Supracognitive Consciousness

I recall taking my first psychology course, senior year in high school, and learning about Freud’s notion of the unconscious. According to Freud (1899; 1901), there were processes happening inside my brain which were totally out of my willful control; while the father of psychoanalysis’s more specific theories would go on to be discredited (Crews, 2018), modern psychology and neuroscience has confirmed the depths to which “I” am unaware of and powerless over what is going on inside my head (Holmgren, et al., 2019; Melnikoff & Bargh, 2018; Stanovich, 2018; Stanovich & West, 2000). At the time, the idea that part of my thinking was unconscious was quite shocking as it undermined my assumptions about unity of mind and it took a few months for me to find grounding in my altered perspective on self.

In comparison to Freud, a more empirically informed expression of the unconscious comes from Ray Jackendoff (1996) and his model of inner speech and attention. To Jackendoff, all thinking is unconscious. What we might folk-perceive as thought, our internal dialogue and imagery, is merely a second-order manifestation of what is happening more deeply in the brain. This is not to say that inner representations are useless or play no role in thought, but that they are not thought itself. All healthy vertebrates seem to be capable of thinking about what is in their immediate environment, and perhaps even have some internal representation via imagery. To Jackendoff, humans have the advantage of second-order phenomena expressing as words instead of just pictures, and this ability has led to our seemingly significant advantage in intelligence.

Jackendoff’s account is that we have a field (metaphorically) of consciousness and an attentional system which allows us to place more or less focus on different aspects of the conscious experience. One might pay considerable attention to just one aspect of consciousness, mostly ignoring the rest, or pay general attention to all of consciousness, with a loss of detail towards any particular part. Consciousness consists both of what is occurring in our sensory apparatus and our inner speech/imagery; attention can be paid to anything in consciousness. Our thinking, then, focuses on what we are paying attention to, and this dynamic is what makes language so powerful. That language is distinctly separate from thinking, unlike the cognitive view of language, yet acts as a tool for our thinking, unlike a pure communicative view where language only helps us share our thinking with others, is what makes his view supracommunicative.

If I wanted to think about politics but could only focus on external stimuli, I would be required to go out and sensorily experience aspects of politics to gather any insight. From these experiences it seems unlikely I would be able to develop higher-order models, a la Marx or Smith, but instead only observe basic interactions between other humans and come to identify alliances and family relationships, something other primates are also capable of doing (Cheney & Seyfarth, 1996). Via just sensory experience I can never hold in my attention the entire process of production, the psychological states of workers, or abstract concepts like the “invisible hand.” Attention is just too limited to sensorily handle that much information (Miller, 1956). Language, however, manages to pack these huge processes into tiny chunks that fit into our attentional system like a glove. Human thinking can then be applied to these broader conceptual frameworks, and we can end up with (for better or worse) free markets and dialectical materialism.

The biggest weakness in Jackendoff’s paper is that he leaves thinking as a black box, a mysterious process which has a causal role with no explanation itself. Jackendoff might protest my disagreement by citing all of cognitive science as a way to fill in this blank, but even with a cognitivist conceptualization of thinking being given, there does not seem to be an explanation for the tie between unconscious thinking and the phenomenological aspects of inner speech. How does our information processing give rise to the words in our head? This issue is not tackled.

However, if a causal link can be drawn between thinking and inner speech I think Jackendoff’s account is quite powerful. His model demystifies consciousness by claiming its identification with though is an “illusion” (Jackendoff, 1996, pg. 28) without having the claim that all of consciousness itself is an “illusion” (Dennett, 2018); demystification can be helpful in seeing subjects through a scientific lens. The inner attentional model gives an account on how language gives humans a cognitive advantage, while not dismissing other beings as having no language and therefore no thought (Descartes, 1998 [1637]). I have yet to encounter a compelling definition of “thinking” which can exclude animals from being able to think, Jackendoff does not attempt to make this leap. His theory also brings inner speech conceptually closer to sensory experience by having both be aspects of the same smaller process. This reflects how inner speech and sensory audition seem to be intrinsically tied (Alderson-Day & Fernyhough, 2015) and lets us focus in on specific parts of the brain, such as Broca’s area, to further explore the link between language and cognition.

