Since about 6th grade, I've been struck by a worry about consciousness. I've never actually been able to articulate it properly, but I think that I'll give a stab at it here. While it sounds close to solipsism (or perhaps, in a way, pantheism), I think that the issue is fundamentally different. Simply put, why am I conscious?
I think the problem comes down to the peculiar phenomena of the 1st-person point of view, which seems to demand a certain special, non-shareable quality which nonetheless is held by a particular individual, without any particular feature of that individual marking him out from others.
I experience the world from a 1st-person point of view, and that experience appears to be incompatible with other 1st-person accounts. There can be many 3rd-persons in a single universe, but multiple 1st-persons seem to demand different universes, in a way. If I am conscious, and you are conscious, then your consciousness can never be 1st-person within my own. I could regard you as a 2nd-person instead of as a 3rd-person, but never as a 1st-person.
Another way of approaching the problem is that my own consciousness seems so asymmetrical. I mean, if there were a 1st-person view of the universe experienced in consciousness, it would seem to make sense that it were God's. But this particular consciousness is a finite one, amongst other finite ones. Why this one? Why is this life the one being experienced, when there are other apparently identical options?
I'm not sure that any of this has really communicated the problem. Like I've said, I've never really found a way to articulate it, perhaps because due to its nature it can never be made general or public; it is precisely about the particular and private.
17 comments:
I'm not sure I can shed any light on your question, but I've had a very similar question from a different angle for a while: how can I be sure anybody else even has a consciousness, or is even actually sentient? If everyone I knew were actually a very sophisticated robot, how would I know? And I'm totally leary of self-authentication, but what other reason do I have to believe in even my own consciousness?
Oh, but in answer to the robot question: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvrva8NoMLM
I'm not sure how this is an original problem, but maybe you didn't mean for it to be?
Have you read any Husserl or other phenomenologists? I haven't read much (just one grad seminar with some Husserl, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty), but this sounds to me like the sort of thing that gets talked about in that field.
I don't claim to understand what I was reading in the phenomenology seminar. However, it seems given that there are multiple subjective worlds. A world just *is* a subjective thing. We postulate an intersubjective world in order to relate to other subjects. It is important, ethically, to relate to others as subjects and not as objects.
Again, I really don't know what I'm talking about.
And by saying this doesn't seem like an original problem, I'm not saying that it is not a real problem, or that its solution is readily apparent.
Kevin: Concerning the video.... I just don't really have any words that can express the shear... something.
Both: While I'm not sure what exactly phenomenology says on this topic (I haven't even taken the class), I'm not sure that it's the same issue, though maybe it'll help bring it into focus. The problem isn't that I start with my own subjective world, and that I can't get to something intersubjective from there or to he givenness of other subjectivities.
Rather, it's that even if there are other subjectivities, why am I this one? One can range over 3rd-person objects and group the together as a kind, but there is something completely incommunicable to my specific having of consciousness, which doesn't feel capturable under any common feature with others.
>Rather, it's that even if there are other subjectivities, why am I this one?
Oh, OK. I think I get it now. I think this is one of the philosophical problems that kept me up at night before and during college, although I honestly haven't thought about it that much recently.
I used to think about how maybe I could be someone else (have their lived experience) for a while, but then would either of us really know the difference (either during or after)?
The intuitions I have considering this problem go along with my intuitions in support of a psychological-properties/memory theory of personal identity, and along with my intuition that personal identity _is_ a philosophical problem. :)
When I was in undergrad, I actually took a seminar on the philosophy of the self, which was super-interesting. One of the most relevant points for this discussion, I think, is that we considered the fact that, in a few cases where someone had their corpus callosum severed surgically, the two halves of their brain would seem to have different goals (e.g., a woman would want to pick out a different dress with either hand). Do such people experience two different consciousnesses?
Scott: You're right; it would be interesting to see more done on personal identity. Most of the people I've been reading do regard it as a problem, but only because particular personal identities are a bad thing, and one should ideally universalize oneself in (the Active Intellect, the One, Nirvana, take your pick). What are your thoughts on how this particularity may be a good, despite the problems finitude causes (that is, lack of understanding in relevant situations, a tendency to prioritize one's own inclinations, etc.).
Kevin: Would it be all that different from when I'm tired, and I reach out to grab something while, at the same time, my mind already realizes that I'm reaching in the wrong place? It seems that at least my mind and my hand are acting independently, for a moment.
What would it mean to experience two consciousnesses, I wonder? It seems that a defining characteristic of consciousness is that it synthesizes the manifold of experience into an apperceptive unity (sorry, I've been ready way too much Kant recently). Experience (and also consciousness), by its very nature, is one. Now, would there be two consciousnesses in one person then? Or, if there were one, would this be evidence for either a dualistic view of identity, or for another point in the brain where the hemispheres connect?
I think, yes, your experience of a mind-body dualism is at least a temporary version of what the split-brain person experiences all the time (although maybe a little different, too, since a hard-line philosophical materialist could easily see just two different sets of neurons firing in the case of the severed c.c.).
Let me go all fundy on you for a minute and suggest further that there are times when you know you're sinning, and your brain tells you you really should stop, but your body keeps going anyway. There seems to be a dualism here, too. And, I have to say, this seems to comport pretty well with a Biblical interpretation that sees bashar (flesh) + ruach (spirit) = nephesh (traditionally translated soul, but not always appropriately so, as I'm sure you know) - in other words, a strict dualism (and importantly, not separating mind/soul/spirit/etc. either).
