The Conscious Goal-Image Hypothesis

Conscious goal-images can activate unconscious goal structures.

If we ask, “What are two names for the flying dinosaurs that lived millions of years ago?” the question is obviously conscious. Now, according to the ideomotor theory, this conscious experience initiates an intention to retrieve a word that matches the intention. Further, the conscious question triggers unconscious search processes that produce candidate words that may match or mismatch the intention. Because the words are rare, the momentary intention is likely to be prolonged into a tip-of-the-tongue state.

In Global Workspace (GW) Theory, a “conscious goal-image” is of course a global, consistent representation that provides information to numerous specialized processors. It is not surprising that a conscious goal would trigger local processors that control the muscles that carry out the goal. Specialized processors are often goal-addressable: They are activated by goals.

One nice feature of the GW system is that the goal-image can be quite arbitrary or fragmentary, since it is the specialized processors themselves that have the real “intelligence” of the system, and that interpret the implications of the goal-image in their own ways. Note that the goal-image can trigger both the subordinate specialists able to carry out the action and the intentional goal frame that constrains planning and execution without itself becoming conscious.

In fact, the goal-image itself results from yet a higher-level goal frame. Speaking is normally in the service of some other goal, communicating a thought, calling attention to oneself, gaining information, which is, in its turn, in the service of even higher-level goals.

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Much of voluntary action is unconscious. Consciousness seems to become especially important when routine action encounters uncertainty, competition, or choice.

The bulk of spontaneous problem solving is unconscious. The same is surely true of voluntary actions. Much of our intention to perform a particular act must be formulated unconsciously, and the muscular effectors and subgoals needed to carry out the intention are also largely unconscious. Thus, many systems cooperate in creating a voluntary act.

It is useful to keep this great amount of cooperative processing in mind when thinking about voluntary control. Some sets of systems may cooperate most of the time, only to begin competing when an action runs into trouble.

Normal speech gives us a familiar example. Many systems work together to structure speech, yet a slip of the tongue may violate some but not all of them. When Spooner slipped into “our queer old Dean,” he violated no criteria of English syntax, vocabulary, pronunciation, or phonetics. The systems able to detect the error were semantic and pragmatic, those concerned with meaning and communicative purpose.

Those systems may begin to compete against the error while the others continue to cooperate. Thus, the coalition of automatic processes controlling normal speech may begin to decompose in the face of an error that violates some but not all levels of control.

Where does consciousness enter?

If we are unconscious of these routine, cooperating systems, what are we conscious of? The most informative aspects of action should tend to become conscious, particularly those that are unpredictable and significant. It is therefore the underdetermined choice points in the flow of action that should become conscious most often.

In speech, hesitation pauses are known to occur at points of high uncertainty. Making people conscious of their routine speech will slow down or interrupt its flow, because previously parallel automatisms must now be monitored through the limited-capacity bottleneck of consciousness. Hesitation pauses may therefore reflect high conscious involvement.

There is independent evidence for limited-capacity loading at important junctures in the flow of speech, including clause and sentence boundaries. These junctures are likely to be points of high uncertainty. The evidence does not prove that there is more conscious involvement at these points, but it makes the hypothesis plausible.

This suggests a general principle. Routine action may proceed largely without conscious intervention, while consciousness becomes especially important when the course of action is uncertain, when competing possibilities arise, or when something goes wrong.

Voluntary action and the ideomotor idea

William James’s ideomotor theory fits naturally into the global workspace framework. According to this view, a single conscious goal image, if it does not meet with effective competition, may be sufficient to set off a complex, highly coordinated, and largely unconscious action.

James’s ideomotor concept emerged from a puzzle in the experience of starting an action. Do we ever experience a command at all? Introspective reports about action commands were vague and contradictory, and the question became a major source of controversy.

James suggested that there may in fact be no experience of commanding an action. Rather, an action is organized and initiated unconsciously whenever a certain goal image becomes conscious without effective competition.

