So Wilson wants to suggest as we've mentioned before, that unconscious processing is a huge part of our cognitive lives and mental lives broadly speaking. He argues for this in the following passage, I'm quoting, "Consider that at any given moment, our five senses are taking in more than 11 million pieces of information. Scientists have determined this number by counting the receptor cells each sense organ has and the nerves that go from each cell to the brain. Scientists have also tried to determine how many of these signals can be processed consciously at any given point in time, by looking at such things as how quickly people can read, consciously detect different flashes of light, and tell apart different kinds of smells. The most liberal estimate is that people can process consciously 40 different pieces of information per second. Think about it, we take in 11 million pieces of information per second and can only process 40 of them consciously. What happens to the other 10,999,960? It would be terribly wasteful to design a system with such incredible sensory acuity but very little capacity to use the incoming information. Fortunately, we do make use of great deal of this information outside of conscious awareness." The suggestion being as follows, That for Wilson, that remaining 11 million minus 40 is all processing that occurs at the unconscious level and therefore, That is supposed to justify the metaphor of the snowball on top of the iceberg where the snowball corresponds to conscious awareness, and the rest of the iceberg, including the part of iceberg that's above water, is all part of the unconscious and particularly the adaptive unconscious. And that's an interesting claim. But it isn't justified by the argument that he gives here and here's why. I believe that Wilson is equivocating with the word �information�. It's perfectly acceptable to use the word information to apply to a bit of signaling that happens from one cell to another. There's not the slightest reason to think that a single receptor activation for example on my retina, corresponds to a mental state such as a belief, or an emotion, or even an experiential state. It's only if we thought that experiences were happening, or emotional phenomena occurred, or cognitive phenomena occurred, corresponding 1:1 with each one of those 11 million or 11 million minus 40 events, then we'd be able to say that all the remaining, everything but the 40 are mental phenomena that are occurring at the subconscious or at least unconscious level, Because, you remember, to be unconscious you still have to be mental. The growth of my toenails, my metabolizing food, respiration, thermoregulation are all cases of nonconscious mental phenomena but that does not make them unconscious mental phenomena. To be unconscious you still have to be mental. To be mental, you've got to be cognitive, or affective, or experiential, and it's only if Wilson can argue that each one of those 11 million minus 40 information processing events corresponds to a mental phenomenon such as one of these, then he'll be able to make the argument that supports this snowball on top of the iceberg position. So, let's be careful about how this particular line of reasoning is not persuasive. We want to be open to the further question of what is the relationship between the extent of conscious awareness and the extent of unconscious awareness? It might still be that there's a great deal of unconscious processing that goes on under the hood so to speak, but this argument doesn't tell us what that relationship is. We'll need to keep on looking.
