Blind Brain Theory and the Role of the Unconscious
Blind Brain Theory (BBT) is a theory developed by novelist and philosopher R. Scott Bakker. His original paper can be found here.
BBT centers around the observation that only a miniscule fraction of all the information processed by the brain makes it to conscious awareness. Crucially, that includes information about our brain’s own informational processing. For example, there is no “meta-eye” that catalogues how it is that our sense of vision is constructed, and then presents information about the construction of our sensation of sight to consciousness. Due to the architecture of our eyes, the image projected onto our retinas is upside-down. Processing in the brain flips this image so that we do not experience an upside-down world; yet we are completely unaware of this sort of activity.
We have almost no awareness of the monstrously complex processes that underly our conscious awareness. The result is a sort of sleight of hand resulting from our cognitive blind spots. Consciousness appears to us to be more than it actually is. We tend to think our first-person experience contains far more detail than studies suggest it actually does, a finding well documented by Daniel Dennett in his book “Consciousness Explained.”
For just one example of this:
If everything in your peripheral vision suddenly changed from color to black and white, would you notice? There’s a good chance you wouldn’t — in a new study involving virtual reality, most people never realized that their surroundings had abruptly desaturated. The results add to a large body of research suggesting we often perceive much less of the world around us than we think we do.
In the study, published last week in PNAS, 160 participants freely explored scenes in virtual reality. For the first 7 seconds of each session, the scenes were in full color. After that, though, all color was removed from the periphery of the videos.
Fascinatingly, most people didn’t notice that much of the scene they were looking at had turned to black and white. When the researchers divulged the change after the experiment was over, the volunteers were shocked.
You May Not See as Much Color as You Think You Do (gizmodo.com)
Informational Asymmetry
In his paper, Bakker points out that the brain is capable of an estimated throughput of 38 trillion calculations per second, 38 petraflops. (Forget the Nvidia 3090, you should be able to run Cyberpunk at 12K off your own hardware without breaking a sweat!) However, of this information, it’s estimated that perhaps just 50 bits make it to consciousness (admittedly, these are extremely rough estimates). This is one of the reasons that consciousness is very bad at multitasking. If you’ve ever zoned out on the highway and couldn’t remember the last 20 miles, you have experienced this constriction of data into consciousness firsthand.
The brain, in turn, has a number of “magic tricks,” sleights of hand to cover up how little information makes it into consciousness. Take the example above, which shows how a lack of color sensitivity in our vision is “papered over” in subjective experience, or how we are unaware of the blind spot each of us have where our optic nerve enters the eye.
For a spookier example, several studies suggest that the sensation of making a decision vis-à-vis voluntary movement (e.g., when I decide to move my hand “now!”) actually comes after the movement has already been initiated. That is, the sensation of volition trails the initiation of movement rather than playing a role in causing said movement. (Granted, interpretations of these findings are still debated).
Or consider “Blindsight.” People with damage to their occipital lobe may lose the ability to experience vision. Their eyes may be fine, but they no longer experience sight due to damage to the areas of the brain that process vision. Even in their dreams they no longer experience vision, whereas a person with damaged eyes and a working visual cortex can dream of vision. However, the eyes also make direct connections to the motor cortex (probably to produce quicker reaction times) and so these people with no conscious experience of sight may still successfully navigate a room full of furniture or even catch a ball thrown at them.
Recursive Self-Referentiality and Blind Spots
To borrow from another summary of Bakker’s work:
…we also need to take account of the recursively self-referential nature of consciousness. Scott takes the view (others have taken a similar line), that consciousness is the product of a special kind of recursion which allows the brain to take into account its own operations and contents as well as the external world. Instead of simply providing an output action for a given stimulus, it can throw its own responses into the mix and generate output actions which are more complex, more detached, and in terms of survival, more effective. Ultimately only recursively integrated information reaches consciousness.
The limits to that information are expressed as information horizons or strangely invisible boundaries; like the edge of the visual field the contents of conscious awareness have asymptotic limits — borders with only one side. The information always appears to be complete even though it may be radically impoverished in fact. This has various consequences, one of which is that because we can’t see the gaps, the various sensory domains appear spuriously united.
