Reflections on the Problem of Consciousness (Studies in Brain and Mind)

Reflections on the Problem of Consciousness

Studies in Brain and Mind Volume 3 Series Editors John W. Bickle, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, Ohio Kenneth J. Sufka, University of Mississippi, Oxford, Mississippi

Reflections on the Problem of Consciousness by

Errol E. Harris John Evans Professor of Philosophy (Emeritus) Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, U.S.A.

A C.I.P. Catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN-10 ISBN-13 ISBN-10 ISBN-13

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CONTENTS

Preface

vii

Chapter I

The Crucial Question - Mind, Brain and Body

Chapter II

Dennett and Descartes

1 21

Chapter III A Natural Method

49

Chapter IV Descartes’ Error and Spinoza’s Truth

63

Chapter V

83

The Dynamic Brain

Chapter VI Guidance from Past Insights

97

Chapter VII The Conditions of Consciousness

111

Chapter VIII Who or What Thinks?

125

Chapter IX Towards a Solution

143

Appendix

The Theory of Emergence and Contemporary Analytic Criticism

165

Select Bibliography

173

Index

183

PREFACE The relation between body and mind has presented philosophy with its perennial problem. It exercised the minds of Plato and Aristotle and it was implicit in the thought, if not always present to the minds, of the Presocratics. In modern philosophy it became explicit in Descartes’s Meditations and remained central to the deliberations of every subsequent philosopher of any significance from Hobbes to Hume, from Spinoza to Hegel, and from Husserl and Heidegger to Russell and Whitehead. From whatever angle one approaches philosophy one cannot avoid this problem. Moral philosophy, both ethical and political, compels one to adopt some conception of human nature, its origins and status within the world, for one cannot decide on the best way to live without considering the impact of natural influences on the human condition and of human behaviour on nature including other humans; and these considerations at once raise the question of the relation of the human mind to Nature and the natural body it enlightens. A philosophy of Nature must include the place of humanity in the natural scheme, not only the human body, but also the knowing mind. Metaphysics cannot be divorced from Epistemology nor can that neglect the part played in the acquisition of knowledge by the bodily senses. And clearly a philosophy of mind must include some vision of the relation of the mind to the body it inhabits. The problem has been central to my own thinking throughout my philosophical career and has figured in almost everything I have written. The solution I have reached is not new and I claim for it no originality; it is derived from Aristotle, Spinoza, Hegel and Collingwood, and my reading of Bradley and Samuel Alexander have contributed to it. I know of none that is better founded. But I can claim that it has been sorely neglected and universally overlooked by contemporary writers, whether from ignorance or from deliberate oversight; and I have felt the necessity repeatedly to remind them of it. The long period during which the philosophical scene has been dominated by Analytic Philosophy, which has abjured metaphysics and what I am inclined to call genuine philosophy, especially its history, has probably engendered in younger writers a disinclination to consult past speculation, or to discuss its merits. They seem also determined to ignore the writings of anybody who does.1

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Preface

Those who write about the mind today do so mostly from a psychological viewpoint and are for the most part cognitive scientists. Their avowed aim is to arrive at what they consider to be a “scientific” theory, ignoring the transformation that the twentieth century revolution in physical science has effected in the meaning of that word. What was “scientific” before Einstein and Max Planck was expressly materialistic and atomistic. In regarding what it considered “objective” the “scientific outlook” of the nineteenth century excluded the observer and everything subjective. What is scientific today has to be viewed in a very different light. Einstein established the interdependence of all physical measurements with the consequent inseparability of physical concepts: space and time, energy and matter. He laid the foundation of a unified field theory, which, after several vicissitudes, has recently become prominent in physical research, giving promise of success and enlightenment. Contemporary physicists have discovered the indivisible interdependence of quantum events (basic to all others) and the consequent indissoluble unity of the entire physical world. Further, both Relativity and Quantum theories have united observer and observed in a way that promises a reconciliation of materialism with idealism. At the same time, while micro-biology has penetrated to the minutest details of living processes, an organismic approach in biology has become ever more important; and the science of ecology has established the interlaced holism of the biosphere. What is “scientific” today is the very opposite of materialism and atomism, and any philosophical doctrine that seeks to be scientific should be aware of this new outlook. A fresh approach to philosophical questions is now called for, quite different from that adopted by those who have been seduced by materialism, are enamoured of reductionism,2 and obsessed (especially in connection with the mind-body problem) by neo-Darwinism. In what follows I have sought evidence from current neurophysiological research for the view of body-mind relation that I have advocated elsewhere and have tried to reformulate below. The genuine scientists, the neuro-biologists and physiologists have, in my opinion, adopted a much more sensible attitude towards the mind and its relation to the brain than have the self-styled conceptual scientists, who are really crypto-metaphysicians espousing a materialistic metaphysic that science no longer supports. My central appeal to the reader is to acknowledge duly his or her own immediate experience and not either to pretend at the behest of contemporary materialists that it does not exist or to forget its undeniable occurrence which renders any attempt at denial blatently self-refuting.

Preface

ix

The writings of scholars like Daniel Dennett and Antonio Damasio have caused me to reflect afresh on the nature of consciousness and have aroused anew the puzzlement concerning the functioning of the brain, which is obviously essential to consciousness, yet has in itself not the least indication of anything in common with our psychical experience. What has impressed me most has been the extent to which the discoveries of the neuro-physiologists have supported and confirmed the views of the philosophers of the past which I have hitherto found most convincing. I am not a scientist and make no pretence at scientific competence. I have simply accepted on their authority what scientists have written and I have tried to think out its philosophical implications. I have always believed in the continuity of science and philosophy, and always recognizing the right (and duty) of the epistemologist to examine and if necessary criticize scientific method and presuppositions, I have remained convinced that philosophers cannot afford to ignore scientific discoveries and may not reject facts well supported by empirical evidence. At an advanced age, living in retirement in a rural area, remote from academic libraries, I cannot embark upon a full-scale study of the subject of consciousness taking into account all available relevant scientific and philosophical publications. I have set out only to record my own reflections on the material that has come readily into my hands. I have made no attempt to explore the fields of the relevant sciences with any degree of comprehensiveness. Artificial Intelligence and the various speculations and debates about it I have dismissed as incapable of throwing any light upon what I have called the crucial problem, because the neurophysiologists have firmly established that the brain does not function like a computer, and the only consciousness relevant to computation is that of the information engineer who works with the machine. Moreover, Roger Penrose has argued (and in my opinion) convincingly that no computer, capable as it is only of operating some algorithm, can produce the insight that is essential to mathematical thinking (and to any decision as to what algorithm is applicable or appropriate). Evolutionary biology, also, does not appear to me to enlighten us in any way about how the electro-chemical action of brain cells can generate consious experience. How the human brain has evolved and how particular conscious activities may have been advantagious to survival are questions of importance and of great interest, but they are beside the main point that I am concerned with in these reflections.

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Preface

I have merely pursued the ideas suggested to me by the authors I have read, seeking such enlightenment as they might provide. I have rejected and tried to reveal the defects of suggestions that obviously conflict with patent facts, and arguments which pre-suppose what they are intended to deny. My object has been more to find illumination of the obscurities that have troubled my own mind than to persuade others of the value of my own opinions. Nevertheless, I can but hope that what I have written may be of some help to those who read it in elucidating what has hitherto seemed unintelligible and to some even unfathomably mysterious. Errol E. Harris High Wray, October 18th., 2005

NOTES 1

The contemporary critque and rejection of metaphysics I have discussed at some length in the Introduction to my book, The Reality of Time. As I indicated there not all Analytic philosophers nowadays reject metaphysics outright. Some have acknowledged the legitimacy of what they call “revisionary” and “descriptive” metaphysics, and others address problems that are essentially metaphysical, although they frequently overlook the latent metaphysical positions which they themselves tacitly presuppose.

2

What I mean by “reductionism” is analysis based on the assumption that the molecular parts of a systematic whole can, regarded as a mere collection, explain the specific nature of the whole, which is generally and more probably only to be found in the over-all structure

Preface

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and co-operative combination of such parts. The analysis and examination of molecular structures, especially of brain functioning, is not only legitimate but essential to understanding how the brain operates; but it does not, of itself, explain how brain functioning, qua electrochemical activity, produces subjective experience.

CHAPTER I THE CRUCIAL QUESTION - MIND, BRAIN AND BODY

The Origins of Dualism

By provisionally rejecting any belief which (for any reason extravagant or weighty) was susceptible of doubt, Descartes, in his quest for certainty, found it impossible to question the existence of his own consciousness as long as it lasted; because even to doubt it he must necessarily be conscious. He then decided that he was more certain of the existence of his mind than of his body or of any object external to it, for he could still find reason to imagine that his experience of physical objects might be illusory. It seemed not to occur to him (as it did later to Spinoza) that the ground-base of his consciousness was bodily feeling - though, if it had, he might well have argued that while he could not doubt his awareness of that feeling he still could doubt whether it was the feeling of an existing material body. He did not raise the question “What is consciousness?” but simply declared that it was a manifestation of a special self-sufficient unextended substance that he called Thought. The position thus reached raises two questions: first, by what criterion does one decide whether one’s experience is illusory or veridical? and second, if it is veridical and presents to the mind existing objects in the physical world, how do such objects generate ideas of themselves in consciousness? Descartes decided that cogito ergo sum was indubitable because it was clear and distinct, and that was his answer to the first question; to the second the only answer that could satisfy him was that God (of whom he had an idea, the nature of which clearly and distinctly demonstrated the existence of its object) would not deceive him if he accepted what was clear and distinct in his natural belief that the physical things he experienced existed. He then asserted without further question that they were parts of a separate extended substance, and he subsequently had difficulty, which he never satisfactorily overcame, in explaining the relation between his body and his mind. But the really crucial question concerning the relation of body to mind was inadvertently raised by the British Empiricists. First Hobbes declared

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Chapter I

that nothing existed other than matter and motion, and that sensation resulting from the impact of external motions upon our sense-organs was simply further motion in the sense organ, “...for motion produceth nothing but motion”, although “it appears to us as Fancy”.1 To what (or whom) it “appears”, how it could appear to mere matter and motion, or what “Fancy” might be, he did not ask. Then Locke ventured to assert that “some motion must be thence [from the external object] continued by our nerves or animal spirits ...to the brains or the seat of sensation, there to produce the particular ideas we have of them,”2 leaving unexplained (and inexplicable) how brains generated ideas or (apart from being “the object of the understanding when a man thinks”) what ideas might be. This question how physical processes and effects produced by the action of external things on the human body can be converted into “ideas” has not yet been answered. In the centuries since Hobbes and Locke wrote, neuroscientists have established that nervous activity consists of the “firing” of nerve cells (neurons) when appropriately stimulated by external influences, and the transmission of the resulting change of electrical potential along nerve fibres (axons and dendrites). In the human brain the interconnection of these cells and fibres is bewilderingly complex and intricate, but the transmission of electrical potentials, however complex, is still no more than physico-chemical (or, if you wish, physiological) activity; how is it (or can it be) translated into conscious experience? This is the crucial question. In recent years, many scholars - neuroscientists, cognitive scientists, psychologists and philosophers have returned to this subject in the endeavour to overcome Descartes’s dualism, but in doing so, while many of them have thrown valuable and interesting new light on the way in which the brain functions, they have thrown little or none on this crucial question of the actual relation between neural activity and conscious experience. In fact, they seldom even seem to be aware of it. (For the most part they have ignored, or been ignorant of, the theories put forward by such past philosophers as Spinoza, Hegel, and R.G. Collingwood, to which reference will be made later in this essay). Perception and the Relation of Mind to Body

The question is directly related to the problem of perception - How do we acquire knowledge of externally existing things? Are the appearances to us in consciousness faithful representations of an existent world? How can we test and know whether this is the case? If the precise relation remains

The Crucial Question - Mind, Brain and Body

3

unknown between the body (with its presumed sense organs to receive impulses from without, and the brain to which these impulses are transmitted) and the mind for which the impulses are to constitute knowledge of the external objects, how reliable can that assumed knowledge be, and how can its reliability be assessed? Unless we can provide an intelligible answer to the question how brain functioning becomes transmuted into conscious awareness, we have no access to the presumed external objects other than the ideas they are alleged to imprint upon our minds, and no means of making any comparison between those ideas and their assumed objects. Locke’s doctrine that we can only know our own ideas led him into an impasse obstructing any possible avenue to the comparison of ideas with the external objects they were supposed to represent, making it impossible for the knower to discover whether they did represent anything external, or, if they did, whether the ideas accurately corresponded to the things; so his successor, Berkeley, rejected altogether the existence of matter and an external world. For him, then, the crucial question of the relation of mind to body evaporated. The human body was dissolved away into ideas and became no more than a content of consciousness. Much the same was true for Leibniz, who contended that reality consisted entirely of spiritual monads, for whom bodies in space and time were merely confused ideas of the relations between such monads, phenomena bene fundata. Kant produced an ostensible reconciliation between the positions of Leibniz and Locke, concluding that human knowledge was only of phenomena and that although these originated from sense, which had an external cause, we could know nothing of “things in themselves”. These philosophers, in consequence, are not troubled by our crucial question, nor does it concern those who immediately follow Kant, such as Fichte, who generated everything from the transcendental consciousness of the Ego, and even Schelling, who traced everything back to “the Original Act of Cognition” in which subjectivity and objectivity were identical. Hegel, however, is an exception to this trend and I shall reserve comment on his position for a later chapter. More recent Idealist philosophers, in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries followed a similar path, influenced largely by Kant - in particular Husserl and those of the Phenomenological school who followed him. So much for the historical background. Nowadays philosophers who address the questions of perception and of the relation between mind and body fall roughly into two groups: those who approach the problems from

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Chapter I

the subjective side (like the Phenomenologists just mentioned) and those who approach them from the “objective” side - from the scientific investigation of activity of the brain. Neither, we shall find, face up to the crucial problem squarely, because each, from the opposite perspective, cuts itself off from the means of doing so by its initial presupposition which explicitly or implicitly eliminates one side of the relationship. The objectivists, who declare that they seek for a “scientific” theory of consciousness, are the more prominent today, and are likely to be impatient of any discussion of the opposing position; nevertheless I shall begin with the “subjectivists” who are temporarily prior and who draw attention to important aspects that are apt to be overlooked.

Unsuccessful Strategies

As we have observed, the relation of mind to body and the external world beyond is closely connected with that of perception and its veridicality, for if we cannot know “things in themselves” directly we can never be assured that our perception of the world around us is anything but a phantasmagoria true of nothing whatsoever. Descartes’s solution was an appeal to God’s veracity, and Kant resolved the difficulty by maintaining (in effect) that truth was the coherence of representations (Vorstellungen), which the a priori synthesis of the manifold of sense engendered through the transcendental unity of apperception, derived from the unity of the I that thinks, bringing them under the categories of the understanding, so that things-in-themselves become irrelevant. But unless we are content with this criterion, the problem of how we know when, in our common perception of external objects, we are the victims of illusion and when we are not remains on our hands.3 1. Phenomenology Husserl followed Kant and Fichte closely returning to their position in disregard of Hegel whose dialectic he rejected (although some of his followers argued that it was implicit in Husserl’s own doctrine). Husserl recommends a philosophical method which enables him, more or less to sidestep the main problem with which I am concerned. In effect, he discounts scientific theories, neurophysiology no less than the rest, arguing that the objective outlook of which science is the typical expression, is itself derivative from a more fundamental subjective experience.4 This original consciousness could, then, not possibly be caused by or generated from brain activity the knowledge of which is no more than an abstraction from it.

The Crucial Question - Mind, Brain and Body

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Some existentialist philosophers have pursued a similar line: Sartre stressed the complete freedom of the subject to structure the world of its experience according to its own unrestricted choice; and Heidegger, in a famous essay5, contends that a tacitly presupposed judgement has characterized modern science as “research” through the predelineation of an area of investigation, which prescribes both its method of procedure and the sort of object that is to count as real and as evidence; hence scientific investigation becomes restricted to the pursuit of an institutionalized professional community to which its ideas and the canons of its methodology are esoteric. On such presupposition consciousness is taken to be prior to any scientific investigation which could pronounce upon a relationship of brain activity to our common experience. Going back to the Cartesian cogito Husserl points out that its indubitability includes its whole phenomenal content as cognized and evidenced in consciousness. Such consciousness, he says, is absolute, and our unreflective distinction of ourselves from the outer world surrounding us - what he calls “the natural attitude” - is derivative from this absolute consciousness. If, for the purpose of philosophical reflection, we suspend this "natural attitude" and its common belief in the external existence of the perceived world (without denying it), we perform the epoché or transcendental reduction, which alters nothing that appears in consciousness but reveals the whole content of our experience as the intentional object (what the mind contemplates as presented to it - the presented content of consciousness) of the transcendental subject whose undeniable existence was established by Descartes. The transcendental subject is transcendent to all intentional objects, to the whole world commonly perceived as external in the natural attitude. This “externality” of the world is its meaning as constituted by the transcendental subject. The perceiver, as a member of the existent world, the psyche of the individual person as studied by psychology, is therefore not to be confused with the transcendental subject. The natural person as a psycho-physical being is one among the rest of the objects which make up the perceived world. The natural self of the meditator is itself an intentional object to the meditating transcendental ego, which discovered to itself by the epoché, and which, as Husserl has it, “is not a piece of the world” - its “ego cogito” does not signify “I, this man, exist.” In Husserl’s words: “No longer am I the man who, in natural self-experience, finds himself as a man... nor am I the separately considered psyche itself. Consequently for me, the meditating Ego who, standing and remaining

Chapter I

6

in the attitude of epoché , posits exclusively himself as the acceptancebasis of all Objective acceptances and bases (als Geltungsgrund aller objectiven Geltungen und Gruende), there is no psychological Ego and there are no psychological phenomena in the sense proper to psychology.”6 This statement is of critical significance in relation to the problem I am investigating. If in transcendental awareness there are no psychological phenomena, there can equally be no relation between such phenomena and the brain of “me, this man”; and if any such relation is to be contemplated it can only be as constituted by the transcendental subject. Once we have effected the epoché, so Husserl asserts, the crucial question concerning perception ceases to arise, and to ask it makes no sense: “When I apperceive myself as a natural man I have already apperceived the spacial world and construed myself as in space, where I already have an Outside Me. Therefore the validity of world apperception has already been presupposed, has already entered into the sense of asking the question...” Before we can rightly ask how the content of my awareness as that of a natural man acquires objective validity, or how it derives from the functioning of my brain, we must perform the phenomenological reduction; that is, we must realize that the whole spectacle of the natural world with myself as a natural man inhabiting that world - a person with a nervous system and a brain - is the content of my consciousness as transcendental Ego. But then the problems are solved, because in the natural attitude the relation of natural men to their surrounding world and how they perceive it is presupposed, and unless it were so presupposed no question about the objectivity of mental contents could be raised. On the other hand, the whole schema of relationships is the intentional object of the transcendental Ego and is constituted by it. There can be no question of a world external to transcendental consciousness to which it could in any way correspond, because any conception of such a world including individuals with brains producing their awareness of it must be constituted as an intentional object of the transcendental subject. 2. Natural and Transcendental Ego However persuasive this phenomenological approach may initially appear to be, it seems to me to involve a fatal defect. The transcendental Ego cannot

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be its own intentional object; it can only be the subject of transcendental awareness. It cannot be a member of the objective world which it constitutes. It is clear that Husserl sharply distinguished the transcendental subject from the natural self (or psyche), which must be one of its constituted intentional objects related to others in the natural world. Subsequent identification of the two must then be totally illegitimate. Yet the transcendental ego is mine, and I am a member of the world of which I am conscious. I am my natural self, and, if it is genuinely to be ego, the transcendental Ego must be mine. And we find Husserl making this identification, within and in spite of his professed transcendental reduction. On the one hand, to identify the transcendental Ego with the natural psycho-physical self would undermine the proffered solution of the problem of objective knowledge, for that is said to depend on the assumption made in the natural attitude of the distinction between the psycho-physical person and his experienced world - a distinction inapplicable to the transcendental Ego. Yet to fail to do so is to sacrifice the identity of the transcendental subject as ego cogitans. It is in the natural psycho-physical individual that body, brain, and mind are distinguished and interrelated in the attempt to explain our ineluctable experience of the surrounding world. No such explanation of the phenomenological content of the consciousness of the transcendental subject can be offered, for it constitutes all its intentional objects and their mutual relations, natural psyche among them. It is prior to all of them, both logically and existentially. As Kant demonstrated, the attempt to make the original transcendental unity of apperception an object of consciousness is to commit the paralogism of bringing it under the categories of which it is the original source; and for Husserl the same must be true. In his own words: “The Objective world, the world that exists for me... with all its objects, I said, derives its whole sense and its existential status it has for me, from myself, from me as the transcendental Ego, the Ego who comes to the fore only with transcendental-phenomenological epoché .” (His italics).7 Yet it is I who think, and the transcendental subject must be mine, for I cannot identify it with any other subject than myself. It can never be an alter ego and no alter ego can constitute me for myself. I am aware of my psychological self in relation to, and distinction from, my own physical body and brain. To this distinction the transcendental subject is prior and it cannot be identified with any of the distincta. It cannot be one of many, for then it would be one term in relation to others, and it is prior to all such relations and can never be one term in a relation it has itself constituted.8 Yet as mine

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Chapter I

it must be identified with one (person) among many, and unless it is it is not ego. But if it is mine, then transcendental phenomenology is incoherent, because it becomes indistinguishable from solipsism, which must at the same time assert and deny the natural distinction between self and other. It must assert it in order to be ego ipse, and deny it to establish its claim to be transcendentally prior - to be solus. Another way of seeing this dilemma is to observe that an essential characteristic of my awareness of myself is as a finite subject. As Descartes recognized and insisted, I am subject to doubt and error, my experience is full of obscurities and gaps, of conflicts and inconsistencies. Much of it fills me with bewilderment and wonder; and if it were not so I should never raise questions or be stimulated to reflect, to investigate, or to philosophize. But if all my objects were constituted absolutely by my transcendental Ego, they would be (as Merleau-Ponty has remarked) entirely transparent, clear and distinct; or if this were not so initially it would be in my power to make it so at will. This, however, is manifestly not the case. My objects are never fully and clearly revealed to me, something always remains obscure and every answer to every question raises new questions demanding further search. The transcendental subject, on the other hand, can admit no limitations, any more than it can be one of many, for the relation between a finite entity and what limits it must be constituted transcendentally by this subject. The problems we are confronting, however, arise just because each of us is aware of being a finite entity among many a finite biological animal dependent for its conscious experience on its relation to other finite constituents of the surrounding world and on the normal functioning of its nervous system and brain. Husserl is not unaware of the difficulty and his Fifth Cartesian Meditation is a valiant effort to overcome it. It is nevertheless an effort that fails, if only because from the very first the main issue is evaded. Husserl begins by acknowledging the charge of solipsism against transcendental idealism: “When I, the meditating I, reduce myself to my absolute transcendental ego by phenomenological epoché do I not become solus ipse... what about other egos, who surely are not a mere intending and intended in me, merely synthetic unities of possible verification in me, but, according to their sense, precisely others? ... Can we, as phenomenologists do anything but agree with this and say: “The Nature and the whole world that are constituted ‘immanently’ in the ego are only my ‘ideas’ and have behind them the world that exists in itself, the way to this world must still be sought?”9 (his italics)

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Nevertheless, he immediately dismisses these questions and proceeds to carry out a phenomenological explication of the constitution of the alter ego by the transcendental subject. However successful we might consider this explication to be, it is no answer to the question just quoted whether whatever is constituted immanently in the ego is other than my idea; and the charge of solipsism remains unmet.

To resolve the problem Husserl realizes that he must somehow validate the existence for the transcendental subject of an objective world, not simply constituted by itself as objectively intended, but as inter-subjectively constituted by a multitude of subjects, all of whom, along with the constituted world, remain essentially objects to the original experiencing ego. In his efforts to explicate the constitution of the alter ego and an intersubjective world Husserl tells us much that is illuminating and instructive, but his main argument fails in two respects at least. First, he animates the alter ego, by empathetic transfer of the feeling and awareness of the original constituting ego to the perceived body of the other person, which amounts to no more than an argument from analogy for the existence of other minds; and it does not alleviate the onus of solipsism, because the circle of subjectivism is not broken by subjective projection. It could be said that the constitution of the world on Husserl’s showing, was no more than a projection of ideal constructions. Secondly, Husserl is forced in the course of his exposition to identify the transcendental subject with the psyche of the natural self. He begins by reducing his transcendental thematic field to what constitutes within himself “his peculiar ownness”. This excludes all other persons and everything attributable to them, and leaves the world of “mere nature”, including “my body” in which “I rule and govern immediately” and which I diversify into sensory fields. (Husserl suggests, but does not clearly state, that “mere nature”, as well as “my body”, coincide with the deliverances of all the sensory fields taken together). He then proceeds to identify this sensory awareness with “my animate organism” and “my psyche” - the objective phenomenon “I, as this man”. The psycho-physical ego which is peculiarly mine is nevertheless distinguished from other bodies in the world of “mere nature”, a world that has spatio-temporal form, so that it includes the relation between bodies, of being outside one another, my own among the rest. Husserl continues: “But I myself constitute all this in my “psyche” and bear it intentionally within me. If perchance it could be shown that everything constituted as part of my peculiar ownness.. belonged to the concrete essence of the

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constituting subject as inseparable internal determination, then, in the Ego’s self-explication, his perculiarly own world would be found ‘inside’, and, on the other hand,...the Ego would find himself as a member among its ‘externalities’ and would distinguish between himself and ‘the external world’ (Cartesian Meditations V, 44). Which Ego in this passage is which? Husserl proceeds in effect to identify the two in the next section. He speaks of “the ego of all constitutions” - the transcendental ego - as existing “in his actual and potential life-processes”. This ego constitutes everything objective as a world, including the “Ego in the usual sense”. He calls it the “mundanization” of the (transcendental ?) Ego, by which “everything included in the ownness belonging to me transcendentally (as this ultimate ego) enters, as something psychic, into ‘my psyche’. Not only has the transcendental subject here been smuggled into the natural psyche, but the relation between that psyche and its body and brain posited by biological science, to which the epoché is prior, has not been accounted for, and no solution of our crucial question has been adumbrated. Moreover, we have already seen that the projection of the constituted ownness of the transcendental subject into the natural psyche is illegitimate on Husserl’s own terms. For whatever is constituted and objectified transcendentally, including my natural psyche, is intentional object, and precisely not transcendental subject. Accordingly, to identify transcendental with natural self is to commit a paralogism. Yet at the same time, apart from this identification, the constituting Ego is no longer mine. Nor is Husserl’s subsequent explication of the alter ego possible without it. Other selves are perceived by me as natural bodies and are constituted as psycho-physical organisms on a par with my own only by empathetic projection into them of my psychical experiences and the constitutive activity of my transcedental subjectivity. Such projection is possible only if my transcendental Ego and my natural psyche (which it constitutes) are identified. But because the former is prior to the latter epistemologically, is the ultimate basis (Geltungsgrund) of its validity as an object, no such identification is permissible. Transcendental idealism is thus incapable of solving the problems from which we began. It can account for my membership of world only by making my natural psycho-physical self intentional object, along with the world that it inhabits, and it can account for my consciousness of the world only by withdrawing the subject of consciousness from that world and

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making it transcendentally prior to my natural self and its brainprocesses as to the distinction between self and other. The epoché and the withdrawal of the subject of consciousness from the natural world, including the psycho-physical self, not only leaves our crucial problem unaddressed, it makes it all the more insoluble. The difficulty cannot be avoided by saying, as defenders of Husserl well may, that the transcendental ego is not identified with the phenomenal psyche, but its constituting activity is only projected into the natural self as “something psychical”. This, no doubt, is what Husserl professes to be doing, but apart from its illegitimacy upon which he himself formerly insisted, it will not solve the problem of transcendental solipsism, but only compounds it. For if my psyche were constituted as itself psychically constituting its world, it would embrace the whole of the phenomenal scene in itself as its phenomena, and the actual reality of the world would be, for it, a mere Ding-an-sich. If, on the other hand, it were identical with the transcendental Ego, which constitutes the world as real and external to the natural psyche and in causal relation with it, Husserl’s solution of Locke’s problem would be undermined. If the “peculiarly own” of the transcendental Ego could be found inside the natural psyche it could be only as phenomenon, and that at best would be subjective idealism. Nor can the transcendental subject be found among the “externalities” of the world, even as reduced to what is psychically included in the “peculiar ownness” of the natural person. Thus Husserl can succeed in making his case only if we understand him to be identifying transcendental Ego with natural psyche, a resort which he himself has proscribed and which would undermine his proffered solution of the problem of knowledge. Further, there is no escape from this predicament by pointing out that for Husserl the constitution of the phenomenal world is perspectival from “my body” as centre - as he says: “I… find my animate organism as uniquely singled out… the only Object ‘in’ which I ‘rule and govern’ immediately.”10 Indeed, for Husserl, the world is constituted in this way, but the vital issue remains whether it can legitimately be so constituted by a transcendental Ego. A perspectival schema centred on a distinguishable spatial position presupposes an absolute system of spatial relations in which perpectival views can be distinguished. On the one hand, different perspectival views of the world cannot be mutually inter-related as views of one and same world from a single point within it, except on the presupposition of space as such, with relations between points definable

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Chapter I

independently of any perspective - in short, an absolute geometry. On the other hand, no such absolute geometry could be constituted by a transcendental subject unless it were itself transcendent to that schema, let alone any perspectival projection distinguishable within it.11 Accordingly, there is no legitimate way to make the transcendental Ego coincide with the natural psyche, even if one denies their identity, for there is no place in which the transcendental subject resides or from which it could perspectivally constitute the spatio-temporal world. Only the viewpoint of the natural, objective, human body can be perspectival. Hence neither transcendental nor psychical consciousness can be located “in my head”, nor yet spatially related to my brain. We may conclude, therefore, that our crucial problem cannot be solved by performing the transcendental reduction, nor even the second reduction to my peculiar ownness, and that Husserl’s phenomenological approach is, in this connection, unavailing. 3. The “Lived Body” and its “Being-in-the-World” Existentialists have attempted to find a way round our problem by insisting that our very existence (Heidegger’s term Dasein) is an immediate awareness of “being-in-the-world” that is implicated in direct perception. Such consciousness of being in the world, however, cannot assure us that the world in which we are conscious of being exists independently as what we perceive; nor can it show us how the electro-chemical functioning of our brains, which are objects of that perception, generates that consciousness. The contention is that if the essence of perception is involvement with the world, and if the perceived world is one in which the “Ex istenz” of the percipient is directly "lived", the obvious vehicle of this being-in-the-world, as of the perception, is the body. It is the body that is in the world and it is through the body and by means of its sense organs that the world is perceived. To state the matter in this way clearly does nothing to solve the problems from which we began, because the body is precisely that finite and strictly limited entity whose membership in the surrounding world has to be reconciled with its inclusion, as one finite object, in our awareness of the panoramic spectacle of the world that we perceive, along with much of its microscopic detail. The relation that we have to clarify is that between some of the microscopic detail (neural functioning) and the conscious spectacle of the whole panorama, as well as that between the inclusion within one finite body of the representation of the entire surrounding universe. If we object that it is the mind and not the body that grasps this spectacle, the problem of

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explaining the relation between the two becomes acute, for the channel through which the spectacle is alleged to reach the mind is sensation, and the sense organs are appurtenances of the body (which is part of the spectacle) and the senses are appurtenances of the mind, which grasps the whole; yet they can be reduced neither to mere objects of consciousness nor to purely subjective agencies. Merleau-Ponty, and those who follow his lead, seek to break through the impasse by insisting that the body which mediates our awareness of the world is not the objective body, as conceived and studied by the physiologist. That is part of the whole objectivized scientific schema that results from reflection upon primordial “lived” experience (Erlebnis, to use the German equivalent), whereas the perceiving body is the centre and source of that Erlebnis itself. It is the “lived body” (not the objective body) that, in its involvement with the world, perceives; and the perception is nothing more nor less than that involvement. The body thus “living” (erlebend) its involvement with the world is neither merely subject nor merely object, neither “in-itself” nor “for-itself”, to the exclusion one of the other. Its experience is pre-objective, existential. It is not in the objective world, for that is derived from it; and the objective world can be said to be “in” the lived body only in the sense that the “lived” experience of involvement with the “lived” world yields, on reflection, the conception of an objective world including an objective body, identified as “mine”, but actually abstracted from the pre-reflective “existence” of my bodily involvement in the world. This “existence” is ambiguous - neither subjective nor objective - and its Erlebnis pre-empts the dilemma which gave rise to our original problem. This ambiguity of the “lived” body, however, is apt to be the source of some bewilderment rather than the solution of philosophical problems, unless an interpretation can be given to Erlebnis that is less slippery. The “lived body” like the “lived world” is, in English, an ungrammatical phrase; for the verb to live is not transitive. We cannot substitute for it “the felt body” or even “the experienced body”, without becoming ensnared in ambiguity. Both “feel” and “experience” may be used transitively as well as intransitively: we may feel and experience something objective, or we may simply feel a feeling, or have an experience (the object being cognate). If we wish to avoid the ambiguity of translating corps vecu as “experienced” or “felt body” we must find some way of indicating that we do not mean “experienced or felt as object”. But in English we have no easy way of distinguishing what, in German, is clearly indicated by the difference between Erlebnis and Erfahrung, and even these two words do not clearly

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convey the required distinction between feeling as an inner experience and feeling as the experience of some object. The German words distinguish between experiencing, as when we live through an emergency or a crisis, and experience as acquired skill or familiarity with a special type of situation - e.g. in the phrase “an experienced mountaineer”. It is not this kind of distinction we are trying to express, but rather the type of distinction between experiencing, or feeling, a pain and feeling the rough surface of a solid body. The first is a so-called “lived” experience; the second is the sensory awareness of an intentional object. Leaving aside the etymological questions, we may observe that MerleauPonty seems definitely to intend by “lived body” the body as inwardly felt, not felt as an object (yet there are times when his usage is ambiguous even on this point, e.g. when he discusses the nature of the body-image or the relation between “external” perception and the perception of the body12). But inward feeling, whether bodily or of any other sort is, in an acceptable sense, subjective. If involvement with the world is included in such feeling, to what world are we referring? Surely, it is the experienced world; but is that the same as the real world in which my actual body is truly involved? To say that it is, implicitly denies the possibility of error. Whatever I experience of the world must then be what the world actually is, and I could never misperceive or mistake in perception. If, on the other hand, the “real world” is simply the intentionally “objective world” derivative from my primordial inner experience by abstraction, and errors of perception are simply confusions, or misplaced relations, between elements of that primordial experience committed in the process of abstracting, have we not subjectivized the world just as much as the transcendental idealist? Merleau-Ponty clearly is anxious to avoid this dilemma, but it is only by ambiguity and subtle shifts of meaning that he appears to succeed. In either case, how are we to understand the relation of the lived body to the objective body, and the preceived world to the real world? How is the lived body with its perceived objects related to its perceived brain and neural activity? Merleau-Ponty does not so much as address this question. Further, if the lived body is essentially involved with the lived world, how can this relationship be construed in terms of truth and falsity? What sort of involvement constitutes misperception as opposed to the sort that results in veridical perception? Despite a great deal of most illuminating and salutary discussion of psychological phenomena and philosophical misprision, Merleau-Ponty never clearly faces this question - or rather, is extremely obscure and ambiguous in his treatment of it.

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The word “involvement” is itself ambiguous, for involvement is of two kinds. If I stretch out my hand to grasp a stick, or direct my gaze upon a distant object in order to distinguish it from its background, the object and the stick are equally involved in the situation with my body. But they are not aware of the involvement and the relationship, whereas I am. We should somehow be able to elucidate the difference of these two kinds of involvement and can do so only if we take cognizance of the fact that the involvement which results in awareness has a two-fold character that the other sort of involvement lacks. The first may be true or false, but the second is neither. If I stretch out my hand and find that the stick is beyond my reach, it is in my bodily movement that the distance has been misjudged. The stick has made no such error. If I peer at a distant object and see it as a bear whereas it is only a bush, my eyes have deceived me and I have made a mistake. The bush is not deceived or mistaken although it is equally involved with my body. Something on the side of the lived body must account for this difference and it is this that we must seek to explain. It will not do merely to say that truth and falsehood are features of the objectified world which is the product of reflection, and that perception is prereflective, pre-predicative and prior to all judgement. Merleau-Ponty does tend to take this position, but it is not wholly acceptable. No doubt there is, as we shall presently see, a pre-reflective level of experience; but whatever relation it bears to perception, we can speak of the latter only if we are referring to some form of cognition, an awareness of some situation, or some object, which may or may not be veridical. Anything less is not perception, even if it is sensation or feeling. When Merleau-Ponty speaks of pre-predicative experience he seems for the most part to refer to perception, yet also at times to some pre-perceptive (even pre-conscious)13 level, and once again ambiguity befogs the position he advocates. There is, nevertheless, much to be learned from Merleau-Ponty’s exhaustive discussion of perception. The view I shall finally propose will have much in common with his. I wish merely to concentrate attention more closely than he does on the problems of relating conscious perception to veridicality and the body-mind relation, and to try to produce a clearer doctrine. In rejecting intellectualism Merleau-Ponty complains that it posits “the precise and entirely determinate world” as the immanent end of perception, whereas we should “put the correct world back into its cradle of consciousness, and ask how the very idea of the world or of exact truth is possible, and look for its first appearance in consciousness.” With this we may agree in general terms, but that the idea of truth is already adumbrated at the level of perception is hardly to be denied; for we inevitably distinguish between true and false at the perceptual level. When we perceive

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an object we take it to be really there and no mere apparition, yet at the same time we are aware of the possibility and the frequent occurrence of error, as when a camouflaged object missed at first glance, is distinguished on closer attention from its background, and emerges within definite outlines. Merleau-Ponty gives an interesting and suggestive account of just such examples, which we shall find conformable to the theory I should be willing to accept, but his own theory of veridicality is hard to pin down. To this question I shall return later. Closer consideration will have to be given to the role of the body in perception, of which Merleau-Ponty makes so much, and to the precise way in which the body, in this connection, is being and should be conceived. 4. Sentience and the Body The percipient subject is aware of its own body in quite a different way from that in which it is aware of other bodies. We do certainly see our own limbs as we see other things and we can tactually explore most parts of our own bodies by means of other parts, notably with our hands. But even in this case the sensory experience is different from the tactual sensation, for both the sensed objects are at the same time receptors and each simultaneously becomes object to the other, and what is felt is also what feels. Moreover, apart from such modes of percipience there are kinaesthetic and proprioceptive sensations, seldom if ever in the focus of attention, which apprise us of the position of our limbs, and a general bodily feeling tone which envelopes and largely constitutes for us our physical being. These various feelings are not independent, in fact neurophysiological and psychological investigation finds them mutually involved so that even the way we see things, where they appear to be and how we orient ourselves towards them, depend upon obscure bodily sensations scarcely if at all registered in consciousness. This total conglomeration of feeling, combining in one whole all the various sense fields, is “the body” as intransitively felt, which might well be dubbed “the lived body” if we wish to adapt that phrase. Regarded in this way as a single great symbiosis of feeling and felt in one, “the lived body” is not the body as distinguished from other bodies external to it; for primary sentience is a level of mental life below that of objective consciousness. Sensation attributed in objective thought to some external object as its cause is not separate or differentiated in mere feeling from the felt body. The sensation in my finger tips when I touch a rough

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surface is at once the feel of that surface and of my fingers, but at the primary level no such distinction is made. The lived body in this sense is the whole world of feeling, felt indiscriminately, yet containing within it all potentially perceptible differences and variations of quality and intensity. The total conglomerate of feeling is body as perceived in its relation to and involvement with other bodies. It is the totality of the sensory, or the phenomenal, field within which both my own body and all others eventually appear to the subject as intentional objects. This is what we should mean when we deny that the lived body is the same as the objective body. But in that case the lived body would not be involved with the external world as described by Merleau-Ponty, and the existentially “lived” world would still be embryonic within the primordial mass of pre-objective feeling.14

It is only at the higher level at which intentional objects and their external reality have been constituted that any question can arise of perceptual illusion as opposed to perceptual veridicality. Likewise, it is only subsequent to reflection (as Merleau-Ponty admits) that scientific investigation such as that which might distinguish brain-functioning from consciousness as such, or might identify them, could occur. In primitive sentience (the “lived body”) there is no brain, for neural activity is never consciously felt; the brain is only distinguished within the consciousness of the neuro-physiologist at a late stage of reflective (scientific) experience, and it is always the brain of another subject who is directly unaware of its existence. Accordingly, Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of perception, as the existential involvement of percipience with external objects, is not competent to address what I have called the crucial question both for neuro-physiology as well as for perception (if the latter is taken to be the causal result of external physical effects upon the sense organs and nervous system). We may turn next to examine more recent attempts to tackle this crucial question by the cognitive and neurobiological sciences - the attempts to approach it from the objective or scientific angle. NOTES 1

Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Ch.I.

