Act and Object Dismantled

Things are getting scary around here, philosophically. Paradigms are shifting, shattering, vaporizing before our very eyes (literally). The act-object analysis of conscious experience is in deep trouble. The senses have no objects! There is no object such that a visual experience is a seeing of it. Not physical, not mental, and nothing else either.[1] We have visual experience, but there is no object that is seen. The external physical object causes the experience, but it doesn’t feature as a constituent of it—as what is immediately given. The internal mental sense-datum exists in the mind, but it also isn’t seen, since the mind is not a visible thing. But then, there is no object to be the object of a mental act of seeing: when we see, there is no mental act of object perception—no object for the mind to act towards. Otherwise put, no object is presented to the mind, because there is no object being perceived. The seeing is empty of objects, material or mental. In the case of hearing, we don’t hear sound waves traveling through the air–we don’t hear sounds as wave-like movements of molecules in the air. What would that even be like? Nor do we hear sense-data of sound: sense-data are silent, for one thing, being occurrences in the mind. In the case of touch, we don’t experience hot objects as high in molecular motion; if we did, heat would feel like millions of tiny collisions. Neither do we taste or smell molecular formations. These objects, though real enough, are not perceptual realities—not phenomenological facts. Also, the experience is phenomenologically real, but it isn’t itself an object of sense experience. The act-object structure is therefore lacking essential ingredients. This means there is no intentional relation between the subject and an object—if there is any intentionality, it doesn’t take that form. Then what form does it take, if any?

This failure is mirrored in the subject side of the alleged act-object relation. What is the subject that features as a constituent of the subject-act-object triad? The question is pressing and prominent: it has troubled many a theorist of conscious experience from Hume onwards. Some say the subject is a mental object, but there is no perception of such an object (the “transcendental ego”); others maintain that the subject is physical, the body or brain perhaps. I need not rehearse this debate. I wish only to point out that the act-object analysis seems to cry out for a subject to perform the object-directed act, or to be what the object in question is presented to. It seems like a theoretical postulate designed to prop up a dubious piece of metaphysics—that which performs the putative act in question. The subject, the ego, the conscious self—a homuncular something I know-not-what. No doubt animals exist, even persons, but this subject entity is wheeled in to do a conceptual job—to be the other end of a postulated relation. But if we reject the underlying model, this entity loses its raison d’etre; it vanishes to the same place as its correlate the intentional object, leaving…leaving what exactly?

Where does the subject-act-object picture come from? Why do we think in these terms about conscious experience? Surely, it comes from our thinking about the physical world, not from any immediate apprehension of the structure of experience. The body is a physical object existing in space, surrounded by other physical objects; it acts on these objects and is acted on by them. In perception objects act on the senses to stimulate them, eventually reaching the brain, another object. We have act-object relations. It is very natural, even unavoidable, to suppose that this same structure repeats itself in the perceiving mind, only now we are dealing with conscious subjects, mental acts, and intentional objects. The entities and relations are different, but the structure is the same. How could it not be so? Granted, the ontology is spookier, more contrived, but the overall architecture repeats itself. But do we experience this architecture, feel it in our mental bones? Might it rest on a false analogy? Consider the atom: it was modeled on the solar system, with a nucleus and surrounding particles. The nucleus is like the Sun and the revolving particles are like the planets. But this model was cast into doubt by quantum physics; the atom turned out to be stranger than the model suggested. Similarly, we might model the mind on the solar system, with the self as like the Sun and intentional objects as like the planets. But that may be a misleading model, a baseless extrapolation. It might, indeed, be a complete myth, entrenched by repetition and a lack of any alternative model. That is what the problem of identifying suitable objects of perception would appear to suggest: the inner architecture of conscious experience simply fails to contain objects of the required type—the potential candidates just don’t have the requisite qualifications. The problem of non-existence already posed a difficulty for the model, leading to the sense-datum theory; but that theory had its own difficulties, notably the imperceptibility of sense-data. Then there was the problem of the conscious subject, and of the exact nature of the intentional relation (is it causal?). Perhaps it is time to face the possibility that the whole scheme is an error: the act-object conception of experience rests on a mistake.

