And
here you were thinking all the time that you thought
“One realm we have never conquered—the pure present. One
great mystery of time is terra incognita to us—the instant. The most superb
mystery we have hardly recognized—the immediate instant self. The quick of all
time is the instant.”
D.H. Lawrence
"The growing good of the world is partly dependent
on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they
might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life,
and rest in unvisited tombs."
George Eliot
You are
thinking that your partner stole your wife and you are going to get even with
him. You are considering alternatives and making deductions about the best way
to go about it. You know that as you think you encompass in your mind all of
your thoughts. (1) Your wife left you for the man who owns half the shares in
your company. (2) He fooled you. (3) The bitch betrayed you. (4) One way to get
even would be to swindle him. (5) But this could get you in trouble with the
law. (6) Maybe you could have him kneecapped. (7) On the other hand, is it
worth it going through so much hassle for the bitch? (8) After all, you weren’t
that much in love with her anymore, so good riddance. (9) But on second thought
they cuckolded you. (10) You could let things be as they are. (11) The company
is doing good and you don’t want to spoil things. (12) Your wife is your wife
and it hurts that she doesn’t love you any more. (13) And suppose you did get
back at them, will you ever recover her affection? (14) So your wife left you
and you have to do something about it. (15) You cannot just twiddle your thumbs
and do nothing like a dork. And so it goes.
Were you
really encompassing in your mind at one time such a variety of ideas, which
additionally are not all that coherent and in cases like (7) and (12) are in
frank contradiction to each other? Number (1) is a statement containing two
seemingly unrelated facts, because your wife might have left you for another
man, although of course the fact that he is your business partner surely
contributed to that it was this man and not another for whom your wife left
you. Number (2) is a debatable proposition, unless you were totally unaware of
certain anteceding conditions, which (3) implies was not the case, unless again
thinking of her as “bitch” could be just an emotional reaction. But (4) and (5)
indicate that you are calculating, unless you are just fantasizing, which,
since (5) indicates that you are law-abiding, is reinforced by (6). Number (7)
shows a hesitancy that belies the previously emphatic (1), (2), and (3). And
this probably means that you might have known what was going on and really did
not mind. This interpretation is borne out by (8). Number (9) reiterates (2)
and (3) but with the connotation that your wife and your business partner acted
together and have become inextricably involved with each other. Number (10)
probably manifests a realistic attitude, in which you might be foreshadowing on
your part how things will most likely turn out. Number (11) reinforces number
(10) and could mean that you were over-reacting in (2), (3), and (6). But (12)
and (13) change entirely the previous perspective: before you were resentful of
your wife but reasoned or felt that it shouldn’t be a matter of concern since
you and she were not getting along. Now it turns out that you did not want to
lose your wife and are assuming that she loved you, which is certainly not the
case from (3), (7), and (8). Number (14) is a seeming reversion to (4) and (6),
but now there is an implicit complication in that it is not only your feelings
that are involved but many unstated considerations such as that your situation
is not socially becoming and that you must react in some manner whether you did
or did not love her or she did or did not love you, which leads to (15) in
which the thinking, underpinned by the “facts” of the situation and social
considerations, is unwittingly degenerating into self-pity.
If you
review the sequence, what you have is a chain of thoughts related through one
event but each one underpinned by myriad cognitive processes. There is a causal
relation between those processes and each thought but there is no such
concatenation between the thoughts individually (as expressed verbally here),
which means that you are not aware of cognitive processes but have instants of
awareness which have emerged from your mind in a manner over which you have no
control and no awareness. You’re going to be thinking like this for a long time
and less than half the time what you are aware of thinking will have nothing to
do with what your subconscious is considering and calculating. You certainly
cannot spend the rest of your life “twiddling your thumbs”. Some one has to
take care of business. It is inevitable that you will have to go on doing this
and that, which does not mean that in your subconscious the “betrayal” will not
be there provoking thoughts of one kind or another and barging into your mind.
You probably won’t do anything about all the thoughts of revenge that you are
having while dealing with this and that business problem. Maybe in the end you
will just have to accept the facts and arrive at some kind of way to get along with
your partner. One thought is but a result of a chain of subconscious thoughts.
The sequence cannot be explained from the single thoughts that you are aware
of.
One side
of my mouth is anesthesized so that when I drink I feel as if saliva were
dribbling down my chin and I mechanically take my hand to the side of my jaw.
The anesthesia dampens normal sensation and I have a false sensation. In the
absence of a real sensation, the false sensation of dribbling can only have
come from cognitive processes that prompted other cognitive processes
commanding me to hold my jaw. There was no ostensive cause for the dribbling
sensation and the hand movement. An induced physiological condition has set off
an unjustified logical chain. But my awareness that I am not dribbling out of
the side of my mouth can do nothing about my recurring subconscious reasoning
that I am. I am trapped between a physiological process and a cognitive
process, and I have control over neither. After a while I can stop going
through the motion of swiping the side of my mouth, but the perception of
drooling will still be there. The physiological condition is in touch with
cognitive processes that I cannot control. That I am acting both logically and seemingly
illogically, does not mean that logic is not a constraint on awareness, but
only that our “logical apparatus” can act on erroneous physiologically induce
premises.
In
themselves, “e-mail” and “mojo” are sounds. They were exactly that and no more
fifteen years ago. But they have become words I understand, although I am not
so sure about “mojo”. When I come across “e-mail”, I know what it means without
consulting a dictionary. This is because of something that happened in the
past. But do I know exactly what happened in the past that allows me now to
know the meaning of a word? I could have achieved this by various means:
hearing the word used in context or going to a dictionary or having some one
show me what an e-mail is. When I see the word now, I do not make a conscious
effort to go to the past. I do not have to. But I cannot claim that I have done
this in any manner that could be called awareness. I am aware now of what an
e-mail is but its meaning was acquired through means that most likely were
subconscious. It could have happened that I was aware the first time I saw or
heard the word. But after that it went into my subconscious “lexicon” and I
understand it without having to make a “aware” search for its meaning. But a
search did occur, because I saw an e-mail and I had to discard every
proposition that did not correspond to its meaning. For instance, “mojo” is
underscored in red in my monitor because as a neologism it has not been
included in its program. And I have only the vague recollection that “mojo” was
used by some actor as a double-entendre for “penis”, but the scientist Dennis
Overbye will not be using that sense in connection with a theory on the
universe. My search results in the unspecific notion that a “mojo” is something
important, with the mental equivalent of a question mark next to it. In the
case of “e-mail”, there are no such ambiguities, but I would be hard put to
give a precise technical definition of what it is. Since it could have happened
that it only took an instant of awareness for me to have the concept, learning must
be mostly a subconscious process which can leave a lot of gaps in its wake.
We see
an abstract figure. The next time it has been turned about but it is still the
same figure we saw the first time. How do we know that it is the same figure?
We do not move it around back to its original position. We figure out its form
without doing complex calculations. We can tell from a word in a headline in a
front page what the story is probably about. There are countless daily-life
incidents in which a bare minimum of input yields outputs not always
necessarily accurate but always inevitably logical. Yet we have no awareness of
the process through which this happens. Out of three switches we have to have
one on and two off. We know the middle one is the odd one. But at first we are
not certain which is the on or the off position. Often for a time we put the
switch on the off position. It’s not of crucial concern. Gradually, without
making outlines, we learn how to either put the other switches off or put the
right one or switch one off and switch the right one on. What was first trial-and-error
has become an automatic but “logically” correct behavior. I could have made an
effort to imprint in my mind the exact position in which the switches should
be, but I did not have in my subconscious the proposition that this was
something of vital importance, so I let it learn the slow rather the fast
schematic way. I was reasoning without being aware of reasoning.
I am
facing a threat, real or imaginary. I react either with panic or with a
strategy. In panic I do not stop to analyze the threat. A strategy implies an
intention. The threat can be an immediate cause for action or it can cause an
intention. When we act we intend to do something. Since in either case we act,
panic can be said to involve an intention of coping with a threat, albeit
badly. An intention involves propositional content. Therefore, despite what
might appear, panic too is propositional. It turns out then that the irrational
is rational after all, but we are not aware of the contradiction and in the
subconscious there is no contradiction. An instant of awareness—the cry
“fire”—does not trigger the rationality that we normally would associate with
awareness, but leads to what appears to be irrational behavior, though not in
the subconscious which takes its own logical cognitive path, as in the
syllogism: fire à danger; danger à flee; fireà flee.
In the
cases above the subconscious is determining the aware present, but since the
present is but an instant then the past is continually pressuring the present
into the past so that I get, if I think about it, an impression of flux. I do
not know exactly how these cognitive operations occur, but I cannot deny that
they were subconscious, because they originated in instants of awareness that
did not involve going to the past or manipulating the brain. In the case of
recognizing a shape that has been turned on its side, it is evident that when
we first saw it we recognized certain defining features, which later were not
so altered as to prevent us from recognizing it in a different position. Our
ability to make deductions is very fast and we do not stop to question how this
comes about. We accept what cognition tells us without questioning its
deductions or being able to prevent them. In a state of panic we might think
that we are not thinking but we are, only in our thought we are not considering
consequences that might be damaging to others but that could also revert
against us. Our logic might be missing certain premises—such as that in fleeing
we could be trampling on others or being trampled on, which certainly could
make fleeing difficult or impossible—but the logic is there and it is
compelling and we do not have the time to consider whether maybe we should
reason differently. Being composed of instants, the flux cannot yield knowledge
of the cognitive past, much less have access to brain functions. It is as if in
a fast train we tried to “analyze” all the images that in a second entered and
left awareness. Most likely we would have the impression of a blur, for which
“flux” would be an appropriate description, but even the blur would be changing
and we would not have time to explore how each blur came about.
But
perhaps we are using a mistaken concept of present which could be the opportunity
for inserting awareness into an apparent flux. Supposedly, we know the flux
through the fugacity of the present. We could fall back on the concept of time—one
moment followed by another and another and so on—to put things in order and
pull the sting out of the flux. But awareness is not so durable that we would
be compelled to consider it is not a flux but successive instants of itself. I
remember my panic and I do not recall reasoning in a methodical, step-by-step
manner. And anyway, is time as simple as that? A moment of panic is a tiny
fraction of a second, but moments of extreme boredom, like having to read a
financial report, can seem like an eternity. Time per se is an abstraction and
it would be very complicated (and controversial) to do an examination of the
concept of time to explain how it relates concretely to the flux of awareness,
which in any event will not break down the panic into successive instants of
awareness. So if we exclude time as a concrete explanation of the flux of
cognition, to what do we turn? The self is also flux, but the concept of self
requires as much elaboration as that of time and we would be facing the same
difficulties that time presents. We do have the present, however fugacious, as
a foundational proposition within the flux of awareness. But even as I write, I
am caught in a flux of propositions which I know are constantly going into the
past. If I tried to define the present in this context I would be hard put to get
a grasp on it. Is it the last sentence I wrote? Or is it the question I am posing
now? The present ultimately does not exist except as flux. The present
therefore cannot “contain” the cognitive flow. The present is a product of the
past, not the past simpliciter, but the past as subconscious cognitive process.
We can have the past through instants of awareness, but we cannot have at any
moment of the flux a grasp on subconscious cognitive processes. We cannot be in
the flux and out of it at the same time. We have no present nor a direct cognitive
understanding of the past, neither what is happening in an instant nor what its
causes were.
