Do We Have Minds?

8/3/2019 Do We Have Minds?

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Do we have minds?

Romke van der Meulen

February 4, 2011

Abstract

Before answering the problem of other minds, I must first prove the existence of my own. I

show that the mind can be divided into conscious and unconscious parts, and that the mindas conceived of in the philosophy of other minds does not exist: rather, the conscious mindis an unnecessary by-product of the unconscious mental processes. I present a number ofdiscoveries in psychological and neurological research that show discrepancies between ourconscious experience and the true state of the world. I argue that, following the philosophicalzombie thought experiment, consciousness is actually superfluous to normal human function.From this, I present the theory that consciousness as traditionally conceived of is an illusion.The conscious mind is not intentional, the unconscious mind is. We experience qualia as aside effect of mental state, not as a result of perception. I then present consciousness as asocial construct that follows from the formation of language, in tandem with the conceptof the narrative self. Finally, though I make no claim whether the source of the illusionof consciousness can be explained in dualistic or physicalistic terms, I do suggest adoptingheterophenomenology for further research into consciousness.

Je pense donc je suisRene Descartes, Discours de la methode

Behold, we know not anythingAlfred, Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam A. H. H.

Student Human Machine Communications, Department of Artificial Intelligence, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen


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Introduction

Philosophy of Mind has, for some time now, concerned itself with the problem of other minds.This problem states that I can not be certain that the people around me are not some sort ofautomatons, but instead posses a mind like myself. However, before we can ask the questionHow do we know that other people have minds?, we must first ask ourselves: How do I knowthat I have a mind?.

Even before we can answer this question, we must first answer another: what, exactly, is amind? Though the subject of an entire branch of philosophy, not to mention a sizable portionof the scientific community, the answer to this has never been definitive. Wikipedia definesMind thus:

Mind (pronounced /maInd/) is the aspect of intellect and consciousness experiencedas combinations of thought, perception, memory, emotion, will, and imagination,including all unconscious cognitive processes. The term is often used to refer, byimplication, to the thought processes of reason. Mind manifests itself subjectively asa stream of consciousness. [...] The original meaning of Old English gemynd was thefaculty of memory, not of thought in general. Hence call to mind, come to mind, keepin mind, to have mind of, etc. Old English had other words to express mind, suchas hyge mind, spirit. The generalization of mind to include all mental faculties,thought, volition, feeling and memory, gradually develops over the 14th and 15thcenturies.1

This definition includes a large number of mental faculties. There is one property of mind,however, which has been critical in the problem of other minds: consciousness. Many of these

faculties, like perception and memory, might be functionally described in terms of input andstorage. The deciding factor in the discussion of other minds is consciousness, also described interms like awareness, sentience and qualia.

A good example of the significance of consciousness is the though experiment of the philosophicalzombie. The philosophical zombie is like us in every way physically and behaves exactly the sameas would we. The important difference is that the zombie lacks awareness. This is then takenas a defining and necessary part of the mind, though not the only part: consciousness. Someconceptions of the philosophical zombie go as far as to describe them as simply behaving, lackingeven such faculties as perception, but for present purposes this is going a bit too far. Othersargue that philosophical zombies are an impossibility: that consciousness necessarily followsfrom having the same structure as us. For this paper, this is not a problem: we can replacezombies with robots, as we are not interested in the question what gives rise to consciousness,but in the existence and function of consciousness itself.

Let us then divide the mind into the conscious and unconscious, keeping in mind that in termsof the problem of other minds, the conscious mind is a necessary requirement for mind as awhole. A person having only a unconscious mind would be equivalent to a philosophical zombie.The conscious mind includes all awareness, including sentience and qualia. It also include theparts of the thought process of which we are aware, which is more or less what is referred to bythe classic term Reason. What is included in the unconscious is still under debate, but will

1Wikipedia. Mind. Retrieved January 3rd, 2011. Wikimedia Foundation. 2011. url: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind

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include such things as basic mind-body communications and non-verbalized thought processes.For this paper however, we will define the unconscious mind as all mental processes whichproceed without consciousness.

In the course of this paper, I intend to argue that the conscious mind is erroneous and superflu-

ous, and in the end something of an illusion, while the unconscious mind is actually in chargeof my decision processes. I will show that the main function of the illusion of consciousness issocial, and that it grew with the formation of the concept of self in tandem with the evolu-tion of language. I consider some argument against consciousness being an illusion. Finally Imake some suggestions on how the illusion of consciousness could be the subject of research,suggesting adopting the approach of heterophenomenology.

