Do we have minds?

Romke van der Meulen February 4, 2011

Abstract Before answering the problem of other minds, I must rst prove the existence of my own. I show that the mind can be divided into conscious and unconscious parts, and that the mind as conceived of in the philosophy of other minds does not exist: rather, the conscious mind is an unnecessary by-product of the unconscious mental processes. I present a number of discoveries in psychological and neurological research that show discrepancies between our conscious experience and the true state of the world. I argue that, following the philosophical zombie thought experiment, consciousness is actually superuous 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 a side eect of mental state, not as a result of perception. I then present consciousness as a social construct that follows from the formation of language, in tandem with the concept of the narrative self. Finally, though I make no claim whether the source of the illusion of consciousness can be explained in dualistic or physicalistic terms, I do suggest adopting heterophenomenology for further research into consciousness.

Je pense donc je suis Rene Descartes, Discours de la mthode e Behold, we know not anything Alfred, Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam A. H. H.

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

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 of automatons, but instead posses a mind like myself. However, before we can ask the question How do we know that other people have minds?, we must rst ask ourselves: How do I know that I have a mind?. Even before we can answer this question, we must rst answer another: what, exactly, is a mind? Though the subject of an entire branch of philosophy, not to mention a sizable portion of the scientic community, the answer to this has never been denitive. Wikipedia denes Mind thus: Mind (pronounced /maInd/) is the aspect of intellect and consciousness experienced as combinations of thought, perception, memory, emotion, will, and imagination, including all unconscious cognitive processes. The term is often used to refer, by implication, to the thought processes of reason. Mind manifests itself subjectively as a stream of consciousness. [...] The original meaning of Old English gemynd was the faculty of memory, not of thought in general. Hence call to mind, come to mind, keep in mind, to have mind of, etc. Old English had other words to express mind, such as hyge mind, spirit. The generalization of mind to include all mental faculties, thought, volition, feeling and memory, gradually develops over the 14th and 15th centuries.1 This denition 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 and storage. The deciding factor in the discussion of other minds is consciousness, also described in terms like awareness, sentience and qualia. A good example of the signicance of consciousness is the though experiment of the philosophical zombie. The philosophical zombie is like us in every way physically and behaves exactly the same as would we. The important dierence is that the zombie lacks awareness. This is then taken as a dening and necessary part of the mind, though not the only part: consciousness. Some conceptions of the philosophical zombie go as far as to describe them as simply behaving, lacking even such faculties as perception, but for present purposes this is going a bit too far. Others argue that philosophical zombies are an impossibility: that consciousness necessarily follows from having the same structure as us. For this paper, this is not a problem: we can replace zombies 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 terms of the problem of other minds, the conscious mind is a necessary requirement for mind as a whole. 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 the parts of the thought process of which we are aware, which is more or less what is referred to by the classic term Reason. What is included in the unconscious is still under debate, but will
Wikipedia. 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 dene the unconscious mind as all mental processes which proceed without consciousness. In the course of this paper, I intend to argue that the conscious mind is erroneous and superuous, and in the end something of an illusion, while the unconscious mind is actually in charge of my decision processes. I will show that the main function of the illusion of consciousness is social, and that it grew with the formation of the concept of self in tandem with the evolution of language. I consider some argument against consciousness being an illusion. Finally I make 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. These include limits of perception, such as perceptual illusions but also inattention blindness or change blindness. There is also an ever growing list of evidence that behaviour can be inuenced without involvement of consciousness, most notable of which is priming. Priming involves exposing a subject to stimuli whose duration fall below the threshold needed for