Stream of Unconsciousness

A response to Cormac McCarthy's "The Kekulé Problem"

Photo by Jr Korpa on Unsplash

Content warning: brief discussion of how the trauma mechanism works

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One of my favourite essays I’ve ever read is the late Cormac McCarthy’s "The Kekulé Problem", which appeared in Nautilus in 2017. You can find the article here, though it’s paywalled and the publication only allows you two free articles a month, so if you want to read it don’t do what I did and click out of it into another Nautilus article by mistake, thus triggering your second free article of the month, so that when you click back to “Kekulé” it tells you you’re all out of free articles even though you’re only returning to the first article, not opening a third article, which is all a bit unfair really and makes you wish they let you do that thing where you subscribe and get a week free before your card payments kick in, where they’re clearly hoping you’ll just forget to cancel later but you make sure that won’t happen by cancelling as soon as you’ve subscribed, but nope Nautilus doesn’t do free weeks and their subscription is a tenner a week and you’re definitely not going to read enough science articles in the next 30 days to justify that kind of investment, so you end up finding someone reading the article out loud on YouTube so you can look at the entirely unpunctuated transcript, making things somewhat hard going. I know, not very solidarity-with-writers of me and it’s only a tenner, but a try-before-you-buy scheme really should enable you to reread an article you’ve already clicked on dammit!

Anyway, "The Kekulé Problem" is about a deeply fascinating topic that goes strangely undiscussed outside of psych circles: the unconscious mind. This is a vast subject: after all, “the unconscious” is just a catch-all term for every single thing we don’t do consciously, from generating ideas to scratching an itch to seeking a romantic partner who reminds us of our mother to dreaming to being manipulated by ads to involuntarily turning around when someone makes a noise. Everything that in other animals we call “instinct”, plus just about everything that makes us distinctively human - excepting that tiny little tip of the iceberg we call “consciousness”. A world-interpreting, behaviour-generating apparatus so ridiculously big and complicated it’s almost impossible to know where to begin studying it. So much so that Chomsky calls pre-conscious choices a ‘much deeper problem’ than the so-called “hard problem” of consciousness itself.

So who’s Kekulé? A 19th-century organic chemist who claimed he discovered the ring shape of the benzene molecule after having a dream about a snake eating its own tail. McCarthy wants to know why the dream gave the scientist a visual riddle to interpret, rather than just telling him the facts in so many words: ‘the unconscious understands language perfectly well or it would not understand the problem in the first place…[so] why the images, metaphors, pictures?’

His answer is that the unconscious is a ‘biological system…a machine for operating an animal’. All animals of sufficient complexity possess an unconscious mind, which means the human variety has been doing its thing for two million years. As we’ve grown more complex over time, our operating machine has added more strings to its bow, including taking the myriad facts of nature and making comprehensible narratives of them, and even working on mathematical and philosophical puzzles. Once the machine has solved a problem for us, we use language to explain it to ourselves and others. But language didn’t answer the question: the unconscious did.

What is language, then? A much more recent interloper in the brain, one McCarthy compares to a ‘virus’.¹ He reckons it arrived on the scene about 100,000 years ago and rapidly colonised the human mind, rather than evolving alongside our brain over time like the unconscious.² Along with representational art, letters and words boil down to ‘the simple understanding that one thing can be another thing’. In speaking, painting and exchanging money for goods we’re taking signs, shapes and sounds and making them symbolically stand in for something else. Other animals use gestures and noises to communicate, McCarthy goes on, but none of them seem to use language to represent the world in this way. They don’t make Helen Keller’s leap from I do this sign when I want a glass of water to this sign is the glass of water.

This, then, is why the unconscious doesn’t speak in words: it’s been directing us for two million years without them, just as it continues to direct all the other animals that still don’t use them.

McCarthy points out that the unconscious seems to be ‘labouring under a moral compulsion to educate us’, giving us life guidance via wordless parables and hard-to-interpret dreams. For him, this ‘picture-story mode of presentation’ benefits from its ‘simple utility’: ‘a picture can be recalled in its entirety, whereas an essay cannot’. In this reading, the unconscious sounds almost like a prophet crying in the wilderness of the night, knowing what’s best for us and beating us over the head with its images and riddles.