Consciousness is an illusion

Ever since the beginning of psychological and cognitive, and recently neurological, research,

there has been a growing list of discrepancies between our awareness and the world. Theseinclude limits of perception, such as perceptual illusions but also inattention blindness or changeblindness. There is also an ever growing list of evidence that behaviour can be influenced withoutinvolvement of consciousness, most notable of which is priming. Priming involves exposing asubject to stimuli whose duration fall below the threshold needed for conscious perception. Thestimuli are perceived by the subject at the unconscious level, influencing performance in somefollowing task.

Besides these subtle indications that our awareness is limited, there are some findings thatshow glaring contradictions between our understanding of the real structure of the world andour conscious experience in it. Dennett, for example, notes that though we have an experience

of a visual field that is fully coloured, we know from biological data that we only have visualreceptors for colour in the foveal field, which covers about 2% of our visual field.2 Even moresurprising, a recent study3 showed that the outcome of a test subjects decisions could bepredicted, based on neurological data, ten seconds before the subject was even aware of havingmade the decision.

Together, this indicates that our awareness is severely limited and not at all representationalof the world around us or even our own mental processes. Knowing that this is the status ofour consciousness given current knowledge, we must ask ourselves what else we may find inthe future. It seems to me entirely possible and not even unlikely to find that our consciousexperience of the world is actually limited to such a degree that we humans would not be able to

function at all if we had to rely on our conscious mind alone. The ideas of the Enlightenment,which still live on today and largely represent how the nave subject thinks of the world andhimself, will prove inaccurate and will have to be revised.

Though our conscious minds our limited, we do continue to function. This indicates that theunconscious mind plays a large part in our daily live. Given this, what is then the added benefitof consciousness? We come back again to the idea of the philosophical zombie: though thiscreature has no consciousness, he is indistinguishable in behaviour. Therefor, consciousness is

2D.C. Dennett. A third-person approach to consciousness. In: Sweet dreams: philosophical obstacles to ascience of consciousness. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005. Chap. 2, pp. 2556

3C.S. Soon et al. Unconscious determinants of free decisions in the human brain. In: Nature Neuroscience11.5 (2008), pp. 543545

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not a prerequisite for function. Intuitively, this makes sense: though there have been strongarguments on whether a robot has a mind, it is usually agreed that, given enough sophistication,a robot can function in very complex ways, theoretically even approaching human performancelevels. The problem of other minds also centres on this idea: that from the outward behaviour orhuman beings we cannot deduce consciousness, as consciousness is (arguably) not a prerequisite

of such behaviour.

Together, we can take it that the conscious mind is not only inaccurate and limited, but evensuperfluous. I now advance the theory that the conscious mind is simply an illusion, an epiphe-nomenon occurring alongside the unconscious mind actually getting on with business with theconsciousness lagging behind. Certainly, I am not the first to advance this theory. SusanBlackwood, for example, wrote:

If consciousness seems to be a continuous stream of rich and detailed sights, sounds,feelings and thoughts, then I suggest this is the illusion.First we must be clear what is meant by the term illusion. To say that consciousness

is an illusion is not to say that it doesnt exist, but that it is not what it seems tobe more like a mirage or a visual illusion.4

Indeed, the existence of consciousness cannot be denied when each of us seems to experience itcontinuously. However, what can be denied is the status of this consciousness. I suggest thatthe conscious mind is a by-product of our mental processes.

We think that our conscious experience of an object derives directly from that object throughthe senses, but this is not the case: the object is observed and the subject of several unconsciousmental process, the precise nature of which remains unknown at present. Then, from this wholeprocess and following it at a distance temporally, comes awareness of having perceived the

object. However, this awareness arises from the underlying mental processes, and the objectof that awareness is not a direct reference to the perceived object. In a sense, this can betaken as a denial of intentionality. The subject of my conscious thoughts is not an object, noreven a mental representation directly of the object. In stead, both the conscious thought andthe object of that thought arise as by-product of ongoing unconscious mental processes. Theunconscious processes could be argued to be themselves intentional, but intention divorced fromconsciousness.

And qualia? They still exist, but have become separated from the world. When I feel pain,this is not because I just stubbed my toe. The feeling of pain, the quale, is a side effect of theprocessing of input coming from the nerve endings in my toe, and at that a side effect whichfollows after some time has gone by after I actually stubbed my toe. Not only is the quale ofpain not caused by the stubbing of my toe, it is dependant on a range of neural factors, such asthe subtle mix of neurotransmitters in my brain. What then happens if I have taken a shot ofmorphine prior to stubbing my toe? I feel no pain because the neural processes that normallyfollow the input from my stubbed toe have been inhibited.

