Took too long to say too little. Great thought overall though

Este puede ser uno de los libros más importantes del siglo XXI en el mundo de la psicología.

El autor lleva más allá las ideas de Daniel Dennett sobre la consciencia y acumula una gran cantidad de pruebas que muestran que el inconsciente tal y como lo concebimos, simplemente no existe. No hay profundidades ocultas que podemos sacar a la luz. El cerebro piensa una cosa cada vez, en un constante esfuerzo por dar significado a los estímulos del entorno. Todo es percepción y memoria. No hay más, y es algo que debería alegrarnos.

La tesis de este libro básicamente destruye toda la psicología popular, todas las pseudoterapias derivadas del psicoanálisis, todo. Es un borrón y cuenta nueva.

Haré cuando pueda una reseña más detallada en el blog, porque hay que ir capítulo a capítulo. Pero este libro es esencial.

The title seemed promising, but I was not getting anything out of this book, so I abandoned it a third of the way through a few months ago. I can't even recall the specifics, but I am dropping this from the 'now reading' list.

We cannot chart our hidden depths because the very idea that our minds contain hidden depths is utterly wrong. The inner, mental world, and the beliefs, motives, and fears it is supposed to contain is a work of the imagination. The stories we tell to justify and explain our own and others’ behaviour aren’t just wrong in detail - they are a thoroughgoing fabrication from start to finish. Our brain creates new momentary thoughts and experiences by drawing not on a hidden inner world of knowledge, beliefs, and motives, but on memory traces of previous momentary thoughts and experiences. Conscious experience is therefore the sequence of outputs of a cycle of thought, locking onto, and imposing meaning on, aspects of the sensory world.

WORKS OF FICTION: The external world is specified in complete detail whether we know the details or not. By contrast, our beliefs, values, emotions, and other mental traits are as tangled,, self-contradictory, and incompletely spelled out as a work of fiction. Our left-brain interpreter is such a good storyteller that it fools us completely in thinking that the answers it comes up with have always been there ‘deep down’.The mind is flat: our mental surface, the momentary thoughts, explanations, and sensory experiences that make up our stream of consciousness is all there is to mental life. We suppose that our contradictions mus represent a clash between different internal selves, but the incoherent nature of the ‘self’ is not explained by adding different selves.

PERCEPTION: our sense of grasping the entire visual world before us is a hoax. Our mental ‘pictures’ of the world can have as many contradictions and gaps as any fictional world. Our beliefs about what we see are systematically misleading; we see far less than we think we do. We see the world one snippet at a time, and tie snippets together just as we link together successive sentences in a story. There is no ‘inner realm’ which mirrors the richness and complexity of the outer world. There is nothing more to the mind that the fleeting contents of our stream of consciousness. The world is a stable place; perception is designed to tell us about the world; thus perception gives us a sense of stable awareness of colour and detail across the entire visual image. And it does so even though, outside of the tiny window of lucidity, this information isn’t actually captured by the eye or brain at all, but is merely available ‘on demand’, with the swivel of a head.

IMAGINATION: Our imagination, like visual experience, is a narrow window of lucidity, and what we see through that window is invented, not merely reported from some fully specified entirely coherent inner world. Dreams, too, are improvised stories, with few details sketched in. When our minds create them, we lock onto some specific fragments of information, almost everything else is left utterly blank. To wonder whether, in my dream, Ludwig was wearing black or brown trousers, but we simply didn’t notice it would be to confuse reality (facts exist independently of our awareness of them) and fiction (where there are no facts beyond what the author specified.) Our thoughts aren’t shadows of an alternative inner reality, to be charted and discovered; they are fictions, devised moment by moment.