2

John Locke, An Essay Concernng Human Understanding, Book II, Ch.8, 12.

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3

Berkeley had maintained that veridicality among ideas consisted in “the common order of Nature” ordained by God, as opposed to ideas we produced by our own volition.

4

Cf. The Crisis of the European Sciences, trans. David Carr (Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 1971).

5

Die Zeit des Weltbildes” in Holtzwege (Frankfurt-am-Main, 1952).

6

Cartesian Meditations, I, ii, Dorian Cairns’ translation (The Hague, Martinus Nijhoff, 1970). pp. 25-26.

7

Op.cit., p. 26.

8

This ultimate priority of the transcendental subject is an obstacle to Husserl’s account of the transcendental ego’s own constitution of itself as a temporally flowing consciousness. It is necessarily prior epistemologically to all temporal relations because it is aware of, and must constitute, any relation of before and after, past, present, or future. See my discussion in The Reality of Time (Albany, NY, State University of New York Press, 1988), pp. 89ff.

9

Cartesian Meditations, p. 89f.

10 Op.cit., p. 97. 11 Cf. my discussion of Bertrand Russell’s theory of perspectives in Nature, Mind and Modern Science (London, G.Allen and Unwin, 1954, 1968; reprinted by Routledge, 2002), Ch. XIV, iv-vi. 12 Cf. The Phenomenology of Perception (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), pp. 91, 100 and 205f. 13 Cf. op.cit., p. 242. 14 I wish to distinguish “sentience” from “sensation” as primitive at the level which precedes explicit consciousness. The question whether sensation is conscious will be considered later; but I consider primitive sentience not to be conscious in the strict sense of awareness of definite

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objects. If the primitive level of sentience is pre-objective and awareness of the body is subsequent to objective discrimination, the question will inevitably be raised how we may legitimately identify the mass of primitive feeling as the felt and feeling body. The answer to this question is that when the objective level is reached it is precisely through the body as then distinguished that all the sensory experience attributable to the lower level is felt. At that lower level it is not distinguished as bodily in distinction from any other sort of feeling, for at that level distinctions are not made; but as discriminated in a subsequent phase it is identified as bodily feeling.

CHAPTER II

DENNETT AND DESCARTES

Contemporary psychologists and cognitive scientists tend to identify the mind with the brain. “The mind,” says Steven Pinker, “is… what the brain does.”1 But as far as we know up to the present, the brain does nothing other than transmit neural impulses in exceedingly intricate and complicated patterns, and this occurs entirely unconsciously, whereas the mind does no such thing, and what it does is in large measure conscious. The question remains unanswered, How is what the brain does converted into what the mind does? And how is what the mind does related to its body and the external world? Daniel Dennett, in his book Consciousness Explained, says “It is very hard to imagine how your mind could be your brain - but not impossible.” But if the brain is the mind how does it imagine that it is the mind? To imagine one must be conscious, and our question is: How can the brain (neural activity) generate consciousness? which is not in the least elucidated by assuming that the brain is the mind (is conscious) or that the mind is nothing other than neural activity. Further, I am able to wonder, or to consider in the light of neuro-pysiologists’ discoveries, what my brain is doing at the moment; if my mind is my brain, how does my brain think about itself and its own activity in so doing? Dennett, although he quite clearly recognizes the problem, attempts to argue it away, but he never really addresses it seriously, and certainly does not resolve it. In effect, he seems to be trying to show that no such problem exists, because, he seeks to demonstrate, there is really no conscious experience. The title of his book should more appropriately have been “Consciousness still Unexplained” even though he makes several interesting suggestions about brain functioning.

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In his opening chapter Dennett begins by asking his reader to imagine that evil scientists (corresponding to Descartes’s evil demon) had dissected out his brain and set it up in a life-support vat, feeding into its nerve endings the impulses which normally produce sensations (e.g. popular music, tingling tactual sensations of lying on dry sand, and the like). These impulses would presumably be electrical, and (to parody Hobbes) electrical impulses produce nothing but electrical impulses. Even if the scientists’ instruments were sophisticated enough for them to detect the resulting reaction of the brain, how could they tell, without asking a conscious subject, what sensations (if any) were being experienced? The brain in the vat could not communicate its experiences to them. It might be no more than a “zombie” reacting automatically without any consciousness whatsoever. I know that I am not such a “zombie” because I am conscious, but I am not conscious and (as by implication Descartes observed) I do not know directly that I have a brain and that its neurons are firing; nor yet, if I have and they are, how that causes me to experience what I do. Moreover, Dennett’s evil scientists do not correspond to the evil demon of Descartes, who was assumed to try to deceive him into believing that what appeared to him clearly and distinctly was true even though it was actually false. This Descartes argues, is impossible in the case of cogito ergo sum, which cannot be false and (he maintains) is clear and distinct. Descartes convinced himself, by what he considered a clear and distinct proof, that God exists, a being perfect in all respects and entirely benevolent, who would not deceive; therefore, whatever he (Descartes) conceives clearly and distinctly (or by the “natural light”) about an external world of extended bodies must be true. Dennett’s evil scientists have no access to what the brain in the vat might conceive clearly and distinctly, nor, if they had, could they persuade their patient that it was true if it were not, nor could they make it appear to the brain in the vat that what was false was clear and distinct in Descartes’s sense. Decisions as to truth and falsehood are judgements, and judgements are not electrical discharges (even if in beings like ourselves they may involve them), and the transmission of electrical potentials along nerve fibres are not judgements. In fact what we cannot understand is how the “evil scientists” could make anything whatever appear to a complex of neural networks. Notice, also, that the evil scientists could do nothing of the sort suggested by Dennett unless they were themselves conscious, in particular of the experiences (!) which they are assumed to produce in the dissected brain. Dennett tries to persuade his readers that the brain is some sort of computer, saying that the neural matter corresponds to the hardware and that

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the mind is the software. But software is usually imprinted on a floppy disk and we are not told what part of the brain or the body corresponds to this diskette. Moreover, the software for a computer is the programme that directs the operation of the hardware, and the programme for a computer has to be written by a human information engineer (a human mind!). Whose is the mind that writes the programme for the human brain? The hardware cannot write its own programme (even if it might be able to write one for another computer), and if the human mind is the software, it does not write itself (so far as we know or can imagine) and if it did it could do so only by means of the operation of the hardware.2 The tendency of some cognitive scientists (Dennett in particular), is to say that the programme is written by natural selection in the course of evolution, but how this could be has never been explained in detail and the idea (as will later become evident) is far from credible. A computer consists of a structure of microchips wired together so as to enable an electric current to be transmitted through a system of relays as directed by the programme inscribed on a magnetic disc. This could be complex and sophisticated to any degree, so that it may be imagined that the computer could control a machine to behave as nearly as possible like a human being. As yet scientists and information engineers have not been able to do anything very nearly approaching this achievement, but there is nothing unimaginable or mysterious about its possibility. The machine, however, would not be conscious - or, if it were, we could never know whether or how it could be. In particular, we cannot imagine how the electrical current in the microchips could produce anything like our own consciousness. That we are ourselves conscious we cannot doubt (Descartes was unquestionably right about that); but with respect to the brain, however much we may find out about its functioning, we are faced with precisely the same conundrum as with the computer. If then it could be shown that the brain were some sort of computer, our problem would remain. Dennett is inclined towards (if not convinced of) this conception of the human brain as some sort of computer. He claims to be striving for a scientific theory of consciousness, which, he believes, must be materialistic. That he should insist on this condition is odd, since Einstein, long ago, declared that 20th century physics (the science of matter) has abandoned the materialist outlook.3 Dennett is fully aware of the problem of explaining how we account for (e.g.) the colour of an imagined purple cow, which is not in any part of the brain nor actual in the real world and is no quality of any material object. He clearly understands the difficulties and unacceptability of dualism, and rightly rejects it, as well as what he calls “barefoot

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behaviorism”. So he proposes to attempt to explain consciousness by adopting what he calls the heterophenomenological method. This is, by and large, the method commonly used by psychologists experimenting with human subjects. Dennett contends that the scientist will adopt a neutral attitude towards the existence of consciousness, neither denying it nor asserting its existence, but simply interpreting the data as reported by the “subject” as we interpret a work of fiction, which engenders a clear and reliable awareness of a factual world which (at least in part) does not exist. Now what is overlooked in Dennett’s long and somewhat tortuous exposition of this method, is (a) that no interpretation of a work of fiction is possible unless the interpreter is conscious; (b) that no idea of a fictitious world can be constructed without consciousness; (c) unless the subject of a psychological experiment is conscious (or at least assumed to be so) the psychologist would not experiment on him or her (the question whether the subject is a “zombie” in the “philosophical” sense cannot arise, as no experimenter could tell the difference between such a “zombie” and a normally conscious human being), nor could the conditions of the experiment be fulfilled (e.g. that the subject understands what he or she is required to do and the reports given be genuine and unbiassed). So, the experimenter is not and cannot be neutral towards the existence of consciousness, and to call the method heterophenomenological is merely se payer de mots. Dennett, however, is very prone tacitly to presuppose in his argument and exposition what he is at pains to deny. Because we frequently are mistaken about appearances (for instance, when I think I see colours in the periphery of the visual field although in fact I do not), and we have no idea how we come to react as we do (e.g. frame sentences when we speak), Dennett seeks to deny that we have immediate private access to our own conscious states about which we cannot be mistaken. Now, while it is often true that we are mistaken about what we think we perceive and that we often act deliberately without knowing in the least how we come to do it, we cannot think we perceive anything at all, or be mistaken, unless we are conscious, and we cannot act deliberately (speak, assert that conscious awareness is real for the cognizant) unless we are conscious of doing so. What Dennett rejects, therefore, is not what the phenomenologist is asserting - that when he (or she) is conscious it is impossible for him (or her) truthfully to deny either the fact or the content of the experience. If, in experiencing the Muller-Lyer illusion I think I see lines of unequal length where the lines I am viewing are really equal I cannot but be certain that the lines appear to me to be unequal. It is merely pedantic to insist (as some philosophers have done) that because the lines really are

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equal I am not actually “seeing” lines of different lengths, and that I only think I see them. Of course I think I see them, (and I am certainly not seeing lines the length of which appears to be the same) and that I do think so I cannot truthfully deny. So I do have private access to my own consciousness about which I cannot be mistaken - even when I am mistaken about the presented reality and am not conscious of how I become aware of it. A great deal of our mental lives is subconscious, some of it is entirely unconscious (e.g. how we retain in our minds and recall remembered experiences of which we may have been oblivious for years). But that does not and cannot invalidate our assurance of our own awareness of that of which we are conscious (mistaken or not). By way of explaining the method he recommends, Dennett uses as an analogy a machine nicknamed Shakey, a box on wheels fitted with a television camera “eye” and controlled by a computer to move solid objects of different shapes as directed. The shapes are distinguished by tracing the interfaces of zeros and ones in a digital code that represent pixels on a screen, the shapes of their intersections discriminating between the various solids. Dennett imagines this machine to be combined with another (SHRDLU) programmed to respond to keyed-in questions with pre-programmed sentences. When “asked” how it distinguishes the various solids, Shakey is imagined to “answer” with one of these sentences. Of course the “answer” is no guide whatsoever to “what goes on in” Shakey, for it is pre-programmed and may (or may not) be quite arbitrary. It cannot be a genuine report of Shakey’s experience (for it has none). It depends on what is meant by “what is going on in one” whether an analogous answer from a living person, the subject of a psychological experiment, is reliable as a guide. If it means what is going on in the subject’s brain, the answer (however sincere) will be no guide at all, because nobody is in the least degree directly aware of what goes on in his or her brain. But if the phrase refers to what goes on in the mind, a genuine and sincere answer must be true, even if the subject is mistaken about features to which scant attention has habitually been given. If I report that I am aware of the colours of objects in the periphery of my visual field, although in fact I cannot see colours in that segment, it is nevertheless undoubtedly true that I think I see them. This is no fiction and is what I am conscious of. After an experiment in the laboratory has drawn my attention to what I am actually sensing I may report differently, but no less reliably. If this were not so the experiment would be futile and could prove nothing. Dennett habitually writes as if reports of experiences were descriptions of “events and states in the brain” (CE, p. 98), which they can never be, as such events and states are never experienced by the subject being investigated.

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Dennett is quite right to reject what he calls Cartesian materialism, that is, the presumption of a Cartesian theatre, a central and final destination in the brain for all afferent inputs, and the origin of all efferent impulses. No such centre has been, or is likely ever to be, found; nor should we think in terms of any such Cartesian theatre. Dennett’s multiple drafts theory, as difficult to explain and expound as the exposition is to follow, is extremely interesting, and is a valuable and important theory, for reasons which Dennett himself might not be willing to acknowledge or accept. What he sets out (if true) would be strong evidence in favour of a theory of perception traditionally rejected by Empiricists and advocated by so-called Idealists - the doctrine that perception is always implicit judgement4 or (in Dennett’s words) “interpretation and elaboration of sensory in-puts” (CE, p. 111): “We don’t experience what happens on our retinas, in our ears, on the surface of our skin. What we actually experience is a product of many processes of interpretation - editorial processes, in effect.” (CE, p.112) That these editorial processes take place in the brain Dennett does not question, and he asserts that they are accomplished by and in different parts (or modules) of the brain, not necessarily contemporaneously. There is no Cartesian theatre in which they all come together to be “viewed”, expressed, and acted upon - no seat of consciousness. As an account of brain functioning this is almost unquestionably right - at least so far as the empirical evidence goes which is now at our disposal. But interpretation and editorial processes involve judgement, the ordering and mutual adjustment of data and the correction of inconsistencies. No neural activity in the brain (so far as I am aware) has yet been identified as corresponding to this rational accomplishment (although there certainly must be some). Moreover, it is difficult to conceive how brain activity (the transmission of electrical potential within complex networks of nerve fibres) can achieve editorial judgement, even if the judgement is only implicit (prepredicative). This is really the crucial question. How can we approach an answer to it? Writers about the brain (not only Dennett) have a curious habit of referring to the brain at times as judging, inferring, drawing conclusions (CE, pp. 127-8) and making decisions, and at other times as if it were the instrument used by some other agency (the mind?) for accomplishing these acts. Is this not a sign that they tacitly believe in the existence of a consciousness which they are, in effect, seeking either to deny or else to attribute to unconscious processes (neural transmissions) in the brain?

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At least part of the allure of dualism, Dennett points out, is the support it gives for the distinction between appearance and reality at the heart of subjectivity. We say that we judge as we do because that is how it seems to us; but, Dennett contends, the seeming and the judgement are one and the same, they are not and cannot be causally related. True enough, the seeming is not the cause of the judgement, but it is its logical ground. In the case of the colour phi-phenomenon experiment, it seems to the subject that the red light moves and changes colour before the green light is switched on. The contention that this seeming is an implicit judgement I approve and welcome, but it is not the judgement that the subjects aware of the set-up of the experiment make about the actual occurrence. They know that the light does not move or change colour en route, it only seems to them that it moves and changes colour midway. The appearance to them, however, is no fiction; if it were, the result of the experiment would be falsified. Dennett is, quite rightly, determined to abandon all assumption of a Cartesian theatre in the brain; but he says (CE, p. 134) “When you discard Cartesian dualism, you really must discard the show that would have gone on in the Cartesian Theater.” That, however, is precisely what you cannot discard, because you are immediately conscious of it. So far, Descartes was uncontrovertibly right. Dennett is also right inasmuch as it is true that “neither show nor audience can be found in the brain” (my italics), but he admits that judgements and discriminations, interpretations and “editing” do occur. Where and how can these occur in the brain, the medium of whose functioning is nothing other than the transmission of electrical potentials along nerve fibres? How can such processes amount to judgements, interpretations and discriminations (apart from those consciously made by the neuro-physiologist)? The summary account that Dennett gives of his Multiple Drafts theory in the fifth section of his fifth chapter is (in all probability) an excellent description of brain activity, but it is not simply a description of neural transmissions; it assumes throughout an accompanying varied “stream of consciousness” which is in no way explained. He talks of “contents” (where do they come from, and how do they arise?) which are interpreted and revised (by what agency?) and which, after suitable editing, are made known (to whom or what?) “through press releases issued in the form of verbal behavior” (p. 135). Is the “press release” just a mechanical physiological effect or is it the expression of a conscious decision? And if it is the latter, how has its conscious character been accounted for? On the same page Dennett speaks of “the narrative” constructed by the brain processes passing from “immediate interpretation” to “rational reconstruction.” But interpretation and rational reconstruction are not

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possible for mere transmissions of electrical potential; they require conscious direction. Further, Dennett asserts (quite rightly) that the order of occurrences in the brain (or in the external world) are not necessarily the same as “the subjective sequence of events” but he does not explain how or where this subjective sequence can occur. Again, he recognizes that there are different degrees of consciousness - there are different levels of attention and we often seem not to be aware of what we can later take into account (clock chimes, the action of driving a car, etc,), and while brain activity can account in some sense for all this, what it does not account for is the awareness, or relative lack of it, as experienced. As an analogy to what happens in the brain, Dennett gives the example of the Governor of Bengal receiving the report of the Battle of New Orleans after that of the truce ending the war, and being able to reconstruct the order of events from the dates marked on the dispatches. This clearly involves interpretation of the written dates, judgement about their order, and mentally restructuring the succession of events. How does the brain interpret, order and restructure the signals it receives from the peripheral organs? How does it read what Dennett calls the “postmarks” and “date stamps” to determine which is earlier and which later? All this is the work of a mind, but the firing of neurons and transmission of electrical potential along nerve fibres do not amount to judgment and interpretation. We may be told that a computer could do the same simply by means of the transmission of electrical current among micro-chips; but this is false. All a computer ever can do is to operate some form of algorithm and, even if an algorithm can assist one in coming to a judgement, it can never itself make the decision. Long division may enable me to answer an arithmetical question, but it cannot decide for me whether, to answer it, I ought to use long division or some other form of calculation. Yet (it may be countered), if properly programmed, a computer might simulate an act of judging;but such programming would have to be accomplished by a conscious human mind who made the judgement. How is the brain programmed and by whom? Dennett (and some others) would say by natural selection, in the course of evolution. A creature with a brain so programmed would naturally be selected , but as natural selection does no more than eliminate the less adapted, it could not itself effect the programming, which must need special structuring and “wiring” within the neural networks. These could presumably only be brought about by mutations within the DNA of the cells (which natural selection cannot produce though it may preserve), and the mutations are supposed (by those who allege that the brain is programmed by natural selection) to occur by pure chance. A computer programmer who tried to do his or her work simply

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by throwing a dice, is unlikely to succeed, and could do so to any extent, or at all, only in a time-span beyond calculation. The “programming” (if that is the appropriate term) of the human brain is incalculably more complex and intricate than that of any computer as yet developed. That it should have been acquired as a result of random chance mutations is altogether incredible. Furthermore, no such attempt to explain brain functioning throws the least light on how the transmission of electrical potential among nerve fibres, or the firing of neurons, could translate into the analytic-synthetic discursus5 involved in conscious judging. Dennett and others (e.g., Pinker) speak of brain processes “representing” objects, carrying “content”, effecting “referral” in space and time. Literally, what can this mean? How and to whom can a brain process represent? To the neuro-physiologist, indeed, it may represent the content of consciousness which his subject reports to him; but how can it “represent” anything in (or to) itself? To represent is to present something to consciousness but we are forbidden (and rightly) to imagine a homunculus to whom a brain process could represent anything. The German word, Vorstellung, used by Kant and his successors, is usually translated alternatively as “idea” or “representation”, clearly implying consciousness. How does a complex structure of neural discharges represent; what could it represent, to what and to whom? How can it generate an idea? When dealing with the evolution of consciousness Dennett writes: “Something in the brain needs to change so that it can keep track of the bird that flies by, or the drop in air temperature, or one of the organism’s own states... and this is the fulcrum that gives genuine representation its leverage - these transient internal patterns come to be able to continue to ‘track’ (in an extended sense) the features they refer to when they are temporarily cut off from causal commerce with their referents.” Something in the brain, indeed; and what it would “represent” to the neurophysiologist is the capacity to retain in the memory (either consciously or unconsciously) - the capacity to envisage something when it is absent. The ability to do this requires some structure in the brain, but the envisagement, when it occurs, must be conscious. If something in the brain process is to “represent” something in the external world it can do so only to a conscious subject, which the brain process itself clearly is not. A brain process may indeed accompany and be indispensable to the awareness of a content, but in what sense can it have a content in itself? It is

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presumably the effect of physico - chemical impingements from some external influences on the sense organs, but that is far from being the conscious configuration that constitutes the content of a percept. What we want to know is how these physico-chemical effects translate into the content of consciousness, and no such explanation is forthcoming. Something can refer to something else only if it has some meaning which is understood to point to that to which it refers. A brain process could “refer” only for a mind that knew its relation to that to which it was taken to refer. It is not intelligible how the brain process itself could “know” to what it “referred”. Referral in space and time requires a judgement about the special relationship to the items in the spatial arrangement or the temporal sequence of that which is referred. What sort of brain process could accomplish this, and how could it do so? No doubt brain processes are involved in such judgement, but the crucial question is how they translate into the relevant conscious activity. Referral of objects and events to positions in space and time requires the mental construction (Husserl would have called it “constitution”) of a spatiotemporal manifold involving both imaginary supplementation of direct perception (for the whole object or event is never immediately sensed) and the logical construction of the juxtapositions and successions involved. The space and time so constructed is phenomenological and is not the space and time in which the brain exists, nor is it depicted by any neural process, nor is it the physical space and time in which the real entities are located. Undoubtedly the phenomenological constitution depends on the occurrence of some brain functioning or other, but how the mental activity emerges from the neural has not been explained, either by neuro-physiologists or by cognitive scientists. Yet another term that creates puzzlement is “mapping”. Both neurophysiologists and cognitive scientists habitually refer to the brain’s mapping some object or bodily condition. But to map is to create a diagram (including symbols representing special features) of the spatial arrangement of something (e.g. a country or landscape). In order to map an object, the brain must first apprehend the spatial arrangement to be diagrammed, but, it seems, it can do that (if at all) only by “mapping” the object in the first place, putting the cart before the horse. It well may be that neural activity in the brain is so disposed as to resemble in spatial arrangement the object affecting the sense organ - although in general this is not what neurophysiologists have observed. But if this is considered to constitute a map of the object, it can only be for the outside observer that it does so, not for the

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brain itself, which has no notion either of the spatial pattern of its own activity or of the structure of the object to be mapped apart from that activity. One can only conclude that what the scientists mean when they talk of the neural discharges mapping an object, or a bodily state, is that the pattern of neural transmissions in some way resembles or suggests to them (the scientists) the structure of the cause or causes of the neural discharges. And the neural pattern can constitute a map only for a conscious observer. The Evolution of Consciousness Although Dennett persistently endeavours to persuade his readers that the concept of consciousness is unnecessary and disposable, he nevertheless attempts to explain how it may have developed in the course of evolution; presumably what he means is how the complexity of brain functioning has evolved to the point at which the behaviour of the living being seems evidence of consciousness. But his surmises are by no means convincing. When he writes about evolution the persistent presupposition of his exposition is that advantageous mutations are purely accidental, and although in his other book, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, he explicitly asserts that natural selection is blind, both there and in Consciousness Explained he constantly contradicts this assertion by implication, speaking, for instance, of systems “designed” by natural selection, although natural selection cannot even metaphorically design anything. All it can do is eliminate the unfit, cause the disadvantaged in the struggle for survival to decrease or die out. Any “design” must have some other source and, for Dennett, this can only be random variation in the genome. Now the complexity and teleological structures in the human brain are so fantastically complex and so staggeringly apposite in their functioning that for them to have been acquired by an accumulation of random favourable mutations, the probability of each of which is vanishingly minute, would require a longer period than the time life has existed on earth, or, for that matter, than the earth itself has existed. This presupposition that all “design” has evolved solely as the result of chance mutations vitiates the whole of Dennett’s reasoning (and not only his, for other writers on the subject entertain the same presupposition), but it is disguised by the repeated allegation that the improvements are due (which they cannot be) to natural selection, as if the selection were deliberate. Some may think that such inconsistency has little to do with our main question: how brain functioning can produce conscious experience; but it is by no means irrelevant. There is little if any dispute that brain functioning is involved in behaviour, and at a certain level of development the behaviour of creatures seems to involve consciousness. If it does, the neural activity in the

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brain must be the source of this apparent awareness; and the corresponding “design” of brain activity that makes this apparent is explained as the result of natural selection. But, even if it were so, that would not in the least enlighten us as to the relation between the brain activity and the consciousness that the behaviour seems to indicate. Dennett’s account of the evolution of consciousness, moreover, is an account of the evolution of brain structure rather than of consciousness. The former is, in itself, a subject of absorbing interest, and what he has to say of it, and his speculations about it are helpful and enlightening, but they throw no light on the emergence of consciousness itself, at what stage in evolution this occurs, or whether it is in some degree present from the very first. This, presumably, does not worry Dennett who (despite the title of his book) is concerned rather to deny the existence of consciousness than to explain it to eliminate any need for consideration of what I have called the crucial question. He begins by contending that primitive self-replicators must somehow distinguish between self and other in order to find means of selfpreservation. It is a mark of all life that in this sense it is “selfish”. Now selfishness implies some conception of self-identity, and, incidentally, Dennett seeks at a later stage of his discussion to deny the existence of any self and to explain away our concept of self-identity. But how does a primitive self-replicator identify itself or the external environment if it has no awareness of either? We are asked to consider the immune system, consisting of “millions of different antibodies arrayed in defence of the body against millions of different alien intruders”. They must, he says, “solve the fundamental problem of recognition”. But recognition requires a consciousness of the object recognized. Can we assume that antibodies are conscious? Apparently not, because Dennett tells us that “antibodies represent their enemies only in the way that locks represent the keys that open them.” What we have here, then, is no rudiment of consciousness and could be nothing more than chemical reaction. So this cannot be a foundation stone for the recognition of reasons or evaluations (which involve conscious judgement), or (the awareness of) a distinction between “here inside” and “the external world”; nor does it follow that all recognition must ultimately be accomplished by myriad “blind, mechanical” routines, as Dennett maintains; for the blind mechanical routines are not even the rudiments of conscious recognition.

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In fact, living behaviour, whether of antibodies or living cells of other kinds, seems to be something other than the merely mechanical (I say “mechanical” rather than “chemical” because chemical affinity may itself turn out to be something more than the merely mechanical). Dennett says that the function of brains is to produce the future - clearly assuming that it is teleological - and that the primordial problem that every agent must solve (presuming that a brain is an agent and not simply an organ used by one) is: “Now what do I do?” And for this, he says, you need a nervous system to control your activities. The unanswered question is how brains and nervous systems can entertain and consider problems and seek their solution unless they are already conscious. Consider the behaviour of the vase-shaped protozoon Stentor. If bombarded by a shower of irritant inedible particles it will first bend to one side and then to the other, as if trying to avoid the noctious stream. If the bombardment continues Stentor reverses its ciliary movement, so as to drive out the flow of irritant particles. If that does not free it from the shower it will next contract into its tube and then expand again; and if the bombardment does not cease it will contract violently, detach itself from its support and swim away. Stentor has no nervous system, much less a brain. Is it conscious of the harmful bombardment? Does it ask itself the question “Now what do I do?” Is it aware that detaching itself from its base will remove it from harm’s way? If not, is its behaviour to be accounted merely mechanical? - By what laws of mechanics? Another protozoon Paramoecium, when the water in which it lives becomes deprived of oxygen, will attach itself to a bubble and move away to where there is a better oxygen supply. A rcella, a shelled rhizopod, in similar circumstances emits a bubble that floats it up to a higher level where the oxygen is more plentiful. Is this behaviour simply chemical reaction? Again, these creatures have no nerves or brain. Still, Dennett concedes that they “know enough” to withdraw from harmful situations. Even metaphorically, however, they could not know anything without some rudimentary consciousness. It seems clear that such primitive animalicules are somehow apprised of occurrences in their surroundings and have the capacity to behave relevantly in response to them despite their lack of nerves and brains - evidence that living organisms ab initio have some inchoate sense of self, experience some kind of sensation and are intrinsically adaptive to changing conditions. Dennett would, no doubt, agree that these facts are important for the understanding of evolution, for unless organisms are originally self-

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maintaining and self-adaptive, with all that that implies, there can be nothing for natural selection to select. Despite his insistence that natural selection is blind, “cannot tell how a system got the way it got”, nor (under the name of Mother Nature) can it foresee anything at all, Dennett still talks of natural selection’s “designing” (in quotation marks). To design (in whatever way or sense), however, implies a capacity to grasp the system to be designed as a whole and to entertain some purpose that the design is to serve. Certainly, natural selection cannot do this, for all it ever does is to eliminate what is unable to survive environmental conditions. Whatever “design” comes to be must be provided (according to Dennett’s submission) by purely random mutations, the vast majority of which are disadvantageous to survival. What chance would one have of designing, say, a steam engine, even with the help of some form of natural selection, by randomly throwing together fragments of metal? The next step, we are told, is short-range anticipation, e.g. the ability to duck incoming missiles, which is often “wired in”. Is this wiring-in simply an accidental coincidence or has it involved learning from experience that incoming missiles can be injurious? If the latter, it presupposes consciousness beyond the mere visual registration of something looming. In fact, each further step in the evolution of consciousness, as invoked by Dennett, presupposes the awareness that it is supposed to produce: “a conspecific is looking at you”; “a predator has you in its gunsights”; “your supper is about to bolt”, etc., prompting the orienting response. Each case involves an implicit or explicit judgement impossible unless consciousness of a situation is already present. The prompted alertness (“All hands on deck”) presupposes an appreciation of danger, of a perceived alarm signal. It is an awareness which is said (by Neumann) to develop into a means of informing the subject about the state of the environment, which it could do only if it (he or she) were already aware of its surroundings. In short, the implication is that each advance in consciousness can evolve only if it has already been acquired and the entire exposition begs the question it is intended to answer. All this is styled “pre-natal design fixing” and is held to be brought about by natural selection (which I have argued is impossible) and to this likewise is attributed “post-natal design fixing” (i.e., learning). We are asked to assume that “the plastic brain is capable of reorganizing itself adaptively” (CE, p.184) a capability that exceeds the presumption for natural selection of mere accidental mutation, yet the process by which the brain does this is said to be

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mechanical. Mechanical self-organization is indeed a curious idea. Various brain-structures that influence behaviour (presumably rendering it incompetent in avoiding danger) would be weeded out by natural selection giving advantage to those organisms with self-organizing brains (which is naturally to be expected); and this capacity is said to be “amazingly”(!) the result of natural selection - a presumption contradictory of the original contention that advantageous mutations are purely accidental, and question-begging because self-organization is the precondition of the propensity’s being selected. Moreover, nothing can organize itself unless it has some prior awareness of self-unity and of the structure to be organized. Forthwith, Dennett has no compunction about calling the brain “an anticipation machine” that “can think ahead” - that is, presumably, conscious of a probable prospect and can infer to a possible future - but how it has acquired this awareness and intellectual capacity has not in any intelligible way been explained. Throughout his speculation about the Baldwin Effect (CE, pp. 184-187) Dennett constantly refers pseudo-metaphorically to natural selection as “trying out” (certain combinations of neural wiring), “discovering” and “recognizing” what is a “Good Trick” for anticipating and adapting to future conditions. This not only presumes that the evolving brain is already fully conscious, but runs counter to Dennett’s own insistence (elsewhere) that natural selection is blind and unconscious, and that purely chance variations are the only source of what could be described as a Good Trick. On his principles it is quite unthinkable that the brain of an organism could recognize a change in its own neural interconnections as advantageous (particularly as favouring the survival of future generations). Still less could it assess (as he contends) something less and other than the relevant “wiring” as a nearer approach to what is desirable. Yet throughout this “fantasy” (adapted from Hinton and Nowlan) these abilities are repeatedly invoked, begging the numerous questions at issue, over and above that of the emergence of consciousness. Assuming a primate brain with connections already installed between “looming-object detectors” and ducking mechanisms, “someone-is-lookingat-me detectors” and “friend-or-foe-or-food discriminators,” and with handeye-coordination circuits, Dennett now postulates a new problem posed for it: that of higher-level control. But he does not explain how a brain merely mechanically provided with reflexes could contemplate a problem of any kind. To do so requires consciousness, judgement, assessment of relationships and probabilities, the emergence of which from a system of merely

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mechanical “wiring” and the transmission of electrical potential along dendrons and axons has somehow to be accounted for, and that has in no way been attempted. The essential question at every stage of the exposition is being begged. The fact is recorded that the brain of our common ancestor with the chimpanzee was little if at all bigger than that of modern chimpanzees, but that in a relatively very short time (“in the evolutionary time scale it was more an explosion than a blossoming” CE, p. 190) it grew to four times that size with vastly increased plasticity. How this could have happened as the result of chance mutation and natural selection in so short a time Dennett does not consider. In terms of the evolutionary time-scale the immense growth of the hominid brain in size and versatility has been quite extraordinary and this has included the development of language. But language, although it has certainly enhanced the scope of human consciousness, cannot have been its source, because language is no more (nor less) than the medium of expression and communication of what the speaker consciously experiences and is therefore not prior to that experience. Further, the use of language makes possible and gives rise to culture no doubt enabling individuals to benefit by the experience of others including past generations. And, again, culture involves conscious appreciation of personal relations and the ability to envisage their regulation. Dennett makes all this dependent upon step-bystep moulding of neural interconnections in the brain and their survival by natural selection. Be that as it may, the fact remains that consciousness is its prior condition and the emergence of consciousness from brain development has not been explained. That mental evolution has progressed independently of biological as a result of the development of language and culture is not to be gainsaid, and this Dennett attributes to the “infestation” of the human brain by “memes” a concept adopted from Richard Dawkins. Dennett maintains that human consciousness is the product of human culture (CE, p. 219), an obvious hysteron proteron; and the notion of “memes” is so inept, that one is tempted to reject it on sight as ridiculous. A “meme” (as described by Dawkins and Dennett) is an idea, a meaning, and (according to the latter) the connotation of the term includes everything from the wheel to the Odyssey, in fact anything that can be entertained by a mind. Following Dawkins, Dennett and others treat memes as analogous to genes, to be naturally selected when favourable to their own self-replication and the consequent survival of the species. “Memes” are said to be produced by minds, yet minds are also said

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to be invaded, or infected, by memes, as if from without, and even to be created by memes: “a human mind is itself an artifact created when memes restructure a human brain in order to make it a better habitat for memes.” (CE, p. 207). Dennett goes so far as to ask “Who’s in charge, we or our memes?” Who, indeed? Are memes external agents or are they the products of our own thinking? They can hardly be both at once.6 Conceivably ideas may be able to restructure the brain if what used to be called association of ideas varies synaptic resistance and causes new neuronal connections, but equally the association could be a result of connections already in place. This is something for neuro-physiologists to investigate, but by itself it throws no light on the actual relationship between neural networks and the consciousness they accompany. But if memes are ideas they cannot be treated like self-replicating molecules, as if they were separable bits and pieces. These writers treat both memes and genes on a par as if they acted independently as separable agents. Many biologists, however, contend, on good evidence, that even with genes this is not the case, and that the genome functions as a single indivisible whole. There is similar evidence that the brain does likewise. However this may be, and I shall return to it later, meanings and ideas are not separable entities. They are ideal contents totally dependent on their context in an ideal structure - an experience, including emotion as well and as much as information. Any change in this whole is apt to affect the meaning of any concept contributing to it, and vice versa. I have no doubt that Professor Dennett has read Kant’s first Critique, but he seems to have missed the profound insight at A97 “If every single idea (Vorstellung) were wholly foreign one to the other as if isolated and separate, nothing like knowledge could ever arise, which is a whole of related and connected representations (Vorstellungen).” And it is essentially on these connections and relations that the meaning of the ideas depends. A modern example (taken more or less at random) is the term “default”. Until recently it meant something lacking, a deficiency, but in the context of computer programming it has come to mean the initial unmodified command structure. The “meme” has undergone a mutation induced by a change of context which has not, however, eliminated its former use. The meaning depends on its context and the culture in which the term is used, in response to the appropriate mental activity, of which henceforward it becomes an integral feature. It would be nearer the truth to say that the culture creates the “meme” than vice versa.

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The use of the notion of memes as if they were something like genes or viruses infesting brains begs the question of consciousness, for memes (qua meaning) are the creations of the mind and are understood only within consciousness. No light, therefore, can be thrown upon the way brain activity gives rise to consciousness by talking of memes infesting the brain from without. This petitio principii is well illustrated by Dennett’s description of the way in which Turing invented the Turing machine: “...his stream of consciousness, like yours or mine or James Joyce’s was no doubt a variegated jumble of images, decisions, hunches, reminders, and so forth, out of which he managed to distil the mathematical essence: the bare bones, minimal sequence of operations that could accomplish the goals he accomplished in the florid and meandering activities of his conscious mind.” (my italics). Without the stream of consciousness, the activities of his conscious mind, Turing could have distilled nothing, and the “variegated jumble of images, decisions, hunches, reminders, and so forth” are features of consciousness, not of the transmission of electrical potential among neurons and nerve fibres (however complex and elaborate) which are their necessary accompaniment. The still unanswered question is how the former emerges from the latter. To assert (as Dennett goes on to do) that the string of digital “instructions” that run through a Turing machine are “severe simplifications of what William James dubbed the stream of consciousness” is patently false. Nothing in a Turing machine, even if it can codify some logicomathematical operations, has any semblance to any form of consciousness. To contend that consciousness could be produced as in a computer by a “virtual machine” (that is, a programme) is again to beg the question because the programme is itself the product of a mind already conscious (the programmer’s) and what appears on the monitor of the computer can be understood only by the conscious mind of its reader.

