There Is No Such Thing as Unconscious Thought
nautil.us
nautil.us
What generates consciousness, appears to me to be a function of what the neurons are all 'doing'. The brain has two features that are devoted to linguistic processing, and you have to activate them in order to find words for the things you think.
Thoughts that 'bubble up' all the way to linguistic representation in the mind are definitely conscious, while it's also possible to make some sense out of brain activity that doesn't quite find words. For example, playing ping pong or some other sport would be exceedingly difficult if you had to use the linguistic part of your brain in order to make sense of what you're doing.
If you meditate, you can focus on that 'line' between when thoughts become linguistic and when they don't, and if you do trance work, you can block out the sensory world and so generate experiences using 'only' the mind. From here, you can work out that brain activity becomes conscious at some point.
Also, obviously there is brain activity that does not reach consciousness, the brain for example needs to do things like regulate heartbeat, and certain aspects of our experience we're only dimly conscious of much of the time. Consciousness is a continuum, not a binary.
So our brains can be doing a lot that we're not aware of.
Conscious brain activity always struck me as the primary meaning of "thought". The idea of conflating "thought" with unconscious brain activity just seems to devalue the word itself rather than bring some utility or added understanding to the table.
Personally, I don't think of breathing as a thought at all, or my heart beating, even though it's evidently controlled by the brain, evidently also the source of thoughts. I only really ever have evidence of thoughts as distinct from other brain functions because I experience them consciously.
Chess is a great example you picture a 'move' as a new layout. Practicing physical activities falls under the same kind of thing where I can focus on where to place my foot or when to breathe etc even when not doing the activity.
If you want to get a sense for what non-linguistic thought would be, think more like your dog. The two language areas are the only functional difference between us and the animals. Once you start getting into the realm of things that dogs or other animals can't do, you're thinking linguistically.
My own personal anecdotal experience is that thinking in words is far, far slower than skipping them and sticking to concepts and connections.
Like I stated earlier, I don't think all cognition is linguistic in nature, but I think you'll definitely lose 'something' if you break your language part.
My argument is that without language, we'll be present-focused and unable to appreciate conceptual subtleties, due to the inability to name and remix thoughts. Like other nonverbal mammals.
I find this as well. I've often caught myself waiting for my inner monologue to finish narrating a thought while simultaneously being fully aware that I've finished the reasoning part and already know the answer. When this happens I actively try to let go of the narration and just take the results and run with them. It's difficult but sometimes doable, and (for me at least) there's about an order of magnitude speedup.
If true, I wonder how humans thought before language had evolved. Sounds like hell.
That is, all our thoughts are post-event justifications to make us feel good.
There’s this famous experiment where they show two different things to each eye of a brain divided patient. The patient would then follow instructions from 1 eye, but provide a justification based on what the other eye saw. Like a PR rep having to do the job but with email and communication being down.
The PR rep has to interpret things in a way that is in harmony to the external environment. Making the self seem self-less or hardworking or moral, etc...
Where it gets interesting is that the resulting PR effects affect the environment which then trigger new behaviors resulting in new PR spin. The PR rep has a degree of control over the system yet at the core of it, the PR rep is installed by language/culture/society and is somewhat of an outsider. Like an overly idealistic justice warrior sent to whitewash some corrupt company and being frustrated by the job.
Which means we literally can never explain the "why" behind any decision we make, because we never know it -- yet that is our true "self", our free will if you choose to interpret it that way.
It's why we can have every rational reason to not eat the cookie, and zero rational reason to eat it (we're not hungry and we rationally know it's in our best interest to lose weight)... and then we eat it anyways. We can't give any rational explanation for why we ate it... it just comes down to, in the end, I wanted to due to emotional factors I can only hypothesize in hindsight.
It's a pretty powerful thesis.
Because brains are jury-rigged by evolution and not a clean integrated design by an intelligent engineer, I think it's natural that there should be a lot of co-dependent modules and redundant cruft that leads to conflicts.
I don't really think this is as a convincing example as a lot of people think. It has less to do with people having no control and more with people not understanding what "rational" is.