EMOTIONS: Emotions are fiction too. Schachter and Singer’s experiment, etc. We seem to interpret our emotions in the moment: and we appear to do this based not just on the situation we are in but also on our own physiological state, which can be ambiguous. The brain receives rather crude perceptual signals from your own body, indicating that your heart is pumping, etc. What does it all mean? The experience of those perceptions of your own internal states depends, as ever on the interpretation that seems to make sense given the wider context. And we interpret the same physiological state not merely as different versions of the same emotion but as examples of different emotions entirely. Plato, envisaging the heart tugging against the head, deceives us. When we ‘of two minds’ so to speak, the two forces tugging at us aren’t reason and emotion, but two different types of reason. The clash of head and heart is a battle between one set of reasons and emotions, and another set. Far from knowing our minds, we are endlessly struggling to make sense of our experiences; emotions are creative acts, not discoveries from our inner world. The belief that emotion is an inner revelation, rather than a creation of the moment, is not only widespread but potentially dangerous. The danger is that one moment’s speculative thought becomes the next moment’s incontrovertible proof. Dealing with negative patterns of thought becomes so much more difficult if we are in the grip of the illusion of mental depth. If we see our emotions as infallible messengers from our inner world, rather than as products of flimsy and incoherent interpretations of the moment.

THE MEANING OF LIFE: Puzzling over the meaning of life is a part of puzzling over meaning more generally. The word dog has developed its meaning because of the way we use it. It’s clearly a hopeless strategy to look for the meaning of the word by closely scrutinising the word itself. The same goes for money: the value of physical currency is a product of enormously intricate relationships between people. Words aren’t mere sounds; money is not just the paper it is written on. And the same is true for the search of meaning in our own experiences and in our lives. Emotions have their meaning, not through some elementary properties of raw experience, but through their role in our thoughts, our social interactions, and our culture. To be ashamed, angry, proud, or jealous is not to experience the welling up of some primitive feeling, we are ashamed of specific actions, proud of particular achievements, angry at individual people for concrete reasons. The same pattern surely applies to the meaning of our lives more broadly. The meaning of pretty much anything comes from its place in a wider network of relationships, causes, and effects - not from within.

CHOICES: If the left-brain hemisphere invents stories to explain what it doesn’t understand, this suggests that people also explain choices naturally and fluently after the fact. Deciding what to say is a creative act; rather than a read-out from a comprehensive inner database of my beliefs, attitudes, and values. The story-spinning interpreter is not entirely amnesiac; it attempts to build a compelling narrative based on what it can remember. The interpreter works by referring back to memories of past behaviour - we stay in character by following our memories of what we have done before.

THE CYCLE OF THOUGHT: The brain uses cooperative computation across vast networks of neurons; this implies that these networks make one giant, coordinated step at a time rather than a myriad of infinitesimally small steps. This sequence of giant, cooperative steps is called the cycle of thought. If each network of cooperating neurons in the brain can only focus on a single problem, then we should be able to read one word at a time, recognise one face at a time, etc. And if we are consciously thinking about one problem, then we cannot even unconsciously be thinking about another. The unconscious cannot be working aware on tricky intellectual challenges while we are consciously attending to some other task. Our brain is fully engaged with making sense of the information it is confronted with at each moment. Deep, subcortical structures search for, and coordinate, patterns in sensory input, memory, and motor output one at a time. There are 4 principles that explain how the mind works.
Attention is the process of interpretation: at each moment, out brain ‘locks onto’, or pays attention to, a target set of information, which the brain then attempts to organise and interpret. The target might be aspects of sensory experience, a fragment of language, or a memory.
Our only conscious experience is our interpretation of sensory information: the result of the brain’s interpretations of sensory input is conscious (we are aware of the brain’s interpretation of the world) but the raw materials from which this interpretation is constructed, and the process of construction itself, are not consciously accessible.
All conscious thought concerns the meaningful interpretation of sensory information: We are conscious of nothing else; we are only conscious of that which requires nterpretation. But while we have no conscious experience of non-sensory information, we may be conscious of their sensory consequences. (I have no conscious experience of the abstract number 5, although I may conjure up a sensory representation of five dots, or the shape of the symbol ‘5’.)
The stream of consciousness is nothing more than a succession of thoughts, an irregular cycle of experiences which are the results of sequential organisation of different aspects of sensory input. The cycle of thought is sequential: we lock onto and impose meaning on one set of information at a time. The brain’s activities beyond the sequential cycle of thought are surprisingly limited; we can manage, roughly speaking, just one thought at a time.
We are relentless improvisers, powered by a mental engine which is perpetually creating meaning from sensory input, step by step. Yet we are only ever aware of the meaning created; the process by which it arises is hidden. Our step by step improvisation is so fluent that we have the illusion that the ‘answers’ to whatever ‘questions’ we ask ourselves were ‘inside our minds all along’. But, in reality, when we decide what to say, what to choose, or how to act, we are, quite literally, making up our minds, one thought at a time. But just because we are able to lock onto one set of information at a time doesn’t mean that we are oblivious to anything we aren’t currently paying attention to. Our perceptual system is ready to raise the alarm and drag our limited attentional resources away from their current task in order to lock onto a new stimulus. But these alarm systems dont involve interpretation; they help direct our attempts to organise and interpret sensory input.

