In his own time Descartes conception of the entirely separate substance of the mind was recognized to give rise to insoluble problems of the nature of the causal connexion between the two. It also gives rise to the problem, insoluble in its own terms, of other minds. Descartes notorious denial that non-human animals are conscious is a stark illustration of the problem. In his conception of matter Descartes also gives preference to rational cogitation over anything derived from the senses. Since we can conceive of the matter of a ball of wax surviving changes to its sensible qualities, matter is not an empirical concept, but eventually an entirely geometrical one, with extension and motion as its only physical nature. Descartes thought, as reflected in Leibniz, that the qualities of sense experience have no resemblance to qualities of things, so that knowledge of the external world is essentially knowledge of structure rather than of filling. On this basis Descartes erects a remarkable physics. Since matter is in effect the same as extension there can be no empty space or void, since there is no empty space motion is not a question of occupying previously empty space, but is to be thought of in terms of vortices (like the motion of a liquid).
Although the structure of Descartes epistemology, theories of mind, and theories of matter have ben rejected many times, their relentless disarray of the hardest issues, their exemplary clarity, and even their initial plausibility, all contrive to make him the central point of reference for modern philosophy.
The self conceived as Descartes presents it in the first two Meditations: aware only of its own thoughts, and capable of disembodied existence, neither situated in a space nor surrounded by others. This is the pure self of I-ness that we are tempted to imagine as a simple unique thing that make up our essential identity. Descartes view that he could keep hold of this nugget while doubting everything else is criticized by Lichtenberg and Kant, and most subsequent philosophers of mind.
Descartes holds that we do not have any knowledge of any empirical proposition about anything beyond the contents of our own minds. The reason, roughly put, is that there is a legitimate doubt about all such propositions because there is no way to deny justifiably that our senses are being stimulated by some cause (an evil spirit, for example) which is radically different from the objects that we normally think affect our senses.
He also points out, that the senses (sight, hearing, touch, etc., are often unreliable, and it is prudent never to trust entirely those who have deceived us even once, he cited such instances as the straight stick that looks ben t in water, and the square tower that looks round from a distance. This argument of illusion, has not, on the whole, impressed commentators, and some of Descartes contemporaries pointing out that since such errors become known as a result of further sensory information, it cannot be right to cast wholesale doubt on the evidence of the senses. But Descartes regarded the argument from illusion as only the first stage in a softening up process which would lead the mind away from the senses. He admits that there are some cases of sense-base belief about which doubt would be insane, e.g., the belief that I am sitting here by the fire, wearing a winter dressing gown.
Descartes was to realize that there was nothing in this view of nature that could explain or provide a foundation for the mental, or from direct experience as distinctly human. In a mechanistic universe, he said, there is no privileged place or function for mind, and the separation between mind and matter is absolute. Descartes was also convinced, that the immaterial essences that gave form and structure to this universe were coded in geometrical and mathematical ideas, and this insight led him to invent algebraic geometry.
A scientific understanding of these ideas could be derived, said Descartes, with the aid of precise deduction, and also claimed that the contours of physical reality could be laid out in three-dimensional coordinates. Following the publication of Newtons Principia Mathematica in 1687, reductionism and mathematical modelling became the most powerful tools of modern science. And the dream that the entire physical world could be known and mastered through the extension and refinement of mathematical theory became the central feature and guiding principle of scientific knowledge.
Having to its recourse of knowledge, its central questions include the origin of knowledge, the place of experience in generating knowledge, and the place of reason in doing so, the relationship between knowledge and certainty, and between knowledge and the impossibility of error, the possibility of universal scepticism, and the changing forms of knowledge that arise from new conceptualizations of the world. All of these issues link with other central concerns of philosophy, such as the nature of truth and the natures of experience and meaning.
Foundationalism was associated with the ancient Stoics, and in the modern era with Descartes (1596-1650). Who discovered his foundations in the clear and distinct ideas of reason? Its main opponent is Coherentism, or the view that a body of propositions mas be known without a foundation in certainty, but by their interlocking strength, than as a crossword puzzle may be known to have been solved correctly even if each answer, taken individually, admits of uncertainty. Difficulties at this point led the logical passivists to abandon the notion of an epistemological foundation altogether, and to flirt with the coherence theory of truth. It is widely accepted that trying to make the connexion between thought and experience through basic sentences depends on an untenable myth of the given.
Still in spite of these concerns, the problem was, of course, in defining knowledge in terms of true beliefs plus some favoured relations between the believer and the facts that began with Platos view in the Theaetetus, that knowledge is true belief, and some logos. Due of its nonsynthetic epistemology, the enterprising of studying the actual formation of knowledge by human beings, without aspiring to certify those processes as rational, or its proof against scepticism or even apt to yield the truth. Natural epistemology would therefore blend into the psychology of learning and the study of episodes in the history of science. The scope for external or philosophical reflection of the kind that might result in scepticism or its refutation is markedly diminished. Despite the fact that the terms of modernity are so distinguished as exponents of the approach include Aristotle, Hume, and J. S. Mills.
The task of the philosopher of a discipline would then be to reveal the correct method and to unmask counterfeits. Although this belief lay behind much positivist philosophy of science, few philosophers now subscribe to it. It places too well a confidence in the possibility of a purely previous first philosophy, or viewpoint beyond that of the work ones way of practitioners, from which their best efforts can be measured as good or bad. These standpoints now seem that too many philosophers may be too fanciful, that the more modest of tasks are actually adopted at various historical stages of investigation into different areas and with the aim not so much of criticizing, but more of systematization. In the presuppositions of a particular field at a particular classification, there is still a role for local methodological disputes within the community investigators of some phenomenon, with one approach charging that another is unsound or unscientific, but logic and philosophy will not, on the modern view, provide any independent arsenal of weapons for such battles, which often come to seem more like factional recommendations in the ascendancy of a discipline.
This is an approach to the theory of knowledge that sees an important connexion between the growth of knowledge and biological evolution. An evolutionary epistemologist claims that the development of human knowledge processed through some natural selection process, the best example of which is Darwins theory of biological natural selection. There is a widespread misconception that evolution proceeds according to some plan or direct, but it has neither, and the role of chance ensures that its future course will be unpredictable. Random variations in individual organisms create tiny differences in their Darwinian fitness. Some individuals have more offsprings than others, and the characteristics that increased their fitness thereby become more prevalent in future generations. Once upon a time, at least a mutation occurred in a human population in tropical Africa that changed the hemoglobin molecule in a way that provided resistance to malaria. This enormous advantage caused the new gene to spread, with the unfortunate consequence that sickle-cell anaemia came to exist.
Given that chance, it can influence the outcome at each stage: First, in the creation of genetic mutation, second, in whether the bearer lives long enough to show its effects, thirdly, in chance events that influence the individuals actual reproductive success, and fourth, in whether a gene even if favoured in one generation, is, happenstance, eliminated in the next, and finally in the many unpredictable environmental changes that will undoubtedly occur in the history of any group of organisms. As Harvard biologist Stephen Jay Gould has so vividly expressed that process over again, the outcome would surely be different. Not only might there not be humans, there might not even be anything like mammals.
We will often emphasis the elegance of traits shaped by natural selection, but the common idea that nature creates perfection needs to be analysed carefully. The extent to which evolution achieves perfection depends on exactly what you mean. If you mean Does natural selections always take the best path for the long-term welfare of a species? The answer is no. That would require adaption by group selection, and this is, unlikely. If you mean Does natural selection creates every adaption that would be valuable? The answer again, is no. For instance, some kinds of South American monkeys can grasp branches with their tails. The trick would surely also be useful to some African species, but, simply because of bad luck, none have it. Some combination of circumstances started some ancestral South American monkeys using their tails in ways that ultimately led to an ability to grab onto branches, while no such development took place in Africa. Mere usefulness of a trait does not necessitate a means in that what will understandably endure phylogenesis or evolution.
This is an approach to the theory of knowledge that sees an important connexion between the growth of knowledge and biological evolution. An evolutionary epistemologist claims that the development of human knowledge proceeds through some natural selection process, the best example of which is Darwins theory of biological natural selection. The three major components of the model of natural selection are variation selection and retention. According to Darwins theory of natural selection, variations are not pre-designed to do certain functions. Rather, these variations that do useful functions are selected. While those that do not employ of some coordinates in that are regainfully purposed are also, not to any of a selection, as duly influenced of such a selection, that may have responsibilities for the visual aspects of variational intentionally occurs. In the modern theory of evolution, genetic mutations provide the blind variations: Blind in the sense that variations are not influenced by the effects they would have-the likelihood of a mutation is not correlated with the benefits or liabilities that mutation would confer on the organism, the environment provides the filter of selection, and reproduction provides the retention. Fatnesses are achieved because those organisms with features that make them less adapted for survival do not survive in connexion with other organisms in the environment that have features that are better adapted. Evolutionary epistemology applies this blind variation and selective retention model to the growth of scientific knowledge and to human thought processes overall.
The parallel between biological evolution and conceptual or epistemic evolution can be seen as either literal or analogical. The literal version of evolutionary epistemology deeds biological evolution as the main cause of the growth of knowledge. On this view, called the evolution of cognitive mechanic programs, by Bradie (1986) and the Darwinian approach to epistemology by Ruse (1986), that growth of knowledge occurs through blind variation and selective retention because biological natural selection itself is the cause of epistemic variation and selection. The most plausible version of the literal view does not hold that all human beliefs are innate but rather than the mental mechanisms that guide the acquisitions of non-innate beliefs are themselves innately and the result of biological natural selection. Ruse, (1986) demands of a version of literal evolutionary epistemology that he links to sociolology (Rescher, 1990).
On the analogical version of evolutionary epistemology, called the evolution of theories program, by Bradie (1986). The Spenserians approach (after the nineteenth century philosopher Herbert Spencer) by Ruse (1986), the development of human knowledge is governed by a process analogous to biological natural selection, rather than by an instance of the mechanism itself. This version of evolutionary epistemology, introduced and elaborated by Donald Campbell (1974) as well as Karl Popper, sees the [partial] fit between theories and the world as explained by a mental process of trial and error known as epistemic natural selection.
Both versions of evolutionary epistemology are usually taken to be types of naturalized epistemology, because both take some empirical facts as a starting point for their epistemological project. The literal version of evolutionary epistemology begins by accepting evolutionary theory and a materialist approach to the mind and, from these, constructs an account of knowledge and its developments. In contrast, the metaphorical version does not require the truth of biological evolution: It simply draws on biological evolution as a source for the model of natural selection. For this version of evolutionary epistemology to be true, the model of natural selection need only apply to the growth of knowledge, not to the origin and development of species. Crudely put, evolutionary epistemology of the analogical sort could still be true even if Creationism is the correct theory of the origin of species.
Although they do not begin by assuming evolutionary theory, most analogical evolutionary epistemologists are naturalized epistemologists as well, their empirical assumptions, least of mention, implicitly come from psychology and cognitive science, not evolutionary theory. Sometimes, however, evolutionary epistemology is characterized in a seemingly non-naturalistic fashion. Campbell (1974) says that if one is expanding knowledge beyond what one knows, one has no choice but to explore without the benefit of wisdom, i.e., blindly. This, Campbell admits, makes evolutionary epistemology close to being a tautology (and so not naturalistic). Evolutionary epistemology does assert the analytic claim that when expanding ones knowledge beyond what one knows, one must precessed to something that is already known, but, more interestingly, it also makes the synthetic claim that when expanding ones knowledge beyond what one knows, one must proceed by blind variation and selective retention. This claim is synthetic because it can be empirically falsified. The central claim of evolutionary epistemology is synthetic, not analytic. If the central contradictory, which they are not. Campbell is right that evolutionary epistemology does have the analytic feature he mentions, but he is wrong to think that this is a distinguishing feature, since any plausible epistemology has the same analytic feature (Skagestad, 1978).
Two extraordinary issues lie to awaken the literature that involves questions about realism, i.e., What metaphysical commitment does an evolutionary epistemologist have to make? Progress, i.e., according to evolutionary epistemology, does knowledge develop toward a goal? With respect to realism, many evolutionary epistemologists endorse that is called hypothetical realism, a view that combines a version of epistemological scepticism and tentative acceptance of metaphysical realism. With respect to progress, the problem is that biological evolution is not goal-directed, but the growth of human knowledge seems to be. Campbell (1974) worries about the potential dis-analogy here but is willing to bite the stone of conscience and admit that epistemic evolution progress toward a goal (truth) while biologic evolution does not. Many another has argued that evolutionary epistemologists must give up the truth-topic sense of progress because a natural selection model is in essence, is non-teleological, as an alternative, following Kuhn (1970), and embraced in the accompaniment with evolutionary epistemology.
Among the most frequent and serious criticisms leveled against evolutionary epistemology is that the analogical version of the view is false because epistemic variation is not blind (Skagestad, 1978), and (Ruse, 1986) including, (Stein and Lipton, 1990) all have argued, nonetheless, that this objection fails because, while epistemic variation is not random, its constraints come from heuristics that, for the most part, are selective retention. Further, Stein and Lipton come to the conclusion that heuristics are analogous to biological pre-adaptions, evolutionary pre-biological pre-adaptions, evolutionary cursors, such as a half-wing, a precursor to a wing, which have some function other than the function of their descendable structures: The function of descendable structures, the function of their descendable character embodied to its structural foundations, is that of the guidelines of epistemic variation is, on this view, not the source of disanalogy, but the source of a more articulated account of the analogy.
Many evolutionary epistemologists try to combine the literal and the analogical versions (Bradie, 1986, and Stein and Lipton, 1990), saying that those beliefs and cognitive mechanisms, which are innate results from natural selection of the biological sort and those that are innate results from natural selection of the epistemic sort. This is reasonable as long as the two parts of this hybrid view are kept distinct. An analogical version of evolutionary epistemology with biological variation as its only source of blondeness would be a null theory: This would be the case if all our beliefs are innate or if our non-innate beliefs are not the result of blind variation. An appeal to the legitimate way to produce a hybrid version of evolutionary epistemology since doing so trivializes the theory. For similar reasons, such an appeal will not save an analogical version of evolutionary epistemology from arguments to the effect that epistemic variation is blind (Stein and Lipton, 1990).
Although it is a new approach to theory of knowledge, evolutionary epistemology has attracted much attention, primarily because it represents a serious attempt to flesh out a naturalized epistemology by drawing on several disciplines. In science is relevant to understanding the nature and development of knowledge, then evolutionary theory is among the disciplines worth a look. Insofar as evolutionary epistemology looks there, it is an interesting and potentially fruitful epistemological programme.
What makes a belief justified and what makes a true belief knowledge? Thinking that whether a belief deserves one of these appraisals is natural depends on what caused the depicted branch of knowledge to have the belief. In recent decades a number of epistemologists have pursued this plausible idea with a variety of specific proposals. Some causal theories of knowledge have it that a true belief that p is knowledge just in case it has the right causal connexion to the fact that p. Such a criterion can be applied only to cases where the fact that p is a sort that can reach causal relations, as this seems to exclude mathematically and their necessary facts and perhaps any fact expressed by a universal generalization, and proponents of this sort of criterion have usually supposed that it is limited to perceptual representations where knowledge of particular facts about subjects environments.
For example, Armstrong (1973), predetermined that a position held by a belief in the form This perceived object is F is [non-inferential] knowledge if and only if the belief is a completely reliable sign that the perceived object is ‘F’, that is, the fact that the object is ‘F’ contributed to causing the belief and its doing so depended on properties of the believer such that the laws of nature dictated that, for any subject ‘P’ and perceived object ‘y’, if ‘P’ has those properties and believed that ‘y’ is ‘F’, then ‘y’ is ‘F’. (Dretske (1981) offers a rather similar account, in terms of the beliefs being caused by a signal received by the perceiver that carries the information that the object is ‘F’).
In whatever conceivably of possibilities, no assumptions are to be taken to be recognizably acknowledged, as no thoughtful conclusion should be lightly dismissed as some fallacious study, herein to converge upon the phenomenon of consciousness. Becoming even more so, when exercising the ingenuous humanness that caution measures, that we must try to move ahead to reach forward into the positive conclusion to its topic.
Many writers, along with a few well-known new-age gurus, have played fast and loosely with firm interpretations of some new but informal understanding grounded within the mental in some vague sense of cosmic consciousness. However, these new age nuances are ever so erroneously placed in the new-age section of a commercial bookstore and purchased by those interested in new-age literature, and they will be quite disappointed.
What makes our species unique is the ability to construct a virtual world in which the real world can be imaged and manipulated in abstract forms and idea. Evolution has produced hundreds of thousands of species with brains, in which tens of thousands of species with complex behavioural and learning abilities. In that respect are also many species in which sophisticated forms of group communication have evolved. For example, birds, primates, and social carnivores use extensive vocal and gestural repertoires to structure behaviour in large social groups. Although we share roughly 98 percent of our genes with our primate cousins, the course of human evolution widened the cognitive gap between us and all other species, including our cousins, into a yawning chasm.
Research in neuroscience has shown that language processing is a staggeringly complex phenomenon that places incredible demands on memory and learning. Language functions extend, for example, into all major lobes of the neocortex: Auditory opinion is associated with the temporal area; tactile information is associated with the parietal area, and attention, working memory, and planning are associated with the frontal cortex of the left or dominant hemisphere. The left prefrontal region is associated with verb and noun production tasks and in the retrieval of words representing action. Broca’s area, next to the mouth-tongue region of a motor cortex, is associated with vocalization in word formation, and Wernicke’s area, by the auditory cortex, is associated with sound analysis in the sequencing of words.
Lower brain regions, like the cerebellum, have also evolved in our species to help in language processing. Until recently, we thought the cerebellum to be exclusively involved with automatic or preprogrammed movements such as throwing a ball, jumping over a high hurdle or playing noted orchestrations as on a musical instrument. Imaging studies in neuroscience suggest, however, that the cerebellum awaken within the smoldering embers brought aflame by the sparks of awakening consciousness, to think communicatively during the spoken exchange. Mostly actuated when the psychological subject occurs in making difficult the word associations that the cerebellum plays a role in associations by providing access to automatic word sequences and by augmenting rapid shifts in attention.
The midbrain and brain stem, situated on top of the spinal cord, coordinate and articulate the numerous amounts of ideas and output systems that, to play an extreme and crucial role in the interplay through which we have adaptively adjusted and coordinated the distributable dynamic communicative functions. Vocalization has some special associations with the midbrain, which coordinates the interaction of the oral and respiratory tracks necessary to make speech sounds. Since this vocalization requires synchronous activity among oral, vocal, and respiratory muscles, these functions probably connect to a central site. This site resembles the central greyness founded around the brain. The central gray area links the reticular nuclei and brain stem motor nuclei to comprise a distributed network for sound production. While human speech is dependent on structures in the cerebral cortex, and on rapid movement of the oral and vocal muscles, this is not true for vocalisation in other mammals.
Research in neuroscience reveals that the human brain is a massively parallel system in which language processing is widely distributed. Computers generated images of human brains engaged in language processing reveals a hierarchical organization consisting of complicated clusters of brain areas that process different component functions in controlled time sequences. Language processing is clearly not accomplished by stand-alone or unitary modules that evolved with the addition of separate modules were eventually wired together on some neural circuit board.
Similarly, individual linguistic symbols are continued as given to clusters of distributed brain areas and are not in a particular area. The specific sound patterns of words may be produced in dedicated regions. All the same, the symbolic and referential relationships between words are generated through a convergence of neural codes from different and independent brain regions. The processes of words comprehension and retrieval result from combinations simpler associative processes in several separate brain regions that require input from other regions. The symbolic meaning of words, like the grammar that is essential for the construction of meaningful relationships between stings of words, is an emergent property from the complex interaction of several brain parts.
While the brain that evolved this capacity was obviously a product of Darwinian evolution, the most critical precondition for the evolution of brain cannot be simply explained in these terms. Darwinian evolution can explain why the creation of stone tools altered condition for survival in a ne ecological niche in which group living, pair bonding, and more complex social structures were critical to survival. Darwinian evolution can also explain why selective pressure in this new ecological niche favoured pre-adaptive changes required for symbolic commonisation. Nevertheless, as this communication resulted in increasingly more complex behaviour evolution began to take precedence of physical evolution in the sense that mutations resulting in enhanced social behaviour became selectively advantageously within the context of the social behaviour of hominids.
Although male and female hominids favoured pair bonding and created more complex social organizations in the interests of survival, the interplay between social evolution and biological evolution changed the terms of survival radically. The enhanced ability to use symbolic communication to construct of social interaction eventually made this communication the largest determinant of survival. Since this communication was based on a symbolic vocalization that requires the evolution of neural mechanisms and processes that did not evolve in any other species, this marked the emergence of a mental realm that would increasingly appear as separate nd distinct from the external material realm.
Nonetheless, if we could, for example, define all of the neural mechanisms involved in generating a particular word symbol, this would reveal nothing about the active experience of the world symbol as an idea in human consciousness. Conversely, the experience of the word symbol as an idea would reveal nothing about the neuronal processes involved. While one mode of understanding the situation necessarily displaces the other, both are required to achieve a complete understanding of the situation.
Most experts agree that our ancestries became knowledgeably articulated in the spoken exchange as based on complex grammar and syntax between two hundred thousand and some hundred thousand years ago. The mechanisms in the human brain that allowed for this great achievement clearly evolved, however, over great spans of time. In biology textbooks, the lists of prior adaptations that enhanced the ability of our ancestors to use communication normally include those that are inclining to inclinations to increase intelligence. As to approach a significant alteration of oral and auditory abilities, in that the separation or localization of functional representations is found on two sides of the brain. The evolution of some innate or hard wired grammar, however, when we look at how our ability to use language could have really evolved over the entire course of hominid evolution. The process seems more basic and more counterintuitive than we had previously imagined.
Although we share some aspects of vocalization with our primate cousins, the mechanisms of human vocalization are quite different and have evolved over great spans of time. Incremental increases in hominid brain size over the last 2.5 million years enhanced cortical control over the larynx, which originally evolved to prevent food and other particles from entering the windpipe or trachea; This eventually contributed to the use of vocal symbolization. Humans have more voluntary motor control over sound produced in the larynx than any other vocal species, and this control are associated with higher brain systems involved in skeletal muscle control as opposed to just visceral control. As a result, humans have direct cortical motor control over phonation and oral movement while chimps do not.
The larynx in modern humans is positioned in a comparatively low position to the throat and significantly increases the range and flexibility of sound production. The low position of the larynx allows greater changes in the volume to the resonant chamber formed by the mouth and pharynx and makes it easier to shift sounds to the mouth and away from the nasal cavity. Formidable conclusions are those of the sounds that comprise vowel components of speeches that become much more variable, including extremes in resonance combinations such as the ‘ee’ sound in ‘tree’ and the ‘aw’ sound in ‘flaw.’ Equally important, the repositioning of the larynx dramatically increases the ability of the mouth and tongue to modify vocal sounds. This shift in the larynx also makes it more likely that food and water passing over the larynx will enter the trachea, and this explains why humans are more inclined to experience choking. Yet this disadvantage, which could have caused the shift to e selected against, was clearly out-weighed by the advantage of being able to produce all the sounds used in modern language systems.
Some have argued that this removal of constraints on vocalization suggests that spoken language based on complex symbol systems emerged quite suddenly in modern humans only about one hundred thousand years ago. It is, however, far more likely that language use began with very primitive symbolic systems and evolved over time to increasingly complex systems. The first symbolic systems were not full-blown language systems, and they were probably not as flexible and complex as the vocal calls and gestural displays of modern primates. The first users of primitive symbolic systems probably coordinated most of their social comminations with call and display behavioural attitudes alike those of the modern ape and monkeys.
Critically important to the evolution of enhanced language skills are that behavioural adaptive adjustments that serve to precede and situate biological changes. This represents a reversal of the usual course of evolution where biological change precedes behavioural adaption. When the first hominids began to use stone tools, they probably rendered of a very haphazard fashion, by drawing on their flexible ape-like learning abilities. Still, the use of this technology over time opened a new ecological niche where selective pressures occasioned new adaptions. A tool use became more indispensable for obtaining food and organized social behaviours, mutations that enhanced the use of tools probably functioned as a principal source of selection for both bodied and brains.
The first stone choppers appear in the fossil remnant fragments remaining about 2.5 million years ago, and they appear to have been fabricated with a few sharp blows of stone on stone. If these primitive tools are reasonable, which were hand-held and probably used to cut flesh and to chip bone to expose the marrow, were created by Homo habilis - the first large-brained hominid. Stone making is obviously a skill passed on from one generation to the next by learning as opposed to a physical trait passed on genetically. After these tools became critical to survival, this introduced selection for learning abilities that did not exist for other species. Although the early tool maskers may have had brains roughly comparable to those of modern apes, they were already confronting the processes for being adapted for symbol learning.
The first symbolic representations were probably associated with social adaptations that were quite fragile, and any support that could reinforce these adaptions in the interest of survival would have been favoured by evolution. The expansion of the forebrain in Homo habilis, particularly the prefrontal cortex, was on of the core adaptations. Increased connectivity enhanced this adaption over time to brain regions involved in language processing.
Imagining why incremental improvements in symbolic representations provided a selective advantage is easy. Symbolic communication probably enhanced cooperation in the relationship of mothers to infants, allowed forgoing techniques to be more easily learned, served as the basis for better coordinating scavenging and hunting activities, and generally improved the prospect of attracting a mate. As the list of domains in which symbolic communication was introduced became longer over time, this probably resulted in new selective pressures that served to make this communication more elaborate. After more functions became dependent on this communication, those who failed in symbol learning or could only use symbols awkwardly were less likely to pass on their genes to subsequent generations.
The crude language of the earliest users of symbolics must have been considerably gestured and nonsymbiotic vocalizations. Their spoken language probably became reactively independent and a closed cooperative system. Only after the emergence of hominids were to use symbolic communication evolved, symbolic forms progressively took over functions served by non-anecdotical symbolic forms. This is reflected in modern languages. The structure of syntax in these languages often reveals its origins in pointing gestures, in the manipulation and exchange of objects, and in more primitive constructions of spatial and temporal relationships. We still use nonverbal vocalizations and gestures to complement meaning in spoken language.
The general idea is very powerful, however, the relevance of spatiality to self-consciousness comes about not merely because the world is spatial but also because the self-conscious subject is a spatial element of the world. One cannot be self-conscious without being aware that one is a spatial element of the world, and one cannot be ware that one is a spatial element of the world without a grasp of the spatial nature of the world. Face to face, the idea of a perceivable, objective spatial world that causes ideas too subjectively becoming to denote in the wold. During which time, his perceptions as they have of changing position within the world and to the essentially stable way the world is. The idea that there is an objective world and the idea that the subject is somewhere, and where he is given by what he can perceive.
Research, however distant, are those that neuroscience reveals in that the human brain is a massive parallel system which language processing is widely distributed. Computers generated images of human brains engaged in language processing reveals a hierarchal organization consisting of complicated clusters of brain areas that process different component functions in controlled time sequences. Language processing is clearly not accomplished by stand-alone or unitary modules that evolved with the addition of separate modules that were eventually wired together on some neutral circuit board.
While the brain that evolved this capacity was obviously a product of Darwinian evolution, he realized that the different chances of survival of different endowed offsprings could account for the natural evolution of species. Nature ‘selects’ those members of some spacies best adapted to the environment in which they are themselves, just as human animal breeders may select for desirable traits for their livestock, and by that control the evolution of the kind of animal they wish. In the phase of Spencer, nature guarantees the ‘survival of the fittest.’ The Origin of Species was principally successful in marshalling the evidence for evolution, than providing a convincing mechanism for genetic change, and Darwin himself remained open to the search for additional mechanisms, also reaming convinced that natural selection was at the heat of it. It was only with the later discovery of the ‘gene’ as the unit of inheritance that the syntheses known as ‘neo-Darwinism’ became the orthodox theory of evolution.
The solutions to the mysterious evolution by natural selection can shape sophisticated mechanisms are to found in the working of natural section, in that for the sake of some purpose, namely, some action, the body as a whole must evidently exist for the sake of some complex action: The process is fundamentally very simple as natural selection occurs whenever genetically influence’s variation among individual effects their survival and reproduction. If a gene codes for characteristics that result in fewer viable offspring in future generations, that gene is gradually eliminated. For instance, genetic mutation that an increase vulnerability to infection, or cause foolish risk taking or lack of interest in sex, will never become common. On the other hand, genes that cause resistance that causes infection, appropriate risk taking and success in choosing fertile mates are likely to spread in the gene pool even if they have substantial costs.
A classical example is the spread of a gene for dark wing colour in a British moth population living downward form major source of air pollution. Pale moths were conspicuous on smoke-darkened trees and easily caught by birds, while a rare mutant form of a moth whose colour closely matched that of the bark escaped the predator beaks. As the tree trucks became darkened, the mutant gene spread rapidly and largely displaced the gene for pale wing colour. That is all on that point to say is that natural selection insole no plan, no goal, and no direction - just genes increasing and decreasing in frequency depending on whether individuals with these genes have, compared with order individuals, greater of lesser reproductive success.
The simplicity of natural selection has been obscured by many misconceptions. For instance, Herbert Spencer’s nineteenth-century catch phrase ‘survival of the fittest’ is widely thought to summarize the process, but an abstractive actuality openly provides a given forwarding to several misunderstandings. First, survival is of no consequence by itself. This is why natural selection has created some organisms, such as salmon and annual plants, that reproduces only once, the die. Survival increases fitness only insofar as it increases later reproduction. Genes that increase lifetime reproduction will be selected for even if they result in a reduced longevity. Conversely, a gene that deceases total lifetime reproduction will obviously be eliminated by selection even if it increases an individual’s survival.
Further confusion arises from the ambiguous meaning of ‘fittest.’ The fittest individuals in the biological scene, is not necessarily the healthiest, stronger, or fastest. In today’s world, and many of those of the past, individuals of outstanding athletic accomplishment need not be the ones who produce the most grandchildren, a measure that should be roughly correlated with fattiness. To someone who understands natural selection, it is no surprise that the parents who are not concerned about their children;’s reproduction.
A gene or an individual cannot be called ‘fit’ in isolation but only with reference to some particular spacies in a particular environment. Even in a single environment, every gene involves compromise. Consider a gene that makes rabbits more fearful and thereby helps to keep then from the jaws of foxes. Imagine that half the rabbits in a field have this gene. Because they do more hiding and less eating, these timid rabbits might be, on average, some bitless well fed than their bolder companions. Of, a hundred downbounded in the March swamps awaiting for spring, two thirds of them starve to death while this is the fate of only one-third of the rabbits who lack the gene for fearfulness, it has been selected against. It might be nearly eliminated by a few harsh winters. Milder winters or an increased number of foxes could have the opposite effect, but it all depends on the current environment.
The version of an evolutionary ethic called ‘social Darwinism’ emphasizes the struggle for natural selection, and draws the conclusion that we should glorify the assists each struggle, usually by enhancing competitive and aggressive relations between people in society, or better societies themselves. More recently the reaction between evolution and ethics has been re-thought in the light of biological discoveries concerning altruism and kin-selection.
The most critical precondition for the evolution of this brain cannot be simply explained in these terms. Darwinian evolution can explain why the creation of stone tools altered conditions for survival in a new ecological niche in which group living, pair bonding, and more complex social structures were critical to survival. Darwinian evolution can also explain why selective pressures in this new ecological niche favoured pre-adaptive changes required for symbolic communication. All the same, this communication resulted directly through its passing an increasingly atypically structural complex and intensively condensed behaviour. Social evolution began to take precedence over physical evolution in the sense that mutations resulting in enhanced social behaviour became selectively advantageously within the context of the social behaviour of hominids.
Because this communication was based on symbolic vocalization that required the evolution of neural mechanisms and processes that did not evolve in any other species. As this marked the emergence of a mental realm that would increasingly appear as separate and distinct from the external material realm.
If the emergent reality in this mental realm cannot be reduced to, or entirely explained as for, the sum of its parts, concluding that this reality is greater than the sum of its parts seems reasonable. For example, a complete proceeding of the manner in which light in particular wave lengths has ben advancing by the human brain to generate a particular colour says nothing about the experience of colour. In other words, a complete scientific description of all the mechanisms involved in processing the colour blue does not correspond with the colour blue as perceived in human consciousness. No scientific description of the physical substrate of a thought or feeling, no matter how accomplish it can but be accounted for in actualized experience, especially of a thought or feeling, as an emergent aspect of global brain function.
If we could, for example, define all of the neural mechanisms involved in generating a particular word symbol, this would reveal nothing about the experience of the word symbol as an idea in human consciousness. Conversely, the experience of the word symbol as an idea would reveal nothing about the neuronal processes involved. While one mode of understanding the situation necessarily displaces the other, both are required to achieve a complete understanding of the situation.
