Consciousness
Recovered provides a synthesis and overview of psychologist George
Mandler’s research on the psychological functions and evolutionary origins of
consciousness. As Mandler explains in
his introduction, his interest is in giving psychological, as opposed to
neurophysicological or philosophical, explanations of consciousness. Mandler subscribes to what he calls the
“principle of phenomenal priority,” according to which “phenomena at a more
complex level need to be discovered and defined before they can be
explained/interpreted at a lower (usually ‘simpler’ and more physical) level”
(ix). His task in the book, then, is to
discover, define, and explain the more complex conscious phenomena in
psychological terms – a prerequisite, on his view, for more basic neurophysiological
explanations of consciousness.

Chapter 1 reproduces the content of
“Consciousness: respectable, useful, and probably necessary,” a 1975 paper in
which Mandler argues against the then-behaviorist bent to psychological
theorizing that regarded the concept of consciousness as unhelpful in empirical
theorizing about behavior. 
Behaviorist-minded psychologists believed that the proper domain of
psychological investigation and theorizing is the observable outward
manifestation of inner events. Indeed,
some went so far as to regard all inner physiological events as utterly beyond
the scope of proper psychological theorizing.

While Mandler’s paper is widely
credited as having revived interest among psychologists in consciousness, it is
primarily an exposition of some of the more promising research of the
time. A number of researchers had
already begun, with considerable success, to investigate various dimensions of
consciousness and its relationship to human thought and behavior. Mandler summarized these projects and tied
them together in a way that highlighted the importance of consciousness in
understanding thought and behavior. 
Considered separately, none of these projects were sufficient to call
into question the prevailing behaviorist assumptions of the day; taken
together, they made a compelling case for the altogether sensible claim that
complex mental phenomena, such as are involved in thought and behavior, cannot
fully be understood from a psychological perspective without investigating
consciousness.

In Chapter 2, Mandler rejects the
very natural idea that what explains the evolution of consciousness is that it
makes possible the experience of qualia and hence survival-conducing behaviors
like pain-avoidance behaviors. Though
Mandler believes that consciousness makes it possible for us to learn and hence
has an adaptive function, he argues that “the qualia aspect, the subjective
conscious experience may have come along as an initially fortuitous aspect of
one of the two (or more) mutational moves” (38). On his view, consciousness evolved because it provides a
mechanism for organizing and limiting the amount of information that must be
processed by the organism, which would otherwise be overwhelming:

What would happen if there were no
conversion to serial limited consciousness?… 
We would be overwhelmed by parallel-produced thoughts and possible
actions, close to indiscriminately cascading in our consciousness.… [W]e would
be conscious of all our possible thought all at once – we would know everything
about ourselves and all our past experiences contemporaneously. But I know of only one being for whom such
possibilities are claimed, and therefore in the absence of these limitation and
seriality mechanism we would be God-like – or close to madness (36).

In Chapter 3, Mandler offers a
theory of how the contents of a conscious state are constructed with the help
of unconscious mechanisms. Unconscious
schemas organize the materials of raw sensory experience into useful
categories. For example, instead of
seeing a meaningless collection of colors, as a newborn infant might, we
organize those colors into shapes that have meanings to us: this particular
collection of colors is categorized and perceived
as a human being, that one is categorized and perceived as a dog. These unconscious schemas, which are learned
and activated through experience, enable us to make sense of sensory input that
would otherwise be meaningless to us. 
Additionally, Mandler believes that these schemas enable us to bind inputs
from different senses into one unified conscious experience, which may include
sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and feels.

Chapter 4 is a cursory survey of
various philosophical positions on consciousness. Mandler makes it very clear in this chapter that he believes
philosophers of mind have contributed little to the understanding of
consciousness: “The difficulty with philosophy is not only with the content of
what many of its practitioners say but with their acceptance of a method that
is designed to generate insight as well as nonsense, discoveries as well as
banalities” (65). Mandler then goes on
to evaluate, in a span of fewer than fifteen pages, a variety of philosophical
views on consciousness that include epiphenomenalism, eliminative materialism,
and functionalism – most of which he dismisses as unhelpful in less than
flattering terms.