But what can replace it? Isn’t it compulsory? How else are we supposed to conceptualize consciousness? One possibility is that we can’t, erroneous as that model may be: the form of conscious experience is a mystery. It has a form, but we cannot conceptualize it, given our object-centered conceptual scheme. But let’s not resort to mysterianism yet; perhaps we can find a better analogy than the solar system and objects that cluster around a center. And there is a model that crops up in the history of thought about consciousness—the model of a river. More broadly, we have the idea of a wave in water (or some other medium): a wave isn’t an object like a planet or a particle; it is a pattern or perturbation. What about the idea that waves pass through consciousness giving it the phenomenology it has? Not objects but undulations—currents, eddies, crests and troughs. Here we can borrow the apparatus of process philosophy: gone is the picture of solid atoms in the void, circling and colliding; instead, we embrace the more fluid idea of alterations in a medium (compare the idea of the ether). Consciousness is not a repository of hard little objects (or even soft ones) but something that bends and vibrates (think of Einstein on space). No doubt these physical analogies are imperfect—consciousness is a being unto itself—but at least they serve to free us from rigid adherence to the solar system kind of metaphor. On this model, there are no objects of perception—nothing object-like—but rather colorations or configurations of a medium: processes, events of becoming, transformations. To be specific, when you see what you call a red cup what is happening is that your consciousness is undergoing a certain process—it is “red-cupping”. Adverbially, it is behaving “red-cuppingly”. This is a strange locution, to be sure, but then our language is not set up to describe experience as it intrinsically is; in fact, experience is pretty ineffable (the same is true of the atom under quantum physics). Just as pain is an object-less alteration of consciousness—a process—so visual experience is not object-involving but a process. There is no real object that we see (or non-existent object), physical or mental, but rather a process-like alteration—a bending or coloring or suffusing. Perhaps there is a kind of appearance of object-hood attached to the experience, but upon closer analysis the experience is not really committed to such an object. Perceptual events are caused by objects in the world, and there might even be mental objects aptly called sense-data, but there are no phenomenal objects—as it were, phenomenal cups. In Kantian language, the noumenal world consists of objects (physical or mental) but the phenomenal world consists of processes in a medium, rather like waves in water. We may call these waves “objects of consciousness”, i.e., things we are conscious of, but they are not themselves objects (as opposed to properties, processes, waves, etc.). This is a non-objectual theory of the phenomenological form of conscious experience—we might call it “the Ripple Theory”. It has the advantage that it avoids the problems attending objectual theories of consciousness, but it must be admitted that it has the drawback of being virtually un-stateable. How serious a drawback this is depends on your view of the expressive limits of human language and human concepts—that is, on your view of the inexpressibility of reality. We were surely built to understand the ways of observable physical reality, but when it comes to the structure of consciousness, we might not be so well prepared. We might have a tendency to fill the gap in our conceptual scheme by borrowing from the part of it we are most comfortable with. Our experience escapes easy comprehension. Phenomenology is difficult.[2]

[1] See my “Are We Blind?”

[2] The whole history of philosophy (and psychology) reveals a struggle to describe what goes on in the conscious mind when it goes about its business, with many a technical term and controversial concept. Impressions and ideas, the phenomenal and the noumenal, the given and the posited, sense and reference, noesis and noema, the real and the intentional, the for-itself and the in-itself, the qualitative and the propositional, the syntactic and the semantic—all attempts to do justice to the inner being of the conscious mind. Clearly, there is something elusive here, which frustrates our best efforts. We vaguely feel that the inner is a domain unto itself, but the pull of the external and physical is strong. The result is a mishmash of the familiar and the novel, never quite hitting the target. We need a conceptual breakthrough, but find nowhere satisfactory to turn to. Hence the metaphors and analogies and strange locutions.

