The fifteen papers collected in this volume all adress, from various viewpoints, the relationship between conscious and unconscious mind. We know, for a long time now, that the mind can often engage in perceptual and cognitive activities without the involvement of conscious awareness. In spite of this, much of the current research into mind is still distinctively consciousness-centered. The main declared aim of the present volume is to accord the unconscious a more prominent place than it usually has in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science – to study conscious experience not in isolation, but as an outgrowth of unconscious processes that give birth to it. Mind is unconscious before it becomes conscious. Conscious experience comes after unconscious activity both in terms of extremely long-term evolutionary processes and in terms of particular neural activations in the brain of a living organism. In this sense, unconscious activity is primary and conscious experience is based on it. Exploring in depth the unconscious, its distinctive mode of operation and its interplay with conscious experience is therefore a much welcome enterprise.

The book is divided into three parts. The first part, entitled Consciousness Meets the Unconscious, focuses predominantly on the conceptual demarcation of the two domains and on how they influence each other. The opening introductory essay was penned by Joseph LeDoux. He claims that we should refrain from appeals to conscious awareness in the explanations of perception and behaviour unless there is compelling evidence that consciousness is indeed involved in the production of the phenomenon under study. Alain Berthoz in his paper writes about the prerequisites of the notion of the self. Of these, the “unified construction of a body” in the brain, sustained mainly by a well functioning vestibular system, is the most important according to him. Berthoz also develops a hypothesis about “elegant actors” facilitating a smooth transition from pre-conscious processing to conscious experience. Of these, he mentions imagery and ihibition in particular as important ancillary mechanisms honed by evolution. Berthoz emphasizes the continuity between conscious and unconscious processes and claims it is difficult to separate them neatly. This line of thought is continued and deepened in the next paper by Zdravko Radman, editor of the volume. Radman’s central claim is that consciousness and the non-conscious are so intertwined that any attempt to explain the one without the other is doomed. Whereas the two are standardly contrasted, he suggests that the best way to study them is to see them as deeply interrelated. Conscious and unconscious processes are not just continuous and mutually complementary. They are also bi-directional. Consciously performed acts transform into non-conscious and become “body-shaped”; we become able to perform them without active involvement of conscious attention. Conversely, the non-conscious constantly gives shape to the conscious landscape. Radman’s ultimate aim is to see the mind as an undivided, non-dichotomized territory, comprising both conscious and non-conscious aspects working in concert. Donish Cushing, Reza D. Ghafur and Ezequiel Morsella put forward an analysis of the interdependence of conscious and unconscious processes involved in the generation of a voluntary act. Their “Passive Frame Theory” portrays consciousness as a mainly passive player at the receiving end, whereas the driving processes of contents generation and response to occurent stimuli are unconscious. The main function of consciousness is to provide a framework – a “field” – in which various contents are unified an can be acted upon. Its function is not to create the action plans and select one amongst them; at most, it can veto an action that is already underway. The theory, similar in some respects to James’ well-known ideomotor theory of action, sharply denounces any need for active homuncular “decider”. Succesful action is simply a result of “blind” competition of various action plans. Axel Cleeremans presents his theory of consciousness according to which consciousness is the result of a specific kind of learning, and uses the currently hotly debated Predictive Processing framework to underpin it. The basic assumption of the theory is that conscious and unconscious processing of information is rooted in the same set of neural processes. In a nutshell, the theory presents consciousness as “informative redescription” of first order representations by means of learned metarepresentations. David Rosenthal’s reprinted 2012 paper “Higher-Order Awareness, Misrepresentation, and Function” has the most thoroughgoing theory of the unconscious of all the papers collected in the volume. The theory is highly counter-intuitive, for it involves the notion of unconscious mental qualitative states. For what it’s worth, I happen to largely share Rosenthal’s view, together with half a dozen other theorists of consciousness. I agree with Rosenthal that robust theoretical explication of the discriminatory function of perceptual qualities (provided by the so-called Quality-Space Theory) is sufficient to trump the deeply entrenched intuition that these qualities must always be conscious. What I find debatable is (1) his claim that higher-order approach is needed to account for how mental states become conscious and (2) his insistence that a theory of consciousness must be couched in psychological, non-neural terms in order to be informative.

