Conscious minds are potentially rational, informed by morality, and qualia-laden. Unconscious minds aren’t.
Your entire argument for preferring conscious over unconscious minds is this last quick throw away sentence? That’s it? Come on, why can’t unconscious minds be rational, informed by morality, or qualia-laden? And why are those the features that matter? Are you really implying this is so completely obvious that this one quick sentence is all that needs to be said? Declaring conscious goals to be the goals of the “person”, versus unconscious goals as goals of the genome, just presupposes your answer.
I guess I did consider it that completely obvious. If it’s causing so much controversy, maybe I need to think about it more.
I’m defining my “conscious self” as the part of my mind that creates my verbal stream of thought and which controls what I believe I would do if I had infinite willpower. I’m defining “unconscious self” as the source of my inability to always go through with my conscious mind’s desires.
By definition, my unconscious mind has no qualia / experiences / awareness, because if it did it would be part of my conscious mind (I suppose it’s possible that it is a “different person” who has experiences that are not my experiences, but I have never heard anyone propose this before and don’t know of any evidence for it.)
When I use the word “I”, I refer to the locus of my qualia and experiences, and thus to my conscious mind. I have no selfish reason to care about my unconscious mind, because its state as happy or unhappy has no relationship to my state as happy or unhappy except insofar as the unconscious mind can influence the conscious mind. And I have no moral reason to care about my unconscious mind, because in my moral system only aware beings deserve moral consideration; the unconscious mind has no more awareness than a rock and deserves no more moral consideration than a rock does.
Along with my qualia, I identify with my rationality. My rationality is what tells me that there’s very probably no such thing as ghosts. This satisfies my conscious mind, which then accepts that there’s no such thing as ghosts. It does not satisfy my unconscious mind, which continues to make me flee haunted mansions or sleep with the lights on or something. My rationality is what tells me that I should ask that girl out because the worst she could do is say no. My conscious mind accepts that. My unconscious mind continues to use all of its resources to hold me back from asking.
It seems vanishingly unlikely that my unconscious actually has as supergoals “Flee haunted mansions” and “Never ask girls out” and is rationally achieving them. It seems much more likely that the unconscious is enacting genetic directives like “Avoid danger” and “Avoid taking risks that could lower your social status”, but is too irrational to realize that although equivalents of these situations might have been problems in the EEA, they are no longer problems today. It thinks that “Flee haunted mansions” and “Never ask girls out” are appropriate subgoals of the supergoals “Avoid danger” and “Avoid taking risks that could lower your social status”, but in fact they aren’t. Since it’s too dumb to realize this, I feel suitably superior to it to ignore its opinions.
The same is true of morality. My unconscious is what tells me to value the life of a photogenic American more than the life of a starving Ethiopian, to value the life of one specific person more than the life of fifty statistical people, to refuse to push the fat man onto the tracks in the trolley problem no matter how many lives it would save, et cetera. If another person had this morality, I wouldn’t respect it in them, and if my own unconscious has this morality, I don’t respect it in it either.
Let me also admit that I have a bias here. I’ve got obsessive-compulsive disorder. It means that my unconscious mind frequently tells me things like “Close that door there eighty two times, or I will throw a fit and not let you feel comfortable for the rest of the day.” I know that feeling is caused by miswired circuits in the basal ganglia. Why should I give miswired circuits in the basal ganglia the same respect as I give myself, a full intelligent human being?
All of my other unconscious urges seem closer to that urge to close the door eighty-two times than they do to anything rational or worth respecting.
Since it’s too dumb to realize this, I feel suitably superior to it to ignore its opinions.
Which is why you then experience akrasia. Or, if I was going to anthropomorphize(?), I’d say, “which is why it feels entitled to ignore your opinions right back”. ;-)
See, “your” opinions don’t count for all that much in what you actually do. If you want to change your behavior, it’s your “unconscious” opinions that you need to change. But you won’t change them without first being aware of them, and if you keep the attitude you have, you’ll have no real inclination to pay attention to them or seriously consider them when designing for your requirements… thereby ensuring that your unconscious mind will be stuck with low-quality ways of getting those requirements met!
In other words, the reason your unconscious desires have such poor quality of thought-throughness and execution is precisely because you refuse to consciously participate in the process.
The words “conscious” and “unconscious” are widely used; I don’t think it helps for you to make up your own definitions. Your evidence about the rationality and morality of your conscious mind come many from your personal conscious beliefs about those features within yourself; these could easily be biased and self-serving. I’m still not entirely clear on what qualia mean, but from what I do understand about them I don’t see why the parts of your mind other than the part I’m talking to couldn’t have them.
I thought I was listing the standard definition of “conscious” and “unconscious” in a way that made it clearer why they led to my conclusion. If you have a different definition, what is it?
My beliefs about the rationality and morality of my unconscious mind do come from my conscious mind, this is where all my beliefs come from. When I say that a creationist is less rational than I am, or a Nazi is less moral than I am, I’m using those same beliefs from my conscious mind, and they are subject to the same biases. I have to either forfeit my right to judge entirely, or use those same judgments to judge my unconscious. I’ve learned (partly from you) ways to try to be less biased, and I try to use them here, but in the end all I have is reflective coherence
Just to clarify your position, are you suggesting I have a moral duty to respect my unconscious mind’s preferences, in the same way I would have to respect the preferences of another person? Or are you suggesting it would benefit my conscious mind to have inner peace?
So to summarize, you think your conscious mind is more rational, moral, and qualia-full than your unconscious mind, and the evidence you cite for these conclusions is: your conscious mind has these opinions. Have I got this right? Any idea what opinions your unconscious mind has on these matters?
“You think you’re more likely to be correct about evolution than a creationist, and the evidence you cite for this conclusion is that this is your opinion.”
Yes, it’s my opinion. But it’s my opinion for reasons. I thought I gave some good reasons why I thought my conscious mind makes better decisions than my unconscious. You rejected those because it was my conscious mind giving them. But if that were sufficient criteria to reject reasons, you would have to reject everyone’s reasons on any subject, from evolution to the roundness of the Earth.
Even aside from all those reasons, I haven’t heard any reasons to think the unconscious is aware, rational, or morally reflective, and I think the burden of proof is on that position, since it would basically be saying there’s a second person inside my head.
