Re:the nature of the unconscious

Intimidating topic to theorize about. Nothing less than our view of how the entire mind is organized.

My slant on this is that we're nearly getting to the point where we can begin to take our own sciences seriously. We can gradually begin to wean ourselves off of outmoded psychology that makes grandiose assumptions about how far removed we are from nature and how unique we are and how impossibly mysterious the mind is. Gradually. It will take a long time, but the process is already beginning in earnest I think.

Freud's theory of the unconscious provided the first widely recognized hint that our self-perceived conscious awareness is not neccessarily an agent in itself driving the bus. His greatest error was not that he was wrong (he didn't even get close enough to be wrong), but that he didn't go nearly far enough disassembling the ego. Conscious awareness, presumably the player in Freud's conscious ego, now seems to play mostly a role noticing things that are different or dangerous or unexpected; the rest (the vast majority of what our mind does) is surely "unconscious."

We have a heavy bias toward things that appear "conscious" because they are the essence of how human beings use feedback to regulate their own behavior. At any given moment, I'm often aware of having a short term goal, but most of the things I do are driven by automatic processes that are only loosely related to that goal.

We have come to recognize this largely by observing the bizarre effects of different neurological syndromes (which show how things we think of as simple atomic "mental" acts are actually composed of many requisite component abilities), and by observing anomalies of "will" such as the effects of hypnotic suggestion. There are plenty of conditions where our awareness of what is going on is disconnected from not only our surroundings, but even our own actions.

Using our heavily anthropocentric and somewhat loaded concept of "memories" in terms of being able to veridically replay an event with ourselves in it, there is probably nothing in very early development upon which to link any sensory associations, no real perceptual object categories much less "self" to organize representations of the world. As far as makes sense to anything we now know, the only way to recall things from the womb or past lives is if they are stored somehow in physical space and later picked up by the matured brain then able to make a coherent representation out of it. It would be a little like building a radio and then hearing a 1950's radio program. The developmental process as we understand it is too narrow a bottleneck to accomodate intact electrochemically based memories from anything prior to the first year or so of life, and even that's a tough stretch.

That's not to say there is not learning going on. Learning and what we think of as explicit or descriptive memories are very different things. The basic chemical mechanism for active adaptive learning is something we share with honeybees. Evolution is incredibly conservative. Sure, 95-98% of our genome is shared with chimps, blah blah blah, but 80% is shared with flatworms, and 60% with sponges. Obviously it isn't just that we are close kin to primates, but that our bodies are built from very ancient mechanisms, which still drive us. The suspected primary neurotransmitter twiddled by Prozac and Paxil was first recruited billions of years ago and determines how our gut talks to itself as well as our brain.

So our "unconscious" doesn't require anything even vaguely resembling Freud's mechanisms, which were based largely on his limited understanding of what Darwin's ideas meant to human behavior. He reasoned that since living things have to have a priority to reproduce, there must be a "drive" or libido programmed into them to do so at any cost, and all the unexplained subtleties behavior would fit into place around it and other "survival" or "death" instincts. Very different from how 20th century biology views motivation. Evolution simply doesn't have forethought to program abstract species drives of that sort into living things, it is an opportunistic process.

Freud's vision of the unconscious was a Victorian fantasy, but he certainly recognized one very important thing: that we have limited access to the processes that drive our own motivation and behavior. He overestimated our insight and had no idea how human motivation was structured. Jung (and others) probably came quite a bit closer, but also had limited tools. Psychology provides many stimuluating (and often mutually incompatible) models, but little real insight into these veiled underlying processes.

The scientific study of psychology in the future will be the study of the "unconscious" (since just about everything else turns out to be basically the "folk psychology" of beliefs, intentions, thoughts, and feelings), but we will hopefully have new models that shed more light and take advantage of what we discover of how the brain and body actually work, and link physical processes to cognitive, emotional, and motivational ones.

Selected useful refs:

"Memory Brain and Belief" (ed.) Daniel Schacter and Elaine Scarry, Harvard University Press, 2000 (an attempt to bridge behavioral, cognitive, and neurological views of "memory" and "belief")

"The Seven Sins of Memory," Daniel Schacter, 2001, Houghton Mifflin. (a superb synthesis of memory research themes and a great introduction to the study of memory in human beings).

"Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief," Jordan Peterson, Routledge, 1999. (This is an undermarketed classic of modern psychology. Peterson links the structure of myth with brain attentional mechanisms to give a rough but plausible theory of human motivation in terms of mapping the unknown and seeking meaning. His theory: an adaptive mechanism makes the unknown unbearable to us, driving us to explore it first with generic motivational stories and then progressively more careful maps.)

"Altered Egos: How The Brain Creates the Self," Todd Feinberg, 2001, Oxford University Press. (uses neurological syndromes to point out how our simple perception of self is actually constructed from layer upon layer)

"The Illusion of Conscious Will," Dan Wegner, 2002, MIT Press. (careful readers will note that he doesn't debunk or even address 'free will,' he just points out self-regulation works substantially differently than the way we perceive it intuitively).

"The Synaptic Self: How Our Brains Become Who We Are" Joseph Ledoux, 2002, Viking Press. (LeDoux discusses what is known of the cognitive, emotional, and motivational foundations of behavior in the brain).

"Original Intelligence: Unlocking the Mystery of Who We Are," David and Ann Premack, McGraw Hill, 2003. (primatologists trace the origin of human mental abilities by comparing humans and primates at various developmental stages in terms of key skills). Relevant to "infant memory" because of the excellent coverage of how the development or lack of language affects behavior where a past event has to be recalled.)

"The Science of the Mind: 2001 and Beyond," (ed.) Solso and Massaro, 1995. (interesting essays on where psychology has been and where it is headed; some speculative, some retrospective, some ironic, and a couple very amusing.)

kind regards,

Todd

Replies:

Re:the nature of the unconscious, by Mindful, 12/18/02 Re:the nature of the unconscious, by Todd, 12/18/02

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