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 1

I recently heard Daniel Dennett's explanation of his concept of deepity. It struck me that the concept of free will is exactly such a thing. It is a concept which is trivially true, but, in another sense, is logically ill-formed. The usual debate about free will is whether the concept of such is compatible with a deterministic (or truly random — that is, quantum) universe. Those who believe free will is compatible with a deterministic universe, and that therefore free will is "real" in some sense, are called compatibilists, while those who believe it is not, and that free will is an illusion, are called incompatibilists. The idea that the universe is not limited in this sense, but could in fact go some way other than the way it went is called libertarianism, but I more or less dismiss it out of hand as incoherent, for reasons I shall explain below.

Normally, free will is somehow taken to be a single, monolithic concept which is either true or false, and therefore is argued over. However, it struck me that there are two very different concepts of free will which no one bothers to distinguish (as far as I have seen). These I call phenomenological free will and metaphysical free will. Let us take them in turn.

Phenomenological free will is what we experience whenever we are awake and aware. It is the feeling of making choices, which is obvious and inescapable whenever we experience usual brain function, not under the influence of hypnosis, drugs or derangement of some sort. It is the conscious mind's narration of the things it sees us doing (we are consciously aware of our actions about 500 milliseconds after our brain initiates them). A large function of consciousness, it seems, is to inhibit actions it realizes aren't desirable, but it does not initiate them. Regardless, as far as one can tell (and in as far as there is a real "I" there to do the telling), we choose our actions and build our identities around those choices.

Metaphysical free will is what I call the idea of making "real" choices. That is, it is what explores the world of counterfactuals relative to what we did indeed choose, and decides that, had it wanted to, it could have selected one of those other choices. Alternately, it can be seen as that device which looks at the current state of the world, and picks what future actions would be most beneficial or desirable for the actor. It is, however, never forced to make any particular choice — it could make some wild, unmotivated flight of fancy at any moment (or at least, that must be a serious possibility in order for this style of free will to be worth considering). It is somehow independent of forces in this world, even if the actor himself isn't.

These two types of free will are very different to each other. One is a fact of experience and perception (hence, phenomenological), while the other makes a claim about the very nature of our minds, about what is true of the universe. I will contrast these two views in my next post, and show why one of these must be the case, while the other cannot be.