The Unconcious Origins of the Will

We are conscious of only a tiny fraction of the information that our brains process in each moment... The intention to do one thing and not another does not originate in consciousness--rather, it appears in consciousness, as does any thought or impulse that might oppose it.

I love the way he put that. Harris is clear in this chapter that physical determinism is irrelevant to his thesis, due to the above. This is where one typically gets into trouble, identifying the will or even the self merely with conscious thought. Consider, for instance, this from the Wikipedia page on consciousness:

As Max Velmans and Susan Schneider wrote in The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness: "Anything that we are aware of at a given moment forms part of our consciousness, making conscious experience at once the most familiar and most mysterious aspect of our lives."

What a complete waste of pixels. Not only does it not say anything, in that statement they are clearly using the pronoun we to only refer to conscious thought, completely identifying the self only with the conscious process. Whereas it's quite clear, as Harris briefly but effectively discusses, that almost all behavior originates unconsciously. Obviously, to make any sense of this we must decide: what it is we call consciousness?

When searching for such clarity be careful: don't assume there is such a thing, a concrete referent, or a Platonic ideal, that we are trying to attach a word to. Rather, decide what the word refers to and stick with it. First we need to recognize that the mind is modular: there are distinct, relatively independent functions, and consciousness is one of them. My favorite description of consciousness, and the one I find most operationally useful, comes from an approach in Pinker's book How the Mind Works. He approached the question from a perspective of reverse engineering: what cognitive problem did consciousness evolve to solve?

The hardware (or wetware) of the brain is a massive associate matrix of nodes with analog inputs and digital outputs. What sort of computations is this hardware good at? Fuzzy pattern matching. You can train the outputs to fire more-or-less if the inputs match a certain pattern more-or-less. The visual system is probably the most salient example of this.

But when does one encounter limitations of the hardware's capability? Problems with combinatorial complexity. How do you choose items for dinner from the grocery store? The possible combinations are astronomical... pattern matching is hopeless. You need to form a narrative: what do you like? What have you had recently? What looks fresh? What do you usually combine with that.? You need a serial process of elimination. The conscious mind is a simulation of a serial process running on parallel hardware.