The Unconscious
Is the unconscious a myth? Or a real and potent component of the psyche where words and memories are stored waiting to invade waking life?
Per Freud and Lacan, word similarity is something the unconscious plays with. Do you pay attention to Freudian slips as a window on the depths of the psyche?
Per Freud and Lacan, word similarity is something the unconscious plays with. Do you pay attention to Freudian slips as a window on the depths of the psyche?
Comments (154)
Dreams would seem to be another indicator of its existence. Despite a person being unconscious, the brain continues to work, producing seemingly random but in some way meaningful movies. If it affects our sleeping state, there's a pretty good chance it affects our waking state as well.
Do you pay attention to slips of the tongue?
As for slips of the tongue, they are probably indicative of things that are near the top of your unconscious thoughts. For example, when you accidentally call your current partner by your ex-partner's name. :-O
What other names?
I don't see how it could possibly be. Quite apart from psycho-analytic theories, it is a physiological fact that many of the regulatory, hormonal, and autonomic somatic processes are not available to conscious introspection, yet constantly shape experience and behaviour. There are any number of experiments showing how various stimuli or influences or causal agents can influence your responses along a number of axes without you're being conscious of them. Even if a subject has a neuronal abnormality, such as a developing tumour, which might cause behavioural changes, then that is an unconscious determinant of behaviours.
Then there's the whole gamut of psychoanalytic interpretations of the unconscious. Even though this customarily is said to have been 'discovered' by Freud, there are many historical precedents, in a similar way to there having been historical precedents to the idea of biological evolution (indeed, Wikipedia tells me the word itself was coined by Schelling, and surely is basic to Schopenhauer's philosophy). But Freud crystallised a lot of that understanding or at least gave it a kind of scientific footing.
I have noticed in my interactions on forums, that diehard materialists invariably reject the notion of the unconscious. However, I don't think they're really cognisant of their own reasons for so doing. ;-)
(Check out this title).
So an important point is that habit and attention operate on different timescales - a fifth of a second vs half a second. And connected to that, all clear thoughts have to start out vague and tentative, becoming focused and strongly conscious by neural competition and selective attention - unless they are, by exact contrast, highly routinised thoughts that can be emitted "without thought" as rapid habits.
So what we are dealing with here is a natural dichotomy of brain activity towards either dealing with life in a rapid, learnt, unthinking way, or a more deliberative, attentive, and learning way. And this is a dynamical balancing act. We have to be doing both at once all the time.
If you apply this neurological model to Freudian slips for example, you can see that speech acts have to bubble up from vague beginnings where there is some general intended thought to be expressed, but multiple choices about how to turn that into an articulated sentence. So the brain has to be in a state of competition where many things could be said - including stuff you don't want to say, or stuff vaguely associated - and all that possibility has to be suppressed just to let some actual formula of words win through to be said.
Nothing nefarious is going on when slips occur. It just reflects the fact that thought has to start with a net cast wide, then speech itself forces a dramatic narrowing of possible sayings to arrive at a string of particular words that then count as what you wanted to say.
And the timing comes into it because you can be conscious of your general intended speech act, but stringing the actual words together happens at subconscious speeds. So it is only after the final speaking you discover how this little process of competitive filtering played out.
So my complaint against Freudian style views is that they kind of paint a picture of two kinds of selves in competition - like the instinctual id and socially constrained super ego. It is a one dimensional tale of repression and betrayal.
But while competition definitely exists, the ability to smoothly integrate the various levels of processing is what is more relevant to an understanding of brain function. The neural architecture may be founded on dichotomies. But the dynamics are then about the fruitful integration of the useful division of labour.
The idea of being at secret war with your own self is a nice romantic myth. It speaks to the real fact of division. But what completes the story of the self is focusing on its actual goal of arriving at an integrated and adaptive state of understanding and action. The unconscious then becomes, in this light, all the dynamic and lively variety that has become constrained for just a moment to form the highly focal state of mind we happen to be in right now, at this time, for some good reason.
What are their reasons?
But it is also pretty materialist to be seeking the hidden subconscious determinants of behaviour. Freud's own model is straight out of the industrial era with its hydraulic steam engine metaphors. Watch out, that thar id is a pressure about to blow! Got to protect the ego system by finding harmless release in Freudian slips!
So that is why I would stress flipping the story. The unconscious is just that dynamical vague mass of everything we might ever think or do. Then the moment to moment consciousness is what becomes our usefully adapted state having constrained all the meaningless variety to form some fleetingly useful mental picture.
The determination of the indeterminate is a top down thing. We are actually in control in the sense that the evolution of a state of mind is holistically organised via a competivite process, a generalised filtering.
So to escape materialism - the standard bottom up story - it is important not to try to pin the blame on our instinctual animal id. That itself is a romantic myth by which society - as a higher scale of mind - is seeking to regulate or constrain individual humans in a holistic and top down fashion.
At least Freud got he super ego story right. But he was essentially speaking to materialist science and romantic ideology.
I don't think so. I think the interpretation you're referring to - the 'instinctive animal ID' - is only one aspect of the story. And indeed, Freud was materialist - but Jung wasn't, and I think Jung's development of 'the unconscious' was far more culturally significant than Freud (even though Jung is generally deprecated by mainstream culture nowadays.)
Furthermore, I see the Jungian idea of archetypes as being related to the Platonic eidos, as 'forms' which represent universals or types.
But the salient point, is to become conscious of the unconscious - to be able to intuit the contents of the unconscious, which is an essential step in the process of liberation. We have to learn to navigate and plumb the depths of the unconscious. That is why I referred to James Hillman's book in my response to Mongrel.
Quoting praxis
I think 'the unconscious' sits uneasily with any form of reductionism, for the obvious reason that it is kind of occult, a 'hidden reality'.
So you are again recognising a division, but then jumping to a transcendent ontology which puts the second source of action outside the level of action to be explained. It is not the integrated view I am taking. Holism is about immanence. It is about the two way interaction that can result because there is a symmetry breaking or dichotomy that forms, allowing the third thing of dynamical integration.
Memory is a better way to look at it. But also everything about the brain is memory.
A snappy way of putting it is that the unconscious or habitual part of brain activity could be called a memory of what can be forgotten, while the conscious or attentional part is our memory of the future.
What I mean is that we form a machinery of adaptive habits by learning what to ignore about the world. We learn what we can afford to forget to make things happen in a way that demands least conscious attention.
And then attention is about noticing what predicts the near future. It is forming the mental picture of what counts and needs to guide our coming behaviour. So it is a (working) memory of the expectable future.
So the unconscious is everything that at the moment we can afford to forget about. The conscious is everything we need to be remembering as context for the moment we are going through so as to smoothly integrate ourselves in the world just about to happen.
The two faces of what we call the faculty of memory. And what people typically think of as memory - recall of past events - is the linguistically structured art of talking ourselves back in time, imagining or recreating an anticipatory image of what it would be like to be back in some moment, doing the Janus thing of ignoring as much as possible via habit, forming a working memory as context for some next moment.
Yeah, seems like he knows some stuff. Maybe he can help us out in the 'Implications of Evolution' thread...? @apokrisis
I didn't 'change the subject'. The subject is the unconscious, and Jung was one of the foremost commentators on that very subject in the 20th century. But then of course your animus against anything you deem 'supernatural' - which is a whole heap of stuff - gets activated.
Quoting apokrisis
Which is a roundabout way of saying, everything has to be explicable naturalistically, otherwise it's 'superstitious', isn't it?
Quoting praxis
Note the above.
I don't think I've ever been roundabout on the point. :)
A brief answer is that biologists now understand life as a manifestation of the laws of thermodynamics. So evolution (and progress) would now be placed securely on that particular branch of physics. Life exists to accelerate the entropification of the universe.
This naturalises life, giving it a purpose. The universe wants something. Life arises not as some wild accident but because it is the kind of complex, energy dissipating, heat producing, process that is meant to be.
This is a big change from the old Darwinian mechanical picture. And the same ontological shift is happening in physics too. The universe itself is a Big Bang, etc. Existence is the evolution of maximalised simplicity - the search for a physical heat death.
Then life and mind arise as the fleetingly complex structure which help with this generalised cause. Where there are undissipated energy stores, we insert ourselves as structure that finds clever ways to dissipate it to waste heat.
So one general physical imperative to rule them all.
Scientific American: A New Physics Theory of Life
Neuroscience explains neurophysiology. Neurophysiology is correlated with, but insufficient to explain, psychological functions. Consciousness is a property of a whole human being (comprising body and mind), not of human brains.
Since the terms "conscious" and "unconscious" are familiar to, and used by, neuroscientists, philosophers, and psychologists, I see no reason to confuse the issue by replacing them with the terms "attention" and "habit" (which pertain to entirely different psychological phenomena). To make sense, that would be a metaphorical use of terms, hence; a category error.
Also, I have never liked the terms "subconscious" and "unconscious", finding them inadequate to the task of categorising psychological functions with respect to semantic information processing.
I would prefer to replace them with the terms "semi-conscious" and "non-conscious" (which are at least cognate). These, together with the term "conscious", seem to comprehend mind-body conditions which can be observed in the behaviour of others, and entail variations in awareness and responsiveness which can be measured.
The mind is variably aware, and the body is variably responsive, to wit:
1) Consciousness is a conscious condition, and to be conscious is to be fully aware and fully responsive.
