On the Account for Human Consciousness

7/22/2019 On the Account for Human Consciousness

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ON THE ACCOUNT FOR HUMAN

CONSCIOUSNESS

TUBA NAZ


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TABLEOFCONTENTS

INTRODUCTIONTOHUMANCONSCIOUSNESS ............................................................................... 1What is Human Consciousness? .......................................................................................................... 1

Language, Thinking and Consciousness ......................................................................................... 2

ORIGINS OF THE PROBLEM OF HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS................................................................. 4

The Nature of the Problem .................................................................................................................. 5

THEANCIENTAGE OF HUMANCONSCIOUSNESS ........................................................................8

The Pre-Socratics: ... 9

Platos Contribution.12

Aristotles conception of Soul...13

THESUBSTANTIALIZINGOF THESUBJECT.15

The Mind-Body Problem17

Critical Analysis..18

Consciousness as Self-awareness..19

THEINTERNALIZING OF THEOBJECT21

Lockes Egocentric predicament21

Descartes and Locke 22


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THEDISTANTIATING OF THESUBJECT FROM ITSMENTALMODES23

Experience Is the Origin of All Ideas .23

GEORGE BERKLEY: To be is to be Perceived ..24

The Skeptical Influence on Human Consciousness.27

THEEMPIRICIZING OF THEMENTAL.30

James on Pure Experience ..33

The Paradox of Consciousness ....34

The Objectivity of Experience .....34

Transcendental Ideas ....36

EXISTENTIALISTVIEW OFCONSCIOUSNESS 39

Objectivity as Untruth..39

The Current Understanding of Human Consciousness ..40

BIBLOGRAPHY 41


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INTRODUCTIONTOHUMANCONSCIOUSNESS

You go to black and then you have to have a moment of Big Bang and that's the origin

of everything the origin of thought the origin of consciousness, whatever it is. In that

moment its like 'from that nothing to everything' is everything.

-Larry Wachowski

Consciousness is undeniably real. It is something that practically every rational human freely

acknowledges. But admitting all of that, turns out to be the easy part. The difficulty arises in

explaining why? Why consciousness exists? Why it is real? Why it works the way it does? And

the more important, where does it exist? When it comes to explaining the origin of

consciousness, the emergence of full consciousness is indeed one of the greatest of miracles

and also a mystery. The past three decades have witnessed a serious and noticeable increase in

interest in the subject of consciousness. One would think that since so much has been written

on the topic of consciousness, surely the definition of this discussed issue would be a

straightforward one, a simple matter. Scientists and philosophers cannot even agree on the

definition of the term, much less on the origin of that which they are attempting to define. So

much has been written to shed light on the issue of consciousness but the difficulties and

criticisms always blurred this idea. Much work has been done in different domains to clarify the

concept of consciousness but neither the consensus nor a clear explanation occurred in any

domain.

I. What is Human Consciousness?Our English word consciousness has its roots in the Latin conscio, formed by the coalescence

of cum (meaning with) and scio (meaning know). In its original Latin sense, to be conscious

of something was to share knowledge of it, with someone else, or with oneself.

A common definition of consciousness has also been defined as: "the totality of the

impressions, thoughts, and feelings which make up a person's conscious being." This general


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definition postulates that consciousness is the sum of all which occurs within the mind. The

American Heritage Dictionary offers an equally vague definition of consciousness, "The state or

condition of being conscious"; conscious being defined as: "Having an awareness of one's

environment and one's own existence, sensations, and thoughts."

More recent definitions of consciousness support the writings of William James. The joint or

mutual knowledge definition considers consciousness to be an expression closely related to the

ability to share thoughts with others. Through learnt interaction a person develops the ability

to be aware of her/himself. Associated with this definition is the radical behaviorists' view

which claims that without the ability to express one's inner experience with other people,

sharing of mutual or joint knowledge, self-awareness would not exist. Thus, the expression of

conscious awareness is a learnt phenomenon dependent upon social interaction and

conditioning.

Contrary to the above definition is one in which consciousness is seen as the ability for internal

knowing. Rather than being considered a social construct consciousness arises from within an

individual. A combination of the mutual or joint knowledge definition and that of internal

knowing is the definition that consciousness is a state of awareness. This definition considers

consciousness to be a state in which knowledge of one's internal domain, as well as the outside

world coexist. External knowledge is derived from the senses allowing a person to be aware of

her/his inner and outer worlds.

II. Language, Thinking and ConsciousnessHuman beings' ability to speak has changed consciousness in several ways. Whereas animals

learn principally from their own experiences, we can share our subjective experiences with

each other and so learn from each other. We can build up a body of collective knowledge that

can be passed down from one generation to another.


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Not only do we use speech to talk to each other, we can talk to ourselves, inside our own

minds: we can think in words. Of all the significant developments that came from language

thinking has been the most important.

Words can conjure up associations to past experiences. The word "elephant" brings back to

mind images of elephant we have seen, cats we may have known, dolphins we have heard

about, things we know about them, and a range of other associations. Through words we can

deliberately bring the past back to mind, independently of what is happening in the present.

Other creatures may well experience associations to past experiences, like dogs seem to

remember people who have treated them badly but their associations are almost certainly

determined by what is going on around them in the present moment.

Through thinking we can liberate ourselves from this constraint. Not only can we think about

past experiences, we can entertain thoughts about the future. We can make plans and take

decisions, and exercise far greater influence over our future that other creatures. Just our

consciousness has expanded in space to encompass even the edges of the Universe, so too it it

has expanded in time.

Thinking has allowed us to ask questions -- "How?" and "Why?", and ponder their solutions.

Such quests led to science and philosophy, literally, "knowledge" and "the love of wisdom". Our

consciousness discovered a whole new realm, i.e. understanding. We could look into the heart

of matter.


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ORIGINSOF THE PROBLEM OFHUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS

Philosophers argue about whether all thinking is accompanied by or perhaps even constituted

out of sensory materials (i.e. images), and some champion the idea of a pure thought-consciousness independent of sensory components. In any event, there is no doubt that

thought is something that often happens consciously and is in some way different from

perception, sensation or other forms of consciousness. Yet another sort of conscious

experience is closely associated with the idea of conscious thought but not identical to it:

epistemological consciousness, or the sense of certainty or doubt we have when consciously

entertaining a proposition (such as 2 + 3 = 5 or the word eat consists of three letters).

Descartes famously appealed to such states of consciousness in the method of doubt, that

reason alone determined knowledge of true reality, independently of the senses. All things

which I conceive very clearly and very distinctly are true.1

Still another significant if subtle form of consciousness has sometimes been given the name

fringe consciousness, which refers to the background of awareness which sets the context for

experience. An example is our sense of orientation or rightness in a familiar environment

(consider the change in your state of consciousness when you recognize someones face who at

first appeared a stranger). Moods present another form of fringe consciousness, with clear links

to the more overtly conscious emotional states but also clearly distinct from these. But I think

there is a fundamental commonality to all these different forms of consciousness.

Consciousness is distinctive for its subjectivity or its first-person character. There is something

it is like to be in a conscious state and only the conscious subject has direct access to this way

of being. There is nothing it is like to be a rock, no subjective aspect to an ashtray. But

conscious beings are essentially different in this respect. The huge variety in the forms of

consciousness makes the problem very complex, but the core problem of consciousness

focuses on the nature of subjectivity.

1Copleston, F. S.J. vol. IV of A History of Philosophy (London: Burns and Oates Ltd., 1960) pg: 97


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A further source of complexity arises from the range of possible explanatory targets associated

with the study of consciousness. One might, for instance, primarily focus on the structure or

contents of consciousness. These would provide a valid answer to one legitimate sense of the

question what is consciousness. But then again, one might be more interested in how

consciousness comes into being, either in a developing individual, or in the universe at large. Or

one might wonder how consciousness, seemingly so different from the purely objective

properties of the material world studied by physics or chemistry, fits in with the overall

scientific view of the world. To address all these aspects of the problem of consciousness would

require volumes upon volumes. The history presented here focuses on what has become

perhaps the central issue in consciousness studies, which is the problem of integrating

subjectivity into the scientific view of the world.