As for what opinion my unconscious mind has, yes, I have some idea. I predict it has no opinions at all, and is more of a collection of drives, instincts, and processes than the sort of entity that forms rational opinions on complicated issues. I doubt my unconscious “disagrees” with me about this any more than my kidneys disagree with my position on tax reform, or my tibia disagrees with my interpretation of quantum mechanics.
If I had multiple personality/dissociative identity disorder, I would be prepared to treat my alternate personalities as worthy of respect and cooperation. But I think my unconscious is probably more like a kidney or a tibia than like a whole other personality. I realize this is a factual claim, and am willing to change my mind if I hear evidence that suggests otherwise.
I didn’t see you offering reasons—I just saw you declaring that in general the conscious is more rational and moral, this conclusion being so obvious it didn’t need reasons. You later gave specific examples of beliefs in yourself where your conscious part thinks your conscious beliefs are more correct and more moral than your unconscious beliefs, but surely you can’t expect that to be considered a sufficient argument about the general trend in all people on all topics.
I do think you could stand to read a bit more about the unconscious; I think you will find it far more complex and capable than you realize.
Things I gave as evidence: the logical inconsistency of unconscious mind having conscious experience, irrationality of unconscious mind continuing to pursue subgoals when clearly no longer connected to supergoals, unconscious’ vulnerability to proximity/scale biases when dealing with morality, and several others. I don’t see how any of these can be dismissed as just “my conscious part thinks my conscious beliefs are more correct” with anything other than a Fully General Counterargument.
I’ve read plenty about the unconscious, and I admit it’s astonishingly complex and capable. So are honeybees. But when bees perform unbelievably complicated tasks, I don’t assume they therefore have human-level intelligence, and I think the unconscious’ actions are more like the honeybees’ than people’s.
However, if there’s something you think I should know more about, why not recommend me specific articles, authors, or books?
irrationality of unconscious mind continuing to pursue subgoals when clearly no longer connected to supergoals, unconscious’ vulnerability to proximity/scale biases when dealing with morality, and several others.
The conscious is guilty of these too.
I’ve read plenty about the unconscious, and I admit it’s astonishingly complex and capable. So are honeybees. But when bees perform unbelievably complicated tasks, I don’t assume they therefore have human-level intelligence, and I think the unconscious’ actions are more like the honeybees’ than people’s.
Okay, but carrying the analogy over, I’m sure you also don’t trivialize the value of honey!
However, if there’s something you think I should know more about, why not recommend me specific articles, authors, or books?
You could start with making yourself aware of the non-conscious mind’s ability to solve CAPTCHAs, an AI-complete problem, and current conscious minds’ inability to figure out how they do it with enough clarity to re-implement it in software.
Actually, it’s funny you mention CAPTCHAs as your example. If you’re going to go that far, why not also attribute skill at chess to the unconscious? After all, it’s got to be the unconscious that screens out most of the several dozen possible chess moves each turn and lets your conscious concentrate on the few best, and you can generalize from chess to practically all matters of strategy. Or for that matter, how about language? All my knowledge of English grammar was purely unconscious until I started studying the subject in high school, and 99% of my grammar use still comes from there.
So the issue’s not whether it can perform complex tasks. I don’t know exactly what the issue is, but I think it connects to the concept of “personhood” somehow. I question whether the unconscious is more than a collection of very sophisticated mental modules, in the same way that a bird’s brain may have a flight dynamics module, an astronomical navigation module, a mate-preference-analysis module, and so on.
The computing hardware of my brain contains a program for recognizing letters, a program that detects potential mates and responds with feelings of lust, a program that interacts with my reward system in such a way as to potentially create alcoholism, and so on. They’re all computationally very impressive. But I don’t see why I should assign them moral status any more than I would feel morally obligated to listen to a laptop on which I had installed a program that detected the presence of beautiful women nearby and then displayed the words “mate with this woman”. I don’t want to privilege these programs just because they happen to be located inside a human brain and they get reflected glory from some of the other things human brains can do.
To make me want to assign them moral status, you’d have to give me evidence that there was something that it felt like to be my lust. This seems kind of category-error-ish to me. I feel my lust, but my lust itself doesn’t feel anything. You may feel sorry for me for having to deal with my lust, but feeling sorry for my lust because I don’t choose to satisfy it is in my opinion a waste of sorrow. It’s also an infinite regress. If I feel unhappy because I have unfulfilled desire, and my desire feels unhappy because it’s unfulfilled, does my desire’s unhappiness feel something? Why stop there?
I have a feeling this problem requires more rigor than I can throw at it right now. I’ve been trying to think about it more clearly so as to hopefully eventually get some top-level posts out of it, but this is the best I can do at the moment.
I’ll bite the bullets in your first paragraph. So chess also relies on non-conscious skills. What trap did I just fall into?
I don’t see why I should assign them moral status any more than I would feel morally obligated to listen to a laptop …
There is a major difference between your unconscious mind and a laptop with the same output: specifically, the unconscious mind has a direct, seamless, high-bandwidth connection to your mind. When you recognize a face or a letter, you don’t have to pass it to a laptop, look at the output, and read the output. From your conscious mind’s perspective, you just get insta-recognition. This makes it more valuable that a laptop—in all senses—just as faster mental addition is better than a hand calculator that computes with the same speed.
If and when someone makes a machine that can do these tasks faster, and still interface seamlessly, in the unconscious’s stead, then you will be justified in trivializing the latter’s value. Just like you would feel less bad (though not completely indifferent) about the extinction of honeybees if honey could be more efficiently sythesized.
The only case where the above reasoning doens’t apply is, as you point out, in values. Why is the unconscious mind’s decision of values, er, valuable? Why are you morally bound to its decrees of lust? There answer is, I don’t know. But at the same time, I don’t know how you can clip out the lust while retaining “you”—not given your existing brain’s architecture. That is, I disagree that the brain is as modular as you seem to think, at least if that’s what you meant by the use of “modules”.
And remember, pure value judgments are only a small fraction of its outputs.
