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Unconscious Representations 1: Belying the Traditional Model of Human Cognition

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Abstract

The traditional model of human cognition (TMHC) postulates an ontological and/or structural gap between conscious and unconscious mental representations. By and large, it sees higher-level mental processes as commonly conceptual or symbolic in nature and therefore conscious, whereas unconscious, lower-level representations are conceived as non-conceptual or sub-symbolic. However, experimental evidence belies this model, suggesting that higher-level mental processes can be, and often are, carried out in a wholly unconscious way and/or without conceptual representations, and that these can be processed unconsciously. This entails that the TMHC, as well as the theories on mental representation it motivates and that in turn support it, is wrong.

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Notes

  1. The approach adopted here, which sees cognition and mentation in general as mental representation, is accounted for and elaborated on in the second, independently published part of this paper on unconscious representations (Augusto 2013).

  2. Not to be confused with wakefulness and mere sentience; see below the discussion motivated by Merker (2007). Wakefulness/sentience appears to be more immediately connected to subcortical structures, namely to the brainstem (e.g., Laureys 2005).

  3. Signs are sub-symbolic/non-conceptual according to Rasmussen (1983); so, this activation of consciousness appears to imply that the processing is taken over by symbols/concepts.

  4. Although not necessarily without symbols. In fact, concepts are just a kind of symbol or symbolic expression/structure. In the more restricted sense commonly attributed to it, the term concept(ual) is intimately connected to word meanings (e.g., CAT is the concept associated to the meaning of the word cat). While we cannot equate both (for instance, there are aphasics who appear to preserve conceptual representation in the loss of language; see, e.g., Lecours and Joanette 1980), in non-impaired subjects concepts and word meanings appear to be intimately connected or associated.

  5. For instance, there is a current, often implicit or only timidly stated, view in cognitive science and cognitive psychology according to which although mental representations may be inaccessible to conscious processing, mostly for the reasons above (i.e., degradation, indistinctness, low intensity, brevity of presentation, meaning, etc., of stimuli), they may be available to be processed in an unconscious way. This view claims to account for many phenomena in studies of unconscious mentation (see Augusto 2010; Cleeremans 2006), but it does so largely by—often implicitly—taking side with either the vehicle theories or their rival process theories.

  6. This is an important note, as newborns and very young infants can be said to have “consciousness” in the sense that they can exhibit altered states of consciousness. See below for a necessary clarification of the meaning of the term consciousness.

  7. In particular, the prefrontal cortex appears to be implicated in consciousness (e.g., Frith and Dolan 1996), and the development of the frontal cortex region appears to be more prominent only in the second year of life (Gilmore et al. 2012).

  8. Although subcortical structures appear to be also involved, it is well known that verbal language, and in particular semantic processing, is highly localized in the cortex, namely of the left hemisphere (see, e.g., Bookheimer 2002; Ojemann 1991). While we cannot equate conceptual representation with natural language processing (see above), we might have reasons to believe that they are intimately connected (e.g., Fodor 1975).

  9. Unfortunately, Merker sees consciousness where none seems to be possible. Merker’s claim that children with hydranencephaly are conscious is actually non-falsifiable due to his all too vague conception of what it is for a (human) animal to be conscious: the “state of wakefulness … which typically involves seeing, hearing, feeling, or other kinds of experience” (Merker 2007, p. 63). A few lines below, he specifies this vagueness and imprecision: “As employed here, the attribution of consciousness is not predicated upon any particular level or degree of complexity of the processes or contents that constitute the conscious state, but only upon whatever arrangement of those processes or contents makes experience itself possible. To the extent that any percept, simple or sophisticated, is experienced, it is conscious, and similarly for any feeling, even if vague, or any impulse to action, however inchoate. … In this basic sense, then, consciousness may be regarded most simply as the ‘medium’ of any and all possible experience” (Merker 2007, pp. 63–64). But wakefulness is by no means a synonym for consciousness, as our knowledge of dissociated (wakefulness–awareness) states such as the vegetative state, absence seizures and sleepwalking indicate (see, e.g., Laureys 2005); this is supported by evidence from just about all fields involved in unconscious cognition strongly suggesting that “seeing, hearing, feeling, or other kinds of experience” (see above) can all take place without consciousness (see Augusto 2010). Merker, in a Brentanian-like refute of unconscious mental phenomena (see Brentano 1874/1973), sees sentience (here: the ability to sense, or experience stimuli) as consciousness, but in this sense—labeled “creature consciousness”—an ameba can be conscious, so there is nothing gained and much actually can be lost. Although sentience is indeed an important conception, namely as far as it contributes to a much needed notion of animal welfare, it must be distinguished from whatever the mental state is that allows humans—and perhaps other animals—not only to be able to refer to their experiencing (by verbal language, by pointing, by gesturing, etc.), but also to refer to themselves as the immediate locus or source of that experiencing. The problem seems to be, of course, that from sheer sentience to self-consciousness there is a phenomenal continuum, but it might help to realize that while there can be sentience without (self-)consciousness, this requires sentience; this makes Block’s (1995) distinction between phenomenal and access consciousness misguided, as access consciousness is necessarily phenomenal consciousness.

  10. For instance, delay eye blink conditioning is impaired in humans with lesions in the brainstem and the cerebellum (Clark et al. 2002).

  11. Note that in this Case II, and contrary to Case I, subcortical implication in conceptual representations can be supported by the subjects’ (apparently) intact mature cerebral cortex (see above). We can hypothesize that fully developed conceptual representations initially require the cerebral cortex and the ‘language areas,’ being more or less supported by subcortical structures. Evidence for this might be the finding that thalamic lesions are associated with disturbances in naming (see Ojemann 1991), a linguistic feature that appears to be intimately connected to conceptual representation.

  12. This explains a safeguarding degree of doubt with respect to amenability to consciousness of stimuli presented to blind fields (see Table 2 above).

  13. As pointed out above, this might suggest that, perhaps for evolutionary reasons (e.g., earliness), subcortical structures are more extensively implicated in unconscious cognition.

  14. A tough nut to crack for aesthetics; see, e.g., Kant (1790/2000).

  15. This degree of awareness is uncertain; this explains the safeguarding doubt with respect to amenability to consciousness (see Table 2 above).

  16. Note that this feature separates this from the ‘classical’ Jungian postulation of a collective unconscious, which is claimed not to think, or cognize at higher-levels (see, e.g., Jung 1928/1953).

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Acknowledgments

I wish to thank the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) and the European Social Fund for the post-doctoral fellowship that funded, among others, this work.

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    Luis M. Augusto

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Augusto, L.M. Unconscious Representations 1: Belying the Traditional Model of Human Cognition. Axiomathes 23, 645–663 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10516-012-9206-z

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