It's safe to say that, up there with "Where did the universe come from?" and "What is the meaning of life?" is that mysterious, difficult (or, in some respects, maybe impossible) to describe question: "What is consciousness?"
It seems like just about everything there is to say has already been said about consciousness. It is not just a classic philosophical topic, but one that relates to literally every aspect of our experience. What is experience? Why do we have it? What else has it?
To avoid confusion, here is the basic problem.
Let's say René wants to see if George is conscious or has consciousness, in other words that he has some sort of internal experience of what is going on in his life (as opposed to just being a very complex organic machine with no inner life). So René throws a snowball at him. George then clutches his shoulder where the snowball hit him and says "Ouch!". Ok, thinks René, when I threw the projectile, George responded by clutching his shoulder and making an audible signal of distress, so that must mean that the snowball hurt him a bit. If he felt pain, that means he has the capacity to feel, and if he has the capacity to feel, that is an internal experience, so he must be conscious.
At first glance, this seems all well and good. It is typically how we reason in our daily lives. If you see your friend reclining on the couch with his eyes closed, and you shout to get his attention only to be met with no reaction, you conclude your friend is probably asleep or unconscious, if not that he otherwise didn't hear you for some other reason (meaning he didn't experience or wasn't conscious of your shout). Conversely, if your friend does respond, you assume that he did experience it. But there is more to it than that.
René gets curious, so next he throws a snowball at a glass vase sitting on a table. He throws it so hard that the vase shatters with a *CRASH*. Hmmm, he thinks, the glass broke up into pieces and made an audible signal that it was damaged, so that must mean that the snowball hurt it. If the snowball hurt it, then it has the capacity to feel hurt or pain, so it must have an internal experience. The vase must be conscious!
Obviously, most of us probably don't think of glass vases as being conscious, despite the fact that they may deform and make a noise if they are damaged. But why, then, do we assume that a person is conscious when they do the same sort of thing under similar circumstances? The tricky part here is the transition from external physical reactions to an internal subjective experience. We assume the fact that the glass made a noise when it broke is simply a physical byproduct of the fact that the pieces were deformed, and the deformation itself is because of the force that was exerted on it by the snowball, not because of some sort of experience that the glass has of breaking. In other words, the glass doesn't feel itself breaking; it is just inanimate matter. Any reaction it may have is just a result of physical mechanisms. But why don't we use the same reasoning with people? Why don't we just assume that the reactions people give to events that happen outside of them are just due to neurological and physiological mechanisms? Why aren't people also just inanimate, though very intricate, machines?. In other words, why should René assume that George actually experiences the impact of the snowball? Why are George's neurological and physiological functions not simply causing him to behave in the way that he does without ever providing him with any internal experience of it all? Not just why, but how the subjective experience happens is a mystery. How could a set of physical mechanisms ever become a subjective consciousness? How complex does a system have to get before it becomes conscious? Is that even the right question to ask? What we are discussing is called the mind-body problem, and solutions to the problem can by difficult to pin down.
Consequently, many theories have been developed in order to answer these questions.
MIND & MATTER
When speaking about consciousness, dualism is the idea that mind and body are two separate kinds of things. The dualist philosopher that comes to mind first is René Descartes, who is known in part for his famous line "I think, therefore I am."
What is interesting about Descartes' dualism is that he believed the mind could influence the body, but one can believe that mind and matter are two separate things without necessarily believing that this is how it works. For example, you could believe that the mind is running on its own course and does not interact with but merely accompanies matter (see "3.3 Parallelism" in the previously linked SEP article Dualism). Mind and matter would then be like two musicians in two separate isolated rooms of a recording studio, both improvising in C major at 120 beats per minute and both only hearing what they themselves are respectively playing, while the producer in another room can hear both at once. What will happen is that the two combined sounds will probably sound quite nice; they will harmonize, even though the two musicians are not interacting with each other at all. Another idea, epiphenomenalism, is that matter affects the mind, but not the other way around. This would be akin to if musician #1 played a few minutes of music that was then recorded and given to musician #2 to solo over. Musician #1's activity would certainly determine what musician #2 played, but musician #2's playing in no way determines what musician #1 had already recorded.
MIND & MATTER
If you think about it for a while, you may find that there is another possible solution to the mind-body problem. If the only connection we have with the outside world is through our consciousness, and, as Descartes articulated, our consciousness is not always accurate, why don't we just cut out the outside world all together and assume that consciousness is all there is like George Berkeley? Perhaps this is a solid solution.
SUBJECTIVITY
One of the fascinating things about consciousness is that it is subjective. Some may say that consciousness has an owner. That is, it only happens when someone or something is conscious. Otherwise, one might say that each consciousness is walled off from every other consciousness in some way, if we are going to avoid placing a separation between a being and its consciousness. Either way, William James explored the subjectivity of consciousness in The Principles of Psychology:
James mentions how we have no "direct sight of a thought in another personal consciousness than its own" (pp. 226). Our consciousness is limited to our own experience. You have experienced this reality if you have ever wondered what life is like from someone else's perspective. What if you could swap minds with someone and see what their consciousness is like? Would it be more or less the same, or completely different?
You may have seen the Vsauce video on this topic:
CONTINUITY
James also observed that consciousness is continuous, meaning that it "does not appear to itself chopped up in bits" (pp. 239). He believed that our thoughts seem to bleed into each other without having abrupt breakages in between. Even when you sleep, you don't experience the void of consciousness between when you cease to be awake and when you reawaken. That is because you can't experience a void of experience. James masterfully explains it this way: "To expect the consciousness to feel the interruptions of its objective continuity as gaps, would be like expecting the eye to feel a gap of silence because it does not hear, or the ear to feel a gap of darkness because it does not see" (pp. 238).
Even when certain thoughts seem to get cut off or changed so suddenly as to cause a disconnect between two events in our consciousness, James says that it is still continuous. He uses the example of a thunder-clap. "The thunder itself we believe to abolish and exclude the silence; but the feeling of the thunder is also a feeling of the silence as just gone; and it would be difficult to find in the actual concrete consciousness of man a feeling so limited to the present as not to have an inkling of anything that went before" (pp. 241).
I find it helpful to think of James' idea of continuity in terms of the following. Trying to construct a consciousness in a discontinuous way would be akin to trying to build a circle out of toothpicks. No matter how many toothpicks you use, your constructed shape will only ever approach a perfect circle, but it would never quite get there. James' theory of continuous consciousness is best represented by a perfect circle, where there is always a smooth curve from one point to the next no matter how far you zoom in, rather than there being stretches of the shape were the points all follow the same straight line for a distance. With the circle, there are no breaks in curvature (like how there are no breaks in consciousness).
People are always so fascinated by the question of whether their red (or blue or whatever) is the same as others. That seems like just about the least interesting question one could ask about consciousness.
ReplyDeleteSo what is it? It's the reflexive awareness of oneself as a breathing, thinking, intending, experiencing intelligence. But what's all THAT? And why is it?
No matter, never mind...
My view of consciousness motivates me to ask lots of questions.