Is there a subconscious?
I'm curious, is there anyone here who does not believe in the subconscious limen? If you do not, would there be any way you could please provide your point of view on why it does not exist? Have a good weekend people.
Comments (81)
In my view there's no good reason to believe that there are subconscious mental phenomena--thoughts, desires, ideas, etc.
We'd need evidence that someone has mental phenomena that they're not aware of, but we don't have third-person observable, direct evidence of others' mental phenomena period.
Terrapin was very specific but perhaps this example might help.
Conscious mental content: Kevin robs a bank because he consciously wants to go to prison.
Subconscious mental content: Kevin robs a bank, consciously he is doing it for the money but unbeknownst to him he is institutionalised and subconsciously he wants to return to prison.
The underlined part would be subconscious mental phenomena. Whether it exists or not is still controversial as it would undermine most of our institutions, including scientific research,
Wittgenstein addresses this in his 'Brown' book, and I agree with his interpretation of the disagreement. Some prefer that 'thought' only be applied to what others would call 'conscious thought.' It's a question of grammar. (He connects this to an understanding of solipsism that makes it automatically true by redefining ordinary words). Is there any disagreement deeper than this cosmetic preference?
Meet Kevin.
It also brings to mind the Dunning-Kruger effect, a cognitive bias in which people of low ability have illusory superiority and mistakenly assess their cognitive ability as greater than it is. It was identified as a form of cognitive bias in Kruger and Dunning's 1999 study "Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments". The identification derived from the cognitive bias evident in the criminal case of McArthur Wheeler, who robbed banks with his face covered with lemon juice, which he believed would make it invisible to the surveillance cameras. This belief was based on his misunderstanding of the chemical properties of lemon juice as an invisible ink. (Wikipedia).
When you pick up your phone and dial a number, you are not aware of all the mental processes that are required. You are not aware of how the brain actually generates and delivers speech out of your mouth. That is a very good thing: being aware of and needing to direct the detailed machinery would interfere with higher level mental activity.
So where are "you" in all of this? "You" are present in everything your brain does, both not-consciously (as in thinking about how to fix something while you are busy with another task) and consciously, when you are very much in the present moment.
Yes, the disagreement is whether (there is any good reason to believe that) you have anything with the properties of thoughts, desires, ideas, concepts, etc. except that you are not aware of them.
For me it's still about an interpretation of the terms. Most would agree that we are only partially aware of our own psyches. For instance, where do memories come from and disappear to ? I remember 'those are pearls that were his eyes.' That phrase came to me 'randomly' when I decided I needed an example of a 'stored phrase' or 'unconscious thought.' And then, if I remember Freud correctly, he would say that this retrieval was not 'random,' but subject to some kind of law (an assumption that makes a science of association possible.)
So the real issue, which isn't simply a terminological issue, is whether memories always exist just like they do when you're aware of them, you simply "store" them somehow so that they're present just the same, only you're not aware of them, or whether memories aren't always there just the same, and rather the capacity or disposition to have that mental content is present, but where it actually isn't mental content, or anything like mental content when it's just a disposition to have that mental content.
In my opinion, that's a tangential issue. I'm trying to point out in general terms what sensible people might have in mind when they talk about the unconscious. The old iceberg metaphor is pretty convincing in my view. The hope is that we get a more predictive and illuminating theory with a wider conception of the object (the mind or soul or psyche.) In Freud there is something like a continuum that runs from the 'psychoid' to classically conscious thoughts. I'm not terribly invested in Freud, and it's been a long time since I've read An Introduction to Psycho-Analysis (one of his last books.) But I would claim to understand why talk about an unconscious seemed useful. I also understand concerns about this concept.
In my opinion, that IS the issue. It's not tangential. And it's not just a terminological issue. It's an issue about the sorts of things that exist.
I respect that position, but my natural response is to question what it means for something to exist. My natural answer is that it means all kinds of things in different contexts.
I don't think that's anything complicated. Exists=obtains, occurs, is instantiated, etc.--whatever synonym we want to use.
I think the meaning of these synonyms will themselves depend on context, starting with the context of the sentence and expanding outward to include not only the entire personality of their user but also that of the culture from which they emerged.
