Consciousness and Space
1 Colin McGinn’s Mysterianism............................................................................................................. 1
1.1 The Space Problem............................................................................................................................. 1
1.1.1 How Experience and Space hang
together................................................................................ 1
1.1.2 How Experience and Space differ................................................................................................ 2
1.1.3 How to resolve the apparent tension:
ACT & OBJECT........................................................... 2
1.1.4 The NONSPATIALITY of EXPERIENCE
ITSELF....................................................................... 2
1.1.5 McGinn’s solution of the Space
Problem................................................................................... 2
1.2 More on the Properties of EXPERIENCE ITSELF.................................................................... 2
1.3 G.E. Moore on Experience/Consciousness Itself (1903)................................................... 3
2 A Nonrelational Account of Consciousness........................................................................ 4
2.1 William James...................................................................................................................................... 4
2.1.1 Experience Itself as Pathetic
Remnant of the Soul.................................................................... 4
2.1.2 Pure Experience.............................................................................................................................. 5
2.2 Bertrand Russell............................................................................................................................... 5
2.2.1 No Self to do the
Sensing/Experiencing (act)........................................................................... 5
2.2.2 Russell’s Neutral Monism.............................................................................................................. 6
3 Upshot of the Discussion so far...................................................................................................... 6
4 Consciousness (nonrelationally
construed) and Space............................................. 7
4.1 Experiences are located............................................................................................................... 7
4.2 But where is Experience Located?........................................................................................... 7
4.2.1 The Radical View (James and Early
Russell)............................................................................ 7
4.2.2 The Scientifically Informed View
(Later Russell)...................................................................... 8
“The bond between the mind and
the brain is a deep mystery. Moreover, it is an ultimate mystery, a mystery
that human intelligence will never unravel. Consciousness indubitably exists,
and it is connected to the brain in some intelligible way, but the nature of
this connection necessarily eludes us.” (The Mysterious Flame, 5)
“The brain is a three-dimensional
object occupying a specific region of space, but the mind seems not to be
spatially defined in this way. How then could the mind be the brain?” (105)
ß We experience space
ß We are perceptually acquainted with space
ß Our awareness is spatial
ß The spaciality of our awareness is one of its more
striking features
ß “Our world is thoroughly spatial” (109)
ß ”Our
consciousness is not spatial“ (109)
“We need to make a distinction
between the object of awareness and
the awareness itself…Consider the visual experience of seeing a red sphere two
feet away with a six-inch diameter. The object of this experience is of course
a spatial object with spatial properties, but the experience itself does not
have these properties: it is not two feet away from you and six inches in
diameter. The experience is in you, what it represents is out there in the
world. Once we are clear about this distinction, the spatiality that is
inherent in our experience of the world can be seen to belong to the object of
experience, not to experience itself.” (109)
“When we reflect on experience
itself, we can see that it lacks spatial properties altogether. Your visual
experience of red or my emotion of fear has no particular shape or size. Nor
does it stand in spatial relations to other experiences. Your experience of red
is not, say, next to your experience of a whistling sound, or four centimeters
away from it, or behind it. There is no clear sense in the question of how
great a distance separates a pair of experiences. Conscious states are like
numbers in this respect.” (109-110)
ß The brain has a hidden spatial structure that we
cannot grasp.
ß Consciousness has hidden spatial structure that we
cannot grasp.
ß These two structures are identical.
ß That’s how brain and consciousness hang together in a
nonmiraculous, but (to us) mysterious way.
v Experience is nonspatial:
ÿ Not located
ÿ Not extended
v If my experience of the red ball is not extended,
then
ÿ It can’t be round
ÿ It can’t be spherical
ÿ It can’t be red
v What properties are left over for experience itself?
ÿ None at all, it would seem
ß Not color
ß Not shape
ß Not size
ß Not extension
ß Not location
ß And what else is there?
v How would the two experiences involved in seeing a
red circle and a green triangle differ?
ÿ Not at all, for they are both quite featureless.
v How would the two experiences involved in seeing a
red circle and in hearing a trumpet differ?
ÿ Not at all, for they are both quite featureless.
v Do you still have any idea what you are talking about
when you talk about EXPERIENCE ITSELF?
ÿ Not at all, for I have no concept of that which has
no properties whatsoever.
v Something must have gone wrong. For consciousness,
whatever it is, is not something that is totally elusive and undetectable. We
need a different approach.
McGinn’s focus on “experience
itself” and the ensuing thinning out of experience/consciousness is nothing
new. We find precisely the same maneuver in G.E. Moore, one of the founding
fathers of analytic philosophy:
“We all know that the sensation
of blue differs from that of green. But it is plain that if both are sensations they also have some point in
common. What is it that they have in common? And how is this common element
related to the points in which they differ?
