By way of warming up to this notion of the adaptive unconscious. Wilson asks us to think about proprioception. Right now, as you watch this lecture, you are sitting or standing, maybe you're walking. I don't know if it's possible to run, but your body is in some position or other and you're probably aware of the position that your body is in. If you can without putting yourself or others in danger, close your eyes. You can detect probably very easily what the positions are of your limbs. Are your knees bent, are your hands clenched, closed, or are they open, are you sitting or your lying down? These are all forms of proprioception, which psychologists think of as a kind of sixth sense, a sensory way of knowing what's happening with our bodies. Wilson wants to suggest that generally speaking, we monitor our bodies proprioceptively, constantly at least while we're awake and we do so outside of the spotlight of conscious awareness. We generally don't have to pay conscious attention to the fact that for example, our legs are bent when we're about to get up out of a chair. Whereas, there might be people and there have been people who have lost that proprioceptive ability and whose lives become vastly more difficult as a result. In the famous book "Pride and a Daily Marathon", we hear the story of Ian Waterman who I think at age 19, if I'm recalling correctly, lost his proprioceptive ability due to a neurological disorder and so was unable to, without looking at himself, know what was happening with his body. You can get I think a little inkling of what that would be like if you've ever had an arm or leg fall asleep while you were lying down for example. You might find, okay, my arm is falling asleep while I literally fell asleep with my head on my arm and now here it is, this kind of limp thing and I can't feel it from within until at least the blood comes back in, the nerves start losing up again. I'm not sure what exactly what happens physiologically there, but it feels like I have this limb, but I don't know what's happening within unless I look at it. Imagine that happens to your entire body, that as I understand it would be like to lose proprioception. Waterman has to go through a daily marathon, so to speak, in order to just go through a day in his life. In order to get dressed, he's got to watch carefully everything that happens with his feet, and his legs, and his arms to know precisely how to put on his pants and put his shirt on. He's got to be watching himself constantly and we're told that one day, when there's a power outage, lights went out, I guess it was nighttime, the lights went out. He was plunged into darkness and he fell into a pile in the process because he couldn't watch himself anymore. This is an example that dramatically reveals how much, according to Wilson, unconscious processing is going on at any given moment for such banal daily activities as proprioception. So, one core idea about the notion of the adaptive unconscious for Wilson is that it's a way in which we, so to speak, outsource intelligence. Just as a corporation might outsource some of the work, pay somebody else to do work that it doesn't have time to do that would take up too much of its resources do on its own, so too the human mind outsources a great deal of its work to the unconscious mind. For example, proprioception does the work of keeping track of what our limbs are doing relative to each other, relative to the world outside of us, so we don't have to pay conscious attention to that process and if we're forced to the way that Ian Waterman was forced into, it's a huge overwhelming task and you can imagine how inefficient our lives would be if we had to do that all the time. Just and that's just for proprioception put that alongside, as we'll see in a moment the various other things that are imputed to the unconscious mind and you'll be grateful that you've got it according to Wilson. Other aspects of the unconscious, they're the adaptive unconscious include the following, that it's relatively modular. You've got different components, so to speak, different modules that carry on in relative independence of one another. So, I've talked about proprioception, likewise there's perception, perceptual experience that allows us to determine how far something away is or how fast it's moving towards you, very important for negotiating your environment and that's something that you generally be able to do without paying conscious attention to the process. Likewise, our reaction is a huge part of our social competence. Responding to faces both when you see a face whether it's one you're familiar with, and whether or not it is, what's going on in that face. Is that a face that's manifesting happiness, or anger, threat, invitingness, openness, etc. Those are different emotional expressions and faces that most, not all, that most of us are able to determine with no effort at all presumably because of a very fast, very effective, effortless unconscious process. Another example would be language. Let me change focus on that a little bit partly because that's at least one of my areas of research and so I think about it a great deal. Think about language. Suppose for example that you ask somebody to go to a movie with you and they reply, "I'd like to, I have to study tonight." That generally will be an answer by a way of saying, "No, I can't go to the movie with you because I'm going to be studying." But notice that your friend who answered the question didn't say, didn't actually explicitly out of the words "I can't go because I've got a study", they just said I've got to study. There has to be a leap in on your part that goes from the information that they've got a study to the conclusion that therefore won't be able to go to the movie with you. That's a leap that you do effortlessly and at a split second time frame, but nevertheless involves something that is a cognitive achievement on your part. Not all of us can do it. Some people who are early language learners often have trouble doing so, for example. Nevertheless, it's part of an, Wilson would say unconscious processing mechanism. That's what's known as the pragmatics of language, that aspect of language that involves our meaning things that go beyond what would literally say. Another example is the semantics of language that has to do with the literal meaning of the word. So, if you pass by a billboard, the billboard might say something like "Joe's hamburgers are the tastiest burgers in town" and you without any effort so long as it's in a language that you're competent in, without any effort, you can't help but understand what that sentence says. It's not as if you have to engage in any effort or any conscious processing to determine what's being said there. However, compare that with a case in which you were just