To make this more concrete, one typical interpretation of 'exists' means something like exists-for-physics. This is not some neutral position. It grasps the object (the real) with a particular method that does not justify itself.
If the real and the method for grasping it were truly non-controversial, then it would be hard to make sense of the endless parade of -isms in philosophy.
What do you see as controversial about it?
In other words, what do you see as the confusion?
In short, I think people mean all kinds of things by the word 'exists' in different contexts. IMO, treating words as if they refer to clear and distinct meanings independent of context is fundamentally misguided and leads to 'artificial' problems that disguise grammar preferences as a kind of super-science. This is not to say that analysis isn't sometimes worth the candle. For me, though, what I call meaning holism is a useful suspicion that helps us avoid 'artificial' problems and uncharitable misreadings of others' communicative intentions.
EXAMPLES
Does she love me? (Does love exist in her 'heart' for me?)
Am I talented at painting/music/etc? (Does real quality exist in my work?)
Do you get me? ('Does the meaning in my 'head' also exist in yours')
There is a God. (Is this really a statement about an object for physicists? I don't know exactly what theists mean. Some of them might not themselves. But I think they mostly don't mean what some of their critics take them to mean.)
The correspondence theory of truth is true. (This has some weird problems. How does this theory exist? And to what does it itself correspond that is mind-independent?)
In the pursuit of that question, it may not be useless to point out models made to explain behavior in the most general sense of the word are not the same as those developed to try and help people in real time with awful problems. Freud and Jung had patients. Skinner created some.
It's not at all clear to me re those examples that anyone would be using "exist" in some different way. You'd have to explain the different ways that you think that people are using "exist" in more detail, without just trying to contextually hint at it without spelling it out.
I definitely wouldn't say that someone couldn't use the word (or any word) unusually, but it's not clear to me what the differences you have in mind are.
Note that your attempt to define 'exist' was basically a list of synonyms. I don't blame you for this. It's natural. I would probably do the same if asked for a general definition of existence. But of course I would also object to the relative uselessness of a general definition. I would retort that a better request would be that I interpret a particular use of 'exist.' Then I would do my best to paraphrase this particular use and finish with a reminder that meaning is distributed rather than localized. My paraphrase would really be no less 'mysterious' or 'atomizable' than the original use, but it might gel better in the context of the listener's personality.
Definitions are synonyms. Whether synonymous words or synonymous phrases/sentences.
How about addressing the question I asked you, though?
We need only look to the OP. Is there a subconscious? Does a subconscious exist? How this entity is supposed to exist is the crucial factor. If someone thinks that thoughts exist consciously (adverb on exist), then they might answer no. Ontology, epistemology, and identity are all entangled in the same field of meaning. I mention identity because epistemological frameworks are held self-consciously. People identify with science, logic, hermeneutic ontology, anti-foundationism, various religions, mysticism, skepticism. They don't enter stage right with no method at all either. And they persuade and are persuaded not only in terms of their conscious method (argument versus explorative discussion vs etc.) but also by presenting/perceiving possible ways of being (new self-conceptions.) From one perspective this might seem like a digression, but from a holistic perspective it's an attempt to put the 'tree' in the context of the 'forest.'
I don't think cognitive bias counts as subconscious mental phenomena. The intent is there but it doesn't pull it off. When people learn more their intentions and approaches change.
Dunning-Kruger is a curious one. Perhaps people need to enthused with self-confidence in order to begin learning a task.
I read all of that and I haven't the faintest idea what any of the alternate senses of "exist" are that you might be proposing.
I thought of one more way to approach this. I have the impression that you are focusing on whether something exists. It's a binary predicate in the same way in all of the different contexts I mentioned. But I am suggesting that the important variable is how something exists. The idea that God is love doesn't exist in the same way as a hat or an electron. The mood inspired by music doesn't exist in the same way that the rule of law exists. My sleepiness doesn't exist in the same way the alphabet exists.
