NewScientist (15 August 2015, paywall) publishes one of the most mystifying popular science articles I’ve ever read. Outside of string theory, of course. This is on the subject of consciousness, and it’s worth mentioning the title and leader:
Consciousness evolved for the greater good, not just the self
The unconscious mind tricks you into believing in a sense of self, argue two psychologists. And it does this for an unexpected reason
Who am I to argue with a couple of psychologists? They are Peter Halligan of Cardiff University and David Oakley of University College London. And it must be kept in mind that this is a relatively short article falling under NewScientist‘s The Big Idea rubric. Still, statements like these make me goggle:
A close examination of your own conscious experience reveals how little control, if any, you have over it or its contents. When you regain consciousness each morning, after losing it the night before, it arrives without effort. Likewise, your thoughts and memories arrive ready formed and you can’t really exercise control over that experience: a blue shirt remains a blue shirt even if you wish it to be different.
The first statement appears to be an artificial division between consciousness and “you”. To me, consciousness is me; to suggest I have control over it appears, in my untrained opinion, a non-sequitur. On the second statement, I congratulate them, because I certainly must fight way back to consciousness after a night’s sleep – and, no, I do not have sleep apnea. The rest of the statement is rather vague, much like myself: except that sometimes, given enough time, a blue shirt is a green shirt, as much work on memory has confirmed over the years. Not that I don’t get their point, I just wish they’d had an editor working on this; thoughts, in my experience, are triggered, directly and indirectly, by external events impinging on my consciousness: evaluating survival tactics, triggering desires, enjoyment. Memories come up as part of the thought processes, roughly as data being sent to algorithms, although I’m wary of the ‘computing brain’ analogy.
We proposed 15 years ago that consciousness is an elaborate creation and that everything experienced in consciousness has already been formed backstage by unconscious processes (New Scientist, 18 November 2000). Relevant information is broadcast from the unconscious to form the contents of conscious experience. This means that self-awareness, thoughts, feelings and intentions are simply broadcasts of unconscious brain outputs. This occurs in much the same way that having the experience of seeing the colour blue or feeling the emotion of sadness is the product of a series of uncredited unconscious brain processes.
We hold that our very real experience of the contents of consciousness is a characteristic of this internal broadcasting and hence conscious awareness has no specific or generic cognitive function.
Unconscious? Conscious? I’m tempted to wonder if this is a circular definition; but I suspect it’s the lack of definition of unconsciousness (the dangers of pop-sci!) which leaves me grumpy and suspicious. (Defining an unconscious process as a cognitive process of which you are conscious mind is unaware just might make me scream at this point.) And I note the last sentence once again presupposes a division between consciousness and myself. Then there’s this:
So why did this powerful sense of conscious awareness that we feel on waking evolve? What purpose does it serve?
Wait a moment. You just told us “… hence conscious awareness has no specific or generic cognitive function.”!
Although our conscious experience feels personal and intimately real to us, we suggest that it is a product of evolution that provides a survival advantage for the wider social group, rather than directly for the individual. We think that consciousness emerged alongside other developments in brain processing that conferred a powerful social evolutionary benefit of communicating our internal thoughts to others.
Which gives the individual a better opportunity to reproduce and carry on the species.
This all seems to be motivated by a certain set of experimental observations:
… measurements of brain activity reveal that muscles and brain areas prepare for an action, such as a reaching out for an object, before we are even aware of our intention to make that movement. As noted by the psychologist Jeffrey Grey and others, consciousness simply occurs too late to affect the outcomes of the mental processes apparently linked to it.
Which does have its fascinating implications, once you’re assured of the validity of the data, which is always primary in science (and way outside of my competency to consider, so I’m willing to stipulate it). I’m considering the action of a parry in fencing: the attack of your opponent is coming so fast that sometimes I find myself lodging a command to what I conceptualize as the mental machinery responsible for the response to the attack: direct parry vs indirect parry, for example. It’s rarely even perceptibly a conscious response, just that an attack in this line gives me several choices and this will be the choice; then I depend on reflexes to handle it.
30000 years ago reflexes would have been far more important, and consciousness may not have been fast enough. That we’re measuring neurological responses anticipating conscious awareness is very interesting, but I’m not sure I see the explanation, as roughly described as it is to a layman, as convincing; there are others, as I darkly sense. Unless all actions show an anticipatory neurological response! In that case, it’s a different ballgame….
They finish up with this:
As the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche noted, “consciousness is really only a net of communication between human beings…consciousness does not really belong to man’s individual existence but rather to his social or herd nature.” Consciousness therefore provides a powerful evolutionary advantage by allowing shared communication, and extending each individual’s understanding of the world.
I have not read Nietzsche, so the context of his remark eludes me. Any philosophers care to elucidate his remark?
