In any normal domain of expertise, even the most knowledgeable of specialists can’t come close to knowing everything about the domain. The breadth of knowledge that one would need to assimilate in order to be an expert in every nook and cranny is so cast that setting oneself such a goal makes no sense. And of course the idea of being an expert ‘in every nook and cranny’ is itself problematical, since when one uses a magnifying glass, every domain shatters into yet further subdomains.

~ Douglas Hofstadter & Emmanuel Sander, Surfaces and Essences: Analogies as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking, p. 245

Taken as a whole, the literature seems convincing. But take each study individually and skepticism  rears its head about task validity, sample sizes, weak effects, and of course replication. This skepticism has been building to point that journalists and science writers now entertain  words like “crisis” to describe the scientific respectability of social psychology, especially after the recent series of high-profile fraud by leaders of the field. Reflecting broader intellectual moods, the author of the Nature piece then says this:

The theory holds that behaviour can be influenced, or ‘primed’, by thoughts or motives triggered unconsciously — in the case of intelligence priming, by the stereotype of a clever professor or a stupid hooligan. Most psychologists accept that such priming can occur consciously, but many, including Shanks, are unconvinced by claims of unconscious effects.

Notice how the last line is “unconscious effects” in general not “these particular unconscious effects of intelligence priming”. Whether or not this is Shanks view or simple journalistic distortion, the author implies that there is a heated empirical controversy about the actual existence of “genuine” unconscious activity, and that it’s still an open question whether there the unconscious “has effects” at all. Although I do not specifically endorse the recent (2006) version of “unconscious-thought theory” proposed by Dijksterhuis (imo, a classic case of reinventing the wheel), in this post I want to convince you that there is no empirical controversy at all about the existence of unconscious effects in general, and that the great causal efficacy and intelligence of the unconscious mind should understood as a theoretical axiom to be taken for granted, not a hypothesis in need of empirical “proof”.

Obviously any scientific theory must be stated in terms that are meaningful, otherwise we cannot make sense of what the theory claims to be true about the world. Accordingly, a theory that calls itself the “unconscious thought theory” should provide an operational definition of “conscious” because the claim is meant to be contrastive: whatever consciousness is, thoughts can happen without it. Thus, to understand the unconscious thought theory we must have a sense of what it means to be conscious. (We need to also have an operational definition of “thought”, but I will set this aside).

As theoreticians, we have unlimited freedom in defining the specialized theoretical terms we use in our theories so long as we can convince our colleagues that these are coherent and useful. Suppose you defined consciousness to be synonymous with what is understood to be uniquely human, reflective, introspective consciousness, what theorists sometimes call “System II processing” or what laypersons might think of as “self-consciousness”. If this is how the term consciousness is defined, then it follows axiomatically that all (or most) nonhuman animals are “unconscious”, or as I like to say, “nonconscious”. And clearly nonconscious animal minds are capable of producing a continual stream of intelligent and brilliantly adaptive behaviors. Thus, it is clearly unnecessary to go into a social psych lab to “prove” that the unconscious “has effects”. We plainly see the varied effects of the unconscious in nonhuman animal behavior all around us.

When psychologists throw around terms like “unconscious” they often fail to unambiguously specify the precise operational meaning of the contrasting term “conscious”. As a result, the folk psychological associations of the term as synonymous with “incoming sensory awareness” makes it sounds so cruel and mean to deny nonhuman animals consciousness. Upon reading the above paragraph, many people would immediately say how ghastly it is to deny animals experience, sentience, or a mental life. But it would be an anthropocentric delusion to suppose that human reflection alone bestows mentality upon an otherwise mindless nonconscious system. It is quite the reverse, in fact. It is the buzzing humming activity of the nonconscious system that bestows meaning and mindfulness upon the conscious system. Clearly, if you are an animal and lack reflective consciousness you are not thereby deprived of experience. I am doubtful that the terms “experience” or “awareness” can be given operational precision, but pretheoretically it is quite plain what it means to say that an animal is aware but unreflective; they can process information on-the-fly to produce intelligent, adaptive behavior but cannot “step back” and engage in sophisticated reflection.

In conclusion, I hope to have shown that the unconscious-thought theory is not a hypothesis that can be empirically proved or disproved. When a lab fails to produce priming effects, this has zero bearing on the claim that most of our mental activity is unconscious. That idea falls out of the definition of consciousness as the rarified act of reflective consciousness. It is a theoretical axiom, a guideline for hypothesis generation and research.

