In the previous essay in this series, I made some fairly banal comments about abstractions from something like a nominalist point of view. Nominalism is usually couched in metaphysical terms, but my approach is epistemic and heuristic. I don't say "abstractions don't exist", I say "abstractions are ideas".
Ideas are ontologically subjective. We can have objective knowledge about ideas, it's just a different kind of knowledge than we can have about objects. As John Searle puts it:
The ontological subjectivity of the domain [of consciousness] does not prevent us from having an epistemically objective science of that domain.
For example, ideas do not have properties such as location, extension, or orientation in space or time. Still, ideas are knowable. Counting systems and numbers are abstract and thus ontologically subjective, but 2 + 2 = 4 is an epistemically objective fact about numbers.
At the same time, we can treat ideas as metaphorically located, extended, and orientated. An apt example would be "the ideas in my head". Metaphorically, IDEAS ARE OBJECTS. With this mapping from objects to ideas in place, we can now make statements in which qualities of objects and verbs that apply to manipulating objects are applied to ideas.
Unfortunately, this opens up the possibility of (1) treating the abstract as real (reification) and (2) treating the abstract as independent of concrete examples (hypostatisation). There is a third problem, which has no widely-accepted name, but which we can call animation, which is treating ideas as if they have their own agency (compare Freud's psychoanalytic theory which gives emotions their own agency). That is to say, without care we may conclude that ideas are real, independent, and autonomous agents.
The point of taking this approach to abstractions is pragmatic. Over the years I have participated in and witnessed many philosophical discussions. Not a few of these have concerned the nebulous abstraction consciousness. And on the vast majority of occasions the discussion is plagued by unacknowledged reification, hypostatization, and animation. In other words, the abstraction "consciousness" is routinely treated as a real, independent, and autonomous agent. For example, these are some actual questions recently asked on Quora.
- If we did not have a consciousness, would we have thought of the idea of consciousness?
- If science was able to clone an exact copy of me, including my consciousness, would it be me?
- How can we upload human consciousness via AI?
- Is there any scientific evidence that we are all one consciousness?
- Is it possible to transfer consciousness to another body like a clone or machine?
- Is it scientifically possible to transfer self consciousness from one body to another?
- What is the real nature of consciousness? Can it be engineered or exported by humans, or does it exist beyond us?
- Is consciousness a fundamental property of the universe, or is it an emergent phenomenon of complex biological systems?
- How likely is it that humans will eventually be able to fully explain consciousness?
These kinds of questions are asked again and again with minor differences in emphasis. They are also answered over and over again. It appears that having many available answers does not reduce the desire to ask the question. I think part of the problem is that answers are wildly inconsistent. Asked a yes/no question, Quora answers often say "yes", "no", and "maybe" with equal confidence and authority.
In this essay, I will attempt to apply my heuristic to cut through some of the bullshit and bring some order to one the most confused topics in philosophy: consciousness. This is not as difficult as it sounds.
Meaning is Use
Observing how people use this term "consciousness", my sense is that that vast majority of people use "consciousness" as a synonym for "soul". That is to say they treat "consciousness" as a nonphysical entity that is both independent of their physical body (including their brain) and, at the same time, integral to their identity and/or personality. For the majority, it seems, consciousness is a kind of secularised soul, stripped of the supernatural significance given to it by christians, but still a real, independent, autonomous agent.
Being independent of the body means that "consciousness" is able to survive death. It is hypostatized consciousness, for example, that allows for techno-utopian ideas such as "uploading consciousness", "transferring consciousness" from one body to another (including the wildly incoherent concept of the "brain transplant"), as well as various kinds of disembodied consciousness (including post-mortem consciousness).
In these examples, "consciousness" is something that is not causally tied to a body and, as such, it can exist without a body or be moved between bodies, including non-human bodies. Like the soul, the uploaded consciousness is disembodied and effectively immortal (which explains some of the ongoing appeal of the fallacious idea). "Uploading consciousness" is an analog of the christian narrative of resurrection or the buddhist narrative of rebirth. It's an afterlife theory. In my book Karma and Rebirth Reconsidered, I argued that all religious afterlife theories are incoherent because they all contradict each other.
A particular mistake that almost always goes with consciousness qua soul, is vitalism. This is the idea that what distinguishes living matter from non-living matter is some kind of animating principle or élan vital. In antiquity, this principle was almost always associated with breath (see, e.g. my essay on spirit as breath). In Judeo-Christian mythology, Yahweh breathes life into Adam, animating him. The word animate derives from a root meaning "breathe". Similarly, psykhē (Greek) and spīritus (Latin) originally meant "breath".