Qualia The attempt to explain away consciousness, as we commonly experience it, comes to a head in Dennett’s arguments aimed at “disqualifying qualia”

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and eliminating the self. That there is nothing in the brain corresponding to a Central Meaner is probably a sound presumption, but Dennett’s endeavours to eliminate the self fail and are frequently contradicted by implication in his own exposition. Let us turn first to his attempt to “disqualify qualia”. He begins by trying to do away with the “phenomenal properties” which are “the props without which a Witness [i.e. a conscious self] makes no sense.” Drawing on an elaborate array of psychological experiments with blindsighted subjects and prosthetic devices providing “vision” to the blind, he argues that what we tend to insist upon as visual qualities can be mechanically generated. What the actual conscious experiences of these subjects are - the first when trained to guess and when to guess the appearance of objects in their scotoma, the second when they learn to interpret patterns of tingles on their skin as visual objects - only they could tell us (if at all they could, for how do you describe to someone who has never had the experience what an itch in your big toe feels like?); but we ourselves know uncontrovertibly and distinguish immediately the lights and colours we experience visually. Dennett seeks to demonstrate that these qualia can be simulated by patterns of digits numbering pixels in the visual field. But such effects are at most only of different shadings in the appropriate areas and are not the colours we actually see in the objects represented. Even so, the different shadings are themselves qualia. The hypothesis he proposes of the way the brain functions to produce the effect of “filling in” the blind spot is interesting and credible and it supports (not only by implication) the judgement theory of perception that Idealist philosophers have advocated and to which I have always adhered, namely, that what we actually perceive is not just the reception of some sense datum but is a judgement based on a sensory effect. When we see a wall-paper design consisting of hundreds of identical portraits of Marilyn Monroe although these cannot all simultaneously be recorded on our retinae, we judge that we see them and that they are there, and we judge rightly; in other cases, while the visual experience is actual, we judge wrongly that we see what is actually there when it is not, as in the case of neon colour-spreading. But the judgement in both cases registers itself in consciousness, not in “mentalese” nor in words (unless we decide to describe it), but as perception. What we actually see is (in one instance) a wall-paper with hundreds of portraits and (in the other) a pink ring. If we did not there would be nothing for Dennett to argue away. Although there is no actual pink ring on the page, there seems to be to the viewer and the seeming is actual. When Dennett says, in his dialogue with his supposed critic Otto, that the text of a novel in an unstrained sense is about nothing:

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“It’s fiction. It seems to be about various fictional characters, places, and events, but these events never happened; it isn’t really about anything.” (CE, p. 366) Otto should have replied in Hamlet’s words: “Seems, Sir, nay it is, I know not seems.” The text is about various characters, although they have never existed in reality yet they do exist in the mind of the author and in our minds when we read his book. Mr. Pickwick is a real character and the events recorded in Pickwick Papers are what we actually envisage when we read what Dickens wrote (as he did when he wrote it). We may be confident that the characters and events do not exist in our brains, and what precise brain functioning corresponds to them as we read and think about them we do not know. Dennett suggests that it is “various events of content-fixation occurring in various places and at various times in the brain” which have further effects creating “a heterophenomenological text”. As I have said, this so-called heterophenominology cannot be dismissed, for it is what we are actually and undeniably aware of, despite Dennett’s assertion here that there is no such thing as phenomenology. Here again, what can he mean by saying that events in the brain have content (CE, p. 365)? Content, to me, is the object of consciousness, and what we need to know (and are not told) is how events in the brain (neuronal discharges) can acquire content; how they become conscious (how they can acquire intentionality). It is clear that Dennett is fully aware of the puzzle to be solved and he states the problem correctly, but he provides no legitimate solution. He claims to be denying that there are any such properties as “secondary qualities” but he agrees “whole heartedly that there seem to be qualia.” This means, I take it, that it seems to each of us that we experience qualia, (not that it seems to others as if we do). As I have insisted, if there seem to be qualia we must be conscious of them, otherwise they could not seem to exist, yet this is what Dennett claims to be denying. Colours, he says, are simply reflective properties of the surfaces of objects, or of transparent volumes. This is what they are in the world external to our senses. In us they are “discriminative states scattered about in our brains” induced by the lightreflecting properties of objects. This he says is what science has actually shown. Now clearly what science has shown is that various objects reflect light of differing wave lengths in different ways; it has also shown that our brains are

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organs transmitting electrical impulses between neurons in highly complex patterns, and (save perhaps the emission of particular chemical hormones and similar substances) it has not shown that anything else occurs in our brains. The discriminative states corresponding to colours scattered about in these organs, Dennett suggests, are some form of colour-coding registering the diverse light-reflecting properties of external bodies. What he makes no attempt to explain is how the coding is decoded so that this registration can become a seeming to see colours in the hues that we actually experience. The discriminative states are said to have contents (one of them is red) in which case they must be conscious states and not merely unconscious neural transmissions. We can compare the colours of things by putting them side by side and looking at them and by recalling or imagining them and then judging of their likeness or difference. All this happens (it is admitted) in our conscious experience (CE, pp. 371-2), but Dennett reduces it to the operation of something analogous to a prosthetic machine said to compare different colour code symbols. The prosthetic machine (CADBLIND Mark 1) is said to interpret the difference between the symbols as a colour difference. But no machine can interpret its output as anything other. It can only display it to some observer who interprets. Moreover, interpreting something as representing a colour difference implies that one knows what colours are and thus can experience colours as such. Colour-coding in the brain, if it exists, is not what we experience when we see something red, nor, when we do, are we interpreting anything other than the colour as what we seem to be experiencing. Furthermore, colour-coding is impossible unless the agents using it are able to experience the colours that the code is meant to represent. Elaborate arguments adduced by Dennett about the deviousness of colourvision under differing lighting conditions and the different capacities of animals with differing chromatic systems are beside the point. Whether the colours we see accurately match the reflective properties of physical things is not the question at issue, nor whether they are the same as the colours seen by other animals. The question at issue is whether we do in fact experience colour qualities - various hues in differing saturations, brightness and contrast. If we do, as a result of some sort of colour-coding device in the brain, how does the latter produce the former? Dennett speculates on how colour vision may have evolved and contends that it developed to serve biological purposes for which it was naturally selected. While this is highly probable, the account he gives of it again weighs powerfully against his belief that the necessary mutations could have been purely random. That, however, is also beside the point at issue here,

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which is whether the colour-vision so developed involves an experience of qualia. That the taste of some substances to some people is not the same as it is to others, that some creatures may consider objects lovely which others consider disgusting, is likewise beside the point. Moreover, what is being tacitly assumed throughout this discussion is that they all experience qualia that they find either pleasant or unpleasant, whatever brain process causes them to do so and however that developed. Moreover, pleasure and displeasure are themselves qualitative experiences. This criticism applies almost uniformly to the rest of Dennett’s chapter on Disqualifying Qualia. Unquestionably the appeal of Bach’s music to 18th century audiences was not the same as that to audiences of our own day, and for the reasons given (which, incidentally, support my contentions about “memes” and undermine the Pinker-Dennett treatment of them). But it cannot follow that none of these audiences heard the sounds of the music. What are sounds and music if not qualia? Dennett seeks to reduce them to “reactive dispositions inherent in my nervous system” (CE, p. 387), but I am never conscious of such reactive dispositions, whereas the basis of all my consciousness is sentience, which is nothing if not qualitative. Undoubtedly neural dispositions to react in various ways play an important part in determining what I do and am conscious of, but just how they do so has yet to be explained. Meanwhile we may ask what a neural disposition actually is, where is it located when it is not in operation? It is, no doubt, a persistent state of a group of neurons and synapses? But in any case, it is nothing of which we are ever conscious, and how it generates consciousness, if and when it does, is still unknown.But of colours and sounds and other sensequalities we are constantly conscious, even if and when that consciousness is dependent on discriminative dispositions. In fact, the discriminatory dispositions are rather dependent on the awareness of the qualia than the other way round. When in imaginary argument with his pretended critic, Otto, Dennett suggests that what makes his “occurrent pink” the particular tantalizing experience he enjoys “is simply the sum total of all the innate and learned associations and reactive dispositions triggered by the particular way he was (mis)informed by his eyes” (CE, p. 388), Otto ought to have replied that he certainly did not experience any innate or learned associations, still less any neural reactive dispositions, and whether he was informed or misinformed by his eyes what he did experience was a pink ring, and that is a quale, wherever or however it occurred and by whatever dispositions it was prompted.

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Dennett persistently disregards the fact that what seems to us is what we consciously experience. If it seems to us that we see pink rings (or whatever), we experience qualia, which are not and cannot be “disqualified” by pointing out that they merely seem to be. If disqualified as existing in the physical world, that would not affect their occurrence as experienced sensations. That they merely seem does not prove that they are not qualia, as Dennett takes himself to be demonstrating. Nor, if it did, would it prove that our experience when it is veridical is not qualitative (as well as quantitative). The fact that people can adapt to distorted and reversed vision produced by special lenses in no way requires that they do not experience visual qualia, rather the opposite - what is it that the spectacles reverse or distort? Indeed, their neural reactive dispositions need to be modified, but they must still see colours, lights and shades. In short, the evidence that Dennett offers of the non-existence (or for disqualification) of qualia is in the main irrelevant. In the discussion of Mary in her black and white room, what is consistently overlooked is that she must from the first have been experiencing black and white qualia, otherwise she could have learnt nothing about the physical basis of colour vision from her books or her computer. And when presented with a blue banana she could have protested only if she had experienced the colour blue. Also, Dennett speaks of “the way you imagine the case” and condemns “the image” as wrong. Are we not conscious of this image and can we imagine Mary and her knowledge of colour vision without experiencing qualia? It is all mental imagery, of course, but from the start that is what we had to explain. Clearly mental imagery does not consist of “figment” or any kind of mental “stuff”, but we experience it and cannot consistently deny its occurrence; to do so is neither explanatory nor true. Throughout his discussion, Dennett is presupposing the occurrence of what he is ostensibly seeking to deny, and he is thus in effect contradicting his own contentions. In concluding Dennett says that “with a brain organized the way ours is, this is just the sort of heterophenomenological world we should expect.” Unless it can be shown how such brain organization produces the phenomenological experiences, it is difficult to see why we should have any such expectation, unless it is that only because we experience the world consciously the way we do could we ever have discovered how our brains are organized.

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The Self We may begin by agreeing that the self is not a Central Meaner or dominant neuron in the brain, nor is it a ghost in a machine, nor “a pearl of immaterial substance” (the issue of personal immortality is not decided simply by postulating any of these implausible and outdated notions, but is something further). These ideas were refuted and rejected by philosophers (Spinoza, Kant, Fichte, Hegel) long before Gilbert Ryle wrote The Concept of Mind. Moreover, Hume was not the only philosopher to cast doubt upon the common notion of a self; F.H. Bradley argued at length that it could not be consistently conceived. Nevertheless, neither of these philosophers was able altogether to escape the concept or to abolish it from his own exposition. Hume confesses that he sought in vain for himself among his particular perceptions. But where did he seek? As he says, he entered most intimately into what he called himself. He apparently failed to ask himself who it was that was seeking or whose perceptions he stumbled upon. In the passage from the Monadology quoted by Dennett at the head of his Chapter 13, Leibniz is illustrating the fact that by entering into the reductive details of a complex device one will fail to discover the effect or the purpose of its working as a whole. In effect he is confuting the whole of Dennett’s case, saying that if perception (consciousness) is dependent on the functioning of the brain, it is not to be discovered by looking into the details of brain processes. Dennett allows that lower creatures (even amoebas) have what he calls biological selves. He records, truthfully, that the human body includes organisms that are independently alive (presumably questioning whether these belong to a person’s self - we may ask, Why not?). He argues that what various creatures construct (spider’s webs, beaver’s dams, etc.) are extensions of their phenotypes. With none of this is there any need to quarrel (though we can wonder how the evolution of the bowerbird’s instinct to build and decorate a nuptial chamber could have evolved by purely random gene mutations, or how it contributes to the bowerbird’s sense of “self” if it has any). We can also admit without demur that in our own case we commonly include our clothes and other possessions in our conception of ourselves. At the same time we often disown actions we have performed and words we have spoken of which we disapprove as unworthy of ourselves, which, moreover, is evidence of our persistent awareness of self - what Dennett is at pains to disallow.

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Dennett contends that this notion of a self is largely a product of the use of words (CE, p. 417) creating a narrative consisting of “memes” that “take over, creating us out of the raw materials they find in our brains.” Quite apart from the confusion involved in talking of memes as if they were alien brain invaders (as it were, gremlins), how they (or rather we) could create a narrative out of raw materials (electro-chemical activity) found in our brains, of which we are never aware, remains a mystery. The narrative they are said to concoct, moreover, is actually no mere fiction. If the self is, as Dennett maintains, “an abstraction defined by myriads of attributions and interpretations...that have composed the biography of the living body whose Centre of Narrative Gravity it is,” (p. 426f) who or what makes the attributions and interpretations? Who composes the biography? Is the author of Dennett’s book an abstraction affectionately called Dan? Or is he nothing other than a living body? If the latter, what has arrived at the abstraction that it calls itself and that others call Dan? - its brain (how does the brain abstract?), or its mind? And is this last again merely an abstraction resulting from the invasion of its brain by memes (gremlins)? The self so far from being an abstraction is a concept and we must remember that the concept is not always (if ever) an abstraction. Rather it is a concrete universal, as maintained by Schelling and Hegel, accounting for the organization of a whole. The essential feature of the self is that it is self-conscious. It is inseparably linked to cogito. Without consciousness there is no self-consciousness and the emergence of consciousness is what cries out for explanation. No doubt the functioning of our brains contributes significantly to it but we do not know how, and Dennett has contributed nothing to the solution of that problem. Self-consciousness is certainly a matter of degree. It is highly improbable that the lower species (protozoa, arachnids, most mammals and birds) are capable of it. Chimpanzees appear to us to have some rudimentary degree of it, and even humans do not always exercise it clearly and distinctly, as Descartes does in pronouncing cogito ergo sum. But whoever genuinely uses the first person pronoun ‘I’ (as Dennett unremittingly does) is aware of him- or her-self, not as an abstraction but as a person conscious and responsible for deliberate action. Dennett, however, is not to be faulted for insisting that the self is embodied. That in fact is what ensures that it is no mere abstraction. A centre of gravity is not an abstraction, it is the point from which a physical body as a whole exerts its gravitational force. So likewise the self is the way

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in which the living body as a whole person (brain included) is aware of acting. And it (he or she) can be so aware only as a self. Multiple Personality Disorder only confirms this assertion for the patient in every case is aware of and usually confesses to creating the personality cleavages (rejecting and disowning the unbearable other), while the person so confessing always dominates over (and is aware of) the other(s) and not vice versa. The adoption of an holistic stance is, in my view, the key to solving the problem of consciousness as well as to understanding the nature of the self and I shall return to this concept of the wholeness of the person in due course. There is much in Dennett’s book that is interesting and informative. My adverse criticism is directed only to the claim made by its title, which it never fulfils, and to his aggressive denials of the existence of what his own argument requires and inevitably presupposes. Similar criticisms have been put forward by John R. Searle in his book The Mystery of Consciousness, with which I am in substantial agreement. Searle is clearly aware of the problem to be addressed and of Dennett’s failure to confront it.7

NOTES 1

Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works (New York, W.W. Norton, 1997), p. 24.

2

Cf., Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained (Boston, New York, Toronto, London, Little Brown & Co., 1991), p. 219ff. For a time the “back propagation of errors” algorithm seemed to offer a hardware structure that could generate its own programme, but apart from the fact that it was far from being biologically realistic (as a model for a brain) it was never independent of the intervention of human intelligence; there always had to be a programmer deciding for the machine whether its replies to the questions it was designed to answer were right or wrong (cf. John McCrone, Going Inside, London, Faber and Faber, 1999, p. 48).

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3

Cf. A. Einstein and L. Infeld, The Evolution of Physics (New York, Simon and Schuster, 1954), passim esp. pp. 155-160.

4

See Brand Blanshard, The Nature of Thought (London, G. Allen and Unwin, 1939, 1948), Vol. I, Chs. I & II; C.A. Campbell, “The Mind’s Involvement in ‘Objects’: An Essay in Idealist Epistemology” in Theories of the Mind, Ed. Jordan M. Sher (New York, The Free Press of Glencoe; London, Macmillan).

5

Cf. H.H. Joachim Logical Studies (Oxford, The Clarendon Press, 1948), p. 38ff and passim.

6

What is said here about Dennett’s use of the concept of memes does not apply to Dawkins, who is much more circumspect.

7

John R, Searle, The Mystery of Consciousness, New York, New York Review, 1997.

CHAPTER III A NATURAL METHOD Not all cognitive scientists take the extreme line that Dennett adopts, but my object is no to discuss cognitive science as such but simply to examine claims to explain consciousness which fail to recognize the essenial issue and so altogether miss the mark. Other writers who, like Dennett, seek to find what they call a scientific theory of the mind, are more conciliatory. One such is Owen Flanagan. While he shows great respect for Dennett and agrees with him on many points (especially about the self), Flanagan rejects many of Dennett’s essential contentions.1 He deprecates what he calls “quining” consciousness and qualia. W.V.O Quine recommended denying altogether the existence or importance of entities that are believed to be real but for which there is no evidence and for which science has no use. Some writers, like Dennett, think that consciousness and qualia fall into this category - but not all for the same reasons. Flanagan believes that quining consciousness and qualia is mistaken. He seeks, and thinks it is quite possible to achieve, a “naturalistic” theory of consciousness, which like Dennett and others, he takes to be the view that “mental processes are just brain processes.” But the position he strives to establish is what he calls “constructive naturalism” which he considers gives hope of understanding the relation between consciousness and the brain.2 He describes the “natural method” which he recommends as follows: “Start by treating three different lines of analysis with equal respect. Give phenomenology its due... Also, let the psychologists and cognitive scientists have their say. Listen carefully to their descriptions about how mental life works and what jobs consciousness has, if any, in its overall economy. Finally, listen carefully to what neuroscientists say about how conscious mental events of different sorts are realised, and examine the fit between their stories and the phenomenological and psychological stories. The object of the natural method is to see whether and to what extent the three stories can be rendered coherent, meshed, and brought into reflective equilibrium.” (Op.cit., p. 11)

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Such a method is indeed natural and very sensible. It is surely the method used widely by all serious students of the mind; none of the three stories ought to be neglected and, above all, the attempt must be made to render them coherent. The only doubt is how the neuro-physiological story and the phenomenological and psychological can be so meshed together that it becomes intelligible how neural (electro-chemical) processes described by the first can produce the phenomenal events described by the second. That they are concomitant is patently evident, but how the first can be transformed, or translated, into the second remains wrapped in obscurity. Discoveries of such concomitances between brain processes and conscious experiences do nothing to make more intelligible just how the former could produce the latter. I shall examine more closely in what follows some of the arguments put forward by those who seek, for that reason, to abolish the concept of consciousness, and of those who, while maintaining its existence, seek to abandon all attempts to explain its relation to brain functioning, as well as Flanagan’s response to them. First, let us notice the position which he opposes. Flanagan lists four attitudes to consciousness that he intends to reject. The first is “nonnaturalism”: the belief that consciousness is a nonphysical substance that can, nevertheless, produce physical effects. This is the doctrine of Descartes, and modern thinkers like Eccles and Popper, Swinburne, Adams and Chalmers. Flanagan refuses to argue against it and says that the theory is not incoherent - but it is. I shall not refer here directly to the arguments by which its adherents support it, suffice it to say that there is no good reason to believe that consciousness is a separate entity or substance from the physical, any more than that there exists an elan vital to account for living behaviour. The difficulties of dualism are notorious, have been clearly set out by Dennett, and the philosophical position has long since been refuted and replaced by thinkers such as Spinoza, Schelling, Hegel and Collingwood. It would be a waste of time to repeat the already convincing arguments that insist on the necessity to reject this kind of doctrine. The second position is what Flanagan calls principled agnosticism, holding that we do not (and cannot?) understand how the relation of consciousness to brain activity can be made intelligible; thus until further enlightenment dawns we must suspend judgement. While Flanagan refrains from adopting this position he advances nothing against it in principle, and it seems, on the face of it, to be quite reasonable. We do not, in fact, understand how the relation of consciousness to brain processes can be made intelligible, and we must seek further insight. Until we have it, we can but suspend judgement.

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But there are some who declare that no such insight is or ever will be forthcoming. This is called “anticonstructive naturalism,” about which something further will be offered below. Its most prominent advocate is Colin McGinn, and Flanagan feels that it goes too far. The fourth position is eliminative naturalism that considers the account of brain activity to be all that is needed and that consciousness is inexplicable a concept too vague, too simplistic and too confused to be intelligible, one that we should abandon along with qualia, as all legitimate phenomena can and will eventually be explained by neuroscience. This too Flanagan rejects, adopting what he calls constructive naturalism, the belief that consciousness is a concept that we need and should retain, that it and its relation to brain functioning can be explained in terms of naturalistic science. If, however, naturalistic science is held to be exclusively materialistic (which has been denied by Einstein and other physicists) there remains some doubt whether that relation can ever be made intelligible, for the phenomena of consciousness do not have material properties (such as mass, for instance), and if the mind is nothing other than the brain there can be no intelligible relation to explain. Naturalism is here being used in different senses and it is not easy to comprehend what the term is intended to convey. Clearly, dualism is no sort of “naturalism” at all; nor is it clear that the agnostic attitude is “naturalistic”, unless in the sense that agnostics accept the neuroscientific theory and merely wish to suspend judgement as to its ability to “explain” consciousness. Yet even some dualists may be ready to admit neuroscience as “explaining” consciousness causally. Causal explanation, we may however point out, implies that there is some connective identity continuous between cause and effect - some characteristic that makes the effect intelligible in terms of the cause; and this does not seem to be the case with respect to neural firings and the transmission of electric potential along nerve fibres, on the one hand, and conscious experience, on the other. McGinn’s stance, while he denies the possibility of ever understanding the causal connection, may be regarded as “naturalistic” in the sense that he does not reject the validity of neuro-physiological theory, and does not doubt that brain activity accompanies conscious states. Outright materialism, on the other hand, abandons the use of the notion of consciousness altogether and with it the need to explain a relation between it and neural activity. This position, I seek to show, is strictly untenable, because those who advance it could do so only if they were conscious.

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“Quining” Consciousness Those who advocate abandoning the concept of consciousness compare it to that of phlogiston in chemistry or Karma in Hindu religion and popular superstition. Of course, a special science may make use of whatever concepts it finds explanatorily useful, or dispense with any that it does not consider helpful. But that does not mean that the concept concerned is altogether meaningless or can be abandoned altogether. It would seem odd that the science of the mind should abandon or fail to make use of the concept of consciousness, for without it the concept of mind itself, which is the subject matter of the science is in jeopardy. Even more compelling is the fact that without consciousness nobody could raise any objection to its use. As has already been stressed, there are definite difficulties about identifying the mind with the brain, as each does what the other does not; and we have observed that when neuro-scientists confine their attention, as they should, to brain processes they frequently speak of neural modules and the brain as a whole as if it were conscious - so they obviously do not abandon that conception. Nevertheless, there are some writers who consider the notion of consciousness outdated, too vague and “simplistic” to be useful, complaining that there is no “orthodox” understanding of the concept and that it should be, as have other outdated concepts in science, consigned to the waste-bin. Flanagan spends an entire chapter refuting the errors of those who advocate “quining” consciousness, and his arguments are acceptable and sound. But there is a much more direct and summary way than he adopts to dispose of any such suggestion. Consciousness is common to all human beings and presumably to many other living species. It is the experience the existence of which none of us, least of all scientists, can deny without self-contradiction. It is the experience which gives the epithet “empirical” to all the natural sciences including those under discussion. Phlogiston, on the other hand, was a clearly defined theoretical concept which was adopted in the seventeenth century to explain combustion, and was not without value in advancing chemical concepts. The presumed substance that it named was shown by the experimental evidence produced by Lavoisier to be non-existent, and its definition (an invisible odourless spirit of negative weight) to be inapplicable, the nature of combustion having been revealed as the absorption of a gas (oxygen), not the expulsion of the so-called phlogiston. Consciousness, however, is a concept of very different significance. Without it (both Lavoisier’s and that of his colleagues) there could have been no evidence of any kind; for consciousness is the one and only medium in which evidence can be displayed. Only

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to a conscious observer can anything that occurs in Nature be evidence of something else, or of anything at all. It should be obvious that consciousness is the one concept that no science can possibly abandon without selfdestruction and self-refutation for no experiments could be devised nor their results observed by the unconscious. The comparison of the concept of consciousness with that of Karma may be dealt with in much the same way. Karma is a religious idea in Hinduism, or a superstition among those who know little of that religion. Consciousness is the ubiquitous condition of there being any religion or superstition at all. Of course, we often behave as if we believed something without being conscious of the belief, or willing to admit it, but then we have no concept of it such as that of Karma. To form such a concept we must conceive: that is, we must be conscious. If we reject the notion of Karma it is because we do not believe in it, but whether we accept or reject it, we can do either only if we are conscious and have the notion. Likewise, we cannot reject the notion of consciousness without being conscious - that is, without contradicting and refuting ourselves. We may, then, readily conclude that the proposal to abolish the concept of consciousness from science (mental or any other) is simply ridiculous, for it amounts to an admonition to abandon every concept whatever, and to annihilate science (i.e. knowledge) altogether. Qualia What I have said above should be sufficient to dispose of the attempt to deny the experience of qualia. Flanagan protests at length against this move maintaining that it is based on a misunderstanding of the nature of sensations as “essentially private, ineffable, and not subject to third person evaluation.” (op.cit. p. 67). They are, he says, none of these things. Indeed, a good case can be made that he is right. Yet surely we need not spend time making it, for all the arguments offered by those who wish to abolish the idea themselves presuppose the existence of qualia, those concerning inverted qualia, intractable qualia, or those that change over time (e.g. acquired tastes). If we did not experience sensory qualities they could not be inverted, nor intractable, nor could they change. If pleasant flavours with time come to seem unpleasant, they are still flavours and still please or displease (both pleasure and displeasure being qualia). Need we say more? Abandon qualia and you abandon consciousness, which, without self-refutation in the very attempt, you cannot.

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The New Mysterianism The view that Flanagan regards as the new mysterianism is that, although we know consciousness to be served and produced by brain processes, we can never understand how this occurs, and our failure to conceive the relation between neural firings and conscious awareness is in principle irremovable. The chief exponent of this position is Colin McGinn. He asserts that “we are cut off by our very cognitive constitution from achieving a conception of that natural property of the brain (or of consciousness) that accounts for the psychophysical link.”3 According to Flanagan McGinn believes that there is a natural property, or set of properties (P) that accounts for consciousness, but that we can never understand P or how it gives rise to consciousness. It is not clear whether McGinn means that P can never be discovered and understood, or simply that even if it (the relevant brain functioning) is discovered, we can never comprehend how it produces consciousness. We may have considerable sympathy with this position, for the crucial question is just how electro-chemical processes in the brain, however complicated they may be, can give rise to experiences that are not electrochemical and have no sort of physical properties. But it does not necessarily follow that we are inevitably excluded from conceiving how that happens which we already know to be possible and to be constantly occurring. McGinn puts forward a subtle argument to the effect that if we knew what physiological processes underlay certain specific forms of consciousness, we should understand how the brain subserved those experiences, and this, he says, would confer a grasp of the nature of those experiences - that is, of their subjective form. But if this subjective form is not available to us (as, for instance, the subjective form of a bat’s experience is not) we could not grasp the theory of how those experiences were generated. Flanagan objects that this argument depends on an ambiguity in the term “grasp”: first meaning that we are enabled to understand the connection between brain processes and concomitant experiences, and then meaning that such understanding confers the subjective form of the experiences on the person understanding the connection. That, of course, does not follow. Flanagan protests that it should not be expected, because we are “acquainted with consciousness [our own] by way of direct, internal, reflexive biological hook-ups to our own nervous systems” (op.cit., p.117). Thus first-person hook-ups are quite different from third-person hook-ups. When we become aware of the physiological conditions of specific forms of consciousness (e.g. seeing red) we cannot and do not need to experience their results for the subject of

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the experiment that reveals it. The experiment does not excite the same conditions in our own brains. Nor is this a requirement. We are not seeking to generate by our theory the subjective experience in ourselves, the generation of which in some other subject we wish to understand. The real question concerns how an experience of any kind is actually generated. Consequently McGinn’s argument does not prove that we are constitutionally excluded from ever solving what I have called the crucial problem. Thomas Nagel, in his paper “What it is Like to be a Bat”4, similarly maintains that even if we could discover how a bat’s brain works we could not thereby engender a bat’s experience in our own mind. That is indeed true, but is not what we seek to do. If we could discover what neural activity in a bat’s brain occurs when (say) it uses sonar to direct its flight, we should still fail to understand how that physiological requirement generates the subjective experience (if any) for the bat. As it does not occur in our brains it has no relation at all to our subjective experience. Flanagan objects, further, that McGinn imposes criteria for intelligibility and explanation that are too stringent. Here his criticism is not always on such firm ground. In particular, McGinn insists on what he calls the principle of homogeneity in explanation, which imposes constraints upon what is legitimate. In order to explain physical facts appeal may be made only to physical conditions and occurrences, phenomenological experiences will not serve; similarly physical (and presumably physiological) processes cannot make the occurrence of conscious experiences intelligible. So McGinn concludes that the causal link between brain processes and sensuous awareness (although he does not deny that there is one) is epistemically unavailable.5 Flanagan contends that science does not impose so rigid a requirement, and in illustration he gives the example of the interpretation of vapour trails in a cloud chamber as the traces of unobservable electrons: “Electrons are a theoretical construct whose postulation best explains certain observable data and whose postulation is in turn supported by certain (predicted) observations.” (Op.cit. p. 113). Similar inferential moves, he says, are required for links between consciousness and the brain.

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But are such moves possible? Flanagan admits that “[c]onsciousness reveals nothing about my brain, even that I have one” (ibid. p.112). Nor does the transmission in the brain of electrical potential among neurons along complex networks of nerve fibres reveal anything about consciously experienced sensa, emotions, or judgements. Neither are these neural processes nor are conscious experiences theoretical constructs devised to explain one another. Nor does the explanation of vapour trails in the cloud chamber appeal to anything other than physical occurrences - no more than the explanation of those observed in the tracks of high flying air-craft. There is no legitimate analogy between the two cases. Here McGinn’s argument is surely justified. Flanagan writes: “…both brain facts and facts about consciousness are on the table to be explained. We then infer that a constellation of a certain set of phenomenological reports of restricted range (‘tastes sweet’) correlate with certain sorts of brain activity (activation of the relevant pathways), and we infer given an overall commitment to naturalism, that the latter explain the former.” (Ibid, p.113) How does the correlation explain the emergence of the former (“tastes sweet”) from the latter? The physicist can explain how a particle (or a highspeed aircraft) causes water vapour to condense in its path, but nobody has yet been able in any way to explain how the activation of neural pathways in the brain causes a sweet taste. There is no dispute about correlations, such as have been discovered, but no explanation has been forthcoming about which to debate. Accordingly, some mystery does remain with respect to consciousness. Whether we proceed from the top down or from the bottom up, or consider the mutual coordination of results of doing both, we still have no explanation. How is sensuous experience generated by neural activity? Temporal coincidence or constant conjunction do not tell us. Even if we adopt a Humean attitude to causation (overlooking the fact that the Humean attitude leads inevitably to scepticism) we are none the wiser. Even Flanagan on a later page (175) admits that: “discontinuities in the neural underpinning of conscious awareness, the binding problem, and massive parallelism neither undermine nor compete with the description of consciousness as a stream. They make more compelling the need for an explanation of how the stream emerges from neural processes that are anything but streamlike.” (My italics).

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and, we might add, nothing like conscious experience. So while, without agreeing with him fully, we may have some sympathy with McGinn’s scepticism, we cannot go along, without serious qualification, with Flanagans’ reasons for confidence. Epiphenominalism Some theorists have concluded that consciousness, although it occurs, is causally impotent and relates to brain processes as smoke to fire, or the whistle of a kettle to the water boiling within it. There seems no reason or evidence to prevent our concluding that observable behaviour is directly caused by the brain processes that accompany sense experiences and that the experiences themselves play no part in the causal nexus. In fact, there is evidence to support the hypothesis, such as that produced by Benjamin Libet (whose research we shall have reason to consider aat a later stage) that there is a detectable time interval between the onset of action and the conscious decision to act. It is quite conceivable that the neural processes are all that is necessary to stimulate overt activity and that the conscious accompaniment is a mere reflection that plays no causal role in the process. Epiphenomenalists point to the ability of scallops to avoid predators without conscious apprisal of the threat and the many instances of human behaviour that are prompted by unconscious processes, for instance “subliminal perception” and the ability of blindsighted persons to make muscular adjustments to objects invisible in their scotoma. Those who oppose epiphenomenalism are apt to argue on neoDarwinian considerations that in the course of evolution consciousness would have been selected only if it had some survival value, and that if it had no causal efficiency it would have been bred out. The argument is posed by Flanagan in language that does considerable violence to neoDarwinian principles, illegitimately attributing purposiveness and inventiveness to natural selection under the name of Nature. He speaks of the brain having been “designed” to endow conscious states with a functional role. But I have made critical comment on this sort of language before and it is not confined to Flanagan but is quite common in the mouths of neo-Darwinians. He also, by rather more than implication, attributes consciousness to the brain in its unconscious workings. He writes: “The epiphenomenalist thinks that the noisy broadcasts of consciousness are like the noisy work of the printer that produces a text already written and filed away in the computer. The alternative is

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that broadcasting is internal to the ongoing activity of the brain. Since many conscious states are global in the sense that they involve synthesis of many different types of contents, the most plausible inference is that these states involve interpenetrating and/or synchronous processing in many different neural areas. If that is right, then the broadcasts are realized in the system and available to it as it modifies, coordinates and plans its next moves.... The suspicious epiphenomenalist must explain how such consciousness can be realized in myriad brain structures without its content also being available to the brain structures it interacts with for subsequent information processing. The brain hardly seems like a system that doesn’t listen to itself.” (Op. cit., p.135). The brain, “modifies, coordinates and plans”; it “listens to itself”; could it do so without being conscious of what it broadcasts - i.e., conscious of its own consciousness? Surely, the epiphenomenalist could reply that as the consciousness is simply the rattle of the machinery, the brain can do all its work without listening. A better and more persuasive case can be made against epiphenomenalism by pointing to the numerous occasions on which consciousness prompts and improves performance that without it might not even be possible. The beagle pursuing a hare cuts corners to anticipate the evasive course of its quarry and could hardly be so crafty without closely attentive consciousness of the movement of its prey. A marksman aiming at a target could hardly hit the bull’s eye if he were unconscious of it, even if (as in the case of some anaesthetized monkeys) his optic nerve and occipital lobe were appropriately stimulated. The blindsighted do not attend or act with respect to objects in their scotoma, as do the fully sighted. The prosopagnosiac treats his or her friends and near relations as strangers even though their appearance unconsciously excites pleasurable emotion. Without close attention nobody can acquire much skill at playing a musical instrument such as the piano or violin, and without consciousness there is no paying attention. The same is true of all conscious learning. Inattention, in most cases, depletes and degrades performance. Even more impressive is the fact that the sensation of pain causes reflex removal of the hurt limb from the source of the injury. If the pain is not felt the action does not occur, as in those rare cases of persons unable to feel physical pain. No doubt the epiphenomenalist will rejoin with new countersubmissions - but the fact is that none of these arguments on either side of the issue is at all relevant to the problem with which I am concerned. Both parties agree that consciousness occurs and both agree that it is the product of cerebral activity, but neither party can throw the least glimmer

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of light on how the electro-chemical processes in the brain (and there are no other) can become, or can give rise to, sensuous experience. The external influences by which the sense organs are affected are not the qualia that we experience; nor are the neural processes they set in motion; there are no colours in the occipital lobe of the brain such as we see when it is activated, nor any sounds such as we hear either in the labyrinth of the ear or in the temporal lobe. How are these qualia (not themselves, so far as we know, any kind of vibration or wave motion) generated - be they either epiphenomena or effective causes initiating action? For some approach to an answer to this question I am seeking illumination. I wish to find out if there is any way at all of uncovering the hidden link between brain process and consciousness. Flanagan would probably protest that I am making too extreme a demand, which, for scientific purposes is anyhow unnecessary. We accept without further question that water is H2O, why should we not be content with the discovery of concomitance between specific brain activities and their accompanying conscious states? The answer is that the cases are not on a par. Oxygen and hydrogen are gases and so is water-vapour. There is nothing odd about the fact that the union of one atom of oxygen with two of hydrogen, the physical cause of which scientists now know, produces a molecule of another gas with new properties. But the electrical firing of neurons and the transmission of electrical potential along nerve fibres, in conjunction with the emission of chemical “messengers”, have nothing whatever in common with sensory qualities as we experience them, nor are they judgements of perception, nor inferences, nor imaginations of such things as Dennett’s purple cow. We have as yet not the slightest inkling of how the electro-chemical processes, that are not themselves appearances (to any but the neuro-physiologist) nor mental acts, give rise to awareness of any kind; nor do our observations of the brain give the least clue to the identification of the subject enjoying the experiences and performing the mental acts. Flanagan recommends a unified theory of consciousness believing it possible and desirable to free the concept from the ghostly character that it has acquired in the past and to “provide it with a credible naturalistic analysis.” The reasons he advances for this are sound enough and the arguments he offers against those who deny its possibility or advocate the renunciation of the concept are entirely reasonable as theirs are indefensible. Consciousness, he declares, exists, and it would be a mistake to try to eliminate reference to it. That nobody should attempt to deny. But much depends on what one understands by a naturalistic analysis. If the use of the term “naturalistic” is intended to exclude the

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supernatural it is wholly justified; but if it is to insist on “materialism” it simply blinkers the so-called “scientific” outlook enabling it to ignore the crucial question. Nobody should object to Flanagan’s insistence on the correlation of neural functioning with conscious states, nor his demand that neural, psychological and phenomenological analyses should be coordinated. But all this could be conceded without opening up any prospect of elucidating how neural activity generates conscious experience. It is not a matter of bridging the gap between first-person revelation and third-person description; Flanagan has explained that quite clearly and acceptably. What needs to be overcome is the chasm between third-person description of brain functioning and third-person description of conscious awareness. In seeking to close this breach we are not demanding excessive standards of explanation. Flanagan protests against the demand for “perfect intelligibility” as putting any interesting relation between phenomena beyond our ken. We readily accept, he avers, that ordinary water is H2O, so we should accept that sensations (colours, tastes and smells) are caused by activity patterns in certain brain pathways (p. 221). Of course we may admit the truth of this connection; but the relation of H2O to water and its wetness has little or no similarity to that of activity patterns in the brain to the sense of revelation experienced by Helen Keller when she first realized that what she felt on putting her hand under the pump was what her companion called “water”. The sensation is not composed of electrical potentials as water is composed of hydrogen and oxygen. So if we seek no further enlightenment about water and chemical components, we may yet be puzzled by and seek further light upon the fact (and it is a fact) that complex transmissions of electrical potential in the brain produce the qualia of tactual and other sensations. Whether he appreciates it or not, Flanagan throws out more helpful clues to the solution of this problem when he asks “What am I? This organism, This thinking being?” (p. 204) and writes that “my consciousness is mine...because of my organic nature..” (p. 221). The direction in which we should look is towards the nature of organism and the sort of wholeness enjoyed by the being who thinks.

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NOTES 1

Owen Flanagan, Consciousness Reconsidered (Cambridge London, M.I.T. Press, 1992).

MA,

2

Op. cit., pp. xi and 2.

3

C. McGinn, “Can we Solve the Mind-Body Problem”, Mind, 1998, p.350. Reprinted in The Problem of Consciousness, Oxford, Blackwell, 1991.

4

Thomas Nagel, “What It is Like to be a Bat” in Mortal Questions, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1979.

5

Cf. McGinn, op.cit., Mind, 1998, p. 358.