You eat the cookie because you do not, in reality, think eating the cookie is that much of a problem. The issue is that you likely have 5 other layers sitting trying to convince you that you don't want the cookie, because you're trying to fit in with society or whatever.
If you really didn't want to eat the cookie, you wouldn't.
The problem is that the average reason a person has for not eating a cookie is very unconvincing. It's often something along the lines of "well, people, somewhere, think I shouldn't eat too many cookies". "Cookies are unhealthy" also doesn't register, it's too broad. If someone told you the cookie was poisoned with cyanide, trust me, you wouldn't eat it.
It really doesn't have /that/ much to do with raw emotion, except in so far as emotion is composed from values, and your values don't care about eating cookies that much at the end of the day.
Sure, if you're purposefully trying to confuse the brain, it's going to be confused. You're actively subverting normal brain function. I bet if they kept performing the same trick, the brain would eventually realize what's going wrong and get quicker at making the realizations.
But, yeah, in terms of long-term semantic and episodic memory you can't retain it unless you were conscious of it. People who claim so-called photographic memory in fact only consistently recall details that they consciously noticed. People with hyperthymesia also only remember stuff that they were consciously aware of.
Plus, it's hard to argue against what the research suggests about echoic memory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echoic_memory. Minutes is at least at least an order of magnitude greater than what's been shown.
This is why I've always found the notion of a "philosophical zombie" to be odd - if it accurately reproduces human behavior, then it would be able to have a conversation with you describing its own consciousness, even if it "doesn't have one".
I think that anyone claiming consciousness is just a rationalization of previous decisions needs an explanation of why the brain is apparently aware of and able to make decisions (like writing about consciousness) that depend on the ability of consciousness to change it's behavior.
> I think that anyone claiming consciousness is just a rationalization of previous decisions needs an explanation of why the brain is apparently aware of and able to make decisions (like writing about consciousness) that depend on the ability of consciousness to change it's behavior.
A different analogy might help: The consciosness is a computer screen that usually displays a simplified image of (parts of) what's going on inside the CPU and memory, or lies, or something totally unrelated. It is possible to take a screenshot, dump it to memory, process it with the CPU, etc.
The notion that "conscious thought" would change that screenshot is equivalent to the message "Whatever is written here affects the CPU" appearing on the screen. It just means that the message was displayed, not that it came from a source other than everything else did.
You probably didn't notice, but you are actually arguing for "freedom of choice", which is its own philosophical can of worms, and is not really compatible with our understanding of physics or biology.
Well, you shouldn't expect broken system to work flawlessly. Splitting the brain makes survived parts of self-model inadequate. It's not reasonable to think that the self-model will not break, but automagically begin to reflect new hardware configuration of the brain. It will take time for parts it broke into to adapt.
As for this PR analogy, I find AlphaZero analogy more correct. One part of AlphaZero does all the heavy lifting, finding good looking moves for the current situation. Other part (Monte-Carlo tree search) selects the best moves (I think about it as conscious attention) and plays them to see where the game will go. The first part then uses the result of this to improve its own good moves heuristics.
Both parts are important, the part which generates allowances and the part which analyze, filter and selects what to really do.
Sequential nature of conscious attention make it impossible to control everything, but it doesn't mean that PR department just makes things up. It generates plausible descriptions of what you might be thinking, if you stopped and really though what to do instead of doing it without conscious control.
Those explanations aren't perfect, but PR department is just that, department. You are more than that, you can, if the need arises, reanalyze those descriptions focusing your attention and resources of all the departments on that task. You can change what you are doing and PR department will in time learn your new modus operandi to give better explanations.
I think you give too much credit to the PR department. Not all thoughts are after the fact justifications. I would say thoughts are invaluable tool to focus and coordinate all the brain subsystems, which by themselves lack vision of the whole situation and tend to produce fast and shallow automatic responses.
The most radical summation that I've heard is that human beings are, for large parts of our lives, just animals pretending to be people.
A scary thought.
Isn't it a common experience to work out problems in your sleep or while doing other tasks? If there's no thought going on beyond the surface of your awareness, where do these solutions come from?
I find analyzing a problem is facilitated by using words to describe it out loud or in writing, but there is clearly something that operates simultaneously apart from the target of my focus, because the description is not the analysis.
