Believing

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Believing Page 13

by Michael McGuire


  Beliefs and divides are seldom experienced during automatic responses largely because of their short duration. However, they appear frequently following such responses. For example, you can remember what you experienced: you recall seeing the dog, pressing the brake, and swerving the car. You are likely to believe that you perceived the dog and initiated your response to avoid hitting it.8 Because the event is over and you missed hitting the dog, the divide separating your belief from what you recall—your evidence—is likely to be narrow.

  It might seem from this example that people can’t know what they are doing. But that isn’t entirely the case. You do know what you did almost immediately after acting. It’s just that the belief that you were aware of your actions prior to acting is wrong. On this point, the evidence is clear: studies consistently show that neuronal activity precedes awareness of the intention to act or an act.9

  Your response to the dog is not a random behavior. Automatic responses are dependent on the presence of transparent models (sometimes referred to as templates or plans) for dealing with familiar situations. In this example, if the model is mostly innate, a first-time driver would respond essentially the same way as an experienced driver. Recall that people don’t have to undergo extensive learning to withdraw their hands from a hot flame. They do it right the first time. On the other hand, if the model is mostly learned, the first-time driver is likely to hit the dog, do nothing, panic, or wreck the car.

  Automatic responses are exceedingly common. For example, you drop something fragile and you “automatically” act to catch it before you are aware of your behavior. Or you experience an itch and your hand starts to move to scratch the itch before you are aware of the movement. Or you trip while walking: as you fall, your response to prevent hurting yourself begins before you are aware that you are responding.

  Models are critical to the scenario developed in this and the remaining chapters. They are discussed in detail in chapter 14. For the present, the important points are as follows: Unperceived representations of models appear to exist. They are stored in the brain. They are triggered by internal and external information.10 They can initiate or bias action.

  2. Belief that a thoughtful decision is being made. You go to a restaurant for dinner. Three entrees are offered: fish, meat, and pasta. You have eaten each before. As you review the menu, you sense that you are making a decision about which item to select. A decision is being made, but not in awareness.

  In this situation, midbrain dopamine systems associated with pleasure and reward appear to be activated by environmental cues—menu items—each of which is associated with a different level of activation of pleasure and reward systems.11 As you deliberate about what to eat, unperceived neural correlates of mental rehearsal precede decision and action—that is, the brain is planning ahead and evaluating actions before one is aware of pending actions or before they are initiated.12 If, in the past, the taste of fish was more pleasurable than that of pasta or meat—that is, of the three menu items, fish is associated with the greatest degree of activation of pleasure and reward systems—you are likely to select fish for dinner. Your past reward and pleasure history predicts your behavior.13

  Should your dinner partner ask why you selected fish, you are likely to reply that the last time you ate pasta and meat, you didn’t like them, but you do like fish. As with avoiding hitting the dog, your belief about your choice occurs after the choice of fish has been initiated. Nonetheless, your answer is likely to be a reasonably accurate way of characterizing events in the brain that occurred out of awareness. This example invites a revision of the view that beliefs sometimes come first and explanations for beliefs come second.14 At least three steps are involved, not just two: (1) a stimulus initiates a belief, (2) awareness of the belief occurs next, and (3) awareness of searching for explanations follows.

  How you perceive divides in menu-type (multiple-choice) situations varies. If, in the past, your experiences with pasta and meat were unpleasant, there is sufficient direct evidence to narrow divides for either choice: you believe that they are unpleasant-tasting foods and you have evidence justifying your view. The divide will also be narrow for fish: you have memories of its pleasant taste. On the other hand, if you haven’t tasted any of the items on the menu, the divide for each of the entrees will be indeterminate.

  3. Belief that you have planned a trip. You have a holiday from work. You wish to take a vacation, so you go about planning it. Your choice is to visit a park in Colorado. A day goes by and you alter the plan: you will include a visit with a friend who lives near the park prior to visiting the park. Another day passes and you alter your plan again; this time, you will visit your friend after visiting the park. Following several more revisions, the details of the trip seem finalized. You telephone your friend and confirm that you will arrive on a specific date.

  Through all of this, you believe that you are making decisions about the trip. But, as with the previous examples, your belief follows on events taking place outside awareness: as noted, the brain plans and evaluates actions before one is aware of the pending actions or before they commence.15

  This explanation invites several questions. First, why is the park in Colorado selected? External information, such as reading a travel magazine, is one possible influence. It could have triggered your interest—this would be an example of situational belief, discussed earlier. A second possibility is that the brain is wandering, and memories, beliefs, imaginings, and emotions are experienced in awareness without your sense that you are initiating them.16 For example, at one time in the past, you may have wished to visit the park but were unable to do so. You didn’t recall this wish when you started planning the trip. But at a moment during planning, your brain wanders and your interest in visiting the park seemingly appears from nowhere.

