Zdravko Radman: The Autonomous Mind

Modern cognitive science and philosophy of mind are predominantly conscious- and thought-centered, and largely insensitive to all that cannot be captured in intellectualist terms. They take for granted that thoughts are consciously controlled, that actions originate in deliberation, and that behavior is basically a result of some sort of propositional plan. However, propositionality, the reign of reason, and conceptual conduct concerns just a small fraction of what makes human mentality; the thinking mind, linguistically structured, explicit in form, rational, and volitional, is but a tiny bit of what constitutes us as mindful beings. All those processes, usually affiliated with ‘higher’ cognitive mental activities, are only late products in the course of the emergence of the mental, preceded by the overwhelming dynamics of what I call the ‘autonomous mind’. The term stays for the massive and robust mechanism acting in the ‘background’, or in the ‘default’ modus, which charts the arena of possible action, motor and mental, before it is molded in consciousness, before the ‘self’ is aware of it, and before it is shaped in narration.