Even if we are to include two aspects of biological reality, finding to a more complex order in biological reality is associated with the emergence of new wholes that are greater than the orbital parts. Yet, the entire biosphere is of a whole that displays self-regulating behaviour that is greater than the sum of its parts. The emergence of a symbolic universe based on a complex language system could be viewed as another stage in the evolution of more complicated and complex systems. As marked and noted by the appearance of a new profound complementarity in relationships between parts and wholes. This does not allow us to assume that human consciousness was in any sense preordained or predestined by natural process. Even so, it does make it possible, in philosophical terms at least, to argue that this consciousness is an emergent aspect of the self-organizing properties of biological life.
If we also concede that an indivisible whole contains, by definition, no separate parts and that a phenomenon can be assumed to be ‘real’ only when it is ‘observed’ phenomenon, we are led to more interesting conclusions. The indivisible whole whose existence is inferred in the results of the aspectual experiments that cannot in principle is itself the subject of scientific investigation. In that respect, no simple reason of why this is the case. Science can claim knowledge of physical reality only when the predictions of a physical theory are validated by experiment. Since the indivisible whole cannot be measured or observed, we encounter by engaging the ‘eventful horizon’ or knowledge where science can say nothing about the actual character of this reality. Why this is so, is a property of the entire universe, then we must also conclude that undivided wholeness exists on the most primary and basic level in all aspects of physical reality. What we are dealing within science per se, however, are manifestations of tis reality, which are invoked or ‘actualized’ in making acts of observation or measurement. Since the reality that exists between the space-like separated regions is a whole whose existence can only be inferred in experience. As opposed to proven experiment, the correlations between the particles, and the sum of these parts, do not constitute the ‘indivisible’ whole. Physical theory allows us to understand why the correlations occur. Nevertheless, it cannot in principle disclose or describe the actualized character of the indivisible whole.
The scientific implications to this extraordinary relationship between parts ( in that, to know what it is like to have an experience is to know its qualia) and indivisible whole (the universe) are quite staggering. Our primary concern, however, is a new view of the relationship between mind and world that carries even larger implications in human terms. When factors into our understanding of the relationship between parts and wholes in physics and biology, then mind, or human consciousness, must be viewed as an emergent phenomenon in a seamlessly interconnected whole called the cosmos.
All that is required to embrace the alternative view of the relationship between mind and world that are consistent with our most advanced scientific knowledge is a commitment to metaphysical and epistemological realism and a willingness to follow arguments to their logical conclusions. Metaphysical realism assumes that physical reality or has an actual existence independent of human observers or any act of observation, epistemological realism assumes that progress in science requires strict adherence to scientific mythology, or to the rules and procedures for doing science. If one can accept these assumptions, most of the conclusions drawn should appear self-evident in logical and philosophical terms. Attributing any extra-scientific properties to the whole to understand is also not necessary and embrace the new relationship between part and whole and the alternative view of human consciousness that is consistent with this relationship. This is, in this that our distinguishing character between what can be ‘proven’ in scientific terms and what can be reasonably ‘inferred’ in philosophical terms based on the scientific evidence.
Moreover, advances in scientific knowledge rapidly became the basis for the creation of a host of new technologies. Yet are those responsible for evaluating the benefits and risks associated with the use of these technologies, much less their potential impact on human needs and values, normally have expertise on only one side of a two-culture divide. Perhaps, more important, many potential threats to the human future - such as, to, environmental pollution, arms development, overpopulation, and spread of infectious diseases, poverty, and starvation - can be effectively solved only by integrating scientific knowledge with knowledge from the social sciences and humanities. We have not done so for a simple reason - the implications of the amazing new fact of nature named for by non-locality, and cannot be properly understood without some familiarity with the actual history of scientific thought. The intent is to suggest that what is most important about this back-ground can be understood in its absence. Those who do not wish to struggle with the small and perhaps, fewer resultant amounts of back-ground implications should feel free to ignore it. Yet this material will be no more challenging as such, that the hope is that from those of which will find a common ground for understanding and that will meet again on this commonly functions as addressed to the relinquishing clasp of closure, and unswervingly close of its circle, resolve in the equations of eternity and complete of the universe of its obtainable gains for which its unification holds all that should be.
Another aspect of the evolution of a brain that allowed us to construct symbolic universes based on complex language system that is particularly relevant for our purposes concerns consciousness of self. Consciousness of self as an independent agency or actor is predicted on a fundamental distinction or dichotomy between this self and the other selves. Self, as it is constructed in human subjective reality, is perceived as having an independent existence and a self-referential character in a mental realm separately distinct from the material realm. It was, the assumed separation between these realms that led Descartes to posit his famous dualism in understanding the nature of consciousness in the mechanistic classical universe.
In a thought experiment, instead of bringing a course of events, as in a normal experiment, we are invited to imagine one. We may tenably be able to ‘see’ that some result’s following, or that by some description is appropriate, or our inability to describe the situation may itself have some consequential consequence. Thought experiments played a major role in the development of physics: For example, Galileo probably never dropped two balls of unequal weight from the leaning Tower of Pisa, to refute the Aristotelean view that a heavy body falls faster than a lighter one. He merely asked used to imagine a heavy body made into the shape of a dumbbell, and then connecting rod gradually thinner, until it is finally severed. The thing is one heavy body until the last moment and he n two light ones, but it is incredible that this final snip alters the velocity dramatically. Other famous examples include the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen thought experiment. In the philosophy of personal identity, our apparent capacity to imagine ourselves surviving drastic changes of body, brain, and mind is a permanent source of difficulty. On that point, no consensus on the legitimate place of thought experiments, to substitute either for real experiment, or as a reliable device for discerning possibilities. Though experiments with and one dislike is sometimes called intuition pumps.
For overfamiliar reasons, of hypothesizing that people are characterized by their rationality is common, and the most evident display of our rationality is our capacity to think. This is the rehearsal in the mind of what to say, or what to do. Not all thinking is verbal, since chess players, composers and painters all think, and in that respect no deductive reason that their deliberations should take any more verbal a form than this action. It is permanently tempting to conceive of this activity as for the presence inbounded in the mind of elements of some language, or other medium that represents aspects of the world. In whatever manner, the model has been attacked, notably by Wittgenstein, as insufficient, since no such presence could carry a guarantee that the right use would be made of it. And such of an inner present seems unnecessary, since an intelligent outcome might arouse of some principal measure from it.
In the philosophy of mind and ethics the treatment of animals exposes major problems if other animals differ from human beings, how is the difference to be characterized: Do animals think and reason, or have thoughts and beliefs? In philosophers as different as Aristotle and Kant the possession of reason separates humans from animals, and alone allows entry to the moral community.
For Descartes, animals are mere machines and ee lack consciousness or feelings. In the ancient world the rationality of animals is defended with the example of Chrysippus’ dog. This animal, tracking prey, comes to a cross-roads with three exits, and without pausing to pick-up the scent, reasoning, according to Sextus Empiricus. The animal went either by this road, or by this road, or by that, or by the other. However, it did not go by this or that. Therefore, he went the other way. The ‘syllogism of the dog’ was discussed by many writers, since in Stoic cosmology animals should occupy a place on the great chain of being to an exceeding degree below human beings, the only terrestrial rational agents: Philo Judaeus wrote a dialogue attempting to show again Alexander of Aphrodisias that the dog’s behaviour does no t exhibit rationality, but simply shows it following the scent, by way of response Alexander has the animal jump down a shaft (where the scent would not have lingered). Plutah sides with Philo, Aquinas discusses the dog and scholastic thought in general was quite favourable to brute intelligence (being made to stand trail for various offences in medieval times was common for animals). In the modern era Montaigne uses the dog to remind us of the frailties of human reason: Rorarious undertook to show not only that beasts are rational, but that they make better use of reason than people do. James the first of England defends the syllogising dog, sand Henry More and Gassendi both takes issue with Descartes on that matter. Hume is an outspoken defender of animal cognition, but with their use of the view that language is the essential manifestation of mentality, animals’ silence began to count heavily against them, and they are completely denied thoughts by, for instance Davidson.
Dogs are frequently shown in pictures of philosophers, as their assiduity and fidelity are some symbols
It is, nonetheless, that Decanters’s first work, the Regulae ad Directionem Ingenii (1628/9), was never complected, yet in Holland between 1628 and 1649, Descartes first wrote, and then cautiously suppressed, Le Monde (1934), and in 1637 produced the Discours de la méthode as a preface to the treatise on mathematics and physics in which he introduced the notion of Cartesian co-ordinates. His best-known philosophical work, the Meditationes de Prima Philosophiia (Meditations on First Philosophy), together with objections by distinguished contemporaries and replies by Descartes (The Objections and Replies), appeared in 1641. The authors of the objections are: First set, the Dutch, thgirst aet, Hobbes, fourth set. Arnauld, fifth set, Gassendi and the sixth set, Mersenne. The second edition (1642) of the Meditations included a seventh se t by the Jesuit Pierre Bourdin. Descartes’s penultimate work, the Principia Pilosophiae (Principles of the Soul), published in 1644 was designed partly for use as a theological textbook. His last work was Les Passions de l´ame (The Passions of the Soul) published in 1649. When in Sweden, where he contracted pneumonia, allegedly through being required to break his normal habit of late rising in order to give lessons at 5:00 a.m. His last words are supposed to have been ‘Ça, mon âme, il faut partir’ (so, my soul, it is time to part).
All the same, Descartes’s theory of knowledge starts with the quest for certainty, for an indubitable starting-point or foundation on the bassi alone of which progress is possible.
The Cartesian doubt is the method of investigating how much knowledge and its basis in reason or experience as used by Descartes in the first two Medications. It attempted to put knowledge upon secure foundation by first inviting us to suspend judgements on any proportion whose truth can be doubted, even as a bare possibility. The standards of acceptance are gradually raised as we are asked to doubt the deliverance of memory, the senses, and eve n reason, all of which are in principle capable of letting us down. This is eventually found in the celebrated ‘Cogito ergo sum’: I think, therefore I am. By locating the point of certainty in my awareness of my own self, Descartes gives a first-person twist to the theory of knowledge that dominated the following centuries in spite of a various counter-attack on behalf of social and public starting-points. The metaphysics associated with this priority are the Cartesian dualism, or separation of mind and matter into two different but interacting substances. Descartes rigorously and rightly to ascertain that it takes divine dispensation to certify any relationship between the two realms thus divided, and to prove the reliability of the senses invokes a ‘clear and distinct perception’ of highly dubious proofs of the existence of a benevolent deity. This has not met general acceptance: A Hume drily puts it, ‘to have recourse to the veracity of the supreme Being, in order to prove the veracity of our senses, is surely making a very unexpected circuit.’
By dissimilarity, Descartes’s notorious denial that non-human animals are conscious is a stark illustration of dissimulation. In his conception of matter Descartes also gives preference to rational cogitation over anything from the senses. Since we can conceive of the matter of a ball of wax, surviving changes to its sensible qualities, matter is not an empirical concept, but eventually an entirely geometrical one, with extension and motion as its only physical nature.
Although the structure of Descartes’s epistemology, theory of mind and theory of matter have been rejected many times, their relentless exposure of the hardest issues, their exemplary clarity and even their initial plausibility, all contrives to make him the central point of reference for modern philosophy.
The term instinct (Lat., instinctus, impulse or urge) implies innately determined behaviour, flexible to change in circumstance outside the control of deliberation and reason. The view that animals accomplish even complex tasks not by reason was common to Aristotle and the Stoics, and the inflexibility of their outline was used in defence of this position as early as Avicennia. A continuity between animal and human reason was proposed by Hume, and followed by sensationalist such as the naturalist Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802). The theory of evolution prompted various views of the emergence of stereotypical behaviour, and the idea that innate determinants of behaviour are fostered by specific environments is a guiding principle of ethology. In this sense that being social may be instinctive in human beings, and for that matter too reasoned on what we now know about the evolution of human language abilities, however, our real or actualized self is clearly not imprisoned in our minds.
It is implicitly a part of the larger whole of biological life, human observers its existence from embedded relations to this whole, and constructs its reality as based on evolved mechanisms that exist in all human brains. This suggests that any sense of the ‘otherness’ of self and world be is an illusion, in that disguises of its own actualization are to find all its relations between the part that are of their own characterization. Its self as related to the temporality of being whole is that of a biological reality. It can be viewed, of course, that a proper definition of this whole must not include the evolution of the larger indivisible whole. Yet, the cosmos and unbroken evolution of all life, by that of the first self-replication molecule that was the ancestor of DNA. It should include the complex interactions that have proven that among all the parts in biological reality that any resultant of emerging is self-regulating. This, of course, is responsible to properties owing to the whole of what might be to sustain the existence of the parts.
Founded on complications and complex coordinate systems in ordinary language may be conditioned as to establish some developments have been descriptively made by its physical reality and metaphysical concerns. That is, that it is in the history of mathematics and that the exchanges between the mega-narratives and frame tales of religion and science were critical factors in the minds of those who contributed. The first scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, allowed scientists to better them in the understudy of how the classical paradigm in physical reality has marked results in the stark Cartesian division between mind and world that became one of the most characteristic features of Western thought. This is not, however, another strident and ill-mannered diatribe against our misunderstandings, but drawn upon equivalent self realization and undivided wholeness or predicted characterlogic principles of physical reality and the epistemological foundations of physical theory.
The subjectivity of our mind affects our perceptions of the world that is held to be objective by natural science. Create both aspects of mind and matter as individualized forms that belong to the same underlying reality.
Our everyday experience confirms the apparent fact that there is a dual-valued world as subject and objects. We as having consciousness, as personality and as experiencing beings are the subjects, whereas for everything for which we can come up with a name or designation, seems to be the object, that which is opposed to us as a subject. Physical objects are only part of the object-world. There are also mental objects, objects of our emotions, abstract objects, religious objects etc. language objectifies our experience. Experiences per se are purely sensational experienced that do not make a distinction between object and subject. Only verbalized thought reifies the sensations by conceptualizing them and pigeonholing them into the given entities of language.
Some thinkers maintain, that subject and object are only different aspects of experience. I can experience myself as subject, and in the act of self-reflection. The fallacy of this argument is obvious: Being a subject implies having an object. We cannot experience something consciously without the mediation of understanding and mind. Our experience is already conceptualized at the time it comes into our consciousness. Our experience is negative insofar as it destroys the original pure experience. In a dialectical process of synthesis, the original pure experience becomes an object for us. The common state of our mind is only capable of apperceiving objects. Objects are reified negative experience. The same is true for the objective aspect of this theory: by objectifying myself I do not dispense with the subject, but the subject is causally and apodeictically linked to the object. As soon as I make an object of anything, I have to realize, that it is the subject, which objectifies something. It is only the subject who can do that. Without the subject there are no objects, and without objects there is no subject. This interdependence, however, is not to be understood in terms of a dualism, so that the object and the subject are really independent substances. Since the object is only created by the activity of the subject, and the subject is not a physical entity, but a mental one, we have to conclude then, that the subject-object dualism is purely mentalistic.
The Cartesian dualism posits the subject and the object as separate, independent and real substances, both of which have their ground and origin in the highest substance of God. Cartesian dualism, however, contradicts itself: The very fact, which Descartes posits the ‘I,’ that is the subject, as the only certainty, he defied materialism, and thus the concept of some ‘res extensa.’ The physical thing is only probable in its existence, whereas the mental thing is absolutely and necessarily certain. The subject is superior to the object. The object is only derived, but the subject is the original. This makes the object not only inferior in its substantive quality and in its essence, but relegates it to a level of dependence on the subject. The subject recognizes that the object is a ‘res extensa’ and this means, that the object cannot have essence or existence without the acknowledgment through the subject. The subject posits the world in the first place and the subject is posited by God. Apart from the problem of interaction between these two different substances, Cartesian dualism is not eligible for explaining and understanding the subject-object relation.
By denying Cartesian dualism and resorting to monistic theories such as extreme idealism, materialism or positivism, the problem is not resolved either. What the positivists did, was just verbalizing the subject-object relation by linguistic forms. It was no longer a metaphysical problem, but only a linguistic problem. Our language has formed this object-subject dualism. These thinkers are very superficial and shallow thinkers, because they do not see that in the very act of their analysis they inevitably think in the mind-set of subject and object. By relativizing the object and subject in terms of language and analytical philosophy, they avoid the elusive and problematical oppure of subject-object, since which has been the fundamental question in philosophy ever. Shunning these metaphysical questions is no solution. Excluding something, by reducing it to a more material and verifiable level, is not only pseudo-philosophy but actually a depreciation and decadence of the great philosophical ideas of mankind.
Therefore, we have to come to grips with idea of subject-object in a new manner. We experience this dualism as a fact in our everyday lives. Every experience is subject to this dualistic pattern. The question, however, is, whether this underlying pattern of subject-object dualism is real or only mental. Science assumes it to be real. This assumption does not prove the reality of our experience, but only that with this method science is most successful in explaining our empirical facts. Mysticism, on the other hand, believes that there is an original unity of subject and objects. To attain this unity is the goal of religion and mysticism. Man has fallen from this unity by disgrace and by sinful behaviour. Now the task of man is to get back on track again and strive toward this highest fulfilment. Again, are we not, on the conclusion made above, forced to admit, that also the mystic way of thinking is only a pattern of the mind and, as the scientists, that they have their own frame of reference and methodology to explain the supra-sensible facts most successfully?
If we assume mind to be the originator of the subject-object dualism, then we cannot confer more reality on the physical or the mental aspect, as well as we cannot deny the one in terms of the other.
The crude language of the earliest users of symbolics must have been considerably gestured and nonsymbiotic vocalizations. Their spoken language probably became reactively independent and a closed cooperative system. Only after the emergence of hominids were to use symbolic communication evolved, symbolic forms progressively took over functions served by non-vocal symbolic forms. This is reflected in modern languages. The structure of syntax in these languages often reveals its origins in pointing gestures, in the manipulation and exchange of objects, and in more primitive constructions of spatial and temporal relationships. We still use nonverbal vocalizations and gestures to compliment meaning in spoken language.
The general idea is very powerful, however, the relevance of spatiality to self-consciousness comes about not merely because the world is spatial but also because the self-conscious subject is a spatial element of the world. One cannot be self-conscious without being aware that one is a spatial element of the world, and one cannot be ware that one is a spatial element of the world without a grasp of the spatial nature of the world. Face to face, the idea of a perceivable, objective spatial world that causes ideas too subjectively becoming to denote in the wold. During which time, his perceptions as they have of changing position within the world and to the more or less stable way the world is. The idea that there is an objective world and the idea that the subject is somewhere, and where he is given by what he can perceive.
Research, however distant, are those that neuroscience reveals in that the human brain is a massive parallel system which language processing is widely distributed. Computers generated images of human brains engaged in language processing reveals a hierarchal organization consisting of complicated clusters of brain areas that process different component functions in controlled time sequences. Language processing is clearly not accomplished by stand-alone or unitary modules that evolved with the addition of separate modules that were eventually wired together on some neutral circuit board.
While the brain that evolved this capacity was obviously a product of Darwinian evolution, the most critical precondition for the evolution of this brain cannot be simply explained in these terms. Darwinian evolution can explain why the creation of stone tools altered conditions for survival in a new ecological niche in which group living, pair bonding, and more complex social structures were critical to survival. Darwinian evolution can also explain why selective pressures in this new ecological niche favoured pre-adaptive changes required for symbolic communication. All the same, this communication resulted directly through its passing an increasingly atypically structural complex and intensively condensed behaviour. Social evolution began to take precedence over physical evolution in the sense that mutations resulting in enhanced social behaviour became selectively advantageously within the context of the social behaviour of hominids.
Because this communication was based on symbolic vocalization that required the evolution of neural mechanisms and processes that did not evolve in any other species. As this marked the emergence of a mental realm that would increasingly appear as separate and distinct from the external material realm.
If the emergent reality in this mental realm cannot be reduced to, or entirely explained as for, the sum of its parts, concluding that this reality is greater than the sum of its parts seems reasonable. For example, a complete proceeding of the manner in which light in particular wave lengths has ben advancing by the human brain to generate a particular colour says nothing about the experience of colour. In other words, a complete scientific description of all the mechanisms involved in processing the colour blue does not correspond with the colour blue as perceived in human consciousness. No scientific description of the physical substrate of a thought or feeling, no matter how accomplish it can but be accounted for in actualized experience, especially of a thought or feeling, as an emergent aspect of global brain function.
If we could, for example, define all of the neural mechanisms involved in generating a particular word symbol, this would reveal nothing about the experience of the word symbol as an idea in human consciousness. Conversely, the experience of the word symbol as an idea would reveal nothing about the neuronal processes involved. While one mode of understanding the situation necessarily displaces the other, both are required to achieve a complete understanding of the situation.
Even if we are to include two aspects of biological reality, finding to a more complex order in biological reality is associated with the emergence of new wholes that are greater than the orbital parts. Yet, the entire biosphere is of a whole that displays self-regulating behaviour that is greater than the sum of its parts. The emergence of a symbolic universe based on a complex language system could be viewed as another stage in the evolution of more complicated and complex systems. As marked and noted by the appearance of a new profound complementarity in relationships between parts and wholes. This does not allow us to assume that human consciousness was in any sense preordained or predestined by natural process. Thus far it does make it possible, in philosophical terms at least, to argue that this consciousness is an emergent aspect of the self-organizing properties of biological life.
If we also concede that an indivisible whole contains, by definition, no separate parts and that a phenomenon can be assumed to be ‘real’ only when it is ‘observed’ phenomenon, we are led to more interesting conclusions. The indivisible whole whose existence is inferred in the results of the aspectual experiments that cannot in principle is itself the subject of scientific investigation. There is a simple reason that this is the case. Science can claim knowledge of physical reality only when the predictions of a physical theory are validated by experiment. Since the indivisible whole cannot be measured or observed, we confront as the ‘event horizon’ or knowledge where science can say nothing about the actual character of this reality. Why this is so, is a property of the entire universe, then we must also conclude that an undivided wholeness exists on the most primary and basic level in all aspects of physical reality. What we are dealing within science per se, however, are manifestations of tis reality, which are invoked or ‘actualized’ in making acts of observation or measurement. Since the reality that exists between the space-like separated regions is a whole whose existence can only be inferred in experience. As opposed to proven experiment, the correlations between the particles, and the sum of these parts, do not constitute the ‘indivisible’ whole. Physical theory allows us to understand why the correlations occur. Nevertheless, it cannot in principle disclose or describe the actualized character of the indivisible whole.
The scientific implications to this extraordinary relationship between parts (qualia) and indivisible whole (the universe) are quite staggering. Our primary concern, however, is a new view of the relationship between mind and world that carries even larger implications in human terms. When factors into our understanding of the relationship between parts and wholes in physics and biology, then mind, or human consciousness, must be viewed as an emergent phenomenon in a seamlessly interconnected whole called the cosmos.
All that is required to embrace the alternative view of the relationship between mind and world that are consistent with our most advanced scientific knowledge is a commitment to metaphysical and epistemological realism and a willingness to follow arguments to their logical conclusions. Metaphysical realism assumes that physical reality or has an actual existence independent of human observers or any act of observation, epistemological realism assumes that progress in science requires strict adherence to scientific mythology, or to the rules and procedures for doing science. If one can accept these assumptions, most of the conclusions drawn should appear self-evident in logical and philosophical terms. Attributing any extra-scientific properties to the whole to understand is also not necessary and embrace the new relationship between part and whole and the alternative view of human consciousness that is consistent with this relationship. This is, in this that our distinguishing character between what can be ‘proven’ in scientific terms and what can be reasonably ‘inferred’ in philosophical terms based on the scientific evidence.
Moreover, advances in scientific knowledge rapidly became the basis for the creation of a host of new technologies. Yet those responsible for evaluating the benefits and risks associated with the use of these technologies, much less their potential impact on human needs and values, normally had expertise on only one side of a two-culture divide. Perhaps, more important, many of the potential threats to the human future - such as, to, environmental pollution, arms development, overpopulation, and spread of infectious diseases, poverty, and starvation - can be effectively solved only by integrating scientific knowledge with knowledge from the social sciences and humanities. We have not done so for a simple reason, the implications of the amazing new fact of nature sustaining the non-locality that cannot be properly understood without some familiarity wit the actual history of scientific thought. The intent is to suggest that what is most important about this back-ground can be understood in its absence. Those who do not wish to struggle with the small and perhaps, the fewer amounts of back-ground implications should feel free to ignore it. However, this material will be no more challenging as such, that the hope is that from those of which will find a common ground for understanding and that will meet again on this commonly functions in an effort to close the circle, resolves the equations of eternity and complete the universe to obtainably gain in its unification of which that holds within.
Another aspect of the evolution of a brain that allowed us to construct symbolic universes based on complex language system that is particularly relevant for our purposes concerns consciousness of self. Consciousness of self as an independent agency or actor is predicted on a fundamental distinction or dichotomy between this self and the other selves. Self, as it is constructed in human subjective reality, is perceived as having an independent existence and a self-referential character in a mental realm separately distinct from the material realm. It was, the assumed separation between these realms that led Descartes to posit his famous dualism in understanding the nature of consciousness in the mechanistic classical universe.
In a thought experiment, instead of bringing a course of events, as in a normal experiment, we are invited to imagine one. We may then be able to ‘see’ that some result following, or tat some description is appropriate, or our inability to describe the situation may itself have some consequences. Thought experiments played a major role in the development of physics: For example, Galileo probably never dropped two balls of unequal weight from the leaning Tower of Pisa, in order to refute the Aristotelean view that a heavy body falls faster than a lighter one. He merely asked used to imagine a heavy body made into the shape of a dumbbell, and then connecting rod gradually thinner, until it is finally severed. The thing is one heavy body until the last moment and he n two light ones, but it is incredible that this final outline alters the velocity dramatically. Other famous examples include the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen thought experiment. In the philosophy of personal identity, our apparent capacity to imagine ourselves surviving drastic changes of body, brain, and mind is a permanent source of difficulty. There is no consensus on the legitimate place of thought experiments, to substitute either for real experiment, or as a reliable device for discerning possibilities. Thought experiments are alike of one that dislikes and are sometimes called intuition pumps.
For familiar reasons, supposing that people are characterized by their rationality is common, and the most evident display of our rationality is our capacity to think. This is the rehearsal in the mind of what to say, or what to do. Not all thinking is verbal, since chess players, composers and painters all think, and there is no a priori reason that their deliberations should take any more verbal a form than this actions. It is permanently tempting to conceive of this activity in terms of the presence in the mind of elements of some language, or other medium that represents aspects of the world. Still, the model has been attacked, notably by Wittgenstein, as insufficient, since no such presence could carry a guarantee that the right use would be made of it. Such an inner present seems unnecessary, since an intelligent outcome might arise in principle weigh out it.
In the philosophy of mind as well as ethics the treatment of animals exposes major problems if other animals differ from human beings, how is the difference to be characterized: Do animals think and reason, or have thoughts and beliefs? In philosophers as different as Aristotle and Kant the possession of reason separates humans from animals, and alone allows entry to the moral community.
For Descartes, animals are mere machines and ee lack consciousness or feelings. In the ancient world the rationality of animals is defended with the example of Chrysippus’ dog. This animal, tracking a prey, comes to a cross-roads with three exits, and without pausing to pick-up the scent, reasoning, according to Sextus Empiricus. The animal went either by this road, or by this road, or by that, or by the other. However, it did not go by this or that, but he went the other way. The ‘syllogism of the dog’ was discussed by many writers, since in Stoic cosmology animals should occupy a place on the great chain of being somewhat below human beings, the only terrestrial rational agents: Philo Judaeus wrote a dialogue attempting to show again Alexander of Aphrodisias that the dog’s behaviour does no t exhibit rationality, but simply shows it following the scent, by way of response Alexander has the animal jump down a shaft (where the scent would not have lingered). Plutah sides with Philo, Aquinas discusses the dog and scholastic thought in general was quite favourable to brute intelligence (being made to stand trail for various offences in medieval times was common for animals). In the modern era Montaigne uses the dog to remind us of the frailties of human reason: Rorarious undertook to show not only that beasts are rational, but that they make better use of reason than people do. James the first of England defends the syllogising dog, and Henry More and Gassendi both takes issue with Descartes on that matter. Hume is an outspoken defender of animal cognition, but with their use of the view that language is the essential manifestation of mentality, animals’ silence began to count heavily against them, and they are completely denied thoughts by, for instance Davidson.
Dogs are frequently shown in pictures of philosophers, as their assiduity and fidelity are a symbol
The term instinct (Lat., instinctus, impulse or urge) implies innately determined behaviour, flexible to change in circumstance outside the control of deliberation and reason. The view that animals accomplish even complex tasks not by reason was common to Aristotle and the Stoics, and the inflexibility of their outline was used in defence of this position as early as Avicennia. A continuity between animal and human reason was proposed by Hume, and followed by sensationalist such as the naturalist Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802). The theory of evolution prompted various views of the emergence of stereotypical behaviour, and the idea that innate determinants of behaviour are fostered by specific environments is a guiding principle of ethology. In this sense that being social may be instinctive in human beings, and for that matter too reasoned on what we now know about the evolution of human language abilities, however, our real or actualized self is clearly not imprisoned in our minds.
It is implicitly a part of the larger whole of biological life, human observers its existence from embedded relations to this whole, and constructs its reality as based on evolved mechanisms that exist in all human brains. This suggests that any sense of the ‘otherness’ of self and world be is an illusion, in that disguises of its own actualization are to find all its relations between the part that are of their own characterization. Its self as related to the temporality of being whole is that of a biological reality. It can be viewed, of course, that a proper definition of this whole must not include the evolution of the larger undissectible whole. Yet, the cosmos and unbroken evolution of all life, by that of the first self-replication molecule that was the ancestor of DNA. It should include the complex interactions that have proven that among all the parts in biological reality that any resultant of emerging is self-regulating. This, of course, is responsible to properties owing to the whole of what might be to sustain the existence of the parts.
Founded on complications and complex coordinate systems in ordinary language may be conditioned as to establish some developments have been descriptively made by its physical reality and metaphysical concerns. That is, that it is in the history of mathematics and that the exchanges between the mega-narratives and frame tales of religion and science were critical factors in the minds of those who contributed. The first scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, allowed scientists to better them in the understudy of how the classical paradigm in physical reality has marked results in the stark Cartesian division between mind and world that became one of the most characteristic features of Western thought. This is not, however, another strident and ill-mannered diatribe against our misunderstandings, but drawn upon equivalent self realization and undivided wholeness or predicted characterlogic principles of physical reality and the epistemological foundations of physical theory.
Scientific knowledge is an extension of ordinary language into greater levels of abstraction and precision through reliance upon geometry and numerical relationships. We imagine that the seeds of the scientific imagination were planted in ancient Greece. This, of course, opposes any other option but to speculate some displacement afar from the Chinese or Babylonian cultures. Partly because the social, political, and economic climates in Greece were more open in the pursuit of knowledge along with greater margins that reflect upon cultural accessibility. Another important factor was that the special character of Homeric religion allowed the Greeks to invent a conceptual framework that would prove useful in future scientific investigations. However, it was only after this inheritance from Greek philosophy was wedded to some essential feature of Judeo-Christian beliefs about the origin of the cosmos that the paradigm for classical physics emerged.
The Greek philosophers we now recognized as the originator’s scientific thoughts were oraclically mystic who probably perceived their world as replete with spiritual agencies and forces. The Greek religious heritage made it possible for these thinkers to attempt to coordinate diverse physical events within a framework of immaterial and unifying ideas. The fundamental assumption that there is a pervasive, underlying substance out of which everything emerges and into which everything returns are attributed to Thales of Miletos. Thales had apparently transcended to this conclusion out of the belief that the world was full of gods, and his unifying substance, water, was similarly charged with spiritual presence. Religion in this instance served the interests of science because it allowed the Greek philosophers to view ‘essences’ underlying and unifying physical reality as if they were ‘substances.’
Nonetheless, the belief that the mind of God as the Divine Architect permeates the workings of nature. All of which, is the principle of scientific thought, as pronounced through Johannes Kepler, and subsequently to most contemporaneous physicists, as the consigned probability can feel of some discomfort, that in reading Kepler’s original manuscripts. Physics and metaphysics, astronomy and astrology, geometry and theology commingle with an intensity that might offend those who practice science in the modern sense of that word. ‘Physical laws,’ wrote Kepler, ‘lie within the power of understanding of the human mind, God wanted us to perceive them when he created us in His image so that we may take part in His own thoughts . . . Our knowledge of numbers and quantities are the same as that of God’s, at least as far as we can understand something of it in this mortal life.’