I. The Nature of the ProblemDespite is a huge range of diverse opinion, I think it is fair to say that there is now something of

a consensus view about the origin of consciousness, which I will call here the mainstream

view. It is something like the following. The world is a purely physical system created some 13

billion years ago in the prodigious event Fred Hoyle labeled the big bang. Very shortly after the

big bang the world was in a primitive, ultra-hot and chaotic state in which normal matter could

not exist, but as the system cooled the familiar elements of hydrogen and helium, as well as

some traces of a few heavier elements, could form. Then very interesting things started to

happen, as stars and galaxies quickly evolved, burned through their hydrogen fuel and went

nova, in the process creating and spewing forth most of the elements of the periodic table into

the increasingly rich galactic environments.

There was not a trace of life, mind or consciousness throughout any of this. That was to come

later. The mainstream view continues with the creation of planetary systems. At first these

were poor in heavier elements, but after just a few generations of star creation and destruction

there were many Earth like planets scattered through the vast perhaps infinite expanse of

galaxies, and indeed some 7 or 8 billion years after the big bang the Earth itself formed along


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with our solar system. We do not yet understand it very well, but whether in a warm little

pond, around a deeply submerged hydrothermal vent, amongst the complex interstices of

some claylike matrix, as a pre-packaged gift from another world, or in some other way of which

we have no inkling, conditions on the early Earth somehow enabled the special though

entirely in accord with physical law chemistry necessary for the beginnings of life. But even

with the presence of life or proto-life, consciousness still did not grace the Earth. The long, slow

processes of evolution by natural selection took hold and ultimately led at some time,

somewhere to the first living beings that could feel could feel pain and pleasure, want and

fear, could experience sensations of light, sound or odors. The mainstream view sees this

radical development as being conditioned by the evolution of neurological behavior control

systems in co-evolutionary development with more capable sensory systems. Consciousness

thus emerged as a product of increasing biological complexity, from non-conscious precursors

composed of non-conscious components. Here we can raise many of the central questions

within the problem of consciousness. Imagine we were alien exo-biologists observing the Earth

around the time of the emergence of consciousness. How would we know that certain

organisms were, while other organisms were not, conscious? What is it about the conscious

organisms that explain why they are conscious? Furthermore, the appearance of conscious

beings looks to be a development that sharply distinguishes them from their precursors, but thematerial processes of evolution are not marked by such radical discontinuities. To be sure, we

do find striking differences amongst extant organisms. The unique human use of language is

perhaps the best example of such a difference, but of course the apes exhibit a host of related,

potentially precursor abilities, as do human beings who lack full language use. Thus we have

possible models of at least some aspects of our pre-linguistic ancestors which suggest the

evolutionary path that led to language. But the slightest, most fleeting, spark of feeling is a fully

fledged instance of consciousness which entirely differentiates its possessor from the realm ofthe non-conscious. Note here dissimilarity to other biological features. Some creatures have

wings and others do not, and we would expect that in the evolution from wingless to winged

there would be a hazy region where it just would not be clear whether or not a certain

creatures appendages would count as wings or not. Similarly, as we consider the evolutionary


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advance from non-conscious to conscious creatures, there would be a range for which we

would be unclear about whether or not creatures within that range were conscious or not. But

in this latter case, there is a fact whether or not the creatures in that range are feeling anything,

however dimly or weakly whereas we do not think there must be a fact about whether a

certain appendage is or is not a wing (a dim or faint feeling is 100% a kind of consciousness but

a few feathers on a forelimb is not a kind of wing). It is up to us whether to count a certain sort

of appendage as a wing or not it makes no difference, so to speak, to the organism what we

call it. But it is not up to us to decide whether or not organism X does or does not enjoy some

smidgen of consciousnessit either does or it does not.

Lurking behind these relatively empirical questions is a more basic theoretical, or metaphysical,

issue. Given that creatures capable of fairly complex behavior were evolving without

consciousness, why is consciousness necessary for the continued evolution of more complex

behavior? Just as wings are an excellent solution to the problem of evolving flight, brains (or

more generally nervous systems) are wonderful at implementing richly capable sensory systems

and co-ordinate behavior control systems. But why should these brains be conscious? Although

perhaps of doubtful coherence, its useful to try to imagine our alien biologists as non-

conscious beings. Perhaps they are advanced machines well programmed in deduction,

induction and abduction. Now, why would they ever posit consciousness in addition to, or as a

feature of, complex sensory and behavioral control systems? As Thomas Huxley said: how it is

that anything so remarkable as a state of consciousness comes about as a result of irritating

nervous tissue, is just as unaccountable as the appearance of Djin when Aladdin rubbed his

lamp (1866, 8, 210). We might, rather fancifully, describe this core philosophical question

about consciousness as that of how the genie of consciousness gets into the lamp of the brain,

or why, to use Thomas Nagels famous phrase, there is something it is like to be a conscious

entity?


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THE ANCIENT AGE OF HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS

Of course, the mainstream view has not long been mainstream, for the problem of

consciousness cannot strike one at all until a fairly advanced scientific understanding of theworld permits development of the materialism presupposed by the mainstream view. A second

necessary condition is simply the self-recognition that we are conscious beings possessing a

host of mental attributes. And that has been around for a long time. Our ancestors initiated a

spectacular leap in conceptual technology by devising what is nowadays called folk

psychology. The development of the concepts of behavior explaining states such as belief and

desire, motivating states of pleasure and pain, and information laden states of perceptual

sensation as well as the complex links amongst these concepts is perhaps the greatest piece of

theorizing ever produced by human beings.

An important part of ancient Greek culture was the mystery cults, into which many Greek

philosophers were initiated. Out of this cultural milieu developed a philosophical tradition that

was hylozoistic, conceiving of nature as animated or alive; ontological, inquiring into the very

essence of things; and monistic, seeking to find a single principle to explain all phenomena.

Now, we will explore the theories of mind and consciousness promulgated by the ancient

philosophers. Note that their teachings consistently emphasized a unity between the goals of

philosophy and the practices of living. Numbers were thus seen as a principle that linked the

symbolic properties of the mind with the mechanisms of the universe. It is precisely this

Pythagorean notion that forms the backbone of the theoretical models of consciousness. For

the most ancient of all philosophical-scientific traditions relating consciousness and reality may

yet prove the most fruitful. If so, it would not be the first time that Pythagorean concepts have

demonstrated extraordinarily penetrating insights. Pythagoras was the first to suggest that the

earth was a spherical planet orbiting the sun. The origin of human consciousness was

understood in the context of this astronomy.


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A great concern for exploring consciousness is expressed in the works of Plato, who was a

student of Socrates. Plato maintains that the world of ideas itself is just as real as the world of

objects, and that it is through ideas that humanity attains consciousness of the absolute.

A fruitful way to present the history is in terms of a fundamental divergence in thought that

arose early and has not yet died out in current debate. This is the contrast between emergence

and panpsychism. The mainstream view accepts emergence: mind or consciousness appeared

out of non-conscious precursors and non-conscious components (note there is both a

synchronic and diachronic sense of emergence). Panpsychism is the alternative view that

emergence is impossible and mind must be already and always present, in some sense,

throughout the universe (a panpsychist might allow that mind emerges in the trivial sense that

the universe may have been created out of nothing and hence out of non -consciousness; the

characteristically panpsychist position here would be that consciousness must have been

created along with whatever other fundamental features of the world were put in place at the

beginning). Of course, this divergence transcends the mind-body problem and reflects a

fundamental difference in thinking about how the world is structured.