Note that I make no claims about the way in which the unconscious mental processes produceconsciousness, neither physicalist nor dualist. Exactly how consciousness is produced is stillsomething of a mystery. What I address here is the role that consciousness has to play, whichis to say little. On the matter how the unconscious mind arises from the brain, I feel it safe tosuggest a physicalist approach, since the main criterion for choosing dualism has always been the

4Susan Blackmore. The Grand Illusion. In: New Scientist 174.2348 (2002), pp. 2629

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special nature of consciousness, not unconsciousness. Rational thought without consciousnessmay be done by a robot or computer, so it seems obvious that the far more complex brain ismore than capable of the same.

To the question Do I have a mind? then, the answer would be no. I do have an unconscious

mind, capable of many of the faculties traditionally ascribed to the mind such as perception orreasoning, but it is not conscious, it is not a mind of which we are aware. I also have a consciousmind, but this mind in turn does not reflect on myself and the world around me, though it mightseem so, but is merely a by-product of the unconscious mind. Neither satisfies the definitionof a mind as I discussed in the introduction. Why then are we all under the illusion that weare conscious of the world and ourselves? In the next section, I will explain what I consider apossible explanation for this.

Consciousness as a narrative

Weve seen that consciousness is not, as we thought, the stream of direct perception of the worldaround us. Rather it is a side effect, an illusion. Very much related to this are the findingsof Gazzaniga in the research on split brain patients. These patients have had the connectionsbetween their two brain halves, the corpus callosum, cut to some degree, usually surgically as atreatments for epilepsy. Gazzaniga and others found that these patients were not able to nameobjects in his left visual field, and reasoned that this was because the left eye connects to theright hemisphere of the brain, while the left hemisphere is involved in speech and the informationcould no longer cross from right to left. The patients were however able to show recognition ofthe object by pointing to it with the left hand, which is also controlled by the right hemisphere.But most interesting was when the patients behaviour was based on the non-verbalized field:when asked to explain his behaviour, the patient would fabricate an explanation based on theinformation available in the verbalized field.

Gazzaniga concluded that the left hemisphere contains some kind of interpreter, which con-tinuously tells the story of our self, based on the available evidence. If the available evidence isinsufficient or incorrect, the interpreter will come up with inaccurate explanations of our ownbehaviour.5 As this interpreter is the continuous narrative of the self, so is consciousness thecontinuing narrative of our thoughts and perceptions. The two are probably even closely re-lated, consciousness forming the main source of information from which we derive the narrativeself. As Gazzaniga said, in the normal course the narrative self is not completely made up, butnot completely accurate either. The same applies to consciousness.

Reviewing the work of Dennett, Galagher wrote:

The consensus from contemporary neuroscience is that neurological processing isfor the most part distributed across various brain regions, and it cannot be said thatthere is a real, neurological center of experience. Thus, there is no real simplicity ofexperience at one time nor real identity across time that we could label the self. Atbest, we might refer to a minimal biological self as something real. But the latteris nothing more than a principle of organization involving the distinction betweenself and non-self. Furthermore, this principle is found throughout living nature, and

5M. Gazzaniga and S. Gallagher. The neuronal Platonist. In: Journal of Consciousness Studies 5.5-6 (1998),706717

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is not something sufficient for the purpose of a coherent continuity or identity overtime, such as is found at the level of human experience. Humans, however, do havesomething more than this we have language. And with language we begin to makeour experience relatively coherent over extended time periods. We use words totell stories, and in these stories we create what we call our selves. We extend our

biological boundaries to encompass a life of meaningful experience.6

It is in language that I think we can find the main function of consciousness, which as we haveseen has no necessary function in mental processes. We use the illusion of awareness in ourcommunication with other people, to whom we also ascribe such awareness. We can describeto another person our conscious perception of some object or some event, and even thoughthat consciousness is not necessarily accurate, the other person will recognize it and is able toimagine the same perceptions in his own conscious mind.

It might be hard to imagine, but consciousness itself may have formed with language. Let meput it thus: when a robot is programmed to avoid bumping into the wall, and it receives input

from its sensors informing it that it has in fact bumped into the wall, it might be said to find thisinput undesirable. Still, we would hesitate to say that the robot perceives running into a wall aspain. We find it hard to ascribe consciousness to the robot. An animal, in particular one similarto us like a mammal, is another case: already it becomes easier to anthropomorphise and saythat the rabbit in the hawks talons feels pain. Now compare this to the situation of the robot:all we have to go on is behaviour, and though the rabbits behaviour may be far more complexthan that of a robot, it is not fundamentally different. In this light, we could imagine thatthough the rabbit undergoes the same mental processes as we do when in pain the activationof neurons, the spread of certain neurotransmitters and so on it does not experience the feelingof pain as we humans do. From this point, we only need to repeat these steps while comparingthe rabbit to a human being to imagine a human being without consciousness.

