Black Box Site

2. The Color of Your Consciousness

or, Getting in Front of a Mob, and Calling it a Parade

After suffering brain damage in an accident, a man becomes completely colorblind.  Being an artist – a painter – who had previously possessed an unusual awareness of color, this is exceptionally tragic.  But even worse, his vision is not simply colorless in the way one might imagine, like a black and white movie.  Instead, the world he sees is strange, unnatural, repellent, wrong.  Shades of gray shift weirdly under different kinds of light, reds become black, and the purest whites have a dirty tinge.  Yet this is not all, for even more profound changes have occurred in his mind.  He no longer dreams in color.  In fact, he eventually cannot even remember what colors were.  With the passing of time he begins to adapt to his situation, however, and with reawakened inspiration creates a new style of art for himself.  In the end, his adaptation becomes so complete that he no longer regrets the absence of color in his life, having come to see “a world of pure form, uncluttered by color.”

These events actually took place beginning in 1986, a detailed account being presented in the first chapter of An Anthropologist on Mars, by Oliver Sacks.

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The most fundamental property of human mentality is consciousness, the awareness of existence – or at least, so it seems.  After all, what could be more fundamental than the Cartesian “I think, therefore I am”?  

But the question then becomes: am what?  

Consciousness, in fact, still has no universally accepted definition.  It may be something which can only be experienced to be understood – which could be a clue to its nature.

For instance, consider the perception of color as an aspect of consciousness.  A common experience, yet how could one go about describing a specific color, such as red?  Yes, “red” could be defined as light within certain limits of wavelength.  However, this would in no way describe the conscious experience of seeing it.  If light of a wavelength corresponding to red is shown to a person who has always been completely colorblind, that person will still have no idea of what red is.  A color can be understood only by referring to the actual experience of the color.

To go even further, the idea that color, as perceived, is solely determined by wavelength is itself an oversimplification.  In a classic experiment reported in 1959, Edwin Land (inventor of the Polaroid camera) simultaneously made two black and white transparencies of a given scene, one photographed through a red filter and the other through green.  To re-create the scene he then projected light through the transparencies, through a red filter for the black and white transparency made with a red filter, but with ordinary unfiltered white light through the transparency originally made with a green filter.  One might expect that the resulting scene would display only red, white, and shades of pink, but what was actually perceived by observers was a remarkably good full-color image!  The mechanism of human color perception managed to compensate for the distortion of light values, a principle now known as “color constancy”.

To put this another way, the colors of the spectrum are not inherent in light itself.  Light is actually electromagnetic radiation that has properties of wavelength and intensity, rather than color, which is only produced in conscious experience when said radiation is perceived.  Color is not reality, but an interpretation of reality – a construct of the mind.

A classic example of color-as-construct can be seen in the case of the colorblind artist referred to above.  It turned out that the subject had suffered damage to only a small part of the brain’s visual apparatus, termed “V4”, which is the very part that produces experience of color.  This caused not only his inability to see colors, but also the fact that he eventually could not even bring them to mind – color no longer existed for him.  However, his primary visual center, “V1”, remained undamaged, and it is this center which perceives wavelengths of light.  Thus the subject was experiencing the raw output of V1, perceptions of wavelengths but not color, which evidently accounts for the strange version of black and white vision that he had.

The fact that perception is an interpretation of reality is also true for other aspects of vision, as well as the senses in general.  As David Hume pointed out long ago, all information about the external world comes through perception by the senses; it is not reality itself which is experienced, but perceptions.  Nevertheless, this is easily forgotten – if realized at all – in the everyday experience of life, because a certain correspondence usually exists between perception and reality.  This is a requirement for survival: if reality is a cliff edge that lies just ahead, but is not perceived by the mind, the existence of that mind is liable to be abruptly terminated.

However, the crucial term here is “usually” – a correspondence between perception and reality usually exists.  It is not always so, which is evident in the case of optical illusions; if seeing is believing, then believing is not always true.  But even more relevant are a number of bizarre conditions – more bizarre, in fact, than the aforementioned case of the colorblind artist – that can come about from organic defects or damage to the brain.  It is here that a very strange realm is encountered indeed.

