Discuss Bargh's claim that everyday life is mostly automatic.

According to Bargh, as behaviourism—and its explanatory reliance on environmental stimuli—lost their prominent position within psychology, the “causal vacuum” (2011, p.629) left by its demise resulted in an increased appeal to conscious, agent-centred explanations of behaviour, goal pursuits, judgement and perception. Developments in cognitive psychology over the past two decades however, have gradually filled the vacuum left by the fall of behaviourism with an increasing lack of reliance on the explanatory role of conscious reflection. Bargh (1997, p.6) advances the concept of automaticity to explain how most of our behaviour results from stimulus bound automatic cognitive processes.

American Psychological Association eBooks, 2015

Psychological Bulletin, 2006

Psychological Bulletin, 2000

The first 100 years of experimental psychology were dominated by 2 major schools of thought: behaviorism and cognitive science. Here the authors consider the common philosophical commitment to determinism by both schools, and how the radical behaviorists' thesis of the determined nature of higher mental processes is being pursued today in social cognition research on automaticity. In harmony with "dual process" models in contemporary cognitive science, which equate determined processes with those that are automatic and which require no intervening conscious choice or guidance, as opposed to "controlled" processes which do, the social cognition research on the automaticity of higher mental processes provides compelling evidence for the determinism of those processes. This research has revealed that social interaction, evaluation and judgment, and the operation of internal goal structures can all proceed without the intervention of conscious acts of will and guidance of the process.

Advances in Consciousness Research, 2010

Unconscious processes come in two varieties, the preconscious, whose contents may become conscious, and the never-conscious, whose contents may not. In this chapter we make use of Global Workspace Theory and its LIDA model to catalog never-conscious and preconscious processes, and offer an explanation of the functionally of the distinction. The LIDA/GWT model suggests that the functional distinction between never-conscious and preconscious processes derives from one of the major purposes of an agent's consciousness mechanism, which is to select the most salient portion of the agent's current situation to which to attend, that is to broadcast globally, in order to choose the best next action.

The Buddha's Radical Psychology: Explorations, 2016

The fact of a self is an enduring assumption of humankind, and if asked how one knows they have a self, often the reply is, “I can make decisions, I can choose; I can voluntarily move, therefore, I know there is an 'I' who is the chooser, the actor, the agent behind my choices.” But how much is the conscious agent or cognitive executive really in charge of our physical, emotional and thought processes? Survival through Filtering Repeating on a recurring theme throughout this book, the newest research in neuroscience and biology indicates that besides some significant cognitive elaborations on the original phenomena, cognitive selectivity and choice is a function based on an organism’s biological and evolutionary need to minimize and sort out all possible “blooming, buzzing confusion”1that would occur without the body’s filtering system. In fact, every second, we are inundated with information from the many stimuli around and in us. In order to keep the brain from becoming overwhelmed by the steady stream of data competing for attention, brain cells work together to sort and prioritize information. To sort out the important from not so vital needs, the brain functions in a hierarchical way with many levels. The brain selects and pre-processes the information introduced by sensory stimuli and then meaning is constructed. The cognitive meaning is then available for commands that controls an appropriate action and expresses itself. So that under normal conditions, our focus is concentrated on just those objects or situations or sensations that we habitually have learned are of importance to us.

Presents definitions of automaticity and control, and uses them to show that automaticity in the domain of mental activity does not threaten the possibility of widespread mental action.

2006

The prevalent view in neuroscience is that the brain produces consciousness. We are conscious because the electrical activity in our brain's neurons works in a complex way and consciousness somehow “emerges” from that complex neural activity. The difficulty with this view is that it doesn't really explain our interior, subjective experience of consciousness, as pointed out by David Chalmers (1995), which is the really “hard problem” of consciousness.

Frontiers in Psychology, 2018

In this essay, we aim to counter and qualify the epiphenomenalist challenge proposed in this special issue on the grounds of empirical and theoretical arguments. The current body of scientific knowledge strongly indicates that conscious thought is a necessary condition for many human behaviors, and therefore, consciousness qualifies as a cause of those behaviors. We review illustrative experimental evidence for the causal power of conscious thought while also acknowledging its natural limitations. We argue that it is implausible that the metabolic costs inherent to conscious processes would have evolved in humans without any adaptive benefits. Moreover, we discuss the relevance of conscious thought to the issue of freedom. Many accounts hold conscious thought as necessary and conducive to naturalistic conceptions of personal freedom. Apart from these theories, we show that the conscious perception of freedom and the belief in free will provide sources of interesting findings, beneficial behavioral effects, and new avenues for research. We close by proposing our own challenge via outlining the gaps that have yet to be filled to establish hard evidence of an epiphenomenal model of consciousness. To be sure, we appreciate the epiphenomenalist challenge as it promotes critical thinking and inspires rigorous research. However, we see no merit in downplaying the causal significance of consciousness a priori. Instead, we believe it more worthwhile to focus on the complex interplay between conscious and other causal processes.

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 1997