2) Semi-Consciousness is a semi-conscious condition, and to be semi-conscious is to be partially aware and partially responsive.
3) Non-Consciousness is a non-conscious condition, and to be non-conscious is to be unaware and unresponsive.
Cognitive Psychology has long recognised the dual aspect of semantic information processing, whether it be termed:
1) Horizontal and Vertical
2) Controlled and Automatic
3) Slow and Fast
4) Serial and Parallel, or
5) Explicit and Implicit, etc.
Descriptions of consciousness and semi-consciousness correspond with descriptions of controlled and automatic processing, respectively. The nature and extent of the relations between types of consciousness and psychological functions remain to be fully discovered and explained.
Some, if not many, functions exhibit characteristics of both types of processing, sometimes switching seamlessly between them (e.g., problem solving). Attention is variously described as Global (Broad), Local (Narrow), Intentional (Active) Selection, and Automatic (Passive) Selection. There are other examples.
So, besides the two types of processing noted, could there be a third type which combines these two in serial (switched), or parallel (simultaneous), operation (otherwise known as ordinary fluctuations in consciousness)? Or even a fourth type which involves non-conscious processing (either independent of, or in combination with, conscious and semi-conscious processing)?
Only if other people are a myth, such as those:
1) suffering from certain forms of brain damage, epilepsy, akinetic mutism, delirium, traumatic experience, and psychosis.
2) who are in pharmacologically induced, minimally conscious, or persistent vegetative, states, or chronic coma.
3) who have been anaesthetised.
It would be more productive to ask: what types of semantic information do people in these conditions process?
That's the advantage of talking instead about attention and habit. We know how both work and how they functionally relate. It's not handwaving.
This only describes one aspect of consciousness, the willful part. It does not describe the creative aspect (intuition) nor does it describe the habitual aspect. The former being by far the most important since it is fundamental to existence, to create. The willful aspect provides the ability to create. Habits, allow the body to persist and extend throughout the body.
If you've written five books on neuroscience, it shouldn't be a difficult thing to provide the requested explanation. Or just give me the titles, I'll purchase them myself, and look for the answer (assuming your books have been published).
Your desire for anonymity will be respected.
Thanks for providing the title of a book which is actually sold by Amazon (presumably written by yourself).
Having read the reviews of this, and your other titles (as listed on Amazon), it is obvious that you are a well-read science writer, and that you are not a neuroscientist. In fact, Amazon describes you as a journalist and author.
None of these titles would be considered to be a textbook on neuroscience. I could spend £2.19 to purchase the title you recommended, but I suspect (and you know) that it doesn't contain an explanation of "attention" and "habit" written strictly in neurophysiological terms. Please ask one of your neuroscience contacts to write one for you. Thanks in advance.
introductory text for neuroscience at my local medical school. And it did focus on the neural architecture of automatic and attentional processing.
Why be such a dick?
To demonstrate that you also do not explain neurophysiology, except by metaphor (which has no scientific or philosophical value). Similar to your pansemiosis monologues, it's reductionist pseudo-science-philosophy, colloquially known as woo, hand waving, fact free waffle, etc.
If you want to know what a good book on neuroscience is like, read Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience, by Bennett and Hacker.
Well, humans have a whole bunch of neurons that think very fast like a computer, and well, he or she is doing it very, very fast, in parallel, and well it's definitely superhuman, and very complicated.
And so it happens.
I don't see how the unconscious could be linguistically structured. Emotions and feelings arise from the unconscious which we cannot put words to. Trying to understand these inner feelings is where words fail us. Furthermore, when we think using words it is always a conscious effort. If we try to put words to the subconscious, in an effort to structure it, we must bring it into the conscious mind, so that it is no longer the subconscious which is being structured.
Humans are superhuman? Isn't that contradictory?
Not according to this famous neuroscientist. It's "complicated" but they are most definitely "superhuman".
Basically, all neuroscience is doing is anthropomorphizing neurons. He talks about neurons as if they are little humans. They can do this, and they can do that, and they are amazing! - but complicated.
Not a myth, more like a fantasy, Lacan, unlike Freud, thought the unconscious is linguistic but not like a structured grammatical language. A sea of referents, which are connected but not directly with each other rather by puns, anagrams, metaphors, desires, memories, history...
Slips are important in talk therapy. The conversations between analyst and analysand tend to brings out slips, which a trained therapist can use to help direct the therapy. The skill of the therapist is to make the right connections to direct the conversation.
Like the myth of Oedipus? Or Narcissus?
I think the unconscious is an unknown known, and one neurologist's woo is as flakey as his brother's. Religion is rather better at psychology than science is, so regarding the unconscious as myth is probably a good idea, if only to keep the worst of the meddlers out our heads.
There is the myth of the cup that is in the cupboard, or is not there, when one does not look, and the unconscious is like that; it's behind you. It's the bits of lego left over from the grand construction of the narrative self, the out of character fellow that takes over when competence is not enough.
A rational man's unconscious is irrational, an emotional man's unconscious is calculating. And of course they are both women! ;)
The anima is just like the wife in the Grimm's fairytale, The Fisherman and His Wife.
Stepmothers are exceptionally cruel calculators.
[quote=Wikipedia: Hansel and Gretel]In the Grimms' version of the tale, the woodcutter's wife is the children's biological mother and the blame for abandoning them is shared between both her and the woodcutter himself. In later editions, some slight revisions were made: the wife became the children's stepmother, the woodcutter opposes her scheme to abandon the children and religious references are made. The sequence where the swan helps them across the river is also an addition to later editions.[3][/quote]
Best to pass blame onto to others whenever possible and to unconsciously adapt stories (narratives) to demonstrate our own intelligence and moral excellence.
I was talking about using the attention~habit distinction instead of the conscious~unconscious one. And then - as we mostly study the neuro-architecture of that by jabbing electrodes into the skulls of laboratory animals - I added the rider that humans would of course have the usual linguistically structured overlay over both of those levels of processing.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Huh? People are always talking about feeling scared, happy, hungry, whatever.
But yes, "emotional" valuation does take place at a rapid and instinctual level of genetically-formed habit. It is automatic and so "arises".
Yet it is also true that the evolution of the higher brain sees all the lower level habitual responding getting mapped to places in the prefrontal and cingular cortex so that they can enter into attentional level responding, become part of working memory planning. Feelings of pain, for instance, are mapped down in the brainstem. But then re-mapped in the anterior cingulate where they can then be either amplified or over-ridden, depending on the broader choices a smart animal has to make.
The higher brain can remember the pain - make it a nagging anxiety. Or it can shut down the feelings of pain if the animal is in a fight or flight situation and has to focus on executing some more complex plan of action.
So feelings can be "conscious" or "unconscious". Sometimes we can be feeling things - like that dull pain in your back while sat in your chair - without really being aware of them. We have a habitual level response but it isn't deemed significant enough to be allowed to break through ... until someone mentions it and you go looking to see if it's there. Then vice versa, a bee stings your toe and that breaks through your concentration, suppressing whatever other thoughts of urgent business that you had at that moment.
This is the sophisticated way brains are organised. They are designed to divide their effort two ways - either to deal with as much as possible with the least effort and analysis, or decide something is so significant that it needs full attentional analysis. And all day they do both things at the same time.
Saying some aspect of mentality is unconscious, semi-conscious, or whatever, explains nothing. It is saying well whatever consciousness is, there is this other stuff I rely on that isn't consciousness.
But attention and habit makes sense as two poles of a dichotomous brain organisation. We can talk about what exactly the brain is doing with each, and also why that seems the logical way for brains to navigate the dynamic complexity of the world.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Or rather it is like an iceberg. The whole brain is involved and the effort is divided between habit and attention. Attention forms a generalised intent (that being the novel part), habit puts that into words (that being routine skill), and then attention can sign off on the final utterance - or at least come up with hasty self-correction having spotted something wrong with the way the words just came out.
You are thinking of conscious and unconscious as two walled off kinds of mind. I am stressing their active interconnection as two complementary modes of processing - one doing the most work for the least effort, the other putting in the most effort only where it is really necessary.
When you refer to "the effort" which the brain is involved in, isn't this intentional effort? If so, then attention could not form intent, because attention is already subsumed under "the effort" which is itself intentional. If you don't mean intentional effort, what other type of effort could there possibly be?
I agree, it is hard to avoid talking like this. But I am trying to argue the more subtle systems view where what I mean by attention is precisely the development of some fleeting brain-wide state of constraint.
A clear intention comes to be in focus because all the background chatter of the brain is being suppressed or restrained. The intent thus pops into view as the efficient cause (supposedly) of the voluntary or controlled behaviour that ensues. And the effort being talked about is the effort of repressing all the possibilities that might have been to allow some particular "best fit" state of mind become fully actualised.
It makes no sense in the systems view to wear yourself out trying to isolate a first cause in such a model of neural action. If we say attention causes a state of intention, we don't mean that in a mechanical sense of there being an agent that has to pick a choice.
Instead, arriving at a state of attentional focus is a process of evolving development. It begins with the vague potential of the many different attentional outcomes that could be the case, and then arrives eventually - half a second later - at the outcome, the state of intentionality, which appears to have the best fit for whatever are the challenges or opportunities of the moment.
