Chapter
Eight
Conscious and unconscious
Here, then, is the rub. If the same action is carried out on one occasion consciously
and on another occasion unconsciously, what is the difference? Obviously, there
is a phenomenal difference – they feel different – but why?
We must avoid jumping to unwarranted conclusions. For example, we might
start by observing that we made a difficult moral decision consciously while we
made the tea unconsciously; jump from there to the conclusion that the former
requires consciousness, while the latter does not; and finally, to the conclusion
that consciousness itself does the deciding. But this is not the only interpreta-
tion. Another possibility is that the processes involved in making difficult moral
decisions incidentally give rise to the impression of their being done consciously,
while those involved in making tea do not. Another is that difficult tasks require
more of the brain to be involved or more parts to be interconnected, and this
greater connectivity either is, or gives rise to, the phenomenal sense of doing the
action consciously. Whenever we compare actions done with and without con-
sciousness, we must remember these different interpretations. This is relevant to
perception (Chapter 3), the neural correlates of conscious and unconscious pro-
cesses (Chapter 4), the Cartesian theatre (Chapter 5), intuition and unconscious
processing (later in this chapter), and the nature of free will (Chapter 9), but for
now the question concerns the role of consciousness in action – what is the dif-
ference between actions performed consciously and those done unconsciously?
If you believe that consciousness has causal efficacy (i.e. does things), then you
will probably answer that consciousness caused the former actions but not the
latter. (See the website for an additional Activity on this.) In this case, you must
explain how subjective experiences can cause physical events. If you do not think
that consciousness can do anything, then you must explain the obvious difference
some other way. Theories of consciousness differ considerably in their answers, as
we can see from the following examples.
THEORIES
CAUsAL tHeoRIes
Some theories have a clear causal role for consciousness, most obviously dualist
theories, but they face the problem that for consciousness to have any effects it
must interact with matter. Descartes located this interaction in the pineal gland,
but he could not explain how it worked. Two centuries after Descartes, in his Prin-
ciples of Mental Physiology, William Benjamin Carpenter (1874) proposed that in
one direction physiological activity excites sensational consciousness, while in
the other direction sensations, emotions, and volitions liberate the nerve-force
with which the appropriate part of the brain is charged. But he too could not
explain how.
A century later, Popper and Eccles’s (1977) dualist interactionism faced exactly
the same problem in having to explain how the independent ‘self-conscious
mind’ could interact with the ‘liaison areas of the dominant cerebral hemisphere’
(p. 362). Eccles later proposed (1994) that all mental events and experiences
are composed of ‘psychons’ and every psychon interacts with one dendron in
the brain. Although this localises the interaction, he could not explain how it
worked.
DID I DO THIS
CONSCIOUSLY?