I agree with McCarthy that the prophet continually communicates truths that we need but don’t always want to hear. But I see a couple of major problems with his analysis. Firstly, the unconscious does use language, all the time. I’m pretty sure characters have said things in my dreams before, and they certainly have in other people’s. I’ve also had phrases emerge from the unconscious depths while I’m awake: neither wordless insights nor the usual chattering of my internal monologue, but fully-formed sentences that surface in my consciousness in a flash and take me by surprise. (Here’s an example that had a particularly strong effect on me a few years ago during a crisis of faith.) Even if language is a more recent arrival than the ‘picture-story mode’, I’d argue that the unconscious has been using it since its invention.

And speaking of my inner monologue, my monkey mind may be ‘closer to the surface’ than the majority of the iceberg of my Self, but is it really any more ‘conscious’ than my dreams? Isn’t most of it composed of old, preprogrammed scripts that repeat themselves on a loop? Scripts that my biological operating machine wrote years ago for reasons of its own, and perpetuates without any assistance from the part of me I call ‘me’?

My second important issue with “Kekulé” is this: if language and representational art are based on ‘the simple understanding that one thing can be another thing’...well, isn’t that also what dreams and metaphors and symbols are based on? A ‘picture-story’ is still a story, and an ouroboros is just as much a conceptual stand-in for a benzene molecule as the phrase ‘benzene molecule’. Whatever art, language, story and symbol are, I find what they have in common more interesting than what they don’t. They all have deep, deep roots.

So, how would I approach the Kekulé problem? I thought you’d never ask; you thought I’d never answer; it was all getting very emotional. Let’s get on with it.

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What is a symbol, really? Well firstly, it’s a picture. A representation of something in nature. Secondly, it’s a generalised abstraction: a snake symbol doesn’t represent a particular snake, but all snakes. And thirdly, it’s a ‘thing that can be another thing’. Not only does this snake stand in for all snakes, but now all snakes stand in for all benzene molecules. With a complex symbol like a national emblem you can make one thing stand in for many other things: a whole network of associations, events and feelings all wrapped up in a single image. For my money, that makes the humble symbol even more conceptually complex than representational art, and arguably even language.

Which makes my version of the Kekulé question not so much ‘Why don’t dreams just tell you what they mean in plain words?’ as ‘How on earth does the unconscious know to symbolise one thing with a different thing at all? When, how and why did it figure out such a sophisticated, multilayered means of representing the world?’

Symbols being images and images being things we see, let’s rewind a few hundred million years to the advent of the eye. It’s hard to overstate how important sight has been to our species, how much of an evolutionary advantage it’s given us, how much we rely on it to make sense of the world. I’ve seen different percentages cited, but a whopping amount of the total information processed by the human brain is visual, and a surprisingly large portion of our cortex is dedicated to that processing. Whales navigate using sound; dogs walk around sniffing things; human babies spend their time staring at the world.

Somewhere along the evolutionary way, as the brain develops more and more, a physical object out there becomes a mental representation in here - a thumbnail sketch that the brain uses to understand its environment - and we have the birth of the image. I don’t know which artist invented the first representation-of-a-thing-that’s-not-the-thing, but it’s worth noting that the images produced by our brain are already representations of objects that aren’t the objects themselves. Those apples you see in the fruit bowl aren’t apples, they’re your brain’s artistic interpretation of the apples. Simplifications. Reductions. Mental processes that “stand in” for the outer world of forms.

In other words, the entire way the brain processes information gets you halfway towards the conceptual territory of the symbol. Continue to picture the apples in your mind’s eye after they’re no longer in front of you, and you’ve gone a little further. Imagination, fantasies and hallucinations take you a little further again. All perception is representation, all interpretation is creative, and all thought is symbolic.

Back to that curious baby. As children we’re far more intent on exploring the outer world than the inner one, with even basic self-recognition not taking place until at least 18 months. When we do arrive at the “I” we only get there by contrasting it with a “you”, and we’re only aware of others because we perceive them with our senses. So sight shapes our world long before introspection, metacognition and stories about who we “really are” join the party.