Drawing the causal link remains a big “if” and goes far beyond the scope of this paper. I am currently investigating the Free Energy Principle, gaining traction amongst both Bayesian brain cognitivists and post-Freud psychoanalysts (Joffily & Coricelli, 2013; Friston, 2010; Solms, 2021; Connolly & van Deventer, 2017), as a way to bridge the gap between thinking and phenomena. Regardless of whether or not said inquiry is successful, Jackendoff’s work on the supracommunicative view both provides an exciting perspective on the nature of consciousness and a compelling argument for how language boosts our ability to think. I have been paying attention to the language of this paper for the last four hours and have produced a, at least relative to monkeys, complex work of high-order thought, something that would make my naïve teenage self proud. Per Jackendoff, the words in this paper are not a mere communication of my thoughts, but a tool I used to develop my thinking.

References

Alderson-Day, B., & Fernyhough, C. (2015). Inner Speech: Development, Cognitive Functions, Phenomenology, and Neurobiology. Psychological Bulletin, 141(5): 931–965.

Cheney, D. L., & Seyfarth, R. M. (1996). How monkeys see the world: Inside the mind of another species. University of Chicago Press.

Connolly, P., & vanDeventer, V. (2017). Hierarchical Recursive Organization and the Free Energy Principle: From Biological Self-Organization to the Psychoanalytic Mind. Front. Psychol., 8, 1695.

Crews, F. (2018). Freud: The Making of an Illusion. London: Picador.

Dennett, D. C. (2018). Facing up to the hard question of consciousness. Phil. Trans. R. Soc., 373: 20170342.

Descartes, R. (1998 [1637]). Discourse on Method. In R. Descartes, Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy (pp. 1-33). Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.

Freud, S. (1899). The Interpretation of Dreams. Leipzig: Franz Deuticke.

Freud, S. (1901). The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. Germany: A. A. Brill.

Friston, K. (2010). The free-energy principle: a unified brain theory? Nature reviews neuroscience, 11(2): 127-138.

Holmgren, M., Kabanshi, A., Langeborg, L., Barthel, S., Colding, J., Eriksson, O., & Sörqvist, P. (2019). Deceptive sustainability: Cognitive bias in people's judgment of the benefitsof CO2 emission cuts. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 64(1): 48-55.

Jackendoff, R. (1996). How language helps us think. Pragmatics & Cognition, 4(1): 1-34.

Joffily, M., & Coricelli, G. (2013). Emotional Valence and the Free-Energy Principle. PLoS Computational Biology, 9(6): e1003094.

Miller, G. (1956). The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on our Capacity for Processing Information. Psychological Review, 63, 81-97.

Solms, M. (2021). The Hidden Spring: A Journey to the Source of Consciousness. New York: WW Norton & Company.

Stanovich, K. E. (2018). How to Think Straight About Psychology (11th ed.). New York: Pearson.

Stanovich, K. E., & West, R. F. (2000). Individual differences in reasoning: Implications for the rationality debate? Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 23(5): 645–726. doi:https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X00003435

Nietzsche’s French: On Whorfian Emotional Efficiency

Does reading how Nietzsche describes ressentiment change the way people experience feelings adjacent to jealously? He says: “they make evil-doers out of friend, wife, child and anyone else near to them. ‘I suffer: someone or other must be guilty’ – and every sick sheep thinks the same,” (Nietzsche, 2007, pg. 94) and with those words he both gives us a conceptual pitch for what these sorts of feelings are, while also giving us a (French) word to describe it. The idea that languages are able to describe unique emotions is not unique to French: “schadenfreude” in German describes the satisfaction of witnessing another’s suffering and the Dutch word “uitwaaien” is a feeling of calm which emerges on walks in the windy outdoors.