For example, in the case of a condition called Anton’s syndrome, blindness is caused by damage to the occipital lobe of the brain (often due to a stroke), which completely destroys the ability to process vision (though eyes and optic nerves remain functional).  What results is not only blindness, however.  Incredibly, those who are thus afflicted do not know that they are blind.  Medical help has usually been sought for them due to such behavior as tripping over things or walking into walls, among other indications of blindness.  When questioned, they insist they can still see perfectly well, and will readily describe objects placed before them – but their descriptions turn out to be hopelessly inaccurate.  Somehow, they seem to be supplying their own “reality”, which causes them to believe they can see.  Perception and reality have become radically disassociated.  As Oliver Sacks noted in the first chapter of An Anthropologist on Mars: “Patients with this syndrome become totally blind, but make no complaint or report of their blindness. They do not know they are blind; the whole structure of consciousness is completely reorganized – instantly so – at the moment they are stricken.”

On the other hand, there is a converse to Anton’s syndrome, known as “blindsight”.  In this condition the primary visual cortex of the brain has been damaged, with the result that the afflicted person can no longer consciously see, and is very much aware of this.  However, another visual system (of ancient evolutionary origin) remains functional, the optic tectum in the mid-brain, which does not communicate with the conscious mind.  This permits a subject with blindsight to unconsciously react to visual stimuli – for example, to flinch at a sudden threatening movement, or, in certain cases, even to catch a thrown object or navigate a path around obstacles.  When questioned about such reactions, however, it turns out that the subject can offer no reasons for them, other than “I was guessing” or “I just wanted to”.  What is evident from blindsight is that behavior can be affected by sensory information of which the mind is not consciously aware.

“Agnosia” is the general term for any neurological condition in which there is a loss of ability to recognize things, even though the sense organ involved remains functional, as in the cases described above.  There are many different types; a sufferer of one form of visual agnosia, for instance, can see perfectly well, but cannot recognize objects, or can discern individual features of an object or scene, but cannot recognize the whole that they form.  There is a sub-type of visual agnosia (“prosopagnosia”), in which human faces, in particular, cannot be recognized, and it affects a surprising number of people (up to 1 in 50, to some extent, for it can be misperceived as an inability to remember names).  “Anosognosia” is a condition in which an obvious disability of some kind is not recognized, or even denied, by the person who suffers it, and it often accompanies other agnosias; Anton’s syndrome would be an example of such.

It must be emphasized that in all these cases, aside from the specific impairment itself, it is possible for the affected persons to remain lucid, alert, and apparently rational.  They may simply lack a particular feature of perception, sometimes without even realizing it.

Such neurological impairments, and others like them, are not merely curiosities, for they are clues to how the brain actually functions.   And one important thing they reveal is this: that the conscious experience of perception is not what it seems to be.  The eye is not a camera that transmits a fully formed picture directly into awareness; it does indeed convey sensory information, but that information must first be processed, by a variety of functions that operate beneath the level of awareness, to produce what is perceived.  As Stanislas Dehaene put it in his book Consciousness and the Brain:

…what we experience as a conscious visual scene is a highly processed image, quite different from the raw input that we receive from the eyes. We never see the world as our retina sees it. In fact, it would be a pretty horrible sight: a highly distorted set of light and dark pixels, blown up toward the center of the retina, masked by blood vessels, with a massive hole at the location of the “blind spot” where cables leave for the brain; the image would constantly blur and change as our gaze moved around. What we see, instead, is a three-dimensional scene, corrected for retinal defects, mended at the blind spot, stabilized for our eye and head movements, and massively reinterpreted based on our previous experience of similar visual scenes.

An interesting point is made in the last sentence above: that a visual scene is “massively reinterpreted based on our previous experience…”.  According to current “predictive coding” theory, the brain constantly generates models that predict what it would ordinarily expect to perceive, before perceptions are experienced; the models are then compared to perception itself, and any substantial discrepancies noted.  This would constitute an efficient method of dealing with perception, for it is often the discrepancies that are most important, rather than the perceptions themselves.  For example, while walking through a forest many trees will be seen; their details need not be inspected to know that they are trees, for which a general model of “tree” (gained from prior experience) will suffice, without extensive attention to any particular one.  In this manner the forest can be seen for the trees.  However, an unusual looking specimen might prompt closer observation – perhaps to discover it is actually a disguised cellular phone tower.