I. The Pre-Socratics:The Pre-Socratics immediately recognized the basic dilemma: either mind (or, more generally,

whatever the apparently macroscopic, high-level, or non-fundamental property at issue) is an

elemental feature of the world or it somehow emerges from, or is conditioned by, such

features. If one opts for emergence, it is incumbent upon one to at least sketch the means by

which new features emerge. If one opts for panpsychism (thus broadly construed) then one

must account for the all too obviously apparent total lack of certain features at the

fundamental level. For example, Anaxagoras (c. 500-425 BC) flatly denied that emergence was

possible and instead advanced the view that everything is in everything. Anaxagoras explained

the obvious contrary appearance by a principle of dominance and latency which asserted that

some qualities were dominant in their contribution to the behavior and appearance of things.

However, Anaxagoras views on mind are complex since he apparently regarded it as uniquely


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not containing any measure of other things and thus not fully in accord with his mixing

principles. Perhaps this can be interpreted as the assertion that mind is ontologically

fundamental in a special way; Anaxagoras did seem to believe that that everything has some

portion of mind in it while refraining from the assertion that everything has a mind.

On the other hand, Empedocles, an almost exact contemporary of Anaxagoras, favored an

emergents account based upon the famous doctrine of the four elements: earth, air, fire and

water. All qualities were to be explicated in terms of ratios of these elements. The overall

distribution of the elements, which were themselves eternal and unchangeable, was controlled

by love and strife, whose operations are curiously reminiscent of some doctrines of modern

thermodynamics, in a grand cyclically dynamic universe. It is true that Empedocles is sometimes

regarded as a panpsychist because of the universal role of love and strife, but there seems little

of the mental in Empedocles conceptions, which are rather more like forces of aggregation and

dis-aggregation respectively. The purest form of emergent was propounded by the famed

atomist Democritus. His principle of emergence was based upon the possibility of multi-shaped,

invisibly tiny atoms interlocking to form infinity of more complex structures. But Democritus,

in a way echoing Anaxagoras and perhaps hinting at the later distinction between primary and

secondary properties, had to admit that the qualities of experience (what philosophers

nowadays call qualia, the subjective features of conscious experience) could not be accounted

for in this way and chose, ultimately unsatisfactorily, to relegate them to non-existence: sweet

exists by convention, bitter by convention, in truth only atoms and the void. Sorely missed is

Democritus accountof how conventions themselves, the consciously agreed upon means of

common referenceemerge from the dancing atoms (thus the ideas of Democritus anticipate

the reflexive problem of modern eliminativist materialists. who would enjoin us to consciously

accept a view which evidently entails that there is no such thing as conscious acceptance of

views. What is striking about these early struggles about the proper form of a scientific

understanding of the world is that the mind and particularly consciousness keep rising as

special problems. It is sometimes said that the mind-body problem is not an ancient

philosophical issue on the basis that sensations were complacently regarded as bodily


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phenomena, but it does seem that the problem of consciousness was vexing philosophers 2500

years ago, and in a form redolent of contemporary worries. Also critically important is the way

that the problem of consciousness inescapably arises within the context of developing an

integrated scientific view of the world. The reductionist strain in the Pre-Socratics was not

favored by the two giants of Greek philosophy, Plato and Aristotle, despite their own radical

disagreements about how the world should be understood. Plato utterly lacked the naturalizing

temperament of the Pre-Socratic philosophers, although he was well aware of their efforts. He

explicitly criticizes Anaxagoras efforts to provide naturalistic, causal explanations of human

behavior.

Anaxagoras concept of Nous provided one of themost powerful intuitions . . . in the whole

course of Pre-Socratic philosophy . . . that the [basic] principle is an infinite reality, separate

from everything else.2

All things which have life, both the greater and the less, are ruled by mind. Mind took

command of the universal revolution, so ad to make (things) revolve at the outset. At

first things began to revolve from some small point, but now the revolution extends

over a greater area, and will spread even further. And the things which were mixed

together, and separated off, and divided, were all understood by mind. And whatever

they were going to be, and whatever things were then in existence that are not now,

and all things that now exist and whatever shall existall were arranged by mind, as

also the revolution now followed by the stars, the sun and moon, and the air and aither

[ether] which were separated off. . . . And nothing is absolutely separated off or divided

the one from the other except mind. Mind is all alike, both the greater and the less. But

nothing else is like anything else.3

2Reale, pp.114.

3Anaxagoras, Frg. 12; Reale, pp. 114.


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Anaxagoras believed that in everything there is a portion of everything.4Our eyes and other

senses are too unrefined to see everything.

II. Platos ContributionOf course, Plato nonetheless has a significant role in the debate since he advances positive

arguments in favor of the thesis that mind and body are distinct as well as providing a basic,

and perpetually influential, tri-component based psychological theory (see Republic, Book 4).

Platos primary motivation for accepting a dualist account of mind and body presumably stems

from the doctrine of the forms. These are entities which in some way express the intrinsic

essence of things. The form of circle is that which our imperfect drawings of circles imitate and

point to. The mind can grasp this form, even though we have never perceived a true circle, butonly more or less imperfect approximations. The ability of the mind to commune with the

radically non-physical forms suggests that mind itself cannot be physical.

In the Phaedo, Plato, putting words in the mouth of Socrates, ridicules the reductionist account

of Anaxagoras which sees human action as caused by local physical events. In its place, the

mind is proposed as the final (i.e. teleological) cause of action, merely conditioned or

constrained by the physical:

If it were said that without such bones and sinews and all the rest of them I should not

be able to do what I think is right, it would be true. But to say that is because of them

that I do what I am doing, and not through choice of what is best although my actions

are controlled by mind would be a very lax and inaccurate form of expression.

(Phaedo, 98b ff.)

In general, Platos arguments for dualism are not very convincing. Heres one:

Life must come from death, because otherwise, since all living things eventually die,

everything would eventually be dead. Life can come from death only if there is a distinct

4Anaxagoras, Frg. 11; Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy. Ed. 4

th(London, 1930) pp.259.


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component, responsible for something being alive, that persists through the life-death-

life cycle. That persistent component is soul or mind.(Phaedo 72c-d).

Another argument which Plato frequently invokes (or presupposes in other argumentation) is

based on reincarnation. If we grant that reincarnation occurs, it is a reasonable inference that

something persists which is what is reincarnated. This is a big if to modern readers of a

scientific bent but the doctrine of reincarnation was widespread throughout ancient times and

is still taken seriously by large numbers of people. The kernel of a much more powerful

argument for dualism lurks here as well, which was deployed by Descartes much later.

III.Aristotles conceptionof SoulAristotle is famously much more naturalistically inclined than Plato. But Aristotles views on

mind are complex and obscure; certainly not straightforwardly reductionist (the soul is not, for

example, a particularly subtle kind of matter such as fire). Aristotles metaphysics deployed a

fundamental distinction between matter and form, and any object necessarily instantiates

both. A statue of a horse has its matter: bronze, and its form: horse. Aristotle is not using

Platos conception of form here. The form of something is not another-world separate entitybut something more like the way in which the matter of something is organized or structured.

Nor by matter does Aristotle mean the fundamental physical stuff we refer to by that word;

matter is whatever relatively unstructured stuff is enformed to make an object (English retains

something of this notion in its use of matter to mean topic), so bronze is the matter of a

statue, but soldiers would be the matter of an army. Objects can differ in matter but agree in

form (two identical pictures, one on paper another on a computer screen) or vice versa. More

abstractly, Aristotle regarded life as the form of plants and animals and named the form ofliving things soul (the form of a natural body having life potentially within it (De Anima, bk. 2,

ch. 1). Aristotles views have some affinity both with modern biologys conception of life and

the doctrine of psycho-physical functionalism insofar as he stresses that soul is not a separate

thing requiring another ontological realm, but also cannot be reduced to mere matter since the


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essential attribute is function and organization. Yet there are elements of Aristotles account

that are not very naturalistic.