Re: I question whether the unconscious is more than a collection of very sophisticated mental modules, in the same way that a bird’s brain may have a flight dynamics module, an astronomical navigation module, a mate-preference-analysis module, and so on.
...and what do you think your conscious mind is, then—if not a collection of sophisticated mental modules?
Wikipedia gives Fodor’s list of eight characteristics of “mental modules”, which include “domain specificity”, “fast speed”, “shallow output”, “limited accessibility”, “encapsulation”, et cetera, and quotes someone else as saying the most important distinguishing feature is “cognitive impenetrability”.
In other words, “module” has a special definition that doesn’t mean exactly the same as “something in the mind”. So when I “accuse” the unconscious of being “modules”, all I’m saying is that it’s a bunch of single-purpose unlinked programs, as opposed to the generic and unified programs that make up the conscious mind. This seems relevant since it makes it harder to accept the idea of the unconscious as a separate but equal person living inside your brain.
If there are other definitions of “module” that include anything in the mind, and you’re using one of those, then yes, the conscious mind is a module or collection of modules as well.
In some respects, consciousness is largely a perceptual filter—the attention filter—whose role it is to block out most sensory inputs from most systems most of the time. From that perspective, the contents of consciousness primarily consist of the outputs of normally-unconscious modules. The bit of the mind that switches attention around might itself be relatively small—and gains the illusion of size by being able to illuminate many areas of the mind—by damping down perceptions from everywhere else.
Anyway, you might have a case that consciousness is somehow “less modular” than all the other parts of the mind.
This whole “identifying with consciousness” business is totally bizarre to me. I hate to come on with the self-help—but: consciousness is tiny! You are so much more than that! Please repeat to yourself 1,000 times—“I am not my conscious mind!” The idea that you are your consciousness is an illusion created by your ego—which thinks it is the most wonderful thing in the world—that everything revolves around it—and that it is you. If you get some perspective, you should be able to see what utter nonsense that is.
The bit of the mind that switches attention around might itself be relatively small—and gains the illusion of size by being able to illuminate many areas of the mind—by damping down perceptions from everywhere else.
And the PCT hypothesis for why this is so (predating the Society of Mind by a decade or so), is that consciousness is effectively the debugger or test rig for the rest of the brain: a tool whose job is the tuning, adjustment, and extension of the brain’s unconscious control systems. The conscious mind is heavily engaged in any sort of skill acquisition, “noticing” what perceptions are associated with success or failure, and this noticing process is key to wiring up new control circuits.
From this perspective, consciousness is effectively an on-call maintenance person, a tech support rep for the unconscious. Which provides a good evolutionary reason for “higher” animals to have higher degrees of consciousness; the more flexible the creature, the more advanced the tech support required. ;-)
That humans have decided to rebel and take over the company instead of functioning in a strictly support capacity is a separate issue.
And when the revolution isn’t going so well, we call it “akrasia”.
So the key to a smooth takeover is realizing that if the unconscious machinery isn’t working well, then you will suffer right along with your unconscious. You need a win-win solution, and the unconscious is pretty easily satisfied, being just a big dumb array of thermostats and all.
An array which—being that you’re its tech support rep—you can actually rewire. In fact, most of what’s in there, you consciously put there at some point, or at least didn’t object to.
But if you treat it like it’s an independent mind—which it isn’t—and an enemy (which it also isn’t) whose demands should be disregarded, then you’re never even going to perceive what is actually going on in there, and therefore won’t be able to tell how to change any of it. And you’ll just keep fighting, instead of debugging.
I think we agree. Your statement that the unconscious is “just a big dumb array of thermostats” is just what I was trying to get across, plus as you said that it isn’t an independent mind.
I interpreted Robin (I’m still not sure if I’m right) as suggesting the unconscious is a full and separate mind whose preferences deserve respect for the same reason you’d respect another human’s preferences. So that, for example, if you wanted to stay sober but your unconscious wanted to drink, you “owe” it to your unconscious to compromise, in the same way you’d be a bad friend if you didn’t take a friend’s preferences into account. All I am trying to say is that the unconscious doesn’t deserve that kind of respect.
If you’re saying that my conscious mind can achieve its own goals better by working with the unconscious in some particular way, well, you’re the expert on that and I believe you.
So that, for example, if you wanted to stay sober but your unconscious wanted to drink, you “owe” it to your unconscious to compromise, in the same way you’d be a bad friend if you didn’t take a friend’s preferences into account. All I am trying to say is that the unconscious doesn’t deserve that kind of respect.
If you’re saying that my conscious mind can achieve its own goals better by working with the unconscious in some particular way,
Yes. The reason I argued with your notion that you shouldn’t pay any attention to your unconscious goals is because, with relatively few exceptions, your unconscious goals are your goals.
Generally, they’re either re goals you share with your unconscious (like staying alive), or goals you put in there, based on what you thought was useful or valuable at some point in your life. Once such goals are acquired, any action patterns that lead towards those goals tend to stick until better action patterns are learned, or the goal is consciously deactivated.
But it isn’t enough to say, “I don’t want X any more”, when you don’t actually know what, precisely, X is. That’s why you actually do need to pay attention to your unconscious goals, so that you can either find alternative ways to satisfy them, or verify that in fact, you no longer require them to be satisfied on your behalf.
Think of it as a safety interlock of sorts, that allows you to maintain a sincere verbal belief and expression that you don’t want X, while leaving the machinery in place to nonetheless acquire X without your conscious knowledge or consent.
To borrow the metaphor of the Sirens, your unconscious won’t untie you from the mast until you stop fighting to get free. When you once more become the person who ordered yourself tied to the mast in the first place, then and ONLY then will your unconscious accept a reversal of your original orders.
That’s why you need to pay attention to the goals, so you can step into the mental shoes of the “you” who put the goals in in the first place, and then either reconsider the original goal, or find a better way to get it that doesn’t have side effects.
But unless you can actually acknowledge the desirability of the goal in question, your unconscious effectively assumes you’re merely under social pressure to demonstrate your desire to adhere to the ways of the tribe, and ignores your attempt to give it “new orders”.
