Incognito

Of course, animals have intelligence too but they don't reflect on the world in a conscious way. They can solve complex problems instinctively but cannot connect the given world to an abstract world of thoughts/icons. When you are doing things on autopilot, you can do it without conscious thought, or you can even think about something entirely different than the activity you're engaged in. This is done via active thinking which cannot be done without language. Animals mostly have passive obedient minds following unconscious commands based on instincts. They cannot think rationally a decision before making it.

Animals do not plan and make decisions consciously. They just go with 'the flow' and do whatever the unconscious (instincts) dictates them. Their world is more like what we experience when we're sleeping and we're not lucid dreaming. Consciousness is about the world of ideas which is independent from the real world and to be conscious you need to be able to THINK about the real world and simulate it inside your mind to solve problems, think about brushing your teeth at 10pm or raise your arm at will. Raising your arm to scratch your neck is different than raising your arm at will. The first action is done unconsciously, while the second is done on purpose. That's the difference between executing unconscious commands vs making conscious decisions. "Sentience is all about the given, sensory world. Consciousness isn’t. To understand why, let’s imagine the tribe as no longer mute. Imagine that every member of the tribe has language. They all know the word “river”. They can all vocalize that word, and understand when they hear it what it means, what it refers to. When they all go back to their cave, they can go on referring to the river and making plans and decisions regarding the river even though they now have no sentience of the river because they are nowhere near the river and can’t see it. Consciousness is the ability to go on referring to something when it is no longer present to you in the given world. If you are nowhere near the river, your sentience of it has gone, but not your consciousness of it. You can lie in your bed with your eyes closed and think about the river. That is what consciousness concerns – the ability to think about something even when it is not present to sentience. All non-human animals are sentient. None is conscious. Not one nonhuman animal can lie down with its eyes closed and reflect on something, whether a river or anything else. Animals are prisoners of the moment. They cannot escape from it. It has been disastrous for the intellectual development of the human race that, thanks to science in particular (with its psychotic hatred of mind), sentience has been constantly conflated with consciousness even though they have practically nothing in common. Sentience, to be fair, is a necessary condition of consciousness (consciousness is built on top of it), but it is definitely not sufficient for it. Consciousness uses the foundations of sentience, but constructs a radically different type of building, one that relies on intelligent language rather than mere instinct. Sentience requires that which you are sentient of – a specific thing in the given world – to be present to your sensorium. Consciousness has no such requirement. You do not need to be sentient of a river (i.e., be beside a river) to be conscious of a river. You could be anywhere – in the middle of a desert or at the top of a mountain or even on the moon – and have consciousness of a river if that was what you were consciously thinking about." "Jaynes wrote, “Historically, we inferred and abstracted ideas of sense perception from a realization of our sense organs, and then, because of prior assumptions about mind and matter or soul and body, we believed these processes to be due to consciousness – which they are not.” How can people solve the problem of consciousness if they don’t know what it is, if they confuse it with something else? People imagine they are conscious of what their sense organs deliver to them. That’s not consciousness. That’s sentience. Every non-human animal engages in sense perception. None is conscious. Jaynes wrote, “If any of you still think that consciousness is a necessary part of sense perception, then I think you are forced to follow a path to a reductio ad absurdum : you would then have to say that since all animals have sense perception, all are conscious, and so on back through the evolutionary tree even to one-celled protozoa because they react to external stimuli, or one-celled plants like the alga chlamydomonas with its visual system analogous to ours, and thence to even amoeboid white cells of the blood since they sense bacteria and devour them. They too would be conscious. And to say that there are ten thousand conscious beings per cubic millimeter of blood whirling around in the roller-coaster of the vascular system in each of us here this afternoon is a position few would wish to defend.” " From the book "Lucid Waking: the Answer to the Problem of Consciousness"

I doubt so. If you were conscious, you would lucid dream all the time. Being conscious means making conscious, thoughtful decisions which can't be possible without language and education. When you're dreaming, your unconscious controls the dream except when you're becoming conscious/lucid of the dream.

Are you conscious when you're dreaming?

I see you're confusing awareness/sentience with consciousness. They aren't the same thing.

No, the decision maker is your consciousness and the one that executes is your unconscious. If your consciousness is affected or you're not making any conscious decision, then the unconscious is on autopilot. This can't be useless since thanks to it we are able to make conscious decisions and make plans to shape our future. Humans dominate the animal kingdom because they are conscious and intelligent enough to understand the world via logic and reason and aren't guided entirely by unconscious processes/instincts. This is the key difference between animals and humans. Don't conflate consciousness with sentience which is a totally different thing. I see this category error a lot on this forum. Consciousness has been evolved because of language and education and it is a feature belonging exclusively to humans. Animals are only sentient. They can't make conscious decisions ie think about cleaning their fur or going to sleep at 10pm.

It's the unconscious that is controlling your hands. Your conscious mind commands/wills your unconscious to do the movements and then the unconscious executes it. I recommend the Jack Tanner's book on this subject "Lucid Waking: the Answer to the Problem of Consciousness".

Are they tall or small?

I second that.

God realization is a process, it isn't something that you force it to happen. You don't have to surrender anything because your ego has it's functions but you shouldn't identify with it either. God is the Whole, not the ego or the persona, nor their absence.

The secondary might be true but I don't consider myself a psychopath

Boom! Congratulation

Ghost in the Shell Yes, it is God who has the free will, not the human form. You have to switch the perspective from the material to the spiritual/mental to realize that. PS. I believed in the "no free will" dogma for almost 10 years.

You decide whether you want or not. Not wanting is also wanting. And you are free to make your own choices and plan ahead. I'm sure that your choices aren't involuntary twitches of your body or brain. And if I were you I would have been no different. Also, you do not have the subjective experience of being me. The influences are only internal and mental (the materialist interpretation says it's the brain chemicals and genetics but it's way more deep than that). It's more like a "thought thinking itself", so it creates a body to reflect upon itself. Who are you talking to inside your head?

Great topic. I often wonder why we experience TIME as an external force when it is just a mind construct? It looks like an external uncontrollable force that makes us age and die but it has nothing to do with what really happens. Also, distance is an illusion. So yes, you cannot measure objective reality. You can only measure what happens inside your head.