Early in the De Anima, Aristotle raises the possibility that the relation between the body and

the mind is analogous to that between sailor and ship, which would imply that mind, is

independent of body. Later Aristotle apparently endorses this possibility where he discusses,

notoriously obscurely, the active intellect the part of the soul capable of rational thought.5

Aristotle clearly states that the active intellect is separable from body and can exist without it.

For Aristotle, like Plato, the problematic feature of mind was its capacity for abstract thought

and not consciousness per se, although of course these thinkers were implicitly discussing

conscious thought and had no conception of mind apart from consciousness. Discussion of one

particular, and highly interesting if perennially controversial, feature of consciousness can

perhaps be traced to Aristotle. This is the self-intimating or self- representing nature of all

conscious states. Many thinkers have regarded it as axiomatic that one could not be in a

conscious state without being aware of that state and Aristotle makes some remarks that

suggest he may belong to this school of thought. For example, in Book Three of De Anima

Aristotle presents, rather swiftly, the following regress argument: Since we perceive that we

see and hear, it is necessarily either by means of the seeing that one perceives that one sees or

by another [perception]. But the same [perception] will be both of the seeing and of the color

that underlies it, with the result that either two [perceptions] will be of the same thing, or it

(perception) will be of itself. Further, if the perception of seeing is a different (perception),

either this will proceed to infinity or some (perception) will be of itself; so that we ought to

posit this in the first instance.

Aristotles argument appears to be that if it is essential to a conscious state that it be

consciously apprehended then conscious states must be self-representing on pain of an infinite

regress of states each representing (and hence enabling conscious apprehension of) the

previous state in the series. The crucial premise that all mental states must be conscious is

5De Anima, bk. 3, ch. 4-5


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formally necessary for the regress and modern representational accounts of consciousness

which accept that conscious states are self-intimating, such as the Higher Order Thought

theory, can block the regress by positing non-conscious thoughts which make lower order

thoughts conscious by being about them.

THESUBSTANTIALIZINGOF THESUBJECT

In Aristotles hylomorphic account there is no substantial soul or mind. Th e human

being is a special kind of organism, a rational animal; and what we now refer to as the

mind is the range of capacities an organism of that kind is goof for. In Aristotelian

terms the human soul id the form of the matter that has these capacities, and the

capacities themselves, and so also the soul, can be witnessed both by observers and by

the organisms themselves with no special privilege attached to the point of view of

those actually exercising them.6

According to Aristotle things exist according to some pattern, some form. The Greek term for

soul is psyche, and we get the term psychology from it. For Aristotle, soul is the form of the

body. Just as we cannot even imagine a soul going to Atlanta without a body, so too, once body

is not a human being without a human soul, in Aristotles view.

Soul is entelechy. For Aristotle, it is impossible to affect the body without affecting the soul or

to a fact the soul without affecting the body. There is no way to reach the soul except through

the bodily organs (including the brain/mind), and there is no way for the soul to act or

communicate except bodily. Recently, some scientists have lent support to the view that the

mind plays a role in a altering the course of various autoimmune diseases, that laughter and

positive attitude has healing power. Such idea reflects Aristotles insistence on the organic,

holistic, inseparable union of body and the natural soul. African, Amazonian, Native American

6Alastair Hannay, Human Consciousness(Great Britain: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1970) pp. 21.


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and other tribal cultures have long accepted this as a fact. Human beings are not only besouled

creatures, and each kind of substance requires a different kind of study.

A great concern for exploring consciousness is expressed in the works of Plato, who was a

student of Socrates. Plato maintains that the world of ideas itself is just as real as the world of

objects, and that it is through ideas that humanity attains consciousness of the absolute. In

Neoplatonist and Platonian versions, the human being is an independent self, an ego, in touch

with the spiritual world which is its real home and therefore eternal even when finite.

The substantializing of the rational faculties is usually associated with Descartes

dualism, in which (anticipating current trends in cognitive science) the biological, and

also (it might be claimed) merely psychological, functions are reduced to mechanisms

belonging to physical substance, while the human spirit, the specifically human soul,

becomes the thinker of potentially rational thoughts, which if concerned with rational

ends must then be transformed by will into action against the weight of natural

disinclination. Notes pg. 22 top

Descartes was one of the dangerous philosophers in philosophical tradition whose impact

remained imprinted on after generations. Cartesian dualism refers to Descartes statement that

human beings are a mysterious union of mind (soul) and body, of incorporeal substance and

corporeal substance, with each realm operating according to separate sets of laws. The mind is

independent and free, except it follows the laws of reason. Where, the body is governed but

the laws of physics and falls under the rule of cause and effect: the human body is no freer than

any other material thing. The soul is somehow scattered to all parts of the body but, according

to Descartes, thinking enters the brain through the pineal gland.

And as a clock composed of wheels and counter-weights no less exactly observes the

laws of nature if I consider the body of a man as being a sort of machine so built up

and composed of nerves, muscles, veins, blood, and skin, that though there were no

mind in it at all, it would not cease to have made the same motions as a present,


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exception being made of those movements which are due to the direction of the will,

and in consequence depends upon the mind.7

We can understand thinking without ever referring to the body, and we can understand the

body without ever referring to the mind/soul. So, Descartes concluded, minds and bodies are

essentially independent of each other. Science can study bodies and the natural world without

ever get involved in theology.

Initially, this rationale seems satisfactory. Overall, it fits the common sense view of Christian

theology and ordinary experience. Cartesian dualism allows for the doctrine of the souls

continued existence after the death of the body. Further, Descartes defined himself as a

thinking substance rather than corporeal, he reaffirms the primacy of the soul over the body.

So, the conclusion is drawn that human beings are essentially spiritual beings who happen to

inhabit bodies. As a scientist, he gave a great contribution and freed science to progress

without church interference, since scientific discoveries are about the body and have no real

interest on the nature of the soul.

I. The Mind-Body ProblemDualism generates one of the most tenacious timeless (and timely) questions: what is therelationship of the mind to the body? This issue has been very appealing to philosophers,

psychologists, and most of the rest of us. The contemporary philosopher Gilbert Ryle refers this

issue, in his influential and controversial book The Concept of Mind, as the official doctrine.

Ryle says:

The official doctrine, which hails chiefly from Descartes, is something like this. With the

doubtful exceptions of idiots and infants in arms every human being has both a body

and a mind. Some would prefer to say that every human being is both a body and a

7Descartes, Meditation VI, in Philosophical Works, vol. 1, p. 185.


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mind. His body and his mind are ordinarily harnessed together, but after the death of

the body, his mind may continue to exist and function.8

Versions of the official doctrine are obvious in beliefs about the immortality of the soul and

reincarnation. It is implicit in psychological theories that the mind is something other than the

brain, and that differentiate mental states from bodily conditions and behavior. It is also

reflected in our ordinary language when we feel as if we are somehow in our bodies.

Dualism seems consistent with certain common experiences, but inconsistent with others. For

instance, if I hit my thumb with a hammer, I experience no mind-body separation. Yet there are

serious consequences if we reject dualism in favor of a materialistic or behavioristic monism.

The fact that millions of people believe something does not make it real or true. Cartesian

dualism stands in direct opposition to another major modern philosophical archetype i.e. the

skeptical questioner who turns to experience rather than to the mind for knowledge.

Critical Analysis

The dualist might respond that the problem of how an immaterial substance can cause physical

events is not much obscurer than the problem of how one physical event can cause another.