The history of science grandly testifies to the manner in which scientific objectivity results in physical theories that must be assimilated into ‘customary points of view and forms of perception.’ The framers of classical physics derived, like the rest of us there, ‘customary points of view and forms of perception’ from macro-level visualized experience. Thus, the descriptive apparatus of visualizable experience became reflected in the classical descriptive categories.
A major discontinuity appears, however, as we moved from descriptive apparatus dominated by the character of our visualizable experience to a complete description of physical reality in relativistic and quantum physics. The actual character of physical reality in modern physics lies largely outside the range of visualizable experience. Einstein, was acutely aware of this discontinuity: ‘We have forgotten what features of the world of experience caused us to frame pre-scientific concepts, and we have great difficulty in representing the world of experience to ourselves without the spectacles of the old-established conceptual interpretation. There is the further difficulty that our language is compelled to work with words that are inseparably connected with those primitive concepts.’
It is time, for the religious imagination and the religious experience to engage the complementary truths of science in filling that which is silence with meaning. However, this does not mean that those who do not believe in the existence of God or Being should refrain in any sense for assessing the implications of the new truths of science. Understanding these implications does not require to some ontology, and is in no way diminished by the lack of ontology. And one is free to recognize a basis for an exchange between science and religion since one is free to deny that this basis exists - there is nothing in our current scientific world-view that can prove the existence of God or Being and nothing that legitimate any anthropomorphic conceptions of the nature of God or Being. The question of belief in ontology remains what it has always been - a question, and the physical universe on the most basic level remains what has always been - a riddle. And the ultimate answer to the question and the ultimate meaning of the riddle are, and probably will always be, a mater of personal choice and conviction.
Our frame reference work is mostly to incorporate in an abounding set-class affiliation between mind and world, by that lay to some defining features and fundamental preoccupations, for which there is certainly nothing new in the suggestion that contemporary scientific world-view legitimates an alternate conception of the relationship between mind and world. The essential point of attention is that one of ‘consciousness’ and remains in a certain state of our study.
But at the end of this, sometimes labourious journey that precipitate to some conclusion that should make the trip very worthwhile. Initiatory comments offer resistance in contemporaneous physics or biology for believing ‘I’ in the stark Cartesian division between mind and world that some have rather aptly described as ‘the disease of the Western mind.’ In addition, let us consider the legacy in Western intellectual life of the stark division between mind and world sanctioned by René Descartes.
Descartes, the father of modern philosophy, inasmuch as he made epistemological questions the primary and central questions of the discipline. But this is misleading for several reasons. In the first, Descartes conception of philosophy was very different from our own. The term ‘philosophy’ in the seventeenth century was far more comprehensive than it is today, and embraced the whole of what we nowadays call natural science, including cosmology and physics, and subjects like anatomy, optics and medicine. Descartes reputation as a philosopher in his own time was based as much as anything on his contributions in these scientific areas. Secondly, even in those Cartesian writings that are philosophical in the modern academic sense, the e epistemological concerns are rather different from the conceptual and linguistic inquiries that characterize present-day theory of knowledge. Descartes saw the need to base his scientific system on secure metaphysical foundations: By ‘metaphysics’ he meant that in the queries into God and the soul and usually all the first things to be discovered by philosophizing. Yet, he was quick to realize that there was nothing in this view that provided untold benefits between heaven and earth and united the universe in a shared and communicable frame of knowledge, it presented us with a view of physical reality that was totally alien from the world of everyday life. Even so, there was nothing in this view of nature that could explain or provide a foundation for the mental, or for all that of direct experience as distinctly human, with no ups, downs or any which ways of direction.
Following these fundamentals’ explorations that include questions about knowledge and certainty, but even here, Descartes is not primarily concerned with the criteria for knowledge claims, or with definitions of the epistemic concepts involved, as his aim is to provide a unified framework for understanding the universe. And with this, Descartes was convinced that the immaterial essences that gave form and structure to this universe were coded in geometrical and mathematical ideas, and this insight led him to invented algebraic geometry.
A scientific understanding to these ideas could be derived, as did that Descartes declared, that with the aid of precise deduction, and he also claimed that the contours of physical reality could be laid out in three-dimensional coordinates. Following the publication of Isaac Newton’s ‘Principia Mathematica’ in 1687, reductionism and mathematical modelling became the most powerful tools of modern science. And the dream that the entire physical world could be known and mastered through the extension and refinement of mathematical theory became the central feature and principle of scientific knowledge.
The radical separation between mind and nature formalized by Descartes served over time to allow scientists to concentrate on developing mathematical descriptions of matter as pure mechanisms lacking any concerns about its spiritual dimension or ontological foundations. Meanwhile, attempts to rationalize, reconcile, or eliminate Descartes’s stark division between mind and matter became perhaps the most central feature of Western intellectual life.
As in the view of the relationship between mind and world sanctioned by classical physics and formalized by Descartes became a central preoccupation in Western intellectual life. And the tragedy of the Western mind is that we have lived since the seventeenth century with the prospect that the inner world of human consciousness and the outer world of physical reality are separated by an abyss or a void that cannot be bridged or to agree with reconciliation.
In classical physics, external reality consisted of inert and inanimate matter moving according to wholly deterministic natural laws, and collections of discrete atomized parts made up wholes. Classical physics was also premised, however, a dualistic conception of reality as consisting of abstract disembodied ideas existing in a domain separate form and superior to sensible objects and movements. The notion that the material world experienced by the senses was inferior to the immaterial world experienced by mind or spirit has been blamed for frustrating the progress of physics up too at least the time of Galileo. But in one very important respect, it also made the first scientific revolution possible. Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and Newton firmly believed that the immaterial geometrical and mathematical ideas that inform physical reality had a prior existence in the mind of God and that doing physics was a form of communion with these ideas.
The tragedy of the Western mind is a direct consequence of the stark Cartesian division between mind and world. This is the tragedy of the modern mind which ‘solved the riddle of the universe,’ but only to replace it by another riddle: The riddle of itself. Yet, we discover the ‘certain principles of physical reality,’ said Descartes, ‘not by the prejudices of the senses, but by rational analysis, which thus possess so great evidence that we cannot doubt of their truth.’ Since the real, or that which actually remains external to ourselves, was in his view only that which could be represented in the quantitative terms of mathematics, Descartes concluded that all qualitative aspects of reality could be traced to the deceitfulness of the senses.
Given that Descartes distrusted the information from the senses to the point of doubting the perceived results of repeatable scientific experiments, how did he conclude that our knowledge of the mathematical ideas residing only in mind or in human subjectivity was accurate, much less the absolute truth? He did so by making a leap of faith - God constructed the world, said Descartes, according to the mathematical ideas that our minds could uncover in their pristine essence. The truths of classical physics as Descartes viewed them were quite literally ‘revealed’ truths, and it was this seventeenth-century metaphysical presupposition that became in the history of science what is termed the ‘hidden ontology of classical epistemology.’ Descartes lingers in the widespread conviction that science does not provide a ‘place for man’ or for all that we know as distinctly human in subjective reality.
The historical notion in the unity of consciousness has had an interesting history in philosophy and psychology. Taking Descartes to be the first major philosopher of the modern period, the unity of consciousness was central to the study of the mind for the whole of the modern period until the 20th century. The notion figured centrally in the work of Descartes, Leibniz, Hume, Reid, Kant, Brennan, James, and, in most of the major precursors of contemporary philosophy of mind and cognitive psychology. It played a particularly important role in Kant's work.
A couple of examples will illustrate the role that the notion of the unity of consciousness played in this long literature. Consider a classical argument for dualism (the view that the mind is not the body, indeed is not made out of matter at all). It starts like this: When I consider the mind, which is to say of myself, as far as I am only a thinking thing, I cannot distinguish in myself any parts, but apprehend myself to be clearly one and entire.
Descartes then asserts that if the mind is not made up of parts, it cannot consist of matter, presumably because, as he saw it, anything material has parts. He then goes on to say that this would be enough to prove dualism by itself, had he not already proved it elsewhere. It is in the unified consciousness that I have of myself.
Here is another, more elaborate argument based on unified consciousness. The conclusion will be that any system of components could never achieve unified consciousness acting in concert. William James' well-known version of the argument starts as follows: Take a sentence of a dozen words, take twelve men, and to each word. Then stand the men in a row or jam them in a bunch, and let each think of his word as intently as he will; Nowhere will there be a consciousness of the whole sentence.
James generalizes this observation to all conscious states. To get dualism out of this, we need to add a premise: That if the mind were made out of matter, conscious states would have to be distributed over some group of components in some relevant way. Nevertheless, this thought experiment is meant to show that conscious states cannot be so distributed. Therefore, the conscious mind is not made out of matter. Calling the argument that James is using is the Unity Argument. Clearly, the idea that our consciousness of, here, the parts of a sentence are unified is at the centre of the Unity Argument. Like the first, this argument goes all the way back to Descartes. Versions of it can be found in thinkers otherwise as different from one another as Leibniz, Reid, and James. The Unity Argument continued to be influential into the 20th century. That the argument was considered a powerful reason for concluding that the mind is not the body is illustrated in a backhanded way by Kant's treatment of it (as he found it in Descartes and Leibniz, not James, of course).
Kant did not think that we could uncover anything about the nature of the mind, including whether nor is it made out of matter. To make the case for this view, he had to show that all existing arguments that the mind is not material do not work and he set out to do just this in the chapter in the Critique of Pure Reason on the Paralogisms of Pure Reason (1781), paralogisms are faulty inferences about the nature of the mind. The Unity Argument is the target of a major part of that chapter; if one is going to show that we cannot know what the mind is like, we must dispose of the Unity Argument, which purports to show that the mind is not made out of matter. Kant's argument that the Unity Argument does not support dualism is simple. He urges that the idea of unified consciousness being achieved by something that has no parts or components are no less mysterious than its being achieved by a system of components acting together. Remarkably enough, though no philosopher has ever met this challenge of Kant's and no account exists of what an immaterial mind not made out of parts might be like, philosophers continued to rely on the Unity Argument until well into the 20th century. It may be a bit difficult for us to capture this now but the idea any system of components, and for an even stronger reason might not realize that merge with consciousness, that each system of material components, had a strong intuitive appeal for a long time.
The notion that consciousness agrees to unification and was in addition central to one of Kant's own famous arguments, his ‘transcendental deduction of the categories’. In this argument, boiled down to its essentials, Kant claims that to tie various objects of experience together into a single unified conscious representation of the world, something that he simply assumed that we could do, we could probably apply certain concepts to the items in question. In particular we have to apply concepts from each of four fundamental categories of concept: Quantitative, qualitative, relational, and what he called ‘modal’ concepts. Modal concept’s concern of whether an item might exist, does exist, or must exist. Thus, the four kinds of concept are concepts for how many units, what features, what relations to other objects, and what existence status is represented in an experience.
It was relational conceptual representation that most interested Kant and of relational concepts, he thought the concept of cause-and-effect to be by far the most important. Kant wanted to show that natural science (which for him meant primarily physics) was genuine knowledge (he thought that Hume's sceptical treatment of cause and effect relations challenged this status). He believed that if he could prove that we must tie items in our experience together causally if we are to have a unified awareness of them, he would have put physics back on ‘the secure path of a science.’ The details of his argument have exercised philosophers for more than two hundred years. We will not go into them here, but the argument illustrates how central the notion of the unity of consciousness was in Kant's thinking about the mind and its relation to the world.
Although the unity of consciousness had been at the centre of pre-20th century research on the mind, early in the 20th century the notion almost disappeared. Logical atomism in philosophy and behaviourism in psychology were both unsympathetic to the notion. Logical atomism focussed on the atomic elements of cognition (sense data, simple propositional judgments, etc.), rather than on how these elements are tied together to form a mind. Behaviourism urged that we focus on behaviour, the mind being alternatively myth or something otherwise that we cannot and do not need of studying the mysteriousness of science, from which brings meaning and purpose to humanity. This attitude extended to consciousness, of course. The philosopher Daniel Dennett summarizes the attitude prevalent at the time this way: Consciousness may be the last bastion of occult properties, epiphenomena, immeasurable subjective states - in short, the one area of mind best left to the philosophers. Let them make fools of themselves trying to corral the quicksilver of ‘phenomenology’ into a respectable theory.
The unity of consciousness next became an object of serious attention in analytic philosophy only as late as the 1960s. In the years since, new work has appeared regularly. The accumulated literature is still not massive but the unity of consciousness has again become an object of serious study. Before we examine the more recent work, we need to explicate the notion in more detail than we have done so far and introduce some empirical findings. Both are required to understand recent work on the issue.
To expand on our earlier notion of the unity of consciousness, we need to introduce a pair of distinctions. Current works on consciousness labours under a huge, confusing terminology. Different theorists exchange dialogue over the excess consciousness, phenomenal consciousness, self-consciousness, simple consciousness, creature consciousness, states consciousness, monitoring consciousness, awareness as equated with consciousness, awareness distinguished from consciousness, higher orders thought, higher orders experience, qualia, the felt qualities of representations, consciousness as displaced perception, . . . and on and on and on. We can ignore most of this profusion but we do need two distinctions: between consciousness of objects and consciousness of our representations of objects, and between consciousness of representations and consciousness of self.
It is very natural to think of self-consciousness or, cognitive state more accurately, as a set of cognitive states. Self-knowledge is an example of such a cognitive state. There are plenty of things that I know bout self. I know the sort of thing I am: a human being, a warm-blooded rational animal with two legs. I know of many properties and much of what is happening to me, at both physical and mental levels. I also know things about my past, things I have done and that of whom I have been with other people I have met. But I have many self-conscious cognitive states that are not instances of knowledge. For example, I have the capacity to plan for the future - to weigh up possible courses of action in the light of goals, desires, and ambitions. I am capable of ca certain type of moral reflection, tide to moral self-and understanding and moral self-evaluation. I can pursue questions like, what sort of person I am? Am I the sort of person I want to be? Am I the sort of individual that I ought to be? This is my ability to think about myself. Of course, much of what I think when I think about myself in these self-conscious ways is also available to me to employing in my thought about other people and other objects.
When I say that I am a self-conscious creature, I am saying that I can do all these things. But what do they have in common? Could I lack some and still be self-conscious? These are central questions that take us to the heart of many issues in metaphysics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of psychology.
Even so, with the range of putatively self-conscious cognitive states, one might naturally assume that there is a single ability that all presuppose. This is my ability to think about myself. I can only have knowledge about myself if I have beliefs about myself, and I can only have beliefs about myself if I can entertain thoughts about myself. The same can be said for autobiographical memories and moral self-understanding.
The proposing account would be on par with other noted examples of the deflationary account of self-consciousness. If, in at all, a straightforward explanation to what makes those of the ‘self contents’ immune to error through misidentification concerning the semantics of self, then it seems fair to say that the problem of self-consciousness has been dissolved, at least as much as solved.
This proposed account would be on a par with other noted examples as such as the redundancy theory of truth. That is to say, the redundancy theory or the deflationary view of truth claims that the predicate ‘ . . . true’ does not have a sense, i.e., expresses no substantive or profound or explanatory concept that ought to be the topic of philosophic enquiry. The approach admits of different versions, but centres on the pints (1) that ‘it is true that p’ says no more nor less than ‘p’ (so, redundancy’) (2) that in less direct context, such as ‘everything he said was true’, or ‘all logical consequences of true propositions as true’, the predicated functions as a device enabling us to generalize rather than as an adjective or predicate describing the things he said, or the kinds of propositions that follow from true propositions. For example, its translation is to infer that: (∀p, q)(p & p ➝ q ➝ q)’ where there is no use of a notion of true statements. It is supposed in classical (two-valued) logic that each statement has one of these values, and not as both. A statement is then false if and only if it is not true. The basis of this scheme is that to each statement there corresponds a determinate truth condition, or way the world must be for it to be true, if this condition obtains the statement is true, and otherwise false. Statements may indeed be felicitous or infelicitous in other dimensions (polite, misleading, apposite, witty, etc.) but truth is the central normative notion governing assertion. Considerations of vagueness may introduce greys into this black-and-white schemes. For the issue of whether falsity is the only way of failing to be true. The view, if a language is provided with a truth definition, according to the semantic theory of the truth is a sufficiently characterization of its concept of truth, there is no further philosophical chapter to write about truth itself or truth as shared across different languages. The view is similar to that of the disquotational theory
There are technical problems in interpreting all uses of the notion of truth in such ways, but they are not generally felt to be insurmountable. The approach needs to explain away apparently substantive uses of the notion, such as . . . ‘science aims at the truth’ or ‘truth is a norm governing discourse. Indeed, postmodernist writing frequently advocates that we must abandon such norms, along with a discredited ‘objective’ concept ion of truth. But perhaps, we can have the norms even when objectivity is problematic, since they can be framed within mention of truth: Science wants to be so that whenever science holds that ‘p’, when ‘p’‘. Discourse is to be regulated by the principle that it is wrong to assert ‘p’: When not-p.
It is important to stress how redundancy or the deflationary theory of self-consciousness, and any theory of consciousness that accords a serious role in self-consciousness to mastery of the semantics of the first-person pronoun, is motivated by an important principle that ha governed much of the development of analytical philosophy. This is the principle that the philosophical analysis of thought can only proceed through the philosophical analysis of language:
Thoughts differ from all else that is aid to be among the contents of the mind in being wholly communicable: It is of the essence of thought that I can convey to you the very thought that I have, as opposed to being able to tell you merely something about what my thought is like. It is of the essence of thought not merely to be communicable, but to be communicable, without residue, by means of language. In order to understand thought, it is necessary, therefore, to understand the means by which thought is expressed. We communicate thought by means of language because we have an implicit understanding of the workings of language, that is, of the principles governing the use of language, it is these principles, which relate to what is open to view in the employment of language, unaided by any supposed contact between mind and the senses that they carry. In order to analyses thought, therefore, it is necessary to make explicitly those principles, regulating our use of language, which we already implicitly grasp. (Dummett, 1978)
So how can such thoughts be entertained by a thinker incapable of reflexively referring to himself as English speakers do with the first-person pronoun be plausibly ascribed thought with first-person contents? The thought that, despite all this, there are in fact first-person contents that do not presuppose mastery of the first-person pronoun is at the core of the functionalist theory of self-reference and first-person belief.
The best developed functionalist theory of self-reference has been deployed by Hugh Mellor (1988-1989). The basic phenomenon he is interested in explaining is what it is for a creature to have what he terms as subjective belief, which is to say, a belief whose content is naturally expressed by a sentence in the first-person singular and the present tense. Mellor starts from the functionalist premise that beliefs are causal functions from desires to actions. It is, of course, the emphasis on causal links between belief and action that make it plausible to think that belief might be independent of language and conscious belief, since ‘agency entails neither linguistic ability nor conscious belief. The idea that beliefs are causal functions from desires to actions can be deployed to explain the content of a give n belief through which the equation of truth conditions and utility conditions, where utility conditions are those in which the actions caused by the conjunction of that belief with a single desire result in the satisfaction of that desire. To expound forthwith, consider a creature ‘x’ who is hungry and has a desire for food at time ‘t’. That creature has a token belief b/(p) that conjoins with its desire for food to cause it to eat what is in front of it at that time. The utility condition of that belief is that there is food in front of it at that time. The utility condition of that belief is that there is food in from it of ‘x’ at that time. Moreover, for b/(p) to cause ‘x’ to eat what is in front of it at ‘t’, b/(p) must be a belief that ‘x’ has at ‘t’. Therefore, the utility/truth conditions of b/(p) is that whatever creature has this belief faces food when it is in fact facing food. And a belief with this content is, of course, the subjective belief whose natural linguistic expression would be ‘I am facing food now.’ On the other hand, however, a belief that would naturally be expressed wit these words can be ascribed to a non-linguistic creature, because what makes it the belief that it is depending not on whether it can be linguistically expressed but on how it affects behaviour.
For in order to believe ‘p’, I need only be disposed to eat what I face if I feel hungry: A disposition which causal contiguity ensures that only my simultaneous hunger can provide, and only into making me eat, and only then. That’s what makes my belief refers to me and to when I have it. And that’s why I need have no idea who I am or what the time is, no concept of the self or of the present, no implicit or explicit grasp of any ‘sense’ of ‘I’ or ‘now,’ to fix the reference of my subjective belies: Causal contiguity fixes them for me.
Causal contiguity, according to explanation may well be to why no internal representation of the self is required, even at what other philosophers has called the subpersonal level. Mellor believes that reference to distal objects can take place when in internal state serves as a causal surrogate for the distal object, and hence as an internal representation of that object. No such causal surrogate, and hence no such internal representation, is required in the case of subjective beliefs. The relevant casual components of subjective beliefs are the believer and the time.
The necessary contiguity of cause and effect is also the key to =the functionalist account of self-reference in conscious subjective belief. Mellor adopts a relational theory of consciousness, equating conscious beliefs with second-order beliefs to the effect that one is having a particular first-order subjective belief, it is, simply a fact about our cognitive constitution that these second-order beliefs are reliably, though of course fallibly, generated so that we tend to believe that we believe things that we do in fact believe.
The contiguity law in Leibniz, extends the principles that there are no discontinuous changes in nature’: ‘natura non facit saltum, nature makes no leaps.’ Leibniz was able to use the principle to criticize the mechanical system of Descartes, which would imply such leaps in some circumstances, and to criticize contemporary atomism, which implied discontinuous changes of density at the edge of an atom. However, according to Hume the contiguity of evens is an important element in our interpretation of their conjunction for being causal.
Others attending to the functionalist point of view are it’s the advocate’s Putnam and Stellars, and its guiding principle is that we can define mental states by a triplet of relations: What typically cayuses them, what affects they have on other mental states and what affects they have on behaviour. The definition need not take the form of a simple analysis, but if we could write down the totality of axioms, or postulates, or platitudes that govern our theories about what things are apt to cause (for example) a belief state, what effects it would have on a variety of other mental states, and what effect it us likely to have on behaviour, then we would have done all that is needed to make the state a proper theoretical notion. It would be implicitly defined by these theses. Functionalism is often compared with descriptions of a computer, since according to it mental descriptions correspond to a description of a machine in terms of software, that remains silent about the underlying hardware ee or ‘realization’ of the program the machine is running. The principal advantages of functionalism include its fit with the way we know of mental states both of ourselves and others are via their effects on behaviour and other mental states. As with behaviourism, critics charge that structurally complex items that do not bear mental states might nevertheless imitate the functions that are cited. According to this criticism functionalism is too generous, and would count too many things as having minds. It is also queried whether functionalism is too parochial, able to see mental similarities only when there is causal similarity, when our actual practices of interpretation enable us to ascribe thoughts and desires to persons whose causal structure may be rather different from our own. It may then seem as though beliefs and desires can be variably realized in causal architectures, just as much as they can be in different neurophysiological stares.
Nevertheless, we are confronted with the range of putatively self-conscious cognitive states, one might assume that there is a single ability that is presupposed. This is my ability to think about myself, and I can only have knowledge about myself if I have beliefs about myself, and I can only have beliefs about myself if I can entertain thoughts about myself. The same can be said for ideographical memories and moral self-understanding. These are ways of thinking about myself.
Of course, much of what I think when I think about myself in these self-conscious ways is also available to me to employ in my thoughts about other people and other objects. My knowledge that I am a human being deploys certain conceptual abilities that I can also deploy in thinking that you are a human being. The same holds when I congratulate myself for satisfying the exacting moral standards of autonomous moral agencies. This involves concepts and descriptions that can apply equally to themselves and to others. On the other hand, when I think about myself, I am also putting to work an ability that I cannot put to work in thinking about other people and other objects. This is precisely the ability to apply those concepts and descriptions to myself. It has become common to refer to this ability as the ability to entertain ‘I’-thoughts.
Nonetheless, both subject and object, either mind or matter, are real or both are unreal, imaginary. The assumption of just an illusory subject or illusory object leads to dead-ends and to absurdities. This would entail an extreme form of skepticism, wherein everything is relative or subjective and nothing could be known for sure. This is not only devastating for the human mind, but also most ludicrous.
Does this leave us with the only option, that both, subject and objects are alike real? That would again create a real dualism, which we realized, is only created in our mind. So, what part of this dualism is not real?
To answer this, we have first to inquire into the meaning of the term ‘real.’ Reality comes from the Latin word ‘realitas,’ which could be literally translated by ‘thing-hood.’ ‘Res’ does not only have the meaning of a material thing.’ ‘Res’ can have a lot of different meanings in Latin. Most of them have little to do with materiality, e.g., affairs, events, business, a coherent collection of any kind, situation, etc. These so-called simulative terms are always subjective, and therefore related to the way of thinking and feeling of human beings. Outside of the realm of human beings, reality has no meaning at all. Only in the context of conscious and rational beings does reality become something meaningful. Reality is the whole of the human affairs insofar as these are related to our world around us. Reality is never the bare physical world, without the human being. Reality is the totality of human experience and thought in relation to an objective world.
Now this is the next aspect we have to analyse. Is this objective world, which we encounter in our experience and thought, something that exists on its own or is it dependent on our subjectivity? That the subjective mode of our consciousness affects the perceptions of the objective world is conceded by most of the scientists. Nevertheless, they assume a real and objective world, that would even exist without a human being alive or observing it. One way to handle this problem is the Kantian solution of the ‘thing-in-itself,’ that is inaccessible to our mind because of mind's inherent limitations. This does not help us very much, but just posits some undefinable entity outside of our experience and understanding. Hegel, on the other side, denied the inaccessibility of the ‘thing-in-itself’ and thought, that knowledge of the world as it is in itself is attainable, but only by ‘absolute knowing’ the highest form of consciousness.
One of the most persuasive proofs of an independent objective world, is the following thesis by science: If we put a camera into a landscape, where no human beings are present, and when we leave this place and let the camera take some pictures automatically through a timer, and when we come back some days later to develop the pictures, we will find the same picture of the landscape as if we had taken the picture ourselves. Also, common-sense tells us: if we wake up in the morning, it is highly probable, even sure, that we find ourselves in the same environment, without changes, without things having left their places uncaused.
Is this empirical argument sufficient to persuade even the most sceptical thinker, which there is an objective world out there? Hardly. If a sceptic nonetheless tries to uphold the position of a solipsistic monism, then the above-mentioned argument would only be valid, if the objects out there were assumed to be subjective mental constructs. Not even Berkeley assumed such an extreme position. His immaterialism was based on the presumption, that the world around us is the object of God's mind, that means, that all the objects are ideas in a universal mind. This is more persuasive. We could even close the gap between the religious concept of ‘God’ and the philosophical concept by relating both of them to the modern quantum physical concept of a vacuum. All have one thing in common: there must be an underlying reality, which contains and produces all the objects. This idea of an underlying reality is interestingly enough a continuous line of thought throughout the history of mankind. Almost every great philosopher or every great religion assumed some kind of supreme reality. I deal with this idea in my historical account of mind's development.
We're still stuck with the problem of subject and object. If we assume, that there may be an underlying reality, neither physical nor mental, neither object nor subject, but producing both aspects, we end up with the identity of subject and object. So long as there is only this universal ‘vacuum,’ nothing is yet differentiated. Everything is one and the same. By a dialectical process of division or by random fluctuations of the vacuum, elementary forms are created, which develop into more complex forms and finally into living beings with both a mental and a physical aspect. The only question to answer is, how these two aspects were produced and developed. Maybe there are an infinite numbers of aspects, but only two are visible to us, such as Spinoza postulated it. Also, since the mind does not evolve out of matter, there must have been either a concomitant evolution of mind and matter or matter has evolved whereas mind has not. Consequently mind is valued somehow superiorly to matter. Since both are aspects of one reality, both are alike significant. Science conceives the whole physical world and the human beings to have evolved gradually from an original vacuum state of the universe (singularity). So, has mind just popped into the world at some time in the past, or has mind emerged from the complexity of matter? The latter are not sustainable, and this leaves us with the possibility, that the other aspect, mind, has different attributes and qualities. This could be proven empirically. We do not believe, that our personality is something material, that our emotions, our love and fear are of a physical nature. The qualia and properties of consciousness are completely different from the properties of matter as science has defined it. By the very nature and essence of each aspect, we can assume therefore a different dialectical movement. Whereas matter is by the very nature of its properties bound to evolve gradually and existing in a perpetual movement and change, mind, on the other hand, by the very nature of its own properties, is bound to a different evolution and existence. Mind as such has not evolved. The individualized form of mind in the human body, that is, the subject, can change, although in different ways than matter changes. Both aspects have their own sets of laws and patterns. Since mind is also non-local, it comprises all individual minds. Actually, there is only one consciousness, which is only artificially split into individual minds. That's because of the connection with brain-organs, which are the means of manifestation and expression for consciousness. Both aspects are interdependent and constitute the world and the beings as we know them.
Scientific knowledge is an extension of ordinary language into greater levels of abstraction and precision through reliance upon geometry and numerical relationships. We imagine that the seeds of the scientific imagination were
planted in ancient Greece. This, of course, opposes any other option but to speculate some displacement afar from the Chinese or Babylonian cultures. Partly because the social, political, and economic climates in Greece were more open in the pursuit of knowledge along with greater margins that reflect upon cultural accessibility. Another important factor was that the special character of Homeric religion allowed the Greeks to invent a conceptual framework that would prove useful in future scientific investigations. But it was only after this inheritance from Greek philosophy was wedded to some essential feature of Judeo-Christian beliefs about the origin of the cosmos that the paradigm for classical physics emerged.
The Greek philosophers we now recognized as the originator’s scientific thoughts were oraclically mystic who probably perceived their world as replete with spiritual agencies and forces. The Greek religious heritage made it possible for these thinkers to attempt to coordinate diverse physical events within a framework of immaterial and unifying ideas. The fundamental assumption that there is a pervasive, underlying substance out of which everything emerges and into which everything returns are attributed to Thales of Miletos. Thales had apparently transcended to this conclusion out of the belief that the world was full of gods, and his unifying substance, water, was similarly charged with spiritual presence. Religion in this instance served the interests of science because it allowed the Greek philosophers to view ‘essences’ underlying and unifying physical reality as if they were ‘substances.’
Nonetheless, the belief that the mind of God as the Divine Architect permeates the workings of nature. All of which, is the principle of scientific thought, as pronounced through Johannes Kepler, and subsequently to most contemporaneous physicists, as the consigned probability can feel of some discomfort, that in reading Kepler’s original manuscripts. Physics and metaphysics, astronomy and astrology, geometry and theology commingle with an intensity that might offend those who practice science in the modern sense of that word. ‘Physical laws,’ wrote Kepler, ‘lie within the power of understanding of the human mind, God wanted us to perceive them when he created us in His image so that we may take part in His own thoughts . . . Our knowledge of numbers and quantities are the same as that of God’s, at least as far as we can understand something of it in this mortal life.’
The history of science grandly testifies to the manner in which scientific objectivity results in physical theories that must be assimilated into ‘customary points of view and forms of perception.’ The framers of classical physics derived, like the rest of us there, ‘customary points of view and forms of perception’ from macro-level visualized experience. Thus, the descriptive apparatus of visualizable experience became reflected in the classical descriptive categories.
A major discontinuity appears, however, as we moved from descriptive apparatus dominated by the character of our visualizable experience to a complete description of physical reality in relativistic and quantum physics. The actual character of physical reality in modern physics lies largely outside the range of visualizable experience. Einstein, was acutely aware of this discontinuity: ‘We have forgotten what features of the world of experience caused us to frame pre-scientific concepts, and we have great difficulty in representing the world of experience to ourselves without the spectacles of the old-established conceptual interpretation. There is the further difficulty that our language is compelled to work with words that are inseparably connected with those primitive concepts.’
It is time, for the religious imagination and the religious experience to engage the complementary truths of science in filling that which is silence with meaning. However, this does not mean that those who do not believe in the existence of God or Being should refrain in any sense for assessing the implications of the new truths of science. Understanding these implications does not require to some ontology, and is in no way diminished by the lack of ontology. And one is free to recognize a basis for an exchange between science and religion since one is free to deny that this basis exists - there is nothing in our current scientific world-view that can prove the existence of God or Being and nothing that legitimate any anthropomorphic conceptions of the nature of God or Being. The question of belief in ontology remains what it has always been - a question, and the physical universe on the most basic level remains what has always been - a riddle. And the ultimate answer to the question and the ultimate meaning of the riddle are, and probably will always be, a mater of personal choice and conviction.
Our frame reference work is mostly to incorporate in an abounding set-class affiliation between mind and world, by that lay to some defining features and fundamental preoccupations, for which there is certainly nothing new in the suggestion that contemporary scientific world-view legitimates an alternate conception of the relationship between mind and world. The essential point of attention is that one of ‘consciousness’ and remains in a certain state of our study.