So as I say, you are analysing this mechanically - A leads to B leads to C. I am talking about an organic logic where a heap of potential self-organises through competition to arrive at a best adapted outcome. And in information processing terms, much of that effort goes into inhibiting or constraining all the possible neural activity that would otherwise muddy the water.
One striking finding was that if you measure the electrophysiological activity in the limbs of expert athletes, there is very little noise. Actions are being controlled with the least effort, the most efficient set of commands to the muscles. While a novice by contrast is sending a confused blast of often contrary messages to those same muscles - a reason why their motion is choppy and inaccurate.
So to control interactions with the world, we do have to learn what to do. But mostly that becomes learning to suppress the randomness of all the things we shouldn't do.
And this is the organic constraints-based model. A system is some collection of degrees of freedom which can be organised by limiting those degrees of freedom. The result is not complete suppression of error (as reflected in the OP's concern about Freudian slips), but instead its minimisation to an average that is tolerable - pragmatically good enough to serve a purpose.
The point of the OP was this suspicion that every action has a cause and so Freudian slips have to be secretly intentional. But an organic or Aristotelean view of causality says slips can be just slips. Accidents are also still part of the game. In a sense, you are always thinking about many other things at once, its just that you are also for the minute trying to suppress them so as to be left thinking about just the one thing.
Having a mind that rambles associatively comes for free. That is the brain's accumulated degrees of freedom expressing themselves. You can call it the unconscious if you like. But it is more about what we are putting an effort into suppressing just for an instant so as to be matchingly attentive to whatever wins out as that part of current experience we can least afford to restrict to an automatic response.
Then there is a kind of hiarchy of importance, so that some needs are met, and others suppressed or put off. Then there are strategies, actions and reactions aimed towards the fulfillment of impulses that bleed out, as it were, and used in unsure circumstances.
Consciousness is like unitary, there isn't a such thing as multitasking, there is just quickly moving ones attention back and forth. Kind of like the focus point of the eye, where only the thing being looked directly at is clear, and in consciousness, whereas the rest melds into the periphery. When it comes to drives, emotions, qualia, they are of this sort. One is not separate, or distinct from them, but are them. One is not hungry, one is hunger. One is not angry, one is anger. Etc. The unconscious is like the complete "self", only this itself is not complete, but open ended, and itself in flux as a totality, and not simply the individual unitary part that makes up consciousness in this moment.
Something like that maybe. Who knows?
I wouldn't be so quick to make that claim. Efficient causes commonly come into existence as a result of a final cause, this is the nature of freely willed actions. Also, it is a fact that we consciously direct our attention toward things which interest us. Being attentive is the capacity to direct ones attention without be distracted by things which tend to create a sub-conscious, reflex action of the attention, toward other things. Being able to consciously direct one's attention is essential to learning. We cannot learn without this capacity to direct our attention.
Quoting apokrisis
So this is clearly backwards. Intention is what focuses the attention, suppressing the background chatter. You are assuming some sort of "effort" by the brain, to focus attention, which allows intention to pop up, when it's quite obvious that this effort is intention itself, already in action. What else would you assume this effort to consist of, when we clearly have so many examples of intention focusing the attention?
You seem to have taken this faulty materialist, determinist premise, that intention is subservient to attention, and you've run all over living behaviour with it.
Quoting apokrisis
Do you think that intentional acts only come into existence through learning? In actuality, intention is required for learning, as that which focuses the attention. The ability to control interactions with the world is innate, it is not learned. That is what it means to be alive. What is learned is which things to control.
Do you believe in a collective unconscious?
I agree that the unconscious is an unknown known.
The remit of the scientist is to resolve empirical questions (i.e., to establish fact by means of empirical investigation) and provide reliable explanations. The remit of the philosopher is to resolve conceptual questions (i.e., to determine whether or not a concept makes sense by means of logical investigation) and provide coherent models. These are complementary tasks.
Cognitive Neuroscience is concerned with the neurophysiological processes which are associated with psychological functions. It is only through an integrative analysis of the explanations each domain generates that a complete explanation and coherent model of consciousness can be provided.
Yes, we do it all the time. We don't just think in actualities, and concrete entities, but in possibilities which are not correlative, or even necessarily actionable. Funny thing about openness and creativity, is that creatives tend not to be great at implementation and non-creative people are great at it. As if they're opposed. Jordan Peterson says that he thinks this is because in order to do a lot of creative thinking, one has to be able to detach their abstractions from their actions. Otherwise they would act out everything that they thought. Kind of like how you're put into paralysis while you're sleeping. Reminiscent of Kierkegaard's ideas of angst being caused by freedom, and infinite possibility. Without definite boundaries between categories, constraints, and strong belief in the reality of one's world view, ideas become less actionable.
The highly abstract possibilities, which include with them all kinds of qualitative judgments, and associations greatly affect the unconscious, in the sense of telling you what's possible, what's good and things without any necessary experience directly with them, or even correlative to other experiences you've had. You can preconceive of things, and they can be pretty much anything, which will tell you in advance how to react to them, or accomplish something without training or experience with it, which you can implement.
You mean like hypnosis?
Namely, that there is a myth that the unconscious has a will of its own. This is a mistake to think of the mind competing in interests between the ID, ego, and super-ego. Intentionality resides wholly with the ego. The super-ego and ID, as I understand it, don't have a will of their own in regards to decision making; but, are just components of the mind searching for the most agreeable outcome to some decision making process.
A question worth bringing up is to ask, why is it that we think that the ID or super-ego would have a sort of will of their own?
This is the mistake which I explain above. You create an incoherent model by restricting intentionality this way. Intentionality is required for learning, in order to focus the attention. Intentionality is behind all the desires which arise from the non-conscious aspects of being. If a desire inspires an action which is carried out for a purpose, it must be consider to be an intentional act.
Talk about attention is talk about a general faculty. Talk about intentions is talk about particular states.
Now I am trying to get away from such a mundanely mechanical framing of the debate myself. But if we have to talk in those terms, then you can see how you are confusing apples and oranges. Or the general and the particular.
Intentions have to form via attentional mechanism. And then having formed as particular states of attention, they can act as constraints on further attentional acts.
But also, this attentional machinery is design to allow those intended acts of attention to be interrupted. You might be intending to open the door and noticing odd noises coming from behind, be rapidly caused to halt and form some new state of intention.
So you've got yourself into some pointless spiral in trying to prove attentional machinery is under voluntary control and never subject to involuntary trigger. But that machinery obviously has to switch efficiently between two modes of attending - either pursuing a plan or getting a new plan started.
Also, does the OP ask about intransitive or transitive unconsciousness, or both? Probably both if condition determines function (especially if that function fluctuates between two conditions).
In case you didn't notice, I'm talking about the general thing, intention, not particular intentions.
Intention in its basic form is general, and not a particular intention. This is why we often do things without being able to state the particular intention involved with the act, when the act is nevertheless intentional.
Quoting apokrisis
In the formation of particular intentions, one's attention must be directed inward. towards one's inner self, at the general intention which is within. So if I'm feeling uncomfortable, I direct my attention inward and form the particular intention to eat, or to urinate, or whatever I see as required to relieve this uncomfortable feeling. From there I move to the even more specific, what I will eat, or where I will go. So directing my attention is a process of determining the particulars of a general intention. This "directing my attention" must be intentional, or else there could be no "directing". It is not a particular intention, because it considers many possible intentions so it must be general..
Of course I cannot really name the general intention from which the particulars are derived, or else it would no longer be general, it would be something specific, named. But I can describe them in general ways, like the feelings of anxiety, anticipation, discomfort, etc., which all seem to exist in forms which attract my attention.
Quoting apokrisis
"Intention" does not mean "voluntary control", that is a misrepresentation. To have intention means to have purpose, it does not mean to have control. So involuntary acts are still intentional acts according to the fact that they are purposeful. The conscious agent may not always be consciously aware of the purpose for all the acts which one is carrying out, but this does not make these acts unintentional.
Quoting Galuchat
It is a mistake to class the intentional as necessarily voluntary. All voluntary acts are intentional, but not all intentional acts are voluntary.
Good thing that's just your misrepresentation then. I have stressed the complementary way that habit level and attentional level processing support each other.
Habit is there to do everything that needs to done without demanding thought. If you have already learnt the right responses (learning being what attention is for) then you can just act quickly with minimal need for analysis.
Attention is then where things get escalated because more thought and focus is needed.
So the fact that there has to be switching machinery that either gates or promotes events to the higher level is what you would expect. Your brain would not be much use if it couldn't flip between the need to keep focused on its own internal plans in the face of distractions, yet also then stop to focus on distractions when they might actually matter.
It's funny to hear you bringing up semi consciousness again as if it is a term with any relevance here. But maybe you can explain what you mean in neuro terms rather than as some handwaving metaphor, like a volume button being turned down low or something.
Yes but I was talking about intentions. And it was my usage you were attacking. If you want to talk about intentionality, then that is a different subject. Making the point that life and mind are characterised by intentionality is just making the point that they are telic being. And that is explained by a systems understanding.
In regards to habit or attention, they are both intentional or goal directed in a general sense. One is just intentions learnt and fixed while the other is the forming and particularisation of intentions.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
So something vague like a discomfort leads to the intention to look closer. And yet something vague like a discomfort attracts your attention so that you might develop a suitable intention.
Hmm. See your problem?