Also, I find your description of meditating not really in line with my experience - what I think of as meditating is focusing on a mantra in order to suppress conscious thought, gently pushing it away every time it resurfaces. "Generating experiences" would be the opposite of meditating to me.
The author seems to have a model of "unconscious" as being deliberate or task-oriented or focused, just like conscious thought, except sequestered somehow from the conscious section of our minds.
Obviously it's not like that, and I don't think anyone thinks it is like that. So the article can be perhaps summarized as "man has obviously wrong idea of how phenomenon works, tests his hypothesis, finds that it can't work that way, declares the phenomenon must not exist at all."
None of this contradicts the idea that your brain can only work on one problem at a time, but the overall thesis of the essay only works by blurring different concepts together under the terms "thought" and "consciousness."
Let's distinguish between these different brain/mind functions:
1) Parallel, perceptual work (like recognizing an image)
2) Serial, conceptual work (problem-solving, "thought")
3) Verbal, narrative mental occurrences ("thoughts")
4) Conscious awareness
Cognitive behavioral therapy demonstrates that (3) doesn't imply (4) as much as you'd think; you can have a verbal thought very rapidly that you are at most dimly aware of and immediately forget. Rather than implicating consciousness awareness in a wide range of mental activities extending all the way to problem-solving (2), I would say that most things the brain can do with awareness it can also do without awareness.
Those of us familiar with non-verbal "thinking" as we solve a problem know that (2) doesn't imply (3), either. Meanwhile, the thesis of the essay seems to require that (2) implies (4), which is quite a stretch.
I don't think that follows -- driving is a habitually developed skill which we know can be done unconsciously, while "working on a problem" has nothing to do with habits or skills, and it's hard to argue that kind of symbolic manipulation can be done unconsciously.
In your framework of 1-4, I agree that (3) doesn't always imply (4) because we can produce language out of habit/instinct rather than thought (yelling a curse word involuntarily).
But I find it hard to believe how (2) wouldn't always imply (4). But perhaps this is semantics -- from my understanding, (2) and (4) are merely different terms for the same thing, each implies the other. We're almost always solving some problem at each point during the day and therefore consciously aware -- and when occasionally we're not, that's when we daydream or space out and lose conscious awareness.
Edit: I just remembered that Jonathan Blow reports programming “unconsciously” in the same manner as the driving example. Also, on a good day my consciousness is not devoted to “problem-solving” every second of the day; that would be miserable. I don’t see why conscious awareness is seen as so necessary for thought, the only explanation for me being that many people experience themselves as being their thoughts and not their awareness. It is a journey many of us are on.
The experiment involving retrieval of foods and countries is suggestive, but I think it cannot be generalized outside of that experimental paradigm. The same for doing arithmetic in one's head. Creative problem solving is a different beast, and the flashes of inspiration described in the article which take place after a matter of hours or days are indicative that the mind revisits the problem in the unconscious.
When people are working on a problem, simply saying out loud "I'm trying to work out this problem" has an effect lighting up the neurons associated with the previous thinking done on that topic. If there is new information, (like a snake eating its tail), that may be integrated unexpectedly into the consideration.
I would suggest that there are prompts all around us that will trigger a "revisit" of a problem, it is conscious (or at least autonomous based on stimuli) action, but not directed.
That doesn't explain dreams. The notion that the brain requires constant external stimuli to keep it pumping along doesn't fit known phenomena.
The key is NOT, as the author describes, to work hard on topic B while topic A is expected to percolate in the background process. This will have the exact result that he found, no progress on A, and indeed many studies show that it will actually interfere with learning/cogitating A to immediately switch to work/study/cognition on topic B.
Instead, the method requires focus on topic A until near exhaustion, then active rest -- do something not requiring any big mental energy/focus, e.g., go for a walk, do work with your hands, go to a cafe for idle conversation, and await inspiration (with writing implements at hand ready to write furiously & in no particular order when it arrives).
He highlights a nice little study showing 1, stuff we already knew (similar to studies I read of decades ago), and 2, are irrelevant to the question at hand.
I'd go even further to counter his title and say that there is barely any such thing as conscious thought, and that the vast majority of thought is unconscious.