In any case, it would not be feasible for the conscious mind, or even the unconscious, to deal in any detail with all of the sensory information encountered in everyday existence.  It has been estimated that the human senses can transmit over 11,000,000 bits of information per second (the great majority being visual), based on the number of receptor cells and connections through nerves; however, a maximum of perhaps 40 bits per second can be consciously dealt with, as inferred from performance on various tasks – for example, such as reading, if a bit value is assigned to each letter of a word.  Thus, in addition to processing sensory information, mechanisms of the unconscious must also select what is most pertinent, perhaps by predictive coding.

The ability of the brain to select pertinent information from the vast stream produced by the senses has been called the “cocktail party effect”: as in the capacity to follow a conversation among the babble of many voices in a noisy room.  Conscious attention to the conversation can be maintained with the assistance of unconscious mechanisms, which permit extraneous sensory stimuli to be filtered out.  But if the listener’s name should happen to be mentioned among the unattended babble, attention may instantly switch to it – indicating that this selection of perception was made entirely by the unconscious, without any intervention by conscious will.

It is evident, then, that what is perceived and experienced is actually a complex construct assembled by neurological functions of which the individual is consciously unaware, but on which awareness is completely dependent.  Thus it might seem as if we consciously recognize people by sight, but if a stroke damages the particular part of the brain that deals with facial recognition, then it will be impossible to identify faces in the usual way, no matter how much conscious effort is employed.  It seems as if we consciously understand the scene in the street outside, or the words on a printed page, but again, if the unconscious neurological function that is relevant becomes inoperative, such understanding becomes impossible.

The activities of the unconscious are not limited to perception, however.  There also exists the phenomenon of unconscious memory, an early report of which was made in 1910 by the Swiss neurologist Edouard Claparede, as the result of observing an amnesiac patient.  Every time he met with the patient he had to re-introduce himself, as she could not remember him; but at one such session he came with a concealed pin, with which he pricked her when they shook hands.  At their next session she would not shake hands with him, even though she still had no conscious memory of their ever having met, and could offer no reason for her hesitation.  Another amnesiac patient that the doctor studied had lived in an institution for some years and could not provide him with directions to any of the places in it, yet could easily find her own way to such places when she had to.

Closely related to unconscious memory is what might be called unconscious learning, or perhaps “intuition”, which has been demonstrated in a number of experiments. In one such, the participants took part in a card game for play money; the cards were in four different decks, which appeared to be identical, but in fact had been “stacked”.  The stacking was not obvious, but two of the decks were subtly biased to tend to produce winning results over time, while the other two were biased to produce losing results.  After a while the participants came to prefer drawing cards from the winning decks – but could give no reason why, other than a “gut feeling”.  Evidently they had unconsciously learned that two of the decks were somehow “better”.  Interestingly, the same experiment was also run with participants who had damage to the ventromedial prefrontal region of the brain, which is associated with such gut feelings or intuition.  These people did not come to show a preference for any of the decks.

In another experiment, the participants were asked to press one of four buttons when an “X” appeared in a given quadrant on a computer screen; the idea was to press the correct button as quickly as they could.  Unknown to those taking part, however, the quadrant in which “X” appeared was not random, but governed by a rather complex rule, depending on where the symbol had come up before.  After a time the performance of the participants improved significantly, even though they had no conscious idea that the aforementioned rule even existed – and then that rule was suddenly changed, causing their performance to precipitously decline.  No one taking part could explain why they had eventually come to do better, and then worse; not even some who happened to be psychology professors, and were aware that the experiment involved unconscious learning.

Quite apart from formal experimentation, however, it is clear that unconscious learning can take place in everyday life.  An obvious example is the way very young children acquire language – they take no classes, use no books (as they cannot even read!), in fact do not study at all – yet they effortlessly and rapidly learn their native language, by simply listening to it used around them.  At a certain age, primed to learn a language by existing neurological mechanisms, people acquire its highly complex rules unconsciously.  Other skills gained later in life – driving a car, riding a bicycle, reading and writing – require considerable attention to learn and initially employ, but later become almost automatic in application, directed by unconscious reflexes.  In many cases such reflexes are essential; a pianist playing a Beethoven sonata could scarcely give conscious attention to every key that is struck, or lengthily consider which note might come next.

