Ongoing Discussion of Francis Crick and Christoph Koch (Vol. 2, No. 1) Consciousness and Affect: Commentary, by Mortimer Ostow

It is generally understood among neuroscientists that we cannot fully know the world in which we live. Our consciousness constructs an image by combining and organizing reports from our various senses as they have been processed by the brain. First, even in the realms that these senses report, they detect only a segment of the full visible and audible spectra; they are sensitive to only a small number of the ambient chemicals in the air and in the substances introduced into the mouth; of the physical substances of the environment they are sensitive only to those that stimulate the tactile receptors of the skin and the tension sensitive receptors in the muscles. Second, we know, by inference, that the environment contains things for which we have no sense organs. There is a clock mechanism in the brain but we cannot directly perceive time. We can only infer its passage from observations of changes in those things that we can directly perceive. Science has made us aware of components of the external world that we cannot directly know, and of many things that we find it impossible even to conceptualize, such as the multiple dimensions of the cosmic “strings” that cosmologists speak of. The world in which we live is one that is constructed by our consciousness and all of the perceptive and apperceptive processes that report to it.

I propose that the conscious image of the inner world is constructed in an analogous way. We have evidence that only a small fraction of those brain processes that could, under the right conditions, become mental contents are actually available to consciousness at any one time. The nonconscious premental contents include representations of instinctual impulses, inhibiting influences against these impulses, certain memories, false memories and myths, anticipations and apprehensions, or rather dispositions that would be expressed as expectations and fears if they became conscious. Only those impulses that do not seem to invite danger are permitte