I
will call the common element ‘consciousness’ without yet attempting to say what
the thing I so call is. We have then
in every sensation two distinct terms, (1) ‘consciousness,’ in respect of which
all sensations are alike; and (2) something else, in respect of which one
sensation differs from another. It will be convenient if I may be allowed to
call this second term the ‘object’ of a sensation: this also without yet
attempting to say what I mean by the word.” (17)
“When we refer to introspection
and try to discover what the sensation of blue is, it is very easy to suppose
that we have before us only a single term. The term “blue” is easy enough to
distinguish, but the other element which I have called “consciousness”—that
which sensation of blue has in common with sensation of green—is extremely
difficult to fix…it seems, if I may use a metaphor, to be transparent—we look
through it and see nothing but the blue.” (20)
“The moment we try to fix our
attention upon consciousness and to see what,
distinctly, it is, it seems to vanish: it seems as if we had before us a mere
emptiness. When we try to introspect the sensation of blue, all we can see is
the blue: the other element is as if it were diaphanous.” (25)
In Moore’s hands consciousness or
the experience itself also looses all of its features and becomes a featureless
something. That seems wrong.
This thin, transparent sense of
consciousness is exactly the sense of consciousness that William James attacked
in his famous paper “Does Consciousness Exist.” (1904)
“‘Thoughts’ and ‘things’ are
names for two sorts of object, which common sense will always find contrasted
and will always practically oppose to each other. Philosophy, reflecting on the
contrast, has varied in the past in her explanations of it…At first, ‘spirit
and matter,’ ‘soul and body,’ stood for a pair of equipollent substances quite
on a par in weight and interest…[but] in the hands of such writers as…[Moore
and McGinn]…the spiritual principle attenuates itself to a thoroughly ghostly
condition, being only a name for the fact that the ‘content’ of experience is known. It loses personal form and
activity…and becomes a bare Bewußtheit or
Bewußtsein Überhaupt, of which in its
own right absolutely nothing can be said.
I
believe that ‘consciousness,’ when once it has evaporated to this estate of
pure diaphaneity, is on the point of disappearing altogether. It is the name of
a nonentity, and has no right to a place among first principles. Those who
still cling to it are clinging to a mere echo, the faint rumor left behind by
the disappearing ‘soul’ upon the air of philosophy.” (1-2)
Pure Experience is what James
offers in place of the combination of (diaphanous) consciousness and its
content/object. Pure experience does not have these two aspects - it is simple
and unstructured.
“Experience, I believe, has no
such inner duplicity; and the separation of it into consciousness and content
comes, not by way of subtraction [consciousness = experience - the object of
experience], but by way of addition—the addition, to a given concrete piece of
it, of other sets of experiences, in connection with which severally its use or
function may be of two different kinds…a given undivided portion of experience,
taken in one context of associates, play[s] the part of a knower, of a state of
mind, of ‘consciousness’; while in different context the same undivided bit of
experience plays the part of a think known, of an objective ‘content.’ In a
word, in one group it figures as a thought, in another group as a thing.”
(9-10)
When challenged to say more about
the nature of pure experience, James says this:
“There is no general stuff of which experience at large is made. There are as
many stuffs as there are ‘natures’ in the things experienced. If you ask what
any one bit of pure experience is made of, the answer is always the same: “It
is made of that, of just what
appears, of space, of intensity, of flatness, brownness, heaviness, or what
not.” (27)
Doubts about the self lead
Bertrand Russell (who used to occupy a position quite similar to that of Moore)
to give up the act/object analysis of experience. The act—the sensing, the
experiencing—is something the subject does. If there is reason to doubt the
subject, the act of sensing/experiencing must be given up.
Skepticism
about the self is an enduring trait of the empiricist tradition. True to this
tradition, Russell reasons as follows. The subject must be given up because it
cannot be observed. Hence, a relational theory of experience is untenable and
the distinction between act and object cannot be upheld. Here is a passage that
succinctly summarizes this thought:
“If there is a subject, it can
have a relation to the patch of color, namely, the sort of relation which we
might call awareness. In that case the sensation, as a mental event, will
consist of awareness of the color, while the color itself will remain wholly
physical, and may be called the sense-datum, to distinguish it from the
sensation. The subject, however, appears to be a logical fiction…It is
introduced, not because observation reveals it, but because it is
linguistically convenient and apparently demanded by grammar…If we are to avoid
a perfectly gratuitous assumption, we must dispense with the subject as one of
the actual ingredients of the world. But when we do this, the possibility of
distinguishing the sensation from the sense-datum vanishes; at least I see no
way of preserving the distinction. Accordingly the sensation that we have when
we see a patch of color simply is the
patch of color, an actual constituent of the physical world.” (Russell 1978:
141-142)
This consideration proves to
Russell that “the patch of color and our sensation in seeing it are identical.” (Russell 1978: 143)
“So long as the ‘subject’ was
retained there was a ‘mental’ entity to which there was nothing analogous in
thee material world, but, if sensations are occurrences which are not
essentially relational [subject/act/object], there is not the same need to
regard mental and physical occurrences as fundamentally different. It becomes
possible to regard both a mind and a piece of matter as logical constructions
formed out of materials not differing vitally and sometimes actually identical.