Further, other unconscious actions – besides the purely reflexive – are also possible.  A peculiar feature of the nineteenth century spiritualist movement was the phenomenon of “table-turning”: a number of people would sit at a table in expectation of a spirit intervention, all with their hands flat on its surface, and after a time the table would actually begin to move, rotating or even tapping on the floor in answer to questions.  This odd behavior came to the attention of the celebrated scientist Michael Faraday, who tested it by placing force measurement devices between the hands of the participants and the table.  He discovered that those involved were actually moving the table themselves, though they seemed to be completely unaware of what they were doing.

However, there is no need to consult the spirit world to discover much more consequential, if less spectacular, examples of unconscious behavior, especially in the matter of all the preferences and idiosyncrasies that make up a personality. An individual may be inclined to a given variety of art or music; or find a particular type of person to be attractive; or even have a simple penchant for a favorite color – preferences that are not determined by any conscious logic, but must come from somewhere: namely, it would appear, from the unconscious mind, perhaps as influenced by factors of genetic inheritance, prenatal development, environment, and the experiences of life.

For instance, consider someone who is attempting to decide which career to pursue.  Aside from the possession of some unusual innate talent, any number of personal proclivities might come into play – a desire for a large income, an inclination to artistic or intellectual endeavor, an ambition for position and prestige, a willingness to gratify the expectations of others.  But where do such desires and inclinations come from?  And how is weight to be assigned to them?  It might seem that the final decision is made by conscious logic, but in reality this cannot be the whole explanation for the result, or even most of it.

In fact, the very concept of conscious decision – of free will itself – may be subject to serious question.  In the 1970s and 80s a researcher named Benjamin Libet conducted experiments to investigate this matter, and made some unsettling discoveries.  In the experiments, subjects would be asked to make a simple movement, such as pressing a button or flexing a finger or wrist, and while watching the position of a moving dot on an oscilloscope, report exactly when they decided to make the movement.  An average of about 200 milliseconds would elapse between the decision and the actual movement, as might be expected from the time it would take the nervous system to react.  However, the motor cortex of the subjects’ brains was also monitored, via EEG, and it was found that activity there, termed the “readiness potential”, typically occurred 300 milliseconds before a decision to move was made.  A possible interpretation of this result was that some part of the brain had unconsciously decided to perform the move on its own, and then the conscious mind only reported it later – as if it had made the decision itself.

The implications of Libet’s experiments were – and are – controversial.  Many similar experiments have since been conducted, which confirm the delay between conscious awareness of the decisions made in them and activity in the brain, but the nature of such activity is not completely understood.  It has been suggested that the EEG readiness potential is not truly causal in nature, rather only an indication of attention or preparation; that the subjective reports of the timing of the participants’ decisions cannot be relied upon; that perhaps a decision to not carry out an action could still be made after the measured brain activity takes place.  A 2012 paper by Schurger, Sitt, and Dehaene reported that spontaneous fluctuations in brain activity can account for the readiness potential, meaning that the precise moment of action in Libet’s type of experiments may actually be decided at random, at the point when a suitable fluctuation occurs.  Further, a 2019 paper by Maoz, Yaffe, Koch, and Mudrik indicated that in cases where a deliberative decision was called for, rather than an arbitrary or reflexive one, the readiness potential did not exist or was greatly reduced.  In any case, no completely definitive result, either to confirm or deny the existence of conscious decision, has yet been determined.

What we are left with, then, is an unexpected but profoundly important portrait of the unconscious mind.  An unconscious that processes and manages vast amounts of sensory information; that can learn on its own; that produces idiosyncrasies of personality; that can perhaps even make decisions and carry out actions – all occurring without conscious awareness.   Which, of course, leads to an interesting question: what is the purpose of the conscious mind?  Why does it even exist?

One clue to the function of consciousness may arise from the fact that it does not seem to be localized in any particular structure of the brain; there is no “consciousness center” that produces it.  Rather, it is a phenomenon that occurs across many neurological systems at once – conscious awareness of an event appears to stimulate synchronized activity across the entire brain. Thus it may function as an observer, monitoring perceptions of the outside world and one’s self, and also serve as an intermediary, sharing information between systems and providing feedback to its unconscious companion.