Two possibilities present themselves. First, that learning an emotion word is simply that, an addition to one’s lexicon. Emotions are emotions, and at best different forms of learning gives one rational coping tools to deal with them. If one learns the word “schadenfreude” and finds themselves experiencing it more often than they had before, that is the result of the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon. The alternative is that having a word for an emotion, in and of itself, makes some sort of change in how the emotion is experienced.

This debate has long been waged in psychology and neuroscience, framed as emotional essentialism vs. constructivism (Barrett, 2017). The essentialist stance is that feelings are hardwired brain functions which are universal across normal-functioning human beings. Constructivists believe that emotions are unique to individuals, as influenced by culture, and built by one’s conceptual framework. One aspect of constructivism which is Whorfian is the idea that having a lexical tag for an emotion concept alters one’s actual experience of the emotion itself (Lindquist, Barrett, Bliss-Moreau, & Russell, 2006). One central conjecture is the idea that having a tag makes emotion processing more efficient (Barrett, 2006), and because cognitive load is experiential (Ayres, 2006), an increase in efficiency would lead to a different experience in a particular emotion. Given work by neuroscientist Mark Solms, who claims that emotions are the primary way in which conscious organisms experience the world (2021), this aspect of constructivism would lend some credibility to the more dramatic claims Whorf gave of language defining our relative views of the world (1940).

There is strong evidence that “affect labeling,” that is, naming an emotion which is being experienced, changes the emotion process beyond what normal cognitive activity can do. One fMRI study, by Lieberman et al (2007), asked subjects to view a series of emotionally charged faces over a series of five different tasks (additionally, a control task of viewing shapes). Each face triggered an emotional response in the subjects, corresponding to limbic system activity in the brain, and this neural activity was measured in comparison to which task was being done. Whether one was matching faces to genders, matching faces, to other faces’ genders, or matching faces to similar emotions, no task was able to decrease amygdala activity in the same way as simply noting, verbally, which emotion was being expressed. Similar work, focusing on asking subjects about their personal experiences while emotion labeling, have found a marked decrease in distress when the practice is done (Lieberman, Inagaki, Tabibnia, & Crockett, 2011).

Distress is, of course, experiential and the neuroscientific and psychological studies agree: having a word for an emotion state can alter one’s qualitative experience and this change cannot be fully explained through a more generic claim of “cognitive activity.” If one is scientifically conservative, they can focus on the studies listed and which those exist elsewhere. More ambitiously, an excited constructivist may conclude that emotional Whorfianism is a universal assessment of how emotions work in the brain. However, this does not prove the more ambitious aspects of the lexical-emotional tie: claims that some cultures possess fully unique emotions (read: regardless of cognitive efficiency) (Spiegel, 2017) is to be determined.

I have found the essentialist critique of lexical labels to be fairly weak. One paper, written by Sauter, LeGuen, and Haun (2011) in support of Ekman’s idea of “basic emotions” (1992), published data on German and Yucatec Maya speakers on differentiation of emotions in the context of lexical categories. Yucatec Maya is a relatively unqiue language; it does not have separate words to for two of the universal emotions proported by essentialists (and many moderates in the essentialist/constructivist debate): disgust and anger. Someone speaking Yucatec Maya would describe the emotion of a man screaming at the TV or avoiding a dead animal carcass with the same words (p’eek, p’uha’an, or ts’ı´ik). This is not the case in German. A visual aid will help before I describe the task:

Figure 1

Researchers paired up three dichotomies of emotional expressions: disgust/anger, disgust/sadness, and anger/sadness. Each task involved only one pairing. Participants were shown the most extreme version of the pairing, and then shown a series of faces which expressed “in between” feelings and were asked to select which extreme face the current part of the series was closest to; they were then assessed by accuracy. The idea here is that if Yucatec Maya lack a lexical differentiation between disgust/anger linguistically (having a separate word from both for “sadness”) that some sort of special struggle in noticing the differences between disgust and anger faces should arrive one all three tasks get compared. The results? 

