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Thoughts on Thought

Managing the Mind

Roger Haines contemplates how we consciously manage our minds.

A Martian, I’m told, recently visited a terrestrial garment factory. He was surprised to see that the boss never touched a sewing machine. Even when she asked someone to order new material, it was only after other minions had brought her details of stock levels, work-in-progress, and garment orders. This woman who calls herself ‘the boss’, the Martian concluded, is a mere puppet, her every action being manipulated by these minions. Her only creative input was to make up a story justifying her instructions.

Students of the literature about the mind may recognize this fable as a metaphor for the way a certain school of neuroscientists describe the conscious mind as a helpless bystander manipulated by unconscious processes – because conscious decisions are always preceded by unconscious activity that shapes the conscious outcome.

Of course, we know the factory boss was only given the information she needed because she’d previously asked for it. I want to argue that, in the same way, the pre-conscious inputs to conscious processes very often arise only because previous conscious activity has served to define issues for unconscious processes to answer. Thus the ‘pre-conscious’ is also ‘post-conscious’.

Choosing Words

Consider what happens when we choose a word. Many accounts of this process are inadequate.

How did I come to use the word ‘inadequate’ in the last sentence? Did I choose it consciously, that is to say, with deliberation? No. I certainly didn’t recall a list or a thesaurus of words then consciously work through it. The only way I can explain my choice of that specific word, is that it popped into my mind when I needed it. As other writers have stressed, the actual search process is unreportable because it’s unconscious – which means it involves strictly non-conscious brain processes. But what these writers often fail to stress is that the right word doesn’t just pop into our minds by coincidence: it does so because we’ve held the idea the word is needed to express in our conscious attention for a few moments. This is a hugely important difference.

Sometimes the right word might not come right away, so we use some memory jogger – which might be thinking of a similar word in another language; or trying to recall an occasion when we heard the word we’re looking for used; or maybe concentrating on words beginning with ‘in’ because we have a hunch the desired word begins thus… And, how do we decide to use these little tricks? Again, we have to admit that each possibility just ‘occurs’ to us: it arrives out of the darkness without us knowing where it was hiding. But, it only does so because we were first conscious of the need to aid our verbal memory.

Perhaps the first word that came to mind was ‘fallacious’ rather than ‘inadequate’, and the thought then occurred to me that I ought to review this choice. So for a few moments I attended to the possible drawbacks of the word that first came to mind, before concluding, say, that it would gratuitously offend a reader who was unconvinced of my view.

In the previous paragraph, the terms ‘occurred’ and ‘came to mind’ signal the results of an unconscious prompting, while ‘attending’ and ‘concluding’ are elements of conscious thought. If we call unconscious activity ‘U’ and conscious activity ‘C’, the pattern that is emerging can be summarised as: ‘C⇒U⇒C’. Consciousness informs the unconscious, which then informs consciousness. Considering all these examples, the notion of consciousness as a passive bystander (the U⇒C stage without the C⇒U stage) should be consigned to the dustbin of once-fashionable bad ideas.

Making Decisions

Let’s take a quite different kind of activity: decision-making.

“The forecast’s good – where shall we go on Sunday?”

Presented with such a question, a number of options may ‘come to mind’. I then reflect on each in turn, resulting in relevant facts and feelings also coming to mind, leading to a choice.

Certainly, I was unconscious of the processes by which the options came to mind, and also of the processes by which the subsequent facts and feelings came to mind too. But I was conscious of acknowledging the facts, and of rejecting or accepting the options accordingly. The conscious rejection of options has been described by some writers as ‘Free Won’t, rather than Free Will’. The implication is that the conscious mind has a veto over suggestions arising from the ‘unconscious mind’ (that is, from non-conscious brain processes). But, crucially, that’s only half the story: the options only came to mind in the first place because I was consciously attending to the question of where to go on Sunday; and the ‘relevant facts’ only came to mind because I was consciously attending to the options generated in turn. So the conscious mind makes two distinct contributions to a decision process. Firstly, it demands suggestions from the unconscious, and secondly, it either vetoes or assents to them. Free Won’t only describes the second stage. So it’s recognizable as a normal element or sub-process of Free Will, but not as a description of the whole decision process.

The process described here is obviously very similar to the process of choosing a word, in that again, attention creates a demand that elicits unconscious activity which generates new conscious contents. So C⇒U⇒C is seen to be more widely applicable.

Although we cannot report on the unconscious processes by which options and facts come to mind, we can make a number of inferences both from studies of the neural correlates of consciousness and from experiences of many decisions.

Firstly, many of the responses to the demand created by attention fail to reach the highly condensed summary that constitutes our working memory of a thought. Secondly the response to a particular demand is normally not repeatable (at least in precise detail), depending among other things upon how recent experience has varied the strengths of relevant neural connections, or as we would say in common parlance, ‘what is fresh in our minds’.

It’s important to note the precise nature of the role being attributed to consciousness here. It is certainly not controlling the unconscious processes like a puppet-master controlling a puppet, or a sergeant-major controlling a parade-ground squad. It is as suggested by my initial anecdote, more like ‘managing’ the unconscious processes, in the sort of way that a boss manages a company – by asking questions or more generally, setting objectives, in the expectation that they will be met. And how objectives are set is by consciously attending to a need, for a moment or more. In fact, as we know, we can accentuate the priority given to a particular demand upon consciousness by concentrating attention on it. If we don’t want to be distracted from thinking of words, making a decision, or whatever else, we make an effort to ‘think hard’ about what we’re doing. Think about that, though: how can we possibly ‘think hard’ about something when the process we are trying to emphasise is an nonconscious one? Yet although it’s almost impossible to describe, everyone will recognise this virtually painful state of concentrating thought to try to come up with a response.