conscious perception. The stimuli are perceived by the subject at the unconscious level, inuencing performance in some following task. Besides these subtle indications that our awareness is limited, there are some ndings that show glaring contradictions between our understanding of the real structure of the world and our conscious experience in it. Dennett, for example, notes that though we have an experience of a visual eld that is fully coloured, we know from biological data that we only have visual receptors for colour in the foveal eld, which covers about 2% of our visual eld.2 Even more surprising, a recent study3 showed that the outcome of a test subjects decisions could be predicted, based on neurological data, ten seconds before the subject was even aware of having made the decision. Together, this indicates that our awareness is severely limited and not at all representational of the world around us or even our own mental processes. Knowing that this is the status of our consciousness given current knowledge, we must ask ourselves what else we may nd in the future. It seems to me entirely possible and not even unlikely to nd that our conscious experience 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 na subject thinks of the world and ve himself, will prove inaccurate and will have to be revised. Though our conscious minds our limited, we do continue to function. This indicates that the unconscious mind plays a large part in our daily live. Given this, what is then the added benet of consciousness? We come back again to the idea of the philosophical zombie: though this creature has no consciousness, he is indistinguishable in behaviour. Therefor, consciousness is
D.C. Dennett. A third-person approach to consciousness. In: Sweet dreams: philosophical obstacles to a science of consciousness. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005. Chap. 2, pp. 2556 3 C.S. Soon et al. Unconscious determinants of free decisions in the human brain. In: Nature Neuroscience 11.5 (2008), pp. 543545
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not a prerequisite for function. Intuitively, this makes sense: though there have been strong arguments 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 performance levels. The problem of other minds also centres on this idea: that from the outward behaviour or human 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 even superuous. I now advance the theory that the conscious mind is simply an illusion, an epiphenomenon occurring alongside the unconscious mind actually getting on with business with the consciousness lagging behind. Certainly, I am not the rst to advance this theory. Susan Blackwood, 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 to be more like a mirage or a visual illusion.4 Indeed, the existence of consciousness cannot be denied when each of us seems to experience it continuously. However, what can be denied is the status of this consciousness. I suggest that the conscious mind is a by-product of our mental processes. We think that our conscious experience of an object derives directly from that object through the senses, but this is not the case: the object is observed and the subject of several unconscious mental process, the precise nature of which remains unknown at present. Then, from this whole process 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 object of that awareness is not a direct reference to the perceived object. In a sense, this can be taken as a denial of intentionality. The subject of my conscious thoughts is not an object, nor even a mental representation directly of the object. In stead, both the conscious thought and the object of that thought arise as by-product of ongoing unconscious mental processes. The unconscious processes could be argued to be themselves intentional, but intention divorced from consciousness. 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 eect of the processing of input coming from the nerve endings in my toe, and at that a side eect which follows after some time has gone by after I actually stubbed my toe. Not only is the quale of pain not caused by the stubbing of my toe, it is dependant on a range of neural factors, such as the subtle mix of neurotransmitters in my brain. What then happens if I have taken a shot of morphine prior to stubbing my toe? I feel no pain because the neural processes that normally follow the input from my stubbed toe have been inhibited. Note that I make no claims about the way in which the unconscious mental processes produce consciousness, neither physicalist nor dualist. Exactly how consciousness is produced is still something of a mystery. What I address here is the role that consciousness has to play, which is to say little. On the matter how the unconscious mind arises from the brain, I feel it safe to suggest a physicalist approach, since the main criterion for choosing dualism has always been the
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Susan Blackmore. The Grand Illusion. In: New Scientist 174.2348 (2002), pp. 2629