Is existence really a predicate in the first place? In some contexts, it is usefully and plausibly treated that way. But I don't think that exhausts the use of the word.
pick up information because it is not fully aware of anything The reason is because the brain will
be having much information that will not be useful in the end Philosophy of the subconscious Is
still debtable
Yes, that's the way I'm using the term.
Re "How or the way that something exists" I see as a different issue. The thing in question has to exist for us to get to that question.
On my view, the "how" or "way" is more or less similar in each case. It's just that the materials and processes involved differ. But yeah, I'm obviously familiar with people thinking that, say, real(/non-mental) abstracts exist somehow, where they see that as being different than material particulars existing. In my view--I'm a nominalist and a physicalist--only material particulars and their particular, dynamic relations exist (with the dynamic relations supervening on however the material stuff is situated and however it moves).
First, thanks for responding, and I think we have made progress in understanding one another.
In your quote, you write : only material particulars and their particular, dynamic relations exist. But I assume that you will grant that this idea itself exists in some fashion or another. How does this fit in with your view? I get the impression that you use the predicate of existence (or existence as a predicate) to filter out the real from the unreal --which is to say categorize entities into those that really ('objectively') exist and those that might or merely seem to exist. But I'd point out that these entities being categorized already exist somehow in order for us to deny their existence-in-your-sense. I'd also say that existence-in-your-sense (as I understand it) seems like just one use of the word, a use that depends on context and intention. For instance, we had to talk for awhile before we got a sense of what the other meant (holism).
Yes, ideas are particular brain states.
Re saying something like "God doesn't exist," it's not denying ideas about God, it's denying that there's something external to our brains (so our ideas, concepts, etc.) that is God, where there's an understanding that we're not positing something that we only have imaginings of.
But surely most don't mean the same thing by 'ideas' and 'particular brain states.' Most would probably grant some kind of important relationship, but to say that ideas are brain states seems like a bold assertion. The natural question is how are ideas brain states? Because we have weird feedback here: the idea that ideas are brain states is just a brain state.
Also the idea of the brain is itself...just a brain state.
I'm not speaking for most people. Most people believe that a God exists, too. Most people are wrong about some things.
It might seem like a bold assertion to you, but to me it seems incredibly obvious. Wanting a schematic of it doesn't impact that. We want a schematic of just what dark matter is, too, but that we don't have that yet doesn't lead to us positing that it's some mysterious nonphysical or supernatural we-don't-know-what, exactly.
I find it hard to parse this. If you are only saying that ideas are caused by or related to or dependent upon brain states, then sure, nothing controversial.
I'm assuming though that you are thinking of brain states in terms of 'mind independent reality,' the kind of thing accessible by scientific instruments. And then I think you 'believe' in something that people call the mental. For instance, the experience of a scientist reading the output of one of her machines. Or the experience of the 'meaning' of your own assertion. How are we to understand that these things are the same and not just predictably related?
Mentality is what particular brain states are like when you are the brain in question. It's what the properties are like when you are those properties. That's different than what brains are like from a third-person perspective.
It's actually the case for everything in the world that properties are different from different perspectives.
OK. I agree. From my point of view you are making a similar distinction in a different terminology. So your idea about ideas 'being' brain states would be the what-it-is-like-to-be of a particular brain state, which makes sense to me. I just think we need some kind of distinction like that to account for what is called the subjective (and I'm not allergic to the dependence of the subjective on the objective in the usual sense: a world 'out there' was here first and will outlast us).
Yeah, that's all I'm saying, really. Subjectivity then is all of those brain states from the first-person perspective. Objectivity is the complement.
Yeah, it's definitely just that I'm not familiar with the arguments for it. Good work. :roll:
That would be a bad move because subjective/objective don't imply or in any way map to anything about agreement or "shared."
Also, argumentum ad populums remain fallacies.
Thanks for clarifying. That seems very reasonable. Perhaps we can explore this idea: clearly we use some of our subjectivity to mode objectivity or mind-independent stuff, but subjectivity (or our experience) is much richer than this modelling. It includes much more than this one kind of modelling. And subjectivity includes models of itself, of its own modeling, for instance, and models of that modelling. We might ask what makes these models 'true' or 'false' or better or worse.
