le troisième: the adaptive unconscious
I’m on a flight back to NYC post-holidays and I can’t seem to shake the reverberating thoughts focused around the central themes of the last book I read over the break. My latest read has been a book gifted to me by a dear friend (if you can’t tell already, books are one of my joys in life!) titled, Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious by Tim Wilson - a fascinating read about the unconscious and conscious mind, history of the study of the conscious self, and really trying to uncover what purpose, if anything at all, do the conscious and unconscious minds serve? More than anything, reading this book guided me to the realization that I don’t shape life as much as life shapes me. There is so much processing going on in our unconscious minds that it is inconceivable to fully self-actualize - and it begs the premise that it is mostly our unconscious self that actually guides our daily decisions and life. The adaptive unconscious can be defined as the mental processes that define and characterize our behaviors - with all these processes happening ‘behind the scenes’ so to say; rapid decisions and processes accounting towards the thousands per day that ultimately make up your daily habits and being. It’s an interesting theory that somewhat humbled me when I read through the book, a kind of surrender to a greater force or energy that is both within me and also affecting me on a daily basis.
During the onset of starting to dive into this book, I immediately analogized the adaptive unconscious to an LLM, a type of artificial intelligence (I know, I know, very VC of me/the term is saturated within the zeitgeist right now but stay with me, the analogy will actually help paint a fuller picture - I promise). An LLM, a large-language model, is a type of artificial intelligence model that can generate text, audio, visuals, etc. LLMs are a type of generative AI - meaning they ‘generate’ or produce some sort of output. They’re built upon large amounts of input (aka data); LLMs are trained on these huge sets of data - everything from music, to newspapers, to scholarly reports and articles, LLMs are able to swiftly sparse through thousands if not millions of inputs of data to produce an answer or text in mere seconds. And this is where the analogy comes in - as I was initially reading the book, the adaptive unconscious felt like an LLM to me; rapidly and efficiently making decisions based on data sets (previous human experiences, primal instincts, biases, feelings, etc.) to produce a decision point, behavior or external reaction. Wilson also mentions that the adaptive unconscious is also poor at long-term planning or fact checks (these are better determined using more recent perceptions by the conscious mind) - and similarly, many AI models ‘hallucinate’ - a concept in which the AI learns incomplete or incorrect patterns because they were fed unreliable data sets and end up producing incorrect responses. One example in the book was in regards to quick decision making during a hike - in this scenario a hiker walking along a dirt road spots a long brown object ten feet ahead of him, his first instinct was to fear that it was a snake based on the initial color and length of the object. Upon closer review as he neared the object, the hiker is at ease realizing that the object is just a mere branch of a tree fallen along the path. An innocuous example of the adaptive unconscious making a quick rationalization which did not end up being true - and where the conscious mind took in the information upon closer review and felt at ease. The link between the adaptive unconscious and LLMs/generative AI was fascinating to me and something I’ll probably fiddle with as I continue to think about the book.
A larger concept towards the middle of the book centered on introspection and trying to better understand how humans can know themselves, understanding the symbiotic relationship between the conscious and unconscious mind. The main question standing - what is the point or larger reasoning for self-analysis? As you have probably gathered by now, a lot of my writing is around my own introspection or perspectives on life, the human experience, forms of connection, and anthropology. But if what Wilson is postulating is there is only so much we can know about ourselves and the world around us given that the adaptive unconscious processes and maps out our daily behaviors and actions, how much does introspection really tell us about ourselves? Or even further, is there another avenue beyond introspection that would help us as humans understand our own behaviors, feelings, and motivations on a deeper level?