Obviously my point is that brains do have the general intent of focusing on what needs attention. That is why some very complicated machinery exists to make that switch if your thoughts need interrupting.
And then shifting the spotlight - to use the popular metaphor - allows the nagging discomfort to develop into some fully consider intention. An act or action plan that would be the right response. You find your arse itches and so you scratch.
So the facts you think significant are ones that are already accommodated.
By empirical investigation, it is easy to establish the fact that conscious, semi-conscious, and non-conscious mind-body conditions exist: simply observe that people can be awake, asleep, or in a coma.
If, having a background in neuroscience, you wish to have PET, fMRI, MEG, NIRS, or some other type of data correlated with these conditions, that might be useful in classifying psychological functions such as attention (and intention), but how would it be relevant to the OP?
I agree. Lower levels of explanation (neurophysiology in this case) always underdetermine higher levels (cognitive psychology in this case).
I've been away for a couple of weeks and am catching up with threads. I just wanted to mention that there is a body of scientific and philosophical opinion that attention and consciousness overlap, but are clearly dissociated. My best-known source is the 2015 book by Montemayor and Haladjian, Consciousness, Attention and Conscious Attention. Their arguments derive from the evolution of different forms of attention, the earliest forms being prior to any form of 'consciousness'. (They also wrote a sequence of articles in Psychology Today at the time)
Because our will is not a discrete whole, it is fragmented by times, contexts, desires, moods, objects, others.... but we imagine our self one.
The anorexic is compelled not to eat or to bulimia by very strong urges, which they do not understand.
Why and how neurosis compels neurotics to act the way they act is what interested Freud and Lacan.
Actually Bulimics demonstrate increased neuroticism after treatment. Contrary to that, Bulimics are highly orderly and conscientious, with extremely high disgust sensitivity. Similar to OCD sufferers.
That's interesting, what kind of treatment? Psychotherapy?
My understanding is that Cognitive Behavior Therapy is kinda standard today.
Point was that neuroticism is a fundamental personality trait, and there are problems with its excess and deficit, like there are with all of the other fundamental personality traits. It's not that all mental illness is reduced to sensitivity to negative emotions or anything...
But yeah, it was CBT. I looked it up because it seemed to both imply things that I didn't like, and was counter to my understanding of the personalities of Bulimics from what I've heard. Though I understand that it was a passing comment that wasn't super important to the thrust of what you were saying. I just didn't like it, and wanted to point out that neuroticism isn't related to mental illness in and of itself.
The reason people seek help is because they are not happy with themselves, the way they are acting. Anorexia and bulimia are dangerous, someone can end up dead. I think we are all neurotic to a certain extent, but we are not all compelled by urges to hurt our self.
Cognitive Behavior Therapy is quick, cheap and it works to the extent that the symptoms vanish...which is 'good enough for government work' but it is not a causal explanation, also these problems may not be gone, they may morph into something else also bad.
The problem with psychotherapy (which is causal) is the length of time it takes, the cost, and I think, finding the therapist that has the right skills and right empathy.
I still feel like you're implying that neuroticism, which is simply sensitivity to negative emotions, is in itself problematic... is blindness to negative emotions preferable? It's basically shy people.
Its excess leads to depression, phobia, anxiety and panic disorders, and drug and alcohol abuse. Not Bulimia. That's caused by orderliness, and like a perfectionism, and high disgust sensitivity. Surely many things, and I'm sure that neurotics can be bulimics, but there is no obvious pathway, or correlation that I'm aware of.
The point has to do with intensities. A shy person, is very different from someone who is agoraphobic, who can't leave the house because they are deeply afraid. People who experience high intensity neurosis don't behave normatively, and some of them can pose a threat to themselves.
I don't follow your statement that Bulimia is caused by orderliness, "like a perfectionism, and high disgust sensitivity." Why do you think this is the case. Traditionally anorexia and bulimia have been thought of as symptoms characteristics of a kind of neurosis displayed in binge-purge cycles.
I got that from listening to Jordan Peterson, but I just did a google search, I found an abstract that said that neuroticism increased after treatment, and another one that correlated the big five personality traits (which is all the rage now) with it and found no correlation. Look it up.
Lots of stuff has traditionally been considered such and such by psychology. These days they consider there to be problems with the excess or deficit in any of the big five traits. Or upsides and downsides to them all, and these to be genetic, and everyone, when pushed hard enough will break where they are most susceptible to breaking based on their balances of those traits.
You also should understand that what is considered healthy, and sane is up for debate, and not agreed about by everyone. They're theories. If just being happy all of the time is the goal, then neuroticism may be the enemy, but then just taking drugs all the time, if that causes happiness ought to be fine.
Fine, but when it can lead to death or an inability to go outside or other hurtful behavior, I think we as society need to ask wtf.
The question is why perfection or the compulsive need for order is demonstrative of bulimia. If many who suffer from bulimia also demonstrate similar compulsions then why is it this case?
Because of the state of their lives, as being really really clean and organized. The observation that they find skin, muscle, fat to be gross, but bone to be all white and pristine. That's what he said, I don't have all of the facts. I just googled it, because it was contrary to what I was hearing, and google seemed to confirm that.
Yeah, I'm not denying that neuroticism can lead to particular disorders, but also that it is considered a fundamental personality trait with strengths and weaknesses, and not problematic in itself. Just look up the "big five personality traits".
Not into the big 5.
The following from Bruce Fink's book on Lacan:
For Lacan it is a question of desire versus drive (which is thoughtless), where the drive cuts though the dialectic of desire, and desire 'is put into effect (or activated or affected) in the drive"
To binge is to give in or up on desire, which causes guilt, reinforced by one's version of what one thinks is expected, which leads to bulimia or anorexia, in an endless cycle.
I would say this "dissociation" is a function of how we choose to approach the task of explanation. Talking about consciousness is really coming at things in terms of phenomenology - what seems reportable as the contents of experience. And then talking about attention (and habit) is talking at a mechanistic level about the brain mechanisms that might produce those "contents".
So what I would object to in Montemayor/Haladjian's approach (and Koch/Tsuchiya) is that they are trying to turn the quest for consciousness into another part of the brain mechanism story. They are collapsing the phenomenal level to the functional level. They are buying into the dumb representationalist idea that consciousness is indeed "an output", a display of data once all the information processing is done.
Now I've been defending the science that approaches the brain as an information processing device. It wants to pull the machine apart and identify the mechanisms that serve the functions.
So attention is the selective filter that enhances or amplifies or focuses states of information. Habit is the short-circuiting of this extended processing that instead sees fixed routines being emitted when triggered by simple cues. It is all very clunky, but it is also a way to attempt to tie the functional and the phenomenal levels of explanation together. We can point to some very concrete lab data we have constructed by jabbing electrodes in a kitten's head, and then say this was what was going on as the kitten seemed to be making a conscious discrimination in some behavioural task.
So this is the way mind science proceeds. It is forced into a dissociation where it tackles the brain with the baldest mechanical metaphors - the information processing paradigm - and then hopes to connect that back to a phenomenal account, the "first person" point of view.
Naive neuroscientists and philosophers of mind then start protesting that the science is revealing all this information processing machinery and yet not giving us the further thing of the display of the information processed. Therefore more machinery remains to be discovered. We need to have seperate neural mechanisms to do the processing and the displaying.
I am trying to speak instead to an organismic paradigm - one that is founded now in semiotics or a theory of meaning. Life and mind are understood in terms of a modelling relation. Consciousness is embodied or enactive in being in dynamical interaction with a world. Instead of being dualistically split in the usual way - treating the mind as both a phenomenal substance and a bunch of brain circuits at the same time - it is a holistic approach that treats everything as "sign processing". :)
So I do defend the scientific understanding that has resulted from 100 years of treating consciousness as elaborate information processing. Reductionism employing mechanical metaphors has produced a ton of concrete results that tell us "what is going on in the brain".
But then you have to understand the conceptual limitations built into those same results. And seeking to reduce consciousness to brain representations - claiming you have discovered a dissociation that needs to be corrected by further mechanistic reduction - is the opposite of what you want to be doing.
So I am instead with the semiotic camp who seek to shift from an information processing paradigm to a sign processing paradigm.
I had a quick look at Montemayor/Haladjian's stuff and it felt like something out of the 1970s. I saw Haladjian is indeed a recent student of Zenon Pylyshyn and that made me smile, Pylyshyn being a famous information processing hardliner during the mental imagery war of the late 1970s.
Anorexics aren't Bulimics in the sense that they're obsessed with being thin, but they don't binge and purge.
That seems pretty general, and non-descript. The more general something gets, the truer it gets because it applies to more things, but sacrifices content in the process. The higher level of abstraction we get, the less we say about something. Things should be as simple as possible, but no simpler.
You said:
Quoting apokrisis
And also:
Quoting apokrisis
So it should be clear that it was you making the category error, not myself. You talked about how "intentionality", and "a generalised intent" forms from attention, but when I took exception to this, you insisted you were talking about particular intentions.
Quoting apokrisis
Great, I'm glad that you see it this way. So we should avoid saying that intentionality, or generalized intent, is formed by attention. In reality, both attention and habit are formed through intentionality.
