Is Consciousness Shrinking?

Is Consciousness Shrinking?

What is the ratio of the conscious mind to the unconscious mind? Is the human unconscious half the size of the conscious or twice the size? What percentage of mental activity is carried out unconsciously and what consciously? Does this proportion vary between species? Which species has the largest unconscious mind relative to its conscious mind? If you are a believer in the Freudian unconscious, do you think other animals also have a Freudian unconscious, and is it as extensive as the human unconscious? So far as I know, such questions have never been broached. There must be a capacious linguistic unconscious in humans, given the nature of our linguistic competence, but do animals that employ various kinds of signal system likewise have a large signaling unconscious? Does the unconscious expand over the course of a lifetime? There is reason to think that it does, because it is common for tasks that begin with conscious mental activity to gradually become taken over by the unconscious. This is because of considerations of economy: the conscious mind is easily overloaded and it is more economical to shift the burden to unconscious processes; the machinery gets moved to the basement. Consciousness is notoriously slow compared to the unconscious. Just think how slow and cumbersome speech would be if it had to be figured out consciously—or walking, driving, throwing. The involvement of conscious activity in these skills shrinks as the skill is acquired; that part of the conscious mind falls away to take up residence in the unconscious mind. To that extent and in that sense the conscious mind gets smaller—less full. The ideal is to be able to perform the skill while your conscious mind is a blank, so that you can daydream and let your mind wander. Conscious activity is not required to perform the task in question, so it has a tendency to disappear, handing the responsibility over to the unconscious. It is no longer actively involved.

Suppose there was a mind that began with a zero unconscious and a jampacked consciousness, but then over time the process of shifting responsibility to the unconscious proceeded apace. More and more of mental functioning is delegated to the unconscious, leaving the conscious mind free for more agreeable occupations—listening to music, fantasizing about movie stars, meditating as vacantly as possible. There would be consciousness shrinkage and corresponding unconsciousness expansion. This might reach the point that consciousness had hardly anything to do, and nothing vital to the well-being of the conscious subject. It might exist only as a light buzz, or not at all. Suppose that is the normal course of the lifetime of an organism constructed like this: a childhood of brimming and taxing consciousness, followed by a middle age of relative conscious relaxation, ending in an old age of virtual unconsciousness. The unconscious has taken over all the jobs that used to be done by the conscious. There don’t seem to be any actual species that develop like this, but there could be, logically speaking. Such a species has a shrinking consciousness; it undergoes consciousness atrophy or downsizing. It was once big and now it is little. It slowly becomes unnecessary. Then, assuming all this, my question is: Could this happen to consciousness as it exists in the biological world? Could it gradually fade away over evolutionary time? Is it destined to disappear as the unconscious takes over its functions? Might consciousness be only a temporary feature of evolutionary history on this planet? Could natural selection eventually phase it out in favor of more efficient unconscious processes and mechanisms? Might the unconscious mind take over completely? It is, of course, extremely difficult to obtain evidence as to whether consciousness has been expanding or contracting over evolutionary time, and ditto for the unconscious. How could we empirically determine whether the conscious mind has been ceding territory to the unconscious mind? But it doesn’t seem wildly implausible to suppose that the dinosaur mind, say, was heavily tilted in the consciousness direction: most of what went on in it was conscious, with only a minimal unconscious (nothing Freudian or Chomskyan going on). The mind that evolved early on was largely a conscious mind; only after eons did it grow a subsidiary unconscious, so as to avoid the burden of a crammed consciousness. The unconscious is a fancy adaptation, developed rather late in the game, designed to relieve consciousness of too much responsibility for organizing behavior. First the conscious, then the unconscious—as with skill acquisition. It strikes me as very likely that the human unconscious is by far the largest in the animal world, but that our consciousness is relatively confined. Certainly, our sensory consciousness is more limited than that of many animals—just consider our relative poverty with respect to sounds, smells, eyesight, and possibly taste (though we seem pretty discriminating in this respect). The elephant’s consciousness might well be larger than ours, but I doubt there is much going on in the elephant’s unconscious. There has been a trend towards smaller animals since the time of the dinosaurs, and maybe the same is true of the size of consciousness (with a corresponding increase in the dimensions of the unconscious). Might this trend continue until consciousness is replaced by purely unconscious mental processing, or by some negligible remnant of consciousness as it exists today? Might consciousness become extinct like so many biological adaptations? Has the hominid line been slowly shedding its earlier glorious consciousness in favor of a more streamlined and efficient unconscious? Are we less conscious than we used to be, more zombie-like? Is there less that it’s like to be us? The hypothesis does not seem beyond the bounds of possibility.

One future scenario is that human technological ingenuity might hasten this progression—I mean AI. What if devices are invented that can slot into the brain to take over many of the tasks now executed by the conscious mind? We might well welcome these as reducing the tedium that consciousness regularly courts (tax forms etc.). What if we could vastly improve our efficiency by inserting these devices, creating a kind of machine-based unconscious? Wouldn’t people want that kind of advantage? The end result could be a massively reduced consciousness, or no consciousness at all. We might retain some remnants of conscious pleasure for old time’s sake, but otherwise we hand things over to our man-made unconscious. AI becomes the form that the new unconscious takes. After all, consciousness was always slow and glitchy, prone to breakdown and depression, so we might be better off without it. On some remote planet this might already have happened: the inhabitants were once conscious and fleshy, but now they have gone fully unconscious and partly mechanical. Consciousness just wasn’t cutting it for them, so they phased that junk out. They de-conscioused. In their history, consciousness came–and then it went. Consequently, they don’t see themselves as raising a difficult mind-body problem, since there is no consciousness to be puzzled about. There is nothing it is like for these robotic beings. And is it even correct to describe them as robotic? Maybe the unconscious mind that pulses within them is a sensitive and sophisticated thing, morally sound and peace-loving; it may be soulful, creative, family-oriented, and kind to animals. Who knows what evolution can bring? Consciousness may not be all that it’s cracked up to be when it comes to intelligence and moral behavior. People still operating with the old conscious brain might be looked down on as primitive and hidebound—they need to get with the program. Eventually consciousness becomes a distant memory, darkly spoken of in ancient texts; the universe has gone completely unconscious, though still mentally rich (the unconscious being a type of mind). In the history of the cosmos, consciousness was born, grew, and flourished; then it began to shrink, giving way to superior forms of mentality, eventually disappearing entirely—a mere blip in the cosmic drama. To us it seems central, crucial, infinitely valuable, but maybe it will turn out to be just another discarded evolutionary gimmick destined to be superseded. Even now it may be on its way out. It may follow the fate of the dodo.[1]

[1] Another possibility is that some species retain consciousness in some form while others discard it. Reptiles may stay conscious in their modest way, but mammals abandon consciousness in favor of a supercharged unconscious. The most advanced animals move on to the new biological reality while the more pedestrian types stick with the consciousness game. The most successful species are thus the unconscious ones. Or plants become conscious and animals cease to be. Evolution is nothing if not creative.