In wondering what can be done to steer civilization away from the abyss, I confess to being increasingly puzzled by the central enigma of contemporary cognitive psychology: To what degree are we consciously capable of changing our minds? I don't mean changing our minds as to who is the best NFL quarterback, but changing our convictions about major personal and social issues that should unite but invariably divide us. As a senior neurologist whose career began before CAT and MRI scans, I have come to feel that conscious reasoning, the commonly believed remedy for our social ills, is an illusion, an epiphenomenon supported by age-old mythology rather than convincing scientific evidence. If so, it's time for us to consider alternate ways of thinking about thinking that are more consistent with what little we do understand about brain function. I'm no apologist for artificial intelligence, but if we are going to solve the world's greatest problems, there are several major advantages in abandoning the notion of conscious reason in favor of seeing humans as having an AI-like "black-box" intelligence.

Shaun Patel has such a tranquil voice that it's easy to see how he convinces patients to let him experiment in the depth of their brains. On the phone, in his office at Massachusetts General Hospital (he is also on faculty at Harvard Medical School), the neuroscientist spoke about gray matter almost as if he were guiding me in meditation. Or perhaps that was just the heady effect of him detailing a paper he had just published in Brain, showing how, using implants on his patients, he could enhance learning by stimulating the caudate nucleus, which lies near the center of the brain.1 You have to time the electric pulse just right, he told me, based on the activity of certain neurons firing during an active learning phase of a game. A perfectly timed pulse could speed up how quickly his patients made the right associations.

In wondering what can be done to steer civilization away from the abyss, I confess to being increasingly puzzled by the central enigma of contemporary cognitive psychology: To what degree are we consciously capable of changing our minds? I don't mean changing our minds as to who is the best NFL quarterback, but changing our convictions about major personal and social issues that should unite but invariably divide us. As a senior neurologist whose career began before CAT and MRI scans, I have come to feel that conscious reasoning, the commonly believed remedy for our social ills, is an illusion, an epiphenomenon supported by age-old mythology rather than convincing scientific evidence. If so, it's time for us to consider alternate ways of thinking about thinking that are more consistent with what little we do understand about brain function. I'm no apologist for artificial intelligence, but if we are going to solve the world's greatest problems, there are several major advantages in abandoning the notion of conscious reason in favor of seeing humans as having an AI-like "black-box" intelligence. To believe that we can accurately determine whether or not consciousness contains causal properties is sheer folly. But first, a brief overview as to why I feel so strongly that purely conscious thought isn't physiologically likely.