The soul lurking behind 'consciousness'.

Let's breathe a little life into philosophy of mind, shall we?

Innocence. Wonder. Yeah.

THE WORD CONSCIOUSNESS HAS MANY MEANINGS. That’s just language for you. Language makes a mockery of the philosopher’s attempts at technical tidiness, and yet in our everyday lives we handle its messiness and ambiguity like it’s nothing. We don’t even think about it. Even the most small-minded SOB turns out to be generous when it comes to language. That’s because the generosity I’m talking about is less like a moral virtue and more like an instinct. Some say generosity makes language possible.

But when it comes to the word consciousness, suddenly it’s nothing but trouble. Words have a superhuman ability to slip the definitional leash, and this makes it easy for those with pet theories to swap one meaning out for another when it suits them. Too many academic papers and articles have abused the reader’s generosity in this way. It has gotten to the point where some believe consciousness can’t be defined. I would agree, albeit for different reasons, but I also think we don’t need to define it. Strict definitions and precise terminology can’t force us to stop equivocating and loading unearned conclusions into the definition anyway. We have to deal with that problem ourselves.

In his book, The Weirdness of the World,

Eric Schwitzgebel

defines consciousness by example, and while I have my quibbles with some of what he says there (who wouldn’t have a quibble?), I thought his overall approach earnest and fair-minded. Most of all I liked his “wonderfulness condition”:

“Consciousness, in the target sense that we care about, is this amazing thing that people reasonably wonder about! People can legitimately wonder, for example, how something as special as consciousness could possibly arise from the mere bumping of matter in motion, and whether it might be possible for consciousness to continue after the body dies, and whether jellyfish are conscious…If consciousness just is by definition reportability, for example—if “conscious” is just a short way of saying “available to be verbally reported”—it makes no sense to wonder whether jellyfish might be conscious. A definition of “consciousness” loses the target if it cuts wonder short by definitional razor.”

The Weirdness of the World: Consciousness, Innocent and Wonderful.

Yes!

Consciousness “from the inside”.

CONSCIOUSNESS IS SOMETIMES DEFINED AS EXPERIENCE, or ’what it’s like’, which seems reasonable enough, but some include contentious add-ons such as ineffable, infallible, irreducible…and other words beginning with ‘i’ that I can’t remember right now. A few of these i-word add-ons I might agree with, depending on how they’re elaborated, but I don’t think they’re essential to the meaning of consciousness.

Another version of consciousness from the inside (so to speak) is phenomenal consciousness. I use that phrase from time to time, but there are problems with it. First of all, phenomena implies its opposite, noumena, or things in themselves, so this might imply that reality is something altogether different from experience. This is, of course, what many philosophers and scientists actually think. I, along with maybe three others, do not. But I don’t have a problem with it so long as it’s not used to mean “non-veridical, exclusively sensory experiences.”

Eastern religion and philosophy has much to say about consciousness as well, of course, but I’m far from knowing what I’m talking about here, so I’ll leave it at that. From what I gather, the terminology doesn’t always align with the way it’s used these days in philosophy of mind, and this isn’t always obvious. Just something worth noting, especially when trend-chasing western philosophers align themselves with popular eastern ideas that are based in a metaphysics that has nothing to do with, or even conflicts with, their own ontological assumptions.

The word experience seems broad enough to indicate what we mean by consciousness, so long as we leave off those add-ons and keep the word experience open-ended. Yes, it’s vague. But so is consciousness, and so are we when it comes to understanding it. There are other ways we use the word, but for philosophical purposes, they all seem too narrow. Perfectly fine in some contexts, but not great substitutes for the broader meaning we’re aiming at in philosophy.

Consciousness “from the outside”.

IN CERTAIN REAL LIFE SITUATIONS when we talk about consciousness, we’re simply referring to being responsive to one's surroundings, or being awake. This sense has little to do with experience or ‘what it’s like’, and is instead about the state of a person from the outside, the way someone appears. For instance, when someone gets a knock to the head and slumps to the ground, we might say the person has lost consciousness. It’s not as though a bystander can know what the unconscious person is experiencing, if anything, but that epistemic hurdle hardly matters here, since conscious just means responsive, or the appearance of being alert, fully awake, or sensible to the world.

