Keith Frankish on Conscious Thought
11:59 Share

This is Mind Bites, a series for Philosophy Bites with me, David Edmonds. And me, Nigel Warburton. What makes humans different, cognitively, from other animals? Keith Frankish says that one crucial difference, perhaps the crucial difference, lies in what he calls conscious thought. Keith Frankish, welcome to Mind Bites. Hello, thank you for inviting me. The topic we're going to focus on is conscious thought. What do you mean by conscious thought? Well, that's a very big question.

The nature of conscious thought is perhaps one of the most important and most complicated issues in philosophy of mind. But perhaps I could begin with an example. Suppose I'm driving to work and I'm following my normal route, listening to the radio perhaps, daydreaming, and suddenly it occurs to me that roadworks are due to start today and that I won't be able to take my normal route into work. When that happens, my behaviour changes. I look out for the next turning, follow a different route into work.

And that event, the occurrence of this thought that roadworks are going to start today, that is what I would call a conscious thought. I think it's a distinctive kind of mental event, and our ability to have these conscious thoughts is a very important fact about us as humans. I think it's the source of many of the distinctive features of human cognition and of human culture. Our ability to have conscious thoughts is the distinctive feature of the human mind.

Just to get this clear, when I see the red light when I'm driving, when I'm not really reflecting on it and I just stop the car, that's not so much a conscious thought, that's just a thought. But when I think about the roadblock ahead and that changes my behaviour, that's a conscious thought. Well, you might have a conscious perception of the light and certainly animals can do that and you can respond to that conscious perception and it will change your behaviour. But that's not quite what I mean by a conscious thought.

What I mean by a conscious thought is a thought about something that isn't perceptually present. You could have conscious thoughts about things that are perceptually present, but the point about conscious thoughts is that they are not driven by perception in this way. You can think about things that are not immediately present to you. And that's exactly what happened in the case of the thought about the roadworks. It was the fact that I didn't need to wait until I actually saw the stop sign. The thought served as a proxy for the perception.

And that, I think, is the distinctive thing about human conscious thought, that we can react to thoughts about the world rather than just to the world itself. So sure, animals can have conscious perceptions of the world, but I'm not sure that they can have conscious thoughts about the world that are detached from immediate perception. Just to play devil's advocate on this, look, we are part of the animal kingdom now.

We have close genetic relatives. What makes you so sure that they aren't doing the same kind of thing as you do when you think about the roadblock? Well, that's a very interesting question. I think it's quite a puzzle, I think, for people thinking about the human mind. On the one hand, the human mind does seem to be quite different from the minds of other animals. On the other hand, as you say, we are part of an evolutionary history and physiologically we are very similar to other non-human animals. But I think the fact is that we are different.

And there is one crucial difference, which is that we have language that seems, certainly in the full-blown form that we have, is unique to humans.

So I think there are reasons for thinking that there could be a sharp discontinuity between us and other animals. And I think this is connected with conscious thought. Indeed, I think language is connected with conscious thought. And actually, it is the presence of language that enables the kinds of conscious thought that we have. So I wouldn't say categorically that animals have nothing like this at all. I think they might have rudimentary forms of it, but nothing like the full-blown form that we have. That fits very much with the recognition that

One of the things that makes us different from other animals is we do have language, that it's universal for human beings to have language and where apes or other animals are able to learn some language, they learn it from human beings.

Yes, I think that's right. I mean, a lot of people believe that humans have a special adaptation, evolutionary adaptation for language. And I think there's a very strong case for thinking that that's true. Language is universal among humans. It develops very rapidly. And certainly it's undeniable that we have a facility for language that no other animal has. And I think that is the root of our difference.

What makes the human mind special is that it's a mind that has language and can use language for cognitive purposes, to represent the world to itself in ways that vastly enhance its own powers.

So we don't just use language, I think, for communicating with each other. We use language for communicating with ourselves, for stimulating ourselves in new ways, for representing the world to ourselves, for representing situations that aren't actually real. We can represent counterfactual situations, situations that might happen. And this enables us to anticipate, to plan, to prepare for eventualities that haven't yet occurred.

This, I think, is the function of conscious thought. Conscious thought, I think, is essentially a kind of speaking to ourselves. So we might say that one of the main functions of mind generally in us and other animals is to lock us on to the world, to make us sensitive to the world around us so that we can respond quickly to changes in the world, to enable us to negotiate the world in a rapid and flexible way. And that, I think, is true of our minds. It's true of the minds of other animals. If you think about, say, walking down a busy street,

You're continually monitoring what's happening around you. You're adjusting your behaviour, the pace at which you walk, where you place your feet, how you avoid other pedestrians, plan your route to the shop where you're going. This is quite a complicated process, as we know from attempts to replicate it artificially. And yet we do it so easily. Millions of years of evolution have prepared us very well to do this kind of thing, to engage with the world in this online way. Now, the function of the conscious mind, I think, is quite different.