Opposed to this, I'd rather suggest that there is no such thing as an active thought process (which is probably more like an illusion). Also, the concept as described in the article really fails to account for the experience of creative insight or impulse, neuroses, or "metapsychological" phenomena.
Edit: By applying the idea/concept of threaded processes (pretty much the only concept sufficiently defined in the piece), it really illustrates how much we adapted culturally to the technology we use, which, when introduced, was clearly pictured as an restrictive abstraction from how we would model such processes or how the underlying "architecture" was described by McCulloch and Pitts. (Comparatively, we might add an observation on how Freud was influenced by the then prominent technology of telephone networks on how this was reflected especially in his first topic.)
You might say "aha! walking is not thinking", but surely you would think very hard about where to put your limbs if you were to walk through a minefield, etc. Is walking thinking if the conscious mind does it? So whether "thought" can occur unconsciously or not is a question of English not of neuroscience.
I think this statement makes the same error as the article, just in reverse: making a very strong claim that's impossible to prove.
I don't think walking uses "thinking". That sounds incredibly inefficient. Wouldn't unconscious thinking be slow, just as conscious thinking? If not, why not? Wouldn't the body be better off using its short-circuited system, as opposed to thinking through it?
And consider animals whose brains are not very large or known for their mental ability, yet who are very good at body kinematics. I'm inclined to think these are not related at all. The body likely uses some short-circuited system for kinematics, similar to how spiders' legs work, just more advanced. If we figured out how such a system works, we'd be able to build very good robots, but right now we try to make our robots think about how to control each individual part of their limb, so it's cludgey, slow, and inaccurate.
> but surely you would think very hard about where to put your limbs if you were to walk through a minefield, etc.
I'm not thinking of how to put my limbs there, only where to put them, which is a very different task from actually putting them there.
I think he needs stronger evidence
From the article:
> I carried out an experiment some years ago that tested whether unconscious memory searches can help out the conscious mind. ... Across a wide range of test stimuli, the results were unequivocal
That's not conclusive proof, but it looks to me like evidence?
We can take a default view that what "a professor of behavioral science" calls an experiment is likely an experiment. Feels presented "without evidence or any elaboration" don't make it an anecdote.
The real answer would be to consult with an expert in the field over the details of this experiment.
Moreover, if we examine more powerful trips (mystical experience, induced psychosis), there can be no doubt whatsoever as to the presence of a multitude of intelligenceS that one can communicate with. In fact, one can take away the psychedelics and learn to gain access to these parts of the mind through other methods (Jung - active imagination, western esoteric tradition, shamanism). It boggles the mind that the author of this nautilus drivel has nothing to say on these matters.
Finally, he makes the classic mistake of assuming that the unconscious processes of the mind work in the same way as the conscious ones, in terms of one taking advantage of them, when he describes the experiments he uses as proof, that are based on verbalisation and language instead of visualization and symbol reinforcement.
What does this profound experience with drugs tell us about human consciousness/thought? Literally nothing.
Psychonautics (from the Ancient Greek ψυχή psychē ["soul", "spirit" or "mind"] and ναύτης naútēs ["sailor" or "navigator"] – "a sailor of the soul") refers both to a methodology for describing and explaining the subjective effects of altered states of consciousness, especially an important subgroup called holotropic states, including those induced by meditation or mind-altering substances, and to a research paradigm in which the researcher voluntarily immerses themselves into an altered mental state in order to explore the accompanying experiences.
Smoking weed with music playing in the background (your own words) is pretty far from doing _research_ by immersing oneself into altered mental states. Psychedelics are powerful but one, of course, needs a modicum of understanding into how to best take advantage of them and the ability to do _research_ with one's own psyche as the subject. I could rephrase your comment as:
"One time I drove a race car and I had a lot of fun, it was quite pleasurable. What does this experience tell us about the limits of the human body in such situations? Literally nothing." => Because you are not in the position to evaluate the inputs you are receiving besides the rudimentary level of "having fun". Or as the old Hermetic proverb goes:
"The lips of Wisdom are sealed; except to ears of Understanding"
The statement "and there has been no opportunity for unconscious background pondering" doesn't seem true here. There is always opportunity for "background pondering", even if you're apparently focusing on something. There's no reason to think two parts of the brain aren't working in parallel.
