Feeding unconscious processes

I flicked through my blogposts. There are 518 of them to date on the ‘changing minds’ blog and 507 on ‘existential soft rock’. This averages 73 per year or 1 every 5 days.

I do not remember writing most of them. It does not, therefore, seem proper to call them mine. They come from ‘my’ unconscious but ‘I’ am not in control of it. So who or what is in control? And to what end?

The contents of the unconscious have evolved. The mindbrain is in a state of constant churn as it searches for patterns and agents. A vast number of variations are produced for selection to work on; and these can be natural, under domestication, or cultural.

‘My’ mindbrain is not an independent agent. ‘I’ exist because of processes rooted in nurture, nature, and chance.

The nurturing process began when one of my Dad’s sperm fertilised one of my Mam’s eggs. That was in the Spring of 1948. The ongoing process involves a constantly churning set of thoughts, feelings and moods (TFM) that guide my involvement with culture specific feeding, fighting and fornication.

Some of the nature rooted stuff (instincts, reflexes, intuitions, biases etc) goes back millions of years but I am presently interested in what was going on during the long phase of foraging that went before the recent development of settled agriculture.

BUT … I have been reading the fabulous Yuval Noah Harari (2015) Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. He is an academic historian to trade and recognises three revolutions – cognitive, beginning 70,000 years ago, agricultural, 12,000 years ago, and scientific since 500 years ago.

He has gathered an impressive amount of evidence in support of his storyline and is thorough in pointing to weak and contentious areas. I am inclined to trust his scholarship and so far find his speculations to be convincing.

SO – ‘my’ unconscious will be processing Harari’s thought trains intensely for the next few days and sporadically for as long as I keep breathing.