“…we can no more bring to consciousness the operation of our brain than we can bring to consciousness other aspects of our own biology. We can invent stories about what the liver is trying to achieve, speak as if the immune system is confused by tissues from our own bodies, or talk of genes being selfish. And we can invent stories about our brain too—suggesting that it might be suppressing beliefs, harboring hidden motives, tapping into the collective unconscious, or whatever we like. But this is metaphor… Our brains are no more engaged in unconscious thought than our livers, immune systems, or genes.”

I have been reading a bit about Nick Chater, a behavioral scientist who recently wrote a book called The Mind is Flat. The above quote is from an interview Chater did for Nautilus and, although I haven’t read his book yet, the more I read about his view of the “improvisational brain,” the more I’m feeling that it fits very well with a Whiteheadian and Confucian understanding of “the self” and a panexperientialist understanding of consciousness…

Now I’m by no means an expert in psychological theory or psychological history, but I do know a little bit about behavioral psychology and I am aware of folks like B.F. Skinner, whom Chater is obviously influenced by. If I’m not mistaken, Skinner disliked Freud a great deal (which I can’t hold against him, I have issue with Freud as well…) and denied the concept of the unconscious. Skinner was an empiricist and what we might call a deterministic, scientistic materialist and a physicalist. For example, he didn’t think humans “thought” thoughts, and he considered free will to be an illusion since he believed that human behavior was a consequence of environmental histories of reinforcement. Here is Skinner saying pretty much this:

“The position can be stated as follows: what is felt or introspectively observed is not some nonphysical world of consciousness, mind, or mental life but the observer’s own body. This does not mean, as I shall show later, that introspection is a kind of psychological research, nor does it mean (and this is the heart of the argument) that what are felt or introspectively observed are the causes of the behavior. An organism behaves as it does because of its current structure, but most of this is out of reach of introspection. At the moment we must content ourselves, as the methodological behaviorist insists, with a person’s genetic and environment histories. What are introspectively observed are certain collateral products of those histories.
…

In this way we repair the major damage wrought by mentalism. When what a person does [is] attributed to what is going on inside them, investigation is brought to an end. Why explain the explanation? For twenty five hundred years people have been preoccupied with feelings and mental life, but only recently has any interest been shown in a more precise analysis of the role of the environment. Ignorance of that role led in the first place to mental fictions, and it has been perpetuated by the explanatory practices to which they gave rise.”

Skinner had some major critics, including Noam Chomsky, and I agree with pretty much all of the criticism of him that I have read (dude definitely had some weird ideas and took the whole conditioning thing way too far), but I do like his thoughts here about how our environments causally affect us; Skinner’s behaviorism, with it’s emphasis on how we are constantly affecting and being affected by our environments is not a far cry from something a social psychologist would want to say and, for me, this seems undeniably true in at least some respect. Whitehead would agree to this as well, his “physical prehension” concept or causal efficacy describes the sense of causal relations between entities, a feeling of being influenced and affected by the surrounding environment, unmediated by the senses; we’re constantly prehending or incorporating aspects of a perceived thing into our-self; our bodies (and all of reality) are made up of actual occasions of experience (Whitehead’s final real things of which the world is made up; Griffin termed this view panexperientialism), each one of them constantly prehending the others. I think Chater’s definition of emotions as interpretations fits well here:

“I think emotions are interpretations. Understanding one’s own emotions, or another person’s, is very much like understanding the emotions of a fictional character. You’re in a situation, you have a physiological reaction, and you need to make sense of that. If you see someone sweating profusely and looking tense on a high ledge, you think, “That’s bad, they’re afraid of falling, they’re feeling fear.” You do the same with yourself. If you’re on a high ledge, you have the experience being afraid, you are thinking, “My goodness, my heart’s going like crazy, I’m full of adrenaline, I’m sweating profusely,” and, “Help, I’m on this high ledge.’ But you might experience the same physiological symptoms at the starting blocks of a 100-meter race. So your physiological state is highly ambiguous. The point is feelings don’t burst forth from some mental depths. They don’t pre-exist at all. They’re our brain’s best momentary interpretation of feedback about our bodily state, in the light of the situation we’re in” (Emphasis mine).

Now, to be clear, I DON’T like that behaviorists (and their philosophical cousins, functionalists) tend conflate mind and brain; I think, like Whitehead did, that consciousness belongs to an entity (a mind or psyche) that is distinct from the brain, and that genuine freedom can partly for this reason be attributed to conscious experience. I also DON’T like that they use mechanistic, reductive computer metaphors to talk about the mind and brain. However, here is what I’m digging about Chater’s updated behaviorism: the way he seems to describe the brain as an absurdly amazing interpretive storyteller (not a reporter form an inner world) or an improvisational jazz player. Famously (for me anyway), Whitehead’s cosmos has been described by many (and by Richard Lubbock here) as “a musical performance; a free-wheeling jazz festival; an ensemble of countless players, some good, some bad, all improvising as hard as they can go.” In other words, we’re making it all up as we go, folks. For instance, I think it’s correct, as scientific studies have been showing for some time, that we don’t “store” memories like a computer; when we recollect we actually re-create the experience on the fly, improvisational style… I love this idea.

