Wired for Culture: Origins of the Human Social Mind (45 page)

Our environments routinely give us clues to be thinking about certain things, but the clues and our thoughts about them might sit mostly beneath our awareness. Driving along a motorway, your brain will be subconsciously monitoring your speed and stability, where other cars are and where you are, and all the while readying itself to alert you to the turning or exit you should take. When you choose a seat at a cinema, or select an ice cream flavor, pick out a book at a bookstore or the color to paint the wall of your living room, the decisions might have been made sometime before they were made available to you. How widespread this is is surely one of the most fundamental questions of our inner existence.

The neurological results coincide with a radical proposal from psychology: that we do not have the privileged access or knowledge of our inner selves that we might imagine, and that most of us simply take for granted. René Descartes is best known for his statement,
Cogito, ergo sum
, his philosophical leap of faith for the reality of being. Descartes believed that if there was something that was thinking, then at least we could be sure there was something that existed. But being aware of its existence doesn’t ensure that that thinking thing can know itself. Indeed, the social psychologist Daryl Bem proposed in the late 1960s that we come to know our own attitudes, emotions, and character at least in part by inferring them from observing our own behaviors rather than from introspection. Bem thought that when it came to knowing ourselves, we were often in a position no different from an outside observer. Like them, we arrive at inferences about ourselves from watching what we do and from seeing how others react to us.

If this seems far-fetched, who among us can say how we would react in an emergency medical situation, on the battlefield, encountering a burglar, or having to watch abdominal surgery? If you
can
answer one or more of these questions, ask yourself if it is because you have been in one of these situations and so have had a chance to observe how you would react. I once had to have an injection in my forearm to test for tuberculosis—the standard tests that are done to people who have travelled in parts of the world where this disease is still prevalent. I stood and watched as the needle was inserted under my skin. The next thing I knew I was lying on my back on the floor with my feet up in the air, resting on a nurse’s shoulders, while another nurse crouched down to attend to the open wound on my forehead. While I was contentedly watching the needle go in, my body had decided to black out. When I fell to the floor, my forehead hit a large piece of equipment. After I came to, the agitated nurses demanded to know why I hadn’t warned them. Feebly, all I could say was that I didn’t know. Now I do, and I sit down to get any injections. But I only know to do this because I watched what my body did.

Even our inventiveness might be largely a subconscious, or at least a non-verbal, process. Where do our new and imaginative thoughts come from? Why do we use the metaphor of a light bulb switching on to describe them, unless we have a sense that they just seem to come from nowhere out of the dark depths of our minds? In the 1940s, the great mathematician Jacques Hadamard interviewed creative people in an attempt to describe how they came up with their ideas. For Hadamard, creativity did not lie in consciousness, but in the long unconscious work of our minds incubating thoughts, which even once formulated, must pass through what Hadamard thought of as a sort of aesthetic filter before they reach consciousness. Einstein was Hadamard’s most celebrated contributor, and for him creative thinking took on a physical property. Hadamard quotes a letter from Einstein in which he described how he could physically feel when thoughts were emerging in his mind, but could not put them into words:

the words or the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The physical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images… this seems to be the essential feature in productive thought before there is any connection with logical construction in words or other kinds of signs which can be communicated to others.

There is a growing belief that many of our moral decisions might be made before we become aware of them, as if we have an innate moral sense. One suggestion is that we might have an ancient affective or emotional system in our brains that makes split-second decisions about things that have moral content, and then it presents those decisions to a younger, more recently evolved cognitive or deliberative side of our brains that might have been bolted on in the last 100,000 to 200,000 years of our evolution. The evidence for this is that people presented with moral dilemmas can often quickly tell you how they would behave but often struggle to explain why.

