This is where the debate tends to bring on a headache, where reality seems to flip into mirage and vice versa. You think you are reading this with your conscious mind. It certainly feels as if I am writing it with mine. However, this is only a fabulous illusion. Logic and experiment easily reveal this disturbing truth. We actually live in our unconscious. We are our unconscious. (Which is why we can be uncertain as to who we ‘really” are.) Every mental thing is initially done in our unconscious. We become conscious of only a miniscule fraction of the result. It is not clear why this happens – why we become conscious at all – and it is not clear how useful, or otherwise, this consciousness of ours really is. It sometimes seems to be a rather pointless and intermittent appendage, in fact, dealing in a rather second rate manner with second hand material already managed perfectly well in the unconscious.

A thought provoking stab at teasing out what consciousness might be for, even though it is entirely illusory, is provided by Daniel Wegner:

‘Although it is sobering and ultimately accurate to call all this an illusion, it is a mistake to conclude that the illusory is trivial … It is only with the feeling of conscious will that we can begin to solve the problems of knowing who we are as individuals, of discerning what we can and cannot do, and of judging ourselves morally … Our sense of being a conscious agent who does things comes at a cost of being technically wrong all the time. The feeling of doing is how it seems, not what it is – but that is as it should be. All is well because the illusion makes us human.” (2002 p. 341)

To begin with a whizz through some logic:

Hector Projector and the half second delay:

All mental activity, of whatever kind or degree, happens in the brain. The mechanism the brain uses is electrical circuitry. Every thought or feeling, however rare or wonderful, is also, and by definition, a collection of microvoltages, microresistances, chemical reactions and particular connections among particular circuits. There is no other way to have a thought. The P conscious ‘me’ has no idea how all this is done and, even if ‘I’ did I have neither the time nor the capacity to manage it successfully – even for an instant. I cannot, consciously do it. At all. My unconscious, therefore, has to do it for me and then, perhaps, present me with some of the results. In other words, whatever I think I am thinking, deciding or feeling has already been thought, decided or felt in my unconscious.

Not only that: my P conscious is only able to handle refined, developed, meaningful concepts. All such concepts are, by definition, constructs. They are constructed from countless, absolutely minute pieces of data. These myriad data are almost completely meaningless in themselves. Someone has to gather them, prioritise them, correlate them and make meaning from them; condense and simplify them into concept. Only my unconscious can do this. It is a task which is well beyond my conscious.

Vision will do very well as an example. Literally millions of bits of visual information pour into my brain along my optic nerves; a mass, or mess, of details of light and dark, intensities and colours, shapes, edges, surfaces, curves and corners, some of it changing from moment to moment. There is light and shadow, stillness and motion, greys, browns, greens, yellows and blues. My long-suffering brain sorts all of this material out unconsciously, ‘I’ don’t know how, and gives me the answer. After unbelievably complicated computing (as researchers into vision find, to their cost and alarm, when they try to model it) my unconscious is able to tell my conscious that I am looking at a blue tit skipping around in the depths of a privet hedge. A complexity of detail has, swiftly and apparently effortlessly, been reduced to a simplicity of concept; a meaning of which ‘I’ can be made consciously aware.