I first encountered Freud when I was 12 or 13. I lived within walking distance of a library, and I holed up there for about a week reading everything I could get my hands on. In the end, I walked away with my head shaking, wondering how anyone could believe this bunk. At the time, I didn't realize that the purpose of empirical science is not to find out the answers to how things work, the purpose is solely to make up narratives, models if you will, that seem to reflect reality, and then accept those models as reality.
It's beyond the scope of my abilities to describe all the conclusions Freud makes about parental influences, sexual relationships (after all, we are dealing with a drug addict in a period when virtually no one knew anything about sex) and all the Greek mythology blather (I was a comparative literature minor in college and studied Greek mythology, and believe me, Freud does it a disservice). I'm going to confine myself to Freud's biggest contribution to the world's ignorance, the creation of the concept of the subconscious mind.
I cover the operation of the mind in columns 34 and 35-05. Briefly, and of course contrary to empirical science, there is a mind. It takes in encoded pictures of reality through the optic nerves and forms them. These pictures have distinct elements which are encoded in units similar to genes. Each unit has a specific electrical charge. The electrical currents generated by forming pictures are measurable as they move through the multi-connected neurons that compose the physical structure of the brain where the memory units of all the pictures formed are stored. The electrical currents pick up memory units stored at similar charges and therefore containing similar pictures and transports them into the mind where they are compared with the picture formed in the mind. If the two agree, we understand. If the two don't agree, we are uncomfortable and attempt to come up with some recall from the stored pictures that will compare, that will make us have the feeling we know as understanding.
It's not rocket science, which is not a science at all, it's a simply matter of sitting down and examining how we come to act in reality, how we are able to interact externally in reality from a position of our own internal reality. Unfortunately for us, Freud used Oedipus Rex, in which the principle character unknowingly kills his father and marries his mother, for his final pre-university tests and it has colored our sense of reality ever since. Four years later he's publishing his first article, on what? On hermaphrodism. Eels! Now I have to admit, hermaphrodism is called intersexuality today, a condition in which a single organism contains both sexes. What kind of mentality, I ask you, is interested in this subject at the age of 21? Combine this interest with whatever twisted upbringing turned Oedipus Rex into a major factor in Freud's life, and you get the subconscious mind.
The subconscious mind evolves in Freud's mind from creating three levels of awareness. The first level is the conscious mind. This is where we are paying attention to the present, doing the things we have to do to survive, cooking our food, watching the latest program on television, driving down the street. In my lexicon, of course, this is the operation of the mind. We see reality, we recall experiences of ourselves acting in reality, we form a picture of ourselves acting in reality and then we act. However, Freud did not believe in the existence of the mind, that question having been solved definitively by empirical science simply by taking a brain and cutting it up, slicing and dicing it looking for a physical mind in the physical brain, and finding none, simply concluding in its superior wisdom the mind didn't exist. Of course, when empirical science made this conclusion a reality, a fact of science, it had no knowledge of the existence of the atom or the existence of the electron, and it still has no knowledge about the nature of the electron, that it has properties of attraction and motion (see column 17-05) that lead to the construction of three types of structures, the atom, the electromagnetic spectrum and the mind, because it insists on creating particles to explain effects rather the induce a particle that consistently explains all effects.
The conscious mind is what needs to be explained and it is easily explainable. Freud, influenced by the sexual restrictions of Victorian England (we tend to forget that Victorian England was ruled by a German, Queen Victoria), wasn't interested in disagreeing with the consensus belief there was no mind, he was, like Kinsey years later, simply obsessed with sex. I don't think I've ever met anyone that wanted to kill his father and have relations with his mother, but that was Freud's starting point, the notion that underlies his search for the subconscious. It's like everything else in empirical science, a false premise that disappears to becomes a basic assumption to some other notion, here the subconscious, and is never reexamined.
