Jaynesian Consciousness, or Why Consciousness Is Not What You Think It Is

Many people use the term "consciousness" to mean a huge variety of things. In this talk by John Searle, he attributes consciousness to his golden retriever. I have had conversations with people who say that consciousness is a matter of degree, all the way from plants up to humans. The idea that consciousness is somehow a fundamental and pervasive feature of biology is a very common idea — but is simply wrong.

If you've ever driven a car for any length of time, you've almost certainly had the experience of driving for many minutes at a time, and only coming to realize very near the end of your trip that you'd reached your destination. For miles and mile, you monitored traffic, changed lanes, taken turns and exists, all while blissfully daydreaming or listening to your favorite music. The realization that you had arrived might have come as a bit of a shock, a record-skip from the last moment you were conscious of driving to that moment, when you became conscious of it again. The entire time, your brain faithfully carried out all the complex, precise movements required to keep the car on the road and going in the right direction without your conscious awareness.

If consciousness were somehow fundamental to human cognition — or cognition in general — this would not only be impossible, it would not even make sense! However, it is very possible, and extremely common! Nervous habits are often completely outside consciousness until pointed out. The vague recollection of dreams — not to mention their very existence — is another place where consciousness is shown to be fuzzy and transitory. Various drugs that can destroy the ego or cause us to have blackouts are similar. Hypnosis and schizophrenia, phenomena that suppress or eliminate conscious control and replace it with hallucinatory or external control, would be just as absurd. Spirit possession, found in a multitude of cultures, would require actually supernatural explanation, rather than a more prosaic psychological one. The entire notion of inspiration is entirely unrelated to consciousness, in fact! Invention and intellectual discovery, often naively identified with conscious reasoning, is in fact almost always the result of sudden flashes of insight which come upon one in the shower or while taking a walk, rather than consciously worked out piece by piece from premises.

Daniel Dennett is fond of saying that consciousness is an illusion. I think that's too strong. It's more accurate to say that the fundamental and all-encompassing nature of consciousness is an illusion. What seems to us the basic operating principle of the brain is actually a much more limited object. Others subvert reason, logic, memory, understanding and planning to consciousness. However, these are all separate things. The term "consciousness" is best reserved for the self-introspecting ability that seems unique to human. It is that constant stream of language we hear in our heads at all times, almost uninterruptibly, which allows us to form a sort of internal mind-space, and to give ourselves declarative commands in the form of decisions and arguments.

Various animals share almost all the cognitive features of humans in some combination. Dolphins are highly intelligent, playful and social. The other great apes share our sociability, and to some extent our language. Many animals, from chimps to pigeons, can either learn or be taught to recognize themselves is mirrors. Dogs and crows can recognize individual humans and react to each in unique ways. Chimps, crows and some fish make and use tools. Ants, termites, spiders, and birds build homes. In fact, it is extremely difficult to come up with a human faculty which is not also expressed by some animals.

One ability which very probably does distinguish us from all other animals is our ability to model the world around us in certain ways. An important part of brain function in any animal is modeling the world it inhabits. This allows it to plan and execute movement in useful and beneficial ways. Without a mental representation of the world, movement would be meaningless and uncoordinated. An animal's brain must know — that is, represent — the details of its environment and its own body in some way so that it can interact with it. Many intelligent animals, including us, take this a step further. We do not merely build models of our physical environments, but also of our social environments. It must be the case that, up to some point in our evolution, humans went no further than this. But eventually we took it another step further: we made models of mental environments. That is, we created models of how minds work, presumably whenever it was that we figured out that other humans had minds.

And that is exactly what consciousness is. It is the ability to make absract, multi-level models of minds, including our own. This ability is granted to us by the linguistic relationship between sounds and meanings in combination with a cultural focus on self-hood and narrativity ("narrativity" referring to our habit of telling stories about ourselves and events around us regardless of whether such stories actually relate in any way to reality). This ability to simulate the mental world not only lets us generate new ideas and inventions, it also lets us model the inner world of other people, to guess their thoughts and motivations. Here I don't mean empathy, which chimpanzees almost certainly share with us, but rather an ability to very literally read another person's thoughts, to form words in your head which are likely similar in meaning to the words they are forming in theirs.

