“People Have Limited Knowledge. What’s the Remedy? Nobody Knows”: New York Times review of “The Knowledge Illusion” forgets “The Unconscious”

“In The Knowledge Illusion, the cognitive scientists Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach hammer another nail into the coffin of the rational individual. From the 17th century to the 20th century, Western thought depicted individual human beings as independent rational agents…”

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/18/books/review/knowledge-illusion-steven-sloman-philip-fernbach.html

But Western thought has long given up on the idea that people are always rational, that they always know why they think what they think or do what they do. I discussed the centuries-old Western idea of “the unconscious” in a recent post:

March 31, 2017

“The Unconscious”: First, Freud did not discover it (it was already well known); Second, it’s a misnomer, since it refers to conscious, alternate personalities.

Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unconscious_mind

“The term ‘unconscious’ was coined by the 18th-century German Romantic philosopher Friedrich Schelling and later introduced into English by the poet and essayist Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Influences on thinking that originate from outside of an individual's consciousness were reflected in the ancient ideas of divine inspiration, and the predominant role of the gods in affecting motives and actions. Unconscious aspects of mentality were referred to between 2500 and 600 BC in the Hindu texts known as the Vedas. Paracelsus is credited as the first to make mention of an unconscious aspect of cognition in 1567. William Shakespeare explored the role of the unconscious in many of his plays, without naming it as such. In addition, Western philosophers such as Arthur Schopenhauer, Baruch Spinoza, Gottfried Leibniz, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Søren Kierkegaard, and Friedrich Nietzsche used the word unconscious. In 1880, Edmond Colsenet supports at the Sorbonne, a philosophy thesis on the unconscious. Elie Rabier and Alfred Fouillee perform syntheses of the unconscious ‘at a time when Freud was not interested in the concept.’ In 1890, when psychoanalysis was still unheard of, William James, in his monumental treatise on psychology (The Principles of Psychology), examined the way Schopenhauer, von Hartmann, Janet, Binet and others had used the term 'unconscious' and ‘subconscious.' Historian of psychology Mark Altschule observes that, 'It is difficult—or perhaps impossible—to find a nineteenth-century psychologist or psychiatrist who did not recognize unconscious cerebration as not only real but of the highest importance.' ”

The Discovery of the Unconscious by Henri F. Ellenberger (Basic Books, 1970)

“During the entire nineteenth century, hypnosis remained the basic approach to the unconscious mind. However…it was supplemented by [the study of]…mediums…automatic writing…multiple personality…Chevreul’s pendulum…[etc.]” Freud came later.

“The Unconscious”: Misconception and Misnomer

The idea of “the unconscious” assumes, incorrectly, that a person may have only one consciousness. Posthypnotic amnesia demonstrates two states of consciousness: 1. what the person knows and remembers when in hypnosis, and 2. what the person knows and remembers when not in hypnosis. What the person knows and remembers only in hypnosis is “unconscious” only from the point of view of the person when not in hypnosis. Hypnosis that involves posthypnotic amnesia might be viewed as artificially-induced multiple personality.

In multiple personality, per se, what an alternate personality knows and thinks may be “unconscious” from the point of view of the host personality, but it is quite conscious to the alternate personality (who is conscious simultaneously with, but outside the awareness of, the host personality).

Of course, there are certain types of truly unconscious processes. For example, there are physiological processes of which a person is not conscious. Also, there are some cognitive functions, such as recognizing faces, of which a person is conscious of the result, but not of how it was done (assuming there is no face-recognizing personality, per se).

Most things that a writer’s host or editorial personalities attribute to their “unconscious” are things that one or another of their alternate personalities consciously thought up. Give credit where credit is due.