Doing the empirical thing, Freud had to create categories, so to get to the subconscious, he first had to create another category to complement the conscious mind. This is the preconscious mind. Freud recognized that we have a lot of stuff we have ready access to that we don't currently have in our minds. We can access these things with our conscious mind when we want to. Of course we do. It's called experience and it rests as recall, in my scheme of things, recall that is contained in memory units similar to the genes that contain the information that controls how we're constructed. These memory units are stored in the neurons and are recallable by the electrical currents that continually flow through our physical brains. We only have one mind, one place to compare recall with reality, so all this preconscious bull is just surface philosophizing. We have to deal in reality and we have our prior experience of reality stored in our neuronic storage bins. We have access to everything we have experienced simply because it rests in our brains as recallable memory units. As I get older, I have what's called senior moments where I momentarily can't remember a word or recall a name. That's simply an increasing inability to produce the precise electrical currents that would recall the information. Later the information will pop into my mind simply because I've created a hole in my recall and sooner or later something in reality will come close to the current level that captures the memory unit with the recall.
Creating the preconscious mind out of nothing, Freud can then go on to his basic task of creating the subconscious mind. Regular readers readily know my contempt for the notion that we only use one or two percent of our minds, the rest being some vast cavern we don't have access to (see column 33-05). This bald statement is simply a crock. We have one mind and it accesses our experience to do what it evolved to do, notify our bodies when reality has changed from our prior experience so we can readjust prior experience to the current reality. Our consciousness results from being able to hold pictures of reality that don't exist in reality in our minds and our technology results from this consciousness. However, instead of exploring the world of reality, why our minds evolved and how they work, Freud cooked up the subconscious mind that today is universally accepted as a reality. The subconscious supposedly thinks and acts independently of our conscious mind and drives us to do things that we wouldn't consciously do.
Now, Freud is really dealing with something here, but he's doing so in a manner that doesn't reflect reality. I deal with this basic problem, the fact that we are driven to do things we don't understand, the fact that we find ourselves doing things we later think are things we wouldn't ordinarily do, the fact that we basically have different personalities when we are sexually aroused or drinking or both, the fact that we sometimes explode in unreasonable anger at things that make no difference, I deal with these things in The Model Mind: What the Mind Is and How it Works and Human Nature: How the Mind Generates Behavior. There's no question we are driven by things we don't understand. I often ask myself why I write this column when all it gets me is nasty emails (although I get some very nice ones too). I say I do it because I enjoy doing it, but that avoids the compulsion, starting around the age of four, that sent me on a course to challenge our most basic concept, that gravity is a property of and proportional to mass. My diversion into how the mind operates and how we are driven to certain behaviors only resulted from the absolutely incredible response I received when I questioned the status quo.
Freud was actually trying to answer a question, what drives us to do what we do, but his answer didn't account for how our minds operate in the first place, and as a result, his answer, the subconscious mind driven by Greek tragedy plays, is absurd. Once he created the subconscious, he went on the empirical way to make up more categories, claiming that our minds were basically battlefields where the prude, the superego, and the sex fiend, the id, are forever engaged in a struggle that is refereed by the ego.
In other words, it's all about sex!
The reason Freud was obsessed with sex, and there are stages in life where sex is absolutely everything and the late teens and early twenties is one, is it creates a different personality. Sex, however, is not the only thing that creates a different personality. As I've pointed out in these columns and in The Model Mind, we are conscious simply because we form pictures of reality in our mind and store those pictures in our recall at a specific current level. All the pictures we form of reality contain one common element, a picture of ourselves, the "I" that is common to all the pictures. When we are at work, concentrating on whatever it is we have been trained to do, we have a band of electrical currents we are storing the pictures at. Our minds do not store pictures willy-nilly, we group our experiences according to when we need the recall. When we come home, slip into our slippers, get a drink and bounce the kids on our lap, we have an entirely different band of electrical currents running through our minds. If we are well-balanced, our home life is a mile away from our work life. We can, of course, access one life when we are in the other, and I have often done so simply to escape boring meetings, but the simple fact is, there is basically one "I" that deals with our work world and another "I" that deals with our leisure activities.