This whole “identifying with consciousness” business is totally bizarre to me. I hate to come on with the self-help—but: consciousness is tiny! You are so much more than that! Please repeat to yourself 1,000 times—“I am not my conscious mind!” The idea that you are your consciousness is an illusion created by your ego—which thinks it is the most wonderful thing in the world—that everything revolves around it—and that it is you. If you get some perspective, you should be able to see what utter nonsense that is.
Sounds like an outside the box box. So I have a job interview tomorrow morning and my conscious mind is telling me to go to sleep early, but my unconscious keeps me up worrying and watching TV until midnight. Should I respect the secret wisdom of the unconscious mind that my deluded ego-self is keeping me from understanding, or should I shut up and figure out some way to get to sleep?
I like Buddhism. I meditate and I’m very interested in exploring the depths of my unconscious mind and possibly at some point dissolving my ego and achieving full awareness, whatever the heck that means. But the “unconscious” referred to in the original post is what’s telling the drunkard to get another shot of whiskey. I don’t think the Buddha would approve of that particular manifestation of it any more than anyone else, and all I’m saying is that this drunkard is justified in being against this desire, rather than thinking that since it’s their unconscious mind they have to accept it.
I feel like I already addressed such issues when I wrote: “We do not have to choose between these two theories.” Sometimes the conscious goals are best, and sometimes the unconscious ones are. You have given some examples of the former, but there are also examples of the latter.
Just because your conscious mind isn’t aware of experiences by your unconscious mind doesn’t mean they don’t exit. And just because your unconscious is subject to some biases doesn’t mean your conscious mind does better on average.
I don’t disagree with any of that, but it’s all phrased sort of as “you can’t prove it doesn’t.” What should make me single out the hypothesis that it does as worthy of further consideration?
I don’t know how else to say it: the things you point to as evidence supporting your claims just don’t actually offer substantial support for those claims. To support claims about the relative features of two systems you need relative evidence; absolute evidence about one system just isn’t very relevant.
Maybe individual honeybees aren’t very intelligent, but hives are moreso. Hopefully Anonymous often makes a similar point about markets, corporations or other collective entities and suggests some might even be (or become) conscious. I don’t really care much about consciousness, but viewed as persisting and replicating entities they might be lumped in with other life (just like multicellular and unicellular life are).
The conscious mind does some pretty stupid things too. Like becoming a catholic priest. That sort of thing consigns your potentially-immortal essence that’s responsible for your very exisence to the trash bin.
If this is a battle to see which system is the more stupid, we could be looking at examples of insanity from both sides all day.
My beliefs about the rationality and morality of my unconscious mind do come from my conscious mind, this is where all my beliefs come from.
I’d dispute this. Just as an example, it is your unconscious mind which provides the processing power for you to read this statement, to understand spoken words, etc. It is largely your unconscious mind which declared some words interesting and others boring. It is your unconscious mind which declares things pleasant (and therefore morally good if you value hedonism). It is your unconscious that contains mirror neurons, without which your morality might be rather different. It is your unconscious that remembers and forgets, though with repeated effort and a consequent use of willpower your conscious can demand a few specific facts be remembered. Your conscious mind may have devised your moral system, but where did the initial values you seek to maximize come from?
I have to either forfeit my right to judge entirely, or use those same judgments to judge my unconscious.
Does it do you any good to judge your unconscious? If you could accomplish more of your conscious goals if you had more willpower, perhaps you could accomplish more of your conscious goals if you found a way to spend less willpower fighting your unconscious.
I know that feeling is caused by miswired circuits in the basal ganglia. Why should I give miswired circuits in the basal ganglia the same respect as I give myself, a full intelligent human being?
But your rational/conscious/whatever mind is also made of neurons, and yet that makes mistakes, confuses morality etc, and does things you know aren’t right. Why does that get described as ‘a full, intelligent human being’ while your unconscious mind is just basal ganglia?
My rationality is what tells me that I should ask that girl out because the worst she could do is say no. My conscious mind accepts that. My unconscious mind continues to use all of its resources to hold me back from asking.
All true enough, but to go on and say that one is ‘better’ or ‘righter’ is not as trivial as you seem to assume. If your supergoal is ‘get laid’ then asking her out is the correct decision. If ‘don’t look silly’ has more utilons in your head, then that’s correct. If you want to argue that 1 ‘conscious’ utilon is worth more than 1 ‘unconscious’ utilon, then that’s fine, but you’ll have to demonstrate how and why.
Yvain, can you re-summarise your argument drawing better boundaries than ‘conscious’ and ‘unconscious’, and without things like ‘intelligent, rational human being’ to describe parts of your head that, to an unbiased observer, look a lot like other parts? If not, perhaps the conscious/unconscious boundary you’re trying to draw is a false (though highly intuitive) one.
Drawing conclusions from what little neuroscience I’ve managed to overhear, the conscious mind isn’t even the part where you live most of the time. It fires up when you’re paying it attention. Instantaneous experience (“qualia”) exists outside it except the ephemeral experience of being conscious. Playback experience exists inside but references outside it. However it’s the part where your human-level intents exist. If all the rest of the brain were copied to a sim, but not the conscious mind, I think you’d have no difficulty labeling that “not me”. Miss a comparable sized chunk of your unconscious, and you might not even notice.
There’s a series of posts on the foolishness of “qualia” here. I agree with it and share the low-regard for philosophy also found there (relevant for this post, that would also be low relative to cynical economics). I also think what pjeby said above makes sense. The common thread being to find little significant in what we call “consciousness”, preventing it from holding privileged status.
That traditional anecdote (and its modified forms) only illustrate how little the pro-qualia advocates understand the arguments against the idea.
Dismissing ‘qualia’ does not, as many people frequently imply, require dismissing the idea that sensory stimuli can be distinguish and grouped into categories. That would be utterly absurd—it would render the senses useless and such a system would never have evolved.
All that’s needed to is reject the idea that there are some mysterious properties to sensation which somehow violate basic logic and the principles of information theory.
My understanding of qualia is that mysterious is not a definitional property, i.e. “Qualia can be explained in a reductionist sense” is not a self-contradictory statement. The existence of qualia simply means that sense-experience is a meaningful event, not that it is a supernatural one.
