[lit-ideas] Re: Conscious after the fact?

John wrote
On the other hand, some of the research I mentioned focuses specifically on highly time-pressured decisions made by people like firemen or tank commanders confronted with what are literally life-and-death situations.
That they are life-and-death situations does not show that the decisions/desires/reasons/choices that lie behind the actions done in them adhere to a pattern that is interestingly different from my 'deciding' to swerve my car in order to avoid hitting something in the roadway that I think _might_ be a cat. Behind my doing this are all sorts of things—call them reasons, desires, assumptions, or what you will—that make my doing this intelligible, and some subset of them will be known to me in the following sense: I can tell a story, just as a tank commander might tell a story, which explains my actions ('I thought it was a cat,' 'I believe that animals have souls and that it is bad karma to take take their lives,' 'I couldn't stop in time,' 'The steering wheel is (somehow) connected to the front wheels, etc.,' It could have been some poor child's pet,' 'There wasn't sn 18-wheeler juggernaut in the oncoming lane,' 'Cats are not made of titanium,' and so on.) My action was, in light of this set of beliefs, assumptions, and the like, rational and purposive. Yet none of them is hardwired into human brains in a way that makes what I did the result of an inarticulate desire that might be. That I tell my story after the fact no more shows that this action must have been the result of some irrational or non-rational part of my psyche that neo-Freudians, and now, apparently, recent cognitive psychologists think they must posit to 'explain' it.
So it is for tank commanders, bless them; they do the best they can, just as I did the best I could. If they have to react quickly, well, they have to react quickly, just as do boxers, skiers in a slalom race, 
dozing students in Professor What's-His-Name's class in the Paper Chase.
and enormously many other folk.
Recognition-primed decision making (Gary Klein) describes the process as one that begins with a pattern recognition process in which the individual compares incoming information with a set of possible models and acts on the first to pop off the stack which seems to offer a reasonable fit with what is going on (using satisficing heuristics instead of trying to calculate the best possible model). Then, while action based on the model begins, another part of the brain continues to monitor incoming information looking for discrepancies that indicate a wrong model choice. When enough contradictory information piles up, this triggers a new pattern recognition step; the process continues until the situation is resolved. The critical factor here is the range and richness of the models invoked by the pattern recognition step. The more and richer the models the more likely it is that the one on which action is based does, in fact, fit the situation well and yield the desired result.
None of this should surprise any child psychologist or, sans jargon, reasonably intelligent adult. The evidence for such mental processes isn't spelled out here, but I wonder if Klein isn't making some sort of transcendental argument (such arguments are more common in science than one might suppose) of the form 'This is what, given x....x-sub-n, people do; so there must be a string of intervening (mental?) processes that explain how/why they do it.' Nothing at all wrong with that, but it strikes me as highly theoretical and not especially compelling at this stage.
Thanks to John, for again bringing such interesting hypotheses to our Sunday afternoon discussion group. 

Robert Paul
Reed College
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