The
present barely exists. The past is un-modifiable. The past precedes and
determines the present. We cannot change the past and we cannot determine the
present. And if we cannot determine even an instant of awareness, then we
cannot determine any cognitive process. But the present could be “many instants
of awareness”. Is the past determining a present or many instants of awareness?
Does it make any difference? If every present were a coherent whole lasting
over more or less “durable periods of time” with recognizable beginnings and
unequivocal ends, then we could say that our cognitive processes would be a
perfect match to what we habitually call the present, where, in awareness, we
feel free to act, and logic, with some shadings, influences our decisions. But
our cognitive past refuses to submit to such an orderly state of affairs. Our
present is a congeries of instants, mainly because if awareness is a flux, and
awareness is much slower than the processes than underpin it, then the
subconscious itself is also in a state of flux but at such a rate that each one
of our instants of awareness is but a small fraction of the states in our
subconscious. At a guess, one thousand subconscious processes are the
equivalent of an instant of awareness. This does not make for stability in
awareness and we know that our present is quite unstable and that what we
consider a “present” comprises so many instants of awareness that we know it is
not a wholeness and we can only have the illusion that it started at a certain
point and ended at another precise point. Our instants of awareness that define
our present cannot be distinguished neatly from the past present that went
before and the present that follows it. Suppose our present were a task and we
accomplished it. But the task arose out of circumstances that were not exactly
those surrounding the task itself, and while I am at the task I could easily be
thinking of ways to do it better or how it will be received when finished, so
that in effect the present is attached to a previous present and is linked to a
“future present”. But the present is different from the past and the future,
and I cannot be in two of them at the same time, let alone three. The present
is an illusion constituted by countless aware propositions and even more
cognitive processes, and each has as much a right to be considered a present
than the orderly and discrete present that we imagine.
But we
are taking for granted the present as the instant of awareness. We see things.
We make statements. We read sentences. We practice sports. We do all these
things in something we call the “present”. These cognitive operations and these
actions are not strictly speaking the instant of the present, but they are a
present conventionally defined. Even though a test match in cricket can last
three or five days, we can call it “the present”. We seem to be creating the
present in all these activities, somewhat the way a painter does a canvass or a
sculptor chisels a statue. But we have to admit that we are doing no such
thing. An Indian cricket fan would consider a three-day test the present. But what does he do in between matches? Suppose he becomes
inordinately happy if his team takes a big lead over Australia. That certainly
is a great “present” for him. But if India ends losing, his “present” will take
so catastrophic a turn that his previous happy “present” would have become a
nightmarish “present”. OK. Granted, win or lose, the test match is objectively
a “present”. But suppose our Indian fan sees fate coming and leaves the stadium
disgusted. That would certainly put an end to the contest as a “present”. A
home run can be an exhilarating “present” for the Yankees, but when the Red Sox
take the lead in the seventh that will surely put a quick end to the previous “present”.
For a Red Sox fan who had to go to the john when his team took the lead, the “present”
will not have been the same as that of his fellow Red Sox fans. His “present”
will feel like a lot of anxiety at hearing the crowd cheer without his being
present. Does this mean that the “present” is a question of personal affects?
Well, you could hardly deny Australia’s win and the Yankees’ home run the
condition of facts which converted for spectators the reality of their games
from one emotional state to another. Facts and affects have an impact on what
we could conventionally define as the “present”, but the facts of perception
are transitory and affects are volatile, so they do not really provide a solid
ground for defining “present”, much less “solid” anyway than the instant
despite its ephemeralness.
Mutatis
mutandi, a historian could consider the 17th century as “revolutionary”, which
of course a host of other historians could call at the very least misguided. But
in effect that is how historiography works, by dividing the past into discrete
periods of time, which are analogous to different “presents in the past”. There
is a general consensus on how the history of European art should be divided so
that each period is a form of “present”, but on political issues criteria vary
widely, so our 17th century historian could make a good case for his
assertion, although those who don’t agree could perhaps make even better cases
for other views, as, for instance, that it was not the 17th but the
18th century that was the real time of revolutions. And within the 18th century some might want to make further subdivisions in the historical past.
These historiographical categories are not arbitrary. They are based on sound
arguments. We can define many discrete periods of past time that qualify as
different “presents”: the time I held such and such a job, or my college years,
or the occasion of my first published book. They are all “presents” in the
historical sense. But when we get to the shorter presents of our every day
lives, the divisions we make tend to be either fortuitous, as when I was
diagnosed with cancer, or strictly subjective, like the time I was having a
terrible run of bad luck. In view of these facts: that the past is divided into
periods and that for the individual these periods are usually subjective, then
we really cannot define the present in a consistent, constant way as anything
other than the instant of awareness. We could even say that, just as in nature
there are constants such as π, which can be used to formulate relative
scientific mathematical equations, so the one constant of mind/brain has to be
the instant of awareness.
That we
think means we are in a present. But it is a present that lasts but an instant.
We do not have the time in that instant to organize and coordinate our
extremely complex cognitive processes. I may not know how much 43 times 56 is,
but I can as sure fire know how to go about finding out very quickly. I don’t
know what is going on in the street beyond the hedge at the edge of the garden,
but I know that vehicles are going by—in two directions, if I pay enough
attention—and that some are bigger than others and that most are going straight
ahead but, from experience, I can also know that occasionally one is in reverse
gear, and so on. But when I think that I am in a present I know that I am not
in that present so very long, yet this thought requires more time than I can devote
to it at any given present. Though I need only an instant to change my mind
about something—running like hell if the walls start shaking—I know that knowing
the process of doing so, not being arbitrary, would require more time than
awareness can devote to it. When I run out of the house it is because I know either
an earthquake is taking place or there is big fire nearby, and so on. These are
not automatic, unreflective reactions, but carefully thought out responses. In
the case of an quake I will remember instantaneously that I haven’t read in a
long time that one should stand under a lintel or a threshold and that I have
read something about getting under some cover, but I’ll also remember even
faster that I can get to the garden, faster than I can get under the sofa,
which I probably don’t fit because it is very low, but that whatever action I
opt for none will be as advisable as just running for the yard because a very
very rapid calculation tells me my chances of falling into a crevasse are much
smaller than of getting crushed by a falling ceiling.
There is
much more that I will infer when I see the wall swaying, but I think the point
is made: panic is not just panic and we do calculate much faster than we can
think in awareness. And yet no matter how logical I make a panic reaction in
the end I will have to admit that I am not aware of the "work" that
goes into thinking. Or writing for that matter, although it would seem as if
writing gave much more scope for “aware reasoning”. Writing certainly takes
more time and involves more thought than a panic reaction. But the logic that
dictates writing is not different from the logic that produces panic. Writing
would seem to involve more awareness, but what writing involves are more instants
of awareness than panic. Yet each individual act of awareness in writing is not
qualitatively different from the instantaneous awareness of panic. Although
panic is an act, not as simple as one syllogism—I must flee but towards where?—it
is in many ways more “knowable” than writing, which is so much more complex that
the awareness of it can be said to be less and not more “reasonable” than
panic. In writing I am reasoning but I am also using language and I am
utilizing memory in many complex ways and my entire “specific self” is involved
to a greater extent than it is in a panic situation in which the specific self
is mainly looking out for itself. Since all the operations involved in writing
are much more opaque than the act of looking for the nearest exit, then it can
hardly do to say that in writing there is more awareness of cognitive processes
than in panic.
If we
possessed a specific awareness, we could not be thinking at the same time of
how we attained it. We can of course think about cognition and such thoughts
would be specific instances of awareness, but we cannot be using cognition for
subjects other than cognition and be thinking at the same time how cognition
functions. Yet this is the impression that we get from awareness. I think of a
thought I had a moment ago and I go back over the steps that led to it. Let’s
say I concluded that the present is the past or vice versa. I got there from
two arguments: the instantaneity of the present and the speed of thought. I can
think of the various arguments involved. In particular, I do not find that my
thinking is contradictory or inconsistent. Consequently, I am inclined to
believe that I am in the present having such a chain of thought. I can almost
simultaneously reach for any of the components of my thought process and they
come readily to awareness. I feel justified in thinking that this is the
present. And this is the least of it, because I can also feel justified in
thinking that I was in charge of the entire process from beginning to end. I
can write down my thoughts again or I can use logical notations or even express
them in the form of predicate calculus. So what greater proof can I have that I
am in total command of my cognitive processes? I am so totally in command that
I am willing to do an exposition of my ideas and have them subjected to
questioning and to possible refutation. And I am so willing because I know how
and where to go in defending them. But if I am honest with myself I will have
to admit that I do not really know the how or the where of my thought. And I
have to admit this because it is not only me who is ignorant of how my mind
works, but there is no philosopher, or neurologist, who can answer these
questions for me. But I can still claim that there is a “present” or a “sum”
involved here different from its instants or its parts. But is there? Of the
time when I wrote: “Being pastness, each instant of the awareness of the past
is beyond our manipulation”, I can now only have an illusion of a “present”
because “being” and “pastness” and “each” and so on were individual specific
“forms” of being present, exactly as when I press the keys of my computer and
the letters appear on the monitor. It may seem to me as if the “being” were a
present but the machine had to go through an electronic process for the “b” to
appear and then the “e” and the “i” and so on. And just as I do not know, nor
do I care, how the machine can do these operations, so I cannot know how my
mind goes about composing the entire sentence or any of its parts. I could have
a theory about all of this, but I cannot claim that it is knowledge. All I know
for sure is that I did it and that it was done in time or in a temporal
context.
Awareness
is only the barest, instantaneous tip of cognition. Every cognitive process
takes place below the threshold of awareness. “Limen” is often used to describe
the time between a stimulus and its presence in awareness, but limen makes no
assumptions on what innate cognitive processes there might exist which would be
operative or ready to operate instantaneously upon a stimulus, and this implies
that the “belowness” of awareness is more complex than what
stimulus-and-response imply. Awareness is the recognition of the successive
results of cognitive processes. A thought naturally goes into pastness. The
present ceases to exists and becomes the past. The present thought becomes an
irretrievable past thought. But what exactly is the past? We know it is
certainly not the present but it must be something and if it exists it must
exist somewhere. One obvious answer is that if it is not in awareness it must
be in non-awareness or the subconscious. We might presume that it is somewhere
in the ether or that it is in a realm where only ideas exist. But the most
likely answer is that our evanescent present becomes pastness in the brain.
What’s more, the instant that is our present, however sublime, is also in the
brain and as material as the present thought that went into pastness in the
brain.
