By way of warming up to this notion of the adaptive unconscious.

Wilson asks us to
think about proprioception. Right now, as you watch this lecture, you are sitting
or standing, maybe you're walking. I don't know if it's possible to run, but your
body is in some position or other and you're probably aware of the position that
your body is in. If you can without putting yourself or others in danger, close
your eyes. You can detect probably very easily what the positions are of your
limbs. Are your knees bent, are your hands clenched, closed, or are they open, are
you sitting or your lying down? These are all forms of proprioception, which
psychologists think of as a kind of sixth sense, a sensory way of knowing what's
happening with our bodies. Wilson wants to suggest that generally speaking, we
monitor our bodies proprioceptively, constantly at least while we're awake and we
do so outside of the spotlight of conscious awareness. We generally don't have to
pay conscious attention to the fact that for example, our legs are bent when we're
about to get up out of a chair. Whereas, there might be people and there have been
people who have lost that proprioceptive ability and whose lives become vastly more
difficult as a result. In the famous book "Pride and a Daily Marathon", we hear the
story of Ian Waterman who I think at age 19, if I'm recalling correctly, lost his
proprioceptive ability due to a neurological disorder and so was unable to, without
looking at himself, know what was happening with his body. You can get I think a
little inkling of what that would be like if you've ever had an arm or leg fall
asleep while you were lying down for example. You might find, okay, my arm is
falling asleep while I literally fell asleep with my head on my arm and now here it
is, this kind of limp thing and I can't feel it from within until at least the
blood comes back in, the nerves start losing up again. I'm not sure what exactly
what happens physiologically there, but it feels like I have this limb, but I don't
know what's happening within unless I look at it. Imagine that happens to your
entire body, that as I understand it would be like to lose proprioception. Waterman
has to go through a daily marathon, so to speak, in order to just go through a day
in his life. In order to get dressed, he's got to watch carefully everything that
happens with his feet, and his legs, and his arms to know precisely how to put on
his pants and put his shirt on. He's got to be watching himself constantly and
we're told that one day, when there's a power outage, lights went out, I guess it
was nighttime, the lights went out. He was plunged into darkness and he fell into a
pile in the process because he couldn't watch himself anymore. This is an example
that dramatically reveals how much, according to Wilson, unconscious processing is
going on at any given moment for such banal daily activities as proprioception. So,
one core idea about the notion of the adaptive unconscious for Wilson is that it's
a way in which we, so to speak, outsource intelligence. Just as a corporation might
outsource some of the work, pay somebody else to do work that it doesn't have time
to do that would take up too much of its resources do on its own, so too the human
mind outsources a great deal of its work to the unconscious mind. For example,
proprioception does the work of keeping track of what our limbs are doing relative
to each other, relative to the world outside of us, so we don't have to pay
conscious attention to that process and if we're forced to the way that Ian
Waterman was forced into, it's a huge overwhelming task and you can imagine how
inefficient our lives would be if we had to do that all the time. Just and that's
just for proprioception put that alongside, as we'll see in a moment the various
other things that are imputed to the unconscious mind and you'll be grateful that
you've got it according to Wilson. Other aspects of the unconscious, they're the
adaptive unconscious include the following, that it's relatively modular. You've
got different components, so to speak, different modules that carry on in relative
independence of one another. So, I've talked about proprioception, likewise there's
perception, perceptual experience that allows us to determine how far something
away is or how fast it's moving towards you, very important for negotiating your
environment and that's something that you generally be able to do without paying
conscious attention to the process. Likewise, our reaction is a huge part of our
social competence. Responding to faces both when you see a face whether it's one
you're familiar with, and whether or not it is, what's going on in that face. Is
that a face that's manifesting happiness, or anger, threat, invitingness, openness,
etc. Those are different emotional expressions and faces that most, not all, that
most of us are able to determine with no effort at all presumably because of a very
fast, very effective, effortless unconscious process. Another example would be
language. Let me change focus on that a little bit partly because that's at least
one of my areas of research and so I think about it a great deal. Think about
language. Suppose for example that you ask somebody to go to a movie with you and
they reply, "I'd like to, I have to study tonight." That generally will be an
answer by a way of saying, "No, I can't go to the movie with you because I'm going
to be studying." But notice that your friend who answered the question didn't say,
didn't actually explicitly out of the words "I can't go because I've got a study",
they just said I've got to study. There has to be a leap in on your part that goes
from the information that they've got a study to the conclusion that therefore
won't be able to go to the movie with you. That's a leap that you do effortlessly
and at a split second time frame, but nevertheless involves something that is a
cognitive achievement on your part. Not all of us can do it. Some people who are
early language learners often have trouble doing so, for example. Nevertheless,
it's part of an, Wilson would say unconscious processing mechanism. That's what's
known as the pragmatics of language, that aspect of language that involves our
meaning things that go beyond what would literally say. Another example is the
semantics of language that has to do with the literal meaning of the word. So, if
you pass by a billboard, the billboard might say something like "Joe's hamburgers
are the tastiest burgers in town" and you without any effort so long as it's in a
language that you're competent in, without any effort, you can't help but
understand what that sentence says. It's not as if you have to engage in any effort
or any conscious processing to determine what's being said there. However, compare