Quoting apokrisis
No I don't see any problem here. It is quite clear that intention develops from the more general toward the more particular. I'm hungry, I intend to eat. I look in the fridge and see some ground beef, so I intend to eat hamburger. I decide to turn on the BBQ and intend to eat grilled hamburgers. Intention is always there, whether it's in the more general, or more particular form.
Quoting apokrisis
I take it we are in agreement then. It is incorrect to say that intentionality, or generalized intent is formed from attention. It is correct to say that things like attention and habit are formed with intention. So when I find you speaking in this incorrect way in the future, you should not object when I correct you.
You are still not getting it. I said the process of attending leads to a particular state of intention. So it brings intentionality - our general long-run state of orientation to the world - into some particular focused state. And then in doing that, the particular attentional/intentional state should be understood not as something already fleshed out and action specific, but instead a fixing of limits, a production of a state of generalised constraint on action.
From that generalised constraint on action, a habit level of performance can take over. Strict bounds have been set that allow the lower brain to fire off automatically and unthinkingly. Permission to fire has been granted the frontline troops. Attention then gets reserved for monitoring performance in terms of being there to pick up errors, problems, significance, or whatever else might prompt the need for a re-focusing of the prevailing state of intent.
I appreciate this is a dynamical and complex tale. But that is how it is. The general and the particular are always going together as this is a hierarchical systems view of causality.
Attentional level thought and intention forming is there to deal with time horizons of seconds to minutes. Habit level emitted responses are there to deal with action by the split second. So attention creates the mindset. Habit takes that as its context and does its rapid fire thing. Attention then kicks back in to refocus as much as seems necessary when habit generates an alert telling that it is either faced by the unexpected or it has come upon something already flagged as important.
All of that flying along and making sense of the world from a self-centred point of view is what we would call intentionality. It is not a function of the brain but a characteristic of life and mind.
However we can talk also of intentions - some focused mindset that exists at some point of time. That would be intentionality particularised.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
But you yourself said you had to notice that you were hungry. So attending to a feeling was a first step. And from there flowed an action plan, an intention to actually do some particular thing. Choices can only form following attention. Although faced with the same situation often enough, those choices do become habits. I know its confusing.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
No, I'm not yet getting you understand a word I say.
Actually, you said that intentionality is formed by "attentional" focus. Attention forms a generalized intent. When I pointed out to you that this is inconsistent with the rest of your statement that this attentional focus requires effort by the brain, (implying that general intent exists prior to this) you said that what you really meant is that particular intentions are formed in this way.
Quoting apokrisis
All right, so let's proceed with a clear distinction between intentionality and particular intentions, intentionality being prior to, and necessary for focusing the attention, and a focused attention is what is associated with particular intentions. We still need to deal with the process of how intention focuses the attention. Since habit is described as coming about from this focus, we cannot turn to habit to understand this process.
Quoting apokrisis
Ok, we have here "attending to a feeling". Do you agree that this is a focusing of the attention in an inward direction, toward an internal object (the goal), and that this should be distinguished from focusing the attention on an external object (sensing)? In the one case we attempt to filter out all the vagueness of the general intentionality to focus on a particular intention, and in the other case, we attempt to filter out all the vagueness of the environment to focus on a particular thing.
Would you agree, that the latter is a description of consciousness, being aware of one's surroundings, and being capable of focusing one's attention on particular aspects of one's environment? And do you agree that the former is a description of being self-conscious, self-aware, being aware of one's inner feelings, and being capable of focusing one's attention on particular aspects of these inner feelings?
I think it is necessary to put this distinction in relation to the distinction between habit and attention, which you refer to, in order to properly understand the living activities. That is because we need to understand the role of introspection in relation to habits, to understand the capacity to break habits.
But here's another thing to consider. if the internal focus of one's attention is required for the living being to produce a new goal, and therefore a new activity, then the internal focus (self-consciousness) is what is responsible for the living being's capacity to move, and the external focus (consciousness) is simply a habit. How would you describe self-consciousness?
Quoting apokrisis
The model you describe outlines the forming of habits in relation to attention, but it does not address the breaking of habits.
Quoting apokrisis
Actually the issue being addressed is whether or not you understand what you're saying. You said something, and when I pointed to the inconsistency, you declared that you meant something else. We could take it for granted that I would not understand what you were saying, when you didn't say what you meant. The question is why would you not say what you meant in the first place. It appears like either you didn't understand what you were saying (mistaken), or you were actively trying to deceive.
That would be the modus operandi: if you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit.
Thanks for the longer explanation, apo. I think then that what's puzzling is your paradigm:
Quoting apokrisis
I don't understand how this fits with your explanation of your holistic position. Put simply, attention does not correlate with consciousness, and habit does not correlate with non-consciousness, so how does attention/habit help us understand conscious/non-conscious? You seem to have pressed for a more mechanical metaphor than the information-processors Montemayor/Haladjian. I don't grasp how spinning semiotics into the mix makes your approach more respectful of the phenomenological than theirs.
If I remember correctly, none of these characters had living mothers. Freud's & Lacan's psychological systems revolve around the desire for the mother. Lacan changed Freud's Oedipal analysis because of the mother problem. Lacan thought that both male & female babies, identified with and desired the mother, that both male & female infants feel a sense of castration (anxiety...leading to freedom) due to their natural separation from the mother.
I'm not familiar with your version of Venus, I thought she was Aphrodite goddess of love, beauty...and Eros, her son by Ares.
The caretaker of an infant isn't always its mother and isn't even always female, so is it appropriate to interpret Lacan as speaking of caretakers in general when he says "mother?" And how eurocentric do you think Lacan was? How much is he analyzing a particular culture as opposed to the psyche... and is that all psychologists ever do... analyze the psyche as it appears in a certain culture?
I think he would say that his three registers or orders: the 'real,' the 'symbolic', and the 'mirror'/imaginary are how all psyches ordinarily come to interpret the world
I am not sure how far he would go beyond that. Norms are diverse, and perhaps how norms evolve or emerge, and how society structures of norms might be appropriate for his analysis.
Freud's system was very masculine, even though women provided his deepest insights, Lacan in rethinking Freud still has a masculine streak, just not as bad as Freud. There have been some attempts at a feminist rereading of Lacan, but I have not read any of the books, just some articles.
I had a friend who dreamed of and wrote a story about a person who had no language.
So, then perhaps alienation from the immediacy and the intimacy which it experienced pre-linguistically. The real is not lost, we have become unconscious of it, it is still there, just unable to speak.
Which creates an intriguing role for unconscious content. I'm reminded of Rumi's 'In the depths of our hearts the light of God is shining on a soundless sea with no shore'
It also brings in the mystery associated with the advent of speech in individuals and in the species as a whole. I'm thinking of Chomsky's view that the abrupt onset of fluency in toddlers indicates that it can't be learned piecemeal. Lots of details... I've yet to organize it. :)
Actually I said a state of intentionality.
And when I was talking about a generalised intent, I was explicit about that meaning a general constraint in regard to the particular actions to be supplied by rapid habit level machinery. The point being that intentionality of course cashes out as finality, and hence the causality of constraints.
You lost me with your claim that attention and consciousness, habit and non-conscious, cannot be related. Just too contrary.
Oh, I only said that they do not correlate, with my intended meaning being, they cannot be correlated without substantial exceptions - I didn't mean that they 'cannot be related' at all, that would be silly. Habit is often conscious, and attention is sometimes unconscious and certainly is often ascribed to creatures whom we don't normally call 'conscious' : that's my point.
That is why it is better, in my opinion.
As to habit being often conscious, that just confirms the haziness of consciousness as an explanatory construct. There is a good reason why the word is barely used in neuroscience research. You might as well be talking about souls or res cogitans.
Of course what gets done by habit can also be the subject of our attention and become reportable - fixed in working memory and contemplated as something that just happened. Yet that demonstrates the essential dissociation. We act fast and automatically as that is efficient when we know what we are doing. And then "consciousness" or attentional level reportability comes that split second after the fact. We can introspect and form a memory of that automatic action we just performed.
And as I have also explained, the actually important relation between attention and habit is that attention produces some general state of intentionality ahead of every moment of action. So it creates some general state of mental constraint - I want to get around this next corner in my car to reach my destination - and then all my well learnt driving habits can slot into place in automatic fashion.
I don't need to have reportable awareness of exactly what to do to coordinate my hand on the gear shift, my foot on the clutch. Fuck the detail, let it take care of itself. Achieving the goal, getting the next step to where I'm going, is what I need to focus on.
So the folk psychology term of consciousness has huge problems once you try to apply it in science. It confounds biology and sociology in believing things like introspection to be a biological function rather than a linguistically structured skill. It makes the big mistake of thinking awareness to be a running realtime representation of reality rather than having this complex internal temporal structure. It makes a big mistake in creating this homuncular self that is then witnessing the representation.
So consciousness - and all its crew: unconscious, non-conscious, subconscious, preconscious, semi-conscious - is a very familiar social construct that just ought to be junked so we can start over again on a better metaphysical and scientific basis.
But no hope of that of course.
Of course there's no hope because this is nonsense or can you explain why there's no hope?
Talk about consciousness is a way to fix individual humans within some social state of conception. If we think of ourselves as freely choosing souls or rational beings, separate from our gross animal physicality (or Freudian unconscious), then that is exactly the myth by which we will learn - get into the habit of - acting. If you think about the nature of consciousness in the conventional fashion, then society is assured you will behave within the scope of that conventional construct.