I can't imagine two consciousnesses. In fact, I think the big question in my seminar was, if this phenomenon is indeed as robustly true as purported (or if not, then hypothetically), would we have to see two persons in one physical body? That's pretty hard to conceive, but it's also pretty hard to work one's way around. Of course, on the other hand, maybe "personhood" resides in the brain stem (which in my understanding doesn't have the corpus callosum anyway) - if someone is at least minimally sentient, I'm okay with calling them a person (thus ascribing personhood to, for example, people in permanent vegetative states, which it won't surprise you to learn, I'm all for). Of course, then we'd have to ascribe personhood to animals, but not human embroys, except that now we're in Peter Singer territory, but of course we could bring back in the concept of a soul/spirit, in which case we're back at dualism... so is dualism inescapable if we want to retain having one person per body?
I think that in the case of sinning intentionally, I only need conflicting reasons. I can't think of a single case where I was sinning, where I didn't also think that what I was doing would attain my desired ends more effectively (maybe I didn't think that I had the power to do otherwise, or that present gratification would be better than delayed, or that God wouldn't really come through for me in the end).
Concerning the person with the split cc, what happens with functions that are more dependent on one side of the brain than the other? Is one hemisphere talking, while the other is reasoning (not that these are reducible to one side or another, but different areas tend to dominate)? It would seem that the person(s) would be completely dysfunctional, unless (a) the different hemispheres developed the lacking abilities (which through the brain's plasticity might work, but would take a bit), or (b) there is some other point of connection, though it would be too slow a route to unify many tasks. If the latter, we still have one person.
I would hold that fetuses are human beings, but I'm doubtful that they are persons (same with human vegetables, or people with very severe retardation). They are potentially persons, in a way that animals even at a higher level are not, and so should be respected; but this has not yet been actualized.
So, there is a soul, but it may be in the sense of a life-principle in the body, which has a tendency to grow in a certain way and a certain stability to it which tends toward preservation of the life-form in a way that a random lump of matter does not.
Michael:
I might argue that personal individuality is a good because of the social relationships for which it is a precondition. I prefer being in a relationship with Sarah in which we are distinct individuals (with separate minds, thoughts, wills, epistemic positions, desires, preferences, etc.) to one in which we were indistinguishable with respect to personality.
Scott: good point on the good of individuation.
Michael: my understanding is that there are some funky things - e.g., if you show an object to only the left eye of a person with a split c.c., they can't verbally name it, but can pick out similar objects. That's where I'm thinking the brain stem may form that one point of connection, even if it's too slow to unify many tasks. And that kind of makes sense with what we've been talking about with the soul, too, since you can damage a lot of chunks of brain to some pretty ill effect (such as permanent vegetative state), but not always lethally, whereas I would think that catastrophic damage to the brainstem would mean certain death - and therefore the end of even the potential of personhood (and thanks for reminding me about the potential personhood argument; that was helpful). So we've solved it: the soul is somewhere in the brainstem!
Yo,
Know i'm late here, but i think Kenneth Gergen has something helpful to contribute to the conversation: our selves are not inherent to us, but are largely the products of our numerous, ongoing, longstanding social interactions with others. It is the modernist who believes the myth of "I".
Hey Matt,
Kenneth Gergen is wrong then. There are notions of individual selfhood as least as far back as Aristotle, and arguably in Plato as well, at least up until Duns Scotus in the 14th century and probably straight up until the modern time (and even in the Persian philosopher Suhrawardi, unconnected to the West, there is a concept of the self as a individual entity). Granted, this is not the same turn to the subject of Descartes and Kant, which I suppose is what Gergen is more concerned with.
But I'm not sure that even there Gergen on your take is really getting at the issues in the tradition; "social construction" sounds more like how we practically get along in society or view ourselves in our complex, contingent relationships rather than as the ontological subject of these relations or as the qualitative difference between 1st-person and 3rd-person views of reality, which are closer to what concerned the moderns. In that respect, there are simply two different projects, and contructionism says nothing at all about the modern "I" as philosophically discussed.
Consciousness is the specimen of psychology and sociology before philosophy. I know philosophers like to philosophize about it, but it's just guesswork relative to cognitive and social science.
And I'm not arguing against individual selfhood (nor is Gergen), merely that the uniqueness of each individual is largely the product of the myriad webs of relationships unique to each person. No doubt we have some raw material (more aptly termed "potential" i think) to start with, but the construction of the self is wholly dialogical. You ever seen the movie Nell? If not, you should watch it in light of this conversation.
"Consciousness is the specimen of psychology and sociology before philosophy. I know philosophers like to philosophize about it, but it's just guesswork relative to cognitive and social science."
Psychology and sociology, like any other science, talk about what is within their realm of discourse, but they always assume this realm. Philosophy establishes it an connects it to other realms. For example, physics talks about what specific types of motion we find in the world, but the notion of motion itself is still philosophical, even with advances in science. Same with causation, etc. So, the existence of consciousness in the first place, and certain determining features, will always be the purview of philosophy, although it may take much debate between philosophy and cognitive science to determine where the boundary lies; but regardless of how we come to have selves, the phenomenology of being a self appears to have some stability (I can read texts from many ages and places on the topic to great advantage, for example). And science or not, it can still be incoherent, and this again is something for philosophy to consider.
If philosophy can be loosely construed as the process of logical reasoning, then it's perfectly sensible to view it as a basic methodology applicable (if not necessary) to numerous disciples. I would have a problem with philosophy exercising magisterial influence over a subject that is more primarily the subject of a distinct discipline, but would support it as a tool utilized within such a discipline.
We're probably more or less in agreement then.
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