This analogical mind-space, and the cohesive sense of self that it leads to, was first described by Julian Jaynes in his criminally misinterpreted and completely underappreciated book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Daniel Dennett is one of the few thinkers on consciousness who openly acknowledges Jaynes's influence on his own ideas, but many others have proposed effectively identical characterizations of consciousness, most notably the neuroscientist and philosopher Thomas Metzinger, whose monograph Being No One lays things out in great detail.

The more I come to understand consciousness, the more tentative my grasp on my own consciousness feels. I become more and more aware every day of just how little of my everyday life I am conscious of. Malcom Gladwell's Blink, derided by many as anti-intellectual, is in fact an excellent document on the limits of our conscious thought, and at the same time of the power of our brains as a whole. Thinking, reasoning, learning, talking, inventing, discovering, and, for the most part, acting are all non-conscious events. Consciousness is just a curved mirror held up to our mental world, reflecting itself and its surroundings.

[Edit: Thanks to my friend Rob for pointing out a very important mistake I made, whereby I failed to distinguish modeling the world from modeling the mental.]

Two Types of Free Will, part 3

As my previous post argued, the position that free will is somehow essentially true in a naive sense suffers from the problem highlighted in this Dilbert cartoon. It is an incoherent and meaningless way of talking about free will. However, it seems obvious (to me, at least) that there is some sort of free will at play. Otherwise, why would we even have such a concept? If we were mere automata carrying out our inherent programming, why would be have any reason to think about such a thing as free will? Hence, there is free will in some sense, or what I defined as phenomenological free will.

The description of phenomenological free will I gave in my first post on the subject relied heavily on the concept of consciousness, and I think it is exactly consciousness that makes free will a valid concept. As I will go to some length to describe in a future post, consciousness is the self-reflective model of the world we use to predict the future, including the future of our own mental states. It is also the tool by which we invent a narrative for the events that go on around us, sometimes referred to as confabulation. We instantly and instinctively come up with stories about our actions, thoughts, motivations and surrounding, often with absolutely no relation to truth or reality. Many cognitive fallacies are driven by the storytelling ability, such as the fundamental attribution error. We prefer reasons to be narrative than empirical. We need to know why things happen, not just that they do, even (especially?) if the why doesn't exist or is completely made up.

This exact ability applies as much to ourselves as to other people or objects. We come home from a long day at work and yell at our significant other over some petty transgression, and rationalize it by saying that they were annoying and we were tired and it's not our fault anyway. Every non-philosopher has said to themselves that they never intended to yell, and apologized afterwards. However, I contend that that impulse to deny volition isn't a mere face-saving exercise, but is rather precisely correct. We yelled completely automatically, because that is what our brain decided was the correct behavioural response to the situation. Our confabulation ability, however, even as it watched us yelling, was coming up with retroactive reasons to start yelling, and since we became consciously aware of yelling at the same time as we became conscious of our confabulation (since the confabulation is, in a very important sense, our consciousness) we go on to believe that we chose to yell of our own free will.

If we were less tired when we came home from work, our conscious mind might have been quick enough to notice that we were getting ready to yell, and would have stopped us doing so. That, it seems,  is another function of consciousness (although, of course, not exclusively of consciousness). Consciousness allows us — if we have time — to stop an action we notice we are about to start. When you reach for a hot skillet while cooking, you don't stop reaching (and thereby prevent burning your hand) until you actually look over and become aware of what you are about to do. Most telling of all, sometimes your don't stop reaching! You helplessly watch yourself proceed to grasp the burning hot skillet and burn your hand! Where is your free will then? This is a case of your brain going about the work it knows it needs to do, completely outside your conscious control, and your consciousness not working fast enough to stop it making a grave (and painful) mistake.

I won't delve into what "we" and "chose" refer to in the above paragraph (as those are both profound questions in their own right), but on the assumption that whatever it is that we refer to when we say "I" is a subset of the function of our brain, we can say that "we" are capable of contributing some influence on our actions, but that for the most part our brain goes about it's business completely without "us", until some sort of conscious decision needs to be made — perhaps one too complicated for our animal brain to figure out on its own. However, we should not despair! After all, "our" interests are almost always in line with that of our brain and body. So the limited, phenomenological sense in which we have free will is enough, even if it's a confabulation. For myself, I'm willing to trust my brain to take care of itself, and it's passenger, "me".