For instance, you idea of the relationship between brain states and what-it-is-like-to-be-brain-states would seem to be a modelling of this wider context, since it relates the non-objective to the objective.
Would you say that your model of the situation is simply the one you currently find most appropriate? Or is it more certain and grounded than that? If so, by what?
Most of that would be misleading in my view. I use "subjective" simply as a label for "anything mental." I don't think it's a good idea to attach any normatives to it*, to talk about it as more or less "rich" or anything like that.
Ultimately I see it as a term simply picking out a location. An analogy I often use is that it would be like having a term for "inside a refrigerator."
There are upshots to noting that things occur in the one location versus other locations, but the term is only a locational term in my view.
* I'm not at all a fan of normatives in general, by the way.
Fair enough. I'm not big on normative either. Or at least I like putting one my amoral theorist hat and talking about what is. There are more than enough people out there doing the easier thing of talking about what merely ought to be. [Hegel expresses a contempt for the merely-ought-to-be in terms of it being too weak to even exist and not worth talking about.]
So let's abandon rich. My point is that subjectivity contains far more than modelling of the non-mental. We might even say that it mostly models itself --and the relation of itself to models of the non-mental. It seems to me that philosophy is largely a thinking of thinking, operating at a very high level. It, among other things, models the modelling of the modelling, etc.
So maybe I can rephrase my question: what grounds or makes true theories about the relation of the mental to the non-mental? I understand that the non-mental can ground or be said to ground statements about the non-mental. But when we include the mental in our models, it becomes less obvious what makes them true --unless we rank the existence of the mental and the non-mental similarly, etc.
Yeah, I definitely agree with that.
Re truth theory, its easiest if I copy/paste a summary of my view, but I need to do it in a bit. I'm on a mobile at the moment.
OK, sounds good. And I should actually do some work that pays the bills.
‘P’ is true for S iff S judges ‘P’ to have relation R to either S’s phenomenal P, and/or S’s stock of previously adjudged true propositions, depending on the relation R. Relation R is whatever truth theory relation S feels is the appropriate one(s)—correspondence, coherence, consensus, pragmatic, etc.
So in other words, what it is for some proposition, 'P' (quotation marks denoting the proposition literally as a sentence), to be true to some individual, some S, is for the proposition to have the relation R to S's phenomenal P (their phenomenal perception etc. of some state of affairs) or their stock of previously adjudged true propositions, in S's judgment.
I like the flexibility of the relation R. It responds to issue-appropriate uses of the word 'true.' While you gave a few good examples, I suppose we could plausibly differentiate them further. For instance, an individual is likely to have an idiosyncratic, history-dependent assimilation of the coherence theory or the correspondence theory. So we could start by thinking of a slightly different set of relations in each individual, classified by family resemblance. As you might guess, I would just move from the discrete to the continuous. Admittedly it's hard to work with a continuum without discrete categories. I think we maybe move our bodies in the world or play music more or less with a continuous understanding, but language forces us to categorize.
Do you find it plausible that instead of a few separate relations that we have in practice something more like a continuum? That we clarify 'true' in a sentence by mostly imperfectly categorizing that relation?
I wouldn't say that "perfectly"/"imperfectly" makes much sense here. It's rather a matter of how individuals think about it, however they're applying meanings, assessing the relation between a proposition and whatever else they're using in a given instance as the truthmaker, etc.
"Objective" has been used that way, especially by idealists, but it's more common in contemporary philosophy (where idealism isn't near as common as it was at some points in the past) to use "objective" to refer to "mind-independent." Of course, objective in the mind-independent sense is going to be useless to someone who rejects realism, because they either don't believe that anything is objective then (if they're ontological realists) or they at least believe that we can't know anything objective (if they're epistemological idealists)
.Quoting DiegoT
Which is mostly a nonsensical idea in my view.
Because that's a common definition of that term. Subjective refers to things that are mind-dependent.
Not when we're using "subjective" in the sense of mental phenomena or mind-dependence. When we use that definition, mental contents can not have a degree of objectivity by definition. On this definition, the subjective/objective distinction has nothing to do with whether anything is shared, whether there is any agreement, etc.
