The same thing happens inside one’s mind. We usually have a constant sense that we’re ‘conscious’ of things that are happening now. But when we examine this critically, we recognize that there must be something wrong with it—because nothing exceeds the speed of light. This means that no internal part of a brain can ever know exactly what is happening “now”—either in the outside world or in any other part of that brain. The most that any resource can know is some of what happened in the recent past.
Citizen: Then why does it seem to me that I am conscious of all sorts of sights and sounds, and of feeling my body moving around—right at this very moment of time? Why do all those perceptions seem to come to me instantaneously?
It makes good sense, in everyday life, to assume that everything we see is “present” in the here and now, and it normally does no harm to suppose that we are in constant contact with the outside world. However, I’ll argue that this illusion results from the marvelous ways that our mental resources are organized—and I think this phenomenon needs a name:
The Immanence Illusion: For most of the questions you would otherwise ask, some answers will have already arrived before the higher levels of your mind have had enough time to ask for them.
In other words, if some data you need were already retrieved before you recognized that you needed it, you will get the impression of knowing it instantaneously—as though no other processes intervened.[61]
For example, before you enter a familiar room, it is likely that you have already retrieved an old description of it, and it may be quite some time before you notice that some things have been changed; the idea that one exists in the present moment may be indispensable in everyday life—but much what we think that we see are the stereotypes of what we expected.
Some claim that it would be wonderful to be constantly aware of all that is happening. But the more often your high-level mental resources change their views of reality, the harder it will be for them to find significance in what they sense. The power of our high-level descriptions comes not from changing ceaselessly, but from having enough stability.
In other words, for us to sense what persists through time, one must be able to examine and compare descriptions from the recent past. We notice change in spite of change, not because of it. Our sense of constant contact with the world is a form of the Immanence Illusion: it comes when every question asked about something is answered before we know it was asked—as though those answers were already there.[62]
In Chapter §6 we’ll also see how our ways to activate knowledge before we need it could explain why our ‘commonsense knowledge’ seems ‘obvious’.
§4-4. Over-rating Consciousness
“Our mind is so fortunately equipped that it brings us the most important bases for our thoughts without our having the least knowledge of this work of elaboration. Only the results of it become conscious. This unconscious mind is for us like an unknown being who creates and produces for us, and finally throws the ripe fruits in our lap.”
Why has Consciousness’ seemed such a mystery? I’ll argue that this is largely because we exaggerate our perceptiveness. For example, at any one moment the lens of your eye can clearly focus only on objects in a limited distance range, while everything else will be blurry.
Citizen: That doesn’t seem to apply to me, because all the objects that I can see seem clearly focused all at once.
You can see that this is an illusion, if you focus your eyes on your fingertip while trying to read a distant sign. Then you’ll see a pair of those signs at once, but both will be too blurry to read. Until we do such experiments, we think we see everything clearly at once, because the lens in each eye so quickly adjusts that we have no sense that it’s doing this. Similarly, most people believe they see, at once all the colors of things in a scene—yet a simple experiment will show that we only see colors of things in the field near the object you’re looking at.
Both of these are instances of that Immanence Illusion, because your eyes so quickly turn to see whatever attracts your attention. And I claim that the same applies to consciousness; we make almost the same kinds of mistakes about how much we can ‘see’ inside our own minds.
Patrick Hayes: “Imagine what it would be like to be conscious of the processes by which we generate imagined (or real) speech. … [Then] a simple act like ‘thinking of a name’, say, would become a complex and skilled deployment of elaborate machinery of lexical access, like playing an internal filing-organ. The words and phrases that just come to us to serve our communicative purposes would be distant goals, requiring knowledge and skill to achieve, like an orchestra playing a symphony or a mechanic attending to an elaborate mechanism.[63]
Hayes goes on to say that if we were aware of all this, then:
“We would all be cast in the roles of something like servants of our former selves, running around inside our own heads attending to the details of the mental machinery which currently is so conveniently hidden from our view, leaving us time to attend to more important matters. Why be in the engine room if we can be on the bridge?”
In this paradoxical view, consciousness still seems marvelous—but not because it tells us so much, but for protecting us from such tedious stuff! Here is another description of this, from section 6.1 of The Society of Mind.
Consider how a driver guides the immense momentum of a car, not knowing how its engine works or how its steering wheel turns it left or right. Yet when one comes to think of it, we drive our bodies, cars, and minds in very similar ways. So far as conscious thought is concerned, you steer yourself in much the same way; you merely choose your new direction, and all the rest takes care of itself. This incredible process involves a huge society of muscles, bones, and joints, all controlled by hundreds of interacting programs that even specialists don’t yet understand. Yet all you think is “Turn that way,” and your wish is automatically fulfilled.
And when you come to think about it, it scarcely could be otherwise! What would happen if we were forced to perceive the trillions of circuits in our brains? Scientists have peered at these for a hundred years—yet still know little of how they work. Fortunately, in everyday life, we only need to know what they achieve! Consider that you can scarcely see a hammer except as something to hit things with, or see a ball except as a thing to throw and catch. Why do we see things, less as they are, and more with a view of how they are used?
Similarly, whenever you play a computer game, you control what happens inside the computer mainly by using symbols and names. The processes we call “consciousness” do very much the same. It’s as though the higher levels of our minds sit at mental terminals, steering great engines in our brains, not by knowing how that machinery works, but by ‘clicking’ on symbols from menu-lists that appear on our mental screen-displays.
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Chapter §8 will propose more details about how our memory structures are organized to so swiftly deliver such information. Basically, when a problem arises, some processes may start to solve it before other processes formulate questions about it.