Unconscious Consciousness
Can you have a feeling you’re not aware of? Obviously not, right? If you’re not aware of it, then you’re not feeling it.
But what about the feeling of your clothes on your body right now? Now I’ve drawn your attention to it, you might be aware of it. But when you were absorbed in reading these important and fascinating words, you presumably weren’t aware of the feelings of the clothes on your body. Does that mean you didn’t really have the feelings? Or could it be that you had the feelings but you weren’t aware of them?
Or what about those occasions when you’re driving on autopilot, lost in thought on a very familiar route. Did you have a visual experience of the road in front of you? It doesn’t seem like you were aware of your visual experience of the road. But if you didn’t have a visual experience of the road, why didn’t you crash?
Perhaps in these cases we can say that purely unconscious mechanisms were storing information ready to be delivered to consciousness when required. That’s why you don’t crash when driving on autopilot. It’s hard to rule that out decisively. But when you do become aware of, for example, the road — perhaps when you start to wonder if you’ve taken a wrong turn — it doesn’t seem like you’re suddenly experiencing something that was totally unconscious a moment earlier. It seems like you’re becoming aware of something you were experiencing all along.
Even when you’re not lost in thought, there is strong empirical evidence that we’re unable to cognitively access much of the detail of, say, our visual experience. And yet it nonetheless seems like we experience a detailed visual scene. The philosopher Ned Block has a nice way of illustrating the point with reference to George Sperling’s classic experience from 1960, in which participants were briefly shown a grid of letters (e.g. 3 rows of 4 letters for 50 milliseconds). When participants were asked to report as many letters as they could, they could only recall 3 or 4. And yet it certainly seems like you visually experienced all of the letters. Block argues that participants did visually experiences all of the letters, they just can’t cognitively access all aspects of that experience. The data on change blindness raises similar issues.
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about these cases of “unconscious consciousness,” as we might call them. I think they are of huge importance, in at least the following three ways:
Where is consciousness located in the brain? Whether or not you believe in unconscious consciousness impacts how you interpret the scientific data of where consciousness is located in the brain. This is a major reason why we’re failing to reach consensus on where consciousness is in the brain (I discuss this in my book “Why?”).
The Combination Problem for Panpsychism If unconscious consciousness exists, it offers a solution to one form of the combination problem for panpsychism, the challenge of understanding how the simple consciousness of particles or fields that panpsychists believe in combine to form the complex consciousness of the human and animal brain.
The Unconscious Mind: I believe that unconscious consciousness offers an attractive way of understanding the role the unconscious plays in our psychology. This is something quite new I’ve been thinking about recently.
If I’m going to keep writing posts fortnightly, I’m going to have to make them fairly short, so I’ll stop here for now. But in the near future I’ll write a post on each of the above. Subscribe to my Substack if you don’t want to miss them!
How regularly should I post?
At the moment I’m doing Substack posts every two weeks (It was on a Friday, but the comments were distracting me too much from family time at the weekend, so I’m going to do it every other Monday). I’m going to alternate the topics of consciousness and spiritual matters. After Christmas, I’ll make a decision as to whether to post monthly, fortnightly, or weekly, depending on the numbers of subscribers. So if you’d like me to do this more frequently, please subscribe.
I often wonder if unconscious consciousness makes p-zombies more possible since if we can have unconscious awareness or thoughts (your brain often works on problems in the background), why couldn’t everything be that way?
Great post. I'm very much looking forward to what you have to say on "The Combination Problem for Panpsychism". And I'm so glad to know people are thinking about that. I have often wondered about it, and keep thinking that, if panpsychism or panexperientialism are ever to be taken seriously, there has to be a mathematical system developed (like quantum mechanics for particles of matter). Also, if we're voting for how often you should post, I vote for as often as you feel comfortable doing it. I will read your posts however often they come out, and want them to be frequent.