Events
come about from events that are both past and subconscious. Their pastness is
undeniable, but their subconsciousness could be disputed. After all, we learn
to read. We were not unconscious during the process. We practice sports through
conscious activity. Let us for now set aside the argument that in learning to
read and to practice a sport we experience a multitude of instants of awareness
each of which went into the past even as it was taking place. But who taught us
to see? Here certainly is a cognitive activity that stemmed from subconscious
cognitive processes which cannot be related to any instant of conscious
awareness. And if the ability to perceive has nothing to do with specific
instants of awareness and seeing is required for reading or practicing sports,
then we do nothing that does not ultimately originate in the subconscious. We
are not aware of cognitive processes except by deduction. We reason but we do
not “see” ourselves reasoning. If cognition is a process and awareness is
cognitive and instantaneous, then cognitive processes are subconscious. When we
recognize things and people, we do it from extremely complex subconscious
cognitive acts. Suppose we posited that awareness were only “partly”
subconscious. After all, we can do various things at the same time, such as
thinking and walking, both of which involve our cognitive means. We “will”
walking and when we walk we navigate past obstacles “automatically” or we go in
a certain direction which we can do in some cases without actually seeming to
think that we are going somewhere. In this sense, awareness and the
subconscious appear to be compatible, even complementary to each other. Another
possibility is that awareness is not a domain different from the subconscious
but a part of cognition. In this case, however, we do not solve the antithesis:
cognition can be conscious or subconscious but it cannot simultaneously be in both
conditions. Even a word-processor knows this and will underscore the phrase if
we wrote: “cognition can be both conscious or subconscious but it cannot be in
both conditions at once”. Even the “partly” argument is specious if we posited,
as well we might, that both thinking and walking are cognitive but alternative
rather than simultaneous instants. We are thinking of something that requires
concentration but we are not neglecting to think that we are walking which does
not usually require great concentration. But no matter how often the mind/brain
shifts from one cognitive process to another, it will, however instantaneously,
be either conscious or unconscious of the results of each process. In the end,
therefore, it remains true that logically we cannot be both in awareness and in
the subconscious at the same time.
Before
going any further, it is imperative that we have a better grasp on what exactly
is awareness, besides its temporal characterization as an instant. The issue
can become complex if instead of awareness we use the word “consciousness”, for
the latter often connotes debatable questions such as soul, free will, God, and
so on. In particular, “consciousness” is the root of philosophical dualism,
which today is a mostly dead conundrum but which can still stir passions about
how it is that matter can see, think, and do all the things that mind does.
Provocative philosophers have attributed consciousness to thermostats, but the
issue can be defused by saying that a thermostat is just a device that is
sensitive to ambient temperature. Awareness is a fairly neutral term and it can
be easily illustrated, although saying that a thermostat is “aware” sounds as
controversial as that it is “conscious”. In humans, awareness does not, or
should not, give rise to a profound and complicated search for, say, the
existence of the soul as something different from seeing or thinking. Awareness
could briefly be defined as “recognition”. This would seem to be applicable to
perception but not to other contents of awareness. But this could be a
misreading of the definition in opposite directions. Perception is not always
reliable enough to pass as recognition. But we can readily “recognize” thoughts
that we have had from a though that previously had not come to our mind. So we
can have misperception and “intellectual recognition”. But we could also be
wrong about thought. In reading back on some notes on awareness I made a long
time ago, I come across an idea I had actually entertained before and then
forgotten. Either in perceiving or thinking we can make errors, but on the
whole awareness is right about perception and thought more often than it is
wrong, although, even as we make this claim, the subconscious is calling
attention to that I really have no means of proving it. But doesn’t this mean
that our claim is basically right?
We know
that we are aware when we recognize our surroundings but we are also aware that
we are thinking. This raises the problem that if awareness is an instant of
recognition, how can it be that we can see and reason at the same time?
Perception could be considered as a form of thought because it requires logic
and memory, but I know that there is a difference between the two. So how can I
define awareness as both recognition and thought? And if I add that I could be
wringing my hands at the same time, I have a triple state of mind which could,
literally, chop up the definition of awareness as recognition. If I am
perceiving, I may be engaging in a kind of thought, but it is not the same as figuring
out, for instance, how I will explain how the three events can co-exist. But
consider the following: I am thinking as I write these lines but I am also
seeing the computer keyboard—I do not touch type—and the monitor where my
thoughts are being translated into sentences. As I type I think and as I think
I type and these processes alternate without my being, literally, aware of how
events succeed each other in time. I couldn’t very well be wringing my hands at
the same time I type, but I could in another situation, like staring at the
ceiling, thinking, and wringing my hands. “Wringing my hands” could be some
kind “automatic action” I do in certain situations, but I am occasionally aware
that I am doing it, so it cannot be a connection between my hands and some
“module” in my brain. I can therefore be aware of doing three different things.
This would seem nonsensical unless it were the case that awareness is extremely
fast and that what seem like entire and unbroken instants are really
alternating instants all within very fractional periods of time. The answer
then must lies in the speed of recognition.
The
simulation of movement in films requires 24 frames per second which divided by
1000 milliseconds gives a speed of 42 milliseconds. Films are not reality of
course but they seem to be very much like it. The simplest and most realistic
explanation for the recognition of movement in films is that we perceive the
frames in such a way that, when referred to memory, they match our real-life
recognition of movement. There is no “persistence of vision” involved here. Max
Wertheimer in 1912 theorized that motion was inferential (beta movement),
although he was wrong, as was Gestalt psychologist, in denying the utility or
possibility of “decomposing” the perception of motion into separate,
interactive subconscious processes. The perception of motion is not an
illusion. It is a fact of life. There is a correspondence between life and the
way it is filmed. The blurry impression of a landscape in a TGV probably takes
even less time than the recognition of movement. Blurriness implies the
dizzyingly rapid deduction that we are seeing something which does not
correspond, except in an extremely vague manner, to anything that we normally
see. This means that in recognizing blurriness the mind is not only seeing but
it is also continually reasoning at faster than it takes to recognize a familiar
face. As we have no other reference, we shall take as conventional that
recognition occurs at the rate 42 milliseconds. It should seem obvious,
therefore, that in one second of real time we can both perceive and think and
even have other experiences, for all it takes is a small fraction of a second
to switch from one act of recognition to another. But is it recognition? We may
perhaps not be aware of the inter-action between logic and perception, but
there can be no mistaking that from a TGV we are perceiving although we cannot
see cows grazing and we are barely able to distinguish one color from another.
That awareness and perception are instantaneous implies the continuity of
awareness and, of course, continuity is also a feature of all mental
propositions. This makes it very doubtful that the speed of recognition is
anywhere near the speed of thought. Awareness involves so many propositions
that for practical purposes we can use the 24 frames per second measure, but in
reality the thought behind awareness can probably only be measured in millionth
or even billionth of a second.
My
thoughts are undoubtedly mine but I have no control over them. The attribution
of my thoughts to myself can be considered a logical deduction. But there is no
need for that. There is universal consensus about perception as a “fact”. I
cannot do anything about my perception of a garden I am tired of seeing. I
could close my eyes but when I opened them again the garden would still be
there. I could close my eyes and, knowing my way around my room, go to the
vestibule from where I cannot see the garden. But I would remember having seen
the garden and there is also a consensus about memory. I might feel depressed
about seeing the same garden everyday instead of taking off for the valley of
Hunza, which I can do because I know that I can travel by train to Lahore and
from there join a tour or something. But this takes time and planning and in
the meantime I am stuck with my depression and, much as I would like to, I
cannot get rid of it. In short, my thoughts are depressingly mine but I cannot
do anything about them. Apart from whatever basis it may have on the body’s
chemistry, depression must also have a cognitive cause. Let us assume that it
is a “clash of propositions” which lessens a state of well-being, as between,
say, a proposition about myself which I cherish and some external report that I
am wrong about my self-esteem. If depression is cognitive, theoretically I
could reason my way out of it, like the thought that I won’t always be seeing
the cause of my depression. Besides what’s so bad about the garden? It beats
being in death-row. But no matter how many arguments I recur to I am still
depressed. There could be causes for my depression which make it resistant to
reason, but if there are, I cannot go into my brain, find them, and extinguish
them. Affects are propositional and should in theory be open to rationality.
Nevertheless, I have no control over them. I cannot penetrate my subconscious
to modify them. A friend could drop by and we could converse and my depression
would be alleviated, but I wouldn’t know exactly why.
It
cannot be claimed that awareness orients cognition. It would be like going back
in time since every instant is the result of a previous cognitive process.
Every “random” turn of the head is the result of an unbroken chain of cognitive
events. I can of course go back in time through memory. But would I find the
cause of “why” I turned my head at a specific moment? But I did turn my head.
That is a fact. What I cannot know is why I did it. Turning my head is not that
momentous. But suppose what I did was to go long on the dollar, and the next
day and for the following weeks it went into a precipitous fall. Why did I go
long in the first place? The decision was made at a precise moment in time. But
behind it there were many instances of awareness that went into my “mental
calculator”, which eventually determined my decision. Perhaps during many if
not most of those moments of awareness my cognitive system was reasoning well.
But since I made the wrong decision it is obvious that on one or many occasions
I was not reasoning so well. It is possible that I could go successively gone
over the reasons for why I went long. Could I then find exactly where I went
wrong? One thing is certain: before my final decision I could not have had in
my awareness all the reasons for and against in neat columns posed one next to
the other. I can only have had them one at a time. This does not mean that one
or various reasons did not come up to awareness more than others. They were all
there in my subconscious “fighting” each other for ascendancy perhaps under the
pressure that if a decision was not forthcoming quickly I could lose the
opportunity of making a lot of money. In other words, cognition worked on its
own independently of my awareness. There could have been an overriding
consideration that led to my error, but it was not in my power to measure the
“weights” that cognition was putting on the different pro and con arguments. I
became aware of the final decision but my awareness could not have prevented
the wrong decision any more than a meteorologist can avoid making a wrong
prognostication.
Our
thoughts go into the subconscious not just as the “contents” of brain cells but
also as “representations” or as propositions. We could argue, then, that
through recall we could manipulate these propositions in such a way that they
would affect or even produce future instants of awareness. This is a common
occurrence. We can have a thought now that is the result of propositions that
we have recalled to awareness and have modified in some way or other. But how
far can we reach into the subconscious to manipulate propositions? Here we are
faced with certain difficulties. Let’s continue with the previous example.
Suppose there were many reasons why I should short dollars, but then it comes
to my mind that, however persuasive these reasons may have been, the fact is
that the dollar is nearly on a par with the pound. I know that currency
fluctuations can be charted and that, whatever happens, sooner or latter a
curve will turn up or down. The curve for the dollar had been persistently
down. I thought that it was time that it should go up. I had seen this happen
so many times that my reasoning had to be spot on. So I fed it into my brain.
But if I did, it had to be because I wasn’t convinced of my own argument. But I
was almost convinced. Was this importance I gave to cyclical
fluctuations what finally determined my decision to go long? This is possible.
But it is more likely that what I did was “throw up my hands” and let my mind
decide what I would finally do. But even if I had made the decision to go long
solely on cycle theory, it would still have been my mind deciding for me. I had
experienced currency fluctuations. I had made money on them. But unbeknownst to
me there might have been the totally logical but un-validated proposition that
I was feeling “lucky”. I could have had some previous reverses and things, like
the dollar, were bound to turn in my favor. The fact of the matter is that even
if I had made my decision in an instant of awareness that had been preceded by
all my carefully thought considerations on currency cycles, I would not have
made that decision if other cognitive processes, not as rational as demand and
supply, had not been subconsciously rooting for it.
Each
individual instant of awareness quickly passes into memory. Since awareness is
instantaneous, then it cannot "cover" cognition in general. For
reasoning and cognition to be possible they must occur below the threshold of
awareness. If there are instants of awareness which can be called “concentration”
or “attention”, then they too must be the result of subconscious processing.
