On the contrary, I would argue that conscious attention is only focused on one of those subroutines at a time. When the ball is in play you focus in it, and everything from your posture to racket handling fades into the background as a subconscious routine. When you make a handling mistake or want to improve something like posture, your focus shifts to that; you attend to it with your attention, and then you focus on something else.
In either case, with working memory for example, conscious contents are limited to at most a basket of 6-7 chunks. This number is very small compared to the incredible parallelism of the unconscious mind.
For all we know, there might be tons of conscious attention processes active in parallel. "You" only get to observe one, but there could be many. You'd never know because the processes do not observably communicate with each other. They do communicate with the same body though, but that is less relevant.
When you are learning a high-performance activity like a sport or musical instrument, the good coaches always get you to focus on only one or at most two things at any time.
The key value of a coach is their ability to assess your skills and the current goals to select what aspect you most need to focus on at that time.
Of course, there can be sequences, like "focus on accurately tossing to a higher point while you serve, then your footwork in the volley", but those really are just one thing at a time.
(edit, add) Yes, all the other aspects of play are going on in the background of your mind, but you are not working actively on changing them.
One of the most insightful observations one of my coaches made on my path to World-Cup level alpine ski racing was:
"We're training your instincts.".
What he meant by that was we were doing drills and focus to change the default — unthinking — mind-body response to an input. so, when X happened, instead of doing the untrained response then having to think about how to do it better (next time because it's already too late), the mind-body's "instinctive" or instant response is the trained motion. And of course doing that all the way across the skill-sets.
And pretty much the only way to train your instincts like that is to focus on it until the desired response is the one that happens without thinking. And then to focus on it again until it's not only the default, but you are now able to finely modulate in that response.
This is completely anecdotal.
But a years ago while playing beer pong i fuund could get get the ball in the opposing teams cup nearly every time.
By not looking at the cups until the last possible second.
If I took the time to focus and aim I almost always missed.
Yes, how, when, & where you focus your eyes is very key to performance. In your case, it seems like the last-second-focus both let your eye track the ball better to your paddle, then focusing on the target let your reflex aim take over, which was evidently pretty good. Not sure if I'd say the long-focus-on-target compromised the early tracking on the ball, or made your swing more 'artificial'.
A funny finding from a study I read which put top pro athletes through a range of perceptual-motor tests. One of the tests was how rapidly they could change focus from near-far-near-far, which of course all kinds of ball players excelled at. The researchers were initially horrified to find racecar drivers were really bad at it, thinking about having to track the world coming at them at nearly 200mph. It turns out of course, that racecar drivers don't use their eyes that way - they are almost always looking further in the distance at the next braking or turn-in point, bump in the track, or whatever, and even in traffic, the other cars aren't changing relative-distance very rapidly.
You were on to something!
In this context, we differentiate between the conscious and unconscious based on observability: the conscious is that which is observed, while the unconscious comprises what is not observed.
No, what I was trying to convey is that there could theoretically be multiple consciousnesses in one brain. These are however unaware of each other.
A person might have the impression that there is only one "me", but there could be tens, hundreds, or millions of those.
It might help to get away from the problem of finding where the presumed singular consciousness is located.
Then there is the beautiful issue of memory: maybe you are X consciousnesses but only one leaves a memory trace?
Consciousness and memory are two very different things. Don’t think too much about this when you have to undergo surgery. Maybe you are aware during the process but only memory-formation is blocked.
Or perhaps they all leave traces, but all write to the same log? And when reconstructing memory from the log, each constructed consciousness experiences itself as singular?
Which one controls the body? There is a problem there. You can’t just have a bunch of disembodied consciousnesses. Well, maybe.. but that sounds kind of strange.
What makes you think a singular consciousness controls the body?
It’s a single narrative that controls the body is what I mean. If one consciousness says “I am Peter” then other consciousnesses would know that and be conflicted about, if they don’t call themselves that.
What I mean is that a single narrative “wins”, not a multitude. This has to be explained somehow.
How do you know there aren't several different consciousnesses that all think they are Peter?
How do you know they aren't just constructing whatever narrative they prefer to construct from the common pool of memory, ending up with what looks like a single narrative because the parts of the narrative come from the same pool and get written back to the same pool?
Perhaps each consciousness is just a process, like other bodily processes.
Perhaps a human being is less like a machine with a master control and more like an ecosystem of cooperating processes.
Of course, the consciousnesses like to claim to be in charge, but I don't see why I should take their word for it.
No matter how you twist it at some point two consciousnesses differentiate on some contradictory issue maybe not name, but surely they differ on some issue otherwise they wouldn’t be .. different consciousnesses. Life as a human moves and is narrated as a single story, not the story of a thousand processes.