Here is an example. A runaway train carriage on a rail line is about to run over and kill five people. You can save them by pushing a button that will divert the carriage onto another track. The trouble is there is a person on that track who will be killed by the carriage. Should you push the button? Most people say yes to this question, even if feeling slightly uneasy about doing so. But now consider a different scenario. Once again, a runaway carriage is bearing down on five people. You can save them, but to do so you must push someone else standing nearby into the carriage’s path. Should you do it? Most people say no. When asked to explain the differences, many people are simply dumbfounded—at a loss to provide a rational explanation for what they say they feel instinctively they should do, or why they feel differently about the two situations. Others can eventually provide explanations but much too slowly to have used them to save anyone.

If there is a strand that links these two scenarios, it is that we have an instinctive reluctance to cause harm to others directly, especially when, as in these examples, they pose no threat to us. It is a disposition that might put a brake on our more violent tendencies, and this is something that should be valuable, at least in most circumstances, in our social groups. It is an instinct that also appears, to a far larger extent than most people would have guessed, to be hard-wired into our brains, and they—our brains—act without directly consulting our conscious minds. It could be that our brains get us to make moral decisions and we don’t really even know how they arrived at them. Structures in our brains that support this moral decision making will have spread in our evolutionary past, so long as the actions they influence serve our well-being. Much of our so-called moral nature might be just this—dispositions and the behaviors they bring about, some acquired or burnished by learning, others part of our genetic makeup—linked by promoting actions that work for us in the peculiar outlines of our social systems.

Where do these features of our minds leave consciousness, and what is its role? Here is one possibility. Life in a complex social environment such as our own requires us to make decisions about a fluid and constantly shifting situation. The role of a conscious mind might be to weigh up alternative courses of action sent to us from our subconscious minds. This role might be given over to our conscious mind rather than allowing our brains to follow some rule of thumb or algorithm because the social contingencies multiply endlessly—“If I do this, that might occur, and then she might do this or he might do that and that would lead to this… .” If not merely a problem of contingencies, the rapid pace of cultural change means that new situations constantly arise and these require conscious deliberation rather than less flexible subconscious rules. We see this today in the field of the social management of technology: should we allow elderly men and women to have children; should we make it possible for someone to clone themselves, or for that matter someone else? Should a woman be allowed to gestate someone else’s baby for them? It might be that precisely because of the complexity and novelty of the social relations we regularly engage in, we need something that works in real time and is flexible.

Giving consciousness this role in deliberating and updating us on a real-time basis is a scenario particularly apt for our moral decision making, even if the conscious part appears to happen after the decision has been made by our subconscious minds. After-the-event moral reasoning might help us to understand the connections between external events we can witness, and our own emotions. We can then use these to help us predict others’ feelings and emotions, and, importantly, how they might behave. We can frequently observe the same things as others can; it is just that we cannot have direct access to how they feel about those things. Simulating what might be going on in their minds and then comparing the outcomes of our simulations to their actions might be useful. Is someone likely to be bothered, amused, enraged, or euphoric at some set of external events? Analyzing the links between our own emotions and those same external events may therefore give us a better-developed theory of mind that we can put to use in real time as we encounter others. It might be precisely an inability or an impoverished ability to conduct such simulations that plagues people with autism and its milder manifestation in Asperger’s syndrome: patients who routinely say they don’t know what is going on in the minds of the people around them.

A simpler explanation for consciousness looks to the properties of successful ideas themselves. The ideas that we carry around in our heads are predominantly those that have in our past been good at getting themselves transmitted from one mind to another. Catchy songs like “Fly Me to the Moon,” or phrases like “Watch out,” or, “Mind your head,” or useful pieces of knowledge, such as “Train conductors stop working after 10 p.m.,” or “The angle of Polaris from the horizon can be used [at least in the northern hemisphere] to work out your latitude,” are more likely to get themselves transmitted than dull or incorrect ones. Countless millions of ideas probably never even see the light of day—or perhaps a better metaphor would be are never given a hearing—because they don’t get us to talk about them. Others do, and they are the ones that are, on balance, more likely to be transmitted. Perhaps, then, our ideas in the form of active memes created consciousness as a way to get us to think about and transmit them! Who knows? Maybe it is even our memes constantly agitating and clamoring to be heard that creates the cacophony of “stimulus-independent thought” we saw at the start of Part III.

