Problem of Consciousness

Abstract There has been much said about consciousness, but too often the right questions are not being asked. In this paper, the author sets out to press certain “limit questions” that raise both matters of epistemological constraints in the inquiry and issues in metaphysical speculations about this thing called consciousness (and whether it names anything real at all?). Various candidates for a partial or (doubtfully) complete description of consciousness are entertained, before moving on to propose certain basic characteristics that would appear to be basic and in need of further explication. Drawing from critical phenomenology, these are identified as the surprising traits of intentionality , subjectivity (or deep self-awareness and the unconscious), and historicality of consciousness. On the metaphysical side, the paper concludes by arguing against faith in both the dualism of mind/spirit over matter, and reductionist materialism or physicalism, leaving open a qualia-based model of decentralized conscious states. Consciousness by any other name? – some outstanding problems. Is consciousness any of these?: an event a process a substance a property of a property (qualia) a function of some other event or process an extension (of mind, of corporeality) momentary contentless mental movements time-sequenced awareness contents utterly contingent experiential apperception eliminative product Of course, these are not the exhaustive categories in terms of which consciousness has been described or analysed in accounts that abound the various fields investigating the phenomenon apparently unique in at least the living human constitution. I do not have a particular theory to propound, but wish to take this opportunity to register some of the questions and issues that, for me at least, remain outstanding or insufficiently addressed. I believe there is a good deal of high-fluting scholasticism matched only by extreme cynicism and positivism in the inquiry; and yet there are certain insights that need to be highlighted in such discussions as we are engaged in here at the symposium, but these may come from unexpected quarters. One of the questions that we have not dealt with but which gets a fair degree of attention these days in the literature is that of intentionality (fn see JNM, Chalmers, Searle). So I will begin with this observation before moving on to other more ontological and metaphysical questions. All conscious experience appear to have the characteristic of being intentional, i.e. whenever we have some awareness that state of consciousness (even if it is without any specific form) tends towards or is directed towards some object or other (however obliquely). No other part of our body or bodily state seems to possess this characteristic, unless consciousness is already involved even at a most primitive, subconscious level. For instance, the finger may pull itself away from the flame or the syringe as a stimulus of pain, but the finger does not in and of itself refer to the object of likely pain, or is is any sense about the stimulus of pain in the way in which awareness, cognition, feeling, memory, anxiety, fear and such other consciousness states in such an occurrence are precisely of or about (the object) of pain. The pain when it occurs may itself become an internal object or noetic content of consciousness Without consciousness it seems the body is not in a dis-position to direct itself toward the world or anything outside (although perhaps in the comatose state of a brain-dead person or in the analogues to deep sleep, parts of the body continue to interact with each other through the complicated nervous system and organic functions that keep going as long as there is life force in the body). In short, then, we experience consciousness not directly but in the course of an awareness that is of or about something; there is no such moment as ‘pure’ non-intending consciousness. Unless, of course, we mean by the latter some primitive, inchoate mental space momentarily absent of content, nonetheless expectant of it (as in dreamy or drowsy states, or in a dash of anguished rage where the subject has lost sight of that to whom or which the anger is directed, an some innocent by-stander or the family pet cops the heat). Apart from certain strains of mysticism which are not necessarily based on empirically sustainable phenomenological data that is accessible across the spectrum, there is no good evidence to believe that consciousness is a formless, without parts and in essence non-intentional as the diyen of Advaita Vedanta, Sankara had argued back in the 8th century. As Professor Mohanty has pointed out elegantly elsewhere, Indian philosophers and mystic theosophies alike tend to conflate something not having form, or parts, nor a locus, with not being intentional; even the distinction between something being act or being a state, and being without form or without parts, or bereft of location and non-referential re-identification (‘ego’), can be critical in such matters, as the debate between the