But at the end of this, sometimes labourious journey that precipitate to some conclusion that should make the trip very worthwhile. Initiatory comments offer resistance in contemporaneous physics or biology for believing ‘I’ in the stark Cartesian division between mind and world that some have rather aptly described as ‘the disease of the Western mind.’ In addition, let us consider the legacy in Western intellectual life of the stark division between mind and world sanctioned by René Descartes.
Descartes, the father of modern philosophy, inasmuch as he made epistemological questions the primary and central questions of the discipline. But this is misleading for several reasons. In the first, Descartes conception of philosophy was very different from our own. The term ‘philosophy’ in the seventeenth century was far more comprehensive than it is today, and embraced the whole of what we nowadays call natural science, including cosmology and physics, and subjects like anatomy, optics and medicine. Descartes reputation as a philosopher in his own time was based as much as anything on his contributions in these scientific areas. Secondly, even in those Cartesian writings that are philosophical in the modern academic sense, the e epistemological concerns are rather different from the conceptual and linguistic inquiries that characterize present-day theory of knowledge. Descartes saw the need to base his scientific system on secure metaphysical foundations: By ‘metaphysics’ he meant that in the queries into God and the soul and usually all the first things to be discovered by philosophizing. Yet, he was quick to realize that there was nothing in this view that provided untold benefits between heaven and earth and united the universe in a shared and communicable frame of knowledge, it presented us with a view of physical reality that was totally alien from the world of everyday life. Even so, there was nothing in this view of nature that could explain or provide a foundation for the mental, or for all that of direct experience as distinctly human, with no ups, downs or any which ways of direction.
Following these fundamentals’ explorations that include questions about knowledge and certainty, but even here, Descartes is not primarily concerned with the criteria for knowledge claims, or with definitions of the epistemic concepts involved, as his aim is to provide a unified framework for understanding the universe. And with this, Descartes was convinced that the immaterial essences that gave form and structure to this universe were coded in geometrical and mathematical ideas, and this insight led him to invented algebraic geometry.
A scientific understanding to these ideas could be derived, as did that Descartes declared, that with the aid of precise deduction, and he also claimed that the contours of physical reality could be laid out in three-dimensional coordinates. Following the publication of Isaac Newton’s ‘Principia Mathematica’ in 1687, reductionism and mathematical modelling became the most powerful tools of modern science. And the dream that the entire physical world could be known and mastered through the extension and refinement of mathematical theory became the central feature and principle of scientific knowledge.
The radical separation between mind and nature formalized by Descartes served over time to allow scientists to concentrate on developing mathematical descriptions of matter as pure mechanisms lacking any concerns about its spiritual dimension or ontological foundations. Meanwhile, attempts to rationalize, reconcile, or eliminate Descartes’s stark division between mind and matter became perhaps the most central feature of Western intellectual life.
As in the view of the relationship between mind and world sanctioned by classical physics and formalized by Descartes became a central preoccupation in Western intellectual life. And the tragedy of the Western mind is that we have lived since the seventeenth century with the prospect that the inner world of human consciousness and the outer world of physical reality are separated by an abyss or a void that cannot be bridged or to agree with reconciliation.
In classical physics, external reality consisted of inert and inanimate matter moving according to wholly deterministic natural laws, and collections of discrete atomized parts made up wholes. Classical physics was also premised, however, a dualistic conception of reality as consisting of abstract disembodied ideas existing in a domain separate form and superior to sensible objects and movements. The notion that the material world experienced by the senses was inferior to the immaterial world experienced by mind or spirit has been blamed for frustrating the progress of physics up too at least the time of Galileo. But in one very important respect, it also made the first scientific revolution possible. Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and Newton firmly believed that the immaterial geometrical and mathematical ideas that inform physical reality had a prior existence in the mind of God and that doing physics was a form of communion with these ideas.
The tragedy of the Western mind is a direct consequence of the stark Cartesian division between mind and world. This is the tragedy of the modern mind which ‘solved the riddle of the universe,’ but only to replace it by another riddle: The riddle of itself. Yet, we discover the ‘certain principles of physical reality,’ said Descartes, ‘not by the prejudices of the senses, but by rational analysis, which thus possess so great evidence that we cannot doubt of their truth.’ Since the real, or that which actually remains external to ourselves, was in his view only that which could be represented in the quantitative terms of mathematics, Descartes concluded that all qualitative aspects of reality could be traced to the deceitfulness of the senses.
Given that Descartes distrusted the information from the senses to the point of doubting the perceived results of repeatable scientific experiments, how did he conclude that our knowledge of the mathematical ideas residing only in mind or in human subjectivity was accurate, much less the absolute truth? He did so by making a leap of faith - God constructed the world, said Descartes, according to the mathematical ideas that our minds could uncover in their pristine essence. The truths of classical physics as Descartes viewed them were quite literally ‘revealed’ truths, and it was this seventeenth-century metaphysical presupposition that became in the history of science what is termed the ‘hidden ontology of classical epistemology.’ Descartes lingers in the widespread conviction that science does not provide a ‘place for man’ or for all that we know as distinctly human in subjective reality.
The historical notion in the unity of consciousness has had an interesting history in philosophy and psychology. Taking Descartes to be the first major philosopher of the modern period, the unity of consciousness was central to the study of the mind for the whole of the modern period until the 20th century. The notion figured centrally in the work of Descartes, Leibniz, Hume, Reid, Kant, Brennan, James, and, in most of the major precursors of contemporary philosophy of mind and cognitive psychology. It played a particularly important role in Kant's work.
A couple of examples will illustrate the role that the notion of the unity of consciousness played in this long literature. Consider a classical argument for dualism (the view that the mind is not the body, indeed is not made out of matter at all). It starts like this: When I consider the mind, which is to say of myself, as far as I am only a thinking thing, I cannot distinguish in myself any parts, but apprehend myself to be clearly one and entire.
Descartes then asserts that if the mind is not made up of parts, it cannot consist of matter, presumably because, as he saw it, anything material has parts. He then goes on to say that this would be enough to prove dualism by itself, had he not already proved it elsewhere. It is in the unified consciousness that I have of myself.
Here is another, more elaborate argument based on unified consciousness. The conclusion will be that any system of components could never achieve unified consciousness acting in concert. William James' well-known version of the argument starts as follows: Take a sentence of a dozen words, take twelve men, and to each word. Then stand the men in a row or jam them in a bunch, and let each think of his word as intently as he will; Nowhere will there be a consciousness of the whole sentence.
James generalizes this observation to all conscious states. To get dualism out of this, we need to add a premise: That if the mind were made out of matter, conscious states would have to be distributed over some group of components in some relevant way. Nevertheless, this thought experiment is meant to show that conscious states cannot be so distributed. Therefore, the conscious mind is not made out of matter. Calling the argument that James is using is the Unity Argument. Clearly, the idea that our consciousness of, here, the parts of a sentence are unified is at the centre of the Unity Argument. Like the first, this argument goes all the way back to Descartes. Versions of it can be found in thinkers otherwise as different from one another as Leibniz, Reid, and James. The Unity Argument continued to be influential into the 20th century. That the argument was considered a powerful reason for concluding that the mind is not the body is illustrated in a backhanded way by Kant's treatment of it (as he found it in Descartes and Leibniz, not James, of course).
Kant did not think that we could uncover anything about the nature of the mind, including whether nor is it made out of matter. To make the case for this view, he had to show that all existing arguments that the mind is not material do not work and he set out to do just this in the chapter in the Critique of Pure Reason on the Paralogisms of Pure Reason (1781), paralogisms are faulty inferences about the nature of the mind. The Unity Argument is the target of a major part of that chapter; if one is going to show that we cannot know what the mind is like, we must dispose of the Unity Argument, which purports to show that the mind is not made out of matter. Kant's argument that the Unity Argument does not support dualism is simple. He urges that the idea of unified consciousness being achieved by something that has no parts or components are no less mysterious than its being achieved by a system of components acting together. Remarkably enough, though no philosopher has ever met this challenge of Kant's and no account exists of what an immaterial mind not made out of parts might be like, philosophers continued to rely on the Unity Argument until well into the 20th century. It may be a bit difficult for us to capture this now but the idea any system of components, and for an even stronger reason might not realize that merge with consciousness, that each system of material components, had a strong intuitive appeal for a long time.
The notion that consciousness agrees to unification and was in addition central to one of Kant's own famous arguments, his ‘transcendental deduction of the categories’. In this argument, boiled down to its essentials, Kant claims that to tie various objects of experience together into a single unified conscious representation of the world, something that he simply assumed that we could do, we could probably apply certain concepts to the items in question. In particular we have to apply concepts from each of four fundamental categories of concept: Quantitative, qualitative, relational, and what he called ‘modal’ concepts. Modal concept’s concern of whether an item might exist, does exist, or must exist. Thus, the four kinds of concept are concepts for how many units, what features, what relations to other objects, and what existence status is represented in an experience.
It was relational conceptual representation that most interested Kant and of relational concepts, he thought the concept of cause-and-effect to be by far the most important. Kant wanted to show that natural science (which for him meant primarily physics) was genuine knowledge (he thought that Hume's sceptical treatment of cause and effect relations challenged this status). He believed that if he could prove that we must tie items in our experience together causally if we are to have a unified awareness of them, he would have put physics back on ‘the secure path of a science.’ The details of his argument have exercised philosophers for more than two hundred years. We will not go into them here, but the argument illustrates how central the notion of the unity of consciousness was in Kant's thinking about the mind and its relation to the world.
Consciousness may possibly be the most challenging and pervasive source of problems in the whole of philosophy. Our own consciousness seems to be the most basic fact confronting us, yet it is almost impossible to say what consciousness is. Is mine like your? Is ours like that of animals? Might machines come to have consciousness? Is it possible for there to be disembodied consciousness? Whatever complex biological and neural processes go backstage, it is my consciousness that provides the theatre where my experiences and thoughts have their existence, where my desires are felt and where my intentions are formed. But then how am I to conceive the ‘I,’ or self that is the spectator of this theatre? One of the difficulties in thinking about consciousness is that the problems seem not to be scientific ones: Leibniz remarked that if we could construct a machine that could think and feel, and blow it up to the size of a mill and thus be able to examine its working parts as thoroughly as we pleased, we would still not find consciousness and draw the conclusion that consciousness resides in simple subjects, not complex ones. Eve n if we are convinced that consciousness somehow emerges from the complexity of brain functioning, we many still feel baffled about the way the emergence takes place, or why it takes place in just the way it does.
The nature of the conscious experience has been the largest single obstacle to physicalism, behaviourism, and functionalism in the philosophy of mind: These are all views that according to their opponents, can only be believed by feigning permanent anaesthesin. But many philosophers are convinced that we can divide and conquer: We may make progress by breaking the subject into different skills and recognizing that rather than a single self or observer we would do better to think of a relatively undirected whirl of cerebral activity, with no inner theatre, no inner lights, ad above all no inner spectator.
A fundamental philosophical topic both for its central place in any theory of knowledge, and its central place in any theory of consciousness. Philosophy in this area is constrained by a number of properties that we believe to hold of perception. (1) It gives us knowledge of the world around us (2) We are conscious of that world by being aware of ‘sensible qualities,’ colours, sounds, tastes, smells, felt warmth, and the shapes and positions of objects in the environment. (3) Such consciousness is affected through highly complex information channels, such as the output of three different types of colour-sensitive cells in the eye, or the channels in the ear for interpreting pulses of air pressure as frequencies of sound. (4) There ensues even more neurophysiological coding of that information, and eventually higher-order brain functions bring it about that we interpreted the information so received (much of this complexity has been revealed by the difficulty of writing programs enabling commuters to recognize quite simple aspects of the visual scene.) The problem is to avoid thinking of there being a central, ghostly, conscious self. Fed information in the same way that a screen is fed information by a remote television camera. Once such a model is in place, experience will seem like a model getting between us and the world, and the direct objects of perception will seem to be private items in an inner theatre or sensorium. The difficulty of avoiding this model is especially acuter when we consider the secondary qualities of colour, sound, tactile feelings, and taste, which can easily seem to have a purely private existence inside the perceiver, like sensations of pain. Calling such supposed items names like sense data or percepts exacerbate the tendency. But once the model is in place, the fist property, the perception gives us knowledge or the inner world around us, is quickly threatened, for there now seem little connection between these items in immediate experience and any independent reality. Reactions to this problem include scepticism and idealism.
A more hopeful approach is to claim that complexities of (3) and (4) explain how we can have direct acquaintances of the world, than suggesting that the acquaintance we do have at best an emendable indiction. It is pointed out that perceptions are not like sensations, precisely because they have a content, or outer-directed nature. To have a perception is to be aware of the world as bing such-and-such a way, than to enjoy a mere modification of sensation. Nut. Such direct realism has to be sustained in the face of the evident personal (neurophysiological and other) factors determining how we perceive. One approach is to ask why it is useful to be conscious of what we perceive, when other aspects of our functioning work with information determining responses without any conscious awareness or intervention. A solution to this problem would offer the hope of making consciousness part of the natural world, than strange optional extra.
Even to be, that if one is without idea, one is without concept, and, in the same likeness that, if one is without concept he too is without idea. Idea (Gk., visible form) that may be a notion as if by stretching all the way from one pole, where it denotes a subjective, internal presence in the mind, somehow though t of as representing something about the world, to the other pole, where it represents an eternal, timeless unchanging form or concept: The concept of the number series or of justice, for example, thought of as independent objects of enquiry and perhaps of knowledge. These two poles are not distinct in meaning by the term kept, although they give rise to many problems of interpretation, but between them they define a space of philosophical problems. On the one hand, ideas are that with which we think. Or in Locke’s terms, whatever the mind may ne employed about in thinking Looked at that way they seem to be inherently transient, fleeting, and unstable private presence. On the other, ideas provide the way in which objective knowledge can ne expressed. They are the essential components of understanding and any intelligible proposition that is true must be capable of being understood. Plato’s theory of ‘Form’ is a celebration of the objective and timeless existence of ideas as concepts, and in this hand ideas are reified to the point where they make up the only real world, of separate and perfect models of which the empirical world is only a poor cousin, this doctrine, notably in the Timarus opened the way for the Neoplatonic notion of ideas as the thoughts of God. The concept gradually lost this other-worldly aspect, until after Descartes ideas become assimilated to whatever it is that lies in the mind of any thinking being.
Together with a general bias toward the sensory, so that what lies in the mind may be thought of as something like images, and a belief that thinking is well explained as the manipulation of images, this was developed by Locke, Berkeley, and Hume into a full-scale view of the understanding as the domain of images, although they were all aware of anomalies that were later regarded as fatal to this doctrine. The defects in the account were exposed by Kant, who realized that the understanding needs to be thought of more in terms of rules and organized principles than of any kind of copy of what is given in experience. Kant also recognized the danger of the opposite extreme (that of Leibniz) of failing to connect the elements of understanding with those of experience at all (Critique of Pure Reason).
It has become more common to think of ideas, or concepts as dependent upon social and especially linguistic structures, than the self-standing creatures of an individual mind, but the tension between the objective and the subjective aspects of the matter lingers on, for instance in debates about the possibility of objective knowledge, of indeterminacy in translation, and of identity between thoughts people entertain at one time and those that they entertain at another.
To possess a concept is able to deploy a term expressing it in making judgements: The ability connects with such things as recognizing when the term applies, and being able to understand the consequences of its application. The term ‘idea’ was formerly used in the same way, but is avoided because of its association with subjective mental imagery, which may be irrelevant to the possession of concept. In the semantics of Frége, a concept is the reference of a predicate, and cannot be referred to by a subject term. Frége regarded predicates as incomplete expressions for a function, such as, sine . . . or log . . . is incomplete. Predicates refer to concepts, which themselves are ‘unsaturated,’ and cannot be referred to by subject expressions (we thus get the paradox that the concept of a horse is not a concept). Although Frége recognized the metaphorical nature of the notion of a concept being unsaturated, he was rightly convinced that some such notion is needed to explain the unity of a sentence, and to prevent sentences from being thought of as mere lists of names.
Mental states have contents: A belief may have the content that I will catch the train, a hope may have the content that the prime minister will resign. A concept is something that is capable of being a constituent of such contents. More specifically, a concept is a way of thinking of something – a particular object, or property, or relation. Or another entity.
Several different concepts may each be ways of thinking of the same object. A person may think of himself in the first-person way, or think of himself as the spouse of May Smith, or as the person located in a certain room now. More generally, a concept ‘c’ is such-and-such without believing ‘d’ is such-and-such. As words can be combined to form structured sentences, concepts have also been conceived as combinable into structured complex contents. When these complex contents are expressed in English by ‘that . . . ‘ clauses, as in our opening examples, they will be capable of been true or false, depending on the way the world is.
Concepts are to be distinguished from stereotypes and from conceptions. The stereotypical spy may be a middle-level official down on his luck and in need of money, none the less, we can come to learn that Anthony Blunt, are historian and Surveyor of the Queen’s Picture, is a spy: We can come to believe that something falls under a concept while positively disbelieving that the same thing falls under the stereotype association with the concept. Similarly, a person’s conception of a just arrangement for resolving disputes may involve something like contemporary Western legal systems. But whether or not it would be correct, it is quite intelligible for someone to reject this conception by arguing that it does not adequately provide for the elements of fairness and respect that are required by the concept of justice.
A theory of a particular concept must be distinguished from a theory of the object or objects it picks out. The theory of the concept is part of the theory of thought and epistemology: A theory of the object or objects is part of metaphysics and ontology. Some figures in the history of philosophy - and perhaps even some of our contemporaries - are open to the accusation of not having fully respected the distinction between the two kinds of theory. Descartes appears to have moved from facts about the indubitability of the thought ‘I think,’ containing the first-person way of thinking, to conclusions about the non-material nature of the object he himself was. But though the goals of a theory of concepts theory is required to have an adequate account to its relation to the other theory. A theory of concepts is unacceptable if it gives no account of how the concept is capable of picking out the object it evidently does pick out. A theory of objects is unacceptable if it makes it impossible to understand how we could have concepts of those objects.
A fundamental question for philosophy is: What individuates a given concept - that is, what makes it the one is, than any other concept? One answer, which has been developed in great detail, is that it is impossible to give a non-trivial answer to this question. An alternative addresses the question by stating from the ideas that a concept is individuated by the condition that must be satisfied if a thinker is to posses that concept and to be capable of having beliefs and other attitudes whose contents contain it as a constituent. So to take a simple case, on e could propose the logical concept ‘and’ is individuated by this conditions: It is the unique concept ‘C’ to possess which a thinker has to find these forms of inference compelling, without basing them on any further inference or information: From any to premisses ‘A’ and ‘B,’ ‘ABC’ can be inferred: And from any premiss ‘ABC,’ each of ‘A’ and ‘B’ can be inferred. Again, a relatively observational concept such as ‘round’ can be individuated in part by stating that the thinker find specified contents containing it compelling when he has certain kinds of perception, and in part by relating those judgements containing the concept and which are based on perception that individuates a concept by saying what is required for a thinker to possess it can be described as giving the possession condition for the concept.
A possession condition for a particular concept may actually make use of that concept. The possession condition for ‘and’ does not. We can also expect to use relatively observational concepts in specifying the kind of experiences that have to be of comment in the possession condition for relatively observational concepts. We must avoid, as mentioned of the concept in question as such, within the content of the attitudes attributed to the thinker in the possession condition. Otherwise we would be presupposing possession of the concept in an account that was meant to elucidate its possession, in talking of what the thinker finds compelling, the possession conditions can also respect an insight of the later Wittgenstein: That a thinker’s mastery of a concept is inextricably tied to how he finds it natural to go on in new cases in applying the concept.
Sometimes a family of concepts has this property: It is not possible to master any one of the members of the family without mastering the other. Two of the families that plausibly have this status are these: The family consisting of some simple concepts 0, 1, 2, . . . of the natural numbers and the corresponding concepts of numerical quantifiers there are 0 so-and-so’s, there is 1 so-and-so, . . . : And the family consisting of the concepts ‘belief’ ad ‘desire.’ Such families have come to be known as ‘local holisms.’ A local Holism does not prevent the individuation of a concept by its possession condition. Rather, it demands that all the concepts in the family be individuated simultaneously. So one would say something of this form: Belief and desire form the unique pair of concepts C1 and C2 such that for a thinker to possess them is to meet such-and-such condition involving the thinker, C1 and C2. For these and other possession conditions to individuate properly, it is necessary that there be some ranking of the concepts treated, and the possession conditions for concepts higher in ranking must presuppose only possession of concepts at the same or lower level in the ranking.
A possession condition may in various ways make a thinker’s possession of a particular concept dependents upon his relations to his environment. Many possession conditions will mention the links between a concept and the thinker’s perceptual experience. Perceptual experience represents the world for being a certain way. It is arguable that the only satisfactory explanation of what it is for perceptual experience to represent the world in a particular way must refer to the complex relations of the experience e to the subject’s environment. If this is so, then, more is of mention, that it is much greater of the experiences in a possession condition will make possession of that concept dependent in particular upon the environmental relations of the thinker. Also, from intuitive particularities, that evens though the thinker’s non-environmental properties and relations remain constant, the conceptual content of his mental state can vary if the thinker’s social environment is varied. A possession condition that properly individuates such a concept must take into account the thinker’s social relations, in particular his linguistic relations.
Concepts have a normative dimension, a fact strongly emphasized by Kriple. For any judgement whose content involves s a given concept, there is a correctness condition for that judgement, a condition that is dependent in part upon the identity of the concept. The normative character of concepts also extends into the territory of a thinker’s reason for making judgements. A thinker’s visual perception can give him good reason for judging ‘That man is bald’: It does not by itself give him good reason for judging ‘Rostropovich is bald,’ even if the man he sees is Rostropovich. All these normative connections must be explained by a theory of concepts. One approach to these matters is to look to the possession condition for a concept, and consider how the referent of the concept is fixed from it, together with the world. One proposal is that the referent if the concept is that object (or property, or function, . . . ) which makes the practices of judgement and inference in the possession condition always lead to true judgements and truth-preserving inferences. This proposal would explain why certain reasons are necessarily good reasons for judging given contents. Provided the possession condition permit s us to say what it is about a thinker’s previous judgements that make it the case that he is employing one concept rather than another, this proposal would also have another virtue. It would allow us to say how the correctness condition is determined for a newly encountered object. The judgement is correct if t he new object has the property that in fact makes the judgmental practices in the possession condition yield true judgements, or truth-preserving inferences.
Despite the fact that the unity of consciousness had been at the centre of pre-20th century research on the mind, early in the 20th century the notion almost disappeared. Logical atomism in philosophy and behaviourism in psychology were both unsympathetic to the notion. Logical atomism focussed on the atomic elements of cognition (sense data, simple propositional judgments, etc.), rather than on how these elements are tied together to form a mind. Behaviourism urged that we focus on behaviour, the mind being alternatively myth or something otherwise that we cannot and do not need of studying the mysteriousness of science, from which brings meaning and purpose to humanity. This attitude extended to consciousness, of course. The philosopher Daniel Dennett summarizes the attitude prevalent at the time this way: Consciousness may be the last bastion of occult properties, epiphenomena, immeasurable subjective states - in short, the one area of mind best left to the philosophers. Let them make fools of themselves trying to corral the quicksilver of ‘phenomenology’ into a respectable theory.
The unity of consciousness next became an object of serious attention in analytic philosophy only as late as the 1960s. In the years since, new work has appeared regularly. The accumulated literature is still not massive but the unity of consciousness has again become an object of serious study. Before we examine the more recent work, we need to explicate the notion in more detail than we have done so far and introduce some empirical findings. Both are required to understand recent work on the issue.
To expand on our earlier notion of the unity of consciousness, we need to introduce a pair of distinctions. Current works on consciousness labours under a huge, confusing terminology. Different theorists exchange dialogue over the excess consciousness, phenomenal consciousness, self-consciousness, simple consciousness, creature consciousness, states consciousness, monitoring consciousness, awareness as equated with consciousness, awareness distinguished from consciousness, higher orders thought, higher orders experience, qualia, the felt qualities of representations, consciousness as displaced perception, . . . and on and on and on. We can ignore most of this profusion but we do need two distinctions: between consciousness of objects and consciousness of our representations of objects, and between consciousness of representations and consciousness of self.
It is very natural to think of self-consciousness or, cognitive state more accurately, as a set of cognitive states. Self-knowledge is an example of such a cognitive state. There are plenty of things that I know bout self. I know the sort of thing I am: a human being, a warm-blooded rational animal with two legs. I know of many properties and much of what is happening to me, at both physical and mental levels. I also know things about my past, things I have done and that of whom I have been with other people I have met. But I have many self-conscious cognitive states that are not instances of knowledge. For example, I have the capacity to plan for the future - to weigh up possible courses of action in the light of goals, desires, and ambitions. I am capable of ca certain type of moral reflection, tide to moral self-and understanding and moral self-evaluation. I can pursue questions like, what sort of person I am? Am I the sort of person I want to be? Am I the sort of individual that I ought to be? This is my ability to think about myself. Of course, much of what I think when I think about myself in these self-conscious ways is also available to me to employing in my thought about other people and other objects.
When I say that I am a self-conscious creature, I am saying that I can do all these things. But what do they have in common? Could I lack some and still be self-conscious? These are central questions that take us to the heart of many issues in metaphysics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of psychology.
Even so, with the range of putatively self-conscious cognitive states, one might naturally assume that there is a single ability that all presuppose. This is my ability to think about myself. I can only have knowledge about myself if I have beliefs about myself, and I can only have beliefs about myself if I can entertain thoughts about myself. The same can be said for autobiographical memories and moral self-understanding.
The proposing account would be on par with other noted examples of the deflationary account of self-consciousness. If, in at all, a straightforward explanation to what makes those of the ‘self contents’ immune to error through misidentification concerning the semantics of self, then it seems fair to say that the problem of self-consciousness has been dissolved, at least as much as solved.
This proposed account would be on a par with other noted examples as such as the redundancy theory of truth. That is to say, the redundancy theory or the deflationary view of truth claims that the predicate ‘ . . . true’ does not have a sense, i.e., expresses no substantive or profound or explanatory concept that ought to be the topic of philosophic enquiry. The approach admits of different versions, but centres on the pints (1) that ‘it is true that p’ says no more nor less than ‘p’ (so, redundancy’) (2) that in less direct context, such as ‘everything he said was true’, or ‘all logical consequences of true propositions as true’, the predicated functions as a device enabling us to generalize rather than as an adjective or predicate describing the things he said, or the kinds of propositions that follow from true propositions. For example, its translation is to infer that: (∀p, Q)(P & p ➞ q ➞ q)’ where there is no use of a notion of truth.
There are technical problems in interpreting all uses of the notion of truth in such ways, but they are not generally felt to be insurmountable. The approach needs to explain away apparently substantive uses of the notion, such as . . . ‘science aims at the truth’ or ‘truth is a norm governing discourse. Indeed, postmodernist writing frequently advocates that we must abandon such norms, along with a discredited ‘objective’ concept ion of truth. But perhaps, we can have the norms even when objectivity is problematic, since they can be framed within mention of truth: Science wants to be so that whenever science holds that ‘p’, when ‘p’‘. Discourse is to be regulated by the principle that it is wrong to assert ‘p’. When not-p.
It is important to stress how redundancy or the deflationary theory of self-consciousness, and any theory of consciousness that accords a serious role in self-consciousness to mastery of the semantics of the first-person pronoun, is motivated by an important principle that ha governed much of the development of analytical philosophy. This is the principle that the philosophical analysis of thought can only proceed through the philosophical analysis of language:
Thoughts differ from all else that is aid to be among the contents of the mind in being wholly communicable: It is of the essence of thought that I can convey to you the very thought that I have, as opposed to being able to tell you merely something about what my thought is like. It is of the essence of thought not merely to be communicable, but to be communicable, without residue, by means of language. In order to understand thought, it is necessary, therefore, to understand the means by which thought is expressed. We communicate thought by means of language because we have an implicit understanding of the workings of language, that is, of the principles governing the use of language, it is these principles, which relate to what is open to view in the employment of language, unaided by any supposed contact between mind and the senses that they carry. In order to analyses thought, therefore, it is necessary to make explicitly those principles, regulating our use of language, which we already implicitly grasp. (Dummett, 1978)
So how can such thoughts be entertained by a thinker incapable of reflexively referring to himself as English speakers do with the first-person pronoun be plausibly ascribed thought with first-person contents? The thought that, despite all this, there are in fact first-person contents that do not presuppose mastery of the first-person pronoun is at the core of the functionalist theory of self-reference and first-person belief.
The best developed functionalist theory of self-reference has been deployed by Hugh Mellor (1988-1989). The basic phenomenon he is interested in explaining is what it is for a creature to have what he terms as subjective belief, which is to say, a belief whose content is naturally expressed by a sentence in the first-person singular and the present tense. Mellor starts from the functionalist premise that beliefs are causal functions from desires to actions. It is, of course, the emphasis on causal links between belief and action that make it plausible to think that belief might be independent of language and conscious belief, since ‘agency entails neither linguistic ability nor conscious belief. The idea that beliefs are causal functions from desires to actions can be deployed to explain the content of a give n belief through which the equation of truth conditions and utility conditions, where utility conditions are those in which the actions caused by the conjunction of that belief with a single desire result in the satisfaction of that desire. To expound forthwith, consider a creature ‘x’ who is hungry and has a desire for food at time ‘t’. That creature has a token belief b/(p) that conjoins with its desire for food to cause it to eat what is in front of it at that time. The utility condition of that belief is that there is food in front of it at that time. The utility condition of that belief is that there is food in from it of ‘x’ at that time. Moreover, for b/(p) to cause ‘x’ to eat what is in front of it at ‘t’, b/(p) must be a belief that ‘x’ has at ‘t’. Therefore, the utility/truth conditions of b/(p) is that whatever creature has this belief faces food when it is in fact facing food. And a belief with this content is, of course, the subjective belief whose natural linguistic expression would be ‘I am facing food now.’ On the other hand, however, a belief that would naturally be expressed wit these words can be ascribed to a non-linguistic creature, because what makes it the belief that it is depending not on whether it can be linguistically expressed but on how it affects behaviour.
For in order to believe ‘p’, I need only be disposed to eat what I face if I feel hungry: A disposition which causal contiguity ensures that only my simultaneous hunger can provide, and only into making me eat, and only then. That’s what makes my belief refers to me and to when I have it. And that’s why I need have no idea who I am or what the time is, no concept of the self or of the present, no implicit or explicit grasp of any ‘sense’ of ‘I’ or ‘now,’ to fix the reference of my subjective belies: Causal contiguity fixes them for me.
Causal contiguities, according to explanation may well be to why no internal representation of the self is required, even at what other philosophers have called the sub-personal level. Mellor believes that reference to distal objects can take place when in internal state serves as a causal surrogate for the distal object, and hence as an internal representation of that object. No such causal surrogate, and hence no such internal representation, is required in the case of subjective beliefs. The relevant casual component of subjective belies are the believer and the time.
The necessary contiguity of cause and effect is also the key to =the functionalist account of self-reference in conscious subjective belief. Mellor adopts a relational theory of consciousness, equating conscious beliefs with second-order beliefs to the effect that one is having a particular first-order subjective belief, it is, simply a fact about our cognitive constitution that these second-order beliefs are reliably, though of course fallibly, generated so that we tend to believe that we believe things that we do in fact believe.
The contiguity law in Leibniz, extends the principles that there are no discontinuous changes in nature, ‘natura non facit saltum,’ nature makes no leaps. Leibniz was able to use the principle to criticize the mechanical system of Descartes, which would imply such leaps in some circumstances, and to criticize contemporary atomism, which implied discontinuous changes of density at the edge of an atom however, according to Hume the contiguity of evens is an important element in our interpretation of their conjunction for being causal.
Others attending to the functionalist points of view are it’s the advocate’s Putnam and Stellars, and its guiding principle is that we can define mental states by a triplet of relations: What typically situations to them, in of what effects them have on other mental states and what affects them have on behaviour. The definition need not take the form of a simple analysis, but if we could write down the totality of axioms, or postulates, or platitudes that govern our theories about what things are apt to cause (for example) a belief state, what effects it would have on a variety of other mental states, and what effect it us likely to have on behaviour, then we would have done all that is needed to make the state a proper theoretical notion. It would be implicitly defined by these theses. Functionalism is often compared with descriptions of a computer, since according to it mental descriptions correspond to a description of a machine in terms of software, that remains silent about the underlying hardware or ‘realization’ of the program the machine is running. The principal advantage of functionalism includes its fit with the way we know of mental states both of ourselves and others are via their effects on behaviour and other mental states. As with behaviourism, critics charge that structurally complex items that do not bear mental states might nevertheless imitate the functions that are cited. According to this criticism functionalism is too generous, and would count too many things as having minds. It is also queried whether functionalism is too parochial, able to see mental similarities only when there is causal similarity, when our actual practices of interpretation enable us to ascribe thoughts and desires to persons whose causal structure may be rather different from our own. It may then seem as though beliefs and desires can be ‘variably realized’ in causal architectures, just as much as they can be in different neurophysiological stares.