Consciousness and Solipsism

This is to be an essay in existential psychotherapy, proceeding from a sound basis in the metaphysics of consciousness. It is going to be pretty abstract and theoretical, though with a practical payoff (sort of). We can begin with the old thought that consciousness (the conscious self) is an isolated thing as well as a thinking thing—cut off, self-enclosed, remote, sequestered, lonely. The conscious self suffers from existential solitary confinement. It is not united with other selves or the world outside it: it never merges with them, joins with them, overlaps with them. It is never touched by them—really embraced or penetrated. It remains aloof, alone, self-involved. This is our existential predicament as centers of consciousness: consciousness is in its essence a separate bounded being, not one with other beings. Thus, we are essentially alone in the universe. We may be aware of other beings, animate and inanimate, but we are not part of them, nor they of us. In particular, we are not joined with other people, merely cognizant of them from a distance (at best). We are all separate egos revolving around each other but never really meeting. And this produces a kind of existential loneliness—the loneliness of the long-distance runner (through life). We are in it alone, at birth, during life, and in death. Perhaps the most powerful expression of this truth and its accompanying emotion is the concept of merging—we are incapable of merging with other people and things. We are not like drops of water dissolving into each other. We may dream of it, long for it, be intrigued by it—as in various ideals of romantic love and the Vulcan mind-meld—but we cannot achieve it. We are condemned to solitude, metaphysically speaking. We are born solipsists, forever isolated from each other, certain of our own existence but uncertain about others. We never experience another consciousness; nor do they experience us.

Imagine if our consciousness were different from what it is–more blurry, indeterminate, vague–so that nothing comes into clear focus. Imagine, indeed, that it lacks any intentional objects at all (not an easy task): it is just a blank slate, a pure emptiness, Sartre’s nothingness devoid of an accompanying in-itself. It lacks all intentionality, or has a much-reduced intentionality. Wouldn’t our sense of isolation be greatly magnified? For we would be phenomenologically completely self-directed—aware of nothing beyond ourselves (perhaps not even that). We would exist as entirely cut off beings. If that proves imaginatively impossible, then consider a highly truncated intentional world with no people or animals as intentional objects. We can’t merge with them and we can’t even think of them. It sounds bleak, solitary confinement on stilts. All we have to contemplate is ourselves and a few rocks and trees. Wouldn’t that be an order of magnitude lonelier than the status quo? So, things could be worse! We could be outright phenomenological solipsists. There wouldn’t even be the appearance of other people, let alone the ability to merge with them. We couldn’t so much as dream of such merging. If we are haunted now by the idea of personal merging, then this reduced consciousness would be deprived even of the very idea of another person, having never had an impression of one. In the limit, there might be a consciousness devoid of any intentionality at all, as we normally experience it, just a blank slate that can’t be written on (legibly anyway). I doubt very much that such a being would be emotionally healthy. It sounds like a type of hell (hell as the absence of other people, including animals). If there were a disease (like Alzheimer’s) that progressively removed all such intentionality, it would be greatly feared, because of its capacity to amplify our natural solipsism; the victim would be robbed of even the thought of human company (or animal).

Now we have a therapeutic inroad. It turns out that consciousness itself supplies a partial solution to the problem it presents. It is both inherently isolated (there is something lonely it is like to be conscious) and also outer-directed, the latter mitigating the former to some degree. No doubt the architects of consciousness (genes or genies) had no intention of providing this mitigation, but we may be thankful for it, since it soothes the existential solitude inherent in the conscious self. At least we can have the idea of self-other merging, even if the reality eludes us. I like to think of it in the following way. It has often been conjectured that birth marks the moment at which the baby’s consciousness splits from the mother; previously, there was prenatal union in the fetus’s mind. This abrupt transition occasions a lifelong trauma—the schism between self and world. Of course, it is hard to obtain evidence of such a psychological upheaval, but the suggestion has at least mythical appeal (and I have a sneaking suspicion that it may be literally true). If so, human consciousness requires some sort of healing balm, and intentionality provides it (per accidens, as it were). It isn’t as good as actual merging, or even the prenatal appearance of it, but it is something—a sort of psychic band-aid. It is thus as ifmerging is going on (sexual intercourse is often thought to approximate to the desired condition). A Vulcan mind-meld would be a whole lot better, but at least we do not exist marooned from all intentional awareness of outside things. We can communicate with other people, after all, and see and touch their bodies. We are not total shut-ins, confirmed de facto solipsists. We may yearn, hopelessly, to enter fully into the mind of others; but we can at least form thoughts and emotions regarding their minds. Life might not be as satisfying and meaningful as we would like, because of the impossibility of interpersonal merging, but it is not as meaningless as it would be if intentionality were not possible. We have a kind of ersatz merging.

