Hi Emery, I enjoyed the article. Was it that article which estimates conscious thought at about 5-10% of total brain activity? My thinking is that if conscious thought is so underpresented and then susceptible to automaticity as well, then conscious thought isn't something we can rely on as an object for study. I'd love to know what you are thinking on this topic, whether it has progressed or not. Cheers, Jonas

Jonas, thanks for the thoughtful response. I'm tending toward and examination of my own automatics and looking at examples of how artificial selection and habituation appears as a process of ontological construction. I'm thinking through the notion of "pre-conscious" thought as "intention" or "pre-dispostion", or "orientation. I'm beginning to think about the autonomic nervous system as animal inheritance and too a source of unconscious behavior. If intention is the parent of the thought, then how does intent link to the inborn animal autonomies; the instincts?

Well, you've got your work cut out for you! Our interests are similar. But I have been looking the unconscious by way of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory. The question which arises from this, and from fMRI scans showing brain activity presaging conscious motor activity, is: if intent is the parent of thought, what is the parent of intent?

I think that question is what you are gesturing towards with 'pre-disposition'. Lacanian psychoanalysis says little expicitly about animal inheritance, although this is one element of Lacan's category 'the Real' -- an 'impossible' 'unknowable' realm because it is beyond any language which might either constitute or describe it. I hope it doesn't prove to be so for you. Best, J

Jonas, I thought about your last comments and the challenge you perceive and what came, almost immediately, to mind was the the physiology of the autonomous nervous system, i.e., the sense organs and their link to the brain. I can say that I am not conscious of all the sensory signals that are processed in my brain. In the same way that the individual is not aware of the "pre-thinking" that precedes the conscious thoughts of action, neither is there conscious awareness of the logical precedent to information transfers between the environment of an human and the brain. Might these energy inputs be part of the vast unconsciousness that envelopes our consciousness? An even more intriguing questions asks if it is only external sensory inputs that might trigger an "pre-thought;" might states of imagination, dreams, etc., also be sources of "pre-thought"? I'm searching for more readings on these topics.

Em

Hi Emery. This is a vast field which might draw on philosophy of the mind, psychology, psychoanalysis and neurobiology. In what field are you enquiring -- what sort of literature are you reading?

If you want to start with something light, something which gives an overview of recent insights into the unconscious in social psychology (what they now call 'automaticity' -- for fear of Freud ;-) ), you might read Daniel Ariely's "Predictably Irrational". What is thought insomuch as it is pre-thought? I would look to Daniel Dennet's philosophy of the mind in his "Consciousness Explained" (pay no attention to his comments on Freud! -- he's basically re-inventing Freud without having read him). Another light treatment I enjoyed was Sam Harris's "Free Will". He basically agrees with Dennett but, like me, disagrees with the conclusions Dennett draws.

On the dreams etc... Dennett's methodology is super here. He quite rightly claims that you can't investigate thought without including 'abberant' modes of thought: dreams, hallucination, etc. Freud included the mis-thought that occurs in mis-speech. If you haven't read the above, I think you'll find them helpful.

Jonas, thanks so much for sharing those readings. I'll get started. I can't wait to see what emerges.

As an economist I’d follow a different line of thought from the one that Jonas and Emery discussed reasoning about neurobiology, philosophy of the mind, psychology and psychoanalysis. Yet, what I intend to express may have some reference to those fields of research. I’ll start quoting a passage from a lecture on morality as a mirror of intelligence given by the distinguished philosopher of science and mind Tim Crane in October 2011.

"I do not know how to explain, in terms of neuroscience, why we have a moral instinct, but every gesture, every decision, every our behavior is driven by a choice between right and wrong, or appropriate and inconvenient, and so on. This depends on the fact that man is not perfectly rational but is also the result of culture and experience, and has a limited capacity to make practical choices. The proof? There is no way to teach a non-human to make moral choices. "

On the issue of interrelations between rationality, practical choices and culture, theoretical works such as the one by Hutchins & Hazlehurst (1991) [Hutchins, Edwin and Hazelehurst, B. Learning in the cultural process. Langton, C.; Taylor, C.; Farmer J., and Rasmussen, S., Eds. Artificial Life II, SFI Studies in the Sciences of Complexity X. Addison-Wesley; 1991; pp. 689-706] suggest that gradual cultural evolutionary process can collect a series of effective mental models of complex questions—that is, sufficiently difficult problems that no single individual could solve on her own. From the bounded rationality side, such process can generate simple rules that are quite tough to work out. This parsimonious heuristics then allows people to answer difficult questions. [Cf. Group Report: What Is the Role of Culture in Bounded Rationality? Joseph Henrich, Rapporteur, Wulf Albers, Robert Boyd, Gerd Gigerenzer, Kevin A. McCabe, Axel Ockenfels, and H. Peyton Young, in Gerd Gigerenzer and Reinhard Selten (eds.), Bounded Rationality, The Adaptive Toolbox, Dahlem Workshop Reports, February 2001.]