The first important point is that actions may be initiated by relatively simple, momentary images of their goals. For many actions these images may be visual, because the visual system is very good at representing spatial properties of action. But auditory, tactile, taste, and olfactory images are not ruled out. Walking to the kitchen to prepare lunch, for example, may be initiated by a taste-and-smell image of an attractive peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich.

A second point is that competing events may drive the goal image from consciousness. Such competition may come from conscious goal images as well as from intentions that are themselves not consciously experienced. New conscious thoughts or images can therefore interfere with the planning of an action, while different intentional systems may also modify or edit the goal.

A third point is that most detailed information processing is unconscious. Executive processes have no routine access to the details of effector control. The control of the muscles used to carry out an action is simply unconscious.

The moment of willingness to execute the action may itself become conscious, especially when the timing of execution is non-routine. James called this the “fiat,” the mental permission to start the act. Once that point is reached, the goal image tends to execute in the absence of effective competition.

This default execution is important. If nothing effectively competes with the conscious goal image, the underlying systems can carry out the action largely on their own. Subgoals may become conscious when automatic execution runs into difficulty, but when they are routine and unobstructed they can proceed without further conscious involvement.

Speaking without consciously controlling speech

Consider retrieving a word, intending to say it, and then saying it. Complex activities such as word retrieval and speaking involve many separable components. Because of the limited capacity of consciousness, we cannot afford to think consciously about many details in the act of speaking.

Instead, we want to access all the components of speaking at once, so that the speech system behaves as a single processor. But when we change from speaking to listening, or from speaking to eating, that unitary speech system can be decomposed and its components reorganized into new configurations for listening, chewing, inner speech, and the like.

The ideomotor theory suggests that the speech processor as a whole must be recruited, organized, and triggered by a single conscious goal image. That image is itself controlled by a higher-level goal structure.

Voluntary action, on this view, does not require consciousness to control every detail of what the body does. Consciousness may provide the goal, become especially involved at uncertain choice points, and help resolve competition, while the detailed execution of the action is carried out by cooperating unconscious systems.

Neuroscientists have never stopped using words like “voluntary” and “involuntary” to describe some obvious phenomena. Reflexes are obvious examples of involuntary actions; so are autonomic functions like peristalsis, heart rate, sweat-gland activity, and the like, as opposed to …

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I am gratified by the current recognition of my Global Workspace Theory of conscious cognition, first published in 1983 and developed over several decades. My name, and GWT, have recently appeared in The Conversation, Startup Fortune, The Guardian, and other places in connection with artificial intelligence and the question of machine consciousness.

This is normal in science when insights that run against the dominant view of things begin to receive wider recognition. While I feel grateful for this attention, something is always lost in translation when a dense and sometimes complex idea is presented to the public.

Newton crystallized our current view of the Earth and planets, but it took time for other natural philosophers to understand Newton’s mathematics and the revolutionary impact of the Copernican theory. To make it possible for new people to visualize the new and radically upsetting understanding of the Sun-centered system, some clever soul made a tabletop toy model of the Newtonian solar system, called an “orrery,” which you can still see in science museums and hobby shops.

The tabletop model consisted of a big ball representing the Sun and smaller balls for the planets, all connected cleverly by rods and gears to keep them in their proper places, rotating around the Sun. You can buy plastic orreries today, and they are a great way to learn about the real solar system.

But the obvious question remains: where are the little rods and gears that keep the REAL Sun and planets in their orbits? As far as astronomers could see, there were no physical connections between the real planets.

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Psychopathology is the study of repeated, dysfunctional errors that are often known to be errors by the person who makes them, “slips” of action or experience that escape attempts to control them over and over again. Most psychopathology in the neurotic range involves a loss of voluntary control over inner speech, feelings, mental images, or overt actio…

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Episode #27 of Consciousness & The Brain features Dr. Roy Baumeister, one of the world’s most prolific and influential psychologists, known for his work on the self, social rejection, belonging, sexuality and sex differences, self-control, self-esteem, self-defeating behaviors, motivation, aggression, consciousness, and free will.

