Reading and Calculating With Your Unconscious

The body can do most anything without being conscious of it, we just put a rubber stamp on all the actions and call them our own.

What then is the point of consciousness ?

Maybe your question has no meaning. Maybe "consciousness" is this thing that philosophers got obsessed with when dealing with potentially made-up issues like the "mind-body" distinction. Maybe the reality is that "awareness" and "consciousness" are much more flexible than we think.

I'm a pianist and I've done a lot of accompanying for choirs. I've also in the past been a choir director. At times, when working through a new piece, I've often been essentially sight-reading a piano part while giving cues and direction to the choir. And I don't claim to be the best person at this activity -- I know many directors who are more skilled than I am.

So, all at the same time, I am simultaneously:

• Sight-reading the music, which involves parsing the notes not only into measures and rhythms, but also picking up on harmonic patterns and "filling in" some notes in those chords when I don't have a chance to read every single note precisely while sight-reading
• Coordinating my body in playing a piano, including not only both hands, but also my feet in pedaling
• Responding to basic interpretation while playing -- getting louder/softer, changing attacks, rhythmic feel, legato/staccato, etc. -- not to mention handling tempo changes and things like that -- while sight-reading, there's only so much you can do, but you need to play at least somewhat musically
• Turning pages, which requires finding a gap in the music or "filling in" some parts on the fly while turning the page
• Giving basic cues to the choir for entrances, etc., which may involve getting a free hand up or at least nodding or whatever
• Evaluating whether the choir is still on track, and helping to correct it or stopping if not
• Perhaps emphasizing voice parts on the piano and/or singing one of them rather than simply playing the piano part if some part in the chorus gets lost
• Etc.

In all of this, how much of what I am doing is "conscious"? How much is "unconscious" or "subconscious" or whatever? My attention is continuously shifting back and forth -- cue the choir, pay attention to that weird rhythm, have to slow down here, turn the page, etc., etc. I'm certainly not consciously "thinking" about sight-reading the music or playing the piano for the most part, since I'm primarily concerned about making sure the choir is learning something -- but those tasks seem quite a bit more complex than the ones mentioned in TFA.

I would defintely not saying I am consciously "multitasking," since my attention usually is skipping back and forth between things -- I can't really "think" actively about more than one of these activities at once.

Yet, it's all happening. My body is managing to do all of these things, including potentially decoding a new piece of music and instantiating a performance of it, while giving basic direction and evaluation to a choir... most of it at any giving moment happening without my direct "conscious" attention.

In such a situation, what is the "point" of consciousness? To me, the only meaning "consciousness" has there is "the thing I'm giving slightly heightened focus to at a given moment," usually the thing that is most novel and can't just be "put on autopilot."

I realize that to some people this may sound like I'm demeaning consciousness -- but I'm not. And all of us do stuff like this all the time, coordinating all sorts of body motions and behavior while managing to focus on some other task. Does that mean I don't have ("conscious") control over these "autopilot" tasks? Of course I do -- they just aren't at the center of focus.

What's really going on is a lot of degrees of awareness, some bubbling up to visual, auditory, and/or verbal consciousness, while others (like the coordination of my body in playing the keyboard) are mostly part of my body remembering and responding to musical patterns as it has done thousands of times before.

Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/Nz1Q3ou7QdE/story01.htm

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