It became possible to think that what the physiologist regards as matter in the
brain is actually composed of thoughts and feelings, and that the difference
between mind and matter is merely one of arrangement. I illustrated this by the
analogy of the Post Office Directory, which classifies people in two ways,
alphabetical and geographical. In the first arrangement, a man’s neighbours are
those who come near him in the alphabet; in the other, they re those who live
next door. In like manner, a sensation may be grouped with a number of other
occurrences by a memory-chain, in which case it becomes part of a mind; or it
may be grouped with its causal antecedents, in which case it appears as part of
the physical world. This view affords an immense simplification.” (Russell
1975: 103-104)
McGinn generates the space
problem (which gives rise to Mysterianism) by insisting that consciousness is
nonspatial. He supports this claim by presenting a relational act/object
analysis of experience/sensation. The object is spatial. But the act itself—the
sensing or the experiencing—is supposedly nonspatial.
I have presented reasons for
doubting that the talk about the act itself makes sense. And I have presented
two versions of a nonrelational view of consciousness (those of James and
Russell) that reject the act/object analysis of experience. Hence the argument
that consciousness is nonspatial because the act (the sensing/experiencing
itself) is nonspatial is blocked.
This undermines McGinn’s specific
way of supporting the nonspatial character of experience/consciousness. But it
falls short of showing that experience/consciousness, nonrelationally
construed, is in space (spatially located and extended). To lay to rest the
worry raised by the Space Problem we need to do more: we need to show that
experience/consciousness is spatial.
ß Everybody agrees that the object of experience is
spatially located.
ß Given a nonrelational account of experience, the
experience “itself” will inherit the location of its object.
ß Hence experiences are located in space and the Space
Problem goes away. There may be other reasons to embrace mysterianism. But the
Space problem is not one of them.
ß But we still want to know where experience is
located, not just that it is located.
Physical space is a feature of
the world of physical things. Psychological space is a feature of the world of
“psychological things.” Neither one of these notions of space applies to the
world of pure experience. Physical space arises once physical things are
constructed out of pure experience. Psychological space arises once mental
phenomenal are constructed out of pure experience. Elements of pure experience
considered as such, taken neat, have no location in either one of these spaces.
Considered in a physical context they are physically located at the place of
the object they constitute (e.g. at the place of the red ball). Considered in a
psychological context they are located in the mental space of the experiencing
subject. Thus the red experience we have upon seeing McGinn’s ball will have
two locations associated with it: that of the ball in physical space and that
of your ball perception in your visual field. If you insist on asking: But
where is this bit of pure experience located in itself, as it were - after all,
it must be somewhere - everything must be somewhere! If that is what you say
you have not understood the view. For on this view pure experience comes before
space.
According to Russell’s later
view, your experiences are literally in your head. That is, what you see is in
your head. When you see the ball what you see is in your head. He was lead to
this change of view by embracing what we might call “the primacy of science.”
The idea is that philosophy has to respect the findings of science. One such
finding is, allegedly that it is a brute fact that you and the red ball are
spatially located in physical space. And you get to experience/see the ball by
means of some complex causal transaction that transpires between the ball and
you. The event called seeing the ball must come at the end of this causal
process. This end in somewhere deep in your head. Hence the neutral element
“seeing the ball” does have a location - it is located in your brain.
“Whoever
accepts the causal theory of perception is compelled to conclude that percepts
are in our heads, for they come at the end of a causal chain of physical events
leading, spatially, from the object to the brain of the percipient. We cannot
suppose that, at the end of this process, the last effect suddenly jumps back
to the starting point, like a stretched rope when it snaps…I shall therefore
assume that this [that the percept is in the head] is the case, when we are
speaking of physical, not sensible location.”
On this view your experiencing
the red ball is physically located in your brain. Of course you do not
experience the object of your experience as being located in your brain. In
psychological space—in the space as you experience it—the ball is located out
there, in front of you, on the lawn. But all of your psychological space is,
from the standpoint of physics, located in your head.