But there is something unsatisfactory about all of these scenarios for consciousness, and it is this: why is it necessary to conduct deliberations “consciously”? Why is it necessary for a meme to “pop into consciousness” for us to tell someone else about it? These explanations for consciousness beg the question they are meant to answer by assuming the value of consciousness they set out to explain. (As an aside, the meaning of “begging the question” has been changing over recent years so that now many people use it to mean “demanding to be answered.” But its original meaning to philosophers was “an answer that assumes in its premise the proposition it sets out to explain.”) They assume that consciousness makes us more likely or better able to think about something or act on it. But
why
do we think consciousness improves deliberation, decision making, or for that matter the transmission of memes? Maybe it does, but if we are willing to assume this, there is nothing really to explain.

To see why this assumption is not as obvious as you might think, consider that the game of chess is surely an extreme case of mulling things over before deciding how to act, and of infinite and evanescent possibilities. But this is a game at which computers now routinely beat humans and no one would say that the computers are conscious. When in the 1990s Garry Kasparov played against, and was finally beaten by, the IBM Deep Blue computer, it was his realization that the machine was not conscious that he found most distressing. Kas-parov explained that chess is a game of warfare in which terrifying your opponents—striking fear into their hearts—with moves they don’t understand or have not seen coming is a vital part of a winning tactic in a grandmaster’s game. But computers have no fear; they don’t mind losing; and they don’t get tired.

It might be objected that computers play chess differently from humans, and this might be true. But this still doesn’t tell us why what we think of as our conscious awareness must be conscious to be effective. Here is a suggestion that does not so obviously suffer from begging the question about consciousness, but must be regarded as little more than speculation. Perhaps consciousness arises as a true “sixth sense,” albeit a virtual one (our other five senses conventionally being touch, hearing, smell, sight, and taste). Like the Persian “King’s Eyes,” who were charged with keeping the King informed, perhaps our “consciousness” keeps our hungry-for-knowledge subconscious mind informed of an ever-changing and socially complex outside world that it cannot see. What we
perceive
as consciousness is just a byproduct of the vast amount of brain activity required to produce this sixth sense, and then manage all the continuous cross-talk between it and our subconscious minds, all the while updating the sixth sense with the new perceptions flowing in. Consciousness, or the “I” we see inside us, might just be an artifact of the “post-processing” step that tries to summarize and make sense of the material flowing in, and manage the disagreements between it and what is “downstairs.”

For example, our social world changes continually, so that a former ally might have just a moment ago become a competitor. When we search our subconscious mind for how to accommodate these changed circumstances, it might get the wrong item off the memory shelf. We have to send it back, updating it with the new information. Listen to St. Augustine musing in his
Confessions
in the fourth century
AD
about what he called the “palaces of my memory”:

I come to the fields and spacious palaces of my memory, where are the treasures of innumerable images, brought into it from things of all sorts perceived by the senses. There is stored up, whatsoever besides we think, either by enlarging or diminishing, or any other way varying those things which the sense hath come to; and whatever else hath been committed and laid up, which forgetfulness hath not yet swallowed up and buried. When I enter there, I require what I will to be brought forth, and something instantly comes; others must be longer sought after, which are fetched, as it were, out of some inner receptacle; others rush out in troops, and while one thing is desired and required, they start forth, as who should say, “Is it perchance I?” These I drive away with the hand of my heart, from the face of my remembrance; until what I wish for be unveiled, and appear in sight, out of its secret place. Other things come up readily, in unbroken order, as they are called for; those in front making way for the following; and as they make way, they are hidden from sight, ready to come when I will. All which takes place when I repeat a thing by heart.