The Atheist's Guide to Reality_ Enjoying Life Without Illusions - Alex Rosenberg [96]
For all its headiness, conspiracy theorizing using mental markers and spoken or written ones brings with it the illusion that the markers are thoughts about stuff. The theorizing plus the illusion is the folk psychology we all embrace. It’s imperfect because it is a quick and dirty solution to the pressing design problem nature needed to solve to get us past the African bottleneck. Because the markers that move around our introspectable minds only crudely indicate what is really going on in each person’s brain, folk psychology doesn’t do a very good job. It breaks down badly once you use it to predict a lot of people’s actions. It’s not very good when it is used to explain or predict someone’s actions with any precision or over a long period of time. Folk psychology is almost never able to predict exactly what people will do or explain what they did beyond the relatively low level of precision of a good yarn.
The notion that thought is about stuff doesn’t even approximate what is going on in the brain. That’s why the folk psychology that rests on it can’t be improved, even when we rein in conspiracy theorizing and try to make it more “scientific.”
When you consciously think about your own plans, purposes, motives, all you are doing is stringing together silent “sounds” or other markers into silent “sentences” (or fragments of them) in your head. These sentences in your conscious thought are not even rough approximations of what is going on in your brain. They are simply indicators of the brain states doing the actual work in cognition and behavior. What is going on in consciousness when it introspectively “thinks about stuff” is just a crude indicator or symptom, similar to the way a fever is just a symptom of any one of a hundred different illnesses. The often incomplete, ungrammatical, ambiguous sentences and sentence fragments in conscious thought are in fact only rough moment-to-moment symptoms of ever-shifting packages of millions of connections in the brain. These vast packages of input/output circuits drive behaviors appropriate to the circumstances. Recall how Kandel showed that the brain stores information as abilities. Everything we do consciously, including talking out loud to others or silently to ourselves, is just the brain manifesting some of those abilities. That’s why the conscious sequence of markers that pass for thoughts about stuff can’t be rough approximations of the information the neurons store. Neural circuits are input/output devices. They have the ability to respond to inputs with outputs. Images and sentences can’t approximate abilities.
To see the problem, try the following thought experiment: You can ride a bicycle or drive a car or scramble an egg. Try expressing any of those abilities in a set of diagrams or a set of sentences “about” bicycle riding or driving or frying an egg. You would run through a huge number of photos or sentences and you still would not have communicated the ability. The sentences won’t ever describe much of your know-how, and they will include information that really isn’t required. That’s because you can’t express the relevant information in sentences or pictures. No one can adequately convey or display any complex ability in terms of statements you have to know or believe in order to have the ability. And no diagram or even a movie can do it either. Try writing down the ability to ride a bike—not the instructions about how to learn, but the ability that is learned. Can’t be done.
There is a more obvious reason why conscious thoughts about stuff can’t approximate neural circuitry. Introspection can’t let us in on conscious thoughts about stuff to begin with. There aren’t any such thoughts in consciousness. There is just the play of silent noises or other markers across consciousness. And those markers aren’t about anything either. Combining the markers with a lot of other physical processes in the brain