PHILOSOPHICAL EGGS

One of the ongoing puzzles for humanity is, paradoxically, something that accompanies us all our waking lives: consciousness. Consciousness seems to be so obvious and yet so perplexing. Here are a few very basic ideas and strategies that might be helpful to those interested in taking a deeper look at this mysterious phenomenon.

Describing Consciousness

It can be helpful to start with an ostensive definition of consciousness, that is, a definition that offers examples that help us gain a basic understanding. This classic one comes from psychologist G. T. Ladd in his book Psychology, Descriptive and Explanatory (Longmans Green and Co., 1894): 

“What we are when we are awake, as contrasted with what we are when we sink into a profound and perfectly dreamless sleep, or receive an overpowering blow on the head – that is to be conscious. What we are less and less as we sink gradually down into dreamless sleep, or as we swoon slowly away; and what we are more and more, as the noise of the crowd outside momentarily arouses us from our after-dinner nap, or as we come out of the midnight darkness of the typhoid-fever crisis – that is to become conscious.” (30)

We can further explore this immediate experience of consciousness with which we are all familiar by describing certain forms it can take. In his book The Soul (Moody Publishers, 2014), J.P. Moreland offers a helpful five-fold categorization: 

1) Sensation: a state of awareness; e.g., an awareness of an itch, a pain, the color red, and an emotion of anger.  

2) Thought: a mental content that can be expressed in a sentence. 

3) Belief: an affirmative or negative attitude towards a thought that can be true or false. 

4) Desire: a felt inclination to do, have, experience, or avoid something.

5) Act of will: a choice to do something for a purpose. (77)  

These forms are by no means exhaustive and they shouldn’t be thought of as essentially isolated categories: they can inform one another and reveal plenty of networking. For example, I may have the sensation I have because of a thought; I may have a desire which gives rise to thought and then an act of will; I may choose to act based on a belief directed toward a thought; I may have a thought as a result of an act of the will which was itself a response to a sensation; and so on.  

Three General Methods of Investigating Consciousness 

But how should we go about investigating consciousness and its various states in more detail? Here are three popular options to consider.

Third-person approach

One very helpful method in psychology and philosophy has been methodological behaviorism which states that theory formation and testing in psychology should be limited to observed behavior. This is a sensible and effective strategy which has resulted in a great deal of verified knowledge. However, it is important to distinguish between methodological behaviorism and metaphysical behaviorism which is the much stronger claim that there are no mental events that occur essentially inside or privately. All conscious activity is, in principle, publicly verifiable. This more radical claim is what has had more influence on many philosophers who, in their hopes to give an account of consciousness completely consistent with the third-person approach adopted in the sciences, hope to make conscious mental states observable as well. 

There are many issues associated with this approach, but one key problem for metaphysical behaviorism is this: how can sensations, thoughts, mental images, and so on simply be certain forms of behavior we can in principle observe? Wouldn’t something be left out of our understanding of some conscious state even if we could observe all behavior associated with it? John Locke, in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689; Book III, Chapter 3, Section 11), argued there would be and offered this thought experiment:

“A studious blind man, who had mightily beat his head about visible objects, and made use of the explication of his books and friends, to understand those names of light and colours which often came in his way, bragged one day, That he now understood what scarlet signified. Upon which, his friend demanding what scarlet was? The blind man answered, It was like the sound of a trumpet. Just such an understanding of the name of any other simple idea will he have, who hopes to get it only from a definition, or other words made use of to explain it.”

First-person approach

If we are impressed with Locke’s thought experiment, we might take an approach which maintains that our inner and private experiences are essential to the meaning of terms that describe consciousness. Phenomenology, most famously represented by its founder Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), is the branch of philosophy that studies consciousness from the inside and seeks to carefully characterize the ultimate structures of consciousness.

There are also plenty of issues with this first-person approach. But one central problem is this: if the meaning of sensation-words is completely private then, as Ludwig Wittgenstein pointed out, could we ever be justified in applying our private meanings to others? How could we verify that others felt as we did? 

An approach that combines both first and third person perspectives

In light of the above problems it is sensible to seek a model of inquiry that incorporates aspects of both the first and third-person approaches. Jerome Shaffer, in his book Philosophy of Mind (Prentice Hall, 1968) has offered the following helpful compromise model which, while it might not be convincing to some, at least shows a kind of strategy that can employed and refined:

“And now we can see how the third-person and first-person aspects of consciousness can be combined in a definition of consciousness. I suggest that we define an expression referring to some determination of consciousness – e.g., “pain” – in the following way: it is that state which the subject usually notices to intervene between particular causal conditions and particular behavioral effects. Here we have both aspects brought out in the two accounts we have examined. (1) We have the causal conditions and the behavioral effects, which provide the publicly observable setting. They allow us to specify the experience in public terms and to fix the meanings in an interpersonal linguistic scheme, so that the application of these terms to others is both intelligible and verifiable. (2) We have the private, inner experience, which is what actually is noticed to intervene in thee circumstances. This gives us the content of the expression. Without it, we are in the position of Locke’s “studious blind man”; he knew, as it were, the grammar or the use of color-words but he did not know the content or meanings of such words. The third-person account gives us, as it were, the addresses of states of consciousness in logical space, and the first-person account reminds us that we must look in at the address to see who lives there. We have a private, ostensive definition, but the directions for the ostensive definition are not private but public.” (29)

Two Competing Metaphysical Views of the of Consciousness 

Finally, we of course want to ask: what is the ultimate nature of consciousness? It is one thing to offer an ostensive definition, describe the forms consciousness takes, and discuss ways we might inquire into it; it is another to ask about its very nature. Is its nature completely material? It would seem so given its close reliance on the brain. But consciousness also has characteristics – its apparent invisibility, privacy, and possession of traits like morality, rationality, freedom, qualities, and purpose – that make us wonder if it might be immaterial in nature –  more akin to what has traditionally been referred to as the soul. Throughout the history of philosophy we find some thinkers maintaining consciousness is material and others maintaining it is immaterial. The former are materialists and the latter are dualists. Here is brief introduction to these two approaches from the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry “Consciousness” (read the whole entry here):

“Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy concerned with the ultimate nature of reality. There are two broad traditional and competing metaphysical views concerning the nature of the mind and conscious mental states: dualism and materialism. While there are many versions of each, the former generally holds that the conscious mind or a conscious mental state is non-physical in some sense. On the other hand, materialists hold that the mind is the brain, or, more accurately, that conscious mental activity is identical with neural activity. It is important to recognize that by non-physical, dualists do not merely mean “not visible to the naked eye.” Many physical things fit this description, such as the atoms which make up the air in a typical room. For something to be non-physical, it must literally be outside the realm of physics; that is, not in space at all and undetectable in principle by the instruments of physics. It is equally important to recognize that the category “physical” is broader than the category “material.” Materialists are called such because there is the tendency to view the brain, a material thing, as the most likely physical candidate to identify with the mind. However, something might be physical but not material in this sense, such as an electromagnetic or energy field. One might therefore instead be a “physicalist” in some broader sense and still not a dualist. Thus, to say that the mind is non-physical is to say something much stronger than that it is non-material. Dualists, then, tend to believe that conscious mental states or minds are radically different from anything in the physical world at all.”

It is important to understand there are various forms of materialism and dualism and each has its own set of problems and solutions. But this general distinction provides a helpful orientation and can get you moving into classifications that are far more nuanced (go here for a more complex overview of the options).