But if this is the case, how can we account for the “durability” and “willfulness”
of concentration? Volition is a propositional event in which certain
propositions “predominate” over other propositions. There is nothing “volitional”
that cannot be explained propositionally, hence subconsciously, including
attention. The durability of attention is the "sustaining" of
perception or thought from the “persistence” of memory. Let's say I am writing
and decide to concentrate on the view from my office window. It might have to
do with an instant of awareness, but only if we ignore that the specific self
has a continuous unbroken past. I “chose” to concentrate from a cognitive chain
coterminous with my experience. We never do anything on the spur of the moment.
When I say I am concentrating I am keeping before me an object of perception or
thought and I am “breaking down” this object into details or parts. Since I am
aware only an instant and awareness is a succession of instants, this breaking
down has to be going on in subconscious mind. And my ability to keep this
object before me and to break it down successively is the result of the
continuous interaction of cognitive processes. Awareness is the illusion that awareness comes
“out of itself” and not from below its own threshold, or from what is happening
“beyond the ken” of the instant of awareness. A form of attention can be
described as an interaction between the “rules of perception” as applied to
inputs and the “rules of memory” as affecting successive results of perception
or thought.
We can
try to hang on to a thought but each instant that passes the thought becomes
different from itself. We cannot have a specific thought in its precise
configuration except in the instant of the present and as soon as that instant
passes the thought changes however slightly. The thought may “in essence” be
the same over various or many instants of time, but no thought can be pinned
onto a base like the specimen of an insect. But suppose we take the thought
exactly as we first had it and express it in a sentence and we learn the
sentence or sentences. I can keep them in my mind for many instants of
awareness. Though possible, it is not very likely that I will be doing any such
thing because cognition will be “intruding” with many different instantaneous
thoughts. Repetition cannot be a denial of subconscious cognitive processes. Sooner
or later we will have to go beyond the one sentence or the sentences we have
memorized. We will be applying cognitive processes beyond memory and if we do
this sooner or later our sentence will have to be different from the one we
originally learned and tried to hang on to. If the sentence accords with the thoughts
that follow upon it, we might not need to change it, but this seldom happens.
Even when in a debate we are all agreed, there are always nuances. And
supposing the next thoughts are not in full agreement with the sentence, then
we shall have to either defend it or modify or reject it. Can we defend it
exactly as it is without any modifications whatever? After all, the sentence
was complete but it wasn’t “self-standing” and from the many components that
went into it, we might, during one of our repetitions, realize that it would
improve by changing it in some way. So, yes, theoretically we could try to pin
down a sentence like an insect, but it sure as hell won’t be a dead insect, and
have you every tried to kill a cockroach going full throttle?
Recall
is not a precise, infallible process. If cognition is subconscious, then it is
unlikely that the propositions that we recall will be exact duplicates of the
propositions that we once had. But even supposing that these propositions came
back to us exactly as we once had them, the context in which we recall them
will probably be different from the context in which we had them. Suppose the
propositions that we had went into an impeccable, logical report with graphs,
statistics, and all the rest. But then the report will have to pass the
committee gantlet and it is likely that our report will not emerge unscathed
especially if some member wants us to fail. The context of our report will be
quite different from the personal cognitive context in which we wrote it. Whether
we like it or not we will find that the gantlet will impinge on our cognitive
process. But we do not need a committee to see this. Since a “cognitive context”
emanates from the subconscious the same as propositions, then it is not our
instants of awareness that will be determining our thought, but the subconscious
cognitive processes to which propositions are subjected and which will be “making”
the context into which propositions will re-surface. We have a natural tendency
to feel that we are somehow in touch with the past if not in an infallible, in
a reasonably reliable way, which would imply that we can indeed affect thought.
But here we need to remind ourselves that each moment of the past was at
sometime an “instant of the present” and that therefore any past moment was
itself the product of a previous past. However much faith we may put into our
past (and in our ability to recall the past), it is an impossibility that any
moment of the past was not itself determined by a previous past and that each
instant past or present is a result of subconscious cognitive processes. And
since cognition feeds on the continuity awareness, the context of cognition
will never be exactly the same at any given instant. We are in touch with our
past but with each instant of awareness, the past we recalled once will never
be the same as the past that we recall now.
Just as
in the physical world we cannot be in two places at the same time, so we cannot
be aware and unaware at the same time. We cannot be in a cognitive operation
and at the same time be manipulating the cognitive operation. These are two
different things altogether. To be in a cognitive operation is to be aware of
the result of a logical process. But in “possessing” the result of a thought,
we cannot be at the time thinking of how this result came about. We can do any
specific syllogism step by step, but only the end-result will be the same as
the conclusion of the operation. And even here we are avoiding a greater
discrepancy, because the form of the syllogism has nothing to do with any
specific contents, and so when we have an inference, although it is the result
of a syllogism, it is different from the syllogism that produced it either as a
form or a specific proposition. Using cognitive means is not the same thing as
having those means in awareness. Yet without those means we would not have the
inference. Consequently in reasoning we are aware of going from one proposition
to another, but we are not aware of the operation which allows us to have the sequence
of propositions. In sum, we cannot exercise reason and be aware of reason at
the same time. We trust our powers to reason but we do not apply them in a
conscious manner. Specific thought is aware and only “implicitly” aware as such,
and “implicitness” is not awareness, just as a well-regulated 24-hour clock
cannot substitute for day and night. If we were living in an enclosed space
with no windows to the outside, the clock would tell us when the day begins and
when it ends without having to check see the sun’s rise and setting.
We can
do an instantaneous syllogism—like that since computers do not grasp “meaning”,
they cannot do “intuitive” or “semantic” logic—but we cannot at the same time
be where the syllogism is taking place. The syllogism is a form. It is as
applicable to numbers as to sentences. We can do syllogisms throughout a
lifetime without having to know just exactly why syllogisms work apodictically
in some fields but produce controversial results in others. Computers are
frequently described as thinking machines, but the fact is that computers do
logical operations of all sorts but they do not think in the way that humans
do. The father of all possible computers, Alan Turing, invented a system that
could do any conceivable computation. Basically it consisted of an endless
strip of paper divided into equal segments over which a printhead hovered and
marked one of a limited set of signs. The printhead could go either left or
right along the strip and erase and replace any sign it had previously made. It
could go on computing eternally, say, an infinite multiplication table, but
that would have been a caricature of itself, because the purpose of the
exercise—and the Turing machine is often described as a Gedanken or “mental
exercise”—was not to compute for its own sake but to reach conclusions, such as
that an arbitrary series of ciphers represented a word or even just a letter in
an encoded message. But Turing did not invent a thinking machine in the strict
sense.
[1]
Thought requires meaning, but the Turing machine does not comprehend meaning
although it can be described semantically as in the following exercise: lifeà write “rock” à next segment à back to “rock” à erase “rock” à replace with “animal” à next segment à write “mammal” à another segment à back to “mammal” and replace with, say, “animate”, and
so on until you end perhaps with
Although
we cannot be in two distant places at the same, we can be in the same place at
different times. Now, this is perfectly conceivable in the large-scale world we
normally inhabit. I have been working in the room with a view to a certain garden
for quite a long time. But in the case of mind/brain there is much to be said
for the contrary view. Obviously all our thoughts are in the mind/brain, so
arguably cognition is in the same place all of the time. But the issue
is not whether this is true in a general sense, but rather whether any present
state of the brain can be identical to a past state. If it isn’t, then even
when we are in the same place we are always in different places. Neurologically
the point is moot and probably unanswerable, because all experiments on the
brain based on different scanning methods always necessarily assume that the
brain can be in a “normal state”, or else all that neurology claims to have
discovered is poppycock. In a recent experiment, Dr. V.S. Ramachandran, of whom
we shall be hearing more in another essay, “demonstrated” that the brains of
subjects who see another person being subjected to pain will “fire” in the same
areas as those excited by real sensations. Although this is probably nothing
more than an experimental demonstration of the “squirm effect” that we have
when we see a man walking on live coals or lying down on a bed of nails,
Ramachandran was apparently in search of a neurological basis for morality, or
at least that is what he says he got out of his experiment, in the sense
presumably of “do not do unto others what you would not want others to do unto
you”. Since the subjects of the experiment were assumed to be in a
“normal-brain” state when they were exposed to the sight of pain-infliction, it
is to be doubted that anything was really proved at all: is Ramachandran, for
instance, advocating classes in feigned sado-masochism for kindgergartners; or,
which is more likely though equally far-fetched, does he believe that ethical
behavior can be “conditioned”?
To get
by without neurology, what we need is what neurologists call a “loan” from mind
to “finance” a temporary separation from brain, a sort of provisional alimony
payment. Kant coined the phrase the “manifold of experience”. It was so successful
that other philosophers have probably quoted it as frequently as they have
“categorical imperative” or “transcendental idealism”. My question is this:
given the flux or “stream of consciousness”—another loan, from James Joyce this
time—is it conceivable that a “normal-brain” state has its counterpart in a
“normal-mind” condition? I am not referring to the theoretical contrary of
neurosis or of madness but to events such as mood-changes or dramatic turns of
opinion. President George W. Bush was elected massively for a second term in
2004, but today he could lose an election for dog-catcher in Austin if that
involved Iraq, yet nobody considers that Americans are collectively mad or
neurotic. I am writing now, but before getting to where I am here, I have stood
and walked around the room various times. When navigating past a problem of
expression, I have lain on the sofa behind me and read portions of different
books and articles. Can it be said that I am exactly the same person at this
moment that I was when I began to write my day’s quota six hours or more ago?
However routinary an employment, is the person that comes home at night the
same that left home in the morning? “Normal brain”, perhaps, but the “same
mind” impossible, if only for the fact of having lived another day. But
although this probably trivial increase in experience makes the “same mind”
thesis unsustainable, we are not aware that we are different now from what we
were before. Yet logically it must be so, and if we are unaware of any difference,
we do not have grounds to deny it to the subconscious. So once again, we are
aware of our “selves” yet unaware of most of what goes into their formation. Is
this reading too much into one day’s run-of-the-mill experience? When Einstein
began his mathematical work on photons, he did not know that he would come up
with the formula E = mc2. On the day he made his discovery he was not the same
Einstein as the Einstein of the day before, but his equation could not have
been possible without a lot of previous groundwork, so in the course of his
work Einstein was, in effect, changing from day to day, although if he had been
asked whether he was or felt like another person when he finished his essay on
relativity, he probably would have said either no or that he didn’t know.
We
cannot have thought and the means whereby thoughts come about at the same time.
They do not fit into the same time frame, although they occupy the same space.
As we become aware of our thought, our brains are in a certain state which we
do not know, and wouldn’t know even if we were inside a scanning machine and a
neurologist had attached electrodes all over the brain. Our thoughts appear
sequentially in awareness, but in mind they are not the result of a sequential
process. We are not aware of it but as we think all cognitive processes are
constantly active and inter-active at such speed that it would be impossible to
monitor these processes. We could not have at the same time the memory function
and its simultaneous inter-action with logic, which itself would be part of the
memory-function. Perhaps if we went into memory alone we could embrace both
recall and logic, but these are different inter-active functions and awareness
is instantaneous and sequential. We are in effect powerless before the awesome
complexity and rapidity of the mind/brain. Next to this,
awareness/consciousness in itself is a puny cog in cognitive processes,
although it might seem extremely powerful when we become aware of its contents.