special nature of consciousness, not unconsciousness. Rational thought without consciousness may be done by a robot or computer, so it seems obvious that the far more complex brain is more 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 or reasoning, but it is not conscious, it is not a mind of which we are aware. I also have a conscious mind, but this mind in turn does not reect on myself and the world around me, though it might seem so, but is merely a by-product of the unconscious mind. Neither satises the denition of a mind as I discussed in the introduction. Why then are we all under the illusion that we are conscious of the world and ourselves? In the next section, I will explain what I consider a possible explanation for this.

Consciousness as a narrative
Weve seen that consciousness is not, as we thought, the stream of direct perception of the world around us. Rather it is a side eect, an illusion. Very much related to this are the ndings of Gazzaniga in the research on split brain patients. These patients have had the connections between their two brain halves, the corpus callosum, cut to some degree, usually surgically as a treatments for epilepsy. Gazzaniga and others found that these patients were not able to name objects in his left visual eld, and reasoned that this was because the left eye connects to the right hemisphere of the brain, while the left hemisphere is involved in speech and the information could no longer cross from right to left. The patients were however able to show recognition of the 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 eld: when asked to explain his behaviour, the patient would fabricate an explanation based on the information available in the verbalized eld. Gazzaniga concluded that the left hemisphere contains some kind of interpreter, which continuously tells the story of our self, based on the available evidence. If the available evidence is insucient or incorrect, the interpreter will come up with inaccurate explanations of our own behaviour.5 As this interpreter is the continuous narrative of the self, so is consciousness the continuing narrative of our thoughts and perceptions. The two are probably even closely related, consciousness forming the main source of information from which we derive the narrative self. As Gazzaniga said, in the normal course the narrative self is not completely made up, but not completely accurate either. The same applies to consciousness. Reviewing the work of Dennett, Galagher wrote: The consensus from contemporary neuroscience is that neurological processing is for the most part distributed across various brain regions, and it cannot be said that there is a real, neurological center of experience. Thus, there is no real simplicity of experience at one time nor real identity across time that we could label the self. At best, we might refer to a minimal biological self as something real. But the latter is nothing more than a principle of organization involving the distinction between self and non-self. Furthermore, this principle is found throughout living nature, and
M. Gazzaniga and S. Gallagher. The neuronal Platonist. In: Journal of Consciousness Studies 5.5-6 (1998), 706717
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is not something sucient for the purpose of a coherent continuity or identity over time, such as is found at the level of human experience. Humans, however, do have something more than this we have language. And with language we begin to make our experience relatively coherent over extended time periods. We use words to tell 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 nd the main function of consciousness, which as we have seen has no necessary function in mental processes. We use the illusion of awareness in our communication with other people, to whom we also ascribe such awareness. We can describe to another person our conscious perception of some object or some event, and even though that consciousness is not necessarily accurate, the other person will recognize it and is able to imagine the same perceptions in his own conscious mind. It might be hard to imagine, but consciousness itself may have formed with language. Let me put 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 nd this input undesirable. Still, we would hesitate to say that the robot perceives running into a wall as pain. We nd it hard to ascribe consciousness to the robot. An animal, in particular one similar to us like a mammal, is another case: already it becomes easier to anthropomorphise and say that 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 complex than that of a robot, it is not fundamentally dierent. In this light, we could imagine that though the rabbit undergoes the same mental processes as we do when in pain the activation of neurons, the spread of certain neurotransmitters and so on it does not experience the feeling of pain as we humans do. From this point, we only need to repeat these steps while comparing the rabbit to a human being to imagine a human being without consciousness. So, imagining a human being without conscious experience, I nd it conceivable to think that my conscious experience of pain might be the result of language: I have come to think about certain inputs, certain brain events, certain mental states, as undesirable. I found that other human beings also encounter these states. I then learn to categorize this mental state as pain, and communicating with other human beings nd that they have similar concepts which they refer to with the same word. Now I come to associate the conscious experience that accompanies these mental states with the concept of pain. But the conscious experience of pain is not the same as these mental states: there is nothing inherent in the conscious experience of pain that says that this is a sensation that should be avoided. It is the unconscious mind, itself based on a neural 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 to address each in turn.
Shaun Gallagher. Philosophical conceptions of the self: implications for cognitive science. In: Trends in Cognitive 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 for philosophy, 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 help me achieve other goals later in life. To this I respond that, though this is what might seem to be the case, our perception is mistaken. As a matter of fact, both my perception of myself and my conscious reasoning using this perception, are illusions: our conscious minds trying to explain our mental states after they have already occurred. Certainly parts of the above line of reasoning may have occurred, but if so, they have unconsciously been reviewed long before I repeat the exercise in my conscious reasoning. 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 nd that in the 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 behaviour in terms of the information available to it. Could I then not consciously decide to override my motivation and attend classes anyway? No I could not: if I did this, it would not be the consequence 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 nish before becoming aware of the decision in some cases, this does not necessarily mean that this is always the case. 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 can we not determine this? Because this line could, in principle, be drawn anywhere. Where it not for the evidence, we might still believe that all decisions are conscious. Now we are forced to lay the line further. There is no reason however, not to draw the line at completely the other side: the only argument against saying that all decisions are unconscious, is that this does not comply with our normal conscious experience. But this conscious experience, as has been shown, 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. This prevents 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 nally like to make some remarks on consciousness as described by this paper in relation to further research. Let me reiterate that though our existing conception of consciousness is an illusion, I by no means claim 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 7

examined phenomenologically, is an answer to which I lay no claim here. Though I do think that many 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 Churchland describes it7 because I make no assumptions here that consciousness is reducible to the mental states that produce them as side eect. Rather, I suggest using the heterophenomological approach as described by Dennett2 : since it is clear that our conscious experience is dierent from our actual mental processes, data about both should be collected, assuming a neutral stance toward the verity of claims made from conscious perception. It then follows to explain both consciousness and mental states, and the relationship between them.

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

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