Thursday Entry - Stream of Consciousness

Stream of consciousness refers to the flow of thoughts in the conscious mind. The full range of thoughts that one can be aware of can form the content of this stream, not just verbal thoughts. Commonly used experimental techniques, including self-reporting, gives easier access to verbal thoughts than to thoughts more closely connected to senses other than hearing and activities other than speaking and writing.

"Within each personal consciousness, thought is sensibly continuous. I can only define 'continuous' as that which is without breach, crack, or division. The only breaches that can well be conceived to occur within the limits of a single mind would either be interruptions, time-gaps during which the consciousness went out; or they would be breaks in the content of the thought, so abrupt that what followed had no connection whatever with what went before. The proposition that consciousness feels continuous, means two things:

a. That even where there is a time-gap the consciousness after it feels as if it belonged together with the consciousness before it, as another part of the same self;

b. That the changes from one moment to another in the quality of the consciousness are never absolutely abrupt" - William Blake, from his essay The Stream of Consciousness (1892)

Dainton, Barry. Stream of Consciousness Unity and Continuity in Conscious Experience. New York: Routledge, 2000.

"Although there has been a massive upsurge of interest recently in consciousness, most of this has been focused on the relationship between consciousness and the brain. This has meant that important and intriguing questions concerning the fundamental characteristics of consciousness itself have not received the attention they deserve. Stream of Consciousness is devoted to these questions, presenting a systematic, phenomenological inquiry into the most general features of conscious life: the nature of awareness, introspection, phenomenal space and time-consciousness." (from Amazon.com)

Stream of consciousness relates to my work in a variety of ways, but primarily in that it is almost always the way artistic motivation comes to me: when I just write without structure or any defined intent, or simply lay with my eyes closed and allow my thoughts to roam with as little focus as possible. Also, whenever I work with mixed media, in the first stages I like to work impulsively, letting my hand work as quickly as my the thought comes to my mind.



"As described in Figure 7, pre-reduction quantum computation is suggested to correlate with pre-conscious processing, and the objective reduction process itself to a conscious moment. A series of such moments can give rise to a stream of consciousness." (Quantumconsciousness.org)