University Studies 15A:
Consciousness I
The Pre-history of the
Modern Version of
Conscious Experience
NOUNS!
Nouns are Things.
What sorts of things are things?
“Apple”
“Ripening”
“Eating”
“Redness”
Object/Entity
State
Action
Property
“Kindness”
“Her kindness to small animals is
legendary.”
“We thank you for your kindness to him
last night.”
“Consciousness”
Entity?
State?
Action?
Property?
Consciousness <> Being conscious of…
Early Western examples seem to think of
consciousness not as a faculty
but as “being aware/conscious of.”
Genesis 2
7And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and
breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a
living soul.
8And the LORD God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and
there he put the man whom he had formed.
9And out of the ground made the LORD God to grow every tree
that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; the tree of life
also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of
good and evil.
…
21And the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and
he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh
instead thereof;
22And the rib, which the LORD God had taken from man, made
he a woman, and brought her unto the man.
23And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my
flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of
Man.
24Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and
shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.
25And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were
not ashamed.
Genesis 3
1Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast
of the field which the LORD God had made. And he
said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, Ye shall
not eat of every tree of the garden?
2And the woman said unto the serpent, We may
eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden:
3But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of
the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it,
neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die.
4And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not
surely die:
5For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof,
then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as
gods, knowing good and evil.
6And when the woman saw that the tree was good
for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a
tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of
the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto
her husband with her; and he did eat.
7And the eyes of them both were opened, and they
knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig
leaves together, and made themselves aprons.
In the Old Testament Hebraic world:
There was a clear distinction between
1. being naked, knowing one is naked (the edenic state),
2. And having one’e “eyes opened” and being conscious
of nakedness.
The crucial point here is not the precise nature of the
distinction but the fact that they clearly thought in
terms of an inwardness of knowledge that mattered
and was the source of moral discrimination.
The tradition of an “inner consciousness of…” is very
old. However, is it a faculty, a property, or a state?
The situation gets clearer in more recent thought:
René Descartes (1596-1650) is important to our story.
In order to create a secure foundation for his
philosophical explorations, he adopted a clear
ontological dualism to explain the relationship of the
mind to the body.
The mind is a res cogitans, a “thinking thing”
The body is a res extensa, an “extended thing”
For Descartes, consciousness was “awareness of…,” a
state of being aware of one’s thoughts:
Consider:
“Thought.
I use this term to include everything that is within
us in such a way that we are immediately aware [conscii] of it.
Thus all the operations of the will, the intellect, the imagination
and the senses are thoughts. I say ‘immediately’ so as to exclude
the consequences of thoughts; a voluntary movement, for
example, originates in a thought.”
“Idea. I understand the term to mean the form of any given
thought, immediate perception of which makes me aware
[conscius] of the thought.”
“As to the fact that there can be nothing in the mind, in so far as
it is a thinking thing, of which it is not aware [conscius], this
seems to me to be self-evident.”
For Descartes, consciousness of thinking the thought is part of
thinking a thought.
“The initial thought by means of which we become aware of
something does not differ from the second thought by means
of which we become aware that we were aware of it, any more
than this second thought differs from the third thought by
means of which we become aware that we were aware that we
were aware.”
After much reflection, Descartes argues that this ability to be
aware of one’s thoughts brings him to the one thing he cannot
doubt: “He thinks; therefore he exists.”
The consciousness of thought is, under certain circumstances,
completely transparent and unerring:
“I am certain that I am a thing which thinks; but do I not then
likewise know what is requisite to render me certain of a truth?
Certainly in this first knowledge there is nothing that assures me
of its truth, excepting the clear and distinct perception of that
which I state, which would not indeed suffice to assure me that
what I say is true, if it could ever happen that a thing which I
conceived so clearly and distinctly could be false; and accordingly
it seems to me that already I can establish as a general rule that
all things which I perceive very clearly and very distinctly are
true.”
For Descartes, consciousness is awareness and is a property of
thought and largely defines thought.
John Locke (1632-1704) in the next generation, also
considers consciousness of thinking to be simply a part of
thinking itself:
“I do not say there is no SOUL in a man, because he is not
sensible of it in his sleep; but I do say, he cannot THINK at
any time, waking or sleeping, without being sensible of it.
Our being sensible of it is not necessary to anything but to
our thoughts; and to them it is; and to them it always will be
necessary….”
He continues:
“If the soul doth think in a sleeping man without being
conscious of it, I ask whether, during such thinking, it has any
pleasure or pain, or be capable of happiness or misery? I am
sure the man is not; no more than the bed or earth he lies on.
For to be happy or miserable without being conscious of it,
seems to me utterly inconsistent and impossible….”
For Locke, “consciousness of…” is central to experience.
For Locke, consciousness is private and inaccessible to others:
“Consciousness is the perception of what passes in a man's own
mind. Can another man perceive that I am conscious of
anything, when I perceive it not myself? No man's knowledge
here can go beyond his experience. Wake a man out of a sound
sleep, and ask him what he was that moment thinking of. If he
himself be conscious of nothing he then thought on, he must
be a notable diviner of thoughts that can assure him that he
was thinking. ”
For Locke, consciousness defines the self:
“SELF is that conscious thinking thing,—whatever substance
made up of, (whether spiritual or material, simple or
compounded, it matters not)—which is sensible or conscious
of pleasure and pain, capable of happiness or misery, and so is
concerned for itself, as far as that consciousness extends.”