Could be. I wasn't trying to give birth to a virile concept. Just tellin' the truth. Action and habit are irrelevant.
There you go again. Remember, you agreed with me that the general state of intentionality directs the attention, not vise versa. The general state of intentionality directs the attention, producing particular intentions. Attention does not produce a general state of intentionality. You agreed with me that this general state of intentionality is prior to, and active in the directing of atttention. And I told you that I'd correct you whenever I saw you slipping back into these old habits. You need to learn how to break these bad habits, that's why I will continue to bring them to your attention.
Put these various items in hierarchical order - cat, Fluffy, animal, persian, mammal. It's not hard is it?
We can obviously resist what a culture wants us to believe. Culture doesn't dictate our metaphysics or scientific investiagions.
Quoting apokrisis
Granted a faulty or limited understanding may effect our abilities, but this is beside the point of there being no hope of bettering our metaphysic and scientific foundations on the subject.
Roll that rock, Sisyphus. :)
If you want me to agree to my own point, well sheesh, just take it as read, dude.
If you thought you were challenging anything I said, have a go at tidying up your posts.
If you just want to express your usual hostility, big deal.
More nonsense, apparently.
Quoting Mongrel
Maybe you just don't realise how disjointed your thinking is? Two different points and you ask don't I agree as if you were still talking about the one thing - which still remains unexplained.
Why should either present a difficulty in terms of the attention~habit conceptual framework of a neuroscientific account?
Of course if there is a block between the central nervous system and the skeletal muscle system, then "conscious wishes" are thwarted. A runner with no legs can't run. Big deal.
Likewise if attention doesn't focus your state of mind, it is unfocused. If you have no need to act, then you rest. And if you want to talk about intentionality as something very general, then rest and other forms of inaction are how organisms save energy and avoid risks.
We could go on to talk about vigilance, creativity, the right brain's mode of attending. It's all standard fare within an attention~habit neuroscientific framework.
But as I say, you don't seem to be realising that your replies don't even stick to the point you were making an instance ago.
Category mistake, that's what the problem is. A particular is an individual thing. We might use a word to refer to that particular. If that same word is used to refer to a general in relation to something else, then we have a different sense of that word. So the word "cat" may be used to refer to a particular cat, or it may be used to refer to cats in general, but to confuse these two is category error, or equivocation. The particular cat is never a cat in general. And cat in general is never a particular cat.
That's really great, MU. But you are the one barking about there being only the one possible use of "intent" here. I'm happy not to confuse them the way you keep doing.
The brain is already an "intentional device". It is full of potential intentions at all times.
Then what we call being conscious is centrally about focusing this general state of intentionality so that some concrete goal emerges to dominate the immediate future. This requires all contradictory intentions to be suppressed. Some particular attentional focus and state of intentionality emerges.
Then this in turn becomes the general constraint that places limits on habit-level performance. Attention can't control rapid, smooth, highly learnt behaviour with latencies of milliseconds. And nor would that even make sense - as attention is there to be slow and deliberate, to break things apart rather than stick them together in unthinking complexes, to do the learning that masters novelty rather than the performing in which novelty is minimised.
So the dichotomy of attention and habit is no accident. It is what logic demands as it dichotomises our response to the world in exactly the way that has to happen. It is an obviously reasonable division of labour.
Let me run you through it again.
General brain-level intentionality is the ground for attentionally-focused particular states of intention.
Attentionally-focused intentionality is the generalised constraint on the freedom of learnt habits and automaticisms that arise to fill in the many particular sub-goals necessary for achieving that greater general goal.
I don't have to notice what my feet and hands do when turning a corner in the car. If it's routine, the mid-brain/cerebellum fills in those blanks unthinkingly. I form no reportable working memory in the prefrontal cortex. What I experience phenomenally is what folk label "flow". Or smooth action with an "out of the body" sense of not having to be intentionally in charge.
You can obsess about trying to make my right words wrong. But haven't you got better things to do?
Thought and feeling can be pretty passive. That was my point: not that consciousness isn't involved in habit, intent, and action, but that those things aren't necessary. Newborn infants are conscious after all.
Involuntary muscles (smooth muscles) are usually maintenance entities.
Were we to have to calculate the trajectory of a tennis ball, or think about each note on the page as we play the piano we would fail to achieve the simplest thing.
You appear to take a step backward here, in your description of the process, and that is what throws me off. A particular intentional focus with a particular state of intentionality emerges. This can be nothing other than a particular set of constraints, unless we go back to a general state of intentionality. But in doing this the particular state of intentionality would necessarily be negated.
So I see no logical way for us to say that a particular attentional focus becomes the "general constraint". If the constraint is general rather than particular, we are right back at the level of general intentionality, which has the capacity to produce many different particular states of attentional focus. Then we have a vicious circle, and there is no explanation for the existence of the habit, which is the inclination toward one particular state of attentional focus.
Therefore the habit must be placed between the general intentionality, and the particular attentional focus, which emerges. The habit is prior to attentional focus, as constraining the general intentionality in particular ways, to produce a particular intention. The act of the habit constraining intentionality is manifested as attentional focus. Since the habit is at, or close to the sub-conscious level, this provides the appropriate representation of general intentionality as being within the subconscious.
It is the common language use, which associates intentions with conscious thought, which leads us astray when discussing general intentionality, which is of the subconscious.
Quoting apokrisis
So this is precisely where I see the problem with this representation. In actuality, habits place constraints on the general intentionality of the mind, not vise versa. This limits the freedom of the general intentionality, producing attentional focus, and particular intentions. It is not intentionality which puts constraints on habits, because intentionality being the more general, is the more free, and habits constrain this general intentionality in particular ways.
If we represent the relation between habit and intention in this way, we have a platform from which we can address the question of habit formation, and habit breaking. To do this, we must consider the relationship between habit and intentionality, free from the influence of attention. This is necessary in order to understand these issues, because attentional focus is what comes about, is created from, this relationship between intention and habit.
This is the importance of meditation. By focusing our attention on one very specific thing, we release ourselves from all other habits of attentional focus. Then we allow our mind to be released from this one particular attentional focus which has brought us to this state, to be as free as possible from all attentional focus. Now we may approach the level of having just intentionality and habits, demonstrating to ourselves, that we have the freedom to choose our habits. .
The puzzle for me is that in talking in these terms you seem to be adopting the information-processing approach you criticised earlier when I mentioned students of Pylyshyn proposing to dissociate attention from consciousness. Aren't you removing the phenomenological question and therefore the basic issue arising from the idea of 'consciousness'? Attention and habit are characteristics we seem to share with many other animals; consciousness is something we don't seem to share with all that many of them (as I would say), if any (as some say).
I was thinking about placebo studies, which I read a lot about earlier in the year. However cunning our studies of placebos, we can't scientifically get beyond something irreducible about 'belief' and 'expectation'. The I-viewpoint is not, as yet at any rate, susceptible to an 'information-processing argument'.
You are just muddling with words to prolong an argument. As is usual.
Another way of putting it is that vague intentionality becomes crisp intentionality through attentional focusing.
There you go. Another statement which you can muddle away at forever. :)
So thought, feeling and consciousness generally can also be "pretty active"?
In other words, you are making an irrelevant distinction given that one of my key points is that consciousness, or attention level processing, wants to be as little involved in the messy detail of responding to the world as possible.
The brain's architecture is set up to with this sharp division of labour that I describe - attention vs habit. It makes sense to learn to deal with the world in as much a rote, automatic, learnt, skilled fashion as possible. That in itself becomes a selective filter so that only anything which by definition is new, difficult, significant, surprising, gets escalated to undergo the exact opposite style of processing. One that is creative, holistic, tentative, exploratory, deliberative.
Note how talk of consciousness always comes back to the "thingness" of experience. It is classic Cartesean substance metaphysics. Consciousness is a something, a mental stuff, a mental realm. The unconscious is then another kind of stuff, another kind of realm. No surprise nothing feels explained by that kind of rhetoric.
But my approach zeroes in on the very machinery of reasoning and understanding. We can see how a particular division of labour - a symmetry breaking - is rational. The question becomes what else could evolve as an optimal way to set up a modelling relation between a self and a world?
Well I said I would reject that old fashioned cogsci symbol-processing paradigm and instead of information processing, I speak of sign processing.
So instead of the 1970s conviction that disembodied, multirealisable, algorithms could "do consciousness", I am saying that actually we have to understand "processing" in a Peircean semiotic fashion as a pragmatic sign relation which seeks to control its world for some natural purpose. And this has become the reasonably widespread understanding within the field, with the decisive shift to neural network and Bayesian prediction architectures in neuroscience, and enactive or ecological approaches in psychology and philosophy of mind.
So all the laboratory experiments carried out in the name for the search for the attentional and automatic processes in the brain still stand. What has changed - for some of us - is the paradigm within which such data is interpreted.
Quoting mcdoodle
What makes human mentality distinctive is that it is has an extra level of social semiosis because Homo sapiens evolved articulate, grammatical, speech. Language encodes a new possibility of cultural engagement with the material world. And that is of course revolutionary. It gives us the habit of self-aware introspection and self-regulation. It gives us the "powers" of autobiographically structured recollection and generalised creative imagination.
But apart from that, we are exactly as other animals. We share the same bio-semiotic level of awareness that comes from having a nervous system that can encode information neurally.