It would be as if in understanding the meaning of E = mc2, I, and not Einstein,
were actually inventing the equation. To a certain extent my understanding of
it is indeed, in itself, a significant achievement, but I cannot attribute its
invention to my mind. I can legitimately attribute it to my own thought
processes, assuming I can disengage them from the thought processes of others,
as Einstein, for example, could in discovering his equation, but those are as
opaque to awareness as Einstein’s were to his famous formula. This is not meant
to belittle Einstein or to equate his genius to comparatively ordinary minds,
but to indicate that thinking is so complex in any human being that even an
imaginative mathematical genius cannot fathom its complexities. Even Einstein
would have had to admit that he did not know exactly how and at what point he
made his discoveries. His famous “cosmological constant”, for example, was the
arbitrary expression of his desire for a stationary predictable universe, which
he later implicitly recognized was faulty reasoning, an astonishing lapse in a
career that was marked by extraordinarily lucid explanations and predictions.
If such a superlative genius could lose touch with his own reasoning processes,
what can an ordinary mortal claim for his own thought? This, however, is a
simplistic diversion from our main argument, which does apply equally to
Einstein and to all of mankind and consists in the logical principle that our
brain cannot be in two different states at the same time.
Being
pastness, each instant of the awareness of the past is beyond our manipulation.
There are implicit here two different arguments. There is hardly a difference
between an instant of awareness and the past. No sooner do we write this than
it is already past. We can go back and rewrite our thought but the first draft
itself cannot be modified. Obviously I can erase from the computer memory the
sentence, but the complex and multiple act of having written it is unerasable
and if I am responsible for an error I might have made I will be responsible
for it for all of eternity. If I spelled “Mycenaean” in a book and wrote
“Mycenean” instead, that misspelling will be there as long as the book exists,
and I will be responsible for the error even if the book did not exist. In this
sense, I cannot do anything about the past. But there is more to it than that.
It is not just that awareness becomes “pastness” instantaneously, but also
that, if the mind’s speed is faster than the instant of awareness itself, then
even the instant of awareness is already in the past when it is in the
“present”. A logical act related to memory will have taken less time than the
combined memory/logic operation that resulted in the thought. Before
recognition, which is the briefest aware process we can have (even, or
especially, if it involves non-recognition, as in blurriness), it will have
taken mind/brain various complex processes of infinitesimal duration to get
there. The same logic that applies to a past statement is valid for the
cognitive propositions that made such a statement possible, but carried to a
finer degree of discrimination. In the instant of awareness, since it is the
result of the complex processes that preceded it, we are already in the past,
and not just because we are an instant away from pastness. We live in the past
because we are so near to it and because the instant is indistinguishable from
the past cognitive processes that make it possible.
Since it
is the “system” that makes awareness possible, it is to be doubted that
awareness could affect cognition. This has to mean that awareness is a fiction,
but it is in awareness that I reach this conclusion. Yet it is the subconscious
that makes me aware and this entails that subconsciousness is not creating
awareness but only more subconsciousness leading to the paradox that awareness
is subconscious, which is impossible because we cannot be at one and the same
time aware and unaware. If we are in the subconscious, we are not aware, and if
we are in awareness, then the subconscious exists separately from awareness.
The only possible conclusion is that we are “subconsciously aware”. This, as we
shall see, may not be as oxymoronic as it sounds. But even if we cannot somehow
make the paradox plausible, then we shall have to live with it for good or ill.
Besides what ill can there be in that we live in a state of subconsciousness
which requires awareness only to “feed” itself constantly? Being subconscious
does not mean that we are not specific selves nor that life is a matter of
indifference to us. Nor incidentally will it put us in a state such that pain
or pleasure will not matter to us. “Subconscious awareness” suggests nirvana,
but it isn’t, because nirvana is a condition that is sought and all sentient
beings are what they are without doing anything to be what they are.
A
thought tends to engender other related thoughts and these thoughts feedback on
the original thought. This is going on all the time and sometimes it results in
expression. If we tried to express a thought, we would be faced by the problem
of how to express it because the linguistic possibilities of doing so are
multiple and they may not all have the same connotation. If we paused every
time that we had to express ourselves, we would be in a terrible quandary
indeed. Fortunately, the subconscious does the choosing for us. If we did think
in sentences, we'd know it. It would not be a matter of introspection at all. Words
would flow effortlessly like a stream. If I was thinking about how to develop
this argument, I could say immediately what I was thinking about, but the
likeliest thing is that I would have to pause and recollect my thoughts and put
them into language. Since we think without a direct awareness of the processes
of thought, there must exist means for subconscious cognitive processes
that make possible language, thought, and perception. We do not read by
grasping letters. If we did, errata and accidental misspellings would not get
by. But the subconscious means of the processes of mind do grasp letters. Why
don't they tell us about the misspellings and the errata? Because cognitive
processes rush along without bothering to make perfect sentences. It would seem
as if a set of instructions were overriding another set of instructions. Our
public language is much too slow for the processes of mind. If we stopped to
verbalize a reaction to danger, we could have much cause for regret. There is
evidence for the subconscious language of mind in any activity that involves
muscle coordination. It is possible to take a club, go up to a ball, and swing
away. But it is also possible to rehearse in the mind how to swing at the ball.
If the rehearsal were verbal, I would never get a swing in. When I finally
swing, the rehearsal is over, but even during the swing I will still be trying
to follow certain instructions. These instructions are instantaneous, but they
affect every movement I make. The means of cognition make possible the
acquisition of the public language. But the public language does not
necessarily reflect in its expression all the cognitive processes that go into
its representation. Just as awareness is but the tip of cognition, so the
public language is but the tip of the “mental language”.
We know
that we express ourselves in public, communicative languages and that we can
and often do think in these languages, but we also know that thought is much
too fast to be carried out by language. We know directly that we think—most of
the time quite reliably—without actually forming sentences, or using syntax, or
even often very accurate definitions of terms. We can try to use language to
make thought more “precise”. But what we are doing in such instances is
becoming aware of our subconscious cognitive processes questioning themselves
and going with more rigor over what those processes had yielded before. We do
not intervene in those processes other than having awareness as a conduit for
information or for the subconscious informing awareness that it is delving
deeper into its own processes. From these arguments, it is possible again to
conclude that we think in a language different from the language that we use to
communicate with others. Although inevitably, since this language is functioning
subconsciously, it could be said that communication is not from an awareness to
another awareness but from the subconscious of a specific self to the
subconscious of another. We can further infer that since subconscious reasoning
can sometimes be fuzzy and the public, communicative language can make it more
precise, then we think in some “means” different from the alphabet, the words,
and the syntaxes of spoken or written languages. If these means apply to these
languages, they must also be the means for all subconscious cognitive
processes, including perception and memory and logic. But apart from analogies
and inferences there is very little we can know of the language of mind except
that it must exist. The language-of-mind hypothesis, however, is beset by
problems raised by psycho-neurology, which tends to see specialization in the brain
rather than homogeneity. Without doing an outright defense of the language of
mind—basically because there is really nothing much that can be said of it that
is not pure speculation—we will be doing a critique of neurology as it intrudes
on certain logical deductions about how mind operates in the essay on memory.
In principle, there should be no contradiction between neurology and language
of mind, and if there is, then neurology should claim primacy, unless neurology
makes generalizations about mental states with instruments that are not equal
to the speed at which mind works, somewhat like trying in our times to keep up
with the speed of light.
Some
philosopher has claimed that the crucial question in awareness is “what to do
next?”, and that this makes all the difference from, say, “awareness” in a
thermostat, which doesn’t have to do anything but be sensitive to temperature
changes. But let’s look closely at this proposition. The idea of considering “what
to do next?” implies that at one point in time, when, for example, we have put
the period to the last sentence of a book we were writing, we have an instant of
awareness in which we can do one thing or another. The most obvious thing is
that we go through some “routine” like getting up or relaxing or having a drink
or whatever, none of which involve momentous “conscious decisions”. But let’s
set aside the mundane and consider that eventually we have to decide what
really important task we are going to take up next. Here it seems lies the “hiatus”
where awareness is not just a matter of subconscious cognitive processing and
we are free to choose what chores we are going to assign ourselves. But if the
mundane sequel to the end of the book is “trivially determined”, why should we
assume that the more serious intellectual issue of what work to do next is not
equally determined? The mundane business does not involve any really complex
thought processes, comparatively of course since all thought and all behavior
is complex. But what to do next with our life in a wider sense is so much more
complicated that we needs must think that subconscious determinism here is much
more powerful. Choosing what to do during a break involves a limited range of
possibilities. But it does not commit us to anything in particular. But
choosing what do with our lives, though it probably presents less
possibilities, does commit us for a significant lapse of time. It is not likely
that a novelist will “choose” to become a copy editor. It is more likely that
shehe will want to get on with another novel or go for more experience for
another novel or, if shehe’s novels have been successful, shehe might decide just
to do nothing in particular from a professional point of view. But in all of
these instances, though perhaps less numerous than the mundane possibilities,
the subconscious cognitive processes will involve many more variables, the
thoughts will be more complex, the specific self will carry more weight in
whatever eventually is decided.
But do
we ever really pose the question of “what to do next”? It is possible that if
we are doing nothing in particular, like looking at our fingernails, we might
have some such thought. Various doubts arise here. “Doing nothing in
particular” is an illusion. We could be in a yogic trance, but, unless this
means totally unconscious, it is not very realistic to presume that our brain
is not working as in a more “normal condition”. Ascetics are as prone to itches
as is the rest of humanity, although they are probably better “trained” for
resisting the urge to scratch, which is certainly cognitive: itch-scratch,
logically, unless you like itches. And if the mind is always active, what
objection can there be to that we are thinking besides looking at our fingernails,
which itself is thinking? And if we are thinking of something else besides our
fingernails, it is likely that we are going over in our mind what we are going
to do next without being aware of any such thing. If something or some one
interrupts us, then we will do something that we did not choose. But if nothing
intervenes, we already probably have a good idea of what we are going to do
after looking at our nails. We may have multiple choices, but what we
eventually do will be something that might seem out of the blue but more likely
out of the subconscious.
Let us
suppose that we did ask ourselves the question: “what next?” This indicates
dubiousness and doubt is a cognitive event. Without being aware of it, we have
options, and thus we could say that we can “choose” between different courses of
action. But then the question comes down not to “what next” but to “do we
choose a solution to our state of doubt?” Do we in awareness review successively
a given number of possibilities and choose one among them? Normally, we are not
that methodical. But even if we were, or if at that particular junction we
decided to be methodical, do we really go about choosing from a sequence of
instants of awareness the one that offers the best alternative as to “what
next”? Again, we come against the fact that the process of “choosing” is
subconscious, whether in doing so we went or not through however many instants
of awareness. Perhaps we do opt for an alternative that is better than looking
at our nails—assuming that the latter is a “desirable” state of mind—but we
cannot be in the subconscious in any particular instant of awareness. This does
not mean that we are incoherent: that, for instance, we prefer to commit
suicide than to go on looking at our nails, but it does mean that we will do
something that coheres with our specific selves, which presumably we love and
want to protect, but it does not mean that we are in there choosing what
it is that we are going to be doing, which will be within a certain range of
possibilities except the possibility that it is our awareness that will decide.
