Is "non-conscious thought" possible? (questions after Locke)

In the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke writes: “For if these words ‘to be in the understanding’ have any propriety, they signify to be understood. So that to be in the understanding, and not to be understood; to be in the mind and never to be perceived, is all one as to say anything is and is not in the mind or understanding.” (1.II.5)

Although the immediate target of Locke’s remark is the doctrine of innate ideas, and particularly the supposition that certain ideas may be innate without having ever been perceived (as in the minds of children and idiots), his remark nonetheless has farther-reaching implications for the meaning of thought and its relation to consciousness. For in order to counter the claim that certain a priori ideas lie latent within the mind until such occasion as they are made drawn out into active and explicit recognition, he must deny the very intelligibility of such a thing as “unconscious idea.”

While this might strike us a perfectly reasonable and unobjectionable claim, there are certain cases raised by recent neuroscientific research that suggest a perfectly coherent way of understanding thought as an activity that is not primarily or originally an operation with consciousness. That was the point I wanted to make in class yesterday when I referred you to this article on a study that showed predictive patterns of activity in the brains of test subjects prior to their becoming aware of their own supposedly conscious and deliberate decisions to act.


Now clearly the data provided by this one study are open to multiple interpretations, and we should not be too quick to dismiss Locke’s argument on the basis of this evidence. For one thing, although the study was able to produce discrepancies as great as seven seconds between the time of observable brain activity and awareness of choice in test subjects, it is obviously not the case that the delay is so pronounced in all decision-making activities (think of split-second reactions, for example). These results were produced under very controlled conditions that (from what I could gather from the study itself) were meant to exaggerate the delay as much as possible. In any case, I wonder whether you think that these measurable activities in the brain that exist prior to our awareness of them should count as “thoughts” in any meaningful sense. Suppose that one of these subjects were interrupted just after having registered a predictive pattern of brain activity, but just prior to becoming consciously aware of it—would we say that this person had thought?

I’m curious to hear what you all think.