The accumulated breadth and depth of human knowledge is staggering. But even the sharpest minds still only know a fraction of what’s going on inside us. The cortex is just one part of our brain. While it does all of our analyzing, planning, and pontificating, it has only limited access to what we actually feel, or need.
The only option my analytical mind has is to guess why I feel and do the things I do. At times, it can seem like I know myself with absolute certainty, but that’s only because my mind loves the consonance of conviction, even when it’s completely wrong. And because it’s an extraordinary huckster and sucker, able to convince itself of pretty much anything.
At my best, I make choices that feel right. But, I do not choose my feelings, or even fully understand what they are. When my reasoning is particularly sound, my mind can inform and effect my instincts, but it never unilaterally dictates how I feel.
All I can ever do is weigh the options with the hope that my mind will guide my gut toward choices that will bring my future self some reasonable semblance of satisfaction. But, it can easily take several attempts to get it right.
It makes sense that the mind is a mystery. Evolutionarily, the neocortex was recently slapped on top of an already fully functional command and control center. This newfangled consciousness was granted only limited access to existing operations, severely restricting what we can know about what’s really going on up there.
Of course, this limitation hasn’t stopped us from rushing in to justify and “explain” everything we do.
The jagged pill is that my conscious mind isn’t in charge. It’s an adjunct administrator brought on to help the rest of the organization make better decisions. As Jonathan Haidt describes, our reasoning mind is like a rider on an elephant of our unconscious, emotional urges. The rider can direct the elephant this way or that, and teach the beast all kinds of cool things, but only so long as the elephant doesn’t have another plan, like pounding down my feelings with food.
It’s not that our thoughts have no power. They clearly do. Just not as much as we think they do. Or, rather, as they think they do. Or, perhaps, as they make us think they do, depending of course, on who “us” and “they” are in this tortured passage.
In the end, our actions are almost certainly driven by a collaboration between the stirrings of our deepest unknown impulses and our user-accessible, verbal thought. But, however the division of labor ultimately breaks down, it’s probably wise to treat the reporting of our reasoning minds as we should treat the reporting of any other news outfit. Especially after we’ve had a few.