There may be an implicit assumption that the inner state of the person in question corresponds, more or less, to the appearance. But it’s not as though doctors and nurses have to imagine what it’s like to be the unconscious person they’re about to operate on, or suppose the unconscious patient is having no experiences. Someone under anesthesia might be dreaming about puppies or having an out of body experience or talking to Jesus. Whatever! What’s relevant here is whether the patient experiences, or will later remember experiencing, the surgeon’s scalpel.

This narrow meaning of consciousness can play into the hands of those want to focus on the external ‘public’ markers of consciousness—including those who commit the further mereological fallacy of supposing the brain is all that matters, not the whole person—while reducing experience to a ‘subject report’, the experiential equivalent to a grunt or cave drawing. What can get overlooked here, however, is that the epistemic gap in the everyday situations described above really exists, it’s just that it’s perfectly reasonable to downplay or ignore it in those situations. The appearance of consciousness from the outside is simply not the same thing as consciousness itself. I hope you feel I’m stating the obvious.

Consciousness as parts of consciousness.

SOME DEFINE CONSCIOUSNESS AS ‘CONSCIOUS EXPERIENCE’. At first glance, that seems redundant: are we to think consciousness is experience experience? What’s meant by the word conscious here is unclear. I think it probably means awareness, as in, “I am conscious of the hour”. But if so, then consciousness is experience you’re aware of seems, like the definition above, too narrow.

Awareness might better be thought of as a mode or feature of consciousness, in which case it can’t simply be consciousness. The very concept of awareness brings up its opposite, unawareness, and these sit at opposite ends of a continuum, the intermediate levels of which we must also experience in some sense, otherwise we wouldn’t know about them. How we experience these gradations or levels of awareness is worth considering, and I wouldn’t want to constrict the discussion at the outset.

Suppose one of my flip flops falls off my foot. I wasn’t aware of wearing flip flops, the feeling of them on my feet, before, but I become aware of the feeling after one falls off. How would I have even noticed the change had I not been experiencing wearing the flip flops before? Maybe you’ll say I was ever-so-slightly aware of them before. That won’t work here, since that would make me ever-so-slightly conscious overall. Experience on the whole needs to be accounted for, and it goes way beyond a simple sliding scale of awareness. It makes more sense to decouple experience from awareness to give us more flexibility in these discussions and to preserve the richness of lived experience. Awareness, attention, intention and other such terms are good for discussing how we pick out salient things in consciousness relative to other things in the background, but all that richness is lost if we equate awareness with consciousness. The part can’t be made to stand in for the whole.

ANOTHER WAY OF TAKING THE PART FOR THE WHOLE is by equating consciousness with ‘higher order’ cognition or representations of mental states. In other words, consciousness is defined as a kind of self-awareness or thinking about thought. To me this sounds a lot like good old-fashioned reason is being replaced by self-reflection or self-awareness, a view that goes back to a time when we supposed only humans feel pain, thanks to our superior reasoning capabilities. And that’s absurd. Please don’t make me explain why animals are conscious too.

You might think these theories are not trying to explain consciousness per se, and so I should just ease up. Chill out. But if that’s the case, and I don’t think it is, but if it is, it shouldn’t be too hard to make that point clearer. Maybe by not calling your not-really-about-consciousness theory a theory of consciousness. Seems like a good place to start.

TAKING A PART FOR THE WHOLE could prove hard to maintain, to be consistent about, in the long run. Even if you don’t mean to equivocate, you’re likely to end up doing so by inadvertently including more…simply because there is more. Of course, I might be being overly broad in my understanding of consciousness, and perhaps trying to explain what is not experience will be my particular challenge. I’ll have to tackle that some other day.

Here’s how screwed up things can get. Let’s say you define consciousness as awareness and you explain it by saying something like, “Experienced drivers are often unconscious (unaware) of driving.” If you later equate consciousness with being responsive or awake, we have every right to ask how it’s possible to drive while being in a coma or in a deep sleep.

