Are we responsible for our own thoughts? For most people the intuitive answer will be “yes, of course we are, for if not, who or what is responsible for what we think?”
But intuition is not always a reliable guide to the truth. Perhaps we don’t own our thoughts at all. Perhaps they are autonomous.
Taking a shower
You are luxuriating in a hot shower on a chilly morning. At some point you will have to turn the taps off, extinguish comfort, step out into the cold, face the unforgiving mirror, and answer the call of a new day’s duties and obligations.
But exactly when? Exactly when do you terminate your brief indulgence in hot water therapy? Just one more moment, a voice tells you. And when that moment is over, just one more! Let the day come when it will. Right now, life is bliss. But it must come to an end. You know you can’t stay there forever. You are wasting water And so it happens. Of their own volition your hands reach out, and the taps are closed. Life resumes its pitiless path of duty and obligation. But how did it happen? How was that decision made?
Were you aware of any process of computation, deduction, or reasoning that led your hands to reach out for the taps at that very moment? It could have taken place a nanosecond before, or a nanosecond later. Why just then? What prompted your hands to act at that precise moment?
The same apparent arbitrariness of action is manifest in countless everyday situations. You are sitting in a chair reading a book. But you also want to make yourself a cup of tea. You are torn between two imminent and pressing goals. How do you arbitrate between them? Who knows? All you know is that at one moment you are sitting, and at the next you are walking towards the kettle. How did that happen?
A whaling analogy
Should you think these animadversions otiose, I invite you to consider the torment of Ahab – Ahab, captain of the Pequod, obsessed by the existence of Moby Dick who must be killed – a torment given voice in the question Ahab hurls at the universe in his bid to understand what drives him on his fatal collision course with the white whale: “”Is Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm?”
Ahab experiences the same defeat of understanding I experience when I come to terminate my morning shower: what is the source of human action?
(Moby Dick represents a long and arduous read, and I shall not attempt it twice in my lifetime, but I do recommend the opening chapters as undoubtedly the high water mark of humour in fiction, culminating in Ishmael’s famous observation after having to spend the night in a corn-cob-mattressed double bed in The Spouter’s Inn with the harpooner Queequeg, “Better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian”.)
Cogito, ergo sum
It all comes down to an anterior question: what is thought … where does it take place … who is responsible for it … who or what commands it into being? I have to mount a challenge against Descartes in confronting these questions. “I think, therefore I am” is a worthless proposition. “I think…” – stop a moment, and (dare I say it) think about it: it means that there is an agent doing the thinking, the “I.”
This in turn means that there are two entities at play here, an agent, “I”, and the thinking. But how on earth can “I” be the agent in control of my own thought? Expressed humorously, it would mean I would have to have another mind, as it were, in order to do the thinking in my head-bound mind. You therefore cannot say with any cogency, “I think’; all you can say is, “thinking takes place”. This seems to me to be non-contentious – a self-evident truth that accurately reflects our experience of living: thinking is not done, it takes place.
But how interesting is this, then. If we reject the Cartesian view, it means that our thinking takes place willy-nilly as it were, independently of our control, and we act accordingly. Again, at the more humorous or trivial level, this novel understanding is borne out by the frequency with which solutions to daylight problems are solved for us in the darkness of sleep.
At a more seriously understood level, the great Hungarian polymath and philosopher of science, Michael Polanyi, has propagated the hypothesis that few of the great intellectual discoveries that mark personkind’s growing understanding of the universe can have been arrived at by a process solely of deduction or induction.
They have arisen from the promptings of what he calls tacit knowledge – the knowledge we don’t know we have. In other words, we are the beneficiaries of thinking that takes place autonomous of our control. Polanyi draws on scientific evidence to demonstrate that perception (visual perception, for instance) is not a neutral transmission of external reality, but a process characterised by creativity and interpretation, and he locates thought not in the mind alone, but in the body as a whole. If you haven’t encountered Polanyi yet on your travels through the intellectual universe, I recommend you do so. You mess with him at your peril.
Incidentally, the Cartesian duality (the separation of mind and body, or in the terms that I have suggested, thinking on the one hand, and, on other, the “I” that is held to be the agent of the thinking) finds humorous expression in a myriad nonsensical human utterances, such as “I let myself down” – which prompts the question, who is doing the letting down, and who is the victim of the letting down? – or “I am my own worst enemy”.
Unconscious living
There is another great philosopher who proposes the notion that we are not the agents of our thoughts. He is the splendidly named American psychologist Julian Jaynes, who wrote a book some 50 years ago entitled The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Don’t be in the least bit intimidated by so august a title. It is a readable book, in fact a pure delight, and I treasure my copy so much that I will not let it out of my house. (A renowned critic, D C Stove, reviewing the book for Encounter magazine, said Jaynes’s hypothesis could be regarded as the most significant of the 20th Century).
Jaynes posits the view that thinking and consciousness are different things, and we make a mistake when we regard consciousness as the seat or faculty of thought. Consciousness is more like the theatre in which we see acted out a play of what has already been thought for us. In fact, with a wealth of encyclopaedic but charmingly expressed evidence, Jaynes demonstrates that consciousness, a creation of language, is a late arrival in the human make-up, appearing in the period between the writing of the Iliad and the writing of the Odyssey, between the early books of the Old Testament, and the later books of the Old Testament.
He further demonstrates that great complexity of thought and judgement can and does take place without benefit of consciousness. Even more startling to contemplate, his hypothesis means that for many thousands of years humans – Homo sapiens – existed without benefit of consciousness at all – in other words humans lived without awareness of being alive (there was no consciousness within which the self-identity “I” could exist) yet were fully equipped with the ability to think and make judgements.
At first blush this will seem preposterous. OK, you are entitled to your scepticism, but stop and consider examples drawn from states of hypnosis, sleepwalking or even brain injury in which people have demonstrated all the necessary powers of thought, perception and judgement without being conscious.
Strange anaesthetic
By way of a personal anecdote, I can testify to the accomplishment of living without benefit of being conscious. As a result of a strange anaesthetic given to me for relatively minor surgery, I apparently engaged in an extended, meaningful and intelligent conversation in respect of which I was not only unconscious but certain that no such conversation had taken place. It might indeed be the case that the only really intelligent discourse I have been capable of in my life was the one that took place without my being aware of it!
I have travelled a long way from the drama enacted in the course of my early morning showers, and you might be tempted to dismiss all of this as persiflage irrelevant to any helpful consideration of the demands of living.
But next time you are in your car waiting at a stop sign for a gap in the traffic, and you duly pull into it without mishap, you might be inclined to wonder how you came to make the judgement necessary for your safe manoeuvre? Did you make the judgement? Or was it made for you?
[Image: Guy Dugas from Pixabay]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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