What are some examples of intentionality being used to mitigate the intrinsic isolation of consciousness? I will mention four; no doubt there are others. First, God: people conjure the idea of God (truly or falsely) as a means to assuage the disconnect that is inherent in consciousness. They postulate a merging with God, inviting God into their inner sanctum, enacting rituals in which union with God is promulgated. They seek to become at one with God (he has no body to get in the way); he may flow into them. Second, we cultivate certain kinds of intimate connection with other people (sometimes animals), particularly marriage, which we picture as forms of spiritual union (hence talk of one’s “other half” and of being “completed”). Third, there are types of fiction that dabble in personal merging: fairy tales, science fiction, telepathy. We imagine ways of getting inside the mind of the other instead of being stuck inside our own mind. Fourth, there are solitary animals with a very limited social life (I am thinking of wild cats, in particular): is it possible that their prey function for them as devices of other-absorption? Just think of the way a cat plays with its prey, as if it is the most fascinating and fun thing in the world (compare our relation to food). We are constantly in search of ways to relieve the sense of aloneness proper to consciousness. Merging attracts us in all imaginable (and unimaginable) forms. If we can’t have real merging, we can at least settle for close connection, while knowing that our minds constitute an impermeable precinct. There is a sign on our minds that says “No Admittance” (or maybe “Merging Prohibited”).

So, what therapeutic advice follows from this general picture? I think it is obvious: cultivate your powers of intentionality. The main way to do this is via knowledge in all its varieties. In acquiring knowledge, we expand our interior space; we stock ourselves with information about things (people, planets, plants, etc.).[1] This can mean textbook academic knowledge (not to be despised), or it can mean practical knowledge, or knowledge of the people one knows. We must soak ourselves in the reality that exists outside our heads (I don’t exclude ballroom dancing and skittles). Also, we must make the best of our contacts with other people, not being content with superficial acquaintance and glancing interactions. True, we can never merge with them, even for a second, but we can at least exploit our capacity for intentionality to gain the deepest knowledge we can (I don’t mean everyone you meet). The same goes for nature, animals and plants, the moon and the mountains. We must not allow ourselves to become closed off, incurious, inaccessible. We are striving to escape the isolation of the conscious self, so we must do what we can with what we have. Call this “Intentionality Therapy”; it is designed to deal with the trauma of maternal separation, or simply the very nature of consciousness. Bodies flow together and mingle in myriad ways, sharing space; minds can’t do that, so they must rely on their powers of intentionality. This may seem like a pallid substitute for full-blown mind-melding, but it provides more than we might have naively supposed before the power of intentionality was recognized (by Brentano and later thinkers). And remember that we don’t have to endure the disadvantages of mind-melding—the drastic loss of privacy, the mental confusion, the uncertainties of personal identity. It is not always a good experience to merge with someone else (I can think of plenty of people I would not like to merge with). Nature seems to have provided us with an antidote to the isolation entailed by consciousness, at least to a limited degree. Consciousness without intentionality would be a seriously lonely business; with it the isolation is bearable. Maybe too much merging would make us long for some alone-time (Mr. Spock engages in it only sparingly and evidently finds it a strain—he prefers to know all about science). Our existence is suspended between a desire for union with others and a need to stand aloof from them. It would certainly be terrible to be forced to merge with every person you meet; total aloneness would be preferable to that.[2]

[1] Bertrand Russell talks this way about knowledge in chapter XV (“The Value of Philosophy”) of The Problems of Philosophy (1912). Solipsism was a lifelong preoccupation of his.

