[lit-ideas] Re: Conscious after the fact?
- From: Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 29 Jun 2008 14:01:48 -0700
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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