learning a new language and you're in a country in which that's the language that's spoken. You might have to go through some conscious effort. Would you say, "That's the verb, there's the noun over there, one of them, they relate to each other in some way" and then you consciously construct the meaning of the sentence on that basis. So now that's semantic processing for the new language is effortful, painstaking, exhausting whereas semantic processing for the language that you're already competent in is lickety-split, effortless, feels like it happens instantaneously, and so on. Then there's a middle case, what I call the pragmatics of language in which you have to engage in some effort, but it's generally speaking, largely effortless, and generally speaking something that you don't pay any attention to. So now, two of those are examples not included the one which you're learning a new language, but for home language as well as for the pragmatics case in which you are unconsciously processing what people say. So now, Wilson also suggest that proprioception, facial recognition, perception of the external world, language processing are examples of unconscious processes that enable us to get through our daily lives with relative efficiency and if you had to put all those processes into conscious awareness, it would be massively inefficient because you'd have to think through consciously, deliberately, painstakingly what the information that you're given and you hardly get anything done. So, just as a corporation behaves much more efficiently if it outsources some of its work, so too I can process things more efficiently by outsourcing various axes or processes that require intelligence and that makes my life much more livable so to speak. So, if we're going to get a better picture of the adaptive unconscious, it's going to include further features such as the following. As we said, the adaptive unconscious is supposed to comprise a number of different modules, different relatively separate components. So that for example, if I have an accident that causes me to have trouble with facial recognition, then that won't necessarily make difficulty for my ability to understand language and vice versa. These are modular in that sense. Likewise, the adaptive unconscious includes what's known as an online pattern detector and by that I mean we generally, automatically, and effortlessly respond to patterns, not always to our benefit, but nevertheless, it's at least might have evolutionary value. The idea that comes, for example, from Joseph LeDoux, a neuroscientist, talks about examples such as imagine you're hiking in the mountains and you see out of peripheral vision, something that's kind of brown and curvy off to the side. Now you might jump away from that, you might even run before you have to give it a careful look. A peripheral vision might have produced by virtue of its pattern, detection activities, something that sends a signal that there's a snake and that might have caused a fear reaction on your part. It might only be later on when you take a closer look at it after screwing up your courage, that after taking a closer look, you say, "Oh, that's just a stick that looks like a snake from peripheral vision. I looked at it more carefully, it's not." But you had automatic pattern detecting kind of reaction that engage the emotion of fear as a result of this work of the adaptive unconscious. Again, the adaptive unconscious is concerned primarily with the here and now. It's not very good at planning far into the future. It tends to be more impulsive, it tends to help us negotiate immediate situations, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. As I've said, it's automatic, and let me spell it out a little bit more. The adaptive unconscious is automatic in the sense that it's not something you have to will or choose or do deliberately by means of exertion of effort. In that sense, according to the definition behavior that we gave when we were talking about Gilbert Ryle, it would now count as an example of behavior nevertheless as something that happens to me, it's not so different from, for example, processing that occurs for metabolism for example. The automatic processing system is relatively rigid in the sense that it's difficult to change at will by means of direct intervention. But as I've mentioned, it can be changed over time with some effort. Nevertheless, it tends to make us respond automatically just thinking of when something is falling towards you and you react, perhaps hitting somebody in the cheek in the process even though what was falling on you was a leaf, it wasn't a brick. The adaptive unconscious tends to be precocious in the sense that it adapts fairly early in life unlike more higher cognitive processing, which tends to develop fully for many adults not until they're into the early 20s, whereas the adaptive unconscious tends to be developed pretty well by age somewhere between five and 10. The adaptive unconscious tend to be more sensitive to negativity by way of a kind of relatively paranoid protecting myself kind of default response to the world. Then finally, let's think about what it means to say that the adaptive unconscious is adaptive. The idea is that, the one that Wilson wants to propose is that this aspect of our unconscious minds is the result of our being products of evolution through natural selection. As products of evolution of the natural selection, the idea is early humans or hominids might've gained at advantage by virtue of outsourcing some intellectual processes, some mental processing outside of consciousness. Perhaps, unconscious processing was the original form in which thought occurred in, for example, earlier primates, primates that inhabited the earth before we did. Nevertheless, the idea is that, for example, as hunters, our ancestor would have had a great advantage being able to, for example, process without having to pay conscious attention to things in their environment, that they were able to filter out while they were focusing on prey for instance. As social beings, it behooved our ancestors to be able to have immediate, automatic, effortless recognition of the emotional expression on each other's faces, for example. So the idea is that, having an adaptive unconscious that did various things automatically without conscious intervention made our lives more successful, gave us a survival advantage perhaps in comparison to other species with whom we competed, because it allowed us to apply conscious attention only to those things that are more difficult, that were novel aspects in the environment that required that effortful, painstaking thought known as conscious decision making, conscious reasoning, etc. The rest we could outsource and make our way through the world much more efficiently.