These monitoring or feedback functions could be related to the fact that the conscious mind can follow lengthy chains of logic.  Solving a problem, step by step, in geometry; coming up with a strategy for hunting an animal; working out how a pattern might be woven into cloth; plotting a course of advancement in a complex social environment – all these things involve a certain amount of deliberation, in which each step of the operation at hand is consciously monitored to determine its truth or applicability.  Yet even so, when a new step is to be formulated, the idea for it must come from somewhere; might it not originate in the unconscious, perhaps arising as a series of several possibilities, which consciousness then evaluates?  In such a case the final result might seem to be the product of nothing but conscious rationality, but the reality would be otherwise.

Indeed, there are countless examples of inspiration seeming to come out of “nowhere”, not only in the arts (where such is actually expected), but in the sciences as well.  A famous case involved the problem of the structure of the benzene ring; chemist August Kekule had a day-dream in which a snake seized its own tail, suggesting the basis for his solution of the ring’s riddle.  For Albert Einstein inspiration came with a sudden thought which startled him, as he sat in the Swiss patent office at Berne: “If a person falls freely he will not feel his own weight.”  This simple idea had a profound meaning for him, as it eventually led to his General Theory of Relativity.  And mathematician Henri Poincare reported more than one episode in which a completely unexpected flash of insight – occurring while his thoughts were occupied elsewhere – suddenly led to the solution of a difficult problem he had been dealing with.

Thus, while consciousness may have a critical role as observer and intermediary, it may not be a creator, or instigator of action, or decision maker; in fact, it may have no relevance to the question of why people do things.  Which, if true, would imply that free will, as generally conceived – that is, as conscious will – does not actually exist at all.  Rather, that the motives for human behavior are determined by factors operating beneath the level of awareness; that choices are actually made by “unconscious will”, so to speak, and then, as they come into the awareness of the conscious mind, are adopted as its own.

Is there actually any evidence that unconscious motivation could be accepted by the conscious mind as a product of itself?  Researcher Jose Delgado, a native of Spain who joined the department of physiology at Yale University in 1950, carried out numerous experiments in electrical stimulation of the brain (ESB) which turned out to have some bearing on this very question.  The technique of ESB involved implantation of an electrode in the brain of a subject; a small electrical current could then be delivered to the electrode, via a miniaturized radio receiver, to stimulate the point where it terminated.  In animal subjects the response triggered by stimulation could range from the simple flexing of a limb to rather more complex behavior (the exact nature of which of which was initially unpredictable, though completely repeatable for stimulation at the same location).  For example, the reaction of one monkey was to stand upright and circle to the right on its two feet (an unnatural posture for it), climb a pole, descend back to the ground, growl and threaten (and often attack) a subordinate monkey, and then finally become friendly to its fellows once again.  This same odd pattern of behavior was replicated many times by repeated stimulation.  

An important feature of such experiments with animals was that the subject typically did not appear to be upset or agitated by the stimulation in and of itself, as might be the case if an unwanted influence was acting on it; rather, it simply carried out the stimulated action, perhaps directing it toward a particular purpose, as if the impulse was its own. From Delgado’s book of 1969, Physical Control of the Mind: Toward a Psychocivilized Society:

In the cat, electrical stimulation of the inferior part of the sulcus presylvius consistently induced licking movements with well-organized opening and closing of the mouth and phasic protrusion of the tongue. Under anesthesia, the licking was automatic and purposeless; but in the awake, free-moving animal the response was directed toward some useful purpose, and the cat searched for a target to lick – food, the hands of the experimenter, the floor, or its own fur. In this case, motor performance and posture of the whole body adapted to the experimental setting, and in order to lick the investigator’s hand, for example, the cat advanced a few steps and approached the hand even if it moved slowly away.

Of course, an animal cannot say anything about its reaction, and in any case the extent to which animal consciousness might exist is uncertain.  However, Delgado also carried out brain stimulation experiments on a number of human subjects, sufferers of intractable cases of epilepsy or mental illness, to determine if a therapeutic benefit might be achieved by the technique.  Again, from his book:

For example, in one of our patients, electrical stimulation of the rostral part of the internal capsule produced head turning and slow displacement of the body to either side with a well-oriented and apparently normal sequence, as if the patient were looking for something. This stimulation was repeated six times on two different days with comparable results. The interesting fact was that the patient considered the evoked activity spontaneous and always offered a reasonable explanation for it.  When asked “What are you doing?” the answers were, “I am looking for my slippers,” “I heard a noise,” “I am restless,” and “I was looking under the bed.” In this case it was difficult to ascertain whether the stimulation had evoked a movement which the patient tried to justify, or if an hallucination had been elicited which subsequently induced the patient to move and to explore the surroundings.