On that definition, by the way, (a) what mental phenomenon wouldn't be objective? and (b) what would "subjective" refer to?
Re (a) anything you think is an "object of the mind," no? It's something you focus on mentally/consciously, simply by virtue of it being whatever your thought is of.
What I had in mind is that we are giving up a certain amount of complexity or detail as we categorize. For instance, we don't switch between our theories (plural) of truth as we change gears on a bicycle. The connectedness of mental life is smoother than that IMV.
Yeah, I didn't mean to suggest hard-edged divisions between them, necessarily. The idea is simply to make it more of a meta-theory that fits whatever relations (between propositions and whatever else) you're using, however fuzzily you might be thinking about them.
So there is no doubt to me that the subconscious exists.
Depending on the horror, the nightmares linger or else go away eventually. Some take longer than others.
This is not conscious on my part. If it were I would make then go away immediately. It is subconscious.
I would say that's your consciousness doing that, hks. Otherwise you wouldn't be aware of it.
I don't think there is anything here to believe, only a definition to be understood. There are things we know that we do that we have no awareness of. Like when you drive home with no memory of doing so, or when the solution to a problem suddenly emerges in your mind, with no awareness of how it got there. We describe these things as "subconscious" (although I prefer Guy Claxton's term, "undermind" ).
The question there is whether there's any evidence of mental content that we're not aware of (and how there could be (any evidence of mental content that we're not aware of) if we're claiming there is) in either of those situations.
With the driving example, one thing that's important to point out is that we're not talking about propositional knowledge there, we're talking about "how to" knowledge at best--in other words, the ability to do something. In that scenario, by saying that it's evidence of subconscious mental content, you're ruling out that it can simply be akin to "muscle memory," and you're saying that it's necessary to think about it in some sense, just where you're not aware that you're thinking about it. So in the face of a challenge about that, we'd need to be able to provide evidence that there's necessarily something mental about it.
Re the solution to the problem, we'd have to explain why we'd believe that there's something like thought occurring (whether a thought of the solution itself or thinking that amounts to something like rationally working ona solution) where we're not aware of that mental content, rather than the simple possibility that once mental content occurs, it's a solution to the problem at hand.
I think you have misunderstood the idea of the subconscious. The word, and its intended meaning, stem from the fact that our conscious minds are unaware of what the subconscious gets up to. We don't really know what the subconscious might be aware of, if it is aware at all, or the nature of this awareness if there is one.
The driving home involves some sort of mental control. The physical body cannot achieve such things unaided. Deduction beyond this simple observation is difficult, and who is to say what is the exact nature of this "mental control" that I have referred to? But I think it is clear that there is something mental going on, and that is the point I wished to make.
Right. So that's a claim. What's the support of the claim?
(And I'm trying to avoid that you're phrasing that as if the mind is something different than "the physical body" . . . we can just say, "The physical body aside from mind" I suppose.)
Empirical evidence. Our brains control many (all?) aspects of our physical behaviour. We call this "mental", presumably because it's the brain that does it? Even unconsciously, we make decisions to allow our driving to proceed. [E.g. the decision to change lane.] These decisions are "mental". [Beyond that simple observation, I assert nothing.]
Just to clarify, the dispute isn't over whether the brain is involved in some way. It obviously is.
The dispute is over whether there are mental phenomena occurring that we're not aware of. What are mental phenomena? It's difficult to make an exhaustive list, but examples are (having) thoughts, desires, concepts, ideas, etc.
No one claims that all autonomic functions are mental functions just because the brain is doing them.
So, I'm asking you what the empirical evidence would be that our brains regulate driving, say, in a manner that involves thought that we're not aware of versus something like muscle memory where that involves no thought.
So take a lane change. And we're assuming that we're not aware of making a lane change (otherwise this wouldn't be an example of mental content that we're not aware of).
One side says, (A) "We're doing that via muscle memory and other non-mental events akin to muscle memory."
The other side says,(B) "We're doing that via having a thought (or whatever sort of mental phenomenon you want to say that it is) that we're not aware of."
What counts as empirical (or other) evidence of (B) over (A)?
I agree with a lot of what you're saying.
