Today I want to talk about the so called adaptive unconscious. Our main text will be a book by Tim Wilson, we'll be looking at some chapters of Wilson's book entitled "Strangers to Ourselves. A big theme of this book is to use contemporary research in experimental social psychology primarily, and use these contemporary methods to determine if there is an unconscious, and if so what it contains. Wilson is going to be starting with the idea that Freud and his legacy left us with an open question about whether there is an unconscious part of our mind, and if so what its like. Remember that we concluded our last class with that open question to the fact that Freud's claims and the claims of others who followed him, about the nature of the unconscious mind were interesting, provocative, exciting, fascinating et cetera, but not adequately born out by experimental inquiry. So now the question is if you've put those claims under the experimental microscope, what we find out. One take-home that we'll be getting from our discussion of Wilson's work and the work of other psychologists who've been engaged of late in research on the unconscious, is that introspection as is traditionally conceived in, for example tradition going back to Descartes, introspection as is traditionally conceived is probably overrated, and if we're going to learn about ourselves, we'll probably have to take something like a third personal as opposed to a first personal approach to understanding what's within. Then in order to do so, I want first to widen our definition of the self. So far we've talked about the self as comprising cognitive states, affective states, and experiential states. Where cognitive states have to do with beliefs, memories, predictions, expectations, probability, judgments and the like. Affective states have to do with emotions and moods, and experiential states have to do with how things feel both as they come from an emotional state like for example the burning sensation when you're feeling extreme anger or the smell of a lemon or the taste of a lemon when you bite into one, those are all experiential states, and now we can add as part of the self. That's as much part of the mind as it's commonly conceived, that's still part of the self, are character traits and as you recall, Gilbert Ryle was strong on that aspect of the self. That is character traits such as, being short-tempered, irascible that is, someone who has a good bird spotter, or an aggressive chess player, somebody's got a good head for numbers. Those are all aspects of one's character. That might have implications for what happens in your mind but they're not the same thing. So if we're going to introspect, we can probably find such things as cognitive states, affective states, and experiential states but introspection is not in the business generally speaking of revealing character traits, and nevertheless those things are important to understanding who we are. They are nevertheless an important part of the self. These are all things that we want to know about that is, not just what's in our minds, but also what makes up our character. So Wilson refers to the notion of the unconscious that he wants to study as the adaptive unconscious, and that's it's going to be adaptive because he wants to suggest that it's something that can be understood from the point of the theory of evolution through natural selection. We'll be getting back to that in a moment. Starting out with our discussion though, Wilson asks us to imagine that each of us has access to what he calls an inner self detector. Imagine you could get yourself a little device that we call the inner self detector. You put it up to your to your cranium for example and ask it to determine what's going on in your inner self. You might ask a question such as what would you ask it? Maybe for instance, "What kinds of things will really make me happy in life?", "Do I really love that person enough to decide to spend the rest of my life with her or him?", "Am I good at this or should I give up trying to be better at it than I am?", "Am I a good person, or not?", "If not, should I just let go of my aspirations to be a good person and continue on?" The inner self detector is the kind of thing that we might mythologize as something which if we'd only get it'd be very nice, but Wilson suggest that perhaps it's mythological to suppose that we could ever get such a thing. It's a nice thing to dream about. But perhaps there's nothing about our inner selves that we could know in this prosthetically aided introspective way. Or if there is, what we would actually find out, and how much of what we'd find out would differ from what we think is in ourselves. That is, what we take ourselves to be like. Many of us might walk around with an inaccurate picture of what our true selves are, if there is such a thing as a true self, and if so, we should probably be aware of the inaccuracy and the extent to the inaccuracy and think about ways to make our self image align a bit closer at least, to how things really are with us. In aid of doing that, it's helpful I think to distinguish between two kinds of unconscious state. We discussed this in our treatment of Freud. I want to go back to it to make sure we're clear. Two kinds of unconscious state divide into the preconscious, and the subconscious. Where preconscious states are states of mind, there's still mental states that is cognitive, affective or experiential that are not conscious, but that can be brought up to conscious awareness if we try. Names of teachers from elementary school, memories from your past would be cases. Whereas subconscious states are going to be states of mind that are unconscious but that cannot be brought into conscious awareness by virtue of introspection or anything else. That is, they're fixed. They're by definition below the line of conscious awareness. Are there any such things? That's an interesting and open empirical question that Wilson was going to try to answer. In the course of doing so, he suggests that, our conscious minds according to the research that he's going to be telling us about should be understood as, not so much as an iceberg, the tip of the iceberg rather, a small part of which only protrudes above the surface of the water, the great majority of which is actually under the surface, his metaphor that he wants to replace that with this instead, a snowball on the tip of the iceberg. His suggestion is that the conscious awareness, the conscious mind is just like that snowball, a little tiny bit of our mentality. The vast majority of which is instead unconscious. That's a very striking, very dramatic claim. Is it true, and more precisely is it justified by the evidence that Wilson offers us. Now, in the course of responding to the tradition that he wants to build from, he remarks that, I quote "An important part of the Freudian legacy was rejection of the scientific method." He wants to say, "I think that there are a lot of things in the Freudian legacy that are interesting, but I don't think that that legacy followed the scientific method, and we're going to try to do better this time." I want myself to suggest that that's not quite accurate. As we saw in our last class, the Freudian methodology does pay respect to what we called inference to the best explanation. That is, when you've got a hypothesis accepted, if it's the best explanation that you can find, of the data that are available, so long as it's coherent with other things we know, so long as it's reasonably plausible, so long as there aren't other theories that are better, that's a perfectly good example of the application of scientific method. To the extent that the Freudian legacy uses that, it's not problematic; it's not a rejection of scientific method. To the extent that it goes beyond that by such maneuvers as if you challenge the psychoanalytic tradition then you are going to be accused of repression or resistance for example, then I would say that probably is rejection of the scientific method. So I think that what Wilson has to say is only half true. Partly, the Freudian legacy does employ the scientific method, but doesn't do so consistently.
