a thin boundary between the conscious and the subconscious mind. According to this concept, those misleading and weird perceptions (examples in entry 367) exist in all humans' subconscious mind. High transliminality makes them available to consciousness, in low transliminality they remain hidden. The assumption is widespread, that the ability to be logical is restricted to consciousness and that everything in the subconsciousness is automatically illogical. Intuition is generally (not specially in connection with transliminality) considered as a method of arriving at a decision by a shortcut bypassing logical reasoning.
I very strongly disagree, even though I have no evidence to back up my own point of view.
In his concept of transliminality, Thalbourne considers it as having only a thin boundary between the conscious and the subconscious mind. According to this concept, those misleading and weird perceptions (examples in entry 367) exist in all humans' subconscious mind. High transliminality makes them available to consciousness, in low transliminality they remain hidden. The assumption is widespread, that the ability to be logical is restricted to consciousness and that everything in the subconsciousness is automatically illogical. Intuition is generally (not specially in connection with transliminality) considered as a method of arriving at a decision by a shortcut bypassing logical reasoning.
I very strongly disagree, even though I have no evidence to back up my own point of view.
I consider the human brain as a complex information processing machine.
The input are
- external stimuli to the senses
- external information stimuli to cognition
- physical responses to external stimuli
- internal stimuli indicating dishomeostasis
- emotions elicited by the above
The process of how to react to the input uses information stored in the memory. All of this together are the premises of a logical reasoning and deciding process. A part of the process is under the focus of a spot light called consciousness, the rest is in the dark. Conscious decisions are reasoning processes in the light, intuitions are processes in the dark, of which only the results appear in the light. Both conscious and intuitive decisions are both as much or as little rational as is limited by the reasoning faculties.
The processes in the brain are fully logical, irrationality is in the choice of the premises. Rationality is a faculty of a person and it is more or less there, but equally in the conscious and in the subconscious part of the brain.
Every irrational belief is a logical conclusion processing an input. If A utters a claim, then it is true, appears logical to B. The mistake is the wrong premise, that A can know something as true. When a person after a near-death-experience believes, that he has a soul having temporarily left the body, this is principally a logical conclusion, as long as no other information is available except the own perception. But when someone is familiar with scientific thinking, when he has the possibility to acquire information about neuroscience, then the belief in the soul is irrational, because it is derived from an insufficient choice of premises.
Therefore I consider the faculty of rational information processing and the sensitivity to conscious distorted perceptions are two different traits. Telepathy as in item 14 of Thalbourne's 1998 questionnaire is an example. "I am convinced that I have had at least one experience of telepathy between myself and another person".
- A distorted-sensitive irrational person feels and believes it.
- A less distorted-sensitive but irrational person believes other's claim of having felt it.
- A distorted-sensitive rational person is aware of experiencing weird things as happening in the brain without any connection with reality.
- A less distorted-sensitive rational person does not believe in telepathy and has never experienced anything misleading.
I call it distorted-sensitive in contrast to the good sensitivity of being receptive to other people's emotional needs. Rationality can discard weird sensations like telepathy in the subconscious brain, because they are not valid for bothering the conscious mind. While I cannot know it, I am reluctant to think, that high general sensitivity makes people automatically prone to have distorted sensations.
The transliminality scale mixes two different things, perceptions and their rational or irrational interpretations. So far, I have not yet found any questionnaire or inventory separating both. In the telepathy example, there should be two questions, one about having experienced a perception as if it were telepathy, and a second question about the interpretation as either a belief or a function of the own brain.
The transliminality scale mixes two different things, perceptions and their rational or irrational interpretations. So far, I have not yet found any questionnaire or inventory separating both. In the telepathy example, there should be two questions, one about having experienced a perception as if it were telepathy, and a second question about the interpretation as either a belief or a function of the own brain.
But at this moment, I have not even a speculation, what about transliminality was visible in the EEG in this study.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2610283