The anticipation, to revolve os such can find the tranquillity in functional logic and mathematics as function, a relation that auspicates members of one class ‘X’ with some unique member ‘y’ of another ‘Y.’ The associations are written as y = f(x), The class ‘X’ is called the domain of the function, and ‘Y’ its range. Thus ‘the father of x’ is a function whose domain includes all people, and whose range is the class of male parents. Whose range is the class of male parents, but the relation ‘by that x’ is not a function, because a person can have more than one son. ‘Sine x’ is a function from angles of a circle πx, is a function of its diameter x, . . . and so on. Functions may take sequences x1. . . .Xn as their arguments, in which case they may be thought of as associating a unique member of ‘Y’ with any ordered, n-tuple as argument. Given the equation y = f(x1 . . . Xn), x1 . . . Xn is called the independent variables, or argument of the function, and ‘y’ the dependent variable or value, functions may be many-one, meaning that differed not members of ‘X’ may take the same member of ‘Y’ as their value, or one-one when to each member of ‘X’ may take the same member of ‘Y’ as their value, or one-one when to each member of ‘X’ their corresponds a distinct member of ‘Y.’ A function with ‘X’ and ‘Y’ is called a mapping from ‘X’ to’Y’ is also called a mapping from ‘X’ to ‘Y,’ written f X ➝ Y, if the function is such that (1) If x, y ∈ X and f(x) = f(y) then x’s = y, then the function is an injection from to Y, if also: (2) If y ∈ Y, then (∃x)(x ∈ X & Y = f(x)). Then the function is a bisection of ‘X’ onto ‘Y.’ A dijection is both an injection and a sirjection where a subjection is any function whose domain is ‘X’ and whose range is the whole of ‘Y.’ Since functions ae relations a function may be defined asa set of ‘ordered’ pairs
One of Frége’s logical insights was that a concept is analogous of a function, as a predicate analogous to the expression for a function (a functor). Just as ‘the square root of x’ takes you from one number to another, so ‘x is a philosopher’ refers to a function that takes us from his person to truth-values: True for values of ‘x’ who are philosophers, and false otherwise.’
Functionalism can be attached both in its commitment to immediate justification and its claim that all medially justified beliefs ultimately depend on the former. Though, in cases, is the latter that is the position’s weaker point, most of the critical immediately unremitting have been directed ti the former. As much of this criticism has ben directed against some particular from of immediate justification, ignoring the possibility of other forms. Thus much anti-foundationalist artillery has been derricked at the ‘myth of the given’ to consciousness in pre-conceptual, pre-judgmental mode, and that beliefs can be justified on that basis (Sellars, 1963) The most prominent general argument against immediate justifications is a whatever use taken does so if the subject is justified in supposing that the putative justifier has what it takes to do so. Hence, since the justification of the original belief depends on the justification of the higher level belief just specified, the justification is not immediate after all. We may lack adequate support for any such higher level as requirement for justification: And if it were imposed we would be launched on an infinite regress, for a similar requirement would hold equally for the higher belief that the original justifier was efficacious.
The reflexive considerations initiated by functionalism evoke an intelligent system, or mind, may fruitfully be thought of as the result of a number of sub-systems performing more simple tasks in co-ordination switch each other. The sub-systems may be envisaged as homunculi, or small, relatively stupid agents. The archetype is a digital computer, where a battery of switches capable of only one response (on or off) can make u a machine that can play chess, write dictionaries, etc.
Nonetheless, we are confronted with the range of putatively self-conscious cognitive states, one might assume that there is a single ability that is presupposed. This is my ability to think about myself, and I can only have knowledge about myself if I have beliefs about myself, and I can only have beliefs about myself if I can entertain thoughts about myself. The same can be said for ideographical memories and moral self-understanding. These are ways of thinking about myself.
Of course, much of what I think when I think about myself in these self-conscious ways is also available to me to employ in my thoughts about other people and other objects. My knowledge that I am a human being deploys certain conceptual abilities that I can also deploy in thinking that you are a human being. The same holds when I congratulate myself for satisfying the exacting moral standards of autonomous moral agencies. This involves concepts and descriptions that can apply equally to me and to others. On the other hand, when I think about myself, I am also putting to work an ability that I cannot put to work in thinking about other people and other objects. This is precisely the ability to apply those concepts and descriptions to myself. It has become common to refer to this ability as the ability to entertain ‘I’-thoughts.
What is an, ‘I’-thought’ Obviously, an ‘I’-thought is a thought that involves self-reference. I can think an, ‘I’-thought only by thinking about myself. Equally obvious, though, this cannot be all that there is to say on the subject. I can think thoughts that involve a self-reference but are not ‘I’-thoughts. Suppose I think that the next person to set a parking ticket in the centre of Toronto deserves everything he gets. Unbeknown to be, the very next recipient of a parking ticket will be me. This makes my thought self-referencing, but it does not make it an ‘I’-thought. Why not? The answer is simply that I do not know that I will be the next person to get a parking ticket in downtown Toronto. Is ‘A’, is that unfortunate person, then there is a true identity statement of the form I = A, but I do not know that this identity holds, I cannot be ascribed the thoughts that I will deserve everything I get? And si I am not thinking genuine ‘I’-thoughts, because one cannot think a genuine ‘I’-thought if one is ignorant that one is thinking about oneself. So it is natural to conclude that ‘I’-thoughts involve a distinctive type of self-reference. This is the sort of self-reference whose natural linguistic expression is the first-person pronoun ‘I,’ because one cannot be the first-person pronoun without knowing that one is thinking about oneself.
This is still not quite right, however, because thought contents can be specific, perhaps, they can be specified directly or indirectly. That is, all cognitive states to be considered, presuppose the ability to think about oneself. This is not only that they all have to some commonality, but it is also what underlies them all. We can see is more detail what this suggestion amounts to. This claim is that what makes all those cognitive states modes of self-consciousness is the fact that they all have content that can be specified directly by means of the first person pronoun ‘I’ or indirectly by means of the direct reflexive pronoun ‘he,’ such they are first-person contents.
The class of first-person contents is not a homogenous class. There is an important distinction to be drawn between two different types of first-person contents, corresponding to two different modes in which the first person can be employed. The existence of this distinction was first noted by Wittgenstein in an important passage from The Blue Book: That there are two different cases in the use of the word ‘I’ (or, ‘my’) of which is called ‘the use as object’ and ‘the use as subject.’ Examples of the first kind of use are these’ ‘My arm is broken,’ ‘I have grown six inches,’ ‘I have a bump on my forehead,’ ‘The wind blows my hair about.’ Examples of the second kind are: ‘I see so-and-so,’ ‘I try to lift my arm,’ ‘I think it will rain,’ ‘I have a toothache.’ (Wittgenstein 1958)
The explanations given are of the distinction that hinge on whether or not they are judgements that involve identification. However, one can point to the difference between these two categories by saying: The cases of the first category involve the recognition of a particular person, and there is in these cases the possibility of an error, or as: The possibility of can error has been provided for . . . It is possible that, say in an accident, I should feel a pain in my arm, see a broken arm at my side, and think it is mine when really it is my neighbour’s. And I could, looking into a mirror, mistake a bump on his forehead for one on mine. On the other hand, there is no question of recognizing when I have a toothache. To ask ‘are you sure that it is you who have pains?’ would be nonsensical (Wittgenstein, 1958?).
Wittgenstein is drawing a distinction between two types of first-person contents. The first type, which is describes as invoking the use of ‘I’ as object, can be analysed in terms of more basic propositions. Such that the thought ‘I am B’ involves such a use of ‘I.’ Then we can understand it as a conjunction of the following two thoughts’ ‘a is B’ and ‘I am a.’ We can term the former a predication component and the latter an identification component (Evans 1982). The reason for braking the original thought down into these two components is precisely the possibility of error that Wittgenstein stresses in the second passages stated. One can be quite correct in predicating that someone is B, even though mistaken in identifying oneself as that person.
To say that a statement ‘a is B’ is subject to error through misidentification relative to the term ‘a’ means the following is possible: The speaker knows some particular thing to be ‘B,’ but makes the mistake of asserting ‘a is B’ because, and only because, he mistakenly thinks that the thing he knows to be ‘B’ is what ‘a’ refers to (Shoemaker 1968).
The point, then, is that one cannot be mistaken about who is being thought about. In one sense, Shoemaker’s criterion of immunity to error through misidentification relative to the first-person pronoun (simply ‘immunity to error through misidentification’) is too restrictive. Beliefs with first-person contents that are immune to error through identification tend to be acquired on grounds that usually do result in knowledge, but they do not have to be. The definition of immunity to error trough misidentification needs to be adjusted to accommodate them by formulating it in terms of justification rather than knowledge.
The connection to be captured is between the sources and grounds from which a belief is derived and the justification there is for that belief. Beliefs and judgements are immune to error through misidentification in virtue of the grounds on which they are based. The category of first-person contents being picked out is not defined by its subject matter or by any points of grammar. What demarcates the class of judgements and beliefs that are immune to error through misidentification is evidence base from which they are derived, or the information on which they are based. So, to take by example, my thought that I have a toothache is immune to error through misidentification because it is based on my feeling a pain in my teeth. Similarly, the fact that I am consciously perceiving you makes my belief that I am seeing you immune to error through misidentification.
To say that a statement ‘a is b’ is subject to error through misidentification relative to the term ‘a’ means that some particular thing is ‘b,’ because his belief is based on an appropriate evidence base, but he makes the mistake of asserting ‘a is b’ because, and only because, he mistakenly thinks that the thing he justified believes to be ‘b’ is what ‘a’ refers to.
Beliefs with first-person contents that are immune to error through misidentification tend to be acquired on grounds that usually result in knowledge, but they do not have to be. The definition of immunity to error through misidentification needs to be adjusted to accommodate by formulating in terms of justification rather than knowledge. The connection to be captured is between the sources and grounds from which a beef is derived and the justification there is for that belief. Beliefs and judgements are immune to error through misidentification in virtue of the grounds on which they are based. The category of first-person contents picked out is not defined by its subject matter or by any points of grammar. What demarcates the class of judgements and beliefs that ae immune to error through misidentification is the evidence base from which they are derived, or the information on which they are based. For example, my thought that I have a toothache is immune to error through misidentification because it is based on my feeling a pain in my teeth. Similarly, the fact that I am consciously perceiving you makes my belief that I am seeing you immune to error through misidentification.
A suggestive definition is to say that a statement ‘a is b’ is subject to error through misidentification relative to the term ‘a’ means that the following is possible: The speaker is warranted in believing that some particular thing is ‘b,’ because his belief is based on an appropriate evidence base, but he makes the mistake of asserting ‘a is b’ because, and only because, he mistakenly thinks that the thing he justified believes to be ‘b’ is what ‘a’ refers to.
First-person contents that are immune to error through misidentification can be mistaken, but they do have a basic warrant in virtue of the evidence on which they are based, because the fact that they are derived from such an evidence base is closely linked to the fact that they are immune to error thought misidentification. Of course, there is room for considerable debate about what types of evidence base ae correlated with this class of first-person contents. Seemingly, then, that the distinction between different types of first-person content can be characterized in two different ways. We can distinguish between those first-person contents that are immune to error through misidentification and those that are subject to such error. Alternatively, we can discriminate between first-person contents with an identification component and those without such a component. For purposes rendered, in that these different formulations each pick out the same classes of first-person contents, although in interestingly different ways.
All first-person consent subject to error through misidentification contain an identification component of the form ‘I am a’ and employ of the first-person-pronoun contents with an identification component and those without such a component. In that identification component, does it or does it not have an identification component? Clearly, then, on pain of an infinite regress, at some stage we will have to arrive at an employment of the first-person pronoun that does not have to arrive at an employment of the first-person pronoun that does not presuppose an identification components, then, is that any first-person content subject to error through misidentification will ultimately be anchored in a first-person content that is immune to error through misidentification.
It is also important to stress how self-consciousness, and any theory of self-consciousness that accords a serious role in self-consciousness to mastery of the semantics of the first-person pronoun, is motivated by an important principle that has governed much if the development of analytical philosophy. This is the principle that the philosophical analysis of though can only proceed through the principle analysis of language. The principle has been defended most vigorously by Michael Dummett.
Even so, thoughts differ from that is said to be among the contents of the mind in being wholly communicable: It is of the essence of thought that I can convey to you the very thought that I have, as opposed to being able to tell you merely something about what my though is like. It is of the essence of thought not merely to be communicable, but to be communicable, without residue, by means of language. In order to understand thought, it is necessary, therefore, to understand the means by which thought is expressed (Dummett 1978).
Dummett goes on to draw the clear methodological implications of this view of the nature of thought: We communicate thoughts by means of language because we have an implicit understanding of the workings of language, that is, of the principles governing the use of language, it is these principles, which relate to what is open to view in the mind other than via the medium of language that endow our sentences with the senses that they carry. In order to analyse thought, therefore, it is necessary to make explicitly those principles, regulating our use of language, which we already implicitly grasp.
Many philosophers would want to dissent from the strong claim that the philosophical analysis of thought through the philosophical analysis of language is the fundamental task of philosophy. But there is a weaker principle that is very widely held as The Thought-Language Principle.
As it stands, the problem between to different roles that the pronoun ‘he’ can play of such oracle clauses. On the one hand, ‘he’ can be employed in a proposition that the antecedent of the pronoun (i.e., the person named just before the clause in question) would have expressed using the first-person pronoun. In such a situation that holds that ‘he,’ is functioning as a quasi-indicator. Then when ‘he’ is functioning as a quasi-indicator, it be written as ‘he.’ Others have described this as the indirect reflexive pronoun. When ‘he’ is functioning as an ordinary indicator, it picks out an individual in such a way that the person named just before the clause of o reality need not realize the identity of himself with that person. Clearly, the class of first-person contents is not homogenous class.
There is canning obviousness, but central question that arises in considering the relation between the content of thought and the content of language, namely, whether there can be thought without language as theories like the functionalist theory. The conception of thought and language that underlies the Thought-Language Principe is clearly opposed to the proposal that there might be thought without language, but it is important to realize that neither the principle nor the considerations adverted to by Dummett directly yield the conclusion that there cannot be that in the absence of language. According to the principle, the capacity for thinking particular thoughts can only be analysed through the capacity for linguistic expression of those thoughts. On the face of it, however, this does not yield the claim that the capacity for thinking particular thoughts cannot exist without the capacity for their linguistic expression.
Thoughts being wholly communicable not entail that thoughts must always be communicated, which would be an absurd conclusion. Nor does it appear to entail that there must always be a possibility of communicating thoughts in any sense in which this would be incompatible with the ascription of thoughts to a nonlinguistic creature. There is, after all, a primary distinction between thoughts being wholly communicable and it being actually possible to communicate any given thought. But without that conclusion there seems no way of getting from a thesis about the necessary communicability of thought to a thesis about the impossibility of thought without language.
A subject has distinguished self-awareness to the extent that he is able to distinguish himself from the environment and its content. He has distinguished psychological self-awareness to the extent that he is able to distinguish himself as a psychological subject within a contract space of other psychological subjects. What does this require? The notion of a non-conceptual point of view brings together the capacity to register one’s distinctness from the physical environment and various navigational capacities that manifest a degree of understanding of the spatial nature of the physical environment. One very basic reason for thinking that these two elements must be considered together emerges from a point made in the richness of the self-awareness that accompanies the capacity to distinguish the self from the environment is directly proportion are to the richness of the awareness of the environment from which the self is being distinguished. So no creature can understand its own distinction from the physical enjoinment without having an independent understanding of the nature of the physical environment, and since the physical environment is essentially spatial, this requires an understanding of the spatial nature of the physical environment. But this cannot be the whole story. It leaves unexplained why an understanding should be required of this particular essential feature of the physical environment. Afer all, it is also an essential feature of the physical environment that it be composed of a an objects that have both primary and secondary qualities, but thee is n reflection of this in the notion of a non-conceptual point of view. More is needed to understand the significance of spatiality.
First, to take a step back from primitive self-consciousness to consider the account of self-identifying first-person thoughts as given in Gareth Evans’s Variety of Reference (1982). Evens places considerable stress on the connection between the form of self-consciousness that he is considering and a grasp of the spatial nature of the world. As far as Evans is concerned, the capacity to think genuine first-person thought implicates a capacity for self-location, which he construes in terms of a thinker’s to conceive of himself as an idea with an element of the objective order. Thought, do not endorse the particular gloss that Evans puts on this, the general idea is very powerful. The relevance of spatiality to self-consciousness comes about not merely because he world is spatial but also because the self-consciousness subject is himself a spatial element of the world. One cannot be self-conscious without being aware that one is a spatial element of the world, and one cannot be aware that one is a spatial element of the world without a grasp of the spatial nature of the world. Evans tends to stress a dependence in the opposite direction between these notions
The very idea of a perceived objective spatial world brings with it the ideas of the subject for being in the world, which the course of his perceptions due to his changing position in the world and to the more or less stable in the way of the world is. The idea that there is an objective world and the idea that the subject is somewhere cannot be separated, and where he is given by what he can perceive (Evans 1982).
But the main criteria of his work is very much that the dependence holds equally in the opposite direction.
It seems that this general idea can be extrapolated and brought to bar on the notion of a non-conceptual point of view. What binds together the two apparently discrete components of a non-conceptual point of view is precisely the fact that a creature’s self-awareness must be awareness of itself as a spatial bing that acts up and is acted upon by the spatial world. Evans’s own gloss on how a subject’s self-awareness, is awareness of himself as a spatial being involves the subject’s mastery of a simple theory explaining how the world makes his perceptions as they are, with principles like ‘I perceive such and such, such and such holds at P; So (probably) am P and ‘I am, such who does not hold at P, so I cannot really be perceiving such and such, even though it appears that I am’ (Evans 1982). This is not very satisfactory, though. If the claim is that the subject must explicitly hold these principles, then it is clearly false. If, on the other hand, the claim is that these are the principles of a theory that a self-conscious subject must tacitly know, then the claim seems very uninformative in the absence of a specification of the precise forms of behaviour that can only be explained by there ascription of such a body of tacit knowledge. We need an account of what it is for a subject to be correctly described as possessing such a simple theory of perception. The point however, is simply that the notion of as non-conceptual point of view as presented, can be viewed as capturing, at a more primitive level, precisely the same phenomenon that Evans is trying to capture with his notion of a simple theory of perception.
But it must not be forgotten that a vital role in this is layed by the subject’s own actions and movements. Appreciating the spatiality of the environment and one’s place in it is largely a function of grasping one’s possibilities for action within the environment: Realizing that f one wants to return to a particular place from here one must pass through these intermediate places, or that if there is something there that one wants, one should take this route to obtain it. That this is something that Evans’s account could potentially overlook emerge when one reflects that a simple theory of perception of the form that described could be possessed and decoyed by a subject that only moves passively, in that it incorporates the dimension of action by emphasizing the particularities of navigation.
Moreover, stressing the importance of action and movement indicates how the notion of a non-conceptual point of view might be grounded in the self-specifying in for action to be found in visual perception. By that in thinking particularly of the concept of an affordance so central to Gibsonian theories of perception. One important type of self-specifying information in the visual field is information about the possibilities for action and reaction that the environment affords the perceiver, by which that affordancs are non-conceptual first-person contents. The development of a non-conceptual point of view clearly involves certain forms of reasoning, and clearly, we will not have a full understanding of he notion of a non-conceptual point of view until we have an explanation of how this reasoning can take place. The spatial reasoning involved in over which this reasoning takes place. The spatial reasoning involved in developing a non-conceptual point of view upon the world is largely a matter of calibrating different affordances into an integrated representation of the world.
In short, any learned cognitive ability be contractible out of more primitive abilities already in existence. There are good reason to think that the perception of affordance is innate. And so if, the perception of affordances is the key to the acquisition of an integrated spatial representation of the environment via the recognition of affordance symmetries, affordance transitives, and affordance identities, then it is precisely conceivable that the capacities implicated in an integrated representation of the world could emerge non-mysteriously from innate abilities.
Nonetheless, there are many philosophers who would be prepared to countenance the possibility of non-conceptual content without accepting that to use the theory of non-conceptual content so solve the paradox of self-consciousness. This is ca more substantial task, as the methodology that is adapted rested on the first of the marks of content, namely that content-bearing states serve to explain behaviour in situations where the connections between sensory input and behaviour output cannot be plotted in a law-like manner (the functionalist theory of self-reference). As such, not of allowing that every instance of intentional behaviour where there are no such law-like connections between sensory input and behaviour output needs to be explained by attributing to the creature in question of representational states with first-person contents. Even so, many such instances of intentional behaviour do need to be explained in this way. This offers a way of establishing the legitimacy of non-conceptual first-person contents. What would satisfactorily demonstrate the legitimacy of non-conceptual first-person contents would be the existence of forms of behaviour in pre-linguistic or non-linguistic creatures for which inference to the best understanding or explanation (which in this context includes inference to the most parsimonious understanding, or explanation) demands the ascription of states with non-conceptual first-person contents.
The non-conceptual first-person contents and the pick-up of self-specifying information in the structure of exteroceptive perception provide very primitive forms of non-conceptual self-consciousness, even if forms that can plausibly be viewed as in place rom. birth or shortly afterward. The dimension along which forms of self-consciousness must be compared is the richest of the conception of the self that they provide. All of which, a crucial element in any form of self-consciousness is how it enables the self-conscious subject to distinguish between self and environment - what many developmental psychologists term self-world dualism. In this sense, self-consciousness is essentially a contrastive notion. One implication of this is that a proper understanding of the richness of the conception that we take into account the richness of the conception of the environment with which it is associated. In the case of both somatic proprioception and the pick-up of self-specifying information in exteroceptive perception, there is a relatively impoverished conception of the environment. One prominent limitation is that both are synchronic than diachronic. The distinction between self and environment that they offer is a distinction that is effective at a time but not over time. The contrast between propriospecific and exterospecific invariant in visual perception, for example, provides a way for a creature to distinguish between itself and the world at any given moment, but this is not the same as a conception of oneself as an enduring thing distinguishable over time from an environment that also endures over time.
The notion of a non-conceptual point of view brings together the capacity to register one’s distinctness from the physical environment and various navigational capacities that manifest a degree of understanding of the spatial nature of the physical environment. One very basic reason for thinking that these elements must be considered together emerges from a point made from which the richness of the awareness of the environment from which the self is being distinguished. So no creature can understand its own distinctness from the physical environment without having an independent understanding of the nature of the physical environment, and since the physical environment is essentially spatial, this requires an understanding of the spatial nature of the physical environment. But this cannot be the whole story. It leaves unexplained why an understanding should be required of this particular essential feature of the physical environment. Afer all, it is also an essential feature of the physical environment that it be composed of objects that have both primary and secondary qualities, but there is no reflection of this in the notion of a non-conceptual point of view. More is needed to understand the significance of spatiality.
The general idea is very powerful, that the relevance of spatiality to self-consciousness comes about not merely because the world is spatial but also because the self-conscious subject is himself a spatial element of the world. One cannot be self-conscious without being aware that one is a spatial element of the world, and one cannot be aware that one is a spatial element of the world, and one cannot be aware that one is a spatial element of the world without a grasp of the spatial nature of the world.
The very idea of a perceivable, objectively spatial would be the idea of the subject for being in the world, with the course of his perceptions due to his changing position in the world and to the more or less stable way the world is. The idea that there is an objective world and the idea that the subject is somewhere cannot be separated, and where he is given by what he can perceive.
One possible reaction to consciousness, is that it is only because unrealistic and ultimately unwarranted requirements are being placed on what are to count as genuinely self-referring first-person thoughts. Suppose for such an objection will be found in those theories tat attempt to explain first-person thoughts in a way that does not presuppose any form of internal representation of the self or any form of self-knowledge. Consciousness arises because mastery of the semantics of he first-person pronoun is available only to creatures capable of thinking first-person thoughts whose contents involve reflexive self-reference and thus, seem to presuppose mastery of the first-person pronoun. If, thought, it can be established that the capacity to think genuinely first-person thoughts does not depend on any linguistic and conceptual abilities, then arguably the problem of circularity will no longer have purchase.
There is no account of self-reference and genuinely first-person thought that can be read in a way that poses just such a direct challenge to the account of self-reference underpinning the conscious. This is the functionalist account, although spoken before, the functionalist view, reflexive self-reference is a completely non-mysterious phenomenon susceptible to a functional analysis. Reflexive self-reference is not dependent upon any antecedent conceptual or linguistic skills. Nonetheless, the functionalist account of a reflexive self-reference is deemed to be sufficiently rich to provide the foundation for an account of the semantics of the first-person pronoun. If this is right, then the circularity at which consciousness is at its heart, and can be avoided.
The circularity problems at the root of consciousness arise because mastery of the semantics of the first-person pronoun requires the capacity to think fist-person thoughts whose natural expression is by means of the first-person pronoun. It seems clear that the circle will be broken if there are forms of first-person thought that are more primitive than those that do not require linguistic mastery of the first-person pronoun. What creates the problem of capacity circularity is the thought that we need to appeal to first-person contents in explaining mastery of the first-person pronoun, combined with the thought that any creature capable of entertaining first-person contents will have mastered the first-person pronoun. So if we want to retain the thought that mastery of the first-person pronoun can only be explained in terms of first-person contents, capacity circularity can only be avoided if there are first-person contents that do not presuppose mastery of the first-person pronoun.
On the other hand, however, it seems to follow from everything earlier mentioned about ‘I’-thoughts that conscious thought in the absence of linguistic mastery of the first-person pronoun is a contradiction in terms. First-person thoughts have first-person contents, where first-person contents can only be specified in terms of either the first-person pronoun or the indirect reflexive pronoun. So how could such thoughts be entertained by a thinker incapable of reflexive self-reference? How can a thinker who is not capable of reflexively reference? How can a thinker who is not the first-person pronoun be plausibly ascribed thoughts with first-person contents? The thought that, despite all this, there are real first-person contents that do not presuppose mastery of the first-person pronoun is at the core of the functionalist theory of self-reference and first-person belief.
The best developed functionalist theory of self-reference has been provided by Hugh Mellor (1988-1089). The basic phenomenon he is interested in explaining is what it is for a creature to have what he terms a ‘subjective belief,’ that is to say, a belief whose content is naturally expressed by a sentence in the first-person singular and the present tense. The explanation of subjective belief that he offers makes such beliefs independent of both linguistic abilities and conscious beliefs. From this basic account he constructs an account of conscious subjective beliefs and the of the reference of the first-person pronoun ‘I.’ These putatively more sophisticated cognitive states are casually derivable from basic subjective beliefs.
Mellor starts from the functionalist premise that beliefs are causal functions from desire to actions. It is, of course, the emphasis in causal links between belief and action that make it plausible to think that belief might be independent of language and conscious belief ‘agency entails neither linguistic ability nor conscious belief’ (Mellor 1988). The idea that beliefs are causal functions from desires to action can be deployed to explain the content of a given belief via the equation of truth conditions and utility conditions, where utility conditions are those in which are actions caused by the conjunction of that belief with a single desire result in the satisfaction of that desire. We can see how this works by considering Mellor’s own example. Consider a creature ‘x’ who is hungry and has a desire for food at time ‘t’. That creature has a token belief b/(p) that conjoins with its desire for food to cause it to eat that there food in front of ‘x at that time. Moreover, for b/(p) to cause ‘x’ to eat what is in front of it at ‘t’. b/(p) mus t be a belief that ‘x’ has at ‘t’. For Mellor, therefore, the utility/truth condition of b/(p) is that whatever creature has this belief faces when it is actually facing food. And a belief with this content is, of course, the subjective belief whose natural linguistic expression would be ‘I am facing food now’ on the other hand, however, belief that would naturally be expressed with these words can be ascribed to a non-linguistic creature, because what makes it te belief that it is depends no on whether it can be linguistically expressed but on how it affects behaviour.
What secures a self-reference in belief b/(p) is the contiguity of cause and effect. The essence of a subjective conjointly with a desire or set of desires, and the relevant sort of conjunction is possible only if it is the same agent at the same time who has the desire and the belief.
For in order to believe ‘p’, I need only be disposed to eat what I face if I feel hungry, a disposition which causal contiguity ensures that only my simultaneous hunger can provoke, and only into masking me eat, and only then.
Scientific knowledge is an extension of ordinary language into greater levels of abstraction and precision through reliance upon geometric and numerical relationships. We speculate that the seeds of the scientific imagination were planted in ancient Greece, as opposed to Chinese or Babylonian culture, partly because the social, political, and economic climate in Greece was more open to the pursuit of knowledge with marginal cultural utility. Another important factor was that the special character of Homeric religion allowed the Greeks to invent a conceptual framework that would prove useful in future scientific investigation, but this inheritance from Greek philosophy was wedded to some essential features in beliefs about the origin of the cosmos that the paradigm for classical physics emerged.
All the same, newer logical frameworks point to the logical condition for description and comprehension of experience such as to quantum physics. While normally referred to as the principle of complementarity, the use of the word principle was unfortunate in that complementarity is not a principle as that word is used in physics. A complementarity is rather a logical framework for the acquisition and comprehension of scientific knowledge that discloses a new relationship between physical theory and physical reality that undermines all appeals to metaphysics.
The logical conditions for description in quantum mechanics, the two conceptual components of classical causality, space-time description and energy-momentum conservation are all mutually exclusive and can be coordinated through the limitations imposed by Heisenberg’s indeterminacy principle.
The logical farmwork of complementarity is useful and necessary when the following requirements are met: (1) When the theory consists of two individually complete constructs: (2) when the constructs preclude one another in a description of the unique physical situation to which they both apply, (3) when both constitute a complete description of that situation. As we are to discover a situation, in which complementarity clearly applies, we necessarily confront an imposing limit to our knowledge of this situation. Knowledge can never be complete in the classical sense because we are able simultaneously to apply the mutual exclusive constructs that make up the complete description.
Why, then, must we use classical descriptive categories, like space-time descriptions and energy-momentum conservation, in our descriptions of quantum events? If classical mechanics is an approximation of the actual physical situation, it would seem to follow that classically; descriptive categories are not adequate to describe this situation. If, for example, quantities like position and momentum are abstractions with properties that are ‘definable and observable only through their interactions with other systems,’ why should we represent these classical categories as if they were actual quantities in physical theory and experiment? However, these categories are rarely discussed, but it carries some formidable implications for the future of scientific thought.
Nevertheless, our journeys through which the corses of times generations we historically the challenge when it became of Heidegger' theory of spatiality distinguishes that concludes to three different types of space: (1) world-space, (2) regions (Gegend), and (3) Dasein's spatiality. What Heidegger calls ‘world-space’ is space conceived as an ‘arena’ or ‘container’ for objects. It captures both our ordinary conception of space and theoretical space - in particular absolute space. Chairs, desks, and buildings exist ‘in’ space, but world-space is independent of such objects, much like absolute space ‘in which’ things exist. However, Heidegger thinks that such a conception of space is an abstraction from the spatializing conduct of our everyday activities. The things that we deal with are near or far relative to us; according to Heidegger, this nearness or farness of things is how we first become familiar with that which we (later) represent to ourselves as ‘space.’ This familiarity is what renders the understanding of space (in a ‘container’ metaphor or in any other way) possible. It is because we act spatially, going to places and reaching for things to use, that we can even develop a conception of abstract space at all. What we normally think of as space - world-space - turns out not to be what space fundamentally is; world-space is, in Heidegger's terminology, space conceived as vorhanden. It is an objectified space founded on a more basic space-of-action.
Since Heidegger thinks that space-of-action is the condition for world-space, he must explain the former without appealing to the latter. Heidegger's task then is to describe the space-of-action without presupposing such world-space and the derived concept of a system of spatial coordinates. However, this is difficult because all our usual linguistic expressions for describing spatial relations presuppose world-space. For example, how can one talk about the ‘distance between you and me’ without presupposing some sort of metric, i.e., without presupposing an objective access to the relation? Our spatial notions such as ‘distance,’ ‘location,’ etc. must now be redescribed from a standpoint within the spatial relation of self (Dasein) to the things dealt with. This problem is what motivates Heidegger to invent his own terminology and makes his discussion of space awkward. In what follows I will try to use ordinary language whenever possible to explain his principal ideas.