When we finally do learn to talk about our inner states, we do it using physical metaphors.³ These can be spatial (‘I was feeling down until you cheered me up’), tactile (‘I grasp your point’), kinetic (‘go through the motions’), thermal (‘You were cold to me yesterday but today you’re warm’), olfactory (‘He’s sniffing around for clues’), gustatory (‘I’m feeling a little bitter, but you’ve been very sweet about everything’) or auditory (‘That’s music to my ears’). But an awful lot of them are visual. At least in the English language, we equate understanding with the act of seeing itself: I see what you mean, I see the light, I see the wisdom of what you’re saying, I see what to do now, I really see you.

People like me who spend a lot of time in our heads are used to thinking of a vast “I” that self-reflects, interprets its environment and projects its own desires and fantasies outward. But it’s at least as true that the information we receive from the outside world influences how we think about the contents of our own mind. Think about all those metaphors they teach you in meditation instruction: your thoughts are like a chattering monkey, a river flowing beneath your feet, clouds fluttering across a vast, empty sky. We’re so used to the pictures that even the most seasoned instructor struggles to convey the central idea that we’re more than these limiting images. You’re the sky, not the clouds; the river’s observer, not the river; the ocean, not the wave is about the best they can do. The Void isn’t actually nothing, they tell us. It just can’t be expressed in words. Which is because it can’t be pictured.

I don’t have the best visual imagination myself, but like Kekulé I’ve had a meaningful snake vision. It came to me a couple of years ago when I did an extraordinary movement therapy session as part of my ongoing attempts to address my chronic gut issue.⁴ The tracks my coach cued up for me to move to evoked a range of different emotions in me, from hope and liberation to suffocation and despair, making me feel trapped in a dense thicket one minute and like a majestic bird in flight the next. At one stage I pictured a giant snake inside me, a dark, sinister force, but somehow not entirely my enemy. A manifestation of anger and pain, but also power. As metaphors go, it couldn’t have been more apt: not only does this particular animal carry all sorts of emotional and mythic resonances, but the intestinal tract looks quite a lot like a coiled snake, no?⁵

We need visualisations like this. Interoception is a nebulous affair, and our emotional and somatic problems can often seem overwhelming as a result. But we’ve been trained over millennia to respond to threats we can see. Just as the individual baby explores the world before they explore themselves, our ancestors were using their eyes to survive and thrive long before the invention of language or the self-conscious “I”. And the things they saw became the basis for what Jungians would now call the archetypes of the collective unconscious.⁶ Seeing problems gives them a shape, and once they have a shape we know what to do about them. And so life is a journey - hardships are mountains you climb a step at a time - your primal emotions are a crying inner child - your various internal parts are a family system - and so on and so on. As without, so within.

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So what mechanism powers this conversion of the things we see into inner picture-stories? I would like to nominate the process of association. First, we see things out in the world. The more impressive of them have a powerful impact on us, scaring us, intriguing us, inspiring awe. Later in life, when we come to introspect, our somatic and mental processes remind us of some of the things we’ve encountered in the wild. Things with similar “shapes” that provoke similar emotions and physical responses in us.

When you were four, you looked at a river and noticed that if you tried to follow its path with your eyes you’d get “swept away” by the current, whereas if you sort of focused and unfocused your vision at the same time, you could keep looking at the same spot as the river rushed past you. Later, when examining your own thoughts, you noticed the same mechanism at work: try to follow any particular thought and you lose the run of yourself; keep your attention fixed on a stiller part of your consciousness while your thoughts rush by, and you remain centred.

But while anxious thoughts may “run” across the surface of the mind, powerful negative emotions are a different matter. We experience them as much “thicker” and “deeper”, filling up our being, overwhelming us, slowing down our movements, maybe even making it hard to breathe. We feel similarly when we’re plunged into deep water. So naturally, dreams in which grief and sorrow are represented as a flood are very common.