Figure 2

The team noted how there seemed to be a universal pattern of expression differentiation, regardless of lexical differences between speakers of the two languages. People seems to have an easier time matching very angry faces with the angriest face and a harder time doing the same for ambiguous faces. By this framework, it seems that emotions are innate.

There are four issues I can identify with applying this study as evidence against emotional Whorfianism (of the efficiency variety): 1) No control was put into place on people’s ability to differentiate emotions from information other than facial expressions (tone of voice, context, etc.); my ability to match up pictures may have nothing to do with my ability to experience or understand emotions 2) one major critique of the Ekmanian school of emotion (I borrow this argument from Barrett, 2017) is that scientists often train their subjects on the emotions in question before actually gathering any data (i.e. the extreme faces were shown to subjects and that dichotomy framed the entire experience for them) 3) not all the data in the anger/sad continuum hit statistical significance, meaning we should probably only be looking at disgust/anger and sad/disgust 4) when only looking at those two continuums, this seems like evidence for a Whorfian emotional efficiency; the terms which the Yucatec Maya had no lexical tag to differentiate them led them to worse performance than the Germans, but when the linguistic playing field was equal the two groups were equally effective at differentiating the faces.

So, does reading On the Genealogy of Morals give someone access to a new sort of emotion? Nietzsche would certainly say, “No.” He was under the impression that he was describing the experiences of the ignorant, across time and culture, and that all peoples of a certain type experienced ressentiment. However, the Whorfian emotional efficiency model may better align with Nietzsche’s goals and with the truth of how emotion processing works. When we study an emotion, say in a philosophy book, and gain a new word for it there is evidence that shows that when we apply this word (regardless of any other form of understanding) we can handle the situation with more cognitive efficiency. Different languages have different words for different emotions, and some languages lack labels for particular types of feelings. Because of this, one’s language (or languages) does impact one’s experience of the world via the emotions and by (at least) the cognitive load they place on us. However, Barrett (2017) notes that one does not need to study other languages to get the benefits of this Whorfian efficiency; by paying attention to our affective experience it is possible to create our own lexical tags to describe our emotional experiences, thereby gaining the benefits of the special role language plays in emotion processing. I call this specific emotional satisfaction of finishing an essay while flying over the Atlantic because the initial draft I wrote earlier in the week got deleted, “no plane no gain.”

References

Ayres, P. (2006). Using subjective measures to detect variations of intrinsic cognitive load within problems. Learning and instruction, 16(5): 389-400.

Barrett, L. F. (2006). Solving the Emotion Paradox: Categorization and the Experience of Emotion. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 10(1): 20-46.

Barrett, L. F. (2017). How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Ekman, P. (1992). An Argument For Basic Emotions. Cognition and Emotion, 6(3/4): 169-200.

Lieberman, M. D., Eisenberger, N. I., Crockett, M. J., Tom, S. M., Pfeifer, J. H., & Way, B. M. (2007). Putting feelings into words. Psychological Science, 18(5): 421-428.

Lieberman, M. D., Inagaki, T. K., Tabibnia, G., & Crockett, M. J. (2011). Subjective responses to emotional stimuli during labeling, reappraisal, and distraction. Emotion, 11(3): 468-480.

Lindquist, K. A., Barrett, L. F., Bliss-Moreau, E., & Russell, J. A. (2006). Language and the perception of emotion. Emotion, 6(1): 125-138.

Nietzsche, F. (2007). On the Geneaology of Morality. (K. Ansell-Pearson, Ed., & C. Diethe, Trans.) New York: Cambridge University Press.

Sauter, D. A., LeGuen, O., & Haun, D. B. (2011). Categorical Perception of Emotional Facial Expressions Does Not Require Lexical Categories. Emotion, 6(1): 1479-1483.