As anyone who has experienced the corpse of a loved one knows, its intuitive to think that something animated them and that their corpse is the body minus that animating principle. For example, I vividly recall seeing my father's corpse in 1990 and having this reaction.
Actually, what's missing in the experience of see the corpse of a loved one is our emotional response to them. There is a neurological condition known as Capgras Syndrome, in which localised brain damage can leave a person able to recognise familiar faces, but unable to experience emotional responses to them. They frequently arrive at the bizarre conclusion that the people they know have been replaced by doppelgangers.
My father's corpse was like an exact replica of him, that wasn't moving or responding. All the personality was gone. Like many people my first intuition was that my father's life and personality had gone somewhere. Which is to say, that they still existed apart from the body. With a lot more life experience and learning under my belt, I can now see that, while the difference between living and dead is stark, it's our own lack of emotional response to corpses that we are trying to explain.
As a teenager, I remember going to the funeral of my best friend's father who died quite young. My friend and his nuclear family were all disconcertingly smiling and happy. They were not overtly religious in the conventional sense of being members of a religious community. Nevertheless, for them, the deceased man was still a very strong presence. They felt him still there with them. They were not sad, at the time, because in their minds, the father was not gone wholly gone or inaccessible.
I get the attraction to and plausibility of vitalism. I just don't believe it. Vitalism was discredited when we discovered how to synthesise organic compounds in the late 19th century. We don't have to add any "vital principle" or "life force" to account for animate matter.
Despite being secularised and stripped of significance, the idea of a consciousness qua autonomous entity that survives death still has a religious flavour. Witness the people who assume that "consciousness" is an entity then go around seeking evidence that supports this view.
By contrast, a rational approach would begin with concrete evidence. If we were to start over, and re-examine the evidence, no one would propose the concept of a soul.
The abstract concept “consciousness” has become a dead end.
- All statements that treat “consciousness” as a concrete or real thing or entity are false.
- All statements that treat “consciousness” as a separate or disembodied thing are false.
- All statements that treat “consciousness” as an autonomous agent are false.
And from what I can see, very little of what remains is useful. Some metaphorical uses of "consciousness" are common:
- A stream of consciousness.
- The fabric of consciousness.
- A field of awareness.
- A thread of awareness
- The tapestry of the mind
- A vessel of thought
- The machinery of the mind.
- A lens of perception.
However, all of these uses are prone to hypostatisation, reification, and animation.
Intentionality
One way around the mistakes people make is to acknowledge Dan Dennett's observation that consciousness is (almost) always intentional. We can say that consciousness (almost) always has an object or condition. Heuristically, we can say that consciousness is always consciousness of something. If we always follow "consciousness" with "of _____" and fill in the blank, we are much less likely to go wrong. For example:
- Concrete: “I am conscious of feeling cold.” ✓
- Abstract: “There is consciousness of feeling cold.” ✓
- Reified:
- “There is a consciousness.” X
- “My consciousness...” X
- “Consciousness is…” X
- “Consciousness does…” X
Unfortunately, even true abstract statements about experience are likely to be misinterpreted in ways that falsify them.
The exception to conscious states being intentional is the state of "contentless awareness" sometimes experienced in sleep or meditation. See for example the discussion: "Can you be aware of nothing?" in The Conversation.
For Buddhists, note, that I now distinguish "contentless awareness" from "cessation". Following cessation there is no awareness. The state of śūnyatā (also an abstract noun) is not a conscious state. It is an unconscious state, though seemingly distinct from sleep or anaesthesia.
Contentless awareness probably corresponds to the higher āyatana stages, for example "the stage of nothingness" (ākiñcaññāyatana) or "the stage of no awareness or unawareness"(nevasaññānāsañña). Prajñāpāramitā texts make it clear that having any kind of experience or memories of experience is inconsistent with śūnyatā.
To sum up
"Consciousness" is an abstract concept. An idea. Ideas are not real, independent, and autonomous agents. Ideas are ideas. Ideas are subjective; though we can have objective knowledge about them.
Talking about consciousness as a soul is a dead loss. But, then, there is very little talk about consciousness that is not a dead loss. And this includes most of "philosophy".
Consciousness as a abstract concept is intentional. This can be reflected in statements that include what we are conscious of.
~~Φ~~