The association mechanism belongs to a very old part of our brain indeed, a distant ancestor of the more scientific, rigorous way of relating to the world that we call logic. And like its great-great-grandchild, association involves abstracting out from the here and now to make mental connections between disparate things that often have very little to do with each other on the surface. It’s a strategy we share with many other species. When a predator waits for its prey to emerge from its den, it’s associating the animal it can’t see with the hole that it can. When a dog salivates at the sound of a dinner bell, it’s associating the ringing with the food that follows it. When crows tell each other to avoid an area of the forest where a fellow crow got shot down, they’re associating the area with the calamity. There’s a compelling proto-logic here: This happened once, so it could happen again.

All part of the complex-brained creature’s quest to repeat positive experiences, avoid less positive ones, and generally stay alive as long as possible. And surely we’re looking at a major evolutionary innovation here. Where lower life forms just do the same thing over and over and the lucky ones live, animals equipped with association play an active role in their own survival, running towards situations they remember as having been good for them and away from ones they remember as being bad. They thrive because they adapt.

It seems to me that the roots of the ‘a thing can be another thing’ cognitive breakthrough can be found right here. This isn’t an insight that it took representative art and language to unleash; it’s embedded in the day-to-day associative process that we share with countless animals around the world. The dog is saying The dinner bell = dinnertime = food = salivation, and via the transitive property we get The dinner bell = salivation. Similarly, the crows are saying That area of the forest = death. Basically, if something’s been very good or very bad to an animal, in their brain that thing becomes the goodness or badness.

We really are dealing with an astonishingly sophisticated cognitive architecture here, long before we get anywhere near homo sapiens, let alone cave paintings. The crows have to remember the past (a bird got shot), generalise from a specific incident to a pattern (if one bird got shot once then another bird could get shot again), predict potential futures (if I head into the danger zone I could be that bird!!), and decide on a winning strategy (best not head into the danger zone then). I suspect that in this beginning-middle-end sequence, the replaying of the past in order to ward off a potentially bad future, we have the roots of story. Not such a big leap from councils of concerned crows to ‘Gather round, children, and let me tell you what happened to Hansel and Gretel, and what will happen to you too if you venture past the edge of the woods…’

Perhaps the most visceral experience of the associative process in humans can be seen with trauma. Maybe someone avoids a part of town where something bad happened to them, associating the place with the memory, or they’re reminded of the incident via a particular sound or smell. Some of the healing process may involve using the more precise, later-developed tools of logic and rationality to question the automatic assumptions that association makes (‘Just because something happened to you in that spot once doesn’t mean the same thing will happen there again. In fact it’s statistically quite a safe area’). And of course there are happier examples of the power of association too: the smell of a hyacinth = my first summer abroad, the intro to “Last Nite” = my first teenage crush…

Again and again, a thing can be another thing. As far as your brain is concerned, the hyacinth is the holiday, the song is the crush. This ability to make intuitive lateral connections between unrelated things is surely part of the very essence of art, making association not only the ancestor of logic but also its estranged cousin, creativity. So we owe the associative process a good chunk of the credit for the arts, the ingenuity that generates technological innovation, and - I have a hunch - the roots of some of the cognitive architecture that supports language. Lately something very like it has been powering our most cutting-edge artificial intelligence systems too.⁷

When Kekulé saw that snake, his unconscious was generalising from a particular animal to a category of animal, and comparing that to a category of molecule. The generalisation part isn’t a million miles more advanced than A crow died, so others might die too. And the comparison part doesn’t seem that far removed from A dinner bell symbolises food.

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Earlier I talked about how part of healing from trauma is moving from an older, more instinctive way of understanding the world (this location equals this painful memory) to a newer, more precise one (the place is just a place, the memory is just a memory). So now that we have all these shiny new mental tools - grammatical languages, Aristotelian logic, the Enlightenment worldview, science, Bayesian reasoning, an ever-improving understanding of our own psychology - do we need the mysteries and intuitions of the unconscious to help guide us any more? Or are they all just so much evolutionary dead weight?

The short answer is that the only reason we do anything at all is because we’re motivated to, all our motivations are based on primordial needs, feelings and drives, and all those things have coexisted with the unconscious for vastly longer than they’ve had to share space with Aristotle and Bayes. Conscious reasoning isn’t an end in itself, merely a tool that we use to help us attain what our unconscious has decided are ends in themselves. One tool among many, at that. Trying to organise your life using rationality alone is like trying to build a house using only a hammer.