The idea of free will can be re-stated in a way that will be more palatable to all but the most rigid determinists. To enable human beings to participate in culture, evolution gave us the ability to override our initial responses, choose among different options, and let behavior be guided by meanings (including rational analysis, abstract rules, and long-term planning). In addition to programming some of our tendencies and reactions, evolution created us to be able to re-program ourselves. It gave us controlled processed, self-regulation, and lifelong behavioral plasticity. It enabled us to use the results of complex, logical reasoning (occasionally!) to alter our behavior.

~Roy Baumeister, The Cultural Animal, p. 274

The need for critical science journalism: Too much science writing falls under the category of 'infotainment' goo.gl/feCEy—
ms. melody (@moximer) May 16, 2013

The view of the mind as a pragmatic, problem-solving survivalist has also inhibited research on the evolution of human creativity, morality, and language. Some primate researchers have suggested that human creative intelligence evolved as nothing more than a way to invent Machiavellian tricks to deceive and manipulate others. Human morality has been reduced to a tit-for-tat accountant that keeps track of who owes what to whom. Theories of language evolution have neglected human story-telling, poetry, wit, and song. You have probably read accounts of evolutionary psychology in the popular press, and felt the same unease that it is missing something important. Theories based on the survival of the fittest can nibble away at the edges of human nature, but they do not take us to the heart of the mind.

~Geoffrey Miller, The Mating Mind

Hacking’s contributions to these debates involves clearing up a mess of conceptual confusions about what the debate amounts to, what the relevant terms mean and don’t mean, and how to resolve (or dissolve) the tension. Hacking seems to think that the term “social construction” is practically useless given the inevitable ambiguities and myriad meanings associated with the term. Ever ecumenical, Hacking nevertheless argues that both the realists and constructionists have a point worth making, and diagnoses the debates partially as a result of each side talking past each other with an ample dose of pamphleteering on both sides. Once a scientific question is well-posed, realists are right to insist there are determinate answers independent of what anyone thinks. But constructionists are right to point out that contingent personal, social, and cultural factors influence what questions are asked, as well as the standards and methods used to evaluate the answers to the questions. Thus, Hacking concludes that although the “content” of science is realist enough to warrant the term, the “form” of science is not.5/5 stars.

Sid Kouider et al. recently published a paper claiming to have found a “neural marker of perceptual consciousness” in babies too young to verbally report their awareness, a finding that would be a significant achievement if it actually meant anything. But I will argue that it doesn’t signify any progress at all in the science of consciousness. I have a single over-arching complaint about this paper which will generalize to the entire neural correlation approach: lack of operational precision in defining what they are trying to detect with their measuring instruments. The title says they are looking for a neural marker of “perceptual consciousness”. But in the abstract and paper they use a confusing mixture of different words such as ”conscious reflection”, “conscious access”, “conscious perception”, “conscious experience”, “awareness”, and “subjectivity”.

This is ridiculous. Concepts that play a role in scientific thinking should not be so ambiguous. Are reflection and perception the same thing? How is perception defined? Is perception the same as perceptual consciousness? If not, what’s the difference? Is perception the same as access? Are awareness and subjectivity identical? Can you have awareness without reflection? Is all subjectivity reflective? How is experience defined? Do creatures incapable of reflection have sensory experiences? Is experience the same as having awareness? The slipperiness of these words is paralyzing because you can never pin them down; every time someone claims to have a firm grasp of these terms their meaning vanishes into a vapor of further undefinitions and hand-waving.

How can the science of consciousness ever be taken seriously if it never escapes from the morass of undefinitions and ambiguous synonyms? Are we detecting qualia, phenomenology, reflection, awareness, or experience? What do these terms mean? Do they all mean the same thing? How can we measure them? Can “experiences” be directly measured? If not, how do we justify our indirect measurement? How can we be sure that our measuring instruments are accurately measuring the things we say they are? These studies are built on a foundation of verbal sand, a tangled, confused mass of open-ended verbal definitions that are chained to nothing but other verbal definitions, with no clear sense of how these concepts can be measured by standard scientific instrumentation.

