Consciously or not...

Consciously or not..

Philosophers, psychologists and neuroscientists have for many years suffered a lot of intellectual perplexity trying to fit, into one or more of their many pigeonholes, the nature of human consciousness – the experience of self awareness in our sensations, thoughts, feelings, memories, dreams.

I started musing again on the subject after reading a newspaper article on the alleged irrationality of most human decision-making. My attention was caught by the following passage:

“chasing the Rainbow: The Non-conscious Nature of Being” is a research paper from University College London and Cardiff University. Its authors….argue “that ‘consciousness’ contains no top-down control processes and that ‘consciousness’ involves no executive, causal, or controlling relationship with any of the familiar psychological processes conventionally attributed to it”.

Which can only mean that even when we think we are being rational, we’re not even really thinking. That thing we call thinking – we don’t even know what it really is.

I wondered whether that was indeed the message of the paper. Dutifully, I followed the handy link https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01924 embedded in the article and read it.

The paper does indeed argue that ‘consciousness’ plays no role in human agency. But it is far from asserting that this implies an absence of rationality. Rather, the claim is that the ‘executive functions of our minds, rational or otherwise, are to found in unconscious areas of our brains.

The paper lies within a tradition that goes back to at least the C19 (as the paper itself concedes). Uncompromising “physicalist” thinkers such as Thomas Huxley wanted to account for all phenomena in the world by reference to physical scientific : everything, but everything, has a physical cause, including consciousness (goodbye to Descartes and his dualism of spirit and body). Consciousness bothered those worthies. The idea of non-material stuff was offensive. Thus there arose a couple of lines of argument. One says consciousness is basically more or less an illusion; the other concedes that consciousness poses a problem (the “hard problem”) for physicalism, but the problem will eventually be cracked by hard science.

The latter tradition does not necessarily seek to downgrade the role of consciousness, but to explain it in terms of physical activity in the brain.

The illusion school claims that science shows, in relentless study upon study, that our sense of conscious agency (that our conscious selves are in charge of our decisions, or at least the important ones) is just mistaken. Our conscious sense of being in charge is a fiction, a phenomenon like a rainbow, which is a by-product of causative physical events but has no causative potency itself. (Huxley’s metaphor likened consciousness to the whistle from a steam engine.)

So what is the point of consciousness, thus relegated from any real effectiveness? The paper suggests that the unconscious causal centres of our brain construct a “narrative” of conscious identity for the conscious self, which it in turn “broadcasts” to the external world. This sequence performs the evolutionary useful function of allowing other people to understand us and predict  our behaviour (so a little bit more than a rainbow then..).

I am a little bemused by this huffing and puffing against consciousness. Surely the scientific position is that it is not yet explained. And even if it is demonstrated that a large part of our decisions are made unconsciously, and not by conscious deliberation, is does not follow that conscious deliberation, reflection, attention or even day dreaming cannot be causally connected to our decisions. And it may sometimes amount to a question of semantics: the paper’s “narrative” channels may be just another of putting the common-sense intuition that we sometimes think consciously.

It seems rather perverse to assert that the richness of conscious experience is on the same existential footing as a steam whistle or a rainbow, however pretty the latter. Does not conscious experience make us human?

Which leads to another byway of philosophical debate – where skulk zombies. These creatures are not lethal cannibals – at least no more or less lethal or cannibalistic than ordinary humans. They, p-zombies, are an invention of philosophers that want to show that consciousness is an additional quality in humans, over and above unconscious brain functions.

The argument goes that it is logical possible to conceive of beings that have all human cognitive abilities , down to the last neuron, but who have no conscious experience (p-zombies).

If this starting point is true, it follows that consciousness is something unique and additional to physical brains – for we have it and p-zombies don’t.

This argument can, of course, support two widely-differing conclusions: a neo-Cartesian one, where consciousness has an exalted role at the centre of our mental life; or, indeed, the less exalted rainbow effect put forward in the paper discussed earlier.

For my part. I instinctively (consciously or otherwise) find the idea of p-zombies incoherent. Just as one renowned US philosopher, Thomas Nagel, said that we cannot conceive what it is like to be a bat, I don’t believe it is possible to conceive of beings having all human attributes apart from consciousness. Is not consciousness essential to embarrassment, for example? Or to aesthetic appreciation?

The wonderful Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy has a quote from a 1930s philosopher, concerning a p-zombie world (although the term had not come into currency then). In such a world:

It ought to be quite credible that the constitution and course of nature would be otherwise just the same as it is if there were not and never had been any experiencing individuals. Human bodies would still have gone through the motions of making and using bridges, telephones and telegraphs, of writing and reading books, of speaking in Parliament, of arguing about materialism, and so on. There can be no doubt that this is prima facie incredible to common sense.

It is clear to me that thought and action spring from a mixture of conscious and unconscious decisions. Every essay writer, or blog poster, knows that not every sentence is the product of conscious premeditation. Words often “just come”. Similarly, most motor decisions, from walking to sport, are best left to a well-trained unconscious. But, on the other hand, one should always think carefully before treading on ice.

February 2018