Nyaya, the Mimamsa, and Buddhist on the structure of consciousness (or conscious-ing moment from the Buddhist perspective) have attested to. (fn) But we cannot go into this intricate debate here, suffice to note that a thorough critique of faith in ‘pure’ consciousness (or the presumed stark opposition between ‘asmad’ and ‘yusmat’ – self as consciousness and the other – on the flawed analogy of light to darkness, fn PB), leads to the unavoidable conclusion of the basic intentional character of consciousness. This is not to argue for the ‘essence’ of consciousness, for to admit to any essence would be to suggest already that there is such an existent as consciousness, when in fact, following the wisdom of the Buddhist philosophers and reports from modern science, consciousness may well turn out to be a convenient naming term for what is basically a process, an event, a momentary series of awareness-(mental) states that arise and disappear with each apprehension of an object or more likely the concept of the object, and held together contingently by another unifying and slightly more enduring mental state, individuated or, as it were, pegged down to a virtual-spatial locus (roughly around or within the body), that acts as the ‘owner’ of the intentional series, which we call the ‘ego’, or what manifests itself in its self-reference as ‘I’, or (more theoretically) as the transcendental subjectivity (in neo-Kantian terms, where ‘transcendental’ is a phenomenological and not a metaphysical ideal for an experiencing subject or person). The foregoing analysis thus far, then, has made a strong case for intentionality within any discourse of consciousness. This has been one of the great discoveries attributed widely to Husserlian phenomenology, although Ramanuja (the 12th century Indian philosopher) was also insistent upon this trait, albeit more on metaphysical grounds than from any studied empirical or phenomenological consideration, but all the richer for it within the Vedanta discourse). This fact about consciousness has huge ramifications for any systematic study thereof, one of which is that it should prove theoretically difficult to isolate consciousness as a substance (in a vat for example, or in supposedly deep meditate state), that is not at the same time in relation to some other thing or things – and it is hard to see how a thing could be in relation to itself, as is often implied in the Vedanta (Advaitic) utterances about the self-luminosity of atman as sui generis consciousness (cit). I fail to see what certain experiments such as the arrestive ECG and probes into the neural chemistry or anatomy of the brain can yield when these seem scantly attentive to the dimension of intentionality, not as a side-product, but as a correlate part of what constitutes (or is constitutive of ) consciousness. It is not unlike the situation where an etymologist thinks he can pronounce on the meaning of a sentence as a speech-act simply by discerning the root denotation of each word in the sentence in its formal structure. Like meaning, that can vary with each utterance or occurrence of the same sentence (depending on the context, norms of interpretation, disposition of the audience, etc.), consciousness too appears to have this peculiar subjective dimension which cannot be easily, reductively, extricated or suspended for want of a ‘clean’ analytic or scientific account. But this does not necessarily affect eliminative accounts which are also reductive to a degree. But before saying something more on the heuristic significance of such accounts, I wish to say something about another model I have in mind, which I call the ‘ideality’ of consciousness, in terms of which certain hard-headed assumptions that have been around so long can be eliminated. By ‘ideality’ I mean to underscore several points at once. In the most general terms, ideality can be taken to mean ‘just the very idea of’ or paradigm of controlling ideas (as perhaps when we think of ‘ideology’ in the Hegelian sense); but in more specialized terms, it would suggest something like a capacity for formal abstraction, a geometry or architectonic if you like, which lends itself to conceptual or discursive analysis. Ideality covers certain specific and in many ways inexplicable characteristics of consciousness alongside intentionality. These are capacities of higher mental order, much besides sensations, reactions, and similar light-weight empirical measure of the presence or ‘facticity’ of consciousness (to avoid talk of ‘essences’). And these, mind you, still cry out for explanation or adequate integration within all accounts of consciousness. Let me list a few of these elements: Subjectivity (self-conscious apperception) The capacity for a priori concepts Categories of understanding Moral intuitions Historical sense (individually and collectively) Aesthetic experiences Compassion Time and space fore-grounds Language Logic and reason Extension or universalization These capacities, tendencies, or dispositions do not just happen to us and they are not as easily reducible to psychological