Is it possible to have two (or more) conscious thoughts at the same time? I thought about this some time ago and have practised now and again, without success. I realise that sensory inputs can be multiple and that one is able to, say, type a letter whilst listening to music. But if one tries to, say, think of the meaning of life and create a supermarket shopping simultaneiously, it is impossible. One has to leave thinking about one task to begin or resume thinking about the other. With all of the multitasking that the brain can do (eg driving the car, listening to music and talking to a passenger) when unconscious activity is involved, I wondered why simultaneous conscious thinking is not possible. Come to think about it, does multitasking actually occur, or is there just rapid sequential tasking?

Simultaneous conscious thoughts r possible!

you obviously did it. well done. now explain please.

"Unity" is one of the accepted properties of consciousness. That is, consciousness is not split among independent tasks. Don may be referring to multiple persons thinking simultaneously. In a single individual, consciousness is unified. You have to change contexts serially.

There are some interesting "split brain" cases, but aside from surgical splitting of a brain, consciousness in normal people is unified.

Privacy
Unity
Non-locality

Three properties of consciousness.

Public
Distributed
Local

Three properties of physical things.

Fine. Why do you think this is? One could imagine that having more than one conscious thought (or process) by the same individual consciousness confers advantages. Maybe evolution tried this and then discarded it, or maybe it hasn't turned up yet, after all our brains/minds haven't been around that long, in evolutionary terms. We can have unconscious and conscious activities simultaneously so why not multiple conscious activities? Also, what does split brain say about the nature/location of consciousness?

so why not multiple conscious activities?


We are capable of this!

I think one can train himself to do two things at once, dividing his attention between them, but the result is not as good as if he focuses on one thing and then on another.

While I paint I am often thinking and doing of many things simultaneously.

....focuses on one thing and then on another....

....is too slow and more of the old school style ( a relic of past cognitive generational stages) of cognitive functioning, remember, I've been reared from an advanced point in the social and cognitive developmental stages of the global environment (a dwarf atop the...., etc.)

It occurs rather easily.

Where tha gap is bridged from one concept to another and forms an elevated state of consious thought.

You know, the whole percept, recept, concept thing?

I type these words and letters while simultaneously thinking about women on a beach!

so no serious attempt to discuss this potentially "expanded consciousness" topic then?

I am serious!!!!!

Hello!

When I think about women on the beach, I put my whole mind into it.

Yeah, I guess that's a bad example, huh?

Some key points of interest!

Let these thoughts perculate and see if your mind makes any leaps across previously uncrossible chasms!

Bucke, Richard Maurice (1901). Cosmic Consciousness. New York: Innes & Sons.

Cosmic Consciousness (1901) – Richard Maurice Bucke, M.D.

The work of a Canadian doctor.

Developed an idea of a new consciousness as a mental evolution of mankind, where as it became increasingly common, and eventually general, it would lift the whole of human life to higher plane of existence.

During the formative years most men are having their originality suppressed and their opinions standardized by school and college routine.

Bucke was a student of the human mind, a psychologist, and he treated Illumination from the standpoint of psychology, as a very rare but definite and recognizable mental condition.

He considered that in the last three thousand years of human history, there were at least 14 undeniable cases of complete and permanent enlightenment, as well as other partial or temporary instances of Illumination.

Noticing the increase in frequency of experiences, he deduced that very gradually, the human race is in the process of developing a new kind of consciousness, far in advance of the ordinary human self-consciousness, which will eventually lift the human race above and beyond all the fears and ignorance’s, the brutalities and bestialities which beset it today.

He dealt with for distinct stages of consciousness observable in all living creatures: the perceptual mind of the lower animals, open only to sense impressions; the receptual mind of the higher animals, producing simple consciousness; the conceptual mind of human beings, accompanied by self-consciousness, and cosmic consciousness.

He shows that the human race has added several new kinds of consciousness over the evolution of time, i.e. colour sense, sense of fragrance, and musical sense.

Bucke argued that these new senses must have begun as sporadic, isolated instances of new awareness in a few individuals, and that they spread gradually with the passing of the generations until nearly all civilized races possessed them, though by no means to the same degree or completeness.

He himself had received temporary Illumination.

Contemporary William James once wrote of Bucke, “I believe that you have brought this kind of consciousness ‘home’ to the attention of the students of human nature… your book, dear Sir, is that it is an addition to psychology of first rate importance.”