CHAPTER IV “DESCARTES’ ERROR” AND SPINOZA’S TRUTH One of the clearest thinkers and most illuminating writers on brain functioning and its effects upon consciousness is Antonio Damasio. He makes no attempt to deny or explain away consciousness but, although he is aware of the crucial question that I raised in the first chapter and believes that scientists should aim at discovering the relation between neural functioning and consciousness, as a neurobiologist he does not directly address it. Further, he does his best to define the sense in which he uses pertinent terms. The position he adopts is succinctly expresses in the following statement: “The study of human consciousness requires both internal and external views. Although the investigation of consciousness is condemned to indirectness, this limitation is not restricted to consciousness. It applies to all other cognitive phenomena. Behavioral acts - kicks, punches and words - are nice expressions of the private process of mind. Likewise electroencephalograms and functional MRI scans capture correlates of the mind but those correlates are not the mind.... Whether one likes it or not, all the contents of our minds are subjective and the power of science comes from its ability to verify objectively the consistency of many individual subjectivities.” (The Feeling of What Happens, pp. 82f). It is odd that in a footnote Damasio remarks that Dennett takes the same view, whereas to me it seems that Dennett’s attitude is directly opposed to the scientific recognition of subjectivity. In his book Descartes’ Error it is not the contention that our awareness is ineluctable that Damasio queries, but only Descartes’s fundamental dualism. He complains that cogito ergo sum indicates the precise opposite of what he, Damasio, believes: “that beings were beings long before the dawn of humanity, and that elementary consciousness only appeared at some later epoch of evolution.” (op. cit., p. 148). Here1 he overlooks the fact that it is only because he is conscious that he can believe this, and that without consciousness he would have no knowledge, no belief, no science of neurobiology and evolution, and no awareness of his own or other existence. The undeniable fact of consciousness, then, is logically prior to the knowledge of other existences whatever that knowledge may reveal of prior evolution. This philosophical point, however, is secondary to Damasio’s 63

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conviction that Descartes was wrong to encourage the belief in a disembodied mind, and hence to undermine the possibility of what later has emerged as a sounder conception of body-mind relation. At the same time he provides incidentally copious evidence in favour of Spinoza’s Proposition 13 in Part II of the Ethics: “The object of the idea constituting the human mind is the body - that is, a definite mode of extension actually existing, and nothing else.” (Shirley’s translation. All quotations from Spinoza are from Shirley’s translation, unless otherwise stated) It should be noted, in passing, that Spinoza does not mean that the “object” of the idea is what nowadays philosophers call its “intentional object”. What he means by “objectum” here is what he calls elsewhere “ideatum”, the same mode of Substance under the Attribute of Extension as the idea under the Attribute of Thought. What one might today call the intentional object, for him, is only a part or a modification of part of this ideatum. While giving no indication that he is aware of Spinoza’s assertion, Damasio tells us that a feeling ”may not be an elusive mental quality attached to an object, but rather the direct perception of a specific landscape: that of the body.”and again: “...the body, as represented in the brain, may constitute the indispensable frame of reference for the neural processes that we experience as the mind.” (DE, p. xiv). He has no doubt that the mind is what we consciously experience, and he recognizes that the body, as represented in the brain, is its frame of reference. This does not mean (either for Damasio or Spinoza) that what we are aware of is what goes on in the brain (we are not by nature skilled neuroscientists), but that what we are aware of is what is being processed through the body - that the body provides the frame of reference within which the mind works. This amounts to much the same as what R.G. Collingwood (in company with Hegel and F.H. Bradley) maintains, that bodily feeling is the fundamental basis of consciousness. What Damasio has done is to provide scientific evidence that was not available to the authors of these highly important philosophical theories. In one short paragraph on p. 84, Damasio states with complete clarity the main thesis of Dennett’s argument:

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“...because of the brain’s design, the requisite broad-based knowledge [for social behaviour] depends on numerous systems located in relatively separate brain regions rather than in one region. A large part of such knowledge is recalled in the form of images at many brain sites rather than a single site. Although we have the illusion that everything comes together in a single anatomical theater, recent evidence suggests that it does not. Probably the relative simultaneity of activity at different sites binds the separate parts of the mind together.” (DE., p. 84) Here there is no refusal to admit mental images nor any explicit attempt to identify brain with mind. Damasio makes no attempt to evade or disavow consciousness, he simply takes it for granted as the product of certain brain activities. Neurophysiologist though he is, he does not refrain from epistemological statements that he does not defend, the truth of which he simply assumes (cf. DE, p. 97). He contends that “the factual knowledge required for reasoning and decision making comes to the mind in the form of images” (p. 96). In short, it is, and necessarily involves, consciousness (although, as we shall see later, the sense in which images are consciously experienced may be questioned). Further, so far from denying or trying to explain away the self, Damasio insists that it is indispensable to image-making and that subjectivity is a key feature of consciousness (p. 99). The self, he says “is not the infamous homunculus, a little person inside our brain perceiving and thinking about the images the brain forms. It is, rather, a perpetually recreated neurobiological state.” (ibid.) Like Pinker and Dennett, Damasio makes frequent use of the term “representation” in reference to topographical brain activity, but (in another work, The Feeling of What Happens) he tells us precisely what he means by it: “‘pattern that is consistently related to something,’ whether with respect to a mental image or to a coherent set of neural activities within a specific brain region” (p. 320). Clearly, it is to the neurophysiologist, who is conscious of the neural activity and its consistent relation to something, and to us who perceive the image, that the relation is represented. There is no implication that the function of the brain is representation. It is we, the scientist and the reader, who consciously perceive the consistent relation. Possibly Dennett and Pinker intend the same meaning when they use the term, but if they do, they must assume that it involves a conscious

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appreciation of what is represented, an implication that at least Dennett appears to deny. Images Salient in Damasio’s theory of the relation of the mind to the brain is the formation of images and what he calls dispositional representations. In parenthesis above I asked what a disposition is when it is not operative. Damasio goes a good way to making this intelligible. A dispositional representation, he tells us, is a potential pattern of neuron activity in a small ensemble of neurons (a “convergence zone”), and the dispositional character of the pattern of activity results from the strengthening and weakening of synapses (i.e., the state of the synapses connecting the neurons in the ensemble. Cf. DE, pp. 102 and 104). Images, clearly, can be experienced only in consciousness. Damasio quite clearly explains that the image is not in the brain, the dispositional representations are not topographically organized and nothing resembling the image is likely to be found in the brain, apart from the fact that patterns of activity in the primary visual cortex can be detected as being “consistent” with the structure of the image. (This is the case with visual images. It is difficult to understand what characteristics of patterns of activity in the primary sensory cortex could make them consistent with an auditory or an olfactory image). These patterns of activity are excited by the convergence zones when stimulated by whatever it is that prompts the formation of the image. Of course, there is no homunculus in the brain who observes the patterns of activity and registers their consistency with the image envisaged. The observer is the neurophysiologist; and Damasio tells us that the “codes” (if there are any) involved in the ensembles of neurons are entirely unknown. A yet deeper mystery would be how such codes could be decoded to present an image to the conscious subject. According to Damasio, all knowledge is deposited in dispositional representations: innate knowledge guiding biological regulation and instinct in the hypothalamus, brain stem and limbic system; acquired (learned) knowledge in higher order cortices and grey-matter nuclei beneath the level of the cortex. The former by and large does not involve images; the latter does, as well as records of rules and strategies by which we operate upon the images. And Damasio is convinced that all thought consists of images, even when in the media of words and abstract symbols, and that only what is imaged can be known. He seems to forget that he has said that

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innate knowledge does not involve images, and the implicit admission here is that knowledge proper is always conscious. In short, all thinking and acquired knowledge, for him, is conscious. This consciousness is somehow constructed and generated by brain activity, but the relation between the two remains unexplained. Evolution Damasio’s speculations about the evolution of the brain (neural development) are more credible than Dennett’s. There are not enough genes in the genome, he reminds us, to determine the precise structure of all the neural circuits in the brain (involving 10 trillion synapses). The structure of the old brain, the hypothalamus, brain stem and basal forebrain with the probable addition of the amygdala and the cingulate area, is probably determined more or less precisely by the genome. These areas govern and regulate the vital bodily functions and homeostatic processes essential to the survival of the organism and are the product of the evolutionary process. The cerebral cortex, on the other hand, and the parts of the brain that have evolved more recently are only generally structured by the genes and much of their organization is developed long after birth, shaped by experience of the outer world and other people. This occurs, he contends under the influence of (a) predetermined structure, (b) individual activity and the environment, and (c) “self-organizing pressures arising from the sheer complexity of the system” (p.112). In the second of these influences chance plays some part, but there is no suggestion that the brain could have evolved as a result merely of random mutations in the genome, or the accidental discovery of “good tricks”. Damasio emphatically maintains, however, that the innate circuits of the old brain play an important part in modulating the activity of what has evolved later and the subsequently developed capacities of the neocortex. The postulation of “self-organizing pressures” is significant as an admission of the holistic character of brain activity and its plastic architecture; for self-organization presupposes a recognition, felt or implicit, of the whole to be organized. Body as “Ideatum” The thesis, however, which is most strongly suggested by Damasio’s exposition is that the body is the object of the mind’s consciousness. Having explained how activation of innate circuits alters the state of the body so as to remedy defects, as when a declining level of blood sugar causes a feeling of hunger and prompts action to seek and consume food, he concludes:

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“The goal of the entire process was saving your body. The signal to initiate the process came from your body. The signals that entered your consciousness, in order to force you to save your body, also came from your body. As the cycle concluded, the signals that told you that your body was no longer in danger came from your body. You might say that this is government for the body and by the body, although it is sensed and managed by the brain.” (p. 116) The signals from the body (we are told) enter consciousness and tell “you” (your self or mind) that your body was no longer in danger. The body is the object of the mind throughout. But the “government” of the body is also said to be sensed and managed by the brain, and how this may be is not clear. Stimulation of the relevant part of the brain (itself part of the body) by bodily changes elsewhere (e.g., decline in the level of blood sugar) no doubt activates neural circuits so as to bring about the necessary behaviour, but neural firings and transmissions do not amount to sensation. Surely it is the mind rather than the brain that senses the bodily process. Further, “management” implies assessment of circumstances and decision. Can the brain make judgements and decide? Damasio says that “neurons in the hypothalamus detect” bodily change, as if the neurons were conscious - but that surely cannot be what he really intends. Not even neurons are homunculi. The question what in the brain corresponds to “you” who are told by the signals from the body what the condition of the body happens to be is answered in a subsequent exposition (see below). This example is of a bodily condition (hunger) in which it is natural for the object of sensation and subsequent consciousness to be the body. But Damasio goes on to argue that the body is intimately involved in more complex and developed forms of consciousness; and here the distinction between mind and brain becomes still more important. Brain circuits innately preorganized, he asserts, help the organism to classify things as good or bad - that is, to make value judgements. They establish for it “a set of preferences - or criteria, biases or values.” Biases need not be conscious, but preferences based on criteria are conscious value judgements. Instinctive drives, which are bodily states combined with emotions (which themselves turn out to be bodily changes), influence, or even determine, these judgements. So that our inherited predispositions affect what, in humans especially, is altered and developed through learning and cultural experience. Instinctive and suprainstinctive are inseparably interwoven; but the actions of the latter require, above and beyond the former, “the control of animal inclination by thought, reason, and the will” (p. 124). What

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remains to be discovered is the neural activity corresponding to these, especially the last, and that they involve consciousness can hardly be disputed. Two important points emerge. One is that the body is the object of consciousness: “It is not only the separation between mind and brain that is mythical: the separation between mind and body is probably just as fictional. The mind is embodied, in the full sense of the term, not just embrained.” (p. 118) And the other is that not only brain activity but consciousness is indispensable to social activity: “...suprainstinctual survival strategies generate something probably unique to humans: a moral point of view that, on occasion, can transcend the interests of the immediate group and even the species.”(p.126) A moral point of view is possible only for a self-conscious mind which is aware of the self in its social relations and can make judgements of right and wrong that may induce it to oppose its own instinctual inclinations. How and where patterns of neural transmission in the brain bring about such self-conscious reflection is puzzling enough, Damasio tells us that they may be similar in their overall formal design to those governing biological drives; but that such patterns could themselves amount to moral judgements (although they may “represent” them) hardly makes sense. Emotion That the object of the mind is the body becomes further apparent in Damasio’s account of emotion. In the old brain certain automatic (virtually reflex) reactions to general features of specific stimuli (presumably what Tinbergen called “sign stimuli”) are “wired in” - for example, in chicks, the ducking of the head on the appearance of a swooping wingspan. Such responses are unconscious, but Damasio conceptualizes them as primitive decision making. They are activated by dispositional representations in the amygdala which are said to process and detect them. These stimuli trigger body changes and states characteristic of an emotion (e.g. fear). No conjecture is offered here to what extent these body changes are felt in less highly developed creatures. More evolved social organisms faced with more

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complex unpredictable situations engage systems in the neocortex in order to make decisions. Here the body changes characteristic of the emotion are felt and the nexus between the perceived object and the emotional state is cognized. Thus, more highly evolved animals can learn to anticipate and prepare for hitherto unforeseen situations. The more elementary automatic reactions are called primary emotions, but in the higher animals (particularly humans) secondary emotions supervene. Here again there is an echo of Spinoza’s classification of the emotions (affects) of which the primary, in his definition of them, are pleasure and pain, while the more complicated are secondary (Cf. Ethics, Part III, ). The primary emotions remain the basic mechanism, and secondary emotions are generated by images consciously and deliberately entertained, the objects of which have in the past been associated with emotional states. The subconscious memory of these associations (acquired dispositional representations separate from the innate dispositional representations needed for primary emotions) automatically and unconsciously excite bodily changes, endocrine, autonomic and musculo-skeletal, aimed at the entire organism in spectacular co-ordination. The mental evaluative process (that is, presumably, the images and their remembered emotional accompaniment) along with the bodily changes, Damasio avers, constitute the emotion. The perception of these changes he designates feeling. “If an emotion,” he writes,“is a collection of changes in the body state connected to particular mental images... the essence of feeling an emotion is the experience of such changes in juxtaposition to the mental images that initiated the cycle. In other words, a feeling depends on the juxtaposition of an image of the body proper to an image of something else...” (DE, p. 145) It is primarily the body that is the object of the mind. The bodily state is subconsciously present at all times, and when we have feelings connected with emotion “attention is allocated substantially to body signals, and parts of the body landscape move from the background to the foreground of our attention” (p. 149). What we are conscious of throughout is this body landscape: “Not only can the brain construct, in some of its systems, a multifarious neural view of the body landscape that other brain systems have induced, but the construction of the view itself, as well as its use, can be influenced by the body directly [e.g., by chemical transmitters].” (p. 144)

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The “neural view” is presumably the integrating pattern of neural activity that is “viewed” by the neurophysiologist; but Damsio goes on to assure his reader that the body state is felt: “You perceive changes in your body state and follow their unfolding over seconds and minutes. That process of continuous monitoring, that experience of what your body is doing while thoughts about specific contents roll by, is the essence of what I call a feeling (p. 145). It is clear from this that the neural view translates into consciousness as feeling and thought. Damasio never attempts to explain this translation and never professes that this is his intention. He is giving us a neuro-physiological account of what happens when certain conscious states occur. Comparison with Spinoza It is intriguing to compare this theory with Spinoza’s view of the passions. As already quoted, Spinoza declares that the mind is the idea of the body and nothing else. For Spinoza all passions are ideas, inadequate so far as they are passive, adequate so far as they are active. Definition 3 in Part III of the Ethics states: “By emotions I understand the affections of the body by which the body’s power of activity is increased or diminished, assisted or checked, together with the ideas of these affections.” In Proposition 18 of Part III of the Ethics he writes: “From the image of a thing past or future man is affected by the same emotion of pleasure or pain as from the image of a thing present. For Spinoza, love and hatred are respectively pleasure and pain, (primary emotions) accompanied by the idea of an external cause. And, just as Damasio asserts that emotion alters cognitive processing and that “feelings are just as cognitive as any other perceptual image” (p. 159), so Spinoza insists, in the Short Treatise on God, Man and Human Well-being (Chapter II of the Second Part) that the cognitive aspect of ideas is prior: “We thus maintain that Knowledge is the proximate cause of all the ‘passions’ in the soul. For we consider it once for all impossible that any one, who neither thinks nor knows in any of the preceding ways and modes, would be capable of being incited to Love or Desire or any other mode of Will.” (A. Wolf’s translation).

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While Damasio refers explicitly to Descartes (in Descartes’ Error) he never mentions this particular doctrine of Spinoza’s, for which he provides so much favourable evidence. Somatic Markers So convinced is Damasio of the participation of the body in mental activity that he has put forward what he calls the somatic marker hypothesis to the effect that bodily feeling typicalof secondary emotions (derived as we have seen from primary emotions) and associated with images that we form of the anticipated outcome of our actions, direct, and are in fact indispensable to, social reasoning. He argues that the thought by which we direct our conduct could not in practice be governed solely by formally composed inference, because practical decisions proceed from very varied circumstances, and the consequences of action are complex and unpredictable, giving rise to innumerable possible alternatives, so that purely formal reasoning would be interminably inconclusive and would take far longer than the time available for practical decision-making. What in fact happens, he contends, is that in rapid succession we contemplate images of the options with which we are presented, and that associated with these, as a result of past experience (commonly of reward and punishment), are bodily sensations, pleasant or unpleasant, characteristic of secondary emotions, and these (as the case may be) attach positive or negative markers to the images. These somatic markers enable us immediately to accept or reject the presented option without any explicit reasoning. The term somatic-marker, he explains, is adopted because the feeling refers to the body in the most general sense, both visceral and nonvisceral feelings being included. The effect of the marker is to direct attention to the negative or positive outcome of the contemplated action and to act as a warning signal (or the reverse) enabling us either to reject or to accept a course of action immediately. The hypothesis is proposed as applicable primarily to practical and social reasoning, but Damasio speculates that it may also apply to scientific reasoning, giving in evidence statements by Henri Poincare′, Leo Szilard and Jonas Salk who testify that direct insights and intuition, directed by subconscious feelings (in Damasio’s view, of somatic markers), occur and are necessary for creative advance in mathematics, physics and science generally. Damasio sums up his position as follows: “The action of biological drives, body states, and emotions may be an indispensable foundation for rationality. The lower levels in the neural

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edifice of reason are the same that regulate the processing of emotions and feelings, along with global functions of the body proper such that the organism can survive. These lower levels maintain direct and mutual relationships with the body proper, thus placing the body within the chain of operations that permit the highest reaches of reason and creativity. Rationality is probably shaped and modulated by body signals, even as it performs the most sublime distinctions and acts accordingly” (Op. cit., p. 200). The outcome of the argument is that the basic object of the mind in all cases is the body, for even the images juxtaposed with emotional feelings are excited by the convergence zones in the early sensory cortices, so that what is being imagined is the consequence of an original reaction in a sense organ. A further implication of the somatic marker hypothesis is that the fundamental substrate of consciousness is bodily feeling. By providing neurophysiological evidence of this correlation of mind and body, Damasio is giving strong support to much neglected theories that have been put forward by some philosophers in the past, re-examination of which might well be rewarding. Body-Mind Unity The tenth chapter of Damasio’s book, Descartes’ Error, is so apt a modern neurophyiological confirmation of Spinoza’s theory of body-mind relationship that one is tempted to quote long passages in illustration. “The body,” he repeats, “provides a ground reference for the mind”. He describes how an experience of somebody walking behind one on a dark night generates sensations (many of them sub-conscious) of visceral and muscular responses, relayed to the brain via neural and chemical routes, which bring about a profound departure from normal bodily feeling-changes occurring in both brain and body proper. The sense of danger, is thus an awareness of the body. But not only so, “...it is the entire organism rather than the body alone or the brain alone that interacts with the environment...when we see, or hear, or touch or taste or smell, body proper and brain participate in the interaction...” (DE, p. 224). For me, this insistence on the integral reaction of the entire organism is especially significant, a feature to which I shall return in the sequel. Damasio illustrates his point further by describing how the viewing of a favourite landscape involves not only visual cortices but the cornea,

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lense, and iris of the eyes, the reflex adjustment of which focus the image, the muscles which control eye-movement, head and neck movements, all of which depend on two-way signals going from body to brain and from brain to body. Signals from the outside world are processed in subcortical structures of the brain as well as the sensory cortices and the association cortex along with other interconnected centres; associated knowledge is activated from dispositional representations, and memory images are formed, which excite organismic changes, some in the brain and some in the body proper. All this is involved in the perception of the landscape, which is no mere reception of signals from the environment, but the direct awareness of bodily feelings which include the sensations afforded by the sense-organs. Many of the bodily reactions are required in order to maintain homeostasis, so that “perceiving is as much about acting on the environment as receiving signals from it.” Here we have evidence not only that the object of the mind is the body as Damasio puts it: “I am saying that the body contributes more than life support and modulatory effects to the brain. It contributes a content that is part and parcel of the workings of the normal mind” (p. 226). It is also evidence supporting the view that perception is not simply the reception of a “datum” but is an active interpretation of the sensory input requiring at least implicit judgement. Again, corroborating Spinoza, Damasio writes: “While mental events are the result of activity in the brain’s neurons, an early and indispensable story which brain neurons have to tell is the story of the body’s schema and operation” (p. 228). The Self Damasio is convinced that the self is an essential feature of human consciousness. Referring to the imagined episode of becoming aware that somebody is following you home on a dark night, he says that the detected threat initiates complicated chains of biochemical and neural reactions, some in the body proper and some in the brain, which are not mutually differentiated. They amount to an awareness of danger, a feeling of alarm, an urge to walk faster, and a hope you are finally out of danger. The consciousness is an amalgam of bodily feeling and mental imagery rooted in

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the organism. But an essential feature of it is the “you” - “a very real mental construction I will call the ‘self’”. “[T]he self is a repeatedly reconstituted biological state…” It is certainly not a homunculus or a Cartesian Theatre, nor even a central knower and inspector of everything happening in our minds. But it requires a number of brain systems to be active as well as numerous body systems. The core for the neural representation of the self is probably provided by primordial representations of the body proper in action. The basic reference is to the body, successive states of the organism, severally renewed each moment in multiple concerted maps, and each anchoring the self that exists at any one moment (I am paraphrasing Damasio’s statement). The important emphasis is on co-ordination and coherence of the resulting experience. Damasio bases his conviction of the significance of the idea of a self upon the reports of his brain-damaged patients (those who are not severely anosognosic). As they become aware of their deficiencies they immediately locate the difficulty they suffer in some part of their persons which they survey from the vantage-point of self. He concludes that our experiences tend to have a consistent perspective, as if most (though not all) the contents of the mind are grasped and “owned” by a single subject. He assumes that this perspective is “rooted in a relatively stable and endlessly repeated biological state,” and that the stability of this notion is due to the predominantly unchanging structure and operation of the total organism, slowly developing (he contends) “elements of autobiographical data.” The neural basis of the self consists first of a set of representations of the body (i.e., how it feels now and has felt lately, just prior to processes leading to the perception of some object - Damasio maintains that subjectivity depends largely upon changes taking place in the body state during and after the processing of an object of perception). This includes background feelings of body and emotional states. The collective representation of the body, says Damasio, constitutes the basis for a “concept” of self. Secondly, there is a varied set of representations (images, presumably, or what others have called ideas) of key events identified as autobiographical. On the basis of such events the conception of one’s identity can be constructed: images of what we do, whom and what we like, the objects we habitually use, the places we frequent and the actions we habitually perform. These involve the activation of topographically organized sensory neural maps. Along with these are special facts from our past such as where we

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live and work, the nature of our job or profession, the people to whom we are related and with whom we are friendly, nationality, and so forth. Finally there are recent memories in temporal relation with present events and our expectations and plans for the immediate future. Damasio concludes: “In brief, the endless reactivation of updated images about our identity (a combination of memories of the past and of the planned future) constitutes a sizable part of the state of the self as I understand it” (p. 239). The idea or feeling of the self (however we wish to represent it) is a consistently reconstructed evanescent reference state in which sensory signals and feelings of emotion occur ”in the coordinated actvity of multiple brain regions.” When responses are generated to some object, the self as described above does not know that its organism is responding, but Damasio says that a process which he calls the “metaself” could know provided that the brain creates some kind of description of the perturbation of the state of the organism resulting from its responses to the presence of an image, that the description generates an image of the perturbation, and the image of the self perturbed - all displayed in rapid interpolation with the image which triggered the perturbation. In short, the description concerns the perturbation of the organism’s state resulting from the brain’s response to the image. It seems that what he envisages as the basis of the metaself is a “convergence zone” or “third-party neuron assembly” reciprocally connected with the images of the self and its object, which builds a dispositional representation of the self in the process of changing as the organism responds to the object. What is so constructed is initially non-verbal, but becomes verbal when language enables us to say “I”. This is the source of subjectivity which, he asserts, is the key feature of consciousness. Referring to Dennett’s hypothesis of a “virtual machine” as the device for generating subjectivity, Damasio declares that, despite some similarity between his notion of image construction and Dennett’s of sequence construction creating our experience of a “stream-of-consciousness”, his (Damasio’s) device is definitely not a virtual machine. In fact, in a later chapter, Damasio rejects, as a modern variant of the Cartesian doctrine, the view that the mind and the brain are related “only in the sense that the mind is the software program run in a piece of computer hardware called brain” (cf. DE, pp. 247f).

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The dominant ideas in this account of the self and the mind are the essential part played by the feeling of the body, the coherence and wholeness of the felt organism, the significant co-ordination of the activity of different parts of the brain, the idea of the metaself and the importance of subjectivity, as keys to the notion and nature of consciousness. All these ideas will prove of preeminent importance in our subsequent consideration of the problemfrom which we began. Bodily Feeling as Foundation of Consciousness In his later book, The Feeling of What Happens, Damasio approaches more nearly the problem of consciousness with which I am concerned in these reflections; but still, from the viewpoint of a neurobiologist, he can hardly tackle it directly; for it is essentially a philosophical problem. Besides Descartes, Damasio is not unacquainted with older philosophers and he is aware that consciousness has long been an important topic in philosophy, yet he refers with appreciation only to the work of contemporary philosophers as having created within the past decade what is currently known as the field of consciousness studies. Consciousness, however, (or mind) has, one way or another, been a major concern of philosophy throughout its history.2 My immediate concern is to try to throw light, if possible, on the relation between neural activity and consciousness, between the brain and the mind, and Damasio’s study provides a wealth of evidence for some of the philosophical theories that seem to me to bring us nearest to understanding this relation. In particular, he continually gives support to Spinoza’s above-quoted doctrine. It is significant that, while his references to Dennett are always respectful, his own position is virtually diametrically opposed to Dennett’s. Everything that Dennett plays down, Damasio insists on as of prime importance. He asserts that consciousness is an entirely private, first-person phenomenon “part of the private, first-person process we call mind” (TFoWH, p 12). A sense of self, he declares, is an indispensable part of the conscious mind - all human consciousness is necessarily “consciousness with a sense of self” (p. 16). Mental images, he maintains, are fundamental to consciousness, and what constitutes images are qualia (p. 9). That the object of the mind is essentially the body is the constant implication of what Damasio tells us, for instance: “Consciousness begins when brains acquire the power, the simple power I must add, of telling a story without words, the story that there is a life ticking away in an organism, and that the states of the living organism, within body bounds, are continuously being altered by

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encounters with objects or events in the environment, or, for that matter, by thoughts and by the internal adjustments of the life process.” (p. 30) The important implications here are not only that the primary object of the mind is the body, but also that the living organism is an integral whole of organic activity, both physiological and mental. These implications give further credence to the theory I have suggested in other contexts and shall later try to develop in this study.3 But not only does Damasio’s submission support Spinoza, at times he inadvertently subscribes to what Descartes originally propounded - cogito ergo sum; in Damasio’s terms: “Consciousness, as we commonly think of it, from its basic levels to its most complex, is the unified mental pattern that belongs to the object and the self” (p. 11). Emotion is identified with bodily changes, visceral and musculoskeletal. In this Damasio follows James and Langer, but he distinguishes emotion from feeling, which, nevertheless, is the feeling of the bodily changes, of which we human beings can become conscious (as most animals, presumably, do not); thus what we become conscious of is the body. As he develops his theory of the structure of consciousness, this identification of the body as the object (Spinoza called it the ideatum) of the mind becomes more and more apparent. The main points of Damasio’s teaching are: (i) that emotion is the complex of bodily changes occurring in response to specific stimuli as an integral part of the regulation of metabolism and physiological processes that maintain homeostasis and promote the survival of the organism. These changes are unconscious and those which are overt are observable by others; (ii) the bodily changes involved in emotion include modifications of brain activity which come to constitute the basis for the feeling of the emotion; (iii) feelings are private and are not observable by others than the feeler, who, however, may not be conscious of them; (iv) “feelings are poised at the very threshold that separates being from knowing and thus have a privileged connection to consciousness” (Op.cit., p. 43); (v) “consciousness is rooted in the representation of the body” (p. 37). We shall see later that all these points underpin significant theories that the philosophers I have mentioned above have stressed in the past.

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Emotion per se, as a feature of the survival mechanism of the organism (part of the homeostasis regulation), is unconscious; but as it modifies certain brain processes, it generates an image (according to Damasio), presumably of the body changes engendered, through the medium of which it is felt. In the first instance, feeling also is not conscious, but it becomes conscious when it is known, in conjunction with a “sense of self” (p.36). This seems to imply that the images of the body changes, are not conscious, as such, but only when known in conjunction with the sense of self. What unconscious mental images could be I find difficult to understand, unless they are simply neural activity in the sensory centres in certain areas of the brain, stimulated before any sense of self has developed. This neural activity may be said to “represent” images of which we are not aware until we become conscious that we (our selves) have them. Consciousness for Damasio thus not only involves images but also requires a sense of self. How this comes to be we must next consider. The Structure of the Conscious Self The foundation of the sense of self is what Damsio calls the proto-self, which he describes as “an interconnected and temporarily coherent collection of neural patterns which represent the state of the organism” (TFoWH, p. 174). Of this, he tells us, we are not conscious. Of course, we are not conscious of any neural patterns; but the state of the organism which they are said to represent can be felt, and feeling may be more or less conscious according as attention is paid to it. The next phase is the core-self, inhering in the second-order non-verbal account that occurs whenever the proto-self is modified by an object. Of this, he says, we are conscious. Core-consciousness is of the here and now, involving working memory but not conventional long-term memory. The third and ultimate phase is the autobiographical self, requiring long-term autobiographical memory of incidents in the past (which may be explicit or merely implicit), and anticipated future developments. What triggers consciousness is the internal “exhibition” of a specific kind of wordless knowledge that our organisms have been changed by (interaction with) an object. Its simplest form is a “feeling of knowing” and Damasio seeks to discover how such knowledge is gained and why it arises in the form of feeling. Our first question must be how wordless knowledge is internally exhibited and to whom. Certainly not to a homunculus. Then it must be to the self, but self-consciousness is also an item of wordless knowledge that has to be exhibited. The only intelligible answer can be that the knowledge

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is exhibited to our selves in the form of feeling, and the feeling is of the state of the organism as modified - that is, the feeling of the body and the processes that maintain its life (homeostatic, visceral, and autonomic, including those that constitute emotion). Damasio describes the process in terms of neural maps in the brain, (i) of the organism, of its internal states as signalled to the brain by the processes that regulate its life; and (ii) of the object in the sensory and motor areas which it activates. These are firstorder maps which stimulate second order maps that can become images. The maps, presumably, are what the neuroscientist discerns, but the images can appear only (in the first instance) to the core-self. What emerges from the evidence marshalled by Damasio is (among other things) that the primary object of the mind is the body, that the awareness of the body, at the initial level, takes the form of feeling, and that consciousness is essentially the self’s knowledge of itself (qua proto-self) being modified by an object (an external cause). This is just what Spinoza tells us: that the mind is the idea of the body (its ideatum), that emotion is the affection of the body, and that passion is the idea of the body as affected by an external cause (Cf. Ethics, Pt. II, Axiom 4, P2, P13; Pt.III, Defs. 2 & 3). NOTE It was only after I had written this chapter that Damasio published his book, Looking for Spinoza, but even there he does not so much stress the agreement of his own work with Spinoza’s doctrine as seek for evidence of Spinoza’s life and character. It should be obvious to the reader why I am not critical of Damasio as I have been of Dennett. Damasio gives support, not only to Spinoza, but also to other philosophers’ views, from which I have derived profit, whereas Dennett’s position is largely opposed to them, as will become evident in the sequel.

NOTES 1

In his later book, The Feeling of What Happens, he shows that he is aware of the primacy of consciousness in these respects.

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2

Cf. my book, Nature, Mind and Modern Science (London, G.Allen and Unwin, 1954, 1968; reprnted by Routledge, 2002), Introduction and passim.

3

Cf. E.E. Harris, The Foundations of Metaphysics in Science (London, G. Allen and Unwin, 1965; reprinted, Atlantic Highlands, NJ, Humanities Press 1995, and London, Routledge, 2002), Chs. XVI and XVII; and The Restitution of Metaphysics (Amherst, NY, Humanity Books, Prometheus Press, 2000), Ch.12.

CHAPTER V THE DYNAMIC BRAIN Is the Brain a Computer? Cognitive scientists in the 1980s, with some exceptions, proceeded (tacitly or overtly) on the working hypothesis that the brain was like some sort of computer or virtual machine, treating brain functioning itself more or less as a black box and endeavouring to work out programmes that might deliver the sort of behaviour and/or phenomenal effects reported by subjects. It was assumed that the same results could be produced by the firing of neurons as by microchips. This kind of theorizing at first tended, by and large, to neglect the neurological facts (at times without sufficient attention to the neuro-physiological evidence already available). They did not always contend that the brain was precisely like a contemporary commercial computer, but rather that computer science could provide clues to its working and so help solve cognitive problems. Neurological researchers had for some time been examining the reaction of single neurons, stimulating cells in animals’ brains with impulses from fine electrodes. The results encouraged the idea that each cell responded to a specific feature of the environment as recorded by the relevant sense organ, as if coded to react to just one perceptual character. For instance, in the case of vision, one cell might be found to fire only when exposed to a definite colour of a particular shade (say, pillar box red), others similarly to other colours, some to edges running in precise directions, others to movement, and so on. It was assumed that each was excited by its own particular character and remained inactive when that was absent. These findings resulted from experimenting with anaesthetized animals, and the brain cells fired in response to their special stimuli irrespective of the comatose condition of the subject. Scientists, accordingly, tended to think of neurons as analogous to pixels on a computer screen, and the notion that the brain was a computer was reinforced. Evidence to the Contrary The neural functioning, however, turned out to be intriguingly complex. The sensory cortex was found to be hierarchically responsive, successive layers reacting to more detailed and refined characters of the objects presented. In the visual cortex, for example, cells in the primary layer (V1) 83

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seemed all to code for lines and edges, with intermittent knots of special colour-coding cells at intervals, so that they mapped the visual field as a whole mainly according to position. The next layer (V2) seemed to emphasise the shapes and inter-relations of objects; the next responded more precisely to such features as motion, depth, and texture; and subsequent layers reacted only to shapes and the specific characters of whole objects (e.g. hands, or faces). Similar hierarchical structure was found in other sensory centres with appropriate respective variation. The structure and functioning of the cortex seemed to suggest that perception consisted of the cerebral organization of “data” to construct a coherent and orderly scene. Problems, however, remained. First, how was all this welter of specific firing and complex series of maps tied together so that characteristics were attributed to each object correctly? Why was the colour red attached to the shape of a tomato and not to some other presented object? How could the scent of the rose be combined with the colour and shape of the right flower? Secondly, if certain cells reacted only to specific shapes, why was consciousness of the shape not lost when cells die, as they periodically do? Moreover, it was observed that neurons while they react vigorously to a special stimulus, also reacted less strongly to stimuli approximating in varying degrees to the particular character. This undermined the pixel interpretation of neural performance. Third, scientists were puzzled by the fact that our sensory acuity (especially vision) far exceeded the sensitivity of the receptive neurons in the sense organ; how did this precision come about? Investigators noticed that adjacent neurons were sensitive to closely related features, for instance, if one was strongly responsive to lines running at an angle of forty-five degrees to the vertical and more weakly to lines at other angles, the next neuron would be strongly responsive to lines pitched at, say, fifty degrees and less strongly to other inclinations. The reactions overlapped and the same stimulus excited a whole group of neurons with varying force. It then occurred to the researchers that the conscious effect might be produced by an averaging of the strengths of reaction of a group of neurons and that this would produce the required result with greater precision than could any single neuron. The method was called “population coding”. What it implied was that neural reactions were not so much digital as global. They were integrated and inseparably conjoined, so that groups acted as wholes to produce their outputs. The hypothesis offered a solution both of the acuity problem and of the retention of recognition of specific characters despite periodic loss of cells. The question how characters were correlated with the proper objects was answered by attributing the phenomenal effect to synchrony

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among strong firings. Nevertheless, theorists were still faced with difficult puzzles. If the outcome of group firings depended on the averaging of the strength of individual neuronal reactions, what calculates the average? Must this be assigned to yet other cells, and, if so, would not they too have to be averaged? If we are not to postulate an homunculus, would we now be sucked into an infinite regress? It would seem as if there must be some other agency using the brain as an instrument to reach a required result. Reading the literature, one finds writers sometimes representing the brain in this way, as if there were a separate observer reading off what the brain cells registered; at other times they seem to assume that the brain, or its parts, are themselves aware of what they are doing, that they have expectations and can make decisions. A New Approach The position so far reached was for the most part based on experiments with anaesthetized animals, but one experimenter, Robert Desimone, wanted to investigate the affects of attention, which demanded the use of conscious subjects, and he discovered that the intensity of firing of individual neurons varied as attention was diverted from or directed upon the relevant object. Such variable action was further evidence contraverting the assumption that brain cells behaved like transistors in a computer. Another development inducing a more holistic approach to the neurobiology of the brain was the influence of chaos and complexity theories. In order to assimilate neural activity to computation, because brain processes proved to be plastic and variable, minor adjustments had to be made in the measurements relating input to output, which seemed too small to make significant (if any) difference to the outcome of calculations. But chaos theorists had discovered that the minutest difference in initial conditions could, in the course of non-linear processes, result in enormous deviations in the eventual outcome. The general effect of chaos theory was a reaction against reductionism. It was found that what appeared on the surface to be chaotic confusion masked a complex order that emerged from the total process guided by what came to be called a strange attractor. It was impossible to explain the consequent effect by analysing the process and reducing it to disparate items. The organizing principle of the whole is what determined the detail of the total structure.

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The further effect of complexity theory (particularly in the hands of Stuart Kauffman), building on the conclusions of chaos theory, was the postulation of a principle of self-organization in adaptive systems capable of extracting order out of seemingly random occurrences, again implying a nisus to coherent wholeness. In the light of these findings, the attempt to interpret brain functioning as straight-forward computation inevitably became suspect. Complexity of Neural Activity Research in the last decade of the twentieth century disclosed that, although in some respects brain functioning might resemble that of a computer (for example, neuron firing is all or nothing, similar to the digital operation of a micro-chip), other features of brain-cell activity are wholly unlike the standardized and invariant behaviour of the hardware of a digital machine. The firing of a neuron is not merely an electrical discharge, it is an electro-chemical process depending on the movement across the cell membrane of ions of calcium, sodium, potassium and chlorine. There are numerous minute pores of different kinds serving different functions all over the cell wall, some promoting the flow of ions, others blocking it, regulating the flow back and forth. Alteration of the electrical potential of the membrane can cause a pore to open or close, and the performance of the cell is regulated by feedback loops that may enhance or restrain the activity of the pore. Voltage changes in one area tend to spread to others, and pores opening or shutting may create a drop in electrical potential that affects other pores resulting in a chain reaction running over the entire surface of the cell. Further, scientists discovered that brain activity was dominated by feedback controls, some with circuits restricted to a few neighbouring neurons and others much more complicated traversing the entire brain before returning to their source in modified form. This reciprocal excitation is what some neuro-physiologists call re-entry, and it is not confined to feedback processes. Moreover, a cell’s discharge was found to run in opposite directions at the same time, not simply down the axon, but also back over the cell and its dendrites. Synapses are altered in their degree of permeability and are variously affected according as the experience is important or otherwise to the needs of the organism: if it is important the transmission of impulses through the synapse is enhanced by attention; if not, it is reduced or altogether inhibited. In short, the reaction of the brain to any input is never predictable as is the response of a computer. There is, besides, the multiply diverse system of devices for releasing and directing the flow of

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chemical neuro-transmitters, including the release of nitric oxide (normally noxious) to activate enzymes in the axon that stimulate their production. All this goes to show that the brain is not a computer, and there are still more features of brains that confirm that conclusion. Gerald Edelman and Guilio Tononi tell us that “the billions and billions of connections that make up the brain’s connections are not exact”; that no two brains of the same size have the same connections, not even those of identical twins, as would computers of the same make; and the variability of neural connections at the microscopic level is enormous. Further, the input from the sense organs is never received by the brain in the form of a computer tape containing an unambiguous series of signals. Moreover, connections between neurons and neuronal groupings in the brain are reciprocal (“re-entrant”), and modules can perform differing functions (what Edelman and Tononi call “regeneracy”, presumably because when cells die or are damaged other structures can often take over their function).1 These authors also maintain that memory is effected in the brain by the ability of different neuronal systems to produce similar outputs: memory, they say, is nonrepresentational and is not simple storage as in a computer. The mass of empirical evidence disclosed demonstrates that theories of artificial intelligence can throw little or no light on how the brain operates, any more than they can on what I have said is the crucial problem. It follows, incidentally, that the organization of the brain and its activity is so fantastically complex and so intricately purposive that it could never, in the time available, have been evolved simply through sheer chance mutations. Anatomical brain structure is undoubtedly established in the first instance genetically, and variation is frequent and diverse, but it is not by any means all accidental, much of it is altered by its own operation. In fact, the cortex is self-organizing from infancy onwards, as dictated by experience. What proves to be advantageous to the survival of the organism would naturally be selected; but for the modern adult human brain to have been assembled and the mutually relevant and coherent functioning of its different regions determined by a succession of purely chance mutations would have required trillions of years more than the length of time brains at any level have been in existence on Earth. Edelman insists that brain circuitry and structure has throughout been developed by selection, an hypothesis he calls the theory of neuronal group selection (TNGS) and he aligns this theory with Darwinism. But here he is confusing different senses of the term “selection”. In Darwinian selection there is no element of deliberate choice: what is not sufficiently adapted to

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enironmental conditions simply dies out, and what is better adapted to survive reproduces more prolifically. But according to Edelman’s theory the pressure to modify brain structure must be felt by the animal concerned, which implies that there is already in the brain some system that enables it to apprehend the pressure and to give it additional attention which alters the relevant synaptic transmission pattern. This is selected according to its success and usefulness. The change is far from being purely random and the selection is more suggestive of Lamarkism than Darwinism. If TNGS is to be considered an application of Darwin’s doctrine, current Darwinism would have to be significantly modified. Brain-Body Holism Just as states of consciousness are eminently integrated and cannot be dissected into independent pieces, while at the same time they are decidedly differentiated, being internally diverse and almost infinitely various, so (Edelman and Tononi demonstrate) the neural processes in the brain that support them are both closely integrated and profusely differentiated. Separate neuronal groupings are highly specialized yet they work in concert being multiply connected by reciprocal linkages; they fire concurrently and coherently, correlating with the perception of an ordered scene of environing objects. Research into working memory also has revealed that it is not held in a special brain module (as computer memory is stored) but utilizes all the scattered nuclei that are invoked in the original experience, a process that involves the whole brain. As distinct experiences are found to involve numerous modules acting in different parts of the brain synchronously and in succession, directed by attention which is determined largely by what have been called “value systems” (ubiquitous networks of fibres connecting systems in the brain-stem with virtually all other parts of the brain), it is clear that the brain does not work piecemeal activating separate areas independently, but behaves as a single organ, correlating and concerting together the functioning of widely disparate systems. That this is the case is strongly supported by the hypothesis elaborated by Edelman and Tononi of what they call the dynamic core.2 an intricate complex of neuronal groupings distributed within the thalamo-cortical system (but not confined to it). Numerous clusters of cells, each with a special function, are linked into groups, which again are tightly, though variously, interconnected by re-entrant linkages. The dynamic core, they say, contributes directly to consciousness as does no other part of the brain. It is dynamic, not static; that is, it has not only developed over the time of maturation, but is continually changing with varying experiences and learning. The dominant feature of this complex is that any specific

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stimulus, whether originating externally or internally, excites not just one appropriate module but the entire dynamic core because of the intricate reciprocal linkages within and between systems and subsystems. Further, this dynamic core is connected, more loosely but nevertheless significantly, with other portions of the brain serving unconscious processes. Long polysynaptic parallel loops connect the basal ganglia, cerebellum, and other regions of the old brain with the dynamic core. These areas are responsible, among other functions, for subconscious activities that accompany and subserve conscious acts and perception. For instance, vision involves focusing the lense of the eye in accordance with the distance of the object, adjusting the aperture to the brightness of the light and contracting the eye and the neck muscles to move the head and eyeball to keep the object in the line of sight. All this is accomplished unconsciously. Similarly, unconscious adjustments and movements of the larynx and tongue facilitate speech expressing conscious thoughts and experiences. The conscious decision to grasp on object (say, a pen or a cup) triggers automatic and unconscious muscular adjustments and feedback directed movements in arm and hand. Motor skills required to play a musical instrument and competitive games are acquired, first by deliberate conscious concentration on the desired movements, but with continued practice they are executed automatically and without conscious direction. The driver of a car operates the pedals, the gear lever and the steering-wheel without conscious attention to the detailed movements once learning and practice have made his or her reactions automatic. Furthermore, all the above reactions and adjustments are affected by what the neuro-physiologists call value systems: the emotional charge produced by impulses from the brainstem and hypothalamus, impulses that cause emotive feelings appropriate to reward and failure. The neural connections between the dynamic core and the other parts of the brain effecting this collaboration between unconscious and conscious performances are such that the compound functioning is not separable into discrete activities; they are intimately interdependent and occur as one undissectable operation. Conscious decisions trigger unconscious accompaniments to action and unconscious preparations precede conscious acts, such (for instance) as speech, and when we lift a heavy weight the preadjustment of muscles to take the strain. Likewise, conscious thoughts, images, and intentions will evoke strongly or dimly felt emotions, which again will influence thought and action. Background emotions will determine moods, sentiments and attitudes.