The connection between economics and the cultural evolutionary component of human behavior has advised part of the economic literature ‘to go beyond 'the assumptions of' self-interest based on the mechanistic paradigm of optimization in the presence of static assumptions and constraints of stability and constancy of the environment in which the ‘process of choice’ takes place. At the same time, this strand of economic thought conceives to go over that concept of 'substantive rationality’ which is traditionally considered as the foundation of neoclassical economics. As an alternate scheme, the different conception has showed the need to move away from an inaccurate view of human nature and to consider instead as appropriate the claim that it is the result of an evolutionary process of a cultural nature and then imagine the influence of social structures which are an expression of its essence.

As a more detailed specification, we are far away from a meaning and type of rationality of economic behavior which starts from a utility model which has no relation with the current thinking in psychology and evaluates large part of human behavior under the assumptions of continuity and linearity in the variables as well as the necessity of simplification of models through the omission of significant ones.

The history of decision theory has a number of attempts to overcome the restrictive assumptions of the traditional economic theory through the use of different representations of 'rationality'. Besides the Bayesian rationality which considers uncertainty and information problems due to conditions of deficiency and limitation of the capacity of the agent to manage information in a comprehensive way, there is a ‘strategic’ rationality to allow for interactions among individuals belonging to a group and between groups themselves, and an ‘inter-temporal’ rationality to look after the expectations over time.

However, when we come before the problem of operating in a complex environment, such as the one where all the factors are reflected by the three 'figures' of rationality, we arrive at a true 'theoretical dilemma': either the theory of optimization of the neoclassical school ignores such a composite setting given by the real abilities of the economic agents or it requires unrealistic extensive cognitive capacity that they should have. Hence, the abandonment of the optimization theory to assume instead that rationality is limited.

But I want to stress what appears to me the very significant point that these methods of understanding the rationality of economic action largely overlooked. It is the existence of forms of social conditioning that are a reflection of moral values and standards of conduct which request to explore the possibility of integrating them into the basic model of the economic agent to imagine systems of interaction between them and the current incentive and social structures.

Besides that, I wish to comment on a related issue. I am convinced that the old Cartesian rationalism, the post-Cartesian idealism and the more recent forms of positivism and neo-positivism have formed an inextricable tangle, which prevented scientific knowledge to enhance culturally. All this is more true if we consider the related ideologies and ambiguous pseudo-metaphysics emerging as a series of “ isms” such as: scientism, reductionism, determinism. I believe that in the so-called ‘society of knowledge’, the emergent professions: executives, entrepreneurs, managers, ‘high bureaucrats’ have learned to impose the ‘scientistic’ and ‘technicist’ mythologies thereby giving them increased benefits and power. As a way to conclude my comments, I am of the opinion that, since then, it followed that their models based on efficiency have determined an inextricable web of lifestyles, scales of values, social behavior which prevented to enrich the cultural value of scientific knowledge.

You have really posed some significant questions here. I will reread your comments and in the interim suggest that the instinctual nature of humans as learning animals and their ability to assume a behavioral structure that operates beneath consciousness points to the limits of conscious rationality. Models are after all tools to reduce analytic complexity. Let me share this link for your perusal:

https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/

and suggest that the content of the behavioral structure is under scientific scrutiny. I'd like to put together some articles for your consideration that might begin to shed some light on the emerging field of depth psychology as an extension of previous comments on Bourdier's concepts of 'habitus' and field and Durkhiem's notion of "social fact". Both terms point to behavioral fixities that operate beneath consciousness and serve as automatisms that guide our unthinking, conscious, behavior. The bounds of our rationality are being explored and in systems it is the boundary conditions, the interface between the system and the environment, that harbor system challenges. I suggest that your article may be seen as a specification of boundary challenges to accepted thought.

Dear Emery,

 I’d express a few further comments on the question you raised as it is perceived from an economic perspective. The economic literature more attentive to the psychological implications of individual behavior has emphasized persistently the lack of commitment of the economist to deal adequately with the process of formation of preferences, especially with reference to its stability, selfish nature and rationality.