Cosmic consciousness is a higher form of consciousness than that possessed by the ordinary man. The upper half of the animal kingdom possesses simple consciousness. Man possesses self-consciousness. Cosmic consciousness, in addition to the other two, is a third and higher consciousness.

Language is the objective of which self-consciousness is the subjective.

In the evolution of the intellect there are four distinct steps: The first of them was taken when the primary quality of excitable sensations were established. At this point began the acquisition and perfect registration of sense impressions, percepts.

A percept is a sense impression – a sound that is heard or an object that is seen and the impressions they make are percepts.

Individually and generation by generation the primordial brain accumulated these percepts, the constant repetition of which, calling for further and further registration led, in the struggle for existence and, under the law of natural selection, to an accumulation of cells in the central sense ganglia; the multiplication of cells made further registration possible; that, again, made further growth of the ganglia necessary, and so on.

At last a condition was reached in which it became possible for our ancestor to combine groups of these percepts into a recept. Similar percepts are registered one over the other until they are generalized into one compound percept or a recept, something that has been received.

Now the work of accumulation begins again on a higher plane of existence where the sensory organs keep steadily at work manufacturing percepts; the receptual centres keep steadily at work manufacturing more and yet more recepts from the old and the new percepts; the capacities of the central ganglia are constantly taxed to do the necessary registration of recepts; then as the ganglia by use and selection are improved they constantly manufacture from percepts and from the initial simple recepts, more and more complex, that is, higher and higher recepts.

After many thousands of generations have lived and died, comes a time when the mind has reached the highest possible point of purely receptual intelligence. Then another break in conscious thought, higher recepts are replaced by concepts.

A recept is a composite image of many thousands of percepts; it is itself an image abstracted from many images; but a concept is that same composite image, that same recept, named, ticketed, and dismissed. A concept is in fact a named recept – the name standing henceforth for the thing itself, that is, for the recept.

The revolution by which concepts were substituted for recepts has increased the efficiency of the brain for thought, the ability to replace big cumbersome recept by a simple sign.

As the possession of concepts implies the possession of language, so the possession of concepts and language (which are in reality two aspects of the same thing) implies the possession of self-consciousness.

There is a moment in the evolution of mind when the receptual intellect, capable of simple consciousness only, becomes almost quite instantaneously a conceptual intellect in possession of language and self-consciousness.

In the history of individual man the point is reached and passed at the age of three years; in the history of the human race it was reached and past several thousands of years ago.

Our intellect today is made up of a complex mix of percepts, recepts, and concepts.

A concept is made up of one or more recepts combined with probably several percepts. This complex recept is then marked by a sign; that is it is named and becomes a concept, which, after being named or marked, it is laid away in a vast storage house in the brain for later retrieval.

We have seen the expansion of the perceptual mind had a limit and that its own continued life led it to develop into the receptual mind and that the receptual mind inevitably developed into the conceptual mind, which leads us to the consideration of a corresponding outlet to be found for the conceptual mind, the cosmic consciousness.

The four stages the in the development of the human mind were: first, the perceptual mind, the mind made up of percepts or sense impressions; second, the mind made up of these and recepts, the receptual mind or simple consciousness; third, the mind made up of percepts, recepts and concepts, the conceptual or the self conscious mind; and fourth, there is the intuitional mind, the mind whose highest element is not a recept or a concept but an intuition. This is the mind in which sensation, simple consciousness and self-consciousness are supplemented with cosmic consciousness.

Much more modern than the birth of the intellect is that of the colour sense.

It is well known that the ability to distinguish different colours came at relatively late date:; Xenophanes knew of three colours of the rainbow, purple, red and yellow; even Aristotle spoke of the tri-coloured rainbow; and Democritus knew of no more than four colours – black, white, red and yellow.

Throughout the Homeric poems and the Bible the colour of sky is not once mentioned, therefore, apparently, not recognized.

In the Bible the sky and heaven are mentioned more than four hundred and thirty times, and still no mention of its colour.

In no part of the world is the blue of the sky more vivid and intense than in Greece and Asia Minor, where the Homeric poems were composed.

At first man distinguished only two colours, red and black. Under the name red was included the colour white, yellow and all intermediate tints. While under the name black was included all shades of blue and green.

As the sensations of red and black came into existence by the division of an original unital colour sensation , so in the process of time these also divided, and so on, until at present where apparently four colours, red, yellow, blue, and green have split up into the enormous number of shades of colour which are now reorganized and named.