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So in spite of the distinction to be drawn between the dynamic core, which is presumed directly to underpin consciousness, and the other regions of the brain controlling unconscious activities, the occurrence of both is involved in any conscious activity, and they both must operate in conjunction. Our conscious life is affected one way or another by everything that occurs unconsciously, and this includes not only the activity of the brain but all the physiological functions of the body which affect it (blood supply, sugar concentration, adrenaline secretion, and the like) as well as the control exerted upon those bodily functions by the brain activity itself. Undeniably, therefore, an imposing body of evidence testifies to the facts, not only that the brain does not operate digitally, but also that it functions as a whole in response to every stimulus. Moreover, this holistic functioning is closely dependent on that of the other organs of the body, giving evidence of the holistic operation of the entire organism. The “World Knot” Edelman and Tononi’s book, Consciousness, offers many valuable and illuminating intimations about the amazingly complex interconnections of the nerve cells in the brain and the astonishingly adaptive and plastic organization of their functioning, but its subtitle, How Matter Becomes Imagination, is hardly apt, for that is never explained and the authors never address the crucial problem, which (quoting Schopenhauer) they call “the World Knot”. However, there have been yet more neuro-physiological discoveries that may give us clues to the solution of this problem, for indeed we cannot hope to untie the World Knot without taking careful note of how the brain works. New Techniques and Brain Holism The Harvard psychologist, Stephen Kosslyn, found that he could not give an adequate explanation of the results of experiments he had devised on mental imaging without investigating their neurological background. His objective was to discover just what parts of the brain were activated by the experimental tasks he devised for his subjects. His initial attempts with electro-encephalographical techniques (EEG) proved too inaccurate and vague to be productive, but the advent and availability first of positron emission topography (PET) and later of functional magnetic resonance imaging (f-MRI) and magneto-encephalography (MEG) revealed with unprecedented accuracy and clarity just what areas of brain activity accompanied particular conscious accomplishments.

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It is important to notice that what these techniques revealed and measured was not simply neural firings and electrical transmissions, but momentary changes in blood supply and glucose provision to specific areas of the brain concomitant with the conscious tasks. So what was being recorded was not only the activity of the brain proper but at the same time the activity of the heart and the liver, as well as other organs, which that brain activity needed in order to function. Kosslyn’s primary aim was to prove that inducing mental imagery involved the visual cortex and took place in the same areas as did visual perception. The technical advances enabled him to do this fairly conclusively; but they also demonstrated with equal conviction that the brain did not operate like a computer. Not only did activity in the visual cortex show up, but PET pictures also revealed simultaneous activity in a number of other areas (the temporal lobes, the frontal lobes and elsewhere); in fact, Kosslyn found that a disturbance in one area of the brain provoked widespread echoes and activity of varying vivacity all over. The activity revealed was, in fact, so diverse that the brain could no longer be viewed as a collection of simple processing modules. As John McCrone puts it: “The whole brain - both the settings of its circuits and its global state of organization - would need to develop in concert...”3 Karl Friston, who was responsible for introducing the new techniques, was so impressed by the pervasive response of brain functioning to virtually every stimulation, that he advocated the adoption of a more dynamic view than was permitted by the computer model, a view which revealed holism of operation both in development and in momentary functioning. As John McCrone tells us:4 “Gradually... PET researchers came to realise that the widespread activity was telling them something basic about the brain.… the brain seemed to respond in a much more holistic way. Even the smallest mental effort appeared to send reverberations right across all its circuits.” Reaction Time Between 1960 and 1990 Benjamin Libet was conducting experiments which disclosed a time lag of up to half a second between the response in the brain to a sensory stimulus and the awareness of its source, and between preparatory activity in the brain and the conscious decision to make a bodily movement. Initially his findings were met by some with scepticism and

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controversy, and by others were welcomed with enthusiasm. The former resisted them as throwing doubt on human free will, and the latter, in particular Sir John Eccles, as evidence of a dualistic interaction between the brain and the mind. In fact, Libet’s discoveries should not have surprised psychologists familiar with the work of Helmholz and Wundt a century earlier, who had recognized and attempted to measure reaction times, nor those like Sir Frederick Bartlett,5 who had shown quite conclusively that perception was far from being immediate, but took time and thought to attain the recognition of objects. Moreover, if, as is well known, much unconscious activity supports conscious action, skilled and other, a time-lapse between its onset and the conscious accompaniment was to be expected. As for casting doubt on free will, that would hardly trouble those philosophers who rejected the notion of freedom as mere arbitrary uncaused choice (not to mention outright determinists) and who had taken note of F.H. Bradley’s famous essay on responsibility.6 If it is the case that consciousness supervenes only on a high intensity (possibly some threshold) of intimately coordinated and integrated neural activity, then it would naturally follow that some time should elapse between the first impact of a stimulus or the generation of an intention to move and the consequent awareness. And, as the initial stages of the process would be incomplete, fragmentary and unconnected, they would naturally be unconscious. To quote McCrone again: “If sensing and acting were brain processes - states of information that had to evolve - then there would always be a time course, an arc of development. And it also seemed logical that the early stages in the history of a moment would lack in strength, organisation, electivity of focus, or some other critical quality. Therefore, they would be subconscious. Or, rather, pre-conscious - a wave of activity on its way to become a settled state of consciousness... “There would be no specialised pathways, but instead a whole-brain reaction to the moment that began with many pockets of localised response and escalated to some more globally focused reaction.”7 The fact that in some sports the response to a stimulus occurs in much less than Libet’s half-second is explained by anticipation built up by learning and long practice. For example, a professional tennis player learns to anticipate an opponent’s service (often propelling the ball at over 100 kilometers an hour) from the prior attitude and movement of his shoulders and arm before the stroke is actually played. The reaction, of course, becomes unconscious and automatic to anticipate the active return of the ball, which cannot be a direct response to the visual perception of its

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trajectory (which would take longer than the delivery of the service), but to the total presented dynamic situation. Dynamism As research has proceeded with the new techniques, scientists have been weaned away from the digital computer model of brain functioning and are more and more inclined to adopt a dynamic approach. “Dynamism,” McCrone points out, “ - or more correctly, the science of complex, adaptive systems... says it is not the bits that count but the way they hang together.” It has been established that the way in which the brain performs is not compartmentalized, but that its various nuclei and sub-organs play interacting and co-ordinated parts in generating a state of consciousness. Even the two hemispheres are not as independent in their functioning as was once imagined but each contributes an essential factor conjoined with the other, the left concentrating on detail and the right on more comprehensive overall aspects of what is being apprehended or of the intended action - the two features interplay and are mutually interdependent. For instance with respect to speech, the left hemisphere is devoted to the choice of words, grammar and syntax, while the right determines the tone of voice, emotive stress, and overall sense and meaning. In the case of imaging, which was once thought to be the monopoly of the right brain, it has since been discovered that the left contributes the detail while the right grasps the general pattern. Where one school of thought once favoured the notion that reverberatory cortico-thalamus loops were the source of awareness, more recent investigation has convinced neurologists that what these effected was rather ancillary and that for conscious states a co-ordinated response by the entire brain had to be invoked. Further, the cortex, especially the frontal lobe, was formerly considered to be the seat of consciousness, but with the progress of research it was progressively revealed that the activity of many other parts of the brain was contributory to and intimately integrated with that of the cortex to shape the current conscious experience. Susan A. Greenfield asserts: “...there is no simple one-to-one matching between a function and a particular part of the brain.”8 In company with Damasio (perhaps in imitation of his simile9), she compares the activity of the brain to an orchestra playing tutti, in which different instruments producing different sounds are all contributing to one harmonious whole, and she insists that what is important is not so much

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what each is doing on its own, as the way in which they are organized together. Reductionism is not a fruitful way of thinking, nor of proceeding in research, and cannot help much, if at all, to elucidate the problem of consciousness. But we must understand reductionism aright. It means the belief that the matter under investigation can be explained by taking it to pieces and examining the behaviour of the bits in mutual isolation, and then trying to assemble the whole by collecting the pieces together again.It is plainly apparent that this is impossible with a living organism; to dissect is to murder and living activity cannot be restored once the organism has been dismembered. Much less can it illuminate the activity of a developed brain. As Susan Greenfield maintains: “As soon as a system is reduced to its tiniest components, something special is lost.” (Op.cit., p. 9) Not that the careful and detailed study of anatomy is unproductive, for structure in living things is the product of function and so throws light on the way the organism is able to behave. Similarly, without knowledge of the anatomy of the brain little progress could have been made in discovering its function. But the attempt to explain the latter simply in terms of the activity of single neurons, or even of complete centres, eventually broke down as techniques became more advanced and refined. The dynamic approach, which has been more fruitful, is forcing scientists to adopt an holistic view of the neuro-physiology of brain functioning; and not even that in isolation from the rest of the body’s physiology. This is what needs to be stressed in particular that brain processes are not isolable from the physiology of the body as a whole. They do not function if the various interdependent bodily processes, themselves regulated by the nervous system both cerebral and vertebral, are not working. The organism is an integrated whole, and Susan Greenfield is convinced that, at least in the higher species, consciousness is essential to the co-ordination and communication between body and brain, unifying nervous, endocrine, immune and vascular systems. She also believes that feeling primarily emotion) is basic to all consciousness; accordingly, insofar as bodily processes are felt, bodily feeling would be the foundation of all conscious experience. The conclusions to which we are led are, (1) that the brain acts as a whole, neither digitally nor piecemeal, and that its action is inseparably integrated with that of the rest of the body; (2) that consciousness issuing from neural functioning, is rooted in bodily feeling.

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The task for the philosopher, now, is to consider the implications of this scientific evidence for the problem of relating consciousness as experienced to the complicated electro-chemical processes that the neuro-physiologist has discovered and the way in which these processes are interconnected and interact.

NOTES 1

Cf. Gerald M. Edelman and Giulio Tononi, Consciousness: How Matter Becomes Imagination (London, Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, first published in USA as A Universe of Consciousness by Basic Books, 2000), pp. 47f, 81, 86f, 98.

2

Op.cit., Ch.12 et seq.

3

John. McCrone, Going Inside (London, Faber and Faber, 1999), p. 55.

4

John McCrone, Going Inside, p. 39.

5

Cf. Sir Federick C. Bartlett, Remembering (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1967), Ch.II.

6

Cf. F.H. Bradley, Ethical Studies (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1927), Essay I.

7

McCrone, op.cit. pp. 135-136.

8

Susan A. Greenfield, The Private Life of the Brain (London, Allen Lane, the Penguin Press, 2000), p. 6.

9

Cf. Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens, pp. 87-89, 179, and 216.

CHAPTER VI

GUIDANCE FROM PAST INSIGHTS

Collingwood has told us that “the philosophy that neglects its history spends its labour only to discover errors long dead.” But perhaps he was a little too pessimistic: to neglect past history may also deprive us of wise insights that have inspired previous philosophers and which may be of help in solving present problems. When we look at the past history of philosophy we notice that current neuro-physiological research has produced empirical evidence supporting the pronouncements of several earlier philosophers, both ancient and modern. Let us then re-examine the theories of some of these thinkers from whom we may gain illumination, providing an indication of the route to be taken if we are ever to solve our main problem. Aristotle As in many other areas, Aristotle frequently anticipates to a remarkable extent the discoveries of modern science, so in his discussion of the nature of the soul and its relation to the body he presents a conception which is profoundly suggestive. Throughout his system he explains everything in terms of matter and form, matter being mere potentiality (dunamis) and form being its actualization (entelecheia), actuality, or in some contexts activity (energeia). The form is the intelligible aspect of the thing of which the matter is what it is made of, (its hule). Every substance (with one unique and special exception) is a composite of matter and form, and substances are related to one another in a continuous range from proximate matter to subsequent form, the proximate matter itself being a similar composite. Thus, the four opposites (hot, cold, wet and dry) in differing combinations constitute matter to the form of the elements (fire, air, water and earth). These again are matter, in varying combinations, to the omoiomere - what we might call chemical combinations. Special coalescences of these are matter to the forms of living things, which are themselves related in a scale, the successive members of which are similarly ranked. Life is the form of

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living matter, and the soul, which enlivens the body of the living entity, is its form. Soul, Aristotle maintains, is the form (the actualization) of which the body is the matter (the potentiality), for it is the soul which gives the creature life and makes it the living being that it is. Substantially, nevertheless, body and soul, as matter and form, are one: “So one need no more ask whether body and soul are one than whether the wax and the impression it receives are one, or in general whether the matter of each thing is the same as that of which it is the matter…” (De Anima, 412 b. W.S.Hett’s translation). We must remember that this is only an analogy, for the form (eidos) of a living being is not just its shape (as is the impression on the wax), but is the actualization of the potentiality of its body - what, in Aristotle’s words, the body is “for the sake of”. In the case of living things, the body is for the sake (ultimately) of intellect and thought. This definition of soul, Aristotle points out, is a generalization. Specific kinds of living thing range in a gradation of forms, the first, of which plants are typical, being capable only of nutrition, growth and reproduction; the second being capable also of sensation, appetite and locomotion, common to animals; and the third is capable of thought and intellectual activity, peculiar to human beings. The earlier grades can exist without the later, but not vice versa: nutrition and reproduction do not require sensation and locomotion, but the latter cannot dispense with the former; nor can thought and intellect, which are not necessary to the earlier phases, be developed and exercised except on the basis of the lower vital functions. Hence self-conscious reflective thinking and intellect are the actualization of the potentialities of all the earlier stages, each of which is successively matter to the next as form. Each is the form of its specific type of body, and all are ultimately “for the sake of” intellect, or mind. That the soul is pure consciousness is implicit in what Aristotle says of it in various contexts. For instance, commenting on the view that the soul is the agent of self-movement, he remarks that the soul does not move by physical impact but “by choice and a process of thought” (De Anima, 406b25). At the same time he is fully aware that the affections of the soul involve the body. He considers whether thinking might be an exception, but remarks that if thinking is some sort of mental imagery (phantasia) even this cannot exist apart from the body.1 This is not far from Damasio’s contentions that the core-self is the feeling of the body (proto-self) and that all consciousness requires imagery.

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It is to be noted that the Greek word which Aristotle most frequently uses for “form” is eidos (although he also uses morphe) and eidos translates into Latin and English as “idea”, a concept he inherited from Plato and the Pythagoreans.2 Significantly, also, he tends to identify eidos with logos, which is appropriately translated “formula” or “ratio”, the proportion of constituents in a mixture, or the principle of organization which constitutes the form of the matter under investigation. Thus the thinking soul or mind, which is the form of the body is its principle of organization. (Aristotle rejects the theory of Philolaus that the soul is the proportion of the elements constituting the body). What all this amounts to is that the human mind is the form (or idea eidos) of the human body, a highly organized complex phase of matter, incorporating all prior stages in the scale of forms. Yet as a composite of matter and form the living human being is one substance only, not two, as the wax and the impressed pattern are one and the same thing. Let us now compare this with what Spinoza teaches. Spinoza Like most seventeenth century thinkers, Spinoza has little respect for Aristotle, whose system had been debased due to its use and adaptation by the Scholastics in the Middle Ages; yet, whether inadvertently or under the latent influence of Aristotelianism (transmitted from the Schoolmen through Descartes, who was educated at the Jesuit College of La Fleche), Spinoza’s doctrine has much in common with Aristotle’s. First, Spinoza proves that there can be only one Substance (identified with God), which is infinite and possesses infinite Attributes. The Attributes are not static categories but are dynamic active powers of God from whose nature, under each of the Attributes, there necessarily proceed infinite things in infinite ways (modes). But under every Attribute the order and connection of modes is the same, that of ideas being the same as that of things. Further, every mode, under whatever Attribute, is identical in Substance with the corresponding mode under every other Attribute, hence every idea is identical in substance with its object (its ideatum). As already noted, Spinoza maintains that the human mind is the idea of an actually existing thing, namely the human body, and nothing else (Cf. Ethics, Part 2, Props.11-13). So, just as Aristotle asserts that the mind is the form (eidos) of the body, Spinoza holds that the mind is the idea of the body, which we have seen is, in effect, the conclusion reached by the twentieth century neuro-physiologist, Damasio. And just as Aristotle insists that body

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and soul are one and the same substance, so Spinoza insists that the idea (the mind) and its ideatum (the body) are identical in substance - one thing (res). Here there is no Cartesian dualism, nor is Spinoza’s theory one of parallelism (as some commentators have thought); idea and ideatum are one and the same thing conceived under two different Attributes - one thing (res) with two aspects, physiological (Extension) and psychological (Thought). What Spinoza means by the idea of the body, is not that our consciousness is of the facts of physiology (as Sir Frederick Pollock mistakenly interprets the doctrine), but that it is the way in which we feel our bodily processes. He contends that nothing can happen in the body that is not perceived by the mind (Ethics II, Prop.12), which may at first seem to be a somewhat extreme statement; but the evidence of modern psychology and neurophysiology seem to support it, for every bodily change which takes place has some effect on our consciousness, either as background emotion (mood), or primary emotion, besides the general tone of bodily feeling and the sensations we constantly experience, whether at the focus or in the background of attention. Further, Spinoza is careful to distinguish between confused and distinct ideas of the body. Most of our perceptions of the body, he says, are confused (Ethics II, Prop.28) for a number of reasons, among which is the fact that when our bodies are affected by other, external, bodies the ideas of the affections involve both the nature of the external bodies and that of the human body; we then either substitute one for the other (as when we attribute to an external body characteristics of our own sensation - for instance, when we say that the road runs round the hill), or confuse them together (as when we describe a touch sensation as “rough” or “hot” - these are my examples, not Spinoza’s). The more distinct ideas of the body would be those more scientifically conceived. Just as Aristotle correlates human intellectual capacities with a body that is more highly developed than that of lower animals and plants, so Spinoza explains that bodies are complex in varying degrees, and that the more complex have the most versatile minds. The Attribute of Extension (as we have said) is a dynamic power of God, from the specific character of which immediately proceed two infinite modes, motion-and-rest (presumably what we today would call some kind of energy) and “the face of the whole universe” (facies totius universi, that is., the structure, or order, of the whole physical world). Finite bodies, which next proceed from God’s creative power under this Attribute, are first distinguished one from another merely by the proportion of motion-and-rest they involve (compare Einstein’s equation e = mc2). These are the simplest bodies. When two or more such

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simple bodies are contiguous they combine to form a more complex body, the individuality of which persists as long as the proportion of motion-andrest transmitted among its constituents remains constant. Of each and every one of these bodies there is an idea in the infinite intellect of God; so all things are (in some degree) beminded. The minds of those that “are more apt than other bodies to act and be acted upon simultaneously in many ways” are more apt to perceive many things simultaneously, and “in proportion as the actions of one body depend on itself alone and the less other bodies concur with it in its actions, the more apt is its mind to understand distinctly.”(Ethics II Prop. 13, Scholium). Clearly, in this description of the more complex bodies in the hierarchy, Spinoza is referring to living bodies, the minds of which are more capable of clear and distinct thinking the more their bodies are complex and selfmaintaining. We may infer that the minds of the simpler bodies are correspondingly simple and in most cases are too inept at perceiving to be classified as minds proper. Like Damasio, Spinoza was well aware that knowledge goes hand in hand with consciousness and that ideas differ in degree of “distinctness” (from imaginatio to scientia intuitiva). He asserts with some emphasis that ideas are never just “dumb pictures on a tablet” (E2P49S) but always and at every level are in some degree active, involving judgement, affirmation and/or negation, even when they are passions. He is equally insistent (with Descartes) that to be conscious is to know indubitably that we exist (Cf. his comments on scepticism in the Tractatus de Intellectus Emendatione). The centrally relevant asseveration of Spinoza’s doctrine for our purpose is that the mind is the body’s knowledge (idea) of itself as affected by other bodies. When it is the passive effect of an external cause, this idea is confused. It is what Damasio describes as the feeling of the proto-self when modified by the effect upon it of an external object, the feeling of what happens in the body as mine - as I come to know that I have it; and as the reactions of the body come more fully under its control so its mind becomes more active and its thought more comprehensive and adequate. This theory of body-mind relation, I shall later try to show, like Aristole’s, will give us a fruitful clue to the answer to our crucial question. Hegel An account of body-mind relation too much neglected, and extraordinarily insightful, one which develops and elaborates the Aristotelian position in accordance with a new but kindred concept of the universe of Nature, is developed by Hegel in the first section of his Philosophy of Spirit (Geistesphilosophie), what he calls Anthropology.

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Hegel conceives Nature as the self-external manifestation of the Absolute Idea (a conception originally derived from Plato’s Idea of the Good but for Hegel consisting of the identification of subject and object as the whole of reality). In the Preface to his Phenomenology of Spirit Hegel asserts that “the Truth is the Whole”, but the whole, only in its systematic development and explication; and the principle of order structuring the Whole is the Idea , which, for Hegel, is the Concrete Universal, specifying itself dialectically in and as a scale of forms, natural, conceptual, and institutional. The actualization of subjective mind involves the existence of a living organism, a developed natural being and so it presupposes the existence of the whole of Nature. The dialectical relationship is typical of the way in which a whole develops itself.3 Qua whole it is complete, but as such it cannot be contained in any limited extension, spatial or temporal. What so appears, therefore, is always more or less partial, but as integral to the whole it is what it is in virtue of, and is defined by, its relations to everything else. Consequently, as self-contained it is self-contradictory, asserting itself as if independent, excluding its other: what it is not, yet what is essential to its nature as that which defines it. Accordingly, to be properly and comprehensibly itself it demands, and turns into, its other (what it is not) and unites with it; thus the opposites are reconciled in a more complete and self-sufficient entity - e.g. (to cite an example from modern biology, not yet available to Hegel) a fertilized egg-cell, while it is potentially a mature animal is as yet only a single cell, and becomes what it has in it to be only by turning into its opposite, a multiplicity of equipotential cells; then the egg (implicitly the whole creature) becomes an integrated system of diversified and specialized cells, at first developing in independent groups (again the opposite of the previous stage), and then becoming mutually interdependent and coherently interactive, their unity and multiplicity being reconciled. The absolute totality of the real, according to Hegel, develops analogously, first manifesting itself as Nature, as an external manifold in space and time, which develops from a physical and chemical matrix to an organic totality, overcoming its self-externality, in dialectically related stages, and then, through the living organism (especially the human body), it internalizes itself as sentience to become the consciousness of its environing world. So object becomes subject, and the two are united in life and cognition to become a personified mind aware of itself and of the object of its cognition, Nature (the process of its own becoming). The final consummation is an ideal totality (the Absolute Idea, which is the Truth, and is identified by Hegel with God). This is a severely compressed account of the Hegelian

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system, as I understand it, which will, I hope, suffice as a background to the theory he develops of the relation of mind to body. Hegel tells us that Spirit (mind) is the truth of Nature, by which he means, first that what Nature potentially is - what it has in it to become - is mind; secondly, that mind is the knowledge of Nature, for truth must be known, and knowledge to be genuine must be true. Knowledge, further, is a mental category: in the full sense, only a mind can know. How does this transition from Nature to Mind happen? The processes of Nature constitute a progressive dialectical overcoming of the self-externality of spatio-temporal physicality, first in the mechanical interdependence (such as gravity) between material bodies, then through the mutual affinities among chemical elements, then in the organic unity of the limbs and organs of living bodies. Each phase presupposes and includes the prior phases within itself, enfolded, transformed and annulled (in Hegel’s term, aufgehoben). At this stage, through the physiological self-maintenance of the living organism, the whole gamut of forms is “inwardized” (erinnert), subjectivized in sentience. The first phase of Spirit or Mind is what Hegel calls the soul, that is, sentience (Empfindung), but the sentient soul emerges from Nature with characteristics imposed by the natural conditions of its existence: the changing seasons, the variations of night and day (to which response is made in sleeping and waking), and climatic contrasts specific to different regions of the Earth. These manifest themselves in racial differences and local types, with varieties of temperament, talents, and disposition correlative to the external conditions, which are displayed in inherited characters, both mental and physical. These are modified in the course of the life-history of the organism: in infancy, youth, maturity and senility. The germ of personal identity and opposition to another is evidenced in sexual differences, through which one individual seeks completion and satisfaction in conjunction with its opposite; as Hegel puts it, one individual seeks and finds him (or her) self in an other. The characters of the inchoate soul are physical and physiological in adaptation to the cosmic and telluric influences, but are also mental inasmuch as they are “inwardized” (erinnert) in sentience as bodily feeling. The feeling, moreover, is at one and the same time the feeling of the body and of all the natural influences determining its functioning and character. So the inwardization of natural determinations is at once the immediate unity of body and mind and the basis of an awareness of the external world. Thus the spatio-temporal extensivity of physico-chemical nature having been overcome in the organic unity of the living body is cancelled, yet

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preserved transformed (aufgehoben) in the internalized subjectivity of sentience, the feeling of the natural characters and alterations of the body that constitute soul. As the body is the sublated whole of nature registering natural changes and responding to influences from its remotest regions, that whole is enclosed within the soul as one composite but (as yet) undiscriminated feeling. As Hegel puts it: “The soul is in itself the totality of Nature, as individual soul it is a monad; it is itself the posited totality of its particular world, so that this enclosed within it is its filling, [in opposition] to which it stands (verhalt) only against itself.” (Enzyklopaedie der Philosophischen Wissenschaften, 403) Thus is the externality of Nature “idealized”: that is, its multiplicity is unified in a single, soon to become self-conscious, whole. But the idealized whole, as we shall presently see more precisely, is not separate from the body; it is no ghost in a machine (what Hegel satirically calls ein Seelending). “Sentience, as such,” he says, “is the healthy communion (mitleben) of the individual mind in its bodiliness” (Enz., 401). And the body is permeated throughout by soul, as feeling is in and of all its parts and organs. There are two words in German for “feeling”: Empfinden and Fuhlen. Up to this point Hegel has used only the former, but the next phase of the dialectical development of the soul is as fuhlende Seele. Whereas the soul in the earlier phase is merely sentient, at the next level it feels itself as a self. What Hegel means seems to be something like Damasio’s insistence that the sensed bodily processes must be felt as mine. At this level, however, the feeling of self is not yet clearly opposed to not-self. Subject and object are not yet distinguished: self and feeling, while they are both “mine” are not yet discriminated. What finally makes the soul actual is the identification of inner and outer, by the imprintation on the body, through habit, of the feeling responses of the self. In habituation these responses become immediate and automatic, and are unconsciously performed. So the body becomes the outward sign of the inner experience. Hegel quite plainly asserts that sentience is subconscious and that its content is immediate and transient. He also maintains that everything in consciousness has its source and origin in sentience. The emergence of the Ego at this point is the result of the self’s distinguishing of itself from its sensations and feelings, while it is evertheless immersed in them, to become aware of itself as I. It thus makes its prior stage (sensibility) its object from which it distinguishes itself as subject, at one and the same time becoming conscious of itself and aware of the outer world registered in

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its feeling. Sensibility now becomes perception, through the activity of attention which singles out specific objects, and develops to understanding and reason. Into the detail of this further dialectical development we need not go. For Hegel body and mind are one, he entertains no dualism. The mind is the dialectical transformation of the body, which is itself the epitome of Nature, all the phases of which are sublated in it. The Whole (the Idea) is immanent throughout Nature and each successive phase is a more adequate manifestation of the Whole (a more appropriate specification of the concrete universal). So the relation between body and mind is, as Hegel maintains, that of the particular to the universal. It is the relation between successive phases of a dialectical process, in the ultimate concrete universal’s selfspecification. The specific forms are adequate, in progressively increasing degrees, to the wholeness of the Idea. Thus the mind is simply the body raised to a higher degree of organized wholeness, more adequate to the universal principle that determines the absolute whole of reality. F.H. Bradley The metaphysic elaborated by F.H. Bradley is one in which our problem is insoluble. But his doctrine of immediate experience is suggestive and worth further consideration and development. For Bradley, the real is an absolute experience, which imparts itself in ways that we cannot understand to innumerable finite centres (ourselves). In its primary and most undeveloped form our experience is “immediate”, that is, mere feeling, which is the matrix and the inseparable accompaniment of every other kind of experience. Immediate experience Bradley describes as “a positive, non-relational, non-objective whole of feeling” within which, by the activity of attention, we distinguish differences and abstract complexes, creating ideal constructions, such as body, soul, self, nature, etc., none of which, he maintains, under critical examination, can be made self-consistent. They are thus none of them in fact real; they are all appearances of the real, forming a series increasing in degree of reality. Body and soul, being severally self-contradictory, neither have any consistent meaning, and the kinds of relation we imagine as existing between them are ultimately unintelligible. It will follow that on this doctrine we could never discover how the brain produces consciousness. In fact, as consciousness is experience, and for Bradley experience is the nature of reality, while body is merely an ideal construction within it, the question how a body can generate experience makes no sense. Subject and object are themselves abstractions made within the “non-objective whole” of feeling,

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which itself is neither subjective nor objective. In the ultimate reality, which (according to Bradley) we can know only in general terms, all contradictions are resolved, and all abstractions (while preserved) are harmoniously united; but how this is accomplished our finite minds cannot comprehend. Bradley refuses to identify immediate experience with the unconscious, although clearly the feeling which constitutes it is often subconscious. He also declines to speculate whether at any level experience could be no more than immediate. Nevertheless, all our conscious awareness is derived from and all our objects are distinguished within the mass of feeling that primarily is the positive, non-objective whole of feeling and felt in one. “At every moment” (he writes) “my state, whatever else it is, is a whole of which I am immediately aware. It is an experienced nonrelational unity of many in one. And object and subject and every possible relation and term, to be experienced at all, must fall within and depend vitally on such a felt unity.” 4 It is clear that, for Bradley, whatever the relation might be between the unconscious, the sub-conscious and the conscious, consciousness is experience and is originally derivative from feeling (immediate experience), and this so far agrees with what Damasio contends, that feeling is the source of conscious awareness There are serious difficulties in Bradley’s doctrine of appearance and reality, and his theory of finite centres in relation to them. I have discussed these difficulties elsewhere5 and it is not necessary to do so here. It will profit us more to attend to another account of feeling, put forward by a more recent philosopher, R.G. Collingwood. Collingwood The work in which we find Collingwood’s theory relevant to our present investigation is The New Leviathan, in which he begins by addressing the question of the alleged division between body and mind. “Man’s body,” he says “is made of matter and the study of man’s body belongs to that group of studies which are concerned with ‘the material world’: what are called the natural sciences.” (Ibid., 1.3). As man’s body is alive it is an organism and what that means Collingwood leaves to the physiologist to explain, saying that the answer to “What is Life?” is “What physiologists investigate”. He goes on to say that “Man’s mind is made of thought.” (1.61) The sciences of the mind, Collingwood says, differ from the natural sciences in that they are reflective and teach us only things of which we are already

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conscious (1.71). Man, as body, is whatever the sciences of body say that he is; as mind he is whatever he is conscious of being. (1.83-1.84) Like Spinoza, Collingwood asserts that mind and body are not two things but one and the same, known in two different ways (Ibid., 2.43). The question of the relation between them is a bogus question, for there is no such relation and the traditional theories: Psycho-physical Paralellism, Psycho-physical Interactionism, and Epiphenomenalism, are old wives tales, which nobody believes, not even those who expound them. Discussion of them is simply academic, a case of what Hobbes called “insignificant speech”. Again, as Spinoza insists that modes under one Attribute cannot be explained through causes under a different Attribute, Collingwood maintains that problems arising in the reflective sciences of mind cannot be solved by the natural sciences (pace Dennett) but only by further reflection, and that questions concerning physical and physiological matters cannot be answered by reflection but only by the natural scientist. Although the problem of the relation between body and mind is a psuedoproblem, that of the relation between the natural sceinces and the sciences of mind (or Man) is not. Collingwood thinks it should be investigated, but declines to do so himself in this context. There are two legitimate senses of the word “body”: one referring to a material entity, as used by the physicist, chemist and physiologist, and the other a psychological sense which refers to bodily feeling (Ibid., 3.1ff), as when one speaks of bodily pleasure, bodily appetite. Such feeling he identifies with sensations and the emotions attendant upon them (4.1). Feeling, Collingwood says, is an apanage of mind, it is the proper object of consciousness, which is the essential constituent of mind. Simple feeling is the object of simple consciousness, which is not knowledge although it is the root of knowledge (4.3). To know is to be conscious and to reflect on that consciousness, to attend to an object, make suppositions about it and to raise questions concerning it. These specialized operations of thought are matters for further consideration. A feeling, Collingwood tells us, is a here-and-now (compare Damasio’s core consciousness), which has a focal region that is intense and definite, and a penumbral region that has no outer edge, in which precision and intensity decrease to a minimum. Within the here-and-now distinctions are made by the act of selective attention, which sharpens and heightens the consciousness of what it selects and dims the consciousness of the rest. This muffling or blunting of the objects outside the focus of attention Collingwood identifies with what psychologists call repression. It is

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attention that constructs figure and ground as the object of consciousness (4.55), Without attention the sensory field is a dazzle or blur in which all the sensed qualities are confused. In the overlapping and interpenetrating mixture of simple feeling elements, selective attention makes a pattern (or many patterns) reducing the confusion to order, making positional and qualitative distinctions. It also distinguishes between different sense modalities and between sensation and its accompanying emotion, as well as between the sensing and the here-and-now within which it occurs. Whether feeling itself, what is sensed, is conscious, or whether it is present “unconsciously” before we are aware of it, he professes to be ignorant. This is one of the respects in which feeling is ambiguous, and there are others besides, which we need not here consider. Here again we have a theory of feeling, which is a feeling of the body (in Spinozan terms, the idea of the body) on the threshold of consciousness, and of which we become conscious when we attend to it. Attention is selective and by selecting, Collingwood maintains, it creates “data” for consciousness and organizes them into patterns (or systems), which together construct the awareness that we experience of ourselves in relation to the environing world. By way of comparison we may recall Merleau-Ponty’s insistence on the pre-predicative involvement of le corps vecu with the world in which we existentially feel ourselves to be. It is the “lived” (felt?) body in its involvement with external objects that, when organized in the pre-perceptive phase (as he further asserts), presents to us the world in which we feel ourselves to be. Merleau-Ponty, as does Collingwood, attributes to attention the function of creating its object, rejecting the view that attention acts like a searchlight to reveal what is already present. The two theories are not exactly the same, yet there is common ground in what they affirm. In another work, An Essay on Philosophical Method, Collingwood sets out a theory of the structure of what he calls the philosophical universal. Its species, he maintains overlap (e.g. in ethics, pleasure, advantage, duty and virtue, are species of moral goodness, but are none of them mutually exclusive). And they overlap because they are each of them forms of the universal itself, but at differing and progressive degrees of adequacy to its nature as the generic essence which they specify. The universal is thus constituted by a scale of forms, each of which is distinct from the others, each is the opposite of its predecessor and its successor (for distinction and opposition are species of difference which overlap), and each is a manifestation of the generic essence in a specific degree of adequacy.

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This theory is an almost exact representation (possibly intentional) of the Hegelian dialectical logic; and if it is combined with Collingwood’s account of feeling (something he himself does not undertake) a theory closely akin to Hegel’s emerges, in which the physiological activity of the living body may be considered as one form in a scale and feeling as the next, mutually they are distinct and opposite specific manifestations of an organized whole, specific forms serially increasing in degree of adequacy to what is finally realized in an ideal comprehension of a systematic world. Collingwood does not commit himself to such a theory of the relation between the physiological and the mental, in fact he declines to consider it, although the relation between the natural sciences and the reflective is one that he thinks ought to be addressed. Nevertheless, his own doctrine could lead to some such resolution of the problem. Susanne Langer One other twentieth century philosopher deserves mention. In her Philosophical Sketches and in Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling, Susanne Langer contends that physiological activity, when it reaches a certain threshold of intensity is felt.6 And she compares the emergence of feeling from physiological functioning to the transformation occurring when a simple triangular pattern of straight lines is rotated so as to produce a pattern of curved lines in which the triangles are not apparent and an entirely new effect is produced.7 Unfortunately, Langer, despite lengthy discussions of the stages of the evolution of language in birds and animals, never succeeded in developing a theory of consciousness out of this insight about feeling, and we are left to do the best we can to push the suggestion further. Where are we led? Reflecting on the above brief review of these philosophers, it has first become clear that modern neuro-scientific discoveries have confirmed the speculations of several of them, especially the last four. There is a definite similarity between the views of Aristotle and Spinoza, who insist, in particular, on the identity of body and mind, without falling foul of the oversights of neurological facts that have been committed by contemporary identity theorists.8 Most notable is the contention common to Hegel, Bradley, Collingwood and Susanne Langer that the matrix (so to speak) of consciousness is immediate (or bodily) feeling. So the next question we must consider, is how the transition from feeling to consciousness proper occurs.

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NOTES 1

Cf. De Anima, 403a5.

2

The Pythagoreans used the term to denote the shape or “form” of a number (e.g., triangular for 3, square for 4, and so forth). They believed that all things were numbers, so the eidos of numbers were also the “forms” of things. Plato took over this notion and generalized it. As numbers are purely intellectual concepts, the forms of sensible things, he maintained, were their ideas or concepts, which were not sensible but purely conceptual. Whereas Plato kept the ideas strictly separate and apart from sensible things, which (as he put it) merely imitated (or “participated” in) the ideas, Aristotle insisted that form and matter were one and the same “substance” and existed in unison.

3

Cf. my Formal, Transcendental and Dialectical Thinking (Albany NY, State University of New York Press, 1987), Ch. 8; Cosmos and Anthropos (Atlantic Highlands NJ, Humanities Press, 1991), Ch. 2, and The Restitution of Metaphysics (Amherst NY, Humanity Books, Prometheus Press, 2000), Ch. 8.

4

F.H. Bradley, Essays on Truth and Reality (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1914), Ch.VI, p. 175f.

5

Cf. my Nature, Mind and Modern Science (London, G. Allen and Unwin, 1954, 1968; reprinted by Routledge, 2002), pp. 256-264.

6

Cf. Susanne K. Langer, Philosophical Sketches (Baltimore MD, John Hopkins Press, 1962), pp. 8-9.