[2] Do people vary in their need to merge with others or is it a species constant? What encourages or discourages the urge? How self-conscious is it? What is the reason the conscious self is thus secluded? What kinds of intentional directedness are the most natural and easy? Do some creatures feel miserably alone (sharks, eagles)? Might mind-merging one day become technically feasible? What will be its social consequences? How much actual human loneliness stems from this source? Does it ever lead to suicide? These are all good questions.

Conscious Matter

I will pose a question I don’t think has been posed before: Why can’t there be conscious matter, but only conscious mind? A mental state can be either conscious or unconscious, passing from one condition to the other, but an unconscious material state can only be unconscious. Consider a state of the brain that is not a mental state; it is unconscious and it cannot become conscious. A mental state of the brain, however, can become conscious, even if it is unconscious, temporarily or permanently. A merely physical state can never become conscious. Of course, it is possible for such a state to become an object of consciousness: you might pass from not seeing it to consciously seeing it. But that is not for it to become conscious, i.e., to be a conscious state. It is necessarily not a conscious state given that it is a non-mental state. This is compatible with it already being a mental state, as the identity theory contends: C-fiber firing might be identical to pain, and thus may be a conscious state (ditto desire and belief). But if a physical state is not a mental state at all, then it cannot become conscious—though it can clearly become an object of consciousness. The shape of the brain cannot become conscious, or its chemical composition, or its microanatomy—just as for other physical states of the world. A chair’s being made of wood cannot become a conscious state of the chair—unless it is first made into a mental state (don’t ask me how). In other words, it is a necessary condition of the possibility of being conscious that a state be a mental state: only mental states are candidates for consciousness. Not that mental states are always conscious—they are not—but rather their potential for consciousness is dependent on their being already mental. Consciousness is reserved for the mental; it cannot spread to the non-mental. A state has to qualify as mental before consciousness can admit it.

That sounds eminently reasonable, even indisputable, perhaps trivial; but actually, it raises a serious puzzle. For we may ask why it is so: what is it about being mental that makes a state eligible for consciousness? Consciousness is not inherent in the mind—much of the mind is quite unconscious—and yet being mental is indispensable to the possibility of consciousness. There must be something about the mental that explains this fact, that grounds the necessity. The problem is that no good answer comes to mind—hence the puzzle. Call this the “consciousness-mind puzzle”: what is it about being mental that allows non-conscious mental states to become conscious but not non-mental states? A simple higher-order thought theory runs up against this problem: one would have supposed that one could just add a thought to a non-mental state of the brain and it would thereby become conscious; but no, it stubbornly resists becoming a conscious state. It lacks a nature that permits it to make this transition. But why then does a mental state that is unconscious, perhaps permanently and necessarily, possess the secret ingredient? It may never be conscious, like a purely physical state, but it has what it takes to be conscious, unlike the physical state—it passes the consciousness test. It seems to possess a magic power, the power to metamorphose into a conscious state (assuming that it does or could). It must somehow possess the seeds of consciousness, even though the seeds may never actually sprout. So, what do these seeds consist in—from what does the power derive?