The solar or other light rays that excite vision are named red, orange, yellow, green, and blue, indigo, violet. These rays differ in the length and amplitude of the waves that compose them, with red being the highest and violet being the lowest.

The energy of light waves has the power of exciting vision. Red rays have several more thousand times the ability for exciting vision than that of violet.

Unlock the innate neural hardwiring in your brain and embrace all your idiosyncratic (idiosynaptic) potentialities of reality!

Allow other realities to pop in and out of your conscious, waking, evolving (?) thought.

It's the quantum way, and eventually, the only way.

The next stage in the evolution of thought, quantum consciousness and the next or is it current social cognitive paradigm.

Escape the bondage of relativity and the relativistic paradigm and progress to the next cognitive stage before your time is up, for it is something very special indeed.

Or, maybe once the brain passes a certain age (stage) it is incapable of accepting and operating under new patterns of thought!

Usually, somewhere in the 30's I would venture to guess, yes guess, where the brain assimilates the mode and level of cognitive thought that it will operate under for the duration of the life cycle.

The simultaneous potentialities of the cosmos, the macro cosmic and the micro cosmic of the universe and of the brain.

patterns of thought

parallel lines

bridging the gap

leaps across chasms of thought

....and escape the relic Cartesian/Newtonian mechanical paradigm....

....when the hunter-gatherers took a quantum leap....

A simultaneous thought?

Between two individuals!

the flux of conscious state is, by definition, serial (there is only one time 'dimension' - forward). This seriality need not be thought of as a sequence of logical thought, but merely a flux of consciousness that, at any given instant, is in a single state but that, when compared to a past state, can be in a different state.

There is a lot of unsubstantiated rambling above. It is quite common for wishful thinking to displace reality. It seems to mean that conscious thoughts occur serially and the able or well practiced might be able to flit from one thought to another more quickly, perhaps even giving the impression, though untrue, that parallel thinking is occurring. Wishing that one might be able to simultaneously think two thoughts is philosophical humour.

Simultaneous thoughts between individuals - there is a good term for that - coincidence!

....Wishing that one might be able to simultaneously think two thoughts is philosophical humour....

Hey, Hey Hey,

It's your topic dude!

You posted it and asked the question.

....There is a lot of unsubstantiated rambling above....

Yes, however I think that I made my point!

Do you ever ramble Hey Hey?

I'm rambling merely due to the fact that this subject I covered and discussed in numerous other threads.

....It seems to mean that conscious thoughts occur serially and the able or well practiced might be able to flit from one thought to another more quickly, perhaps even giving the impression, though untrue, that parallel thinking is occurring....

Now your talking!

Thought at the speed of light. (sensory input overload - for the majority)

multiple concepts/sense impressions/connecting the dots
metaphors/parallels
neural network/neural web

Neural speed is orders of magnitude slower than light speed. Don't deal in illusions.

It's more of an analogy than it is an objective fact!

Thought at the speed of light, that is.

I do love illusions though, as long as they are not delusional illusions that cause cognitive contusions.

I aim to employ illusions only to push the boundaries of cognitive thought.

Provoke and evoke questions regarding reality, both subjectively and objectively.

They are a great tool when used correctly and in the right atmosphere.

BTW, What is the speed range, in order of magnitude, of thought, when neurons are firing?

That synaptic spark feels, to me, to occur rather quickly, all the while paradoxically seeming to occur in slow motion.

So you are sensitive too Don, eh? But don't let's do a RtB. Rather let's stick to the question. And wrt the topic being covered before, not being psychic and not having too much time on my hands, I didn't search the forum for previous threads. If it has been covered before, then it can't have been adequate, or a reasonable response might have popped up here already.

And why would you want to insult the whole USA for points/comments raised by one citizen? Again I am embarrased that USAism has shown its ugly head. Rule Brittania doesn't cut it any more for we ordinary citizens and we ought to be making friends not enemies in these dangerous times. Rick usually makes sensible and objective points. We don't have to agree with him but we SHOULD offer some respect.

I am disappointed that no-one can suggest a truely scientific approach to the question or point to some decent literature, rather than some New Age meaderings. I think that the notion of simultaneous conscious thoughts could be a serious topic for study to seek ways of achieving it and then enhancing it.

ps, if simultaneous conscious thought is not possible, why is this?

It's been doing that for a while now, so I figured it was a program glitch, so I eventually got used to it and mentally avoided it's objective fact, 'simultaneously' being aware of it....

How do you mean, Dan?