The second part of the volume, Doing Complex Cognitive Tasks in a Non-Conscious Way, opens with a paper written by Jesse Prinz. Prinz defends the existence of unconscious perception. We can unconsciously perceive shapes, colours, texture, motion, and more. Prinz then asks a logical question: What good is consciousness given we can do so much without it? His answer is that the function of consciousness is to enable action tailored to circumstances. His “cue and confirm” proposal consists in claiming that consciousness “tells us that something is present, and this knowledge creates the possibility of deliberate response” (p. 159). This is the cueing part. When I consciously see a road before me, this cues me to take a step forward (without this consciousness I would be passive and probably do nothing). The confirm part is this: consciousness needs to reassure us that we actually are performing the action we decided to perform. To keep walking on the road, consciousness needs to confirm repeatedly that I am actually taking the steps I intended to take. In the following paper, Shaun Gallagher describes some striking “prenoetic” effects on judgement and perception. These prenoetic effects are bodily processes which enter directly into cognitive acts; they are not cognitive representations in the traditional sense. For instance, we peceive an apple as bigger and more ripe when we are hungry. Being non-conscious, the prenoetic aspects pre-shape our judgements and perceptions. Ben R. Newell scrutinizes some recent claims about the alleged unconscious influences on decision making. In particular, he focuses on causal influence on decisions by the direction and duration of eye gaze, and on unconscious influences on decisions of legal professionals. There is, according to him, no conclusive evidence, except for a small minority of cases, convincingly demonstrating unconscious influence on decisions. Thomas P. Reber reviews recent research on memory and consciousness. As he points out, the evidence for the existence of implicit (unconscious) memory is growing, and the implicit memory is being viewed as more elaborate than previously thought. This may lead to a re-categorization of forms of memory – these were traditionally catalogued on the basis of their conscious form. Perhaps, Reber suggests, it is more appropriate to see conscious awareness not as an attribute of memory itself, but just as a modulating factor of memory performance.

Can we make analogical inferences without conscious effort? Many would be inclined to believe that no, but Penka Hristova in her paper claims that actually the evidence for unconscious processing of analogies is rather convincing. She uses, e.g., a modified Stroop test to show how unconscious analogical inferences can improve or hamper performance. Her paper closes the second part of the book. The last part, on unconscious skills, opens with a paper by Javier Bernacer and Jose Ignacio Murillo. The authors concentrate on habits and on the integration of conscious and unconscious actions. They start with some history (Descartes and Paul Ricoeur), and then put forward their neo-Aristotelian proposal: habits improve awareness of acting. Habits in the form of acquired skills release the agent from most of the motor aspects of action execution. This allows her to concentrate more fully on the set goal, to be more successful in achieving it and to experience the action execution more fully. Massimiliano Cappuccio uses embodied approach to cognition to describe the role of consciousness – or its absence – in sport performance. Sport performance allows us to observe the exercise of cognitive capacities such as action planning, motor control or quick decisions in an extraordinarily pronounced form, often under great stress. How much consciousness, then, is needed for optimal sports performance? Is consious monitoring of body movements during sport performance a hindrance, or does it, on the contrary, improve the performance of an athlete? The answer is not clear-cut, as Cappuccio shows. Consciously focusing on performance too much can be crippling for an athlete, more so than a cognitive load or distracting stimuli. But that does not mean that doing things completely automatically and never paying conscious attention to their details is always the best strategy. Sam Wilkinson and Charles Fernyhough are applying the Predictive Processing framework to account for auditory verbal hallucinations. They briefly review the “self-monitoring” account of auditory verbal hallucinations and its problems and then show how it can be productively reformulated within the Predictive Processing framework. Conceived this way, self-monitoring emerges from the more basic processes of “prediction error minimization”, which seem to lay at the basis of human cognitive functioning. Wilkinson and Fernyhough also sketch a Predictive Processing account of inner speech. Jonathan Cole’s essay is written from the perspective of a clinician. Cole wrote a captivating narrative about how neurological impairments disturbing normal action and perception are subjectively experienced by the patients. He vividly describes how the simplest of tasks become daunting when the automatic and largely unconscious routines of movement move to one’s consciousness. A short epilogue by the doyen of consciousness studies, Chris Frith, closes the volume.

As I see it, the central question the volume poses (but rarely adresses directly) is this: How similar are the conscious and unconscious mental states? Most theories of consciousness on offer today paint the unconscious as some alien world.Everyone agrees that there is a lot going on in the mind unconsciously. Take perception as an example. Most contemporary theorists believe we can perceive things unconsciously in different sensory modalities. But what is it to perceive unconsciously? Are the unconscious perceptual states completely different from the conscious ones? Again, most would say that yes, they are completely different. Rosenthal disagrees: we should not construe the perceptual qualities as consciousness-making properties (Rosenthal calls this “the consciousness-based approach”). The qualities are alike in their conscious and unconscious form, he believes. However, Prinz and, I guess, all the other contributors to the volume would not prefer to take this course. But how can we perceive both consciously and unconsciously, and how can both of these kinds of perception successfully guide our behaviour, if they are dramatically dissimilar? This conundrum should become one of the foci of current research on consciousness. It is not only interesting in its own right, but will shed light on other, related questions (How precisely do non-conscious and conscious states of mind interact? Why can conscious states guide behaviour much more efficiently than the non-conscious ones? Is a mental state something that must in principle be able to exist consciously?).

The book vigorously affirms the importance and in some respects also the primacy of the unconscious. It is highly recommended as a sample of what the proposed “paradigm shift” towards the study of the non-conscious mind might look like. Needless to say, much work on all topics covered by the book lies ahead and many of the central questions of research on consciousness remain open: How to pry unconscious from conscious processes and from the processes related to performance? Which measure of conscious awareness to use, given that different methods (both subjective and objective) can lead to different results? And does unconscious perception really exist? Still, the theoretical and experimental developments in consciousness science in recent years, many of them documented in the present volume, are extremely interesting and promising.

© 2017 Tomáš Marvan

Tomáš Marvan, Institute of Philosophy, Czech Academy of Sciences