Several ideas suggest themselves. The first is that mental states, even unconscious ones, have a phenomenology, unlike purely physical states, and this provides the fertile soil in which consciousness may take root.[1] Granted, these states can be completely unconscious—the subject has no awareness of them—but (it may be said) they are blessed with phenomenological features and these make them at least conducive to consciousness. The trouble with this suggestion, striking though it is, is that the features in question will either constitute a type of consciousness or will be so attenuated that they fail to supply what is needed. We either build consciousness (“what-it’s-likeness”) into the mental state or we play with an idea that raises the same question again, viz. why should those features provide the necessary ground? The suggestion is either too strong or too weak. Also, is it true that all unconscious mental states have genuine phenomenology in some colorable sense—what about the syntactic tacit knowledge postulated by Chomsky-style psycholinguistics? Does it feel some way to perform a syntactic transformation unconsciously? Is there something it is like to have tacit knowledge of deep structure? A second suggestion fastens onto propositional content: what equips a mental state to rise to the level of consciousness is that it is a propositional state. The difficulty with this is apparent: why should propositional content qualify a state to become conscious? What has the one got to do with the other? It seems neither necessary nor sufficient: pains don’t have such content, though they clearly can be conscious; and sub-personal computational states arguably possess it, yet can’t become conscious (they are like non-mental brain states). Consciousness and propositional content are clearly not the same property, so why should the latter be a necessary condition of the former? It is the same with the property of intentionality: being about something is not necessarily linked to being conscious (not necessary and not sufficient), so why should it be the required basis? The puzzle is beginning to look deep, intractable. At this point desperation is apt to set in: perhaps the right thing to say is that there are no unconscious mental states—then there is nothing to explain. If all mental states are necessarily conscious, then it is trivially true that mental states are inherently equipped to be conscious. Physical states can’t be conscious because they are not already conscious, unlike mental states. Here the objection is that this is flying in the face of much science and common sense: there really are unconscious mental states, lots of them. Then there is this maneuver: the question is purely verbal—we simply decline to say, as a matter of convention, that anything non-mental can be conscious. We just stipulate that the word “conscious” shall apply only to things to which the word “mental” applies; there is nothing about the things referred to that underpins our linguistic practices (our “language game” with the words “mental” and “conscious”). About this I will simply say: haven’t we got over this kind of nonsense?

But perhaps we have not run out of wacky ideas. One idea would be that it is simply a mystery about mental states that they, and only they, can be conscious. Mental states possess an unknown property, call it C, that explains their availability to consciousness. But this seems unduly panic-stricken: surely it should be possible to detect something in mental states, and only mental states, that suits them to attaining consciousness, given that it is so plainly true that only the mental can be or become conscious. This isn’t the mind-body problem! So, let’s not declare defeat just yet; after all, the question I am trying to answer has only just been broached. It’s a brand-new question, a freshly minted puzzle, so we should give it a while to marinate (we can declare defeat in a couple of hundred years, if necessary). And there is a possibility we have not yet explored: what I will call psycho-functional role. I intend no commitment to traditional functionalism with its emphasis on physical behavior; I mean to be speaking of functional role within the mind (which can include action). Each type of mental state has a characteristic place in the overall functioning of the mind, which is complex and often obscure—its processes, procedures, laws, quirks. This includes folk psychology, scientific psychology, and whatever else about the mind that may lie hidden or alien to our existing conceptual scheme. I am talking about the sum-total of mental interactions and connections. Then the idea is that this psycho-functional role is the key factor in equipping mental states with the wherewithal to merit the appellation “conscious”. Indeed, it is largely this role that underlies our use of the word “mental” (or “psychological”): a state of the organism counts as mental just in so far as it plays this kind of role in the organism’s mental life. Now, a purely physical state has no such psycho-functional role; it is detached from the mind, wholly or partially. Therefore, it cannot enter the realm of the conscious, because to be a conscious state is also to play a certain psycho-functional role—not the same role but a connected one. The only things that can be conscious must have a role that suits them to be conscious, and only mental states have that role. We have role match-up. For example, to be a desire a given state must function in a certain way in the organism’s psychology; and to be a conscious desire the state must preserve this role and possess a further role, namely that appropriate to its being conscious. The unconscious mental state must have a role that fits its conscious expression; it can’t lack that role and yet expect to be capable of achieving conscious expression. Thus, non-mental states can’t become conscious states. To have a role in the conscious mind, an unconscious mental state such as desire must have a role in the mind as a whole—for instance, its mode of interaction with beliefs and intentions. These roles must be in the nature of the things that have them, thereby generating necessities. Accordingly, only mental states can become conscious, because only they have the kind of psycho-functional role that conscious states of their type possess. This explanation requires us to take on board a conception of mind and consciousness that recognizes the centrality of function in fixing the nature of the mental; it isn’t all introspective qualia and what it feels like from inside (though it is partly that). What a mental state, conscious or unconscious, does is key to its identity. We need a notion of phenomenological function as well as phenomenological quality (as well as sub-phenomenological function to accommodate the unconscious mind). It is true that much remains mysterious about this as an answer to our question, but it has the right form to constitute an answer. The notion of psycho-functional role is somewhat obscure, though not horribly so, and what consciousness does to modify the unconscious mental state is a matter of unbridled speculation almost alchemical in its logic. Still, we have the beginnings of an account of how the conscious and the unconscious manage to hook up; it begins to seem less puzzling why only the unconscious mental can penetrate the boundary that marks the extent of consciousness. Consciousness is actually quite demanding in what it will grant entrance to. It might even be that some precincts of what we think of as the mind are too cut off from the rest of the mind to slot into a place in the conscious mind, so that they are destined to remain always in an unconscious state. The conscious mind does not recognize them as mental in any sense it can understand (I am thinking of some aspects of pre-conscious visual processing). After all, the conscious mind is just one compartment of the mind among others, not all of which function in the same way. The borders of what we call the mind are likely to be indeterminate.[2]