“This may show us wherein personal identity consists: not in
the identity of substance, but, as I have said, in the identity of
consciousness, wherein if Socrates and the present mayor of
Queenborough agree, they are the same person: if the same
Socrates waking and sleeping do not partake of the same
consciousness, Socrates waking and sleeping is not the same
person.”
For Locke, the SELF is a certainty, as is the unity of conscious experience that
defines that self. Three generations later, however, this confidence ebbed,
and David Hume (1711-1776) rejected Locke and Descartes:
“I may venture to affirm of the rest of mankind, that they are nothing but a
bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with
an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement. Our eyes
cannot turn in their sockets without varying our perceptions. Our thought is
still more variable than our sight; and all our other senses and faculties
contribute to this change: nor is there any single power of the soul, which
remains unalterably the same, perhaps for one moment. The mind is a kind of
theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass,
repass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations.
There is properly no simplicity in it at one time, nor identity in different,
whatever natural propension we may have to imagine that simplicity and
identity. The comparison of the theatre must not mislead us. They are the
successive perceptions only, that constitute the mind; nor have we the most
distant notion of the place where these scenes are represented, or of the
materials of which it is composed.”
Something odd has happened with Hume.
Earlier writers thought of consciousness as the inner
state of people as they think:
I am conscious of A
For Descartes and Locke, there is an added
Therefore I (as a self) exist.
Hume, however, denies this “thinking thing” exists and
has serious doubts about A as the object of awareness.
“Consciousness of A” therefore cannot be a state of this
“thinking thing” and instead Consciousness in itself seems to
become a faculty of mind. It comes to define the very nature of
mind as a process without content:
“The mind is a kind of theatre, where several perceptions
successively make their appearance; pass, repass, glide away,
and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations….
They are the successive perceptions only, that constitute the
mind.”
Is this shift clear?
Let’s now leap ahead another hundred and fifty years, to William
James (1842-1910), honored as a great pioneer in the American
tradition of empirical psychology.
How does he navigate the distinction between “consciousness”
as a mental faculty and consciousness as simply a descriptive
term?
In Chapter 9, “The Stream of Thought,” James begins, “The only
thing which psychology has a right to postulate at the outset is
the fact of thinking itself, and that must first be taken up and
analyzed.” Descartes is still with us, even if just as a postulate.
James lists 5 features of thinking in general:
1) Every thought tends to be part of a personal consciousness.
2) Within each personal consciousness thought is always
changing.
3) Within each personal consciousness thought is sensibly
continuous.
4) It always appears to deal with objects independent of itself.
5) It is interested in some parts of these objects to the exclusion
of others, and welcomes or rejects - chooses from among
them, in a word - all the while.
What is the “It” in #4 and #5?
“Consciousness” here looks like Hume’s theater, a place where
thoughts arise.
But for James, there clearly is someone who owns the theater
and the thoughts:
“The universal conscious fact is not ‘feelings and thoughts exist,’
but ‘I think’ and ‘I feel.’ No psychology, at any rate, can question
the existence of personal selves.”
“What I find when I look at my consciousness at all is that what I
cannot divest myself of, or not have in consciousness, if I have
any consciousness at all, is a sequence of different feelings.”
Consciousness here can be looked at; it is a constant form of
perceiving, and it is mine.
James, responding to Hume’s critique, argues that it is not the
content of consciousness that defines the self but that the self can
be found in the experienced coherence of consciousness:
“[T]he sense of the parts being inwardly connected and belonging
together because they are parts of a common whole, the
consciousness remains sensibly continuous and one. What now is
the common whole? The natural name for it is myself, I, or me.”
A bit later on, James fudges by noting that in fact Consciousness
shapes its content into coherence through an “agency of attention”:
“[T]he mind is at every stage a theatre of simultaneous possibilities.
Consciousness consists in the comparison of these with each other,
the selection of some, and the suppression of the rest by the
reinforcing and inhibiting agency of attention.”
Note that in this function of selection, Consciousness remains
“consciousness of….”
• It is inward and personal
• It is a functional state of the mind
• Yet it is strongly committed to engaging the external world:
• It provides a synthetic account of the self in the world:
“There is not a conjunction or a preposition, and hardly an
adverbial phrase, syntactic form, or inflection of voice, in human
speech, that does not express some shading or other of relation
which we at some moment actually feel to exist between the
larger objects of our thought. If we speak objectively, it is the real
relations that appear revealed; if we speak subjectively, it is the
stream of consciousness that matches each of them by an inward
coloring of its own. In either case the relations are numberless,
and no existing language is capable of doing justice to all their
shades.”
It is here, I think, that James begins to approach the modern
version of consciousness as “what it is like” to be a self
experiencing the world, which will be the topic for Thursday.