Attending To Experience

Perception appears to be quite distinct from word choice and other decision-making, but we control aspects of it in a very similar way.

From a variety of evidence, it appears that what the process of perception does is to construct a model of the instantaneous environment for the mind, which it constantly updates to match all the sensory inputs as closely as possible. If so, then what enters short-term memory and sometimes long-term memory is not our raw perceptions, but the mental model of reality our brain has shaped to match those perceptions. Notice, however, that the detail of what we perceive can be changed by what we’re paying attention to.

Take vision as an example. Consider that I can determine the position of some peripheral icon on the computer screen in front of me without moving my eyes, just by paying attention to it, even though a few moments earlier I was unaware of it. Here, I consciously give attention to the icon’s position, thereby unconsciously amending the processing of input data, and so modifying conscious knowledge of the answer received. So my analysis of what I’m seeing can be modified by the focus of attention, as well as the analysis modifying the focus. So C⇒U⇒C applies here, too.

This capability we have of modifying the processing of sensory data by means of attention, is, it seems, relied upon by those advocates of meditation who recommend periods of close attention to one’s environment. Others recommend periods of close attention to the stream of consciousness itself. In both cases, the purpose seems in part to be, to strengthen one’s ability to choose what one pays attention to.

Moreover, as a general rule, what we remember is a reconstruction of what we’ve previously been conscious of. That which we have not turned our attention to, or which has not seized our attention, flies beneath the radar of consciousness and goes unrecorded. The significance of this, as Catherine Price has put it, "Our lives are what we pay attention to" (The Power of Fun: How to Feel Alive Again, 2021). In any event, in the memory case, the second C of C⇒U⇒C is remembering, while the first, as always, is conscious attention.

Mind in Cave by David S. Soriano 2022 Creative Commons 4

The Competition For Attention

Sometimes, being open to interruptions can be valuable or even essential. Examples of how our attention can be suddenly changed by sensory input include things like hearing a familiar name in a conversation we weren’t listening to; somebody waving at us; or a stab of pain from a sore toe… In Livewired (2021), David Eagleman explains that this sudden refocusing occurs when the sensory input is unexpected. That prompts the question: why is conscious attention needed in such a case? Why can’t our unconscious model just be updated unconsciously in the light of the new data? Eagleman’s reply is that “Attending allows you to put your high-resolution sensors on the problem and figure out how to incorporate it into your model.” The second part of this answer seems to be the key: the external seizing of attention makes sense when we consider the role of attention in asking abstract questions for the unconscious mind to answer, because only in this way can the model revisions needed by the unexpected data be identified. The implicit question we focus on when some unexpected sensory input occurs is ‘Why was that unexpected?’

We have to acknowledge at least two other kinds of potential input into our minds that compete for the spotlight of our attention. Firstly, there’s conscious output from unconscious processes that were intentionally initiated by conscious attention some time earlier – like a name that I was trying to remember yesterday popping into my head today. Secondly, there are the many unbidden thoughts much studied by psychologists, arising from initially unconscious worries or cravings and other compulsions.

Moreover, initiating a memory search, modifying the handling of sensory inputs, and memory formation, are not the only capabilities of attention. We can also consciously intend to remember something, and ‘set a trigger’: for example, to remind ourselves that we were going to buy something the next time we walk past a particular shop. We can also consciously concentrate so that a particular focus is returned to after distraction – such as holding a number in mind while adding another number to it, or looking out for a particular name while scanning a list. We can consciously make a choice at whim, too – such as when asked to ‘think of a number’. The number thought of necessarily emerges from the unconscious; but only because we have consciously wanted the unconscious process to take place.

Attention & Online Searching

Given the very evident and ubiquitous role of attention as a means of managing mental processes, it’s surprisingly difficult to find neurological accounts of just how this remarkable capability might work – at least until recently, with new developments in AI.

There is certainly a resemblance of consciousness utilising the unconscious to online searching, with the conscious mind initiating searches and receiving results, and the unconscious mind operating like search software. However, there are crucial differences too. In a computer search, some kind of representation of what is sought must be put into the search box – usually some words. But when I am looking for a memory or thought with my mind, what goes into the metaphorical search box can be an abstract idea, free of any evident representation. The stored information is also of a quite different nature. Conventional computers rely on data storage, accessed by separately stored translating data (such as a jpeg algorithm to translate stored image data), all located by separately stored coordinate pointers. But the brain seems to integrate all these functions together: the sense of an idea, or the feeling of a quale [an instance of subjective experience], seems not to be something separate that’s derived from or pointed at by the neural cluster that correlates with it, but rather is the logical position of that cluster in the vast web of associations the brain makes for the mind. Indeed, all the material of thought is apparently stored in the brain as patterns of neuronal and synaptic associations.

The latest iteration of AI, Large Language Models such as ChatGPT, does seem to have made an important step towards reproducing this activity, although its stored web of relationships does not directly represent the world, but only what has been said by humans online about the world – and with no ‘self’ at the core, either.

Roger Haines is a retired mechanical engineer with a lifelong interest in philosophy.