  Second, why is the park selected in preference to alternative sites? In a process similar to selecting an item from a menu, the activation of pleasure and reward systems is likely to be part of the answer. You might have been to the park before and enjoyed it, in which case, there are pleasurable memories. Or you might have been to a similar park. Pleasure and reward are unlikely to be the only influencing factors, however. Pragmatic models that deal with details of the trip may influence your decision. Such models are based on past experience and secondary evidence. In this example, a pragmatic model would address factors such as the time required to drive to the park, the energy required for activities such as hiking, and the expenses of the trip. Unperceived competition may occur between pragmatic models and pleasure and reward systems: the pleasure and reward systems may be activated, but if the pragmatic model predicts excessive costs and very little available time to spend in the park, the trip may be cancelled or modified.

  Third, how does visiting your friend enter your plans? A possible answer is that the location of the park and the location of your friend who lives near to the park are connected in the brain. It’s easy to demonstrate this possibility: close your eyes and think of a city and note what follows in awareness. Then pick another city and compare what follows in awareness with what appeared for the first city.

  4. Free will. Is there free will? That is, is there voluntary choice or decision? Answers to this question are far from clear.17

  Consider the following example. You have inherited a considerable amount of money. You wish to invest it, but you have minimal experience in financial matters. From a variety of sources, you obtain recommendations about investing. With each new recommendation, you experience a change in your evolving plan about how best to invest. Last week, you were thinking about buying stocks, but today, an annuity looks most interesting. After a while, there are multiple options. Throughout all of this, you believe you are involved in making a voluntary choice based on the recommendations you have received.

  In this example, unperceived brain systems appear to be creating and revising largely learned models in response to new information. As new models are developing, they are infl
uenced by memories of prior behavior, pleasure, reward, pragmatics, and a variety of other factors, such as one’s age and sex, health, and social status. A likely critical factor in the revision process is the brain’s rehearsal of possible outcomes for each version of a model. This process appears to combine unperceived neural rehearsal for possible future events and “preplay”: “internal neuronal dynamics during resting or sleep organize parts of the brain into temporal sequences that contribute to the encoding of related experiences in the future.”18

  Eventually, the recommendations for how to invest your money cease. You invest in gold, something you hadn’t considered when you began your search. A free-will choice has occurred because there have been extended periods of awareness associated with creating, revising, and assessing a variety of models and rejecting all but one.19

  Free will can be put another way. Choices aren’t random. They don’t occur without the presence of models or some equivalent. In this example, the models deal with investment choices and possible financial outcomes. What has happened is that you have selected a model from those available in your library of models. But note that your choice is limited to models in your library. The choice is “free” in the sense that you might have opted for investing in bonds rather than gold.

  Throughout this process, you are likely to believe that you are evaluating different investment possibilities. You are, but, again, your belief temporally trails unperceived evaluation and decision-making processes. You may also believe that you are reviewing models and rejecting some because they don’t seem to promise sufficient financial return. This also is happening.

  At least two factors appear essential for free will. One is the availability of models from which to select. The second is the presence of systems that can prioritize models to facilitate selection. Systems dealing with pleasure and reward and pragmatics have been mentioned as facilitators. But as will be discussed in coming chapters, there are other possibilities.

  The four examples are consistent with Burton’s characterization of awareness: “The feelings of knowing, correctness, conviction, and certainty aren’t deliberate conclusions and conscious choices. These mental sensations happen to us.”20 What has been added here is an emphasis on the timing of events in the brain and a discussion about possible brain systems that might account for them.

  If the beliefs and divides we experience in awareness are illusions, are there significant consequences? From the perspective of daily life, there would seem to be few—after all, you did miss hitting the dog, select fish for dinner, visit a park and your friend, and purchase gold. Ideologically, however, consequences can be anticipated. These will deal with how humankind conceives of itself and the importance it attributes to awareness as the initiator of choice.

  THE PHYSICAL BRAIN

  The brain’s physical properties are those of material-energy-space-time reality. They promise to inform our understanding of beliefs, divides, and awareness.

  The brain has systems that are sensitive to environmental information, such as noises, smells, light, and faces. It has connections throughout the body that transmit information about touch, temperature, pain, and location. It has systems that initiate action.21 It has systems that perform information-processing tasks, such as spatial representation, causal modeling, belief creation, and belief rejection. It creates and stores representations of memories, beliefs, and models. Many of these systems are involved in the creation and management of beliefs and divides. Which systems are involved varies in part with the type of belief and divide.22

  Events in the brain occur in a chemical-and-electrical milieu. There are cells that transmit electricity via releasing molecules that initiate electrical activity in connecting cells. Our current understanding of the brain suggests that representations of beliefs, divides, memories, and models reside in this milieu, which consists of cells, their connections, and their surrounding environment. The chemical nature of cells means that molecules are involved (recall that many of the brain’s molecules are affected by other molecules, such as those of drugs). Molecules have weight and structure. That they do means that they are not infinitely flexible.