The space-of-action has two aspects: regions (space as Zuhandenheit) and Dasein's spatiality (space as Existentiale). The sort of space we deal within our daily activity is ‘functional’ or zuhanden, and Heidegger's term for it is ‘region.’ The places we work and live-the office, the park, the kitchen, etc.-all have different regions that organize our activities and contextualize ‘equipment.’ My desk area as my work region has a computer, printer, telephone, books, etc., in their appropriate ‘places,’ according to the spatiality of the way in which I work. Regions differ from space viewed as a ‘container’; the latter notion lacks a ‘referential’ organization with respect to our context of activities. Heidegger wants to claim that referential functionality is an inherent feature of space itself, and not just a ‘human’ characteristic added to a container-like space.
In our activity, how do we specifically stand with respect to functional space? We are not ‘in’ space as things are, but we do exist in some spatially salient manner. What Heidegger is trying to capture is the difference between the nominal expression ‘we exist in space’ and the adverbial expression ‘we exist spatially.’ He wants to describe spatiality as a mode of our existence rather than conceiving space as an independent entity. Heidegger identifies two features of Dasein's spatiality - ‘de-severance’ (Ent-fernung) and ‘directionality’ (Ausrichtung).
De-severance describes the way we exist as a process of spatial self-determination by ‘making things available’ to ourselves. In Heidegger's language, in making things available we ‘take in space’ by ‘making the farness vanish’ and by ‘bringing things close’
We are not simply contemplative beings, but we exist through concretely acting in the world - by reaching for things and going to places. When I walk from my desk area into the kitchen, I am not simply changing locations from point A to B in an arena-like space, but I am ‘taking in space’ as I move, continuously making the ‘farness’ of the kitchen ‘vanish,’ as the shifting spatial perspectives are opened as I go along.
This process is also inherently ‘directional.’ Every de-severing is aimed toward something or in a certain direction that is determined by our concern and by specific regions. I must always face and move in a certain direction that is dictated by a specific region. If I want to get a glass of ice tea, instead of going out into the yard, I face toward the kitchen and move in that direction, following the region of the hallway and the kitchen. Regions determine where things belong, and our actions are coordinated in directional ways accordingly.
De-severance, directionality, and regionality are three ways of describing the spatiality of a unified Being-in-the-world. As aspects of Being-in-the-world, these spatial modes of being are equiprimordial.9 10 Regions ‘refer’ to our activities, since they are established by our ways of being and our activities. Our activities, in turn, are defined in terms of regions. Only through the region can our de-severance and directionality be established. Our object of concern always appears in a certain context and place, in a certain direction. It is because things appear in a certain direction and in their places ‘there’ that we have our ‘here.’ We orient ourselves and organize our activities, always within regions that must already be given to us.
Heidegger's analysis of space does not refer to temporal aspects of Being-in-the-world, even though they are presupposed. In the second half of Being and Time he explicitly turns to the analysis of time and temporality in a discussion that is significantly more complex than the earlier account of spatiality. Heidegger makes the following five distinctions between types of time and temporality: (1) the ordinary or ‘vulgar’ conception of time; this is time conceived as Vorhandenheit. (2) world-time; this is time as Zuhandenheit. Dasein's temporality is divided into three types: (3) Dasein's inauthentic (uneigentlich) temporality, (4) Dasein's authentic (eigentlich) temporality, and (5) temporal originality or ‘temporality as such.’ The analyses of the vorhanden and zuhanden modes of time are interesting, but it is Dasein's temporality that is relevant to our discussion, since it is this form of time that is said to be founding for space. Unfortunately, Heidegger is not clear about which temporality plays this founding role.
We can begin by excluding Dasein's inauthentic temporality. This mode of time refers to our unengaged, ‘average’ way in which we regard time. It is the ‘past we forget’ and the ‘future we expect,’ all without decisiveness and resolute understanding. Heidegger seems to consider that this mode of temporality is the temporal dimension of de-severance and directionality, since de-severance and directionality deal only with everyday actions. As such, inauthentic temporality must itself be founded in an authentic basis of some sort. The two remaining candidates for the foundation are Dasein's authentic temporality and temporal originality.
Dasein's authentic temporality is the ‘resolute’ mode of temporal existence. Authentic temporality is realized when Dasein becomes aware of its own finite existence. This temporality has to do with one's grasp of his or her own life as a whole from one's own unique perspective. Life gains meaning as one's own life-project, bounded by the sense of one's realization that he or she is not immortal. This mode of time appears to have a normative function within Heidegger's theory. In the second half of BT he often refers to inauthentic or ‘everyday’ mode of time as lacking some primordial quality which authentic temporality possesses.
In contrast, temporal originality is the formal structure of Dasein's temporality itself. In addition to its spatial Being-in-the-world, Dasein also exists essentially as ‘projection.’ Projection is oriented toward the future, and this futural orientation regulates our concern by constantly realizing various possibilities. Temporality is characterized formally as this dynamic structure of ‘a future that makes present in the process of having been.’ Heidegger calls the three moments of temporality - the future, the present, and the past - the three ecstases of temporality. This mode of time is not normative but rather formal or neutral; as Blattner argues, the temporal features that constitute Dasein's temporality describe both inauthentic and authentic temporality.
There are some passages that indicate that authentic temporality is the primary manifestation of temporalities, because of its essential orientation toward the future. For instance, Heidegger states that ‘temporality first showed itself in anticipatory resoluteness.’ Elsewhere, he argues that ‘the ‘time’ which is accessible to Dasein's common sense is not primordial, but arises rather from authentic temporality.’ In these formulations, authentic temporalities is said to found other inauthentic modes. According to Blattner, this is ‘by far the most common’ interpretation of the status of authentic time.
However, to ague with Blattner and Haar, in that there are far more passages where Heidegger considers temporal originality as temporality as distinct from authentic temporality, and founding for it and for Being-in-the-world as well. Here are some examples: Temporality has different possibilities and different ways of temporalizing itself. The basic possibilities of existence, the authenticity and inauthenticity of Dasein, are grounded ontologically on possible temporalizations of temporality. Time is primordial as the temporalizing of temporality, and as such it makes possible the Constitution of the structure of care.
Heidegger's conception seems to be that it is because we are fundamentally temporal - having the formal structure of ecstatico-horizonal unity - that we can project, authentically or inauthentically, our concernful dealings in the world and exist as Being-in-the-world. It is on this account that temporality is said to found spatiality.
Since Heidegger uses the term ‘temporality’ rather than ‘authentic temporality’ whenever the founding relation is discussed between space and time, I will begin the following analysis by assuming that it is originary temporality that founds Dasein's spatiality. On this assumption two interpretations of the argument are possible, but both are unsuccessful given his phenomenological framework.
I will then consider the possibility that it is ‘authentic temporality’ which founds spatiality. Two interpretations are also possible in this case, but neither will establish a founding relation successfully. I will conclude that despite Heidegger's claim, an equiprimordial relation between time and space is most consistent with his own theoretical framework. I will now evaluate the specific arguments in which Heidegger tries to prove that temporality founds spatiality.
The principal argument, entitled ‘The Temporality of the Spatiality that is Characteristic of Dasein.’ Heidegger begins the section with the following remark: Though the expression `temporality' does not signify what one understands by ‘time’ when one talks about `space and time', nevertheless spatiality seems to make up another basic attribute of Dasein corresponding to temporality. Thus with Dasein's spatiality, existential-temporal analysis seems to come to a limit, so that this entity that we call ‘Dasein,’ must be considered as `temporal' `and' as spatial coordinately.
Accordingly, Heidegger asks, ‘Has our existential-temporal analysis of Dasein thus been brought to a halt . . . by the spatiality that is characteristic of Dasein . . . and Being-in-the-world?’ His answer is no. He argues that since ‘Dasein's constitution and its ways to being possible are ontologically only on the basis of temporality,’ and since the ‘spatiality that is characteristic of Dasein . . . belongs to Being-in-the-world,’ it follows that ‘Dasein's specific spatiality must be grounded in temporality.’
Heidegger's claim is that the totality of regions-de-severance-directionality can be organized and re-organized, ‘because Dasein as temporality is ecstatico-horizonal in its Being.’ Because Dasein exists futurally as ‘for-the-sake-of-which,’ it can discover regions. Thus, Heidegger remarks: ‘Only on the basis of its ecstatico-horizonal temporality is it possible for Dasein to break into space.’
However, in order to establish that temporality founds spatiality, Heidegger would have to show that spatiality and temporality must be distinguished in such a way that temporality not only shares a content with spatiality but also has additional content as well. In other words, they must be truly distinct and not just analytically distinguishable. But what is the content of ‘the ecstatic-horizonal constitution of temporality?’ Does it have a content above and beyond Being-in-the-world? Nicholson poses the same question as follows: Is it human care that accounts for the characteristic features of human temporality? Or is it, as Heidegger says, human temporality that accounts for the characteristic features of human care, serves as their foundation? The first alternative, according to Nicholson, is to reduce temporality to care: ‘the specific attributes of the temporality of Dasein . . . would be in their roots not aspects of temporality but reflections of Dasein's care.’ The second alternative is to treat temporality as having some content above and beyond care: ‘the three-fold constitution of care stems from the three-fold constitution of temporality.’
Nicholson argues that the second alternative is the correct reading.18 Dasein lives in the world by making choices, but ‘the ekstasis of temporality lies well prior to any choice . . . so our study of care introduces us to a matter whose scope outreaches care: the ekstases of temporality itself.’ Accordingly, ‘What was able to make clear is that the reign of temporal ekstasis over the choices we make accords with the place we occupy as finite beings in the world.’
But if Nicholson's interpretation is right, what would be the content of ‘the ekstases of temporality itself,’ if not some sort of purely formal entity or condition such as Kant's ‘pure intuition?’ But this would imply that Heidegger has left phenomenology behind and is now engaging in establishing a transcendental framework outside the analysis of Being-in-the-world, such that this formal structure founds Being-in-the-world. This is inconsistent with his initial claim that Being-in-the-world is itself foundational.
I believe Nicholson's first alternative offers a more consistent reading. The structure of temporality should be treated as an abstraction from Dasein's Being-in-the-world, specifically from care. In this case, the content of temporality is just the past and the present and the future ways of Being-in-the-world. Heidegger's own words support this reading: ‘as Dasein temporalizes itself, a world is too,’ and ‘the world is neither present-at-hand nor ready-to-hand, but temporalizes itself in temporality.’ He also states that the zuhanden ‘world-time, in the rigorous sense of the existential-temporal conception of the world, belongs to temporality itself.’ In this reading, ‘temporality temporalizing itself,’ ‘Dasein's projection,’ and ‘the temporal projection of the world’ are three different ways of describing the same ‘happening’ of Being-in-the-world, which Heidegger calls ‘self-directive.’
However, if this is the case, then temporality does not found spatiality, except perhaps in the trivial sense that spatiality is built into the notion of care that is identified with temporality. The content of ‘temporality temporalizing itself’ simply is the various openings of regions, i.e., Dasein's ‘breaking into space.’ Certainly, as Stroeker points out, it is true that ‘nearness and remoteness are spatio-temporal phenomena and cannot be conceived without a temporal moment.’ But this necessity does not constitute a foundation. Rather, they are equiprimordial. The addition of temporal dimensions does indeed complete the discussion of spatiality, which abstracted from time. But this completion, while it better articulates the whole of Being-in-the-world, does not show that temporality is more fundamental.
If temporality and spatiality are equiprimordial, then all of the supposedly founding relations between temporality and spatiality could just as well be reversed and still hold true. Heidegger's view is that ‘because Dasein as temporality is ecstatico-horizonal in its Being, it can take along with it a space for which it has made room, and it can do so factically and constantly.’ But if Dasein is essentially a factical projection, then the reverse should also be true. Heidegger appears to have assumed the priority of temporality over spatiality perhaps under the influence of Kant, Husserl, or Dilthey, and then based his analyses on that assumption.
However, there may still be a way to save Heidegger's foundational project in terms of authentic temporality. Heidegger never specifically mentions authentic temporality, since he suggests earlier that the primary manifestation of temporality is authentic temporality, such a reading may perhaps be justified. This reading would treat the whole spatio-temporal structure of Being-in-the-world. The resoluteness of authentic temporality, arising out of Dasein's own ‘Being-towards-death,’ would supply a content to temporality above and beyond everyday involvements.
Heidegger is said to have its foundations in resoluteness, Dasein determines its own Situation through anticipatory resoluteness, which includes particular locations and involvements, i.e., the spatiality of Being-in-the-world. The same set of circumstances could be transformed into a new situation with different significance, if Dasein chooses resolutely to bring that about. Authentic temporality in this case can be said to found spatiality, since Dasein's spatiality is determined by resoluteness. This reading moreover enables Heidegger to construct a hierarchical relation between temporality and spatiality within Being-in-the-world rather than going outside of it to a formal transcendental principle, since the choice of spatiality is grasped phenomenologically in terms of the concrete experience of decision.
Moreover, one might argue that according to Heidegger one's own grasp of ‘death’ is uniquely a temporal mode of existence, whereas there is no such weighty conception involving spatiality. Death is what makes Dasein ‘stand before itself in its own most potentiality-for-Being.’ Authentic Being-towards-death is a ‘Being toward a possibility - indeed, toward a distinctive possibility of Dasein itself.’ One could argue that notions such as ‘potentiality’ and ‘possibility’ are distinctively temporal, nonspatial notions. So ‘Being-towards-death,’ as temporal, appears to be much more ontologically ‘fundamental’ than spatiality.
However, Heidegger is not yet out of the woods. I believe that labelling the notions of anticipatory resoluteness, Being-towards-death, potentiality, and possibility specifically as temporal modes of being (to the exclusion of spatiality) begs the question. Given Heidegger's phenomenological framework, why assume that these notions are only temporal (without spatial dimensions)? If Being-towards-death, potentiality-for-Being, and possibility were ‘purely’ temporal notions, what phenomenological sense can we make of such abstract conceptions, given that these are manifestly our modes of existence as bodily beings? Heidegger cannot have in mind such an abstract notion of time, if he wants to treat authentic temporality as the meaning of care. It would seem more consistent with his theoretical framework to say that Being-towards-death is a rich spatio-temporal mode of being, given that Dasein is Being-in-the-world.
Furthermore, the interpretation that defines resoluteness as uniquely temporal suggests too much of a voluntaristic or subjectivistic notion of the self that controls its own Being-in-the-world as for its future. This would drive a wedge between the self and its Being-in-the-world, thereby creating a temporal ‘inner self’ which can decide its own spatiality. However, if Dasein is Being-in-the-world as Heidegger claims, then all of Dasein's decisions should be viewed as concretely grounded in Being-in-the-world. If so, spatiality must be an essential constitutive element.
Hence, authentic temporality, if construed narrowly as the mode of temporality, at first appears to be able to found spatiality, but it also commits Heidegger either to an account of time that is too abstract, or to the notion of the self far more like Sartre's than his own. What is lacking in Heidegger's theory that generates this sort of difficulty is a developed conception of Dasein as a lived body - a notion more fully developed by Merleau-Ponty.
The elements of a more consistent interpretation of authentic temporality are present in Being and Time. This interpretation incorporates a view of ‘authentic spatiality’ in the notion of authentic temporality. This would be Dasein's resolutely grasping its own spatio-temporal finitude with respect to its place and its world. Dasein is born at a particular place, but lives in a particular place, dies in a particular place, all of which it can relate to in an authentic way. The place Dasein lives is not a place of anonymous involvements. The place of Dasein must be there where its own potentiality-for-Being is realized. Dasein's place is thus a determination of its existence. Had Heidegger developed such a conception more fully, he would have seen that temporality is equiprimordial with thoroughly spatial and contextual Being-in-the-world. They are distinguishable but equally fundamental ways of emphasizing our finitude.
The internal tensions within his theory eventually leads Heidegger to reconsider his own positions. In his later period, he explicitly develops what may be viewed as a conception of authentic spatiality. For instance, in ‘Building Dwelling Thinking,’ Heidegger states that Dasein's relations to locations and to spaces inheres in dwelling, and dwelling is the basic character of our Being. The notion of dwelling expresses an affirmation of spatial finitude. Through this affirmation one acquires a proper relation to one's environment.
But the idea of dwelling is already discussed in Being and Time, regarding the term ‘Being-in-the-world,’ Heidegger explains that the word ‘in’ is derived from ‘in-an’ - to ‘reside,’ ‘habitare,’ ‘to dwell.’ The emphasis on ‘dwelling’ highlights the essentially ‘worldly’ character of the self.
Thus from the beginning Heidegger had a conception of spatial finitude, but this fundamental insight was undeveloped because of his ambition to carry out the foundational project that favoured time. From the 1930's on, as Heidegger abandons the foundational project focussing on temporality, the conception of authentic spatiality comes to the fore. For example, in Discourse on Thinking Heidegger considers the spatial character of Being as ‘that-which-regions (die Gegnet).’ The peculiar expression is a re-conceptualization of the notion of ‘region’ as it appeared in Being and Time. Region is given an active character and defined as the ‘openness that surrounds us’ which ‘comes to meet us.’ By giving it an active character, Heidegger wants to emphasize that region is not brought into being by us, but rather exists in its own right, as that which expresses our spatial existence. Heidegger states that ‘one needs to understand ‘resolve’ (Entschlossenheit) as it is understood in Being and Time: as the opening of man [Dasein] particularly undertaken by him for openness, . . . which we think of as that-which-regions.’ Here Heidegger is asserting an authentic conception of spatiality. The finitude expressed in the notion of Being-in-the-world is thus transformed into an authentic recognition of our finite worldly existence in later writings.
The return to the conception of spatial finitude in the later period shows that Heidegger never abandoned the original insight behind his conception of Being-in-the-world. But once committed to this idea, it is hard to justify singling out an aspect of the self -temporality - as the foundation for the rest of the structure. All of the existentiales and zuhanden modes, which constitute the whole of Being-in-the-world, are equiprimordial, each mode articulating different aspects of a unified whole. The preference for temporality as the privileged meaning of existence reflects the Kantian residue in Heidegger's early doctrine that he later rejected as still excessively subjectivistic.
Meanwhile, it seems that it is nonetheless, natural to combine this close connection with conclusions by proposing an account of self-consciousness, as to the capacity to think ‘I’-thoughts that are immune to error through misidentification, though misidentification varies with the semantics of the ‘self’ - this would be a redundant account of self-consciousness. Once we have an account of what it is to be capable of thinking ‘I’-thoughts, we will have explained everything distinctive about self-consciousness. It stems from the thought that what is distinctive about ‘I’-thoughts are that they are either themselves immune to error or they rest on further ‘I’ -Thoughts that are immune in that way.
Once we have an account of what it is to be capable of thinking thoughts that are immune to error through misidentification, we will have explained everything about the capacity to think ‘I’-thoughts. As it would to claim of deriving from the thought that immunity to error through misidentification depends on the semantics of the ‘self.’
Once, again, that when we have an account of the semantics in that we will have explained everything distinctive about the capacity to think thoughts that are immune to error through misidentification.
The suggestion is that the semantics of ‘self-ness’ will explain what is distinctive about the capacity to think thoughts immune to error through misidentification. Semantics alone cannot be expected to explain the capacity for thinking thoughts. The point in fact, that all that there is to the capacity of think thoughts that are immune tp error is the capacity to think the sort of thought whose natural linguistic expression involves the ‘self,’ where this capacity is given by mastery of the semantics of ‘self-ness.’ Yielding, to explain what it is to master the semantics of ‘self-ness,’ especially to think thoughts immune to error through misidentification.
On this view, the mastery of the semantics of ‘self-ness’ may be construed as for the single most important explanation in a theory of ‘self-consciousness.’
Its quickened reformulation might be put to a defender of ‘redundancy’ or the deflationary theory is how mastery of the semantics of ‘self-ness’ can make sense of the distinction between ‘self-ness contents’ that are immune to error through misidentification and the ‘self contents’ that lack such immunity. However, this is only an apparent difficulty when one remembers that those of the ‘selves’ content is immune to error through misidentification, because, those employing ‘’I’ as object, were able in having to break down their component elements. The identification component and the predication components that for which if the composite identification components of each are of such judgements that mastery of the semantics of ‘self-regulatory’ content must be called upon to explain. Identification component are, of course, immune to error through misidentification.
It is also important to stress how the redundancy and the deflationary theory of self-consciousness, and any theory of self-consciousness that accords a serious role in self-consciousness to mastery of the semantics of the ‘self-ness,’ are motivated by an important principle that has governed much of the development of analytical philosophy. The principle is the principle that the analysis of thought can only continue thought, the philosophical analysis of language such that we communicate thoughts by means of language because we have an implicit understanding of the workings of language, that is, of the principle governing the use of language: It is these principles, which relate to what is open to view and mind other that via the medium of language, which endow our sentences with the senses that they carry. In order to analyse thought, therefore, it is necessary to make explicitly those principles, regulating our use of language, which we already implicitly grasp.
Still, at the core of the notion of broad self-consciousness is the recognition of what consciousness is the recognition of what developmental psychologist’s call ‘self-world dualism.’ Any subject properly described as self-conscious must be able to register the distinction between himself and the world, of course, this is a distinction that can be registered in a variety of way. The capacity for self-ascription of thoughts and experiences, in combination with the capacity to understand the world as a spatial and causally structured system of mind-independent objects, is a high-level way of registering of this distinction.
Consciousness of objects is closely related to sentience and to being awake. It is (at least) being in somewhat of a distinct informational and behavioural intention where its responsive state is for one's condition as played within the immediateness of environmental surroundings. It is the ability, for example, to process and act responsively to information about food, friends, foes, and other items of relevance. One finds consciousness of objects in creatures much less complex than human beings. It is what we (at any rate first and primarily) have in mind when we say of some person or animal as it is coming out of general anaesthesia, ‘It is regaining consciousness’ as consciousness of objects is not just any form of informational access to the world, but the knowing about and being conscious of, things in the world.
We are conscious of our representations when we are conscious, not (just) of some object, but of our representations: ‘I am seeing [as opposed to touching, smelling, tasting] and seeing clearly [as opposed too dimly].’ Consciousness of our own representations it is the ability to process and act responsively to information about oneself, but it is not just any form of such informational access. It is knowing about, being conscious of, one's own psychological states. In Nagel's famous phrase (1974), when we are conscious of our representations, it is ‘like something’ to have them. If, that which seems likely, there are forms of consciousness that do not involve consciousness of objects, they might consist in consciousness of representations, though some theorists would insist that this kind of consciousness be not of representations either (via representations, perhaps, but not of them).
The distinction just drawn between consciousness of objects and consciousness of our representations of objects may seem similar to Form's (1995) contributes of a well-known distinction between P- [phenomenal] and A- [access] consciousness. Here is his definition of ‘A-consciousness’: ‘A state is A-conscious if it is poised for direct control of thought and action.’ He tells us that he cannot define ‘P-consciousness’ in any ‘remotely non-circular way’ but will use it to refer to what he calls ‘experiential properties,’ what it is like to have certain states. Our consciousness of objects may appear to be like A-consciousness. It is not, however, it is a form of P-consciousness. Consciousness of an object is - how else can we put it? - consciousness of the object. Even if consciousness is just informational excess of a certain kind (something that Form would deny), it is not all form of informational access and we are talking about conscious access here. Recall the idea that it is like something to have a conscious state. Other closely related ideas are that in a conscious state, something appears to one, that conscious states have a ‘felt quality’. A term for all this is phenomenology: Conscious states have a phenomenology. (Thus some philosophers speak of phenomenal consciousness here.) We could now state the point we are trying to make this way. If I am conscious of an object, then it is like something to have that object as the content of a representation.
Some theorists would insist that this last statement be qualified. While such a representation of an object may provide everything that a representation has to have for its contents to be like something to me, they would urge, something more is needed. Different theorists would add different elements. For some, I would have to be aware, not just of the object, but of my representation of it. For others, I would have directorial implications that infer of the certain attentive considerations to its way or something other than is elsewhere. We cannot go into this controversy here. As, we are merely making the point that consciousness of objects is more than Form's A-consciousness.
Consciousness self involves, not just consciousness of states that it is like something to have, but consciousness of the thing that has them, i.e., of ones-self. It is the ability to process and act responsively to information about oneself, but again it is more than that. It is knowing about, being conscious of, oneself, indeed of itself as itself. And consciousness of oneself in this way it is often called consciousness of self as the subject of experience. Consciousness of oneself as oneself seems to require indexical adeptness and by preference to a special indexical ability at that, not just an ability to pick out something out but to pick something out as oneself. Human beings have such self-referential indexical ability. Whether any other creatures have, it is controversial. The leading nonhuman candidate would be chimpanzees and other primates whom they have taught enough language to use first-person pronouns.
The literature on consciousness sometimes fails to distinguish consciousness of objects, consciousness of one's own representations, and consciousness of self, or treat one three, usually consciousness of one's own representations, as actualized of its owing totality in consciousness. (Conscious states do not have objects, yet is not consciousness of a representation either. We cannot pursue that complication here.) The term ‘conscious’ and cognates are ambiguous in everyday English. We speak of someone regaining consciousness - where we mean simple consciousness of the world. Yet we also say things like, She was haphazardly conscious of what motivated her to say that - where we do not mean that she lacked either consciousness of the world or consciousness of self but rather than she was not conscious of certain things about herself, specifically, certain of her own representational states. To understand the unity of consciousness, making these distinctions is important. The reason is this: the unity of consciousness takes a different form in consciousness of self than it takes in either consciousness of one's own representations or consciousness of objects.
So what is unified consciousness? As we said, the predominant form of the unity of consciousness is being aware of several things at the same time. Intuitively, this is the notion of several representations being aspects of a single encompassing conscious state. A more informative idea can be gleaned from the way philosophers have written about unified consciousness. As emerging from what they have said, the central feature of unified consciousness is taken to be something like this unity of consciousness: A group of representational relations related to each other that to be conscious of any of them is to be conscious of others of them and of the group of them as a single group.
Call this notion (x). Now, unified consciousness of some sort can be found in all three of the kinds of consciousness we delineated. (It can be found in a fourth, too, as we will see in a moment.) We can have unified consciousness of: Objectively represented to us; These are existent representations of themselves, but are contained in being alone, that in their findings are a basis held to oneself, that of something has of each the discerning character to value their considerations in the qualities of such that represents our qualifying phenomenon. In the first case, the represented objects would appear as aspects of a single encompassing conscious states. In the second case, the representations themselves would thus appear. In the third case, one is aware of oneself as a single, unified subject. Does (x) fit all three (or all four, including the fourth yet to be introduced)? It does not. At most, it fits the first two. Let us see how this unfolds.
Its collective and unified consciousness manifests as of such a form that most substantively awaken sustenance are purposive and may be considered for occurring to consciousness. Is that one has of the world around one (including one's own body) as aspects of a single world, of the various items in it as linked to other items in it? What makes it unified can be illustrated by an example. Suppose that I am aware of the computer screen in front of me and of the car sitting in my driveway. If awareness of these two items is not unified, I will lack the ability to compare the two. If I cannot bring the car as I am aware of it to the state in which I am aware of the computer screen, I could not answer questions such as, Is the car the same colour as the WordPerfect icon? Or even, As I am experiencing them, is the car to the left or to the right of the computer screen? We can compare represented items in these ways only if we are aware of both items together, as parts of the same field or state or act of conscious. That is what unified consciousness doe for us. (x) fits this kind of unified consciousness well. There are a couple of disorders of consciousness in which this unity seems to break down or be missing. We will examine them shortly.
Unified consciousness of one's own representations is the consciousness that we have of our representations, consciousness of our own psychological states. The representations by which we are conscious of the world are particularly important but, if those theorists who maintain that there are forms of consciousness that does not have objects are right, they are not the only ones. What makes consciousness of our representations unified? We are aware of many representations together, so that they appear as aspects of a single state of consciousness. As with unified consciousness of the world, here we can compare items of which we have unified consciousness. For example, we can compare what it is like to see an object to what it is like to touch the same object. Thus, (x) fits this kind of unified consciousness well, too.
When one has unified consciousness of self, it is to occur that at least one signifies its own awareness of oneself, not just as the subject but in Kant's words, as the ‘single common subject’ of many representations and the single common agent of various acts of deliberation and action.
This is one of the two forms of unified consciousness that (x) does not fit. When one is aware of oneself as the common subject of experiences, the common agent of actions, one is not aware of several objects. Some think that when one is aware of oneself as subject, one is not aware of oneself as an object at all. Kant believed this. Whatever the merits of this view, when one is clearly aware of oneself as the single common subject of many representations, one is not aware of several things. As an alternative, one is aware of, and knows that one is aware of, the same thing - via many representations. Call this kind of unified consciousness (Y). Although (Y) is different form (x), we still have the core idea: Unified consciousness consists in tying what is contained in several representations, here most representations of oneself, together so that they are all part of a single field or state or act of consciousness.
Unified consciousness of self has been argued to have some very special properties. In particular, there is a small but important literature on the idea that the reference to oneself as oneself by which one achieves awareness of oneself as subject involves no ‘identification.’ Generalizing the notion a bit, some claim that reference to self does not proceed by way of attribution of properties or features to oneself at all. One argument for this view is that one is or could be aware of oneself as the subject of each of one's conscious experiences. If so, awareness of self is not what Bennett call ‘experience-dividing’ - statements expressing it have ‘no direct implications of the form ‘I’ will experience C rather than D.’ If this is so, the linguistic activities using first person pronouns by which we call ourselves subject and the representational states that result have to have some unusual properties.
Finally, we need to distinguish a fourth site of unified consciousness. Let us call it unity of focus. Unity of focus is our ability to pay unified attention to objects, one's representations, and one's own self. It is different from the other sorts of unified consciousness. In the other three situations, consciousness ranges over many alternate objects or many instances of consciousness of an object (in unified consciousness of self). Unity of focus picks out one such item (or a small numbers of them). Wundt captures what I have in mind well in his distinction between the field of consciousness and the focus of consciousness. The consciousness of a single item on which one is focussing is unified because one is aware of many aspects of the item in one state or act of consciousness (especially relational aspects, e.g., any dangers it poses, how it relates to one's goals, etc.) and one is aware of many different considerations with respect to it in one state or act of consciousness (goals, how well one is achieving them with respect to this object, etc.). (x) does not fit this kind of unified consciousness any better than it fit unified consciousness of self? Here that we are not, or need not be, aware of most items. Instead, one is integrating most properties of an item, especially properties that involve relationships to oneself, and integrating most of one's abilities and applying them to the item, and so on. Call this form of unified consciousness (z). One way to think of the affinity of (z) (a unified focus) to (x) and (Y) is this. (z) occurs within (x) and (Y) - within unified consciousness of world and self.
Though this has often been overlooked, all forms of unified consciousness come in both simultaneous and across-time versions. That is to say, the unity can consist in links of certain kinds among phenomena occurring at the same time (synchronically) and it can consist in links of certain kinds among phenomena occurring at different times (diachronically). In its synchronic form, it consists in such things as our ability to compare items with one of another, for example, to see if an item fits into another item. Diachronically, it consists in a certain crucial form of memory, namely, our ability to retain a representation of an earlier object in the right way and for long enough to bring it as recalled into current consciousness of currently represented objects in the same as we do with simultaneously represented objects. Though this process across time has always been called the unity of consciousness, sometimes even to the exclusion of the synchronic unity just delineated, another good name for it would be continuity of consciousness. Note that this process of relating earlier to current items in consciousness is more than, and perhaps different from, the learning of new skills and associations. Even severe amnesiacs can do the latter.
That consciousness can be unified across time and at given time points merited of how central unity of consciousness is to cognition. Without the ability to retain representations of earlier objects and unite them with current represented objects, most complex cognition would simply be impossible. The only bits of language that one could probably understand, for example, would be single words; The simplest of sentences is an entity spread over time. Now, unification in consciousness might not be the only way to unite earlier cognitive states (earlier thoughts, earlier experiences) with current ones but it is a central way and the one best known to us. The unity of consciousness is central to cognition.
Justly as thoughts differ from all else that is said to correspond among the contents of the mind in being wholly communicable, it is of the essence of thought that I can convey to you the very thought that I have, as opposed to being able to tell you merely something about what my thought is like. It is of the essence of thought not merely to be communicable, but to be communicable, without excess, by means of language. In order to understand thought, it is necessary, therefore, to understand the means by which thought is expressed.
We communicate thoughts by means of language because we have an implicit understanding of the workings of language, that is, of the principles governing the use of language. Of these principles, which relate to what is open to view in the employment of language, unaided by any supposed contact between mind and mind other than a formal medium of language, which endow our sentences with the senses that they carry. In order to analyses thought, therefore, it is necessary to make explicitly those principles, regulating our use of language, which we already implicitly grasp.
By noting that (x), (y) and (z) are not the only kinds of mental unity. Our remarks about (z), specifically about what can be integrated in focal attention, might already have suggested as much. There is unity in the exercise of our cognitive capacities, unity that consists of integration of motivating factors, perceptions, beliefs, etc., and there is unity in the outputs, unity that consists of integration of behaviour.