Such an assessment is connected to the disapproval of that mental ‘habitus’ of a large part of economists which leads them to consider a utility model to still have a scant relation with the current thinking in psychology. Moreover, this school of economic thought is still inclined to appraise a large part of the human behavior as "abnormal" because of the usual assumptions of continuity and linearity in the variables or their simple transformations imposed on the model, as well as of the omission of significant variables. All that, in spite of the results of research in psychology that tend to exclude the operation of the human brain as a central processing unit and to consider it - instead - as a system of parallel processing. Moreover, account must be taken of the fact that studies in psychology have prompted new economic approaches in the field of utility theory. Specifically, in a distinguished lecture Henry J. Aaron states that: “Economists rapidly acquire the capacity to think of human behavior in terms of the standard utility function, U = f(X), where X is a vector of whatever goods or bundles of goods or attributes of goods happen to be relevant for the problem at hand. This characterization of human behavior contains powerful assumptions that simplify analysis… However, it is clearly an "as if" formulation. It posits that people behave as if their preferences were stable, egoistic, and rational (meaning that preferences obey the laws of transitivity) and cover all states of the world. Much (perhaps most) human behavior violates these standards. Indeed, whole sub-disciplines of economics, to say nothing of the entireties of sociology and psychology and much of political science, have grown up to analyze these "irrationalities" and to explain why they occur” (see Aaron, HJ, "Public policy, values and consciousness", Journal of Economic Perspectives, vol.8, n.2, Spring 1994).

Profound changes in theoretical direction and research methods are necessary if we are to make significant progress in analyzing major social issues. Moreover, modification of the psychological prizes that direct the behavior should be carefully thought-out. This means consideration of the role that emotions that induce agents to behave in a manner not only inspired by the observance of the principle of self-interest. The inclusion of emotions in behavior patterns alter the predictions provided by models based on self-interest. It is so from the moment of change of the matrix of pay-off in the DP model, with the addition - for those who cooperate - of a 'good' resulting from knowing that the other agent has been able to achieve a specific benefit or the fact that he acted in fulfillment of the commitment of adherence to a social norm shared by the group.

Individual behavior - intentional and emotional together - originates from the intersection between biology and cultural environment, intersection governed by the nature of epigenetic rules of thumb that allow individuals to find quick solutions to problems posed by the process of decision and choice. These rules of thumb tend to reduce complex tasks, such as those which seek to determine the probability of occurrence of certain outcomes, such simple tasks of evaluation.

A different meaning of the rationality of economic behavior has been proposed which takes into account realistically and primarily the fact that a process of information management leads to the formulation of choice taking place under conditions of imperfection and limited capacity to process fully the information available. Moreover, this approach of understanding the rationality of economic action must take into account the existence of forms of social conditioning that are a mirror image of moral values and standards of conduct that invite to explore the possibility of integrating them into the basic model of the economic agent and to imagine forms of interaction between them and the existing incentive and social structures. Specifically, the neoclassical approach seemed  inadequate under another viewpoint. In fact, it proves inappropriate to consider how the various impulses evolve because it considers altruism and selfishness as fixed and pre-existing stocks when allocative effects are analyzed. By doing so, even the role of society is neglected as well as the social and moral norms and practices of what is included in the term "culture". All this  when the different impulses to action are taken into account, while it is explicitly postulated by the neoclassical school that experience has no feed-back effect on the preferences of the agents.

As a general rule and only in respect to the issue of information, incomplete and costly to acquire, it is proper to remember that this topic closely affects the analysis of economic relations between formal rules and informal norms of social conduct. It has been suggested and ascertained that individuals demonstrate a willingness to learn also from the experiences of other people, supplemented by a predisposition to imitate patterns of behavior based on social rules not only directly and indirectly beneficial. It is considered a primary task of anthropological and sociological studies on the mechanisms of cultural evolution to deepen - for instance - if and to what extent the use of forms of social learning, such as imitation of the experience that others have taken in similar contexts about the solution of the problems posed by the human interrelations, approaches on average the optimal behavior compared to the solutions that individuals can come up with on their own. This type of informal rules is made - according to Douglass North - of conventions, norms of behavior, and self- imposed codes of conduct, i.e. that form of 'codification' of the lessons learned from the common experience which becoming institutional rules, "….are a part of the heritage that we call culture”. (D.C. North, ‘Institutions, institutional change and economic performance’, Cambridge University Press, 1990, 5,37).

 Thank you for reading and best regards,

Gianrocco