traits as more simple-minded psychologistic or positivistic accounts would have it: just my sense that there is an extended temporal space and several sites or locations outside of the extremities of my individual body is not (as far as I can tell) experienced by, for example, inanimate thing such as the table I am sitting on and the computer I am writing on (or even by the deceased body that I dreamt of last night in its blissful self-folding sleep of oblivion to my concerns about its proper ritual disposal). Notice that I am also, unlike the table, able to describe my behaviour and make decisions about what to write (if the inspiration moves me!). In other words, I am a subject, who has a range of experiences which are episodically or periodically brought under an ‘I’, often described as the unity or apperception of the all experiences connected mereologically in a series. How can we explain this sense of awe at being a drop in the vast panorama of phenomenon coupled with being self-conscious?. Subjectivity – which is a major category heading the list under ‘Ideality’ – presents a major challenge to all accounts of consciousness, especially, naturalist, reductive, and eliminative ones. But is this subjectivity an act, and event, a property, or whether it is nailed, so to speak, solidly onto a substance of some kind? One of the enduring virtues of the Cartesian model – despite its dualistic excess on which I will comment in a moment – is that by focusing on the mental , the ‘ghost inside’, it kept this challenge in the fore-front and has continued to rear its cinematic head to critique unbending naturalist accounts. Many traditions have wondered who is the ‘I’ that sees and hears, that listens and speaks, that thinks and writes, and even thinks about thinking? But then scholastic tendencies in these traditions have tended to run far off the immediate questions only to bring back, as it were bigger ghosts and mysteries from afar to explain this small mystery – such as God, Brahman, universal Atman, spirit-self, and (in Descartes’ case in European thought and echoing the Nyaya’s case in Indian thought) a mental non-material substance (mind or spiritual self) that is separate and independent of the corporeal body (physical matter, biological nervous system and brain), that makes possible this self-consciousness of an extended being (res extensa) amidst all the furniture of the universe. Ontological dualism, however, has not got us very far, and if anything – going by current wisdom in Philosophy – has rather got in the way of clear thinking in respect of this inquiry. The problem has not so much been in what we have been led to believe on the mind (or the broadly spiritual) side of the equation but in respect of the tacit intuition about the material substance. As David Ray Griffin has pointed out (rephrased by George Shields, fn) that the Cartesian formula of res extensa as representing the essence of matter has impacted on both the materialist and the dualist traditions alike: “(S)ince consciousness has been regarded as the opposite of extended matter, those who presuppose Cartesian matter are then logically forced into two divergent paths, each rife with difficulty and paradox: either completely reduce consciousness to extended matter (or eliminate consciousness entirely) or ontologically separate it from the material domain. On the first option, we end up with a most implausible denial of the reality of consciousness and its qualia, and, on the second, we give up naturalism and thus introduce notions of occult agency (among other perplexities)’. Kisor Chakrabarti’s attempt – here closely following the Nyaya ontology - to shift the burden of extension (vibhu) from material substance to the non-material substance called atma (self) does not get us out of this paradox, as it leads to reducing consciousness in the other direction (the purely spiritual, the ‘occult agency’), without providing a satisfactory answer to the major question of how can substances of entirely different nature or kind be said to interact at all? Well, perhaps we ought to recognize this unique suggestion that coming from the Nyaya for what it is worth. Namely, that, unlike as in Cartesian dualism where it is the material substance (the body and its sense-organs) that has extension, in the Nyaya, it is the essence of the self, the non-material substance, to have vibhu or (literally ‘pervasion’) that makes possible this extension (the mystic-disembodied self extended to other, even distant, egological bases is rendered as vibhuti and may claim to itself yogic awareness of others’ mental states thereby, notwithstanding problems of individuation, confusion of ego-identities, and zealous expropriations). But how exactly this inversion of the source of extension helps solve problems in dualism is not clear (, see Foster review). There is a same old causal impasse here as in the Cartesian (or any other) model of mind-body dualism qua realist ontology (as distinct from aspectual or discourse dualisms). The analogy of my thought moving the pen (or to a