The Emotion Machine

she’s thinking about herself. If those reflections lead to some choices she makes, then Joan may feel that she is in “control of herself”—and perhaps apply the term ‘conscious’ to this. As for her other processes, if she suspects that they exist at all, she may represent them as beyond her control and call them ‘unconscious’ or ‘unintentional.’ And once we provide machines with such structures, perhaps they, too, will learn to make statements like, “I feel sure that you know just what I mean when I speak about ‘mental experiences.’

I don’t mean to insist that ‘detectors’ like these must be involved in all of the processes that we call consciousness. However, without some ways to recognize these particular patterns of mental conditions, we might not be able to talk about them!

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This section began with some ideas about what we recognize when we talk about consciousness, and we suggested that this might relate to detecting some set of high-level activities.

However, we also ought to ask what might cause us to start up such sets of activities. This could be done in the opposite way: suppose among Joan’s resources are some ‘Trouble-Detectors’ or ‘Critics’ that detect when her thinking has got into trouble—for example, when she fails to achieve some important goal, or to overcome some obstacle. In such a condition, Joan might describe her state in terms of distress or frustration, and try to remedy this by a mental act that, expressed in words, might be “Now I should make myself concentrate.” Then she could try to switch to some way to think that engages more high-level processes—for example, by activating set of resources like these:

This suggests that we sometimes use ‘conscious’ to refer to activities that initiate rather than recognize sets of higher-level processes.

Student: How did you choose those particular features for your scheme to decide when to use words like ‘consciousness?’ Surely, since this is a suitcase-word, each person might make a different such list.

Indeed, just as we have multiple meanings for most of our other psychology-words, we’re likely to switch among different such feature-lists whenever we use words like ‘consciousness.’

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4.3.1 The Immanence Illusion.

The paradox of consciousness—that the more consciousness one has, the more layers of processing divide one from the world—is, like so much else in nature, a trade-off. Progressive distancing from the external world is simply the price that is paid for knowing anything about the world at all. The deeper and broader [our] consciousness of the world becomes, the more complex the layers of processing necessary to obtain that consciousness.

—Derek Bickerton, Language and Species, 1990

When you enter a room you have the sense that you instantly see all the things in your view. However, this is an illusion because it will take time to recognize the objects that are actually there; then you’ll have to revise many wrong first impressions. Nevertheless, all this proceeds so quickly and smoothly that this requires an explanation—and we’ll propose one later in §8-3 Panalogy.

The same thing happens inside one’s mind. We usually have a constant sense that we’re ‘conscious’ of things that are happening now. But when we examine this critically, we recognize that there must be something wrong with it—because nothing exceeds the speed of light. This means that no internal part of a brain can ever know exactly what is happening “now”—either in the outside world or in any other part of that brain. The most that any resource can know is some of what happened in the recent past.

Citizen: Then why does it seem to me that I am conscious of all sorts of sights and sounds, and of feeling my body moving around—right at this very moment of time? Why do all those perceptions seem to come to me instantaneously?

It makes good sense, in everyday life, to assume that everything we see is “present” in the here and now, and it normally does no harm to suppose that we are in constant contact with the outside world. However, I’ll argue that this illusion results from the marvelous ways that our mental resources are organized—and I think this phenomenon needs a name:

The Immanence Illusion: For most of the questions you would otherwise ask, some answers will have already arrived before the higher levels of your mind have had enough time to ask for them.

In other words, if some data you need were already retrieved before you recognized that you needed it, you will get the impression of knowing it instantaneously—as though no other processes intervened.[61]

For example, before you enter a familiar room, it is likely that you have already retrieved an old description of it, and it may be quite some time before you notice that some things have been changed; the idea that one exists in the present moment may be indispensable in everyday life—but much what we think that we see are the stereotypes of what we expected.

Some claim that it would be wonderful to be constantly aware of all that is happening. But the more often your high-level mental resources change their views of reality, the harder it will be for them to find significance in what they sense. The power of our high-level descriptions comes not from changing ceaselessly, but from having enough stability.

In other words, for us to sense what persists through time, one must be able to examine and compare descriptions from the recent past. We notice change in spite of change, not because of it. Our sense of constant contact with the world is a form of the Immanence Illusion: it comes when every question asked about something is answered before we know it was asked—as though those answers were already there.[62]

In Chapter §6 we’ll also see how our ways to activate knowledge before we need it could explain why our ‘commonsense knowledge’ seems ‘obvious’.

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§4-4. Over-rating Consciousness

“Our mind is so fortunately equipped that it brings us the most important bases for our thoughts without our having the least knowledge of this work of elaboration. Only the results of it become conscious. This unconscious mind is for us like an unknown being who creates and produces for us, and finally throws the ripe