The Centered Mind: What the Science of Working Memory Shows Us About the Nature of Human Thought by Peter Carruthers

by Peter Carruthers

The Centered Mind offers a new view of the nature and causal determinants of both reflective thinking and, more generally, the stream of consciousness. Peter Carruthers argues that conscious thought is always sensory-based, relying on the resources of the working-memory system. This system has been much studied by cognitive scientists. It enables sensory images to be sustained and manipulated through attentional signals directed at midlevel sensory areas ofthe brain. When abstract conceptual representations are bound into these images, we consciously experience ourselves as making judgments or arriving at decisions. Thus one might hear oneself as judging, in inner speech, that it is time to go home, for example. However, our amodal (non-sensory) propositionalattitudes are never actually among the contents of this stream of conscious reflection. Our beliefs, goals, and decisions are only ever active in the background of consciousness, working behind the scenes to select the sensory-based imagery that occurs in working memory. They are never themselves conscious.Drawing on extensive knowledge of the scientific literature on working memory and related topics, Carruthers builds an argument that challenges the central assumptions of many philosophers. In addition to arguing that non-sensory propositional attitudes are never conscious, he also shows that they are never under direct intentional control. Written with his usual clarity and directness, The Centered Mind will be essential reading for all philosophers and cognitive scientists interestedin the nature of human thought processes.

Genres: Psychology, Nonfiction

Hardcover

First published July 23, 2015

Reviews

[Owlseyes]

According to him there's no conscious thought, consciousness has only access to the thought outcomes, but not to thought itself; we make a confusion between the content of our thoughts and the act of thinking.
Quite new.

[Zo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Similar to other books I've read on topics I'm not overly familiar with (though in this case I at least have a little more familiarity with the topic), I am struggling to understand how this book is not a bigger deal. My naive take is that while Carruther's does fall prey to some philosophical fallacies about the rigidity of words, which causes some of his important points to feel more semantic than revelatory, in general this book offers as unified an accounts of human psychology and consciousness as modern science affords. It inspired way too many notes to put them all down here, but my basic conclusion is that I think all of his main theses are in large part right. I recognize that is a dangerous assumption in philosophy, and I am eager to read reviews and contradicting views, but everything he says fits together in an understandable way, and is backed up by what seems like solid evidence. I think the biggest point of potential contention is a better understanding of the way amodal propositional attitudes can be embedded in sensory objects, and how that differs from them existing in unconscious "goal-like" states, but even in those areas I feel like Carruthers is at least approaching the right ways of describing things. My biggest issue with this book was how reserved Carruthers is, though I respect the philosophical modesty of it. There are a huge number of places where I think he could easily extrapolate into more wide-ranging comments on human psychology/consciousness but he largely resists them. There are points where things feel repetitive, but I think there are even more points where things feel under-explored, and that is because the understanding Carruthers presents is so exciting. The biggest thing I want to know is how this account fits in with predictive processing theories of the human brain, and whether they are compatible different forms of description or contain discrepancies that need to be resolved. Wonderful work, and despite what can be a dry writing style, still has some moments that cause powerful excitement about the insight into human (and animal! - those sections were superb) consciousness and psychology of Carruthers theory.

[Jhc · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think this was the best book I read in 2017.

[Peter Russel · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent follow up to The Opacity of the Mind. Carruthers builds a unified theory on working memory system/attention/access consciousness with a positive component (a fully sketched explanation of a mental event, explained by his theory at every point and presented at the end of the book) and also an inference to the best, most fruitful and explanatory theory given the current evidence from a range of related disciplines. Carruthers both converses with the theories of his colleagues in this book and works on his own material - the result is an impactful academic nonfiction that is accessible even to the uninitiated.