Measurement verification circularity is not completely unique to the “mental sciences”. The mental sciences are just not as well-equipped to practically deal with the problem. The concept of “temperature” is also circularly defined, but unlike consciousness, we have a consensus by convention that if you stick a mercury thermometer into the steam of boiling water the mercury will expand to the point on the thermometer marked “100″ on an arbitrarily defined numerical scale under standard conditions e.g. normal atmospheric pressure, impure water, etc. The problem with consciousness studies is that there is no consensus on how to operationally define our concepts in terms of classes of operations that can uniquely defined and carried out by independent scientists with measuring instruments calibrated to a conventionally agreed standard.

Take Kouider et al’s operational definition for detecting consciousness in babies with EEG. They first use EEG on adults and classify perceptual processing as a two stage process, the second stage they take to be a neural marker for consciousness because the adults report they have “seen” something:

During the first ~200 to 300 ms of processing, brain responses increase linearly with the stimulus energy or duration. This early linear stage can be observed even on subliminal trials in which the stimulus is subjectively invisible. By contrast,the second stage, which starts after ~300 ms, is characterized by a nonlinear, essentially all-ornone change in brain activity detectable with event-related potentials (ERPs)  and intracranial recordings . Note that this second stage occurs specifically on trials reported as consciously seen.

But how do they know there is no consciousness during stage 1 where there is no report? How do we rigorously make the inference from “There is no report” to “There is no consciousness”? It’s certainly not an analytic truth, so there must be some empirical justification. But what is it? Suppose some kind of consciousness exists in stage 1 but we haven’t figured out how to measure it. How do we rule out the possibility that our measuring instruments have missed something? If you define consciousness as “The act of reporting, and/or the contents of what are reported”, then the inference is on firmer ground but the firmness is purely conceptual. To see the verbal nature of this inference, suppose you define consciousness as “The subjectivity that can occur independently of any possibility of reporting it” (forgetting for now this isn’t actually a meaningful definition without also defining ‘subjectivity’). Then clearly the inference from lack of report of consciousness to lack of consciousness doesn’t follow.

I see the problem here as simple terminological disagreement. But terminological disputes are not innocent; they have a tendency to pollute the entire downstream scientific process. If competing labs have a terminological dispute but claim to be studying the same thing (“consciousness”) then they will be talking past each other in the most wearisome and unproductive manner. No progress will be made. Sure, there will be progress within the theoretical frameworks of each competing lab. But in Kuhnian language this will be akin to there not being a single “normal paradigm” of consciousness but dozens of rival paradigms, each with their own disciplinary matrix of terminology, definitions, preferred measurement protocols, and standards for measurement verification.

As I see it, the science of consciousness has two futures. In the first future, the dozens of competing definitions and concepts of consciousness will undergo a process of artificial selection, and in, say, 100 years all scientists who call themselves consciousness researchers will have reached a consensus on how to operationally define the concept, much like the current field of thermometry. This wouldn’t mean that the science of consciousness would be “complete”, it’s just that it would turn into a single “normal science”, which, if it undergoes a conceptual or experimental revolution, the revolution will be against a single well-established paradigm. Right now all we have are micro-revolutions that are of no general significance. The victories ring hollow because there is no consensus on how to evaluate the standards of success.

John Dorris called this line of thinking dangerously akin to “scorched Earth skepticism”. But I’m okay with that. To twist the metaphor, I see it as “Forest fire skepticism” because some plant species have adapted to local “fire regimes” such that the fire kills off half the species but triggers seed formation that secures population recovery. That’s my purpose in being skeptical of consciousness studies: to thin the field via negativa.

The second future is more grim: the science of consciousness will simply be abandoned. Either that, or what amounts to the same: the science of consciousness will be fractured into dozens of distinct, hyper-specialized subdisciplines that are effectively distinct academic pursuits, and only historians will remember that they were once all trying to study the same thing.

p.s. I don’t think talk of “perceptual representations” or “neural representations” is on any firmer ground than “perceptual consciousness”.

If we are willing to conceive education as the process of forming fundamental dispositions, intellectual and emotional, toward nature and fellow men, philosophy may even be defined as the general theory of education…Unless a philosophy is to remain symbolic – or verbal – or a sentimental indulgence for a few, or else mere arbitrary dogma, its auditing of past experience and its program of values must take effect in conduct.

~John Dewey, Democracy and Education, p. 338

If you do not provide the people in your audience with information that they require in order to understand you, it is the same as telling them that you do not care if they understand you or not.

Read the rest here.