Human beings bring a strikingly wide range of factors to bear on a cognitive task such as seeking to characterize something or trying to decide what to do about something. For example, we can bring to bear of what we want, and what we believe, and of our attitudinal values for which we can of our own self, situation, and context, allotted from each of our various senses: It has continuing causality in the information about the situation, other people, others' beliefs, desires, attitudes, etc.; The resources of however many languages we have possession in the availabilities for us, and include of the many-sided kinds of memory, bodily sensations, our various and very diverse problem-solving skills, . . . and so on. Not only can we bring all these elements to bear, we can integrate them in a way that is highly structured and ingeniously appropriate to our goals and the situation(s) before us. This form of mental unity could appropriately be called unity of cognition. Unity of consciousness often goes with unity of cognition because one of our means of unifying cognition with respect to some object or situation is to focus on it consciously. However, there is at least some measure of unified cognition in many situations of which we are not conscious, as is testified by our ability to balance, control our posture, manoeuver around obstacles while our
consciousness is entirely absorbed with something else, and so on.
At the other end of the cognitive process, we find an equally interesting form of unity, what we might call unity of behaviour, our ability to establish uninterruptedly some progressively rhythmic and keenly independent method for which to integrate our limbs, eyes, and bodily attitude, etc. The precision and complexity of the behavioural coordination we can achieve would be difficult to exaggerate. Think of a concert pianist performing the complicated work.
One of the most interesting ways to study psychological phenomena is to see what happens when they or related phenomena break down. Phenomena that look simple and seamless when functioning smoothly often turns out to have all sorts of structure when they begin to malfunction. Like other psychological phenomena, we would expect unified consciousness to be open to being damaged, distorted, etc., too. If the unity of consciousness is as important to cognitive functioning as we have been suggesting, such damage or distortion should create serious problems for the people to whom it happens. The unity of consciousness is damaged and distorted in both naturally-occurring and experimental situations. Some of these situations are indeed very serious for those undergoing them.
In fact, unified consciousness can break down in what look to be two distinct ways. There are situations in which saying that one unified conscious being has split into two unified conscious beings without the unity itself being destroyed is natural or even significantly damaged, and situations in which always we have one being with one instance of consciousness. However, the unity itself may be damaged or even destroyed. In the former cases, there is reason to think that a single instance of unified consciousness has become two (or something like two). In the latter cases, unity of consciousness has been compromised in some way but nothing suggests that anything have split.
The point in fact, is that it is possibly the most challenging and persuasive source of problems in the whole of philosophy. Our own consciousness may be the most basic of fact confronting us, yet it is almost impossible to say that consciousness is. Is yours like yours? Is ours like that of animals? Might machines come to have consciousness? Is it possible that there might be disembodied consciousness? Whatever complex biological and neural processes go on backstage, it is my consciousness that provides the theatre where my experiences and thoughts have their existence: Where my desires are felt and where my intentions are formed. But then how am I to conceive the ‘I,’ or self that is the spectator of this theatre? One of the difficulties in thinking about consciousness is that the problems seem not to be scientific ones: Leibniz remarked that if we could construct a machine that could think and feel, and blow it up to the size of a mill and thus be able to examine its working parts as thoroughly as we pleased, we would still not find copiousness, and draw the conclusion that consciousness resides in simple subjects, not complex ones. Even if we are convinced that consciousness somehow emerges from the complexity of brain functioning, we may still feel baffled about the way the emergence takes place, or why it takes place in just the way it does.
Subsequently, it is natural to concede that a given thought has a natural linguistic expression. We are also saying something about how it is appropriate to characterize the contents of that thought. We are saying something about what is being thought. This ‘I’ term is given by the sentence that follows the ‘that’ clause in reporting a thought, a belief, or any propositional attitude. The proposal, then, is that ‘I’-thoughts are all and only the thoughts whose propositional contents constitutively involve the first-person pronoun. This is still not quite right, however, because thought contents can be specified in ways. They can be specified directly or indirectly.
In the examination of the functionalist account of self-reference as a possible strategy, although it is not ultimately successful, attention to the functionalist account reveal the correct approach for solving the paradox of self-consciousness. The successful response to the paradox of seif
consciousness must reject the classical view of contents. The thought that, despite all this, there are first-person contents that do not presuppose mastery of the first-person pronoun is at the core of the functionalist theory of self-reference and first-person belief.
The best developed functionalist theory of self-reference has been provided by Hugh Mellor (1988-1989). As, the basic phenomenon in the explaining to, is what it is for a creature to have what is termed as a subjective belief, that is to say, a belief whose content is naturally expressed by a sentence in the first-person singular and the present tense. The explanation of subjective beliefs that offers to makes such beliefs independent of both linguistic abilities and conscious beliefs. From this basic account of construing an account of conscious subjective beliefs and then of the reference of the first-person pronoun ‘I.’ These putatively more sophisticated cognitive states are causally derivable from basic subjective beliefs.
Another phenomenon where we may find something like a split without diminished or destroyed unity is hemi-neglect, the strange phenomenon of losing all sense of one side of one's body or sometimes a part of one side of the body. Whatever it is exactly that is going on in hemi-neglect, unified consciousness remains. It is just that its ‘range’ has been bizarrely circumscribed. It ranges over only half the body (in the most common situation), not seamlessly over the whole body. Where we expect proprioception and perception of the whole body, in these patients they are of (usually) only one-half of the body.
A third candidate phenomenon is what used to be called Multiple Personality Disorder, now, more neutrally, Disassociative Identity Disorder (DID), everything about this phenomenon is controversial, including whether there is any real multiplicity of consciousness at all, but one common way of describing what is going on in at least some central cases is to say that the units if whether we call them persons, personalities, sides of a single personality, or whatever, ‘take turns’, usually with pronounced changes in personality. When one is active, the other(s) is usually(are) not. If this is an accurate description, then here to we have a breach in unity of some kind in which unity is nevertheless not destroyed. Notice that whereas in brain bisection cases the breach, whatever it is like, is synchronic (at a time), here it is diachronic (across time), different unified ‘package’ of consciousness taking turns. The breach consists primarily in some pattern of reciprocal (or sometimes one way) amnesia - some pattern of each ‘package’ not remembering having the experiences or doing the things had or done when another ‘package’ was in charge.
By contrast to brain bisection and DID cases, there are phenomena in which unified consciousness does not seem to split and does seem to be damaged or even destroyed together. In brain bisection and disassociative identity cases, the most that is happening is that unified consciousness is splitting into two or more proportionally intact units - two or more at a time or two or more across time. It is a matter of controversy whether even that is happening, especially in DID cases, but we clearly do not have more than that. In particular, the unity itself does not disappear, although it may split, but we could say, it does not shatter. There are at least three kinds of case in which unity does appear to shatter.
One is some particularly severe form of schizophrenia. Here the victim seems to lose the ability to form an integrated, interrelated representation of his or her world and his or her self together. The person speaks in ‘word salads’ that never get anywhere, indeed sometimes never become complete sentences. The person is unable to put together integrated plans of actions even at the level necessary to obtain sustenance, tend to bodily needs, or escape painful irritants. So on, here, saying that unity of consciousness has shattered seems correct than split. The behaviour of these people seems to express no more than what we might call experience-fragmentation, each lasting a tiny length of time and unconnected to any others. In particular, except for the (usually semantically irrelevant) associations that lead these people from each entry to the next in the word salads they create, to be aware of one of these states is not to be aware of any others - or so to an evidentiary proposition.
In schizophrenia of this sort, the shattering of unified consciousness is part of a general breakdown or deformation of mental functioning: pertain to, desire, belief, even memory all suffer massive distortions. In another kind of case, the normal unity of consciousness seems to be just as absent but there does not seem to be general disturbance of the mind. This is what some researchers call dysexecutive syndrome. What characterizes the breakdown in the unity of consciousness here is that subjects are unable to consider two things together, even things that are directly related to one another. For example, such people cannot figure out whether a piece of a puzzle fits into a certain place even when the piece and the puzzle are both clearly visibly and the piece obviously fits. They cannot crack an egg into a pan. So on.
A disorder presenting similar symptoms is simultagnosia or Balint's syndrome (Balint was an earlier 20th century German neurologist). In this disorder, which is fortunately rare, patients see only one object located at one ‘place’ in the visual field at a time. Outside of a few ‘degrees of arc’ in the visual field, these patients say they see nothing and seem to be receiving no information (Hardcastle, in progress). In both dysexecutive disorder and simultagnosia (if we have two different phenomena here), subjects seem not to be aware of even two items in a single conscious state.
We can pin down what is missing in each case a bit more precisely. Recall the distinction between being conscious of individual objects and having unified consciousness of a number of objects at the same time introduced at the beginning of this article. Broadly speaking, we can think of the two phenomena isolated by this distinction as two stages. First, the mind ties together various sensory information into representations of objects. In contemporary cognitive research, this activity has come to be called binding (Hardcastle 1998 is a good review). Then, the mind ties these represented objects together to achieve unified consciousness of a number of them at the same time. (The first theorist to separate these two stages was Kant, in his doctrine of synthesis.) The first stage continues to be available to dysexecutive and simultagnosia patients: They continue to be aware of individual objects, events, etc. The damage seems to be to the second stage: it is the tying of objects together in consciousness that is impaired or missing altogether. The distinction can be made this way: these people can achieve some (z), unity of focus with respect to individual objects, but little or no unified consciousness of any of the three kinds over a number of objects.
The same distinction can also help make clear what is going on in the severe forms of schizophrenia just discussed. Like dysexecutive syndrome and simultagnosia patients, severe schizophrenics lack the ability to tie represented objects together, but they also seem to lack the ability to form unified representations of individual objects. In a different jargon, these people seem to lack even the capacity for object constancy. Thus their cognitive impairment is much more severe than that experienced by dysexecutive syndrome and simultagnosia patients.
With the exception of brain bisection patients, who do not evidence distortion of consciousness outside of specially contrived laboratory situations, the split or breach occurs naturally in all the patients just discussed. Indeed, they are a central class of the so-called ‘experiments of nature’ that are the subject-matter of contemporary neuropsychology. Since all the patients in whom these problems occur naturally are severely disadvantaged by their situation, this is further evidence that the ability to unify the contents of consciousness is central to proper cognitive functioning.
Is there anything common to the six situations of breakdowns in unified consciousness just sketched? How do they relate to (x), (Y) or (z)?
In brain bisection cases, the key evidence for a duality of some kind is that there are situations in which whatever is aware of some items being represented in the body in question is not aware of other items being represented in that same body at the same time. We looked at two examples of the phenomenon connection with the word TAXABLE and the doing of arithmetic. With respect to these represented items, there is a significant and systematically extendable situation in which to be aware of some of these items is not to be aware of others of them. This seems to be what motivates the judgment in us that these patients’ evidence a split in unified consciousness. If so, brain bisection cases are a straightforward case of a failure to meet the conditions for (x). However, they are more than that. Because the ‘centres of consciousness’ created in the lab do not communicate with one another except in the way that any mind can communicate with any other mind, there is also a breakdown in (Y). One subject of experience aware of itself as the single common subject of its experience seems to become two (in some measure at least).
In DID cases, and a central feature of the case is some pattern of amnesia. Again, this is a situation in which being conscious of some represented objects goes with not being conscious of others in a systematic way. The main difference is that the breach is at a time in brain bisection cases, across time in DID cases. So again the breakdown in unity consists in a failure to meet the conditions for (x). However, DID cases for being diachronic, there is also a breakdown in (Y) across time - though there is continuity across time within each personality, there seems to be little or no continuity, conscious continuity at any rate, from one to another.
The same pattern is evident in the cases of severe schizophrenia, dysexecutive disorder and simultagnosia that we considered. In all three cases, consciousness of some items goes with lack of consciousness of others. In these cases, to be aware of a given item is precisely not to be aware of other relevant items. However, in the severe schizophrenia cases we considered, there is also a failure to meet the conditions of (z).
Hemi-neglect is a bit different. Here we do not have in company of two or more ‘packages’ of consciousness and we do not have individual conscious states that are not unified with other conscious states. Not, as far as we know - for there to be conscious states not unified with the states on which the patient can report, there would have to be consciousness of what is going on in the side neglected by the subject with whom we can communicate and there is no evidence for this. Here none of the conditions for (x), (y) or (z) fail to be met - but that may be because hemi-neglect is not a split or a breakdown in unified consciousness in the first place. It may be simply a shrinking of the range of phenomena over which otherwise intact unified consciousness amplifies.
It is interesting that none of the breakdown cases we have considered evidence damage to or destruction of the unity in (y). We have seen cases in which unified consciousness it might split at a time (brain bisection cases) or over time (DID cases) but not cases in which the unity itself is significantly damaged or destroyed. Nor is our sample unrepresentative; the cases we have considered are the most widely discussed cases in the literature. There do not seem to be many cases in which saying that is plausible (y), awareness of oneself as a single common subject, has been damaged or destroyed.
After a long hiatus, serious work on the unity of consciousness began in recent philosophy with two books on Kant, P. F. Strawson (1966) and Jonathan Bennett (1966). Both of them had an influence far beyond the bounds of Kant scholarship. Central to these works is an exploration of the relationship between unified consciousness, especially unified consciousness of self, and our ability to form an integrated, coherent representation of the world, a linkage that the authors took to be central to Kant's transcendental deduction of the categories. Whatever the merits of the claim for a sceptical judgment, their work set off a long line of writings on the supposed link. Quite recently the approach prompted a debate about unity and objectivity among Michael Lockwood, Susan Hurley and Anthony Marcel in Peacocke (1994).
Another point in fact, are the issues that led philosophers back within the unity of consciousness, is, perhaps, the next historicity, for which had the neuropsychological results of brain bisection operations, only that we can explore at an earlier time. Starting with Thomas Nagel (1971) and continuing in the work of Charles Marks (1981), Derek Parfit (1971 and 1984), Lockwood (1989), Hurley (1998) and many others, these operations have been a major themes in work on the unity of consciousness since the 1970s. Much ink has been spilled on the question of what exactly is going on in the phenomenology of brain bisection patients. Nagel goes insofar as to claim that there is no whole number of ‘centres of consciousness’ in these patients: There is too much unity to say ‘two,’ yet too much splitting to say ‘one.’
Some recent work by Jocelyne Sergent (1990) might seem to support this conclusion. She found, for example, that when a sign ‘6’ was sent to one hemisphere of the brain in these subjects and a sign ‘7’ was sent to the other in such a way that a crossover of information from one hemisphere to the other was extremely unlikely, they could say that the six is a smaller number than the seven but could not say whether the signs were the same or different. It is not certain that Sergent's work does support Nagel's conclusions. First, Sergent's claims are controversial - not, but all researchers have been able to replicate them. Second, even if the data are good, the interpretation of them is far from straightforward. In particular, they seem to be consistent with there being a clear answer to any precise ‘one or two?’ Question that we could ask. (’Unified consciousness of the two signs with respect to numerical size?’ Yes. ‘Unified consciousness of the visible structure of the signs?’ No). If so, the fact that there is obviously mixed evidence, some pointing to the conclusion ‘one’, some pointing to the conclusion ‘two’, supports the view expressed by Nagel that there may be no whole number of subjects that these patients are.
Much of the work since Nagel has focussed on the same issue of the kind of split that the laboratory manipulation of brain bisection patients induces. Some attention has also been paid to the implications of these splits. For example, could one hemisphere commit a crime in such a way that the other could not justifiably be held responsible for it? Or, if such splitting occurred regularly and was regularly followed by merging with ‘halves’ from other splits, what would the implications are for our traditional notion of what philosophers call ‘personal identity’, namely, being or remaining one and the same thing. (Here we are talking about identity in the philosopher's sense of being or remaining one things, not in the sense of the term that psychologists use when they talk of such things as ‘identity crises’.)
Parfit has made perhaps the largest contributions to the issue of the implications of brain bisection cases for personal identity. Phenomena relevant to identity in things others than persons can be a matter of degree. This is well illustrated by the famous ship of Theseus examples. Suppose that over the years, a certain ship in Theseus was rebuilt, boards by board, until every single board in it has been replaced. Is the ship at the end of the process the ship that started the process or not? Now suppose that we take all those rotten, replaced boards and reassemble them into a ship? Is this ship the original ship of Theseus or not? Many philosophers have been certain that such questions cannot arise for persons; identity in persons is completely clear and unambiguous, not something that could be a matter of degree as related phenomena obviously can be with other objects is a well-known example. As Parfit argues, the possibility of persons (or at any rate minds) splitting and fusing puts real pressure on such intuitions about our specialness; perhaps the continuity of persons can be as partial and tangled as the continuity of other middle-sized objects.
Lockwood's exploration of brain bisections cases go off in a different direction, two different directions in fact (we will examine the second below). Like Nagel, Marks, and Parfit, Lockwood has written on the extent to which what he calls ‘co-consciousness’ can split. (’Co-consciousness’ is the term that many philosophers now use for the unity of consciousness; Roughly, two conscious states are said to be co-conscious when they are related to another as finding conscious states are related of yet to another in unified consciousness.) He also explores the possibility of psychological states that are not determinately in any of the available ‘centres of consciousness’ and the implications of this possibility for the idea of the specious present, the idea that we are directly and immediately aware of a certain tiny spread of time, not just the current infinitesimal moment of time. He concludes that the determinateness of psychological states being in an available ‘centre of consciousness’ and the notion that psychological states spread over at least a small amount of time in the specious might present stand or fall together.
Some philosopher’s interests in pathologies of unified consciousness examine more than brain bisection cases. In what is perhaps the most complex work on the unity of consciousness to date, Hurley examines most of the kinds of breakdown phenomena that we introduced earlier. She starts with an intuitive notion of co-consciousness that she does not formally define. She then explores the implications of a wide range of ‘experiments of nature’ and laboratory experiments for the presence or absence of co-consciousness across the psychological states of a person. For example, she considers acallosal patients (people born without a corpus callosum). When present, the corpus callosum is the chief channel of communication between the hemispheres. When it is cut, generating what looks like a possibility that two centres of consciousness, two internally co-conscious systems that are not co-consciousness with one another. Hurley argues that in patients in whom it never existed, things are not so clear. Even though the channels of communication in these patients are often in part external (behavioural cuing activity, etc.), the result may still be a single co-conscious system. That is to say, the neurological and behavioural basis of unified consciousness may be very different in different people.
Hurley also considers research by Trewarthen in which a patient is conscious of some object seen by, say, the right hemisphere until her left hand, which is controlled by the right hemisphere, reaches for it. Somehow the act of reaching for it seems to obliterate the consciousness of it. Very strange - how can something pop into and disappear from unified consciousness in this way? This leads her to consider the notion of partial unity. Could two centres of consciousness be as integrated in ‘A’, only to find of its relation to ‘B’, though not co-conscious with one another, nonetheless these of them is co-conscious with some third thing, e.g., the volitional system B (the system of intentions, desires, etc.?). If so, ‘co-conscious’ is not a transitive relationship - ‘A’ is co-conscious with ‘B’ and ‘C’ could be co-conscious with B without A being co-conscious with ‘C’. This is puzzling enough. Even more puzzling would be the question of how activation of the system ‘B’ with which both ‘A’ and ‘C’ are co-conscious could result in either ‘A’ or ‘C’ ceasing to be conscious of an object aimed at by ‘B’.
Hurleys’ response to Trewarthen's cases (and Sergent's cases that we examined in the previous section) is to accept that intention can obliterate consciousness and then distinguish times. At any given time in Trewarthen's cases, the situation with respect to unity is clear. That the picture does not conform to our usual expectations for diachronic singularity or transitivity then becomes simply an artefact of the cases, not a problem. It is not made clear how this reconciles Sergent's evidence with unity. One strategy would be that the one we considered earlier was of making questions in incomparably precise comprehension. For precise questions, there seems to be a coherent answer about unity for every phenomenon Sergent describes.
Hurleys’ consideration of what she calls Marcel's case. Here subjects are asked to report the appearance of some item in consciousness in three ways at the same time - say, by blinking, pushing a button, and saying, ‘I see it’. Remarkably, any of these acts can be done without the other two. The question is, What does this allude to unified consciousness? In a case in which the subject pushes the button but neither blinks nor says anything, for example, is the hand-controller aware of the object while the blink-controller and the speech-controller are not? How could the conscious system become fragmented in such a way?
Hurleys’ stipulation is that they cannot. What induces the appearance of incoherence about unity is the short time scale. Suppose that it takes some time to achieve unified consciousness, perhaps because some complex reaction’s processes are involved. If that were the case, then we do not have a stable unity situation in Marcel's case. The subjects are not given enough time to achieve unified consciousness of any kind.
There is a great deal more to Hurley's work. She urges, for example, that theirs a normative dimension to unified consciousness - conscious states have to cohere for unified consciousness to result. Systems in the brain have to achieve her calls ‘dynamic singularity’ - being a single system - for unified consciousness to result.
A third issue that got philosophers working on the unity of consciousness again is binding. Here the connection is more distant because binding as usually understood is not unified consciousness as we have been discussing it. Recall the two stages of cognition laid out earlier. First, the mind ties together various sensory information into representations of objects. Then the mind ties these represented objects to one other to achieve unified consciousness of a number of them at the same time. It is the first stage that is usually called binding. The representations that result at this stage need not be conscious in any of the ways delineating earlier - many perfectly good representations affect behaviour and even enter memory without ever becoming conscious. Representations resulting from the second stage need not be conscious, either, but when they are, we have at least some of the kinds of unified consciousness delineated.
In the past few decades, philosophers have also worked on how unified consciousness relates to the brain. Lockwood, for example, thinks that relating consciousness to matter will involve more issues on the side of matter than most philosophers think. (We mentioned that his work goes off in two new directions. This is the second one.) Quantum mechanics teach us that the way in which observation links to physical reality is a subtle and complex matter. Lockwood urges that our conceptions will have to be adjusted on the side of matter as much as on the side of mind if we are to understand consciousness as a physical phenomenon and physical phenomena as open to conscious observation. If it is the case not only that our understanding of consciousness is affected by how we think it might be implemented in matter but also that process of matter is affected by our (conscious) observation of them, then our picture of consciousness stands as ready to affect our picture of matter as vice-versa.
The Churchlands, Paul M. and Patricia S. and Daniel Dennett (1991) has radical views of the underlying architecture of unified consciousness. The Churchlands see unity itself much as other philosophers do. They do argue that the term ‘consciousness’ covers a range of different phenomena that need to be distinguished from another but the important point that presents to some attending characteristic is that they urge that the architecture of the underlying processes probably consist not of transformations of symbolically encoded objects of representations, as most philosophers have believed, but of vector transformations in what are called phase spaces. Dennett articulates an even more radical view, encompassing both unity and underlying architecture. For him, unified consciousness is simply a temporary ‘virtual captain’, a small group of related information-parcels that happens to gain temporary dominance in a struggle for control of such cognitive activities as self-monitoring and self-reporting in the vast array of microcircuits of the brain. We take these transient phenomena to be more than they are because each of them holds to some immediacy of ‘me’, particularly of the moment; The temporary coalition of conscious states winning at the moment is what I am, is the self. Radical implementation, narrowed range and transitoriness notwithstanding, when unified consciousness is achieved, these philosophers tend to see it in the way we have presented it.
Dennett's and the Churchlands' views fit naturally with a dynamic systems view of the underlying neural implementation. The dynamic systems view is the view that unified consciousness is a result of certain self-organizing activities in the brain. Dennett thinks that given the nature of the brain, a vast assembly of neurons receiving electrochemical signals from other neurons and passing such signals to yet other neurons, cognition could not take any form other than something like a pandemonium of competing bits of content, the ones that win the competitions being the ones that are conscious. The Churchlands nonexistence tends to agree with Dennett about this. They see consciousness as a state of the brain, the ‘wet-ware’, not a result of information processing, of ‘software’. They also advocate a different picture of the underlying neurological process. As we said, they think that transformations of complex vectors in a multi-dimensional phase space are the crucial processes, not competition among bits of content. However, they agree that it is very unlikely that the processes that subserve unified consciousness are sentence-like or language-like at all. It is too early to say whether these radically novel pictures of what the system that implements unified consciousness is like will hold any important implications for what unified consciousness is or when it is present.
Hurley is also interested in the relationship of unified consciousness to brain physiology. Saying it of her that she resists certain standard ways of linking them would be truer, however, than to say that she herself links them. In particular, while she clearly thinks that physiological phenomena have all sorts of implications and give rise to all sorts of questions about the unity of consciousness, she strongly resists any simplistic patterns of connection. Many researchers have been attracted by some variant of what she calls the isomorphism hypothesis. This is the idea that changes in consciousness will parallel changes in brain structure or function. She wants to insist, to the contrary, that often two instances of the same change in consciousness will go with very different changes in the brain. We saw an example in the last section. In most of us, unified consciousness is closely linked to an intact, functioning corpus callosum. However, in acallosal people, there may be the same unity but achieved by mechanisms such as cuing activity external to the body that are utterly different from communication though a corpus callosum. Going the opposite way, different changes in consciousness can go with the same changes to structure and function in the brain.
Two philosophers have gone off in directions different from any of the above, Stephen White (1991) and Christopher Hill (1991). White's main interest is not the unity of consciousness as such but what one might call the unified locus of responsibility - what it is that ties something together to make it a single agent of actions, i.e., something to which attributions of responsibility can appropriately be made. He argues that unity of consciousness is one of the things that go into becoming unified as such an agent but not the only thing. Focussed coherent plans, a continuing single conception of the good, with reason of a good autobiographical memory, certain future states of persons mattering to us in a special way (mattering to us because we take them to be future states of ourselves, one would say if it were not blatantly circular), a certain continuing kind and degree of rationality, certain social norms and practices, and so forth. In his picture of moral responsibility, unbroken unity of consciousness at and over time is only a small part of the story.
Hills’ fundamental claim is that a number of different relationships between psychological states have a claim to be considered unity relationships, including: Being owned by the same subject, being [phenomenally] next to (and other relationships that state in the field of consciousness appear to have to one another), as both embrace the singularity of objects contained of other conscious states, and jointly having the appropriate sorts of effects (functions). An interesting question, one that Hill does not consider, is whether all these relations are what interests us when we talk about the unity of consciousness or only some of them (and if only some of them, which ones). Hill also examines scepticism about the idea that clearly bounded individual conscious states exist. Since we have been assuming throughout that such states do exist, it is perhaps fortunate that Hill argues that we could safely do so.
In some circles, the idea that consciousness has a special kind of unity has fallen into disfavour. Nagel (1971), Donald Davidson (1982), and Dennett (1991) have all urged that the mind's unity has been greatly overstated in the history of philosophy. The mind, they say, works mostly out of the sight and the control of consciousness. Moreover, even states and acts of ours that are conscious can fail to cohere. We act against what we know perfectly well to be our own most desired courses of action, for example, or do things while telling ourselves that we must avoid doing them. There is an approach to the small incoherencies of everyday life that does not requires us to question whether consciousness is unified in this way, the Freudian approach (e.g., Freud 1916/17). This approach accepts that the unity of consciousness exists much as it presents itself but argues that the range of material over which it extends is much smaller than philosophers once thought. This latter approach has some appeal. If something is out of sight and/or control, it is out of the sight or control of what? The answer would seem to be, the unified conscious mind. If so, the only necessary difference among the pre-twentieth centuries visions of unified consciousness as ranging over everything in the mind and our current vision of unified consciousness is that the range of psychological phenomena over which unified consciousness ranges has shrunk.
A final historical note. At the beginning of the 21st century, work on the unity of consciousness continues apace. For example, a major conference was recently devoted to the unity of consciousness, the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness Conference assembled inside Brussels in 2000, and the Encyclopaedias of philosophy (such as this one) and of cognitive science are commissioning articles on the topic. Psychologists are taking up the issue. Bernard Baars (1988, 1997) notion of the global work space is an example. Another example is work on the role of unified consciousness in precise control of attention. However, the topic is not yet at the centre of consciousness studies. One illustration of this is that it can still be missing entirely in anthologies of current work on consciousness.
With a different issue, philosophers used to think that the unity of consciousness has huge implications for the nature of the mind, indeed entails that the mind could not be made out of matter. We also saw that the prospects for this inference are not good. What about the nature of consciousness? Does the unity of consciousness have any implications for this issue?
There are currently at least three major camps on the nature of consciousness. One camp sees the ‘felt quality’ of representations as something unique, in particular as quite different from the power of representations to change other representations and shape belief and action. On this picture, representations could function much as they do without it being like anything to have them. They would merely not be conscious. If so, consciousness may not play any important cognitive role at all, its unity included (Jackson 1986; Chalmers 1996). A second camp holds, to the contrary, that consciousness is simply a special kind of representation (Rosenthal 1991, Dretske 1995, and Tye 1995). A third holds that what we label ‘consciousness’ are really something else. On this view, consciousness will in the end be ‘analysed away’ - the term is too coarse-grained and presents things in too unquantifiable a way to have any use in a mature science of the mind.
The unity of consciousness obviously has strong implications for the truth or falsity of any of these views. If it is as central and undeniable as many have suggested, its existence may cut against the eliminativist position. With respect to the other positions, in that the unity of consciousness seems neutral.
Whatever its implications for other issues, the unity of consciousness seems to be a real feature of the human mind, indeed central to it. If so, any complete picture of the mind will have to provide an account of it. Even those who hold that the extent to which consciousness is unified has been overrated owing us and account of what has been overrated.
To say one has an experience that is conscious (in the phenomenal sense) is to say, that one is in a state of its seeming to one some way. In another formulation, to say experience is conscious is to say that there is something that stands alone, like for only one to have. Feeling pain and sensing colours are common illustrations of phenomenally conscious states. Consciousness has also been taken to consist in the monitoring of one's own state of mind (e.g., by forming thoughts about them, or by somehow ‘sensing’ them), or else in the accessibility of information to one's capacity for rational control or self-report. Intentionality has to do with the directedness or aboutness of mental states - the fact that, for example, one's thinking is of or about something. Intentionality includes, and is sometimes taken to be equivalent to, what is called ‘mental representation.’
It can seem that consciousness and intentionality pervade mental life -perhaps, but one or both somehow constitute what it is to have a mind. But achieving an articulate general understanding of either consciousness or intentionality presents, an enormous challenge, part of which lies in figuring out how the two are related. Is one in some sense derived from or dependent on the other? Or are they perhaps quite independent and separate aspects of mind?
One frequent understanding among philosophers, that consciousness is a certain feature shared by sense-experience and imagery, perhaps belonging also to a broad range of other mental phenomena (e.g., episodic thought, memory, and emotion). It is the feature that consists in its seeming some way to one to have experiences. To put it another way: Conscious states are states of its seeming somehow to a subject.
For example, it seems to you some way to see red, and seems to you in another way, to hear a crash, to visualize a triangle, and to suffer pain. The sense of ‘seems’ relevant here may be brought out by noting that, in the last example, we might just as well speak of the way it feels to be in pain. And - some may say - in the same sense, it seems to you some way to think through the answer to a math problem, or to recall where you parked the car, or to feel anger, shame, or elation. (However, that it is not simply to be assumed that saying it seems some way to you to have an experience is equivalent to saying that the experience itself seems or appears some way to you - that it, is - an object of appearance. The point is just that the way something sounds to you, the way something looks to you, etc., all constitute ‘ways of seeming.’) States that are conscious in this sense are said to have some phenomenal character or other - their phenomenal character being the specific way it seems to one to have a given experience. Sometimes this is called the ‘qualitative’ or ‘subjective’ character of experience.
Another oft-used means for trying to get at the relevant notion of consciousness, preferable to some, is to say that there is, in a certain sense, always ‘something it is like’ to be in a given conscious state - something it has, in the like for one who is in that state. Relating the two locutions, we might say: There is something it is like for you to see red, to feel pain, etc., and the way it seems to you to have one of these experiences is what it is like for you to have it. The phenomenal character of an experience then, is what someone would inquire about by asking, e.g., ‘What is it like to experience orgasm?’ - and it is what we speak of when we say that we know what that is like, even if we cannot convey this to one who does not know. And, if we want to speak of persons, or other creatures (as distinct from their states) being conscious, we will say that they are conscious just if there is something it is like for them to be the creature they are - for example, something it is like to be a nocturnal creature as inferred too as a bat.