So this - as I said - is another reason why "consciousness" is such a bad folk psychology word. It conflates biological semiosis and social semiosis in ways that really leave people confused. It makes self-consciousness seem like a biological level evolutionary development.
Quoting mcdoodle
But it does make sense as a sign-processing argument. Straight away we can see that we don't have to search for the secret of those kinds of beliefs in bio-semiosis. They are instead the product of a linguistic cultural construct - social-semiosis.
And that is all right. It is the same naturalistic process - sign-processing - happening in a new medium on a higher scale.
Oh, instead of addressing the issue which I pointed out, the fault in your described relationships between intentionality, attentional focus, and habit, this is all you can come up with? There's no argument to prolong, just prolonged ignorance on your part.
Quoting apokrisis
See, even here, you completely neglect the role of habit. Attentional focusing is a function of habit unless a particular crisp intention acts to focus attention rather than habit. So the issue which your model cannot deal with, is how vague, general intentionality can become a crisp particular intention without habit and attentional focusing. This is what we call creativity.
Thanks apo. I haven't embraced this idea but I do feel I've understood it better.
[quote= Norman O Brown]The realm of the unconscious is established in the individual when he refuses to admit into his conscious life a purpose or desire which he has, and in doing so establishes in
himself a psychic force opposed to his own idea. This rejection by the individual of a
purpose or idea, which nevertheless remains his, is repression. "The essence of
repression lies simply in the function of rejecting or keeping something out of
consciousness." Stated in more general terms, the essence of repression lies in the
refusal of the human being to recognize the realities of his human nature. The fact that
the repressed purposes nevertheless remain his is shown by dreams and neurotic
symptoms, which represent an irruption of the unconscious into consciousness, producing not
indeed a pure image of the unconscious, but a compromise between the two
conflicting systems, and thus exhibiting the reality of the conflict.[/quote]
Life against Death.
This is what someone might reasonably claim does not exist, only get the response, 'well of course you would say that, because you are repressing it.'
(Y) 3 (N) 1
Is not our "mind" our "brain" in fact "aware" of (responsive to) many things that do not rise to the level of phenomenal awareness? Although I agree the terms "consciousness" and "subconsciousness" beg definition, I am not sure the terms "awareness" or "attention" and "habit" fare much better.
I am also interested in the application of those concepts to other creatures and life forms. At the less complex end of life forms, one could make an argument that response to the environment is all fixed stimulus response (habit). As the mind (nervous system) becomes more complex, attention to selected environmental stimulus appears, but much habit based behavior remains?
Talk about consciousness is talk about phenomenology. Unless it is rephrased as some kind of information processing claim, there is no way of investigating it as a modelled construct.
So unless you ground the term conscious (or unconscious) in some kind of information processing paradigm, you can't even ask the question scientifically. And then the extent to which you tie your notion of "being conscious" to neuroscience, you find that it overlaps more and more with reportable attentional states.
You claim that even a cursory review of the literature supports you. I hope you don't just mean stuff like blindsight where those folk still had intact superior colliculi and so a preattentive path for guiding their visual search. Of course they could report having had an instinct to look somewhere as well as report they had no consequent visual image due to their particular brain damage.
Staring at the problem, it appears there is no separation but rather a fluid movement between different qualities of attention. Habit, being a type of memory, functions without a no or nominal attention, depending upon the habit. The body memory simply does it unless intervened by a act of will. As activities present themselves to a mind, there may be greater or less awareness brought to a potential action which makes us more or less conscious of it, peripheral vision be being an example.
Problems arise when attempting to categories or separation, for some practical reason, onto a continuously flowing and changing process. It is the act of the mind to create an object, a conscious that creates a problem, but observing it there is no problem. It is just always changing in character.
What is most interesting is this state where the mind is seeking unconsciously apparently without any direct attention or awareness. The mind is pretty amazing.
Most such studies of "attention" involve vision and the presentation of various forms of stimulus to the visual field, which does make for simple experimental paradigms.
There are also studies involving various forms of perception and regional brain activity as seen on PET or other functional scans.
Then we have information from various lesions of the brain and the accompanying functional or perceptual defects that result (leading to a somewhat modular approach to neurologic correlates) facial recognition say.
The assertion here is that "attention" is a primitive neurological function, seen in say frogs and fruitflies. Do we wish to say they are "aware" and "conscious" in the same manner as humans?
In "blindsight" is the subject "aware" of the object in the visual field?. Not by verbal report only by behavioral response. So once again the topic of awareness links with the topic of attention and by implication consciousness.
A simple search of awareness, consciousness and attention will readily yield discussions of these topics and indicate it is not nearly as clear cut as some are asserting.
Personally most I think most of the mental operations (broadly defined) involved in walking, driving, etc.) never rise to the level of voluntary attentional awareness. Instead so called sub conscious (mental activities not amenable to verbal report) constitute the bulk of mental processing and voluntary intentional awareness is only the tip of the iceberg of mental operations. Furthermore the special skills of the human mind (brain) are layered on top of more primitive neural functions and circuits which have evolved over time and many of which are found in simpler less complex organisms.
Language is a special feature of human mental operations and allows for uniquely abstracted conceptual forms of thought. I do not equate language with thought. I do not think all awareness (or attention) or all experience is "conscious" in the usual sense we understand that term.
On examination there seem to be many forms of "attention". Some of which rise to the level of "conscious awareness" and are voluntary and others of which are "habits" and involuntary. Discussions of various forms of attention and the relationship between consciousness and awareness can be found in the relevant literature. Some forms of attention involve primitive neural circuits which have been preserved in the evolution of the mind.
We also have natural experiments in the form of brain tumors, injuries, strokes, etc which are quite informative about the relationship between structure and function. We can also induce experimental lesions in animals. We can study brain activity with PET and other functional scans.
Another area is the evolution of minds and brains in nature. More progress in the last few decades than in the previous few millennium.
Is it a difference in kind or difference in scale? Is mind something only humans have or does the degree correlate with neural organisational complexity?
Both are reasonable hypotheses. And what we do know is that the degree of organisational complexity actually does correlate with how most people would rank sentience.
As to the rest, I don't think you could have read my earlier posts.
Well at least now we are talking about "mind" and "neural organisational complexity" instead of just attention and habit.. I think it is a difference in scale but then I am a panpsychist (panexperientialist) of sorts. Still a combination problem although neuroscience helps with how things get informationally integrated.
Quoting apokrisis
I am no more sure how to define, interpret or measure "sentience" than any of the other terms. If the organism responds appropriately to information in the environment (and what surviving organism does not) then I would say it is paying "attention" is "aware" or has "sentience". Self-awareness is something different as is consciousness in my mind. The laws of nature may be "habits".
Quoting apokrisis Read them all actually; now you can say I did not properly understand them.
You have to admit even among the neuroscience community these issues are not as simple, uncontrroversial or straighforward as you present.
OK, so it is a difference in scale as the neuroscience suggests. But then you want to make some kind of claim about a difference in kind?
This is where we might discover if anything useful can be said about what you feel to be missing from my pragmatic account based on naturalistic or ecological information processing principles.
Theor Biol Med Model. 2010; 7: 10.
Published online 2010 Mar 30. doi: 10.1186/1742-4682-7-10
PMCID: PMC2857829
A thalamic reticular networking model of consciousness
Byoung-Kyong Min 1
Conclusions: I propose that the thalamocortical integrative communication across first- and higher-order information circuits and repeated feedback looping may account for our conscious awareness. This TRN-modulation hypothesis for conscious awareness provides a comprehensive rationale regarding previously reported psychological phenomena and neurological symptoms such as blindsight, neglect, the priming effect, the threshold/duration problem, and TRN-impairment resembling coma. This hypothesis can be tested by neurosurgical investigations of thalamocortical loops via the TRN, while simultaneously evaluating the degree to which conscious perception depends on the severity of impairment in a TRN-modulated network
http://scholar.google.com/scholar_url?url=https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/7bb0/e25195329956ac3dd49eb38c4c7e880d78b0.pdf&hl=en&sa=X&scisig=AAGBfm0XvAWlhAHLlYYYCeXTbwz_163fwA&nossl=1&oi=scholarr
Towards a true neural stance on consciousness
Victor A.F. Lamme
Department of Psychology, University of Amsterdam, Roeterstraat 15, 1018 WB Amsterdam, the Netherlands
A second advantage is that we would be able to dissociate consciousness from other cognitive functions such as attention, working memory and reportability, which is a prerequisite for using the term at all. Elsewhere [10,33], I have shown how, from the neural perspective, attention and consciousness can be orthogonally defined as entirely separate neural processes. When other cognitive functions are neurally defined as well, we do not lose explanatory power at all by adopting the neural stance. It can be easily understood why there is no reportability of conscious experience in the case of IB, split brain, neglect and other conditions; in all these cases there are other cognitive functions than consciousness (neurally defined) that are manipulated, which is causing the failure of reportability.
END
My objection is that trying to simplify mental operations into two categories “attention” and “habit” although useful in some experimental paradigms does not solve the problems posed by “conscious” and “unconscious or subconscious” mental activity.
