Consciousness and Action Control

© 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2017 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. One of the key questions that guide and organise research on human consciousness is functional in nature: What is consciousness good for? Many answers to this question are possible, but the one that I shall be dealing with in this chapter is particularly popular. Although many laypeople and researchers would be willing to grant that many perceptual, to some degree even attentional processes occur outside of conscious awareness, the decision how to react to a given stimulus or situation is often assumed to be either necessarily or at least preferentially conscious. This idea is nicely captured by the blurb for the book Better Than Conscious? edited by Engel and Singer (2008): ‘Conscious control enables human decision makers to override routines, to exercise willpower, to find innovative solutions, to learn by instruction, to decide collectively, and to justify their choices’. If correct, the implications of this characterisation are that decision making and action control are particularly promising targets of human consciousness, as they support and improve the quality of the way we deal with environmental challenges. One of the origins of this widely held view is rooted in the psychoanalytic approach of Sigmund Freud. He claimed that both conscious and unconscious processes can contribute to the control of human action and considered control to emerge from the interplay between unconscious, automatic action tendencies generated by the pleasure‐seeking Id and socially acceptable considerations provided by the rational Ego (Freud, 1923). Whereas processes initiated by the Id were assumed to be inaccessible to consciousness in principle, some, but not all, Ego operations were considered to be conscious. According to Freud, leaving action control to the Id would be problematic in modern societies, which calls for moderation by the Ego, whose task is to seek compromise between the Id’s pleasure‐driven urges and the strict requirements of the Superego, which represents societal norms, expectations, and principles. More modern approaches still buy into this psychoanalytic scenario and the idea that socially responsible action requires conscious mediation. Indeed, so‐called ‘dual‐route’ or ‘dual‐process’ models can be found in almost all psychological and cognitive‐neuroscientific research areas (for an overview, see Evans & Stanovich, 2013), and even in the theoretical foundations and everyday practices of modern law (e.g., Günther, 2003). For instance, in Consciousness and Action Control Bernhard Hommel 7