Yet there is an important difference: there are many clear cases of physical causation but notone clear case of nonphysical causation. Physical interaction is something philosophers, like all

other people, have to live with. Nonphysical interaction, however, may be no more than an

artifact of the immaterialist construal of the mental. Most philosophers now agree that no

argument has successfully demonstrated why mind-body causation should not be regarded as a

species of physical causation.

Dualism is also incompatible with the practices of working psychologists. The psychologist

frequently applies the experimental methods of the physical sciences to the study of the mind.

If mental processes were different in kind from physical processes, there would be no reason to

8Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind(New York: Harper & Row, 1941), p.11.


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expect these methods to work in the realm of the mental. In order to justify their experimental

methods many psychologists urgently sought an alternative to dualism.

II. Consciousness as Self-awarenessLockes notion of consciousness is that of the minds reflective awareness of its own

operations (perceiving, thinking, doubting, believing, reasoning, knowing, willing, etc.).

This can be labeled the minds self-awareness. Notes pg. 22 end

Consciousness, however, has become a rather ambiguous term in its everyday usage. It can

refer to: (1) a waking state; (2) experience; and (3) the possession of any mental state. It may

be helpful to the reader to provide an example of each of these three usages: (1) the injured

worker fall into unconsciousness; (2) the criminal became conscious of a terrible sense of dread

at the thought of being apprehended; and (3) I am conscious of the fact that sometimes I hurt

your feelings. Anthony OHear, in his book, Beyond Evolution: Human Nature and the Limits of

Evolutionary Explanation, suggested:

In being conscious of myself as myself, I see myself as separate from what is not

myself. In being conscious, a being reacts to the world with feeling, with pleasure and

pain, and responds on the basis of felt needs.... Consciousness involves reacting to

stimuli and feeling stimuli.

Notice how often consciousness seems to be tied to awareness (or self-consciousness to

self-awareness)? Theres a reason for that: the two frequently are used interchangeably in

the scientific and philosophical literature.

Consciousness refers to your individual awareness of your unique thoughts, memories, feelings,

sensations and environment. Your conscious experiences are constantly shifting and changing.

For example, in one moment you may be focused on reading this article. Your consciousness

may then shift to the memory of a conversation you had earlier with a co-worker. Next, you

might notice how uncomfortable your chair is or maybe you are mentally planning dinner. This


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ever-shifting stream of thoughts can change dramatically from one moment to the next, but

your experience of it seems smooth and effortless.

In Hegels Geist,Kierkegaards Aand, implicitly in Heideggers Dasein, and according to

Heidegger himself explicitly in Husserl, the reflexivity of the human mind is the notion of

the human spirit (and in Kierkegaards case the self), which in general is the ability of

the human being or mind to come up with specifications of its own nature; that is self-

understandings in the form of appraisals of the overall standing or worth of its own

mental and practical operations, in Kierkegaards case not least the worth of its

volitions.9

In general, consciousness as self-awareness here forms a definitive crack in the causal structure

of nature. The self-conscious subject is represented as a substance aware of its changing modes

and therefore somehow separated from them. In rationalist versions, the selfs repertoire

includes the ability also to subject its own response patterns to control from above in the form

of freely adopted principles, values, or goals which then govern the overall performance in a

way that raises the subject above the deterministic influence of natural laws.



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THEINTERNALIZINGOF THEOBJECT

I. Lockes Egocentric predicamentLocke holds a position known as epistemological dualism. According to his view, knowing

contains two distinct aspects: the knower and the known. The basic empiricist argument that all

knowledge comes from our own ideas, which in turn are based on our own sensations and

perceptions, epistemological dualism presents us with a fundamental problem: If all knowledge

comes from my own ideas which are based on sense data, how can I verify the existence of

anything external to the sensations that constitute sense data?

This problem has been termed as Lockes Egocentric predicament because Lockes copy theoryseems to put us in the egocentric position of being able to know only a word of our own mental

construction, a self- limited world. If there is no external world, can be there be any mind

other than my own? How could I know? How could I distinguish another mind from my own, if

all I ever know are my own subjective perceptions?

And if, as Locke suggest, all true ideas are based on sense data that correspond to something

else, how can we ever verify the objective, independent existence of an external reality? How

can we ever apply Lockes own standards of verification to his notion of primary qualities?

At this point, it seems as if all I can know are my own perceptions (i.e. secondary qualities). As

soon as I am aware of them, I have labeled and organized them. That is, even if external objects

exist, the process of perceiving sense data is a process of becoming aware of my own ideas. I

dont ever seem to be able to actually experience thing themselves. If, as Locke claims , my

ideas are messages from my senses, how can I, or anyone, verify that the messages come

from independently existing things? Locke himself asks, How shall the mind, when it perceivesnothing but its own ideas, no that they agree with things themselves?


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Locke tries to avoid the egocentric predicament by asserting that we somehow know that

mental and physical substances and an objective external reality exist. We just dont have a

clear idea of the difference between mind and bodies or other aspects of ultimate reality:

Sensation convinces us that there are solid extended substances [matter and bodies];

and reflection that there are thinking once [minds, souls], experience assures us of the

existence of such beings; and that once has the power to move body my impulse, the

other by though; this we cannot have any doubt of. Experience, I say, every moment

furnishes us with clear ideas both of one and of the other. But beyond these ideas, as

received from their proper sources, our faculties will not reach.10

In other words, Locke holds on to both a commonsense view of reality and his copy theory of

truth, even though he cannot verify either by appealing to the copy theory.

II. Descartes and Locke:In spite of his major differences with Descartes, he draws surprisingly similar conclusions for

similar reasons. Both Locke and Descartes shied away from pursuing the logical consequences

of their basic premises. Descartes was able to establish the momentary certainty of the cogito

but had difficulty moving beyond his own mind when he attempted to provide a certainfoundation for the external world and Gods existence. Locke was able to demonstrate the

importance of experience as an element of knowledge and show that many of our ideas are

based on sensation and experience. He was also able to show the inadequacy of pure reason as

a foundation for all knowledge. But, like Descartes, he was unable to move from direct

knowledge of his own ideas to direct knowledge of external reality.

Pursued to its logical conclusion, Lockes empiricism does not seem to end in the egocentric

predicament. If it does, not only are we denied knowledge of an external, independent reality,

we are denied the possibility of knowing God, for what simple sensations and experiences can

10John Locke, The Art of Medicine (a paper written in 1669), quoted in Fox Bourne, vol.1 p, 224, and John Locke,

An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. A.C. Fraser (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1894), bk. 2, ch. 23, sec. 29.


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there be on which the idea of God rests? Locke chose, in the end, to affirm certain beliefs at the

expense of philosophical consistency.

THE DISTANTIATING OF THE SUBJECT FROM ITS MENTAL MODES

I. Experience Is the Origin of All IdeasAccording to Locke, all ideas originate in sensation and reflection. He says we can think about

things only after we have experiences them. In other words, all ideas originate from sense data.

For example, according to this theory no one born blind can ever have an idea of color. Those of

us who are sighted the idea of color in abstraction from specific sense data by reflecting on, for

instance red, green, yellow and blue circles. In doing so, we note that they have two commonqualities, circularity and color. Our blind friend can trace their shape, and thus acquire

sensation of circulation, but color, which is only perceived through sight, will remain unknown

to him.

As part of his empirical inquiry into the nature of human understanding, Locke attempted to

explain and classify different kinds of ideas and the ways we combine and reorganize sense

data from simple into increasing complex and abstract ideas. He insisted that all ideas are

copies of the things that caused the basic sensations on which they rest. Ideas, then, are less

intense copies or images of sensations. Your idea, for example, of a pen is a copy of the set of

sensations and impressions you have received from seeing and handling actual pen. If your idea

of a pen includes the shape of a cube, it is a poor copy because it does not correspond to

reality.