I find the “neural correlates of consciousness” approach both more interesting and informative. Using this approach we know there are separate neural circuits and locations for the processing of verbal, auditory and other sensory input. We know that disruption of the thalamic cortical connections interferes with the subjects ability to recall or report (language). We know that recurrent processing loops and cortical thalamic connections seem to be associated with “conscious awareness”. We know that even in the absence of these connections, some aspect of the “brain” the ventral medial structures still “perceives” and “recognizes” the object and that this “stored information affects later choice and behavior on the part of the subject.
Various experiments (split brain, blindsight, visual agnosia, backward masking, Transcranial magnetic stimulation, binocular rivalry, neglect/extinction, change blindness, inattentional blindness, attentional blink, etc.) all indicate the difficulties with the notions of “attention”, “awareness” or consciousness.
Lesions of the CNS (brain) (strokes, tumors, injuries) give us information about the function of various anatomic structures and pathways.
Oliver Stacks wonderful series of books and human cases demonstrate the types of very selective deficits of memory or perceptual processing that can occur without impairing global consciousness.
In the absence of voluntary recall (memory) or ability to report (language) can the subject be said to have been “conscious” of the “experience” or “perception”? Can the subject be said to have been “attentive” or displaying “attention”. IMHO opinion we now have voluntary and involuntary attention states which seems little improvement over conscious and un or sub conscious mental operations.
So while I bow to your expertise in neuroscience, I object to your insistence on a single approach limited to attention and habit and on briefly reviewing some literature find many other approaches in the field.
If you want to side with Lamme and replace the dichotomy of habit~attention with feed-forward vs feedback - as the best way of getting away from having to talk about unconscious vs conscious - then that is not really different from what I said. I said habits are emitted fast and direct while attention is about the slower top-down evolution of novel states of global focus or constraint.
So where does an important difference lie with the cites you provide? I would say Lamme is an example of representationalism - the idea that consciousness involves some bottom-up data crunching that has to rise to some level and produce "a display" ... with all the homuncularity that then ensues in having pushed the "witnessing self" out of the picture again.
Byoung-Kyong Min is then an example of trying to locate consciousness to a particular brain structure rather than just focusing on the dynamics of integrative (and differentiating) neural processes. Again, representationalism hovers in the background. The talk is of neural states that are to be imagined as some sort of display (to whom?). Consciousness becomes a thing, a substance, as representationalism - in begging the question of how the extra quality of awareness arises - is basically dualistic and leaves us always with the two things of the neural display and the unanswered issue of how this extra feature of reportable witnessing can arise.
As I argue, the habit vs attention distinction is the routine way into understanding the functional anatomy of the brain. Anyone taking a general information processing route to explaining the brain will find this is a core structural dichotomy.
And then I distinguished my own position within this general standard approach. I said I was taking the ecological, systems thinking, sign processing, etc, etc, angle. So that marks a big shift in paradigm from data-processing and representationalism. It puts semiosis or a modelling relation approach centre stage.
When you hear me talk about attention, you immediately think about that as the creation of some kind of state of display. But I am thinking about attention in terms of constraint and the globally coherent suppression of possible neural activity. Attention brings things into focus by creating fleeting useful states of limitation. It is repression for a purpose, if we want to put it simply.
Quoting prothero
Well you are misunderstanding what I said. Attention vs habit is a general distinction used to organise our scientific understanding of how brains "process the world". It was what got experimental psychology going in the 1800s. It kind of got lost with the heavily computational, data-processing, representationalism of 1970s cogsci, but has come back again as a foreground distinction with 1990s neuroscience.
Then within cognitive neuroscience - the study of the brain's functional anatomy - I stand with a number of counter-positions. So as I say, I am with the dynamicists, ecologists, the anti-representationalists, the Bayesians, and most particularly, the semiologists.
If you go in that direction far enough, you are then talking about brain function in terms of sign processing rather than information processing. The implicit dualism of representationalism has been left behind and now it is about a triadic modelling relation in which self and world co-emerge as a concrete causal state of affairs. The "I" is not a mysterious homuncular witness but instead the very action of imposing a state of constraint on material possibility.
Yes, this doesn't seem to explain "consciousness" - as a dualist/representationalist will always still believe it needs to be explained. It just doesn't speak to the issue of "the psychic cause of an aware display". But tough. That is why consciousness is such a bad term when it comes to doing science. It carries with it all its dualist/representationalist overtones. It is a verbal trap. Shifting the conversation to attention vs habit is the first step to breaking with this culturally and religiously entrenched metaphysical paradigm.
I want you to engage engage in speculation based on intuition which is colored by your education experience and knowledge.
I think most mental activity never rises to the level of attentional awareness. Most mental activity is below this threshold. The mental activities below the level of attention however are not primitive but instead a lot of decision making, analysis and even creative production resides there as well as most emotions and many intentions.. In fact if all important reactions or decisions had to pass through deliberative attention and analysis we would all be dead before the evening. Animals are not dumb automatons but instead smart adaptive intentional affective creatures who without language are focused intently on the hear and now, different from us only in degree not in kind and in fact most human mental activity and sensory processing closely parallels our mammalian cousins. This is more in the spirit of the OP.
The only difference is that I emphasise the complementary logic involved. The brain has an obvious interest in doing as much at an automatic learnt level as possible, because by doing that, attentional level deliberation is by default reserved to deal with whatever else turns out to be unexpected, novel, or otherwise most significant about some passing moment.
And I've long been championing functional models - like Grossberg's ART neural nets, or Friston's Bayesian brain - which best make that point.
To the extent that the brain can make its environment predictable, it doesn't really have to pay attention to it. It already knows what is going on before it happens. The other side of that coin is then that when events start not meeting expectations, the brain knows to flip to the complementary form of analysis - the one we call attentional and deliberative. Rather than the smooth and skilled stereotype response, the higher brain can enter a creative and exploratory mode of thinking, remembering and learning. With the frontal planning areas and working memory engaged, the world can be kept in mind long enough to try stuff until some new understanding appears to have a good fit.
So it is an approach that accounts for the phenomenology pretty easily. It explains stuff like how we can hit tennis balls or drive cars when attentional processing is much too slow and much too tentative to account for such real world skill.
I don't know why you would start banging on about pre-conscious habit being "primitive". It should be clear enough that habit equates with accumulated wisdom. Attention and habit are two ends of the one dynamical process of coming to understand the world in useful fashion. So there is no evolutionary sequence here. Both had to arise together because each is formally the other's opposite as a style of processing.
But again, that is a point that is difficult to understand unless you are a Peircean or systems thinker.
Reductionists think that complexity builds hierarchically from the ground up. You have primitive unthinking creatures that are a bundle of reflexes. Then evolution keeps adding more intricate processing and suddenly out pops a self aware mind. It is the same computational paradigm that leads people to expect awareness to pop out as part of an information processing sequence that culminates in some final data display.
But natural philosophy understands hierarchical organisation to be triadic. Everything starts with a symmetry breaking that then progresses in two complementary directions. The two orthogonal poles of organisation that result - the local and the global - can then interact. You have a holistic system which self-organises.
So when it comes to brains, or simpler nervous systems, you can't talk about which came first - attention or habit. They have to arise together as a way of mutually breaking some vaguer state of uncertainty or indeterminacy.
A jumping spider has a brain the size of a poppy seed and yet it still has this same contrast between attentional and habitual processing. It can creep around the back of dangerous prey after it has paused long enough to assess the situation.
Now of course a jumping spider is not conscious like a cat let alone a child. But - if we define consciousness vs unconscious in terms of a functional contrast of processing strategies - then we can say it is also a conscious creature as we can stick electrodes in its head and observe the same fundamental attention vs habit distinction.
Our intuition that the consciousness of the jumping spider is hardly as good as ours is then also accounted for by the fact it has to pause and consider. It has to pounce rather than smoothly pursue. It is more robotic in that its levels of neural performance are not so integrated in "real time", nor are they integrated in a general fashion over scales of minutes, hours and days.
So definitely we can see a clear difference in scale - without having to claim an essential difference in kind.
But if we get down to a worm or a jellyfish, neither attentional-processing nor habit-forming exist except in the most neurally reduced form. You can demonstrate the habituation of reflexes. So there is a bit of "in the moment" learning to go with a bit of genetically-inherited instinct. There is some kind of contrast in adaptive behavioural response - the precursors to attention and habit. Yet also it is getting about as attenuated as we can imagine.
So I am speaking to a different model of a system - the model of an organism rather than a machine. A system that processes signs rather than information. And that is just a different paradigm with its own developmental and self organising logic.
I'm curious, what are your thoughts on the global workspace theory stuff?
(global neuronal workspace et al.)
I don't think it is wrong so much as just clunky. It is still stuck in essentially a representational/computational paradigm with its flaws.
But on the other hand - in the mid-1990s - I thought it also clearly the leader in terms of that approach. It got the neural basics right, like the two stage habit~attention distinction, and the contextual, or constraints-based, approach to processing.
I knew Baars, so we discussed this quite a bit. At the time, the debate for me was about how to reconceive brain function as self-organising dynamics instead of data-processing computation. Both paradigms appeared to have a lot of correctness, yet how could they be married? That was when I got into the emerging bio-semiotic approach in theoretical biology. Semiotics does marry the dynamical and computational views in the one idea of the sign relation.
So in summary, 20 years ago, the global workspace was a competent summary of the neurocognitive evidence. But the philosophy of mind issue of "what paradigm" was equally clearly not solved by that. It still awaits its semotic revolution. :)