I was reading this article the other day which poses an idea, or to him, a fact, but it poses this idea that we don’t really have any conscious thought. I’ll link the article, just so you can read it, though, I’m not going to reference it too much in this post, but rather just touch on it for a brief moment.
There Is No Such Thing as Conscious Thought
Anyways, his argument is, honestly, a very compelling and strong argument, and, in some ways, is hard to refute. But I’d like to take a shot at trying to refute his argument, or, at the very least, make an alternative case, even based on some of the premises he already stated!
He doesn’t go too deep in the neuroscience of the brain, and I’ll admit, that’s not my particular area of expertise either. But I have read and listened to a fair amount of neuro-physiological literature, and understand, mostly at an abstract level, of what’s going on.
Let me explain what I believe the premise he is trying to argue from.
First, we need to understand motivation, because that’s the driving force in all of our lives: motivation. Without motivation, you’d have no reason to get out of bed and do all the, seemingly, arbitrary things you do: brush your teeth, eat breakfast, go to work, have lunch, go home, hang out with your friends, party on the weekend. Let’s be honest, if you look at all the things we do, and there’s a lot of weird things we do, it seems as if they’re weird, right?
I was at Disney World this past summer and, although it was a magical and fantastic place, it did feel very odd in that, what exactly were we all doing? Why were we all here? To have fun? To escape from our boring lives? Why? I’m not exactly going to answer those questions, but it is going to lead me to my next point.
So, we’re creatures of strange habits, so strange, that the only explanation for this is free will, right? The only reason we would be so compelled to do the things we do is because that we, in fact, have the free will to do so, otherwise, why would we do them?
But what Carruthers, in his argument, states that we don’t have conscious thought, but the thoughts we have are simply the product of our brain in areas we don’t have control over, and thus, we are merely the spectator to our thoughts as if they were “passing by”, but we ourselves were not the ones who formulated them.
And this is how I’ll defend his argument. Say you’re at work, and out of nowhere, you start imagining a hamburger; a big, juicy, hamburger with cheese, lettuce, tomato, onions, all sitting atop a warm, fluffy, bun. And suddenly, you realize it’s 12:00 PM, lunchtime. What do you do? You go to lunch. And what do you go get? Yep, you guessed it, the exact hamburger you were fantasizing about.
So now I ask you, was it you who produced those thoughts, or was it the part of you that was hungry that produced those thoughts? At first, it seems like the same question, no? Is it not me who was hungry, in turn, me myself that produced the thought to go get a hamburger? I would say no, just like Carruthers might argue as well.
Let me explain that idea here. Most of us seem to think we are the controller of all our thoughts and motivations, but we’re not. It’s more like, there’s a group of underlying competing emotions that seem to fight for control of the body and what thoughts emerge. And I can explain that, as well.
Back to the hamburger scenario. Now, you could say you produced your own thought to get a hamburger, thus, in turn, you went to get a hamburger. But what seems more likely is that motivational state of hunger produced your fantasy of the hamburger, which that drove you to go get one. Why do I say this? Well, once you get back to your desk, after lunch, you no longer will have spontaneous thoughts of food. The motivational state of “I’m hungry” has been satisfied, thus, a new motivational state takes its place, such as get back to work, which might be nested in the higher goal of making money, nested inside of the goal of to pay bills, nested inside of the goal of providing for family, and so on.
And the emergence of thoughts, which can be turned into actions, don’t seem to be products of your own creation, at least, insofar as the fact you know exactly where and how they’re produced. They seem to be things that emerge into consciousness, and you become aware of them, so, in a sense, they were your own, but in another sense, you didn’t know they were inside of you, that is, until they emerged or remerged, and it only seems like the proper motivational states will cause their emergence.
So maybe I’m not arguing against Carruthers claim, but I’m just expanding on it. So what it seems to be that, although we don’t have exact control of what thoughts do emerge, we do seem to have control of what motivational states we want controlling us, though it’s a bit more complicated than that.
Let me provide one more example, and even, let’s go back to the hamburger example. Say you’re driving on your way to go get your hamburger, and while you’re driving, just before you reach your destination, it’s within your sights, someone rear-ends you; you got in an accident, maybe through no fault of your own, but nonetheless, it happened. And let’s say it was so severe that now your car is totaled; it can’t be driven any longer.
What happens then? Well, suddenly, your motivational state of “I’m hungry” shifts to “I’m angry” and maybe into a new state of “I’m worried” and so on. You might forget that you’re hungry altogether. But here’s the part that seems to, in part, explain free will. We have the ability to shift between motivational states, more or less, at our control. Although you had, seemingly, no control over the emergence of this new “angry” motivational state, you can choose to ignore it in that you can continue to go and fulfill the original goal of “I’m hungry” by getting the hamburger.
And that’s very odd, I think. So maybe I do agree with Carruthers, but I don’t want to go down the rabbit hole and say, “Aha! That proves we don’t have free will!” But more so, I’m trying to say, that just makes the idea of free will that much more complicated, and even, the idea of the unconscious that much more evident.
And why do I say that? That’s because it seems as if, collectively, the thoughts that emerge “out of nowhere” appear to have loose patterns over time and across the world.
The only thing that I could compare it to is though Sci-fi movies which depict Artifical Intelligence. The robots, as portrayed in some movies, might be all, very much different, it’s as if they all seem to have this underlying thought or collective motivation. Usually it’s something like, they know they’re not real, that they want to feel something, or at the very least, they feel as if they’re more than robots. It’s as if they know they’re missing something, just they can’t pinpoint exactly what it is.
