The Cognitive Unconscious

"Consider, for example, all that is going on below the level of conscious awareness when you are in a conversation. Here is only a small part of what you are doing, second by second:

Acessing memories relevant to what is being said
Comprehending a stream of sound as being language, dividing it into distinctive phonetic features and segments, identifying phonemes, and grouping them into morphemes
Assigning a structure to the sentence in accord with the vast number of grammatical constructions in your native language
Picking out words and giving them meanings appropriate to context
Making semantic and pragmatic sense of the sentences as a whole
Framing what is said in terms relevant to the discussion
Peforming inferences relevant to what is being discussed
Constructing mental images where relevant and inspecting them
Filling in gaps in the discourse
Noticing and interpreting your interlocutor's body language
Anticipating where the conversation is going
Planning what to say in response

Cognitive scientists have shown experimentally that to understand even the simplest utterance, we must perform these and other incredibly complex forms of thought automatically and without noticeable effort below the level of consiousness. It is not merely that we occasionally do not notice these processes; rather, they are inaccessible to consious awareness and control." - George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh

I can agree with Lakoff and Johnson that the majority of our thought processes occur below the level of conscious awareness. And I don't mean things like breathing and heartbeating, those activities don't [normally] have anything to do with thought at all (it's autonomic nervous function). How many of those things in the list above are we conciously aware of during a discussion with someone? It doesn't even have to be a discussion, these processes take place during everyday conversing as well. There are a few items in the list that are suspect (e.g. I am usually consciously aware of planning responses) but, for the most part, these activities along with countless others are being accomplished automatically. It is these neural happenings that cognitive scientists are dubbing the cognitive unconcious (CU hereafter).

The CU is largely shaped by our interactions with the external world. For example, physical environments give rise to spatial-relation concepts which provide a basis for conceptual metaphors that, in turn, affect how we interpret our experience of reality. The same is true of socio-cultural environments. From the moment we emerge as infants our brains begin the process of encoding our neural networks with the CU (it actually starts before exiting the womb, but I'm not much into developmental psychology). This is why it seems that children have an innate ability to acquire language and moral concepts. They learn early on that certain vocalizations result in particular responses and this continual process develops into what becomes their native language. They learn early on that up means good and down means bad, that close is warm and intimate, and far is cold and impersonal. I'm sure you can see other conceptual metaphors forming just from these few examples, and this is only one part of the CU's activity. Since this is a blog entry and not an academic journal submission, I don't feel the need to explain this in much more detail at this time. Needless to say, coming to terms with the CU can bring a new bag of philosophy toys to play with when talking about what it means to know something. I'll interact with this in more detail in future posts as I work throught Lakoff and Johnson's book.