Solms, M. (2021). The HIdden Spring: A Journey to the Source of Consciousness. London: Profile Books.

Spiegel, A. (2017, June 1). Invisibilia: A Man Finds An Explosive Emotion Locked In A Word. Retrieved from NPR: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/06/01/529876861/an-anthropologist-discovers-the-terrible-emotion-locked-in-a-word

Whorf, B. L. (1940). Science and Linguistics. Technol. Rev., 247-248.

A More Empirical Psychological Continuity

Locke’s criterion for personal identity has an intuition-breaking feature. In short, Locke believed that the identity of a person is separate from the body which it presumably occupies and is associated with. A person, instead, is a being which exists over time and is defined by having psychological continuity (PsyCon) with itself. Memory is the mechanism for PsyCon; “Consciousness makes the same Person” (Locke, 2008, pg. 45) and being able to remember (not imagine) past conscious states is what links a single consciousness throughout time. There are good reasons why this criterion sets off alarm bells in our intuition, and I would like to suggest a way to alter Locke’s argument which better serves both our natural inclinations and Locke’s own empirical school of thought.

Locke addresses intuition-breaking cases with a surprising dedication to his settled definition. A drunk man, having lost his memory in a black out, is not the same as the sober person from the night before. He advocates for the possibility that two people, each with their own PsyCon, could both take turns living in the same body. In another example, while he offers no mechanistic way for this to occur (he finds the idea absurd) if someone remembers being Socrates (rather than imagining himself as being Socrates) then he is Socrates, even if the two physical bodies are distanced by two thousand years. All of these seem to run counter to some sort of “common sense” perspective on what a person is, especially in the case of drunken memory loss.

The problem of memory loss is where Reid focused his criticisms of Locke, in his case of the Brave Officer:

“Suppose a brave officer to have been flogged when a boy at school for robbing an orchard, to have taken a standard from the enemy in his first campaign, and to have been made a general in advanced life; suppose, also, which must be admitted to be possible, that, when he took the standard, he was conscious of his having been flogged at school, and that, when made a general, he was conscious of his taking the standard, but had absolutely lost the consciousness of his flogging.” (Reid, 2008, pg. 114)

Reid argues that by Locke’s account, the old general and the flogged boy must be two separate people because of the lack of PsyCon between the two persons. However, by Locke’s same logic, both the flogged boy and the old general must both be the brave officer who took the standard:

Figure 1

I would like to focus on two of Reid’s arguments for the sake of this paper. First, there seem to be situations where Locke’s rules for determining identity lead to non-intuitive answers (one person being two people). This would not be problematic in and of itself, Einstein’s relativity is intuition shattering in many ways (see his famous thought experiment in Einstein, 1949), but his ideas command the paradigm of physics because of the evidence supporting them. This, however, brings up another of Reid’s criticisms: memory is only one aspect of consciousness; the Flogged Boy probably experience strong conscious sensation with no active memories in the moment of him being punished. Reid believed that Locke was confusing evidence for PsyCon, via memory, with the continuity in and of itself. Consciousness, to Reid, cannot be tracked only by memory and cannot be the anchor of identity because of its ever-shifting nature.

We (as in, Locke apologists) might say something like this to Reid: you are correct in saying that memory and consciousness are not synonymous, and we agree with you that memory is just evidence for PsyCon! However, memory is the only form of evidence for PsyCon. No other type of information can show us a link between conscious states, and we therefore must center memory in any question of PsyCon. Assuming memory is a valid form of evidence for PsyCon, we know memory exists and therefor have evidence for PsyCon, and by that evidence this continuity must be accounted for in any definition of personal identity. As previously stated, the only way to do this is by leveraging memory.