Now, given how sexual arousal ramps us up, what actually happens to the currents coursing through the brain when we begin to engage in, or for that matter think of sexual activity? They go into a world of their own. We can remember details of what we did, sometimes pleasant, sometimes embarrassing, but the fact is, the level of current at which the memory units of the actual "I" experiencing the sex are stored is nowhere near the level of current at which the memory units of the "I" that is at work or bouncing the kids on the knee. For Freud, sex was the starting point of a theory of the subconscious that has taken over the world when, in fact, sex is not the starting point in creating an explanation for the mind, it's simply one thing that has to be accounted for in explaining how the mind evolved and how it operates.
Another distinct "I" would definitely be the one created while we are drinking. As detailed in Human Nature, we have to regulate our behavior in order to live together in a society that is beneficial to our needs. When we drink, these societal restrictions disappear to one extent or another and we end up doing things we can't image having done once the effect of the drinking wears off. In ancient Greece, and even in Rome, days were set aside for festivals, as they are today during Mardi Gras, where drinking loosened society's restrictions and people behaved as they wished, free of regret once they recovered.
It is at this point that we open the door to why we are driven. Notice I used the word "regret" in the last sentence of the last paragraph. We do things when we are in one personality that we regret when we are in our normal personality. The entire entertainment industry exists simply because we do things when we are overcome with passion that we wouldn't do if we were going about our business in our normal frame of mind. We are driven to do things that are against our interest simply because of the way our mind operates. I want to here avoid getting into a discussion of the psychopathic personality because everything has its extremes, but I do want to talk about the normal personality that is driven to do things, whether it be attend tailgate parties, play video games, cook, basically direct our lives in what we do.
As often noted, the mind compares recall, experience, with reality, and if they match, the feeling we get is understanding and if they don't match, the feeling we get is uncomfortable. Take Lewis and Clark as an example for all famous explorers. Just like I became obsessed with gravity, they became obsessed with what exists where there's no recorded account of what exists. Every morning explorers get up, they have a hole in their recall that doesn't match reality. Why else, and I ask this sincerely, would anyone want to explore caverns beneath the surface of the Earth if they weren't driven, if they didn't have a hole in their recall, a drive to find out something they didn't know?
We are driven to do what we do simply because we want to cover over the hole in our recall and feel comfortable. We are driven by the discomfort that not knowing creates. Some of us are not so demanding, or basically not interested, or even too afraid to bother with the holes in our recall. For instance, I can only imagine what it would be like crawling around beneath the Earth (thank God for television) or climbing the side of a mountain, but I have to admit, any discomfort I feel by having a hole in my recall is overcome by the discomfiture I feel even thinking about doing it.
On the other hand, people obsessed with spelunking or free climbing don't have a hole in their recall with respect to gravity because they know that if the rocks fall around them or they lose their grip, they are going to most likely die. They don't really care what the mechanical nature of gravity is, they only care about the fact that it exists and they have to account for it. The same is true for engineers that design airplanes and rockets. They only care that they have to deal with gravity, not the mechanics of it, and we end up with our skewered technology.
We are driven. If I want something I don't have, I live in a reality that doesn't include what I want. It doesn't matter whether it's a car, a woman, a piece of real estate, if I want it, and I don't have it, I have a continual hole in my recall. That hole makes me feel uncomfortable and I'm driven to fill it. It's not like gravity, where all I have to do is make up some sort of bull crap explanation to satisfy the hole. It's a physical thing. I want it, and I won't be happy until I get it. If it's something negative, I find my love in the arms of my best friend, then I want him dead. I'm driven to do what I have to do to get rid of the hole in my recall.
There is no subconscious mind. We use one hundred percent of our brains, although as I get older, I think my hundred percent is either filled up or shrinking, our minds exist because they had to evolve to permit us to move safely through the environment, and that's the story. There is nothing beyond, nothing mysterious, nothing out of site, nothing going on beneath the surface, in fact, other than matter, there is simply nothing.
Peter Bros is the author of the 9 volume Copernican Series and is President of The Far Museum of Dallas, an actual history museum, which will house its collection of 50,000 rare Eastern Mediterranean manuscripts and artifacts together with actual history displays and tours in a full-sized replica of the Egyptian Temple at Dendera to be built in the Dallas Ft. Worth area. Email:peterbros@therealskeptic.com