My view is that Mary’s Room is fundamentally mistaken; what red looks like is a fact about Mary’s brain, not about light of a certain wavelength. Mary can know everything there is to know about that wavelength of light without knowing the experience of a certain combination of neurons firing. Since we don’t actually live in Mary’s brain, we can’t understand the qualia of “Mary’s brain being stimulated by red light”, but this is a limitation on our brains, not a “mystery.” Perhaps a conscious being could exist that could construct others’ brains and experience their qualia; we just don’t know. But still, the fact that qualia are a potentially non-replicable hardware feature does not make them somehow supernatural.
I take a different but compatible objection to Mary’s Room—that is, as Mary is said to know everything there is to know about the color red, she therefore knows exactly what it would be like to experience it, and so is not surprised.
All that’s needed to is reject the idea that there are some mysterious properties to sensation which somehow violate basic logic and the principles of information theory.
Your entire argument for preferring conscious over unconscious minds is this last quick throw away sentence? That’s it? Come on, why can’t unconscious minds be rational, informed by morality, or qualia-laden? And why are those the features that matter? Are you really implying this is so completely obvious that this one quick sentence is all that needs to be said? Declaring conscious goals to be the goals of the “person”, versus unconscious goals as goals of the genome, just presupposes your answer.
I guess I did consider it that completely obvious. If it’s causing so much controversy, maybe I need to think about it more.
I’m defining my “conscious self” as the part of my mind that creates my verbal stream of thought and which controls what I believe I would do if I had infinite willpower. I’m defining “unconscious self” as the source of my inability to always go through with my conscious mind’s desires.
By definition, my unconscious mind has no qualia / experiences / awareness, because if it did it would be part of my conscious mind (I suppose it’s possible that it is a “different person” who has experiences that are not my experiences, but I have never heard anyone propose this before and don’t know of any evidence for it.)
When I use the word “I”, I refer to the locus of my qualia and experiences, and thus to my conscious mind. I have no selfish reason to care about my unconscious mind, because its state as happy or unhappy has no relationship to my state as happy or unhappy except insofar as the unconscious mind can influence the conscious mind. And I have no moral reason to care about my unconscious mind, because in my moral system only aware beings deserve moral consideration; the unconscious mind has no more awareness than a rock and deserves no more moral consideration than a rock does.
Along with my qualia, I identify with my rationality. My rationality is what tells me that there’s very probably no such thing as ghosts. This satisfies my conscious mind, which then accepts that there’s no such thing as ghosts. It does not satisfy my unconscious mind, which continues to make me flee haunted mansions or sleep with the lights on or something. My rationality is what tells me that I should ask that girl out because the worst she could do is say no. My conscious mind accepts that. My unconscious mind continues to use all of its resources to hold me back from asking.
It seems vanishingly unlikely that my unconscious actually has as supergoals “Flee haunted mansions” and “Never ask girls out” and is rationally achieving them. It seems much more likely that the unconscious is enacting genetic directives like “Avoid danger” and “Avoid taking risks that could lower your social status”, but is too irrational to realize that although equivalents of these situations might have been problems in the EEA, they are no longer problems today. It thinks that “Flee haunted mansions” and “Never ask girls out” are appropriate subgoals of the supergoals “Avoid danger” and “Avoid taking risks that could lower your social status”, but in fact they aren’t. Since it’s too dumb to realize this, I feel suitably superior to it to ignore its opinions.
The same is true of morality. My unconscious is what tells me to value the life of a photogenic American more than the life of a starving Ethiopian, to value the life of one specific person more than the life of fifty statistical people, to refuse to push the fat man onto the tracks in the trolley problem no matter how many lives it would save, et cetera. If another person had this morality, I wouldn’t respect it in them, and if my own unconscious has this morality, I don’t respect it in it either.
Let me also admit that I have a bias here. I’ve got obsessive-compulsive disorder. It means that my unconscious mind frequently tells me things like “Close that door there eighty two times, or I will throw a fit and not let you feel comfortable for the rest of the day.” I know that feeling is caused by miswired circuits in the basal ganglia. Why should I give miswired circuits in the basal ganglia the same respect as I give myself, a full intelligent human being?
All of my other unconscious urges seem closer to that urge to close the door eighty-two times than they do to anything rational or worth respecting.
Which is why you then experience akrasia. Or, if I was going to anthropomorphize(?), I’d say, “which is why it feels entitled to ignore your opinions right back”. ;-)
See, “your” opinions don’t count for all that much in what you actually do. If you want to change your behavior, it’s your “unconscious” opinions that you need to change. But you won’t change them without first being aware of them, and if you keep the attitude you have, you’ll have no real inclination to pay attention to them or seriously consider them when designing for your requirements… thereby ensuring that your unconscious mind will be stuck with low-quality ways of getting those requirements met!
In other words, the reason your unconscious desires have such poor quality of thought-throughness and execution is precisely because you refuse to consciously participate in the process.
The words “conscious” and “unconscious” are widely used; I don’t think it helps for you to make up your own definitions. Your evidence about the rationality and morality of your conscious mind come many from your personal conscious beliefs about those features within yourself; these could easily be biased and self-serving. I’m still not entirely clear on what qualia mean, but from what I do understand about them I don’t see why the parts of your mind other than the part I’m talking to couldn’t have them.
I thought I was listing the standard definition of “conscious” and “unconscious” in a way that made it clearer why they led to my conclusion. If you have a different definition, what is it?
My beliefs about the rationality and morality of my unconscious mind do come from my conscious mind, this is where all my beliefs come from. When I say that a creationist is less rational than I am, or a Nazi is less moral than I am, I’m using those same beliefs from my conscious mind, and they are subject to the same biases. I have to either forfeit my right to judge entirely, or use those same judgments to judge my unconscious. I’ve learned (partly from you) ways to try to be less biased, and I try to use them here, but in the end all I have is reflective coherence
Just to clarify your position, are you suggesting I have a moral duty to respect my unconscious mind’s preferences, in the same way I would have to respect the preferences of another person? Or are you suggesting it would benefit my conscious mind to have inner peace?
So to summarize, you think your conscious mind is more rational, moral, and qualia-full than your unconscious mind, and the evidence you cite for these conclusions is: your conscious mind has these opinions. Have I got this right? Any idea what opinions your unconscious mind has on these matters?