Roy received his PhD in social psychology from Princeton in 1978 and did a postdoctoral fellowship in sociology at the University of California at Berkeley. He has received research grants from the National Institutes of Health and from the Templeton Foundation.

Roy has published some 700 scientific works, including 40 books. In 2013, Roy received the highest award given by the Association for Psychological Science, the William James Fellow Award, in recognition of his lifetime achievements.

In his 2011 New York Times bestselling book Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength (with John Tierney), Roy writes:

“When you pick your battles, look beyond the immediate challenges and put your life in perspective. Are you where you want to be? What could be better? The unconscious is asking the conscious mind to make a plan.”

The episode discusses:

• Is mental effort (willpower) like a muscle?

• The proposed role of glucose in restoring mental energy.

• “Ego Depletion” is another useful analogy.

• Practice can make mental effort easier.

• Is Free Will an illusion? A scientific view.

• Self-esteem without achievement is a trap.

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Loss of voluntary control over the details of an action seems to follow a loss of conscious access to those details. Langer and her co-workers conducted some elegant experiments to support this point. They were pursuing the hypothesis that perceived competence affects performance: the more skilled we think we are, the better we perform, provided that we…

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In Episode #26 of Consciousness & The Brain, we explore new and interesting questions about Smell, Taste & Consciousness with our special guest Dr. Stuart Firestein, an esteemed neuroscientist who specializes in the olfactory system: why and how our brains and noses sense smell.

Beyond detecting molecules, olfaction offers a valuable model for studying broader principles of signaling and perception in the brain, including how neurotransmitters, hormones, and peptides act through membrane receptors.

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With the rise of physicalistic psychology at the beginning of the twentieth century, many psychologists tried to make the case that there really is no question of volition, just as there was no true scientific issue of consciousness. Behaviorists and other physicalists initially believed that any apparently voluntary action could be reduced to a chain o…

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In Episode #17 of Consciousness & The Brain, Dr. Alea Skwara and Ilian Daskalov join a discussion of Global Workspace Theory, first proposed in 1983, and its account of conscious and unconscious processes in the brain.

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Hello everyone,

Dr. Richard Brown is a really smart guy, a top notch philosophy professor in the cognitive neuroscience program at the City University of New York who cares about empirical evidence, a rare combination. Richard interviewed me for his terrific podcast called “Consciousness Live!” in Season 4, and we thought you’d enjoy our discussion. I su…

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Imagine repeating a slip of the tongue you have just made. The slip itself is experienced as involuntary; its imitation is voluntary. And yet the two isolated actions are much the same as far as an outside observer is concerned. Some famous slips attributed to the Reverend William Spooner illustrate the point:

1. Instead of “our dear old Queen,” he reported…

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We know what it is to get out of bed on a freezing morning in a room without a fire, and how the very vital principle within us protests against the ordeal. Probably most persons have lain on certain mornings for an hour at a time unable to brace themselves to the resolve. We think how late we shall be, how the duties of the day will suffer; we say, “I …

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Episode #22 of our podcast Consciousness & the Brain welcomed neuroscientist David Edelman, who graciously hosted this discussion in the home of his late father, Nobel laureate Gerald M. Edelman.

Gerald Edelman was a renowned biologist who thought deeply about consciousness and the philosophical question of whether consciousness can be causal.

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A goal is a representation of a future state that tends to remain stable while different means are explored for achieving it. It is not simply a conscious wish, nor merely a verbal statement of intention. A goal can function as an organizing condition for perception, memory, speech, and action. Like other frames, a goal frame may bias choice-points in p…

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Conversations on Consciousness & the Brain are 90-minute live Zoom events:

Dynamic explorations of select topics with Q&A woven throughout so you can ask questions, push back, and contribute your own ideas freely and in real time.