This position known as the copy theory or representation theory, or, most recently,

correspondence theory of truth, a term attributed to contemporary philosopher BertrandRussell. The correspondence theory of truth is a truth test that holds that an idea (or belief or

thought) is true if whatever it refers to actually exist. In other words, an idea is defined as true

if it corresponds to a fact. The producer for checking the truth of an idea is called confirmation

or verification.


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Favored by empiricist, the correspondence theory if truth is in direct contrast with the

coherence theory of truth favored by rationalist and differs from the other major truth theory,

the pragmatic theory of truth.

Lets see what happened when Locke applied his empirical truth test to one of the foundations

of continental rationalism, innate ideas- ideas that by their very nature are not copies of

external experience.

Leibnitz felt that all matter is alive and animated throughout with monads. The monad is the

principle of continuity between the physical and the psychological realms. The same principle

that expresses itself within our minds is active in inanimate matter, in plants, and in animals.

Thus the nature of the monad is best understood by studying the spiritual and psychic forceswithin ourselves.

Monads themselves vary in the amount of consciousness or clarity of their perceptions. Certain

physical facts, such as the principle of least action, indicated to Leibnitz intelligence within the

most basic particles in creation. On the other hand, the findings of psychology have indicated

that there are areas of the mind that are unconscious in their nature. In the lowest monads

everything is obscure and confused, resembling sleep. While in humanity, consciousness attains

a state of apperception -- a reflexive knowledge of the self.

II. GEORGE BERKLEY: To be is to be PerceivedFrom a commonsense point of view it may seem absurd to seem the existence of a material

world, but Berkley pointed out that on closer examination it makes more sense to deny the

existence of matter than it does to affirm it. Taking empiricism a logical step further than Locke,

Berkley argues that the material world doesnt exist. Only ideas exist, and ideas are mentalstates, not material objects. This makes Berkley an idealist or immaterialist: the idea of the

matter existing without mental properties is self-contradictory, for this there is no way to

conceive of what an unperceived, inexperience existence would consist of. We can conceive of

things only in terms of perceptions (ideas) we have of them.


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Berkley challenged Lockes copy theory of truth by pointing out that the so-called objects Locke

thought our ideas correspond to lack any fixed nature. They are constantly changing. There is

no thing to copy, Berkley said, only a cluster of constantly changing perception:

[Some hold that] real thing, it is plain, have a fixed and real nature, which remain the

same notwithstanding any change in our senses or in the posture and motion of our

bodies; which indeed may affect the ideas in our minds, but it were absurd to think they

had the same effect on things existing without the mind.

How then is it possible that things perpetually fleeting and variable as our ideas

should be copies or images of anything fixed and constant? Or, in other words, since all

sensible qualities, as figure, size, color, etc., that is, our ideas, are continually changing

upon every alteration in the distance, medium, or instruments of sensation, how can

any determinate, material objects be properly represented or painted forth by several

distinct thing each of which is so different from an unlike the rest? Or if you say it

resembles someone only of our ideas, how shall we be able to distinguish the true copy

from all the false once?11

According to Berkeley, all of .the qualities we assign to material objects are relative to the

perceiver, what Locke called secondary qualities. For example, the coffee I am drinking is hot

or cold depending on my perception of it. It is absurd to ask if it is really hot or cold. But, you

might point out, it has an objective temperature, say 120 degree Fahrenheit. Only, however,

when someone measures it, that is, only when someone perceives thermometer registering

120 degrees Fahrenhiet. Even so, youre probably tempted to respond, it does have a certain

temperature regardless of whether or not someone is aware of it.

Does it? What kind of temperature is it if no one anywhere is aware of it? We can know things

only in terms of some perception of them through the senses, or as idead perceived by the

11George Berkley, Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous, in Selections, ed. Mary W. Calkins (New York:

Scribners, 1957), pp. 268-269.


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mind. Berkley points out that there is no difference between sound as perceived by us and

sound as it is itself. We may define sound in terms of what is perceived: sensations,

atmospheric disturbances, decibels, waves marks on a graph, or whatever, but in all cases

sound remains something that is perceived.

Berkley takes the radical, but logically correct step of concluding that this is true of everything.

We know things only as different kinds of ideas about them. Berkeleian ideas imply

consciousness, perception. It is self-contradictory to discuss ideas we do not know we have.

The implications of this position for psychological theories of the unconscious mind: if an

unconscious mind exists, it can have nothing to do with us. Moods and emotional states like

guilt or self-hate exist only as we perceive them; they, too, are ideas in Berkeleys sense. When

we do not perceive them, they do not exist. The notion of an unconscious mind is self-

contradictory, since by definition a mind is a thinking, perceiving, hence conscious, thing.

It is equally absurd to posit an independent, external reality, for if it exists, we cannot have

anything to do with it. If we accept Lockes starting point that all knowledge derives from

experience, Berkeley reasons, we must conclude that all knowledge is limited to ideas, because

we experience things only as ideas. So-called material or physical states are perceptions, mental

acts. Pain is a perception; sweet and sour are perceptions, the moon is a perception; my own

body is known to me only as a series of perceptions. Esse est percipi: To be is to be perceived.

Heading

As for the mind-independent world itself, or Descartes res extensa, the alternatives are

Berkeleys expedient of dying its existence, Humean skepticism about the existence of

an external world, or some form of representational theory like Descartes own in which

mind-independent world is reflected in the individual mind in what would nowadays be

called a world-model, a construct whose correspondence with reality Descartes himself


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tried to vindicate by logical reasoning from certain premises, famously including the

certainty that God exists and cannot deceive.12

Descartes argument is crucial to the Cartesian Genesis. His conception of God as a perfect being

includes the qualities of all-knowing, all-powerful, all-loving, all-good. Descartes posits that such

a God would not let him be constantly deceived by either himself or some evil genius. If, the

argument goes God gave us reason and faculties of perception, they must be basically accurate

and reliable.

. . . But, since God is no deceiver, it is very manifest that He does not communicate to

me these ideas immediately and by Himself. . . . I do not see how He could be defended

from the accusation of deceit if these ideas were produced by causes other than

corporeal objects. Hence we must allow that corporeal things exist.13

Descartes reasoned that his own ideas of body and mind be basically sound, since God allowed

him to know clearly and distinctly that he is both.

III.The Skeptical Influence on Human ConsciousnessAccording to Hume, no proof exists in support of cause and effect relationships within the

universe. This is the case because through habitual observation, one infers a relationship

between two independent events. Since one cannot experience the necessary connection

between two events such as, the Law of Gravity, one cannot necessarily prove that event A

caused event B. Therefore, even though experience and reasoning indicate that objects act in

a predictable way, this fails to necessarily prove how objects will act in the future based upon

previous interactions.


13Descartes, Meditation VI, in Philosophical Works, vol. 1, p. 191.


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Hume thought that Locke was correct in claiming that thought is a faithful mirror, and copies

objects truly. But he reminds us not to overlook a vital fact: the copies are always duller and

fainter than the original perceptions they are based on.

Hume proposes that we distinguish ideas from impressions:

Here therefore we may divide all perceptions of the mind into two classes or species,

which are distinguished by their different degrees of force and vivacity. The less forcible

and lively are commonly denominated Thoughts or Ideas. The other species wants a

name in our language, and most others. . . . Let us, therefore, use a little freedom, and

call them Impressions;employing that word in a sense somewhat different from usual.

By the term impression, then, I mean all our more lively perceptions, when we hear, or

see, or feel, or love, or hate, or desire, or will. And impressions are distinguished from

ideas, which are the less lively perceptions, of which we are conscious, when we reflect

on any of those sensations or movements above mentioned.14

To establish these claims, Hume puts forth the notion that causal relationships belong to two

types of knowledge: relations of ideas and matters of fact. Relations of ideas refer to a priori

knowledge, or knowledge learned sans experience. They include anything that may be true by

definition or discovered by mere thought. In order for anything to represent a relation of ideas,its contrary must be self-contradictory or inconceivable. For example, mathematical truths

belong in the relations of ideas category because the opposite of 2 + 2 = 4 is inconceivable.