that with a case in which you were just learning a new language and you're in a
country in which that's the language that's spoken. You might have to go through
some conscious effort. Would you say, "That's the verb, there's the noun over
there, one of them, they relate to each other in some way" and then you consciously
construct the meaning of the sentence on that basis. So now that's semantic
processing for the new language is effortful, painstaking, exhausting whereas
semantic processing for the language that you're already competent in is lickety-
split, effortless, feels like it happens instantaneously, and so on. Then there's a
middle case, what I call the pragmatics of language in which you have to engage in
some effort, but it's generally speaking, largely effortless, and generally
speaking something that you don't pay any attention to. So now, two of those are
examples not included the one which you're learning a new language, but for home
language as well as for the pragmatics case in which you are unconsciously
processing what people say. So now, Wilson also suggest that proprioception, facial
recognition, perception of the external world, language processing are examples of
unconscious processes that enable us to get through our daily lives with relative
efficiency and if you had to put all those processes into conscious awareness, it
would be massively inefficient because you'd have to think through consciously,
deliberately, painstakingly what the information that you're given and you hardly
get anything done. So, just as a corporation behaves much more efficiently if it
outsources some of its work, so too I can process things more efficiently by
outsourcing various axes or processes that require intelligence and that makes my
life much more livable so to speak. So, if we're going to get a better picture of
the adaptive unconscious, it's going to include further features such as the
following. As we said, the adaptive unconscious is supposed to comprise a number of
different modules, different relatively separate components. So that for example,
if I have an accident that causes me to have trouble with facial recognition, then
that won't necessarily make difficulty for my ability to understand language and
vice versa. These are modular in that sense. Likewise, the adaptive unconscious
includes what's known as an online pattern detector and by that I mean we
generally, automatically, and effortlessly respond to patterns, not always to our
benefit, but nevertheless, it's at least might have evolutionary value. The idea
that comes, for example, from Joseph LeDoux, a neuroscientist, talks about examples
such as imagine you're hiking in the mountains and you see out of peripheral
vision, something that's kind of brown and curvy off to the side. Now you might
jump away from that, you might even run before you have to give it a careful look.
A peripheral vision might have produced by virtue of its pattern, detection
activities, something that sends a signal that there's a snake and that might have
caused
a fear reaction on your part. It might only be later on when you take a closer
look at it after screwing up your courage, that after taking a closer look, you
say, "Oh, that's just a stick that looks like a snake from peripheral vision. I
looked at it more carefully, it's not." But you had automatic pattern detecting
kind of reaction that engage the emotion of fear as a result of this work of the
adaptive unconscious. Again, the adaptive unconscious is concerned primarily with
the here and now. It's not very good at planning far into the future. It tends to
be more impulsive, it tends to help us negotiate immediate situations, sometimes
for better, sometimes for worse. As I've said, it's automatic, and let me spell it
out a little bit more. The adaptive unconscious is automatic in the sense that it's
not something you have to will or choose or do deliberately by means of exertion of
effort. In that sense, according to the definition behavior that we gave when we
were talking about Gilbert Ryle, it would now count as an example of behavior
nevertheless as something that happens to me, it's not so different from, for
example, processing that occurs for metabolism for example. The automatic
processing system is relatively rigid in the sense that it's difficult to change at
will by means of direct intervention. But as I've mentioned, it can be changed over
time with some effort. Nevertheless, it tends to make us respond automatically just
thinking of when something is falling towards you and you react, perhaps hitting
somebody in the cheek in the process even though what was falling on you was a
leaf, it wasn't a brick. The adaptive unconscious tends to be precocious in the
sense that it adapts fairly early in life unlike more higher cognitive processing,
which tends to develop fully for many adults not until they're into the early 20s,
whereas the adaptive unconscious tends to be developed pretty well by age somewhere
between five and 10. The adaptive unconscious tend to be more sensitive to
negativity by way of a kind of relatively paranoid protecting myself kind of
default response to the world. Then finally, let's think about what it means to say
that the adaptive unconscious is adaptive. The idea is that, the one that Wilson
wants to propose is that this aspect of our unconscious minds is the result of our
being products of evolution through natural selection. As products of evolution of
the natural selection, the idea is early humans or hominids might've gained at
advantage by virtue of outsourcing some intellectual processes, some mental
processing outside of consciousness. Perhaps, unconscious processing was the
original form in which thought occurred in, for example, earlier primates, primates
that inhabited the earth before we did. Nevertheless, the idea is that, for
example, as hunters, our ancestor would have had a great advantage being able to,
for example, process without having to pay conscious attention to things in their
environment, that they were able to filter out while they were focusing on prey for
instance. As social beings, it behooved our ancestors to be able to have immediate,
automatic, effortless recognition of the emotional expression on each other's
faces, for example. So the idea is that, having an adaptive unconscious that did
various things automatically without conscious intervention made our lives more
successful, gave us a survival advantage perhaps in comparison to other species
with whom we competed, because it allowed us to apply conscious attention only to
those things that are more difficult, that were novel aspects in the environment
that required that effortful, painstaking thought known as conscious decision
making, conscious reasoning, etc. The rest we could outsource and make our way
through the world much more efficiently.