You can phrase any argument that way:
“You think you’re more likely to be correct about evolution than a creationist, and the evidence you cite for this conclusion is that this is your opinion.”
Yes, it’s my opinion. But it’s my opinion for reasons. I thought I gave some good reasons why I thought my conscious mind makes better decisions than my unconscious. You rejected those because it was my conscious mind giving them. But if that were sufficient criteria to reject reasons, you would have to reject everyone’s reasons on any subject, from evolution to the roundness of the Earth.
Even aside from all those reasons, I haven’t heard any reasons to think the unconscious is aware, rational, or morally reflective, and I think the burden of proof is on that position, since it would basically be saying there’s a second person inside my head.
As for what opinion my unconscious mind has, yes, I have some idea. I predict it has no opinions at all, and is more of a collection of drives, instincts, and processes than the sort of entity that forms rational opinions on complicated issues. I doubt my unconscious “disagrees” with me about this any more than my kidneys disagree with my position on tax reform, or my tibia disagrees with my interpretation of quantum mechanics.
If I had multiple personality/dissociative identity disorder, I would be prepared to treat my alternate personalities as worthy of respect and cooperation. But I think my unconscious is probably more like a kidney or a tibia than like a whole other personality. I realize this is a factual claim, and am willing to change my mind if I hear evidence that suggests otherwise.
I didn’t see you offering reasons—I just saw you declaring that in general the conscious is more rational and moral, this conclusion being so obvious it didn’t need reasons. You later gave specific examples of beliefs in yourself where your conscious part thinks your conscious beliefs are more correct and more moral than your unconscious beliefs, but surely you can’t expect that to be considered a sufficient argument about the general trend in all people on all topics.
I do think you could stand to read a bit more about the unconscious; I think you will find it far more complex and capable than you realize.
Things I gave as evidence: the logical inconsistency of unconscious mind having conscious experience, irrationality of unconscious mind continuing to pursue subgoals when clearly no longer connected to supergoals, unconscious’ vulnerability to proximity/scale biases when dealing with morality, and several others. I don’t see how any of these can be dismissed as just “my conscious part thinks my conscious beliefs are more correct” with anything other than a Fully General Counterargument.
I’ve read plenty about the unconscious, and I admit it’s astonishingly complex and capable. So are honeybees. But when bees perform unbelievably complicated tasks, I don’t assume they therefore have human-level intelligence, and I think the unconscious’ actions are more like the honeybees’ than people’s.
However, if there’s something you think I should know more about, why not recommend me specific articles, authors, or books?
The conscious is guilty of these too.
Okay, but carrying the analogy over, I’m sure you also don’t trivialize the value of honey!
You could start with making yourself aware of the non-conscious mind’s ability to solve CAPTCHAs, an AI-complete problem, and current conscious minds’ inability to figure out how they do it with enough clarity to re-implement it in software.
Actually, it’s funny you mention CAPTCHAs as your example. If you’re going to go that far, why not also attribute skill at chess to the unconscious? After all, it’s got to be the unconscious that screens out most of the several dozen possible chess moves each turn and lets your conscious concentrate on the few best, and you can generalize from chess to practically all matters of strategy. Or for that matter, how about language? All my knowledge of English grammar was purely unconscious until I started studying the subject in high school, and 99% of my grammar use still comes from there.
So the issue’s not whether it can perform complex tasks. I don’t know exactly what the issue is, but I think it connects to the concept of “personhood” somehow. I question whether the unconscious is more than a collection of very sophisticated mental modules, in the same way that a bird’s brain may have a flight dynamics module, an astronomical navigation module, a mate-preference-analysis module, and so on.
The computing hardware of my brain contains a program for recognizing letters, a program that detects potential mates and responds with feelings of lust, a program that interacts with my reward system in such a way as to potentially create alcoholism, and so on. They’re all computationally very impressive. But I don’t see why I should assign them moral status any more than I would feel morally obligated to listen to a laptop on which I had installed a program that detected the presence of beautiful women nearby and then displayed the words “mate with this woman”. I don’t want to privilege these programs just because they happen to be located inside a human brain and they get reflected glory from some of the other things human brains can do.
To make me want to assign them moral status, you’d have to give me evidence that there was something that it felt like to be my lust. This seems kind of category-error-ish to me. I feel my lust, but my lust itself doesn’t feel anything. You may feel sorry for me for having to deal with my lust, but feeling sorry for my lust because I don’t choose to satisfy it is in my opinion a waste of sorrow. It’s also an infinite regress. If I feel unhappy because I have unfulfilled desire, and my desire feels unhappy because it’s unfulfilled, does my desire’s unhappiness feel something? Why stop there?
I have a feeling this problem requires more rigor than I can throw at it right now. I’ve been trying to think about it more clearly so as to hopefully eventually get some top-level posts out of it, but this is the best I can do at the moment.
So’s your conscious. The unconscious just isn’t connected up the right way for deliberation and reflectivity.
(IAWYC)
I’ll bite the bullets in your first paragraph. So chess also relies on non-conscious skills. What trap did I just fall into?
There is a major difference between your unconscious mind and a laptop with the same output: specifically, the unconscious mind has a direct, seamless, high-bandwidth connection to your mind. When you recognize a face or a letter, you don’t have to pass it to a laptop, look at the output, and read the output. From your conscious mind’s perspective, you just get insta-recognition. This makes it more valuable that a laptop—in all senses—just as faster mental addition is better than a hand calculator that computes with the same speed.
If and when someone makes a machine that can do these tasks faster, and still interface seamlessly, in the unconscious’s stead, then you will be justified in trivializing the latter’s value. Just like you would feel less bad (though not completely indifferent) about the extinction of honeybees if honey could be more efficiently sythesized.
The only case where the above reasoning doens’t apply is, as you point out, in values. Why is the unconscious mind’s decision of values, er, valuable? Why are you morally bound to its decrees of lust? There answer is, I don’t know. But at the same time, I don’t know how you can clip out the lust while retaining “you”—not given your existing brain’s architecture. That is, I disagree that the brain is as modular as you seem to think, at least if that’s what you meant by the use of “modules”.
