- seCtIon tHRee: BoDY AnD WoRLD
Human niche construction shows the physical and cognitive worlds to be insep-
arable. Language is probably the most powerful example of an ecology that
shapes human development, at both individual and species level – it shapes
our ways of thinking and acting, and everything that we think of as our human
nature, including consciousness itself. Maybe language makes thinking and
acting feel different enough that we have learned to call the kinds of thinking
and acting we know how to talk about conscious, when in fact speaking and
writing are just kinds of action, not fundamentally different from pressing a but-
ton, catching a ball, moving our eyes, or opening and closing our fingers under
general anaesthetic.
THE UPSHOT
The evidence for unconscious perception and action, and for intuitive deci-
sion-making and creativity, shows that some popular ideas about consciousness
have to be wrong. To make this clear, let’s consider three basic ways of thinking
about consciousness.
The first is the traditional (ever-tempting) idea of a Cartesian
theatre. Consciousness is like a multisensory cinema with infor-
mation coming into consciousness, for ‘me’ to experience and
act upon. In its most extreme view, this assumes that sensory
information can lead to action only once it has ‘become con-
scious’ in the Cartesian theatre. We had already found many
reasons for rejecting this view, and the phenomena explored in
this chapter provide more.
The second view allows for unconscious perception and learn-
ing, but still fails to throw out the theatre metaphor. The idea
is something like this: sensory information enters the system,
whereupon two distinct things can happen to it. Either it goes
into consciousness and is acted upon consciously, or it bypasses
consciousness and is acted on unconsciously, perhaps by using
routes through the brain that lead to motor output without
ever actually ‘reaching consciousness’.
This second theory, a form of Cartesian materialism, is proba-
bly the most common in consciousness studies today. While
rejecting the notion of a homunculus watching events on a
mental screen, it retains the essential idea that things are either
‘in’ or ‘out’ of consciousness. As we have seen, phrases such as
‘enters consciousness’, ‘available to consciousness’, or ‘reaching
consciousness’ tend to imply such a theory. The tricky issues
surrounding the border between ‘in’ and ‘out’ of consciousness
are sometimes dealt with by proposing a ‘fringe’ consciousness
(e.g. Baars, 1988), or by avoiding ‘fuzzy’ cases such as blindsight
or subliminal perception.The findings discussed above suggest a more radical third
theory. To recap: thresholds of conscious experience are not‘unravelling the complex
interplay between
genes, environments
and embodied action
[. . .] will surely be one
of the great intellectual
adventures of the 21st
century’
(Wheeler and Clark, 2008,
p. 3572)
PRoFILe 8.2
Andy Clark (b. 1957)
Andy Clark wants to extend our no-
tion of mind far beyond our brains
and even our bodies. Human minds
can be ‘extended minds’, he says,
realised by neuronal, bodily, and
even technological elements, such
as smartphones and good old-fash-
ioned pencil and paper. He believes that the drive towards
cognitive extension is so deeply ingrained that we are nat-
ural-born cyborgs: beings whose minds and selves arise at
the changing intersections between biology and technol-
ogy. More recently he has come to believe that work on
the ‘predictive brain’ – with feedback between top-down
expectations and bottom-up inputs – holds the key to the
delicate dance between brain, body, and world. He loves
electronic music (especially old-school techno), American
comics, and pulp detective fiction. He owns a 47 ft house-
boat, Love and Rockets, named after the comic and deco-
rated (like his own body) with tattoo art. He has held posts
in St Louis and Bloomington, and now holds the Chair in
Logic and Metaphysics at the University of Edinburgh.