I also like Chater’s criticisms of the unconscious. Here is Chater on this:

“The brain is doing lots of unconscious work—but it is not thought in any way we understand it. At the everyday level, thought is what flows through my mind—images, pains, fragments of language…The unconscious thought viewpoint actually is a rather parochial view on how the brain works—it assumes that the thoughts that inhabit my conscious mind are a pretty good representation of how my brain operates of which, of course, I have no awareness. But the operation of the brain is much stranger than this: The brain mechanisms of perception, language processing, motor control, and memory help generate conscious thoughts—but they are nothing like hidden “copies” of conscious thoughts.

So the brain’s activity is unconscious all right—it is just not thought in any way we commonly understand it. The trap we fall into is thinking, “Well, if brain activity is not conscious, the brain must be doing unconscious things, and those things must be thinking.” And thinking is about beliefs and reasoning and motives and planning and pains—the things that flow through our conscious minds. So we suddenly start to think, “Yes, the brain has two types of thought, divided by some mysterious boundary of consciousness.” I think that’s a big mistake. You’re quite right that we have brain processes of which we’re not conscious. But it’s not right that those brain processes are doing unconscious thinking.”

It’s always been really weird to me how, in classical psychoanalytic theory, the mind is sliced up into conscious and unconscious sections, and that the unconscious is viewed as this mysterious part of our mind that is actually thinking in the background and secretly controlling us or something; the term used in psychology is “homunculus,” which is Latin for “little man.” The idea is that the unconscious mind functions as a mind inside of a mind, or like a little person inside of us that does the thinking for us. So yeah, the iceberg theory of mind has never quite sat well with me for some reason… I do like the more contemporary, updated, psychological definitions of unconscious: that much of what we call “unconscious” is really either habitual automatic thinking, or automatic behaviors resulting from overlearning. Although Whitehead (to my knowledge) doesn’t talk much about the unconscious the way Freud does; with the id battling the superego and the ego making peace between them, all of this happening in our “unconscious”; this does line up with Jon Mill’s take on Whitehead’s unconscious ontology: that underlying Whitehead’s system is the unconscious, habitual activity of prehension (referenced above already). Obviously “unconscious” here, for Mills and Whitehead, is referring to the automatic, habitual processes happening that we are unaware of; it’s definitely not referring to a part of our mind that is thinking and scheming behind the scenes.

So yeah, I do like what Chater says in regard to what the aim of therapy should perhaps be: to help people construct new thoughts and patterns of behavior that can help them move forward. It is not, for example, about uncovering or correcting unconscious motives or beliefs—it is about helping the conscious mind move forward.

THE SELF
Related to all of this, one of my tasks lately has been trying to get away from the Cartesian and Greco-Roman idea of a “true self.” It’s so easy to slip into, I still find myself doing it quite a bit (being a native English speaker doesn’t help!). If there is something I am currently not it is a believer in a “true” substantial self. I do not resonate with the Greco-Roman/Indian version of a “true self,” either the Stoic true self that never sleeps and is never compromised by the passions OR the Vedantist-Atman version of a spiritual self that is a unitary cosmic self that we share with all human beings and is the basis of our common humanity (I realize I’m generalizing a great deal here and I’m sure someone will take me to task for this, and that’s ok I welcome push-back and correction). I do like the process self of Confucius and Whitehead better with its individual integrity, one that is united with its desires and emotions, but one that is constituted by its relations with others. For Confucians, one establishes one’s own character (zhong), i.e. one constitutes one self, by establishing/constituting the character of others (shu). In addition to this, the search for a “true self” is a fruitless endeavor as far as Confucians are concerned. Our goal, instead, according to folks like Xunzi and Laozi, should be to recognize which habits, preferences and patterns shape our identities most and try to overcome these patterns to realize greater potential for our lives. Chater says similar things in a news story from his university:

“The very idea of a true self, buried deep in your unconscious is an illusion… Psychoanalysts have spent many years listening to ‘clients’, trying to find the unconscious knot driving their behaviour. This book suggests it has been an expensive waste of everybody’s time. Or, rather, if therapy helps, it helps by reshaping our conscious mind, not untangling our unconscious.

For Chater, decades of research and experimenting on human decision-making, reasoning and behaviour, leads to the conclusion that the search for a true inner self is a “wild goose chase”.

“We should think of ourselves as like a tradition, like cookery, music, or law,” he says. “Each new thought or action is a creative variation on our past thoughts and actions; and, in turn, also shapes our future thoughts and actions.

“We can view our patterns of thought and behaviour as like learning to play the saxophone. It would be odd to wonder, before I have even picked up a saxophone, about the nature of my true inner saxophone style.

“Only as we play, and learn from others, do we each create our own style, but it wasn’t hiding inside us all along! And, of course, if you had learned different pieces and played with different people, you would have created a completely different style – that is true of our personalities as well.”

I am shaped by others and they are shaped by me; we shape our worlds and our worlds shape us. Our environments, in large part, make us who we are and vice versa. Nice. I’m sure I’ll read Chater’s book eventually and probably hate it. But yeah, right now, based on the talks I’ve listened to and the articles I’ve read, I’ve never found myself agreeing so much with a behavioral scientist!

Tags:B.F. SkinnerbehaviorismconfucianismconfuciousconsciousnessdualismFreudmaterialismNick Chaterpanexperientialismpsychologyunconsciouswhitehead