The inevitable contrast: Conscious vs. unconscious processes in action control

摘要

The simple actions of everyday life—flicking a light switch, suppressing the urge to say something, or grabbing a waiter's attention with a “check, please”—remain difficult to understand from a scientific point of view. Unlike the mechanisms giving rise to machine action—which are designed according to clear-cut, well principled plans—the mechanisms underlying human action are fashioned by the happenstance and tinkering process of evolution, whose products can be counterintuitive and suboptimal (Simpson, 1949; Lorenz, 1963; Gould, 1977; de Waal, 2002; Marcus, 2008), far unlike the kinds of things we humans design into robots (Arkin, 1998)1. When speaking about the reverse engineering of biological products, the roboticist thus cautions, “Biological systems bring a large amount of evolutionary baggage unnecessary to support intelligent behavior in their silicon based counterparts” (Arkin, 1998, p. 32), and, speaking of the products of mother nature, the ethologist concludes, “To the biologist who knows the ways in which selection works and who is also aware of its limitations it is no way surprising to find, in its constructions, some details which are unnecessary or even detrimental to survival” (Lorenz, 1963, p. 260).