Chasing Rainbows : consciousness as observational without control

An excellent, detailed, meaty read. Can't say I agree with much of it but that doesn't mean it isn't excellent. Not that I'm in any position to judge... but I will anyway. I really should stop doing this, but I'm drawn to articles on consciousness like a moth to a flame.

Despite the compelling subjective experience of executive self-control, we argue that “consciousness” contains no top-down control processes and that “consciousness” involves no executive, causal, or controlling relationship with any of the familiar psychological processes conventionally attributed to it. In our view, psychological processing and psychological products are not under the control of consciousness. In particular, we argue that all “contents of consciousness” are generated by and within non-conscious brain systems in the form of a continuous self-referential personal narrative that is not directed or influenced in any way by the “experience of consciousness.”

The experience of consciousness is a passive accompaniment to the non-conscious processes of internal broadcasting and the creation of the personal narrative. In this sense, personal awareness is analogous to the rainbow which accompanies physical processes in the atmosphere but exerts no influence over them. Though it is an end-product created by non-conscious executive systems, the personal narrative serves the powerful evolutionary function of enabling individuals to communicate (externally broadcast) the contents of internal broadcasting. This in turn allows recipients to generate potentially adaptive strategies, such as predicting the behaviour of others and underlies the development of social and cultural structures, that promote species survival.

It took me a little while before I got what they're on about. At first I thought they were saying consciousness is useless for anything except external communication. Which would be strange because there would be nothing preventing internal communication, e.g. extended cognition. Then I thought that they meant that consciousness was useless but somehow important in communication, which made no sense.

Finally I realised that they have this idea of a "personal narrative", which is constructed by non-conscious processes. This is used for both external and internal communications and provides a "coherent reference point" that can be influenced by non-conscious (communicative or otherwise, e.g. perceptive) processes. The personal narrative and communications have fairly obvious evolutionary advantages. Consciousness, in their view, really doesn't do anything at all. It's an emergent property like a rainbow, utterly useless and having no direct influence on anything. It just sits there like a big fat lemon, never doing anything but very hard to get rid of.

I'm pretty sure there's nothing novel there, though it's still a bitter pill to swallow. However, they make a valiant attempt to restore such common-sense notions of free will and personal responsibility. Those, they say, exist, it's just that the "you" controlling them is your non-conscious processes rather than your conscious mind :

As our account removes any self-serving controlling influence from the contents of the personal narrative and personal awareness, it could be seen to undermine the principle of personal accountability. We, however, consider personal responsibility, a mainstay of the cultural broadcasting architecture and a social contruct critical to most democratic and legal systems, as lying within non-consciously-generated actions and intentions transmitted into the personal narrative and in particular where these same contents have been publicly announced via external broadcasting. Both of these events are accompanied, albeit passively, by personal awareness (“experience of consciousness”)—thereby meeting the traditional moral and legal benchmark.

In our account, everyday constructs such as free-will, choice, and personal accountability are therefore not dispensed with—they remain embedded in non-conscious brain systems where their existence as near universal constructs serving powerful social purposes could well be seen in large part to be a consequence of cultural broadcasting impacting on personal narratives.

What of the "hard problem" ? Here I have to say I found their answers deeply unsatisfying :

The hard problem (Chalmers, 1996) involves two questions: First: “How and why do neurophysiological activities produce the “experience of consciousness”?”. Our account addresses this by concluding that personal awareness is a passive, emergent property of the non-conscious processes that generate the contents of the personal narrative and is not causally or functionally responsible for those psychological contents.

But that doesn't really answer anything. Consciousness as an emergent phenomena is an old idea. So, for that matter, are non-physical concepts, as I was saying recently (https://plus.google.com/u/0/+RhysTaylorRhysy/posts/FKgWG5pq89S). From the relative velocity of two high-speed sheep (https://plus.google.com/u/0/+RhysTaylorRhysy/posts/Vx6W8fF48P3 and comments therein) to Pratchett's "one atom of justice" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUt6sPXQQus), non-physical things nevertheless exist. So where and what exactly are thoughts ? Never mind consciousness for the moment, just simple thoughts. How does the brain create non-physical things, which after all clearly do exist, though in an obviously non-physical sense ? I don't think this answer says anything about that.

The converse question “How can the non-physical experiences of “conscious awareness” control physical processes in the brain?” is consequenctly no longer relevant. We propose that there are no top-down executive controls exerted by either personal awareness or the personal narrative as both are psychological end-points of non-conscious processes.

Yes, but I would like to know how non-physical things exist before we even start on whether or not they have any controlling influence. Not that I have any clue how to answer that. I don't think anyone does.

Still, if we don't know what thoughts are, let alone consciousness, can we at least work out what it does ? The authors present many good examples where it might seem that actually it does little or nothing, such as when subject's brain waves reveal they're made a choice before they themselves think they have.

My totally inexpert inclination is this : consciousness does stuff. True, unconscious processes play more of a role in our decision making than we might like...

Enid Blyton, who described how, when beginning a new book she would simply sit at her typewriter and wait, and then “My hands go down on my typewriter keys and I begin. The first sentence comes straight into my mind, I don't have to think of it.….

... but this by itself does not mean that consciousness does nothing at all except observe. Pure observation is impossible anyway. So I hypothesise that consciousness is in part a way of validating our unconscious conclusions. There's an "ah-hah !" moment when you realise how to articulate a previously indescribable suspicion - it becomes not only easier to communicate, but much easier to remember. The process of consciously thinking about something deeply also seems to be useful in getting those unconscious processes going in the first place. True, sometimes we can hit on a good idea very quickly indeed or after setting it aside for a while, but some things seem to require dedicated thought. And I'll further bet that consciousness is important in external cognition... it would take an awful lot to convince me that someone could solve differential equations in their sleep*. Imagination, particularly visual imagination, seems to be extremely useful when conscious as well.

* Maybe while dreaming, but that's not quite the same thing as being truly unconscious - it's not a binary state.

So that's my view : consciousness as an important but not exclusive governor of behaviour. The extreme views of consciousness being the only controlling force or just a passive observer... well, don't they seem just a bit, well... extreme ? Doesn't it seem more likely that it would be something in the middle ? It does to me at any rate. Reading this alternative view, I'm reminded of Descartes evil demon - except that here it's our own minds that are desperately (and apparently purposelessly) trying to persuade us that we're in control. I don't buy it, but I thought it was interesting.

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01924/full