In his book Why Everyone (Else) is a Hypocrite, psychology professor Robert Kurzban argues that hypocrisy is hard-wired into the human brain. Kurzban’s evolutionary psychological view of the mind calls into question our customary notions of consciousness and self, as this excerpt from his book entertainingly demonstrates:
There really is something strangely compelling about the notion of someone in charge in the brain, someone watching the action, someone in control. Indeed, the philosopher Jerry Fodor is insistent on this point: “If . . . there is a community of computers living in my head, there had also better be somebody who is in charge; and, by God, it had better be me.” I don’t really know what Fodor means by “somebody,” “in charge,” or “me” in that sentence, so I’ll just pass discreetly on.
The modular view means that we ought to be really careful about how we think about consciousness. Because we don’t really know the function of the modules that happen to be conscious, we should be very wary of the notion that conscious modules are necessarily going to turn out to have really big roles to play in what the brain, as a whole, is up to. It might seem as though they should, but it could be that we only feel this way because consciousness is the only thing the brain does that feels like something. My guess–and I think the evidence in psychology is with me on this–is that whatever the conscious modules actually do constitutes relatively little of what the mind, in total, does. So, there are many, many things going on in your brain, and “you” have consciousness–experience–of only some of them. Your visual system is doing all kinds of complex computations–it takes an insanely complicated set of operations to turn the light on your retina into something other bits of the brain can use, and you don’t experience any of those. You just experience the visual world.
Further, there’s no particular reason that we ought to expect that consciousness is or must be associated with any particular process. We know more today than we used to about consciousness, but I think I’m on firm ground when I say that there’s still a lot we don’t know. In particular, I don’t think we know what the function of consciousness is, or even if it’s reasonable to talk about consciousness having a function. I won’t get into the philosophy of this, but it’s worth keeping in mind that if we don’t really understand it, we probably shouldn’t make any sweeping claims about it.
There’s a strong intuition that the conscious modules are “us,” and that “we” need to know, basically, everything. But while Bobby does just fine asking Annie out at the end of cranium command, the modules that implement this excellent idea probably don’t have information about how that decision was made. Many, many modules are busily doing their jobs, giving conscious modules the information necessary to do theirs, but quite possibly not much beyond that.
It’s easy to forget this. It’s easy to think that the conscious I is “in charge,” originates decisions, and, basically, is every single module. But it’s not. I think Dennett got it right when he said that while there is some sense in which we all reject dualism, nonetheless, as he put is, “the persuasive imagery of the Cartesian theater keeps coming back to haunt us–laypeople and scientists alike–even after its ghostly dualism has been denounced and exorcized.” Excerpted from Why Everyone Else Is A Hypocrite: Evolution and the Modular Mind, by Robert Kurzban. Copyright © 2011 by Robert Kurzban. Excerpted with permission by Princeton University Press.
Buy the book: Skylight Books, Powell’s, Amazon
*Photo of Rodin’s “The Thinker” courtesy of edmenendez.
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