I’ve never been a big fan of the word consciousness as a replacement for what philosophers used to call mind or psyche. Remember ‘the mind-body problem’? Those were the days!

But wait. Let’s not forget there once was a time when people talked about souls with a straight face. We dumped the word soul to get away from its religious implications, and yet we load the word consciousness with just as many unproven assumptions. Perhaps our preference for the latter is nothing more than a secular bias on our part.

As E.B. White once said…

“Soulwise, these are trying times.”

I’LL BE HONEST. WHEN I HEAR CONSCIOUSNESS, I THINK SOUL. I believe at the heart of our talk about consciousness in philosophy of mind, what we’re trying to define, describe, sneak past, is nothing less than what those outside of philosophy call the soul. I’m thinking of the core meaning of soul, the essence of soul, not all the grubby add-ons people have imposed on it throughout history.

I hear your objections. Yes, souls are indeed immaterial. But so what? Why should that bother you? Are computations material? Information? Laws? Math? Yet you believe those are real, don’t you? We’re so beyond materialism…or so we say.

Soul doesn’t necessarily mean immortal. Philosophers of the past would have had a tough time questioning the immortality of the soul if that were the case. And there’s no reason to assume the soul can exist apart from the body either. (See Aristotle).

We can’t pick apart the meaning of soul to discover whether rocks, plants, or animals have them. Yes, in the past some have thought only humans have souls. In my opinion they were definitely and obviously wrong, but my opinion has nothing to do with the meaning of the word soul either. Do rocks have souls? Plants? Who knows?

The soul isn’t necessarily a simple indivisible substance. It can have parts. Or not have parts. Same goes for uber-souls: ant colonies, the population of China, the universe. The Beautiful City of Plato’s Republic is a soul made up of souls. So why not. Who knows.

BUT WHAT IS THE SOUL?

I don’t know! All I can say is, I think it’s most keenly understood by its absence.

Recently I had to have my sweet Geordie Bear put down, and the hardest part came when I looked into his eyes and saw that he was gone. Unmistakably, irreversibly gone. My first thought was: Where did he go? Childish though this may seem to many of you, I think it makes sense to ask that question. Nothing in the world just disappears, so to speak, into thin air from one moment to the next—nothing, that is, except souls.

What’s left behind when someone dies is of so little importance by comparison to what is no longer there. During life the physical body seemed identical to the life, the personality, the individual soul, but in death it suddenly turns into this non-breathing, motionless thing that immediately begins the process of cooling, disintegrating, self destructing. When the body is no longer occupied we see its material nature most clearly, see it for what it truly is. What is the physical body? It’s nothing. Or almost nothing. Returning to nothingness.

You might object to this blatant dualism, but I assure you, no metaphysical commitments are intended here. It’s hard to avoid the language of dualism. I don’t care who you are or what you believe, death makes dualists of us all.

Maybe you’re thinking what I’m calling the soul is nothing more than life. But what is that? Life is no less mysterious! No one has figured out how life ‘emerges’ from dead matter. So go ahead and call it life, if you like. Either way captures the sense of wonder that’s too often missing from our discussions on ‘consciousness’ these days.

Why should we not be filled with wonder? It’s not like neuroscience has it all figured out. Far from it! The mind-brain identity theory didn’t stack up the way many assumed it would (check out this paper by physicist,

Marco Masi

, if you don’t believe me). The neural correlates of consciousness? We’re jumping ship. Well, there are holdouts. There always are. Some conclude the mind or self is an illusion, but that’s neither here nor there. I suspect most people, people who don’t have axe to grind, ordinary people, would say the evidence points in the opposite direction. It’s the brain that comes under suspicion here. Not the mind. Not the self. Not the soul.

And yet, I sense a distinctly materialistic tone still hanging in the air. Why?

I suppose these things take time.

No, I don’t think we’ll ever say soul with a straight face. There’s no going back. That’s how it goes.

Fine. Okay. I guess.

Well, I think IT is more than the brain, more than the body, more than the sum of its parts, even if IT doesn’t survive death. But what is this more? I don’t know. Just that IT—whatever you want to call it—is more.

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What do YOU think?