Something close to the reverse might be true. It's possible the apparent act of focusing may not have helped solve the problem, and it's always solved by some background effort. I can't say that I'm consciously aware of how to analyze an image, in the same way that I'm aware of how to multiply.
Following the conclusion of this article, given that it uses fairly broad definitions, I'm not sure how it is possible to understand a concept the morning after a good night of sleep. Something has to be going on sufficiently powerful to solve a problem, even if it's not a "thought" in the experiential sense.
I'm inclined to believe the opposite, the brain does a hell of a lot of work unconsciously and not that much consciously. I generally found that I reach better conclusions from throwing a lot of information at my brain, as opposed to trying to build a logical chain. The latter generally happens after.
The author is not arguing against unconscious thought. They are arguing against background thought. I've never heard of anybody claiming to gain unconscious insight while concentrating hard on something else. It's only claimed to happen while dozing or walking or similar. I'd always assumed that unconscious thought used the exact same brain resources as conscious thought, and the only difference was the lack of consciousness. Obviously if you're using those resources for something else then they won't be available for unconscious thought.
I feel like this might have happened to me here or there...
You never felt like you thought about one thing, and, in the background, something else was processed?
No, the brain is reconfiguring itself during REM sleep to be more able to solve the sort of problem that you had been working on. It doesn't happen when you're thinking about other things, particularly. There's a ton of research relating REM sleep to improved skill at problem solving and Poincaré was certainly sleeping on the problems he was trying to solve.
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By refusing to serve the site to those who opt to block cookies, they ensure that consent can only be given under duress.
Not being able to read a random website is not "duress".
Not being able to read a particular article or articles is not duress. Duress is if nautilus would threaten to send killer ninjas to your house of you won't accept the cookies.
Next, you call people childish, when you are acting immaturely. How does name-calling generally work out for you as a means for settling disagreements?
It also bugs me that you are not even technically correct. You see, I looked up the definition of duress before I posted. I am British, so I used the OED and it told me that in the legal sense of the word, duress is, "Constraint illegally exercised to force someone to perform an act." Based on that definition, I don't think I could have picked a word that would better suit my intention.
Are we to conclude upon observing the crossing paths of trains and passengers that a rail system can service only one route at any moment?
The bulk of our thinking is unconscious (in the sense that, whatever your subjective awareness is, it doesn't contain perceptions of the process of most thinking your system does.)
In fact, you have a distributed brain in your gut that does a great deal of thinking about food, both what to eat and what to do to handle what we've already eaten. (To give an extreme example, it's what decides you have to throw up.) And the spine and motor cortex form a kind of brain also. But even the head-brain thinking is mostly outside of your subjective awareness.
Certainly it's possible to cram your brain with information, then take a break and sleep on it (literally or otherwise) and then come back and suddenly the answer appears, or your understanding has increased.
Chomsky thinks that there's a sharp divide between language and non-linguistic communication, in that a language is infinite. Turning to formal languages, even regular languages are infinite, so I think he's more talking about Turing equivalent languages - and given just a little complexity, just about everything is Turing equivalent.
Some people equate language with intelligence. But it's possible intelligence is a cause of language (or both are caused by something else).
However, I'd make two counterpoints:
1) The article completely ignores nighttime dreaming, when our brain does reorganize information we've processed during the day, and perhaps prepares us for the subsequent flash of inspiration we wouldn't otherwise achieve.
2) The idea of "unconscious thought" is a contradiction in terms -- thought is generally defined as exclusively conscious -- so the article sets up a bit of a semantic strawman. But the research here in no way invalidates our unconscious knowledge or instincts, which of course play a huge role in psychology.
I don't know if this really passes the... sniff test, if you will.
Even if something is not remembered, it would need to be processed long enough for the subject to also be able to recognize it and/or wake up as a result, with an emotional reaction. This doesn't really seem to happen. Most cases of people waking up with a strong reaction involve nightmares and similar.
"Anything can happen if we can forget it" is not really that solid, since things happening here-and-now nonetheless have effect, even if not remembered.