Whatever question we can ask that will seem to demonstrate that we are free to
will, we cannot escape the two essential facts: that awareness is instantaneous
and that it is the product of subconscious cognitive processes. Everything else
is verbal games. The question “what to do next?” is not of such a nature as to “mark”
an interruption in the continuous subconscious flow of cognitive processes. It
is a theoretical verbalization of what we "normally" do without at
any moment “injecting” awareness into the subconscious. We do not at any moment
of our conscious lives stop and take stock of what we have in the subconscious
and from this operation proceed to choose what we will do next.
I have
been making many assumptions and deductions, so it may be time for a
recapitulation and a confrontation with views that do not coincide with mine.
An eminent neuro-psychologist Bernard J. Baars has concluded “that consciousness
(in some unspecified fashion) facilitates learning”. If I have the idea that “subconscious cognitive processes determine
awareness”, I do not necessarily have it in the form of the sentence in quotes I
just wrote. Yet it is in my mind and it seems plausible to me. I didn’t just
come up with it through an illumination from somewhere. It was the result of a
great deal of reasoning. Yet such a claim flies in the face of generally held
opinion and of dissimilar assertions by philosophers, certainly closer to
Baars’ somewhat vague but constative statement, which implies that awareness is
much more important for cognition than the lesser role I ascribe to it. In a
very simplified form, my idea is AàB. But I would have to be mad to go around proclaiming this
unless I was sure that the simplified form of the idea really held. Therefore,
I must express what it is “A” and “B” stand for. What do I mean by
“subconscious cognitive processes”? And what exactly is “awareness”? “Subconscious” means that it is not in
awareness, which is easy enough to defend because I know that if memory was not
mostly subconscious my awareness would be overwhelmed by a congeries of
disconnected thoughts. “Cognitive” is slightly more complicated, because if it
is prefixed by “subconscious” it means that cognition, which is its root, is
subconscious, and how can cognition, the summation of our mental powers, be
anything but aware? Yet I know that I know many things of which I am not aware.
I cannot be writing and at the same be thinking of the infinite number of
things I know. So, yes, when written down, “cognition” and “subconscious” are
not incompatible. Finally, there is “processes”, but this is a cinch because
everything is processual, as I know from the simple fact of existing.
“Awareness” is a harder nut to crack. What tack should I take? There is after all
something antinomic between being aware and the subconscious. Awareness surely
is caused, but why can’t one instant of awareness determine the following
instant of awareness without any subconscious intervention? Awareness is
knowing something, but I can “know” many things that are not knowledge at all,
such as the fear of being fired because I am not getting along with my boss.
Being aware of a possible future is not knowledge. Awareness also does not
square well with cognition. The relation is messy and obscure and I want a
bottom-line definition of awareness, beyond even its characterization as the
instant of recognition..
In
English, “consciousness” and “awareness” are often used interchangeably but
“consciousness” has metaphysical connotations absent from mere “awareness”.
Curiously, this distinction does not arise in French or Spanish. In these
languages “awareness” means “knowledge”. In German, the same word,
“Bewußtheit”, designates both “awareness” and “consciousness”. It is, thus, in the language of empiricist
philosophy that “consciousness” has a “special” sense. This subtle distinction
has made it possible for English-speaking philosophers to make of
“consciousness” the “code word” for Cartesianism and dualism. Descartes himself
used the word “âme”, the English “soul”, for what to all intents and purposes
was “consciousness”. Whereas French philosophers can set aside as irrelevant
the French equivalent of the English “consciousness”, this particular term has
been the subject of perhaps the most voluminous production in contemporary
English-speaking philosophy. Another curiosity is that, while “consciousness”
is still being debated in American universities (as far as we know), the
English philosopher Gilbert Ryle, as we argued, disposed of the issue when he applied
the same introspective method as Hume to refute “consciousness”, or, if you
will, the French concept “âme, as awareness of awareness. Awareness implies one
content and no more than one content. Awareness is each instant of itself. Therefore,
the only continuity in awareness has to originate elsewhere than in awareness, which
makes subconscious cognitive processes a legitimate alternative. So through
language, I had gone into my subconscious and cleared up with some precision
what A à B meant. This contradicted
my contention that we have no control over our subconscious cognitive
processes. It also meant that my use of language as an instrument is an aware
cognitive act. The problem that undermined the carefully built analysis was
that language itself is a subconscious cognitive operation. I do not know
exactly how sentences are structured. Everything I had said before could have
been expressed in a different way. There was not one but many possibilities for
grammatical structures, and I remembered that as I wrote I was not constantly
considering many alternatives. Perhaps I was occasionally changing a phrasing
but I was not continually doing this. Still, my argument stood and I had made it
explicit though a conscious/aware process. But if the definition of awareness I
had finally obtained was valid, then it was not a “continuous aware process”
but many instants of awareness the continuity of which, because I had taken
many steps, I could not recall, for every instant of awareness had to originate
in subconscious cognitive processes. These provided the argumentative
continuity and the ability to use language to clear up concepts. It was not
awareness affecting the subconscious but the subconscious affecting itself. The
use of the written language in reasoning can bring issues into focus. It
disciplines thought. But this is not something that language does on top of
what basic cognitive processes do.
We
promised before to show how it was not as absurd as it seems to speak of “unconscious
or subconscious awareness”. Dreams have a coherence of sorts. For all intents
and purposes, they are meaningful. They also exhibit association and other
cognitive processes, as when we dream about things that concern us or that we
desire in “real life”. Cognition necessarily encompasses dreams. But awareness
and dreaming are different, even if both are meaningful. If dreams were
awareness, since in dreaming we are by definition unconscious and awareness and
consciousness are nearly equivalent, then consciousness would be
unconsciousness. It is true that the subconscious "rules" awareness, but
the instant of awareness still exists and it is not at all like the “awareness”
of dreams. In their entirety, individual dreams seem not to be rational, but
the “parts” which conform a dream sequence are at least as meaningful as “reality”.
Since reality is also logical, then the “parts” of dreams are logical. Besides
the “parts” of dream sequences that are meaningful and logical, I can also find
in dreams meaningful “motifs”. These “motifs” give dreams unity and coherence.
And in this sense, it can be argued that dreams are rational even in their
entirety. In sum, I could argue that a “propositional theory of cognition” is
applicable even to dreams, and this is important because if it is to work, “propositionality”
must leave out nothing mental, and it is in this sense that we can extend it to
volition and affects. Dreams could “function” as an argument for “consciousness”
as distinct from mere awareness. Awareness is meaning. When we dream we have
meaning. If awareness is meaning, dreaming is awareness. Ex post facto, we
reach out from awareness to dreams, but we cannot reach out from dreams to
awareness. This reaching out in one direction but not in another could mean
that awake awareness is more than meaning: in fact, that it is “consciousness”.
But there is no basic difference between awareness and consciousness. The
inverse reciprocal relation between dream-awareness and awareness simpliciter
must have another significance. In dreaming I am directly in touch with subconscious
cognitive processes. But dreams do not probe. In awareness, I am determined by
subconscious cognitive processes to become aware of my being determined. There
is a further significance in all this. In awareness we perceive whereas in
dreams we have no “perception” in the conventional sense. They are as if mind
were perceiving itself and it is even possible that in their way dreams are
inputs to cognition. This cannot be proven, but what is self-evident is that
awareness is a conduit from experience to subconscious cognition. Dreams are “unconscious
awareness” with a difference: that awareness is a constant, conscious feeding “conduit”
to the subconscious.
If our
consciousness is just a means to keep “in touch” with the subconscious, then
why do we have affects? Affects distort information. They are often amorphous
and inexplicable. I read about the execution of Saddam Hussein and it provokes
a certain malaise. Now why should this event that has no personal bearing on my
life trouble me? Why should I go back occasionally to it? After all, it is in
the past. It is part of history and I can do nothing about it. Yet the
uncomfortable thought of his execution, the way he was taunted by his
executioners, and the dignified and brave manner in which he faced death, are
pulling at something in my subconscious. The only explanation I can find is
that Hussein’s execution was an assault on my system of beliefs. I believed
from the start that the Second Iraqi war was an unjustified act of imperialist
aggression. I consider George W. Bush to be a nefarious historical figure. Most
importantly, Iraq was better under Hussein, despite his despotic rule, than it
is under the American occupation. I remember reading about a middle-class Iraqi
woman who hated Hussein but dreaded the idea of an American intervention that
would upset not only her life but the entire Iraqi society. It turned out to be
that way. I was totally convinced that Hussein’s execution was unfair. But
still why should I have feelings of regret about it since it doesn’t pertain to
me in any way? I am, incidentally, not the only one to hold to such ideas about
Iraq. But the fact is that I can only speak for myself and those ideas are part
of my specific self, which at any moment in time is a “sum of propositions” in
a hierarchical order. As a specific self, I want to survive as I am. Survival
is universal. And so is self-love. Anything that collides with my specific
self, therefore is a source of affects, which ultimately originate in the
universal desire to survive. The execution of Saddam Hussein did not constitute
a threat to me, but it did collide with my beliefs and, since my beliefs are part
of the definition of my specific self, then this event was, in a remote way, a
threat to my existence. Affects may have a distorting effect on the way that I
perceive the world, but they are, ultimately, the basis for my desire to be in
awareness even if awareness is nothing but a conduit to the subconscious.
For most
people, philosophers in particular included, the problem is that awareness as a
mere instrument of cognition, and not even the most important one, means that
we have no free will, and when this issue comes up philosophers always find
excuses for not taking the actually minimal step between the subconscious as
the active part of cognition and awareness as the acted upon part. One way to
express this hesitation is found in a book titled somewhat like this essay: Blink: the power of thinking without
thinking (2005), by Malcolm Gladwell. He writes: “Every moment—every
blink—is composed of a series of discrete moving parts, and every one of these
parts offers an opportunity for intervention, for reform, and for correction.”
Since the book is mostly anecdotal, Gladwell can be forgiven for pandering to
conventional opinion. Exactly how is it that I can “intervene”, “reform”, or
“correct” a blink? Are we even aware of blinking? Yes, if I concentrate on my
eyelids, but while I am concentrating on my eyelids, which I can do so much of,
what right have I to conclude that it is the act of concentrating, which is not
one act but many acts, that demonstrates free will? Concentration is a
“directed” form of the continuity of awareness. Presumably I can command such a
continuity, but why would I if there were not something compelling it from some
reason? OK, so I want to prove that Gladwell is wrong (or that he is right),
but why would I want one or the other? Then also, blinking is physiological and
there is no way in the world that any one can control it, and if you cannot do
that obviously you do not have control over your “moving parts”.
Various
scientists who consider the possibility of free will discard it. According to
Dennis Overbye, Einstein once said or wrote: “This knowledge of the non-freedom
of the will protects me from losing my good humor and taking too seriously
myself and my fellow humans as acting and judging individuals”. This was of
course pure subjectivism and most humans would not subscribe to such a view. Philosophers
seem particularly reluctant to go as far as Einstein. Ted Honderich invented
something called “psycho-neural pairings” through which he espoused
determinism. It took him all of two volumes and many diagrams and graphs to
defend his thesis which was basically that brain-determinism cannot be
separated from thought even though we have no evidence of thought-determinism. But
then he brought out “hopes and desires” as a way out of absolute determinism.