The examples of conscious states given comprise a various lot. But some sense of their putative unity as instances of consciousness might be gained by contrasting them with what we are inclined to exclude, or can at least conceive of excluding, from their company. Much of what goes on, but we would ordinarily believe is not (or at any rate, we may suppose is not) conscious in the sense at issue. The leaf's fall from a tree branch, we may suppose, is not a conscious state of the leaf - a state of its seeming somehow to the leaf. Nor, for that matter, is a person falling off a branch held of a conscious state - is rather the feeling of falling the sort of consciousness, if anything is. Dreaming of falling would also be a conscious experience in this sense. But, while we can in some way be said to sense the position of our limbs even while dreamlessly asleep, we may still suppose that this proprioception (though perhaps in some sense a mental or cognitive affair) is not conscious - we may suppose that it does not then seem (or feel) any way to us sleepers to sense our limbs, as ordinarily it does when we are awake.
The way of seeming’ or ‘what it is like’ conception of consciousness I have just invoked is sometimes marked by the term ‘phenomenal consciousness.’ But this qualifier ‘phenomenal’ suggests that there are other kinds of consciousness (or perhaps, other senses of ‘consciousness’). Indeed there are, at least, other ways of introducing notions of consciousness. And these may appear to pick out features or senses altogether distinct from that just presented. For example, it is said that some (but not all) that goes on in the mind is ‘accessible to consciousness.’ Of course this by itself does not so much specifies a sense of ‘conscious’ as put one in use. (One will want to ask: And just what is this ‘consciousness’ that has ‘access’ to some mental goings-on but not others, and what could ‘access’ efforts that mean in of having it anyway? However, some have evidently thought that, rather than speak of consciousness as what has access, we should understand consciousness as itself a certain kind of susceptibility to access. For example, Daniel Dennett (1969) once theorized that one's conscious states are just those whose contents are available to one's direct verbal report - or, at least, to the ‘speech centre’ responsible for generating such reports. And Ned Form (1995) has proposed that, on one understanding of ‘conscious,’ (to be found at work in many ‘cognitive’ theories of consciousness) a conscious state is just a ‘representation poised for free use in reasoning and other direct ‘rational’ control of action and speech.’ Form labels consciousness in this sense ‘excess consciousness.’
Forms’ would insist that we should distinguish phenomenal consciousness from ‘excess consciousness’, and he argues that a mental representation's being poised for use in reasoning and rational control of action is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for the state's being phenomenally conscious. Similarly he distinguishes phenomenal consciousness from what he calls ‘reflexive consciousness’ - where this has to do with one's capacity to represent one's mind's to oneself - to have, for example, thoughts about one's own thoughts, feelings, or desires. Such a conception of consciousness finds some support in a tendency to say that conscious states of mind are those one is ‘conscious of’ or ‘aware of’ being in, and to interpret this ‘of’ to indicate some kind of reflexivity is involved - wherein one represents one's own mental representations. On one prominent variant of this conception, consciousness is taken to be a kind of scanning or perceiving of one's own psychological states or processes - an ‘inner sense.’
Forming a threefold division of our phenomenon, whereby its access, and reflexive consciousness need not be taken to reflect clear and coherent distinctions already contained in our pre-theoretical use of the term ‘conscious.’ Form seems to think that (on the contrary) our initial, ordinary use of ‘conscious’ is too confused even to count as ambiguous. Thus in articulating an interpretation, or set of interpretations, of the term adequate to frame theoretical issues, we cannot simply describe how it is currently employed - we must assign it a more definite and coherent meaning than extant in common usage.
Whether or not this is correct, getting a solid ground here is not easy, and a number of theorists of consciousness would balk at proceeding on the basis of Form's proposed threefold distinction. Sometimes the difficulty may be merely terminological. John Searle, for example, would recognize phenomenal consciousness, but deny Form's other two candidates are proper senses of ‘conscious’ at all. The reality of some sort of access and reflexivity is apparently not at issue - just whether either captures a sense of ‘conscious’ (perhaps confusedly) woven into our use of the term. However, in contrast to both Form and Searle, there are also those who raise doubt that there is a properly phenomenal sense we can apply, distinct from both of the other two, for us to pick out with any term. This is not just a dispute about words, but about what there is for us to talk about with them.
The substantive issues here are very much bound up with differences over the proper way to conceive of the relationship between consciousness and intentionality. If there are distinct senses in which states of mind could be correctly said to be ‘conscious’ (answering perhaps to something like Form's three-fold distinction), then there will be distinct questions we can pose about the relation between consciousness and intentionality. But if one of Form's alleged senses is somehow fatally confused, or if he is wrong to distinguish it from the others, or if it is the sense of no term we can with warrant apply to ourselves or our states, then there will be no separate question in which it figures we should try to answer. Thus, trying to work out a reasoned view about what we are (or should be) talking about when we talk about consciousness is an unavoidable and non-trivial part of trying to understand the relation between consciousness and intentionality.
To clarify further the disputes about consciousness and their links to questions about its relation to intentionality, we need to get an initial grasp of the relevant way the terms ‘intentionality’ and ‘intentional’ are used in philosophy of mind.
Previously, some indication of why it is difficult to get a theory of consciousness started. While the term ‘conscious’ is not esoteric, its use is not easily characterized or rendered consistent in a manner providing some uncontentious framework for theoretical discussion. Where the term ‘intentional’ is concerned, we also face initially confusing and contentious usage. But here the difficulty lies partly in the fact that the relevant use of cognate terms is simply not that found in common speech (as when we speak of doing something ‘intentionally’). Though ‘intentionality,’ in the sense here at issue, does seem to attach to some real and fundamental (maybe even defining) aspect of mental phenomena, the relevant use of the term is tangled up with some rather involved philosophical history.
One way of explaining what is meant by ‘intentionality’ in the (more obscure) philosophical sense is this: it is that aspect of mental states or events that consists in their being of or about things, as pertains to the questions, ‘What are you thinking of?’ And, what are you thinking about?’ Intentionality is the aboutness or directedness of mind (or states of mind) to things, objects, states of affairs, events. So if you are thinking about San Francisco, or about the increased cost of living there, or about your meeting someone there at Union Square - your mind, your thinking, is directed toward San Francisco, or the increased cost of living, or the meeting in Union Square. To think at all is to think of or about something in this sense. This ‘directedness’ conception of intentionality plays a prominent role in the influential philosophical writings of Franz Brentano and those whose views developed in response to his.
But what kind of ‘aboutness’ or ‘of-ness’ or ‘directedness’ is this, and to what sorts of things does it apply? How do the relevant ‘intentionality-marking’ senses of these words (‘about,’ ‘of,’ ‘directed’) differ from? : the sense in which the cat is wandering ‘about’ the room; the sense in which someone is a person ‘of’ high integrity; the sense in which the river's course is ‘directed’ toward the fields?
It has been said that the peculiarity of this kind of directedness/aboutness/of-ness lies in its capacity to relate thought or experience to objects that (unlike San Francisco) do not exist. One can think about a meeting that has not, or will never occur; One can think of Shangri La, or El Dorado, or the New Jerusalem, as one may think of their shining streets, of their total lack of poverty, or their citizens' peculiar garb. Thoughts, unlike roads, can lead to a city that is not there.
But to talk in this way only invites new perplexities. Is this to say (with apparent incoherence) that there are cities that do not exist? And what does it mean to say that, when a state of mind is in fact directed toward’ something that does exist, that state nevertheless could be directed toward something that does not exist? It can well seem to be something very fundamental to the nature of mind that our thoughts, or states of mind more generally, can be of or about things or ‘point beyond themselves.’ But a coherent and satisfactory theoretical grasp of this phenomenon of ‘mental pointing’ in all its generality is difficult to achieve.
Another way of trying to get a grip on the topic asks us to note that the potential for a mental directedness toward the non-existent be evidently closely associated with the mind's potential for falsehood, error, inaccuracy, illusion, hallucination, and dissatisfaction. What makes it possible to believe (or even just suppose) something about Shangri La is that one can falsely believe (or suppose) that something exists? In the case of perception, what makes it possible to seem to see or hear what is not there is that one's experience may in various ways be inaccurate, non-existent, subject to illusion, or hallucinatory. And, what makes it possible for one's desires and intentions to be directed toward what does not and will never exist is that one’s desire and intentions can be unfulfilled or unsatisfied. This suggests another strategy for getting a theoretical hold on intentionality, employing a notion of satisfaction, stretched to encompass susceptibility to each of these modes of assessment, each of these ways in which something can either go right, or go wrong (true/false, veridical/nonveridical, fulfilled/unfulfilled), and speak of intentionality in terms of having ‘conditions of satisfaction.’ On John Searle's (1983) conception, intentional states are those having conditions of satisfaction. What are conditions of satisfaction? In the case of belief, these are the conditions under which the belief is true; Even so, the instance of perception, they are the conditions under which sense-experience is veridical: In the case of intention, the conditions under which an intention is fulfilled or carried out.
However, while the conditions of satisfaction approach to the notion of intentionality may furnish an alternative to introducing this notion by talking of ‘directedness to objects,’ it is not clear that it can get us around the problems posed by the ‘directedness’ talk. For instance, what are we to say where thoughts are expressed using names of nonexistent deities or fictional characters? Will we do away with a troublesome directedness to the nonexistent by saying that the thoughts that Zeus is Poseidon's brother, and that Hamlet is a prince, is just false? This is problematic. Moreover, how will we state the conditions of satisfaction of such thoughts? Will this not also involve an apparent reference to the nonexistent?
A third important way of conceiving of intentionality, one particularly central to the analytic tradition derived from the study of Frége and Russell whom asks us to concentrate on the notion of mental (or intentional) content. Often, it is assumed to have intentionality is to have content. And frequently mental content is otherwise described as representational or informational content - and ‘intentionality’ (at least, as this applies to the mind) is seen as just another word for what is called ‘mental representation,’ or a certain way of bearing or carrying information.
But what is meant by ‘content’ here? As a start we may note: The content of thought, in this sense, is what, is reported when answering the question, What does she think? By something of the form, ‘She thinks that p.’ And the content of thought is what two people are said to share, when they are said to think the same thought. (Similarly, that contents of belief are what two persons commonly share when they hold the same belief.) Content is also what may be shared in this way even while ‘psychological modes’ of states of mind may differ. For example: Believing that I will soon be bald and fearing that I will soon be a bald share in that the content of bald shares that I will soon be bald.
Also, commonly, content is taken as not only that which is shared in the ways illustrated, but that which differs in a way revealed by considering certain logical features of sentences we use to talk about states of mind. Notably: the constituents of the sentence that fills in for ‘p’ when we say ‘x thinks that p’ or ‘x believes that p’ are often interpreted in such a way that they display ‘failures of substitutivity’ of (ordinarily) co-referential or co-extensional expressions, and this appear to reflect differences in mental content. For example: if George W. Bush is the eldest son of the vice-president under Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush is the current US. President, then it can be validly inferred that the eldest son of Reagan's vice-president is the current US President. However, we cannot always make the same sort of substitutions of terms when we use them to report what someone believes. From the fact that you believe that George W. Bush is the current US. President, we cannot validly infer that you believe that the eldest son of Reagan's vice-president is the current US. President. That last may still be false, even if George W. Bush is indeed the eldest son. These logical features of the sentences ‘x believes that George W. Bush is the current US. President’ and ‘x believe that George W. Bush is the eldest son of Reagan's vice-president’ seem to reflect the fact that the beliefs reported by their use have different contents: these sentences are used by someone to state what is believed (the belief content), and what is believed in each case is not just the same. Someone's belief may have the one content without having the other.
Similar observations can be made for other intentional states and the reports made of them - especially when these reports contain an object clause beginning with ‘that’ and followed by a complete sentence (e.g., she thinks that p; He intends that p; She hopes that p and the fear that p; She sees that p). Sometimes it is said that the content of the states is ‘given’ by such a ‘that p’ clause when ‘p’ is replaced by a sentence - the so-called ‘content clause.’
This ‘possession of content’ conception of intentionality may be coordinated with the ‘conditions of satisfaction’ conception roughly as follows. If states of mind contrast in respect of their satisfaction (say, one is true and the other false), they differ in content. (One and the same belief content cannot be both true and false - at least not in the same context at the same time.) And if one says what the intentional content of a state of mind is, one says much or perhaps all of what conditions must be met if it is to be satisfied - what its conditions of truth, or veridicality, or fulfilment, are. But one should be alert to how the notion of content employed in a given philosopher's views is heavily shaped by these views. One should note how commonly it is held that the notion of the finding representation of content is of that way of an ambiguous or in need of refinement. (Consider, for example: Jerry Fodor's) defence of a distinction between ‘narrow’ and ‘wide’ content, as Edward Zalta’s characterlogical distinction between ‘cognitive’ and ‘objective content’ (1988), and that of John Perry's distinction between ‘reflexive' and ‘subject-matter content’.
It is arguable that each of these gates of entry into the topic of intentionality (directedness, condition of satisfaction, and mental content) opens onto a unitary phenomenon. But evidently there is also considerable fragmentation in the conceptions of both consciousness and intentionality that are in the field. To get a better grasp of some of the ways the relationship between consciousness and intentionality can be viewed, without begging questions or trying to present a positive theory on the topic, it is useful to take a look at the recent history of thinking about intentionality, in a way that will bring several issues about its relationship with consciousness to the fore. Together with the preceding discussion, this should provide the background necessary for examining some of the differences that divide those who theorize about consciousness that is very intimately involved with views of the consciousness-intentionality relation.
If we are to acknowledge the extent to which the notion of intentionality is the creature of philosophical history, we have to come to terms with the divide in twentieth century western philosophy between so-called ‘analytic’ and ‘continental’ philosophical traditions. Both have been significantly concerned with intentionality. But differences in approach, vocabulary, and background assumptions have made dialogue between them difficult. It is almost inevitable, in a brief exposition, to give largely independent summaries of the two. We will start with the ‘continental’ side of the story - more, specifically, with the Phenomenological movement in continental philosophy. However, while these traditions have developed without a great deal of intercommunication, they do have common sources, and have come to focus on issues concerning the relationship of consciousness and intentionality that are recognizably similar.
A thorough look at the historical roots of controversies over consciousness and intentionality would take us farther into the past than it is feasible to go in this article. A relatively recent, convenient starting point would be in the philosophy of Franz Brentano. He more than any other single thinker is responsible for keeping the term ‘intentional’ alive in philosophical discussions of the last century or so, with something like its current use, and was much concerned to understand its relationship with consciousness. However, it is worth noting that Brentano himself was very aware of the deep historical background to his notion of intentionality: He looked back through scholastic discussions (crucial to the development of Descartes' immensely influential theory of ideas), and ultimately to Aristotle for his theme of intentionality. One may go further back, to Plato's discussion (in the Sophist, and the Theaetetus) of difficulties in making sense of false belief, and yet further still, to the dawn of Western Philosophy, and Parmenides' attempt to draw momentous consequences from his alleged finding that it is not possible to think or speak of what is not.
In Brentano's treatment what seems crucial to intentionality is the mind's capacity to ‘refer’ or be ‘directed’ to objects existing solely in the mind - what he called ‘mental or intentional inexistence.’ It is subject to interpretation just what Brentano meant by speaking of an object existing only in the mind and not outside of it, and what he meant by saying that such ‘immanent’ objects of thought are not ‘real.’ He complained that critics had misunderstood him here, and appears to have revised his position significantly as his thought developed. But it is clear at least that his conception of intentionality is dominated by the first strand in thought about intentionality mentioned above - intentionality as ‘directedness toward an object’ - and whatever difficulty that brings in the point.
Brentano's conception of the relation between consciousness and intentionality can be brought out partly by noting he held that every conscious mental phenomenon is both directed toward an object, and always (if only ‘secondarily’) directed toward itself. (That is, it includes a ‘presentation’ - and ‘inner perception’ - of itself). Since Brentano also denied the existence of unconscious mental phenomena, this amounts to the view that all mental phenomena are, in a sense ‘self-presentational.’
His lectures in the late nineteenth century attracted a diverse group of central European intellectuals (including that great promoter of the unconscious, Sigmund Freud) and the problems raised by Brentano's views were taken up by a number of prominent philosophers of the era, including Edmund Husserl, Alexius Meinong, and Kasimir Twardowski. Of these, it was Husserl's treatment of the Brentanian theme of intentionality that was to have the widest philosophical influence on the European Continent in the twentieth century - both by means of its transformation in the hands of other prominent thinkers who worked under the aegis of ‘phenomenology’ - such as Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty - and through its rejection by those embracing the ‘deconstructionism’ of Jacques Derrida.
In responding to Brentano, Husserl also adopted his concern with properly understanding the way in which thought and experience are ‘directed toward objects.’ Husserl criticized Brentano's doctrine of ‘inner perception,’ and did not deny (even if he did not affirm) the reality of unconscious mentation. But Husserl retained Brentano's primary focus on describing conscious ‘mental acts.’ Also he believed that knowledge of one's own mental acts rests on an ‘intuitive’ apprehension of their instances, and held that one is, in some sense, conscious of each of one's conscious experiences (though he denied this meant that every conscious experience is an object of an intentional act). Evidently Husserl wished to deny that all conscious acts are objects of inner perception, while also affirming that some kind of reflexivity - one that is, however, neither judgment-like nor sense-like - is essentially built into every conscious act. But the details of the view are not easy to make out. (A similar (and similarly elusive) view was expressed by Jean-Paul Sartre in the doctrine that ‘All consciousness is a non-positional consciousness of itself.’
One of Husserl's principal points of departure in his early treatment of intentionality (in the Logical Investigations) was his criticism of (what he took to be) Brentano's notion of the ‘mental inexistence’ of the objects of thought and perception. Husserl thought it a fundamental error to suppose that the object (the ‘intentional object’) of a thought, judgment, desire, etc. is always an object ‘in’ (or ‘immanent to’) the mind of the thinker, judger, or desirer. The objects of one's ‘mental acts’ of thinking, judging, etc. are often objects that ‘transcend,’ and exist independently of these acts (states of mind) that are directed toward them (that ‘intend’ them, in Husserl's terms). This is particularly striking, Husserl thought, if we focus on the intentionality of sense perception. The object of my visual experience is not something ‘in my mind,’ whose existence depends on the experience - but something that goes beyond or ‘transcends’ any (necessarily perspectival) experience I may have of it. This view is phenomenologically based, for (Husserl says), the object is experienced as perspectivally given, hence as ‘transcendent’ in this sense.
In cases of hallucination, we should say, on Husserl's view, not that there is an object existing ‘in one's mind,’ but that the object intended does not exist at all. This does not do away with the ‘directedness’ of the experience, for that is properly understood (according to the Logical Investigations) as it is having a certain ‘matter’- where the matter of a mental act is what may be common to different acts, when, for example, one believes that it will not rain tomorrow, and hopes that it will not rain tomorrow. The difference between the mental acts illustrated (between hoping and believing) Husserl would term a difference in their ‘quality.’ Husserl was to re-interpret his notions of act-matter and quality as components of what he called (in Ideas, 1983) the ‘noema’ or ‘noematic structure’ that can be common to distinct particular acts. So intentional directedness is understood not as a relation to special (mental) objects toward which one is directed, but rather: as the possession by mental acts of matter/quality (or later, ‘noematic’) structure.
This unites Husserl's discussion with the ‘content’ conception of intentionality described above: he himself would accept that the matter of an act (later, its ‘noematic sense’) is the same as the content of judgment, belief, desire, etc., in one sense of the term (or rather, in one sense he found in the ambiguous German ‘Gestalt’). However, it is not fully clear how Husserl would view the relationship between either act-matter and noematic sense quite generally and such semantic correlates of ordinary language sentences that some would identify as the contents of states of mind reported in them. Nonetheless, this is a difficulty partly because of his later emphasis (e.g., in Experience and Judgment) on the importance of what he called ‘pre-predicative’ experience. He believed that the sort of judgments we express in ordinary and scientific languages are ‘founded on’ the intentionality of pre-predicative experience, and that it is a central task of philosophy to clarify the way in which such experience of our surroundings and our own bodies underlies judgment, and the capacity it affords us to construct an ‘objective’ conception of the world. Prepredicative experience’s are, paradigmatically, sense experience as it is given to us, independently of any active judging or predication. But did Husserl hold that what makes such experience pre-predicative is that it altogether lacks the content that is expressed linguistically in predicative judgment, or did he think that such judgment merely renders explicitly a predicative content that even ‘pre-predicative’ experience already (implicitly) has? Just what does the ‘pre-’ in ‘pre-predicative’ entail?
Perhaps this is not clear. In any case, the theme of a type of intentionality more fundamental than that involved in predicative judgments that ‘posit’ objects, and to be found in everyday experience of our surroundings, was taken up, in different ways, by later phenomenologists, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. The former describes a type of ‘directed’ ‘comportment’ toward beings in which they ‘show themselves’ as ‘ready-to-hand. Heidegger thinks this characterizes our ordinary practical involvement with our surroundings, and regards it as distinct from, and somehow providing a basis for, entities showing themselves to us as ‘present-at-hand’ (or ‘occurrent’) - as they do when we take of less context-bound, and more in a theoretical stance toward the world. Later, Merleau-Ponty (1949-1962), influenced by his study of Gestalt psychology and neurological case studies describing pathologies of perception and action, held that normal perception involves a consciousness of place tied essentially to one's capacities for exploratory and goal-directed movement, which is indeterminate relative to attempts to express or characterize it in terms of ‘objective’ representations - though it makes such an objective conception of the world possible.
Whether Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty's moves in these directions actually contradict Husserl, they clearly go beyond what he says. Another basic, exegetically complex, apparent difference between Husserl and the two later philosophers, pertinent to the relationship of consciousness and intentionality, there lies the disputation over Husserl's proposed ‘Phenomenological reduction.’ Husserl claimed it is possible (and, indeed, essential to the practice of phenomenology) that one conduct and investigation into the structure of consciousness that carefully abstains from affirming the existence of anything in spatial-temporal reality. By this ‘bracketing’ of the natural world, by reducing the scope of one's assertions first to the subjective sphere of consciousness, then to its abstract (or ‘ideal’) atemporal structure, one is able to apprehend what consciousness. Its various forms essentially are, in a way that supplies a foundation to the philosophical study of knowledge, meaning and value. Both Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty (along with a number of Husserl's other students) appear to have questioned whether it is possible to reduce one's commitments as thoroughly as Husserl appears to have prescribed through a ‘mass abstention’ from judgment about the world, and thus whether it is correct to regard one's intentional experience as a whole as essentially detachable from the world at which it is directed. Seemingly crucial to their doubts about Husserl's reduction is their belief that an essential part of intentionality consists in a distinctively practical involvement with the world that cannot be broken by any mere abstention from judgment.
The Phenomenological themes just hinted at (the notion of a ‘pre-predicative’ type of intentionality; the (un)detachability of intentionality from the world) link with issues regarding consciousness and intentionality as these are understood outside the Phenomenological tradition - in particular, the notion of non-conceptual content, and the internalism/externalism debate, to be considered in Section (4). But it is by no means a straightforward matter to describe these links in detail. Part of the reason lies in the general difficulty in being clear about whether what one philosopher means by ‘consciousness’ (or its standard translations) is close enough to what another means for it to be correct to see them as speaking to the same issues. And while some of the Phenomenological philosophers (Brentano, Husserl, Sartre) make thematically central use of terms cognate with ‘consciousness’ and ‘intentionality,’ and consider questions about intentionality first and foremost as questions about the intentionality of consciousness, they do not explicitly address much that (in the latter half of the twentieth century) came to seem problematic about consciousness and intentionality. Is their ‘consciousness’ the phenomenal kind? Would they reject theories of consciousness that reduce it to a species of access to content? If so, on what grounds? (Given their interest in the relation of consciousness, inner perception, and reflection, it may be easier to discern what their stances on reductive ‘higher order representation’ theories of consciousness would be.)
In some ways the situation is more difficult still in the cases of Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger. For the former, though he willingly enough uses’ words standardly translated as ‘consciousness’ and ‘intentionality,’ says little to explain how he understands such terms generally. And the latter deliberately avoid these terms in his central work, Being and Time, in order to forge a philosophical vocabulary free of errors in which they had, he thought, become enmeshed. However, it is not obvious how to articulate the precise difference between what Heidegger rejects, in rejecting the alleged error-laden understanding of ‘consciousness’ and ‘intentionality’, or their German translations, by what he accepts when he speaks of being to his ‘showing’ or ‘disclosing’ them to us, and of our ‘comportment’ directed toward them.
Nevertheless, one can plausibly read Brentano's notion of ‘presentation’ as equivalent to the notion of phenomenally conscious experience, as this is understood in other writers. For Brentano says, ‘We speak of presentation whenever something appears to us.’ And one may take ways of appearing as equivalent to ways of seeming, in the sense proper to phenomenal consciousness. Further, Brentano's attempt to state that through his analysis as described through that of ‘descriptive or Phenomenological psychology,’ became atypically based on how intentional manifestations are to present of themselves, the fundamental kinds to which they belong and their necessary interrelationships, may plausibly be interpreted as an effort to articulate the philosophical salient, highly general phenomenal character of intentional states (or acts) of mind. And Husserl's attempts to delineate the structure of intentionality as it is ‘given’ in consciousness, as well as the Phenomenological productions of Sartre, can arguably be seen as devoted to laying bare to thought the deepest and most general characteristics of phenomenal consciousness, as they are found in ‘directed’ perception, judgment, imagination, emotion and action. Also, one might reasonably regard Heideggerean disclosure of the ready-to-hand and Merleau-Ponty's ‘motor-intentional’ consciousness of place as forms of phenomenally conscious experience - as long as one's conception of phenomenal consciousness is not tied to the notion that the subjective ‘sphere’ of consciousness is, in essence, independent of the world revealed through it.
In any event, to connect classic Phenomenological writings with current discussions of consciousness and its relation to intentionality, more background is needed on aspects of the other main current of Western philosophy in the past century particularly relevant to the topic of intentionality - broadly labelled ‘analytic’.
It seems fair to say that recent work in philosophy of mind in the analytic tradition that has focussed on questions about the nature of intentionality (or ‘mental content’) has been most formed not by the writings of Brentano, Husserl and their direct intellectual descendants, but by the seminal discussions of logico-linguistic concerns found in Gottlob Frége's (1892) ‘On Sense and Reference,’ and Bertrand Russell's ‘On Denoting’ (1905).
But Frége and Russell's work comes from much the same era, and from much the same intellectual environment as Brentano and the early Husserl. And fairly clear points of contact have long been recognized, such as: Russell's criticism of Meinong's ‘theory of objects’, derived from the problem of intentionality, which led him to countenance objects, such as the golden mountain, that are capable of being the object of thought, although they do not exist. This doctrine was one of the principal theories of Russell’s theory of definite descriptions. However, it came as part of a complex and interesting package of concepts in the theory of meaning and scholars are not united in supposing that Russell was fair to it.
The similarities between Husserl's meaning/object distinction (in Logical Investigation I) and Frége's (prior) sense/reference distinction. Indeed the case has been influentially made (by Follesdal 1969, 1990) that Husserl's ‘meaning/object’ distinction is borrowed from Frége (though with a change in terminology) and that Husserl's ‘noema’ is properly interpreted as having the characteristics of Frégean ‘sense.’
Nonetheless, a number of factors make comparison and integration of debates within the two traditions complicated and strenuous. Husserl's notion of noema (hence his notion of intentionality) is most fundamentally rooted, not in reflections on the logical features of language, but in a contrast between the object of an intentional act, and the object ‘as intended’ (the way in which it is intended), and in the idea that a structure would remain to perceptual experience, even if it were radically non-veridical. And what Husserl seeks is a ‘direct’ characterization of this (and other) kinds of experience from the point of view of the experiencer. On the other hand, Frége and Russell's writings bearing on the topic of intentionality concentrate mainly and most explicitly on issues that grow from their own pioneering achievements in logic, and have given rise to ways of understanding mental states primarily through questions about the logic and semantics of the language used to speak of them.
Broadly speaking, logico-linguistic concerns have been methodologically and thematically dominant in the analytic Frége-Russell tradition, while the Phenomenological Brentano-Husserl lineage is rooted in attempts to characterize experience as it is evident from the subject's point of view. For this reason perhaps, discussions of consciousness and intentionality are more obviously intertwined from the start in the Phenomenological tradition than in the analytic one. The following sketch of relevant background in the latter case will, accordingly, most directly concern the treatment of intentionality. But by the end, the bearing of this on the treatment of consciousness in analytic philosophy of mind will have become more evident, and it will be clearer how similar issues concerning the consciousness-intentionality relationship arise in each tradition.
Central to Frége's legacy for discussions of mental or intentional content has been his distinction between ‘sense’ (Sinn) and ‘reference’ (Bedeutung), and his application in his distinction is to cope with an apparent failure of substitutivity to something of an ordinary co-referential expression. In that contexts created by psychological verbs, the sort mentioned in exposition of the notion of mental content - a task important to his development of logic. The need for a distinction between the sense and reference of an expression became evident to Frége, when he considered that, even if ‘a’ is identical to ‘b’, and you understand both ‘a’ and ‘b,’ still, it can be for you a discovery, an addition to your knowledge, that a = b. This is intelligible, Frége thought, only if you have different ways of understanding the expressions ‘a’ and ‘b’ - only if they involve for your distinct ‘modes of presentation’ of the self-same object to which they refer. In Frége's celebrated example: you may understand the expressions ‘The Morning Star’ and ‘The Evening Star’ and use them to refer to what is one and the same object - the planet Venus. But this is not sufficient for you to know that the Morning Star is identical with the Evening Star. For the ways in which an object (‘the reference’) is ‘given’ to your mind when you employ these expressions (the senses or Sinne you ‘grasp’ when you use them) may differ in such a manner that ignorance of astronomy would prevent your realizing that they are but two ways in which the same object can be given.
The relevance of all this to intentionality becomes clearer, once we see how Frége applied the sense/reference distinction to whole sentences. The sentence, ‘The Evening Star = The Morning Star’ has a different sense than the sentence ‘The Evening Star = The Evening Star’, even if their reference (according to Frége, their truth value) is the same. The failure of substitutivity of co-referential expressions in ‘that p’ contexts created by psychological verbs can consequently be understood (Frége proposed) in this way: The reference of the terms shifts in these contexts, so that, for example, ‘the Evening Star’ no longer refers to its customary reference (the planet Venus), but to a sense that functions, for the subject of the verb (the person who thinks, judges, desires) as his or her mode of presentation of this object. The sentence occurring in this context no longer refers to its truth value, but to the sense in which the mode of presentation is embedded - which might otherwise be called the ‘thought’ - or, by other philosophers, the ‘content’ of the subject's state of mind. This thought or content representation is to be understood not as a mental image, or literally as anything essentially private is the assemblage of its thinking mind - but as one and the same abstract entity that can be ‘grasped’ by two minds, and that must be so grasped if communication is to occur.
While on the surface this story may appear to be only about logic and semantics, and though Frége did not himself elaborate a general account of intentionality, what he says readily suggests the following picture. Intentional states of mind - thinking about Venus, wishing to visit it - involve some special relation (such as ‘mental grasping’)- not ‘in one's mind,’ nor to any imagery, but to an abstractive entity, a thought, which also constitutes the sense of a linguistic expression that can be used to report one's state of mind, a sense that is grasped or understood by speakers who use it.
This style of account, together with the Frégean thesis that ‘sense determines reference,’ and the history of criticisms both have elicited, form much of the background of contemporary discussions of mental content. It is often assumed, with Frége, that we must recognize (as some thinkers in the empiricist tradition allegedly did not) that thoughts or contents cannot consist in images or essentially private ‘ideas.’ But philosophers have frequently criticized Frége's view of thought as some abstract entity ‘grasped’ or ‘present to’ the mind, and have wanted to replace Frége's unanalyzed ‘grasping’ with something more ‘naturalistic.’
Relatedly, it may be granted that the content of the thought reported is to be identified with the sense of the expression with which we report it. But then, it is argued, the identity of this content will not be determined individualistically, and may, in some respect’s lay beyond the grasp (or not be fully ‘present to’ the mind of) the psychological subject. For what determines the reference of an expression may be a natural causal relation to the world - as influentially argued is true for proper names, like ‘Nixon’ and ‘Cicero,’ and ‘natural kind’ terms like ‘gold’ and ‘water.’ Or (as Tyler Burge (1979) has influentially argued) two speakers who, considered as individuals, are qualitatively the same, may nevertheless each assert something different simply because of differing relations they bear to their respective linguistic communities. (For example, what one speaker's utterance of ‘arthritis’ means is determined not by what is ‘in the head’ of that speaker, but by the medical experts in his or her community.) And, if referentially truth conditions of expressions by which one's thought is reported or expressed are not determined by what is in one's head, and the content of one's thought determines their reference and truth conditions, then the content of one's thought is also not determined individualistically. Rather, it is necessarily bound up with one's causal relations to certain natural substances, and one's membership in a certain linguistic community. Both linguistic meaning and mental contents are ‘externally’ determined.
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