7

Cf. Mind. An Essay on Human Feeling (Baltimore MD, John Hopkins Press, 1967), Vol.I, Ch.1.

8

Cf. my book, The Foundations of Metaphysics in Science, Ch.XV, pp. 300ff.

CHAPTER VII THE CONDITIONS OF CONSCIOUSNESS There is general agreement among neuro-scientists that consciousness arises on the basis of sentience, which is equally the view of philosophers like Hegel and Bradley and Collingwood. Sentience, indeed, constitutes the psychical field, the locus of mental phenomena. Likewise, the empirical evidence copiously supports Spinoza’s contention that the mind is the idea of the body and (as Damasio has maintained) that the body is the framework within which the mind operates. Bodily feeling is thus the basic level of consciousness, as Collingwood contends. But he also points out that feeling is, in many ways, ambiguous: first, there is the question, at best difficult to answer, whether feeling is always conscious or may be unconscious; there is also the fact that we sometimes speak of feeling with a cognate accusative (to feel a pain, for example) and at others of feeling something like a smooth surface, or seeing a colour, designating an object. My purpose will not be served by enumerating at length and discussing, as Collingwood does, the many ways in which feeling can be ambiguous, but it is desirable to establish some degree of clarity on significant points. To what extent is feeling conscious? Thinkers like Husserl, speak of “hyletic” consciousness as a sort of “matter” from which the consciousness of objects is constituted, and of course for Husserl consciousness is basic. It is much in this sense that I am proposing to use the term “primitive sentience” while admitting that sentience covers every kind of sensory experience. Nevertheless there can be doubt whether every level of sentience is conscious. Collingwood confesses that he does not know, and Freud would certainly have maintained that some such experience (e.g., libido is unconscious); we frequently become aware that at some time past we had heard a clock chime although we are only now conscious of the fact, and there are many habitual actions that we undertake without being conscious in detail of how we perform them, yet we must at the time feel that we are making the necessary movements (for instance, in playing a game of skill). Like Collingwood, I have to admit that I do not know whether primitive sentience is always conscious, but I am inclined to believe that it is not, and I think Hegel is correct in asserting that consciousness proper entails making a distinction between subject and object, which is not present in primitive

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sentience. What Collinwood does assert is that feeling is an apanage of consciousness, its proper object. There can be little dispute about the further assertion that attention, by singling out some feature of feeling or primitive sentience, creates a datum for perception, and that we do not perceive unless we are conscious. I therefore propose to regard this as the initial phase of consciousness. The effect of such singling out is to produce a figure and ground contrast by bringing the datum into prominence against a background of less definite content, without which there is no definite object of which to be conscious. That attention is an essential feature of consciousness is, therefore, fairly obvious and it is clear that attention is the activity that organizes sentience the psychical field - by distinguishing elements in it as objects for perception. For this reason it has been called (in particular, by Collingwood) selective. The epithet, however, should not be misunderstood in this context to mean that in distinguishing the object from its sentient background attention is necessarily the agent of deliberate choice. Choice of necessity would involve attention, but not vice versa. That attention organizes the sentient field has been argued and demonstrated in the most illuminating detail by Merleau-Ponty. Although we were unable to find in his theory any direct indication of how what I have called the crucial question could be answered, his detailed account of how the perception of objects and the external world emerges from pre-perceptive sentience is most instructive and convincing. Although he rejects (as excessively intellectualist) the view that perception is judgement, what he objects to is rather the notion that our common perception involves explicit ratiocination - which, of course, it does not than that it implicitly involves judgement. But Merleau-Ponty’s penetrating interpretation and analysis of the psychological facts clearly and persuasively display how the development and exercise of perception is implicitly and in fact the detailed and intricate ordering of the content of the sentient (psychical) field. In his own words: “We now begin to see a deeper meaning in the organization of a field: it is not only colours, but also geometrical forms, all sense-data and the significance of objects which go to form a system. Our perception in its entirety is animated by a logic which assigns to each object its determinate features in virtue of those of the rest, and which ‘cancel out’ as unreal all stray data.” (The Phenomenology of Perception, p. 313).

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This “logic” is the logic of organization, of distinguishing, identifying and relating which is the product of attention and when it is made explicit it becomes judgement, as we shall demonstrate anon. What directs attention? This is not, in all cases, an easy question to answer. It has been noted that feeling of some sort is always involved, because feeling is the primary object of consciousness. In many instances we can trace back the excitation of attention to innate emotions and impulses such as fear, curiosity, anger, or sex (instincts evolved to protect the individual and reproduce the species). But in developed consciousness there are innumerable occasions when attention is attracted to objects which have little or no obvious, or at best a very tenuous, relation to these innate instinctive reactions. When my attention is drawn to a spectacular sunset, or to the beauty of some delicate and graceful flower, it is by no means easy to trace back the attraction to any primitive instinct. What Edelman and others have called the value system, developed as a result of experience, the enjoyment of occasional pleasures and pains, no doubt plays a significant part in the direction of attention. But something more must be at work. Clearly no attention need be directed to the stimulus of a reflex movement to bring it into operation, but any deliberate action requires some degree of attention to certain of its contributory factors; for instance, the driver of a car may act largely automatically, yet she or he must at least pay attention to the circumstances that make it necessary to turn the steering-wheel; and it is not always easy to decide what the directing agent might be. Still more difficult is it to discern what drives attention when I deliberately direct it to some activity in which I feel disinclined to engage (e.g. tedious work), forcing it away from some pleasure which I would prefer. One would normally say that “I” turn my attention, or force myself to attend to the matter in hand. To understand what we mean by this claim, we still need to know how to identify the “I”. Neuro-physiologists (despite all the important work that they have done on attention) have not, so far as I am aware, discovered any special neural activity in the brain corresponding to this direction of attention, if indeed they have identified any that corresponds to the exercise of attention itself. PET studies have revealed that attention increases the activity of some neural groups and reduces that of others - which is what we should expect. It has also been established that the firing of certain neurons (in the IT system) facilitates visual discrimination, which would presumably favour the attraction of attention to specific objects, or could be stimulated by the direction of attention towards them. The reticular system of the brain stem, the hypothalamus and other midbrain structures have been found to play an important part in the control of emotion by regulating endocrine secretions.

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Such functioning can enhance or reduce input from the sense organs, and so may influence the direction of attention. These facts, however, give scant indication of the actual impulsive agency directing attention. Yet, if attention is the primary condition of consciousness because it initiates perception by discriminating an object in contrast with a context and constructs a figure against a ground, it would be important to discover what prompts it to do this if we are fully to understand the nature of consciousness. In a very interesting (but little noticed) book, entitled The Subject of Consciousness,1 Cedric O. Evans, a former pupil of mine, has made a perspicacious analysis of attention as a feature of consciousness, arguing convincingly that there is no experience without some form or degree of attention, which polarizes every state of consciousness, however diffuse or rambling, into a foreground and a background. He also distinguishes three types of attention, which he calls, severally, unordered, interrogative, and executive. That all consciousness necessarily involves attention, we have already insisted, for consciousness emerges only with perception, which is the picking out of an object from the sentient background by attention. This immediately polarizes the psychical field into foreground and background, whether or not the object is sharply or only vaguely distinguished. Further, while ever we are awake something is occupying our attention, even when we are making no special effort to concentrate, and this is what Evans has called “unordered” attention. We certainly do constantly exercise attention of this kind, but the adjective is an unfortunate choice because every conscious state is one of some degree of order, first because no object is perceived that is not at least distinguished from a background, and secondly because (as I shall presently argue) attention is always patterned in a series of degrees. Evans might have been better advised to call the more prevalent form of attention “involuntary” to distinguish it from that which we deliberately direct upon a selected object. Evans’ description of what he calls “interrogatory” attention is correct and unobjectionable. It is the attention that we exercise whenever we are searching for anything, be it a person, an inanimate possession, or the solution to a puzzle. The search and its objective become a dominant idea ranging all potential objects in order according to their relevance to the aim of the quest. We are impelled to the third variety of attention, “executive” attention, when we need to concentrate upon some action, physical or mental, requiring previous experience, careful manipulation, and special skill or technique.

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This classification is useful and well founded, and Evans is entirely right to maintain that interrogative attention is governed by a dominant idea which organizes the content of consciousness in accordance with its relevancy to the progressing search, inhibiting the intervention of unrelated objects. His insistence on the polarization of consciousness, however, goes somewhat too far. Certainly attention divides the psychical field into what is “in focus” and what is not. The latter, Evans calls “unprojected consciousness”. But this dichotomy is not a stark polarization. There are degrees of attention at all times, even if on some, rather rare, occasions what is in focus is sharper and more arresting than on others. The background is never simply diffuse, for the structure of attention (if you like, of consciousness) is a series of gradations that may be symbolized as a nest of concentric circles with the heeded matter in the centre, or as a step pyramid with the object in focus at the top. When I am driving my car I focus my attention on the road ahead (if I am to drive safely), but this need not prevent me from admiring the scenery, or noticing objects by the way (e.g. a pheasant on the roadside fence). These objects, however, are not at the centre of my attention. Much less are the tactual sensations of the accelerator and brake pedals I am operating with my feet, although I must to some degree give heed to them. At the same time, although I must feel them, I am scarcely aware (if at all) of the kinaesthetic sensations in my ankles and knees as I do this. Of none of these things am I totally unconscious, but the degrees of attention I devote to them are very different. As I am now concentrating my attention on what I am writing, I am still aware, somewhat more vaguely, of the position of the furniture around me in the room. Less markedly, I am aware of the light coming in through the window, and the glow of the desk lamp at my shoulder. Yet more dimly, I am aware of the pressure against my body of the chair on which I am sitting: and so on, until other objects affecting my sense organs sink into near or complete oblivion. We often experience some object (say, a sound) to which we later say that we failed to pay attention while we were concentrating on some other matter, although we were not wholly unaware of its occurrence. There may, indeed, be occasions when our minds relax and the keenness of attention is attenuated, and others when we drift into reverie, but even then there is some structure in our thinking, although it may be less clearly articulated than when we are giving close heed to the activity in which we are engaged. Not only does consciousness prevail at every level, but no part of the psychical field is devoid of some degree of attention. Only unconscious feeling, if there is such, is beyond its scope.

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This range of levels of attention is important and should not be overlooked (as it is by Evans, with serious consequences for his later identification of the experiential self). It is not only constant and typical of the waking state, but is the essential condition of consciousness and is what has, in large measure, led me to the view, presently to be advanced, that consciousness is the next higher degree of organization than is operative at the physiological and sentient levels. Attention is not, however, simply a static structure imposed upon a state of consciousness; it is a practical activity. We pay attention to particular objects; we take heed of what interests us; and this taking notice is an act, at times more definitely deliberate than at others. As we shift our attention from one object to another, so the psychical field is reorganized around what takes central prominence, and this happens in every state of alert consciousness, not only in special circumstances when we are searching for something, or concentrating on performing a skilled or difficult practical task, but while ever we are conscious. In short, the act of attention is the essential activity that properly defines consciousness. The essential question is: What precisely is the agency that performs this movement? Evans contends that, as it is a practical activity, it is directed by kinaesthetic sensation, both when interrogative attention is governed by a dominant idea (because the idea is always dependent upon sentience and perception, which involve bodily movement in the adjustment of the relevant sense-organs), and when executive attention is guided (as it always is) by kinaesthesis. Certainly the sense organs all function concomitantly with some muscular process, either voluntary or unconscious (like the focussing of the lens of the eye). Nevertheless, from the facts that some kinaesthetic sensation may always be in the background of consciousness and in some cases may even regulate the ongoing activity, it does not follow that the attentive direction of conscious activity is due to this kinaesthetic sensation, but rather that the kinaesthesis is the result, not the cause, of the play of attention. For example, when I lift a cup of coffee to my mouth the movement of my hand is controlled by subconscious kinaesthetic sensations in my arm, but this is not what directs my attention to the cup or prompts the decision to lift it. Whatever that is must precede the kinaesthetic sensation. It is more plausibly the dominant idea of assuaging my thirst, which will have directed my attention to boiling the water and making the coffee. It could, of course, be argued that the idea has been generated by somatic sensations (thirst), which in this example is indeed the case, but those somatic

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sensations are not the same as the idea. Nor is the somatic sensation always at the focus of attention; something is needed to draw attention to it. And suppose I decide that it is more important to write a letter to my bank manager before the morning postal collection than to drink coffee (despite my thirst), what is it that impels the decision and diverts my attention from coffee making? You may say that it is my concern about certain financial matters, and concern is an emotion; but although emotion may influence decision it is not itself decision. That requires conation, which psychologists have told us is always associated with emotion, although they have not otherwise explained what drives it. Here, again, the psychologist may retort that drive and conation are one and the same. Yet to say that drive always accompanies emotion is not to explain its occurrence nor how it is engendered. Emotion per se is passive rather than active; it may well prompt activity by exciting desire, and how it does so is what needs to be explained. In the more extreme case, when we drive ourselves, contrary to desire, to neglect some pleasurable indulgence and to attend to a matter that we find distasteful, we think of the diversion of attention as an act of will. What is the will and how does it act? This is perhaps the most mysterious performance of the mind, on which neuro-physiology has, as yet, to throw more light, although neuroscientists do not hesitate to invoke it (see the reference above to Damasio). Certain regions of the brain, no doubt, become active when it occurs, but what impels them into operation? The position I shall seek to advocate is that primitive sentience is the form assumed by an organized whole of metabolic and physiological processes at a specially high degree of integration. This primitive sentience constituting the psychical field is in itself an indiscriminate whole of diverse feeling, and the supervenience upon it of consciousness occurs only when attention singles out elements within it and (as it were) makes them conspicuous against a contrasted horizon. The critical question that we now face is: Whence comes this activity of singling out, of identifying and distinguishing? We are tempted to answer: From the self, the subject of consciousness. But this cannot be right, first because the self is itself the product of the discriminating activity of attention distinguishing self from other and subject from object, and secondly because attention can be operative in types of consciousness devoid of the distinction between self and other and free of any awareness of a subject, as it presumably is in very young infants and in many species of animal other than homo sapiens.

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I have admitted that attention is, at any rate in many (possibly most) cases, directed by instinctive urges developed in the course of evolution and preserved by natural selection. But the source of these urges themselves is still unexplained. If we assume, as is possible, that all life is in some degree sentient (as, for instance, when a plant grows towards the light), sensibility as such, which is largely passive, cannot be the source of the activity of selection. If the motion is the result of a mere tropism it may be attributed to simple quasi-mechanical (or reflex) action; but in the vast majority of instances the consequent movements are immeasurably more complex than could be accounted for in this way. What the sensibility stimulates is action aimed at self-maintenance (e.g. Paramoecium attaching itself to a bubble to access a more plentiful oxygen supply), and that cannot simply be physicochemical reaction, even if it depends upon it, because physico-chemical reaction per se is not autonomously self-maintaining. Just as sentience is specific only to self-maintaining and self-reproducing organisms, so is autonomous activity in quest of self-maintenance. It is in this auturgy of living things that we must seek the origin of instinctive urges - and so also, perhaps, the impulsion of attention. Since attention raises some sentient feature in the felt state of the organism to the level of conscious perception, of which that feature becomes the object, the waking condition of any animal is always to some degree attentive. This is a necessary condition for recognition and discrimination of objects in the environment and for learning from the consequences of contact with them. The response of the animate creature to destructive or benificent encounters will affect its capacity to survive. Being alert, therefore, will have distinct survival value as the condition of appropriate action. Evolution will, accordingly, have favoured those whose attention is keen and active. The self-activity of attention is thus conceivably the expression at the level of consciousness of the auturgic activity that promotes self-maintenance. If this is so, then the evolution of consciousness can be credibly explained (remembering always that the neural development that subserves it cannot be the result merely of natural selection, which is not itself the source of favourable mutations). Stuart Kauffman has identified what he calls a collective autocatalytic set of macromolecules2 (e.g. nucleic and/or amino acids) as the precondition of life. But the living cell (be it prokaryotic or eukaryotic) involves more than this. It is, he says, a complex of matter, energy, and information plus something more. A collective autocatalytic set of molecules, even though it can be self-reproductive, does not act in its own behalf - is not autonomously self-maintaining. And that, as Kauffman contends,3 is the essential

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characteristic of life. He calls this capacity “agency”. Such self-preserving activity cannot just occur accidentally, because, if it did, it would be merely transient. It has to be encoded somehow in the genetic material. Moreover, what acts on its own behalf acts purposively which purely physico-chemical processes never do. Kauffman defines the living organism as “an autonomous agent” which “is a system able to reproduce itself and carry out one or more thermodynamic cycles.”4 This definition, which he goes to some lengths to illustrate and defend, disguises the fact that the performance of one or more thermodynamic cycles is in the cause of self-maintenance. Nevertheless, the defining character of life is this agency, the capacity to act on one’s own behalf. What I wish to suggest is that attention is this agency operating on the psychical level. If this is correct the innate ability to direct attention to arresting sensations is neither more nor less than being alive. It is the innate urge to self-preservation. It is what Spinoza called the conatus in suo esse perseverandi operating at the level of consciousness. Once this is admitted, it follows naturally that the successive creation by attention of sensible figures against a diverse felt background progressively grows into a system of objects in relation, which comes to constitute the awareness of a more or less orderly surrounding world, within which the organism has to maintain itself. Apart from this activity, relations could not be cognized and, however or wherever they exist could never be explicitly realized. On the hypothesis I am putting forward, it would be legitimate to presume that even a single celled animal, being already a highly complex, integrated organic system, might be in some degree sentient. If so, a presumed feeling of privation and discomfort in Paramoecium might be assuaged by chance contact with a bubble and the protozoan, being alive, might be capable of “learning” by association of this feeling of relief with bubbles. An inclination towards bubbles might be an incipient exercise of attention. Similarly, a bubble floating upwards could lead to the distinction between the directions up and down; in other more complex creatures a loud noise becomes associated with a large threatening object - and so on. A further question, of course, is how these learned associations are genetically imprinted in the genome, which cannot, in the majority of cases be simply a matter of chance mutation.

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This scenario is, however, mere speculation, and even if it may be tempting to entertain, it cannot be accepted without serious qualification, because if we in any sense were to attribute to so lowly an organism as Paramoecium any degree of attention we should be regarding it as already conscious, not merely sentient. The self-preserving drive must somehow direct the protozoan to the bubble. How it does so, it is difficult to conceive, for we can hardly allege learning by trial and error, of which we have no evidence. And we cannot resort to natural selection for explanation , because although it would presumably eliminate organisms unable to access the missing oxygen, it could not initiate the required mutation in the genetic structure that empowers it to seek bubbles when necessary; and without that the protozoan would not survive. Further, self-preservation implies a distinction between the self to be preserved and what is not self, as Dennett has pointed out (CE, p. 174). This distinction at first is, no doubt, only implicit in the creature’s behaviour and becomes explicit only at a high level of development at which other selves are recognized, whether in competition with one’s own, or in family affection and co-operation. Prior to this, the feeling of one’s own body and its modification by contact and commerce with others is the occasion of a primitive self-feeling which is (presumably) the origin and basis of that consciousness of self at the level of intelligence which is the condition of intellectual development. Damasio has told us that this feeling of the protoself as it is modified by an external object is the prior condition of all consciousness. If so, it should be experienced by all animals to which we can plausibly attribute awareness; but although animals almost certainly experience bodily feeling, we cannot credibly attribute the feeling of a self as such to any animal lower in the evolutionary scale than (say) the primates. What self-feeling entails, then, needs more investigation. But this must be deferred until later. The tentative conclusions that emerge from what I have so far considered are: 1. Attention is the operation at the level of consciousness of the auturgy of the organism, the autonomous pursuit of self-preservation at a higher pitch of organized unity and comprehensiveness than is achieved simply by metabolism and physiological regulation. 2. Sentience is raised to the level of consciousness by the discriminating effect of attention upon its content, prior to which it is an indiscriminate conglomerate of feeling. 3. Self-feeling is embedded in the bodily sentience that forms the background to the objects given prominence by attention, although we

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cannot yet say confidently how it becomes a genuine feeling of self. Damasio suggests that self-feeling emerges as we become aware of feelings as “mine” - but surely there is a hint here of hysteron proteron. These conclusions seem reasonably warranted, but can at best be provisional at this stage, because, as has been conceded, they leave a number of questions unanswered, some virtually mystifying. What, for instance, is the source of the autonomous urge to self-maintenance that is the distinguishing mark of life? How does it (if it does) emerge as the direction of attention? How does the sense of self arise ab initio? What, in terms of neuro-physiology, is will? Is there such a thing as unconscious feeling, or are levels of inattention sufficient to account for our failure to notice the more obscure? I can hardly undertake even to try to answer all these difficult questions. In the next chapter I shall make some attempt to identify the subject of consciousness and to clarify the notion of self. What brain activity is involved in an act of will I could not attempt to discover without further intense neuro-physiological research, on which, not being a scientist, I am not competent to embark. In the light of what I shall propose in the next chapter, however, I might suggest some tentative answer to the demand for the source of the autonomous urge to selfmaintenance. Is it not, perhaps, a singular instance, at the appropriate level of complexity, of a new emergent form of functioning supervening upon a specially high degree of intricate chemical holism? That is, after all, the distinctive form of life. What is undeniable, at the point we have so far reached, is that attention, whatever directs it, initiates and instigates implicit judgement in the recognition of an object, for cognition involves the identification of a specific entity and its distinction from others - the analyticsynthetic discursus involved in the apprehension of a Gestalt - a figure-andground complex. It is the discrimination of “this-not-that”, the implicit primary judgement. Accordingly, attention is essentially the activity of interrelating, of establishing the organization of a whole. This is what gives plausibility to the submission shortly to be made that sentience and consciousness are successive phases continuous with that process of organization that has all along been operative throughout what Hegel characterized as the dialectical succession from physical to chemical and organic activity.

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The clues we have derived from neuro-physiology are all the more significant insofar as they confirm the philosophical theories I have cited above: that consciousness emanates from bodily feeling and that perception is the organization of the psychical (sentient) field by the selective activity of attention. Hobbes and Locke, as well as more recent philosophers, such as Bertrand Russell, painted themselves into a corner by confining the content of perception to the brain where the causal process which was supposed to convey it was excluded. For Hobbes it was no more than matter and motion appearing to us as “fancy”; Locke alleged that we could only know our own ideas; and Russell declared that what we perceived was our own grey matter. If that were so they could have no means of knowing whence our percepts originated, what were their causes were, or whether they corresponded to anything other than themselves. The claims of these philosophers to elucidate these matters, then, contradicted their own theories. Are the neuro-physiologists in any better case? They tell us that the source of our consciousness is the body, and that the feeling of the body is perceived when we attend to special features of it (in Damasio’s exposition, when the bodily condition is altered by the effect upon it of an external object). But how can we (or he) come to know this if what we perceive is only that in our own feeling to which we attend? We feel it as the sensation of our bodily parts, but how can we be assured that we are not deceived? This is Descartes’s question, and he found no better answer than was provided by his conviction of God’s benevolent refusal to deceive him. For us, the answer will depend on how we conceive the content of sentience and its relation to the body, the condition of which and to its changes it purports to reveal to us. This, again, will depend on how we conceive the nature of sentience itself. To answer the relevant questions will not be easy and may well be largely speculative. The best we can hope for is that we may be able to reach a coherent theory that does not, by implication, contradict itself and the possibility of ever reaching it or discovering its truth.

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NOTES 1

Cf. C.O. Evans, The Subject of Consciousness (London, G.Allen and Unwin, 1970), Chs.3 and 4.

2

Stuart Kauffman, Investigations (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 45.

3

Op. cit., Ch. 3.

4

Ibid., p. 52f.

CHAPTER VIII WHO OR WHAT THINKS? In the last chapter we observed that we are inclined to answer the question concerning what energizes attention by saying that I do so, but that we then need to identify the “I”, so before going any further, this should be our next consideration. Among neuro-scientists there is a noticeable indecision as to whether it is the self or the brain that is the ultimate agency, or how the two are related. Confusion Bewteen the Brain and the Mind As remarked earlier, neuro-physiologists are in the habit of referring at times to brain processes as if they themselves made judgements, evaluated situations and made choices. As these neural processes are admittedly nothing other than the excitation and transmission of electro-chemical reactions, this is obviously absurd.As Susan Greenfield declares: “The idea that anything within one’s brain can be transmogrified into being anything more than mere banal electrochemical phenomena - the release of a few thousand molecules of transmitter or the generation of action potentials some 90 thousandths of a volt in amplitude and some thousandths of a second in duration - is a fallacy that strikes at the very heart of the problem of trying to understand subjective sensation.”1 No doubt the writers concerned, if taxed with the misuse of concepts, would plead that they were speaking metaphorically, but the metaphor implies a connection between the neural process and conscious performances which is inexplicable in scientific terms. At other times the neuro-physiologists speak as if some other agency (unspecified) were using the brain to reach decisions, as one might speak of using one’s hands to operate a keyboard, and while this manner of speaking is more plausible, the question naturally arises: what, or who is this other agency and how does it “use” the brain? - for it is altogether inadmissible to imagine an homunculus in the brain if only because to do so would simply reduplicate the problem.

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In Daniel Dennett’s attempt to explain consciousness we found plenty of instances of this proclivity to attribute to the brain the capacity of making judgements. He speaks of its interpreting and editing the signals it receives from external objects, activities that obviously cannot be performed by electro-chemical action and potential transmissions, however complex. John McCrone is another writer who presents profuse examples of descriptions which implicitly assume that neural processes are actually thinking. On page 184 of his book, Going Inside, he writes that “the brain has to be incredibly careful about what it actually remembers”, that “the brain would prefer simply to remember...”, “would want to do the opposite...” as if the neurons had feelings of their own, took precautions, and made choices accordingly. On the next page we read that “the brain can have...reasons”, and elsewhere that the cerebellum judges when we have a tight grip (p. 195). Further on we are told that the cingulate cortex determines what level of interruption can be tolerated (p. 256), and on the next page he tells us that Jeffrey Gray has “the cingulate cortex draw the frontal cortex into a state of declared intent” - one may wonder who (Gray?) had heard the cortex declare its intention. On p. 262 we learn that the brain has intentions, and on p. 266 we read that “the brain wanted...” and that “all that matters to the brain is the quality of fit.” One can find dozens of similar examples throughout McCrone’s interesting description. Yet he also speaks (p. 257) of an area of the brain being active when “we have to struggle” [to hold together an intent to do something] - who or what, here, is indicated by “we”? Is it some other area of the brain, or some independent agency? In either case, how is it to be identified? In their paper on “The Problem of Consciousness” (in The Scientific American Book of the Brain), Francis Crick and Christof Koch are even more prone to this confusion between brain function and mind performance. They say that the brain “infers” from the view of the back of a head what is in front (p. 313). They speak of neurons usually not being “too fussy about the exact size or position” of a face in the visual field, while “others seem to be more concerned with the direction in which the eyes are gazing” (p.314), as if the neurons were homunculi. They also contend that “the left side of the brain is not aware of what the other side is seeing” (p. 315) assuming that the brain (not the mind) is conscious. The neocortex is alleged (on the next page) to “use categories it has learned... to find combinations of active neurons that, on the basis of its past experience, are most likely to represent [to whom?] the relevant objects and events in the visual world.” Neurons are

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said to do computations, “trying to arrive at the best coalitions”. Neurons, we all know, do nothing more than fire electrically and transmit the changes in electric potential along nerve fibres, sometimes releasing chemical substances; what evidence is there that they are fussy, are aware of anything at all, that they use categories, do calculations with ends in view, or judge what coalitions are best? Even so circumspect a writer as Damasio occasionally slips into this trick of describing the brain, its regions, or their neurons as if they were consciously experient. We noted above that he speaks of neurons in the hypothalamus “detecting” a change. Elsewhere in Descartes’ Error he suggests circumstances in which the brain is “unlikely to predict” how neural and chemical commands will play out in the body (p.158). Yet he also lists ways in which “we willfully influence the behaviors” usually driven by innate neural patterns (p. 115) and he refers (on p. 151) to the neural maps “we” make for the viscera. It is not difficult to understand what he means when he says that we hold our breath, nevertheless, our doing so must somehow be correlated with some brain activity (not here specified) that is not the innate neural pattern that drives natural breathing. “We” certainly do not make neural maps voluntarily, as we hold our breath, nor in the same way as we make geographical maps, but again what the agency is that is alleged to make the neural maps is not explained. Who are “We”? Self, Mind and Consciousness Three answers to the last question are firmly ruled out from the start. The agency is no homunculus; it cannot be any complex of electro-chemical energy-transmission, as such; nor yet can it be any unembodied “spirit”. This third notion could but raise the unanswerable question how any such “spirit” could work upon one’s brain. Sir John Eccles propounded a dualistic theory in which the brain was conceived as some sort of instrument for transmitting and receiving brain-waves that could be detected by the mind, which was another device (for receiving and transmitting waves?) able to determine atomic changes in the brain that would otherwise be indeterminate by Heisenberg’s Indeterminacy Principle. This intriguing conception smacks somewhat of science fiction, and it does leave one wondering what sort of mechanisms would have to be present and active in “the mind”, and whether it would need a separate “brain” of its own with which to interpret the physical brain-waves. We should then again be threatened with another infinite regress.

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Having rejected these options, what can we say of the relationship between the vastly intricate and interwoven electro-chemical activity constantly at work in the brain and the conscious thought (feeling, judging, interpreting, preferring and choosing) that we experience and perform? And how may we attempt to answer the question, Who or what are “we”? The clues that we have gleaned from neuro-science have been that the brain operates as a whole and is further closely integrated with the physiology of the rest of the body, so that the organism functions as one unified and coherent system. We have been told also that feeling is the foundation of consciousness. This is Damasio’s opinion and also is emphatically maintained by Susan Greenfield. Both of these writers, though for different reasons, contend that consciousness is essential to self-feeling, and, for Damasio, the self which is felt is the proto-self: the state of the organism as represented moment by moment by coherent interconnected neural patterns in the brain. While this proto-self is not per se conscious, it is cognized as soon as it is modified by an object. Greenfield does not identify consciousness with the mind, believing the former to be prior but still to be rooted in feeling, primarily emotion. How she conceives the distinction between consciousness and mind is difficult to understand, unless it is that mind includes the unconscious as well. Nevertheless, both thinkers hold that bodily feeling (in some sense) is basic to consciousness and that self-feeling is inherent at least in developed consciousness. Damasio contends that the self is the individual to whom the sensations and awarenesses are felt to belong as “mine”. This is (presumably) the “we” who think. The key-word is “feeling”. Without sentience, neuro-physiologists seem to agree, there can be no consciousness; so our first task must be to decide what sentience actually is and how it arises from neural process. The behaviour of protistan organisms seems to give some evidence that even they are sentient in some degree. The immune cells in the blood are said to “recognize” alien germs and destroy them. Here is Sir Charles Sherrington’s description of the behaviour of blood cells: “The cells of our blood are as free as fish in a stream. They are in the stream of the blood. Some of them resemble in structure and ways so closely the little free-swimming amoeba of the pond as to be called ameboid. The pond amoeba crawls about, catches and digests particles picked up in the pond. So ameboid cells inhabiting my blood and lymph crawl about over and through the membranes limiting the fluid channels in my body. They catch and digest particles. Should I get a wound they contribute to its healing. They give it a chance to mend by eating and

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digesting bacteria which poison it, and by feeding on the dead cells which the wound injury has killed. They are themselves unit-lives...”2 Arcella and Paramoecium appear to be somehow aware of oxygen depletion in their habitat and to move to better oxygenated waters. Stentor detects a stream of inedible particles and responds with versatile and appropriate movements to avoid it. Are these cells, which have no brains or nervous systems, sentient? Panpsychism If we were to think so, we should be committed to something close to panpsychism, a position that has had impressive advocates. Spinoza taught that all things are beminded; Leibniz constructed a metaphysic based on the notion of immaterial (“spiritual”) monads experiencing “perceptions” in varying degrees confused, which as they became more distinct were conscious. Physical entities in space and time were, in his view, only phenomena bene fundata, the confused perception of monads and their mutual relations. Alfred North Whitehead propounded a difficult and somewhat obscure theory according to which every actual entity in the universe has a “mental pole” and “prehends” every other. He identified “prehension” with feeling, but conceded that it was not conscious (not “apprehension”), except in special highly complicated cases. And Teilhard de Chardin maintained that consciousness was a sort of inner lining in all things which, as they evolved and developed turned outward. It is, premature at this juncture for us to commit ourselves to any such doctrine, but we may note that all these thinkers, in one way or another, concede that the mental aspect of things which they believe to be universal is, in the first instance unconscious and at best “feeling”. That all living things are in some degree sentient is at least plausible, but panpsychism requires us to believe that even physical and chemical entities are inchoately sentient. Indeed, some physicists occasionally talk (and write) of atoms and molecules “feeling” the effects of energy fields in their vicinity - but we normally take this to be metaphorical. On the whole, the behaviour of physical entities below the level of viruses is too regular and predictable to incline us to describe them as sentient; and even if we were so inclined, we should still be at a loss to explain how the mental aspect related to the physical. Even Spinoza distinguishes these two aspects as belonging to separate Attributes of Substance, neither of which can be explained in terms of the

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other. Might it be that sentience is characteristic of all life and that every cell, as a living organism, enjoys some, if only rudimentary sentience? Might the fertilized egg, or even the sperm, be thus sentient? After fertilization, as it becomes an embryo, the segmented cells are equipotential - indeed so is every cell in the early stages, having the innate ability to perform all the fundamental organic functions; but after gastrulation, the cells as they proliferate are differentiated and become specialized to function complementarily. Could it be that, while some become muscle cells, and others blood or bone, some are specialized to take on responsibility for feeling, becoming nerve cells? This notion, however, has its difficulties, for although cells throughout the body often behave as if they were sentient, brain cells themselves are not and are quite insensitive to touch, pain or injury. Even a headache is felt in the flesh of the temples or the forehead, not in the brain itself. As observed in Chapter I above, Steven Pinker is clearly wrong to say that the mind is what the brain does: what the brain does is transmit electrical potentials along nerve fibres in complex patterns, which the mind does not; what the mind does is feel and think, which the brain does not. The Subject of Consciousness 1. Historical Preamble Accepting as a working hypothesis that consciousness is initiated by attention singling out data from the felt sentient mass to distinguish objects of perception, we must face the question: Who or what is the conscious subject? Two types of answer have been offered in the long history of Modern Philosophy from Descartes to Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, both of which present difficulties and the implications of each we shall have to investigate. Briefly to recall the historical record: Descartes took for granted that the subject was the soul, which was characterized as a simple, immaterial substance. Kant claimed to show that this theory was deceptive a “metaphysical” theory involving a logical paralogism. The subject, he maintained must be unitary and was the source of the a priori synthesis indispensable to the perception of objects; but, as such, being the origin of the a priori categories of the Understanding which made such perception possible, the subject could not be brought under those categories and so could not be cognized as a phenomenon characterizable as simple or complex, immaterial or otherwise. The self as perceived by internal sense under the a priori perceptual form of time is phenomenal; that is only the empirical self, not the transcendental subject to which the empirical self is object.

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Fichte made this transcendental Ego the source of all reality, subjective and objective, a doctrine adopted and developed by Schelling and Hegel into what they claimed to be Objective Idealism (as opposed to the Subjective Idealism of Kant and Fichte), giving equal status to Nature with conscious experience. Husserl, in effect, returned to the position of Kant and Fichte, establishing the transcendental subject as the agent constituting all empirical knowledge including the sciences of Nature; but while many of his followers insisted on this fundamental reality of the Ego, others, like Merleau-Ponty, demurred on the ground that the doctrine was too intellectualistic and that consciousness was rooted in what Merleau-Ponty calls “the lived body” (le corps vecu). What Damasio has told us gives support to this submission; and if we understand Merleau-Ponty’s phrase to mean “the felt body” (because the somewhat strained translation as “the lived body” commits a grammatical solicism in English, in which “live” is not a transitive verb), we may agree that the involvement of bodily feeling in perception cannot be denied. This is one side of the historical picture. The other is the approach taken by David Hume, who sought to overcome the inconsistencies of Locke and Berkeley and developed a radically subjectivist position, declaring: “Now since nothing is ever present to the mind but perceptions, and since all ideas are deriv’d from something antecedently present to the mind; it follows that ‘tis impossible for us so much as to conceive or form an idea of anything specifically different from ideas and impressions. Let us fix our attention out of ourselves as much as possible: Let us chace our imagination to the heavens, or to the utmost limits of the universe; we never really advance a step beyond ourselves, nor can conceive any kind of existence, but those perceptions, which have appear’d in that narrow compass. This is the universe of the imagination, nor have we any idea but what is there produced.” (A Treatise of Human Nature, Book I, Part II, Section vi). Here he speaks of “ourselves” and obviously presupposes some subject of perceptions; but he later finds that he can discover in himself no impression or idea of a self: “For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I can never catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception...

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“… 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 perpetual flux and movement.” (Ibid., Part IV, Section vi). More recent theorists have taken a similar course. William James identified the subject as the stream of consciousness itself, and F.H. Bradley found common usages of the term self-contradictory and declared the self to be unreal. Bertrand Russell, Gilbert Ryle and A.J Ayer followed Hume even more closely, while today, Daniel Dennett takes a yet more extreme position, reducing the self to a mere abstraction, the conventional focus of the biographical narrative of a living body. The existence of a genuine subject of consciousness is thrown into doubt or outrightly denied (as, in effect, is consciousness itself). All of these theories (we should find) contain a measure of truth, some more than others, although none of them is wholly satisfactory. It is not my intention to examine them all in any detail, but rather to reflect upon the problem as it presents itself to the thinking person in his or her own direct experience. Let us return to what has been said about sentience and attention. Sentience is the mass of bodily feeling that forms the general background of consciousness. I have found reason at least to suspect that this in itself is not conscious, if only because to be cognized some feature within it must be singled out by attention and distinguished from the background. When that happens, the background itself becomes structured in descending degrees of attention, so that much of it, if not all, is at some level of attention and so is cognized in some measure. The question we now pose is: By whom or what is the object so created cognized? What is the subject of consciousness? 2. The Ego and the Stream of Consciousness The topic has been discussed at length and with much sound insight by Cedric Evans, who distinguished rightly between two approaches to the problem: the “person-approach” and the “self-approach”. The first is concerned with the insignia by which we identify persons, the latter is that which tries to dentify what we feel to be and call ourselves. Confusing these two approaches, Evans asserts, produces seriously misleading results. Of the theories I have summarized above, he calls the first type Pure Ego theories and the second Serial theories (the subject being conceived as a series of mental states).

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Serial Theories William James held a view of the second type, considering the self to be the stream of its conscious states. Owen Flanagan follows him closely, approving in large measure of his statement of the position and quoting from him at length.3 While agreeing with James’ refusal to acknowledge any psychological entity corresponding to the Ego, and likewise in the main with Dennett’s rejection of “the mind’s I”, Flanagan is more tolerant than Dennett of the self. The I, he maintains, is a construct, and is, as Dennett contends, the centre of gravity of a narrative account of the person constituted by the stream of consciousness, about which both he and James have much to say. Their description of the stream is instructive and has implications of which neither of them seem sufficiently aware. As has been noticed above, Flanagan is prepared to admit some of the strictures on phenomenology imposed by critics, but himself accepts and recommends the use of introspective reports in mental sciences. So he has no hesitation in following out James’ phenomenological analysis. James himself is critical of the traditional Empricist atomic account of ideas and insists that all individual consciousness is stream-like. Our mental states occur in continuous interconnection, despite disorders and defects of functional capacity. Even when we are aware of periods of unconsciousness (in deep sleep, anaesthesia, and the like), on regaining consciousness after such interruptions, our awareness links up with our prior memories. For this even short-term memory is sufficient (the minimal condition of any stream of consciousness). Now memory, short- or long-term, involves making past occurrences psychologically effective one way or another in the present. This is not simply a repetition of the past in the form of mental images, for no mental image can be recognized as such unless it can be compared with the original and for that to happen the past original must somehow be present to the mind along with the image. Thus, for instance, when I speak or hear what somebody else says, my mind carries into the present the words and sentences pronounced earlier. This ability to transcend the flux of time is an effect of short-term memory, and its necessity for long-term memory is even more pronounced. It is one example of the inevitable transcendence of time involved in the experience of consciousness as a stream, which means that it cannot simply be a stream, for even that involves something more - the transcendence of the surface appearance of passage. Important consequences for the conception of the subject of consciousness flow from this inescapable fact, to which I shall shortly return.