There was an interesting concept in the book called Epiphenomenalism - the construct that the conscious mind does not actually serve any purpose, but instead the nonconscious/unconscious self is truly what dictates most of our daily decisions and lives. Wilson argues that the view of ‘self’ and ‘human personality’ lies within two places - ‘within the adaptive unconscious and within the conscious construct of self’. The conscious construct of self is also incredibly unreliable in my opinion, because as humans we are each unreliable narrators in our own stories and lives. And so how do we further develop our understanding of the unconscious if we are unreliable in self analyzing? Wilson postulates that fine-tuning an accurate, peaceful, and credible self-narrative is important and this is brought about by observing ourselves as if we were outside of ourselves. And what I mean by that is how are you perceiving yourself as a third-party; similar to the way I explained the theory of eternalism in my last article in regards to the perception of time, the way to more accurately construct a sense of self is to go beyond your physical self and observe yourself from outside yourself. One avenue mentioned in the book for achieving this was through both religious and spiritual practices. And it wouldn’t be an article of mine without the insertion of philosophy so my next thought process launched me into a deep dive into the philosophies of the mind, where I’ll demystify and spend the next chunk of this article.
And so my thought process went as follows - if the main objective to better understanding ourselves is to look at ourselves beyond ourselves (aka in the third person), this segues seamlessly into both religious and philosophical theories.
In many religious and spiritual texts, there have been themes of a cosmic force, higher energy, or some sort of ‘oneness’ that is within each of us. Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Christianity, and Judaism all have some mention of the absence in the separation of existence between the human and higher cosmic force. There are three main philosophies of the mind that stood out to me as I continued down this rabbit hole:
Dualism is the concept that the mind and body are two distinct entities, unconnected
Nondualism literally translates to ‘not of two’ (coined from the Sanskrit term ‘advaita’) and the easiest way to conceptualize it is to understand that even within the highly various experiences we have as individual humans, underlying it all is a single, indivisible unity whose nature is pure consciousness
Monism suggests that the mind and body are manifestations of a single substance. Essentially, monism theorizes that the universe is made up of one ‘type’ of thing or substance and from which human-kind are derived from (to help conceptualize, monism and dualism are opposites)
Philosophies of the mind could be a whole separate article but for the sake of focusing on the adaptive unconscious and really getting to the crux of how we tap into better understanding the unconscious I’m going to focus on non-dualism. The non-dualist philosophy resonates the most with me because of the practices of meditation I have been incorporating more consistently into my life the past year. Meditation, for me, is a way to dissolve mind and body, to surrender and steep myself in a space beyond and above language - a silent space where I am able to connect myself, knowledge, and oneness into one. For me, it’s the easiest way I actualize the concept Wilson states about looking at oneself as a third party. And when I wake from meditation, I take a bit of that feeling into my daily life.
At the same time, part of me rattles with the idea of wanting to understand the unconscious at all - do I really need to understand it? Is this one of those annoying human traits of wanting (and feeling the need) to really ‘understand’ everything going on around me? Perhaps the unconscious is one of those concepts that are out of the reach of human comprehension; something we possess perhaps from a higher energy, perhaps not, that we should appreciate and nurture while we’re here. And for me, and what Wilson mentions in the book, that is through spiritual practice. Wilson does end up stating within the book that there is a human limit, at least currently, in understanding the unconscious. But for now, meditation allows me to decenter myself and perceive experiences from a third-party lens. When I meditate and focus on my breathwork, I’m much more still within myself, able to align myself with - what I believe - is the higher cosmic force that is around us and within us.
While there’s so much more to tinker on and think about after reading Strangers to Ourselves, I hope the various avenues of thought were stimulating and thought-provoking - from how emerging technologies are trying to emulate consciousness, to philosophies of the mind, to understanding the greater meaning of why we even want to understand the conscious and unconscious mind. I leave you with one of my most beloved quotes from Buddha, and I believe it encapsulates all that is non-dualist, rising above the body, mind, and spirit and emphasizes we all have so much more to learn and discover - “Nothing is as it seems, nor is it otherwise”
Much love and to the pursuit of lifelong learning!
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PS: If you’re interested in reading Strangers to Ourselves, here is the link to buy the book
PPS: If you’re interested in learning more about the philosophies of the mind here are some links:
PPPS: If you want a crash course on LLMs/Generative AI here is the link