Additionally, a square could never be circle because it is inconceivable nor could one conceive

of the contrary to the statement a triangle has three sides. Since relations of ideas are known

through reason alone, they are vacuous because they do not assert anything about the world.

While causes and effects may be discoverable by experience, they may not be discoverable by

reason alone. Every effect is distinct from its cause, and every cause is distinct from its effect.

14David Hume,An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Clarendon Press,

1894), sec. 2.


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Therefore, an effect cannot be discovered in a causal object or event merely by a priori

reasoning.

On the contrary, with matters of fact, one may contain certainty, but will not intuitively or

demonstratively possess it. Matters of fact include a posteriori knowledge, or knowledge

learned through experience. As such, the contrary of a matter of fact is conceivable and

represent substantive statements, which are about the world. While one cannot make

assertions about causal relationships through relations of ideas, matters of fact may account for

causal relationships based upon experience alone. Since causal relationships are based upon

ones experience of two independent events, it cannot be known with certainty that event A

necessarily causes event B. Hume claims that an individual observes two independent events,

then infers a causal relationship through habitual observation.

The strengths of Humes theory rest in the fact that experience cannot grasp the causal

connection, which occurs between event A and event B. One cannot experience the Law of

Gravity and thus, may only infer that a causal relationship exists. This conclusion opens the

gates for Skepticism to enter and establishes an astonishing claim that the occurrence of future

events is never guaranteed. Even the statement the sun will rise tomorrow bears a

probabilistic claim based on inferred causal events in the past. I think this points to the

existence of faith within every worldview, for no one can prove with 100% certainty the

following: causal events, the existence or non-existence of God, or the existence of the external

world. On the same token, the notion of probability plays a crucial role in philosophy and

science, so just because one cannot experience certain immaterial/material objects or states of

affairs does not mean that they do not exist or will not occur. However, Humes causal theory is

correct in that objectively proving causal relationships remains unsolvable. The answer to this

dilemma brings up an important weakness of this theory.

In the end, Hume compared full-blown skepticism to doubting the existence of an external

reality, pointing out that the issue cannot be settled logically and rationally. No one can actually

live as a skeptic:


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To whatever length anyone may push his speculative principles of skepticism, he must

act . . . and live, and converse like other men. . . . It is impossible for him to persevere in

total skepticism, or make it appear in his conduct for a few hours.15

The weakness of Humes causal theory lies in the notion that one must not dwell in skepticism

merely because most truth claims rest upon experience, probabilistic claims, or inductive

reasoning. When a skeptic such as Hume claims that we cannot objectively prove causal

relationships, and therefore we should adopt a skeptical outlook, leads Hume into a form of

dogmatism with this approach. If a skeptic claims we cannot know causal relations merely

because we cannot experience the connection, does not indicate that the object in question

does not exist or that we cannot know of its existence. Furthermore, just because one cannot

prove causal relationships does not mean skepticism reigns above probabilistic reasoning or

conclusions. I think one can probabilistically know the necessary causal connection when

understanding scientific evidence. Indeed, a dose of skepticism is always healthy within the

pursuit of truth however, holding skepticism above probabilistic evidence short changes the

fact that humanity can arrive at truth about reality without relying upon sense experience.

THEEMPIRICIZING OF THEMENTAL

William James praised empiricists for making the Slef an empirical and verifiable thing, but

complained that they had neglected certain more subtle aspects of the Unity of

Consciousness In experience itself we have no sense of isolated parts but of indeterminate

continuity. Moments of consciousness occur to us as continuations of narritives that have

begun in the past. And because consciousness is a continuous stream, no phase in it can be

separated entirely from its predecessors and successors.16

The two states of consciousness are objectively unified when they are directed at the same

object. For example, when we look at a red ball, we have an experience of redness, and an

15Hume, Dialogues, parts 10, 11.



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experience of circularity. The color experience and the shape experience here are unified in a

particularly strong way. They are present in my consciousness as directed at a single entity that

is a ball. The same goes for my experience of a blue car moving down the street. Here I

experience color, shape, and motion, all of which are unified by being directed at the same

object. I might even have an auditory experience of the car's engine, and also experience this as

directed at the same object. So there can be objective unity across different sensory domains.

For two experiences to be objectively unified, their object need not actually exist. What if I had

hallucinated a red ball, then my experiences of redness and of circularity will be objectivel

unified, despite the ball's non-existence. On the other side of the coin, two experiences can be

experiences of the same object without being objectively unified. I might see a car's shape and

hear its noise, without anything in my conscious state tying the noise to the car. Perhaps I

perceive the noise as behind me, coming from some grass cutting machine or anything else. If

so, the experiences are not objectively unified. For objective unity, what matters is that two

states are experienced as being directed at a common object.

The notion of objective unity is closely tied to a central issue in cognitive psychology and

neurophysiology. When I look at a red square, the color and the shape may be represented in

different parts of my visual system. But somehow these separate pieces of information are

brought together so that I experience a single red square, so that I can identity and report a red

square, and so on. This phenomenon is often referred to as binding, and the question of how it

is achieved is often referred to as the binding problem.

Objective unity is an important phenomenon, but it will not be central for our purposes. Where

objective unity is concerned, the unity thesis is almost certainly false. While some sets of

experiences are objective unified with each other, it seems that most sets are not. For example,

my experience of the color of the ball and of the shape of the car is not objective unified, but

they are experienced as being directed at different objects. My experiences of a bird singing

and of a sharp pain do not seem to be directed at the same object at all. If so, then objective


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unity cannot unify all of a subject's conscious states. For such a notion of unity, we must look

elsewhere. Although James wrote:

I believe that consciousness is the name of a nonentity and has no right to a

place among first principle, he meant not that the term had no empirical reference but

that it had come to mean a mere echo, a pure consciousness behind the verifiable

facts, or, if you like, a kind of medium this side of the facts into which the facts do not

reach and so lose their verifiability- that one should look instead to its pragmatic

equivalent in realities of experience.17

What James meant by pragmatic equivalent in realities of experience is to look for the side of

reality that works for you. The concept of consciousness is real and penetrated in literature and

in our lives but it can be verifiable with empirical references, but this doesnt make the

consciousness issue to lose its importance.

James believed that these realities could best be captured by introducing the conception of a

primal stuff, to be called pure experience, so that knowing can easily be explained as a

particular sort of relation towards one another into which portions of pure experience may

enter, and where the relation itself is a part of the experience.-pg. 35 second para

The notion of "pure experience" is one of the most intriguing and simultaneously perplexing

features of William James's writings. There seems to be little consensus in the secondary

literature as to how to understand this notion, and precisely what function it serves within the

overall structure of James's thought. Yet James himself regards this idea as the cornerstone of

his radical empiricism. And the latter, James felt, was his unique contribution to the history of

philosophy; he believed that philosophy "was on the eve of a considerable rearrangement"

when his essay "A World of Pure Experience" was first published in 1904.

17Alastair Hannay, Human Consciousness(Great Britain: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1970) pp.35.


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I. James on Pure ExperienceThe starting point of James's thought is a deeply, though not exclusively empirical concern. His

work as a whole is founded upon a consideration of concrete experience means the world as

experienced by an embodied, embedded, and acting agent. The "pre-philosophic" attitude

through which we initially face the world is captured in James's development of the concept of

"pure experience" as the foundation of his radical empiricism.

James's version of radical empiricism therefore looks to ground his empirical philosophy on the

raw material of experience as given. Of this methodological principle he writes:

"The postulate is that the only things that shall be debatable among philosophers shall be

things definable in terms drawn from experience."18

With his distinctive notion of pure experience, James looked to investigate what he perceived

to be the underlying experiential unity behind language and reflective or conceptual thought.