I hope that analogy made sense.
That’s what the Collective Unconscious, as first brought forth by Carl Jung, seems to depict. It’s as if we’re all pushing for a goal of some sort, something we can’t quite define, or even conceptualize, but these underlying motivational states seem to unconsciously be pushing us towards it. I don’t know if it’s even a goal, either, but it’s something.
As we’re free to rid ourselves of the limitations of our own body such as hunger, thirst, shelter, and so on, we can now focus on more “intellectual” matters, but that makes you wonder, what for?
Why should we focus on these intellectual matters? What’s the point of furthering human existence? I’m not trying to be a cynic or pessimist about this, I’m only pointing out that it’s not so obvious what our collective goal is, though there does, in fact, seem to look as if there’s at least one there, though, more than likely, multiple goals in which our unconscious motivational states seem to be pushing for.
But what is it?
Anyways, thanks reading,
cory
You never have conscious thought if you are always asleep and never wake up. It’s pretty straight foreward.
LikeLike
So are you suggesting we’re all sleeping?
LikeLike
No I’m not! The direct meaning of consciousness is being awake and unconsciousness is being asleep! Aside from this the discussions on this have become absurd!
LikeLike
See, I’m not so convinced that “being asleep” necessarily means you’re not conscious, but rather sleeping, in turn, dreaming, is another form of consciousness, one of which is still, to this day, not understood with any degree of certainty, and from that pushes us to make conclusions that a sleeping state is, fundamentally, an unconscious and/or irrelevant state of being.
Hope that made sense, and thanks for your insights!
LikeLike
You conflating unconscious thought and conscious thought. You used the term “conscious thought” yourself! Now you are confusing yourself….gasp!
LikeLike
Yes, I do think I might be confusing you by using the terms interchangeably, which I apologize. I’m merely saying that your consciousness, in turn, the thoughts that are produced as a result of that are not under your control as much as we’d like to believe, but I’m trying to argue at the same time that this discovery still doesn’t produce the grounds of which you can dismiss free will.
Conscious thought and consciousness are two different things, but one is produced from the other. That is what I think I should clarify.
I’m going to rename my title to “What is Conscious thought?” to save the confusion.
Thanks!
LikeLike
You are indeed embedded in a society and a world with its own directions and much of it is not dealt with in a calculated way. I suppose you are right and most of it cannot be challenged directly in a confrontational way, but still you can do it subtly.
I watched this Tedx video last week and I think you’ll like it; https://youtu.be/QMu5XLux_GA
LikeLike
I watched that video, and he’s making a different claim than what I’m making, and all of winch Charles Faulkner said in the Tedx Talk, I completely agree with.
We see the world in based on our perceptions, which our perceptions are nested inside of other higher order structures. Generally speaking, we see the world inside a frame which interprets everything object we see as either a tool or obstacle, the rest of which can be seen as irrelevant (we don’t see), that is, until it becomes relevant.
Much of what we do when we’re “seeing reality” is blocking out everything else that we’ve deemed irrelevant towards our higher order goals.
So I don’t think we have any disagreement there. I’m pointing out that, much like like Maslow pointed out, though I don’t believe he’s entirely right, that we are very much controlled my our emotions, feelings, and needs, some of which will need to be satisfied before moving up the hierarchy. But what I was also pointing out is, we seem to have the ability to ignore the urge or drive to satisfy a lower order need in pursuit of a higher order need. And what I was pointing out as well was, the emergence of these thoughts seem to be a consequence of these needs that must be satisfied.
I do appreciate all the comments though, it helps me sort out my own ideas!
LikeLike
So what if there is no mind/body duality and your mind is no more independent of physical reality than the processing of a computer is independent?
LikeLike
EXACTLY! That what it seems more like rather than the “mind” being separate from “body”, your body is really just a single entity, and that’s what the Buddhists fundamentally claim. You are yourself, and you don’t “have a body” but you “are a body”. But, when you start to make these claims and/or realizations, many people are quick to jump to the conclusion of “So that means we don’t have free will.” Which I don’t, necessarily, think is true.
But that’s where it all get’s more theoretical than objective.
LikeLike
I think that’s where people’s imaginations get to overtake reality and it’s supported by the idea of prayer which is the ability to communicate to imaginary beings with thought.
LikeLike
It’s also interesting that the two main and only academically acceptable modes of thought involve the manipulation of the symbolic systems of language and mathematics according to their rule sets.
Without a doubt sybologies and their rule sets are totally imaginary. And the map should never be confused with the terrain.
LikeLike
It’s also worth pointing out that computers are capable of thinking both linguistically and mathematically; and often are far better at it than us as biological computers. And yet we don’t talk of consciousness of computers as a separate realm like people do with human consciousness.
LikeLike
Well, I think that’s what many people are finding out who are experimenting with AI in that they’re realizing it’s not about “what” to focus on, but “what not” to focus on, if that makes sense.
Such as, in a particular conversation like the one we’re having here, we know we’re talking about consciousness, we understand that everything we’re saying, more or less, will be within a certain domain of context. So we don’t have to worry about if this is, say, a political, mathematical, even poetic conversation, and thus, allows us for easier interpretation of what we’re saying, but what’s odd is we seem to fluidly and subtly shift between domains of contexts and even go back and forth between ones we’ve already touched on, generally speaking, without too much confusion.
Which, for AI, seems to be a difficult task to do, though, maybe, and most likely, will be overcome?
LikeLike