  Viewed this way, two uses of belief and divide have been introduced. One use refers to the beliefs and divides that we experience in awareness. The other use refers to their unperceived representations in the brain. Although it is uncertain if what we experience in awareness conforms to or can be interpreted using the laws of physics, events in the chemical-and-electrical milieu follow these laws.23

  The default state of the brain appears to be one of continual electrical-chemical activity so that there is sufficient energy and metabolism for the preservation and management of tissues responsible for systems, memories, beliefs, models, and the like.24 For example, during resting states in both humans and nonhuman primates, there is metabolic and electrical activity throughout the brain, and specific areas exhibit highly organized patterns of activity.25 Further, the resting brain appears to recapitulate activity patterns that occurred during recent experiences.26 In effect, not only is the resting brain active chemically, metabolically, and electrically, but it also appears to be involved in internal housekeeping and information management, such as belief and divide consolidation and revision, as well as preparation for the future.

  LIKELY ANSWERS

  What can these systems suggest about beliefs and divides and awareness? The likely answer is that what we experience in awareness as beliefs and divides reflect representations stored in the brain.27 Two possible ways this might happen will be considered with the caveat that there is no compelling evidence to support either way.

  One way is analogous to changing the luminescence of a variable-intensity lightbulb. In its resting state, the energy level of representations of beliefs and divides is low and they are not experienced in awareness. In an energized state, beliefs and divides are experienced in awareness (cartoonists may envision this possibility when they draw a lighted lightbulb above the head of a person having a thought). Our awareness of beliefs and divides thus may be due to changes in the energy state of representations in response to internal or external information. This possibility might be termed the activation hypothesis. One of its attractive features is that in doesn’t require a transformation of the information in representations to accompany energy-state changes.

  A second possibility is that there is a transformation process in which beliefs and divides experienced in awareness reflect alterations of their representations. As mentioned, there is not a great deal of evidence in support of this possibility. Nonetheless it is plausible, perhaps more so than the activation hypothesis. (If I had to guess, transformation would be my choice.) It does, however, have to address the fact that molecules are not infinitely flexible and electricity has specific qualities that may determine the types of transformations that can occur as well as affect what is perceived in awareness.

  Let me pause a moment and review. What is being suggested here is this: On one hand, we experience beliefs and divides in awareness. They are illusions in that they are not initially consciously responsible for what we experience or the basis for decisions or actions even though we perceive them this way. On the other hand, there are representations of beliefs, divides, and models that reside in the material brain. These representations continually undergo revisions and updating. They are related to what appears in awareness. The degree to which what is experienced in awareness accurately reflects these representations is unknown, although there is no reason to assume that there is a great deal of difference between representations and what is reflected in awareness.

  Behavior is initiated or biased by unperceived representations, not the contents of awareness.

  A WARNING

  Readers should not depart from this chapter assuming that there is consensus regarding many of the points that have been discussed. For example, for many authors, states of awareness (or states of consciousness) are not passive states for which unperceived
brain operations are responsible. Rather, they are viewed as having influence or control over selected brain operations and behavior.28

  INFORMATION-PROCESSING OPERATIONS

  Information has many definitions and ways in which it is conceived.29 The one adopted here is as follows: information = energy that alters brain activity. It could be defined in terms of other measurable features as it is in information theory.30 Only the energy definition is used here. It is essentially synonymous with the usual meaning of stimulus: something that rouses or incites to activity.

  Viewed this way, there are both internal and external sources of information. For example, an unexpected but familiar sound is usually sufficient to initiate awareness of the noise and belief about its possible cause. Such responses are consistent with studies indicating that both external and internal information are forms of energy and alter the probability of the contents of awareness. There are also well-studied examples of mirroring, a state in which neuronal activity in an observer’s brain closely corresponds to the neuronal activity responsible for the behavior of the person or animal being observed—in effect, an observation initiates a change in an observer’s brain activity (see chapter 13).

  Applying these points to beliefs and divides, likely effects of information include: initiating the processing of both external and internal information; initiating the creation and storage of beliefs, divides, and models; reorganizing representations of beliefs, divides, and models; activating pleasure and reward centers; initiating belief and divide representations that are reflected in awareness; and initiating behavior prior to awareness that the behavior is occurring.

  Other possible brain features and systems are discussed in coming chapters. For this chapter, selected key points are these. The brain has multiple, unperceived information-processing systems. They influence beliefs and divides as we experience them. For example, preplay and event rehearsal narrow divides in advance of the awareness of a belief. When models are involved in free will, choices are limited to a person’s available models. And it is information (energy) that initiates unperceived systems and operations of the brain that are reflected in awareness of beliefs and behavior.

 

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