Somehow it is the future that allows for some degree of freedom. The
physiologist Benjamin Libet discovered that a conscious action was preceded by
a subconscious process. But, like Honderich, he backtracked by attributing to
awareness the ability to override the subconscious. Daniel Dennett, who has described
human beings as “automata” and “zombies”, also believes in a conscious veto
power and in addition a veto to a veto. Like Honderich again, he invoked the
future to “veto” determinism. Another preposterous argument for free will,
based on quantum mechanics, is the argument that our actions are determined but
we cannot predict them. Perception is “determined” in two senses: one, we
cannot modify the subconscious cognitive process, and two, we cannot change the
propositions we have in perceiving. I cannot say I see a car where I see a
tree. But from the determinism in perception I cannot say anything now about
what I will be perceiving next. Reality is one thing and prediction another.
Gravity has always affected light, but it was Einstein who discovered how this
was possible and could be predicted. He did so and amazed the world, which
probably means that knowing the mind is much more complicated than knowing
about the universe.
The
psychologist Jennifer Vendemia used an electronic cap for recording brain waves
that could measure stimulus-response as fast as in 240 to 260 milliseconds. She
claimed that she could anticipate deception before it became aware lying.
Whether she was looking in at the source of lies in the brain or not, whether
in fact there is such a source, can be debated, but she concluded emphatically
that, if she could “read the mind”, then there is no free will. The
experimental psychologist Max Velmans was struggling in an essay published in
1991 with the problem of the relation between awareness and cognition. He gave
subconscious cognitive processes the technical name of “focal attentive
processing (FAP)” and defined it as “whatever processing takes place for
stimuli currently at the focus of attention [before awareness]”. His conclusion
was negative on awareness affecting subconscious cognitive processes, although
some of the arguments he employed to get there seem contestable. In “Is human
information processing conscious?”, his
premise itself—that pre-conscious processing can be as brief as 200 msecs—is
probably wrong. Since we can shift attention during FAP at least every 42
msecs, then processing is much faster than he thinks. It is obvious that
whatever it is that cognitive experimenters are attempting to attain under
laboratory conditions are not even close to the speed with which in reality the
mind works. The impression of normal motion or movement requires
sequences of images at 42 msecs each. All we have during that instant is a
“still”. We are aware of motion, which is processed subconsciously from inputs.
Each image is previously analyzed. The processing of both the images and of
motion are in essence subconscious.
Velmans’ inclination was towards
some role for awareness in cognition. Some of his experiments led him to infer
that, even though it was clear that input analysis can take place pre-consciously,
the “subjects in these experiments are required to process known stimuli, using
well-established skills. To some extent, such `automaticity’ needs to be
acquired. Hence, consciousness may be essential when novel stimuli or skills
are being learnt.” But his experiments kept pointing the other way. “The fact
that a process demands effort does not ensure that it is conscious. Indeed,
there is a sense in which one is only aware of what one wants to say after one
has said it!” Suppose some one asks: “What exactly do you mean by that, doctor?”
You can either repeat what you said or rephrase what you said. In both cases,
you can only do it by going back to the passage, which will not appear as one
block of instantly readable text, but more as successive thoughts. If the
question is in good faith—a snap judgment here is needed—then you have to go
step by step over your argument or word for word over your statements and then
consider alternative expressions or phrasings, but in all cases these will come
up singly and successively and not in a written out, ready-for-reading form. Since
you do not really have the time for an aware consideration of all the
alternatives in detail, you will probably indeed be speaking “off the cuff”,
which means your subconscious is doing the work for you without your being
aware of any such thing. There were nagging doubts. “In principle, therefore,
it might be possible to obtain evidence of focal-attentive processing in the
absence of awareness. In practice, however, a complete dissociation of
consciousness from focal-attentive processing is difficult to achieve, as the
disruption of consciousness is also likely to interfere with at least some
aspects of (normal) focal-attention processing.” If you trip and fall, you will
experience anxiety in less than a millisecond. Here you have “awareness”
without FAP. The fact of the subconscious basis of cognition does not mean that
we can dispense with awareness. There is no contradiction in saying that
awareness is a crucial ingredient of cognition and that it is also only the tip
of cognition. Earth is but a speck in the universe and yet we know this because
humanity on Earth explores the universe. Cognition embraces all basic cognitive
processes. There is no specific process corresponding to awareness per se. As
the tip of cognition, awareness implies the operation of all subconscious
cognitive processes. Since these processes are propositional, the ultimate
definition of awareness is the instantaneous explicitness of subconscious cognitive
propositions.
Velmans tended in another direction
from his previous emphasis on awareness. “The detailed information processing
required to analyze and select among stimuli, or to encode them in memory is
not, by and large, available to introspection, nor is there any awareness of
the processing required to execute a response. Rather, one becomes aware of a
stimulus only after one has analyzed and selected it, and aware of one’s own response
only after one has executed it. This applies not only to simple, automatic
responses…but also to complex, novel, voluntary responses (such as the
production of ‘new speech’).” Our thoughts go into the subconscious not just as
the “contents” of brain cells but as representations or as propositions. In
essence, Velmans was of this opinion but his reasoning sometimes was
inconsistent. “If consciousness does not enter into human information
processing, then the very notion that some of this processing is ‘conscious’
needs re-examination. In retrospect, a process might be said to be ‘conscious’
in three distinct senses. It might be ‘conscious’ (1) in the sense that one is
conscious of the process, (2) in the sense that the operation of the process is
accompanied by consciousness (of its results), and (3) in the sense that
consciousness enters into or causally influences the process. Some processes
(problem solving, thinking, planning, and so on) are conscious in sense (1) but
only in so far as their detailed operation is accessible to introspection. Many
processes (input analysis, motor control, thinking, planning, etc.) are
conscious in sense (2), in so far as they engage focal-attentive processing.
However, no human information processing is conscious in sense (3).” But if (3)
is not possible, then (1) doesn’t make sense. If one is conscious of the
process, then why should one not affect the process? One can certainly modify a
sentence. But one is not conscious of the process at all, but of instants of any
process. And the instants originate in the subconscious, so that by the time
they are conscious they are already in the past.
Velmans was still not giving up on
awareness. “If consciousness does not enter into human information processing,
then processes which allow adaptive functioning in the human brain must be
distinguished from accompanying awareness. If so, information processing models
(and other models) that deal solely with how input is transformed into
behavioural output remain seriously incomplete, for they do not contain
consciousness within their workings.” Awareness is “inside” the brain.
Perception is not the same as memory. So why shouldn’t awareness inhabit the
same “house” as cognitive processes? Alternatively, why is it being assumed that
“cognitive models” do not correspond to brain states? It is not necessary to
have a perfect theory of how cognition and the nervous system relate to believe
on good grounds that cognition is a function of the brain, like secreting bile
is a function of the liver. Mind is both awareness and the subconscious. In
awareness we have the results of subconscious processes. It is awareness that
gives us the clues for the study of neurons. Even this "orienting"
function of awareness is itself a product of the subconscious. Thus, even if we
can claim that we have to have awareness in order to be able to study neurons
and interpret what they do, it is in the final reckoning subconscious cognitive
processes that prompt our knowledge of representation and that orient our
research on brain cells. There is no consciousness different from the instants
of awareness. Assuming a distinction between awareness and consciousness, if we
define consciousness as the awareness of awareness, all we are saying is that
consciousness is the recall of thought (epiphenomenalism).
In “Consciousness, causality, and
complementarity” (1993), Velmans was still defending his basic contention that
awareness had no say in cognition, but this time there were certain modulations
or a softness in the robustness of the 1991 essay, even though he made some
unjustified claims. “In my usage, one cannot be `aware’ of a non-conscious
event; one can speak of ‘subliminal perception’ and ‘unconscious memories’, but
‘subliminal awareness’ and ‘unconscious experience’ are contradictions in
terms.” Dreams are products of cognition and they are “aware”. They are
certainly more real than hypnosis, although admittedly we are truly “aware” of
dreams after they have taken place. At one point he allowed for a patently
incoherent position assumed by the cognitive psychologist Joseph Glicksohn.. “For
[Glicksohn], a ‘conscious process’ is just ‘a cognitive process whose contents
enter awareness’.” If he believed that consciousness is just the result of a
cognitive process, then he would be right. But there is no “conscious process”.
Glicksohn was providing an arbitrary definition of awareness. The contents of a
cognitive process cannot “enter” awareness. It is as if in a computer the RAM
memory became non-selective and if I keyed a period the monitor showed all
punctuation signs in the processor. Alternatively, as if I commanded a “save”
and the computer took an inordinately long time to do it because it was not
saving one file but all the files inside it. Apart from arbitrary, such a
definition implies that there are conscious and non-conscious cognitive
processes and that some cognitive processes never enter awareness, which could
mean that mind is so opaque that it would be impossible to analyze it with any
means that we possess. Implicitly, mind could go dead during sleep, because no
cognitive process it had then would ever surface to mind. In a last-ditch
effort to give awareness a greater cognitive role than it has, Velmans argues
that it involves “information dissemination, a late stage of focal-attentive
processing”. Given the inter-activeness of cognitive processes, it seems more
likely that “information dissemination” is instantaneous from the start of any
cognitive process. The function he conceives is not unlike that of awareness as
conduit for cognition, but it represents awareness as a kind of manager
assigning tasks to subordinates. More, it is almost a throwback to the
Cartesian self looking at a mental stage and directing the proceedings, which
is anathema to cognitivists and to all analytical philosophers of mind.
By the time of that essay, Velmans
was well on his way to rescuing awareness from the clutches of determinism.
This was done in 2003 with the essay “Preconscious free will”. The essay picks
up on the fundamental thesis upheld before: “But you have no introspective
access to the processes that enable you to read. Nor does one have
introspective access to the details of most other forms of cognitive
functioning…Alternatively, if conscious experience results from a mental
process it arrives too late to carry out the functions of that process.” The
basic thesis that consciousness is a result of cognition and that it does not
affect cognition is indisputable. Velmans argues this from what he calls the
complementarity of first-person and third-person accounts. I find the thesis
irrefutable from the temporality of existence. But just as in his 1993 essay
Velmans set up what seemed like an unnecessary confrontation between “representationalism”
and “physicalism”, so now he appeals to experiments by Libet to defend free
will. “However, Libet (1985) found that one’s brain prepares to act not just
before one acts, but before one experiences a wish to act. For example, a
simple motor act such as flexing one’s wrist is preceded by a negative-going
readiness potential (RP) recorded at the scalp by around 550 msecs.