In other words, the patient felt his action was always the product of his own conscious will, even though it was actually the result of an external agency.  Brain stimulation could also produce an emotional response:

The role of the thalamus in the integration of fear is also suggested by the study of a female patient whose spontaneous crippling attacks of anxiety of overwhelming intensity had led to several suicide attempts and a chronic state of depression and agitation quite refractory to drugs and psychotherapy. Stimulation of the dorsolateral nucleus of the thalamus evoked precisely the same type of attack at a level of symptomatology directly proportional to the applied intensity. It was possible to find the electrical threshold for a mild anxiety or to increase it to higher levels simply by turning the dial of the stimulator. “One could sit with one’s hand on the knob and control the level of her anxiety.”

And in general:

It is also true, however, that with the development of technology to stimulate the brain in free subjects, many of the responses obtained in both animals and man are indistinguishable from spontaneous behavior. Sequential behavior, sexual activity, alimentary responses, walking, yawning, fighting, and many other effects documented in previous sections demonstrate conclusively that ESB can evoke purposeful, well-coordinated, skillful activities of great refinement and complexity. Patients have accepted evoked psychological changes, such as an increase in friendliness, as natural manifestations of their own personality and not as artificial results of the tests.

The implications of Dr. Delgado’s experiments are disturbing, to say the least.  That complex physical and emotional behavior could be induced via ESB is disconcerting in itself; but the fact that people could accept such behavior as their own goes even further.  It would seem that when a response originates in a person’s brain, that alone may be enough for it to be accepted as a product of the person’s “will”, even if it is induced by an external agency.  The significance of this in regard to consciousness is, once again, very suggestive, though perhaps not (as yet) completely conclusive.

But in the end, whatever functions the conscious mind might actually perform, or whatever might constitute its true nature, one thing, at least, is made clear by the evidence of the various experiments and investigations outlined above: that consciousness is not what it seems to be.  The subjective experience of it cannot be the reality.  Just as the experience of color is a construct of the mind, an interpretation of reality (but not reality itself), so too is the experience of consciousness a construct – a subjective impression of control that is largely, if not completely, an illusion.

In other words, it might be said that consciousness is like a man who gets in front of a mob, and calls it a parade.  He may imagine that he’s in charge, but he doesn’t know what’s really going on behind him.

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Sources

Much of the information on neurological disorders presented above came from several books authored by the late Oliver Sacks.  These include the previously mentioned An Anthropologist on Mars, along with The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Hallucinations.  Dr. Sacks also produced many other volumes dealing with neurological case studies, including  Awakenings (which was made into a popular feature film).  His books are highly readable – in fact, fascinating – and are highly recommended.

Information on the rate of transmission of sensory information versus the conscious ability to process it can be found in Chapter 6 of the book The User Illusion, by Tor Norretranders, which also deals with many other aspects of consciousness, including the Libet experiments (Chapter 9).  The material presented on experiments in unconscious learning came from Chapter 2 of Strangers to Ourselves, by Timothy D. Wilson, a book which examines the ubiquitous influence that the unconscious mind has on behavior.  An account of the “table-turning” phenomenon investigated by Michael Faraday, and many other “automatisms”, may be found in Chapter 4 of The Illusion of Conscious Will by Daniel M. Wegner, a work which also examines the Libet experiments and many other factors relating to the idea of will.

The book Consciousness and the Brain, by Stanislas Dehaene, deals extensively with the nature and purpose of consciousness.  In particular, it refers to many clinical experiments (some also described in the sources mentioned above), and for the most part treats its subject through reports of systematic observation rather than philosophical speculation.

An interesting report by Laurence Aitchison and Mate Lengyel on the relation of the theory of predictive coding in the brain to Bayesian inference (a formal method of assessing the probability of an event based on prior knowledge) was published in Current Opinion in Neurobiology, Volume 46, October 2017.