Btw, I see things like driving as evidence of there NOT being a subconscious. For example, when my mind drifts elsewhere I often act on habit and drive along a road towards somewhere I don't live anymore before realizing what I've done.
If there was a subconscious greater mind it would be able to discern things like that. However if it was only autonomic habit (something akin to muscle memory) then it makes more sense.
I think dreams are harder to explain but that may also be autonomic with the conscious mind discerning bits of what the autonomic mind is throwing at it. I had a good conversation with @apokrisis about this recently.
With dreams, it doesn't make any sense for us to talk about them but to say that they're not conscious. By definition, we'd have no awareness of them, or the content of any of them, if they weren't conscious. So those aren't good examples. Dreams are simply an example of consciousness that's different than waking consciousness.
The unconscious or subconscious issue with dreams would be claims to the effect that "You're dreaming even when you're not aware of any content of the dreams in question." I'd ask just what could count as evidence of that claim.
Basically, we wind up with claims where:
(a) The subject in question has no awareness of the phenomena in question by definition. (Otherwise we're talking about conscious phenomena, not unconscious or subconscious phenomena.)
(b) A third-person observer is claiming empirical evidence of someone else's mental phenomena.
That should be obviously problematic.
I wasn't referring to the dream in itself. I mean the fact parts of dreams are unpredictable unlike normal thinking. Content we associate with intentionality can appear involuntarily. The content is conscious but the argument is that prior to that it was subconscious otherwise we would have prior knowledge of it or be able to predict it coming.
So can this not be resolved by being at an earlier point to A)?
IE: the observer predicts this mental content exists at X time and will be made conscious to the subject at Y time?
They're phenomena that have to do with the brain, and its activities. This is about vocabulary, not more. "Mental" is the word we use for this purpose.
The problem there would be an illusion or belief in control of one's mental content that doesn't really pan out that well.
Quoting JupiterJess
There would be no way to show that there was mental content at Tx and not just at Ty..
Or another way to put that is this: there's no practical difference between a prediction a la "S has mental content M at Time Tx that they'll become aware of at time Ty" and a prediction simply that "S will have mental content M at time Ty" . . . well, no difference aside from the fact that in the first prediction, we're positing something that there's no way to demonstrate.
Here's the way that it's not about vocabulary:
There are people who posit that there is not only unconscious/subconscious brain activity, but that the unconscious brain activity consists of things such as thoughts, desires, concepts, etc.
If you don't posit that then that's fine. Per my vocabulary, you agree that there is no reason at all to believe that there is unconscious or subconscious mental phenomena.
The people who are positing thoughts, desires, etc. that we're not aware of would not agree with that.
I don't. :up: But I observe, by inference from empirical observation, there is mental stuff of some sort going on when, for example, we drive home without conscious intervention. The exact nature of that mental stuff is unclear to me, but that's OK. This stuff is unconscious; it takes place outside of our conscious awareness, so we don't/can't know exactly what's going on, by definition.
All you're saying there is that there is brain activity? Or are you saying that the brain activity in question is something in the vein of thinking, desiring, etc.--those sorts of things?
All I am saying is that there is mental activity of some kind, a conclusion I derive from simple inference based on empirical observation. I surmise that there may well be details here that I might love to delve into, but my delving would, in the end, be simple speculation. My unconscious mind clearly indulges in what I might as well call thought, with the careful proviso that unconscious-mind-thought and conscious-mind-thought might differ significantly, and in ways that have not occurred to me. Such is the nature of real life, eh? :smile: :up:
So it doesn't sound like you think you're simply referring to brain activity per se, especially if you're using a phrase like "unconscious-mind-thought"
ok one question,
If a device generated complex decisions that were then fed into a brain which a short time after were made conscious 100% of the time, would the device be a subconscious?
A problem with the question is the word "decisions."
"Decisions" in many contexts has a connotation of mental deliberation (or at the very least what seems to be a sort of mental "dice rolling"). So I'd need to know just what's supposed to be going on with respect to saying that a device is making decisions.
yes but ever get the idea in a hedonistic way how pleasure is almost maximized by the pain of others
not sure if this is conscious or subconscious hurt