If that were true I can call my heart a process, my liver, etc. They are in a way part of me but they do not just ex nihilo cohere into a single narrative. That is an active process and whatever does that is the only really interesting one (IMO). So I think there might be a bunch of processes, sub personalities maybe, but there remains the problem of integration. Whatever integrates is the one that really fascinates me.
Anyway, thanks for indulging me. It is hard to go into any depth in this medium. I think you have really interesting ideas. Have a nice weekend.
At some moments there has to be a singular decision taken, such as which of two possible options to take. In such a moment some particular consciousness makes the decision, if it’s a decision made by a consciousness (though consciousness takes credit for more decisions than it actually makes, I think).
But granting that point does not grant that there is a single consciousness that is always (or ever) in charge, and it does not grant that any specific consciousness is associated with any specific singular narrative.
We know, scientifically speaking, some things that call the idea of a single consciousness with a single narrative into question. We know, for example from psychology of testimony that the same person’s memory of the same events differs at different times, and that the act of remembering rewrites memories. We have reason to suspect that the brain attributes to conscious choice decisions that are made too quickly for sensory data to reach the brain (and which may therefore be made elsewhere in the nervous system, even though the brain claims to have made the choice after the fact).
And I know from personal experience that some phenomena that normally appear to be singular conscious experiences can devolve into something else under some circumstances. For example, I have experienced blindsight, in which I cannot see something but can nevertheless collect accurate information from it by pointing my eyes at it. I have also experienced being asleep and awake at the same time.
Experiences like these are hard to account for if I assume that my consciousness is singular and continuous and in charge, but not so hard to account for if I assume that it’s a useful illusion cobbled together by a network of cooperating processes that usually (but not always) work well together. For example, many people might claim that it’s nonsense to say that a person can be asleep and awake at the same time, but it’s nonsense only if asleep and awake are mutually exclusive states of a singular consciousness. If, on the other hand, they are two neurological processes that are normally coordinated so that they don’t occur at the same time (because it’s less than useful for them to do so), then it’s not nonsense to observe that under unusual circumstances that coordination might be disrupted. Similarly, if seeing something is one process and consciously experiencing seeing it is a different process—normally, but not necessarily coordinated—then blindsight is not so hard to account for.
Not to mention that it’s trivially easy to find examples of consciousness not being in charge of our behavior, although it likes to think that it is.
I suggest that the supposed singular consciousness, supposedly in charge, may be an illusion constructed by a system of mostly, but not perfectly, coordinated cooperating processes.
There is a long tradition in India, which started with oral transmission of the Vedas, of parallel cognition. It is almost an art form or a mental sport - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avadhanam
Mental sport - Yes.
It is the exploration and enumeration of the possible rhythms that led to the discovery of Fibonacci sequence and binary representation in around 200 BC.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pingala#Combinatorics
Sounds very much sequential, even if very difficult:
> The performer's first reply is not an entire poem. Rather, the poem is created one line at a time. The first questioner speaks and the performer replies with one line. The second questioner then speaks and the performer replies with the previous first line and then a new line. The third questioner then speaks and performer gives his previous first and second lines and a new line and so on. That is, each questioner demands a new task or restriction, the previous tasks, the previous lines of the poem, and a new line.
The replies are sequential to adjust with new inputs, but the mental process to produce each new line has to do lots of computations
My point is that what we call conscious and subconscious is limited by our ability to express it in language: since we can't verbalize what's going on quickly enough, we separate those out. Could we learn to verbalize two things at the same time (we all do that as well with say different words and different body language, even consciously, but can we take it a step further? eg. imagine saying nice things to someone and raising the middle finger for someone else behind your back :))
As the whole article is really about the full brain, and it seems you agree our "unconscious mind" producing actions in parallel, I think the focus is wrongly put on brain size, when we lack the expressiveness for what the brain can already do.
Edit: And don't get me wrong, I personally suck at multi-tasking :)
What you consider a single thought is a bit ill defined. A multitude of thoughts together can be formed as a packet, which then can be processed sequentially.
Intelligence is the ability to capture, and predicts events in space and time, and as such it must have the capability to model both things occurring in simultaneity and sequentially.
Sticking to your example, a routine for making a decision in tennis would look something like at a higher level "Run to the left and backstroke the ball", which broken down would be something like "Turn hip and shoulder to the left, extend left leg, extend right, left, right, turn hip/shoulder to the right, swing arm." and so on.
Yes . But maybe there's multiple such "conscious attention" instances at the same time. And "you" are only one of them.
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