post-modernist, the act of writing re-inscribing ideas in the head) will not work in the context of accounting for how the mental or spiritual substance, which has none of the properties of matter (and cannot even be said to occupy space for that matter or spirit), could move the physical (or vice versa), and not just whisk right through the physical base (body, brain, pineal point) as low-frequency radio waves do without necessarily breaking into sound or noise at every point. We are left with an unworkable epiphenomenalism. Moreover, ascribing states of consciousness to the disembodied self (atma) as a property (guna) or qualia – which is really the heart of the Nyaya account of consciousness - presents the further difficulty of separately establishing the existence of atma, which is an even more formidable challenge than establishing a non-materialistic Cartesian mind. It is interesting though that the ‘mind’ is more akin to the Aristotelian communis sensus (the ‘common sense’) as virtually the sixth sense-organ and yet distinct from the body and its basic sense-organs. However, locating the mind an a cognitive-affective hermes or conduit in some nebulous space between the given material substance (constituting the body and its sense-organs) and a supposed spiritual substance does not resolve the problem of a more plausible explanation of just how it is that two entirely and essentially different kinds of substance can work through a medium that does not share the properties (fully or even partially) of one side of the divide.(Just the same problems arise for other Indian accounts: in respect of the ‘inner sense’ antahkarana in Vedanta, ‘intelligence’, manas-citta in Samkya-Yoga, and in Mimamsa with its own variant concept of the ‘mind-function’, manapratyaya, although not a supplemental sense-organ). There is something missing here in all these accounts; and what is missing is not some thing but an explanation of the transparency of atma (spiritual self-substratum) to the body qua mind and vice versa. It is often said that at death the atma, like the electricity in the table lamp, departs from the body, and cripples or renders dysfunctional the mind, like the globe of varying voltage and amps, and there is no possibility of consciousness states thereafter . But what is this an evidence of? The absence of evidence to the contrary does not amount to evidence of absence. It seems that we need to free ourselves from the erstwhile polarity of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, i.e. of trying to locate consciousness within the mortal frame (whether in the cinema of the ‘Cartesian theatre’, the supposedly non-physical mind), or, in some single spot within the body, such as the brain, much less in a single spot within the brain (the ‘Center of Narrative Gravity’). Our mental life, and if intentionality that I spoke of earlier is anything to go by, is located neither outside in the world, nor inside our body. Perhaps in the new language that we are desperately in need of here we may have to speak of consciousness as that which is both constituted by and constitutive of the body (or brain) and the mind (as the meaning-act). This sure does sound circular, but it is not viciously so; it is defeasible. Because, what we are trying to do is to avoid the both the horns of the Cartesian-implied dilemma that we pointed to a moment ago: (i) the mind (alone) is responsible for consciousness; (ii) the natural world is itself generative of consciousness. I am tempted to say, consciousness begins with (i), and matures with (ii), and yet – when we take in the historical dimension or long-term persistence of consciousness as of time (which is how I would re-write Heidegger’s much clichéd ‘Being and Time’) – consciousness curiously also constitutes (i) and (ii). By historical consciousness I mean the collective repository or archeology of human experiences. There is, as it were, a cumulative growth of consciousness states, layers upon layers, like fossils, now perhaps inert but and once upon a time every bit was consciously felt and owned (or ‘loved’) by some living agency. The agents may be‘ dead’ or mute but the traces or subtle effects, as it were, are brought forward as many artifacts, testimonies, records, achievements, merits and sins, values and aspirations – indeed, history in that more Hegelian sense – from generation to generation, epoch to epoch, and so on. How dare we leave consciousness out of the movement and trajectory of history, human and other sentient history (unless, we have moved through life like stars and galaxies governed by unself-conscious hidden laws of nature)? For, the very sense of history is the collective self-consciousness and reflection upon the folding layers of qualias, such as are attached to whole groups’, races’, or communities ‘I’s (or ‘we’s), replicating in many ways the individual’s narratives and life-stories writ large (as when we speak of civilizations, the preserve of cultures, transcendental self-identity of enclosed communities, etc.). This back-logged consciousness also creates