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These writers (James and Flanagan) admit that in spite of our awareness of intermittent spells of unconsciousness, our experience seems to us to be continuous. James, especially, insists on the distinction between the objects of consciousness, which are discontinuous, and consciousness as subjectively enjoyed which never is. It is the phenomenal character of consciousness on which they concentrate. For them, this subjective character is apparently irrespective of the processes of brain functioning, for Flanagan admits that although brain activity does not shut down altogether those processes and conditions that subserve consciousness do not always take place (op.cit, p. 157). The subjective “feel” of continuity is thus, it seems, purely phenomenal and persists in despite of the character of brain processes. Yet, as we shall see later, these writers display an intermittent tendency to confuse the brain and the mind. As the feeling of continuity is phenomenal, it is we who perceive the streamlike character of consciousness. And the question remains: Who or what are we? The epistemic implications of this recognition, moreover, have been overlooked. If we can become aware that our consciousness is “gappy” (as Flanagan puts it), even if it feels nevertheless to be continuous, as asserted above, the necessary implication is that being aware of the gaps we grasp the series of states (gaps and all) as a single sequence. This means that even during the gaps, although we are unconscious, we are somehow cognizant of them. In other words, there must be a subject that can span the blank spaces. Just how this subject can be identical with the gappy stream then looks problematic. Further, as psychologists, we reflect on the nature of consciousness, its continuity and its gappiness. How does this self-reflection fit into the stream on which it reflects? If a series, phenomenal or other, is to be continuous, there must be some element of identity running through it which assures us that each phase belongs to the same series. If then continuity characterizes our conscious states so that they run together as a stream, an identity must hold them together, and the question arises as to what constitutes or is itself this identity? Neither James nor Flanagan considers this question and what they write amounts to a denial that there can be any answer to it. While insisting on the streamlike aspect of consciousness, in effect they deny any element of continuity within it. No state of mind, they insist, is ever repeated for whatever is experienced at any moment modifies the character of what succeeds; every mental occurrence modifies what happens in the brain, possibly even its structure, so that identical states of consciousness can never recur. This, Flanagan calls “the network thesis” (cf. op.cit., p. 160).

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Now, to assert that a mental state either is or can never be the same state as has occurred before, we must be able to compare the present state with the past. That means that we must hold them together before our minds both at once. In short, our thought must transcend the passage of time. The brain itself cannot do this; we perceive and judge that the brain changes, if so, how could it perceive this fact itself? And we who do are the subjects that have not been identified. The stream of consciousness itself can hardly perceive that none of its states is identical with any other, for to do so it is necessary to transcend the flux, literally to recall the past and compare it synchronically with the present. James, quite rightly, observes that not all consciousness is accompanied by an explicit assertion: “I think”. Certainly in primitive and undeveloped consciousness the “I think” is absent, and even in much of developed consciousness. It is also fairly well established that the sense of self is a social construct. (There is, incidentally, an interesting similarity between James’ theory of the social self and Bernard Bosanquet’s account of the political person as a combination of social capacities).4 Nevertheless, there being a subject of consciousness (that is, of sentience) does not necessarily imply an awareness of a self, or personality, although the latter may well require the former. James declares that the thought itself is the subject and needs no Ego to stand behind and support it. Here, however, the term “thought” is ambiguous. A thought may be what one thinks, a proposition or a percept - an object of thought - which is not the thinker or the subject. On the other hand, the thinking is and must be the activity of some agent. For more than one good reason we cannot say that this agent is the brain (or, if it is, we cannot tell how it can consciously judge or perceive - percepts cannot appear to neurons or circuits of fibres). If, as we cannot deny, something appears, it must appear to a conscious subject which is (in the vast majority of cases) not that which does appear. Moreover, it is the stream of appearances with which James and Flanagan identify the self; they say that that is how consciousness appears to us; but if appearances require a subject, that subject cannot be the phenomenal stream itself. And if it appears to us as a stream, “we” cannot ourselves be in passage. It is significant that when discussing the biological advantage of consciousness James is quoted by Flanagan as writing that it “increases the efficiency of the brain by loading its dice... Loading its dice would mean bringing a more or less constant pressure to bear in favor of those of its performances which make for the most permanent interests of the brain’s owner..” (p.166). The brain’s owner is presumably either the bodily

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organism as a whole or else the subject of consciousness. It could hardly be the stream of consciousness that is loading the dice in favour of what is in its interests. So, once again there seems to be presupposed what the theory is at pains to deny. Flanagan concurs with Dennett in maintaining that the self is a narrative construct of which the “I” is no more than the centre of gravity. For Dennett this is a mere abstraction, but Flanagan tends to accept the narrative as itself sufficient. Neither considers the consequent lack of a narrator; both posit a narrative without an author. Who is it that constructs the autobiography? Who is the “auto”? Who remembers past experiences and relates them to the present? James contends that the experiences themselves do this, that each is redolent of its own past (contrary to his assertion that in consciousness nothing is ever repeated), but in doing so he habitually ignores the implicit transcendence of time that the self-knowledge of this fact would require. It is clear that the Serial type of theory will not do, whether it be of the kind represented by James or the more extreme form adopted by Hume. James’ and Flanagan’s exposition too often overlooks inconvenient contrary implications (although, as we shall presently have reason to observe, their argument contains more promising suggestions). Hume’s more negative conclusion lands him in complete scepticism. Neither version can be made self-consistent. The subject of consciousness cannot be a bundle or a series of perceptions, because to be aware (as Hume confesses he is) of a bundle or of a series the subject must grasp the series or bundle as a whole, and that can be done neither by any one or any collection of the perceptions contained in the bundle. The bundle cannot, as such, be aware of itself as a bundle. Hume says: “When I enter.. into myself... I… stumble upon some particular perception...” The “I” here is not the particular perception, nor can it be the bundle of perceptions that he takes himself and other selves to be. To be able to conceive himself and others as bundles he must be able to comprehend the collections each as one whole, of which the subject, cannot be a constituent item. The same applies to the awareness of the self as a stream. What is perceived or conceived as a stream must be grasped as a continuous whole; otherwise it falls to pieces and is dissipated into isolated point-instants, uncognized in any form. To be grasped as a stream there must be some subject of the apprehension that is neither the stream nor any of the several perceptions. If I am to be aware of a bundle or series of mental states as mine, I must distinguish myself from each and all of them to claim them as my own. The series to be recognized as such must be apprehended all at once; and the

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subject capable of doing this cannot be confined to any one of the mental states, nor can it be any mere colligation of them, however inclusive. The remedy would seem to be to revert to a trascendental Ego as the subject of all empirical experience; but this resort to a Pure Ego theory simply lands us in new difficulties. A Pure Ego theory overlooks, or more seriously renders impossible, what we have hitherto emphasized, the close dependence of consciousness on sentience, the feeling of the body. Sentience, as Collingwood maintained, is the proper object (an apanage) of consciousness, the subject of which is one with it - cogito ergo sum: the I of cogito is the same I as that of sum, and cannot be separated from the consciousness which it experiences. And the content of that experience is its own sentience, discriminated and ordered by its own activity of attention. Pure-Ego Theories The kind of argument that would lead to a Pure Ego theory would run somewhat as follows. We can begin from the description given by Edelman and Tononi: “Being in a particular conscious state... always constitutes information integrated into a unified coherent whole that is more than the sum of its parts. Another way to say this is that a particular conscious state consists of a tightly interwoven set of relationships that cannot be fully broken down into independent components.” 5 A conscious state is always a whole and is always differentiated, for what is not differentiated cannot properly be a whole. No whole is a blank uniformity (if ever there could be anything of the kind); not even the spacetime continuum is totally uniform, for if it were there could be no distance between points or lapse between events. Yet every genuine whole is one and indiscerptible: it is no mere collection of separable elements; as Edelman and Tononi say, the whole is always more than the sum of the parts. And being both one and differentiated, its components must be mutually related the whole is always a relational complex. What are the implications of these important facts? First, as every diversified whole of multiple components is a relational complex, and this is what every conscious state is said to be, every conscious state is an awareness of objects (terms) in relation. But to be aware of such a relational whole the conscious subject cannot be any one of the relata, or terms. It has, as it were, to stand back from all the related terms, in order to view them as a whole. If it were identified indistinguishably with any one of the terms, that

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term would be subtracted from the whole and lost from the object of consciousness contemplated, for the distinction between subject and object would fall between the subject and the remainder of the complex. This requirement can be illustrated variously. As earlier explained, to be aware of the different perspectives from which (say) a room may be viewed it is not sufficient to see it from any one point, or even to inspect it successively from several different points. It is necessary to be able to conceive the orientation of the viewer from all possible points from which the room could be viewed, those which the viewer has actually occupied and those which he or she has not, and the relations between them. It is necessary likewise to be aware of the mutual relations between the points from which the room actually has been viewed and their relations to others from which it might be viewed, all at the same time. The person who is trying to imagine the appearance of the room from different perspectives, therefore, cannot be irrevocably placed in any one position, but has to envisage together all possible positions, the orientation from each, and their interrelations. Even if the person undertaking this mental task were to occupy each different point from which the room could be viewed in turn, he or she must still be able to envisage the relations of these points to one another as a single system. So he or she, as subject of the envisagement, must be withdrawn from the entire relational complex. Similarly, as has repeatedly been maintained, to remember when a certain event occurred in the past, one must as it were transport oneself back to that event (which is no longer present) and relate it in time to other events in the past as well as to what is being experienced at present. Memory, which is occurring now, must somehow be located both in the present and the past, and cannot be wholly identified with either. If one tries to explain it as a present mental image of the past event, one has to claim ability to compare the two to verify that it is such an image, and that requires that one has the past event before one at the same time as the present image. Memory therefore must transcend the time series in which it places the remembered event and in which the act of memory itself occurs. The past event must be present to the conscious subject, who must concurrently objectify the present moment in order to distinguish it as present from the past (and vice versa). In short, the series of events constituting the intervening passage of time must be present as a whole to consciousness, including all the events but not identifiable exclusively with any one, nor with any collection of them. From this it seems to follow that the subject of consciousness cannot be a component in the whole which is the state of consciousness being enjoyed, if it is to be conscious of it as a whole. It cannot be one term (or any collection

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of terms) in the relational complex of which it is aware - the reason for rejecting the Serial Theory. The subject of consciousness, then, must be “transcendental” and can never be its own object.6 The Pure Ego is thus divorced from the content of its own consciousness in a way that, in the light of what we have so far found, cannot be sustained. If self-consciousness is rooted in the feeling of a proto-self which is the current state of the body, and if this feeling is what becomes the object of attention in perception, the subject cannot be separated from its object in this absolute fashion. That being so, we are faced with new problems. The Dilemma First, as for Damasio, the felt proto-self is the matrix of the mind that thinks and judges, which becomes conscious when it is affected by an outside object; and second, the object of consciousness is always of necessity a configuration of distinct elements. Such a configuration is always a relational complex. But now it has been argued that what thinks and judges can be neither a part nor the whole of the objective configuration, so what becomes conscious cannot be the complex object itself. If that configuration is augmented and developed so as to include the whole of the known world, it would follow that the subject of consciousness is no part of the known world; nor can it be an object to itself, for that entails a relation between self and other - a feeling of the modification of the proto-self by an object other than itself. How, we must ask, can the self be modified by itself as by an object other than itself? Further, how can the proto-self, which is the state of the organism at a particular moment, and becomes conscious of itself when attention is drawn to its condition by the feeling of what happens when it is modified by an external object - how can this proto-self, which is a natural organism, when it becomes conscious justifiably be excluded from the known world? Unprojected Consciousness Evans seeks to resolve the problem by identifying the self with what he calls “unprojected consciousness” (Op. cit., Ch.4). Attention “projects” the object to which it gives prominence at the focus; so what is not thus given prominence is “unprojected”. Evans contends that this unprojected consciousness is the self. As Kant and others have found, it cannot, by definition, be made an object; as Ryle declared (in The Concept of Mind, p. 198), it is elusive; to seek it out is only to discover that the quarry is the hunter. It is ineluctibly in the background of awareness, and any attempt to

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divert attention to it must convert it into an object requiring another subject not itself. This is the basis of Kant’s distinction between the transcendental subject and the empirical self which is projected as a percept in inner sense. Any attempt to identify the two is condemned as logical amphiboly. Evans claims that identifying the self with unprojected consciousness avoids the difficulties of the mutually opposed Serial and Pure Ego theories and reconciles their demands. Unprojected consciousness, he says, while constituting the experiential self (for it is experienced) is, nevertheless, not an object, and is not the empirical self. This is an intriguing hypothesis with important merits, but also with special difficulties of its own. Its merit is that unprojected consciousness, the background of attention, is for the most part if not wholly, bodily feeling, from which, as we have seen, the self cannot be separated. However, as Collingwood averred, bodily feeling is the proper object of consciousness, not its subject. Further, if what I have said above is right, unprojected consciousness is still the structured object of attention, at levels lower than what is in the focus. As such, it remains objective, so it cannot be identified as subject. We seem not to have been liberated from the dilemma with which the whole quest for the self is beset. The arguments of Kant, Ryle and Evans notwithstanding, there are occasions when we can and do make ourselves objects to ourselves quite differently from the way in which psychological enquiry (including introspection) objectifies the empirical self. When I contemplate some action, I can become aware of my own motive and can criticize myself for entertaining it, and the self criticized is the same self as the critic, although the act of criticizing is not the same as the act criticized. It is I who am subject of both. I am aware of my motive and confess to it as my own and I criticize it as my own, as the motive of the self that is criticizing. Yet neither the awareness of the motive, nor of my own critical stance is, nor can it be, unprojected (unless it is somehow subconscious and not really overt selfcriticism). Again, when Descartes pronounces cogito ergo sum the subject of sum is the same subject as that of cogito. The I who am is the same I as am conscious and am conscious of being myself, and am conscious of existing because I am conscious. This “I” cannot be unprojected for in each utterance it is the object of attention to which I am referring. When I say that I know what I am about, the I who knows is the same I who is about what I know that I am doing. We can and do, therefore, become objects to ourselves on such occasions, not as empirically observed, but as self-knowing, as self-

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aware. Accordingly, there must be some other way of comprehending the relation between self and object than we have so far discerned. From the outset it has been claimed that what consciousness assures us of is our own existence, and Damasio has insisted that consciousness is primarily the awareness of ourselves and of our feelings (the modifications of our physiological condition) as our own - that is, of the relation of ourselves to our feelings, a relation that can be cognized as such only if both of the terms are objectified, and so projected from the conscious subject. But if the self is thus extruded from the subject of awareness, genuine self-consciousness would seem to have been proscribed. How are we to extricate ourselves from this new dilemma? A Second Look at James and Flanagan Among the ambivalences and self-confuting implications that we have noticed in the James-Flanagan exposition, there are several hints of another theory. While arguing that the mind’s “I” is an illusion, Flanagan writes: “My consciousness is mine... because of my nature as an organic thinking thing...” (p. 177). and again, “...the self emerges as experience accrues, and it is constructed as the organism actively engages the external world.” (p. 178) He tells us that “the material ‘me’ consists first and foremost of one’s bodily being, how one experiences one’s body... The sense of what it is like to be ‘me’ normally depends in some important sense on the experience of one’s bodily being.” (p. 180). And James says that the “me” is always the bodily existence felt to be present at the time. If we compare statements of this kind with what we have learnt from Damasio and Collingwood we get intimations of a different doctrine. Flanagan also asserts (p.182) that “the whole organism, with its functional nervous system” is the self-reflective subject - a remark consonant with what I shall shortly propose about the form of the organic whole. He also says that

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“... the passing subjective Thought that knows the objective person... emerges from a system with a certain history, a system that knows about that history...” (p. 187) indicating the systematic and holistic nature of the source of subjectivity. If we could follow out these suggestions and indications they might lead to a different conception of phenomenology, of what appears, how the appearance emerges from physiological activity, and how the stream of consciousness presents a world to a subject that is not (as Kant saw it) apprecieved by an I that is a merely nominal analytic self-identity, an abstraction that James is quite right to reject.

NOTES 1

Susan A. Greenfield, The Private Life of the Brain, p. 43.

2

Sir Charles Sherrington, Man on His Nature (Cambridge, at the University Press, 1951), p.67.

3

Cf. Owen Flanagan, Consciousness Reconsidered, Chs.8 and 9.

4

Cf. B. Bosanquet, The Philosophical Theory of the State, (London, Macmillan, 1925), Ch.VII.

5

Edelman and Tononi, Consciousness, p. 24.

6

Cf. Husserl’s transcendental Ego, derived from Kant’s “original transcendental unity of apperception” to which reference has been made above; also my paper, “The Problem of Self-constitution in Idealism and Phenomenology” in Idealistic Studies, Vol. VII, 1977.

CHAPTER IX TOWARDS A SOLUTION Alexander’s Doctrine of Space-time and Emergent Evolution Samuel Alexander elaborated a comprehensive metaphysical theory in which space-time was taken to be the ultimate matrix of reality, and successive increasingly complex configurations of point-instants gave rise to new emergent qualities. Just how or why the new qualities emerged as they did, Alexander confessed we did (and could) not know. The bare fact that they so appeared had to be accepted “with natural piety”. He seems to have been dimly aware that the emergent quality was the consequence of the structural wholeness of the new configuration, although he failed to draw special attention to this significant fact. Alexander held that at critical levels of complexity configurations of point-instants would give rise to physical properties (such as mass, gravity, and electro-magnetism); these again by further complication would generate chemical substances, from suitably intricate combinations of which life would emerge, and at a still further complication of living activity the new emergent would be mind, leading by suitable steps eventually to Deity. A mere complication of point-instants would, however, not seem to warrant the emergence of any quality, other than extensity, whereas ordered interactivity might do so. If we substitute dynamic organizing action for configurations of point-instants, some such theory would be more persuasive. The Order of Nature Now, contemporary scientists recognize dynamic organizing activity as ubiqitous. Physicists nowadays have come to the conclusion that elementary particles and energy waves are mutually interchangeable, so that every particle is associated with, and in certain contexts indistinguishable from, a

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field of force. The ultimate particles, physicists believe (holding in obeyance the more recent string theory still under consideration) are quarks, found to be of various types differing in “colour” and “flavour”. Protons and neutrons are made up of quarks, but individually they have new properties quite different from those of the quarks conjoined in them. Following Alexander (but with some modification of his spatio-temporal concept) we might say that these new properties were emergent from the more complex integration of particular energy fields. In Aristotelian terms it would be justifiable to say that protons and neutrons were forms imposed on the matter consisting of quarks. Further combinations of neutrons, protons, and electrons constitute atoms, which, as each particle represents a field, is a fresh complex of energy fields; and this conglomerate field has new and different properties from any of the separate particles that make it up. Although they are essential to its structure, their several characteristics are no longer evident. Again the atom can be regarded as the new form in which the elementary particles (as matter) are united. We should, however, be careful not to think of matter as something crass and inactive. Contemporary physics distinguishes (if at all) between spacetime, energy and matter only as gradations of dynamic activity. Space-time curvature is equivalent to energy field, and particulate matter, qua wavepacket, is equivalent to energy. The modern version of Aristotle’s distinction, thus becomes one simply of degrees of complexity of unified dynamic activity. The character and behaviour of atoms are quite different from those of its constituents each taken alone, which now in conjunction no longer display their singular properties. Atoms bonded together in chemical combinations form molecules which possess further different properties, not attributable to the constituent atoms; and these molecules again can combine together to form crystals which have characteristics impossible for the molecules severally. Some of these characteristics have been called co-operative properties because they are displayed only by conjunct arrangements of molecules. Ferro-magnetism is one such and optical anisotropy is another, both dependent upon (or emergent from) the leptocosmic order of the crystalline form of the substance. Macromolecules of amino-acids and nucleotides combining in chains and diversifying in polymers display still further properties uncharacteristic of their constituents in separation, and when they congregate in suitable combinations they give rise to living cells and organisms activating interwoven chemical cycles that co-operate as metabolism, merging into the

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organized physiology of a living body. At each stage there are new emergent properties: each successive emergent is form to that which is immediately prior as its matter. Yet matter and form in every instance are substantially identical and the more complex include the whole scale of prior forms in themselves, from quarks upwards. Moreover, these progressive stages are not static at any level, but are always organized combinations of dynamic activity - energy fields, producing elementary particles, electrically variously charged or neutral, which generate chemical bonds, chemical reactions and catalytic effects, producing metabolic cycles in homeo-static equilibrium, and self-maintaining physiological functioning. This scale of forms is, I contend, dialectical, because while the forms are mutually distinct, each successive form is in some significant sense the opposite of its predecessor (for example, space-time as opposed to energy; energy as opposed to matter; field as opposed to particle… and so on). Yet they are also mutually complementary, none is self-sufficient without its predecessor. At the same time, each constitutes a provisional whole, and from the first each, while its characteristic properties are superseded in its successor, is retained in it and indispensable to it. Hence, forms adjacent in the scale overlap. The scale answers to the description given by Collingwood of what he calls the philosophical universal, and what I take to be the best and most recent account of the structure of system or of the concrete universal. It also exemplifies the dialectical series of categories in Hegel’s dialectical logic. The similarity of this scale of forms to that elaborated by Spinoza in his 32nd. letter (to Oldenburg) is plainly apparent, as is that to the scala universi of Aristotle; and for Spinoza, we should remember, there is an idea or mind corresponding to every individual body. He also contends that the whole scale, and the way in which its parts (modes) interact, constitutes one whole or universal unchanging schema, which he calls facies totius universi (the face of the whole universe). This, too, corresponds to a recent development in the way modern physicists view the physical world. Many contemporary physicists point out that current advances in Quantum Physics imply that all physical entities and events are mutually interdependent, so that the physical universe constitutes a single whole - a conclusion they might have reached from the consequences of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, which established the inseparable interrelations of length and velocity (space and time), mass and energy, in fact, of all physical measurements. At each successive stage, what we have is a whole of some degree of complexity and dynamism. The atom unifies elementary particles into a

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distinctive and specific whole, the molecule is a new whole unifying its constituent atoms, the leptocosm of a crystal is a further, more elaborate whole, and the living cell a yet more complex and more intimately unified totality of cyclic chemical activity, syntheses and combinations. The holism of the living cell, Stuart Kauffman points out, is the essential character of life, the source of which has to be discovered if we are ever to understand how life emerged from non-living physical processes.1 The new emergent in each case supervenes upon a new whole - is the sign and the product of its holism; and the properties of the supervenient emergent replace those of its several constituents, which are, in Hegelian terms, aufgehoben (cancelled, yet preserved in transformation). The nature and behaviour of the constituents are, in each case, determined by the specific structure of the configuration of the whole and change with it, as the properties of a protein are modified when the inter-relations of the molecules of the polymer are differently folded. Feeling Susanne Langer contended that when the activity of some part of the nervous system reaches a critical threshold of intensity, it is felt,2 but even if this is the case it does not reveal to us immediately what feeling actually is. Langer suggests that it is some new character arising out of a special configuration of elements which lack it, as a complex of revolving triangles can construct a figure containing curved lines and petal-like shapes in which the triangular shape is suppressed.3 The emergence of feeling would be another example of a new type of property arising from a special organic complexification of activity of lower order, or alternatively, a new form of what may be seen as a proximate matter. In sentience, moreover, the physiological character of bodily functioning (neural included), while still present and essential to it, is nevertheless “cancelled out” (aufgehoben), yet preserved and transformed, being replaced by an entirely new form of activity - mental as opposed to physical. The relation between sentience and neural activity may perhaps be analogous to that between a magnetic field and the molecular structure of the body from which it emanates. They are not separable, they are not two separate entities, yet they are distinguishable, yet they are opposites because the molecular pattern is not discernible in the field although it is indispensable to its presence. We have seen good reason to hold that the intricately intertwined circuitry of neural transmissions in the brain cannot be segregated from the general physiology of the body as a whole; that they are interactive and interdependent. Hence, feeling must be the new propensity that emerges

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from activity of the entire organism at a critical pitch of integration. Sentience, then, would be the form taken by bodily functioning, which, at the critical intensity of complex integrally unified activity, becomes its matter. Such a relationship is not ineptly described as what Spinoza called the idea of the body,4 or (as Hegel might have said) the idealization of the body in its interaction with its environment (its Erinnerung). Indeed, to maintain itself as a living system, the organism has to ingest sustenance, and so to distinguish what is nourishing from what is inedible. To do this some sort or degree of sentience is indispensable. Sentience then becomes the means of assimilating and in some measure domesticating the environment. Lowly organisms sense (if that is what they do) only what comes into direct contact with them, but as living beings evolve they are able to penetrate further afield and they develop distal sense modalities, olfactory and auditory. Sight develops in circumstances that give it special survival value. And so progressively the organism assimilates wider and wider regions of its surrounding world. The environment is thus progressively inwardized (wird erinnert). What in fact the organism accomplishes is the unification of all the multifarious effects upon its body of the illimitable environment, and when the appropriate threshold of intensity of complex integrity is reached, this unified whole assumes the form of sentience (Bradley’s “non-objective whole of feeling”, “a many felt in one”), which is the medium in which the organism brings itself and its world to consciousness (the fundamental matrix of “the idea of the body”). The internalization of the external world is a unification of a diversified expanse, and that involves inter-connection and inter-relation. In other words, its attainment is a new, more extensive, and higher order of integration and organization. The emergence of sentience at a special intensity of integrated physiological activity, is then the phase transition produced by and producing a yet higher degree of organization. What is organized and integrated is a relational complex and relations are made explicit only when they are cognized. Sentience then proves to be the primary means tending to bring relations to cognition, and consciousness, emerging as attention constructs a figure-and-ground datum, is the first and only form in which the explication of implicit relationships can be brought about. Thus, when particular features within the felt whole are brought into the focus of attention to become the objects of consciousness they become at one and the same time the idea of the body and of the surrounding world. To

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regard it as the form of which the matter is the body would not be implausible, and Aristotle has made it plain that form and matter are one and the same in substance (as, Spinoza also insists, are idea and ideatum); so no dualism is admitted, only a distinction between two levels of compexifying organization: metabolic-physiological and sentient; the proto-self felt as the state of the organic whole modified by contact with objects in its surround (as Damasio asserts), a self-feeling which is at once bodily and the fundament of that conscious subject which perceives, imagines, thinks and judges. This conception of the relation of mind to body overcomes the difficulties of causal and representative theories of perception, because what emerges as sentience contains within it (aufgehoben) all the prior phases of development and evolution, so that the dialectical chain is available to the feeling and thence to the knowing mind. How, it will be asked, if this is so, do we come to know it to be so? The composite mass of sentience, though at first undifferentiated, contains within it all the variety of effects upon the organism of its environing world. Within this emulsion of feeling attention distinguishes specific objects including the body which is felt and its relation to others to construct an orderly world which it inhabits. This is the perceived world of common sense, which closer and more systematic observation, further reflection and systematic thinking, scientific and philosophical, show to be organized as a whole of dialectically related phases such as has been outlined above. In this system, the sentience from which the structured cognition began is found to be the next dialectical phase proceeding from a lower phase of living activity which contains and preserves within it all the prior phases. Thus the causal relations linking the organic body and surrounding bodies become available to its mind and it can identify those that modify its own bodily condition as what it perceives. But the test of perceptual truth is no mere comparison of a mental idea with an external object; it is the self-criticism of consciousness, by which it tests the coherence of the system that is being envisaged - the interpretation of the sensed content. Incoherence within experience is the sign of error, and comprehensive coherence the nature of truth. If my eyes seem to deceive me so that I mistake a bush for a bear, I test the accuracy of my perception by closer examination of the object, or careful consideration of the environment. If the region is one which I know bears do not inhabit, and if the object sways in the breeze as bears do not, the inconsistency of my initial interpretation of the appearance with the rest of my experience is what indicates the error.

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The account I have given of sentience gains support from Damasio and from what Edelman and Tononi have written in Chapter 13 of their book, Consciousness; it conforms to the doctrines of Aristotle, Spinoza and Hegel and is consistent with the views of F.H. Bradley and R.G. Collingwood. I can see no obvious objection to it, although I can appreciate that some philosophers (and, no doubt, neuro-scientists) may find it less than satisfying. One of the clearest and most penetrating thinkers I have known personally, Brand Blanshard, complained to me that he could not understand it - an objection to which I do not know the answer. A caveat must, however, be issued that this whole Weltanschauung is not to be confused with functionalism and, while it has much in common with the doctrine of emergent evolution developed by Lloyd-Morgan and Alexander, is not the same as theirs, for as I have tried to show and shall emphasise again later, the emergent properties are not merely inexplicable phenomena, to be accepted with natural piety, for they have an intelligible relation to the matrix from which they proceed. So far as function and activity coincide, it is clear that emergent properties must be dependent on function, but consciousness is not reducible to the function of the prior phase (e.g. of the brain) but is the emergent form of the activity of the entire organism - the dynamic living whole. The above is a general account of sentience as the form assumed by the metabolic-physiological unity of the living organism (its proximate matter). What precisely sentience is in itself can less easily be decided than what consciousness may be. It seems certain that sentience is essential to consciousness, which cannot occur without it. On the other hand, not only occasionally, but constantly, we are not conscious of all that we feel. For example, those who live by the seaside constantly hear the sound of the sea, but are not always aware of it. When travelling in a jumbo-jet, one is not always conscious of the sound of the engines which one cannot help but hear. Night and day I feel the pressure on my skin of bed-covers and clothes, but I am conscious of it only when for some reason it is brought to my attention. What then is feeling when we are not conscious of it? Is what lower organisms ”experience” unconscious sentience? Whatever sentience is, we can be sure, at least, that it is not just the transmission of electro-chemical impulses along nerve fibres, however indispensable that may be to its occurrence, for that is never felt. What is felt is quale (presumably for this reason Edelman declared that all consciousness is quale5), in the first instance, no doubt, what Bradley described as an indiscriminate mass of feeling. Possibly the correct definition of qualia is the quality of sensations.

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Consciousness Consciousness, however, is a further issue. We are habitually inclined to think of it in terms of illumination, forgetting that this is a metaphor. Literally illumination is what vision provides, but the blind are deprived only of one sense modality and are otherwise as conscious as are the sighted. We do not lose consciousness if we close our eyes - except, of course, of the light reflected from surrounding objects. Helen Keller could neither see nor hear, yet she was acutely conscious. Felicitous though the metaphor of illumination may be, therefore, consciousness as such must literally be something other. Successive Stages of Organization While we are not always conscious of what we are feeling, we become conscious of it if it is brought to our attention. So attention is the first condition of consciousness. Secondly, psychologists have discovered that we never perceive a single sense-quality covering the entire sense-field (what has been called the Ganzfeld). To be perceived the object must include some contrast. It must be a configuration of some sort, a figure against a background (a Gestalt). Consciousness, thus involves structure of some kind in the object, and structure implies order and organization - terms in relation. Some philosophers have maintained, I am sure correctly (for, apart from epistemological reasons, there is good psychological evidence to support the contention6), that all perception is implicit (and at times explicit) judgement; and judgement is an activity of ordering or setting in an intelligible context. It would seem, then, that consciousness, whatever else it may be, is an activity of organizing. Its character is more strictly identified as activity than as illumination. But organizing activity is the distinguishing character of all life at whatever level of development. So it would not be inappropriate to say that consciousness is a higher degree of organizing activity, continuous with, and making explicit the relations between differences embedded in feeling - a higher degree of organization than that of the physiological processes at an intensely integrated level of which sentience is the emergent form. It is what clearly sets out or “posits” (what Hegel termed gesetzt) the relations between the qualia submerged in the mass of feeling constituting primitive sentience. What I wish to suggest is that the form assumed by a highly complex and unified organic totality functioning, at the metabolic level to control

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homeostasis and at the physiological level to maintain systematic order (health), is sentience, a new emergent character. It emerges as bodily feeling, and it includes in one undifferentiated mass the effects upon the organism (the proto-self) of influences from the environment. Sentience, then, becomes the matrix of a higher order form of organization. Of the metabolic and physiological phases of activity there is no consciousness except when they malfunction (and not always then), nor is sentience, per se, conscious. Consciousness supervenes upon the feeling which emerges at a critically complex and intensively integrated phase of physiological functioning. It is a further stage of organization (of sentience) implemented by attention, which singles out some element of feeling and sets it in more vivid focus against a less articulate background. The neuro-physiological evidence seems to establish fairly firmly that attention is closely related to emotion. It must therefore be instigated by feeling. Emotion, further, in many or most of its occurrences, is inseparable from innate instinctive impulses evolved to protect the organism from harm and to defend it against predation. Just how these instincts are evolved is poorly understood as yet, and we need not be distracted at this point by attempting to speculate about the detailed process. It would seem reasonably safe to conclude that emotion, generated by instinctive urges, prompts attention to specific bodily feelings, of what Damasio has identified as the modification of the proto-self in reaction to some object. The direction of attention to an object constitutes perception, which is the ground-floor (so to speak) of consciousness. Attention would thus seem to be the initial act of organizing, instigated by a specific kind of feeling at the psychical level, to emphasize the relevant feature and distinguish it from the vaguer background in the psychical field. The act of attention creates the object for consciousness and places it in focus and sharp articulation, contrasting it with other features that shade off towards the periphery of the psychical field where there is little or no discrimination. The act of identifying and distinguishing which is thus accomplished is inchoate judgement - the perception of “this-not-that” (as was noticed above). Here the rudiments of the logical constants, identity, negation, disjunction and conjunction, are implicit, none of which can occur without the rest. Consciousness is, accordingly, the locus of thinking. The common custom of opposing reason to emotion is therefore misplaced, as Damasio has insisted, except perhaps in extreme and unusual cases. Reason is initiated and for much of the time guided and directed by

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emotion, and feeling is its basic substance. Its function and character is to distinguish, identify and to relate, in short, to organize. By means of attention, distinctions are made within the psychical field, ordering it first as a world of objects in relation to one another, and then distinguishing between the self and, on the one hand, its various sense modalities, and on the other, the outside world that they reveal. Although I have listed these two phases as successive, strictly they are concurrent, for among the outside objects distinguished are other selves, in contrast, and sometimes conflict, with which we identify ourselves. The self is the felt whole of the bodily organism now become aware of its feelings as its own and of itself as distinct from its objects and from other selves. Thus it becomes aware of itself as subject (as I). There is yet more to be considered and of which we should seek a more detailed analysis in this account of consciousness, and what has been said thus far should be treated as a bare outline. The Nature of Wholeness Starting from Flanagan’s intimation that system is the source of subjectivity, we may perhaps find a way out of our initial difficulties by examining more closely the nature and implications of a whole of systematically interrelated parts. Consciousness is a state of awareness, and insofar as it is the unitary apprehension of a configuration of differences and contrasts, it combines a many into one. This is the universal function of relations. Now a unitary whole of many components is an organized totality. For the whole to be indivisibly one, the diverse components must be mutually adjusted so that they fit together without conflict or friction, and this means that they are organized in accordance with a principle of order that determines how they are reciprocally adapted. I have suggested above that sentience and cognition are activities of organization in a higher degree than that already operative at the biological level where the principle of organization seems to be, roughly speaking, the urge to self-maintenance; and that involves adaptation to changing and frequently more or less hostile conditions - it involves the integration, not only of the system of the organism, but at the same time the organic unification of organism and environment. This is brought about by the selfadjustment of metabolism and the physiological processes to preserve homeostasis whenever requisite. Metabolism again depends on, and utilizes enzymes, directing chemical combinations and syntheses that are regulated

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by physico-chemical laws; and these, if contemporary physicists are correct, are determined by an ultimate principle of order (a fundamental equation) from which, if enough were known about it, all physical entities and processes could be derived. Accordingly, through successive degrees of complexity and integration, there seems to be a universal principle of order at work, which from the beginning is a dynamic principle (the primary phase being the energy field) and one that remains the same throughout the gamut of forms in which it manifests itself. It remains the same because at each stage in the evolutionary scale the prior stage is retained, although modified by its incorporation within a more elaborate and more intricately unified system. At the chemical level physical laws still hold, at the biological level chemical laws are still effective, and at the psychical level the autonomous urge to self-maintenance of the organism is still operative. The scale of forms is, in fact, a series of specifications of the universal principle successively increasing in degree of complexity and diversified unity. Each successive form, therefore, is a more adequate actualization of the principle of order. Consequently, the universal principle is revealed more truly in its most developed specifications than in its more basic mathematical and physical expression; and the earlier specifications are preserved, although transmogrified, in the later. That the principle of wholeness is more adequately revealed in its higher forms is of supreme importance. It means that the series is in essence teleological (for the correct understanding of teleology is the determination of the parts and constituent processes by the organization and structure - the nature - of the whole). As Aristotle maintained the matter is the potentiality of the form: the actualisation for the sake of which it exists. Metaphysical Presuppositions The organizing principle is dynamic, not only because, from the first, physical reality is an energy field, but also for a more metaphysical reason. It is the integrity of the whole that demands the inter-determination of the parts in accordance with a principle of order. And the whole, as a whole, must be complete - for otherwise it would not be whole. Each partial phase, therefore, in the dialectical scale of forms in which the principle of order the concrete universal - specifies itself, insofar as it is inadequate to the generic nature of that universal, demands for its own subsistence (for that derives from its dependence on and inter-relations with the rest of the system) what it lacks, and thus it is imbued with a nisus to complementation by its other and development towards more adequate completion. What Spinoza postulated as the conatus in suo esse perseverandi of every mode of Substance turns out to be, at the same time,

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an urge to greater adequacy to the holistic principle (what Spinoza called “perfection”, the power of existing and of action). The dialectical phases are at once the species of the universal and its self-manifestation as an existent universe. The principle of order (or organization - for order and organization are mutually implicit) is one of unity in difference, which is the character of every conscious state; so we may conclude that consciousness is the operation of this principle on the level at which it becomes aware of itself - and the self of which it is aware is the sentient whole of the organic body, in which it is immanent. That, again, as we have seen, is the concentrated (or “inwardized”) totality of all the effects upon the organism of its total environment. Although this sentient whole per se may not initially be conscious, in becoming conscious, as attention is paid to its content, it is felt as “mine” - it becomes self-feeling. What I feel is primarily “me”. Hence, in the developed living organism what at the psychical level becomes aware of itself as “I” is the principle of unity immanent in the organic whole, first as sentient, thence as subject of its own feelings, and of those feelings as the objects of attention - as percepts; these it relates to one another as a perceived world. As the mind develops intellectually, it reflects upon this perceived world and understands it scientifically as the range of physico-chemical, biological and psychological phases which constitute its universe. The unity of consciousness, therefore, is the product of the ultimate dynamic principle of wholeness (or organization) at once of the organism and of the entire universe. And this unity of consciousness founded in the sentient whole of bodily feeling is the same whole as that of the physical world epitomized in the organism and inwardized as sentience. The organizing principle at the psychical level has become conscious, not only of a world of objects, but implicitly of itself. Were this not so the above analysis could not have been made. Having advanced through the scale of forms that constitutes the gamut of evolutionary stages, the operative principle of organization now active in the living organism has become aware of itself as “I” (the ego cogitans). The ”transcendental subject”, therefore, turns out to be the ultimate dynamic principle of organization itself as it manifests itself in the human organism and subsequently in the perception of its sentient content; for it is the conscious human mind that, by its activity in selective attention articulating its own bodily feeling, organizes this inwardized feeling of the environing world

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as coherent knowledge, making explicit relationships which at lower levels are merely implicit. There is some premonition of this conclusion in Kant’s theory of the transcendental unity of apperception which he identified with “I = I” and asserted that it can be known only as the transcendental condition of the experience of a unified world. An ordered and unified experience of the world is possible only if it is that of a single identical subject; and it has now become apparent that the identity of the subject is that of the evolved organism at an advanced level of development within the world, and is one and the same as the principle of organization and unity, specifying itself as the series of graded phases of evolution, which are the object of human consciousness. That this is the coming to consciousness of the universal principle of organization is corroborated by the fact that, as the knowledge of a coherent world elaborated in common perceptual experience has, over the centuries, been refined and extended by scientific inquiry, contemporary scientists have been able to discern the fundamental principle of organization immanent in the cosmical constants; and some physicists have expressed confidence that they will soon discover its explicit formulation. If the subject of consciousness in human knowledge is the ultimate dynamic principle of order operative in all being, which has specified itself in a scale of forms progressively displaying increasing degrees of systematically diversified unity, the total object of its subjectivity is nothing more nor less than itself. What is presented in the developed and objectively ordered spectacle of human knowledge is the scale of forms, physical, biological, and psychological, in which the pervading principle of organization has actively specified itself. And the activity by which it has thus become aware of itself is the activity of the human mind consciousness, the cogitatio that guarantees and manifests its own existence. Accordingly, it is at once both subject and object, both transcendent and immanent. As transcendental it is subject; as immanent it is the sentient organism: the felt proto-self. Thus does feeling (as Collingwood and Hegel averred) become the object of consciousness, and immanent in it is the imprint of the whole of Nature. The proto-self, the whole of feeling (F.H. Bradley’s phrase) in which the universal principle is immanent, is felt transcendentally as mine. The appropriation of the feeling by the inchoate self is transcendental because it can only be perceived objectively in opposition to a subject (as Kant insisted, that is the condition of any perception of objects). But that subject, qua principle of organization, is

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immanent in the living organism whose organic condition is being felt. And this self-feeling is subsequently developed into the biographical self, which is included in the world that it has come to know. The principle of order qua subject of awareness is, however, transcendental to this knowledge. Here a caveat must be issued. When we say that the universal principle of organization becomes conscious of itself, it is not just the principle as an abstract formula (although in theoretical physics that is how it is presented); it is the principle as specified at the organic level: namely, the evolved living organism. The principle, as such, is realized only in its selfmanifestations - in the scale of forms through which it is specified and actualizes its systematic structure. It is therefore the organic whole that becomes aware of itself through its own sentience and its own activity of attentively distinguishing the differences within its bodily feeling. The subject of consciousness is this whole - no mere abstraction - felt as a self, and it is only by adopting an holistic view, of the entire universe and of each successive manifestation of the organizing principle up to the conscious mind itself, that the problems we have been grappling with can be solved. It is the bodily whole becoming conscious at the appropriate level of organization that determines itself as “I” and is aware of its own being in being so aware. The felt organism thus turns in upon itself and, in this self-enfoldment, becomes aware of itself as the subject of its own consciousness. An objection to the solution I have proposed might be that, although it may seem to apply successfully to the human mind, a difficulty arises with regard to sub-human animals that behave as if they were conscious of their surroundings but give no such evidence as would induce us to attribute selfconsciousness to them. It seems virtually undeniable that birds building their nest, cats (big and small) hunting their prey and the prey fleeing from their predators, dogs responding to their masters’ commands - even cephalopods attacking their prey and reacting to attack upon themselves - are conscious. I have even suggested that protozoans might be sentient. But a theorist who alleged that any of these creatures was capable of thinking of itself as “I” would be extremely rash. Yet they all represent levels at which the posited universal principle of order manifests itself, and seems here already to have arrived at the conscious stage. We have, however, noted that any self-preserving activity implies an implicit self identification; and autonomous self-preservation is the mark of life. Animals which are evidently conscious are so because of the efficiency and responsiveness with which they behave in maintaining, preserving and

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reproducing themselves. While this does not require explicit awareness of self, it does imply some degree of self-feeling, although the self so felt is never at the focus of attention, but remains in the dim background of awareness. As we saw, Dennett, with some justice, alleged that the spider’s web, the bower-bird’s nuptial decoration, and the bird’s nest, are all features of themselves as instictively behaving species; and to these examples we may add the cosmetics, clothing and possessions of human beings. While human beings, as a general rule, unite these external adornments and possessions unconsciously with their own personality they are able at times consciously to assimilate them to themselves. Less developed creatures do so only instinctively without explicit self-awareness and so are incapable of conscious self-identification. Yet the germ of selfconsciousness is not lacking and presumably matures as the social dependence upon others develops in the higher species, making more apparent the distinction, already incipient in the behaviour of the sexes and the courtship of the bower and other species of birds, between self and other. The interpretation of the world-view of contemporary science here suggested, the submission that at each dialectical level supervening wholes assume new forms that are substantially identical with their matter, and that at the human level (if not before) the form of the body is sentience (the matrix of consciousness), enables us to resolve the problem of relating body (including brain) to mind without resorting to any substantive dualism, without postulating any spiritual figment, or imagining any homunculus in the scull to read off what is occurring in the brain. The universal principle of organization specifying itself at successive levels of activity in structures increasing in degree of adequacy to its holistic generic essence, becomes sentient at the biotic level when the metabolic and physiological integration of the organism reaches a certain threshold of intensity, so that sentience is the form (in its Aristotelian sense) of the body, substantially identical with it. Thus we are contemplating no dualism. At the same time we can placate the dualist by legitimately distinguishing the brain from the mind, and the transmission of electrical potential within complex neural net-works from thinking and judging (the discrimination of differences within the sentient whole); and sentience being the form of the organic whole which is its matter, and perception a further, more explicit and comprehensive, level of organization achieved through the discrimination by attention of the contents of sentient experience, the emergence of consciousness from brain function can be understood without any appeal to what is scientifically unacceptable.