Surprisingly, the RP also precedes the experienced wish to act by around 350
msecs. This suggests that, like the act itself, the experienced wish (to flex
one’s wrist) may be one output from the (prior) cerebral processes that
actually select a given response rather than being the cause of those
processes…In his experiments, the conscious wish to act (W) still preceded the
final motor act by about 150 msecs, which provided an opportunity for the
conscious will to control the outcome of the volitional process by blocking or
‘vetoing’ the process.” Velmans sensibly asks: “Why doesn’t the veto decision
have its own unconscious antecedents, just as appears to be the case for W
itself? If the veto were developed by
preceding unconscious processes, that would eliminate conscious free will as
the agent for the veto decision.” Libet’s straight up answer is a strictly
first-person account (anecdotal): “Every one has experienced having a wish or
urge to perform an act, but vetoed the actual performance of the act.” But
basically, his argument was that during the non-conscious processing of
information there is time for considering alternatives. But from having the
time to choose, it doesn’t necessarily follow that unconscious cognitive
processes are not doing the “choosing”, apart from that the possibility of a
“veto”, under the circumstances described, would also be a determined
subconscious act. Velmans lets Libet off the hook by not refuting the
possibility of such a subconscious space for non-determinism. Libet’s
experiments invite scepticism. Presumably, the readiness potential had to be
preceded by some subconscious cognitive process. I am sitting writing. I know I
can get up and walk around the room and I know that I can go on sitting and
writing. I want to get up and walk around the room. I do it. My RP are (in this
case) two inputs into cognition or two events in a cognitive process. I have no
control on whether I choose one or the other, nor on why there should be these
alternatives and not others (like looking at the ceiling or opening drawers). The
computation that the time between the experienced RP (550 msecs) and the
subconscious RP (350 msecs) left 150 msecs, which afforded time enough for
“veto”. Subconscious RP is probably much less than 350 msecs, which makes the
time for volition greater than Libet says, but below the measure of awareness
that he calculated all was preconscious, subconscious, or unconscious (however
you want to call it) and by definition volition or free will can only operate
in experience and experience is normally the same as awareness.
What seems to bother Velmans about
his theory on consciousness and cognition is that people are being declared
guilty in tribunals when they, in fact, were not in control of their acts. On
this issue we have to distinguish between “volition” and “attribution”. Every
act has to be attributed whether it is free or not. If I kill, I am responsible
for a homicide. Whether I was free or determined to kill makes not one bit of
difference. Courts cannot allow a killer to be on the loose because of the
danger to society. This does not mean that a killer can never be released. A
killer is a specific self. He acted from the “strength” of his specificity. The
specification of the self is an on-going, life-long process. At the very least,
it cannot be denied that experience does not cease as long as one lives. Time
in jail could influence any specific self and its cognitive processes, even
without having to enter the mined field of affects, which are usually a
determining circumstance in homicides and about which it is difficult to make
assessments. Affects signify that a murderer once could murder again, but we
can hope at least that jail time will give any individual’s subconscious
cognitive processes a greater capacity for putting affects under a tighter
control.
It is
the subconscious which determines awareness and not the other way around. Even
when we consciously choose to think in this or that direction, we are still
under the determination of the subconscious. But in all cases there is no
argument for determinism that can make us disbelieve in our ability to be free.
The “will” of the specific self sees itself as the denial of determinism,
whatever arguments we can muster for determinism. Talk of determinism always
tends to trail off into “free-will talk”. “Free will” is embedded in language.
Yet the very strong arguments for determinism—and the crucial one, which is the
absence of a hiatus in existence—mean that linguistic compatibilism is about
the only reasonable position there can exist between determinism and free will.
The past
exists but if we can have it only in instants of awareness, then the past resides
in the subconscious. We remember a great deal of the past, but we cannot have
the past in any instant of awareness. Assuming the inconceivable of having the
past in the instant of awareness, time inexorably imposes that the wholeness of
the past should be broken up into separate, successive instants of awareness,
like a hammer smashing a ball of mercury. The brain cannot express itself no
matter how much we “press” it to do so. Now, this is an obvious exaggeration.
We can ask questions about the brain and we have technological means for doing
do. Experiments on the brain can tell us that, given certain thoughts or mental
states, we can actually perceive where blood is flowing inside the brain, and
so we can say that the brain, in an indirect way, is telling us something about
thought. But such experiments will never tell us anything whatsoever about a
thought that we had as an instantaneous present of awareness. The experimental
exploration of the brain can reveal certain general propositions concerning the
way processes occur in the brain. But, at this stage anyway, it will not give
us precise answers about the specific subconscious cognitive processes that
result in instants of awareness. We have therefore to conclude that recognition
is the result of subconscious cognition over which we have no command and that therefore
we are totally and irrevocably determined. We are even more determined than
Buridan’s ass, who in a famous Medieval Gendanken died of hunger because he
could not choose between two identical bales of hay. In reality, the ass would
be finally be compelled to eat hay and it did exercise an elementary sort of
free will.
What is
it that makes some experimentalists and some philosophers, especially a
philosopher who thinks himself at the cutting of science, such as Dennett, hang
back as if in dread of this conclusion? Velmans argues that
without consciousness “few humans would wish to go on living”. But the fact
that awareness is determined does not mean that it does not exist. According to
this logic, diminished awareness would diminish the principle of
self-preservation. Blind people would be less inclined to live than
normal-sighted people. Dennett is more apocalyptic: “What seems to confront us is a plunge into nihilism and despair”. Granting
that making of awareness a conduit for cognition would seem to make experience
hang on a thread, it is possible to argue that every instant of awareness is
larger than itself. Every instant of every individual is specific. It is
impossible to separate awareness from the specific self. It is our specificity
that is the ground for our self-love and our intense desire to go on existing.
But our specificity does not necessarily mean that its extinction entails
nihilism or the extinction of everything. History certainly goes on and we are
all part of history.
We may
not be aware of how we transcend our selves all the time, but the transcendence
is a part of ourselves. We know that we belong to a family and to a community
and to a country and to a culture. We cannot shed this. Even the hypothetical
“feral boy”—which, incidentally is much less hypothetical than Rousseau’s
“social contract”—must have allegiances of some sort and know that he is more
than himself. But how about a lowly, lonely, penniless individual on the verge
of dying in the street relate to anything? For that we have another argument,
although admittedly we are now in a realm of thought where inferences are not
so compelling as they were in making our deductions about awareness. We are all
survivors. If we exist, it is at the end of a long chain of previous existents.
It would be possible to formulate algorithms to prove that more human beings,
many more, have perished without descendants than those that have survived. We
are not going to attempt such a complex calculation. But just imagine the
following. Up to a certain point in history many more newborns died than
survived. This might have been coeval with the time when human beings
multiplied without restraints of any kind. Perhaps there is no coincidence
between these events. But intuitive logic tells us that each one by itself is
true. Even the miserable individual we began with is as much a survivor as the
mightiest of the mighty. In this sense he deserves equal respect. But does
survivorship contribute in any way to our self-love? If we asked our social castaway whether he
wanted to die, we would not be surprised if he said emphatically “no”. In other
words, this derelict cherishes his miserable specificity as much as the
millionaire that rushes past him in a top-of-the-line Mercedes. But is he aware
that he is a survivor? He certainly must be because surviving is precisely what
he is doing. If improbably he were steeped in history, he could also argue that
begging is possibly, after whoring, the oldest profession.
But let
us return to the specific self as part of history. Birth is the “big-bang” of
cognition. The specific self starts from before the “big-bang”. For something
to be specific it must be determined by specific causes. The specific self
implies determinism. If all cognitive processes were objective, then there
would be universal agreement. Why should the absence of universal agreement
preclude freedom? This argument can only work if we assume a “chain of causes”
and define freedom as obedience to reason. Specificity means deviance from the
logical norm and deviance from the logical norm could mean non-determinism. Awareness
as the tip of cognition is constituted by successive acts of recognition, but
it does not determine the specific self or the choices individuals make. All “determinations”
about the specific self are done in the subconscious. Any other supposition
would imply the impossible feat of simultaneously having two different thoughts
or of being aware of logic even as we do logical operations. From the “historicity
of human events”, we can infer that it is not possible to be engaged in history
and to be determining the course of history at the same time. We cannot both be
part of a larger process and have full control over that process. Since history
is the result of human actions, which are the product of subconscious cognitive
processes, then history itself must be the product of these processes. The “mainstream
of history” is not a conscious choice but the product of the interactive
behavior and thought of individual human beings. Even if it could be possible
to explain the history of mankind from the actions of individual human beings,
we would still be arguing for the operation of subconscious cognitive processes
as they interact and become manifest on a public, collective stage. But history
is not determined by individuals or by fortuitous events. If there is a
"historical engine" it has to be humanity itself, or to be slightly
more precise, the “fundamental aspirations of humanity”—without specification,
we shall consider them as “forces”—as they are expressed through the
subconscious cognitive processes of specific selves. All of history is the
result of these processes and humanity is being driven by “forces” over which
it has no control but which so far seem to favor its survival and its very
gradual improvement, with occasionally major setbacks.
The
subconscious processes that characterize cognition determine the behavior of
individuals. In the aggregate, they determine the course of history. In the
individual, cognitive processes are “imbued” by the principle of the
self-preservation of the specific self. But there does not exist an “aggregate
as such” in history which can be said to correspond to the specific self.
Furthermore, to say that cognitive processes determine history is merely to say
that history is made collectively by human beings. Since the events of history
do not obviously have the preservation of any specific self as an “end in
itself”, the closest correspondence to specific self that there can be “in the
aggregate of history” must be the fundamental aspirations of mankind. Specific
selves do not exist in isolation. They are social beings and they participate
in historical processes. The specificity of self, though innate, is not
entirely self-generated. It is formed through the interaction of the individual
and society. The principle of self-preservation embraces the specific self as
individual and as member of society. The goals of cognition in history are
those that we can be proposed for humanity in general.
Cognition
occurs in the subconscious. Existence is material and its basic imperative is
survival. Judging from what humanity has achieved, subconscious cognitive
processes build up to higher goals from the principle of self-preservation.
These goals are contained in the concept of the fundamental aspirations of
mankind. They can be included in the broad category of “basic social forms”
conforming to the objective of “social openness”. Implicit here is a process
that goes beyond specific selves. The notion that history obeys ultimately “constructive
tendencies” rooted in self-preservation can be associated directly with
subconscious cognitive processes. History is the result of our determined
specific selves through the realization of basic social forms favorable or
inclined towards the general objective of social openness. There is no
incompatibility between the specific self and the fundamental aspirations of
mankind. Self-preservation applies to the individual as a specific self
immersed in society and however modestly contributing to historical processes.
The thesis of the determination of history by the subconscious cognitive
processes of specific selves is based the integration of collective goals as
specific objectives of specific selves.
However,
the “mainstream of history”, which has to involve the future as much as the
past, must be found, if anywhere, in a coherent explanation of why the fundamental
aspirations of humanity must prevail over other historical “forces”. Or
of why social openness and the enhancement of the value of human life have a
better chance than ideological constraints or political despotism. But from the
awareness of historical becoming we can derive no overwhelming demonstration of
why this must be so. “Meaning in history” implies that humanity exists for its
own sake and that history realizes its “meaning” in its own becoming and for
neither of these propositions have we greater "proof" than the
contents of history, whose interpretation can never set itself beyond the
polemics of history. History has no meaning beyond itself and the confirmation
or validation of “meaning in history” depends upon history's becoming. But in
the meantime, at the level of the individual, our specific selves generally
believe that they are doing the best they can and have no doubts about the
worth of their efforts. Even if all of us were adamant determinists, we would
still believe that we have some sort of purpose, if only in having relationships
and families and so on. If we didn’t, we
probably would not go to the bother of doing anything that we aren’t sure will
be adequately rewarded by society. Therefore, either subconsciously or on
occasional instants of awareness, we believe that history has some meaning. And
since we are willy-nilly part of history, then we know without really knowing
that our lives have a purpose even if they are determined and that our instants
of awareness have a “beyondness” that transcends the limitations of our
specificities.
[1]
As we will argue in the
essay on logic, we live in a world of equivalences rather than of relations of identity.
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