The issue with this argument is that memory may not be such a great form of evidence. Locke, as noted, differentiated memory from imagination, but people often confuse the two (Schacter & Loftus, 2013) and both forms of subjective experience seem to involve similar parts of our neuroanatomy (Zeidman & Maguire, 2016). Generally speaking, it is smarter to make assessments using multiple types of evidence rather than one, so centering only (what we now know to be shaky) memory is problematic, per false murder convictions which rely only on eyewitness testimony rather than DNA, testimony, a confession, and fingerprints on the weapon. If memory cannot stand, and there is good reason to think it cannot stand alone, Locke’s whole theory may be vulnerable to Reid’s arguments.

However, other forms of PsyCon exist which may bolster memory. Friston’s free energy principle, coming from neurology and physics rather than philosophy, defines identity over time in the form of an ever-updating model of beliefs (Friston, 2010) which do not require recall. Friston conceptualizes organisms in an abstract fashion, using Markov chains and Bayesian mathematics, in a manner which is reminiscent of Leibniz’s monads. Organisms are conceptualized as separated from the rest of the universe by “Markov blankets,” a mathematical construct which distinguishes beings from each other by their Bayesian predictions of the rest of the universe. These beliefs evolve as identity-holding models of the world over time as the being in question interacts with its environment. If the free energy principle is accurate, mathematically tracked beliefs may be an independent form of evidence for PsyCon.

Figure 2

Identity as defined by Markovian models (Clark, 2017).

The brain itself cannot be ignored in the question of PsyCon. Per Olson (2003), every person we are aware of seems to be a human animal (with a brain). The seemingly irrefutable evidence minds rely on the brain means that the existence of the same brain-substance, over time, also stands as evidence for PsyCon alongside memory and beliefs. The brain is physical, memory is subjective, and Fristonian beliefs are tracked mathematically. Add a social aspect, the verbal expression of “I” to others, and we have four forms of evidence for PsyCon instead of Locke’s lone criterion.

Physical intuitions about the space around us require information from multiple channels: sight, sound, smell, etc. Similarly, our abstract intuitions seem to require multiple forms of confirmation to feel comfortable with rational categories. By requiring more forms of evidence to establish PsyCon, not only do we protect our intuitions from confusion, we also better follow in the tradition of evidence-focused empiricism, of which Locke was a founder. We can even develop a new schema of identity-labels from this angle: “non-identity,” “ambiguous identity,” and “clear identity.” When someone shares no forms of evidence of identity with another person, we can say they are in a non-identity relationship with the other being. With one to three pieces of evidence, cases of identity become ambiguous, as we see time and time again in strange thought experiments. Ambiguity is not much of a problem in the abstract, but drives us to investigate further if we meet the problem in real life. If all four pieces of evidence I outlined above are present, we can claim someone maintains identity over time, beyond a reasonable doubt.

References

Clark, A. (2017). How to Knit Your Own Markov Blanket: Resisting the Second Law with Metamorphic Minds. Philosophy and Predictive Processing.

Einstein, A. (1949). Autobiographical Notes. New York: Tudor Publishing.

Friston, K. (2010). The free-energy principle: a unified brain theory? Nature reviews neuroscience, 11(2): 127-138.

Locke, J. (2008). Of Identity and Diversity. In J. Perry, Personal Identity (pp. 33-52). Berkeley: University of California Press. (First published in 1694 in the second edition of Essay Concerning Human Understanding).

Olson, E. T. (2003). An Argument for Animalism. In R. Martin, & J. Barresi, Personal Identity (pp. 318-334). Oxford: Blackwell.

Reid, T. (2008). Of Mr. Locke's Account of Our Personal Identity. In J. Perry, Personal Identity (pp. 113-118). Berkeley: University of California Press. (First published in 1785 in Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man).

Schacter, D. L., & Loftus, E. F. (2013). Memory and Law: What Can Cognitive Neuroscience Contribute? Nature Neuroscience, 16(2): 119-123.

Zeidman, P., & Maguire, E. A. (2016). Anterior hippocampus: the anatomy of perception, imagination and episodic memory. Nat Rev Neurosci, 17(3): 173-182.