Conscious thought requires effort, is tiring, for some painful, etc. I find it unlikely that, during sleep, this activity suddenly becomes more viable.
The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence. Just because we have an instance of conscious thought leading to the conclusion, and a scenario where it is possible that the unconscious is playing a role, the conclusion that in the second scenario the unconscious does not play a role based on the ability to come to the conclusion consciously does not follow. The nature of the problem here is not given enough of a definition for one to conclude that there is only one way to get to the answer, either.
>"The brain’s networks of neurons are highly interconnected, so there seems little scope for assigning different problems to different brain networks."
Except we know very well that the brain solves different kinds of problems in different areas... the Occipital lobe, Wernicke's area vs Broca's area, are different "sub problems" the brain is working on which the conscious part gets information about. Maybe different creative problems use the whole frontal cortex differently, but the "computational machine" that is our brain is definitely divided up into sub-problems; some are very, very obviously unconscious, like the "problem" of keeping our hearts beating.
>" If it is indeed possible to search for foods or countries simultaneously (even though we can consciously report the results of only one search at a time), then the rate at which we generate answers in both categories should be substantially greater than the rate at which we can generate answers from either category alone."
I think this is a bad experiment and a bad conclusion. It's a bad experiment because in the "control case" (only listing foods or only listing countries), the unconscious, if helping, would still be helping in these cases, trying to generate a list while the conscious mind is also trying to generate a list. So it's not really a controlled experiment, because the unconscious mind is never "stopped" - it is assumed to not be used. It's a bad conclusion then because the premise is faulty; we wouldn't expect someone to list two separate lists more quickly if the same unconscious mechanism is a poor assistant when making the lists alone, too.
And this article dismisses unconscious thought but doesn't offer a good explanation for what is happening. For instance, what actually happens when you figure something out? And while what actually happens is undoubtedly related to flashes of inspiration or seeing an optical illusion in a new way, these things are only part of the story. A story that isn't told by most conventional models of learning or understanding.
But with careful observation, you can find clues for a simple explanation of epiphanies, solving problems in your sleep, and acquiring greater understanding over time. And that explanation is that the mind grows during rest/sleep in response to cognitive effort, most significantly during a period starting at least 24 hours afterwards and maybe peaking 36-48 hours later. That time frame here is from my own observations, the actual numbers aren't important to the explanation here. But it seems probable that learning and understanding is the result of “brain growth” that occurs as a result of thinking about something, and that this growth is specific to what you've been thinking about, and is cumulative. Your brain is not consciously thinking during this, and likely not unconsciously thinking about it either, but instead is just growing in a specific area. The result of the growth is that you are better able to perceive and grasp ideas that you couldn't previously.
We already know that memories are “consolidated” during sleep. Likely this consolidation is just some kind of structural or neural growth in the brain. Other parts of the brain are unlikely to be much different. The flashes of inspiration can be sudden understandings of a simple problem, but understanding deeper concepts or ideas requires brain growth in the area. I'd guess the flashes of inspiration type of understanding is analogous to short term memories, whereas deeper understanding and learning is the result of accumulated brain growth. When that brain growth becomes sufficient to grasp a concept, the sudden understanding (or epiphany) moment doesn't necessarily come with a realization that your brain is different and only has just then been able to grasp or figure out a problem.
Also, my intuition tells me that maybe we don't actually know anything at all, and we really only “figure out” everything. In other words, our brain is just a very good JIT (just-in-time) prediction engine. And when we think we know something, it's actually just the case that we predict or model it in real time at the moment we begin thinking. And memories are reformed every time we try to recall them, by neural structures that recreate the same pattern over and over when it's asked for.
This also explains things like prodigies, who typically spent many formative hours immersed in something over a long period to develop their abilities, and even acquired savant syndrome that can occur after head trauma (which does occur until after the brain has healed in response to the trauma).
Perhaps we should start by defining terms. What is "unconscious," and what is "thought." Depending on how you define that, visual processing, dreaming, operant-conditioning, all fall into that category.
There is also strong peer-reviewed evidence that our mind is constantly reviewing what we have just learned, and interrupting this will inhibit our learning. Perhaps the author should discuss that [1].
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interference_theory#Retroactiv...