The 2012 paper by Schurger, Sitt, and Dehaene, mentioned above in relation to the Libet experiments, was published under the title “An accumulator model for spontaneous neural activity prior to self-initiated movement” in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The 2019 paper by Maoz, Yaffe, Koch, and Mudrik, also mentioned above, was published under the title “Neural precursors of decisions that matter – an ERP study of deliberate and arbitrary choice” in eLife Sciences.

The quotations made from Physical Control of the Mind: Toward a Psychocivilized Society, by Jose Delgado, can be found in Chapters 13 through 18 of that work.  His research, at Yale University and after 1974 in Madrid, was described in over 500 peer-reviewed papers, and his book of 1969 was widely reviewed.  Yet in later years he seems to have been largely forgotten, perhaps because he became a somewhat controversial figure, and perhaps because the implications of his work were too disturbing to be completely acceptable.  Ironically, however, his experiments in electrical stimulation of the brain were initially motivated, in part, by a belief that lobotomies were “horrendous”, and that much less destructive treatments of severe disorders could be developed.  In fact, ESB has lately come into vogue again, for the treatment of chronic pain and movement disorders (such as the tremors of Parkinson’s disease).  It has even been commercialized as a technique that purportedly improves mental performance, utilizing non-invasive electrodes on the surface of the scalp, rather than implanted in the brain (a technology also pioneered by Dr. Delgado).  A certain amount of public recognition for his work was eventually regained with the appearance of a lengthy article on his career in the October 2005 issue of Scientific American magazine.

The experiments conducted by Edwin Land regarding color constancy were originally reported in the article “Experiments in Color Vision” appearing in the May 1959 issue of Scientific American.  The ideas therein were further developed in another article by Land, “The Retinex Theory of Color Vision”, appearing in the same magazine in December 1977.

Finally, it might be appropriate to mention an entry in The Devil’s Dictionary of Ambrose Bierce that touches upon the observations of Descartes:

CARTESIAN, adj. Relating to Descartes, a famous philosopher, author of the celebrated dictum, Cogito ergo sum – whereby he was pleased to suppose he demonstrated the reality of human existence. The dictum might be improved, however, thus: Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum – "I think that I think, therefore I think that I am;" as close an approach to certainty as any philosopher has yet made.

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A Personal Afterword

Some years ago I became intimately familiar with certain neurological disorders, much like those described in the books of Oliver Sacks, during the course of caring for an elderly relative.  Having no prior knowledge of such things, it was a profound and harrowing experience. That the mind can become detached from observable reality in some ways, perceiving things that aren’t actually there, while remaining reasonable and matter of fact in other respects, was a situation that I hadn’t imagined could even exist.  And witnessing the gradual disintegration of  personality in someone I was very close to, while remaining unable to do anything to aid them in their ordeal, is something that I think would shake the foundation of even the most assured view of the order of things.  In the aftermath, I began to realize that what Nietzsche wrote might literally be true: “And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you…”

On the other hand, I have never experienced anything resembling a “psychic phenomenon”, or seen a “ghost”, or even suffered a genuine hallucination.  Save once – decades ago, after I had come down with a severe case of flu (perhaps more severe than I realized).  During its course I awoke in the night, having been roused by a sudden and overwhelming sensation of terror.  This terror had no discernible cause, no evident motive, no object at all.  Yet there it was, more fear than I have experienced at any other time – fear so great that I could do nothing but lie there, rigid, motionless. I was literally paralyzed by it.  It was as if something had turned a hidden dial for fear up as high as it would go (which was how I always thought about it afterwards), and no conscious effort on my part could turn it back down.  Fortunately, after a few minutes the sensation began to abate on its own, though at the time it seemed as if it might never end.  The similarity to the experiment of Dr. Delgado mentioned above, wherein he induced anxiety in a patient by means of electrical stimulation of the brain (in fact, even dialing a knob to do so), is uncanny.  Unfortunately, however, it would seem that for his patient the state of extreme anxiety was chronic, and thus did not end, so horrible a condition that I can well understand her attempts at suicide.

Situations like these demonstrate that there are forces within us, operating far below the level of consciousness, that can rise up and completely overwhelm it.  And if they can do this in such an obvious and drastic manner, could they not also exert a more subtle influence, determining attitudes and behavior while fostering an illusion of conscious control?

