Chapter
Eight
Conscious and unconscious
O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne’er hung there. Nor does long our small
Durance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep,
Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all
Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.
(Gerald Manley Hopkins, from ‘No worst, there is none’, c. 1885)Gradually the focus shifted from parts of mind to mechanisms, and to distinct
types of processing going on in one brain. This can be traced back at least to Helm-
holtz’s idea of ‘unconscious inference’, to William James’s distinction between
associative and true reasoning, and more recently to the debates over subliminal
perception, unconscious processing, and ‘dual-process theories’. These theories
can come in many forms, applying to memory, learning, or decision-making, but
most suggest that one process is fast, automatic, inflexible, effortless, and depen-
dent on context, while the other is slow, effortful, controlled, flexible, requires
working memory, and is independent of context. The two kinds of process map
easily onto a distinction between unconscious and conscious processes.
The fact that similar distinctions have been rediscovered or reinvented throughout
the history of philosophy and psychology leads some to believe that ‘this reflects
on the nature of the object of study that all these authors have in common: the
human mind’ (Frankish and Evans, 2009, p. 2). In other words, the distinction is
common because it is valid.
Certainly it is often taken for granted in consciousness studies. For example, an
encyclopaedia entry on the ‘contents of consciousness’ begins: ‘Of all the men-
tal states that humans have, only some of them are conscious states. Of all the
information processed by humans [. . .], only some of it is processed consciously’
(Siegel, 2009, p. 189). It seems so obvious!
But is this right? Or could it be another example of powerful intuitions leading us
astray? An alternative is that something about our minds leads us to make this
distinction, even if it is not valid.
The question is this – what could the difference between conscious and uncon-
scious processes be? Do they rely on different networks in the brain? Do some
produce qualia and some not? Do some lead to skilled action and some not? Does
the hard problem apply to some but not others? And if so, why? Unless we have
a viable theory of consciousness, this apparently natural distinction implies what
we might call a ‘magic difference’.
To explore these questions, we will consider first perception, then action, and
finally how perception and action, and conscious and unconscious, may converge
in the phenomena of intuition and creativity.