It's not to lock us onto the world, it's to unlock us from the world, to enable us to consider alternative worlds, to consider what we would do if things weren't as we expect them to be, to make plans for how we might change the world. I can see the advantages of being able to use conscious thought from time to time when I'm anticipating problems or running through possible ways in which my life might go and so on.

But it's hard to see how that evolved if the rest of the animal kingdom is locked onto the world. That seems to work pretty well most of the time. How could you get to a stage where suddenly we have this other species which is able to step back and think about what might happen?

Yes, indeed. This is, I think, perhaps the central puzzle about the human mind. How did it acquire this kind of revolutionary new ability? Now, I think the answer to this, and it's an answer that has been anticipated by many people, most particularly Daniel Dennett, is that it didn't involve some big evolutionary change. It came from learning new ways of using abilities that we largely share with animals.

that it involved learning what Dennett calls good tricks. There is one distinct thing, I think, that we have, which I've already mentioned, and that is language. And I assume that language evolved primarily for communicative purposes, though that is itself controversial. But once we had language, we had this explicit representational system that we could then use to represent the world to ourselves in a conscious way. We could talk about situations that weren't present, and thereby we could think about those situations.

And conscious thought is, I think, primarily an internalisation of talk. It's talking to yourself. I'm not suggesting that everything that we would class as conscious thought is language-involving, but I think a lot of it is. And I think it's language that has enabled the flexibility, the creativity of conscious thought. So I think that without language, conscious thought would be much, much more impoverished.

Perhaps we could imagine situations, we could visualise situations, drawing pictures perhaps that would represent the world and that would enable us to imagine alternative scenarios. But I think they wouldn't have the representational power that language has. The descriptive power of language is virtually unlimited.

I was intrigued when you were talking about how, from an evolutionary point of view, conscious thought wasn't something new, that it was using existing processes. I wasn't quite clear what those processes would be. The key one, I think, for the kind of conscious thought that we have is imagination. Through imagination, we are able to produce new stimuli for ourselves. We don't have to wait until we're confronted with the roadblock to stop. We can conjure up a sentence or an image, if you like, of the roadblock.

And that is a new kind of stimulus that affects our behaviour in distinctive ways and that can serve as a proxy for the real world stimulus. So I think language is a key ingredient, imagination is a key ingredient, and of course the ability to manipulate language and to manipulate mental imagery. Those are probably the key elements in this. Conscious thoughts are in a sense a kind of representation to ourselves of the world as it is or as it might be.

But doesn't that imply a viewer in our head, this little homunculus that's sitting in there watching and assessing what's going on, and then that will have another little homunculus in its head and so on ad infinitum. How do you avoid that homunculus problem?

Well, it certainly would be a problem if the picture were committed to that. No, I don't think it's a problem because the viewer, the audience for these thoughts is exactly the same as the audience for things that you say to me. It's me. I'm listening to you and I'm understanding you in virtue of all kinds of processes that take place in my brain. And similarly, I am the audience for my own conscious thoughts.

These are, as I suggested, internalisations of utterances of things I might say to you. And I hear them just as I hear the things that you say to me. And they have a similar sort of effect on me to the things you say to me. You might ask me whether roadworks are due to start today. And I just might say, yes, of course, I'm...

Similarly, I ask myself, are roadworks due to... Again, I have the same reaction. So there need be no audience for these things smaller than me. Now, of course, there are going to be all sorts of processes in my head that make me able to understand, but the audience, the subject, is just me. Conscious thoughts are thoughts that are accessible to me. They are objects for me. They are mental representations that I have.

have, as opposed perhaps to mental representations that my brain systems may have. Some people think there is a language of thought, a kind of mentalese language, which is used for the brain's internal mental processing. But that isn't a language for me. I don't know what mentalese is like. It's a hypothesis that

that cognitive scientists have come up with to explain how I do the things that I do. But these sentences, if they are there, are only available to other mental systems. They're not available to me. The crucial thing about conscious thoughts is that they're available to me.

for which I am the audience, to which I can respond, which I can evaluate, try and improve them, correct them. And these, again, are a whole raft of abilities that I think are pretty much unique to humans. I don't think animals have these metacognitive abilities. This introduces a whole sort of normative dimension to the mind. We can start asking whether our thoughts are justified, which we can reflect upon and evaluate and improve. Keith Frankis, thank you very much. Thank you very much, Nigel.

MindBytes was made in association with the Meaning for the Brain and Meaning for the Person project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. For further information about the project, go to www.nicolashay.co.uk. That's Shay, S-H-E-A. For more Philosophy Bites and how to support us, please go to www.philosophybites.com.