THE MYTH OF UNCONSCIOUS THOUGHT: The brain is a cooperative computing machine - large networks of neurons collectively piece together the solution to a single problem: the cycle of thought proceeds one step at a time. When we succeed in solving a problem that we previously couldn’t solve, there is no unconscious problem-solving going on; insight may occur in a flash when our minds lock onto a problem afresh, but there is no reason to believe that it bursts through from the deliberations of a second, unconscious self.

THE BOUNDARY OF CONSCIOUSNESS: If we are conscious of one thing at a time, and the brain is a sprawling network of neurons, we are unconscious of almost everything our brain does. Consciousness is analogous to the ‘read-out’ on a calculator or search engine. We are conscious of, and could only ever be conscious of, the meanings, patterns, and interpretations that are the output of this cooperative computation. Consciousness is limited to awareness of our interpretation of the sensory world; and these interpretations are the result of each cycle of thought, not its inner workings. Perception is a process of rich and subtle inference - the brain pieces together the best story it can about how the world might be. The attempts to interpret sensory input, language, or our own memories typically involve inference of great subtlety to figure out which ‘story’ weaves together the data most compellingly. And perception is unconscious inference, so we are only ever aware of the results of the brain’s interpretations. According to the cycle of thought viewpoint, our conscious experience is of the meaningful organisation of sensory information. If this is right, then talk of being conscious of one’s self is nonsense, since the self isn’t part of the sensory world. So, we aren’t really conscious of numbers, apples, people, or anything else - we’re conscious of our interpretations of sensory experience and nothing more. We have no subjective experience of ‘deep’ concepts of mathematics, the inner workings of our minds, or consciousness itself. We consciously experience sensory information, (images generated by our minds, sensations of our bodies, inner speech, etc) but nothing more. There are no conscious and unconscious thoughts; there is just one type of thought, and each thought has two aspects: conscious read-out, and an unconscious process that generates the read out. The search for meaning is the object of each cycle of thought: and meaning is about organising, arranging, creating patterns in and making sense of thoughts, actions, stories, works of art, games, and sports. Finding meaning is about finding coherence, and coherence is created step by step, one thought at a time; it is never complete, but it is continually open to challenge and debate.

WHO WE ARE: PRECEDENTS not PRINCIPLES: To learn anything is to impose meaning on previous experiences. Skills, learning, memory and knowledge always work by layering each momentary thought on top of past momentary thoughts, tracing an ever-richer web of connections across our mental surface. The brain interprets one word, face, or pattern at a time, but in so doing it simultaneously explores possible links between the current stimulus and a vast array of memories of interpretations of past stimuli. The brain is focused on coping with the present by relating the present to amalgams and transformations of the past. Memory traces are fragments of past processing, so that it is past interpretations that are stored in memory, rather than raw, disorganised sensory input. Recognising a friend, say, requires connecting sensory inputs to stored memories of faces. Today’s memories are yesterday’s perceptual interpretations. We like to think that our contradictions are found merely on the surface, and that, deep down, there is the ‘real’ us free from any internal contradictions; but this is an illusion because there is no inner core, virtuous or venal. Yet if the mind is an engine of precedent, then we’re not just a bundle of character traits, but a rich store of distinctive past experience. We are unique because of the endless variety of our layered history of thoughts and actions. Each of us is a tradition, guided and shaped by our past, and like traditions in art, music, literature, language, etc, we are capable of refinement, reinterpretation and reinvention.

INTELLIGENCE: The ability to select, recombine, and modify past precedents to deal with present experience is what allows us to be able to cope with an open-ended world we scarcely understand. The cycle of thought doesn’t merely refer passively to past precedents - we imaginatively create the present using the raw materials of the past. Why has our species developed such rich imaginative powers? Imaginative leaps are essential for perceiving the world and making sense of each other. My suspicion is that it is our mental elasticity that is one of the keys to what makes human intelligence so remarkable.