And remember, pure value judgments are only a small fraction of its outputs.
Re: I question whether the unconscious is more than a collection of very sophisticated mental modules, in the same way that a bird’s brain may have a flight dynamics module, an astronomical navigation module, a mate-preference-analysis module, and so on.
...and what do you think your conscious mind is, then—if not a collection of sophisticated mental modules?
Wikipedia gives Fodor’s list of eight characteristics of “mental modules”, which include “domain specificity”, “fast speed”, “shallow output”, “limited accessibility”, “encapsulation”, et cetera, and quotes someone else as saying the most important distinguishing feature is “cognitive impenetrability”.
In other words, “module” has a special definition that doesn’t mean exactly the same as “something in the mind”. So when I “accuse” the unconscious of being “modules”, all I’m saying is that it’s a bunch of single-purpose unlinked programs, as opposed to the generic and unified programs that make up the conscious mind. This seems relevant since it makes it harder to accept the idea of the unconscious as a separate but equal person living inside your brain.
If there are other definitions of “module” that include anything in the mind, and you’re using one of those, then yes, the conscious mind is a module or collection of modules as well.
The conscious mind is probably pretty modular too.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_of_Mind
In some respects, consciousness is largely a perceptual filter—the attention filter—whose role it is to block out most sensory inputs from most systems most of the time. From that perspective, the contents of consciousness primarily consist of the outputs of normally-unconscious modules. The bit of the mind that switches attention around might itself be relatively small—and gains the illusion of size by being able to illuminate many areas of the mind—by damping down perceptions from everywhere else.
Anyway, you might have a case that consciousness is somehow “less modular” than all the other parts of the mind.
This whole “identifying with consciousness” business is totally bizarre to me. I hate to come on with the self-help—but: consciousness is tiny! You are so much more than that! Please repeat to yourself 1,000 times—“I am not my conscious mind!” The idea that you are your consciousness is an illusion created by your ego—which thinks it is the most wonderful thing in the world—that everything revolves around it—and that it is you. If you get some perspective, you should be able to see what utter nonsense that is.
And the PCT hypothesis for why this is so (predating the Society of Mind by a decade or so), is that consciousness is effectively the debugger or test rig for the rest of the brain: a tool whose job is the tuning, adjustment, and extension of the brain’s unconscious control systems. The conscious mind is heavily engaged in any sort of skill acquisition, “noticing” what perceptions are associated with success or failure, and this noticing process is key to wiring up new control circuits.
From this perspective, consciousness is effectively an on-call maintenance person, a tech support rep for the unconscious. Which provides a good evolutionary reason for “higher” animals to have higher degrees of consciousness; the more flexible the creature, the more advanced the tech support required. ;-)
That humans have decided to rebel and take over the company instead of functioning in a strictly support capacity is a separate issue.
And when the revolution isn’t going so well, we call it “akrasia”.
So the key to a smooth takeover is realizing that if the unconscious machinery isn’t working well, then you will suffer right along with your unconscious. You need a win-win solution, and the unconscious is pretty easily satisfied, being just a big dumb array of thermostats and all.
An array which—being that you’re its tech support rep—you can actually rewire. In fact, most of what’s in there, you consciously put there at some point, or at least didn’t object to.
But if you treat it like it’s an independent mind—which it isn’t—and an enemy (which it also isn’t) whose demands should be disregarded, then you’re never even going to perceive what is actually going on in there, and therefore won’t be able to tell how to change any of it. And you’ll just keep fighting, instead of debugging.
Not really a good use of your time, IMO.
I think we agree. Your statement that the unconscious is “just a big dumb array of thermostats” is just what I was trying to get across, plus as you said that it isn’t an independent mind.
I interpreted Robin (I’m still not sure if I’m right) as suggesting the unconscious is a full and separate mind whose preferences deserve respect for the same reason you’d respect another human’s preferences. So that, for example, if you wanted to stay sober but your unconscious wanted to drink, you “owe” it to your unconscious to compromise, in the same way you’d be a bad friend if you didn’t take a friend’s preferences into account. All I am trying to say is that the unconscious doesn’t deserve that kind of respect.
If you’re saying that my conscious mind can achieve its own goals better by working with the unconscious in some particular way, well, you’re the expert on that and I believe you.
Yes. The reason I argued with your notion that you shouldn’t pay any attention to your unconscious goals is because, with relatively few exceptions, your unconscious goals are your goals.
Generally, they’re either re goals you share with your unconscious (like staying alive), or goals you put in there, based on what you thought was useful or valuable at some point in your life. Once such goals are acquired, any action patterns that lead towards those goals tend to stick until better action patterns are learned, or the goal is consciously deactivated.
But it isn’t enough to say, “I don’t want X any more”, when you don’t actually know what, precisely, X is. That’s why you actually do need to pay attention to your unconscious goals, so that you can either find alternative ways to satisfy them, or verify that in fact, you no longer require them to be satisfied on your behalf.
Think of it as a safety interlock of sorts, that allows you to maintain a sincere verbal belief and expression that you don’t want X, while leaving the machinery in place to nonetheless acquire X without your conscious knowledge or consent.
To borrow the metaphor of the Sirens, your unconscious won’t untie you from the mast until you stop fighting to get free. When you once more become the person who ordered yourself tied to the mast in the first place, then and ONLY then will your unconscious accept a reversal of your original orders.
That’s why you need to pay attention to the goals, so you can step into the mental shoes of the “you” who put the goals in in the first place, and then either reconsider the original goal, or find a better way to get it that doesn’t have side effects.
But unless you can actually acknowledge the desirability of the goal in question, your unconscious effectively assumes you’re merely under social pressure to demonstrate your desire to adhere to the ways of the tribe, and ignores your attempt to give it “new orders”.
Sounds like an outside the box box. So I have a job interview tomorrow morning and my conscious mind is telling me to go to sleep early, but my unconscious keeps me up worrying and watching TV until midnight. Should I respect the secret wisdom of the unconscious mind that my deluded ego-self is keeping me from understanding, or should I shut up and figure out some way to get to sleep?