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In conformity with the philosophical Weltanschauung here outlined, it is possible to entertain a solution of our crucial problem that is at least feasible, that is “naturalistic” in the sense that it makes no appeal to anything supernatural, and “scientific” so far as the best empirical evidence from neuro-physiology supports rather than conflicts with it. Moreover, the conclusion of contemporary physicists that the physical universe is an indiscerptible whole organized on a single, universal principle7 is fundamental to it, providing further scientific support. I know of no other proposed conception of the relation of mind to body that is either intelligible or self-consistent. Summary and Conclusion The fundamental proposition of the position reached is that the universe is an indivisible whole of systematically inter-related parts ordered in accordance with a principle of organization which (as in all other wholes at varying levels of completeness) specifies itself as a scale of forms increasing in adequacy to the principle of wholeness governing the system. It follows that the principle is dynamic, because any partial manifestation, depending as it does for its nature and behaviour on the other parts with which it is interdependent (as they are likewise among themselves), will demand complementation and display a nisus towards the whole. Each phase of the whole is itself a provisional whole at its appropriate level, but, being provisional, it is not strictly complete. The human organism is such a whole, highly complex and at an advanced stage of the biological level. But at no stage is a complex adequate to the principle of wholeness if the relations between its parts and processes are merely implicit. This is the case throughout the scale up to the biological, where the relations are effective and make themselves evident, but not to themselves, only to an observing mind. Full completion requires explicit realization of all relations. The immanent nisus to completion, therefore, drives the complex to the explication of its internal relations so that they become recognizable as such. But this is possible only if they come to consciousness, which they cannot do except by registering their interdependence in sentience and by the living organism’s turning in upon itself and attending to those elements in its bodily feeling most crucial to its self-maintenance, survival and reproduction. Consciousness is thus the dialectical phase subsequent to the complex biological wholeness of the evolved organism (or the teleological requirement of its nisus to completion). Consciousness can therefore justly be designated the emergent “quality” of the configuration of the body (as Alexander contends), or the form of

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which the body - the systematic integrity of the living organism - is the matter (as it is for Aristotle), the idea of the body (as Spinoza has it), or the dialectical outcome of organism in Nature - its “truth” (as it is said to be by Hegel); and the biological instrument of its realization is the brain in unison and interaction with the rest of the living body. There is no substantial separation between them, only a difference of “attribute” or aspect. The activity of the mind is its organization and interpretation of bodily feeling, which is the registration of all the influences and impingements upon the body of its environment. In this way the world comes to consciousness as a unitary experience in the human mind, realizing a higher degree of oneness than at any lower level in the scale of forms. This conception of body-mind relation has the double advantage that it avoids dualism - there is but one and the same organism in action throughout - while it retains the distinction between different degrees of organization, between matter and form, between the emergent property of an organic whole which absorbs and represses the physical and physiological properties of its substrate - the kind of distinctions that motivate the demand for a duality between body (brain) and mind: between physical and psychical. It might also go some way to explain the tendency of neuro-physiologists to speak sometimes of neural processes as if they were conscious and could judge and make choices, and at other times as if “we” were some other agency using the brain to enable us to think, as we use our hands to manipulate material things. The brain is, as it were, the instrument by which the conscious organism (while it concurrently distinguishes itself from its surround), unifies itself with its environment in a single systematic, and organized whole, and becomes aware of itself, as self, in relation to other, thus becoming a distinct subject of consciousness aware of the objective world and of its own relation to it. Even prior to this selfobjectification the hypothesis is in accord with the apparently sentient behaviour of protozoans and perhaps also of the amoebiod cells in the blood to which Sherrington refers. Yet the proposal may be criticized by some alleging that the transition from electro-chemical neural activity to sentience and conscious experience has not yet been transparently revealed. We are still left with a mere posit, subject to acceptance with the “natural piety” recommended by Alexander: that sentience is the form emergent upon an exceptionally integral unified organic whole. How does this notion that mind is the form of the body overcome the puzzle mentioned earlier of understanding how, when we consider our crucial question, the brain provides the neural activity

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requisite to our current thought: how can the brain reflect on its own relation to the consciousness that is attempting to contemplate that relationship? To answer this last question first, we must remind ourselves that consciousness is, by its very nature, self-reflective. To be conscious is ipso facto to be aware that one is conscious (even when one does not attend to this fact). If, then, the mind is the form assumed by the body at a critical pitch of integrity, it immediately becomes self-conscious and self-reflective. The conscious mind, therefore, can and does reflect upon itself, and its own nature, and its own preconditions. Such self-reflectiveness, when we attend to it, can very well excite fresh brain activity subserving further interrogation and consideration of the mind’s relation to its own physical and physiological conditioning. Thus the hypothesis I am proposing could overcome the difficulty initially presented by assuming that the brain simply is the mind, as Dennett and Pinker have done. What they assume is at best a half-truth, for there is no substantive severance; but there is a profoundly significant formal difference between brain functioning and conscious experience. Few would be reluctant to accept the notion that lesser wholes lower down the scale give rise to new and unprecedented properties, but at the organic level the self-active integration of the system is so fantasically complex and, from the start, so inexplicable, that to appeal to the matterform relationship seems little more than a convenient device. The appeal to attention comes too late, because attention is the initiation of consciousness proper and it depends upon sentience, which is what we need to explain. How is it that, when sense-organs are stimulated by an object external to the body, the electro-chemical signal they transmit to the brain becomes a quale somehow unconsciously appreciated (“prehended”, to borrow Whitehead’s term), which attention can then convert into an object raising it to the level of conscious perception? The amazingly complicated routes of transmission in the brain, and their interwoven connections, in no way make a causal transformation of electro-chemical activity into awareness intelligible. What I hope I have so far succeeded in suggesting is that no such causal transformation actually occurs (the reason, perhaps, that cognitive scientists deny or ignore the transition), but that the awareness is a new emergent property of the organism supervenient upon so intricately unified a whole. It supervenes as the formal character of the stupendously complex and intimately unified systematic organization of the living entity, in the same

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way as chemical affinities emerge from the physical relations of protons and electrons in the atoms of chemical elements, and as autonomic adaptive systems arise out of the chemical inter-relations of nucleic and amino acids. The emergence of sentience, I am suggesting, is a phase transition occurring when a critical threshold is reached of complex integral unification evincing a property that enables the organism to become aware of itself as a whole (as a self) in relation to its object(s). The relation(s) become explicit, are fully and literally actualized, in being cognized; and cognition (knowledge) is one with consciousness. Further, developed consciousness is self-reflective and self-critical, so that when what is cognized is found to be internally inconsistent “it does not make sense” and is seen to contain some error. Sentience, then, may be regarded as that capacity of the developed organism, emergent upon a high degree of integral biotic organization, which constitutes the medium through which the world is brought to consciousness and is further organized by self-reflective self-criticism as systematic knowledge - the condition of its being yet again organized in practice by the rational mind through social cohesion, moral and legal order, subserving the self-satisfaction that results from more efficient and adequate self-maintenance. We need not simply accept the emergence of sentience from the integral whole of organic activity with Alexandrian natural piety. There is a way of understanding it as speculatively intelligible. We have explained that an emergent of this kind (like all emergents from lesser wholes before it in the evolutionary scale) supervenes upon a whole of systematically related parts. It is the systematic structure of the whole - its form, or holism - that triggers the emergence. Every such whole is a unity of differences - a one of many - uniting its parts according to a principle of organization that adjusts each element to every other, so that they fit together and determine one another as to both intrinsic nature and behaviour. The relation between the parts will therefore be dialectical. Each will have a particular character distinct from every other, and so will negate and be negated by every other (each is what the others are not). Accordingly they will be mutually opposed. Yet in their mutual negation they are also mutually determining, and are thus mutually complementary and compatible, combining to constitute a diversified whole. This is the case with a static geometrical system, like a polygon or a cyclic arrangement of triangles; but the system of the real universe is not static - is not merely geometrical. Its very space-time geometry, inasmuch as the curvature of space indicates energy fields, is dynamic. Every type of elementary particle is a field of energy and the combination of elementary particles is a complex field. This is true from

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gluons and quarks to atoms and beyond to molecules, crystals and polymers. They are all, in progressively increasing degrees of complexity, dynamic. In the biosphere this dynamism is even more obvious and ubiquitous, and as it proceeds, the resulting wholes progressively increase in their degree of complex integral unity. The successive stages of increasing complexity and wholeness, therefore, are also dialectically related: each is the other of its predecessor, is in significant ways opposite to it (as, for instance, organic and inorganic are opposites), and comes into being because of the limitation and deficiency of its predecessor, yet is compatible with it, unites with it, and necessarily unifies its predecessors in itself (as, for example, the one-sided positively charged proton is complemented and united with the oppositely one-sided electron in the atom). The relation between each succeeding whole and the next is therefore dialectically intelligible. When we come to the organized whole of the living organism and the ways in which it assimilates and unites with its environment, we find this dialectical relationship continuing. At the critical stage above indicated, it generates a higher degree of organized unity as its own opposite: sentience, the psychical field, as opposed to blind metabolism - a psyche which is nevertheless implicit in that metabolism as the presage of sensibility (the feed-back sensitivity that maintains homeostasis). The metabolic physiological organism, to maintain itself, needs to adjust and adapt to its environment, and that requires discrimination of the innumerable effects upon it of surrounding physico-chemical impingements. It lacks the means to achieve such discrimination until it can convert its multifarious sensitivities into sensibilities. Sentience, then, is the dialectical consequence of the limitations of metabolism and physiological function, and is the explication of what is implicit in its predecessor - as Hegel asserted that “soul” (qua Empfindung) is the succeeding opposite of organism in Nature, is the registration in the organism of its natural environment, and is the basal phase of Spirit, which is the truth (the awareness and knowledge) of Nature. Sentience, we saw, as a unitary variegated (if as yet undifferentiated) whole of feeling, is a further concentration of the multifarious impingements of the environment upon the organism, the diversity of which is yet to be discriminated and ordered by selective attention to become perception, superseding as cognition. Thus does mind supervene upon body, not as a separate entity, but as the further integral unification of the differences of both organism and environment as they are registered in bodily sensibility and recorded in bodily feeling - the proto-self affected by an external object.

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Brain functioning in its extraordinary intricacy and reciprocal interweaving is the instrument of this emergent unity, in which the diverse multiplicity of the organism in adaptation to its environment, is made explicit in systematic relationship. The emergent qualia set the constituent processes, the interrelations of which have hitherto been merely implicit, in explicit (selfconscious) relational combination, one that constitutes a diversified whole, a more extended and more adequate expression of that universal principle of organization which is, and has been, operative throughout the gamut of dialectical phases from physical to chemical and organic.8 What comes to consciousness, then, is the entire scale of forms, dialectically related each to the next, as which the universal principle of organization has specified itself - the very process through which the mind has been generated. What becomes object is itself the autogenesis of the subject. Subject and object are thus, in their mutual distinction, identical; and the object both includes and is included in the body of the individual person who is conscious, so the unity of subject and object is at the same time the unity of body and mind. By the same token, in this manner, the problem of knowledge is effectively addressed. Our scientific and philosophical reflection upon our common experience of the world reveals that world to be a dialectical evolutionary process through which organism generates awareness as the dialectical becoming of physical Nature and the biosphere to consciousness of its own autogenesis. This identification of subject and object leaves us in no doubt that the objects of our consciousness, insofar as they are coherent and mutually consistent, are true - that Mind is indeed the truth of Nature. The “external world” is not extruded from the mind so as to be inaccessible to it, nor is the proffered theory of knowledge such that, if it were true, it would be impossible to ascertain.

NOTES 1

Cf. Stuart Kauffman, Investigations (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 29f.

2

Cf. Susanne K. Langer, Philosophical Sketches (Baltimore, John Hopkins Press, 1962), p. 9.

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3

Cf. Susanne K. Langer, Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling (Baltimore, John Hopkins Press, 1967), Vol. I, p. 20.

4

It is significant that Spinoza frequently uses the word sentire to signify cognition.

5

See Gerald M. Edelman and Giulio Tononi, Consciousness: How Matter becomes Imagination (London, Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 2000), p. 168.

6

Cf. Sir Frederick Bartlett, Remembering (Cambridge, at the University Press, 1967), Ch.II; M.D.Vernon, (Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1962-1968), Chs.3 and 4; and M.D Vernon, Ed., The Psychology of Perception: Experiments in Visual Perception (Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1970), especially Chs.13 and 25.

7

Cf. D.W.Sciama, The Unity of the Universe (New York, Doubleday, 1961), David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order, (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980); Fritjof Capra, The Tao of Physics (London, Fontana, 1983).

8

It has been objected that this proposed resolution of the crucial problem may be open to the same sort of criticism as was offered to the computer hypothesis by John Searle by his Chinese Room analogy. I cannot see any relation between the two issues. Searle was criticising the assumption that the brain worked like a computer by demonstrating that information could be processed through a device which in no way understood the meaning that it carried. I have insistently maintained that neural activity in the brain is no more than electro-chemical and that we cannot imagine how such activity could amount to understanding, the sensing of qualia and judgement, whereas these latter are what we are indubitably and undeniably constantly experiencing. We can, therefore, never deny the occurrence of consciousness in any of its forms. The problem was to envisage some intelligible relation between the brain functioning and the awareness to which it is demonstrably indispensable. My proposal is that the relation is that of form to matter on a par with that between the polygonal shape (configuration) of, say, a hexagon and the lines and angles that constitute it; or the brush-strokes in a painting and the scene it portrays. Searle’s critique in its proper context is sound and effective and nothing analogous seems to me to be relevant to my suggestion.

APPENDIX THE THEORY OF EMERGENCE AND CONTEMPORARY ANALYTIC CRITICISM The answer to the crucial question that I have suggested appeals in some sense to the notion of emergence similar to that advocated by Alexander, but with the qualification that the emergent quality is the dialectical product of its predecessor in the scale of forms in which the concrete universal principle of organization immanent throughout the universe specifies itself. This metaphysical concept is that of the universe as a whole of systematically inter-related parts, each of which is a provisional specification of the ultimately complete and comprehensive totality. It is the holistic nature of every form that issues in the emergent characters, and for this reason they are new and different from those of the elements that make up the whole. Latterly the idea of emergence has come, once again, under scrutiny by philosophers who have been educated in the Analytic tradition. Logical Positivism and the Analytic philosophy that succeeded it has persistently adopted a physicalist metaphysic (unacknowledged as metaphysical); and in recent years a number of analytic philosophers have, as is not surprising, come to confront the question of fitting the body-mind relation into this physicalist outlook. The solution they have adopted is what has come to be called “nonreductionist physicalism”, that is, the postulation of universal physicalism: the belief that everything in the real world is basically material and subject to physical laws, with the qualification that certain physical complexes “realize” special properties, said to be “supervenient”, that are inexplicable by those laws or in terms of the basic properties of their components. Some contemporary commentators1 have seen this position as a revival of the doctrine of Emergence advocated by Lloyd Morgan and Samuel Alexander early in the twentieth century, which they trace still further back to forerunners such as John Stuart Mill, Alexander Bain, and G.H. Lewes, and in the work of a number of other writers who followed, to culminate in the exposition of the doctrine given by C.D. Broad in his Mind and its Place in Nature. These later commentators have offered a symbolic analysis of the concepts of emergence, irreducibility, supervenience, realization, and the like, to demonstrate that the last two are insufficient substitutes for emergence, and in the final outcome that neither emergence nor nonreductive physicalism can free their advocates from the unavoidable reduction of higher level emergent properties of special complexes to the lower level properties of the constituents on which they are held to depend. 165

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This final denouement results from the notion of “downward causation” which the emergentists hold to be important and the critics say conflicts with the way in which emergent properties are held to be generated. The most notable of these writers and the one to whom most of the others defer is Jaegwon Kim, so I shall confine attention for the most part to his arguments. Kim and those who argue similarly recognize that theories of emergent evolution were attempts to explain life and consciousness admitting the existence only of material entities, without appealing to either Cartesian dualism or the postulation of hypothetical non-physical influences such as entelechy. They were, therefore, ontologically materialist, but sought to avoid reductionism by contending that such properties as those of living beings and conscious minds were inexplicable simply in terms of physical laws or laws regulating entities on lower levels of emergent evolution. Emergentism, consequently, is closely convergent with the nonreductionist physicalism advocated by a number of contemporary Analysts. The essential characteristics of emergentism, according to Kim are: (1) Ultimate Physicalist Ontology, the doctrine that the basic entities of the world are material and non-emergent, having non-emergent properties. (2) Property emergence: the contention that when basic entities combine at a certain level of structural complexity (“relatedness”), genuinely novel properties emerge characterizing these structural aggregates, and do so only when the appropriate basal conditions are present. (3) The Irreducibility of emergents, the view that the emergent properties are “novel” in the sense that they cannot be explained in terms of the conditions out of which they emerge (Cf. C.D. Broad, Op.cit.). This irreducibility, Kim explains, is not simply that defined by Ernest Nagel as the reduction of one theory to another with the help of “bridge laws” (to overcome differences of terminology), but is due to the absence of possibility of explanation of the bridge laws themselves. Such laws as govern the emergent properties differ fundamentally from those governing the lower level entities that enter into the structured complexes from which the emergent properties arise. Further, Kim points out, the emergentists admitted that the higher level complexes also displayed properties that were not emergent but were called “resultant”, or “additive”, being simply the result of collating the lower level properties of the entities involved (e.g., mass). Emergent entities were held to have new and important causal properties, affecting both entities on their

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own level and entities on lower levels. In fact, Kim argues that they cannot have effects on their own level unless they concurrently produce effects on the level next below. This is because it is generally agreed (he claims) by emergentists and nonreductive physicalists that emergent properties can arise only if the basal conditions occur, and depend upon the lower level entities having their own characteristic properties and being in the appropriate relations to one another. For instance, if the light reflected from a photograph affects my optic nerve and causes it to transmit an electric impulse to my occipital lobe so that I see the picture and that causes me to visualize mentally the house where I was born, that can occur only if at the same time the physico-physiological conditions of my recollection are produced.2 In such a case, Kim asks, what are we to think of the causal efficacy of the first mental experience, since its basal conditions are sufficient to cause any further mental effect supposedly produced by it. The implication is that the emergent property is purely epiphenomenal, a conclusion that Samuel Alexander and the present-day neuro-physiologist, Roger Sperry, emphatically reject. Further, Kim maintains that Lloyd Morgan and Roger Sperry (whom he quotes) believe in what he calls “synchronic reflexive downward causation” where the emergent property produces a modification of the lower level constituents of its own basal structure. This, of course, should be impossible and self-defeating, for if the basal structure is modified the emergent property should not occur. Kim concludes: “If these considerations are correct, higher-level properties can serve as causes in downward causal relations only if they are reducible to lowerlevel properties. The paradox is that if they are so reducible, they are not really “higher-level” any longer.”3 In that case we should have abandoned emergentism. Nevertheless, he concedes that downward causation may be saved by giving it a conceptual interpretation: that is, as referring to concepts rather than phenomena or properties in the real world; by describing them in different languages. That, however, would be to give up emergentism as an ontological doctrine and would run counter to the convictions of the writers on whom Kim is commenting. It would seem that the ultimate object of Kim’s analysis, like that of other writers in the same vein, is to demonstrate that the doctrine of emergence cannot save us from downright physicalism, to which so-called nonreduction can make no essential difference.

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What this critique overlooks (apart from occasional incidental mention) is that the central condition for the emergence of new qualities (Alexander’s term) is the holism of the configuration from which they emerge. Alexander himself (cf. Space, Time, and Deity II, pp. 45ff) was clearly aware of this condition, although he fails to acknowledge it explicitly and masks it with “natural piety” (what Broad calls “metaphysical jam”). Others emphasise it explicitly, as does Sperry when he asserts: “...the molecules of higher living things are moved... not by molecular forces or quantum mechanics but by the specific holistic vital and mental properties - aims, wants, needs - possessed by the organisms in question.”4 Kim and the contemporary Analytic critics represent the basal constructs of emergent properties as micro-constituents in relation thus: [C1,...Cn; R], but the R is treated as merely incidental, the presumable tacit assumption being that all relations are external, making no difference to the singulars [C1,...Cn], whereas the assumption (tacit or overt) of the emergentists is that the relations are internal to their terms, which are mutually adjusted to create a systematically co-ordinated whole.5 Internal relations affect the nature of their terms, so that, within the whole that they create, the constituents will have new properties, as the whole itself evinces new capabilities. It is these that Alexander and those who adopt a similar doctrine regard as emergent. That the emergent properties are the result of those of the several components of the configuration from which they emerge, the properties they display on the lower level, is what the emergentists insistently deny. The basal condition of what emerges is the structural integration of the complex. The solvent propensities of water, for example, are not evinced by any of its constituent elements in isolation (oxygen or hydrogen), only by their combination in the special structural order that constitutes the molecules of the liquid. Likewise, regarding mentality as a quality emergent from a special configuration of organic processes, it is only the organized system of the living body as a whole that gives rise to the sensations experienced when certain brain states are activated, not simply the firing of neurons, whether individually or in concert (cf. Ch.9 above). That is why the emergent quality cannot be “reduced” to or explained in electro-chemical terms as can those of the singular components of its matrix or any casual collocation of them. As to downward causation, this never occurs so as to affect or modify the relatively limited whole from which the particular emergent property

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proceeds, but produces only a further integral interaction of lower-level components from which subsequent higher-level qualities emerge. Nor does this restrict the causal efficacy to that of the lower level constituents, for once they combine in the required constellation their lower level causal properties go into obeyance, and that of the higher level constellation would not take place apart from the new structure and special inter-relations of the parts that has arisen. In fact, downward causation never occurs except in the sense of final causation, which, properly understood, is the regulation and determination of the parts or elements of a complex structure and the process of their development by the configuration of the whole,6 as the generation of a living embryo is proleptically regulated and determined by the organized anatomy and metabolism of the mature adult, without eliminating the operation of efficient causation at prior stages. In this kind of development what emerges at the end governs and directs the course of the process teleologically, so the causation operative at each stage is at once efficient (consequent upon the prior stage) and final (governed by what the mature organization requires). If, as Stuart Kauffman surmises, natural selection is guided by a principle of self-organization, this kind of “downward causation” characterizes all evolution. Kim and his Analyst followers, therefore, have simply missed the main point of the Emergenstists’ doctrine: that special configurations of entities at one level of development give rise to new wholes on a higher level, in which the interlock of the constituents modifies them so as to cooperate to produce a new entity with new properties inexplicable by the laws that govern those at the lower level. And these emergent properties are characteristic only of their own level. The lower level constituents are necessarily involved, but in the new configuration are transformed so as to cooperate according to higher level laws to which they are not subject in isolation, or in casual collation, at their own original stage of development.7 I, myself, have gone somewhat further than the theorists of emergence and have applied this principle to the entire universe, as one all-inclusive whole. Thus I have maintained that the emergence of new qualities at higher levels is the result of the complementation of structures on the lower levels so as to constitute wholes more adequate to the generic principle universal to all natural things, due to the dynamic tendency throughout Nature to fulfil the ultimate principle of wholeness which governs the Universe at large - a whole that manifests itself in the scale of forms which these various levels of increasing integration and organization instantiate. This self-

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specification of the universal principle of organization pervading the whole is thus teleologically progressive and is the only way that it can realize its potentialities, which are not fully actualized in any of its separate component parts or temporary phases. The universal principle of organization - the concrete universal - is no mere formula or abstract mathematical ratio; nor is it a static patterned totality, but is perpetually realizing itself in and through its self-development as a dynamic system. I have indicated above how and why this process of self-realization occurs and why self-conscious cognition must emerge as a late phase in the process. It is because the relations that interconnect the constituents of the whole are not fully realised as long as they are only implicit and unite the complex in itself only provisionally; but if the whole is to be complete, as it must be if it is to be whole, it must be an explicit totality for itself. That requires cognition and the recognition of the relational order which must, therefore, be brought to self-awareness in and as a mind. The difference between the view I have adumbrated and the theory of emergent evolution developed in the early 20th. century is simply the contention that the emergent qualities are formal qualities dialectically consequent upon the structural complexity of the ultimate totality and the inadequacy to it of the prior stage - a form that the material substrates assume when they enter into more intricate and more intensely integrated dynamic systems, remembering always that form is not confined to spatiotemporal pattern but extends in progressive stages to dynamic, autonomic self-maintenance. Thus consciousness is the formal quality of the body as an integrated organism at a critically high degree of complex unification.

NOTES 1

See Emergence or reduction?: Essays on the prospect of nonreductive physicalism, edited by Ansgar Beckermann, Hans Flor, Jaegwon Kim (Berlin, New York, Walter de Gruyter, 1992).

2

The example is mine, not Kim’s.

3

Philosophical Studies, v. 95, p. 33.

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171

4

The Omni Interviews (New York, Ticknor and Fields, 1984), p.201.

5

Cf. C.D. Broad (quoted by Achim Stephan) from The Mind and its Place in Nature (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1925) p.61: ”Put in abstract terms the emergent theory asserts that there are certain wholes, composed (say) of constituents A,B, and C in a relation R to each other; that all wholes composed of constituents of the same kind as A.B, and C in relations of the same kind as R have certain characteristic properties; that A,B, and C are capable of occurring in other kinds of complex where the relation is not of the same kind as R; and that the characteristic properties of the whole R(A,B,C) cannot, even in theory, be deduced from the most complete knowledge of the properties of A,B, and C in isolation or in other wholes which are not of the form R(A,B,C). The mechanistic theory rejects the last clause of this assertion.”

6

Cf. my Foundations of Metaphysics in Science (London, G. Allen and Unwin, 1965; Routledge, 2002; Atlantic Highlands NJ, Humanities Press 1992), Chs. XIII and XXIII,3, especially pp.474ff., and Cosmos and Anthropos (Atlantic Highlands NJ, Humanities Press, 1991), Ch 12.

7

The recognition of holism in living beings has recently been reemphasised by Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela with their doctrine of “autopoiesis”. This by itself is no new discovery, but can be traced back as far as Aristotle. They rightly contend that the living organism cannot be explained simply analytically by attending exclusively to its component parts, but only in terms of its total organization, the invariance of which it is designed to maintain. Maturana, however, relies on the idea of autopoiesis to develop a doctrine of cognition that turns out to be admittedly relativistic, and so becomes suspect insofar as it is itself subject to its own prescriptions. See Autopoiesis and Cognition, Dordrecht, Boston, USA, London, Reidel Publishing Company, 1980.

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INDEX

coherence, 4, 75, 77, 148 CADBLIND, 41 Campbell, C.A., 47 Capra, F., 164 causation downward, 116, 167–169 colour-coding, 41, 84 computer, ix, 22, 23, 25, 28, 29, 37, 38, 43, 57, 76, 83, 85–88, 91, 93 consciousness stream of, 27, 38, 56, 76, 132, 133, 135, 136, 142 Crick, F., 126 Culture, 36, 37

Agnosticism, 50 Alexander, S., vii, 143, 165, 167 algorithm, ix, 28, 46 amoeba, 44, 128 Anthropology, 101 antibodies, 32, 33 Arcella, 33, 129 Aristotle vii, 97–100, 109, 144, 145, 148, 149, 153, 159, 171 Atomism, viii Attention, 4, 15, 16, 25, 28, 52, 58, 70, 72, 79, 83, 85–89, 100, 105, 107, 108, 112–122, 125, 130–132, 137, 139, 140, 143, 147–152, 154, 157, 160, 162, 166 axon, 2, 36, 86, 87 Ayer, A.J 132

Damasio, A., ix, 63–80, 93, 98, 99, 101, 104, 106, 107, 111, 117, 120–122, 127, 128, 131, 139, 141, 148, 149, 151 Dawkins, R., 36 dendron, 36 Dennett, D., ix, 21–29, 31–46, 49, 50, 59, 63–67, 76, 77, 80, 107, 120, 126, 132, 133, 136, 157, 160 design, 31, 32, 34, 39, 65, 69 Dickens, C., 14 dispositions, 42, 43

Bain, A., 165 Baldwin effect, 35 biosphere, viii, 162, 163 Blanshard, B. 149 blindsight, 39, 57, 58 blind-spot, 13 Bohm, D., 164 Bosanquet, B., 135 Bradley, F.H. 44, 64, 92, 105, 106, 132, 149, 155 brain hominid, 36 human, ix, 2, 23, 29, 31, 36, 37, 87 brain-stem, 88 Broad, C.D., 165, 166

ecology, viii Einstein, A., viii, 23, 51 electrical potential, 2, 22, 26, 27, 28, 29, 36, 38, 56, 59, 60, 86, 130, 157 Emergentism, 166, 167, emotion, 37, 56, 58, 69, 70–73, 76, 78–80, 89, 94, 100, 107, 108, 113, 117, 128, 151, 152

Cartesian Theatre, 26, 27, 75 Chinese Room, 110 183

184

Epiphenomenalism, 57, 58, 107 Epistemology, vii Evans, C.O., 114–116, 132, 139, 140 Evolution, viii, 23, 28, 29, 31–34, 36, 44, 47, 63, 67, 109, 118, 143, 148, 149, 155, 166, 169, 170 Emergent Evolution, 143, 144, 166, 170 feeling apanage of mind, 107 fiction, 24, 25, 27, 40, 45, 127 Flanagan, O. 49, 133 Form, 9, 15, 27, 28, 34, 38, 41, 53, 54, 65, 72, 79, 80, 86, 87, 97–99, 101, 105, 109, 112, 114, 117, 121, 130, 131, 133, 136, 141, 144–151, 153, 157–161, 165, 170 Freud, S., 72, 111 Friston, K., 58, 91 Ganzfeld, 150 Gastrulation, 130 genome, 31, 37, 67, 119 Gestalt, 121, 151 Gray, J., 126 Greenfield, S.A., 93, 94, 125, 128 Heisenberg, W., 27 Helmholz, H v., 92 holism, 8, 88, 90, 96, 121, 146, 161, 168. homunculus, 29, 65, 66, 75, 79, 85, 125, 127, 157 Hume, D., vii, 44, 131, 132, 136 Hypothalamus, 66–68, 89, 113, 127 Idealism, viii, 10, 11, 131 Indeterminacy Principle, 127 intentionality, 40

Index

intelligence artificial, ix, 87 interpretation, 13, 24, 26–28, 45, 55, 74, 84, 112, 148, 157, 159, 167 James, W., 38, 132, 133 Joachim, H.H., 18 Jordan, M.S., 18 judgement, 15, 22, 26–28, 30, 32, 34, 35, 39, 50, 51, 74, 101, 112, 113, 121, 150, 151 Karma, 52, 53 Keller, Helen, 60, 150 Kinaesthesis, 116 Kauffman, S 86, 118, 119, 146, 169 Koch, C., 126 Kosslyn, S., 90, 91 Lamarkism, 88 Langer, S.,109, 146 language, 36, 57, 76, 109, 167 Lavoisier, A.L., 52 learning, 34, 58, 68, 88, 89, 92, 118, 119, 120 Lewes, G. H., 165 Libet, B., 57, 91 Lloyd-Morgan, C., 149 Logical Positivism, 165 logic dialectical, 109, 145 machine prosthetic, 41 virtual, 38, 76, 83 mapping, 30, 31 materialism, viii, 26, 51, 60 mathematics, 72 Maturana, H., 171 McCrone, J., 91, 126 McGinn, C., 51, 54 Mysterianism, 54 mechanism, 35, 70, 79

Index

memes, 36–38, 42, 45 memory, 29, 70, 74, 79, 87, 88, 133, 138 mental imagery, 43, 74, 91, 98 Metaphysics, vii Metaself, 76, 77 method heterophenomenological, 24, 40, 43 micro-biology, viii microchips, 23, 83 Mill, J.S., 165 Mother nature, 34 MRI scans, 63 Muller-Lyer illusion, 24 Multiple-Drafts theory, 26, 27 mutation, 7, 34, 36, 37, 119, 120 Nagel, E., 166 Nagel, T., 55 natural light, 22 natural selection, 23, 28, 31–36, 57, 118, 120, 169 naturalism anticonstructive, 51 Constructive, 49, 51 Eliminative, 51 Nature order of, 143 Neocortex, 67, 70, 126 neo-Darwinism, viii neon colour spreading, 39 Neumann, 10, 34 neurons, 7, 2, 22, 28, 29, 38, 41, 42, 56, 59, 66, 68, 74, 83–85, 87, 94, 113, 126, 127, 135, 168 Nonnaturalism, 50 Odyssey, 36 organism, 9, 11, 35, 60, 67, 68, 70, 73, 75–80, 86, 87, 90, 94, 102, 103, 106, 118, 119, 120, 128, 130, 136, 139, 141,

185

147–149, 151–154, 156–163, 170 Organization, 35, 43, 45, 67, 84, 86, 87, 90, 91, 99, 112, 113, 116, 121, 122, 147, 148, 150 –161, 163, 165, 169, 170 Pain, 14, 58, 70, 71, 111, 130, 131 Panpsychism, 129 Paramoecium, 33, 118–120, 129 Penrose, R., ix philosophy, 77, 97, 101, 130, 165 Analytic, vii, 165 of Mind, vii phi-phenomenon, 27 Phlogiston, 52 Physicalism, 113 non-reductionist, 165, 166 Pinker, 21, 46, 130 Plank, M., iv Plato, vii, 99 Pleasure, 42, 53, 70, 71, 107, 108, 113, 131 Pollock, F., 100 Presocratics, vii Prosopagnosia, 58 programming, 28, 29, 37 psychical field, 111, 112, 114–117, 151, 152, 162 psychologist, 3, 24, 117 Pythagoreans, 63, 99 Qualia, 38–40, 42, 43, 49, 51, 53, 59, 60, 77, 149, 150, 163. Quantum theory, viii Quine, W.V.O., 49 Quining, 49, 52 Reductionism, viii, 85, 94, 166 Referral, 29, 30 relations internal, 158, 168 Relativity, vii, 145

186

Representation, 12, 29, 65, 66, 75, 76, 78, 109 Russell, B., 122, 132 Ryle, G., 44, 132 Sciama, D.W., 180 Searle, J., 164, 180 scale of forms, 99, 102, 108, 145, 153–156, 158, 159, 163, 165, 169 Science, viii, ix, 4, 5, 10, 23, 40, 49, 51–53, 55, 63, 72, 83, 93, 97, 127, 128, 157 scientific outlook, viii, 60 scotoma, 39, 57, 58 Searle, J.R., 46 self, 13, viii, 7–11, 32, 33, 39, 44–46, 49, 65, 68, 69, 74–80, 104, 105, 116, 117, 120, 121, 125, 127, 128, 130, 132, 133, 135, 136, 139–141, 152, 155–157, 159, 161 self-identity, 32, 142 self-organization, 35, 67, 86, 169 self-preservation, 119, 120, 156 self-replication, 36 Sentience, 16, 17, 19, 42, 102–104, 111, 112, 116–118, 120–122, 128, 130, 132, 135, 137, 146–152, 154, 156–162 Shakey, 4, 25 Sherrington, C., 128, 159 SHRDLU, 25 Stentor, 33, 129 subconscious, 25, 70, 72, 89, 92, 104, 106, 116, 140 self-organization, 35, 67, 86, 169

Index

Sperry, R., 167, 168 supervenience, 117, 165 Teilhard de Chardin P., 129 Teleology, 153 Time, viii, x, 3, 8, 10, 16, 29–31, 36, 44, 50, 53, 57, 64, 72, 83, 86 –88, 91, 92, 98, 102–104, 111, 115, 129–131, 133, 135, 136, 138, 141, 145, 147, 151–153, 157, 163, 167, 168 Turing machine, 38 Unconscious, 21, 25, 26, 35, 41, 53, 57, 58, 69, 78, 79, 89, 90, 92, 106, 111, 115, 116, 121, 128, 129, 138, 149 unified field theory, viii universal concrete, 45, 102, 105, 145, 153, 165, 170 universe, 12, 100, 101, 129, 131, 145, 154, 156, 158, 161, 165, 169 Varela, F., 171 Vernon, M.D., 164, 181 Water, 33, 56, 57, 59, 60, 97, 116, 168 Whitehead, A.N., vii, 129, 160, 181 whole organic, 78, 141, 148, 154, 156, 157, 159, 161 wholeness, 46, 60, 77, 86, 105, 143, 153, 154, 158, 162 zombie, 22, 24