Anthropologists and moral philosophers like to talk about “thin” and “thick” ways of understanding things. Thin descriptions are more objective but also more surface-level, while thick ones are more subjective but get more to the heart of something, the “why” of it. To me, science and rationality give you a “thin” understanding of the universe: an account of objects, events and forces that everyone can agree on, for the purpose of manipulating the things around us for our benefit.⁸ But when we want to understand something in a “thicker” way that touches our emotions, excites us and motivates us to act, we tend to do what Kekulé’s unconscious did and reach for the ancient strategy of ‘this thing is like another thing’. In other words, the realm of simile, metaphor and myth.

When Dylan sings ‘Once I had mountains in the palm of my hand, and rivers that ran through every day’, it has an effect on us. If he were to sing ‘I miss having sex’, it wouldn’t have quite the same ring. And if he were to list all the specific things he missed doing, the whole thing would turn into a Frank Zappa song, and you’d be laughing rather than crying. It’s a beautiful paradox, really: the more literal detail our Zappa-Bob went into about his love life, the less he’d be telling you about what it meant, how he felt, or the point of any of it. We songwriters don’t make the rules here; millions of years of evolution do. Mountains and rivers made our ancestors feel awe, pleasure and joy; they noticed they felt the same things during sex; they connected the two via association; they used physical metaphors to talk about their internal states; and we’re still doing the same thing today.⁹

Scientists want the intellectual assent of their peers, so they use formal, precise, objective language that enables their results to be independently replicated and verified. Poets and songwriters want the emotional assent of their audience, for what they think and feel inside to be independently “verified”, for their innermost passions to be “seen”. So they draw on external objects that we can all see, and that produce the same feelings in all of us, when talking about their internal states, so we can go from ‘I’ve felt this way about mountains’ to ‘Oh, he feels as excited about his lover as I do about mountains?’ to ‘I understand now how he feels about his lover!’

A lot of the time, rationality and literalism aren’t even particularly good at telling you how you feel. Ever spent years wondering why you keep following the same old pattern, turning the question over in your mind, forming endless theories, and then one day feeling into the roots of the pattern and realising ‘Oh! That’s exactly why I keep doing that!’?¹⁰ Well, metaphors are one way for your subconscious to give you the information before your conscious mind catches up. Just read this account of how, during an intense period of psychic destabilisation, the author visualised his personality as a crystal that had dissolved and now had the chance to re-crystallise as a new, improved structure.

As well as communicating lots of information concisely - a picture is worth a thousand words and all that - it’s crucial to add that symbols like this allow for ambiguity and multiple layers of meaning. Mountains, rivers and crystals have lots of features, serve lots of purposes and can be compared to lots of other things. This makes them much more like feelings, in all their complex contradictory overwhelm, than like logical chains of reasoning, which only progress in one direction and can only talk about one thing at a time. So when you’re talking about your feelings, it’s often more helpful to symbolise them than to dissect them logically.

Say you’re feeling excited about a new direction in your life, and one night you have a dream about a river. There’s just so much in that image: your excitement is beautiful, it inspires awe in you, it’s pulling you along with it, it’s doing a lot of the work for you, it’s better to “go with its flow” than resist it, it will lead you through some unexpected twists and turns, it’s a little frightening because it’ll carry you away if you’re not careful, etc, etc, etc. Endless nuance. Some of the meanings build on other meanings. Other resonances contradict, or at least complicate, each other. This gives symbols enormous explanatory power. No wonder our unconscious isn’t giving them up any time soon.

OK, one more thing before I go.

If one image from one person’s dream can mean so many things, how much truer is it that myths, religious stories, fairy tales and all the symbols of our collective unconscious don’t have 1-to-1 meanings that can be easily decoded? McCarthy: ‘The picture-story lends itself to parable, to the tale whose meaning gives one pause.’ Parables, by definition, are nonlinear, counterintuitive, paradoxical, unitive where most of our thinking is binary. They can’t be explained away with a simple ‘And the moral of the story is…’, and they certainly can’t be “translated” into nice, secular language.¹¹ With picture-stories, the medium is very much part of the message. As I’ve written about fairly extensively before, our descriptions of the world are never neutral. We create our reality as soon as we name it. And if you choose to use only reductionist language to name your experience, that’s all you’ve done: reduce it.

