Chapter
Eight
Conscious and unconscious
We started with the simple idea that consciousness causes at least some of our
actions, but the theories and experiments discussed reveal serious problems with
this commonsense notion. So a gentle alarm bell should ring every time we read
that consciousness directs attention, or gives us the ability to introspect; that it
drives our emotions and our higher feelings; or that it helps us assign priorities
or retrieve long-term memories. Comments such as this are deeply embedded in
our ordinary language about consciousness, and can easily be found in the writ-
ings of psychologists, philosophers of mind, and others. It is not obvious which,
if any, of them is true. Maybe exploring an everyday example of skilled action will
help us decide.
THE CAUSAL EFFICACY OF CONSCIOUSNESS
Imagine someone throws you a ball and you catch it – or to make things more
realistic, scrumple a piece of paper up into a ball right now, throw it up in the
air, and catch it yourself. Do this a few times and ask yourself what the role of
consciousness was in this simple skilled action. You were conscious of doing the
catching, and of the sight of the ball as your hands reached for it, but did the con-
sciousness itself cause anything to happen? Without consciously seeing the ball,
could you have caught it?
In doing this simple task, the causal sequence seems to be 1) consciously perceive,
and 2) act on the basis of the conscious experience. This is sometimes known as
the ‘assumption of experience-based control’.
When you think about it, this is a strange notion. It means two mysterious con-
versions: first the physical information in nerve firings in the visual system must
somehow be turned into conscious experiences, and then the conscious experi-
ence must somehow act back on the brain, causing more nerve firings to direct the
appropriate action. But if consciousness is subjectivity (experience, non- physical
qualia, what it’s like to be), how can either process work? How can non-physical
experiences cause physical firings of nerve cells or movements of muscles? And
where and how does this consciousness bit happen in the brain?
This is one example of Susan Hurley’s ‘Classical Sandwich’ model of the mind: ‘The
mind is a kind of sandwich, and cognition is the filling’ (2001, p. 3). You start with
the bread of perception, then you have the filling of cognition, and on top you
have the bread of action. Now we are right back to the mind–body debate and
equally ancient discussions about the problem of mental causation. In ancient
Greece, philosophers were already debating how mental states such as beliefs,
desires, or thoughts could have physical effects. Descartes faced the problem
when he began to think about the human body as a mechanism and realised that
emotions and volition did not easily fit in. He took a dualist way out – which, as we
have seen, almost certainly does not solve the problem.
Note that although the debate about mental causation goes back centuries, the
question of consciousness is just one part of it. As philosopher Jaegwon Kim (2007)
points out, even if a conscious thought can cause other thoughts or actions, this
doesn’t necessarily mean that the fact that the thought was conscious, rather than
(say) its content was the relevant factor. What we want to know here is whether
consciousness has any causal power.