So, imagining a human being without conscious experience, I find it conceivable to think thatmy conscious experience of pain might be the result of language: I have come to think aboutcertain inputs, certain brain events, certain mental states, as undesirable. I found that otherhuman beings also encounter these states. I then learn to categorize this mental state as pain,and communicating with other human beings find that they have similar concepts which theyrefer to with the same word. Now I come to associate the conscious experience that accompaniesthese mental states with the concept of pain. But the conscious experience of pain is not thesame as these mental states: there is nothing inherent in the conscious experience of pain thatsays that this is a sensation that should be avoided. It is the unconscious mind, itself based on aneural foundation and having learned through countless millennia of evolution, that determines

that the mental state corresponding to pain, and by extension the inputs leading to this state,is something that must be avoided.

Counter arguments

I shall now consider some possible arguments against the theory presented here, and try toaddress each in turn.

6Shaun Gallagher. Philosophical conceptions of the self: implications for cognitive science. In: Trends inCognitive Sciences 4.1 (2000), pp. 1421

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Plans based on the self

One might argue that in life, people consciously make choices about the course of their life,based on their perception of their self. For example, knowing myself to have an aptitude forphilosophy, I sign up to a philosophical course in the next semester. I do this because I know

that I need to accumulate credit in order to attain my masters degree, which in turn will helpme achieve other goals later in life.

To this I respond that, though this is what might seem to be the case, our perception ismistaken. As a matter of fact, both my perception of myself and my conscious reasoning usingthis perception, are illusions: our conscious minds trying to explain our mental states after theyhave already occurred. Certainly parts of the above line of reasoning may have occurred, butif so, they have unconsciously been reviewed long before I repeat the exercise in my consciousreasoning. My unconscious mind may have arrived at the same conclusion as I did consciously,but it may not have. In the latter case, my conscious mind should be surprised to find that inthe next semester, I am not at all motivated to attend classes, were it not the case that the

conscious mind is, like Gazzanigas interpreter, very adept in explaining this new behaviourin terms of the information available to it. Could I then not consciously decide to overridemy motivation and attend classes anyway? No I could not: if I did this, it would not be theconsequence of any conscious decision, but of some unknown unconscious conclusion.

The extent of the unconscious mind

Even if we take the evidence as showing that unconscious decision processes finish before becom-ing aware of the decision in some cases, this does not necessarily mean that this is always thecase. Perhaps the unconscious mind is predominant is day to day decisions, while the conscious

mind is required for more large-scale or novel decisions to be made.

To this I would reply that at this point we cannot determine where this border lies. Why canwe not determine this? Because this line could, in principle, be drawn anywhere. Where itnot for the evidence, we might still believe that all decisions are conscious. Now we are forcedto lay the line further. There is no reason however, not to draw the line at completely theother side: the only argument against saying that all decisions are unconscious, is that this doesnot comply with our normal conscious experience. But this conscious experience, as has beenshown, is unreliable as a source of evidence. Let us therefor dismiss this intuitive objection,and suppose that the line can be drawn at the far end, that all decisions are unconscious. Thisprevents us from drawing the line somewhere in the middle, and having to move it further back

as we make new discoveries. Moreover, it opens up new theoretic possibilities to explore.

Examining consciousness

Before I conclude, I would finally like to make some remarks on consciousness as described bythis paper in relation to further research.

Let me reiterate that though our existing conception of consciousness is an illusion, I by no meansclaim that consciousness does not exist. It is a phenomenon, and is certainly worthy of study.Whether an actual neural correlate exists to be found, or whether consciousness can only be

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examined phenomenologically, is an answer to which I lay no claim here. Though I do think thatmany of our preconceptions on the nature of consciousness, notably as held in Folk Psychology,should be discarded in this research, I do not advocate eliminative materialism as Churchlanddescribes it7 because I make no assumptions here that consciousness is reducible to the mentalstates that produce them as side effect. Rather, I suggest using the heterophenomological

approach as described by Dennett2

: since it is clear that our conscious experience is differentfrom our actual mental processes, data about both should be collected, assuming a neutralstance toward the verity of claims made from conscious perception. It then follows to explainboth consciousness and mental states, and the relationship between them.

7Paul M. Churchland. Eliminative materialism and the propositional attitudes. In: The Journal of Philos-ophy 78.2 (1981), pp. 6790

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