These open-minded convers…

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A remarkably general pattern in human thought begins with conscious work, continues outside of consciousness, and then returns to consciousness as a result. A problem is noticed, posed, or felt. Then it may drop out of focal awareness for a time. Later, sometimes quite suddenly, an answer or partial answer comes back into consciousness.

This is the consc…

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“When you pick your battles, look beyond the immediate challenges and put your life in perspective. Are you where you want to be? What could be better? The unconscious is asking the conscious mind to make a plan.”

- Dr. Roy F. Baumeister, social psychologist and professor of psychology (emeritus) at the University of Queensland

Many people believe that free will is an illusion — but is that really true?

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More than 160 of you voted across two polls, and dozens more replied directly or left comments with questions that no textbook has cleanly resolved. We read every one. What follows is what you shared with us, and more about our plans.

✨ Our Poll Results — 162 votes. Thank you… we’re listening!

“How and where does consciousness emerge in the brain?”

— WITH

“How will we ever recognise a consciousness that doesn’t match our own?”

— Bernie Hernandez

“At what point in childhood do we become conscious — and is that connected with memory?”

— Julie Hamilton

“What is consciousness and how is it defined?”

— Aletta Scheepstra, Matthias Heger & others

“Given the structure of cortex is pretty much the same for front to back, doesn’t that suggest a common class of function from front to back? Pattern recognition?”

— James of Seattle

“Why do we have a sense of a continuous, unified self — when the brain appears to be a chorus of competing processes?”

— Paraphrase of several replies

“I’m curious about variations in cognitive architecture — how it is affected by aphantasia, anendophasia, or both. If alters in DID can display different physical characteristics, might two alters in the same body have different cognitive architecture?”

— Auntie Thetical

“Linguistic communication is essential for human consciousness. Which brain characteristics do humans have that great apes lack — and what is the meaning of ‘existing,’ as in I exist?”

— Albertus Morriën

“Why are so many people stuck on the ‘Hard Problem’ — even though it may simply be the wrong question?”

— Sam McRoberts

What strikes us most is how many of the questions resist easy categorization. They sit at the edges of neuroscience, philosophy, and lived experience, just the territory we want to explore together.

What comes next

The results show that many of you want to understand the relationship between conscious and unconscious processes, inseparable from questions about the self, conscious perception and the brain, memory and emotion, and about our health and well being.

When we talk about “the topic of consciousness” in science today, we do not mean subjectivity alone. Rather, we refer to the “conscious-unconscious dimension,” which includes subjective experiences, but always compared to close brain analogues that are not conscious — that is, as an experimental variable that allows us to study brain differences attributable to consciousness.

We are planning at least one Open Dialogue to take this on directly. Details — date, registration, and what to expect — are coming next week. Stay tuned!

More soon.

~ Bernie & Nat :-)

P.S. Sam McRoberts asked why so many people remain fixed on the Hard Problem, suggesting it may simply be the wrong question. Do you agree? We think that's worth its own Open Dialogue. In the meantime, tell us what you think in the comments.

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“In the olfactory system, it’s true that you can regrow neurons. There is a population of stem cells, they’re normally quiet, but in the case of an injury or the loss of the sensory neurons above them, they will come back to life and they’ll bud off new neurons.”

— Stuart Firestein, Neurobiologist

In this provocative conversation, the topic of smell, taste and consciousness is explored with Professor Stuart Firestein, one of the world’s experts on olfaction and taste.

Stuart Firestein is an esteemed neuroscientist who specializes in the olfactory system — why and how our brains and noses sense smell. Stuart Firestein is the former chair of Columbia University’s Department of Biological Sciences and a neuroscience professor, where his laboratory studies the vertebrate olfactory system, possibly the best chemical detector on the face of the planet.

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