The problem with such a question, of course, is that consciousness, by its very nature, is a purely subjective experience. The conscious mind may realize that “I think, therefore I am”, but it cannot get outside of itself for an objective view, or examine its own inner workings as something apart from its being.  In the realm of thought each individual consciousness constitutes its own self-contained universe; and if a universe is everything, how can one get “outside” of it?  Perceptions originating in the senses are experienced, to be sure, but these must first be processed and selected for consideration by mechanisms of the brain that are entirely opaque to consciousness, for without such treatment they would literally be unintelligible.  And the final result that is produced is not reality itself, but a depiction of reality: a subjective impression.  Thus, in order to investigate it, the nature of consciousness has to be treated as a black box, its internal workings to be inferred from external observation and experiment.

That the experience of one’s own self in the world is not what it seems – that reality must always diverge, to some degree, from what it is perceived to be – is strange and unsettling.  But perhaps this could only be expected, for as more and more comes to be known about it, the universe itself seems strange and unsettling.  In the microscopic world of the atom cause and effect become divorced from certainty, instead transmuting into the statistical phenomena of quantum mechanics – and the weird indefiniteness of Schrodinger’s Cat: alive or dead … or neither … or both.  And turning to the macroscopic realm of the galaxies, time and space not only assume incomprehensible magnitudes, but themselves become elastic quantities; no longer fixed frames of reference, but governed by relativistic effects in which nothing remains constant but the speed of light.  Even in the domain of familiar things the unexpected lurks, hidden in plain sight – the predictable clockwork of Newtonian mechanics being rendered effectively unpredictable by chaotic systems, so that forecasts of something as common as the weather become unreliable beyond a limit of a few days.

Thus we exist in a world in which nothing, including consciousness, is what it might at first seem to be.  Even the existence of “free will” becomes debatable – for if it should develop that all human behavior ultimately originates in the unconscious (perhaps monitored by consciousness, but no more), then what place can remain for the concept of “will” itself, as a conscious phenomenon?  

At this point it cannot definitely be said whether free will exists or not, since the available evidence does not yield an unequivocal conclusion.  Though if it does actually exist, it seems clear that the extent of its influence is likely much less than is generally assumed.  In fact, it has always been obvious, to anyone who has taken the trouble to seriously consider the matter, that human beings are not – and never could be – in complete control of themselves.

Yet even if conscious will turns out to be a purely subjective experience, an illusion without real existence, it is nevertheless an inescapable one of overwhelming power.  As Samuel Johnson aptly put it: “All theory is against the freedom of the will; all experience is for it.” And as Isaac Bashevis Singer liked to quip: “We must believe in free will. We have no choice.”  No matter how much evidence is amassed, or how unassailable theory proves to be, the power of immediate experience is such that it may never be possible to dispell the illusion.

Historically, the question of free will has long been a thorny matter, though in the framework of theological debate rather than neurological science.  An omniscient God must necessarily have knowledge of all human thoughts and actions, past, present, and future, which in turn would suggest that all such thoughts and acts are predestined, inasmuch as they are already known.  Needless to say, this would seem to contradict the notion of free will, as a concept essential to most systems of morality; to be “good” or “bad” means to choose between “good” or “bad”, rather than merely acting out a preordained destiny.  This problem has generated endless speculation and controversy, without any generally accepted resolution coming forth – except the idea that it is an “unfathomable mystery” (which may indicate that no such resolution can actually exist).  In fact, if the influence of conscious will is not as great as usually thought (or does not exist at all), then the true relevance of the Biblical injunction might at last become clear: “Judge not, that ye be not judged.”

It might also be mentioned that in philosophy, a fundamental principle of Socratic thought was the denial of akrasia, or weakness of will: that it is impossible for someone to voluntarily choose to perform an action against their better judgment, as such action is always thought to be the most desirable course at the time.  If the result of an action turns out to be undesirable, that is because of a lack of knowledge of the true situation – in other words, weakness of knowledge, rather than weakness of will.  In this framework it would appear that the idea of will itself becomes greatly diminished in importance, if it indeed it does not dwindle away entirely.

So, in the end, though I may think, and therefore am, it would seem that the great question remains what it has always been, intractable as ever (in spite of all the efforts of religion and philosophy and science): exactly what am I?  

A rational maximizer?  A child of God?  A lizard that thinks it knows what it’s doing?

Your guess is as good as mine.