Timothy Wilson Strangers To Ourselves Analysis

This chapter will explain Timothy Wilson’s psychological research on the adaptive uncon-scious and show us that introspection is not always a good thing and just how far we can go with intuition. In “Strangers to Ourselves” Wilson explains why we sometimes feel like we do not really know ourselves. As the title states, the book discusses the topic of people alienat-ing themselves from themselves. The adaptive unconscious is first described as a complex topic that can hardly be explained. In situations where our adaptive unconscious takes over we often cannot explain our behaviour. Not handling a situation consciously, can make us feel unfamiliar with ourselves.
Wilson assigns a much more important role to the adaptive unconscious than just the
in-stinctive, somewhat primitive thinking it is often associated with. The adaptive unconscious is described more or less as a “sophisticated and pervasive thinking process” that is beyond our control.
He takes the view that we as human beings’ know that there is such a thing as consciousness, we have all felt it and consequently, for us, it exists. If someone were to tell us ‘imagine the colour blue’, we could easily do so. Even though we do not know if the other person imagined the same blue as we did, we are able to imagine more or less the same thing as the other person. This thinking process was conscious and with therefore we have proof that we experience our consciousness, arguably every day. This, of course, makes it easier to understand the concept of conscious thinking. The task of understanding the adap-tive unconscious proves so difficult because we do not have the first-hand proof, we have with our consciousness. We are unable to feel the adaptive unconscious’ presence. If we would have to think about the last time we made a decision unconsciously, we would be unable to answer the question. Timothy Wilson does a good job of describing this phenom-enon by just explaining how we would react if we were to lose our non-conscious mind. How would our day be different if we lost the ability to make decisions and process information
unconsciously? “If we had posed this question to René Descartes three centuries ago, he would have replied that our day would be like any other; what we are aware of is what we think, because there are no other mental processes.” In that aspect Descartes was obvi-ously wrong. For if we lost our ability to process information unconsciously even just for one day, it would certainly impinge on us and our mental processes. All the processes that hap-pen unconsciously would be unthinkable. Tasks like blinking or keeping our balance would prove to be impossible. After all, we do not have to tell ourselves to breathe due to the fact that this is also an unconscious action. In addition to that, our unconscious or adaptive un-conscious is the part of our brain that takes control of our mind in stress situations, which we are faced with more than we may think.