us in a manner of speaking; meaning that each individual (body-mind complex) inherits or imbibes fragments (in Hindustani there is a universalizing poetic image of ‘chand ka tukra’, ‘bits of the moon’) of the collectively conscious subjectivity or transcendental qualia (again, in a contingently historical rather than pre-designed ontological sense), that enable (or em-power) many a capacity, or identifies us as distinct individuals belonging to distinct communities, not least of which are speech-language or lingua franca, discourse, self-story or social identity, moral values, religion, aspirations, and so on. And we pass these on, somewhat transformed, evolved or regressed, often without self-conscious authorial imprimatur) to the next generation, ad infinitum. We should not loose sight of this unique dimension of consciousness, which I have called constitutive enough though it may only be correlative, but like history, the next moment is never the same because it is ‘interpreted’ or formed and fused through the antecedent moments. This was the genius also of the Buddhist theory of consciousness in its recognition of the branching effect, the mereological spread over finite time of a self-narrating, self-referring, stream of conscious-ing moments held together in a loosely unified field, we like to call ‘self’ (not as an irreducible substance here), whose present self-awareness and knowledge of the world are supervenient upon properties and relations left-over from the all the past experiences (conscious-ing states), and whose future is likewise determined by or is a mere trajectory of the vanishing present. Beneath all this noise so to speak, and beyond also, is nothing but emptiness – meaning, no-self, no-soul, no-mind, no-God, no-Brahman, no-Absolute, just nothingness. (There are, of course, subtleties and differences within Buddhist schools, such as Yogacara and Sautrantika and Madhyamika that we need not go into here). Coming back to the point about the historicality of consciousness and its cumulative effect on consciousness experiences in every next moment, this however in itself might not, as it clearly need not be, essential to consciousness, for if there were just one person (a purusha) in the whole universe who lived only temporarily without progeny (aprajapati) we would not necessarily want to deny consciousness to the Mahapurusha. The difference nevertheless will be in the qualia of consciousness, the properties that is, which will be one of degree rather than of kind, just so as your or my consciousness which has refracted through many previous prisms of conscious qualias. Suffice it however to show that consciousness is something, it is profoundly enigmatic but a sure remainder in human experiences. This would suggest an irreducible core within consciousness or at least in the explanations and definitions of consciousness. Now this has been a moot issue and subject of much debate in recent works in philosophy and psychology on consciousness. But reductionism is alive and well in several quarters, some more ruthlessly eliminative than others. For example, Daniel Dennett does not believe that irreducibility in respect of the arresting mystery of subjectivity is such a big deal: that is to say, the reference to the subjective, to intentionality, can be carved off, and these too can be reduced to ordinary biological, physical features of the brain (qua Searle and the Churchlands), and exhaustively redefined in third-person (ordinary thing-language) descriptions and criteria (e.g. our experience of heat is redefined in terms of kinetic energy that increases mean temperature) . Such a redefinition eliminates any reference to the subjective appearances, the way heat or colour appears to individuals (p 187 Dreek). There are some philosophers, such as Thomas Nagel, who have resisted ironing out the perspectivism of persons into the smooth objectivity of the world of physics, still believe that there is at least an epistemological irreducibility of mental processes to brain states that calls into question all attempts at one-sided elimination. He has argued, that ‘(t)he subjectivity of consciousness is an irreducible feature of reality – without which we couldn’t do physics or anything else – and it must occupy as fundamental a place in any credible world view as matter, energy, space, time, and numbers (1986, 7f)’. Any ‘correct theory of the relation between mind and body would radically transform our overall conception of the world and would require a new understanding of the phenomenon now thought of as physical. Even though the manifestations of mind evident to us are local – they depend on our brains and similar organic structures – the general basis of this aspect of reality is not local, but must be presumed to inhere in the general constituents of the universe and the laws that govern them.’ (1986, 8). Nagel’s epistemic non-reducibility (with a remainder) reinforces the point I have trying to press here about the involvement of the larger picture, so to speak, of the world as a constitutive element in the emergence of consciousness, neither inside in the brain nor wholly outside in the heavens: but in the matrix that holds them together in an organic whole. Again, I agree with Nagel that the same entity (substance) can have causally emergent physical and mental properties; this is called by Nagel, and others, the ‘dual-aspect theory’; I prefer to call it, non-dual emergentism. This position does not argue for a wholesale elimination of mental concepts (mentalese has a central role to play) in the explanation; but nor does non-eliminative view of our mental world imply that be succumb to some version of ontological transcendentalism or the ‘mystical’ within subjectivity and intentionality! Such a position, which echoes recent developments in Process Para-Philosophy (fn), retains intact a common sense commitment to non-reductionist naturalism, while at the same time assuming a broad ‘radically empiricist’ notion of the data a theory ought to accommodate, including the capacity for nonsensory (‘extra-sensory’) perception, by virtue of admitting a role for the Nyaya’s notion of mensa extensa, the mind as having its own extension (in cohorts with res extensa within an organized division of labour). This overcomes the difficulties of accounting for the emergence of consciousness and its properties from purely extensional matter on the one hand, and pristinely extensional psyche on the other hand. The same substance can have both these correlative qualias or aspects. Still, a further argument is needed to explain how these can be constitutive or productive of consciousness. We are burdened, indeed haunted, by the same sort of problem that arises in attempting to make links from observing behaviour and properties of neurons and synaptic responses to stimuli inserted and observed from without to subjective states and intentionality experienced within; and vice versa. For want of space, to bring this discussion to a close, let me highlight again some salient issues and features of consciousness that I here uncovered in order that discussion moves forward rather than backward in the multi-disciplinary inquiry that we are all engaged in. Here are 10 significant points (with two supplements) I have argued for in this short analysis: consciousness is the name for the preeminent principle of awareness in every day experience that is responsible for making an occurrent self-consciously (or self-awareingly) an experience: it is what illuminates an experience – we may call this the conscious mind; consciousness has no particular form but takes the form or contours of the occurrent experiences which the awareness shadows or witnesses, albeit not as an entity distinct from sensations, feelings, cognitions and other mental states as mapped in phenomenological analysis; awareness may be submerged or suspended as in unself-conscious processes, dreams and deep sleep states – or the unconscious; there is (either way) an irreducible core of subjectivity and intentionality that makes the conscious mind more than all sensations, bodily ascriptions, experiences, including the “I-sense” and moral knowledge; it is thus more than the physiological-neural and synaptic-receptor, etc. activities inside the brain or sense-organs (manas included); the processes and brain mechanisms observed or chartered from outside (or yogically, i.e. mystical-meditative introspection) yield at best correlates and not what is constitutive of consciousness in all its complexity; basically, consciousness is constituted by and constitutive of the world (recurrently birthing) within a historical and social-cultural process; this is the horizon of the transcendental subjectivity into which the individuated subjectivity is fused; in other words, the ‘Gravity of Narrative’ extends beyond the individual ‘owner’ to the larger cumulative historical dimension that constitutes the world and interactively the qualias of all consciousness (i.e. differentially spaced branching streams of conscious-ings each of which creates its own contingent ‘I-feeling’ ) it follows from 4 and 8 above that consciousness is not a substance (materialistic or spiritual and non-corporeal) but a qualia (or intertwined clusters of qualias) and there is no such thing as ‘pure consciousness’ in the metaphysical sense (it could be transcendental in the phenomenological sense, as in the ‘inner core structuring noema’) we need principles of phenomenological supervenience (a depends for its arising on b ceteris paribus), mereological apperception (identity is generated from within the series), and a more inclusive ontology of non-dual naturalism (aspectual or property dualism within ‘natural’ philosophy) to re-define and refine our understanding of consciousness this would help eradicate outmoded discourses of mind-body dualism and epiphenomenalism (Cartesian and Indian), false identifications (upadi, adhyasa) of consciousness with Self, Soul, Spirit, God, Brahman, Absolute, Nirvana- or Svarga-bhokta (each of whose existence remains in doubt); By such a test, we will have put the Grand Narrative of the Mind to rest.