James argued that conceptual analysis could never provide an exhaustive account of human

experience in its phenomenal richness. James insists that many of our basic experiences harbor

non-conceptual content. That is, many of our experiences have a rich phenomenal content that

is too fine-grained and sensuously detailed to lend itself to an exhaustive conceptual analysis.For example, we can have visual experiences of colors and shapes of things for which we lack

the relevant concepts (a previously unfamiliar shade of magenta or a chiliagon). And this ability

holds for other sensory modalities as well. For our ability to describe or report a wide-range of

tastes and smells lags far behind our capacity to actually have an experience of a nearly infinite

spectrum of tastes and smells. In other words, the deliverances of our senses continually run

ahead of both our descriptive vocabularies as well as our conceptual abilities. Though James

does not address the notion of non-conceptual content as explicitly as many contemporaryphilosophers of mind, and furthermore, it's not clear that he's entirely consistent on this point.

18James, Pragmatism, and Four Essays from the Meaning of Truth, ed. Ralph Barton Perry (New York: Meridian

Books, 1955), p. 199.


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II. The Paradox of Consciousness

The conscious human mind is capable of great good and equally extraordinary evil. It is only for

the sake of simplicity that we talk of levels in the form of tiers with an upward hierarchy. In fact,

consciousness, while rooted in causal linearity (within the Darwinian evolutionary framework) is

dynamic, free moving and nonlinear. The greatest discoveries and inventions were arrived at

intuitively. The genius sees what we all see except that s/he thinks about it differently. The evil

genius does exactly the same.

Kierkegaard says: "The supreme paradox of all thought is the attempt to discover something

that thought cannot think." A conscious human knows something and he knows that he knows

it (ad infinitum). The paradox of consciousness is not that we are aware of ourselves but of

other things as well, including those that do not constitute the 'real world'. Of course, when we

'conceive' or imagine something 'unreal' even our farthest imagination cannot transcend

'known' symbolism, which is why there are some things that defy definition. One of these is

'consciousness' itself.

III.The Objectivity of ExperienceIn very simple terms, Kants complex project attempts to show that experience is possible only

under the certain general condition, objectivity. In other word, if there is to be any experience

at all(if we can experience anything), then, Kant argues, the world must be objective relative

to the perceiver. There must be a real distinction between how the world seems to me and how

the world is in order for me to have any experience at all.19

Crudely put, if there were no difference between the world and me, I could not even have an

idea of having an experience. But I do have experience. Indeed, the skeptical argument of

whom only make sense if whom (or any skeptic) understands that he has experience. but

19Roger Scruton, The Rationalists and Kant, in Philosophy: A Guide Through The Subject, ed. A. C. Grayling

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 475.


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experience itself presuppose precisely what the skeptic doubts: his own independent

experience as a unified, continuing self that is part of an objective order, subject to causal

laws.20

Although commentators on Kant understandably disagree over the precise nature of his

argument here, the disagreement seems to center on the concept of the self, which Kant calls

the transcendental unity of apperception. This is the unity of self that allows me to say (and

experience) that this thought or this sensation belongs to me, belongs to one thing, belongs to

a unity that exist prior to any empirical verification. For Kant, such a transcendental unity of

apperception is necessary in order for me to have any experience- and, of course, without me

the whole world ceases to exist.

And this awareness of transcendental unity is possible because I am aware of my own existence

and identity through time. And I can only be aware of my identity through time because I

situate or locate myself in a world of actually existing things, things that endure through time.

Thus, these things have the capacity to be other than I perceive them. That is, they are not

merely my perception. Thus, they must exist objectively.

Kant himself is inconsistent in his treatment of the noumenal world and regulative ideas,

sometimes talking about them as mental construct and other times suggesting they are existing

entities. Thats not surprising either, since, if he is correct, the human need for unity and

transcendence is very strong. One defense of Kants inconsistencies might be the force and

power of regulative ideas. They may not give us new empirical knowledge, but they allow us to

meet our persistent metaphysical longings for an ordered, objective world.

One of the great weaknesses of the strictest empirical theories of knowledge is that by ruling

out knowledge of the existence of God, mind (soul), and other transcendental metaphysical

20Roger Scruton, The Rationalists and Kant, in Philosophy: A Guide Through The Subject, ed. A. C. Grayling

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 475-476.


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believes, they fail to satisfy deep, nearly universal needs. they are sometimes said to rob live of

its specialness or mystery. Kant deserves credit for recognizing and respecting these needs, and

for offering a rigorous and sustained explanation and defense of the kind of thinking that

springs from them. Of course, longing for something to be true does not mean that it is true.

And as philosophers, we do not want to accept as true whatever be deeply long for just

because we long for it. So the timeless questions remain.

IV.Transcendental IdeasKant theorized that neither reason by itself nor sensation by itself can give us knowledge of the

external world. Knowledge is the result of the interaction between the mind and sensation.

Knowledge and experience are shaped, structured or formed by special regulative ideas calledcategories. This theory is known as Kantian formalism, or Kantian idealism, or transcendental

idealism.

Kant noted that Descartes principal error began with a failure to understand scientific method.

Galileo had changed science by establishing a common plan of procedure, a method for

studying phenomena. Thought Descartes had understood the importance of method, he had

not fully understood that the scientific method is both empirical and rational. Kant realized that

the empiricist were guilty of a similar error of incompleteness by discounting the importance of

reason. Knowledge, as the scientific method shows, consist of both a rational and perceptual

(empirical) component. It requires both a subject (a knowing mind) and an object (that which is

known).

The common believe during Kants time, however, was that truth occurs when ideas in the

mind agree with external conditions or objects, the copy theory.21

For example, if I think this

book has a red cover, my idea is true if the cover actually is red. But as Kant realized, if allknowledge fits that model, we could never discover general laws of nature. We could discover

21John Locke, The Art of Medicine (a paper written in 1669), quoted in Fox Bourne, vol.1 p, 224, and John Locke,

An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. A.C. Fraser (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1894), bk. 2, ch. 23, sec. 29.


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only that this apple falls, not that all bodies are subject to gravity, because we never experience

all bodies. Hume understood this but was willing to limit the domain of knowledge the

particulars, in the end asserting that we could only believe in the most important aspects of our

experience: the regularity of experience, the existence of an external world, the experience of a

unified self, cause and effect, and a moral order.

If we accept Humes initial premises, his conclusions follow. However, close inspection of the

way science is actually done shows that scientists make precisely the kinds of generalization

Humes theory says we cannot make. As Kantpointed out, when a theory results in conclusions

that are clearly in consistent with experience, real-world evidence must outweigh theoretical

consistency. And everyday experience shows that knowledge of causes and effects, the external

world, the self, and so on exist.

The scientific method is obviously more reliable and complete than Humes philosophy. How do

they differ? Kant pointed out that scientific thinking involves the activity of asking questions

and framing hypotheses. It is not merely the passive recording of whatever happens; it requires

the active setting up of controlled experimental conditions.22

And this suggests that knowledge

is a kind of interaction, a two-way street between the knower (the subject) and the known (the

object).

Hume has insisted that all knowledge begins in experience with sense impressions. But Hume

confused knowledge that is triggered by experience with knowledge that is based on

experience. Kant raised the possibility that our faculty of knowledge (mind, for short)might at

something to the raw data of experience Because experience triggers and hence accompanies

all knowledge, we may fail to notice the effects the mind has on experience:

But thought all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it all arises

out of our experience. For it may well be the even our empirical knowledge is made up

of what we receive through impressions and of what our own faculty of knowledge

22See Jones, Kant and the Nineteenth Century,pg. 19ff.


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(sensible knowledge serving merely as the occasion) supplies from itself. If our faculty of

knowledge makes a

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On the Account for Human Consciousness

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