[1] This is a view defended by that devotee of the Freudian unconscious, Richard Wollheim. I remember discussing it with him circa1980 in Katherine Backhouse’s office.

[2] There are many types of unconscious and many types of unconscious state, at least as various as the types of conscious and conscious state. It is hard to bring them all together into the natural kinds Conscious Mind and Unconscious Mind. Not surprisingly, then, some items will hover at the edges of these broad categorizations. What should we say about early-stage perceptual processing or the innate form of human universal grammar? What about the motivations of mollusks and ants? What about libidinal urges in monkeys and sharks? What about aliens?

Knowledge of the Unconscious

We have two minds: the conscious mind and the unconscious mind. These two minds differ in respect of the distinctive mark of consciousness (“what-it’s-likeness”) and in their accessibility to knowledge. The unconscious mind lacks the mark of consciousness and isn’t known in the way the conscious mind is. We know what is in our conscious mind but not (generally) what is in our unconscious mind. If we had equal knowledge of both, Freudian psychoanalysis and Chomskian linguistics would be a lot easier. We would know the contents of our dynamic emotional unconscious and the contents of our syntactic cognitive unconscious. But there is no direct route from the unconscious to the epistemic faculties; we have to resort to inference and postulation. Thus, we are naturally ignorant of what resides in the unconscious. It is the same for other species of unconscious—perceptual, creative, dream, memory-related.

But how deep does this ignorance go? We don’t know what is in the unconscious, but do we know what it is to be unconscious? Do we have an adequate conception of the state of unconsciousness? We do know what it is to be conscious of something, since our consciousness is hooked up to our faculty of knowledge, even if we don’t know much scientifically or philosophically about consciousness. But there is no such hook-up between the unconscious and knowledge, so it is a question whether we know what we are talking about when we use the words “unconscious mind”. Do we know what this peculiar condition consists in? We have neither introspection nor perception of the unconscious, so we have no natural mode of presentation of it. What kind of being does it have? It might be thought that this question poses no great puzzle: we simply subtract consciousness and are left with a purely physical or functional state—and we know what they are. I know what a brain state is—I’ve seen them and read about them—and an unconscious mental stare is just a brain state. But this is exactly wrong: an unconscious mental state is precisely a mental state—a desire, a belief, a piece of knowledge (“tacit knowledge”), a visual perception, a memory. We mustn’t confuse an unconscious mental state with a non-conscious physical state such as the state of being magnetized or having a mass. Similarly for functional states. No, we must remove consciousness but still be left with something distinctively and recognizably mental—but what is that exactly? Isn’t our whole positive conception of a mental state shaped and formed by our awareness of our conscious mental states. Surely, we cannot be thinking of our unconscious mental states as somehow implicitly conscious—as it might be, faintly conscious. So, unconscious mental states cannot be merely physical nor un-merely (as it were) conscious—but what else is there? Aren’t we just thinking by analogy to the conscious mind while disavowing the analogy? The unconscious mind is not there for the subject, as the conscious mind is, so what is its mode of existence? Isn’t the whole concept of the unconscious something cobbled together from unsuitable conceptual materials, a mishmash of the purely physical and the frankly conscious? If we had a way of directly knowing about it, we could use this to form a conception of what we are referring to, but that is precisely what we lack. We just have a word derived from negating the word “conscious” not a positive substantive conception of its reference. No wonder, then, that the unconscious was a relatively late discovery in human thought and perpetually in peril of denial (though evidently real)—it is actually a “mystery of nature” (in Hume’s phrase). It is something we need and can talk about, even formulate theories of, but not something of which we have any clear and distinct idea (rather, it is unclear and murky).  Nor is the case like that of the unobservable constituents of matter: we dohave a clear idea of imperceptible constituents of matter, because we can model these on bits of matter we can see and touch—we don’t need to step outside the circle of physical concepts.[1] But the unconscious mind is a concept that radically extends our other concepts, being neither a physical concept nor a concept of consciousness. It can feel like a pseudo concept (compare the putative concept of immaterial substance).