The story of the Garden of Eden alone, with its tree, snake, apple and naked innocents, contains an infinite number of resonances and implications about just about everything under the sun. We’ll never finish teasing out those meanings as long as the story is told.

This is one reason I think it’s so hard to update ancient stories for a modern audience without throwing the provocative baby out with the problematic bathwater. This doesn’t mean agreeing uncritically with everything the Brothers Grimm have to say about good and evil or the role of women. It just means taking care not to let rationality’s sensibleness neuter the instincts of the unconscious’ ‘mode of presentation’, to the point that we’re closing off the possibility that these instincts could ever surprise us or shock us into insight. When it comes to humanity’s hidden depths, dialogue and open-eyed engagement is the only way. With our cultural shadow as much as with our personal one, we can’t deal responsibly with what we’re not aware of.

So long may snakes tempt innocent women, long may Kekulé dream of snakes, long may Kate Bush dream of sheep, and long may the rest of us keep a good ear out for what the unconscious might have to tell us. It may not always speak in plain words, but does your dog have to tell you it’s hungry for you to know it wants something to eat?

1. He’s not making a value judgement, just an analogy for how language arrived and spread.

2. The ‘language arrived suddenly and spread rapidly’ view is similar to Chomsky’s, but Chomsky thinks language does have a biological basis, taking the form of a brain module that’s now hardwired into the species. This view implies that we can teach other animals to make signs when they want things, but never to use grammar the way we use it. They just physically lack the hardware.

3. I was made aware of this by C. S. Lewis, who was made aware of it by someone else; unfortunately I can’t remember who. I don’t remember the book either - it wasn’t part of a speech by Aslan, I know that.

4. Things are going very well by the way! A lot of different techniques and events have played their part, but I want to give a special shout out to

Rebecca

’s CTT method.

5. At other times I’ve pictured my tensed muscle as a knot, or a fist squeezing my insides.

6. I wonder if there’s some epigenetic explanation for the fact that so many of the symbols we still use to make sense of the world have no relevance to our everyday lives, but were matters of life or death for our forebears. After all, it’s curious that we still picture our problems as snakes, long after reptiles have stopped being a problem for the homo family. Then again, few of us are still having nightmares about woolly mammoths, so maybe our relationship to common archetypes is more about memetics than genetics. Some ancient threats have survived in the myths and stories we read as kids, and others haven’t.

7. LLMs are even more associative than we are, generating sentences via dataset-driven token prediction where a human might construct them from the ground up via logic or the desire to communicate specific information.

8. Even scientists who seek to understand the universe for the sheer sake of understanding it do so because they see both understanding and the universe as Good. I’m with Robert M. Pirsig when he says everything comes down to Quality. We don’t do anything unless some part of us wants to do it, seeing the action as “good” for it. We don’t pursue anything unless we value it.

9. Eagle-eyed readers will notice that Dylan’s not quite singing about internal states here. Instead, we have physical things (mountains, rivers) being compared to another physical thing (a woman’s body). Why do we tend to use geographic features to talk about body parts, rather than vice versa? I suspect it’s because, just like we experience sights and sounds before we get around to introspection, we experience nature long before we get around to sex. Once again, it’s all about the thing that comes first being used to understand the thing that comes later.

10. Fascinatingly, oftentimes your “eureka” moment does nothing more than prove the truth of a theory you already came up with years ago: ‘Maybe I avoid relationships because I feel I don’t deserve love…Aha! It is because I feel I don’t deserve love! I can feel the unworthiness rolling around in there!’ As long as it was just a rational theory, you couldn’t really know whether it was true and so you weren’t motivated to do anything about it. You have to get a visceral sense of ‘this is what I’ve been avoiding, I don’t want to keep avoiding it, here’s what I want to do instead’.

11. As I’ve written about before, I do agree with Jürgen Habermas that “translating” thick religious concepts into thin rational ones has limited communicative and political uses in secular states. But Habermas himself has acknowledged that some of the images’ and stories’ meanings will inevitably get lost in translation.