Resurrecting the Role of the Unconscious
This is all good and interesting, but people have been positing similar views of the mind for millennia. With Hume, and long before him Buddhist thinkers, we have examples of empirical self-examinations of consciousness. What these often found was not Descartes’ unified self, directing and reflecting, but a steady stream of different desires, drives, and sensations, given, at best, a loose sort of unity.
Looking inwards, Hume found “nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement.” This insight is not unlike Nietzsche’s “congress of souls,” or Buddhist thinkers’ anattā (or doctrine of “non-self”). Moreover, this loose unity seems to easily fall into blind alleys and disappear at inconvenient times.
My interest here lies in what this massive information asymmetry — 38 trillion calculations per second occurring in the brain versus consciousness straining to do simple multiplication with whole numbers — means for how we consider the unconscious.
The unconscious was the center of early-contemporary psychology. It was the main actor for Freud, the main wellspring of the human soul for Jung. Over time, the views of these thinkers have been largely supplanted by a more mechanical explanation of the mind.
That said, we still point to the unconscious as an actor in some cases. We talk about vague constructs like “stress” having a long-term impact on cognition and physiological health. We still talk about “repressed desires.” However, the common view of the unconscious is that it lacks intelligence, it is a lower form, more animal-like. It’s our “lizard brain” acting behind the scenes, while all higher activity occurs within the realm of consciousness.
However, this conception appears to be more a sort of bias against that which we do not understand than something that follows from findings in cognitive science. What makes it to consciousness at any one time is highly variable. The same systems that let you understand Kant or do calculus aren’t always making it into conscious awareness, but that in no way means they are “asleep.”
Think about geniuses’ great moments of breakthrough. Einstein had his great breakthrough on special relativity, not while meditating, hyper-focused on the problem, but while daydreaming and looking at two painters up on a scaffold. That is, great, highly complex insights can come from the unconscious because the connections that represent knowledge and high-level processing don’t disappear or go silent when they aren’t feeding into in the recursive system of self-awareness.
This might be part of the reasons artists are so attracted to writers like Jung, who scientists have drifted away from. The focus on symbols, on affecting cognition through the unconscious, opens up more material to work with. The paintings of impressionists, or the impressionist writing of folks like T.S. Eliot are not designed specifically for the conscious mind. They are not optimized for the slow, serial analysis that consciousness specializes in, but rather focus on addressing the entire perceptual system, which can recognize and process symbols at a faster rate.
I had an inkling of this listening to lectures on Hegel as I drove across country the last few days. The lecturer was making complex connections between the ideas of Plato and Kant and the Phenomenology of Spirit. At this time, I experienced the sensation of realization. I felt like: “yes, I am seeing how Hegel blends all these concepts in this book of his I’ve read, that makes sense!” And yet, my conscious mind absolutely does not have the ability to hold all these complex concepts at once, in anything near their entirety, all at once, or even in quick succession. Writing out the connections I was making in an orderly way would take hours, pages. Yet nonetheless, the connections were made and exist in my mind, although at a partly, maybe mostly, subconscious level. But the subconscious nature of this awareness also does not preclude that the ideas could be retrieved later and written into a detailed, serial analysis.
The conscious mind is demonstrably a terrible multitasker, and yet high-level thought requires multitasking and summarization on the fly. This suggests that complex works of synthesis, using higher order thinking, simultaneously using symbolic stand-ins to combine complex theories in a form of mental shorthand, etc. — these all seemingly must to take place at a mostly unconscious level, since so little crystalized thought can reach consciousness at one time. Internal monologue is slow, ponderous, far too slow to be the main actor in synthetic thought.
Or to summarize, the unconscious is doing a lot more, at a much higher level, then we often give it credit for, and key aspects of our minds that we generally think of as conscious functions (i.e., most higher-level thought) also appear to be able to run in the background, without making it to the recursive system.