The underlying question is whether we have a concept of the genuinely mental that leaves the concept of consciousness behind. The general concept of the physical will not do because it is too general; ditto for the concept of the functional. Nor will the concepts of the informational or dispositional or computational help us, since they are also too general and reductive. How can we form a concept of the mental that is non-reductive and properly specific that contains no hint of the conscious mind? The whole point of the notion of an unconscious mind is that the mind is not confined to its conscious compartment and is not dependent on it; it is a realm of mentality in its own right. How, then, can it require the concept of consciousness in order to be made sense of—except by beings (such as ourselves) that have no other conceptual resources to go on? When God looks into our minds, he sees the unconscious part for what it is, not as a kind of wan reflection of the conscious part; but that is not a perspective we can aspire to. We are epistemically cut off from the nature of the unconscious, even though we possess an unconscious and can refer to it in our theories. The unconscious is thus at its heart a necessary mystery. To be unconscious is to be naturally unknown (i.e., not a subject of acquaintance). The unconscious is, in fact, rather like the bat’s conscious experience as far as we are concerned. The bat’s experience differs from our experience in such a way as to be conceptually alien to us; but much the same is true of our own unconscious in that we can’t form an adequate conception of that either—such a conception is unavailable to us. It is as if we have an alien mind living in our head, one that eludes our modes of understanding (apprehension). It’s like having a bat mind existing side by side with our ordinary conscious mind, in regular contact with it but different in nature. The conscious mind is just one form that mind can take, though it dominates our thinking about the mind, and its unconscious partner is really very different from it, intrinsically, ontologically. Yet both fall equally under the concept Mind. Things are always stranger than we tend to suppose from our limited standpoint.[2]

[1] It might be thought that quantum physics provides an analogy to the case of the conscious and the unconscious, in that we also have to make a conceptual leap from the observable classical physical world to the non-classical quantum world. It is as if the quantum world is the macroscopic world’s unconscious—a world for which we require different concepts and different rules of operation. However, I don’t think the leap from classical to non-classical physics is as wide and abrupt as the leap from the conscious mind to the unconscious mind, since we are still dealing with a spatiotemporal world of extended objects subject to the same forces in the former case, while in the latter we are asked to jump from the conceivable conscious to the inconceivable unconscious. Also, it’s never wise to place much reliance on analogies to quantum physics!

[2] I think the case of the unconscious is one of those cases in which we are compelled on theoretical grounds to postulate things that lack clear roots in our given conceptual system (rather like Hume on causation or Newton on gravity). The resulting theory is not strictly intelligible (to humans) but it may be the best we can do and serves many of our purposes. So, I am in no way deriding the unconscious or our theories of it, just noting a conceptual lacuna or shortfall. The unconscious is inherently theoretical.