Consciousness 4: What is self-consciousness? (western philosophical perspective) (v1.0)

A key reference is Prof Daniel N Robinson of Oxford University. 

What is self-consciousness? What is it like to be the subject of the experience (thinking, desire, feelings, etc)? Can we ever know what it is like to be somebody else - say a bat or even another person? There are many dimensions to a study of consciousness (like evolutionary perspective, neurological perspective, philosophical perspective, and psychological perspective). Here I will focus on only philosophical aspects - primarily a western philosophy perspective (eastern philosophy perspective is very different). The views here are not harmonized with views from other dimensions. 

There is a difference between unreflective and reflective consciousness. The reflective conscious experience humans experience invariably includes self-consciousness, but also the focus is the self as the subject. But what or who is this self? One line of thought is that many things change about us from moment to moment and there should be continuity across time, therefore there can be no durable self. Another line of thought is a thing is what it is essentially, even if a number of changes occur accidentally over time. Let us say Smith, a male, as a young person learnt the violin. We say smith is a male essentially, and a musician accidentally. John Locke distinguishes between real and nominal essences. He says personal identity is not in the identity of substance but in the identity of consciousness (spatial temporal experiences and memory). A self-conscious being knows its self-knowledge intuitively. All factual knowledge though comes from experience. If self-knowledge is intuitive, how can we ever know there are other minds? Also, to know oneself intuitively leaves room for the possibility of a mistake. How can we really know if it is necessarily true and real?

The subject of consciousness is among the most vexing in both western philosophy and science, and no less tractable in psychology, where the conceptual problems are often neglected. Philosophers agree that the most important question to be answered in our era is consciousness. They agree that there is nothing we know subjectively more intimately than consciousness, but there is nothing that is harder to explain. Interestingly it is a completely taken for granted condition for our lives, but explaining it is hugely vexing to philosophers. To understand why, we need to go back and look at metaphysics. 

Metaphysics was invented by Aristotle and is about what really is. Metaphysics studies the fundamental nature of reality. Two ideas explored are causation and the essence or substance of a being. I don’t want to dive deep into metaphysics in this blog, but the net result is that If consciousness is just a code word for an entity whose substantial nature or essence is a self-reflecting mental state and is not reduceable to anything physical, then the problem of consciousness is beyond the reach of physical analysis, and therefore physics is not complete. So, any complete definition of reality cannot be rendered solely in physical terms. The question also arises – what is anything at all if not some representation in some consciousness?  Is the universe really there? 

These arguments really cause major problems for philosophy. Some think we need to bridge the gap between physical and consciousness to complete physics.  But this gap is not just in consciousness. Everything in social, civic life also has this gap. All of them resist translation to the language of physics. When real life enters the picture, we seem to have gaps all over the place!! How do we bridge this explanation gap? Many philosophers believe the gap needs to be filled by connecting the neurological physical processes in the brain to consciousness as experienced by some causal law. They believe these explanations would be much more foundational and higher quality. But this leads to another apparent gap. Hume saw causation as a relationship between two impressions or ideas in the mind. Thomas Reid disagreed and thought the concept of causation is not an idea copied from a sensory impression in the first place. But one could argue even causal relationships are based on experience (Hume argued we don't really "see" causes but attribute that relationship through experience). Of-course every physicist would vigorously object to the notion that they were not measuring real causal relationships in the universe! Some philosophers on the other hand think that the whole gap issue and concern is really a cognitive illusion. They think of the conscious states as just being the states of the brain itself.  But all these arguments leave one very uneasy!! 

Mental causation is interesting philosophically. Can we associate a massless, spaceless mental cause (a thought) as the causation to the physical movement to raise my arm? Mental phenomenon is those phenomena that contain an object intentionally within themselves. Mental phenomena are always about something. Physical phenomenon is not. Sodium Chloride is salt, but it isn’t about anything. That tastes salty is about the dish you are eating. This gives rise to the question of how mental thoughts which is about something, be caused by something physical that isn’t. Conversely how can a mental thought that is about something give rise to a physical movement that isn’t. Some philosophers have abandoned causal explanations and gone the route of ordinary commonsense explanations arguing also that the causal explanation if it exists would be unintelligible. Also, it would be moving from a philosophical question to a scientific question and may prove to be just as intractable in science.  

How do I know there are any minds other than my own? This problem is another aspect of how we justify we know anything at all. I cannot really perceive any mind other than my own directly. To be exact we cannot perceive even our own minds directly either but loosely speaking we can say I am aware of certain thoughts and experiences and feelings as being my own. The only way we know about other minds is a verbal report or a behavior from that mind. But verbal report implies a common language and linguistic conventions and what that means. For all I know that person could be a robot. I have no obligation to accept there is another mind. We have no direct access to that person’s thoughts, feelings, or experiences. Thomas Reid offers a commonsense approach. While we don’t have direct access to another mind, we do observe behaviors. Any social interaction at all presupposes certain instinctual patterns of behavior, the meaning of which will be understood by members of that species. All languages are driven by convention and social rules and local practices and words derive their meaning solely by use.

If direct experience is the only yardstick used to claim, we know anything then whole realms of what we regard we know becomes quite obscure. There is also inferential knowledge driven by past experience and is a prerequisite for reason and perception.

Do our scientific laws express reality since one’s senses play a big part in scientific observation? This is the debate between realism and anti-realism. Thomas Reid offers a commonsense approach. "No man seeks a reason to not believe what he perceives, and if he did it would be difficult to find one. Though he cannot give reason for believing his senses, his belief remains as firm as if it was grounded on demonstration. Sceptics’ arguments do not convince him".  He also relies on the argument that the sceptics hypothesis is no more likely to be true than the common-sensical belief that the world is much the way we perceive it to be. 

Consciousness is a very problematic area for philosophy and may remain so. 

Sometime later when I am ready, I will dwell deeper into Indian philosophy. As I illustrated in this essay, western philosophers don't really have the answers on consciousness and are still seeking the answers. Understanding the neurological and evolutionary aspects of what the mind experiences is still very much in its infancy as two of my essays illustrate. It is amazing to me that such a very long time ago the Indian sages had such fascinating understandings. The west does not have a distinct unchanging separate notion of "I" that the east has that is distinct from mind experiences. The west's literature refers to the mind experiences including self-awareness experience itself as consciousness. Given the different definition of consciousness, comparing the two is like comparing apples and oranges. The two viewpoints are not necessarily immiscible but approach from different ends.