Searching For Consciousness

Have you ever had to deal with someone close to you who is caught up in an addiction, or have you struggled with an addiction yourself?  If so, you have seen a particularly extreme example of how flawed introspective consciousness can be and how little influence it can have over behavior.  Remembering the experience of how broken consciousness mental processes can be under the influence of addiction may make it easier to digest Julian Jaynes' excellent summary of the limitations of consciousness in the first chapter of OCBBM.  Here he discusses all the cognitive functions that consciousness is not necessary for.  The list includes concept formation, learning, and even thinking and reason.

Certainly, most people when they first encounter this outrageous proposal are ready to reject it automatically.  One's own experience of directing one's own internal conscious process and in turn consciously directing one's own actions is all the evidence needed to see there is a major flaw somewhere in Jaynes' argument.  However, really understanding how limited consciousness actually is, is the bedrock of being able to understand the bicameral mind theory, because, as Jaynes states, “unless you are here convinced that a civilization without consciousness is possible, you will find [the bicameral mind theory] unconvincing and paradoxical.”  Therefore, it is important to note that since OCBBM, there has been a mountain of research from a variety of fields that has shown what a small roll our conscious awareness has in our various mental processes—even to the point that many researches and philosophers have adopted a deterministic perspective and doubt that free will exists.  

“We think our decisions are conscious, but these data show that consciousness is just the tip of the iceberg,” says John-Dylan Haynes in an article from the journal Nature.  Haynes and his colleges have published one example of the many studies that demonstrate how much of our decision making process is done unconsciously.  They show how decisions are made in a person’s brain up to 10 seconds before the person becomes conscious of the decision!  We think of our introspective consciousness as the command center for all the mental processes that control our actions.  However, this is largely an illusion.  

Some of the most profound examples of how unrelated introspective consciousness is to how we understand and judge experience has come to us from the study of split brain patients.  The cognitive neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga is famous for his work with these people.  He describes in an interview published as A Split Brain: A Tail of Two Halves how when only the patient's right hemisphere was given information, “The left hemisphere [which is where language and abstract reasoning are based] made up a post hoc answer that fit the situation.” 

Steven Pinker, in his book The Blank Slate, looks at several examples from Gazzaniga’s work.  He recounted the story of one subject who’s right hemisphere (but not the left) was shown the command “Walk”, but, when asked why he got up and started walking, replied he was going to get a drink.  That is, his left hemisphere, in charge of formulating a conscious response in words, made up a “rational” explanation rather than saying he did not know.  Pinker, after reviewing much of the evidence from all this research, labels the brain’s language and abstract reasoning left hemisphere the “baloney generator” and stated, “The conscious mind…is a spin doctor, not the commander in chief.” (p. 43)  

Going back to the issue of addiction I bought up at the beginning of this post, I have seen a plethora of poignant examples in my clinical work which illustrate how little control consciousness can have in our lives.  Much of the work I have done has been dedicated to helping those who suffer from addiction.  I have seen this curse from the perspective of an outreach worker frequenting the hang outs of addicted homeless people, to a crisis hotline counselor in the late hours of the night listening to addicts and their family members pleading for help, to a therapist creating a safe space for the addicted person sitting in front of me to confront the destruction drug dependency has rained down on his life.

There is much denial that goes on with people who are suffering from addiction.  However, for most of these people at some point, when the winds of the building storms that have been their lives eventually become strong enough to blow back the smoke screen of denial, they are forced to view the wasteland they have made of their health, relationships, finances and vocations.   This is a deeply traumatic experience characterized, many times literally, by much wailing and gnashing of teeth. 

For the addict, relatives and friends, reaching this point in the process, while painful, is also seen as a hopeful time now that the truth is finally staring the addict in the face.  Surely, this will lead to that person doing everything possible to move beyond the behaviors that have caused such devastation.  However, amazingly for those who are experiencing this cycle for the first time, rarely does the carnage end when the addicted person finally acknowledges she has a problem. 

The addict will swear to all that will listen that she has had her last drink, snort, injection, etc.  She will be convinced she has seen the light and will now be focused on being abstinent and cleaning up the mess she has made.  Then, she finds herself horrified the next morning to wake up and realize that, the evening before, as soon as she made her passionate declaration to her best friend, she went straight to the bar and got so smashed she does not remember what happened for the rest of the night.  And this roller coaster of sincere desire to be in recovery and inability to control the impulse to use goes back and forth for weeks, months and often times years. 

To put it a little differently, all the deliberations in consciousness dedicated to changing the behavior around the addiction are like charging at the Great Pyramid of Giza and trying to knock it over with the force of one’s shoulder.  Though they don’t understand it and cannot explain what is happening, these people are getting an abject lesson on how little consciousness has to do with living day to day life and how much our mental life and behavior are controlled by unconscious processes. 

And it’s not just because the chemicals these people are ingesting are inhibiting the executive functions in their brains.  I have also worked with people struggling with behavioral addictions that do not involve ingesting anything.  I have observed no difference in the behavioral and internal psychological digression of people addicted to their sexual impulses or their need to hoard every object they can possess as compared to people addicted to a drug of one kind or another. 

At this point I must mention that the information contained in the last few paragraphs based on my own professional experience should not be considered simply anecdotal evidence.  This is because of the voluminous written records from people’s diaries, memoirs, letters to the editor, popular books, thread posts in cyberspace, etc., that describe the exact process over and over again that I refer to above. 

In fact, the millions of people worldwide who participate in 12 step groups squarely acknowledge the lack of power conscious will has to change behavior.  Instead, they base the foundation of recovery on the individual’s acknowledgement that their life is “unmanageable”, and their only hope is to turn their recovery over to God.  That is, their behavior is beyond any hope that their conscious thoughts and commitments can rule their actions directly.  And its not just addicts who have this experience.  How many times have you and I said to ourselves we really are going to lose weight this time, or get our spending under control, or be nicer to our relatives, etc.

There has been much resistance to the central point of Jaynes' bicameral mind theory: Whole societies can exist without any of its members being capable of conscious introspection. We all experience our conscious awareness as the essence of who we are; therefore, we almost literally can't imagine civilization could be inhabited by people who lack this distinguishing feature. The problem is we are caught in the limitation of what we might term the "subjective paradox". That is, our subjective conscious minds can only be conscious of what we are conscious of. It could be that 99.999% of our mental processes that control our decisions and behavior are unconscious, but the conscious mind by definition would have no direct experience of that. However, recent research has done nothing but support Jaynes' arguments about how little conscious is needed to function, and looking at the example of addiction helps us see how limited our power of conscious will and reflection can be.