Chapter 5 sets out Mandler’s view
on a number of mental operations related to consciousness. Attention, for example, is “a mechanism that
determines the organism’s spatio-temporal orientation to currently interesting
or relevant events” (81). Most of the
chapter, however, is devoted to explaining different types of memory and the
role that memory plays in dreams. 
Particularly noteworthy is Mandler’s intriguing view that the function
of dreams is to “clean[] up unnecessary, unwanted, and irrelevant leftovers
from daily experiences” (90). Dreams,
on this view, perform an “excretive” function by removing various elements of
day-to-day experience from memory where they would otherwise accumulate and inhibit
clarity of thought and perception.

Chapter 6 provides a sketch for a
theory of emotions. Mandler argues that
emotional states involving a felt quality of visceral arousal, such as anger,
fear, and romantic attraction, are “constructed out of autonomic arousal and
evaluative cognitions” (100). On
Mandler’s view, the body has learned through experience to respond in certain
ways to various sensory input; these responses constitute the autonomic
component of emotional experience. The
cognitive component of emotional experience is determined by the value
judgments and schemas that we assign to various sensory inputs. He concludes that “visceral emotions are
generated by the experience of [environmental] discrepancies, whether negative
or positive, which release autonomic reactions, together with an evaluation of
the situation which determines the quality of the emotion” (103).

In general, the book does a nice
job of achieving its modest aspirations. 
The discussions are interesting, informative and usually accessible to
readers who, like myself, lack a background in psychology. While the researcher is not likely to find a
great deal of depth in these pages, the volume provides a useful summary and
synthesis of the theories that Mandler has developed during his distinguished
career.

Even so, I must confess that the
book’s frequently aggressive tone is a turn-off. Though Mandler warns the reader that the book contains a number
of discussions that will come across as “jaundiced” and “outspoken,” those
discussions are no less unprofessional for the gesture. Consider what he has to say about
philosophers of mind, whom he believes have “mainly muddied the waters” (xi):
“I believe the search for an understanding of consciousness has been seriously
impaired by the speculative floods that philosophers started dispensing some 20
years ago. I have great respect for
many strains of philosophy and particularly for many philosophers of science,
but philosophies of the mind have gone over the top – with little regard for
evidence or for the functions of consciousness” (65).

As it turns out, these remarks
all-too-often rest on serious misinterpretations of the various issues and
positions. For example, Mandler
proclaims that “[t]here is, strictly speaking, no mind-body problem” (75) and cites Colin McGinn’s
position that we lack the conceptual resources to solve the problem of mental
causation as one of a number of “over-the-top” philosophical views that can be
dismissed as lacking any foundation in the evidence (66). As any graduate student in philosophy knows,
however, the problem of understanding mental causation cannot be resolved by
empirical evidence; no one disputes that conscious mental states correlate closely with physical events
in the body in exactly the way that one would predict if mental states caused
those physical events. Indeed, that
much is pretty obvious from introspection: I instantiate a volition to raise my
hand and, lo and behold, my hand goes up in the air.

The difficulty is a conceptual
one. While David Hume may be correct in
thinking that the specific mechanisms of physical causation are forever beyond
human understanding, there is no great mystery in seeing how physical items and
states could interact causally. Understanding how a human hand can catch a
baseball does not seem to take us beyond the reach of our nomological concepts
and conceptions: baseballs and hands are both solid and extended in space; and
it is not particularly mysterious, as a conceptual matter, how one extended
object in space can impede the progress of another extended object. Mental causation, however, poses a
conceptual difficulty: it is as difficult to understand how a mental state,
which lacks the properties of extension and solidity, could produce an effect
in a physical body as it is to understand how a ghost could catch a
baseball. The problem is not
evidentiary; it is conceptual: our existing concepts don’t seem to furnish a
framework rich enough for us to be able to understand, apart from some
intuitively unsatisfying identity theory that equates mental and brain states,
how mental states could – even in principle – causally interact with physical
entities. This is McGinn’s point, and this is why there is a mind-body problem.

While there is much to be learned
in Consciousness Recovered, Mandler’s
intemperate discussions of philosophy of mind should serve as a salutary
reminder of why we should all resist the temptation to publicly write off other
academic disciplines as confused or unhelpful: such criticisms are far more
likely to expose embarrassing shortcomings in the critic’s understanding than
any genuine problems in the relevant disciplines.

©
2003 Kenneth Einar Himma

Ken Himma received his Ph.D.
from the University of Washington and is a lecturer in the Information School
and the Philosophy Department.

Categories: Psychology, Philosophical