I like Buddhism. I meditate and I’m very interested in exploring the depths of my unconscious mind and possibly at some point dissolving my ego and achieving full awareness, whatever the heck that means. But the “unconscious” referred to in the original post is what’s telling the drunkard to get another shot of whiskey. I don’t think the Buddha would approve of that particular manifestation of it any more than anyone else, and all I’m saying is that this drunkard is justified in being against this desire, rather than thinking that since it’s their unconscious mind they have to accept it.
I feel like I already addressed such issues when I wrote: “We do not have to choose between these two theories.” Sometimes the conscious goals are best, and sometimes the unconscious ones are. You have given some examples of the former, but there are also examples of the latter.
Sorry, long time ago and different section of the comments. I think with that clarified I mostly agree with you anyway.
Just because your conscious mind isn’t aware of experiences by your unconscious mind doesn’t mean they don’t exit. And just because your unconscious is subject to some biases doesn’t mean your conscious mind does better on average.
I don’t disagree with any of that, but it’s all phrased sort of as “you can’t prove it doesn’t.” What should make me single out the hypothesis that it does as worthy of further consideration?
I don’t know how else to say it: the things you point to as evidence supporting your claims just don’t actually offer substantial support for those claims. To support claims about the relative features of two systems you need relative evidence; absolute evidence about one system just isn’t very relevant.
Maybe individual honeybees aren’t very intelligent, but hives are moreso. Hopefully Anonymous often makes a similar point about markets, corporations or other collective entities and suggests some might even be (or become) conscious. I don’t really care much about consciousness, but viewed as persisting and replicating entities they might be lumped in with other life (just like multicellular and unicellular life are).
The conscious mind does some pretty stupid things too. Like becoming a catholic priest. That sort of thing consigns your potentially-immortal essence that’s responsible for your very exisence to the trash bin.
If this is a battle to see which system is the more stupid, we could be looking at examples of insanity from both sides all day.
If it had any, do you think it would be incapable of letting us know about them? If so, why?
(Maybe Yvain should have a session with a Ouija board.)
I’d dispute this. Just as an example, it is your unconscious mind which provides the processing power for you to read this statement, to understand spoken words, etc. It is largely your unconscious mind which declared some words interesting and others boring. It is your unconscious mind which declares things pleasant (and therefore morally good if you value hedonism). It is your unconscious that contains mirror neurons, without which your morality might be rather different. It is your unconscious that remembers and forgets, though with repeated effort and a consequent use of willpower your conscious can demand a few specific facts be remembered. Your conscious mind may have devised your moral system, but where did the initial values you seek to maximize come from?
Does it do you any good to judge your unconscious? If you could accomplish more of your conscious goals if you had more willpower, perhaps you could accomplish more of your conscious goals if you found a way to spend less willpower fighting your unconscious.
Your definitions of “conscious” and “unconscious” seem highly irregular to me. Best to stick to the dictionary here—I figure.
But your rational/conscious/whatever mind is also made of neurons, and yet that makes mistakes, confuses morality etc, and does things you know aren’t right. Why does that get described as ‘a full, intelligent human being’ while your unconscious mind is just basal ganglia?
All true enough, but to go on and say that one is ‘better’ or ‘righter’ is not as trivial as you seem to assume. If your supergoal is ‘get laid’ then asking her out is the correct decision. If ‘don’t look silly’ has more utilons in your head, then that’s correct. If you want to argue that 1 ‘conscious’ utilon is worth more than 1 ‘unconscious’ utilon, then that’s fine, but you’ll have to demonstrate how and why.
Yvain, can you re-summarise your argument drawing better boundaries than ‘conscious’ and ‘unconscious’, and without things like ‘intelligent, rational human being’ to describe parts of your head that, to an unbiased observer, look a lot like other parts? If not, perhaps the conscious/unconscious boundary you’re trying to draw is a false (though highly intuitive) one.
Clearly, argument for which of the two points of view is the right one wasn’t the focus of the post, the problem statement was.
Drawing conclusions from what little neuroscience I’ve managed to overhear, the conscious mind isn’t even the part where you live most of the time. It fires up when you’re paying it attention. Instantaneous experience (“qualia”) exists outside it except the ephemeral experience of being conscious. Playback experience exists inside but references outside it. However it’s the part where your human-level intents exist. If all the rest of the brain were copied to a sim, but not the conscious mind, I think you’d have no difficulty labeling that “not me”. Miss a comparable sized chunk of your unconscious, and you might not even notice.
There’s a series of posts on the foolishness of “qualia” here. I agree with it and share the low-regard for philosophy also found there (relevant for this post, that would also be low relative to cynical economics). I also think what pjeby said above makes sense. The common thread being to find little significant in what we call “consciousness”, preventing it from holding privileged status.
“He sharply stubbed his toe on a large rock and proclaimed, ‘Thus, I refute this!’”
That traditional anecdote (and its modified forms) only illustrate how little the pro-qualia advocates understand the arguments against the idea.
Dismissing ‘qualia’ does not, as many people frequently imply, require dismissing the idea that sensory stimuli can be distinguish and grouped into categories. That would be utterly absurd—it would render the senses useless and such a system would never have evolved.
All that’s needed to is reject the idea that there are some mysterious properties to sensation which somehow violate basic logic and the principles of information theory.
My understanding of qualia is that mysterious is not a definitional property, i.e. “Qualia can be explained in a reductionist sense” is not a self-contradictory statement. The existence of qualia simply means that sense-experience is a meaningful event, not that it is a supernatural one.
My view is that Mary’s Room is fundamentally mistaken; what red looks like is a fact about Mary’s brain, not about light of a certain wavelength. Mary can know everything there is to know about that wavelength of light without knowing the experience of a certain combination of neurons firing. Since we don’t actually live in Mary’s brain, we can’t understand the qualia of “Mary’s brain being stimulated by red light”, but this is a limitation on our brains, not a “mystery.” Perhaps a conscious being could exist that could construct others’ brains and experience their qualia; we just don’t know. But still, the fact that qualia are a potentially non-replicable hardware feature does not make them somehow supernatural.
I take a different but compatible objection to Mary’s Room—that is, as Mary is said to know everything there is to know about the color red, she therefore knows exactly what it would be like to experience it, and so is not surprised.
Blatant strawman.